Blood Crazy (28 page)

The Irish voice sounded flat and distant now. Like a computer relating an itinerary.

‘Still shooting. There go the mortars. The Crazies've made it easy for us. They're a lot closer.'

I listened and inside my head I saw the Creosotes advance. They walked over their own dead. Then they died too. More came. I knew what they'd do: they would build a ramp of human corpses from the ground to the top of the walls.

Doc said: ‘The Dublin kids'll make it. They've got stuff to equip an army in there. They've done it before, they'll do it again.' He wasn't smiling; sweat dripped onto his glasses.

‘Hello.' The Irish voice was calm. ‘I know you are all listening and praying for us. I have to tell you they've reached the top of the
walls.' The voice sounded apologetic as if the Dublin community had let us all down. ‘They're in the building now. There is gunfire outside in the corridor … Well, it looks as if I should chip in and do my bit. Good night, everybody. Good night, Sheila, God bless. I'm sorry. We did what we could …'

The final crack from the speaker rang on in our ears for a long time.

We sat silent. Silent.

It was still dark when I felt the covers being pulled back from the bed. I saw nothing. For a moment I lay there locked tight with fear, thinking the Creosotes had broken in.

Someone climbed in beside me. There was no mistaking it was a girl. She was naked and her breasts stroked across my bare arm.

‘Nick?'

‘Sheila. Are you all right?'

‘I'm so frightened I just want to bury myself away.'

‘Uh … You feel cold.'

‘I'm frozen. Nick. Let me sleep with you tonight.'

I admit I lay there with Sheila holding onto me tightly, feeling every naked inch of her against me and I thought of Sarah. And I thought of all the sitting ducks at Eskdale and what had happened in Dublin. And I knew I could not make love to her.

‘Do you mind …' I sounded awkward. ‘If we don't try anything. I don't think I'd be much use tonight.'

She kissed the side of my face. ‘I'm glad you said that, Nick Aten. You're a gentleman. But will you put your arms round me and hold me … There, that's it. Thanks.'

I made a decision. Tomorrow I'd face up to Boss, demand that truck ride – and not take no for an answer.

‘Do it for me. I've earned it.'

Boss looked up at the electric light. His eyes were black holes through which pink glinted. ‘You have,' he said. ‘And we're eternally grateful, Nick. But I made a decision. Those trucks do not leave the compound.'

‘For Godsakes, a mugful of diesel'd get me past the Kaybees. Then drop me off; I'll walk home.'

‘No, Nick. That's final.'

He began to walk away but I grabbed him. Those in the canteen watched us, their eyes wide.

‘I need to get home, Boss. I've got to try and stop happening to my people what happened to those poor bastards in Dublin.'

‘I appreciate that. But it's not our problem. We need that fuel to continue the culls. If we let the numbers mount up beyond a certain point it triggers an attack.' Then he hissed under his breath so the others wouldn't hear. ‘And how long do you think those fences would keep them out?'

‘You've enough diesel for the winter. There's a hundred-gallon reserve tank out back.'

He breathed out heavily, sending a booze stench into my nostrils. ‘Nick … Come with me. No, Doc. You stay here. I want a private word with Nick.'

Bad tempered, Boss marched out of the farmhouse round the back of the barn to the reserve tank. He walked up to it and kicked it savagely.

‘Did you hear that, Nick? Did you hear that echo?'

‘I was told there was a hundred gallons in there.'

‘And that's what everyone believes. The truth of it is, old son, I filled it myself in the days when we had diesel coming out of our ears – but I never bothered to check the damn tank first. It leaks. The fucking thing leaked and leaked, week after week, the ground soaking up the diesel so no one noticed.' Tears leaked now from the black eyeholes in his face. ‘That's why you get the echo, Nick. The damn thing's empty …'

‘Shit …' Realization oozed through me. No diesel. No Creosote culls. When they reached that critical number they'd come tramping across the fields, crush down the fences and overrun the place.

Boss looked like Dave Middleton in the days before his suicide. He was a walking corpse, going through the motions, and knowing he had failed.

‘What am I going to do, Nick? Those kids in there are relying on me. They think I'm going to save their skins. I know I could do it, if it wasn't for those murdering psychopaths out there. We've got a good thing going here. We can grow crops, we've learned to look after livestock … But I've killed us. My fault, my bastard fault.' He sat down with his head in his hands. Tears dripped onto the soil.

‘Boss.' I crouched beside him. ‘How much fuel is there left?'

‘The four trucks we use for the culls … They've probably got quarter of a tank apiece. And there's five gallons in the drum in the garage.'

‘Let's see … There's the little Honda car. That's diesel, isn't it? Those things will get you to Timbuctoo and back on a ladleful of fuel.'

Boss looked up. I could see suspicion and hope working in his face. ‘Why do you want to know?'

‘Listen, I've got a proposition. Give me the car and two gallons of diesel.'

‘No way, Nick. Every gallon we have gives us another week of life.'

‘No. Listen to what I have to say. What I'm going to do is give you all the diesel you need for the next six months. In return I get the car and a full tank which will be enough to get me home.'

‘And how you going to pull that off? Work another miracle? Like when you found the new generator?'

‘Come on, we'll grab a coffee and I'll tell you all about it.'

Doc and Jigsaw volunteered to come with me. Sheila wanted to as well but I persuaded her to drive the truck.

I climbed in behind the wheel of the car. It seemed in good nick. The only things that didn't work were the indicators and the fuel gauge. I wasn't going to lose any sleep over that. Jigsaw sat at my side, nursing a sawn-off shotgun on his knee. In the back Doc, armed with a machine pistol, fired questions at me.

‘The plan is this,' I told them. ‘Sheila will lead us out through the Kaybees in the truck. I don't trust this go-cart of a car to get us through. We've got two gallons in our tank. That's enough to take us where we're going.'

‘But not back,' said Doc.

‘That's right. It just makes us look harder for fuel.'

‘But where will we find it? The whole area's been picked clean now by us and other communities.'

I pointed to a dot on the map. ‘Weybeach. I remember it from when I was a kid. It's a little town on the coast where folk retired to – you know the kind of place, one of God's waiting rooms. There will have been very few kids there when the sanity-crash came. So there'll probably be no colonies of kids. In turn, that means there will be no reason for the Kaybees to hang around. They'll have quit Weybeach to go and gang up on survivors in other areas.'

‘Let's hope you're right.'

‘Pray that I'm right, Doc. It's a long walk back … Right, here we go.'

I kept the car close to the truck as we drove out through the gates. There were no adults this close to the camp. Sheila put her foot down and I had to do the same to keep up with her. She was good. She flew that truck down the roads, ripping up the green fuzz from the road in a spray.

‘I only hope she doesn't brake,' I said, ‘otherwise we'll disappear under her back axle.'

‘That's right,' grunted Doc from the back seat. ‘Cheer us up.'

We took the bend to find a line of Creosotes across the road. Sheila didn't even slow down. The truck parted them like a cleaver through cabbage.

At a crossroads Sheila turned the truck round and brought it alongside us.

‘There's no more Kaybees now. Not our lot, anyway.' She looked down at me in an intense way that made me uncomfortable. ‘Take care, sunshine.'

A sudden rush of affection for her swept through me. I climbed out of the car and jumped up onto the step beneath the truck's door.

‘Thanks, Sheila. You look after yourself. We should only be a couple of days.'

‘I'm glad they brought you to us, Nick Aten. You're special, you know that?'

She kissed me on the lips. Jigsaw whistled.

‘There …' She smiled. ‘Remember, there's more where that came from. A lot more …' She squeezed my hand where it rested on the door. ‘Nick. When you come back I'm going to do all that I can to make you want to stay with us.'

She kissed me again, holding my face with her hands. I stood on the step not knowing what to say. She looked so beautiful as she sat there, hair blowing in the breeze.

‘Now, get off my truck, Nick Aten. You've got a journey to make.'

Wiping her eyes, she hit the pedal and the truck went off, swaying down the road back to camp.

The road to Weybeach is long, flat and boring. We drove for sixty miles non-stop. We saw no Creosotes and no camps of survivors. Although we did see in the distance something that looked like a huge doughnut in the middle of a field.

Through the binoculars I could make out that the doughnut ring consisted of dead Creosotes – hundreds of them, lying heaped one
on top of the other. In the centre of the ring were a few buildings that had been burnt to shells.

The ring had formed where the Creosotes had pressed up tight against fences before they had died. A sick feeling ran up through my stomach as I handed back the binoculars to Doc.

We drove on. Doc and Jigsaw were quiet. I knew what they were thinking. How long before the Creosotes attacked
their
camp?

Five miles from Weybeach we cruised by ten geriatric Creosotes limping down the road away from the town. Their hair had grown into white manes. These were probably too infirm to have kept up with the earlier mass migrations of adults.

Weybeach was a ghost town. The beach was as I remembered, complete with a pier that ran out over the sands. Dad took John and me out onto it when we were little kids.

‘It looks as if God loves us today,' I said. ‘He's given us one hell of a peach.'

The town was untouched. Even the supermarket was locked up and looked as if it was only waiting for the manager to come whistling down the street to open up as if nothing had happened.

We found a truck in a nearby coal depot and I began work getting it running. More than six months had gone by since the big DAY 1. The vehicles were still there but tyres and batteries were flat. In most cases the hot summer had evaporated the fuel. Another year or two and cars'd be running to rust.

It was time-consuming but straightforward. Within three days we'd got the truck running, and hitched a huge trailer to the back. We loaded that with enough drums of diesel to see the Leyburn Croppers through the winter. From the supermarket we took food and clothing. I even found space in the car for some bottles of perfume for Sheila.

‘When we tell Boss about this,' said Doc, heaving sacks of rice into the trailer, ‘he's going to come back mob-handed to pick the town clean.'

On the fourth day we left Weybeach. The truck led the way; I followed in the car. Piled high around me in the passenger seats were cases of canned food and cartons of chocolate.

As I drove I couldn't stop smiling as I imagined the happy faces of the kids as we drove back into the camp. I grinned at myself in the rearview mirror. ‘So, Nick old son, this is what it feels like to be Santa Claus.'

I drove back singing to the REM tape on the car stereo. A chocolate box sat open next to me and I stuffed my face. The truck in front, carrying Doc and Jigsaw, lumbered along under its axle-cracking load.

Shiny, Happy People
… Count me in! I sang so loud the steering wheel vibrated against my palms.
‘Shy-nee! Happ-pee …'

Nearly back at the ranch. Ahead blue smoke billowed from the truck. ‘Hey, slow down, guys. We haven't got a ferry to catch … shit.'

Something was wrong. The truck speeded, whipping by trees, shearing branches.

The road was so narrow I could see nothing but hedge and speeding truck.

Jesus. The brakes had failed on the truck. My hands gripped tight around the car's steering wheel as I followed, tyres slipping on the muck. We were running down hill. A hundred more yards and the road levelled out for the last half-mile to camp.

If Jigsaw kept his cool he could just ride the hill out and slow down using the gears on the flat.

No, was it
shit
. It wasn't the brakes. Jigsaw was hammering the truck's engine, powering the thing faster than it was safe to go, even if you had St Christopher himself in the driving seat.

Jigsaw wasn't running away from something either. He was running toward it. My mouth turned dry.

I powered after the truck hoping I wouldn't skid off into the ditch. Wherever Jigsaw wanted to go, he wanted to be there yesterday.

Down the hill, splash through flood water in the dip, onto the flat, ground opening out into fields – and then I saw what Jigsaw had seen.

‘No. No. I don't damn well believe it. You bastards … You bastards!'

We'd set off five days before, leaving a camp of more than forty people. From a few weeks old to nineteen years old.

We came back to no camp and no people.

The truck skidded to a stop. Doc and Jigsaw jumped out and ran toward the torn fences. I stopped the car and ran after them.