Even as she sprinted at the old man, Ruan noted that he remained utterly still, his brown eyes calm. With the virus clawing at his brain, he should have erupted into a frenzy by now. Still, she hadn’t survived this long by indulging in analysis when it was time to kick arse, so she put the incongruity aside. Blood coursed through her veins, feeding her muscles for the swift sword stroke that would clear her path. At school, her fencing lunges had been so rapid that almost nobody could parry a perfectly timed attack—particularly one aimed at the balls of the many sexist boys who assumed a woman would be easy meat. Fast as she was, though, the old man was faster: before she could bring the blade arcing forward he swiveled, went down on all fours with his bum in the air and shot his back leg straight up. His heel smacked her funny bone, and the sword slipped from her numb fingers. As she crashed into him he wrapped his legs around her trunk and used the momentum to flip backward. Ruan somersaulted through the air to land flat on her back with a jarring thud.
She’d been lucky enough to fetch up on a patch of grass still soft from recent rain, so she suffered no serious damage. That was as far as her good fortune went: before she could scramble to her feet, the occupants of the camp had surrounded her. She looked straight up into a dozen hairy nostrils. As the last thing she would see on this earth, the view lacked a certain poignancy. She felt no fear, just anger at being so stupid as to walk blithely into a den of infected.
Instead of setting to frenzied work with teeth and nails, they backed away to make room for Fanny, who held the dropped sword. “We aren’t going to hurt you. Think about it. We could have killed you a dozen times over already.”
“But you’ve got the virus,” Ruan said, getting her feet under her.
“We control it, not it us.” Fanny held out the sword, hilt first. “Take it.”
Ruan snatched her weapon. The point waggled as she swung it around the circle. “Just let me go.”
Fanny leaned forward and placed her throat against the point. Ruan grew still. “Nobody here will harm you. If you have to kill me to prove that, do it.”
Ruan had killed three times, not counting animals. Each time it was done in the heat of the moment, when she needed to fight with every ounce of her being or die herself. This was different. She’d spoken to this woman, who seemed relaxed despite the sharp blade tickling her jugular vein. The camp followers were still retreating, leaving Ruan with a clear route to the exit. She looked at them all in turn, trying to process what she saw. Smoldering joints were being transferred to lips at regular intervals. The average carrier of the virus couldn’t last a few milliseconds in her presence without transforming into a rabid beast, yet these people were keeping themselves in check. All the fight went out of her. She still knew fleeing was the sensible option, but she was so tired. And what did she have to run to?
Life on the road had taught her there was fat chance of making it out of the country. Any time she trudged along the coast, helicopters buzzed back and forth beneath a crisscrossed pattern of jet contrails. If the day was clear, she could sometimes see the outlines of the warships the helicopters had taken off from. The beaches were studded with the splintered remains of boats, and occasionally a fragment of aircraft fuselage would wash up. She was trapped on this island, where it was only a matter of time before her luck ran out. Nor could she return home. That life was gone. It was a life she’d thought she hated: stuck at home with her well-meaning dad, who cringingly tried to relate to her by learning what he thought was cool teenage speak; fighting with Bryan over her desire to play One Direction, which he called Wanked Erection to annoy her, at ear-splitting volume; suffering the indignity of her mum’s insistence on picking her up after training even though all her friends got the bus home on their own. She’d wanted nothing more than independence, to go to university to study something easy like social studies while she worked at becoming a professional athlete, and assumed the adulthood that was being denied her. Now she had that independence and all it had brought her was a life as a fugitive, running in every direction but home, holding on to a useless smartphone and writing stillborn messages to a friend who was probably dead. These people might represent the closest thing to a normal life she would ever have. She lowered the sword.
“What in God’s name was that?” Ruan said, looking at the old man who’d proven to be as far from the weakest link in the chain as possible.
“Combat yoga,” Fanny said.
“There’s no such thing.”
“Sometimes when the mind does not want to hear, only the body truly listens,” the old man said in a soft voice rich with Eastern tones. When Ruan looked at him blankly, he switched to a Scottish accent. “Tell that to your bruised arse.”
Stoned giggles rippled around the audience. Ruan scowled, forcing herself not to rub her injured bum. She wasn’t used to being bested so easily and wouldn’t give her conqueror the satisfaction of seeing she was hurt.
“Let me introduce everyone,” Fanny said. “This is Nayapal: originally from Nepal, longtime resident of Cumbernauld, and now our spiritual advisor and martial arts coach.”
Ruan gave Nayapal a cool nod. She’d made the same mistake that countless men had made when facing her on the fencing piste: she underestimated an opponent. If they ever went into combat again she wouldn’t be taken so easily.
“This,” Fanny said, indicating a man with deep angled lines that branched from his nose to form a shallow triangle filled with a bushy grey moustache, “is Andy Dunlop. In his previous life, he was the president of the World Egg-Throwing Federation. Now he’s responsible for our crop cultivation.”
Andy raised a bushy eyebrow in greeting, sending his wrinkled forehead bunching up. The woman with wavy brown hair who’d handed Ruan the pamphlet was introduced as Eva Gilliam, a former public relations officer for Oxfam who now drew up the copy for the commune’s leaflets. Tom Dixon, an Englishman in his early thirties with a chirpy demeanour, was next up. He was in charge of leaflet delivery. Hannah Campbell, a tiny woman who peeked out from behind a thick fringe of blond hair, introduced herself as a general dogsbody. Scott she already knew. Finally they reached the youth who’d hidden behind the stack of pamphlets.
“This is Rory, one of our newest recruits from across the water,” Fanny said.
Rory lifted his hand slightly in greeting but refused to look at Ruan. She noticed that only Fanny appeared comfortable enough to come close. The rest hung back, whether to set her at ease or because they didn’t fully trust themselves, Ruan didn’t know. They hadn’t attacked her so far, but that didn’t mean they wouldn’t lose their cool at some point. She resolved to keep her wits about her. The door would be locked at night, from the inside this time, and her weapons would always be at hand. If there were any signs of twitchiness, she would take off.
“Now that we all know each other, let’s get back to work, shall we?” Fanny said. As everyone turned to go, Fanny plucked Andy’s sleeve. “Can you finish the tour for Ruan? I’ve got some stuff to do.”
Once everybody had wandered off, Andy’s moustache twitched up into a smile. “That was the most excitement we’ve had in months. Now, I expect you have a few questions.”
Ruan had plenty of questions, but the first one that cropped up was rather random. “Were you really the president of the egg-throwing thingy?”
“Yes, indeed. I was also the 2011 Russian Egg Roulette Champion.”
“Do I really want to ask?”
He narrowed his eyes and deepened his voice until it sounded like a movie voice-over. “Six eggs. One raw. A battle of wills. A game of chance to the death. Well, until you get egg on your face.”
“So how good are you at throwing eggs?”
“I can knock a lit cigarette out of a builder’s arse cleavage from one hundred yards.”
Ruan picked up a rock and held it out. “Show me.”
“We don’t have any builders around.”
“Just hit something small at a distance, then.”
“I can’t throw a
rock. The heft and aerodynamics are all wrong.”
“Don’t you have any eggs?”
“Yes, from the chickens we keep out back, but they’re too precious to waste. I only throw them in emergencies. You’ll have to take my word for it.” He crooked his finger in a come-hither gesture. “Anyway, let’s get on with the big tour, shall we?”
As they walked around the back of the hangar, where a satellite dish poked up from the roof, Ruan said, “Am I the first uninfected person to come here?”
“Yes.”
“So how did you know you were ready?”
“Fanny said we were. We believed her.”
That seemed a risk that Fanny had no right to take. These people had been nonviolent in theory only. Ruan wondered if her savior had one eye on a human guinea pig when she saved her. While not best pleased at this thought, she tried to shrug it off. If she planned to stay for any length of time, she couldn’t afford to be resentful of the leader of this odd little band. Anyway, Fanny’s motivation paled in insignificance compared with the fact that Ruan would have been dead without her intervention.
“She seems to get a lot of respect,” Ruan said.
“She’s a leader. That’s what people need in times of crisis.”
“Have you known her for a long time?”
“Twenty years. We were young activists together, me, Fanny, Scott, and Eva. There were a lot more of us, people who were supposed to come here if anything ever went wrong.” Andy paused and his voice grew soft. “Nobody else made it.”
“Who are the others then?”
“People who drifted in or we picked up and convinced to give our methods a go.”
“And your methods work? I mean, I can see you’re not like the others, but you don’t feel any urges?”
“I’m a man. I’ve spent my whole life trying to ignore my urges. Look, I’m not going to lie to you. When I smelled you, I felt a … twinge. I still do. But we really do have it under control.”
Andy’s words confirmed something Ruan had long suspected but never been in a position to ask any of the infected since they were usually too busy trying to bite her face off. “So it’s smell then?”
“Mainly, although virtually any sense can trigger it. Even the imagination. Look, if it’ll make you feel better, I can ask everyone to collect their sweat in jars. We can rub it on you to mask your scent.”
“I’ll take my chances,” Ruan shot back, before realizing Andy was chuckling.
“Only kidding. Seriously, you don’t have to worry. Once you know the triggers and the signals, you can condition yourself to ignore them. Although I’m not sure it would work in a mob.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’ve never been swept along in a crowd? Felt that mass hysteria? That’s why it was worse in the camps and the cities. Anywhere there was a concentration of people, individuals had no chance of staying in control. Look, this is Fanny’s theory, which I happen to agree with. The human brain hasn’t evolved at all. We’re just as savage as we were thousands of years ago. However, society has evolved. Humans are like individual cells in this structure, and generally they don’t indulge their violent impulses because society developed in such a way that it was frowned upon. We became cooperative to succeed. In the microsociety of the mob, on the other hand, violence is completely acceptable. Everybody is anonymous and just as culpable. It’s too easy to give in. Even without the virus, perfectly ordinary people do awful things in a mob.”
That made sense. While she’d never taken part in real mob violence, Ruan had seen the principle operate on a smaller scale. At school, she’d known a girl called Samantha with a gammy leg, bad breath, and no social skills whatsoever. Ruan had nothing against Samantha and usually left the girl to her own strange devices, which included jamming a finger in her ear and writing her name on the wall in a seemingly endless supply of sticky orange earwax. However, when gathered with her friends in a tight little knot, it was all too easy to join in with the catty remarks and cackling. Desperate to hang out with the cool kids, Samantha kept coming back for more, the strained smile she wore allowing her to pretend they were laughing with her, not at her. One day they took it too far. They rounded on her and shoved her until her bad leg gave way and she crumpled to the concrete playground, still trying to pretend it was a game among friends even as her eyes moistened. It had been the most shameful moment of Ruan’s life. She spent the rest of the school term trying to make it up to Samantha, oohing and aahing at her waxy skills and teaching her how to be less of a weirdo. Nobody had dared to give Ruan a hard time for the association, for they knew they would be the recipient of a slap around the lughole.
“What does it feel like when, you know…”
“When the virus takes over? Everybody has their own analogy, their own way of visualizing it so they can control it. I used to fly planes recreationally, so for me it was like being in a plane on autopilot. I did things my rational mind, sitting in that pilot’s chair, didn’t want to do, and no matter how hard I pulled on the joystick I couldn’t stop.” He paused, his moustache drooping and his eyes distant. Ruan didn’t want to know what he’d done, and didn’t ask. “That’s how I control it now. I breathe, I recite the mantra, and I imagine myself switching back over to manual. Tom, on the other hand used to dabble in ventriloquism, so he imagines the virus as a puppeteer sticking its fist up his…”
“Got it,” Ruan said.
Andy smiled and didn’t continue with the example.
“And this,” he said, stopping in front of a large greenhouse, “helps a lot.”
Ruan peered in the window. Row upon row of the distinctive green, spiky fingers of the marijuana leaf grew under bright lights. It was the first time she’d seen the plant anywhere other than on a T-shirt.
“Ever smoked weed?” Andy said.
“A little,” she lied, prompted by a desire not to seem unworldly. “At parties.”
She’d been presented with plenty of opportunities to smoke dope but always refused, not wanting to reduce her lung capacity even a fraction and lose her competitive edge.
“Resin or grass?”
“Resin,” she said, picking one at random.
“Then believe me, you haven’t tried anything like this. On this stuff, anybody who is infected might be angry but just couldn’t be bothered to kill anyone. I smoked five joints one evening and ended up wetting myself where I sat because I couldn’t summon up the enthusiasm to go to the toilet. And it felt amazing.”
“Eeeewww. TMI,” said Ruan.
“TMI?”
“Too much information.”
Andy laughed. “Fanny wants to get everybody smoking, as it’s better than the drugs that come in the aid supplies. Unfortunately there isn’t enough to go around. They’d need to import it, but the blockade means nothing can come in. Anyway, we do what we can. We print up the leaflets laying out the method, and we have a network of people who deliver them by bicycle.”
Ruan waved in the direction of an old, high-backed truck that was parked almost out of sight in an area where the vegetation began to thicken. “Why don’t you use that?”
“Like the eggs, for emergencies only. It’s got a full tank and we have spare diesel for the generator in case the lights go out, but once that’s done there’s no other fuel to be had. The army’s stockpiled what’s left and all the cars have been siphoned, which is a good thing if you ask me. Road rage was bad enough before. Could you imagine what it would be like now? If you cut somebody off, they’d pull you out of the car and beat you to death with their emergency triangle.”
Ruan indicated the satellite dish. “Couldn’t you set up a Web site?”
A look of irritation flashed across Andy’s face. Ruan backed off a step. He seemed to sense her flash of wariness and raised his hands. “I’m not going to bite your head off just because you’re asking some admittedly very annoying questions. Look, we do know what we’re doing here. If we set up a Web site, who would look at it? A
lmost nobody can get online. We’ve got to go old school. Besides, we try to keep the satellite connection use to a minimum in case they track us.”
“They?”
“The government. They might not approve of what we’re doing.”
Ruan thought the government likely had bigger concerns than a bunch of hippies, and, considering BRIT was also encouraging people to keep calm, she didn’t see the problem. Then again, Fanny’s gang did smoke a lot of dope and were bound to be a bit paranoid. After a few seconds, her gaze lit on a shed penned in by a fence. This time she phrased her question so it didn’t seem like criticism. “What’s over there?”
“The chickens. Behind that we’ve got another greenhouse for fruit and veg. And we all take it in turns to hunt, although Fanny’s the best. There are plenty of rabbits left out there, too, since they breed like, well, rabbits.” Andy rested his hand on the greenhouse door. “If you don’t mind I’ll leave you to make your own way back to your room. I’ve got to check on the plants. See you at lunch on the pier in a few hours.”
With a cheery wave, he disappeared into the greenhouse. Ruan looked up at the satellite dish. She had a message she would love to send, one she couldn’t deliver in person, but it was pointless since the Internet was off elsewhere. Then an idea hit her, something that should have occurred to her as soon as she understood that these people proved the virus could be controlled. She ran back and burst into the hangar where they were producing the leaflets. Tom, the man she was looking for, was stuffing bales of leaflets into panniers.
Too excited to bother with niceties, she blurted out her question: “Do you distribute in Edinburgh?”
“Yes.”
“If I give you an address, could you deliver one of the leaflets there?”
“I could get one of our people to do it.”
Ruan snatched up a leaflet and, tightly gripping a borrowed pen, wrote along the top, “Please try this, then we can talk. Love, Ruan.”
She folded it over and wrote the address on the other side.
“Do you mind if I ask who you’re writing to?” Tom said.
World War Moo: An Apocalypse Cow Novel Page 9