World War Moo (33 page)

“We've got something else to worry about,” Ruan said. “Boats are coming from Arrochar.”

The laughter cut off and everyone ran outside. The two boats were close enough for Geldof to count a total of six bearded men. As far as he could tell across the distance and through all that blond facial hair, they looked decidedly cross.

“They've never bothered us before,” Fanny said. “You guys had better make yourselves scarce while I find out what they want.”

Before Geldof could move, one of the Noels stood up and pointed a long, shiny object toward them. What felt like a host of tiny insects whizzed past his ear, accompanied by a distant bang and smoke rising from the boat. Scott wailed and Geldof looked to his left to see Eva crumple to the ground. Even though he'd been shot at before, his body still hadn't developed the combat reflexes that would have sent him diving for cover. Standing there like a spare tit, he presented an easy target for the Noel in the other boat who was raising a shotgun in his direction. Fanny hauled him to the ground as shotgun pellets whizzed through the space where he'd been standing.

“Get into the hangar and stay there,” she shouted, before getting to her feet and zigzagging away.

Scott was dragging Eva away from the water, while Ruan was sprinting back toward the houses, no doubt to procure her weapons. Geldof didn't intend to cower in the background but had no idea how to make himself useful as anything other than a moving target that would draw fire while the others fought. As he prevaricated, another Noel stood up and let off his shotgun. Pellets dappled the grass in front of Geldof's face. He got to his feet and ran toward the quad bikes. The mercenaries had appeared out of the bushes and were strapping on weapons. Mick was wearing a manic grin as Geldof arrived beside him and crouched down behind a bike.

“Now this is more like it,” Mick said, plucking a grenade from his bag.

He pulled the pin, waited a terrifying few seconds, and lobbed it at the Noel Armada. It exploded in the first boat. In the brief and surprisingly small flash of light before smoke wreathed the boat, Geldof caught a glimpse of a body falling backward. The occupants of the other vessel jumped into the water.

“Amateurs,” James said. “What're they thinking, attacking in broad daylight in those crappy little boats?”

“Let's teach them a lesson,” Mick said.

“You need to still be alive to learn a lesson.”

“Fine. Let's just kill them.”

The mercenaries opened fire. Splashes kicked up across the water in an arcing line until the bullets found the men wading through the shallows. Geldof turned away. That was when he saw what was charging in from the main entrance. He clutched Mick's arm.

“We've got a bigger problem,” he shouted.

A swarm of Noel Edmonds look-a-likes was rampaging in, waving an assortment of weapons that ranged from iron pokers to cricket bats to garden forks. At the vanguard, two men sat atop hulking Highland cows. The wind ruffled their beards around bared teeth. The cows looked even more ferocious, their wide nostrils flaring and shaggy ginger hair rippling as they thundered toward Geldof and the mercenaries. Mick turned, just in time to be caught by a shotgun blast from one of the cow riders. He flew back and his head smacked against one of the metal boxes attached to the quad bike behind him. The other mercenaries spun and unleashed their weapons on the advancing mob. The two men riding the animals fell; the beasts kept on coming even as bullet holes ripped into their muscled flanks.

Geldof felt as though somebody had yanked his brain out through his ear, dipped it in a vat of potent hallucinogens, and then unceremoniously stuffed it back in. His body responded to the chaotic scene just as vehemently, every quavering muscle demanding that he run like hell. He ignored his cowardly body and bent over Mick, who lay unconscious with blood gurgling up from his shredded trouser leg. He picked up the fallen gun, waved it in the vague direction of the horde and pulled the trigger. The weapon leapt in his hand; his bullets fizzed over the heads of the attackers and into the trees. While he was shredding the foliage, James appeared next to him with a long tube on his shoulder. A rocket whooshed through the air and hit one of the cows smack on the forehead. Its head disintegrated into a cloud of red mist that doused the surrounding attackers, and its huge body came sliding forward on its knees. The Noels behind hurdled the steaming corpse and kept coming. As Geldof brought the weapon down, an arrow whistled through the air and took the other cow in the eye. It let out a long moo and staggered sideways, crushing another three of the attackers who were running alongside it. Still the rest came on.

Three individuals peeled off from the mob. At their head ran Rory, his cheeks purple with rage. The little shit, wracked with jealousy, must have gone across the water and told his friends there were uninfected people in the camp. They were heading straight for Ruan, who stood calmly with her sword drawn. Fanny had gained the vantage point of a rock by the water's edge and was busy pumping arrows into the main body of the crowd, while Scott was crouched over Eva at the far end of the camp. Lesley was now beside the mercenaries, raising a handgun she must have grabbed from their weapons stash. The rest of the commune was sprinting toward the diminishing mob armed with sticks, stones, and knives. Nobody was paying any attention to those closing in on Ruan.

Geldof closed his eyes, trying to block out the madness for long enough to bring some clarity to his fuzzy mind.

You can do this
, he thought.
You have to do this
.

As calm as he was ever going to be, which in truth was not very calm at all, he brought the gun around. The angle meant that if he opened fire he would most likely hit Ruan, particularly given his wayward aim. He ran closer, hoping to get a better shot. One of the men pulled ahead and reached Ruan, who sidestepped nimbly. Geldof had known her sword must be sharp, as she spent enough time running its edge along the rocks, but he didn't fully appreciate just how deadly it was until it flashed forward and sliced through the front of the attacker's neck. He took another few steps before he toppled. Rory was next in line and Geldof expected to see Ruan deal with him in a similar manner. Instead, she paused before pulling the point up and clobbering the boy on the temple with the solid-looking hilt. He dropped to the ground.

The delay gave the final assailant time to step inside Ruan's guard and punch her full in the face. She fell and landed heavily on her back. The Noel stood over her, his legs tensed to pounce. Before he could leap, a small white object flew through the air and smacked him in the right eye. He took a step backward, wiping at the sticky fluid running down his cheek. From the corner of his eye Geldof saw Andy, who'd appeared from nowhere, snap his arm forward. Another egg cartwheeled toward the Noel and cracked in his other eye.

Geldof took the opportunity to let fly. He kept the barrel low this time, hoping to compensate for the rise, but his aim was off to the right. The bullets missed the Noel and shattered the last bolts holding the old iron guttering to the houses. An entire section creaked forward and swung down like a club. For a moment it looked like the long splinter of iron sticking out of the top would spike the man through the skull, but he stepped back at the last minute, and it impaled his foot to the ground. Geldof pulled the trigger again, yet somehow managed to miss the stationary target. Eyes now egg-free, the Noel started tugging at the guttering. Geldof moved closer to finish the job. Once he was six feet away, a distance from which even he couldn't miss, he jerked the trigger. The gun clicked.

“Oh, come on!” he shouted.

The Noel looked at him with crazed eyes and ripped his foot out of the guttering without a grunt of pain. He picked up Ruan's fallen sword and raised it. Geldof chucked the gun at him. It sailed over his head. As the Noel stepped toward him, Geldof raised his arms in a hopeless attempt to ward off the coming blow, sure that his prediction of dying a horrible death was about to come true. The blow never came. Ruan, who'd regained her feet, stepped up to the Noel and put her pistol to the side of his head. One shot rang out and the Noel went down.

Ruan lowered the gun, her face expressionless, and faced Geldof. “Are you okay?”

“I was supposed to be saving you,” he said, his voice hoarse.

Geldof stepped toward her, but she held up a blood-slicked hand. “No. The virus.”

He stopped. In the heat of the moment he'd forgotten about the infection risk. Now that his fight—if his actions could be dignified with that term—was over, Geldof became aware the sound of gunfire had died away. He turned to see that the remnants of the Noels, no more than ten, had come toe-to-toe with Fanny's troops. They were taking a pummelling. At the center of the battle Nayapal whirled and twisted, a look of such calm on his face he could have been stroking a kitten. One of the Noels swung a metal pipe at his face. Nayapal dropped, his back arching and hands bending backward to touch the ground. The bar passed over his body and he brought himself up into a handstand, flipped back up to his feet, and drove his heeled hand into the nose of his attacker. Scott had left Eva to join the fray and was whirling his staff around his head, cracking skulls. Tom had brought his hands together into prayer position and, as a Noel charged, stepped forward into a wide-legged stance and drove his index fingers up the nostrils of his opponent with deadly accuracy. It was over within minutes. The members of the commune stood in the middle of the bodies of their vanquished foes, some twitching and moaning, most of them still.

“Now that,” Scholzy said, with genuine admiration in his voice, “was fucking awesome.”

*   *   *

When the bodies were piled off to one side for burning and the surviving Noels—including Rory—were trussed and locked in the spare hangar, they gathered around the table, upon which incense sticks had been placed to mask the stench that would soon follow. Ruan had cleaned herself up. This time she was the one to take Geldof's hand.

“How do you feel?” she said.

“Hmm. Let me think. Ineffectual. Inept. Hopeless. Feeble. Inadequate. I think that about covers it.”

“Don't be so hard on yourself. You did save my life.”

“How do you figure that?”

“I'm assuming you deliberately shot the gutter down.”

He snorted. “Yeah, right. I literally couldn't hit a cow's arse at twenty paces, but I managed to shoot a bolt at the same distance. But you were amazing. You didn't hesitate.”

“You can't allow yourself to hesitate when somebody's trying to kill you.”

“But how do you do it? I mean…”

Geldof trailed off. He'd seen so much violence in his short life; his muted reaction to a bloody massacre that a year ago would have left him traumatized told him he was growing far too used to it. Thanks to his crapness in battle he'd yet to take a life, which somehow provided a layer of insulation that made it easier to bear. And while the impersonal distance provided by a gun meant he may have been able to shoot somebody, he knew that driving cold steel through a human body would always be beyond him.

“How did I kill so easily?”

“Yes.”

“Mental discipline again. I visualized them as sheep. Big, woolly sheep with sharp teeth. I'm pretty good at that kind of thing.”

“Why sheep?”

“When I was eight a sheep bit me in a petting zoo. It gave me the Orf virus and a swollen, seeping thumb. My brother Bryan called me Thumbelina and the bloody name stuck. After that I couldn't even watch a cartoon sheep without wanting to kick the screen in.”

“And after they're dead? Do you still see them as sheep?”

Ruan blinked several times. “I don't look at them after. Anyway, I did hesitate. I didn't kill Rory.”

“Why not?”

“I couldn't see a sheep, just a hurt little boy. It's my fault he went off the rails. I laughed when he came on to me.”

Ruan looked so distraught that Geldof wanted to wrap her in his arms. Nobody their age should have to endure so much. Before he could act, a roar of pain and a jumble of swearwords came from the house where James was tending to Mick's wounds. Everybody looked over, grimacing as one. They'd been lucky in terms of casualties. Only Hannah, who'd been guarding the entrance when the Noels rode in, had died. Eva and Mick would both live.

Fanny, who'd been visiting with Eva, came striding over. “Right. If we don't stop that missile, this insanity is going to play out in every town, village, and city across the globe.”

Geldof looked at the pile of bodies and tried to extrapolate. There was no way he could come up with an equation to work out what percentage of the world population would die in the event of the missile going out. There were too many variables, but it would easily reach hundreds of millions. That many bodies in one tangled heap of flopping limbs would dwarf Mount Everest. He shivered and slapped the images of the base down on the table. “We've got these for starters.”

Scholzy spread the documents across the table. “How recent are these?”

“No idea. Could be a couple of months old.”

Scholzy jabbed his finger at one long pier, where a submarine was docked. “The best way to do it would be to swim down the loch and plant magnetic charges on the underside of the sub, presuming it's in one of those berths and not a dry dock. Problem is, we didn't come prepared for an underwater mission and they're bound to have boats patrolling. In the water with no way of submerging we'd have no chance. A full-frontal assault is out, too. That was just a skirmish with a bunch of untrained idiots. That base will be full of well-trained soldiers. We'd have to fight across hundreds of meters to reach the submarine. We don't have the personnel or weaponry.”

“So we should just give up?” Lesley said.

“I didn't say that. We need to find another way.”