World War Moo (12 page)

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? Almost 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.

Ruan handed the leaflet over. “My parents.”

 

11

After he dropped off Frank and Amira, Tony told the driver to take it slow on the way home. He wanted to clear his mind so that he would be able to spend an hour of quality time with Margot and Vanessa before getting back into it, yet no matter how hard he tried he couldn't block out the babbling mental newsfeed of things to worry about. In particular, Blood of Christ's latest attempt to set off on some continental capers had been the last thing he needed. This near miss would nudge the world closer to action, if not tip them over the edge. He needed to do something fast to stop that from happening, and for the moment the only option that seemed to offer any hope was to do what Archangel's men had failed to do: get the virus out into the world quickly and efficiently.

When he finally got back home thirty minutes later, feeling utterly exhausted and useless as he tried to ignite the spark of inspiration that would provide a way out of this mess without killing half of the world, he paused before the front door. He pulled out all the stops with his Spock mannerisms to ensure that, when he walked into his house, he wouldn't be shunted from the thoughts of the barbaric act Glen wanted him to carry out back into the memories of the barbaric act he'd almost carried out. With a final logical eyebrow raise, which he hoped would be enough to keep him anchored in the present, he inserted his key in the lock. When he pushed open the door and saw Vanessa's innocent little face light up with the simple pleasure of seeing her daddy, the memories engulfed him all the same.

*   *   *

He'd been at a meeting of the Labour Party just as the virus jumped to humans. Even though the threat appeared on the verge of containment, the Tories were holed up in a nuclear bunker in Northwood. Labour leader John Spencer, never one to miss a PR opportunity, even one as ridiculous as taking advantage of a zombie animal infestation, had instructed those party faithful who hadn't already done a bunk to show solidarity with the people through a public meeting. He had one eye on the next election and saw this as a chance to flag up the Tories as snivelling toffs cringing in hiding while the average voter suffered. Solidarity only went so far, though: half a dozen armed police were stationed outside the room for protection, and a squad of helicopters sat on standby a short car ride away from the Hilton Brighton Metropole to whisk off the Labour elite should the situation worsen again.

Tony was in the middle of the packed room, safe in the knowledge he and his family had a spot on one of the helicopters, when former leader Tony Blair took the podium. Sitting in the presence of his namesake, Tony was reminded of how he himself had been touted as the next Blair. They'd both gone to Fettes College in Edinburgh and then to Oxford to study law, although ten years apart, before joining the Labour Party. They shared the same first name and May 6 as a birthday. That, as far as the younger Tony was concerned, was where the similarities ended.