The Silence

by Tim Lebbon

  Lynne remained sleeping, leaning against the door, groaning occasionally. He was glad that Ally couldn’t hear those sounds. He wasn’t even sure just how much she knew about her grandmother, but now wasn’t the time to talk about it with Kelly. Lynne had her medicines, though there was no telling how long they would last. It was a problem for later.

  Huw tried to imagine the future but it was a hazy, troubled place. He could not quite believe that everything was going to change so much. Try as he might, he could not doomsday them into a broken, bleeding land, and that inability surprised him. It went against his usual pessimistic self. But surely the vesps would stop, die out, be defeated by some simple, effective method? If they’d been cut off from the world for millions of years they would have no immunity to any number of common bugs or viruses. Could they really fly across twenty miles of ocean? Would they even bother? Perhaps his natural pessimism was not broad or deep enough to encompass what was happening, and in such dire times he found himself, ironically, thinking the best.

  But stark realities pointed otherwise. Maps displayed on the news, statistics, film clips, interviews. The desperation in the eyes of the Prime Minister. The shocking imagery flooding the net, none of it censored, too much to control. While officials spoke of calm, the truth was chaos.

  He tried calling Mags, but her phone was diverted to voicemail. He left a message, thought of trying again later, but decided that she would call him back. He wasn’t even sure what he’d called to say. He also called Nathan, who answered the phone and then dismissed him angrily. He’d been asleep, and he sounded drunk. Huw ended the call feeling cold and indignant.

  I tried, he thought. I called, told them where we’re going. What they do is their choice. His troubled calls to his siblings made what he had closer by even more precious. His family was everything to him, and anything beyond was simply added stress. In this changing world, you had to keep close what was most precious.

  By midnight they were north of Stoke-on-Trent on the M6 and approaching Manchester. Traffic was heavy, but no more so than on a normal busy day. They saw the results of several accidents, only one of them attended by the emergency services. They passed a van and car burning in a ditch, one man pacing back and forth on the hard shoulder, hands entangled in his hair. A few people had stopped to help. None of them could.

  Several times they saw three or four police cars parked together by the side of the motorway. Sometimes lights flashed, more often the officers stood together on the grass verge, smoking, drinking coffee from flasks, watching thousands of people fleeing north. Though the authorities had advised people to remain at home, they could do little to stem the flow of traffic. A single roadblock with no facility to redirect vehicles would soon cause a reaction all along the motorway, and gridlock would follow.

  The southbound carriageway was quiet. A few cars and lorries drifted past, and now and then they saw military convoys heading south, trucks and other vehicles camouflaged by night. Huw wondered what those soldiers were thinking. They’d been trained to fight wars, not monsters.

  Around 1 a.m., a car drifted across the carriageway several hundred metres ahead of them, clipped the central reservation, flipped into the air, and rolled back across the motorway. Brake lights flared, and two other vehicles collided after the rolling car struck them. It ended up on its roof on the hard shoulder. A few cars stopped, but most moved into the outside lane to pass.

  Glenn indicated left to pull over. Kelly flashed her lights at him repeatedly, glancing across at Huw as she did so. “We can’t stop for everyone,” she said softly.

  Huw looked over his shoulder. The kids and Lynne were asleep.

  “Let’s move on,” he said. He called Glenn on Lynne’s phone, and after a brief exchange his friend agreed.

  By the time they crawled past the wreck a few others had stopped to help. Huw tried not to look at the wrecks as they passed, but he couldn’t help it. People were being dragged from the two cars, and they seemed miraculously unhurt. But the car that had rolled was a ruin, and within its shattered interior he saw the ruin of people. They glimmered wet in the collective headlights.

  “Checking their phones,” Kelly said.

  “Or maybe they fell asleep.”

  They drove on in shamed silence.

  * * *

  The roads became clogged around Manchester and they ground to a halt. They left the motorway via a police lay-by and went off-road again. They crossed a muddy field, skidding and sliding eventually onto a farm lane that led to a B road. Others followed them, quickly becoming mired in the wheel-churned mud.

  Both vehicles had built-in satnavs. They programmed them to set a course for Lancaster, avoiding motorways, and most of the time the satnavs agreed with each other. When they didn’t, they followed Glenn’s because it was newer.

  By three in the morning they’d passed Manchester, and they stopped at a service station to switch drivers and take a toilet break. This time, no one carjacked them. Glenn stood between the parked vehicles with a shotgun resting over his left arm, while Huw and Kelly took turns taking the children and Lynne into the building to the toilets.

  There was a strange atmosphere inside. Huw took Jude, the boy tired and dazed from sleep, and it was an odd experience. Usually such a busy service station would be noisy with chatter, but even though there were plenty of people inside they were all but silent. One coffee stall was open and doing a thriving trade. A food counter had been smashed and the food taken, and the shop at the building’s entrance seemed to have been looted. Magazines, CDs and DVDs lay scattered in front of the forced metal grille, and a trail of trampled chocolate bars led across the lobby area.

  The toilets were a mess. No one had cleaned them for some time, and Jude complained that there was no toilet roll. Huw searched his pockets for a few tissues and handed them around the cubicle door, standing in front of it so that no one could enter.

  But surreal though the atmosphere was, it was not threatening. Everyone was here for a reason, and that reason was survival. These were the people who were doing something instead of sitting passively at home, waiting for the threat to reach them. Huw had no idea how many people were on the move across Britain, but he didn’t think it was the majority. The roads were still flowing, no busier than on a public holiday.

  He exchanged a few nods, and a couple of men made conversation with him. But they were half-hearted exchanges at best. Like him, they all had their own people they wanted to look after. When he caught someone’s eye he saw himself staring back—haunted, tired, confused and scared about what was to come. A sense of urgency made the silence loaded.

  Back at the cars they stood for a while listening to the heavy sound of military helicopters. Lights flashed to the east, accompanied by the whukka-whukka of rotors. Chinooks.

  They started out again. Huw took the lead. He tried to find music on the radio but there was none. So he switched it off, because he couldn’t drive while listening to so much bad news. Kelly dozed beside him, curled up in the passenger seat. He felt a fierce, uncompromising love for her, a depth of emotion he hadn’t felt for some time. They were looking after their family together, because no one else seemed able.

  Ally was awake. Huw heard her tapping her iPad intermittently, and several times she tapped him on the shoulder to relay some more information.

  “Some of them are dying in Switzerland. They don’t like cold. People are fleeing to the Alps.”

  “There’s been an explosion in Russia.”

  “Someone’s transmitting from inside an underground shopping centre in Milan. They’ve cut themselves off, the vesps are passing them by.”

  “They’ve reached the Channel…”

  That was at five in the morning. This late in the year it was still dark, and as they approached the junction that would take them back onto the M6 south of Lancaster, Huw indicated and pulled off into a highways maintenance area. There should have been a barrier preventing access, but it had been forced ope
n. Giant yellow machines sat in shadows like sleeping dinosaurs. They parked amongst piles of gravel, stacked cones, and safety barriers.

  Huw wound down his window. Glenn parked beside him and lowered his window.

  “You heard?” Glenn asked.

  “The Channel. We won’t make it much further.”

  “We should try to make it to the Lakes,” Glenn said. “Wide open country, plenty of places to get lost in there.”

  “And everyone else will be thinking the same,” Kelly said. “Think of anything better?” Glenn snapped. He closed his eyes, shook his head. “Sorry. Sorry.”

  “It’s a good idea,” Huw said. “How far, thirty miles?”

  “Give or take,” Glenn said.

  “So let’s go!” Kelly said.

  “Mummy, I want to go home,” Jude said from the back seat. Huw heard Lynne trying to comfort him, swapping seats with Ally so that she sat in the middle.

  “What if we get split up?” Lynne asked from the back seat.

  Won’t matter, Huw thought. Once they’re all around us, what the fuck does anything matter? His stomach rolled. He’d never felt so scared, not even after the accident and seeing Ally in hospital. Then there had still been some level of control, a system of procedures and protocols to grasp onto—hospital, rehabilitation, physiotherapy, operations. Now, there was only an unknown future ushering in dreadful danger.

  “We’ve got the phones,” Kelly said.

  Huw nodded. “But make sure they’re on silent.” He powered up his window and circled the compound, leaving the same way they’d entered.

  “They’re attacking ferries in the Channel,” Ally said. She’d been sitting in the back, unaware of the conversation and probably feeling terribly cut off. She was their source of information. “They were evacuating people from France. Now they’re stuck on the ships, locked in their cabins while the vesps…” She drifted off, leaving the rest to the imagination.

  Huw tried not to imagine too hard.

  11

  We’re locked in down here, sightless, deaf, fifteen of us. All lost someone. Wish we’d run. Maybe we’d still be ahead. #fucked

  @JennyFall, Twitter, Friday, 18 November 2016

  …in an old minibus… have to whisper because… still see them. Like ghosts in the night. Pale. They… against the windows. Maybe… listening, or feeling for… vibrations. We drove as fast as we could, then had a puncture. Trapped now and… seen what happens to those who make a noise. My daughter. (Silent tears.) My little girl…

  BamKrauss, YouTube, Friday, 18 November 2016

  We stopped and hid when we knew they were getting close. Isa says she thinks we should have gone on until the last moment. But we’re here now, trapped, in a field with a hundred other cars. Five of us in a Volvo. No food, no water, the stench of sweat and piss and fear. The vesps circle. They roost. And if anyone opens a door, they swoop. There are bodies. They have become birthing grounds. I wish we’d driven faster. Wish we’d run further. But they’d have probably still caught us. Sometime soon we’ll have to open the door.

  David Mendoza, CNN Correspondent, France, Friday, 18 November 2016

  There had been much to fear since the accident and losing my hearing. Travelling in cars upset and sometimes scared me. I didn’t like being alone in the house, even with Otis keeping me company. I sometimes found myself turning around and around, as if to catch sight of someone always just behind me. Dense crowds—public transport, sports venues, busy shops—could sometimes send me into a nervous, escalating panic. But it was a deep irony that one of my most traumatic memories was from before the crash.

  I was maybe five or six years old, and it had all been a nightmare…

  Jude was only a baby, and Mum wore him in a sling across her chest. Dad came in from the sunny, bee-buzzed garden one peaceful afternoon, while I was drinking orange juice and eating biscuits and listening to my favourite CD of Disney songs, and gestured Mum towards him. I thought they were going for a hug. I liked seeing my parents hug; even at that age I didn’t think they did it enough. Sometimes they even kissed, and they laughed when I told them it was gross because we all knew it really wasn’t. It was love, and whether awake or asleep I loved seeing that. But this time Dad only spoke to Mum in lowered, serious tones.

  The sunlight immediately faded, replaced by a heavy, almost tactile shadow that fell over the garden and stole all colour.

  Next thing I knew we were running, all of us, sprinting across our garden as if it were the size of a field, not the tiny lawn-and-flower-bed plot it really was. My dad grasped one of my hands, Mum the other, my little brother bouncing against her chest with every panicked step she took. I saw the swing pass by on the left, my sandpit on the right with its cover ripped off and strange, clawed prints shadowed in the damp sand, and with almost every step I kicked away an array of coloured balls of all sizes.

  The thing that chased us was unseen but so obviously there. Its presence was a heavy, dense thing, a gravity behind drawing us back. The faster and harder we ran, the slower our escape seemed to be. It was a vast weight, and every time I tried to turn to look, to see what dreadful thing had invaded our happy, perfect world, my parents squeezed my hands and dragged me along.

  The worst thing—the very worst, more fearful than the sudden darkness, the endless garden of discarded and progressively more broken toys, and the sense of that monstrous thing bearing down on us—was the expression on my parents’ faces. Terror for themselves. Dread for their children. The very real sense in their eyes that every step, every breath was hopeless and they were merely delaying the inevitable.

  I’d screamed myself awake from each and every iteration of this nightmare. Over time their frequency had decreased, and at some point the nightmare stopped without me even noticing. Childhood was like that, I’d come to realise. A series of milestones, large and small, that were never really acknowledged until they had passed.

  Sitting in the car, in the darkness, I remembered that nightmare. It bore down on me with suffocating weight, compressing my chest and making each breath laborious. We were being chased.

  I saw Dad’s face in profile, and it reminded me so much of those dreams. Lynne held my hand and squeezed, and that reminded me as well. Each time I blinked, my vision was blurred with a pulsing, spotted image of countless discarded balls, and I thought they might deflate and spot that lawn for ever. The child that had played with them was long since gone.

  I could see that none of them was talking. Even Jude had picked up on the tense atmosphere, snuggling into Lynne’s side. I wished that my brother was still beside me. It was a big sister’s job to look after her little brother in times like these—not that there ever had been times like these before. We might fight, but the fights didn’t mean we didn’t love each other. Mum often said, Just you wait until Ally grows up and leaves home, Jude, then you’ll miss her like crazy.

  I leaned forward and looked across at him, catching his eye, smiling and making a circle with my thumb and forefinger. But he didn’t smile back. He knew that things were bad.

  I checked the iPad again. I was following Twitter, a new trend labelled #vespsUK. When it had started trending I’d been shocked, because in truth, I hadn’t really expected it. Plugged in though I was to the information superhighway, until recently this had been something happening elsewhere in the world. We’re safe. We’re an island. This is all happening to someone else.

  Not any more.

  There were too many new tweets to read them all, but a few random ones I picked out said everything.

  @DoverDoll

  I see explosions out to sea.

  @PottyBonkkers

  The horizon is on fire, what R they doing?

  @UKPM

  Our forces are engaged with the vesp plague above the English Channel.

  I rolled the folding cover down over the screen. I didn’t want to see. My scrapbook app was open, filling, scattered with folders and links, but right then I only wanted to be al
one with my family, wishing I was ignorant of all that was happening. I turned in my seat and reached for Otis, splayed out now in the stolen Jeep’s empty boot. I scratched his stomach and he rolled onto his back, legs in the air. I felt him grumble with innocent contentment and wished it could be so simple for all of us.

  We were back on the motorway. Glenn was behind us in his Land Rover, keeping close on our tail. There were lots of cars, moving fast. I leaned forward and clocked the speedometer reading sixty, and in the dark, with so many vehicles surrounding us, knew that was dangerous. There’ll be accidents. One little bump and everyone grinds to a halt.

  But a few minutes later I saw why accidents were no longer holding us up.

  Mum and Dad swapped a comment, then Mum spoke briefly into her phone. The lines of traffic slowed. Ahead, past the flaring of brake lights, I saw the glow of a fire. Vehicles in the inside lane slowed to a crawl, and Dad nosed across into the outside lane. I looked back to check that Glenn was still with us. He was so close that the Land Rover’s headlights were shielded by the back of the Jeep, and I could see Glenn plainly through the windscreen. I turned around again without waving.

  We were still doing almost thirty miles per hour when we passed the wreck. Several cars had crashed, two of them entangled and burning, and there were stark scrape marks across the carriageway where they had been shoved aside and dumped on the hard shoulder. The fire still raged. A few people stood along the grass verge, one of them on her knees puking, some of them hugging, all of them confused and lost. We should pick them up, I thought, but then we were past and accelerating away again.

  No one spoke.

  There had been people in those burning cars, I was almost certain.

  “Are you okay, Dad?” I asked, and he nodded without glancing back. His expression didn’t change. That fear, that tense concentration pressed in and moulded the way his lips were set, his eyes wide and filled with reflected light.