by Tim Lebbon
“We need to walk,” Dad signed. “Get as far as we can as quickly as possible. Then we’ll pause at noon, find somewhere to rest and sort ourselves out.” I knew that we should be treating the wounds now—his broken nose and slashed forehead and lip, and especially my mother’s vesp bites. But I also knew that he was right. We needed to get away from this place.
Walking as quickly as we could with the injuries we carried was our way of running.
Jude and I took turns helping Dad. He seemed much better, but still sometimes had to pause to gather himself, shaking his head softly as if to clear it. Mum’s injuries didn’t seem to bother her too much. But even though we had to walk in silence, she seemed further away than all of us.
I tried not to imagine what the night would bring, now that we had all fallen into the Grey.
* * *
We walked for several hours, pausing often so that Dad could try to shake his dizziness away. I was worried that he was hurt worse than he was letting on, but he refused to let anyone examine him closely. He signed that his nose was too sore, so painful that it hurt to breathe, and even breathing through his mouth hurt his damaged lips and broken teeth. Maybe it was that. Perhaps he was simply breathless because it hurt to breathe.
We followed bridleways north along the valley, then down towards the shores of the lake. Windermere, perhaps, or maybe one of the smaller ones. I wasn’t sure and it didn’t seem to matter. The winter sun beat away the cold, and I was relieved that the rain had finally cleared away. The cool blue sky was a welcome sight.
Vesps flew around, a few higher up, most skimming only metres above the ground. They used their sonar to avoid trees, following the landscape and occasionally skipping around us. I could smell them everywhere, even during those rare moments when there were none in sight. It was as if they were making the world their own by spreading their rank odour.
Several times during that morning’s walk, Mum back-tracked the way we’d come. She was worried that the Reverend was following, and while the rest of us slowed down, she would hide a few hundred metres back to wait. It was always tense, me and Jude glancing nervously at each other while we waited, Dad taking the time to close his eyes and rest. Several times he rooted through the bag of medicines, but none of them were labelled. He told me that he had a pounding headache, but I worried it was more than that.
Mum always came back within twenty minutes. She never saw any sign of pursuit. But I could not shake the idea that the Reverend was still following us. I remembered his staring, mad eyes, and the way he’d wanted me, ignoring everyone else. He had removed his own ability to communicate and craved another, and perhaps in his skewed view of the world I might have been the Hushed’s salvation. But he had corrupted everything supposedly good about himself.
It was terrifying how quickly everything had gone bad. I’d heard the saying about how if you take away three square meals you end up with anarchy, but I’d always had more faith in society, had thought people were mostly good. I’d thought that it was a minority that caused trouble. But it now seemed that we had always existed on a knife-edge, and the vesps had pushed it home.
Close to the lake we saw the first group of people. There were maybe fifteen adults and children, walking along a narrow lane that headed down between beached sailing boats to the water’s edge. Our two groups saw each other at the same time. We all paused. Tentative waves were offered. I saw a couple of guns resting on shoulders, and several long-handled gardening tools. One man carried a toddler on his shoulders. An old man used a walking stick. They were refugees.
“We need to stay alone,” Dad signed, and I nodded in agreement.
Two people approached us, a fat man and a short, attractive woman. He wore a suit and coat, completely ill-prepared. She wore running tights and a waterproof top. They seemed familiar with each other, and their uncertain smiles put me at ease.
“No signing,” Dad mouthed at me, and I nodded. I understood.
It was Jude and Mum who went across the field to meet them. Mum left the shotgun behind. When they met they shook hands and started jotting messages on writing pads, the fat man and Jude keeping a watch out for vesps, the two women talking. They conversed for some time, then parted company with another handshake. I was surprised and moved to see the woman draw my mother into a hug.
As Jude and Mum returned, she was writing on the pad, still eager not to reveal our signing abilities to the other group.
We agreed to stay apart. More people, more risk of noise. They’re heading for the west coast, Whitehaven. Most of them come from this side of the Pennines. They’ve gone through it, too.
I raised an eyebrow and pointed at this. Mum mouthed her response.
“Not the Reverend. Other stuff. All bad. There were eight more of them four days ago.”
You told them about the Reverend? I jotted on the pad, and Mum nodded.
We watched the people move on along the road, the short woman glancing back several times as she went. As they turned out of sight around a bend in the lane she offered one last wave. I waved back.
We ate a little of the food Jude had gathered, tearing a loaf of bread to share. It was already stale. I knew we’d have to find more food soon, and also shelter. But the idea of approaching houses or settlements worried me.
We continued down to the lake and followed a footpath along the shore. There were more houses, holiday rentals dotting the shoreline and several larger settlements the further north we went. We skirted around these silent, dead places. Vesps sat on rooftops and circled above the villages, and I could only imagine how many bodies they guarded, how many dormant eggs waiting to hatch at the first sign of noise.
Around two in the afternoon we topped a small rise and looked down on what was left of a small town on the lake’s edge. There were several hundred buildings arranged around a bay, with a marina, a handful of boats moored, and several larger tourist vessels adrift on the open water.
Some of the town had burned. Blackened buildings pointed charred roof timbers at the sky. Gutted rooms lay exposed to the elements, the remnants of personal belongings blackened and sad. Walls had fallen, and gardens and roads were smeared with charcoal shades of ash and soot. The flames were long gone—I guessed the fire had happened days ago, if not weeks—but the smell was still there. Damp ash, the memory of flame, the waft of rot. It was a sobering sight. I had never seen anything like it, not away from a computer or TV screen, and I hoped I never would again. But I knew that with that hope was a certainty that there were more terrible sights in my future than in my past.
The stillness was disconcerting.
Jude pointed past the town then turned to us, his young face grim. He should be smiling more, I thought. He should be laughing and playing and making things up, not wishing things away.
“I think we should check one of those houses,” he signed. He’d pointed past the gutted lakeside community at a rise in the land, where several big, isolated houses commanded priceless views out across the lake.
Nobody disagreed.
* * *
The house was huge, pristine, abandoned. It didn’t look like it had been lived in for a while, and I guessed it was a holiday home. We checked that all the outer doors and windows were secure, then Dad sent us back to the other side of the garden while he forced a side door. He took his time, using a shovel from the shed and easing the lock slowly, gently, so as not to make too much noise.
Inside we did a full circuit of the house checking for vesps. And once we were sure that it was empty, and as safe as anywhere could be, we sat in the kitchen and relaxed for the first time that day.
Dad was asleep in seconds.
* * *
He dreamed of getting there just in time to stop the car crash that had killed his parents and injured his beautiful daughter. He ran onto the road with his hands held out and shouted, “Stop now or everything will change!” The car skidded to a halt, bumper mere inches from his knees. But he was not about to move. He
knew what would happen if he did—he’d seen it all in a terrible nightmare of hospital beds, recovery, and then silent monsters that sought to finish what this crash would begin—and he was nothing if not a good father. He’d do anything to save his little girl.
His parents sat in the front of the car, looking surprised and angry at his intrusion. They were far older than he had ever known them, perhaps the age they would have lived to if the crash had not shortened their lives. But it was not them he was concerned about. Ally opened the car’s rear door and jumped out, smiling when she saw her dad and about to ask what was wrong, why he was here, what he was doing in the middle of the road, and he would hear her just once more, remember those sweet tones and the way her voice dropped deeper when she was being cheeky—
She opened her mouth to talk but no words emerged. All she managed to utter was the sound of cold winds across deserted hillsides, heavy rain pummelling mountaintops in endless, eternal efforts to erode them, echoing booms as chunks of ice fell away into shadowy valleys. Distance and time, both stretched out into mindless, endless infinity. The sounds of desolation.
Huw fell forward onto the car bonnet but hit nothing.
* * *
“Dad,” Jude said. “Dad. Wake up.”
Huw opened his eyes. They hurt. Everything hurt, and it took him a while to come to his senses. Jude was standing beside the sofa on which he had been sleeping in the huge family kitchen, tapping his arm lightly as if scared to hurt him.
“Dad?”
“What is it, mate?”
“Mum said to come and see.”
“See what?”
“Don’t know. Neither does she. That’s why she said to come.”
That stirred Huw from his prone position, and he groaned past the pounding headache and pains in his face to stand and follow his son. He only then noticed how much the light had faded.
“How long have I been asleep?”
“A couple of hours. Mum said you needed the sleep and that she’s worried you’ve cracked your skull.” Jude looked up and back at him with such a wide, innocent expression that Huw had to laugh.
“Don’t worry, Jude. If I’d done that my brains would be leaking.”
Jude smiled and ran through to the living room, but Huw followed slowly. He’d been trying to assess the pain in his face and head all day. Skull fractures didn’t have to be severe, did they? He could still walk, talk and function, couldn’t he?
The living room was even larger than the kitchen. At its centre was a U-shaped sofa, big enough for twenty people, which faced out towards a decked veranda with metal and glass balustrading. The first thing he saw were the three vesps hunkered down at the base of the balustrade, sheltered from the weather and motionless. The next was the fire.
It was way across the lake, miles away on the facing hillside, and it was big. It pulsed and reduced; flames seemed to shrink and grow again as if the distance between the house and fire was constantly changing. Huw knew that air conditions could alter the way something so distant appeared.
“Huw,” Kelly whispered. She was propped with Ally on one end of the leather sofa, not too close to the window, not too exposed. As she turned to him the reflected fire barely touched her face.
“What time is it?” he signed.
“Gone five. Wanted to let you rest, but then we saw that.”
He walked to her side, touched her shoulder, and they watched together.
“What do you think it is?” Jude signed.
“Someone setting fires,” Ally said. She’d been watching them, not the distant flames, eager to be involved in the conversation.
“Why would they do that?” Jude asked.
“Trying to kill vesps?” Ally asked.
“Or maybe just because they can,” Huw said. Since they’d met the Reverend, he’d been thinking about how this sudden change in society might affect some people. Most would simply be doing their best to survive, like him and his family. But even he had changed, moving on from that strange, stressful, ostensibly civilised society he had inhabited only weeks ago. He had killed people last night, he was sure of it. At least one with the shotgun, maybe more, and if he hadn’t killed them outright then his shooting of them had led to the vesps finishing the job. But he had barely thought of them since. They were shapes in the shadows that had threatened his family. They were dangers, they meant nothing to him and he had put them down. Perhaps they would revisit him in nightmares, their tongueless mouths weeping and sad. But he thought not.
He remembered Lynne leaving the kitchen. He’d seen her through a haze of blood and pain, rushing out into the darkness, and he’d already had an inkling of her intention. That death was not meaningless. Her death he would remember.
“There’s something else,” Ally said. She moved across to the wall and flicked a light switch. Nothing happened.
“The Grey,” Huw said, and his daughter nodded. Part of him had hoped it was just the house they had left behind that had lost its electricity. Now it seemed that it was the whole region.
“I want to go,” Jude said. “I don’t like the fires. I want to get away from here.”
“Not by night,” Huw said. “We’ll stay here, all in this room. Two of us sleep, two of us stay awake and keep watch. How about that, mate? You and me keep watch together?”
Jude looked sad but he nodded.
“I’ll bet there are candles somewhere,” Kelly said.
“I don’t think we should light them.”
They found some tinned food in the kitchen and ate a meal of cold beans in curry sauce, followed by fruit cocktail in syrup. The food of the gods. Then they sat silent in the darkness, watching the fire across the lake pulse like a giant, blinking eye.
23
The power is going off. The machinery of automated power plants is under constant attack from vesps, and faults and malfunctions remain untended. Manned power stations have been abandoned. Distribution networks are falling. You should prepare for long periods without electricity, but all government organisations and departments—the police, military and all emergency committees—are working hard to ensure the safety of all residents of the United Kingdom.
Official announcement on all radio, TV and Internet channels, Wednesday, 7 December 2016
They’ve left us all to die.
@F******Truth, Twitter, Wednesday, 7 December 2016
The fire was still raging. As we left the house, Jude said he could hear the rhythmic blaring of a distant siren, and at last I had some idea what was happening.
It was like the sound ships, except on land. They were drawing in vesps to burn them. Maybe it was the military, or perhaps some civilian group doing its best to fight back. They were too far away to make out the exact methods. Flamethrowers, perhaps. Fuel cans lobbed in afresh when more vesps came. A column of greasy black smoke pointed an accusing finger at the sky, and it remained in sight for most of that morning.
I remembered the hour Dad and I had spent together the previous evening, talking about what was happening and surfing the Internet.
There was little good news. A lot of the country had gone Grey, and communication was failing rapidly. Phones still worked, but once their charges ran out they went silent. The world was growing larger.
“We’re going back to the Dark Ages,” Dad said, and he’d smiled, dismissing it like it was a throwaway remark. But it had held a heavy truth that we’d both come to acknowledge as our talk continued. The more we saw online, the darker things seemed.
That first stab of terror had bitten at me as I considered my iPad running out of charge. It contained everything I had collected and written about the vesps, from the first moment they had emerged from that cave. All the evidence, the facts, the rumours and tall tales, all were gathered together in my electronic scrapbook, and when the battery finally died it would all fade away. The analogy to my dead grandmother was striking, and at first I shied away from making it. But it had felt the same as Lynne. Dying out, windin
g down, I had known that the time would come when she would be gone for ever. Turn off her life and she becomes a mass of flesh, bone and blood set to rot. Turn off the electricity and the iPad is nothing.
“Dark Ages,” Dad had said. We had both come to the silent realisation that he was more right than he could have imagined.
Now we walked again, and in our future there would be much more walking. The maps we’d looked at online said it was almost one hundred and thirty miles to Red Rock, Dad’s parents’ old home. It was a remote house close to Galloway Forest Park. A long way, with so many unknowns in between. But there was hope in Dad’s eyes now, and we felt it too. It had become the place we had to be to ride out the storm. It was almost sure to snow, Dad said, for weeks every winter. None of us had really allowed ourselves to doubt that it would be another home. Only once did I think about the Reverend and how there might be others like him, just as mad or madder. Then I had shoved the idea aside because I still needed hope.
“Mum says you never wanted to go there again,” I had said, and Dad laughed, then fell quiet for a while. Tapping the table with his finger. Looking into the shadows, face lit only by the soft glow of the iPad screen on standby. Then he told me why.
“It’s so stupid. Dad and I had a fight there. A proper fight, if you can imagine that. The year you were born. I can barely even remember what it was all about now, but it marred our relationship for years to come. It hurt us both right up until he died, actually, and that’s something I’ve never been able to forget. It’s… complicated. I blamed him for it, and I still do, but I also want to believe he blamed me. Is that weird? I don’t want to think he died feeling guilty. And that makes me feel guilty, that he might have, so although the fight was all his fault, I’m the one carrying the guilt about it all. Twisted, eh? Believe me sweetie, don’t ever become an adult, it’ll fuck you up.”