World War Moo (24 page)

She spent the next two days trying to catch the skittish seagulls, until she finally admitted defeat and chewed grass. It left a bitter taste in her mouth and brought wrenching stomach cramps, lurid green diarrhea, and a fever. On the fourth day, she looked down upon the beach and saw a young seal sunning itself on the rocks. Her head, which had been part of campaigns to stop seals being clubbed to death by evil Scandinavians, said no. Her stomach shouted it down with a vehement yes. She grabbed the largest rock she could find and crept to the edge of the bluff overlooking the beach. The drop was only six feet, so she leapt down and landed close to the animal. She expected it to scoot toward the water and got ready to pursue. Instead, it lifted its sleek snout and looked at her with baleful eyes. With a noise like the bark of an effeminate dog, it flopped toward her.

“You, too?” she said, her voice cracked. “What are you going to do: slap me to death with your fins?”

The seal opened its mouth wide and displayed rows of incisors that wouldn't have looked out of place on a lion. Had she been less hungry, she would have run. Instead, she dodged its clumsy lunge, planted her behind on its back and beat it on the back of the skull until it lay still. She searched until she found a sharp rock and, gritting her teeth, set about butchering. A few hours later, her hands were raw and chunks of seal meat and blubber were piled up on one side. She tried for hours to start a cook fire, fruitlessly rubbing sticks and stones in increasingly frantic combinations. It took her another few hours of staring at the meat, knowing it was infected but also aware that she must be immune, before she fell upon it. She bit into the salty, livery flesh and chewed it down between labored breaths, pretending it was sushi.

One week in, the fever dreams intruded on her waking hours, making her jump at every flicker of movement, and she knew she had to risk the swim before she grew too weak. In her fragile condition, the crossing almost killed her: at one point, not far from the shore, she succumbed and slipped under the water. Luckily the rising slope of the seabed was just beneath her toes, allowing her to bob back up and close the remaining distance to the beach that ran along Leith Docks. She'd timed it so she would arrive around dusk, but it was far too early to consider venturing into the city proper. Just beyond where the beach gave way to loose soil, a squat stone tower jutted from the earth. She leaned against it and scanned the deserted docklands. Feeling reasonably secure for the moment, although keeping one eye on the water in case any zombie seals came flopping after her—a fear that had caused her great stress in the water, where she didn't have the advantage her biped status afforded her on land—she settled down to wait in sopping wet clothes that at least cooled her fever.

When the glowing digits of her waterproof watch told her it was 3:00 a.m., she set off. She encountered her first dead body just outside the docks. The darkness spared her any visual details, although her nostrils were given a full whiff of decay. As she moved deeper into the city, ducking from doorway to doorway, broken glass from storefronts glittered in the faint moonlight and everywhere dark stains blotched the pavement. The streets were eerily empty. She made a quick pit stop to grab a box of powdered antibiotics and a large tub of paracetamol from the jumbled contents of a smashed-up pharmacy.

Only when she'd reached the apartment did she remember she had no key. She considered climbing up the side of the building, as the deep gaps between the blocks provided handholds, but rejected it. She was weak and couldn't take the risk of falling and spraining her ankle or worse. She jammed her finger on the buzzer. After what felt like an eternity of standing in the exposed street, her dad answered.

“I've got a gun, so you'd best be on your way,” he said.

Ruan pressed her mouth against the wall to muffle her squeal of delight. She'd known they would be alive. Everything was going to be okay.

“It's me, Dad.”

“Ruan?” he said. “You're alive. Thank God, you're alive!”

In the background, she heard her mum babble excitedly as the door buzzed open. She took the stairs two at a time. Security chains rattled and keys turned in locks, then she heard footsteps on the landing above. As she rounded the final bend she saw their familiar silhouettes standing side by side at the top of the stairs.

“Mum! Dad!” she shouted, not caring who heard.

As she continued upward, a growl echoed through the stairwell. Her first thought was that a dog must have been taking shelter in the building. Just as she was about to bound up the final set of steps, she realized it was coming from her dad. She froze. There was something wrong with their silhouettes: they seemed bunched, vibrating with tension. Her dad sneezed, before he spoke. “Where have you been? Your mother was worried sick.”

Something had changed in the time it took her to climb the stairs. His voice was low, hard, and choppy—as though he was a mechanical replica of her dad, and somebody was turning a crank to get the sentence out. Her mum shook her head before her voice broke into a yell that held a timbre all too familiar to the screeching in the camp. “We bought you everything you ever wanted, let you do whatever you wanted, and now you do this to us. You need some discipline, you spoiled little brat!”

Then they were coming down the stairs.

This can't be happening
, Ruan thought numbly.
It's just the fever.

Her mum got there first and grabbed her hair. Moments later, her dad punched her on the side of the head. Within seconds, she became a bone between two snarling, snapping dogs. When her mum sank her teeth into Ruan's shoulder and bit down hard, her mind shrank away from this awful reality. She mentally switched her mum with the blond woman in the camp and her dad with a savage stranger. Her elbow snapped up and hammered into the woman's face, forcing her to release her grip. She put both hands into the man's chest and pushed with all her strength. His hands came free and she fell backward, twisting to face back down the stairwell. She landed heavily, but immediately got back to her feet and ran.

At the bottom of the stairs, she yanked on the handle before remembering she had to release the lock. She pressed the button and opened the door just wide enough to slip out. She pulled it shut. A second later the man slammed up against the glass. So distorted was his face—neck muscles corded, eyes popping from his head, teeth clamped together in frustrated rage—that it made it easy to believe the fiction he wasn't her dad. He hauled on the door, too far gone to remember the button, as the woman thumped up alongside him and scrabbled at the glass. Ruan didn't even look at her. She just turned and ran.

*   *   *

During the subsequent months on the road, Ruan had never blamed her parents for what they did; after all, she'd never seen evidence that somebody with the virus could behave any other way in her presence. When she realized Fanny and her troupe were fighting their urges, her first thought had been to pass this technique on to her parents in the hope they could be together again. With every day that passed in which nobody attacked her, she began to reevaluate. Not one of these people knew her or felt anything for her, yet they controlled themselves. Her parents, with a lifetime of supposedly loving her behind them, had shown no such restraint. Then there were the hurtful things her mother said, which had to have come from somewhere. What kind of parents, no matter how sick, tried to kill their child?

On the fourth day, a new recruit came in with one of the couriers—a middle-aged man who appeared to give physical form to the phrase “mild mannered.” Ruan was confined to quarters to head off any potential incidents but watched from her window as Fanny sat him down cross-legged on the pier and took him through a series of breathing exercises. After a while, Fanny brought out a chicken and sat it in front of him. He lunged forward, grabbed the bird and bit its head off. Fanny let him pull off the wings and beat the body on the ground until he was spent and blood speckled his glasses. Nayapal led the newcomer, now weeping and spitting out feathers, to one of the hangars. Fanny saw Ruan watching and came over.

“We'll keep him there until he can be trusted,” she said. “You won't be in any danger.”

“Was that a test?”

“Yes, to judge his levels of anger.”

“You mean it varies?”

“Absolutely. Some people are better at reining themselves in; women more so than men.”

“You have more men here, though.”

“Andy, Scott, and Tom were pacifists. And they're pretty metrosexual. We have more women in the network across the country.”

“So that guy was one of the angry ones? He looked so harmless.”

“It's always the meek ones you have to watch out for. They've usually got a lifetime of rage to come out.”

Ruan thought again of her parents. Perhaps she'd been deluding herself that they loved her. Sure, they'd backed her in whatever she wanted to do and never showed any overt signs of resentment at the sacrifices they must have made for her and her brother, but that's what all parents did for their children. It was an automatic response, built into the genes just as much as the urges that the virus amplified. There was nothing special about a parent caring for the fruit of their loins, no matter how intense and wonderful that relationship seemed to the child. Her whole life may have been a lie.

“Why use a bird?” Ruan asked, trying to distract herself from this painful train of thought. “Couldn't you just annoy him? Call him speccy or something and see how angry he gets?”

“The point of this is ultimately to reintegrate with the world, and that means being able to control ourselves around uninfected beings. We don't get angry enough with each other to really test it.”

“So was I a guinea pig?”

Fanny looked uncomfortable. “Not purposely. I mean, I didn't help you for that reason. But it did cross my mind when you came back.”

“Human testing always follows on from animal, right?”

“I know it sounds bad, but I wasn't taking any risks. I controlled myself, and I trusted everybody else to do the same. They all graduated by not killing the bird.”

“But they all killed it the first time?”

“More or less. Some did it straight away, some held out for a few minutes. This one will take a bit of conditioning. If it's even possible. Some people just can't help themselves. We've had to let a few go.”

That almost everybody killed the bird could serve in mitigation for her mother and father, and for a moment Ruan seized on it. Then again, she wasn't a bird. She was their child. Fanny had said that people needed to choose which side of the line they stood on. Her parents had made their choice, and that knowledge cut Ruan far deeper than any of the physical wounds she'd suffered. Even when the newcomer was locked away and Ruan was free to roam the camp once more, she lay on the bed, blinking until her eyes ached as she rewrote history. Time and again she replayed the scene of returning home, gradually replacing the reality with an alternative scene in which she pressed the buzzer to no avail. When she emerged from the room, she'd just about convinced herself that her parents were dead. This was her home now.

She encountered one other wrinkle in her attempt to build this new life—something she'd been expecting ever since she met Rory. He began following her around, not quite brave enough to talk to her, and she began to find little origami flowers on her bed in the evening. One day the flowers were accompanied by an unsigned note that said, “I fancy you.” She tried to ignore it, as she'd ignored so many such clumsy advances in the past, but she could tell from the way Rory was beginning to look at her more openly, a hurt look on his face, that pretending it wasn't happening wouldn't cut it. Then, the day before, the approach she'd been dreading occurred. She was down by the water's edge, washing the dishes after lunch, when she heard tentative footsteps on the pebbles behind her. Turning, she saw Rory standing there, swishing the stones with his trainers.

“Have you been getting my flowers?” he said, looking at the tops of his shoes.

“Oh, they're from you,” she said. “Thank you. They're lovely.”

He looked up briefly and gave her a shy smile. He was kind of cute, she supposed, but God was he young. His cheeks were ruddy with the bloom of adolescence behind soft fuzz that heralded the beard that would one day, many years from now, take root in the Noel Edmonds–manner of his relatives. She couldn't stand such coyness. What she looked for in boyfriends was a confident maturity that only began to take shape once the early hormone storm settled down, usually in the early twenties. Her problem had been that most of those men wouldn't come near her despite their obvious desire—the French geography teacher who'd taken her virginity during a blissful weeklong exchange trip aside—as she was the very definition of jail bait: underage, fully developed physically, and looking for somebody way out of her age bracket. Now it didn't matter, as she'd celebrated her sixteenth birthday alone in an abandoned house with a bowl of Pedigree Chum topped with a single candle.

So, Rory just didn't fit her profile, even if you put aside the fact he had the virus. It didn't matter in terms of infection risk, but she suspected that once an infected person's dander was up violence could follow if they were getting it on with somebody uninfected. Her room was next to the one shared by Eva and Scott, and she'd heard them going at it. Their lovemaking involved lots of slapping and guttural, angry shouts, although she supposed they could always have been into S&M. Anyway, if she were to take the chance, it wouldn't be with a downy-faced boy who would probably spurt in his pants if she so much as cocked a hip in his general direction.

Rory stepped closer. He was wearing tight jeans, and with horror Ruan saw a lazy stirring of denim. She jumped up, clutching the bowl of dishes to her chest to hide the obvious spur for his growing arousal. “I'd better be going now. I need to stack these.”