My dad just killed my dog. We saw our friend die. Suddenly it’s a different world.
Twitter, @SilentAllyA, Saturday, 19 November 2016
The first thing that hit me was the smell.
It was rich, harsh, sour, acidic, a sickly and overtly biological stench that nevertheless bit in like industrial chemicals. It did not belong up here on the wild hillsides, and even the breeze did nothing to disperse it.
The vesps stank. That was one more thing to note about them. Perhaps that knowledge might help us in the future. The creatures drifted by, coming from uphill and flying a couple of metres above ground as they flew down into the valley. To our left lay the ruin of the Land Rover, and a dozen vesps still roosted on the upturned vehicle, rocks, and the trees sprouting above them. Some were smeared with Glenn’s blood. I hated them, felt a rage burning, but knew that there was nothing I could do.
Through the smashed side window I could see Glenn’s shredded arm and hand, but little else. I was glad. At least this way I could remember him as he had been, not as the vesps had made him.
We stood motionless for a while after getting out of the car, huddled in a group and staring around, trying not to move. I caught Jude’s eye, and though petrified he was also fascinated. “They’re totally silent,” he signed. “Can’t even hear their wings.”
I was worried about the vesps’ echolocation. I’d watched them swerve around static obstructions, and they had to know where the ground was, which direction they were heading—and there was no saying whether or not they also used it to hunt. Once we started moving, perhaps the vesps would see us as prey.
But I thought not. From everything I’d seen and gathered in my digital scrapbook, it appeared that they hunted exclusively by following the sound of their prey.
A vesp flitted past my head, close enough for me to feel the breath of its leathery wings. I froze, shock driving through me, but managed to not cry out. I pressed my finger to my lips and looked around at my family.
They were good. Scared but alert to the dangers. But none of them were moving. They stood in a huddle by the Jeep, door still open behind them. The vehicle suddenly felt like safety, but I knew that there was no going back.
I was the first to start walking. I took slow, gentle steps, looking where I placed my feet so that I didn’t stumble or disturb a stone, focusing ahead, holding my rucksack tight over one shoulder. I felt the pressure of my family’s gaze, and I was afraid that if I turned around they’d be beckoning me back. We can’t go back, I thought. Not after what’s happened. Not after Glenn and Otis. The only way left is forward.
I reached a small tumble of rocks and skirted around them, concentrating so hard on my footsteps that I didn’t see what was coming.
They flew past so quickly that one snagged my hair and tugged my head sideways. I winced and held my breath, holding in the scream. I glanced uphill in time to see several more vesps sweeping down towards me, but at the last moment they swerved, none of them colliding. They flew in close formation but did not touch. For the first time I found myself admiring their grace.
Once past the rocks I signalled the others to follow. Again I planted my finger to my lips, signing that they should remain silent. But they did not need telling.
Lynne came first, then Jude and Mum. My mother still carried the shotgun. It was so unnatural in her hand, made her look almost like someone I didn’t know. I didn’t like it one bit. The shotgun would offer scant protection against a swarm of vesps, but I knew it was more to defend against other people than the creatures. That was the way the world was going, and why I didn’t like it.
Dad stayed behind at the Jeep, and he had a cigarette in his mouth. I’d seen him smoking when I was a kid, but as far as I was aware he hadn’t smoked for ten years or more. I knew that Lynne still stole an occasional puff. I could smell it on my grandmother’s clothes, and was surprised when no one else seemed to notice.
When the others reached me, I raised an eyebrow at Dad, and he signalled that we should move on. Mum nodded to me and started leading the way.
Jude grabbed my hand. I liked that, though I didn’t like the look on his face. It was a very adult fear. Witnessing Glenn and Otis’s deaths had made my little brother grow up quickly. Another change forced upon us all.
Mum veered slightly downhill, past a clump of trees and onto a narrow sheep trail that wound through bracken and across a small stream. Several vesps flew by from right to left as we walked, and once or twice a creature passed between us, shedding a trail of stench behind it. How something alive could smell so rank I did not know. Perhaps it was to do with how they communicated. Maybe it was a sign of their excitement at being on the hunt.
A couple of minutes later we paused and looked back the way we’d come.
Dad waved, then leaned into the Jeep. What’s he doing? I wondered. Then the vehicle juddered and began to roll downhill. He leaped away and crouched down, watching the Jeep pick up speed and just skim past the rolled Land Rover. It struck the clump of rocks, jumped slightly, then rolled on, gathering momentum and bouncing across the rough, uneven ground.
Where it had struck the rocks, several vesps quickly converged, hovering, darting down and up again, finding nothing of worth. They continued on, seemingly agitated and dancing in the air, sweeping left and right as if searching for whatever had made the noise.
When the Jeep struck another large boulder and rolled, they found it. It tumbled onto its roof, rolled one more time, then slid to a stop on its side further down the hill, nose thudding into a hollow in the ground. As its back end tilted up at the sky, dozens of vesps streaked in toward it.
They passed by my crouching father, veering around him and downhill towards the Jeep. Others flew quickly past where we waited, trailing their strange tentacles and rancid smells behind them. Striking the Jeep, they crawled across its surface and disappeared inside, and I suddenly realised a terrible truth—they would find Otis in there, and perhaps they would eat him.
Maybe they would even lay eggs.
I sank down to the damp ground, wanting to cry in rage and grief but knowing that these must now become restrained emotions. Whatever enraged me in the future, I could not scream. Whatever grief was visited upon me, I must cry in silence.
Part of me hated Dad for what he’d done, but I knew it had been the only way. I’d already been worrying about Otis, but my blind love for him had come in the way of any solution. There was no solution to him making a noise, so I’d blocked it out. A problem for later. As it turned out, somebody else’s problem.
I knew that Dad was feeling terrible, and that my haze of hate was already melting to a deep sadness for us all. It was selfish to think that only I had loved him.
Dad edged downhill to the Land Rover, lighting the cigarette as he went. He took what looked like a long, deep drag, and then lobbed the cigarette in through the open portion of the boot door. He hurried towards us across the hillside, watching his footing, and then the fuel ignited with a blue flash. He didn’t look back. By the time he reached us, face grim, the Land Rover was fully aflame. Vesps flew from it and circled the heat before drifting away downhill towards the Jeep.
I found the sight strangely hypnotic. The fire was somehow comforting, because it gave warmth to the desolate scene, and it took Glenn away from us at last. I hoped some of the monsters had been trapped inside. I hoped whatever eggs they’d laid in our friend were bubbling and boiling.
Other vesps flew quickly around, zeroing in on the now silent Jeep. They must have been answering whatever strange call their cousins put out when they were hunting. It was another aspect to them that I would note down, if and when we ever reached somewhere safe.
My parents hugged briefly, then we set off downhill, heading away from the burning vehicle and the Jeep that had brought us this far. Sometimes, when I caught them from the corner of my eye, I thought that distant vesps were snowflakes.
That idea stirred a thought that I could not quite grasp. Confused and troubled, we went in search of safety.
* * *
The cities had fallen first. Loud and chaotic as they were, finding a quiet, safe place in built-up areas must have been next to impossible. Hide your family in one house, and if someone in the next house screamed and attracted a flood of vesps, a chain reaction of terror would doom even those struggling to maintain silence. There was mounting anecdotal evidence of the vesps letting out some sort of signal when they found prey—the strange stench, perhaps, or maybe a sound out of a human’s range of hearing. They acted very much like ants or wasps in that regard, and it made them even more deadly.
People attempting to flee in cars and aircraft would have quickly been taken down. I’d seen the terrible evidence of that, and was pleased to be out in the open, however much it stank, however terrible it was feeling a vesp’s wing snag my hair or brush past my arm.
So far, none of us had cried out in fright. Not even Jude, bless him. But then kids always do adapt quickly.
Right then, the future was barely an hour long. Find safety, somewhere we could hole up and rest, sleep, wait for whatever was to come. A place with food and power if possible, so I could monitor world events without worrying about the iPad running out of charge. After that we’d have to think about our future in the long term. Days ahead, we might have to consider how long our food supplies were going to last. Weeks, and if the power and water failed, we would have to adapt even more.
Months? Would help come, would anything change? Could it really last that long?
But it was the immediate future where the greatest danger lay. So I thought less than an hour ahead, less than ten minutes, and tried to concentrate on putting one foot in front of the other, treading carefully and lightly, so as not to bring down a cloud of vesps.
One wrong move from any of us would put us all in danger. It was a heavy burden, but sharing it brought us closer together.
At one point we all stopped and turned back the way we’d come. I saw a cloud of smoke boiling up into the sky. We could no longer see the burning vehicle or the upended Jeep downhill from it, but I guessed that something in the Land Rover had exploded. Vesps darted rapidly towards the noise, and I could just make them out, so many of them circling the smoke that they formed their own patterns in the sky.
Mum waved us on. Lynne smiled, kissed her fingertips and touched my cheek. I smiled back. Such communication had become precious.
I saw them taking lots of birds. Mostly they plucked them from the sky, eating them on the wing, but sometimes the vesps dropped down into the undergrowth or glided into leafless trees. The birds didn’t know to keep quiet. The beasts were stripping their songs from the countryside, and I remembered it clearer than ever.
Mum had to stop and pee. She squatted down and we turned our backs, giving her some small privacy. Dad remained alert, glancing all around to see if even the sound of pee hitting the grass would attract the beasts. But we were safe.
We came to a well-used path that veered along the side of the hill, and after a brief pause Dad turned right. He was still taking us roughly north, away from where we’d left the vehicles and the blocked road we’d seen further to the south. I could see far across the countryside here, but it was a surreal sight.
It should have been beautiful. This must have been a rare November day in the Lakes, because the sky was mostly cloudless, the air clear, and the breeze breathing across the landscape was cool but not cold. A few sheep still speckled the hills and fields, though when we came closer we saw that most of them were dead. In the distance sprawled a small town.
But familiar though the scene should have been, I could not see it without also seeing the vesps. Close by they drifted north and west, sometimes crossing paths, flying in groups here, individually there. Further away they were pale, slow specks dusting the view. Here and there I could see denser concentrations of the creatures, like wafting mist. In one place a couple of miles to the south-west a spiralling mass circled something out of sight. And above the small town there was a swarm.
Smoke rose from a couple of places between the buildings, too thick to be from chimneys or garden bonfires.
As we walked, I turned to Lynne and signed, “Can you hear anything?”
My grandmother glanced at the town and shook her head. “Too far away.”
I wondered if there were screams, and how far they travelled before fading to nothing.
The path wound down behind an old stone wall, and we had to work our way around an area of waterlogged ground and through a couple of wooden gates. We all walked slowly, worried that splashes might alert a passing vesp, or even the squelch of shoes in mud. I moved close to the wall, reaching out now and then for balance as I concentrated on my footing.
A stone moved beneath my hand. I fell to the left, shifting my hand quickly and stopping my fall before I struck the wall, but the stone tumbled away.
I held my breath and winced, glancing quickly around at the others. They all stared at me wide-eyed. It made a noise! I thought, and I crouched down and looked for vesps coming for me.
A few metres along the path, a vesp flew quickly past, sweeping over the wall and just missing it. The creature didn’t seem to notice us.
I let out my held breath slowly, carefully. Dad waved us on.
The muddy path continued, and a few minutes later the wall disappeared and the path swung down towards a road, and a wider parking area beside it. There were several picnic benches and a few litter bins, and an information board with cracked glass and a fading map of the area. It might have been a nice place to stop in the summer, with a spectacular view out across the wide valley and the walk up into the hills. But now it was a quagmire.
And there were the dead.
They were about a hundred metres along the road, down a gentle slope and just before a bend cut behind stark, leafless trees. Three cars had come to a halt on the other side of the road, one of them tilted precariously over a steep drop. The people had left the vehicles. Maybe they’d all been one group or even one family, but most of them had died alone. There was a huddle of bodies close to the rear vehicle, and six more were scattered along the road.
Several vesps roosted on and around each car, and a crowd of them bickered over the body that seemed to have made it furthest along the road, a couple of hundred metres away. The one that nearly got away, I thought.
We stopped when we saw the dead and grouped close together. I felt sick. At first I thought a couple of the people were still moving. Crawling away, perhaps. But then I saw the reality, and I almost cried out in disgust.
On each body, nestled amongst the bloody remains opened to the world, several vesps pulsed and squirmed. They were laying eggs, I guessed, and each grotesque flex of their sickly-pale bodies might have been another expulsion. I wanted to run at them and knock them aside. I imagined my mother shooting them away, disintegrating their disgusting bodies with shotgun blasts. But neither course of action could save those already dead.
Dad turned and signed to us all, “Across the road and down the hill.”
Lynne pointed in the other direction, along the road and away from the nesting vesps. But I shook my head.
“That’s back towards the roadblock, around the side of the hill.”
Lynne nodded, but looking across the road she frowned. Trees grew close to the road there, and the land dripped sharply away into woodland.
I could understand my grandmother’s misgivings. I’d have much preferred to stay on the road or the path we’d been following. Into the trees meant into the wild, and with the vesps abroad, that felt like a more dangerous place. But truth was, it was probably safer. Where there were people there would be vesps. The wild was the safest place to be.
Mum leaned close to Dad and pressed her mouth to his ear. I held my breath, but saw Dad listening, and there were no signs that the vesps along the road heard anything.
As he started to nod, I saw movement from the corner of my eye.
A vesp squatted atop one of the litter bins less than ten steps away. Its small feet were clawed into the heavy rubber lid. Its strange tendrils were splayed behind it, like a featherless peacock’s tail. Its head, level with its body, seemed to be turned to one side. It was all teeth.
Mum, Dad, no! I thought, but even in panic I did not speak. I waved instead, and as Mum whispered something else to Dad he saw, his eyes went wide, and he pushed her to the ground.
The vesp flew at him and he fell, bringing his arm up in front of his face so that its mouth closed on the thick sleeve of his jacket.
I froze. But it was Mum who did not let terror slow her down. Even as she stood she was swinging the shotgun, and the metal barrel connected squarely with the vesp’s head. It flipped from his arm, tearing the jacket, sharp teeth trailing threads of material, and bounced across the gravel.
Lynne took three steps and brought her foot down on the stunned creature’s head. It burst apart in a spray of dark red blood, tendrils stiffening and then slumping to the ground.
I scanned around for other vesps, afraid that more might have heard, terrified that the dead creature had transmitted a scent signature or a call of some kind. But though some of them flew higher up, and those creatures still roosted on the cars and bodies along the road, none approached.
Lynne stepped away from the bloody mess. When she reached the grass she wiped her foot slowly.
Jude, little boy that he was, walked towards the dead creature to see. I grabbed his arm and shook my head. There was no telling how dangerous they were, even dead—that blood looked thick, and darker than it should. My brother pulled a face.
Dad checked his arm. Even though the vesp had been at him for mere seconds the jacket was shredded, but his skin was intact. The thick material had saved him from any serious injury.
I wondered what would have happened if he had been hurt. We had a few basic first-aid items like plasters and bandages, but nothing more heavy-duty. No needle and thread, no antibiotics. There was no saying what diseases those things might carry. Unknown, I thought. Whatever bacteria or viruses they carry will be unknown to medicine, so even if we did have antibiotics they’d probably be useless. The creatures were as good as alien. The idea depressed me. We were less than an hour out of the vehicles, and already we’d had a close call.
I tried to bring the future in close once again, not projecting ahead. But I couldn’t help imagining Dad fevered, diseased, and dying of some terrible blood poisoning.
“Clean your arm,” I signed.
“There’s no wound,” Mum signed back.
“The teeth might still have touched him.”
Dad nodded, but signalled across the road. I understood. He wanted to get away from the dead creature as quickly as possible, just in case any others somehow sensed it and came to investigate.
Slowly, careful not to scuff our shoes on gravel or trip over in a shallow pothole, we crossed the road and entered the woodland.