The doors of the container creaked open and the engines of the quad bikes burst into life. Geldof opened his eyes to see three soldiers dive out of the way as Scholzy opened the throttle and sent the bike lurching into motion. They shot out onto the center circle of the stadium, right into a maelstrom of typical Glasgow stinging diagonal rain. The gray early morning light revealed soldiers humping sacks of food out of the dozens of crates, large and small, that the choppers had unloaded onto the rutted grass. Geldof expected them to reach for their weapons, but they just gaped at the four bikes tearing up the grass. The bikes sped toward the tall iron gates sitting open in one corner of the pitch, surrounded by old bricks and tangled metal from the seats and walls that had been gouged away to create a larger opening.
The four soldiers there had their backs to them and were busy trying to pacify a clamoring mob. Tears streamed down Geldof’s cheeks, partly from the icy wind that eddied around Scholzy’s body and partly from the icy certainty that he was about to die. For a fleeting moment, he regretted not having taken advantage of the working girl in Nairobi. Given his grandfather’s opposition to eulogizing the dead, his newspaper obituary would probably bear the headline, “Geldof Peters. He Died a Virgin.” The thought fled his mind as they drew closer to the bodies packed thick around the exit, arms undulating in the air and shouting for supplies. He saw no way they could get through the press even as they picked up speed, further churning up the once perfect football surface. Scholzy solved the problem by raising his automatic weapon and letting loose a burst of fire in the air. The crowd parted, falling over each other in their eagerness to flee. Scholzy led the wedge of bikes toward the thinnest part of the wriggling mass, but even as he did so the soldiers turned, hunkered down, and locked weapons to shoulders in one fluid motion. Geldof found himself wishing for a quick death. Better a clean shot to the skull than to be winged and sent sliding into the middle of the infected masses. Traditional zombies or not, he’d watched enough horror movies to know such situations invariably ended with intestines being tossed about like spaghetti. Those deliciously gruesome scenes had been his favorite moment of any zombie film; it was a very different matter when he would be the one providing the stringy pasta. The soldiers didn’t get the chance to fire. With short staccato bursts, the mercenaries sent their targets spinning to the ground, adding further impetus to the scrambled efforts of the crowd to get out of the way.
They thrust right into the middle of the chaos. Scholzy’s front right tire ran over the leg of a wide-eyed woman who’d fallen to the ground. The bike lurched to the left. Geldof started to slip, only managing to catch himself with a desperately flung hand on the side of the bike. Tilted out from the safety of his seat, he zipped inches by a forest of faces, close enough to see the whites of their eyes. Nostrils twitched, and suddenly the crowd was no longer fleeing. Hands reached for them, and the high-pitched screams of panic dropped several octaves into a rumble of anger.
Geldof brushed past a pinched-face youth in a white tracksuit, bottoms tucked into his socks, and a baseball cap with the rim pointing upward perched on his head.
“They’re nicking our fucking drugs,” the youth yelled. “Get the bastards.”
The bikes had too much momentum to be snarled up and pulled clear to bump down onto the road. Geldof chanced a look back. The mob—young and old, male and female, short and tall, and all ordinary looking save for the identical gnarled looks of focused hatred and longing on their faces—was now sprinting after them. Even with the growl of the engine thrumming in his ears, he could hear the throaty roar emanating from their twisted mouths. One of the army trucks came barrelling out of the gate. The throng of people pelting through the rain, now spread out across the whole road, slowed its progress, but a soldier leaned out of the cabin and aimed a weapon.
They were driving up the hill toward the M8 when bullets whined around them. Scholzy began zigzagging, the tires designed for biting into soft grass squealing for purchase on the slick tarmac. Geldof clung on like a baby koala to its mother. The truck had nosed its way through the mob by knocking many of them over and was now roaring up the hill, gaining far too quickly. The intersection with Paisley Road West, and beyond that the on-ramp to the M8, lay ahead on their left, but Scholzy bumped onto the pavement and took a gap between leafless trees throwing their twisted branches up in protest against the relentless rain. They raced across an empty patch of ground and rattled over another curb onto the dual carriageway.
At this hour of day, back in normal times, the street would have been full of buses and cars trundling to work. Now it was empty save for a few sodden cyclists, who veered off at the sight of the four quad bikes. Geldof heard the sound of tearing metal and looked back to see the truck, which must have mounted the verge at speed, sideswipe a parked car. The door of the truck swung shut, mashing the soldier who was leaning out to fire again. The truck tore free and kept coming. On an empty main road they had no chance of outpacing it, particularly since so much shit was strapped over the bikes.
Scholzy pointed left and swung the handlebars to travel in that direction. The quad bike power-slid onto a street flanked by identical tenement buildings. Up ahead was a T-junction. Standing in the middle of it was an old Glasgow wifey. Her blue-tinted hair was done up in curlers wrapped beneath a clear plastic rain mac. She was wearing a shapeless gray overcoat that came down to her knees. Underneath her tan tights, thick varicose veins were visible even at a distance. One arthritic hand was wrapped around a tartan shopping trolley, a two-wheeled contraption with a little black handle that grannies across Scotland used to run over people’s toes and jab the backs of the knees of anybody foolish enough to loiter in their way. It was a fearsome weapon in the right hands.
This particular wifey had clearly already sensed they were uninfected from the roar of the mob because she faced them, legs apart, and picked up the trolley. She hurled it with a strength Geldof did not think possible, forcing Scholzy to swerve to avoid its twisting arc. Mick’s bike crunched it under its thick tires as Scholzy slowed to take the corner. Instead of leaping out of the way, the old woman dived at the quad bike and somehow managed to curl her fingers around the side bar. She held on as the bike accelerated and fixed Geldof with tiny eyes that brimmed with hate behind thick National Health specs.
“Joyriders!” she screamed. “You can’t even let an old lady cross the road. I’ll show you.”
The drag of the road had already claimed her zip-up fleece shoes and was now grating the skin from her shins, but she somehow managed to pull herself closer to Geldof with one hand and reach out with the other to swipe at his eyes. She fell a few inches short.
“Get her off!” Scholzy shouted.
“How?”
“Tell her cat food is half price down in Tesco.”
“I don’t think that’s going to work,” Geldof said as the pensioner tried to pull herself closer for a more accurate swipe.
“I was being facetious,” Scholzy shouted, his voice barely audible above the wind and engine noise. “Punch her in the fucking face.”
“I can’t punch her,” Geldof shouted. “She’s an old lady.”
“She’s also a flesh-eating maniac who’ll kill you or give you the virus.”
In the wild intensity of the moment, Geldof had forgotten about the risk of infection. Now he was even less keen to touch her. “Can’t you shoot her?”
“I’m driving. If she gets her gnashers into you, I’ll bloody well shoot you, though.”
Geldof gritted his teeth and punched the woman as hard as he could, knocking off her glasses. It was only the second time in his life he’d resorted to violence. At least the last time he’d hit Mary’s twin sons, who were both bigger and stronger than him and fully deserved it. Mind you, this woman was trying to kill him and so also deserved it, but in saner times he would be helping her cross the road instead of dragging her along it.
“Hooligan,” she shouted and reached for him.
He punched her again, putting all of his weight behind it. The blow only enraged her further. She opened her mouth wide, like a cobra about to swallow its prey, and let loose a howl. Her false teeth shot out and hit Geldof on the forehead. He swiped at his skin, terrified that her saliva would drip into his eyes and turn him. He needed to get rid of her fast. He let go of Scholzy’s jacket and allowed himself to fall backward, trusting his thighs to hold him onto the bike. The woman slashed at him as his head dropped. Her yellow fingernails brushed through his hair. Now that he was within reach, she bit down on his forearm. With no teeth, she only succeeded in giving his sleeve a moist gumming. Geldof grabbed hold of the swollen thumb on the hand securing her to the bike and, swallowing hard, yanked it backward. The thumb snapped, her grip released, and she rolled along behind them like human tumbleweed, the other bikes dodging past her, before coming to a halt. Unbelievably, she got to her feet and began tottering after them, shaking her fist.
The pursuing truck flew round the corner, too fast. It went up onto two wheels and, still tilting, overtook the pensioner. The undercarriage snagged her plastic rain mac and pulled it off her head. She didn’t even notice, just kept coming after them in an angry little shuffle. The driver yanked the steering wheel back to the right, but the turning wheels slipped away underneath the vehicle and it toppled onto its left side. The metallic screech that followed sounded like nails on a blackboard amplified through a public address system. Geldof hauled himself into an upright position. He scrubbed again at his forehead, but he knew he wasn’t infected, for he felt only fear.
She almost got me, he thought, and barfed onto Scholzy’s back again.
“I’m adding the dry cleaning to your bill,” Scholzy shouted.
Geldof looked over his shoulder again. The old woman kept after them, overtaking the wreck of the lorry that hissed steam from its bonnet like a vanquished dragon. She receded into the distance, but Geldof could see her still in his mind’s eye, stalking them relentlessly across the country on her bandy little legs.
* * *
The next thirty minutes of driving through Glasgow—sticking to the back streets as they hurried toward the Erskine Bridge, where they would cross and begin making their way up to Arrochar—were utterly surreal. Geldof’s mind went into partial shutdown as it tried to recover from the frantic first few minutes of his return home. By contrast, the mercenaries seemed elated by what anybody else would have counted as a bloody setback. They rode two abreast down the traffic-free roads, Scholzy and Mick shouting across to each other as the other two fell in behind.
“That was mental,” Scholzy said.
“Crazier than the Congo,” Mick said. “Did you see the looks on their faces? They wanted to murder us, bring us back to life, and murder us some more. This whole fecking country’s hostile.”
The cheerful inflection he put on the word “hostile” did not indicate that he considered this a bad thing.
“And what about Geldof here?” Scholzy said. “He engaged his first enemy.”
“Right,” Mick said. “He shoved an old lady off of a bike and still managed not to kill her. I’m not shitting myself at his ruthless fecking killer credentials just yet.”
Geldof tuned out their banter and tried to focus on his surroundings as they doubled back through Govan, the River Clyde on the right-hand side. Although there were no cars, there was plenty of life. Mothers pushed their children in prams, kids listlessly kicked a ball against a wall, and a huge queue of people stood outside a branch of a store that appeared to be called Tennerland, where they were being allowed in a few at a time as others emerged with plastic bags hanging limp with meager shopping. As they passed, somebody tried to cut in line. The queue broke up as everybody started shoving and bawling at the transgressor. Geldof gaped. In the past, such an act would have been extremely rare and only resulted in lots of passive-aggressive tutting and eye rolling from the offended parties. The country really had gone to the dogs if Brits had lost their ability to queue in a civilized manner.
Another thing he noticed was that there was not one fat person in sight, which in Glasgow was astonishing. Everybody was hollow-cheeked, and when the bikes went past their gazes followed them. Nobody reacted, however. Geldof guessed they were too far and moving too quickly for the infected to pick up their scent, although two scrawny dogs did try to tail them, barking furiously, before they fell behind. No army vehicles pursued them, nor did any police helicopters take to the sky to track their progress from above. This came as no real surprise. Part of the reason Scholzy had been so confident was the parlous state of the security apparatus, which had been reduced to a threadbare force struggling to keep order in the cities and not even bothering to try outside.
Geldof assumed that this last fact was why, by the time they’d nipped onto the motorway and passed through the raised tollgates of the Erskine Bridge, the mercenaries had fallen silent. The intelligence report talked of gangs of brigands, essentially highway robbers, roaming Mad Max–style through the countryside. It would only be a few hours to Arrochar, but to get there they would have to travel through this bandit-infested countryside. Not that the mercenaries seemed concerned, just alert. Scholzy had said they would easily deal with any of the ill-disciplined rabble they encountered. From the way they’d dropped the soldiers and driven to safety, Geldof had no cause to doubt him.
* * *
The bikes sat idling by the side of the road as James peered through binoculars toward the village of Arrochar. Fanny’s camp was on the other side, up and back around the top of the loch. Geldof climbed down to ease the pins and needles in his buttocks and hopped from foot to foot as he waited to get going again.
The few hours it had taken them to get to this point after the chase in the city were uneventful. They’d continued to take as many back roads as possible, just in case the army was looking for them. There were few people in sight in the small towns and villages they passed through, and those who were out in the street withdrew to their homes well in advance of their approach. Geldof didn’t blame them. They must have looked like a fearsome bandit gang as they roared along the road in their squat little vehicles, all dressed in black and, Geldof aside, weapons at the ready. Of the real bandits that were supposedly out in force, they saw no sign. Maybe they were there, lurking off the road and waiting for travelers to ambush, but their little company was far from an easy target. Any watching eyes may have judged it wiser to wait for lower-hanging fruit.
He had to admit that ripping through the countryside was all rather exciting, now that the fear of the chase had passed and the rain sputtered out. If he’d been entrusted with a gun, he would have been tempted to fire it in the air as he’d seen so many excitable gunmen do during various televised uprisings across the world. It had seemed very much like the worst was over, and he’d grown increasingly nervous as the miles ticked by, knowing that in a very short time he would be with his mum again. He didn’t know how she would react or even how he would react, for that matter. For so many months he’d thought her dead. Now it would be like meeting a ghost.
James laid the binoculars on the seat of his bike and scrunched up his face in thought. “One guy, with a shotgun. We could take him out, but we’d have to slow down to weave through all the crap they’ve blocked the road with. And then we’d probably have to fight our way through the village. I don’t think we need that kind of attention. I suggest we go around.”
Scholzy grunted and looked at his GPS. “This is the only road, so we’ll need to go up through the hills. Ready for a bit of off-roading?”
They mounted up and set off through light shrubbery. Thorns snagged at Geldof’s clothes as they bounced and jostled. Before long every muscle in his body ached. They climbed ever higher, bumping over grassy tufts and small rocks, until the village lay far below. Off in the distance, just above the settlement, Geldof saw a few paddocks in which white and brown dots indicated the presence of livestock. Even though they were way out of range, Geldof still shuddered. He had no desire to get any closer to one of those evil animals.
The view across the valley was spectacular. The rippling loch reflected the sun that had chosen to make an appearance, while off in the far distance heavy clouds unloaded slanting sheets of rain on the rolling hills and peaks. It was typical Scotland: brooding yet beautiful, sparse yet inspiring. Momentarily entranced, he forgot the tragedy that had befallen the nation until the wind carried a shout of alarm up the slope. He looked back at the paddock and saw a figure running down toward the village. He tugged Scholzy’s shoulder.
“I think they’ve spotted us,” he said.
“Then we’d better get a move on,” Scholzy said.
He pulled the throttle back further and Geldof’s pelvic bone suffered a severe pummeling as the heaving, lurching bike threw him up and down. After half an hour of having his internal organs jarred, they rounded the top of the loch and began to nose toward the road, traveling down a narrow track hemmed in on both sides by tall trees. He kept expecting some large animal to come bursting out. The only thing they encountered was a weasel chewing at something on the ground. It lifted its head at their approach and bounded straight toward them. Geldof could swear it bore a predatory look. As they came together, it tensed its back legs to leap. It didn’t get the chance, disappearing under the heavy tread of the front right tire as James swerved to squash it.
“Another kill!” James shouted.
“Doesn’t count unless it’s armed,” Mick shouted back.
“It had sharp teeth. That’s a weapon.”
They emerged from the track and swung onto the road, where they came to a halt. Geldof looked across the water. Halfway up the hill where they’d been, a small group of men was trekking upward.
“Do you think they’re going to come after us?” he said.
“Doubt it,” Scholzy said. “They probably thought we were bandits. When they see we’ve moved on they’ll go back home.”
Geldof wasn’t so sure. They were perilously close to the village, separated just by the water. While he was pretty sure that the residents of Arrochar wouldn’t be able to tell that the riders were uninfected from sniffing their tracks, he couldn’t rule it out. He’d seen just how tenacious an infected animal or human could be. All he wanted to do was get in, sweep his mum off her feet, and get out again. They could find somewhere farther away from inhuman society to hole up until Sergei came back for them. Before he could express his concerns and make his suggestion, Scholzy pointed up the road. “GPS says the camp is just over there.”
Geldof put his fears aside. His reunion with his mum was only minutes away. They inched along the road, searching for a gap in the trees. Peter whistled and pointed toward where undergrowth partially obscured a track running off the main road.
“Weapons up, nice and slow,” Scholzy said. “They’re going to be jumpy.”
They pushed through the undergrowth and trundled along, waiting for the moment they would be challenged. It didn’t take long.
“That’s far enough,” a female voice shouted from somewhere in the trees. “This place is taken.”
All four bikes halted and Scholzy held up his hands. “We’re not looking for any trouble. We’re just here to talk to Fanny Peters.”
A long, tense silence followed, before the invisible watcher spoke again. “Why do you want to talk to Fanny?”
“I think this is your cue,” Scholzy said in a low voice.
Geldof swung his legs off the back of the bike and, with his hands spread wide in a gesture of peace, peered into the trees. “Her son’s here to see her.”
“Geldof? Good Lord, is that really you?”
A tree branch almost directly overhead rustled and something dropped to the ground. A woman, her face smeared with camouflage paint and curly hair tied back, emerged from the greenery. It took Geldof a moment to realize it was one of his mum’s friends, a woman called Eva who came over to stay whenever there was a protest rally on in Glasgow. They were definitely in the right place.
Eva was normally one of those people who felt you weren’t connecting unless her palm was resting on your forearm or her hip was pressed against yours on the sofa. He expected her to come charging forward and give him an inappropriately lingering hug, but she stayed back and muttered something under her breath. After an appraising look at the mercenaries, she gave Geldof a sad smile. “Your mum is going to freak out.”