‘Sure.’ Freya turned to look at her, as if that was actually going to help. ‘Umm . . . I wanna say an air hostess?’
Naga laughed at that. Then tutted. ‘A tax accountant, actually.’
‘Oh.’ Freya nodded as she resumed unpegging socks from the washing line. ‘OK.’
‘Yup!’ Naga laughed. ‘That’s exactly what people used to say to me at parties.’ She propped her small pointed jaw on her fists and batted her eyes as if she was struggling to keep them open. ‘Accounts, huh? Hmmm . . . so very fascinating.’
‘I’m sorry – I wasn’t trying to say your job was bor—’
Naga flapped a hand. ‘Don’t worry about it. It’s the classic “yawn job”. Like being in HR or being an estate agent. Doesn’t matter. The fact is I enjoyed doing it . . . and I made lots of money too, which is what really counts.’
She arched her back, straightened her arms and clicked her elbow. ‘What about you? Who were you?’
‘An A-level student.’
‘Really?’ Naga’s eyes widened. ‘How old are you?’
‘Eighteen.’
‘I thought you were in your mid-twenties!’
‘That old? Charming!’
‘Hey, no, sorry. That came out sounding wrong, didn’t it?’
‘’S OK.’ Freya chuckled. ‘It’s my old-woman hobble I guess.’ She tossed a fistful of socks into the clothes basket at her feet. ‘So, how did you manage to survive, Naga?’
‘Like everyone else here, I was zonked out on medication at the time.’ She held out one hand. ‘Chronic RSI. Carpal tunnel syndrome. I’d just had the operation done . . . privately, I might add. And then guess what.’
‘What?’
‘I got sepsis. An infection as a result of the op. So I was being kept in and pumped full of antibiotics when the plague came.’ She laughed. ‘Ironic, really – as a result of some ridiculously overpaid consultant not washing his hands properly after playing golf, my life was saved.’ She put her hands on her hips. ‘That’s why I probably won’t be suing them for shoddy hygiene standards.’
Freya laughed.
‘What about you?’ asked Naga.
‘I was on meds too. Painkillers. I was diagnosed with—’
‘Multiple sclerosis?’
Freya nodded. ‘Good guess.’
‘My auntie had it. I thought it only happened to older people, though?’
‘Old and young.’
‘What about your boyfriend? American, isn’t he?’ Naga arched her brows. ‘I’m presuming boyfriend?’
‘Oh.’ Freya laughed a little ruefully. ‘We’re not that.’
Naga narrowed her eyes. ‘But . . . ?’
‘No.’ Freya shook her head. ‘That’s not a . . . a thing for us. We’ve got each other’s backs, though. We met at this other place after the virus and we just sort of clicked. And, no, Leon’s not American, by the way, he’s British. He gets really pissed off if you call him a Yank.’
‘Right.’ Naga zipped her mouth. ‘Note to self.’ She unpegged a heavy sweater. ‘So what was this “other place”?’
‘It was like a super-posh health spa in some woods outside Norwich. It was pretty remote, so they were well set up to survive.’
‘What made you leave, then?’
Freya wondered how much she wanted to share with her. The memory of that traumatic last day was still raw in her mind. For Leon, mercifully, a lot of it had been a concussed blur. Not for her, unfortunately. She’d heard Grace’s screams as she burned to death in that storeroom. She’d watched Dave staring through the open door and seen the flicker of flames on his face, the reflected glint in his eye.
She’d been the one who’d had to plead with Phil as he drove them both away, crying, begging for him not to follow Dave’s orders and kill them both. To let them go, and in return she’d promised they’d never come back. She’d done all that, saved their lives, while Leon had been dazed, useless, in shock.
She didn’t want to talk about that now. Instead she gave Naga an edited version of what had brought them here, which included their discovery of that BBC radio studio and the message for other survivors. ‘Me and Leon have no idea how recently that broadcast was recorded. It could have been a few months or weeks ago. It could just as easily have been recorded days after the outbreak.’
‘You said the station still had electric power?’
She nodded. ‘Some places still do. Wind turbines, solar panels . . . you know?’
‘This message, what was it?’
‘The gist is there’s a bunch of ships coming to collect survivors from Southampton. They said we had to get there by September. But, you know, which September? This one? Last year’s? The year befo—’
‘And you two were on your way down to find out?’
Freya nodded. ‘Stupidly. Yeah. Because . . . what else are we going to do? Right?’
‘You told Everett about this?’
Freya wondered what Leon would say about her sharing this with Naga. They hadn’t actually discussed whether it was something to keep secret or not. But both, so far, had instinctively kept it to themselves.
‘Not yet, no.’
‘My God, you have to tell him! If there’s even a small chance . . .’ Naga stepped closer. ‘If there’s even a tiny chance that there’s a rescue effort being put together?’ Her brown eyes were suddenly wide and round with hope. ‘You’re not messing me around? This is for real?’
Freya was regretting opening her mouth now. ‘Yes.’
‘Flipping hell! Seriously. Bloody hell!’ She was grinning. ‘Go tell him!’
Freya nodded. ‘OK . . . but, you know, maybe don’t tell anyone else until I’ve told him?’
Naga nodded quickly. ‘Sure. Sure!’ She snatched the socks out of Freya’s hands and shooed her away.
‘Go! GO!’
CHAPTER 15
Leon was pretty annoyed. He hadn’t wanted everyone to know their business. And now here they were, both summoned to Everett’s room, with Corkie and Everett there waiting patiently to hear them fully explain their story. Since it was Freya who’d blabbed, he let her do most of the talking.
Everett listened impassively, not giving anything away as he absently stroked the tip of his nose. Finally, Freya finished.
‘And you just told Naga about this?’
Freya nodded.
‘Marvellous,’ he said wearily. ‘We can now assume then that it’s common knowledge. It’ll be all around the bloody castle by evening prayers.’
‘Everyone should know about it,’ said Freya. ‘It’s a chance for rescue, for all of us!’
‘Forgive me for not tap dancing with excitement and optimism, young lady,’ he said, settling back in the leather chair behind his dark oak desk.
Freya looked bewildered. ‘Why? Why not? It’s a chance—’
‘Because it’s highly likely any ship has been and gone. Or, more likely, that it never came at all.’
The room – Everett’s ‘campaign room’ – looked like the set from some medieval movie. On the desk, spread out like a tablecloth, was a blueprint of the castle and the surrounding grounds, like some general’s battlefield map. The walls of the room were panelled with dark wood and hung with tapestries bearing coats of arms. A thin shaft of light shone through the narrow arched window, catching floating dust motes in its beam.
‘But how can you be so sure of that?’
Everett sighed. He pointed to a desk beneath the window. Sitting on it was a rack of olive-green army equipment.
‘That is a CNR radio pack. VHF, MHz and digital. We get all the emergency frequencies, and I hate to be the bearer of bad tidings, but we haven’t heard anything on it other than a handful of weak garbled signals for quite some time.’
‘You have heard other signals, then?’ said Freya.
Everett looked sorry for her. Genuinely sorry. His gaunt cheeks creased with paternal pity and he looked down as he spoke.
‘The last person we ever heard
in the ether was speaking in Mandarin. And she was singing. Not particularly tunefully, either. That was eighteen months ago. We’ve not heard anything since.’
Everett directed his gaze at Leon. ‘You’re being rather quiet. What are your thoughts on the matter?’
Leon hadn’t wanted anyone to know in the first place. He was equally inclined to keep his intentions to himself.
‘You can speak freely, lad . . . I’m not a tyrant.’
‘Maybe you’re right, sir.’
Freya did a double take. ‘We have to go and check it out, at least.’
‘I see.’ Everett puffed his lips out. ‘Well, look, you’re both free to leave the castle any time you wish. And, if there’d been no further signs of the virus, I would have wished you all the best, bon voyage and send us a postcard, please. But it appears our hopes that the kraken is dead and gone were . . . shall I say, premature.’
‘We still have to try,’ replied Freya.
‘You’ll die out there.’
‘We got this far, didn’t we?’
Everett glanced at Corkie. ‘If my men hadn’t turned up when they did, that underpass would have been the end of your journey.’
Everett took several steps across his room to stare out of the narrow window. ‘Last autumn, before this second winter kicked in, those grounds out there were a battlefield. There were thousands of them. Our minefields, the moat, these walls kept them back, day after day after day.’
Leon could see his blue eyes gazing out at the distant tree line.
‘Each day, the virus was trying something different. Learning from its mistakes. Adapting its creatures, experimenting with smaller ones, then larger ones. Probing us for weaknesses.’ His voice had a hollow quality to it, the voice of a besieged king.
‘As the weather cooled again, and on its last attempt, it managed to produce some very large creatures, the size of cows. But, of course, nothing like a cow. Lumbering, clumsy, badly balanced things . . . that ended up tumbling into our moat and dying.’
He turned back to face them. ‘The point is that it tried and it failed.’ He smiled. ‘You know this castle is not a real castle?’ He turned to them. ‘The foundations are, but the rest of it is, essentially, one big movie set. The ruins, which I believe do date back to Norman times, were bought by a film company, and this castle was rebuilt to make some sort of expensive fantasy drama. After they finished with it, they sold it on to another company, which used it for corporate events, weddings, medieval banquets, that kind of thing.’
He slapped a hand against the wall beside the window. ‘Behind this facade it’s all modern concrete and iron girders. And, God help me, I’m thankful for that. It’s solid. It’ll hold. If you want to leave us, then feel free. But, if you want my advice? Stay. The kraken, it appears, has awoken once more.’
‘I’ve met him somewhere before,’ said Freya. ‘I know I have.’
‘You know Everett?’
‘I know his face.’
The two of them were sitting outside the castle on a pallet on the mud-churned ground before the entrance. The drawbridge was down; Corkie and the knights were out on another scouting trip. One of them had been left behind on sentry duty. He was sitting on a stool on the far side of the drawbridge in an anorak that snapped and rustled in the cold wind as he scanned the grounds.
‘Maybe he just looks like somebody you know,’ said Leon.
‘Yeah, maybe,’ replied Freya.
His mind shifted on to another matter. ‘So, what are we going to do? Stay? Go?’
She didn’t answer.
Leon sighed. ‘If he’s not heard anything else on that radio in eighteen months, then it means that message is probably old news. Just some repeated loop.’
Freya looked at him. ‘So we give up. Is that it?’
‘It’s not giving up, staying here.’ He nodded at the trucks, at several stacks of boxes containing tins of food. ‘It’s a pretty good set-up. Better than Emerald Parks.’
‘It’s no different to Emerald Parks. Another survivor camp run by another prat with a God complex.’
Leon was grateful she didn’t say Dave Lester’s name out loud. Hearing his name spoken would have brought the memories right back. That day . . . the day that had started with The Horse.
He looked at the distant tree line and wondered if there were any virals lurking out there, observing the open ground and the castle, evaluating with those pale little eyes.
‘A couple of days ago we were seconds away, Freya. We were just seconds away from—’
She nodded, not wanting him to finish. ‘I know. I know.’
He turned to her. ‘You asked me to shoot you.’
Freya closed her eyes and shuddered at the memory.
‘That’s how bat-shit crazy it is out there – when a bullet in the head is the better option.’ He took a deep breath. ‘You really want to head out there?’
‘No. But . . . do you really think we’re going to be safe here forever?’ She stretched out her cramping left leg. ‘What if the virus learns how to make snarks that can fly? Or can tunnel under the castle? Or float across the moat?’
‘That’s a way off.’
‘Oh, of course, because you know that, right?’
‘I know shit. But I do know you and me – we didn’t “make it” this far. We got our asses saved.’
They sat in silence for a while listening to the soft hiss of a steady breeze through the tall grass. Finally Leon spoke. ‘You know . . . I don’t think I could have done it – pulled the trigger.’
Freya rested a hand on his. ‘Yes, you could. And I know you would have. I trust you.’
‘Really?’
‘And, you know . . . you can trust me. If something like that ever happens to us again?’ She shook her head firmly. ‘I’m not dying the virus way. I want it to be quick, to be instant.’ She squeezed his hand. ‘That’s our pact, remember? You and me . . . we’re not going to end up as snarks.’
Leon closed his eyes and saw that service station two years back. The toilets. The snarks in their thousands.
‘I saw Mum die that way. Those things, climbing all over her, in her hair, climbing across her face. You know what her last words were?’
Freya shook her head.
‘They’re inside me.’
She looped her arm through his and pulled him closer. ‘Don’t relive it, Leon. It’s done. It happened. Nothing changes that.’
‘Call me weak, but –’ he sighed – ‘I don’t think I’m ready to go out there again. Not yet.’
He felt her head nod on his shoulder. ‘Well, we’ve got time, Leo. We’ve got six months until September.’
‘Right. Six months.’
CHAPTER 16
[. . . your advance presence is registered . . .]
The core portion of her command cluster – the substance that felt like her – arrived in packets first: parcels of amino acid data that had travelled like a convoy of trucks along endless winding arteries.
For Grace, time was an irrelevance, an illusion. She’d been deconstructed into small batches of cells for easier capillary transportation. Her consciousness had broken down into constructs as incapable of thought as any red blood corpuscle. For the duration of the journey she hadn’t been Grace – she’d been a stream of tumbling, stupid cells – and now that enough of her had been directed by a dedicated ‘chaperone’ cluster to her destination, she felt her consciousness building, block by block.
The translation along untold hundreds of kilometres of networked roots had been an instantaneous process for her. In the world outside, weeks might have passed, but for her it was as if she’d fallen asleep in one place and woken up in another.
My name is Grace.
[. . . this is known . . .]
Where am I?
[. . . collective of command cluster designate . . .]
No, where am I? In the world? What country?
[. . . (term-‘world’) . . . seeking clarification . .
. (term-‘country’] . . . seeking clarification . . .]
The communication clusters, she had grown to understand, were little more than tug boats in this incomprehensible ecosystem, there to latch on to and steer clusters of cells to the right place. They had no intelligence of their own.
To make sense of her surroundings, in her mind’s eye Grace conjured up the illusion of a Manhattan hotel lobby. The illusion solidified in detail around her.
[. . . creating abstract/metaphor for communication convenience. We/I understand . . .]
Her lobby was a busy one with serious-looking businessmen checking in and out. She re-formed the communication cluster into the illusion of a flustered ruddy-cheeked bellboy looking around for someone more senior to help his Very Important Guest with her query.
She sensed the proximity of nucleic acids reacting with her outer cell walls. In her abstraction of a hotel lobby, help arrived in the form of a uniformed manager.
‘Grace, welcome to this place.’
Where am I? Am I in England still?
The manager – tidy, particular and coolly courteous, the cliché of a concierge – looked around and spread his hands.
‘You are referring to exterior macro-universe location labelling?’
She was getting better at understanding their . . . her . . . new language. Yes.
‘I understand. Then no. We are not in The England. We are in the place called “Europe”.’
Europe. She once went on a school trip to Europe. An expensive one. They visited Paris, climbed the Eiffel Tower, saw a bunch of old paintings and some other stuff.
Did I travel across sea?
‘Under the sea. Through an artificial man-made conduit. I believe the term is a “tunnel”.’
She wished a tiny fragment of her mother were here with her too. Just enough to conjure the ghost of her to hold her hand and tell her she was just fine.
‘There are others like you here,’ said the manager. ‘Complete conscious entities.’
Other . . . humans?
‘Once they were “humans”. Now they are all a part of WE. As you are too, Grace.’
I’m afraid.
‘There is nothing to be afraid of. We are all linked now.’ He smiled warmly at her. ‘We are “family”.’