Were you once a human?
‘Yes. A part of me was. I notice you see me as an old man.’
Grace nodded. She imagined the manager of a hotel as grand as the one she’d created would look just like a butler; elderly and distinguished with old-world manners and a handlebar moustache.
The manager smiled. ‘Yes, I was once human. But I didn’t look like this. Would you like to see what I really looked like?’
Grace nodded.
The manager wavered into a nondescript outline. She didn’t want the entire illusion to collapse into darkness and communicate chemically. She needed the comfort of familiarity right now. ‘Don’t go . . .’
‘My name was . . . Hannah. Just give me a moment. More of myself is nearby. I will retrieve information.’
Grace gazed at the indeterminate form in front of her, shimmering and shifting, the power of her imagination hovering in an unstable holding pattern, waiting to have something to work with.
‘I’m Hannah Schenk,’ the manager eventually said. ‘I was thirty-nine. My hair was long and light brown. I was quite tall, slim, healthy. I like to think I was an attractive woman.’
The shimmering avatar in front of Grace took a more distinct form, a collaborative image. Hannah was sharing small packets of data with Grace, and Grace was interpreting them. The voice she was ‘hearing’ rose in timbre to a softer feminine tone, but with a hard edge to it and the hint of an accent, how Grace imagined a German woman with a good grasp of English would sound. She found herself looking at an attractive, smartly dressed woman.
‘Tell me about you, Grace. I know you were a girl. How old?’
Yes. I was . . . am twelve.
Grace wasn’t quite ready to describe herself in the past tense yet. In that case, was she always going to be twelve? Or was that an irrelevance now? More to the point, was she even female now? Could she be either gender? Could she be old or young? Did it matter?
‘Yes. It does matter,’ replied Hannah Schenk. ‘We are the sum of the lives we lived. Our memories define us in a way chemistry can’t.’
Hannah cocked her head, her eyes narrowed as she studied Grace. ‘Embrace who you are, Grace. That’s why we are so important to our friends.’
Our friends? Grace had long since abandoned the term ‘snark’. In that strange period after she’d been consumed, as she’d slowly gathered her wits and gradually comprehended what had happened to her, the term had seemed ridiculous and from another time, another century. Like the horrible ‘N’ word, ‘snark’ felt like an abusive term. As she’d grown to understand they meant no harm to her, she’d abandoned it. She’d very quickly begun to think of the entities she sensed around her as teammates, as colleagues, helpers, assistants.
But friends?
‘Yes. Friends. They only want what is best for us.’
Best for us? For humans? But they killed us all!
‘You’re not dead,’ said Hannah. ‘Nor am I. In fact, I feel more alive now than I ever have.’ She smiled. Grace wondered whether the smile was her imagination, or whether Hannah had somehow stepped within the boundaries of Grace’s imagination and taken control of this whole illusion.
‘We can read each other’s thoughts. Feel each other’s emotions. Grace, you can look inside me. You can know me, a perfect stranger, in a way no one else ever did. Not my parents, not my friends, not my lover. Please –’ she offered Grace a slender hand – ‘come and know me.’
Grace reached out and touched Hannah’s hand. And instantly felt it.
An overpowering kinship.
She saw fleeting images of a whole other life. In a heartbeat, she was Hannah Schenk. She saw, felt, thirty-nine years of another life: childhood memories . . . a birthday party with balloons and cake and a silver-haired woman who was old enough to be Hannah’s grandmother, yet she instinctively knew was her mother. No siblings. No father. Just the two of them. Older now . . . playing the flute in a school orchestra, looking for her mother’s face in an audience of reflecting video camera lenses. Older still . . . practising scales in her bedroom, posters of R.E.M. and Einstürzende Neubauten on the walls, bands Grace had never heard of but all of sudden felt she knew. College. A music college. And a boyfriend called Hamsa who played cello, who had won a musical scholarship and came from Palestine. Reciting pieces together, busking together on the streets of Hamburg. Older now . . . and in an office job she absolutely hated. The flute sitting at home in her single-bedroom apartment, in a box collecting dust. A new boyfriend. This one is called Stefan. He works in the same place. They both want a baby so badly, and Mother now is so old . . . She yearns for grandchildren. Hospital. A miscarriage. Heartbreak. So close to term and then this happened. Hospital again some years later, this time for her mother. Her silver hair is all gone and she looks so pale and sunken. But she strokes the bump of Hannah’s belly and smiles.
A funeral. Hannah watches the coffin being lowered into a grave. Stefan squeezes her hand.
A birth. If only Mother had lived long enough . . .
Christmas. It’s 2010. The bump is now a boy called Homer. The little boy unwraps a present. It’s a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle action figure and he goes absolutely crazy with excitement.
Older now. Homer’s a couple of years older than Grace is . . . was . . . with floppy purple hair dangling across his face. Stefan’s gone. It’s just Hannah and Homer. Life repeating itself, mother and child facing the world alone in a one-bedroom flat. Hannah’s back at work, because bills need paying and Stefan’s being difficult with the maintenance payments. It’s another job she detests and that same college flute sits in the same box with a thick film of dust on it.
The last memory is a rock concert. That’s Homer onstage playing guitar with three other lads, and Hannah may not like their music – it’s grungy and loud and sounds very angry – but she’s so incredibly proud of him. Homer’s a good boy. He might be on tour a lot but he comes home whenever he can and nags her to get online with a dating site. She won’t because it costs so much and it’s all just weirdos anyway. But he insists, and he pays.
Then the day the virus hits Europe.
Hannah dies alone in the kitchen, not knowing if Homer’s still alive in Japan where his rock band is on tour.
The images fade and Hannah lets go of Grace’s hand.
‘And now you know me, Grace. And I know you.’
Why do they want me here?
‘You, and the others who’ve been invited . . . you’re here to discuss what happens next.’
What happens next to what? To whom . . . ? To us?
‘To those poor souls who have been left behind.’
CHAPTER 17
‘Now then, I know the rumour continues to circulate around this castle. So I’m going to address it . . . again. And, hopefully, this will be the last time I have to do so.’ Everett looked up and down both tables like a head teacher admonishing unruly students.
‘There is absolutely, one hundred per cent, no rescue effort currently in progress. Not in Southampton, not at Land’s End, not in Dover . . . not in Barnsley-Bottom-On-Sea!’ Everett stared firmly at his audience sitting either side of the long tables.
‘Our two newcomers stumbled across a message that was, unfortunately, out of date. Two years out of date! I’m sorry to be the killjoy here, but there has been nothing, absolutely nothing, on any frequency in the last year and a half. Not a word, or a beep, or anything other than bloody hissing and warbling. And certainly no messages about approaching rescue fleets!’
He sighed. ‘I’m sorry – genuinely, truly, sorry – but that’s the way it is. Now, I think we should proceed on to more pressing matters. It’s absolutely clear that we are going to have to revive the security measures we put in place last year. That means a return to night watch duties . . .’
There were several groans.
‘. . . ground-maintenance patrols AND weekly blood screening for everyone. I also think it would be prudent for our knights to forage for additional supplies. We
should start stockpiling in case we find ourselves besieged again. I know we’ve been getting slack and tapping into our diesel reserves, so I want those topped up too, Corkie.’
‘Aye, sir.’
The honeymoon period seemed well and truly over for Leon and Freya. They’d become properly enrolled into Everett’s community, and over the last month Leon had found himself adjusting to their new way of life.
Routine and more routine. Everett ran the castle with precisely timed horn-blowing.
There had been nothing remotely resembling an organized day during the eighteen months alone with Freya. There’d been stretches of endless days when they’d remained inside in the dark, beneath quilts, eating cold tinned meals and reading books to pass the time. On other days necessity had forced them to forage outside in the snow, or the rain. Sometimes in the few warm weeks between the late spring and the early autumn, the dead city of Norwich lay fully exposed, forlorn, and it stank like rancid pond water.
He preferred this: keeping busy, the regimented schedule broken into two-hour time blocks marked by the blowing of a hunting horn from the rooftop of the keep. Eight until ten – breakfast. Ten until twelve – work session one. Twelve until one – lunch break. One until three – work session two. Three until four – personal chores. Four until six – work session three. Six until eight – dinner. Nine – lights out.
The work sessions were marked up on a chart in the main hall where they assembled for meal times. The tasks varied and were shared out among the five work groups: laundry, toilet emptying, cooking, combat drill, perimeter inspection, firewood collection, gardening, water purification.
Leon and Freya had been assigned to different groups, divided by gender. Everett seemed to hold a puritanical view on what was considered women’s work and what was men’s work. Three out of the five groups were all female, the other two all male. Which, of course, was an endless source of irritation to Freya, since the female groups tended to get the first three tasks most of the time. None of the women liked it, but Everett’s decision was final.
The days seemed to pass quickly, especially after the evening meal when there was an hour to spend until the power generator was switched to economy mode and the castle’s electric lights went out, leaving nothing but candles to read by. A contrast to Mr Carnegie’s more relaxed schedule, where they’d all seemed to have far too much time on their hands.
Leon liked this better. Come nine o’clock, when the horn sounded and everyone made sure they were close enough to their beds to be able to find them by candlelight, he was ready to hit the pillow and get some sleep.
In his work group were fifteen others, ranging in age from an eleven-year-old boy called Stephen, right up to an old guy, Paddy, who he guessed was somewhere in his sixties. There was a whippet-thin guy called ‘Fish’, with fine blond hair pulled back – always – into a limp ponytail, a goatee that only seemed to appear when the sun caught it at the right angle, and an Adam’s apple that Leon couldn’t stop staring at when he talked or swallowed; it bobbed up and down like a cat in a canvas bag.
Fish had a couple of battered old Nintendo handhelds that he’d managed to keep alive on scavenged batteries. He was grimly resigned to the fact that even though this dead world was littered with pristine plastic-sealed packs of double As, they all had a finite shelf life that was ticking slowly down and one day there’d be no more Mario Karts.
‘I used to be a games coder,’ Fish told him.
‘Really? Any games I might know?’
‘Sure. Probably. Maybe. You a console gamer?’
Leon nodded. ‘I used to have a PlayStation.’
Fish curled his lips. ‘Otherwise known as the PlebStation. Yeah . . . when I was working for Kindoo Games, we did DemonStorm. You remember that one?’
He did. ‘Really? You worked on that?’
Fish nodded.
‘That was pretty awesome.’ Actually it wasn’t. Leon remembered quickly begrudging the fifty pounds and three hours he’d spent on it. He’d been seduced into parting with his money by the trailer and endless five-star reviews. All the same, it was a pleasant connection with the past to be sitting here with someone who’d worked on it.
‘Ah, but, no, see, it wasn’t. In fact, it was a steaming pile of cynical shite. A quick cash-in on those first-gen VR headsets. Run-’n’-gun, pray-’n’-spray bollocks. The whole development team knew it was a complete turd even before it got released.’
‘Uh, OK. I was kind of being polite. Yeah, it wasn’t that great.’
‘I went solo after that. Worked on apps. Did you game much on your phone?’
‘Clash of Clans, a bit. Got bored of that, though.’
‘You ever play Zombie Last Stands?’
Leon shook his head. ‘Never heard of it.’
‘That was one of mine.’ He rolled his eyes skyward and Leon took the chance to stare at his Adam’s apple for a second. ‘Two years in the bloody making, just me on my own. Historical famous last stands, right? You know the famous ones like the Alamo, Thermopylae, Rorke’s Drift?’
Leon nodded.
‘Well, anyway, my game was taking those famous battles and then replacing the bad guys with, you know . . . zombies. Hundreds of ’em swarming over the heroic few.’ He grinned. ‘Bit like us lot last year. Anyway, I launched it on the app store and it was just beginning to take off, right? I swear, it was getting thousands of downloads and was going to make me flipping rich, I’m telling you. I was going to be the next Notch. Then that frikkin end-of-the-world thing happened.’ He shook his head. ‘Can’t moan, though, I suppose . . . I’m still alive.’
‘I’m guessing you were on meds at the time?’
‘Yup. Fluoxetine for the mood swings, Omeprazole for the stomach ulcer, aspirin for the migraines and RSI.’ He laughed. ‘That poor virus never stood a chance with me.’
Leon laughed. Fish was all right.
‘You not finished peeling those yet?’ Naga gestured at the spuds on the chopping board in front of Freya. Three-quarters done, another thirty of the big lumpy things to go.
Naga raised her tidy dark brows into two symmetrical arches, her silent way of saying get on with it. As the work-group leader, she managed to keep her girls in line with a variety of expressions: exasperation, irritation and, on rare occasions, approval.
The kitchen was hot, steamy and noisy with the sound of clanking pans, scrubbing and chopping. This morning they’d been out in the grounds under the watchful eyes of a couple of knights, digging up another patch of earth that had been set aside for potatoes last summer. Digging them up, sorting the winter-spoiled from the good, scrubbing and now peeling them.
If I have to peel another bloody potato this week . . .
Everyone was expected to pull their weight here. Well, nearly everyone it seemed.
‘I’d like to see those army boys do some bloody kitchen work for once,’ muttered Freya. ‘You do know they’re not proper soldiers?’
‘Uh?’
‘Everett’s knights.’
‘But they—’
‘Have the uniforms?’
Freya nodded. ‘And they call Corkie “sergeant”.’
‘My dad was in the army. I lived on army bases throughout my childhood. I know what soldiers are like. And those aren’t proper soldiers, I’m telling you.’
Freya wasn’t entirely sure what Naga meant by that. They seemed to have the rough-and-ready manners and coarse language she expected of a bunch of squaddies.
‘They don’t have the same discipline as proper army lads.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Well, come on, you’ve done laundry duty, right? You’ve picked their pants off the floor, seen their unmade beds? Trust me, blokes who’ve been through basic army training never lose those habits once they’ve had them drummed into them.’
‘Corkie’s area is tidy.’
‘That’s true. Now he, I’m certain, is ex-army. But the rest . . . ?’ Her face pinched sceptically. ?
??Nah.’
Freya halved the last couple of potatoes she’d skinned and tossed them into the pot.
‘Could be reservists, though,’ added Naga. ‘I imagine every last reservist was called up when the virus hit the UK. They had soldiers out and about everywhere.’
‘I really don’t remember much of that week,’ said Freya. ‘I didn’t even notice the news story when it was starting abroad. I was far too busy dealing with this . . .’ She gestured at the walking stick resting against the counter beside her stool. ‘And when the virus reached Kings Lynn it was just so sudden.’ She looked up from the chopping board. ‘I went to bed one night leaving my parents watching the news. I remember they were getting really worried, talking about getting in some extra shopping the next day. I woke up in the morning and I found them in the kitchen. They were . . . well, you know . . .’
‘I’m sorry, Freya. That must have been truly awful.’
Freya started on another potato. ‘All long ago, another time. I try not to think about Mum and Dad any more. What about you?’
Naga shrugged. ‘I was living on my lonesome in London. Single. No kids, no boyfriend. I look back now and thank God I didn’t have to witness anyone I loved die.
CHAPTER 18
‘Leave the engine running, old son,’ said Corkie. ‘Better to be safe than sorry.’ He studied the bottling plant warily; it was a two-storey box-shaped office building with a large warehouse to one side.
Three cars were parked up in the staff car park. Weeds had punched through the cracked tarmac and were slowly wending their way through the vehicles’ hubcaps.
‘Can’t see any creepy-crawlies, Sarge.’
‘Which doesn’t mean to say there aren’t any.’ He continued to scan both buildings for any signs of fine tendril-spread. He also scanned the parking area for the telltale hump of viral roots growing beneath the failing tarmac. Over the last two weeks, now that they were looking, they’d become aware of the subtle bumps that signalled their presence below ground.
The root system seemed to loosely follow the roads. Perhaps the ground beneath them was somehow easier to burrow through, or perhaps there was another unfathomable factor at work. Roads were generally the straightest and least obstructed routes between population centres, and the roots presumably mirrored that rationale. Or maybe their branching and direction of travel was entirely random, but their presence was far more noticeable beneath the flat, tarred surfaces.