Bar None (16 page)

"Jamaica Inn," I say.

She smiles and nods. "We could go there. It's in the middle of nowhere, away from any towns or cities, and if there were people there at the end, I'll bet it wasn't many."

"Not many bodies to move, you mean," the Irishman says.

"Could be they're still alive."

"I'm not going out there," Cordell says. He nods at the windscreen but I know what he means, we all do. The wilds. "I'm staying on this road until we get to Bar None, then I'll go inside and see if what he said is true. And if it's all bollocks—if we don't even find the place—I'll turn around and drive all the way back home. I will. But there's no way you're dragging me onto the middle of Bodmin Moor. I've been there and it's
wild
. And that was before." He shakes his head. "No way."

"Well, it's just an idea."

"We've put so much trust in him," I say, and my words dwindle away into silence. We're all realising exactly what we've done: given up a safe place, come out into the changing world, opened ourselves up to danger, chasing the dream of a place that may or may not be, all on the strength of one man. Perhaps the end really has driven us mad.

We park the Range Rovers close together and sleep in them. The Irishman and I chat for a while, but there's a weight of knowledge between us that makes idle conversation seem almost disrespectful. We've seen and sensed individual things that are strange and almost incomprehensible. Considered together, they give evidence of a huge change. I'm scared, and nervous, and thrilled.

"You know what I heard?" he says, breaking a loaded silence.

"I'm sure you'll tell me."

"Theories," he says. "The internet was alight with them in the weeks before the end. They appeared on all the usual conspiracy theory websites to begin with. I used to love all that bullshit: who shot Kennedy, how the moon landings were faked, who paid for Princess Diana to be assassinated. But pretty soon after they appeared on these sites, the major news agencies started to repeat the same stories. Details were slightly different, dates and places altered just subtly. But close enough."

"Is this the thing about the plagues' origins?"

"Yep. To begin with everyone thought it was just one plague out of Africa, like Ebola. But then it became clear that there were different strains, and from then on new plagues were identified every few days, and new points of origin were found. A cave in Indonesia. An inaccessible valley in Brazil. India, the Australian Outback, an ice-cave in Alaska discovered by oil drillers. Other places, too."

"Lots of people said it was terrorism."

"What terrorists would plant germ warfare weapons in places so far out of the way? If it was terrorists, why not London, New York, Moscow, Paris?"

"Too heavily protected?"

The Irishman held up his hand, flexed his index finger and hissed. "Aerosol. Doesn't take much."

"So it's nature," I say. "That's what these stories were getting at. Nature did this."

"Humankind's expansion
into
nature. Almost as if these plagues have always been there, a guard against us going too far. And when we did go too far . . ."

In one way it's a momentous idea that I can barely absorb. In another, more immediate way, it really does not matter.

I drift off to sleep thinking about the bomb in the channel tunnel, and how nature was far more subtle.

Next morning we eat a brief meal of tinned fruit then set off early. We want to reach Bar None today, if we're ever going to reach it at all.

We travel well that day, pausing here and there for one of the Range Rovers to push tangled cars from the road, stopping around lunchtime to refuel from the jerry cans in the back of the Irishman's vehicle.

We see more strange things, but try to ignore them.

Late afternoon we leave the motorway and head off across the countryside, following A-roads that twist between hills and valleys. These roads are generally quite clear, but when we come across the first real barrier, it's a bad one. An oil tanker has jack-knifed and exploded, taking a dozen cars with it, and we have to leave the road and drive through overgrown fields, skirting a few copses of trees that have strange growths at their centres, ploughing through hedges that grapple at wheels and axles. I take the rear, driving the bike along the route the Range Rovers are carving across the fields. I feel very vulnerable.

We make it back onto the road past the site of the accident, and head off once again in pursuit of a place that may not be.

But Bar None's existence is revealed to us long before we reach it.

I see her as we drive around a bend. She's standing in the middle of the road, away from any wrecked cars, wearing a white wedding dress over leather trousers and a leather jacket. The dress would probably fit her were it not for the clothes beneath, but it is bulged and stretched as though fit to burst. It's unnaturally clean. Her face is painted red.

I stop the bike and turn around. Jessica shrugs.

I look at the woman again and she's still standing there, smiling. She starts walking toward me. I rev the bike and drift forward another fifty metres, then kick down the stand and dismount.

I look around. To my left a steep hill rises away from the road, and to my right there are fields. There could be a hundred people hidden within a hundred steps of me, and I'd never see them. But I need to offer a peaceful sign to this woman, so I smile and walk to meet her. We both pause several steps from each other. There's something strange about her, way beyond the red-painted face and unusual attire, but I can't place it.

"We can't allow you to reach there," she says.

"Reach where?"

"Bar None."

We
, she had said. Of course, I never believed she would have been on her own, but now I'm conscious of other eyes upon me. "Come with us," I say. That disarms her. She frowns, steps back, and that's when I realise what it is about her that's so strange. What I thought were loose threads from the hems of the wedding dress are in fact fine white roots, delving out from beneath the dress's sleeves, across the backs of her hands and around her fingers. There are some at her throat as well, fine white veins trailing upward for her face. The dress is unharmed. These are growing from beneath.

"You'd take me?" she whispers.

Now she's talking in the singular
. If this is a game, I have to win. I can feel the others watching from inside the Range Rovers, and I step to one side to allow Jessica a clear shot.

"Have you not been there already?" I ask. The woman's face drops, all signs of hope slipping from the glazed paint. She spits, laughs, turns around to present her back to me.

"You think I'd have come out again if I had?"

"I don't know anything about Bar None," I say.

The woman spins around again, and spittle flies from her mouth. "Don't lie to me, fresh man. Don't fuck with the Wild Woman of Wongo. Last man who fucked with the Wild Woman left his dick inside. Shall I show you? Would you like to see?" She's lifting the wedding dress and hauling down the zipper on her trousers, and as she's distracted I take another look up at the hillside to my left. I can detect no movement there, but it's so overgrown that there could be anything hidden on its slopes.

"I don't need to see, I believe you," I say.

The woman lets her dress drop. "Oh, if you
did
see you'd
never
believe, fresh man. So innocent. So sheltered. Where have you been all my new life?"

I've no answer, and she spits again.

"Well, doesn't matter. You're not going there. We can't let you."

"Why not?"

"So you
do
know Bar None!"

I offer a rueful smile, as though she has won one over on me. "We just heard it's a nice place to stay."

"Nice?" She moves closer and now I can smell her, a mix of freshly cut grass, turned earth and raw meat. I glance down at her throat and see those roots stroking her chin, as though encouraging her to speak again. "Nice? It's nice if you like pain, and rot, and torture. Nice if you want your face flayed away and pebbles put in place of your eyes.
Then
it's nice, fresh man. Nice for you and all your fresh meat." She looks over my shoulder at the Range Rovers. She seems disappointed. "Fresh, but so sparse."

"We don't want trouble," I say. "We don't want anything from you, all we want to do is pass."

"Pass?"

"On the road. We just want to drive on."

She smiles, and her amazingly white teeth form a slash across her bloody red face. The laughter sounds real, and for a moment I think I can see the human being beneath this charade. I wonder what she was before the end, but realise that no longer matters. Might as well ask what she had been in a previous life. We are all reincarnated now, in this world that seems to carry so little of the past.

"I can't let you drive on," she says. "I'm hungry. My sweet pig-fucking God, I am so damn
hungry
."

Something happens to her teeth.

I turn, shout, run toward the motorbike, trip and fall to the ground. The shotgun breaks the air. Something strikes the road behind me. I scramble to my feet and run for the Range Rover, and it's as if the air is being torn around me, things whipping at my clothing, something cool and harsh slapping the back of my neck, and then the explosions come in and I realise someone is shooting at me. I hear thuds and other metallic sounds as I reach the lead Range Rover, then the shotgun sounds again, the air rifle snaps at the air, and I leap into the rear seat even as the vehicles start moving.

"Keep down!" Jessica shouts. I look up at the back of her head and see it haloed by a shower of shattered glass. I sit up anyway, because I can't bear not being able to see. Jessica curses and punches at the obscured windscreen without slowing. It falls in on her, a million diamonds that pile onto her and Cordell's laps and scatter around their feet, and I just see a flash of white and red before the Range Rover bumps over something lying in the road.

"Was that my bike?"

"Already passed that," Jessica says.

More gunshots. Cordell thrusts the shotgun from his side window and fires at the hillside, but I can't see what he's shooting at. The car shakes as bullets strike it, and the door lining to my left erupts in pieces. I glance back and see the Irishman following. As he passes over the shape in the road it's mostly red.

"Get down, damn it!" Jessica shouts again.

"What the hell was that?" I say. "What was the point?"

"I heard what she was saying," Cordell says. He breaks the shotgun, trying to hunker down low in the seat as he pops in two fresh cartridges. "About Bar None." He sits ups again, gun resting on the sill of the shattered windscreen.

I realise that the gunfire has stopped. Something is growling in the Range Rover's engine, but there are no more bullets trying to tear us apart. I look back again and the Irishman is on our tail. There are some holes in his windscreen but it has not shattered. He smiles and gives the thumbs up, and I wave back.

"There was something wrong with her," I say.

"You can fucking say that again!" Jessica says.

"No, I mean something that's not wrong with us."

"Yeah, well." Cordell leans forward and scans the road ahead, the hillside to our left, the tall, wide hedge that now borders the fields to our right. We round a bend and there's a bus parked beside the road, a car buried in its rear. Jessica presses down on the gas and we roar by, Cordell tracking the bus with the shotgun.

"So what was it?" Jessica says.

Cordell snorts. "Does it matter?"

"Weird," I say, "like she had something growing—"

The shotgun explodes and a spread of shrubs to our left coughs leaves. "Thought I saw something," Cordell says.

Jessica glances at me in the rear-view mirror.

"Maybe we can talk about this later," I say. It's noisy. Wind whistles through where the windscreen had been, and I can see that Jessica and Cordell both have dozens of tiny cuts on their faces. Some of them drip blood, and I'm reminded of the red-faced woman we just left behind.

Jessica ran her over. I wonder whether it was on purpose, or because the road was not wide enough to avoid her. I try to remember where we had been standing, but I can't. I mourn the loss of the motorbike, a link to Michael, but I'm also strangely thrilled at what the red-faced woman had been saying. She and her friends knew of Bar None, which could only mean that it was real.

"We must be close," Cordell says.

"Why?"

"If they didn't want us to get there, they wouldn't be guarding roads miles away."

I dig around in the back of the Range Rover and find an old road atlas.

"Don't think we'll need that," Jessica says. Her eyes are stark against her blood-smeared face, and I realise for the first time how piercingly blue they are. Almost beautiful. I'd never thought of her that way before, and it surprises me.

I look back again to make sure the Irishman is still following. He seems fine, but this time he does not acknowledge my wave. He seems lost, in a world of his own. Daydreaming.

I close my eyes and a flood of images hits me. I recognise them, but at the same time I do not. They're not from my life.

"Has anyone . . . ?" I begin, but trail off.

"What?" Jessica asks.

"Doesn't matter." I lie on the back seat and close my eyes, and this time I do not open them again. I don't sleep. But I do remember.

I'd been at the party for about half an hour, and already I believed this would be a night that would change my life.

I walked from room to room, carrying a bottle of Black Sheep in one hand and a spliff the size of a Cuban cigar in the other. I knew a few people here, but not many, and as was usual when I was drunk and stoned, it was those I did not know who interested me the most.

The house was big, befitting the status of its owner. Rufus was a record producer of some repute. Unfortunately his reputation came from being an unbearable cunt to everyone he worked with, and for investing most of his honestly-earned in various underground ventures. Some said his money reached as far as London's brothels, while others—probably under the influence of too much dope—suggested that the man was a major importer of drugs.