by Tim Lebbon
I went downstairs to be with my family.
* * *
They were all in the big kitchen. It was where we spent the most time together, doors closed and the old range cooker alight. Going into other parts of the house felt strange because it was not ours, and even though Lynne had cleared up the remains of the old woman, her presence was still felt. I often wondered about who she was, whether she had family, how long she had been alone. A few pictures around the place told part of the story, but snooping through her belongings to find out more didn’t appeal to me.
When I joined them, all but Lynne were sitting at the table. Mum and Dad leaned in close whispering, foreheads almost touching, holding hands. Jude was kneeling on a chair with a plate of food in front of him, and somewhere he’d found a small box of old plastic toy soldiers. He’d lined up a few and was flicking bread crusts at them, glancing around furtively as if expecting to be told off at any moment. But Lynne was too busy stirring a pot of baked beans, and our parents were too busy with each other to notice. If they had noticed, maybe they just liked the fact that he was being a little boy.
I paused in the doorway and watched Jude for a while, and when he saw me he grinned. I smiled back. He flicked a piece of bread and it took out his army’s forward defences, ricocheting onto the floor and skimming beneath a cupboard. He was already involved in his battle again, tongue protruding from the corner of his mouth in concentration. He seemed happy and I was glad.
I entered the kitchen and Lynne nodded to me, pointing at bowls piled on the worktop. They had tea towels placed between them to stop them clinking together, although we were slowly learning that low levels of sound were no risk. The vesps did not seem to be able to hear small noises through windows or walls. Still, better safe than sorry.
When we were sat down and Jude’s army were placed in a defensive ring around his bowl, Lynne held up her hand. Speaking softly she said, “Before we start to eat, I have something to say.”
I saw Mum and Dad exchange a nervous glance.
“Mum—” my mother began, but Lynne whispered over the top of her.
“I’m not very well.” She looked back and forth between me and Jude, and I thought, Here it comes. I’ve suspected it for some time but part of me, the part that’s still a kid, just wanted it to go away.
“I have cancer,” Lynne continued. “It’s in my stomach and has spread to my spine and hips, and it’s not going to go away. In fact, it’ll only get worse. It doesn’t hurt that much; I have tablets to take and…” She glanced away. I wondered just how many tablets she had left. “And I’m really quite comfortable. But Jude, Ally, I wanted you to know. I don’t think this is a time for secrets.”
“Are you going to die?” Jude asked, eyes wide and wet.
Lynne didn’t answer for a while. She stared at Jude but saw something else, something further away. Her fingers tapped the table either side of her bowl of beans and freshly baked bread.
“I wanted you to know,” she whispered, very slowly so that I could read every word. “You’re not children any more. Not like you were before all this.”
Jude did not cry. He seemed unsure of who to go to, if anyone, so he stayed where he was. But he didn’t look away.
“And not yet, Jude,” she said. “Perhaps not for a long time.”
Dad said something that I didn’t catch, but I saw the flash of coolness in Lynne’s eyes. “I know I promised, but that was before. I’m sorry, Huw, Kelly. But I think they need to know.”
Mum nodded. She agreed.
I wasn’t sure how I felt. Not shocked. I’d known that something was wrong, suspected what it was even though I’d tried to ignore it, shove it deep down where other secrets were kept. But now that it was out in the open I felt sad for my grandmother. It was as if by admitting the cancer to us, her grandchildren, she had finally surrendered to it.
We ate silently for a while. Jude went to sit next to Lynne. He wasn’t really affectionate with anyone other than our parents, but right then he wanted to hold her hand. She let him, though to me she seemed uncomfortable. She ate, but every mouthful seemed to hurt. She’s only eating for us, I thought.
No one completely finished their meal, despite how hungry we were. Mum scraped the leftovers into one bowl. She’d put it in the fridge and perhaps someone would eat it later.
Then she waved to get my attention and started talking, signing as she went.
“There are only two TV channels still broadcasting. One of them is the BBC News channel. It’s on most of the time, though it drops out now and then. The people on there say they’re broadcasting from a bunker somewhere under London, and I haven’t seen either of them before. They’re scruffy. That seems odd, seeing newscasters scruffy.”
“Another sign of the end of the world,” Dad said, smiling.
“What’s the other channel?” I asked.
“Weird,” Mum said. “It’s one episode of Friends on a loop, repeating again and again.”
“They’ve all been on eighteen million times anyway!” I said, pleased that it raised a smile.
“The One Where Ravenous Monsters Eat the World,” Dad said. Even Jude smiled, though I wasn’t certain he got the joke.
“They’re still saying that the vesps don’t like intense cold,” Mum went on. “People are apparently surviving high in the Alps, Pyrenees, and in other high, cold places. There’s some footage of piles of dead vesps in snowdrifts, all sort of pale blue instead of their normal sick yellow. It might be a good thing.”
“I’ve read that too, in a lot of places,” I said. “But it’s getting difficult to see the truth in the lies.”
Lynne said something and my parents laughed. I asked her to say it again.
“I said, ‘I always trust what they say on the BBC.’”
“I’m not even sure it’s the BBC any more,” Mum said. “Just people using their equipment and an underground studio. I don’t know. Maybe…” But she left the word hanging and it described adequately what any of us knew. Maybes. Possibles. Don’t knows.
“There’s always snow in the Lakes, isn’t there?” Lynne asked.
“Not always,” Dad said. He was frowning, distracted. “And there’s that other thing.”
“The Reverend,” I said.
“Do you really think he’s dangerous?” Mum asked, but no one answered, because no one really knew.
“And there’s something else,” I said. “We’ve talked about it already, we’ve been expecting it. I only saw it mentioned last night for the first time, though, and today it’s all over the net. Called the Grey. It’s places where the electricity’s gone off, and people are getting cut off as their phone and computer batteries run out. It was only Cornwall to begin with, but now people are making lists of lots of other areas turned Grey. Lots of foreign places, but lots in Britain too. Cornwall and most of Devon, parts of south-west Wales, a few areas in London, other places. When people talk about the Grey online it’s like… like places have been wiped off the map.”
“Dark Ages,” I caught on Lynne’s lips, but I wasn’t certain she actually spoke the words. No one else seemed to react.
“I don’t think we should get too comfortable here,” Dad said.
My mother nodded in agreement. “We can’t just wait for help when none is coming. We can’t sit here and hope everything gets better when…” She trailed off.
“It’s getting worse,” I said. I looked at my ailing grandmother, thought of the Reverend gathering his flock of the Hushed, and vast swathes of the countryside turning Grey when the power went off.
My own iPad, everything I had found out, everything I had written and recorded about the vesps, turning into nothing but useless junk.
But right then no one said anything more. Knowing that this place was not permanent was enough to set us all on edge. We’d talk about the future soon.
20
Bronnitsy, south-east of Moscow, has ceased to exist. The town was largely evacuated before the firs
t waves of the vesp plague reached it; when it did, dozens of fuel tankers that had been parked around the outskirts the day before were ignited. The resulting conflagration consumed much of the town, and local forces then started shelling. A constant barrage of the town is underway day and night. Launch sites are fully automated, only manned when missile reloading is required. And while military losses are described as “acceptable” (which quite likely means large, but sustainable), the Bronnitsy incident is proving enlightening. The vesps keep attacking. Although the fires have been burning for almost two weeks and there is little left of any buildings, the noise of conflict still draws vesps in their tens of thousands, each new wave obliterated and burnt to ash by the next ordnance barrage. Estimates of vesp dead range widely from a hundred thousand to three million, but it reveals a lack of reasoning in the creatures. They are driven by instinct. Perhaps such instinct will be their downfall.
What Now? blog, Sunday, 4 December 2016
Silence and stillness, these will save us. Acceptance and embracement, these will be our saving graces. The tongue is danger, the root of the tongue is unholy, and removal will take us closer to God. There is a knife, and the knife-wielder will be your salvation.
The Hushed Manifesto
They make good soup.
How To Eat Vesps blog, Monday, 5 December 2016
It was two days later. Lynne’s revelation about her condition had prompted many questions from Jude, and now the boy rarely left her side. Huw didn’t view that as a bad thing. Lynne baked bread and Jude helped, kneading the dough, trying to do any work he called “heavy”. He was even lifting pots and pans for his grandmother.
Ally continued to monitor the web, recording anything noteworthy but by her own admission becoming more and more sceptical about much of the information posted there.
Intermittent communications from supposed government sources promised that all measures were being taken, and announcements of advances against the vesps were made into thin air. No evidence was produced to back them up. No progress made. The Prime Minister had not been heard from in several days, and online rumour suggested that he and much of his Cabinet were dead. But again, that was all it was—rumour.
The countryside around their temporary refuge remained silent. It had started raining a lot, and Huw thought it was still unseasonably warm for early December. More than anything, he wished for snow.
He spent at least an hour each day observing the vesps. The more he knew, the better he could fight them; at least that’s what he believed. That afternoon was moving on, and soon he and Ally would spend their regular hour discussing anything new and recording what they had discovered. Each day he did his best to have something new to tell her.
When he was a child he’d been a member of the Young Ornithologist’s Club, and he had taken part in several national surveys of common garden birds. He could remember many Saturday mornings spent sitting at the living-room window, looking out over the garden and conscientiously recording each species he saw and how many times. It was not a boring endeavour. His mother had loved birds, and she spent plenty of time and money ensuring that their garden was full of them. She hung feeders from brackets above windows and all around the garden, as well as allowing for several areas between his dad’s organised flowerbeds and vegetable patches that she left untended, letting them grow wild. This brought insects, and they attracted birds.
He’d see siskins, sparrows, finches, robins, thrushes, and occasionally a sparrowhawk hovering over the holly bush at the bottom of the garden, hungry for the sparrows that busied themselves plucking berries.
Sometimes his mother would sit with him, usually after placing a plate of biscuits and a glass of milk on the small table beside him. She’d rarely talk, other than to point out a bird or ask about how many he’d seen that day. It was a comfortable, intimate silence that he had relished. It had never been boring. It had involved the sort of calm concentration he’d never been able to achieve as an adult.
He had chosen to watch the vesps from outside. He could see more of them that way, note greater details about their behaviour. And there was something about being out in the open, in danger, that gave him a sense of thrilling isolation, and made him believe he was doing his best for his family.
He had to believe that. There was nothing else.
He’d been watching one particular vesp for the last five days. It had been roosting in the branches of a young oak tree by the side of the long lane leading up to the house, thirty metres beyond the wall. At first he’d thought it was dead, huddled close to the trunk. But over those five days he had seen no change in its posture, colour or position. If it was dead, surely it would have slumped down, fallen, begun to rot? He checked it every day, and every day it remained the same.
He watched others, too. The creatures continued to fly past, and he was trying to make sense of direction, and whether it was in any way connected to the weather or time of day. When the initial wave was advancing the vesps had all been moving in the same direction—away from areas they had infected and into areas they had not, perhaps attracted by new prey, or maybe acting with the conquering conscience of a hive mentality. Now he saw only randomness. That had frustrated him to begin with, but now that randomness itself was forming something of a pattern.
There were the vesps that guarded the eggs that were laid in dead bodies.
There were those that roosted, waiting for something to stir them.
And there were those that hunted.
He could still not make out any physical features that differentiated one from another. From what he had seen it was always adults that guarded eggs, but other than that there seemed to be no real pattern. Some of those that flew were small, perhaps recently hatched, while others seemed to be fully grown. He could not differentiate sex. Those that chose to rest and wait were of all sizes. It could have been that their life cycles were so accelerated that they had little time to learn and adapt, so the habits of those guarding an egg batch were handed down to the hatchlings. He didn’t know. There was so much he didn’t know that it scared him.
Everything he thought he’d understood about nature seemed to have been turned on its head by these beasts. Animals generally existed in a balanced ecosystem, but there was little about the vesps that spoke of balance. They ate everything made of meat, from the smallest bird to the largest cattle. Humans just happened to be their most common form of food. Their rapid spread and massive proliferation did not bode well for their survival as a species, because their expanding population would soon starve beneath a shrivelling food source.
Maybe down in that cavern there had been a balance, but emerging into daylight had upset it.
And even if the vesps eventually died out—starved, caught a disease, were wiped out by an engineered virus of some kind—what would happen to the ecosystem they had left behind? Nature had surely been damaged irreparably. Whole populations of wild animals had been driven close to extinction, and domesticated livestock reserves might well have suffered even more, gathered as they often were in confined spaces. No livestock would mean no food for the survivors. Hugely diminished bird numbers would lead to a massive growth in insect populations. The balance of nature had already been upset, perhaps cataclysmically. If and when the vesps died out, a very different world would grow out of what they left behind.
Huw lifted his binoculars and focused on the roosting vesp again. It had not shifted. Its tendrils were splayed across the bark of the tree trunk behind it, body laid along the branch, small legs clasping tight, claws buried in bark. Maybe it was sleeping, or perhaps this was a form of hibernation, a dormancy that would only be disturbed by the sound of food.
There was one way to find out. He’d already seen the reaction of the egg nest when he’d thrown stones against the cars at the pub. They, too, were waiting for fresh prey to draw close and make a clumsy noise. He had held back from antagonising any vesps close to the house, afraid that whatever silent signal they sent would
attract more to the area. But he had to balance that against the need to learn more. Perhaps now it was time to see just how dormant this beast was.
He selected a decent-sized pebble from the old woman’s garden, walked to the boundary wall, and lobbed the stone as far as he could along the lane. It struck the ground and bounced into the shadows beneath the trees lining the road.
The vesp did not move. Frowning, Huw found another stone and threw it.
This one ricocheted from the tree trunk just above the ground.
The vesp spread its wings, dropped down, and clamped its mouth against the tree almost before Huw could blink. Even though it was more than thirty metres away the animal’s movement had made him jump, and his heart hammered in surprise. It hadn’t moved for days, and one loud noise had galvanised it into vicious action.
Huw backed towards the house, suddenly needing to be closer to shelter. He had spotted over twenty vesps resting in various places in the countryside around the cottage, and there were four within the garden boundary. Two of those were in a tree, two more up on the roof. They’d all been there for at least a day. He suddenly felt watched. Or if not watched, then in danger of imminent discovery.
Three more vesps homed in on the tree-biting creature, answering a high-pitched call that he could not quite hear.
With his back against the wall beside the door, Huw raised the binoculars again and looked left to right, passing across the trees, the road, and onto the more open landscape that led up into the hills to the right.
And he saw a face.
He froze, shifted the binoculars back, expecting to see a bush’s stark limbs or a rock, or some other optical illusion that he’d at first mistaken for a person.
But as Huw focused on him again, the Reverend stood out from a dip in the land.
Behind him, the Hushed.
* * *
“There’s no reason to be afraid,” he whispered. But he could see that Ally was unsettled. She had already met this man, witnessed what he had done to himself, been urged to join his flock. That he was here meant that he must have come looking for them. And this time he had others.