Ruan awoke at the stealthy click of an opening door. She opened her sleep-encrusted eyes to a boxy room, where the single mattress she’d slept on was the only furniture, and prepared to bolt. She always slept fully clothed, shoes and all, in preparation for just such a moment, but when she threw back the duvet she found she was wearing only a T-shirt and frayed white knickers. Even her rucksack and sword, normally packed and ready to snatch up, lay discarded in the corner instead of beside the window. She thrust a hand under the pillow and settled on the reassuring heft of the pistol. At least she hadn’t been totally lax. Still disorientated, she had no idea where she was, how she’d gotten here, or why she’d been so careless, but she knew that she would have to sacrifice her belongings.
She was up on her feet, fumbling at the catch on the window with nerveless fingers, when the door swung open fully and a soft female voice said, “You don’t have to run.”
The gun rose as Ruan spun and tightened her finger on the trigger. She saw the woman and her arm dropped. It all came flooding back: her failed stew heist, the flight through the forest, the hand reaching out to her.
After they’d been sure the pursuers were shaken off, the woman had doubled back. Ruan had tried to talk, but her new companion held a finger to her lips. She led Ruan high around Arrochar at a jog and curved back toward the road, following it around the loch from just inside the tree line. There were no streetlights on this bank, so when the woman crossed the road and plunged into the bushes Ruan was surprised to find more tarmac beneath her feet. After a few more minutes they came out onto the side of the loch.
A hulk of a building sat on a pier that ran out into the water. At the end of the platform, Ruan spotted a small group sitting in lotus position around a roaring fire, encircled by flickering candles stuck into glass jars. Beyond, the reflection of the moon shimmered on the black water. It would have seemed almost idyllic were it not for the jumble of old machinery and rubble by the water’s edge. Ruan moved toward the light, but the woman put a hand on her shoulder and shook her head. It had been seven months since Ruan had spoken to anybody—in fact, she’d barely said a word, since she considered talking to herself an early sign of going loopy—so she didn’t know how to break the silence that had built up between them. Ruan allowed herself to be led into the house—one of around a half-a-dozen that sat shoulder to shoulder. She’d collapsed onto the mattress and, her guard lowered by the thought of so many clearly uninfected people around her, shucked off her clothes and slipped under the sheets to fall instantly asleep.
Now, in full daylight for the first time, she took in the woman’s face properly. With no shadows to act as a soothing visual balm, the scars presented themselves in full pink and twisted glory. The worst was a bite mark on her left cheek, a crater so deep Ruan could have put her pinkie in up to the first knuckle. The same bite had removed a chunk from one side of a long, sharp nose. Other deep grooves and troughs pitted her face, running up into the gray hair she wore close to her scalp and plunging below the neckline of a long-sleeved black cotton top. Strangely, her face looked peaceful, like the ruins of an old castle. Her watery blue eyes betrayed no signs of bitterness at what had befallen her. When she smiled they seemed to lighten in the same way as a sun-dappled swimming pool.
“I see you’ve noticed my scars,” the woman said.
Ruan’s cheeks flushed and the instinctive urge to apologize nudged her vocal cords into life. Her voice sounded low and hoarse. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to stare. It’s been a while since I’ve had company. My social skills are a bit rusty.”
“It’s okay. If it was a problem, I would wear a mask. I want people to see them.”
Something about the forthright way the woman spoke, about the way her gaze was challenging and encouraging at the same time, emboldened Ruan to ask a question that seemed rude the moment she said it. “Why? I mean, not that you should hide your face if you don’t want to, or that I don’t want to look at it…”
Ruan trailed off. She was sounding even more insulting with every word she added. The woman seemed unfazed. “It reminds me that I’m not the person I used to be.”
Staring into the ravaged face, Ruan felt she’d seen this woman before. She closed her eyes and held the face in her mind. Ruan had always been highly visual, able to store near-photographic shots of any face or scene and conjure up images of startling clarity. She examined the mental picture of the face, turning it left and right like an animator playing with a 3-D model. There had been no scars, so she filled them in with healthy, if rather pallid, flesh. The woman’s hair wasn’t right. It had been longer; something scruffy and unwashed. Dreadlocks, that was it. She scribbled them in and then she had it.
“I’ve seen you before,” she said. “At a demonstration in Edinburgh last year against Trident. You…”
Ruan thought it best not to continue. The protest had been one in a series of many against the U.K.’s nuclear weapons program, which was housed at Faslane naval base on Gare Loch, not too far from where they were now. The protests were normally rowdy but peaceful affairs attended by a mix of students, Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament activists, professional crusties, and genteel gray-haired old ladies. This particular protest involved a “die-in” outside Scottish Parliament, with everyone lying on the ground and feigning death during a visit by the defense secretary, who’d no doubt wished that they would stop pretending and get on with really being dead.
The woman had stripped off her green caftan, thick purple tights, and skimpy knickers, hurling each item at the line of police. The knickers landed right on a policeman’s hat. When everybody else ignored her shrill cries for mass nudity, she kicked off the hand grasping her ankle, which belonged to the ponytailed man lying next to her, and skipped through the prone bodies. She hurdled the barricade and dashed toward the startled politician as he was about to climb into his car. The police intercepted her and dragged her off as she screamed abuse. All of this had been caught on camera and played repeatedly on the news, accompanied by smirking jokes from the presenters.
The woman looked at the ground. “As I said, I’m not that person any longer.”
Ruan realized that she’d just repaid the woman who saved her life by reminding her of an incident she clearly wanted to forget. She hadn’t even expressed her gratitude for the intervention. “Thank you for helping me last night.”
“You’re welcome.”
“What were you doing out there anyway?”
“Hunting.”
“Ah. That explains the bow and arrow. Which, by the way, you’re very good with.”
“Thank you. I used to do archery when I was younger, before I became a pacifist.”
From the way she’d ended the dog, it was clear pacifism had only been a phase. “I don’t even know your name. I’m Ruan Peat.”
“Fanny Peters. Come on, let me show you around.”
“Can I get dressed first?”
“Ah, of course. Old habits die hard, I’m afraid.”
They smiled at each other, and Ruan felt the warmth that only human companionship brought bleed through her. She had to fight to stop it thawing the emotions she’d done her best to keep on ice to maintain her sanity. She pulled on her clothes. As she did so she noticed that the smartphone she’d lifted from an empty house was plugged in and charging. She grabbed the phone and her sword through force of habit and walked to the door. As she approached, Fanny’s breathing slowed. The ruined nostril quivered as she drew in deep breaths.
“I know you are here and it makes me happy,” Fanny said quietly, repeating the phrase she’d uttered upon their first meeting.
Ruan frowned. The lines on her forehead deepened when she passed through the door and noticed the key. It protruded from the outside of the door. Fanny had locked her in.
I’m sure she had a good reason, Ruan thought.
The state of the hallway didn’t help her discomfort. Fungus bloomed around the skirting board, while only a few scraps of wallpaper remained on the blistered walls. It smelled and spoke of ruin.
Fanny seemed to sense her unease. “Sorry about the state of the place. Nobody was in this one, so we left it. We’ll decorate it for you if you decide to stay.”
Ruan stepped into the fresh air, reaching out to flake stones from the gray pebbledash covering the walls. As she did so her arm brushed the guttering, which creaked and swayed. The view outside was just as cheerless. Across the overgrown lawn sat the building she’d seen on her way in. It formed a large part of the pier that ran out over the water on a lattice of warped and worn wooden struts. Scudding layers of gray cloud and the houses and shops of Arrochar across the loch were visible through the charred skeleton of the building. Underfoot, weeds and clumps of moss sprouted from what appeared to be rails set into the concrete. The rails led from the ruined pier to semicircular stone structures with heavy steel doors. Hangars, perhaps.
“What is this place?” she said.
“It was a torpedo testing station, shut down in the eighties and left to rot.”
“Why do you stay here? I don’t mean to be rude, but it’s a bit skanky.”
“Lots of reasons. It’s remote. It’s easily defensible. And it has a rather appropriate symbolism considering what we do.”
“And what do you do?”
“Let me show you.”
Fanny followed the tracks to one of the hangars and rapped on the door. A steel plate slid open and a cloud of smoke puffed out. It held the same sweet, pungent fragrance that used to emanate from her brother Bryan’s room when their parents were out. A pair of gold-rimmed spectacles appeared, from behind which lidded blue eyes peered out. The glasses darkened in reaction to the sun outside.
“Are you ready?” Fanny said.
The man took several deep breaths and said, “I know you are here and it makes me happy.”
Bugger, Ruan thought. Just my luck. This is some crazy cult.
As Fanny and the man talked in whispers, Ruan pulled out her phone and opened her messenger app to send a quick note to her best friend, Bridget. “Had a crazy night,” she wrote. “Just got more mental. Walked into a den of FREAKS! More later.”
She hit send and, as she always did, allowed herself a brief moment of hope that she would see the two little ticks that showed communications were working again and her friend was listening. When the clock icon indicated the message had gone nowhere—just as in the hundreds of other messages in her one-sided conversation—she squeezed the phone so hard the plastic case creaked.
She blinked rapidly, took a step backward, and considered running for it. For all she knew the hangar contained a sacrificial slab and dozens of robed acolytes with sharp knives, ready to sacrifice her to some freaky god. On the other hand, these were the only uninfected people she’d come across, and Fanny had saved her life last night. Metal scraped as a bolt was drawn back and Ruan stepped inside, fingers tightening around the hilt of her sword. The man who’d answered the door shuffled backward until his head butted up against the curved hangar wall. Instead of a robe, he wore a red and blue tie-dyed T-shirt and a pair of jeans. He was enormous, towering over Ruan by almost a foot, and had a bulky frame to match. The sparse covering on top of his scalp became a waterfall of blond hair that cascaded down his back in a long ponytail.
“This is Scott McDonald,” Fanny said.
“Ruan,” she said, holding out her hand.
He flinched, as though she were offering him a dead mouse lollipop instead of a handshake. Fanny stepped over and put a hand on his shoulder.
“It’s okay,” she said. “You can do it.”
These people are seriously weird, Ruan thought.
Then again, it was little wonder after all they’d been through. She’d developed her own strange habits, such as enjoying the taste of Pedigree Chum with fish oil and chicken, a tin of which she’d discovered at the bottom of a skip around the back of a supermarket at a particularly desperate moment. Perhaps it was just that serendipitous combination of hunger and thirst, but the moist, meaty chunks had electrified her taste buds and, as a regular taker of cod-liver oil in her old sporty life, she’d been aware of the benefits of added omega-3s. Since then, she’d always kept an eye out for that particular brand and flavor and ate it even when human food was readily available.
Scott, after a long puff on the joint he was clutching, reached out to take her hand. The contact from the massive paw was limp and fleeting, but it seemed to prompt palpable relief in him. Ruan turned her attention to the rest of the interior. A metal grille with an inset, padlocked door separated her from a windowless room lit by three harsh fluorescent strips. It seemed Fanny had a thing for locking people in. Bog-standard office furniture was crammed into every space above a snaking mess of cables connecting battered computers, monitors, and printers. The room was a fug of dope smoke, emanating from fat joints clutched between the fingers of three men and two women who’d risen from their seats to stare at her. Ruan curled her fingers around the grille.
As one, they said, “I know you are here and it makes me happy.”
A mass inhalation followed and the smoke jetted out added to the clouds swirling around them. Ruan coughed, beginning to feel light-headed.
Give them a chance, she thought, and parroted the phrase back at them. They looked surprised.
In the far corner of the room, half hidden by a stack of what looked like pamphlets, was a youth who hadn’t joined in with the greeting. Although he couldn’t have been more than seventeen and only had a light dusting of beard, he reminded Ruan of the Noels. He had to be local. His right fist was convulsing, mashing one of the pieces of paper into a crumpled ball.
“Where did you get all this stuff?” Ruan asked.
“My old friend Scott here has been putting this together for a few years,” Fanny said. “It was going to be our command-and-control post when the revolution came.”
“What revolution?”
“We were never clear on that,” Fanny said with a rueful smile. “But I’m very glad he did it. Now we really are the resistance.”
“The resistance to the government?”
“No. To the virus.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Rory,” Fanny called. “Hand me one of the leaflets.”
Avoiding looking at Ruan, Rory scuttled out from his refuge like a furtive crab, handed a pamphlet to the woman with wavy brown hair who marked the end of the row of watchers, and scuttled back to his paper cave. Ruan rolled her eyes. Back before every human wanted to kill her, she’d often had this effect on teenage boys. Her Irish descent on her father’s side had given her creamy skin and big green eyes, while her mother’s Slavic genes provided jet-black hair, sheer cheekbones, generous lips, and a tall, lithe body—not to mention breasts that at one point she’d feared would keep growing until it looked like she’d been in a car crash and her chest had somehow fused with the inflated airbags. Even though she knew many women would kill for her figure and she found them useful on occasion, such as when she wanted to get served in bars, she’d hated those breasts. She hated them still. They got in the way of her athletic pursuits—she kept a stack of sports bras in her rucksack—and their sheer heft seemed to exert an extreme gravitational pull on any male eyes orbiting in her vicinity.
Men employed a variety of techniques when faced with her breasts. They stared at the ground and turned an alarming shade of red (most of the teenage boys at school); they stared at her face with the occasional downward flick of the eye (the male teachers); they pretended to be interested in the design or logo on her T-shirt (the sneakier older boys); and, in the case of older, more-experienced tit watchers, they waited until they thought she wasn’t looking and drank their fill in long, greedy gulps or stood off to the side and feigned interest in some distant object that just happened to be in the same eye line as her breasts. Out of all the methods, she preferred the blatant staring, which had the virtue of honesty. At one point, after meeting a particularly discomfited fifteen-year-old whose eyeballs were vibrating with the effort of not looking, she’d snapped and said, “Why don’t you just bloody stare at them for ten seconds to get it out of your system, and then we can try to talk to each other like real people?” Unsurprisingly, he’d skedaddled in a fugue of embarrassment.
Some of the girls at school weren’t much better, basing their assumptions on her appearance and accusing her of trying flirt with their boyfriends. Early in Ruan’s development, one girl had made the mistake of slapping Ruan when her boyfriend began writing unwanted soppy love notes to her. Nobody made the same mistake again. Her fondness for nice clothes had only made it worse. The girls assumed that choosing to adorn her body with well-fitting, gorgeous outfits was a deliberate ploy to steal their men, when in fact she just loved the way they looked and felt. There had been a point when she considered dressing in the frumpy rags that passed for clothes in her mum’s cupboard, but she decided not to change her behavior for other people. It was their problem, not hers. Yet she couldn’t escape the fact that people often made up their minds about her based on genes, over which she had no control. Sure, exposure to the elements and the scars and worry lines she’d picked up over the last seven months had no doubt dimmed her youthful glow, but it hadn’t reduced the size of her chest. Rory’s reaction came as no surprise.
The woman handed the leaflet to Fanny, who in turn passed it to Ruan.
“Resist: You Are More Than Your Urges,” Ruan read aloud from the bold headline.
Underneath, an introductory paragraph exhorted people to remember that they were human and not to give in to the imperatives of the virus. She stopped after the first few lines and looked at Fanny. “Do you really think the infected can resist the urges?”
Fanny looked at her companions and put an arm around Ruan. “Come outside.”
They strolled to the water’s edge, where Ruan picked up a flat stone and skipped it across the loch. A sad smile kinked Fanny’s lips. “My son used to love doing that.”
Ruan took note of the past tense and chose not to pursue it, for it could lead to a conversation she didn’t want to have. They fell silent, listening to the wind rustle through the trees. There was no birdsong. Virtually every bird that could be caught had long since been wolfed down by the hungry population, while the rest had presumably developed the sense to keep their beaks shut or migrated permanently. After a suitably sensitive time elapsed, Ruan held up the leaflet. “So, you really believe this?”
Fanny nodded. “The fundamental question is: Are we creatures of biology only, or are we something more? I’ve never believed in any one god, but I think we are creatures of spirit. A virus can’t infect our spirit.”
Ruan’s experience had taught her the exact opposite. “Look at that village,” she said, nodding across the water. “If they knew you were immune or uninfected, whichever it is, they would be over here in a shot to tear you to shreds. How can you believe anybody can resist?”
“I think a line has been drawn with this virus, between those who want to evolve and those who want to devolve,” Fanny said. “We all have to choose which side of the line we stand on.”
We? Ruan thought.
The strange behavior of Fanny and her band suddenly made sense. The residents of Arrochar must have known that people lived here. The fires would have been visible at night across the loch, which was only a few hundred meters wide at this point. Surely they would have come to investigate and discovered a whole community of uninfected. Unless …
“You don’t understand,” Fanny said, reaching out even as Ruan began to back away. “We’re living proof that it does work. We’re all infected.”
Ruan turned the leaflet over. There, in an oversized purple font, she saw the mantra every member of the community repeated when they saw her. They’d only been saying it because they wanted to kill her. The leaflet fell from her fingers and she turned to run. Behind her, in a semicircle blocking her escape route, stood the occupants of the hangar.
“I know you are here and it makes me happy,” they said in their freaky one-mind voice.
Ruan unsheathed her sword and blinked away her fear. She narrowed her focus down until it was just her, her gleaming weapon, and the targets standing between her and freedom. She set her sights on the apparent weakest point of the chain—a frail, wizened old man with soft brown skin and an Oriental hint to his features—and charged.