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The rabbit and parsnip stew, made possible by Fanny’s return the previous night with a cluster of the small animals, scalded Ruan’s gullet as she chowed down. She didn’t care. She was still recovering from her hand-to-mouth existence and shoveled everything down her throat as if she were a competitor at a speed-eating contest. Her longing for a juicy tin of Pedigree Chum seemed a distant and disgusting memory and she could already feel the extra weight piling onto her thighs, a process aided and abetted by no longer spending half her time cycling over hill and glen.
For the first few days in the commune, she’d remained wary. However, as she worked safely in the printing press or under the bright lights of the vegetable greenhouse, and even took a combat yoga lesson from Nayapal, she began leaving her door unlocked at night. More than anything, she reveled in having human company again. She said nothing of any import. Nobody seemed keen to talk about the past; she was with them on that score. Still, it felt so good just to be able to open her mouth and get a response that, on the second day, she turned off her useless mobile phone and left it in her rucksack. She couldn’t quite bring herself to delete all of the messages to Bridget, though: they served as a chronicle of her time on the run, and she still nurtured a faint hope that one day the Internet would come back on and the device would light up with messages from her friend.
Fanny’s troupe was committed, hardworking, and organized, printing thousands of leaflets each day from their stockpile of paper. Bicycle couriers came and went, panniers laden with their message of hope, dope, and regular sex or masturbation—the latter, Scott told her, inspired by the fact that Fanny’s son, who it turned out was still alive and had left the country, had been an unstoppable wanking machine. Tom disappeared to take care of distribution on the east coast, carrying Ruan’s message with him, but the rest of them never left the compound except to hunt. At the center of the activity, like a benign spider who praised and cajoled the flies in her web rather than sucking them dry, sat Fanny. She possessed a natural authority that permeated the camp and brought harmony where discord could easily flourish. Ruan suspected that without her it would all fall apart.
It was this calmness and normality—the proof that resistance was possible after all—that led her mind down paths it didn’t want to travel but, in the end, couldn’t avoid.
* * *
The Rest and Reception camp had been a novelty on the first night—more like a camping holiday without the grief of fumbling with tent poles while being eaten alive by midges than a frightened huddle against nature’s unleashed savagery. It struck Ruan as odd that the army had scooped up as many people as it could from within the city’s urban armor and plonked them in the countryside—which did seem a more likely place for zombie animals to congregate. She suspected that this was the emergency plan the government had put in place for major threats, which it probably expected would revolve around dirty bombs rather than mad cows, and that it was sticking to it for want of any better ideas. Ruan would much rather have holed up in her bedroom, several floors up and therefore a safe haven from any barmy bovines, and glued her nose to her laptop. Still, the camp seemed safe enough: the previous occupants had been despatched in a speedy cull, the waters of the Firth of Forth provided a natural barrier to intrusion on one side, and the perimeter fence took care of the rest.
The novelty soon faded. Unlike Butlins, the camp didn’t have sports facilities or a bar she could sneak drinks from, there was no Wi-Fi or even power sockets for her computer and phone, and they had to share with another family. As a result, the tent swiftly began to smell as ripe as her unwashed sports kit after a week stuffed under her bed. She was just grateful that Bryan had gone down to visit a friend in Leeds before the virus broke out. The musk of teenage boy would have pushed the pong levels beyond her tolerance. Still, she made the best of it: getting out of the tent to run as often as possible and spending the rest of her time down by the water, reading the sports psychology books she’d borrowed from the library the day before the evacuation.
She was doing just that after dinner, about a week into her stay, when she heard shouting from the direction of the main entrance. That wasn’t unusual: tempers were fraying as people used to coming home to a comfy sofa and giant television rubbed up against each other. She’d witnessed three scuffles, all of them involving people who looked like the only thing they’d ever battered was a fish for tea. While the latest kerfuffle was probably just another uncoordinated slap fest, she set off in search of some voyeuristic entertainment. The last real excitement had come two days before, when an enterprising soldier used a combine harvester to take out a seething carpet of zombie rabbits bearing down on the camp, spraying fluffy bunny gore into the bucket, while his mates crisped those bouncy enough to avoid the grinding blades with flamethrowers. They hadn’t even bothered cleaning up, which meant the acrid smell of hundreds of decomposing bunnies drifted through the camp when the wind blew in their direction.
As she drew closer, somebody let out a piercing scream. The only time she’d ever heard a noise like it was when a teammate tumbled from her bike and snapped her arm clean in two. Another shriek rent the air above the babble of voices. She heard a succession of little pops, followed by more screams. The hairs on her neck wafted upward and she did a U-turn. When she got back to the tent, it was empty. She’d forgotten her mum and dad were “going for a walk”—which, from their happy smiles after they came back from such excursions, she took to mean, “We’re going to the toilets to get frisky because that’s the only place we can get any privacy.” She had no idea where the other family was. While Ruan didn’t know exactly what was going on, her body’s primal response told her it was bad. She struck off in the direction of the closest set of portaloos and knocked on every door, hoping to find her mum and dad. All she got was a succession of people telling her to fuck off. The next closest block was back in the direction of the awful many-throated voice, which grew louder and hoarser with every passing minute, so she squeezed between two portaloos and, using one as leverage, got on top of the other to get a better view. The loo she’d kicked off toppled sideways and hit the next. The domino effect went as far as three toilets, prompting sloshing and more swearing. She ignored it.
At first she saw nothing but thrashing tent tops. She could hear faint and regular pops beneath the crowd noise, like the imperfections on the old jazz albums her dad listened to, from the automatic weapons soldiers in the perimeter towers were unloading into the area where the tents shook. The closest tower, only about fifty feet away, began to vibrate and the soldier pointed his weapon downward. A man in a bright blue jumper scrambled into view above the tents, going hand over hand up the struts of the tower. A red spray materialized around his head and he fell, but others took his place. Ruan’s legs turned to jelly and she almost slipped from the roof. The virus had crossed to humans.
Not more than ten feet away, a woman appeared in one of the smaller lanes that snaked off from the camp’s main thoroughfare. Clumps had been torn from her voluminous head of blond hair, and blood ran down her forehead. Her eyes, blue and unblinking, completed the impression of a raggedy child’s doll tossed aside to rot in the corner. Without a moment’s hesitation she sprinted toward the portaloo, shrieking as she came. From that moment on everything became a blur of unthinking, adrenaline-filled fear. Ruan jumped from her vantage point, but before she could rise from her landing crouch, the blond woman pounced. Ruan had enough time to raise an arm, which the woman seemed to take as an invitation to dinner. The pain that flashed up Ruan’s nerve endings from the bite prompted a wave of anger, which transmitted itself back down her right arm. She balled a fist and hammered the woman repeatedly in the temple. The attacker rolled backward under the force of the assault, buying Ruan the time she needed to find her feet and run to the main avenue.
Just before she turned toward the sea, Ruan glimpsed a pack running toward her. She didn’t wait to find out if they were pursuers or pursued. Now she
was on the avenue, rutted from the tramp of thousands of feet or not, nobody would catch her. As she sprinted, she realized that even though the bite had broken skin, she felt no desire to attack the campers who were poking their heads fearfully out of their tents.
“Run!” she shouted, not waiting to find out if they took her advice.
Within thirty seconds, her feet were crunching on pebbles. She kicked off her shoes and plunged into the sea, settling into a powerful crawl before the freezing water could shock her muscles into immobility. Locked into the easy, simple motion, her whirring mind shut down for a few minutes. She snapped back to herself in a moment of reeling vertigo and remembered her parents. She spun and saw the tents were a few hundred meters away, although they were partially obscured by a mass of people on the shoreline. On the fringes of the struggling crowd, figures were spilling into the water or spreading off in both directions on the land. It was too late to return. She allowed herself one roar of anguish before shutting down the panic with several swift blinks and completing a slow circle. Nowhere on the mainland would be safe. The genie was out of the bottle, and it would quickly flit across the country. Her only option lay out where the firth began to widen into the North Sea: Inchkeith, the abandoned island where a lighthouse spun its circle of light by night. She put her head down and swam.
* * *
When Ruan finally hauled herself onto the island, which was little more than a craggy slice of rock that rose vertiginously from the sea, her muscles were trembling with fatigue and her body was chilled to its core. On a slanting slope to her left lay a cluster of old stone buildings. She made her way across but found they were crumbling, doors and windows open to the elements. She trudged up the steep path to the lighthouse. When she got to the yellow building, which looked like a miniature castle with a large metal lamp plopped on top, she smashed a window and undid the latch. Once inside, she stripped off her light summer dress and underwear and mounted the stairs. In the lamp chamber, she draped her clothes across the light to dry when it turned on. Then she crouched shivering in the corner, listening to the wind howl and staring in the direction of the distant camp. She looked down at her bleeding arm, almost willing the rage to come. Anything would be better than this emptiness. When nothing happened, she began slamming her fist methodically against the toughened glass.
At some point she fell into an uneasy sleep, punctuated by flashes of light that illuminated dreams of running back through the camp, searching for her parents as unearthly screams whistled through rows of blank tents. When she woke, the sun was up and the lamp had fallen still. She slipped on her now dry clothes and went outside. She looked across to Edinburgh. It was too far to see any movement, but columns of smoke drifted over the rooftops. When the wind gusted toward her from the city, she heard a faint jumble of roars, shouts, and screams. She refused to think of her parents as dead or turned. In any zombie movie, there were always survivors. Her mum and dad were the kind of smart and resourceful people who fit that bill. She imagined them waiting in the plastic cocoon of their portaloo for the madness to recede, flitting through the bloody streets of Edinburgh and holing up in their apartment. She would swim across to the city once she’d regained her strength and the city sounded less insanely violent and find them there.
She spent the next two days trying to catch the skittish seagulls, until she finally admitted defeat and chewed grass. It left a bitter taste in her mouth and brought wrenching stomach cramps, lurid green diarrhea, and a fever. On the fourth day, she looked down upon the beach and saw a young seal sunning itself on the rocks. Her head, which had been part of campaigns to stop seals being clubbed to death by evil Scandinavians, said no. Her stomach shouted it down with a vehement yes. She grabbed the largest rock she could find and crept to the edge of the bluff overlooking the beach. The drop was only six feet, so she leapt down and landed close to the animal. She expected it to scoot toward the water and got ready to pursue. Instead, it lifted its sleek snout and looked at her with baleful eyes. With a noise like the bark of an effeminate dog, it flopped toward her.
“You, too?” she said, her voice cracked. “What are you going to do: slap me to death with your fins?”
The seal opened its mouth wide and displayed rows of incisors that wouldn’t have looked out of place on a lion. Had she been less hungry, she would have run. Instead, she dodged its clumsy lunge, planted her behind on its back and beat it on the back of the skull until it lay still. She searched until she found a sharp rock and, gritting her teeth, set about butchering. A few hours later, her hands were raw and chunks of seal meat and blubber were piled up on one side. She tried for hours to start a cook fire, fruitlessly rubbing sticks and stones in increasingly frantic combinations. It took her another few hours of staring at the meat, knowing it was infected but also aware that she must be immune, before she fell upon it. She bit into the salty, livery flesh and chewed it down between labored breaths, pretending it was sushi.
One week in, the fever dreams intruded on her waking hours, making her jump at every flicker of movement, and she knew she had to risk the swim before she grew too weak. In her fragile condition, the crossing almost killed her: at one point, not far from the shore, she succumbed and slipped under the water. Luckily the rising slope of the seabed was just beneath her toes, allowing her to bob back up and close the remaining distance to the beach that ran along Leith Docks. She’d timed it so she would arrive around dusk, but it was far too early to consider venturing into the city proper. Just beyond where the beach gave way to loose soil, a squat stone tower jutted from the earth. She leaned against it and scanned the deserted docklands. Feeling reasonably secure for the moment, although keeping one eye on the water in case any zombie seals came flopping after her—a fear that had caused her great stress in the water, where she didn’t have the advantage her biped status afforded her on land—she settled down to wait in sopping wet clothes that at least cooled her fever.
When the glowing digits of her waterproof watch told her it was 3:00 a.m., she set off. She encountered her first dead body just outside the docks. The darkness spared her any visual details, although her nostrils were given a full whiff of decay. As she moved deeper into the city, ducking from doorway to doorway, broken glass from storefronts glittered in the faint moonlight and everywhere dark stains blotched the pavement. The streets were eerily empty. She made a quick pit stop to grab a box of powdered antibiotics and a large tub of paracetamol from the jumbled contents of a smashed-up pharmacy.
Only when she’d reached the apartment did she remember she had no key. She considered climbing up the side of the building, as the deep gaps between the blocks provided handholds, but rejected it. She was weak and couldn’t take the risk of falling and spraining her ankle or worse. She jammed her finger on the buzzer. After what felt like an eternity of standing in the exposed street, her dad answered.
“I’ve got a gun, so you’d best be on your way,” he said.
Ruan pressed her mouth against the wall to muffle her squeal of delight. She’d known they would be alive. Everything was going to be okay.
“It’s me, Dad.”
“Ruan?” he said. “You’re alive. Thank God, you’re alive!”
In the background, she heard her mum babble excitedly as the door buzzed open. She took the stairs two at a time. Security chains rattled and keys turned in locks, then she heard footsteps on the landing above. As she rounded the final bend she saw their familiar silhouettes standing side by side at the top of the stairs.
“Mum! Dad!” she shouted, not caring who heard.
As she continued upward, a growl echoed through the stairwell. Her first thought was that a dog must have been taking shelter in the building. Just as she was about to bound up the final set of steps, she realized it was coming from her dad. She froze. There was something wrong with their silhouettes: they seemed bunched, vibrating with tension. Her dad sneezed, before he spoke. “Where have you been? Your mother was worried sick.”
&n
bsp; Something had changed in the time it took her to climb the stairs. His voice was low, hard, and choppy—as though he was a mechanical replica of her dad, and somebody was turning a crank to get the sentence out. Her mum shook her head before her voice broke into a yell that held a timbre all too familiar to the screeching in the camp. “We bought you everything you ever wanted, let you do whatever you wanted, and now you do this to us. You need some discipline, you spoiled little brat!”
Then they were coming down the stairs.
This can’t be happening, Ruan thought numbly. It’s just the fever.
Her mum got there first and grabbed her hair. Moments later, her dad punched her on the side of the head. Within seconds, she became a bone between two snarling, snapping dogs. When her mum sank her teeth into Ruan’s shoulder and bit down hard, her mind shrank away from this awful reality. She mentally switched her mum with the blond woman in the camp and her dad with a savage stranger. Her elbow snapped up and hammered into the woman’s face, forcing her to release her grip. She put both hands into the man’s chest and pushed with all her strength. His hands came free and she fell backward, twisting to face back down the stairwell. She landed heavily, but immediately got back to her feet and ran.
At the bottom of the stairs, she yanked on the handle before remembering she had to release the lock. She pressed the button and opened the door just wide enough to slip out. She pulled it shut. A second later the man slammed up against the glass. So distorted was his face—neck muscles corded, eyes popping from his head, teeth clamped together in frustrated rage—that it made it easy to believe the fiction he wasn’t her dad. He hauled on the door, too far gone to remember the button, as the woman thumped up alongside him and scrabbled at the glass. Ruan didn’t even look at her. She just turned and ran.
* * *
During the subsequent months on the road, Ruan had never blamed her parents for what they did; after all, she’d never seen evidence that somebody with the virus could behave any other way in her presence. When she realized Fanny and her troupe were fighting their urges, her first thought had been to pass this technique on to her parents in the hope they could be together again. With every day that passed in which nobody attacked her, she began to reevaluate. Not one of these people knew her or felt anything for her, yet they controlled themselves. Her parents, with a lifetime of supposedly loving her behind them, had shown no such restraint. Then there were the hurtful things her mother said, which had to have come from somewhere. What kind of parents, no matter how sick, tried to kill their child?
World War Moo: An Apocalypse Cow Novel Page 18