by Mark Tufo
‘Shut the fuck up!’ Gary screamed, but all his noise did was make matters worse. Dez pleaded with him, Jackie wailed with fear, the twins both began to cry...
In the midst of the chaos, Scott bolted for the door with George. Michelle had no choice but to follow, Tammy and Phoebe close behind. She tumbled down the steps, losing her footing and falling onto the tarmac, scuffing her hands and knees but barely noticing the pain through the fear. Scott tried to move but she grabbed hold of his shirt and pulled him back. She could hear shouting inside the classroom from which they’d just escaped, five desperate voices fighting for space.
‘What the hell are you doing?’ Michelle demanded.
‘Getting us out of here,’ he said, brushing her off and starting to run.
‘Are you completely out of your fucking mind? Do you know what—?’
A flash of light and a single gunshot from the classroom silenced her.
Tammy and Phoebe were already running. Michelle sprinted after the rest of her family, then overtook Scott and blocked his way through. ‘What the hell did you just do?’
‘What I had to do to keep us safe.’
‘Keep yourself safe, more like.’
‘You’re out too, aren’t you?’
‘But Jackie and Dez... the kids... you engineered that... you made that happen...’
‘Fuck ‘em. And fuck you, too.’
He pushed past and ran on with George. Michelle knew she had to stick with him if she wanted to stay with her son. The sound of another two shots inside the classroom sealed the decision.
The outside world felt wholly alien now. There were still a couple of helicopters high overhead and whilst quieter than before, a never-ending buzz of noise continued to come from around the leisure centre. Michelle watched the rest of her family run on ahead, feeling bizarrely detached from everything now, almost as if she was watching events unfold on TV. Only the fear and the cold air and spitting rain reminded her she was still alive and a part of this. She watched Scott and wanted to wrestle George from him and take the kids away. I don’t know you anymore. Don’t know if I ever really did. We’ll never be safe as long as we’re with you.
They waited in the shadows between two more imposing school buildings until she caught up. ‘Move faster or you’ll get left behind,’ Scott said, his voice detached and unemotional. He looked around for Phoebe. ‘Which way now?’
She couldn’t immediately answer, could barely even think straight, traumatised with fear and struggling to make sense of her surroundings. She looked around again, then gestured down the side of the next school block. Scott sprinted along the wall of the building, using it both as cover and support. He stopped at the furthest corner, gesturing for the others to stay low and almost overbalancing with his son, then looked ahead.
Nothing. It was clear.
Most of the chaotic activity was still concentrated around the back of the school, the area from which they’d escaped. From here Scott could see the main gates. He’d expected to see a mass of soldiers and equipment there, but posts had clearly been abandoned in haste. Michelle grabbed his shoulder and swung him around. ‘You’re going to get us all killed.’
‘No, staying here will get us all killed.’
‘We’re not safe.’
‘That’s why we’re leaving. We can do this. We’re gonna run for the hedge over there, then follow it around to the gate and slip out the front. There’s no one there. We’ll get out, find a car, then get as far away from Thussock as we can, right?’ Scott looked into each face in turn, waiting until he’d seen something positive – a nod, a mumble, some kind of definite agreement, no matter how slight – before he moved.
Just a few steps away from cover and Scott was on his face on the ground, George squashed beneath him, screaming. He picked himself up and put his hand over his son’s mouth, trying to stop his noise. ‘Shh... they’ll hear us.’
‘Is he okay? George, love, are you okay?’ Michelle asked, trying to get closer. Scott turned his back on her.
‘I tripped, that’s all. Keep moving.’
He looked back and saw that none of them were following. Phoebe and Tammy were standing around something he couldn’t make out in the darkness. What did I just fall over? He went back and saw it was the body of a woman, facedown. A pool of blood glistened around her naked crotch, steam still rising. Her torn, blood-soaked knickers were around her knees. ‘Was she...?’ Tammy started to ask.
‘Infected?’ Scott interrupted. ‘Probably. None of our concern. We need to move.’
He shifted George in his tired arms, struggling with his increasingly heavy weight, and ran on. Phoebe still wasn’t following. ‘Come on, Pheeb,’ Michelle shouted at her.
‘Does this mean it’s got out?’
‘What?’
‘This woman... does this mean the parasite-thing got out of the leisure centre?’
‘Obviously,’ Scott said, ‘but it doesn’t make any difference. As long as we keep away from everyone else we’ll be fine.’
‘But it does, though, doesn’t it? It does make a difference.’
‘Listen to me. We’re going to just keep doing what we’re doing and get out of Thussock. We can worry about all this later.’
‘But wait,’ Phoebe said, still refusing to move, ‘I don’t get it. There was ages between all those other people dying.’
‘So?’
‘So why is it getting faster? Is it getting hungrier? It’s not long since it got that man in the leisure centre, is it?’
‘I don’t know. Does it even matter? Just shut up and move, for Christ’s sake.’
She still wasn’t going anywhere.
‘Does it mean there’s more than one of them now?’
Shit. She might be right.
‘We need to go,’ Scott said. This time he kept running, giving the others no choice but to follow.
And it was far easier to get away than any of them expected. A final breathless dash across a patch of open space and they’d made it beyond the school gates.
Chapter 80
The silence away from the school was somehow more frightening than the noise they’d left behind. Thussock was deserted; a ghost town, devoid of all life. Although the lights in most buildings remained unlit, the street lamps enabled the family to see more than enough. It was as if the entire place had been frozen like a paused DVD. Wherever they looked they could visualise the exact moments when people’s lives had been unexpectedly interrupted during the course of the long day now ending. Cars had been abandoned in the middle of the road. The doors of many shops and houses had been left open. A stray dog mooched around for its missing owner, edging forward when it saw Scott and the others, then yelping with panic and running away in the opposite direction. Scott stepped over a river of water flowing into the gutter from a hosepipe which had been left running for hours. Nearby, a courier delivery remained incomplete, the back of a truck half-full of boxes left wide open, its contents untouched. A rain-soaked child’s pushchair lay on its side in the middle of the pavement, its young passenger long gone. Thussock felt eerie and unsettling, as if someone had casually flicked a switch and erased the entire human race save for this one dysfunctional family left skulking through the shadows, avoiding the light as if they were vampires.
They’d been walking unchallenged for almost a quarter of an hour when Scott stopped. He changed direction and led them down a dark alleyway. ‘Where are we going?’ Michelle asked, talking in whispers despite there being no one else around to hear.
‘Back to work.’
And Michelle began to slowly make sense of their surroundings. She’d never seen it like this before, but she was sure this was close to where she’d dropped Scott off on those few occasions he’d actually managed an uninterrupted day’s work at Barry Walpole’s yard.
He handed George to Michelle and told her to wait near a solitary street lamp by the entrance to the yard, out of plain sight but where he could still see them. Scott then
jogged across the yard and forced his way into Barry Walpole’s caravan-cum-office.
He’d triggered the alarm. Scott made straight for the metal key cabinet mounted on the wall by Barry’s desk. He broke into it quickly with a screwdriver, nerves and the shrill alarm noise combining to keep him moving at speed. Keys flew everywhere as he prised the door open and he dropped to his hands and knees and scrambled around on the grubby floor, feeling the constant noise boring into his brain now, clouding his already confused thoughts. And then, right under the desk, his outstretched fingers found what he’d been looking for. He snatched up the keys to the truck and ran back outside.
His family had gone.
‘Michelle,’ he shouted, but he could hardly hear himself think over the never-ending klaxon. Where were they? Had he pushed Michelle too far with what he’d done to Dez and his family? He hadn’t had any choice. It was them or us... it was the only way. He ran over to the truck, no longer sure if he even believed himself.
No time to waste. Helicopters overhead. Easier to find them in the truck. Then again, maybe he should just leave alone? If it wasn’t for George, he thought, he probably would have.
He started the engine and pulled away, accelerating hard down the driveway, figuring Michelle would most probably have tried to get home as there was nowhere else left to go other than back to the school. He’d barely made it halfway to the road when Phoebe jumped out at him from the shadows, scaring him senseless. He slammed on the brakes, virtually standing on the pedal to bring the tired old truck to a stop. Michelle got into the front with George as Tammy and Phoebe clambered onto the flat-bed behind. ‘Drive,’ Michelle yelled at him once she was sure they were safe. He swung around a sharp left turn, then accelerated again. She was confused. ‘You’re going the wrong way. You should have turned right for the house.’
‘We’re not going to the house.’
‘What?’
‘I told you, we’re getting out of Thussock.’
‘You’re not thinking straight, Scott. Everything we own is back at that house. I’m not saying we should stop and pack it all up, just get a few essentials. Our documents, some food and drink, clothes...’
‘No.’
‘For Christ’s sake, it’s on the main road out of Thussock. It’s the most obvious way out of here.’
‘Exactly. That’s why we’re going this way.’
‘But what about the girls? They’ll freeze on the back of this truck.’
‘They’ll be all right.’
Michelle didn’t bother arguing. What was the point? When had he last listened to her, anyway? Maybe if he had, they wouldn’t all be in this fucking mess.
Scott was pushing the truck harder and harder, braking then accelerating, driving like a fucking maniac. The road began to climb – Michelle felt it rather than saw it – and from the shapes of the dark silhouettes on either side, she worked out roughly where they were. They were driving over the hills behind their house now, retracing the route Scott had taken that Saturday afternoon when they’d first arrived in Thussock.
As the road reached its peak then began to descend, Scott braked hard, bringing the truck to an unexpected, juddering halt. Michelle clung onto George with one hand and steadied herself with the other. In the back, both Tammy and Phoebe lost balance and lurched forward, falling against one another and butting heads, yelping with pain. ‘What the hell are you doing?’ Michelle screamed at him, but he didn’t answer, he just left the truck. Incensed, she picked up George and followed him out. He’d stopped a short distance ahead and was standing on the white line in the middle of the road, staring into the distance. ‘I can’t handle this, Scott. You need to...’ She shut up when she saw what was up ahead.
Just beyond the fracking site was a blockade. Scores of soldiers. Plenty of firepower. And it wasn’t just the road, she realised: the blockade stretched for as far as she could see in either direction. ‘They’ve sealed us off,’ Scott said, sounding numb, barely able to believe what he was seeing. ‘The bastards have sealed off the whole bloody town. We’re not going anywhere.’
Chapter 81
They didn’t have any other choice now. Other than surrendering themselves to the military, going back to the house was the only option left.
Scott parked the truck on the grass at the side of the house rather than on the drive, hoping to make it less obvious that they’d returned. Phoebe ran to the door but Michelle called her back. It was still open from where it had been kicked in by soldiers this morning. This morning, she thought, was it really only this morning? Was this day ever going to end? ‘I’ll go first,’ she said, but Scott had other ideas and he pushed her out of the way. She followed him in and flicked on the hall light. He immediately switched it off again.
‘Too dangerous. Don’t want anyone knowing we’re in here.’
‘You really think anyone cares?’
He wasn’t going to discuss it. He grabbed her wrist tight and pulled her closer. ‘You leave the fucking lights alone and you do exactly what I tell you, got it?’
He handed George to Michelle, made sure the girls were inside, then propped the broken door shut with an upturned shoe rack. ‘I need the toilet,’ Phoebe said. He glared at her.
‘Be quick, then get into the living room. I want all of you in the living room, got it? You stay out of sight at the back of the house.’
Michelle ushered Tammy through. Scott waited for Phoebe to finish, then made sure she followed. He went into the kitchen and grabbed a little food and drink, pausing at the window. It appeared deceptively calm out there now, but he knew it was just an illusion. They were trapped between the chaos at the school on one side and the military lines securing Thussock on the other. No man’s land.
The girls were sitting on the sofa, George perched between them, while Michelle anxiously paced the other end of the room. There were no street lamps visible here, but the intermittent moon provided a little illumination through the French window. Scott dropped an armful of food onto the coffee table then shut the door. The silence in the room was ominous, the tension unbearable. Tammy stared straight ahead. George looked from face to face, hoping for reassurance from someone but getting nothing. Michelle chewed her nails and watched the others, Scott especially. Phoebe was sitting with her hands in her lap, eyes wide with fear. When she spoke there was a noticeable waver to her voice. She was right on the edge. ‘What are we going to do?’
‘I don’t know yet,’ Scott answered quickly, getting in fast before anyone else could speak. ‘For now we’re just going to sit tight and wait.’
‘Wait for what?’ Tammy demanded. Michelle felt her guts tighten.
‘No, Tammy, this isn’t the time.’
‘Then when is?’
‘Your mother’s right,’ Scott said. ‘Shut up. No one will have expected us to come back here, so we wait for the situation back in town to get sorted, then we leave. Simple. As long as we stay away from everyone else, there’s no chance of any of us getting infected by this damn thing.’
‘Unless one of us already has been.’
Tammy’s words silenced all of them. She couldn’t be right, could she? Scott and Michelle individually tried to work their way back and remember if any of them had been left alone long enough to have been infected. They couldn’t have caught it from that body on the grass outside the school, could they? It was all too much for Michelle. The idea of one of her girls being violated... she couldn’t bear to think about it. ‘No one’s been infected...’ she mumbled. ‘We can’t have been.’
‘So all we’ve done,’ Tammy said, not letting go, ‘is leave one prison cell to end up in another. We might as well have stayed at the school, or even in that Portakabin. Oh, but we couldn’t stay there, could we, Scott, because you screwed that up as well. You got Mum’s friend and her family killed.’
‘We don’t know what happened. Anyway, they weren’t my concern.’
‘And we are?’
‘You’re my family.’
‘Tammy, please...’ Michelle begged. ‘Don’t...’
‘No, come on,’ Scott said, goading her, ‘let her have her say.’
Tammy stood up, face to face with her step-father. ‘You just keep backing us into corners.’ She looked at Michelle. ‘Can’t you see it, Mum? We had our freedom back in Redditch, until he screwed up and we lost that. You keep making our world smaller and smaller, Scott, adding more and more restrictions. You brought us here to the middle of nowhere and you even managed to fuck that up.’
‘If it wasn’t for me—’
‘If it wasn’t for you, everything would be okay. You think you’re above it all, don’t you? You think you’re more important than everyone else. The army dragged us out of here this morning. The bloody army! And even that’s not enough to stop you. Now look at us, stuck in a single shitty room in this shitty house. Like I said, from one prison cell to another. What’s next? Seems to me there’s nowhere left to go now. We’re stuck here. We’ll probably die here.’
‘Don’t say that,’ Michelle protested. She tried to get to Tammy but Scott wouldn’t let her through. He held her back.
‘You just don’t get it, do you?’ he said to Tammy. ‘You’re all fuck ups, the bloody lot of you.’
‘I don’t have to listen to this.’
‘But you do, don’t you? Because it’s not up to you, it’s up to me.’
Tammy stood her ground, tears of anger running down her face. ‘This was our last chance, Scott, don’t you get it? I’m not going to let you drag us all down anymore.’
She went for the door but he caught her shoulder and pulled her back, throwing her down onto the sofa, crushing George who yelped with pain. ‘Leave her alone!’ Michelle screamed and she threw herself at Scott. He spun around and caught her by the throat, fingers digging into her neck. She tried to speak but couldn’t, choking on her words.