Blood Crazy (6 page)

Clearly it only affected adults. And that effect drove them to kill their children. Whether that was the intention Christ knows but that is what happened. Or at least that was what my theory told me.

Your mind finds a mystery uncomfortable. Like that bit of grit inside an oyster's gut. You have to wrap that mystery in a pearl of an
answer – it doesn't really matter if it's right or completely crackers. An answer makes you feel better and that's all that counts.

I quit the cave and headed up through the valley. As I walked three objectives fell quickly into place.

1. I wanted to eat.

2. I wanted a new set of wheels. The truck was about as discreet as a three-inch zit on the end of your nose.

3. I wanted out of this area.

I guessed the neural disrupter had only affected a few square miles. I imagined driving back to the normal world where the army waited at roadblocks to whisk survivors back to normality. There'd probably even be CNN waiting with cameras to get the survivors' stories.

These thoughts were a comfort to me. They gave me hope.

I knew where I was going. Further up the valley there were a few big houses. Some quite isolated.

The first one I reached looked like a baked skeleton with black walls and still-smoking timbers. A burnt-out Rolls Royce stood on the drive.

The next was a converted farmhouse complete with a swimming pool in the barn.

First I knocked on the door then ran back to hide in the bushes. No one came.

I cut down the side of the house, feet crunching overloud on the raked gravel. The stable doors were open. No horses but three cars parked side by side. Two sportscars and a hulking Shogun 4x4. Perfect.

The bugger was locked.

On the patio at the back I found a child's go-cart. It had been thoroughly cut to pieces with a saw. Hanging from a child's climbing frame, swinging in the breeze, were two black bin liners. They could have been full of hedge clippings, but I doubted it.

For a minute I was ready to quit this house.

Get your fucking head together, Aten. You need that Shogun.

I hunted through the rockery, hoisted out a chunk of limestone the size of a football and lobbed it at the patio window. It bounced off the toughened glass.

Shit … It takes some skill to be a vandal.

Next, I heaved the rock at the kitchen window. It disappeared in a crash loud enough to wake the dead. I froze, expecting someone to charge from the house and cut me in two. Nothing.

I climbed through the window. This was breaking and entering but I didn't feel a shred of guilt. The civilized bit of Nick Aten was already withering.

After checking that the place was deserted (the kids' bedroom turned me sick) I went down and sat on the sofa for ten minutes. A couple of Scotches from the bar helped.

On a table stood a photograph of a family. Beautiful people, mum would have said with a wink, slightly catty, slightly envious. The father had slick executive looks, the mother was glamorous and well-jewelled.

Between them sat two little girls with plaits. They now resided in the plastic sacks hanging from the swing.

I put the happy family portrait face down and went to find food.

There was plenty of it. There was no power but the refrigerator felt cool. The gas cooker still worked so I made a breakfast big enough to bust the intestine of Homer Simpson. Eggs, ham, steak, mushrooms, coffee, more Scotch.

Now I felt fuelled and in gear.

The keys to the Shogun hung from a hook in the kitchen.

It was hit and miss but I loaded supplies into the back of the car. Food, Scotch, cans of beer, soft drinks, a spade, a tool kit, a long-handled axe, a wicked-looking diver's knife. From the wardrobe I took a leather jacket. It was new and smelt so richly of leather you could taste it. I slipped it on.

I'd got the car, I'd got the supplies: now I'd find where the sane world started.

Finding where the sane world started wasn't going to be as easy as I thought.

The motorway wasn't blocked, exactly. It was full.

I stopped the car in the middle of the bridge that crossed the motorway, got out, leaving the engine running and the door open, then looked down.

Beneath me the six-lane highway stretched out in a long S curve, flanked at each side by corn fields. A sign set on the embankment said simply: THE SOUTH.

I had planned to hit the motorway then hammer the Shogun south. In an hour or less I imagined myself reaching the normal world with the army at the checkpoint telling me where to go next. I probably wouldn't even need the food I'd dumped in the back of the car.

But I wouldn't be using this motorway. From one end to the other, as far as I could see, was a river. A vast, sluggish river, squeezed between grass bankings. A river of human beings.

Like a river they all flowed in the same direction, from north to south, at the same slow pace. Thousands of people – you could not see an inch of road tar.

A burnt-out truck a hundred yards to the south forced them to
part like a river flowing round a rock, then they merged again, to flow on in their single-minded migration.

There was something mind-numbing about this flow of people. I imagined myself climbing over the fence to jump down the thirty feet to land on them.

Like you saw singers at rock concerts hurling themselves onto an audience so tightly packed they could roll over them like you roll across a bed. I could do that. I could go with them. There was something at the end of the motorway that they wanted. And, oh shit, they wanted it so badly they were prepared to walk for hours down this road with no food, no drink, no rest. They were like those on a pilgrimage to see the coming of the Lord.

Not one looked up at me. Their ten thousand eyes burned south.

I unglued my hands from the railing and stepped back – shaking.

I walked round the Shogun breathing so deeply it hurt my lungs. When I felt balanced again I looked down at the river of people. I looked harder this time, making myself see individuals, not a mess of heads.

I was searching for a child. Or at least someone who looked under twenty.

Thousands marched silently beneath me. I never did see a single child. However, I did notice blood marks on some of the walkers' faces. They had killed their children too.

I got back into the car and stamped the pedal so hard that the big tyres spun on the Shogun, powering me away from the river of lunatics.

My plan remained the same. If I headed back to Doncaster I knew I could join another road south.

As Doncaster's suburbs began to slip by I slowed down. There were wrecked cars, burnt-out buses. A school was burning so brightly it looked as if a crack had opened in the Earth and a chunk of hell was bursting through.

At a crossroads I looked right. A group of middle-aged men and women walked in my direction. Some carried ten-foot poles topped with objects that although I couldn't identify made me suddenly cold in the warm car.

I had intended driving straight on but looking to my left I saw
an orange VW Beetle, parked at a clumsy angle. Two girls, one about eighteen, the other elevenish, were changing a flat.

They were doing a good job. The car was jacked high and the younger girl was wheeling the spare toward the other girl.

They were dead meat.

The group of adults had seen me for sure, and possibly the girls. They walked purposefully in my direction.

Pulling the car a sharp left, I stopped alongside the VW.

The eighteen-year-old, long blonde hair, wearing jeans and a sweatshirt, ignored me and hoisted the spare onto the hub.

The younger girl, wearing riding jodhpurs, her blonde hair tied into a pony tail, just stared at me as if I'd dropped from a goldenwinged spaceship.

In the rear view mirror I saw the group with the poles had nearly reached the crossroads.

I leaned through the window. ‘I reckon you've got about ninety seconds to leave that and get in.'

The older girl still ignored me and began tightening the wheel nuts.

‘Eighty seconds.' I lightly revved the engine. ‘Forget it. Get in the car.'

The younger girl looked at the older one. ‘Sarah!'

Sarah threw down the wrench. She wasn't frightened, she was angry. ‘All right, all right …' She shot me a hard look trying to read what I was like. Would I drive round the corner, then take a Stanley knife to their throats?

‘Get in.' I opened the back door from the inside, still keeping one hand on the steering wheel and glancing in the rear view. The pole carriers were a hundred yards behind and closing quickly.

The oldest girl, Sarah, opened the VW door. ‘Vicki, out. We're going with this … gentleman.'

Another girl, about tennish, wearing pink-rimmed glasses and with the same colour hair in a pony tail, jumped out of the car, ran to the back door of the Shogun – then she stopped.

‘Wait a minute.'

She ran back to the VW.

The girl behind me shouted in such a high-pitched voice it pierced
my skull. ‘Vicki! Hurry up! There's people coming! They'll catch us!'

‘Vicki!' Sarah ran to the car looking as if she'd drag the brat back by the hair. Vicki bounced into the back seat of the VW, pulled out a fluffy rabbit toy, then ran back to the Shogun. She slid in beside the other girl. Sarah joined her, slamming the door shut so hard I felt the air compress against the back of my neck.

When I looked back at the mob this time they were close enough for me to see their expressions. Some of them had broken into a run.

The two youngest girls lay down in the back seat, hands over their ears, eyes screwed shut. Sarah looked back, composed, even curious.

I wasted no time in hitting the gas – we took off like a rocket, leaving the orange VW to its fate.

THANKS … I waited for her to say the word. She didn't.

‘My name's Nick Aten.' For a second I thought she was going to stay mute.

Then she held up her hands so I could see them in the rear view. They were black with filth. ‘Have you got any tissues?'

The car's owner had thoughtfully provided a drum of wet wipes and I handed them back.

Sarah wiped her hands, then her face. There was a bruise turning blue on her left cheek. From the look on her face she had reached a decision. She'd decided to trust me.

‘I'm Sarah Hayes. These are my sisters, Vicki and Anne.'

‘Where were you going?'

‘Doncaster. We had to drive over a lot of broken glass on the way in. I think we picked up the puncture there.'

‘Have you got relatives in Doncaster?'

‘No.'

One of the girls piped up. ‘We're going to the police station. We're in trouble.'

‘Vicki.' Sarah glared at her to shut her mouth.

‘Why can't we tell him, Sarah?' The little girl sounded as if she'd start crying. ‘He's the first nice man we've seen. He might help us.'

‘We don't know him. He might … he might be on his way to work or something.'

I nearly laughed. Big sister was still trying to pretend the world was sane.

I told them, ‘I'm in trouble too.'

The two youngest girls leaned forward, eyes round. ‘What you done?'

‘Nothing really. But I think it's the same trouble as you. Look, there's no point in going into Doncaster. It's full of … It's not safe at the moment.'

Vicki hugged the rabbit. ‘We've got to go to the police. We've got to tell them what happened.'

‘What did happen?'

‘It doesn't matter.' This was big sister, Sarah.

A seventeen-year-old male can't look at a girl without ticking off the usual list.

Attractive? Nice breasts? Fit figure? Etc, etc … If you're male and over fourteen you know what I mean. To that list I'd add
Was she intelligent?
The answer was a thumping
Yes:
Sarah had got looks and she was nobody's fool.

‘Where are you taking us, Nick Aten?'

‘Have you eaten today?'

‘No.'

The younger girls chorused. ‘We're starving.'

‘Then I'll drive somewhere quiet and we'll have a picnic. I've got stacks of food in the back.'

I drove away from town. Occasionally I glanced back at Sarah. Her eyes had a metal edge to them – also they told me they had seen a slice of hell this last forty-eight hours.

I thought she'd say nothing for while. Shock can lock memories away in a steel box and bury it deep in the mind. But as I looked at her in the mirror her eyes locked onto mine and she told me what had happened to her.

Sarah lived with her family on a farm. On Sunday morning, Day 2, she had got up, dressed, then gone out into the farmyard where her parents stood leaning with their backs to a wall.

‘Morning,' she had said, smiling. ‘Are Vicki and Anne out riding?'

That's when her father punched her in the face.

‘Kill her, James. Kill her,' shouted her mother. ‘Kill her before she hurts anyone else!'

Shock numbed the initial pain of her father's punch, but it knocked her back onto the dirt. Mother reached out for daughter, a knife in her hand, her eyes blazing hatred.

Dazed, Sarah acted on instinct. She ran back to the house, clawed her way upstairs and locked herself in the bathroom. It was a solid door but the bolt wasn't: designed for modesty not survival.

As she backed away from the door someone knocked on it. Her father. ‘Come on out, Sarah, love. We've got to talk to you. It's important.'

If her father had tried he could have kicked in the door inside thirty seconds. But for some reason he talked. He told Sarah over and over how he and her mother loved her. And the plans they had for her. If only she'd unlock the door.