World War Moo (9 page)

As one, they said, “I know you are here and it makes me happy.”

A mass inhalation followed and the smoke jetted out added to the clouds swirling around them. Ruan coughed, beginning to feel light-headed.

Give them a chance
, she thought, and parroted the phrase back at them. They looked surprised.

In the far corner of the room, half hidden by a stack of what looked like pamphlets, was a youth who hadn't joined in with the greeting. Although he couldn't have been more than seventeen and only had a light dusting of beard, he reminded Ruan of the Noels. He had to be local. His right fist was convulsing, mashing one of the pieces of paper into a crumpled ball.

“Where did you get all this stuff?” Ruan asked.

“My old friend Scott here has been putting this together for a few years,” Fanny said. “It was going to be our command-and-control post when the revolution came.”

“What revolution?”

“We were never clear on that,” Fanny said with a rueful smile. “But I'm very glad he did it. Now we really are the resistance.”

“The resistance to the government?”

“No. To the virus.”

“I don't understand.”

“Rory,” Fanny called. “Hand me one of the leaflets.”

Avoiding looking at Ruan, Rory scuttled out from his refuge like a furtive crab, handed a pamphlet to the woman with wavy brown hair who marked the end of the row of watchers, and scuttled back to his paper cave. Ruan rolled her eyes. Back before every human wanted to kill her, she'd often had this effect on teenage boys. Her Irish descent on her father's side had given her creamy skin and big green eyes, while her mother's Slavic genes provided jet-black hair, sheer cheekbones, generous lips, and a tall, lithe body—not to mention breasts that at one point she'd feared would keep growing until it looked like she'd been in a car crash and her chest had somehow fused with the inflated airbags. Even though she knew many women would kill for her figure and she found them useful on occasion, such as when she wanted to get served in bars, she'd hated those breasts. She hated them still. They got in the way of her athletic pursuits—she kept a stack of sports bras in her rucksack—and their sheer heft seemed to exert an extreme gravitational pull on any male eyes orbiting in her vicinity.

Men employed a variety of techniques when faced with her breasts. They stared at the ground and turned an alarming shade of red (most of the teenage boys at school); they stared at her face with the occasional downward flick of the eye (the male teachers); they pretended to be interested in the design or logo on her T-shirt (the sneakier older boys); and, in the case of older, more-experienced tit watchers, they waited until they thought she wasn't looking and drank their fill in long, greedy gulps or stood off to the side and feigned interest in some distant object that just happened to be in the same eye line as her breasts. Out of all the methods, she preferred the blatant staring, which had the virtue of honesty. At one point, after meeting a particularly discomfited fifteen-year-old whose eyeballs were vibrating with the effort of not looking, she'd snapped and said, “Why don't you just bloody stare at them for ten seconds to get it out of your system, and then we can try to talk to each other like real people?” Unsurprisingly, he'd skedaddled in a fugue of embarrassment.

Some of the girls at school weren't much better, basing their assumptions on her appearance and accusing her of trying flirt with their boyfriends. Early in Ruan's development, one girl had made the mistake of slapping Ruan when her boyfriend began writing unwanted soppy love notes to her. Nobody made the same mistake again. Her fondness for nice clothes had only made it worse. The girls assumed that choosing to adorn her body with well-fitting, gorgeous outfits was a deliberate ploy to steal their men, when in fact she just loved the way they looked and felt. There had been a point when she considered dressing in the frumpy rags that passed for clothes in her mum's cupboard, but she decided not to change her behavior for other people. It was their problem, not hers. Yet she couldn't escape the fact that people often made up their minds about her based on genes, over which she had no control. Sure, exposure to the elements and the scars and worry lines she'd picked up over the last seven months had no doubt dimmed her youthful glow, but it hadn't reduced the size of her chest. Rory's reaction came as no surprise.

The woman handed the leaflet to Fanny, who in turn passed it to Ruan.

“Resist: You Are More Than Your Urges,” Ruan read aloud from the bold headline.

Underneath, an introductory paragraph exhorted people to remember that they were human and not to give in to the imperatives of the virus. She stopped after the first few lines and looked at Fanny. “Do you really think the infected can resist the urges?”

Fanny looked at her companions and put an arm around Ruan. “Come outside.”

They strolled to the water's edge, where Ruan picked up a flat stone and skipped it across the loch. A sad smile kinked Fanny's lips. “My son used to love doing that.”

Ruan took note of the past tense and chose not to pursue it, for it could lead to a conversation she didn't want to have. They fell silent, listening to the wind rustle through the trees. There was no birdsong. Virtually every bird that could be caught had long since been wolfed down by the hungry population, while the rest had presumably developed the sense to keep their beaks shut or migrated permanently. After a suitably sensitive time elapsed, Ruan held up the leaflet. “So, you really believe this?”

Fanny nodded. “The fundamental question is: Are we creatures of biology only, or are we something more? I've never believed in any one god, but I think we are creatures of spirit. A virus can't infect our spirit.”

Ruan's experience had taught her the exact opposite. “Look at that village,” she said, nodding across the water. “If they knew you were immune or uninfected, whichever it is, they would be over here in a shot to tear you to shreds. How can you believe anybody can resist?”

“I think a line has been drawn with this virus, between those who want to evolve and those who want to devolve,” Fanny said. “We all have to choose which side of the line we stand on.”

We
? Ruan thought.

The strange behavior of Fanny and her band suddenly made sense. The residents of Arrochar must have known that people lived here. The fires would have been visible at night across the loch, which was only a few hundred meters wide at this point. Surely they would have come to investigate and discovered a whole community of uninfected. Unless …

“You don't understand,” Fanny said, reaching out even as Ruan began to back away. “We're living proof that it does work. We're all infected.”

Ruan turned the leaflet over. There, in an oversized purple font, she saw the mantra every member of the community repeated when they saw her. They'd only been saying it because they wanted to kill her. The leaflet fell from her fingers and she turned to run. Behind her, in a semicircle blocking her escape route, stood the occupants of the hangar.

“I know you are here and it makes me happy,” they said in their freaky one-mind voice.

Ruan unsheathed her sword and blinked away her fear. She narrowed her focus down until it was just her, her gleaming weapon, and the targets standing between her and freedom. She set her sights on the apparent weakest point of the chain—a frail, wizened old man with soft brown skin and an Oriental hint to his features—and charged.

 

8

Geldof wheezed out the droplets he'd inhaled at the revelation his mum was still alive and stared at his grandfather with eyes so wide his contact lenses crinkled.

“Zounds!” he said once he'd recovered his breath.

His grandfather gave up trying to wipe off the pink stains. “Still playing with medieval expletives, I see. Zounds, indeed. I didn't want to tell you until now so you wouldn't get your hopes up, but when I sent in my team to sprinkle your father's ashes over the house, I had them go to the supermarket to look for your mother's body so we could do the same. They found a trail of blood leading from an aisle to a walk-in freezer. No body.”

“But Terry said he saw the pigs kill her.”

“I spoke to him. He was perched on top of a shelf and only had a few seconds to look before he fell and the pigs began chasing him. He didn't have time to take a pulse. He thought she was dead, but she must have just been badly wounded. Your mother is a tough woman, Geldof. You know that better than anyone.”

“Why didn't she come back to the house? We were there for at least another day.”

Geldof knew he was trying to pick holes in the theory; not because he didn't want her to be alive, but because he wasn't ready to believe it. While he hadn't come to terms with her death or his inability to say farewell, to have her resurrected so abruptly freaked the shit out of him. It seemed too much like a far-fetched plot from the cheap South American soap opera the housekeeper watched on her lunch break. Any minute now he would probably discover he had a moustachioed evil twin he didn't know about.

“Maybe her wounds were too severe to move immediately,” his grandfather said. “Or maybe she had to wait for the pigs to leave. All I knew was that there was no body. So I started looking around.”

“You mean you've found her?” Geldof said, aware his voice was rising so quickly in pitch it would soon only be audible to dogs.

“Your mother didn't know, but I knew exactly where she was after she ran off with you and that washed-up soldier husband of hers. I kept tabs on her movements and known associates, looking for some opportunity to either reconcile the family or, in the worst-case scenario, have her arrested so I could claim custody of you.”

“You would have done that?”

“She named you after that awful Irishman. That alone almost made the case for her parental rights to be revoked.”

Fair point
, Geldof thought. Even though he'd ditched his long-standing plans to change his name after the death of his parents, the reaction of others when he told them what he was called still brought choking embarrassment.

“And then filling your head with all that woolly nonsense,” his grandfather continued. “I loved your mother, and I love her still, but she was a principled fool. She was making you weak, my boy. There's no room in this world for the weak.”

Geldof frowned. He'd had months to think about his relationship with his mum. She hadn't made him weak; that was entirely his own doing. She was one of the strongest people he'd ever met and had only being trying to transmit this strength and moral certitude to him. Yes, it had been a spectacular pain in the arse, but the clear-eyed distance the final absence of death brought allowed him to see past his teenage resistance and appreciate her actions.

“That's not fair,” he said. “Mum was a good woman.”

The old man rolled his eyes. “Oh, please. You're far too intelligent to make the mistake of idealizing the dead.”

“I'm not.”

“You are. Everybody does it. When somebody gets knocked over or has a heart attack, the obituary piece is all sweetness and light. Nobody ever writes, ‘John was a shiftless, odious toad who was too fond of cheap lager, slapped his wife around, and smelled like ripe feces. We're glad he's dead.' Even if it's true.”

“Well, she's not dead, is she?”

“Not for the last five minutes, as far as you're concerned. Anyway, back to the point. She was aligned with all kinds of crazy people: mystics, peace campaigners, would-be eco-terrorists. ‘Beardy-weirdies,' I believe they are referred to in the common parlance. These people had hideouts across the country, so I had them investigated.”

“But the country is full of infected, not to mention the fact that anybody who tries to leave gets filled full of lead. You can't just wander in and poke about.”

“Correct. But, with enough resources at one's disposal, you can get your hands on any satellite image.”

Geldof, already irritated with the questioning of his new image of his mum, was growing frustrated at his grandfather's long-winded approach. It was so typical of him: he always had to give a lead-up that showed how rich, powerful, and resourceful he was. The better Geldof got to know him, the more he understood why Fanny had spirited the family away. “Just tell me where she is.”

“I'm getting to that. At one of the locations on my list, a remote camp up in Scotland, the satellite images showed people living there. Quite a few people actually. One of them—a very large man with a propensity for tie-dye who is a known associate of my daughter—was recognizable from the shots. The resolution wasn't high enough, so I had some friends in the military send a drone over to take some better pictures.” He reached into his valise and placed an envelope on the table. “I warn you, it's not pretty.”

Geldof slid out the first picture and quickly put it down, tears brimming in his eyes. He'd only caught a glimpse of the hollow, scarred face and cropped hair, but he knew it was his mum. The pigs may not have killed her, but they'd destroyed her poor face. He took a minute to compose himself, unsure whether the tears were a result of how damaged she looked or having proof that she was still alive. “What's she doing up there?”

“That I'm not sure of, but I assume doing what she does best. Surviving. Resisting. It appears to be a commune of some sort: one can only presume immune or uninfected from the way they're hiding out.”

Uninfected. That's when it hit him: he might get to see her again, might get to say what he should have said instead of being so immature and contrary, might get to erase the distance that had grown between them down the years until it became what he'd believed was the impassable chasm of death.

“If she doesn't have the virus, we can get her out,” he said, his irritation forgotten in a sudden burst of hope. “We have to get her out.”