Apocalypse Cow (31 page)

‘We have to get out of here as soon as possible,’ Terry said. ‘They don’t have our names, but they’ve got our faces and fingerprints. That might be enough.’

‘It’s going to be tough,’ Lesley responded. ‘I don’t know if you noticed, but every second guard post is facing inward. That means they’re just as keen to keep us in as they are to keep the animals out.’

‘Why would they do that?’ Terry asked.

‘The soldiers thought I had the virus,’ Geldof said. ‘For a minute, I thought they were going to shoot me.’

‘I’d say they’re worried too much contact between human and animal will let the virus mutate,’ Lesley commented.

Terry frowned. ‘Well, whatever the reason, we need to skedaddle before Brown turns up.’

‘Geldof and I will scout the camp,’ James said. ‘See if there are any weak spots.’

‘What, now?’ Geldof asked.

‘Yes, now.’

Sighing was something Geldof had become extremely practised at down the years, and he took the opportunity to display his skill as he clambered to his feet.

‘Oh, come on. It’ll be fun,’ James said with a hopeful smile. ‘We can pretend we’re commandos.’

‘Dad, I’m fifteen, not nine,’ Geldof replied. ‘Smoking dope only slows down time for you. The rest of the world marches on.’

James’s smile drooped.

They trudged around the edge of the camp in silence, sandwiched between the outer rim of the tents and the fence. Machine-gun posts and floodlights, connected to snaking cables that ran off to generators studded into the grass, were spaced at regular intervals for the entire circumference. Sure enough, at every second post the guard was looking in, the gun pointed into the camp. Only the terrain on the outside changed, from forest to fields overlooking residential areas to a view of the River Clyde. The only variation to the uniform fence came at the main entrance. The car park had been cordoned off and was full of trucks, armoured vehicles and even two tanks. Soldiers sat around in small groups, chatting, smoking and playing cards.

‘This is a good choice of camp,’ James said. ‘Forest on one side, river on the other. It creates a natural barrier. It means it’s easier to defend.’

‘That’s nice,’ Geldof said, more concerned with the growing rumble in his stomach where food should be.

They looped back to the lake and walked along the side until they reached the rowing boats.

‘Do you want to grab a free ride?’ James asked. ‘Nobody’s looking.’

‘Don’t you remember the last time we did this?’

James shook his head.

‘I peed myself. You were too stoned to row properly on your side and get us back to shore, so we ended up going in circles until I couldn’t hold it.’

Geldof’s dad sat down heavily on the jetty. ‘God, I’m sorry, son.’

He hung his head, looking into the water, where scum from
the
dirty clothes being scrubbed each day slicked the surface. ‘I’ve not been a very good father, have I? I know it’s no excuse, but I only smoked so much so I wouldn’t have to remember. I never told you, but I was in the SAS: in the Falklands; in Iraq behind the lines; training the Khmer Rouge.’ His voice became a hoarse whisper. ‘I did some awful things.’

A flush of sympathy swept over Geldof. He sat on the jetty and edged closer. ‘What’s the Khmer Rouge?’

‘It doesn’t matter. What matters is I should have been there for you. I wasn’t.’

‘Oh look, don’t worry about it,’ Geldof said.

‘I have to. You don’t have your mum now.’ James paused and looked out over the lake, to where a gaggle of women were bent over at their laundry on the other shore. ‘I miss her, you know. She would have loved this: all those women having to abandon their washing machines and go back to nature.’

Tears sprang to James’s eyes. Geldof reached up and put his skinny arm round his father’s shoulder. ‘I miss her too.’

‘I promise I’ll be there for you from now on,’ James said. ‘No more dope, not even if it begins raining Gold Seal.’

Geldof gave his father another squeeze, still feeling slightly uncomfortable at the physical closeness. He could barely remember when he’d last touched his father before the past few days.

‘Come on, let’s take one of the boats out,’ Geldof suggested.

James looked up, wiping away his tears. ‘Are you sure?’

Geldof smiled. ‘Yeah, it’ll be fun.’

James leapt to his feet and clambered into a boat. He held out a hand to Geldof and helped him on. The sun came out
as
they reached the middle of the lake, warming Geldof’s skin, and they chose to drift for a while. For a moment he forgot all about zombie cows, dead mothers and government agents, and became just a boy out on the lake with his father. James had closed his eyes and appeared to be nodding off, when Geldof realized he needed to pee. He looked at his dad’s peaceful face, and smiled. Instead of waking his father, Geldof stood up unsteadily, undid his fly and whizzed into the lake.

If there was a mental equivalent of rubbing your hands in glee, Lesley was doing exactly that. Admittedly, having the population of Britain either dead, living in squalor in refugee camps or cowering in their homes seemed, on the face of it, to be bad news. And the fact that they were trapped in one of those camps was not a source of joy either. Yet as Lesley joined the ration queue with Terry, she could think only of how humongous her story was going to be once it got out.

It just got better and better. The camp was an amazing piece of colour and a perfect example of the role reversal that had swept the country: the people were the ones penned in while the cattle roamed free. She wasn’t going to stop at just a feature. A best-selling book about her battle to bring the story to print was in the offing too. It had all the ingredients: death, struggle, cannibalism, capture, escape. Only a bit of love interest was missing, and, as her gaze rested on Terry’s pert buttocks, she was pretty sure that could be arranged. Titles for the book zipped through her mind –
Flight from Zombie Island: One Journalist’s Heroic Tale
and
Apocalypse Cow: How One Woman Brought Down the British Government
were her two favourites.

Maybe she was getting ahead of herself, as they still had to
get
out of the camp, travel the length of England and navigate a tunnel that would most likely be sealed off. At the moment even getting out of the queue looked like it was going to be an ordeal: the line of people waiting for food doubled back on itself twice along the lakeside (though since it was a British queue it remained polite and orderly; Lesley tried and failed to picture the chaos had the camp been in Italy). Even so, she couldn’t help getting carried away. Just when all had seemed lost, the evidence had been handed to her on a plate and, despite the brief moment of self-doubt in the station brought on by the mention of her overachieving father, she still felt the fates were conspiring to render irrelevant her previous fuck-ups.

She amused herself for a while by graciously accepting various awards for her journalistic magnificence. She plucked the Pulitzer Prize from the hands of a beaming Barack Obama, tipping a wink at a very green Colin, who she had ensured had tickets for the front row. She had no idea what the Pulitzer looked like or even if a non-American could win it. In her fantasy it became a statue of such golden vulgar lavishness she needed two assistants to help her lift it over her head in triumph. Next she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, which she planned to put on the mantelpiece of the beach-front property she would buy in Malibu with her royalties. Then she would hire Colin to dust it.

Colin’s various roles in her fantasies set her to wondering if he was still alive, but the thought winked out as the shrill screams of two pensioners disrupted the order of the queue. They were fighting over a tin of condensed milk, which had fallen out of one of their bags. The old ladies clawed at each other, the tin changing hands three times and eventually
being
put to use as a makeshift club until security separated them. One of the ladies managed to rip off her opponent’s wig as she was being pulled away. When the hubbub had died down, Lesley could not get herself back into her train of thought, so she earwigged on the conversation in front of her.

‘I don’t believe you,’ a girl with dyed-blonde hair and a muffin top was saying.

Her companion, a man in his twenties clad in an Iron Maiden tour T-shirt, sidled closer and said, ‘It’s true. They shot him right outside my house.’

Lesley’s ears pricked up and she tapped him on the shoulder. ‘Sorry, what are you talking about?’

The Iron Maiden fan jerked his head around. Lesley gave him a reassuring smile. ‘I’m a journalist. You were saying somebody got shot?’

He relaxed and leaned closer. ‘I saw the soldiers shoot somebody.’ He inserted a dramatic pause. ‘Just because he sneezed.’

‘Bullshit,’ the girl said. ‘There must have been another reason.’

‘They thought he had the virus,’ Iron Maiden man said.

‘Hold on,’ Lesley said. ‘Explain exactly what happened.’

‘They evacuated my street, right. I was sleeping off a hangover and only woke up at the end. I looked out the window and they were right there, in front of this homeless old nutter who was always hanging around. The old boy was pissed and filthy, the usual, and screaming dog’s abuse at the soldiers. They were just looking at him, doing nothing. Then he sneezed. They opened fire, killed him stone dead. I ducked down, then I heard one of them ask if he had it. I’m telling you, they’re shitting themselves that people might get the virus.’

The girl shook her head. ‘The army wouldn’t shoot somebody for no reason. He must have had a knife or something.’

‘Fine, don’t believe me,’ the man said huffily. ‘All I’m saying is that if you catch a cold, you’d better hope it’s not a sneezy one, or they’ll blow your head off.’

He made a gun with his thumb and forefinger and put it to the girl’s temple. She batted his hand away. ‘Piss off, weirdo. I’m not going to drop my knickers for you just cos you saw somebody get shot.’

‘I was just making conversation,’ he said defensively and turned his back on the girl, who returned to staring vacantly into the distance.

Lesley turned to Terry. ‘You don’t suppose he was infected, do you?’

‘I hope not,’ Terry said, and fell silent.

When they got to the table, a bored-looking assistant checked Terry’s card and then doled out a medium-sized sack of rice, one of maize, some butter, salt, sugar, condensed milk, bottled water and cereal bars.

Terry eyed the maize. ‘What am I supposed to do with this?’ he asked.

‘Cook it,’ the staff member said.

‘How, exactly?’

‘Soak it in water, then boil it for a bit.’

‘Sounds nasty.’

‘You’ve had polenta, haven’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘It’s the exact same, except you don’t have to pay ten quid for it in some fancy Italian restaurant. Next!’

Lesley picked up the smaller items, while Terry slung the two bags over his shoulder. They staggered back to the tent,
and
then returned for their non-food items – blankets, cooking and eating utensils, buckets, candles and matches. The queue was much shorter. They were only in it long enough to watch a green helicopter buzz overhead and disappear behind the tents, presumably to land in the car park. They were on their way back again when Terry dropped his goodies and pulled Lesley off into a gap between two tents.

He’s not going to try it on here, is he?
Lesley thought.

Her heart was not exactly racing yet, but it was definitely on the side of the track stretching out its hamstring. She leaned in towards him. Terry pulled her down to a crouching position, shushing her as he did so.

‘No need to be so rough,’ she said indignantly, and then realized Terry was pointing.

Less than fifty metres away, standing outside the registration tent talking to Karen, stood Brown, flanked by his cronies. Karen beckoned him inside and, with a quick scan of the surroundings, he followed.

‘We need to get out of here,’ Terry said.

He grabbed Lesley’s hand and they scooted away, leaving their supplies behind. As they ran, Lesley supposed she should be grateful for another exciting twist to wind into the story of their escape. But she could almost feel Brown’s strong, icy fingers on her scalp as he forced her to watch the bull rip her source to shreds. Her legs were so weak she struggled to keep up with Terry, stumbling across the cut-up grass. They burst into the tent, and its occupants, including James and Geldof, who had returned from their scouting mission, looked up.

‘Brown’s here,’ Terry announced.

Mary’s head snapped round. ‘He’s here? The man who
killed
my boys?’ She scrambled to her feet and ran for the tent flap. ‘Where is he? I’ll kill him!’

James caught up with her in a few steps and held her tight as she kicked her legs.

‘Be smart, Mary. He’ll kill
you
,’ he whispered into her ear. ‘You’ll get your revenge, I promise. We all will.’

She sagged in James’s arms. He passed her on to Geldof, who patted her hand.

‘We need to leave pronto,’ Terry said. ‘Did you find a way out?’