Zone?
'But...'
'Ma'am,' he said, his voice still calm, but with something slightly harder just beneath the surface, 'I really must insist.'
She knew she wasn't going to get anywhere. She wasn't about to argue with a man holding a gun. The soldier was younger than her, for sure, but he had a gun and Eleanor could see in the soldier's eyes that he was prepared to use it. Maybe he'd feel bad about it, but not as bad as whoever it was he shot.
What kind of emergency warrants shooting people?
Hot after that thought, the fear became a crushing weight.
The soldier's radio squawked and he stepped back and away from Eleanor.
She considered just driving on through the barricade. What were they going to do? Shoot her? Really? Maybe they'd shoot out her tyres - did people actually do that? Maybe they'd just spray bullets all over her car...she didn't know, but her assessment was right: whatever was going on, whatever the spill was, it was dangerous enough to kill people just to stop them getting in.
Some kind of chemical, she imagined, or a toxin, or radiation...
No.
Because why would you shoot people to stop them killing themselves? The army wouldn't work like that. They'd shoot people to save people. That was army thinking.
Which meant something infectious, or contagious...didn't it? Something viral, deadly enough to use the army's kind of persuasion to contain. And George and David were right there. Somewhere behind this blockade, and probably plenty of checkpoints like it, all around the...zone.
'Fuck.'
She made a sharp three-point turn, drove sixty or seventy yards clear of the road block and pulled onto the hard shoulder. There, when the car was safely in neutral, Eleanor Farnham covered her eyes with her hands and sobbed.
*
Eleanor cried because she was afraid, but for her failings, too.
You're a bitch, she told herself. Her husband and son were missing, and her arsehole boyfriend's come was drying in a heap of washing.
She laid her head against the rest, tears still coming even though she closed her eyes and tried to wish it all away. No matter how she tried, she still hated herself, same as every day. She tried, desperately, to think through her self-loathing and her fear for her family, of some way to find them. With no mobile, no help, and the quarantine...
GPS on the car? Would the police help, or turn her away?
Fucking idiot, she thought. I know where the car is.
Her thoughts wouldn't move on. Like she was drunk or on drugs; her mind just kept turning, every thought cyclic.
There was no doubt in her mind that she'd seen David's car. Which meant that either the soldier was lying, or that her husband and son had left the supermarket without the car.
Which just wouldn't happen. So...the soldier lied. But he hadn't looked like he was lying. She lied every day. She knew what a liar looked like well enough.
But there was no other explanation. There was nowhere to walk to from the supermarket. Maybe if you walked for thirty or forty minutes. George would. David? No way. He'd have caught a bus before he walked more than ten minutes in a line that didn't go round aisles.
So what are you going to do about it, Eleanor?
Nothing. That's what she was going to do. She knew for sure that the soldiers weren't going to let her pass, and there wasn't a road into the supermarket that wasn't blocked or quarantined.
Impotent, she was left no choice but to go home and wait for news. It sucked, and she hated herself even more, because for good or ill, they were her men.
Just need some time to think, right?
That sounded sensible to her. Not great, not comfortable, but something. She twisted the key in the ignition and the big engine roared to life just as a bus sped past, rocking the X3.
There hadn't been a bus in the queue approaching the road block.
Then a second and a third bus passed her. For just an instant she saw inside - they were people on the buses. They were full of people.
People who were inside the quarantine. Like George, and David...
Her fog cleared.
She checked her mirrors and pulled out behind the last bus. It was driven by a man wearing a black breathing mask and a soldier's uniform.
*
The BMW's fuel gauge was near enough full. Eleanor had maybe 200 miles before she had to fill the tank again. She worried, though, because she'd been behind the buses for forty-odd miles already. She had no idea how far a bus could travel. They were just ordinary county buses - two decks, advertisements on the side and back. Not like intercity coaches or something, more like they'd been taken from the local bus depot specifically for transporting the people from the supermarket.
What were those people to the army, or the Government, or whoever it was running this show? Prisoners? Witnesses? Infected?
She didn't know that, either.
She thought of her husband and her son on those buses, but of the other people, too. All bundled into a bus and driven out into the countryside, darkness all around and rain on the windows. Hot, tired, probably hungry, and every one of them frightened. Eleanor wondered if they'd been told the truth, or just some kind of pretty lie. She wondered if they'd believe either.
And what was she thinking? Did she think there was something rotten going on? The further they drove, the more she worried. She expected the buses to turn into a hospital, or an army base, but she was wrong.
It was late into the night. They used quiet, back country roads with few road signs. In following the buses out into these backwaters, she had entirely lost track of where she was. Clouds covered any natural light, and the only artificial light was her headlights and the tail lights of the buses ahead, both shining on the wet road, bouncing back from cat's eyes. She was tired from driving and the light was hurting her eyes, sore anyway from the strain of peering into the darkness, from the light of the buses, back to the road, to the light...
The country road wound and twisted and turned and was hard to navigate. The buses ahead were easy enough to follow, though.
Because they're fucking buses, she thought.
The further they travelled, the surer she became that her husband and son were in danger. Why would the army drive innocent people out into the wilds for over an hour? If her assumption was even near the mark, they might even be sick.
Dying, though?
It didn't make any kind of sense.
She rubbed at her eyes for a moment, and when she looked ahead again, the lead bus' brake lights glowed. The following buses slowed for something Eleanor couldn't see. They didn't stop, but turned.
She came this far. She could only follow.
Where the three buses left the road was a long fence, and a gate. It lead through some trees and out onto a small track surrounded by low shrubs.
Signs hung along the fence, each proclaiming the same owner: Ministry of Defence.
It was a simple choice, right then. Her husband and her son might be on one of those buses and they were the only two people in the world that made her better than she was.
No choice at all.
Eleanor switched off her lights and coasted through the gate. She used the ruts in the road as a guide, until she saw the buses ahead, lights off, just looming hulks of metal and glass in a wide expanse of nothing.
'What in the fuck is going on?' she whispered.
Only when she cut the engine did she hear them yelling. Distressed, or scared, and probably angry, too. Taken from a normal day, thinking about family, and chores, and the evening's television. Taken away from dinner or bedtime, or dates, or parents. Then they'd been driven to the middle of nowhere and left in the dark.
George. David.
If they were in there, she had to do something. Even if they weren't...those people...
For a moment, she recognised she was about to try to interfere with the army - men with guns, and the law, and power...
But only for a moment.
&
nbsp; She had her right foot out of the car when a line of fire lit up the sky and the lead bus exploded.
'Oh...God...'
Fire trailed from the sky twice more. A forth bomb struck a beat later - this one spread a wall of fire over the wrecked buses, engulfing everything in some kind of chemical that turned the twisted buses and the fields around into bright blue fire.
There could be no people after that...only fire.
'My baby. My baby...no...please.'
Eleanor slumped back into her seat.
No accident.
Even through the horror, and her sorrow, she understood she'd just witnessed fighter jets raining fire down on three civilian buses full of innocent people. A cold, heartless murder.
And one that left nothing behind at all.
Fragmented images ran through her mind. Skeletons, their limbs curled inward. Tortured metal after plane crashes. Body parts sent home when the remains were not whole. War graves, with bodies forgotten in vast pits.
She closed the car door. In shock, unable to look away from the flames, Eleanor didn't realise a car pulled in behind her until someone rapped on her window.
A man stood calmly by her BMW, the side of his face lit by the distant fire. He didn't smile. He looked, if anything, a little bored.
She opened her window just wide enough so they could speak.
'Ma'am, I'm going to have to ask you to step from the car.'
'Who the fuck are you?' said Eleanor. Sure she was afraid, but she was good and angry, too. Terrified, heart-broken, sore, tired, yes, but above all that she was fucking incandescent. She'd just witness the death of her family. Mass murder, too, but right then she couldn't grasp that. It was just too big a thought to hold to.
The man at the window nodded in response, perfectly calm in the face of her anger. A good looking, confident man, with a straight stance, his shoulders back. He looked fit. He didn't have the tired, broken look of a policeman. If he wasn't a soldier, he had to be RMP - the military police - something like that.
He reached into his jacket - dark, almost black, but in firelight they could have been green fatigues. He pulled out a wallet and took out an ID card from inside. On it, his picture, and his name and rank within some branch of the military she didn't recognise, and Ministry of Defence, which she understood just fine.
Give yourself a round of applause, Eleanor. Now you're really fucked.
Eleanor didn't care either way. Her husband and son had been blown apart by missiles named after snakes or big cats or something like that. Predatory names given to deadly toys by idiot men.
'Now, step from the car, please.'
'You just...you killed all those people.'
'Ma'am, you're in so much trouble right now. I could put you in a cell with a bucket and no fucking posters for the rest of your life and not even your family would remember your name. I'm trying to be reasonable. Step from the car.'
He didn't raise his voice. Not once.
Eleanor felt like she'd just been slapped, and damn hard, but that was good. She needed it.
'My family won't remember me, you fucking prick, because you just killed them.'
He didn't even have the grace to change his expression.
'Out.'
You couldn't just get away with murdering three buses full of terrified people. You just couldn't. Humans. Her family.
But she had no choice.
'Thank you, ma'am,' said the soldier as Eleanor stepped out. Her legs shook and on the uneven surface she leaned sideways and held onto the car door to stop herself falling down. A woman came from the other side of the X3. Eleanor was so shocked she hadn't even noticed the woman.
In case I tried to get out on the passenger side, she thought. She was relieved to know she could still think something, even though she felt cold as death inside.
'Easy or hard,' said the man with a smile that showed no teeth.
'Easy,' said Eleanor. No point in fighting it, not right now. There was a time for fighting, and her way of fighting would involve every newspaper she could get to listen, or the court, or fuck it, if it came to it, she'd...
You'll what? It's the God-damned army.
'Good choice,' said the man.
He stepped back and the woman in fatigues from the other side of the car stepped forward, raised a pistol and shot Eleanor Farnham in the head.
The blood didn't hit the car or the man.
'Easy always best, isn't it?' said the man.
'Suits me fine,' said the woman.
No witnesses and no survivors - a happy circumstance which coincidentally suited Kurt O'Dell just fine, too.
*
V.
The Mill
In three or four days, the fire along the motorway would cool. Cars would fuse to the tarmac, as would the bodies of the dead. Ordinarily, parts would be sent, piecemeal, to the bereaved as they were slowly catalogued and identified.
ENGLAND MOURNS, O'Dell imagined. He should know. He wrote the headline.
That England - countryside, unseen in the darkness, or motorway haunted by disembodied white lights, or cityscapes with their different hues, lights and buildings and people, too - all scrolled by as O'Dell drove north in his quiet black car.
The English would rally. People would cry. But he didn't think they would have all that long to mourn all those poor dead they would never know.
That was how he thought of people. As 'them'. And only when he considered humanity at all.
Himself, his boss?
Us.
Them and us, us and them. No way both were going to be around when the fire started.
Somewhere far behind O'Dell and the clever child in his charge, a road accident he'd caused, and not the kind a clean-up crew simply scraped up and covered with dirt and sawdust. Their pain didn't touch O'Dell. Their pain. Not his.
Old news.
The kid slept sprawled over the back seat of the sedan. He wouldn't wake until he was safe in his new home.
O'Dell, his ever-present damaged grin on his face, wondered about the boy - like how he'd known where to find him. How the boy (no...his power) called out to him.
A boy, thought O'Dell, who was much like himself. Not just talented, like the others he'd taken over the years. The boy was different.
The Mill was the best place for different people like George Farnham.
George grunted something, just like kids talk in their sleep. O'Dell glanced, convinced the kid's eyes would be open, and he would be staring at O'Dell. Reading him.
But no. The kid was done. He wasn't coming back.
'No one's coming back,' he said. Then, his hand jittered on the gear stick and his eyes drifted - but the movement only small, and quick, and as ever O'Dell was unaware.
'They're sheep. Baa baa bleating sheep.'
O'Dell didn't need the radio or news to see the picture they saw. Sheep saw what they wanted to see, and if the picture didn't fit, their minds made it fit. Their own fucking minds, jamming facts into a comfortable box they could manage to hold.
The country in horror. Reporters, shocked. Ticker tapes on Sky News, or the BBC, updating housewives all day long with the same inescapable blather.
As long as the idiot masses got the message that it was a terrible accident and that people could die in their beloved England...well, they'd be happy enough. People loved a tragedy far better than stories about ducks and babies and wonderful gadgets and miracle cures for cancer that weren't real.
None of it is real for them...not really. Just us.
O'Dell had his own ticker tape that updated him on the real news (though just as unimportant, perhaps). Red text against the windshield up and to the right, the phrasing just as angular as the glowing display. It didn't distract him. O'Dell was very good at concentrating.
The car rolled.
Tenants of a farmhouse a mile from the epicentre: Debtors flee country. The inhabitants of five houses to the east: Carbon monoxide deaths. Seven teenagers hanging out in
the park found later, faces stuck in their own dried vomit: New youth drug fatality.
Others besides, but nothing new, or urgent. Local news, mostly.
When the quarantine finally lifted the national (and international) news would report one hundred and ninety four people confirmed dead. Twenty-three missing; their bodies never found.
Maybe, given time, people would look closer and notice the obvious, massive discrepancies in the information released under the auspices of the MoD. O'Dell wasn't concerned in the slightest. They would have other things to worry about by then.
'We'll be fine. Us and them, right?' he said. He wasn't sure who he meant. Talking to himself, or the kid, or maybe just the night sky.
He shrugged his tired, narrow shoulders and settled down to a steady 80mph on the final stretch of the journey. By the time he pulled into a brightly light subterranean car park, most of that which passed on the journey was already forgotten.
His concentration was phenomenally, but Kurt William O'Dell had hardly any memory at all.
*
While the first of O'Dell's fire teams went to work, Francis Drew Sutton was wondering how to get help for the policeman. Now her eyes were better adjusted to the gloom, his uniform became clear. She could even make out insignia on his epaulettes and chest. Rank and force, probably, but the symbols alone didn't mean much to her.
'Have you got a radio?' she asked.
'Broke,' he said.
To her own ears, she sounded shrill and panicked. His was a quiet, tired, voice. Like a man who'd given up. She might have to carry him up the embankment, or leave him and run for help. She was reluctant to do either. To leave him meant they would both be alone, with insane people not too far away. To carry him up the steep slope in the dark would hurt him more, maybe irreparably. Maybe even kill him. She could probably do it, somehow, but not without risking injury herself. If that happened, they'd be fucked together.
'Shit,' she said, and squatted beside the policemen.
'You? Haven't you got a phone?'
'Sure. In my car.'
'Leave me. Go call for help.'
The Dead Boy Page 5