Tom races from the hut, frantic, looking—for what?
Sean clambering through the kitchen window, Kate hurling water on the flames. Graham stumbles on the grass, spinning, arms like a scarecrow. The sparks from the fires, the heaving columns of smoke, the whirling stars in the sky, as Tom sprints toward the track, stops, stares into the darkness, runs, stops again, tries to make sense of the world, tries to hear anything above the thunder of blood in his ears while the shafts of trunks knock around him as he stumbles up the empty track until he hits the road, gasping. Nothing. No one. They couldn’t have come this far this fast, not with the children, and he would have seen a car, a truck, even motorbikes; he would have heard them. He cries out as he runs back down—for Bea, for Jack, but mostly he shouts for Bea until his throat tastes like blood and his voice is cracking as orange touches the clouds and he can see the camp in the dawn-green light back through the billows of churning smoke.
He stops, chest heaving, and watches the forest. Stares at the trees. Their lines. Their branches. Are there people there? In the undergrowth? Behind those bushes? He prowls, arms out, wild, waiting for movement. Did he hear a muffled cry?
The bushes taunt him.
Nothing.
There is nothing.
His face is numb, his heart swollen. He races back into the camp, shouting for Sean, his voice hoarse to hardly anything at all, and Sean comes tearing across the lawn. Around them, charcoal clinks and tings. Some of it drips, crumbling.
“The children,” Tom gasps. “They’ve taken the children.”
“We’ll find them,” Sean barks, and pulls him by the arm to the farmhouse.
Danny is on the kitchen table, Graham restraining him as he jerks, forcing a towel to his throat. And Kate bends, blood on her hands, to pull a needle, gore on the thread, through the lacerated skin of his throat. Tom is through the door and up the stairs. He tugs a drawer out. Grabs his rucksack and some clothes. He’s back downstairs and barges into the study, flings the cupboard open and pours the gun, the bullets, into his bag before he’s back through the kitchen, past the gory chaos, and out into the smoke-filled morning.
Sean shouts at him: “That’s the camp’s gun, Tom! Stop!”
Tom does. He stops. He looks past Sean into the kitchen, where Kate has moved away from Danny. They see each other, Kate and Tom, and she frowns. She brushes a chair aside, moving toward him. Then Mark emerges from around the house, his face black with soot, a gash on his head, and Sean roars. He lowers his shoulders and hurtles him into the wall. Hitting him, pummeling, punching madly, like a mechanism unleashed. Tom looks back to the farmhouse. Kate is now at the door, her lips trembling, her face smeared with blood. She reaches out toward him.
He turns and runs for the track. Runs. Runs under the trees, up the day-lit path, pulling his rucksack on as the sound of people shouting after him is drummed out by the blood in his ears. All he can think about is running.
Kate
Burning Up
The GPS says Tom is 12.45m away & about to turn into view. I’m regaining my balance after falling on the rubble. So much of OldTown is rubble now. But we couldn’t stay in the tower anymore, not after what Tom’s father did. I work out that the interlaceofgrazes on mypalm will take an average 206secs to cease to bleed, 3days20hours17mins12secs to heal deeply & a further 1,885mins42secs to disappear. The looter who smacked me down releases a rock toward the rowofshops. It spins through the air, 1revolution, 2, & I tell Tom we’re taking Rafa with us, & he says we can’t. The rock has turned 4revolutions & covered 3.24m of air. An armyhelicopter banks in the distance, tipping 27º off vertical. It’s cold.
Kate? Are you there? Kate? Kate? It’s Martha. She’s at home, a warm WestCoast breeze rolling into the kitchen, & she wants to know when we’re leaving. Come on, Kate, come now, she tells me, the kids want their auntie! & she waits for my reply. The airports are still open, the fares increasing exponentially in relation to the growingdelay between each flight out of here. I grab the looter’sface & GPSloc & Feed it to the police. An automatic log is taken & someone will reply within 17secs, I’m told—an eternity, because most of the police are at the Saltworth site, which is stillblazing, its orange heart at an estimated 1,729ºC, just 3.7% under critical, the reporter says, surrounded by chokingsmoke & hordes in hazchemsuits. We’re trying to get out, I assure Martha. Like a needle in my veins I feel her panic. It started simmering when PresidentTaylor1 was shot. Boiled over when the Chinesepremier was killed. Exploded in the powerless terror of losing Mum&Dad. An ad comes up. It tells me my body’s showing signs of stress and dehydration and maybe it’s time for a break; there’s a shop that sells [Cham O’Mile] just 30.7m away, do I want my GPS to direct me to it? The tip of the looter’srock touches the shopwindow. Veinsofbreakage freeze out across it as the looter takes a heavystep into the road. MyFeed links me to where I can [buyhistrainers]. He’s blocked hisFeedID, of course, but whoever he is we must share some demographics. I tell Martha to calm down, but already she’s telling me she can’t bear to lose me, that Mum&Dad being gone is more than she can bear, and she bombards me with mundles of when we were kids. My cortisolevels lurch up 23.68%, my heartrate jumps even though I’ve finally found my footing and Tom’s arm has come into view around the corner. Long before I feel it, I know that dopamine is flooding mybody & the reuptake is blocked. I’m going to go into panic. My norepinephrinelevel spikes. I can see my bloodpressure rising & my adrenalglands go crazy—because of the looter? because of the fall? the uncontrollable loss&despair brought on by the memories of our dead parents Martha is pumping at me? because I can see Rafa in my mind’s eye lost amid the monumental wreckage the city will surely become? because I want to stop being pregnant? stop this baby coming into this horrific world? & there’s a—
—She had gulped air like she was contracting in a vacuum. The looter had convulsed too, halfway through the shattered window. Smoke had rolled in the sky, reflected in the murky walls of the bulkier domiciles. Somewhere distant an explosion rumbled toward them. Kate’s eyes jerked, unseeing, the pupils wide as though they were gasping in light like her lungs were choking for air. Her eyes spasmed and she couldn’t breathe, couldn’t cope, and her fingers clawed at her head as she—
—flow of information is smotheringly, comfortingly absolute again. Fuck. My GABAlevels dropped massively & all the stats point to the echoingretreat of a seizure, I nearly had a seizure, & what the hell just happened? Tom? Are you there? I don’t know, he chat-gasps. Hisfear floods me so I filter him, tone his levels down, send a panic-burst back at him, pureinstinct that I apologize for as soon as I can stop it. It felt like theFeed went, he says. Didn’t it? Kate, are you okay? Yes, I chat-gasp too. Ask your father what the hell just happened, but Tom’s already saying, He’s not online; he’s just . . . looking at the carnage, he’s on the homeHub but he won’t reply & Mum’s still blocking me, & Tom says, Kate, I’m with you, I’m nearly there, & there he is, his face all compacted and serious as he turns the corner, as the glitteringfragments of the shopwindow cascade across the road, nearly all fallen now, the looter sparkling amid them, & I tell Tom I love him, & he says, I’m here, I’m with you, we’re going to be okay. I drop into my deserted pool [WhatWouldYouSacrifice?] & spray quickly “. . . to save the world?” I don’t expect anyone to vote (there are only 2people here; 3months & where are the 200million?) & I don’t have time to think of pollquestions so I leave a commentsection blank & I tell Tom we have to escape the city now, for the baby & for us, that if his parents aren’t replying we have to save ourselves, & he knows I’m right. It’ll break his heart, I know it will. My aunt’s place, maybe, if we can’t get a flight out, &— Martha screams at me to get out, get out, get out of there, Kate, her howling knocking out the bandwidth in my brain, that powerstation has— But it’s not her—it— What was— Panic in Tom’s eyes, his slate gray— No, theFeed can’t— Because Martha, Tom, I—
—Her muscles had stopped. She had dropped. Everyone had, that
moment. Smoke rose, rolled and folded into the sky. Impacts, distant detonations, reverberated off the buildings through the stilled and wind-blown streets. Birds had sprayed upward. Dogs froze and then fled. Machines hurtled from the sky, tearing the air, brick- and glasswork spraying. A massive explosion sent tremors through the ground, sucked the windows out of walls; even the strengthened glass from domiciles disintegrated. A midnight flash ripped across the sky. And under the booms a deeper noise: as more things stopped, as more things crashed, the approaching sound of silence.
Night had come early as clouds of noxious smoke flooded from the east. Birds landed. Dogs nosed the fallen, still-lying bodies. Minutes, hours later, Kate had stirred in the cooling, unforgiving air. The silence was more immense than any noise, deeper than her own groans. Similar bestial sounds came from near her. Tom, facedown, bled from a cut on his brow. Something white and sticky congealed around his mouth. She crawled toward him. Life cauterized around her. How long it took. How achingly slow. That was all. Scratchy filth scraped inside her brain. Inside her head she was alone. The Feed was gone. Tom was beneath her. She could see his face, shadowed in the light of the moon. But she couldn’t know his thoughts. She had fancied she felt her baby’s thoughts, fluttering amid her own, but no: there was nothing in her mind but herself.
Rain drills onto the roof, the windscreen smothered by a moving sheet of water through which only darkness lies. First one clouded breath then others burst from her mouth. Kate shivers and cannot sleep. She hasn’t felt the wrench of panic like this, this poisonous plunging grief, since the Feed went down: the panic of loss, of unsolvable loss and separation, the raw, incurable desperation to be reunited. Images flash in impulsive bursts. That looter. Rivers of wrecked cars. Crushed corpses by the road. Digital scuzzing fuzz as things interfered with the Feed. Smoke and wind. Danny’s ripped throat. The warmth of blood on her hands. Bea, Bea, when she had seen her last, as they had hugged and the girl had dashed away across the lawn to the children’s hut, the imprint of her short-armed cuddle across Kate’s shoulders, that moment pulling away, adrift and lost forever.
The cold is getting to her bones.
She hasn’t been in a car for years, can’t remember the last time she drove one, or when she’d last moved quicker than her own legs can go. How her legs hurt now, from running. She’d made Tom get rid of their car, back in the days when it mattered, when the world had needed them to make some sacrifice. When the world had needed them. She laughs. As if it ever had.
She can’t make out any movement outside. The dogs had stopped prowling when the rain became too heavy, their pelts too saturated to take on more. She touches her leg and pulls back instantly, tacky blood inside her damp jeans. The barking, the snapping jaws, the heavy furry mass pummeling her, sideswipes through her thoughts. Her hands shake unstoppably. The dogs? They’re gone now. She crumples forward. Tom’s gone too. He has left her. His face, looking back through the smoke, had been expressionless before he ran. She smothers the T-shirt to her face and cries. It had been one of the unthinkingly few things she had grabbed two panic-fragmented days before. She can smell Bea on the weave. She slumps. She sleeps. She mustn’t. She jerks awake at every sound, at no sound at all, at her ceaseless thoughts, her pulse racing, her bitten leg throbbing all the time.
Early dawn comes with the jolt of waking from a threadbare sleep, her heart pounding like it hasn’t since she lost the Feed. Shards of images cascade once more. Memories spurt as her brain knows she’s panicking and throws up reasons why. Peace destroyed as she remembers again— No. She pushes her thumbs into her eyes, forcing the instinctive muscles still. There they go, there they flex, as she looks for Tom to panic-nudge him on the Feed, to find his GPSloc, to zoom on where he is. She can’t. Looks. Fixes. Looks for Martha. She tries to connect with Bea even though Bea was never enabled, they’ve never been entwined like that.
Having lost sense of time, she becomes aware of the real: the seat’s old springs push into her back, and there are straw-colored eyes close to the window beneath pointed ears. Steam spreads around her fingertip and the dog licks the glass. She removes some old bread from her bag and forces herself to chew it. Then she winds the window down and the dog gulps a chunk, then pants for more, dancing on its feet in the drizzle.
“You’re out of luck,” she murmurs, and its ears go flat.
The dog is still outside. It watches her, blinking in the light rain. Is it one of the pack that attacked her, or a lone one? It’s impossible to tell. The lesion on her leg is tender, the skin stretching around the tooth marks, bruising red and green. So stupid! She hadn’t left the camp in so long, she’d forgotten the ways: to freeze, to throw stones, to make herself look big. She washes the wound with water from the roof. With luck it wasn’t rabid, whichever dog it had been. They all look the same. From nowhere, she misses Rafa.
Metal protesting, the door hinges grate her exhausted ears. The dog stays where it is, sprawled beneath a bush, its jowls spilling over the tarmac. Flickers of memory, after-images, ghost her sight—filthy canines, fire, the woods as she ran up the track—but here, two days’ panicked run from the camp, it is absolutely silent. Hills line the distance. Early mist rises to meet the clouds. Dark trees, beyond it, covering the land. By the time she looks back, the dog is approaching.
“Stay back!” she shouts, and it stops. Nostrils warp and suck the air. It comes forward again. “Stay back!” Kate brings the rock from her jacket, puffs up her chest, and stretches her arm to throw. The dog’s ears droop, its tail drops, it growls but back-walks away. She pushes herself off the car and starts up the road, leaving a bit more bread behind. The dog watches, sits up, and then trots to follow, pausing very briefly to swallow it.
That night she hides in another car. She sleeps. Barely. Tries to stop herself. Exhaustion crowds her sight. She mustn’t sleep unwatched. If she’s taken now, what will happen to Bea? The intruder wouldn’t care. Would it even know? She wakes with the eviscerating realization of where she is, of what’s happened to Bea, and what Tom did, and her head lurches, an absence, a vomitous instinct that fuzzes her sight and has her stumbling from the rust-coated car, barely seeing the things she passes as she struggles toward the only place she can think to go. She skids on something bloody. A carcass. That dog, she sees through her startled, staring eyes, lies nonchalantly back up the hill. Although its ears prick up, it steadfastly doesn’t quite look at her.
“Thanks,” she calls, and stumbles away with the dangling thing.
When the road bends and she’s hidden by a hedge, she hurls the dead animal away. She wants to run. She has to find Bea. She needs to rest. She mustn’t sleep. She runs.
She reaches a village as the first distant thunder rolls. A pack of dogs clusters in the road, nosing large dry bones. She pushes the map back into her rucksack and climbs the fences between overgrown gardens until she finds another way in, passing houses whose walls have tumbled, whose roofs have collapsed. There is a park and a playground and a church. The dusty silence in the dirt-covered streets. The broken windows and fire-blackened roads. She sees a stroller, ripped and decayed, and little bones beside it, one round like a doll’s head. Fizzing and sparking, memories and Feed reflexes swarming in, this is all too much for her brain.
Clouds choke the sky like smoke by the time she finds a safe-looking barn with empty pens inside. As she hears the first heavy raindrops fall, she lobs her rucksack into a hay stall and climbs up after it. Soon rain thrashes the roof in a darkness that swims through her poisonous irresistible dreams, and slowly she realizes she isn’t alone. There is breathing in the darkness, and when she opens her eyes a face is next to hers. Even though she screams, the dog doesn’t move; it keeps its paws on the shelf and pants smelly hotness at her. As another roll of thunder bears down on the barn, it barks and whines and then, as more thunder roars, scrabbles to get up. She lowers herself onto her injured shin and helps it scramble onto the shelf. By the time she has climbed back up, the dog is a big
ball of fur and ears and takes up most of the space with its shivering, quaking pelt.
“You better not snore,” Kate whispers, and lies down beside it. She wonders whether she could train it to watch her while she sleeps. She’s sure it could kill her if it chose to. But she likes the sound the dog makes as it dreams, its hushing snorts, and the weight of it lying beside her. She used to let Rafa sleep on their bed. It had driven Tom totally mad.
There had been someone lurking in her head once. She had woken one day from a sweaty, fevered dream and been absolutely sure: an unshakable sense that, for a time while she had slept, she hadn’t been alone. Someone had been amid her dreams. Tom had been sitting beside the bed—they’d been ordered to watch each other sleep. Ben’s vid had gone into every Feed. Everyone had been forced to watch it. The Collapse had been building. Everyone could feel it, like birds sensing a storm. Paranoia lived in people’s eyes. No one could be trusted. Everyone looked exhausted, most trying not to sleep. Everything wound tightly. Something would have to snap. Southampton had gone down, her parents lost in oblivion, and that was one lost city among many. Martha had been trying to make her leave. But they had stayed. There in the tower, in the bedroom they’d made their home, they’d felt safe, hermetically sealed from the world. She had been shocked by how hard self-preservation had gripped her. She would caress the baby through her own skin and press her forehead to the thick windows and look down. The traffic had not moved for days. Occasionally someone tried to mount other vehicles or smash things out of the way. Fighting was constant. Kill first was the thinking, because at least you’d still be alive.
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