Bronnitsy, south-east of Moscow, has ceased to exist. The town was largely evacuated before the first waves of the vesp plague reached it; when it did, dozens of fuel tankers that had been parked around the outskirts the day before were ignited. The resulting conflagration consumed much of the town, and local forces then started shelling. A constant barrage of the town is underway day and night. Launch sites are fully automated, only manned when missile reloading is required. And while military losses are described as “acceptable” (which quite likely means large, but sustainable), the Bronnitsy incident is proving enlightening. The vesps keep attacking. Although the fires have been burning for almost two weeks and there is little left of any buildings, the noise of conflict still draws vesps in their tens of thousands, each new wave obliterated and burnt to ash by the next ordnance barrage. Estimates of vesp dead range widely from a hundred thousand to three million, but it reveals a lack of reasoning in the creatures. They are driven by instinct. Perhaps such instinct will be their downfall.
What Now? blog, Sunday, 4 December 2016
Silence and stillness, these will save us. Acceptance and embracement, these will be our saving graces. The tongue is danger, the root of the tongue is unholy, and removal will take us closer to God. There is a knife, and the knife-wielder will be your salvation.
The Hushed Manifesto
They make good soup.
How To Eat Vesps blog, Monday, 5 December 2016
It was two days later. Lynne’s revelation about her condition had prompted many questions from Jude, and now the boy rarely left her side. Huw didn’t view that as a bad thing. Lynne baked bread and Jude helped, kneading the dough, trying to do any work he called “heavy”. He was even lifting pots and pans for his grandmother.
Ally continued to monitor the web, recording anything noteworthy but by her own admission becoming more and more sceptical about much of the information posted there.
Intermittent communications from supposed government sources promised that all measures were being taken, and announcements of advances against the vesps were made into thin air. No evidence was produced to back them up. No progress made. The Prime Minister had not been heard from in several days, and online rumour suggested that he and much of his Cabinet were dead. But again, that was all it was—rumour.
The countryside around their temporary refuge remained silent. It had started raining a lot, and Huw thought it was still unseasonably warm for early December. More than anything, he wished for snow.
He spent at least an hour each day observing the vesps. The more he knew, the better he could fight them; at least that’s what he believed. That afternoon was moving on, and soon he and Ally would spend their regular hour discussing anything new and recording what they had discovered. Each day he did his best to have something new to tell her.
When he was a child he’d been a member of the Young Ornithologist’s Club, and he had taken part in several national surveys of common garden birds. He could remember many Saturday mornings spent sitting at the living-room window, looking out over the garden and conscientiously recording each species he saw and how many times. It was not a boring endeavour. His mother had loved birds, and she spent plenty of time and money ensuring that their garden was full of them. She hung feeders from brackets above windows and all around the garden, as well as allowing for several areas between his dad’s organised flowerbeds and vegetable patches that she left untended, letting them grow wild. This brought insects, and they attracted birds.
He’d see siskins, sparrows, finches, robins, thrushes, and occasionally a sparrowhawk hovering over the holly bush at the bottom of the garden, hungry for the sparrows that busied themselves plucking berries.
Sometimes his mother would sit with him, usually after placing a plate of biscuits and a glass of milk on the small table beside him. She’d rarely talk, other than to point out a bird or ask about how many he’d seen that day. It was a comfortable, intimate silence that he had relished. It had never been boring. It had involved the sort of calm concentration he’d never been able to achieve as an adult.
He had chosen to watch the vesps from outside. He could see more of them that way, note greater details about their behaviour. And there was something about being out in the open, in danger, that gave him a sense of thrilling isolation, and made him believe he was doing his best for his family.
He had to believe that. There was nothing else.
He’d been watching one particular vesp for the last five days. It had been roosting in the branches of a young oak tree by the side of the long lane leading up to the house, thirty metres beyond the wall. At first he’d thought it was dead, huddled close to the trunk. But over those five days he had seen no change in its posture, colour or position. If it was dead, surely it would have slumped down, fallen, begun to rot? He checked it every day, and every day it remained the same.
He watched others, too. The creatures continued to fly past, and he was trying to make sense of direction, and whether it was in any way connected to the weather or time of day. When the initial wave was advancing the vesps had all been moving in the same direction—away from areas they had infected and into areas they had not, perhaps attracted by new prey, or maybe acting with the conquering conscience of a hive mentality. Now he saw only randomness. That had frustrated him to begin with, but now that randomness itself was forming something of a pattern.
There were the vesps that guarded the eggs that were laid in dead bodies.
There were those that roosted, waiting for something to stir them.
And there were those that hunted.
He could still not make out any physical features that differentiated one from another. From what he had seen it was always adults that guarded eggs, but other than that there seemed to be no real pattern. Some of those that flew were small, perhaps recently hatched, while others seemed to be fully grown. He could not differentiate sex. Those that chose to rest and wait were of all sizes. It could have been that their life cycles were so accelerated that they had little time to learn and adapt, so the habits of those guarding an egg batch were handed down to the hatchlings. He didn’t know. There was so much he didn’t know that it scared him.
Everything he thought he’d understood about nature seemed to have been turned on its head by these beasts. Animals generally existed in a balanced ecosystem, but there was little about the vesps that spoke of balance. They ate everything made of meat, from the smallest bird to the largest cattle. Humans just happened to be their most common form of food. Their rapid spread and massive proliferation did not bode well for their survival as a species, because their expanding population would soon starve beneath a shrivelling food source.
Maybe down in that cavern there had been a balance, but emerging into daylight had upset it.
And even if the vesps eventually died out—starved, caught a disease, were wiped out by an engineered virus of some kind—what would happen to the ecosystem they had left behind? Nature had surely been damaged irreparably. Whole populations of wild animals had been driven close to extinction, and domesticated livestock reserves might well have suffered even more, gathered as they often were in confined spaces. No livestock would mean no food for the survivors. Hugely diminished bird numbers would lead to a massive growth in insect populations. The balance of nature had already been upset, perhaps cataclysmically. If and when the vesps died out, a very different world would grow out of what they left behind.
Huw lifted his binoculars and focused on the roosting vesp again. It had not shifted. Its tendrils were splayed across the bark of the tree trunk behind it, body laid along the branch, small legs clasping tight, claws buried in bark. Maybe it was sleeping, or perhaps this was a form of hibernation, a dormancy that would only be disturbed by the sound of food.
There was one way to find out. He’d already seen the reaction of the egg nest when he’d thrown stones against the cars at the pub. They, too, were waiting for fresh prey to draw close and make a clumsy noise. He had held back from antagonising any vesps close to the house, afraid that whatever silent signal they sent would attract more to the area. But he had to balance that against the need to learn more. Perhaps now it was time to see just how dormant this beast was.
He selected a decent-sized pebble from the old woman’s garden, walked to the boundary wall, and lobbed the stone as far as he could along the lane. It struck the ground and bounced into the shadows beneath the trees lining the road.
The vesp did not move. Frowning, Huw found another stone and threw it.
This one ricocheted from the tree trunk just above the ground.
The vesp spread its wings, dropped down, and clamped its mouth against the tree almost before Huw could blink. Even though it was more than thirty metres away the animal’s movement had made him jump, and his heart hammered in surprise. It hadn’t moved for days, and one loud noise had galvanised it into vicious action.
Huw backed towards the house, suddenly needing to be closer to shelter. He had spotted over twenty vesps resting in various places in the countryside around the cottage, and there were four within the garden boundary. Two of those were in a tree, two more up on the roof. They’d all been there for at least a day. He suddenly felt watched. Or if not watched, then in danger of imminent discovery.
Three more vesps homed in on the tree-biting creature, answering a high-pitched call that he could not quite hear.
With his back against the wall beside the door, Huw raised the binoculars again and looked left to right, passing across the trees, the road, and onto the more open landscape that led up into the hills to the right.
And he saw a face.
He froze, shifted the binoculars back, expecting to see a bush’s stark limbs or a rock, or some other optical illusion that he’d at first mistaken for a person.
But as Huw focused on him again, the Reverend stood out from a dip in the land.
Behind him, the Hushed.
* * *
“There’s no reason to be afraid,” he whispered. But he could see that Ally was unsettled. She had already met this man, witnessed what he had done to himself, been urged to join his flock. That he was here meant that he must have come looking for them. And this time he had others.
“What are we going to do?” Kelly asked. She’d grabbed the shotgun that they left leaning by the back door, and now she cradled it across her arms. It looked so clumsy and out of place.
“I’ll go out to see him,” Huw said.
“I should come with you,” Lynne said. Jude said nothing, huddled to her side, protective and protected.
“No,” Huw said, but he immediately saw that look on his mother-in-law’s face, the stern expression, head tilted to one side, that meant there was no way he could win this argument.
“I know you think my being a Christian is submitting to mumbo-jumbo, but it’s important to me, and the fact that he’s a vicar means we’ll have common ground.”
“I’ve told you what he’s done to himself,” Huw said.
“And who’s to say he’s wrong?” Lynne said. “We’ve succeeded in talking in whispers, but I bet you feel like shouting at me sometimes.” She offered a faint smile which he returned.
“Stay in the kitchen, all of you,” he said to his wife and children. They nodded. He glanced at the shotgun, reached for it, hesitated. He looked to Lynne, automatically deferring to her judgement. And just how did that happen? he thought. But she had faith and the man was a vicar, so perhaps this really was her territory.
“Maybe leave it for now,” was all she said.
Huw opened the door and Lynne walked out. He followed and pulled the door closed behind him, not quite engaging the catch. They all knew about the vesps within the garden boundary, and now he saw her glancing at them as she walked. For someone so ill she appeared alert and confident. That was good. Huw had no wish to display any weakness.
As they walked across the lawn to the closed vehicle gate leading out onto the lane, the Reverend and the others with him approached across the scrubland beyond. They avoided the lane, where loose stones might be kicked, or holes might trip.
We should be helping each other, Huw thought. Pooling our resources, making sure we’re all taken care of. Not this. Not mutilation and fear.
There were six people with the Reverend, four adults and two children. They wore a variety of clothes, all of them wrapped against the rain. Most of them showed bruising around the lips and mouths.
With every step Huw took, his heart sank a little further.
Lynne reached the gate first. On the other side, the Reverend came within touching distance while his flock hung back a few paces, spread out. This close Huw could see that the two children were both girls, very young, perhaps sisters. One of them seemed to be sobbing silently, the other holding her hand. Both had bloodied chins. The adults were two men and two women. They seemed very thin, almost gaunt, and he could barely imagine the pain they must experience while eating. They all stared, and it took a few seconds for Huw to pin down why their stares seemed so strange. They were looking past him and Lynne at the house.
The Reverend nodded at Huw and smiled at Lynne, opening his mouth to display his ruined tongue. He held out a single sheet of paper over the top of the timber gate.
Lynne took it, glanced briefly, then handed it to Huw.
The girl has to teach us, it said.
Huw shook his head.
The Reverend glared at him. He wrote nothing else, even though he carried a pad and pencil in his left hand. He did not smile or frown.
Lynne took a single step back, but Huw remained steadfast. He glanced away from the Reverend again, looking at those poor, tortured people he’d somehow persuaded to follow him, and they continued to stare expectantly towards the house.
There’s only a wall and a gate.
He must have told the Hushed about the girl who signed, speaking with her face and hands and arms, silent yet filled with expression.
If they rush us, we can only run back to the house and lock ourselves in.
The crying girl shifted from foot to foot. One of the men raised a hand, opened his mouth, and almost touched the pustulant, red-raw stump of his tongue. The agony repulsed his touch. His eyes were wide and he shook with fever. His wound must be infected.
We’ve got to be strong.
Huw took a pen from his coat pocket, folded the note and leaned against the wall beside the gate. He wrote quickly, glancing up at the Reverend and his followers between words. The vicar still stared at him, almost expressionless behind those rimless glasses yet exuding danger. Mad, furious danger.
Huw handed him the note.
We’re surviving well on our own. Please leave us.
The Reverend barely seemed to glance at the note before dropping it aside. He pointed at the house.
Huw shook his head.
The Reverend took a final step forward, pressing against the wide gate, forcing it against hinges and catch. It creaked, groaned.
Huw wished that he’d brought the shotgun.
“Go,” Lynne said, her whisper seeming incredibly loud in the silence. The little girls took a frightened step back, and two of the adults raised hands to their mutilated mouths in shock. Huw wondered what they had all seen to inspire such terror, and whether the Reverend himself had provided examples to teach them the way to survive, his way.
For a moment he thought the leader of the Hushed would climb the gate and urge his people on, forcing confrontation that could really only end one way. The Reverend pushed against the gate so that his upper body leaned over, a small silver cross on a chain slipping from beneath his white collar and swinging slowly back and forth. Then he eased back. His face fell, suddenly sad, and a dribble of blood appeared at the corner of his mouth. Maybe he was trying to speak.
The Reverend turned to his flock and raised his hands. They lowered their heads and looked at their feet, hands clasped against their chests. Their prayer was silent. After only a few moments he led them away without once looking back. They walked on the grass verge beside the road, passing the vesp that Huw had stirred, now back in its familiar roosting place.
Lynne came close and held Huw’s arm, and they stood together watching until the Hushed passed out of sight behind the trees. Then Lynne tugged gently and they went back to the house.
Kelly was waiting at the back door, eyebrows raised. Huw gestured for her to go inside. Once he and Lynne had followed, he closed the door and slid the bolt across.
“He’s mad,” Lynne whispered.
“Yeah.”
“I mean it. Did you see his eyes? It came off him in waves.”
“Dad, what’s happening?” Jude asked.
“We were watching from the window,” Kelly said.
“Not much, mate,” Huw said, answering Jude. “Some people came by and wanted us to go with them, but I said we were happy here.”
“Is that the one you and Ally saw? The one who’d cut out his own tongue?”
“That was the one.” He ruffled his son’s hair. “But don’t worry, he’s got friends with him, and they’ll help each other out.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of,” Kelly said.
Huw saw his own fears reflected in his family’s eyes. They’d already decided that this place could not become their home, and that soon they would have to head out for somewhere safer. Somewhere colder. In those quiet moments in bed, sharing warmth, he and Kelly had agreed between them that their original destination, Scotland, would be their best bet. But now perhaps their hand would be forced.
There was no telling what the Reverend might do next.
* * *
Huw and Ally insisted on having their regular time alone that evening, her iPad open on the table before them. They shared a bowl of peach slices in syrup, passing the fork back and forth as Ally scrolled through websites and articles she thought her dad should see.
None of it was good news. And to Huw it all felt very far away. Over the past couple of weeks their world had narrowed down to this house, this valley, where they could go for food, how long the power would stay on, when the phone reception might become problematic. He was frankly amazed that the electricity supply remained functional, but 3G reception was becoming intermittent. The Internet frequently dropped out while Ally was online. So a family being chased down by a flock of vesps in France… a man in York who paraded naked through the streets wearing the slaughtered creatures’ tendrils from a thong around his neck… the American President promising aid, while several sources claimed he was not the President at all… these were all stories from another world. He cared, but nothing he read helped him and his family confront their own immediate problems. The President could not talk sense to the Reverend. The vesp-killer in York had a long way to come to help them.
After a few minutes of this, Huw placed his hand over Ally’s and lifted it away from the screen.
“We’re in danger,” he signed.
Ally nodded.
“There’s no saying what he’ll do.”
She nodded again. “Are you and Mum still talking about Scotland?”
Huw smiled. She was a clever girl.
“Can you tell me exactly how far it is?” he asked, nodding at the iPad.
She brought up an app and entered the details of where they were, then slid it across so that Huw could tap in the postcode of his parents’ old place, Red Rock. A route map appeared with a summation of distances and times, had they been driving a car.
One hundred and thirty miles. Almost three hours by car.
“That’s a long way on foot,” Ally whispered. “And Lynne…”
Huw sat back and sighed. He wished Glenn were still with them. He wished they hadn’t had this extra horror thrown at them, on top of what had already happened. But they had to deal with the situation rather than try to wish it away. Wishing, praying, placing fate in ephemeral hands, that was the Reverend’s domain. And look where that had got him.
“We have tonight to sleep on it. I’ll chat to your mum. I want you sleeping in with Jude tonight.”
Ally did not argue and he loved her for that. If something happened—if the Reverend returned—they both knew that Ally would not hear.
He stood and kissed his daughter’s forehead, and thought, I’m so lucky to have her. She really was a remarkable kid. Loving, intelligent, possessing a great sense of humour, she hadn’t morphed into anything approaching the monster teen he’d once feared. She was beautiful too, in an unconscious way that sometimes made his heart ache. He’d always told her that she would be a good catch for some young lad one day, and she’d blush and tell him to get lost, Aww, Dad, don’t talk about stuff like that. But he’d meant it.
Now, he wasn’t so sure. The future was an unknown land, growing even more uncertain as days went on. The vesps were one thing, but now there was the Reverend, the Hushed, and what was happening here might well be happening all over.
Leaving the room, going to look for his wife, he wished for one more night of peace.
* * *
Huw walked the house as he had every night, checking that doors and windows were closed and locked, looking outside into the darkness, fearing what was out there. Tonight he feared a little more.
Everything looked quiet. It was raining again and almost completely dark, with very little star- or moonlight making its way through the clouds. When he shone the torch out through the window it illuminated a splay of falling rain, the splashing ground, and very little else. There was no sign of movement, no indication that the Reverend and his people were anywhere near. And why should they be? They had turned him and the Hushed away, and now he would be back wherever he came from, ready to invite other travellers into his flock. There was no reason for him to come here again. None.
Yet Huw couldn’t shake the idea that the Reverend was not finished with them.
He pulled the curtain aside from the window beside the front door and shone the torch outside. Wet, puddled paving, driving rain, nothing else. He sighed. Perhaps the morning would shed more light on what their course of action should be.
Upstairs he looked in on Ally and Jude. Jude was asleep and Ally was looking at the iPad beneath her covers in the other bed, power lead snaking across the floor. He smiled and blew her a silent kiss she did not see.
In the room he and Kelly had taken for themselves, his wife was sitting up in bed. Her washed clothing hung on a rack she’d found in the bathroom.
“Kids asleep?” she asked.
He nodded, pushing the door half-closed behind him. As he stripped he realised how much his own clothes were starting to stink. They washed them as well as they could, but they’d left the vehicles up on the hillside carrying almost nothing. The dead woman’s wardrobes had given them a few items they could use, but he dreamed of finding another abandoned house with fresh clothes for them all.
He crawled into bed beside his wife and she snuggled down next to him, resting her head on his chest. He put his arm around her. She was smooth, comforting, familiar and warm.
“We’ll have to leave tomorrow,” he whispered.
“Yeah. He’s made us so on edge, we can’t live like this.”
“Not only the Reverend. The weather. Ally’s seen more and more about them being affected by the cold and…”
Kelly rested her hand between his legs, gently kneading.
“And we need snow. And…”
She raised her face to his and kissed him.
“What was that for?”
“Because I love you.”
“Love you too.”
She grabbed him and started to stroke, slow and rhythmic. Huw could not remember the last time they’d made love. Not since the vesps, and a while before that, too. They loved each other but life was busy, tiring, filled with things to think about and do; places to go for Ally and Jude, hospital visits for Lynne, work and chores and a thousand other reasons to be too tired, too bored.
They kissed again, deep and long, and she slid on top of him, her hand still working, breasts pressed against his chest. He ran his fingertips down her back, squeezing her behind, delving between her legs.
“We’ll have to be quiet,” he whispered, thinking of Lynne and Jude. But Kelly started laughing silently, and he felt a giggle rising, emerging as a series of heavy breaths.
“I’ll scream when I come,” she breathed into his mouth. “What a way to go.”
They took their time making love, and for a while everything else went away.
* * *
Lying there afterwards, Kelly’s fast breathing slowing into sleep, trying to make out the shape of the room around him in the darkness, Huw heard a noise. A rustle, then a soft knock.
He sat up in bed. Kelly murmured beside him but lay still, saying no more.
He breathed gently from his mouth, head to one side as he tried to listen again. One of the kids or Lynne rolling in their bed? A vesp slithering across the roof, perhaps to get out of the rain? The sound did not come again but he heard it over and over, trying to analyse what it might have been.
Maybe it was even his own heartbeat settling down. He’d been lying down, head buried in the pillow, and perhaps he’d heard a rush of blood through his ear, or—
Another sound, and this one was from outside.
He jumped from the bed and dashed to the window, pulling the curtain aside. Very little was visible out there, other than the faintest tone difference between land and sky. He hefted the torch, pressed it against the glass to reduce reflection, then flicked it on. For just a moment he saw movement out by the garden wall, but when he blinked it was gone. He wasn’t sure what it had been, or even whether it was anything other than rain and shadows dancing in the torch beam.
“What is it?” Kelly whispered.
“Don’t know,” he said. “Nothing.” But he switched off the torch, pulled on his trousers, and went to check that it really was nothing.
The landing was silent. He could hear Lynne’s gentle snoring and one of the kids shifting in their sleep. Rain hushed across the rooftop above his head. Somewhere, water dripped. There was nothing else.
He moved to the head of the staircase and paused, head tilted as he listened.
“Huw!” Kelly whispered from their room. “There’s someone leaving the house!”
Ally? Jude?
He thought of that sound again, the rustle and soft bump. He turned on the torch and aimed it down, illuminating the stairwell and hallway beyond. Something dangled on a string inside the front door, hanging from the letter flap. Several other similar shapes were scattered across the entrance mat, trailing the strings that had been used to lower them quietly inside.
“Huw—” Kelly began, standing naked at their bedroom door.
And then the phones began to ring.