by M. T Hill
They pick towards the wreckage. The ground is boggy, tries to claim their boots. More debris appears between moguls of peat and churned-up soil. In one bowl-shaped area they find a mostly intact solar array, perhaps twenty feet across. Its cells are cracked and charred but clearly definable. Further along, the partially slagged remains of what must be a camera, easily the size of a small car, its lens fractured. It looks like an insect’s compound eye.
‘No bodies,’ Greenley says. ‘And thank heavens it’s damp. The whole moor would be burning.’ Martha nods with relief. It’s a struggle to see beyond twenty metres, Wracklow’s harshness being a reminder, a lesson. The only thing remotely human about the place is the colour of their waterproofs, maybe the only colour in a mile radius.
‘I don’t think this is a plane at all,’ Greenley says eventually.
Martha goes to reply, to agree, but now there’s a faint rattling, steadily getting louder.
‘Oh right,’ Greenley says, and stops in front of her.
As they watch, a procession of soldiers in full combat gear emerge from the grey. Some are carrying powerful flashlights and stretchers. A large tracked vehicle, trailer unit on its rear, looms behind them.
When the soldiers notice the two allotmenteers across the cratered land, they take up their rifles and fan out. The point man screams, ‘On your knees! On your knees! Hands out in front!’
* * *
‘The bloody hell are you pair doing up here?’ the point man says, patting them down. A SEARCH & RESCUE patch shimmers on his tactical vest. He has a bright head torch and a length of rope coiled around his shoulder.
‘Saw it go over,’ Greenley replies, cautiously lifting a finger from his head. ‘We had no phone signal to dial it in, and we thought – well, we’re close enough. We had the means.’
‘Mm,’ the point man says. Over his shoulder, he shouts: ‘Get the dredge down there – there’s more to sweep.’ The soldiers trudge past Martha and Greenley, young men mostly, and the tracked vehicle lumbers after them.
‘Can I get up?’ Martha asks. ‘My knees are freezing.’
The point man nods backwards.
Martha stands up. Greenley is more tentative. Martha grabs his hood and tugs. Over by the solar array, an enormous grid of green laser light springs into the cloud, expanding outwards. It phases in and out of view as it adjusts itself, sharpens and finally settles, shivering, above the territory.
‘Mapping,’ the point man says through one corner of his mouth. ‘They’re big on their mapping.’
‘It’s a satellite,’ Greenley says. ‘That thing.’
The point man glares at him. ‘Says who?’
‘I just think it might be a satellite,’ Greenley offers. ‘A spy satellite. I saw a camera. It smells funny, doesn’t it? Smells foreign.’
The point man looks at his gloved hands, shifting weight from foot to foot. He spits into the peat bank. ‘No,’ he says. ‘It’s not a satellite.’ The lasermesh clicks off. He’s eyeing them both suspiciously. ‘It’s a spy drone. You really haven’t heard, have you?’
‘Heard what?’ Martha says.
Greenley shoots her a sideways look.
‘The reports,’ the point man says.
Greenley shakes his head. ‘Reports,’ he repeats.
The point man squats over his boots. Rubs at the grime on his face. ‘Your network’s patchy because all the networks are going down. After Birmingham… how do you not know?’
‘We’re only peasants,’ Martha says sharply.
Greenley adds nothing.
The point man takes a breath. ‘They’re pulling reports from all over the shop. Top to bottom. Cornwall, right up to the Scots border. Facility after power station after network hub after local substation. Electrics. Factories. Server farms. Defence systems. Power infrastructure. Like a fucking tsunami. We’re going offline, see? We’re being turned off.’
‘Turned off,’ Martha says.
Without a word, Greenley doubles over and vomits a thin stream of bile into the heather.
Martha recoils. The point man takes Greenley’s shoulder. ‘Sir? Sir?’
‘It’s fine,’ Greenley replies weakly, leaning on his knees. ‘It’s just a shock.’
The point man passes Greenley the camelback tube from his vest. ‘Try supping that,’ he says.
But Greenley has to straighten up first. His skin – hands, neck, face – the picture of frailty. He touches Martha’s shoulder and it doesn’t calm her at all.
‘Birmingham was the distraction,’ the point man goes on. ‘I shouldn’t be telling you, but we’re dealing with wave attacks from small cells all over the country. Going in for machines and electronics, automated stuff. A bloody surveillance drone like this bad boy comes down for no one, I’ll tell you. Those things are built to last the end of days.’ He gestures to the burning debris. ‘So, what don’t they want us to see round here? What was this keeping an eye on? It’s not the first, either. Downed units all over the region. And I ask myself: why are we out here in this dismal fucking sog? Why are me and these lot having to clean up, unless we’re trying to keep the sheen on? Pretending the seals haven’t come off?’
Greenley doesn’t reply. It strikes Martha he might already know. That really he vomited because this wreck wasn’t a shock, but actually confirmation of something.
Martha’s insides harden. It’s all so alien. Even if their cities vanish, wink out, the allotments will surely survive. Sharon had told her. Sharon promised her.
And yet. The gear in the back of the injured man’s car. The fact his identity was wiped. The dead man – a hostage? Guilt-ridden? Was he a decoy?
She sees it now in high contrast. The allotments are part of this. And so is the injured man lying in Sharon’s shed. When Martha looks at Greenley, she knows that Greenley knows this, too. Nothing else would explain his physical reaction. His mania, his coming steadily unstitched.
‘We missed it,’ Martha says. ‘Didn’t we? We had the pieces, and we put them together all wrong.’
Because the wolf is among them, and the crashed drone can no longer monitor what the wolf is doing.
‘We need to go back,’ she tells Greenley. ‘We need to go home.’
Greenley nods without blinking.
‘Good plan,’ the point man says. ‘Good plan.’
* * *
In the camper, Greenley is hysterical to the point of driving dangerously. Martha is shivering and gripping the roof handle, holding her seat belt across her. She’s not sure she’s ever seen anyone more alone or frightened, more lost in themselves. He wrenches in breaths between his sobs, his back and shoulders shuddering like he’s trying to get out of his own body. This isn’t the man who took her in. ‘Oh God,’ he keeps saying, face puffy. ‘I’m so sorry. I should have listened.’ The headlights of other cars diffuse in the rain on the glass. The glare is all Martha can hold on to.
When they’re back on the narrow track down into the allotments, Greenley stops the van and cuts the engine. They sit in a corridor of silver birch, bramble and nettle, brilliant pink foxgloves emerging on lengthy stems from the mid-foliage.
There’s a click. Martha looks at Greenley. He has the pistol in the campervan with them. He has the dead man’s pistol between his legs.
‘I couldn’t believe it,’ he tells her softly, voice catching. ‘I think some things you have to see before you can.’
‘What are you doing?’ Martha asks.
‘The thing is,’ Greenley says, wiping his nose up his sleeve, ‘I didn’t want to believe any of it. It was Perrin. Perrin called me on the hard line – oh God. He told me, “Contain that man until I can get back there.” He had finally found the car’s registrar – that woman named Semolt, you remember? – through the sky-eyes network. They have footage of her – of them – in that car. She was one of the bombers. She was right there. Which means our man was involved in the Birmingham attack – not fleeing it. And I didn’t, I wouldn’t believe it was true. I w
ouldn’t. He was a victim, surely!’
Martha kneads her legs. Martha can’t speak. Greenley knew this before she challenged him to look at the footmarks around the campervan.
‘Snippets were coming over the ham, on my scanner,’ Greenley continues. ‘I sat up late, trying to follow the movement of the refugees, telling myself it was the best way to direct our donation. But as the night wore on, the stories started to reveal something to me. Call it pattern recognition, cognitive bias or not. People were talking about railway signals failing. A chain of autonomous factories was firebombed almost simultaneously in three different regions. One woman was wailing about a whole estate of smart-homes going haywire and trying to suffocate their residents… And then Perrin contacted me again, well into the early hours, and it was there in his voice – he was icy, Martha. He was afraid. He said, “Tell me the man is contained.” And I said he was, even though the word “contained” froze my blood. I knew I had endangered Sharon, and you, and Rolly. And now I was certain. It’s just like that soldier told us: Birmingham was the start of something, even as Perrin insisted it was nothing to dwell on. I could tell he was lying. An insurrection has arrived. And we are one of their targets. The allotments. Our work. The lab… We are on the wrong end of it.’
Martha tries to get out of the van. The door’s locked. Her feet are like concrete. She wants to piss, and she needs to run, and she can’t.
‘As soon as I came off the phone,’ Greenley goes on, ‘I went outside to wake Sharon and Rolly to explain. To seek their counsel. We needed a plan to keep this man captive without him knowing. I felt I had a responsibility, that together we could work out how to deal with him. How to respond. It was so late, so first I came by Sharon’s shed, because I knew she’d be in there asleep with him. Except she wasn’t. The man’s drip had been refreshed and his pain relief was set to a timer, but she wasn’t there – she had left him alone. So I left, too. The allotments were more silent than I have known them. There was nothing out there. No birds, no cloud. The starfield was astonishing. The Milky Way…’
Martha’s skin is livid. She wants to peel herself. She gets the idea she should try and moult, like a snake; slip away through the corrosion in the campervan’s chassis.
‘I wasn’t alone,’ Greenley says. ‘There was a fox on the allotments. The most extraordinary creature I have seen there, for all its mundaneness. It came to my legs and rubbed itself on me. I had the sense to try and photograph the thing with my phone, but each time I did, the camera – the pictures – were corrupted. It had eyes unlike any I have seen in a fox. I was almost inclined to believe it was a holotype, a wholly new species, though of course I grasped that this could not be the case.
‘I stroked the fox, Martha. It had such exquisitely furred ears, these impossibly long whiskers. It nuzzled me with an affection I cannot explain. I stood in shock and the creature closed its jaws around my knee, gently, and tugged at me. “You want me to move, do you?” I laughed! Talking to this fox in the middle of the blasted night while the country is starting to collapse around us. It worked, though, whatever it was I did: the fox released me, trotted a yard or two ahead, and turned its head to me. I followed it. I followed the fox around the greenhouses, across the vegetable patches. When it came to the tool shed, the fox stopped and stood still as a rock outside it.
‘I looked inside the tool shed. They were together inside. Sharon and Rolly were in the tool shed, fast asleep. He was wrapped in one of her blankets.’ Greenley turns to Martha, eyes hollow. ‘Please. You have to forgive me.’
‘I’ll walk,’ she manages, unable to meet his gaze for the dread, the shared humiliation, the sheer velocity of her world being upended. ‘It’s not too far.’
‘Don’t you see?’ Greenley says, weeping again. ‘That man, on the allotments. Whose leg we replaced. Oh, Martha. Please forgive me. Oh God, oh Christ, please. He was sent to us, for the work we do. He came because of what we’re doing here. Our contracts. The hands. He came to take our little future.’
‘Please,’ Martha says firmly. ‘Let me get out.’
‘I haven’t finished,’ Greenley hisses. ‘I forced Perrin to tell me. To explain the urgency.’
‘I don’t want to hear it,’ Martha says. ‘I just want to go—’
‘You must. You must know. Perrin told me there was a siege in London. Another man involved in Birmingham was captured and flipped, and the Met were led to a woman in a converted warehouse, an old MI5 safe house. An old writer called Brace who was apparently squatting there. When they finally broke in, they found she had hanged herself from the roof bars of what Perrin called a Faraday cage. She was surrounded by pages and pages of a typewritten manuscript; dozens of folders containing the intimate details and portraits of various people. She was dead, but Perrin told me his call to me was technically a threat-to-life notice – and still I wouldn’t believe him. I couldn’t believe it. Perrin had got word of the contents, and asked for some photos to be uploaded. He cross-checked the pictures he took of the old man’s body in the freezer, and several of the man Agnes saved. Two of the pictures matched. One of these folders down there contained the details of a man called Remi.’
The answers are there. Martha holds her face.
Remi.
Greenley produces something from his pockets – a square of glossy paper. He passes it to her without a word. A baby scan picture.
‘The man called Remi was carrying this,’ Greenley says. ‘It was in their car when I was clearing it. It had fallen under the seat. I suppose he was holding it when they arrived.’
Martha stares at the scan. The full date in the top left corner has been partially obscured by dried blood and abrasion. The month, year and presenting hospital, however, are visible: May 2015, Manchester Royal Infirmary. Next to these details is a surname. A maiden name.
Martha doesn’t say anything. The memory of mourning – but not for him; for her mum. She watches the square tremble between her fingers and can’t steady it; she focuses directly on the foetus, its outsized head and soft features, the otherworldly whiteness, the grain and hollow patches bounded by its skull. The early makings of a life, swelling in darkness. Her life.
‘Why didn’t you tell me sooner?’
‘I didn’t know how to,’ Greenley says. ‘Perrin explained that the dead writer had amassed all these names, locations and targets. And leverage. Each of her recruits had some sort of emotional attachment to their respective targets. Remi was blackmailed, or seeing you was a reward. I couldn’t begin to guess.’
Martha stares out of the window. How? How is this true? He doesn’t even look like her father.
‘Look,’ Greenley says. ‘I made a bag up for you. It’s in the back. Those jeans you always wear, that were soaked the other night. One of Sharon’s jumpers. I didn’t dare touch your underwear.’ Greenley smiles to himself and removes the keys from the ignition barrel and puts them in her lap. ‘I can’t tell you where to go, but I can give you this, at least. The rest of it is done. I just had to be sure. I won’t go back there. I can’t see Sharon and Rolly. And I won’t let myself see what your father has done.’
Then the pistol has slipped into Greenley’s mouth, barrel squeaking over his teeth. Saliva and snot stretch down his chin, down the barrel, on to his chest. Martha looks at him, then past him, into the thicket, the thorned edgelands. She’s down a dark tunnel, her limbs in recession. There’s a flash and a pop, very dull but excruciating, felt in the roots of Martha’s hair and in her teeth, and her ears seem to fill up with liquid. She pitches over, instantly back in the childhood she thought she’d had; a single picture of the father she thought she knew, just one, with the face she remembers. She was on her father’s shoulders with her fists in his thinning hair, his bright smile, possibly a fake smile. Boxes long closed are breaking open: the day he left them, the day he died to her. The house was on fire and her father had gone, and Martha didn’t understand. Her mum was sitting on a kerb wrapped in a child’s garish duvet,
her face like one of those miners’ faces Martha had seen in history lessons at one of those schools she went to. Eyes wide and wet. Sirens and lights and neighbours with hot drinks, and someone with cigarettes, a cigarette being pushed into her mum’s mouth, between those parched lips, smoke shaking from it. The taste of ash when she kissed Martha’s face.
‘That isn’t my dad,’ Martha tells Greenley. ‘He can’t be.’ Her voice like the distant intrusions you hear while deep underwater, when the pressure mounts around your head. Greenley doesn’t reply. His neck muscles have gone taut. His lower lip is downturned. His hair is a mess. His mouth is leaking badly. Behind him, the headrest has been remade as a terrible pink flower. The rain is a slow roll on a loose snare.
11
Part-deafened and disorientated, Martha staggers on to the allotments. The grass is desaturated under cloud, not much lighter in colour than Wracklow. The wind is muffled, a hard static, how she imagines her blood would sound in the vacuum of space. Mizzle on the air, vibrating rather than falling. Something new is burning.
Martha closes on the sheds. The radio antenna on Greenley’s shed has been pulled down. Half-grown and ripe prostheses are scattered on the wet ground. The goats are watching her, crammed into one corner of their pen, and her presence does nothing to reassure them. She comes across a long, deep stripe in the mud. It starts under the empty tarpaulin outside Rolly’s shed. Rolly’s motorbike is gone. Martha holds her belly on approach; not the worst thing, all this considered, but a wrench. A note has been nailed to the shed door. Even before she reads it, she knows Rolly and Sharon have taken their chance, too.
TRIED TO WAIT
COULDN’T
WE LOVE YOU KID X
The WE sets Martha going. Picturing Sharon and Rolly together, a couple. All this time, right under Greenley’s nose. All those little clues she’d missed, or noticed too late. Turning away reveals the source of the burning, anyway. Smoke pumping from the chimney pot above the Greenley’s lab. She wipes her eyes and approaches Greenley’s shed, convinced her heart might stop soon. The shed’s windows are all that seem to contain the heaving bulk of black and grey inside. A plastic stench, caustic and dense, somehow concentrated because she can’t hear properly.