A woman stands alone on a hillside.
It seems to be a park, with ordered planting, trimmed lawns, a statue in the background.
In the distance behind her, a swirling cloud containing countless viespi is visible above the unnamed city. There are distant sounds: explosions, gunfire, car motors, sirens, screams.
The woman stares at the camera. She is terrified.
She seems to hear or see something, goes to scream.
She squeezes her eyes closed and presses her index finger against her lips. Shhhhh.
Vesps fly past her, just one at first, then several more.
Then a cloud.
They are a sickly yellow, their wings opaque and leathery, thin legs hanging like tendrils. As big as small cats. They have no eyes.
They have teeth.
One of them hits her, tumbles, then flies on.
She grimaces, squeezes her eyes shut even tighter.
She’s shaking. The vesps fly away.
The woman’s finger remains pressed so hard against her lips that they bleed. Shhhhhhh.
Clip from VidMe social website, Friday, 18 November 2016
I watched Dad seeing the truth.
I stood silently in the living-room doorway holding his mug of coffee. He didn’t know that I was there. My parents and friends often told me that I moved silently, sometimes almost ghost-like. Perhaps I moved so quietly because, in a way, I was always hoping to hear the faintest sound.
He sat on the edge of the sofa and leaned forward, elbows on knees, remote control in one hand, looking as if he were about to launch himself at the TV at any moment. His mouth hung slightly open. The little finger of his right hand twitched with his pulse, and I wondered how long he’d been driving to reach us.
I’d seen many of the clips and images before, but I watched again as Dad experienced them for the first time. There was professionally filmed footage from news reporters across Europe. Amateur film from mobile phones, much of it shaky, some of it grainy and flickering. Aerial shots from helicopters. Talking heads—experts from across the globe discussing what, why, where, how.
It all amounted to the same terrible, unbelievable, undeniable truth.
Bucharest burned. The ancient city now consisted of islands of buildings in swirling seas of fire. I’d seen this portion of film before, knew what was to come, could not look away. The terrible fascination of death, I thought. The aerial view tilted as the helicopter banked over the Dâmboviţa river, showing several boats floating freely and seemingly under no control. One of them had already struck the bank and stuck fast. Across its decks lay prone shapes, bodies piled on one another and splattered red. Things crawled across the bodies, feeding.
The vesps, I thought. That’s what they were calling them now. Viespi were wasps, and though they were nothing like wasps—I’d seen a few close up; the images had been horrible, and they would be on screen again soon in this terrible loop of destruction the news channel was showing between updates of newer tragedies—the name “vesps” seemed to have stuck. There was nothing else, no name better, because no one really knew what they were.
The film seemed to blur then, the image speckled with spots as if the lens was suddenly dotted with sand or dust. The helicopter juddered. Then the first shapes flew in crazy spirals directly at the cameraman. He must have been strapped into the open doorway, because the first vesp hit the camera lens and knocked it to one side.
A confused, uncertain view of a man’s panicked face, a waving hand, the thudding rotors seemingly staggered by the film’s frame speed, and then more vesps streaking across the sky, wings flapping frantically as they converged on the aircraft.
The picture broke and returned several times as the camera plummeted towards the ground.
I watched Dad put his hands to his face and pull his cheeks down, as if to hold his eyes open in light of the terror.
The newscasters returned and spoke silently, then the next clip came on again. I’d seen this one, too, and I groaned. Dad turned and saw me, and I took him his coffee. He took it gratefully and held my hand, drawing me down to sit beside him. He hugged me tight. I enjoyed his smell, his warmth, his closeness. He felt safe, because that’s what dads are for.
He turned on the subtitles, but I shook my head and he turned them off. It was bad enough just seeing it.
The caption said it was the view inside a shopping mall in Belgrade. Maybe it was a security camera or a webcam; either way it was a fixed, motionless view across a wide walkway and series of staircases and escalators in front of two large department stores. It didn’t seem particularly busy; the shoppers seemed calm and unworried. A mother sat on a bench nursing a baby, a toddler sat beside her eating ice cream. A man stood close by playing a guitar, the instrument’s case open before him and gleaming with change. Shoppers passed back and forth carrying bags, looking at mobile phones, talking, laughing.
Something happened off-screen that caught everyone’s attention. Heads snapped around as if on strings. A couple of shoppers started to back away. One fat man turned to run and stumbled, slipping down a staircase on his behind. No one went to help, because no one really saw him.
The first vesp winged into view and slammed into the guitar man’s chest, knocking him back against glass balustrade. He slapped at it with a strange grin on his face, almost embarrassment. Then his mouth opened in a scream as the thing clawed, thrashed, chewed, and blood spotted the white floor at his feet.
More vesps seemed to zero in on the man’s cries, and soon he was smothered in the creatures. They were pale yellow and moist-looking, their leathery wings flapping faster than most birds’. I’d never seen anything like them, and it seemed no one else had either.
The mother hugged her baby in close, wrapping her jacket around the child and reaching for her toddler. The young child shouted. A vesp flitted in at the left of the image, skimmed the floor, and powered up into the underside of the boy’s jaw.
I closed my eyes, but I had seen this before, and remembered.
I kept my eyes closed, feeling my dad’s reaction to the horror. He tensed, stopped breathing, and his arm held me even tighter. He’ll be seeing the clouds of those things now, I thought. The feeding. The blood pooled on the white floors, the man tipping back over the balustrade and disappearing with those things flying after him. The windows breaking.
When I judged it was safe I opened my eyes again, and the newscasters were back. They looked harried and tired, and in the newsroom beyond the glass walling behind them people dashed back and forth, computer screens flickered, and phones were picked up and thrown back down. The man’s tie was loose, and a film of sweat shone on his top lip. I was fascinated by that. Newsreaders had never seemed so human before.
There was more. Scraps of footage from Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, all showing attacks or, in fewer cases, the results of attacks. People were on the move, fleeing westward. One scene showed a road full of refugees that must have been caught by a wave of vesps, and this time only select stills were aired. When that film had first emerged a couple of hours ago they had broadcast it all, and I would never forget the things I’d seen. So many bodies so badly mutilated, open to the world, steaming and glistening red, and all of them seemed merged with the vehicles and their belongings, forming one large, long dead thing that had once moved along the road.
A man in Croatia was transmitting from his apartment high in a tower block in Zagreb. It was a webcam feed, grainy and uneven, and he kept picking up his laptop to show the scenes beyond his window. There was a small balcony with a single seat, a dead potted plant and several empty beer bottles, but he did not open the doors. Instead he would hold the laptop against the glass, integral webcam aimed through the glass to what lay beyond. Zagreb also had its fires, and though nowhere near as bad as Bucharest, still they gave the city the look of a war zone.
Vesps flitted past his window. Sometimes they seemed to veer off at a tight tangent and disappear from view. Other times they flew in rough lines, like migrating birds following a leader. In the distance, close to a wide park where a lake glimmered in the afternoon sun, a great flock of the creatures twisted and turned in patterns that should not have been beautiful, but were. It was almost hypnotic.
The view tilted and became chaotic, and then the man appeared again. He was holding up a card with hastily scrawled words. He slipped the card away and showed another, then another, and then the first card again. He went through the process several more times. His eyes were wide, his face drawn and so grey that I wondered whether he’d plastered himself in ash. Then he tilted the laptop’s lid to show the view deeper in the room behind him.
A woman and two children sat on a sofa. They had thick packing tape across their mouths, but their hands were free—they were silent of their own free will. The woman nodded at the camera.
When the view switched back to the newscasters, I picked up the remote control and switched on subtitles. I had not seen the Croatian man’s footage before.
“…we’ll get a more accurate translation later for you, but it seems that the man’s written message reads…” The newscaster checked her laptop, frowned, then continued. “Noise brings them. Stay quiet. Stay alive.”
I felt the rumble of Dad saying something, and then Mum, Lynne and Jude came into the room. But I kept watching the screen as they spoke, thinking about those words.
Noise brings them.
The vesps had come from beneath the ground. How there were so many, how they’d spread so far so quickly, these were things I couldn’t know and it hurt my head just thinking about them. But it made sense that if they’d lived for so long in utter darkness, they were blind and hunted by sound.
Stay quiet. Stay alive.
Something else was happening on screen. The “Breaking News” logo remained, and the two newscasters had been handed cups of coffee. The woman was saying something and the subtitles were rushing to keep up, misspelled and missing words. But the gist was there.
“…news coming in of incidents in Slovenia and northern Italy.”
I turned to look at my family. Lynne was shaking her head, saying, “Oh dear, oh dear.” Mum hugged Jude. He was a bright kid, and his earlier excitement at these unusual events had given way to terror. He’d been crying.
My mother made sure I was looking, and then she spoke.
“We should talk about what to do.”
* * *
We sat at the small table in the kitchen. There was no TV in the room, and Dad and Mum had left their phones face down on the worktop. Jude had opened some crisps and dropped them on the table, but instead of picking them up he was moving them around with his fingertip. Neither of our parents told him off.
Lynne had made a fresh pot of coffee, and hot chocolate for me and Jude. Watching the kettle boil gave us pause to gather our thoughts.
I said nothing. I was afraid to speak, because whatever was said next would move events onwards. And I was becoming so, so terrified that onwards might mean away from home.
Home was the only place where I felt totally safe. People sometimes said that they admired me for how I’d adapted and how I was determined to do things that were made more difficult by my condition. But sometimes I was also scared. The world often seemed bigger and wider now that I could no longer hear it, as if it could creep up behind me. Heavier and more malevolent. So after I’d spent time being strong and determined, there was always home to go back to.
“We can’t leave,” I said at last.
“I don’t want to go anywhere!” Jude said. I only just picked it up on his lips.
“No one’s leaving,” Lynne said, signing as she spoke. In a family conversation like this it came naturally for them to sign for me. And I’d become used to anticipating who would talk next, analysing the dynamics of conversation and understanding it to a greater degree than anyone with functional hearing. Jude sometimes called me a witch. I called him a little shit. Equal scores, I reckoned.
“Let’s talk about it sensibly,” Mum said.
“There’s nothing sensible about this,” Dad replied.
Lynne tapped the table with her knuckles until we fell silent and looked at her. “We can’t panic and overreact,” she said. “But we can’t ignore what’s going on and not react at all. We have to do what Kelly says, Huw. Talk about it sensibly.”
Huw shrugged, hands held out to both sides. So? he seemed to be saying. Who’s going to begin?
“Won’t the Queen tell us what to do?” Jude asked. “…in her bunker,” I caught Dad muttering.
“Jude’s right,” Lynne said. “We’ve been watching the news, that’s all, and we know how sensationalist journalists can be. Twenty-four-hour news, I’ve always hated it. They can make a crisis out of a drama just to fill the day.”
“You’re saying this isn’t a crisis, Lynne?” Dad asked.
“Not at all. I’m just saying we should wait. Hear what the authorities have to say.”
“I’m amazed the Prime Minister hasn’t been on already,” Mum said, and I think Dad said something about a bunker again.
Jude flicked a crisp across the tabletop at me, then grinned. I couldn’t help smiling back. However scared, he was a kid, and his attention was wandering.
“We should check other channels,” I said, and Lynne smiled at me. I’d always thought of her as the strong one in our house. Since losing her husband when I was just a toddler, Lynne had lived a fiercely independent life, staying in their cottage in the Brecon Beacons, driving a 4×4 so that she could get about in the harsh winters, holidaying overseas alone. She had not once let my grandfather’s death stand in the way of her dreams. Now almost seventy-five, since he’d been gone she had visited Egypt, Mexico, Morocco, and Canada.
Lynne was being stronger than ever now. I thought perhaps she might even take control.
“Yes, we need to know exactly what’s going on,” Mum said.
“We’ve seen!” Dad said. “You’ve seen more of this than me. Hasn’t there been talk of… intervention? The military? Any discussion about what those things are?”
“It’s all been scattered news reports and amateur footage,” Lynne said. “The government’s emergency… thingy, that was meeting last night.”
“Cobra,” I said.
“Yes, them. But there’s been no official word.”
“There must be soon,” Mum said. “Jude, bring my laptop, will you?” Jude jumped to her words.
Dad touched my wrist, waiting for me to look at him. Then he signed, “Can you fetch me the atlas from the living room?”
I nodded. I knew what he wanted, and why. I was already trying to work out distances and times myself. But it’s still so far away, I thought. And there’s the Channel. They’d never cross the English Channel, they couldn’t. Could they? I dashed into the living room, and as I passed the TV that had been left on with sound on mute, I caught sight of a face I recognised.
“Mum! Dad! There’s a press conference!”
The rest of my family crowded around. Even Jude, no longer bored, hugged the laptop to his chest.
Mum said something to Dad and he put his arm around her shoulders, drawing her close.
Lynne picked up the remote, turned up the sound, and switched on the subtitles as the Prime Minister approached the microphone and lectern set on the street outside Number 10 Downing Street.
He looks tired, I thought. And I’ve never seen him looking so glum.
He shuffled some papers, tapping their edges to straighten the pile. Then he looked around at the assembled cameras, attempting a smile that turned into a grimace. He coughed. Several microphones and handheld recorders poked into the picture.
“By now…” the Prime Minister said, and he coughed again, holding his hand to his mouth. Someone appeared from out of picture and handed him a water bottle. He nodded thanks, took a drink, and seemed to compose himself. “By now you will all be aware of the events in eastern and southern Europe. Rumour and conjecture is widespread, both on the TV and Internet, including social media sites and independent news outlets. Overnight I chaired a meeting of Cobra, and all through last night and into today, my government and I have been in touch with our embassies overseas, and the governments of those countries affected.
“What we are certain of at this point is this: a swarm of creatures, not yet identified and of unknown origin, has been sweeping across several countries in Europe. They have caused widespread panic and, regrettably, many deaths. It appears that they attack any living thing other than those of their own species. There’s evidence that they eat some of their victims, lay eggs in their flesh, and that these eggs have an accelerated birth rate, hatching within hours. The creatures’ young are able to fly upon hatching. They eat their host. They multiply at an aggressive rate. Communication with infected areas is sporadic at best. Attempts to infiltrate infected areas have been mostly unsuccessful. The creatures…”
He coughed again, took another drink.
“It appears that they are blind, and they hunt by homing in on sound. Built-up locations, areas of dense population, are therefore worst affected. Death tolls are unknown, but several sources from Moldova, Romania and Ukraine have described them as ‘catastrophic’.”
There must have been questions shouted from the reporters, and the Prime Minister held up his hands to calm them down.
“Please,” he said. “Please. Let me finish my statement and then I’ll take questions. I have spoken to as many European leaders as I can, and I assure you of this: we are doing everything in our power to ensure that Britain remains safe. All military, police and other emergency service leave has been cancelled indefinitely. All public service leave is also cancelled. All foreign travel is postponed, and we are commencing a phased shutdown of all major air and sea ports. We are offering whatever help we can to those countries affected. Scientists are striving to find out more about this swarm… this plague… and we will find a way to stop them.” He paused, and was immediately deluged with more questions. They came thick and fast, too quick for the subtitle service to list and type them out. The Prime Minister looked harried, glanced left and right as voices clamoured to be heard.
Someone appeared behind him and whispered into his ear. He tilted his head, and for a second I thought he looked like a little boy, a bullied kid being offered an easy way out. But then he seemed to remember himself. He shook his head and said something to his aide, then held up his hand.
“One at a time.”
A question was asked.
“No, evacuation is not an option.”
Another question.
“No, my government and I will not be seeking cover in any shelter. We will remain here in office, serving the country to the best of our ability.”
Another.
“Yes, I saw that, and yes, the caving expedition is a possible source of these creatures. That is being investigated. But let me say…” He suddenly looked scared. He glanced back towards Number 10, where several aides stood huddled by the door, and a dozen security men kept a good watch on their surroundings. It looks like he’s seeking permission to say something more, I thought. But he’s the Prime Minister!
“Let me say,” he continued, “the reports we have are… serious. These things—they’ve been called ‘vesps’ by the popular media, and that’s as good a name as any—they hunt by sound. I’ve seen footage, heard first-hand accounts, read reports. They seek out noise, in the same way as other animals hunt by smell or sight. Helicopters that fly over the infected zones have been brought down. They’re reproducing and hatching at a staggering rate, and they’re voracious!”
He’s gone off-script here, I thought, and sure enough his aides suddenly seemed nervous, glancing at one another until one of them stepped forward. She whispered something to the Prime Minister, but he ignored her. It was as if he didn’t even know she was there.
“Honestly, we don’t know much more than you.” He stopped then, blinking into the camera lights and seeming to look much further. “We’re doing everything we can. I’m being completely honest and open with you, and I promise that I’ll be here, on the hour from now on, to give you any updates. God help us.” He paused for a moment as if to say more, then turned and walked back towards Number 10. His aides were already fluttering around him. He looked like someone under attack.
“That wasn’t what I expected,” I said. I stood and turned, looking at my family so I could be part of any ensuing conversation.
“What were you expecting from the spineless idiot?” Mum asked.
“Kelly!” Lynne scolded. “Didn’t you see? He wasn’t the Prime Minister there at the end, he was a human being, just like us. Scared and confused.”
“Much as I hate it, I agree with your mother,” Dad said, smiling softly. “I think he’s being as honest as he can be.”
“He made me frightened,” Jude said. “It’s like a film, except it isn’t.”
“No evacuation,” I said. That’s what had unsettled me most. Awful though it was, the idea of moving, fleeing, seemed to be the only action we could take. I’d already been thinking things through. We have an attic, but we can’t stay up there for long, too small. No cellar. Could barricade one room, maybe, and…
Memories of the old Cold War information films I’d seen came flooding back. Take down doors, form shelters beneath your stairs, stock up on canned goods, take a bucket for a toilet, make sure you have plenty of water, and a radio and spare batteries…
As if any of that could possibly have helped against an atomic bomb. It had been guff, hollow instructions designed to make the public think they could do something useful instead of just sitting there waiting to be killed. And to stop them running.
The last thing the country needed was millions of refugees streaming out of the cities.
“Nothing’s safe,” I said. “Nowhere. No one.”
“What do you mean?” Jude asked, and it shocked me to see him crying.
“They hunt by sound, and where’s quiet? Nowhere.”
Only in my head, I thought. That’s the only quiet place.