Storm

by Virginia Bergin

  My heart is pumping; I look into my rearview—all I see is the other hedge. I look around… All I see is a bunch of people marching up the road.

  I switch off the engine.

  I get out of the car.

  “Stop!” Bridget yells.

  Hello?! I am SO stopped.

  She’s the one who has the gun now. Priti tries to run to me—but a woman grabs her hand and pulls her back. Behind them is everyone else. Behind them, the glaring man, Barry, is cuddling Angry Catherine.

  I put my hands up…I walk slowly to the back of the car. Angry Catherine, whom I might have to rename Psycho Sharpshooter Angry Catherine, has taken out my back left tire. As in, totally taken out: the dead rubber body of it lies in the road. I was driving on a wheel rim. Which explains the careening.

  They puff up the road after me. Their breath snorts out white against the cold sky of this morning. They are like an angry, frightened herd of snorting things. And me? I guess I’m a rabbit. Suppose I could run. I have this feeling Bridget wouldn’t shoot.

  Is that enough to act on, ever? A feeling?

  They stand before me. Snorting white puffs of human fear and anger. I feel like I have oh-so been here before.

  I fold my arms. (As no rabbit has ever done.)

  “Ruby, we just need to think this through,” Bridget says.

  “You call this thinking it through?” I rabbit-spit.

  She is pointing a gun at me. I am being supremely teen ironic—as in, “At gunpoint?! That’s how you think you can sort this out?!”—but no one seems to register that.

  It doesn’t really matter. All I do know is I have a gun pointed at me…and, in fact, I am fairly deeply grateful it is in the hands of someone who is saying, “We need to think this through,” because if it were up to Psycho Catherine, I swear I’d be dead already. Or that historian, she’d be slashing open veins and drinking my blood.

  “We just need to know more,” Bridget says.

  Uh. What is it with “adults” and needing to know everything?

  “We need to know about the kids,” says the woman who has hold of Priti’s hand.

  “When the army came here the first time, they didn’t just take swabs. They took two of our kids,” Bridget says. “They told us the parents had been found.”

  Ah .

  I walk back down the lane. They part to let me go first. Even Glaring Barry holds back Psycho Catherine to let me go past.

  As I head toward the house, kids scuttle back indoors; kids’ faces reappear at windows.

  “No,” Bridget says. “The shed.”

  “You’re kidding!”

  Apparently not. They’re afraid of me, aren’t they? They’re afraid of the FREAK.

  I go into the shed, and Miss Vaccine, the keen amateur historian, shuts the door on me. (I see a glint in her eye that suggests she is already thinking about where she can get ahold of a scalpel and a syringe.) I hear a bolt slide.

  “Cup of tea would be nice!” I shout.

  When they bring the cup of tea and a blanket and some food, I get a glimpse of the outside world—which consists of a semicircle of adults sitting on chairs on the drive. Ha! They are sitting having a cup of tea and a chat with a shed.

  Countries are probably being bargained for right now, millions of cars’ worth of oil being shipped. Nuclear missiles are probably being pointed in different directions…but this is the British apocalypse, where we all have a nice cup of tea and talk to a shed.

  It does occur to me to withhold information from them, but the way I see it, I’ve already messed things up by telling them stuff in the first place, and adult minds are mischievous and panicky things that can make two plus two equal a trillion, so I may as well give them the complete Emergency Public Service Broadcast. It will be factual overload, I’m sure, but better that than have their skittish minds messing with limited information. Plus, I want to get out of this shed. If they think I’m holding out on them, I could end up locked up with the spiders for days on end.

  So I tell them EVERYTHING. I do a SUPER-BLAB.

  Then I listen to their discussion. It is nothing like the radio programs my mom and stepdad listened to. It is, frankly, worse than that time our history teacher got us to listen to a debate in Parliament—and, possibly, even more nasty and shouty. And pointless.

  They go on, a lot. When just one person gets to speak, they love it. The person speaking, that is. The rest of them mutter so loud, I can hear it from inside the shed, and when the person speaking has stopped, when it comes to the “discussion” part, you just so realize none of them were listening at all. They were just keeping quietish for a bit so it looked like they were listening, when all they were doing was cooking up what they wanted to say.

  They don’t listen to each other at all.

  A variety of cockamamy plans are proposed—but in the end there are just two standout proposals:

  1. They try to trade me in for their kids.

  2. They keep me and make a vaccine out of me.

  The “discussion”—a.k.a. blazing argument—becomes somewhat emotional and then fairly science-y as well as emotional (Miss Vaccine is having a field day) as Glaring Barry (husband of dead Chrissie) and Psycho Catherine (dead Chrissie’s BF) are painfully forced to agree that the army are a bunch of who would probably just take me, say, “Thanks very much,” and shut the gates again without letting the kids go.

  Glaring Barry doesn’t care; he thinks it’s worth a try. He is not without support because everyone feels awful about the lost kids.

  Someone points out that Glaring Barry could get killed trying—and then what? Glaring Barry says he doesn’t care.

  At this point, Miss Vaccine pipes up with the PLAN OF PLANS. She swears blind that it could be as easy as injecting some of my blood into someone else.

  Uh. I have managed to keep quiet for ages, but honestly! “I told you! It’s not in my blood!” I yell from the shed.

  Like, really, I don’t know why Miss Vaccine doesn’t just go and offer to swap herself for the kids because the army would absolutely LOVE her. She’s FULL of ideas. What she is coming out with now is that, as everyone really wants this whole thing to stop (quite a lot of people have wasted quite a lot of breath saying they wish this whole thing wasn’t happening in the first place) (Dur!), and as the army are a bunch of scheming rats that no one can trust, they would be insane to lose this opportunity to find out whether a quick dose of my blood would fix everyone.

  I have this terrifying vision of myself as a human pincushion, strapped down and getting stabbed by two dozen greedy needles while Miss “Keen Amateur Historian” Vaccine consults some weird medieval map of where a human’s veins and arteries are supposed to be.

  Glaring Barry starts on about the kids again, and Miss Vaccine tells him that as the army might not hand over the kids that were taken and/or they might be dead already (she is in charm overdrive; Darius Spratt couldn’t do better) and given that he says he doesn’t care if he dies, he should volunteer for testing.

  A hush falls. Even Psycho Catherine has put a sock in it now.

  “How would we do that?” asks Bridget.

  “We’ll just take some blood out of the girl…”

  I HAVE A NAME—and, honestly, Miss Vaccine, how many more times do you have to be told IT’S NOT IN MY BLOOD!

  “…and inject it into Barry.”

  YOU’RE A KEEN AMATEUR HISTORIAN.

  No—oh no!—Bridget, sensible Bridget is listening to her.

  “So, we take some blood out of…”

  BRIDGET! THE WORD YOU’RE LOOKING FOR IS “NO.”

  “It won’t hurt her at all,” says Miss Vaccine.

  RUBY. RUBY, RUBY, RUBY. MY NAME IS RUBY.

  “Yes, but how would we test Barry?” asks Bridget.

  “We’ll do what the army’s be
en doing. We’ll dip his finger in water, and if he reacts, we’ll chop it off.”

  BARRY! THE WORD YOU’RE LOOKING FOR IS “NO.”

  “And then I’m going for the kids,” he says. “Whatever happens.”

  NOT IF YOU END UP DEAD, BARRY.

  “Yes, of course,” says Miss Vaccine.

  AS IF. If he reacts and survives the whole amputation thing, Miss V is only going to want to have another go—and another, and another, until Baz is out of fingers and toes and she’s eyeing bigger limbs. If he survives…

  Mercifully, at this point someone notices the sky’s looking questionable (I could teach them all a thing or two about correct cloud classifications; I know twenty-four different kinds, did I mention that?) and they get a panic on and drag themselves and the chairs inside. Like really: they’ve been so busy discussing how they’re going to save themselves and the world, they almost got themselves killed.

  “Are you OK, Ruby?” Bridget manages to remember to ask.

  “Yes. I. Am. Fine,” I manage to say with superb control.

  I guess they all make it indoors, because when I hear the rain start to fall on the tin roof of the shed, it is not accompanied by screams.

  I carry on with what I was doing. Yes, that’s right. While they have been cooking up the PLAN OF PLANS, I have not only hatched out but almost fully executed my own plan. The back of the shed is in a terrible state. The wood is very rotten. I have picked and picked and picked at it. When things got really shouty, I even snapped off big chunks. Now it is raining, and they are trapped inside. There is no need to be quiet about it. I kick a Ruby-sized hole in the back of it.

  I should just flee, but I can’t resist it; I go up to the sitting-room window…there they all are inside, going over the PLAN OF PLANS yet again, I shouldn’t wonder. I actually have to knock on the window to draw attention to myself.

  Psycho Catherine jumps up—to get the gun, I’ll bet—but Bridget grabs her arm. Too right. Even if Psycho Catherine manages to clip me (rather than shoot me dead) it might only result in me—their only hope—bleeding to death in the rain on the front lawn.

  “I AM GOING TO GET DARIUS AND THEN I WILL COME AND FIND YOU,” I inform them, mainly for the Princess’s benefit.

  Priti. I must remember to start calling her Priti.

  There is nothing they can say (although obviously they do anyway; I ignore every word of it) and there is nothing they can do. I turn away.

  I turn back because the kid bangs on the window.

  I look at her and she does a super-shrug, the kind of “dur!” shrug you shrug to idiots.

  Ah. That’s when I remember to ask:

  “WHERE ARE YOU GOING?” I yell at them.

  If this wasn’t the apocalypse, this would be fairly embarrassing.

  Bridget comes to the window.

  We look at each other, this craggedy old-young woman and I.

  “Spain,” she says.

  I hear the people behind her groan and kick up and complain. Not because they don’t want a Spanish holiday, but because they don’t want me turning up and spoiling it, I suppose—just in case the British Army is right behind me with their beach balls.

  “We are going to—”

  For the sake of those involved, I will not repeat the name of the place, and I had trouble repeating it at the time. Bridget spelled it out. As we know, I am superbe at French, but we didn’t do Spanish at school. I struggled.

  I seriously struggled.

  She gave up on the spelling and she just said it…over and over, and I repeated it, over and over…until I had it.

  We smiled at each other through the glass.

  I keep saying it.

  I get into one of their cars and leave.

  I keep saying it.

  Plan R has commenced.

  PLAN R

  It is a horrible drive. The rain has a right old laugh with me, coming down so hard I can hardly see the road, then easing off, then starting up all over again. When I have to get out of the car to look for another one (twice—this is not a good day), it’s pretty consistently mean; it pours down on me, even throwing in some hail for fun, so by the time I get to the army base:

  1. I am in a foul mood.

  2. I am more concerned about getting a nice cup of tea than the consequences of what I am about to do.

  Of course, (2) is not really true (though there is a microscopic amount of truth in it). The weather did hold me back, but I also dillydallied. Quite severely. It involved clothes shops (several) and a stop at a gym where I used up all the water and every can of drink inside their drinks machine and about a million towels and wrecked the exercise studio floor dyeing my hair an excellent shocking pink.

  I looked, briefly, like a pale-faced human matchstick, so I plastered on a ton of makeup to even things out. No fake tan; I’m not messing with that again. I then sat and painted my nails, admiring myself in the mirror. Best I’d looked in months.

  Seriously, I looked so good even the Danster would have said, “S’pose you look all right.”

  Don’t get me wrong; though I let my head toy with the idea, there was never really any question about where I was going. So that’s why I did all that dillydallying, you see? On the off-chance that when I rocked up to the army base they weren’t just going to let Dar go, and on the off-chance that I was probably going to end up locked up in some hideous hospital room being poked at all over again, and probably for the rest of my life, I just felt like I wanted to grab a little bit of life while I still could.

  I suppose there was another off-chance that I might end up dead. (There: that will teach you not to run away.)

  So, yeah, any way you looked at it… Well, as far as I’m concerned, the whole thing was completely justifiable. Necessary, even. It was necessary. I’m fifteen years old, and I’ve had everything taken away from me. This was what I took back.

  This was all there was to take back.

  So I rock up in a foul mood, the way anyone would be when they’ve run out of stalling time and just have to get on with something they pretty much know for sure is not going to be very nice and could be very not nice indeed.

  It’s dark already, and it’s raining. AGAIN. To cap it all, the road to the gates is rammed full of cars and people (in the cars), and it’s possible that things have really heated up in my absence because in among the normal cars and caravans and stuff that you’d expect, there are a few more serious-looking vehicles: a couple of those bulletproof, tinted-window monster cars that celebrities and criminals drive, a massive truck, and even a tank I guess someone must have nicked from somewhere…that’s stuck behind a VW van, surfboards still on top of it.

  And I look at it all and I don’t think, Oh yippee, maybe there’s a revolution brewing and everything’s going to be OK!, I don’t even think, Wow, this could be a little scary. I look at it and think, For ’s sake!—because you know what? I can’t get the car through it. I am going to have to get out and walk.

  I have spent what might be my last few precious hours of freedom EVER making myself look utterly spectacular and now I am going to get soaked. After hammering uselessly on the horn for a bit and realizing, for sure, that no one has the slightest intention of moving out of my way (in fairness, there is nowhere for them to go), I clamber about inside the car, stuffing my loot (I have provisioned myself for an indefinite future behind bars) into whatever bags I have, but one plastic bag must be sacrificed for the purposes of fashioning a crude rain-hat. (This word fashioning, it clearly has nothing to do with the word fashion.) And then I get out.

  The reaction is immediate. There is hooting and tooting and shouting and screaming and—oh my word! Was that a camera flash?! I turn, dazzled by headlights, that flick off and on again.

  Hn.

  I can’t resist. I do a superb, carefree, Sound of Music twirl in the rain—o
nly I’ve got shopping bags where that nun-woman carried a guitar.

  WHAT AM I LIKE?

  I KNOW WHAT I FEEL LIKE, I FEEL…NOT LIKE ANY KIND OF THING I HAVE FELT BEFORE. I am not a cavewoman; I am not a troll; I am not a panda. I am not a shadow-being; I am not a witch-fairy; I am not a plasticky-rubbery ghost. I am not a robot… Mom, I am still breathing. I am Ruby Morris.

  I am floating free in space. I am free.

  The mob goes berserko! Headlights, horns—people pound on car windows; a whole busload of mean-looking guys start jumping about—but in a nice way, boinging up and down on seats. And everywhere, everywhere, amazed faces are pressed to windows.

  I see a car door ahead of me crack open—whoa! NO! WAIT! I race to slam it shut.

  “Noooo!” I bellow at the lady inside.

  OH MY ! WHAT IF THEY ALL DECIDE TO DO THAT?! LIKE, REALLY, I HAVE GOT ENOUGH ON MY CONSCIENCE WITHOUT SOME MASS DEATH INCIDENT.

  All around me is tooting, hooting, howling, flashing insanity—I gotta put a stop to this, right now. I dump my loot and clamber up onto a hood and scream:

  “NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!”

  at them all.

  “STOP IT! SHUT UP! NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!”

  —flapping my arms and tearing off my rain hat. And flapping and flapping and flapping my arms again until it quiets down—at which point, before I can open my mouth to shout at them all to STAY IN YOUR CARS! the pesky British Army chips in.

  “DO NOT MOVE,” a loudspeaker voice instructs.

  Of course I do move, because I don’t know they mean me, do I? I turn to look where the voice is coming from and nearly slip off the hood.

  “PUT YOUR HANDS IN THE AIR.”

  Oh now, see…I think they must mean me. Up at the gates, in the floodlights, I can see soldiers crammed in the gatehouse, jammed in vehicles, standing at the gates in biosuits…with guns. I have made myself a perfect target, haven’t I? That’s what I think even before the spotlight hits me. I put my hands in the air, squinting into the brilliance of the light with the rain coming down like fireworks fall, a torrent of sparkling flecks of light.