Lost Girl (46 page)

Just past Salisbury, Penny became hysterical. The father pulled over again and had to restrain her flailing arms. But the girl didn’t strike out for long, and went limp
moments after he embraced her. Miranda had been talking to Penny in a voice so low and quiet that he couldn’t pick up what she was saying. In between moments of shock that made her weep,
Miranda had done her best to revive herself, though her hands were still leaden and unresponsive, and her speech was slow and slurred.

Intermittently, Penny cried softly, until they reached Bath, where she had finally allowed Miranda to, at least, hold her. Not until they were skirting Bristol did she speak and only then to ask
for ‘Mummy’ and ‘Richard’ through her tears.

Who?
Miranda mouthed at him as he leaned over to the back seat, but the father shook his head to deflect the inquiry, saying nothing more than, ‘The people who had her.’

Miranda gave Penny drinks and two of the energy bars she found in the father’s rucksack, sucking in her breath when she saw the handguns, and the money in the bag that he had taken from
Oleg’s vestry and Richard’s safe.

‘I’ll tell you later. Now is not the time.’

Penny always said, ‘Thank you,’ when she was given things, and her instinctive good manners, twinned with the depth of her fear and shock at being in the car with two unfamiliar
adults, left the father’s eyes moist for hours. Her innocence, compared to what he had done that very morning, made him feel desolate.

The wet, grey stirrings of the crops and copses and hedgerows flashed past the car, mile after mile. Occasionally and fleetingly, so as not to be distracted from his traumatized daughter, he
scanned a few channels for weather and traffic reports and learned the hurricane had mostly passed. There was flooding behind him, and across the north-east, but little along his prospective route
into North Wales. But information about nearly everything else was scant because of the escalation around Kashmir.

The father kept the service mute, but just from the visuals and subtitles he could see the evidence of mass strikes from the air, reaching beyond Kashmir, far inside both India and Pakistan.

The Punjab was on fire and the two countries were deep into drone war. They’d smashed as many of the other’s satellites out of orbit as they could manage. Walls of long-range
artillery produced monumental cement and dust clouds in all of the major cities close to the borders. Events seemed to have escalated during the early hours of that morning as the father had fought
his own desperate battle. India was continuing to exercise the long-threatened Water Option policy, and had increased the diversion of the head waters of the rivers the two countries shared.

Almost as a footnote, there was an increase in the amount of information about virus outbreaks in British hospitals. Hundreds more staff and patients were being reported dead in several parts of
the country. CDC precautions were now being announced publically and regularly in the affected areas. People in several counties were being asked, amongst other things, to isolate those they
suspected of infection. Outbreaks seemed far worse in Central Europe and the eastern seaboard of the United States. The ministry for health in the United Kingdom believed the virus was being passed
by touch, sneeze, and coughs. The father believed he knew better. As soon as they arrived at their destination, he would need to inoculate Miranda.

Abandoning the news, he found children’s channels and left one on for hours on all of the vehicle’s screens. His daughter stared at the shows as if the screens were blank. When they
reached Gloucester she started to shake.

Approaching Worcester, the roads became clearer, even unnaturally so. The rain remained incessant.

The roadside services in Shropshire, where he’d stopped to use the toilet, and hoped to buy supplies from, were closed though it wasn’t yet five p.m. A
twenty-four-hour service was advertised from the motorway. Few cars were parked at the facility. Most of the freight was immobile, lights off. The motorway had been near-deserted for the previous
forty miles too. What traffic he had seen was mostly emergency vehicles. Private cars had been travelling far too fast in the wet conditions, their automatic functions overridden by manual
operation to achieve greater, unsafe speeds in terrible driving conditions. For his family’s own safety, the father had kept the vehicle locked into automatic and let the computer transport
them, albeit far more slowly than he would have liked.

Food he bought from a vending machine he left with his wife on the rear seats. His daughter had fallen into an exhausted sleep by then, her nose and eyes red from crying, her head at rest upon
Miranda’s lap. Even that small contact and suggestion of trust and familiarity filled him with a hope that made him dizzy. And watching her sleep engulfed him with memories of doing so when
she was a baby.

Before the final leg of the journey, he leaned his weight against the car. He gripped his scalp as if to contain the riot of his memories, and to calm his shock over the girl who was his again,
at least in body, as was her mother, the real one. Attempting to process all he had done within the past few days, and all he had seen and experienced, was futile.

He climbed back inside the vehicle and they set off again.

As they drove, he began to tell Miranda in hurried whispers about how he had found Penny. She never interrupted, but stared at him in horror.

At dusk, he suspected night was falling earlier and faster than usual. He left two new messages for the owners of a cottage in Snowdonia for which they were headed, giving them his expected time
of arrival. Promising to pay in cash, he had booked the place in the car that morning, just after they had cleared the trees of the New Forest. Four cottages were still rented out in an old slate
quarry as holiday lets. Two were available. As a family they had once stayed there when Penny was eighteen months old. It had been their last family holiday, and was the remotest location the
father knew of that he knew how to get to. Besides three new nuclear power facilities and some chemical plants, the mountainous region had not become overcrowded, nor entirely divided by gated
communities, though there were more of those now than ever before.

He cancelled the transmission of the message that he had made in the car before his assault on Karen Perucchi’s compound, and also checked the news regularly in the front screen so no one
in the rear could see it, still fearing reports of a home invasion with multiple casualties in the New Forest, and the sight of his face on national news services. He kept the sound on mute and
read the subtitles. If he was apprehended, and that was a very real possibility that he refused to imagine in detail, suppressing the idea with a struggle, he would need time to form a cogent
explanation, and to think of a way of ensuring his safety in custody. But instead of news of a national manhunt for him, he instead saw and read that there had been a massive exchange of nuclear
weapons on the Indian sub-continent, within the last three hours, as children’s cartoons had flashed and jumped inside their car.

They arrived at the old slate works’ cottages in Graig Wen after nine. Mighty Cadair Idris and the surrounding mountains had been swallowed by low cloud and nightfall.
Few lights shone in the valleys. Paranoia that the region had suffered a power failure had chased his thoughts right through Wales. He feared that the madness and destruction in Asia had already
reached here too, and thrown the mountains and sea into a blight of darkness and silence.

As soon as he alighted from the car, the sharp, thin, cold air, the starless sky, seemed to get inside his mind and his chest, like an absence of gravity that briefly suggested again that he
could be swept from his feet to plummet upwards. Here, they were three grains of sand lost in a lake of ink.

He had to carry his daughter out of the car and up to the door of the cottage he had secured for one month, while his wife hobbled behind him, the numbness of her feet and hands persisting, but
at least fading. The key to the cottage was in the place the brief, terse message from the owners had notified him of. Perhaps they thought it inappropriate for someone to go on holiday the same
day in which tens of millions must have been burned alive on another part of the planet.

Inside, the father had hurriedly closed all of the blinds and then returned to the car to collect what little luggage they had, the money and his weapons. Miranda settled Penny on the sofa, and
wrapped her in three blankets she ferreted out of the airing cupboard. The father double-locked the doors.

As he returned from checking the rooms upstairs, his daughter had woken up, and began to meekly unwrap and nibble at the food he had left on the coffee table. Miranda couldn’t get the
packets open, but hunger had driven Penny to take what had been offered. She soon lay down again, under the blankets, and Miranda tucked them beneath her thin body.

In all the time he had been searching for her, he had never once looked into how to tend a traumatized child, and knew nothing about when or how details and information from a stolen past should
be introduced to a young mind. Had he ever truly believed that he would find her alive?

He placed a screen on the small table before the sofa. Without speaking, Miranda accessed the files and played a collection of family pictures on rotation. Pictures of Penny as a baby, a
toddler, of them together as a family and at the very same cottage they were slumped inside now. He inserted three of his favourite home movies into the montage, including the last film recorded in
Berry Pomeroy Castle, five days before she was abducted. Lying absolutely still, Penny watched the flickering screen with an expressionless face. Miranda whispered a narration to accompany the
pictures, while stroking her daughter’s hair. Before the father withdrew from the room, he placed Cloth Cat beside the screen.

The father went into the kitchen area. Opened a bottle of rum and supped from the neck. Resting his back against a wall, he thought his muscles could have been dishcloths wrung out around his
bones. One hand and his shoulder throbbed with aches. About his ankles, the broken skin silently screamed beneath circles of dried blood.

You are here, with her
.

For how long?

He checked the news broadcasts with the sound muted. It was all India and Pakistan.

‘Jesus Christ. Oh, Jesus Christ,’ he said to himself, as he looked at the earliest pictures of the devastation. He was thankful that his family was in the other room.

He lay on the bed beside his wife, but on top of the bedclothes, with their daughter between them. The lights in the room were switched off, but he’d left the hall one on
and the bedroom door open as he and Miranda had always done when Penny was small. Downstairs, their daughter had eventually fallen into a deep and silent sleep on the sofa, but still hadn’t
said much. He and Miranda had carried her upstairs to the largest room.

Inside the little bag that Penny had carried from the house on her back, there were only two changes of clothes. The only toys were the few items he had brought down from his last trip to
Birmingham, and she’d not seen those since she was four.

The past for all of them was severed, at least physically. He doubted they could ever go back to Birmingham, or even the south-west. Like for the rest of the planet, the north now called even
more loudly. His wife’s parents had driven to Scotland an hour before Miranda was abducted; she had told him in the car. They would break the news to them about Penny the following morning.
But such things, like their next move, where they could go, who they could tell about Penny, and when, he would have to think about at another time, on another day. For now, they just had to exist
together, in the same space, and the girl had to
know
them again. Until that happened, they weren’t moving from the cottage. King Death’s most loyal supporters would not know
where they were.

In the half-dark, the father stared at the side of Penny’s head for hours. Most of her face was concealed by her raven hair. He listened to her sleep. Not long after she fell asleep,
Miranda had drifted away too, squashed, as if for dear life, against her recovered daughter.

The night before I lost you, I did what I always did, I stood outside the door of your little room and I listened to you sleeping. Peering into darkness, I would hear you turn under your
bedclothes, I would hear the odd puff of air, silence, a sigh, a word, and then the deep, steady breaths. From the day you came into my world, I did this every night I was home. I never wanted to
miss a day of you
.

Eventually the father extended one arm out and over the waists of his daughter and his wife, and carefully placed his chest against Penny’s back. The smell of her hair engulfed him and
their three hearts beat together. The blood of the parents warmed the little one in the middle.

He made a vow. Unto death he’d never let them go, and if death were to divide him from them, he’d go first. But before he left, he would find a place for them to be safe, and he
would fill their hearts with so much love, it would glow within them long after the last reactor died.

Tears made his cheeks slippery. Into the hair that tickled his nose he whispered, ‘Daddy loves you.’

A profound silence seemed to fill and then become a pressure in the darkness. He was afraid to fall asleep in case he woke up and found himself alone again. But gradually, the exhaustion he had
held back for those days that had seemed like years thickened within his aching body and swaddled his conscious mind, leading his thoughts deeper and into strange places.

For informing and inspiring the state of the world in this story, as well as many of my own suspicions about what awaits us in this interconnected world’s future, I owe
much to the ideas and books of James Lovelock (The
Revenge of Gaia
and
The Vanishing Face of Gaia
), Mark Lynam’s
Six Degrees
, Jared Diamond’s
Collapse
, Gwynn Dyer’s
Climate Wars
, David Quammen’s
Spillover, The Spirit Level
by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett and
McMafia
by Misha Glenny.
Writing this story made me imagine other things, and it was near-unbearable to do so, like the worst kind of treatment of children, and I don’t think I could have imagined that side of the
father’s story as vividly without recourse to the work of Harry Keeble, Kris Hollington and Kate McCann.
Master of Death
by Michael Camille provided Oleg Chorny’s verses
here
and
here
and augmented his ‘afterdeath’ philosophy, and
The Black Death
by Philip Ziegler completed about fifteen months of reading that became as horrifying, grim,
ghastly and terrifying as our own (near) future as a species might be.