Consider what you have in your life that might produce noise:
—All electronic devices should be muted or switched to silent: TVs, phones, tablets, personal music devices, satnavs, GPS, digital watches, etc.
—All medical warning devices should be deactivated: medication reminders, hearing aids, etc.
—Babies should be comforted at all times. Do your best to prevent your child from crying. If you cannot prevent it, try to remove yourself from other people, somewhere as secure and safe as possible.
—Do not attempt to start any vehicle engines, generators, or other mechanical equipment.
—Pets should be silenced.
Cobra Emergency Text Transmission #14, Saturday, 19 November 2016
When he was fourteen, waiting for his music teacher to arrive at the start of a lesson, Huw and his friends had been larking around, not causing chaos but generally acting in the manner of teenage boys. Some mild abuse, amusing banter, and all of them cognisant of the girls watching their every move.
A fly had been buzzing around him, and several times Huw snapped out his hand in an attempt to catch the insect. He wanted to look cool, especially in front of Ashley Hughes, who was watching him with a calm, appraising expression. She was his first real crush, and much of what he did was to impress her.
He couldn’t catch the fly. It was too fast for him, or he was too slow, and Ashley had eventually leaned back in her chair and started talking with her friend, pointedly ignoring him.
The fly had landed on the window, and Huw snatched up a sheet of music and jumped forward, placing it flat on the glass and trapping the fly. He’d pressed gently around the insect, feeling soft vibrations as it buzzed between glass and paper, doing its best to escape. Light shone through the paper and he could see the dark, manic button of the fly twisting back and forth.
Then he’d placed his thumb over the fly and gently pushed. He felt the tickling buzz of wings transmitted through the paper and against his skin, then a soft pop as the body burst, then the splash of blood and insides.
“You enjoyed that, didn’t you?” their music teacher said with evident disgust. He’d been standing directly behind Huw when he’d crushed the fly to death.
“Yes, sir!” he’d said, keen at the time to impress his friends. Maybe he had, maybe he hadn’t. He could never remember anyone’s reaction—his friends’, Ashley’s, even his own. It was only many years later that the incident came back to him, in the way that seemingly random events from years before so often do.
As he grew older, Huw had started to relate more and more to his teacher. Not at all religious, he had developed a respect for life that prevented him from killing any living thing. If Jude found a spider in his room Huw would catch it in a glass and take it all the way downstairs to let it loose in the garden. If a mosquito buzzed at night, he’d stalk the bedroom naked, a pint glass ready to catch it, and then release it from a window.
Kelly sometimes took the piss. “It’s only a fly,” she’d say. Mostly Huw would just shrug, not bothering to reply because she was the one still in bed and he was the one doing the saving. It shouldn’t matter to her whether he killed the thing or let it go.
When he saw roadkill he felt pity for the creatures. He’d wonder whether their deaths had left any defenceless young behind, now destined to starve to death or be picked off by predators. He didn’t like watching hunting on television. Images of cruelty, to animals or humans, disturbed him.
Kelly found it difficult to understand. He ate meat, and didn’t seem to mind the fact that he was eating dead animal flesh. But he took time selecting where he bought his meat and whether it was free-range, ethically sourced. He reasoned to her that if he ate a creature that had been treated well and had a comfortable life, then that animal would not have lived at all if it were not for him wanting to eat it.
It troubled him. It amused Kelly.
Once, after she’d killed a wasp and he’d berated her, she’d lost her temper with him. And he’d told her why. “That wasp was alive. It was more amazing than anything humans have ever made. It was incredible, and because it annoyed you, you crushed it to death.”
She’d called him a knob.
As an adult he often thought back to that fly he’d killed, and what his music teacher had said. And he was glad that the man was no longer the boy. Yes, he’d enjoyed it then. No, he would not enjoy it now.
Huw didn’t kill things, because life was a gift.
* * *
Otis had pissed himself while Huw was choking him to death. The dog lay across his outstretched legs, still warm. His right jeans leg was soaked with dog urine, his left ankle badly scratched where Otis’s panicked, lashing claws had caught him. His shoulders and arms ached from the force he’d had to apply, pulling the shotgun up beneath the animal’s head and crushing it back against his neck, as hard as he could, desperate to kill the dog as quickly as possible. And not because of any noise he might make, but because he didn’t want to hurt him.
He didn’t want Otis to suffer.
Now he was dead, and Huw could not hold back the tears. He felt eyes boring into him. Maybe his children would never forgive him, but he hoped that they would at least understand. You couldn’t tell a dog to be quiet. You couldn’t explain mortal danger. He remained kneeling down facing the rear window, shoulders shuddering with each silent sob. It seemed unfair that Otis was dead and they hadn’t killed one single vesp, but the beasts were gone now, drifting by like giant snowflakes, leaving behind slick smears and scratches on the windows.
Then he thought of Glenn, and shock dried his tears. That amazing thing, life, was gone from Otis and Glenn, and now they were just sacks of dead meat. Between one moment and the next they had ceased to live, their histories venting to nothing, memories disappearing, everything they had been existing now only in the memories of others and what they had left behind. But they’d both fought hard.
The bleeding scratches on Huw’s ankle were testament to that.
And he believed that Glenn had fought for them.
He let out a slow breath and bowed his head. He closed his eyes so that he did not have to look down at Otis, then opened them again. He tried to take stock of their situation, because after what he had done, and what had happened to Glenn, they had to make the most of things. They had to honour the dead by surviving.
They’re all going to hate me, he thought, and he could not bear to turn around.
Vesps still flew by, weaving down the hillside and parting around trees, rocks and the Jeep like water around obstructions in a river. Though blind, they could still see, and Huw guessed they had some form of sonar. If that was the case, perhaps sound of a certain frequency could confuse or hurt them. But that was not for him to test or speculate on. A thousand scientists in a hundred bunkers around the world would be doing their best to find these creatures’ weak spot.
Across the hillside, in the distance, he could just make out the line of vehicles twisting up towards the ridge. A couple of them still burned, but there was no longer any movement. If anyone had survived, they were also trapped in their vehicles. But it had been so much louder over there—gunfire, burning, more people panicking and running. He wondered whether the vesps would have given up so easily in their efforts to break into the cars.
Leaning closer to the rear window, he could see the tracework of scratches etched into the glass by their teeth; sharp, curved patterns among the smears of saliva and other fluids. Some of the scratches looked superficial, but there were a couple that seemed to have scored deep. That would have necessitated retracing the scratches again and again, which would have meant a sense of purpose. The vesps had known what they were doing. They weren’t just blindly gnashing and thrashing, they were consciously using their teeth to carve their way inside.
He shivered. They were so lucky that Glenn had drawn them away.
Huw slumped down against the side of the boot’s interior, gently lifting Otis’s head from his leg and resting it on the floor. Then he turned around to accept his family’s hostile glare.
Jude had his face buried in Kelly’s neck. Good. Huw hoped he’d been like that for some time. Kelly looked sad, teary, but she nodded at him to show that she didn’t blame him, and that he’d done what he had to. Lynne retained her usual cool stare, but he could see no resentment in her eyes.
Ally would not meet his gaze. Wide-eyed, pale, she stared past him at her dead dog, or as much of him as she could see over the back seat. Maybe she was remembering all the good times she’d had with Otis, and how much he had helped her. She called him her hearing dog, and although she’d trained him herself he had been surprisingly adept at helping her with certain tasks. He let her know when the phone was ringing, when someone was at the front door, and he’d also been trained to warn her about the presence of fire. They’d had to practise that every three months, just to ensure that he hadn’t forgotten. Kelly hadn’t liked doing that, as she said it was tempting fate, but Huw had scoffed. There was no such thing as fate, he said, and not training Otis about fire would be putting Ally’s life needlessly at risk. If she was alone in the house and a blaze started downstairs… it didn’t bear thinking about.
Now her hearing dog could hear no more, and there were dangers greater than flames.
Huw leaned into the Jeep’s rear seat, reaching for Ally. She turned her head away from him, eyes closed. He held her shoulders and felt her stiffen. They had to remain silent. By turning aside she was denying him the chance to say sorry.
He looked at Kelly instead and she beckoned him to her.
It was awkward climbing over the back seat, squeezing past Ally—still stiff, still looking away from him—and into the driver’s seat again. He moved slowly and cautiously, careful not to kick a window. They didn’t know how much noise the vesps needed to home in on, how loud or persistent it had to be. They knew nothing.
Jude slid over and crouched beside him on the seat. He hugged his father and Huw took so much from that. It could have been forgiveness, but he thought it was more a sense of need. Whatever he’d done to the dog, Jude needed him to be there.
Huw hugged his son back and looked through the smeared windscreen.
Twenty metres downhill, there were still vesps crawling across the overturned Land Rover. Others smothered the rocks and the sparse trees sprouting from them. They slipped in and out of the vehicle, emerging with blood smeared across their sickly yellow skin. Their mouths were wet, dark, red holes. He could not see much inside, other than a bloodied, tattered arm and hand slumped from the window. Glenn was dead in there, and perhaps now home to vesp eggs that would hatch very soon. They’d killed and eaten of him, but left enough for their young to consume.
Huw was determined that would not happen. It was too much. Glenn had distracted them from the Jeep, and Huw believed that he’d known very well what he was doing. He could not bear for him to become a birthing ground for more of those monsters.
Soon, he would perform one last favour for his friend.
A strange calm had settled over his family. They had been waiting for this moment for days, and now it was here some of the pressure had been relieved. Fear sat in its place. It was a heavy, tactile fear, fed by what they could see all around them rather than by nebulous news reports from afar. They sat still and silent, watching vesps flying past, sometimes slow, often much faster. The sense of being surrounded was very real, and Huw knew that was the immediate danger—becoming too scared to leave the Jeep.
And they would have to leave. They could not remain here indefinitely, with very little food and hardly anything to drink. Five of them could not live and sleep in such confined quarters. And there was Otis.
He’d soon begin to smell.
Huw caught Kelly’s attention and started to sign.
“We’ll have to get away from here soon.”
She nodded.
“We’ll leave it a couple of hours, see how many of them there are.”
“Maybe they’ll thin out,” she replied.
“Or maybe there’ll be flocks of them.”
Kelly shrugged. None of them knew.
He looked in the rear-view mirror. Ally was huddled with her back against the side door, legs drawn up, arms hugging her knees to her chest, staring from the rear window. Huw didn’t think she could see Otis from there—the back seat was in the way—but he wished he could reach out instead of her having to comfort herself.
Lynne tapped him on the shoulder and started signing. She was clumsy, and had never really perfected the Andrews family’s personalised signing language. But she had gone to classes to learn, made a big effort, and he could only love her for that.
“Don’t be angry at yourself. There was no other way.”
Huw nodded his thanks. Lynne smiled and touched his shoulder again, leaving her hand there this time.
“I’ll need one of your secret cigarettes later,” he said.
She raised her eyebrows.
“Not to smoke.”
She nodded, confused. He’d explain when the time came.
Jude squirmed beside him and looked from the windscreen. He was staring at the Land Rover.
Huw pressed his mouth to his son’s ear and whispered, “He did it for us.”
No vesps came. None hit the windows at the folly of a father’s whisper. Good. They could talk, at least, though it had to be muted.
Jude nodded slowly, but he was only a little kid. What a terrible thing to see. What an awful thing to accept, that a family friend had sacrificed himself for them.
We’re all learning again from scratch, Huw thought. And perhaps everyone might soon be in that position. It was a new world now, and they were all children.
* * *
Kelly was the first one who needed to urinate. She signalled this to Huw, pointed into the boot, shrugged.
Otis was back there. Bad enough that he’d killed the family dog, no one was going to piss on the poor mutt’s corpse.
Huw nodded, then gestured outside. He’d been keeping track of the time, and it was now mid-afternoon. If they didn’t move soon, they’d have to face spending the night in the Jeep.
Cuddling Jude, becoming warm and sweaty with the boy curled on his lap, Huw had been weighing up their options. Maybe they could stay in the Jeep and open the door whenever one of them needed a comfort break. Would the door opening and closing again be noise enough to attract a vesp? Would the sound of piss hitting the ground? There was no room to move around, and he could already feel his legs stiffening, the dog urine drying into his jeans. They had a few tins of food. They’d already drunk most of the bottled water. He’d risked turning on the ignition and lowering his window an inch, so at least they had fresh air, though it had a strange odour. Perhaps they were safe for now, but he was afraid that the longer they stayed put, the more difficult it would be to start moving again.
He favoured walking. It meant going outside and being among them, but over the past hour the number of vesps passing by had diminished. They were always in sight, but now only ten or so passed by each minute, rather than dozens. He could see some of them resting or roosting, usually in elevated positions—on rocks, in the branches of trees, and several remained on the Land Rover’s underside—and a few seemed to settle comfortably on the ground. If they moved cautiously, slowly, and quietly, he was confident that they could pass the creatures by.
A house would be a far better place in which to hold out. If they were lucky they’d find one with a supply of food and water. But any solid building would be better than this.
He had briefly considered driving the Jeep downhill, but that was a non-starter. The vesps would swarm to the noise, and in moments the windscreen would be covered and they’d be blind. This time, with nothing to lure them away, the creatures might persist in their glass-scratching.
He had ideas of a distraction to set them on their way.
Ally still hadn’t looked at him. He thought perhaps she’d fallen asleep with her head resting on her knees. The more time passed, the more nervous he was about the moment when they would have to communicate with each other again. He didn’t want her to hate him. He didn’t think he could handle that, not now.
Huw signalled to Kelly that they should get ready to move. She nodded slowly. Her mother had seen the exchange and she also agreed.
“You all move along the hillside that way,” he signed, pointing north away from the traffic-clogged road in the opposite direction.
“You?” Kelly asked.
“I’m going to see to Glenn and set a distraction.”
Kelly held out her hands in a What? gesture.
Huw went to answer, but that was when Ally turned around and looked right at him. He stared back, more scared right then of his daughter hating him than the creatures outside. He felt utterly wretched about what he’d done, but also as certain as he could be that it had been necessary. But if Ally did not believe that, there was nothing he could do to persuade her otherwise.
“We’re leaving?” she signed.
Huw nodded.
“Okay. But I want to say goodbye to Otis.” She offered a sad smile, and Huw could not hold back the tears that burned his eyes. He watched his daughter lean over into the back seat, ruffle her dog’s fur, scratch him behind the ear. She stayed there for some time.
Jude stirred and saw what was happening. He scooted across to his mother, rubbing his eyes, watching Ally then turning to look through the windscreen.
Lynne touched Huw’s shoulder and signed, “We should all leave through the same door.”
Huw nodded. “I’ll need that cigarette now.”
He was surprised to see how shamefaced she looked as she pulled the packet from her pocket and handed him a couple. She gave him a lighter too, and he tucked them all into his jacket’s breast pocket.
Kelly had one eyebrow arched at her mother, then she fired a questioning look at Huw. He glanced downhill at the overturned Land Rover. And that was enough. She knew, and seemed to accept what needed to be done.
Ally sat back into her seat and rubbed at her teary eyes. Then she checked the iPad charge and disconnected it from the charger. Packing her small rucksack, she looked like a different girl.
Huw leaned between the seats and touched her knee, ready to sign to her, tell her how much he loved her and how he could see no other way. But she made all of that unnecessary.
“It’s okay, Dad,” she whispered. Hearing her voice was a welcome surprise. He nodded, thinking that perhaps it would be some time until it was completely okay. But at least she seemed to understand why he’d done what he had done. He hoped that time would give them the opportunity to talk about it properly.
They all took a few minutes to prepare. Kelly packed the tins of food they’d rescued from the Land Rover, Lynne massaged her legs where they’d gone to sleep, Jude fidgeted nervously. When the time came, Huw felt a stab of doubt.
Were they doing the right thing? Couldn’t they at least try to stay here until help came? But he shook those thoughts aside. Help was not coming. If they stayed here they would die. He made sure everyone was watching before he signed, “I’ll go first.”