Too much. Just too much.
Burning Grace alive. Hearing her screams…
Freya crushed her eyes shut and urged her mind to move along quickly.
They’d been taken by Big Phil and dumped on an exit ramp off the A11… Phil had Mr. Carnegie’s gun with him. He’d pulled it out to show her and told her Dave had given him orders to “give it to ’em.” And by that he’d clearly not meant handing the weapon over.
She’d been waiting anxiously for something like this. Not just expulsion from the park, but a tidy out-of-sight-of-the-others death for them both. Obviously Dave didn’t want to be looking over his shoulder for the rest of his life.
Phil said he wasn’t willing to do it—actually couldn’t do it. He said he liked Leon and her, but they both had to go. He fired the gun twice in the air to get them walking, and probably so he could show Dave two spent rounds when he returned. Then he’d jumped in the park’s car, turned, and headed back down the road, grinding the gears noisily, the car lurching awkwardly. She’d watched it until it had disappeared, concerned that Phil might have second thoughts, come back and do what Dave had ordered him to do.
The A11 led to Norwich, and Leon had said something about his grandparents living somewhere nearby. So that’s what led them here.
Her mind flickered back to Grace. Skipping quickly past those horrific last few minutes, past that day, to the weeks and months before. Just a young girl. A precocious, sometimes annoying, but mostly cute kid. Always smiling, always making others laugh with her Little Miss Prada put-downs.
Freya wiped her damp cheeks with the back of her hand.
There was no friggin’ way she was a snark.
This “slime from outer space”—as good a theory as any—had managed to make a copy of a horse. Not even a great copy: up close, touching it, the truth was apparent. But to make a copy of Grace that even Leon couldn’t detect?
Bullshit. Complete and utter bullshit.
Dave had murdered an innocent girl in the most horrific way possible.
Chapter 47
Dave stirred the charred remains with the toe of his boot. They’d left the storeroom firmly closed until the fuel had spent itself. There were a few cardboard boxes in the place, but the rest was cinderblock walls and a corrugated-iron roof, nothing that would catch and spread—a perfect oven, in fact.
He looked up at the pale-gray sky. One of the roof support beams had been softened enough by the intense heat for it to buckle and collapse, bringing down about a quarter of the roof. The light angled down in thick shards that flickered with the last wisps of smoke slowly rising from the blackened concrete floor.
He could see chunks of carbonized matter that might once have been part of the fake horse, might have been part of the Fake Girl.
It didn’t have a name now. It wasn’t called Grace anymore… That thing they’d burned was now known as the Fake Girl.
Apart from checking it once after the flames had died down, to make sure the fire wasn’t going to spread to the rest of the complex, the door had remained firmly closed and locked. No one had even gone near it, as if ignoring the door meant that somehow what had occurred here days ago had never really happened.
The mood in the park had become subdued. The Chinese family had packed their things and left. Ten fewer people now lived here than a week ago, and the place suddenly felt like a ghost town. Dave had tried to get their minds off it, to lighten the mood under the new management regime. He’d continued the ritual of Ron’s breakfast briefings, had even tried to get some team games going on the whiteboard in the cafeteria. But there was little appetite for it.
Screw ’em, then. He figured they’d snap out of it soon enough. Life goes on.
He looked around the blackened room. Some of the cinderblocks had been cracked by the heat. Beneath his boots the crisped bodies of some of those crabs crackled like unshelled prawns done far too long on a barbecue.
Nothing in this room could have survived.
He saw something on the floor, a dark lump the size of a fist. He squatted down beside it and poked at it with a pen. Soot flaked off and he saw it was the toe end of one of Fake Girl’s shoes. The rubber toe-tip had melted down to a puddle, but a small fraction of the vinyl material remained and the little swoosh logo.
So damned convincing, weren’t you? Complete with your tennis shoes, your little pink backpack, your…
He felt a momentary wave of nausea that he’d looked at her as human.
He stood up and turned toward the door. Iain was waiting in the doorway, not willing to take even a single step inside.
“Well?”
“Nothing left,” said Dave. “It’s all burned to hell.”
“The roof’s caved in. What if the snarks get in through that?”
Dave joined Iain. He pulled the door shut behind him and turned the key in the lock.
“We’ll just keep this shut up for good.” He looked down at the narrow gap at the bottom of the door. “And we’ll board that gap up.” He sucked air in through his teeth. “The storeroom’s no good to us anyway. We’ll call that ‘outside’ now.”
• • •
It was Katrina, one of the cleaners, who spotted them first a couple of days later. She wasn’t even on watch duty—that was supposed to be Louise, the girl who used to manage the tanning salon. Either Louise was asleep up on the terrace or just not doing her job.
Katrina shook her head. Dave will punish her for not being vigilant enough.
She’d come through to the reception area to refill the watering bucket in the ladies’ bathroom. The first green shoots were showing in Mr. Carnegie’s vegetable garden. Katrina now considered herself the principle custodian of the man’s dream to nurture and grow their own fresh vegetables. No one else seemed to be taking an interest in it. As with everything else, a gloomy lethargy had settled over this place like a fog. Toilet buckets were not being emptied, mealtimes were becoming a free-for-all. Hopefully things would pull together again soon, but until then, Katrina was going to do her little bit and keep those green shoots going.
The last week had seen a stark change in the atmosphere of this place. The burning of that girl had affected everyone. There were two distinct groups in the park now: those who were convinced she’d been a creature disguised as a girl, and those who thought they’d all been responsible for allowing the murder of a child to happen.
Katrina considered herself to be firmly in the latter group, along with the other cleaners.
She saw the new arrivals making their way through the parking lot, just as the fake horse had done, across the gravel and cautiously toward the front entrance. She saw them both at the same time as they glimpsed her through the tinted glass wall at the front.
So there was no ducking out of sight. They now knew someone was home.
A large, slope-shouldered man and a small, much younger woman. They were pushing bicycles, their rear baskets stacked with bottles of drinking water. Unlike the horse though, they didn’t look sick; they looked well nourished. Of course they did. There was food out there in abundance. Anyone armed with a can opener was never going to go hungry. Not for a long time yet.
Instead of ducking down and hiding. Katrina approached the front and waved them over. “Come here!” she shouted through the tinted glass. They walked their bikes over and lay them down just outside.
“You stay there! I go and call someone! OK?”
They both seemed to understand her. The girl nodded.
• • •
Dave and the rest of the park’s inhabitants were gathered in the entrance again, just like they had been a week ago, sizing up the two new arrivals outside. This time around, there was no open discussion, no back-and-forth debate—there was no point. Dave ran things now. On his belt were two things that marked him out as undisputed leader: Mr. Carnegie’s large, jangling bun
ch of keys and, on the other side, the gun.
They looked sullenly to him for a decision.
He felt their eyes resting on him, like hands pushing at him to say or do something.
“I’ll go talk to them,” he announced. He unzipped his anorak and felt on his hip for the reassuring grip of the gun. He unhitched the jangling keys from his belt and searched through them for the right key. He unlocked the double doors and stepped outside.
His hand remained on his hip like a small-town sheriff, ready to pull the gun out and wave it threateningly around if need be.
“Afternoon,” he said stiffly.
The two newcomers stared at him cautiously. Closer to them now, he could see the man looked not quite right. His eyes looked squinty and watery. The hair on his head looked patchy, his scalp bald in places. The girl noticed him looking him over.
“You’re looking at his hair, right?”
Dave nodded.
“’S OK… We’re real. Steven has alopecia.”
The man smiled innocently, a friendly, beaming grin that revealed pink gums and just a couple of wobbly teeth. “Hello…my name is Steven.” He spoke with a whistling lisp.
“He’s got special needs.” The girl shrugged. “I’ve been taking care of him since…well, since all this went down, haven’t I, Stevie?”
Dave looked at her. She looked to be about twenty, long blond hair. She was pretty even without a dash of makeup. Natural pretty.
He looked her over quickly while she was looking up at her simpleton friend.
Nice. Fit.
“My name’s Dave Lester. I’m the leader here.” He turned to gesture at the building behind him, at the row of pale faces peering out. “I run this place.”
She nodded as she studied the front of the building. “Meg.”
“You two…you’re immune, right? You’re not infected?”
“Oh, we know all about the painkillers. Yeah…we’ve been poppin’ the pills all right.”
Dave smiled. He liked her. She seemed straight-up. Confident. No bullshit. A bit like that sarcastic cow Freya used to be, in fact, minus the shitty up-yours attitude she’d had.
Big Phil had come back and told him that he’d done the deed. Dave had counted the bullets and sniffed the barrel. He’d fired the gun all right. No more Freya. And no more of that whining Yank kid, Leon. For all they knew, he could have been another snark waiting to hatch too.
“Seriously…we’re good,” said Meg. She flicked her hair, bared her teeth to him, and presented her hands. “See? We’ve got teeth, nails, and hair… That enough for you?”
“Right.” He nodded. “OK. You know, I just have to be careful.”
“We know. It can do people now. Pretty freaky, huh?”
He raised his eyebrows. “Well, I suppose you can come in if you want.”
“Hey, who says we actually want to come in?”
Dave was taken aback by that. “What? Uh… Oh, I just assumed—”
She laughed dryly. “Just messing with you, Dave Lester.”
He found himself laughing, liking that…liking that a lot. She reminded him of the kind of snarky female lead that populated teen flicks: the hot chick with a brain and all the best put-down lines. The park could do with someone like that around. Someone to liven up this godforsaken place.
Chapter 48
And, it turned out, he was one hundred percent right about that. The mood in the cafeteria that evening was markedly different. New faces for everyone to get to know, to quiz about the big, bad world out there.
The girl, Meg, had little to add to what they already knew. She told them that they were the first real humans that she and Stevie had come across. She gave them all a brief account of their last six months, witnessing the same things they’d all seen—the “balloons,” the “feather clouds,” the “creepy crawlies”—and, a month ago, a completely bald man who looked as pale as a ghost, shambling around like a drunk. She’d been suspicious of him—it—immediately, and they’d given the thing a wide berth.
She told them that the whole world, as far as she knew, had been hit by the plague and was in just the same state as England. Then she told them how impressed she was by this place. Flattered Dave by telling him what a great job he’d done setting up this survival enclave. That it might just end up being the starting point for human civilization version two.
The big man, Steven, she explained, she’d found wandering around outside a nursing home. She told them all not to worry about him. Yes, he was big—and strong too—but he was perfectly harmless. He seemed to have nothing but a childlike gratitude to offer anyone who bothered to take the time to interact with him. Meg told everyone in the cafeteria that although he didn’t say much, he did really cool impersonations of any cartoon characters they wanted to name.
It didn’t take much to persuade him to do his party trick. His Bart Simpson soon had the small cafeteria echoing with guffawing laughter.
Dave was pleased. Finally some smiles, some laughs again. The evening with these two new arrivals felt like an important punctuation point, like a new start, a very definite line drawn beneath the unpleasantness of the previous week. More importantly, a distraction from the clear schism that had begun to develop in the park. Up until these two strangers had turned up this afternoon, Dave was becoming certain he was going to have to start waving his gun around. Lay down the law. Remind people that this was not some hippy-dippy democracy and they’d better get that into their stupid heads.
New management, new rules. Time to buck up and get on with things again.
He was pleased. And then, to make matters all the better, Meg caught his eye across the cafeteria and winked. A wink that suggested she might want to be more than just friends…given time.
Meg talked awhile with everyone who had questions for her, and then finally she was standing right beside him.
“How about you show me around? This place looks very impressive.”
He made an effort not to look too eager to do that. He managed a casual nod. “What about your friend over there?”
“Hey, just look at him!” She shrugged. “He’s having a great time showing off. Gimme a sec.” She wandered over to Stevie and touched his arm lightly. He turned to look down at her. She stood on tiptoes and whispered something into his ear, and he nodded and waggled his hand at her, then went back to entertaining his audience.
She came back.
“What did you just say to him?”
Meg smiled. “That me and you were going for a little…stroll.”
Was that another wink there? Dave could have sworn there was. He led her out of the cafeteria and into the half light of the tropicarium. It was dark outside and several spotlights around a palm tree in the middle caught the tips of its waxy, green leaves and cast jungle shadows up onto the glass ceiling.
“This is really something,” she said again.
“You know, this used to be an exclusive health spa.”
“Really? It’s totally awesome.”
He led her around the edge of what had once been a small pool. It was now filled with soil, and bamboo canes were erected in rows. “We’re going to grow beans and peas here, and potatoes and onions. No canned veggies anymore.”
She nodded, studying the vegetable garden as they walked around it. She seemed to be fascinated with every detail.
“I suppose you must have seen enough yourself to realize that we have to stop waiting for a rescue and start looking after ourselves,” said Dave.
“Yes. You’re right.”
“I’m doing the best I can to adapt it to be a real long-term survival place.” He led her away from the cafeteria, past the empty spa pools and the row of sauna cabins, to the paths around the back that led to the chalets.
“Look. See? We have more growing here. Tomatoes. This tropicarium is good fo
r them. It’s perfect, really. I mean basically this is one big greenhouse.” He was vaguely aware he was babbling. Talking too much.
She furrowed her brows, pursed her lips, and nodded mock-sensibly. “Excellent work, Dave. Excellent.”
He stopped, looked at her, and giggled self-consciously. “Are you pulling my leg or something?”
She looped her arm through his. “No! I’m just soooo impressed with what you’ve achieved here! Very good work!”
He looked at her and narrowed his eyes suspiciously, still smiling though. If she were making fun of him, he was pretty sure—well, hoping actually—it was in a flirty way. “You are…aren’t you?”
He couldn’t make her out yet. They’d only met her just a few hours ago, and she seemed to already have everyone eating out of the palm of her hand.
She gasped theatrically. “Now why on earth would you think that I’m mocking you?”
“The way you’re talking right now. It sounds, well, a little sarcastic.”
Her manner changed abruptly. As if she’d suddenly thought of another game she wanted to play. She walked two fingers up along the inside of his forearm.
“I think I know why you let me and Stevie in this afternoon.” She ran her hand up his arm. “You like me, don’t you?”
Dave realized his mouth was dry. His legs felt like jelly, trembling with excitement.
“OK…OK, yeah…I, uh, think you’re pretty, you know.”
Her eyes rounded, wider still. “So, do you want to kiss me? Hmm?”
He laughed nervously.
“Yes. Kiss me.”
He swallowed. “Uh…I…”
“Kiss me, right now.”
“Right here?” His voice was trembling. He hated that, hated sounding like some kind of teenage dork.
“Yes.” She pressed her hand against his chest and gently pushed him back. He took a step backward onto the soil, almost stumbling.
“Right here…on these tomatoes,” she whispered. “Right now.”
Dave shot a glance across the tropicarium, toward the cafeteria. Light was spilling from the doorway, laughter too. No one sounded as if they were thinking of heading to their chalet anytime soon.