White and Other Tales of Ruin (45 page)

Half an hour later they edged out of the city, along with what seemed like a million other people. Doug was unsure as to why the countryside seemed to offer any better protection from what was soon to come. It was survival instinct, he supposed, an urge to flee that was perhaps a racial hangover from all the wars and ethnic conflicts there had been down through the centuries. As children his grandparents had been evacuated to families they did not know to live lives they could not understand, and now he was subjecting his wife and daughter to the same. Leaving what they knew for what they did not. Except in this case, there was no escaping the reason for their flight. No running from what could — and would — be everywhere. May as well try to leave gravity behind.

But he had to do something. There was no argument. There was always a chance.

He kept in the fast lane of the motorway doing little more than twenty miles per hour. His right ankle was aching where he had it tensed on the gas pedal, yearning to press it down and lay out more miles between them and the city. Other cars tried to dart in and out as and when spaces became available, and there were more than a few fender benders. Normally motorists would stop and help. Now they simply slowed down, joined forces temporarily to shove the bumped cars aside with their own, and went on their way.

It was a scorching summer day. Everyone had their windows up. Doug caught the eye of a few drivers and there was always mistrust there, an animal fear of the unknown — even unknown people — in these times of peril. It made him realise how little it had all really changed, how far humanity had not come, even though it liked to think itself way and above the rest of nature. There were those scientists who had claimed to be a few years away from the Theory of Everything. Now those self-same egotistical bastards were clouds of gas radiating outward from the hub of humankind’s doom.

Where that centre was, few people knew any more. Those who did were dead, mixing themselves with the scientists who had killed them, the laboratories they had been working in, the clothes there were wearing, the test tubes and the microscopes and the particle accelerators and the cultures and the notebooks full of folly…

“
Dad, I want a pee,” Gemma whined.

“
Oh honey, you’ll have to hold it for a while,” Lucy-Anne said.

Doug glanced across at his wife. He’d been ignoring her. He saw her afresh for the briefest instant and realised how much he loved her. He held back a startled sob.

“
But Mum —”

“
Your mum’s right, Gemma. Hold on tight and you can go soon.”

“
When?”

“
Soon.”

“
But —”

“
Gemma,” Doug said, his voice low, “did you see the man on the TV?”

“
Yes,” she said quietly. “He was all … going.”

“
He had a nasty … it was a bug, Gemma. It’s in the air where he was, and it’s spreading. We don’t want to catch it, and if we stop —”

“
And I don’t want you to catch it!” she spurted out, bursting into tears and gasping great hitched sobs into the car. “I don’t want you and Mummy to catch it!”

Doug felt his temper rising and hated himself for it. She was terrified, she’d seen people dying on TV,
dying
for Christ’s sake. At her age the worst he’d ever seen was a squashed cat by the side of the road. He’d put flowers there, tied to a lamp post. The cat had gone the next day. His child’s mind had seen death as a temporary state.

Lucy-Anne had turned fully in her seat and was hugging Gemma, soothing her with gentle Mum-words that Doug could not hear. He reached out and patted his wife’s behind, giving her a quick squeeze:
all going to be alright
, he tried to impart. He knew she’d know he was lying, but comfort was important. Civilisation was important. Without routine and hope, civilisation would crumble.

He remembered the pictures from Rome, beamed in seconds before the cameras were swamped and stripped and dismantled to their component atoms by the nanos: a great cloud looming in the distance; a soup of all things organic, metallic, plastic, historic, rock and water and air. The nanos took it all, dismantled everything and spurted it across the land like reality’s white noise.

Oh my God
, Lucy-Anne had gasped, squeezing his hand, spilling a tear of red wine from her glass.
Surely they can do something about it
?

They?

Well, the scientists. The
… But she had trailed off as the view jumped further north, showing the whole horizon as an indistinct blur, the land and air merged. Armageddon moved with the wind, the nanos flowing with the air and crawling through the ground itself, so it was said.

“
Doug, she really needs to pee.”

He looked in the rearview mirror and saw Gemma rocking in his wife’s grip. A horn tooted, tyres squealed, he glanced forward and slammed on his brakes just as he heard the doom-laden crunch of metal and glass impacting. The accident was several cars in front of them in the slow lane, a Mondeo twisted under the tailgate of a big wagon. The wagon was still moving. Even as a terrible flame licked from beneath the Mondeo’s bonnet, and as the driver struggled to open a door distorted shut, the wagon was still moving. It’s driver knew that to stop was to die, eventually.

“
Oh Jesus,” Lucy-Anne whispered, and Doug put his foot down on the gas. At least something had changed — rubber-neckers had altered their priorities, and they now wanted to leave the scene as soon as possible. Maybe it was the danger from fire, but more likely it was the heat of guilt.

“
You can go on the floor in the back,” Doug said. “You hear me, honey?”

“
I
can’t
pee on the floor,” Gemma said in disgust. “It’s horrible!”

“
Do as Daddy says if you’re really desperate. If not hold on, and you can go when we stop.”

“
When do we stop?” Doug asked, and wished he hadn’t. He saw Lucy-Ann staring at him but he kept facing forward.

“
I don’t know. What’s the plan? Do we have one, other than leaving our home like … like rats from …?”

“
Hey, come on, it was you as much as me! When they reported the first case in Paris —”

“
I’m sorry Doug,” she said quickly, and she squeezed his leg. He liked that, he always had. A touch could speak volumes.

In the back, Gemma worked her way down between the seats. Soon the acrid smell of urine filled the car.

Doug wanted to close his eyes, cry refreshing tears. There was a hot knot in his stomach: fear for his family; love for his daughter; a hopeless embarrassment at what she had been forced to do.

“
Urine is sometimes used to treat the effects of jelly fish stings,” Gemma said suddenly, “especially in the tropics. Sometimes they can’t get normal medicines quickly enough, so they pee on the victims.”

He glanced over his shoulder at his daughter, crushed between the seats, knickers around her knees. What a strange thing to say …

She stared back at him wide-eyed.

He looked at Lucy-Anne, who appeared not to have heard, then decided to say nothing. There had been something in Gemma’s young eyes—an uncomfortable sense of loss in a day full of terror—and he did not want to scare her any more.

An hour later they left the motorway. Doug turned north, and Lucy-Anne did not object. Her silent acquiescence depressed him more than he could have imagined.

Within half an hour of leaving the M4 the traffic had thinned out considerably. People could leave the city, but it was not so easy for most of them to relinquish the motorways, as if the main roads could lead them somewhere safer.

It was almost midday.

Doug turned on the radio and scanned the channels. Mindless pop, classical tunes linked end to end without a presenter, a conversation on football which he recognised as being about a match played a year ago. A semblance of normality, but underpinned with the terrible hidden truth: that things had gone bad, and may never be good again. He slipped a tape into the player and REM started to piss him off.

Lucy-Anne twiddled her thumbs and only occasionally looked through the windscreen. Doug touched her leg now and then to reassure her, and also to comfort himself. He wished she would do the same back, but he had always been the more tactile one, the one who needed a touch as well as a smile to make him feel good. He glanced at her every now and then, wanting to do more but knowing that there was nothing he
could
do. She knew as well as he that they were not escaping, but merely prolonging the inevitable.

He thought about death, and tried to divert his mind elsewhere. “You okay, honey?”

Gemma whispered that yes, she was okay, but she did not look up.

“
So where are we going?” Lucy-Anne said to her hands.

Doug did not answer for a while. A recent signpost had pointed north to Birmingham and Coventry, but their direction so far had been dictated by chance as much as design. “North,” he said, because away from France was the best idea.

Lucy-Anne looked up. “Scotland,” she whispered.

“
Well, we could try, but it depends on fuel and —”

“
No, we
must
go to Scotland! Uncle Peter lives near Inverness, we can go there, he’ll have us, he’ll look after us.” She was looking at him now, and her face had come alight. He hated the false hope he saw there.

“
Who’s Uncle Peter?” Gemma said from the back seat.

Doug snorted. “Precisely.”

“
Doug, he’s not a bad sort.”

“
You haven’t seen him in over ten years. Hell, I think the last time was our bloody wedding!”

“
He’s a bit eccentric, that’s all.”

“
Does that mean he does odd things?” Gemma asked. “Only, I don’t mind that. I quite like people who do odd things.”

“
We’ll go to see him, then,” Lucy-Anne said. “Won’t we, Dad?”

Doug nodded slowly, already beaten. They would go to see him, sure they would, but what then? That’s what was truly bothering him: what then? He had no answer, and seeking it would make him give in, curl into a ball and die.

“
Edgar Allan Poe’s dying words were
Lord help my soul
,” Gemma muttered under her breath.

“
What?” Doug asked.

“
Huh?”

“
What did you say, honey?” Some cars passed the other way, one of them flashing its lights, but he ignored them. As far as he knew Gemma had never read any Poe, let alone read
about
the man.

“
Nothing, Dad.”

“
She’s tired and scared, Doug,” Lucy-Anne said quietly, so that the sound of the engine would cover her words. “Let’s just aim north and leave it at that. When we get there …” She trailed off without substituting the word
when
with
if.

Doug mentally did it for her.

Another car passed with flashing lights, its driver waving frantically as he sped by.

“
Now what?” Doug slowed the car and eased it around a bend in the A-road. When he saw what faced them his foot slipped from the accelerator, and the car drifted onto the grass verge and came to a halt. He forgot to use the brakes. For a while, he forgot even to breathe.

Lucy-Anne was a good mother. She twisted in her seat and motioned Gemma to her, holding her yet again and shielding the girl’s eyes with the back of her seat.

“
Get us out of here,” she said. “Doug, get us out of here, Doug, wake up …”

As the men looked up and saw him staring at them, Doug shoved the car into reverse. He slammed his foot on the gas and glanced in the rearview mirror. If there was another car coming they would meet, crash and burn. At least he hoped they would burn; he did not want to be left alive for these men to be able to get him, and to Lucy-Anne and Gemma, and do to them what they were doing to the family on the road ahead.

It was the dog that shocked Doug more than anything. Why the dog?

The engine screamed as the car slewed across the road. He glanced back at the scene receding in front of them and saw that the men had gone back to their business. It did not matter. He did not let up on the gas until he had clumsily steered back around the bend and spun into a farm gate to turn around. He smelled an acidic burning, the car crunched against a stone wall, Gemma finally struggled from Lucy-Anne’s grip and screamed.

Doug felt like screaming as well. Yesterday, normality, tainted with disquiet over what was apparently happening in the Mediterranean, and a subdued fear that it may come closer.

He shook his head and flicked tears across the dashboard. “We’ll try another road.”

Lucy-Anne did not answer. She was still trying to hug Gemma, protect her, hide her away from whatever had gone wrong with the world today. If only it were so easy.

That afternoon there was a government announcement over the radio. The Prime Minister gave ‘grave news’ about the southern suburbs of London — they were gone — but he assured people that everything was being done that could be done to find a solution to this crisis. Doug wondered just how far away the bastard actually was. The Arctic Circle, perhaps?