An early snowstorm in parts of western Germany has resulted in tens of thousands of vesps becoming slow, lethargic, disorientated, and easy to hunt and kill. Dozens of groups of citizens—some containing police or army members, many more simply well-meaning civilians—have been stalking the silent city of Frankfurt killing vesps with knives and hastily fashioned spears, gardening implements, and bows and arrows. The corpses are gathered into bags and then thrown into the Rhine. There is no accurate count being kept. Communications are difficult. But in this unseasonably cold snap, the fightback has begun.
Reuters, Tuesday, 6 December 2016
There are 1,233 people safe in Antarctica.
Angus MacReady, Halley Antarctic Research Station, Tuesday, 6 December 2016
They had to leave the house.
It was Jude who marshalled them, brought them together, and thought of everything. He busied himself around the kitchen, pausing every now and then to listen at the door leading into the rest of the house. The phones had stopped ringing. There was no sign of the Hushed. Huw watched his son with pride, but every time he closed his eyes it felt like his skull had been cracked in two, his eyes pulped in their sockets.
He’d smacked into the heavy door’s edge face-first, hard enough to break his nose, chip two teeth, and put a three-inch gash in his forehead. The bleeding probably made it seem worse. He was dizzy and felt sick, and suspected he might have a mild concussion. Every time he stood the world swayed, and he remained leaning against the table.
Kelly was also injured and she stood close to him. But her incapacity was of a different kind. She had just seen her mother die—not witnessed it first-hand, but close enough so that the distinction didn’t matter. She was shivering, pressed close to Huw’s side. He did his best to examine the wounds on her shoulder, chest and hands. They were swollen and bleeding, and quite possibly infected. There was no saying what exotic, unknown diseases those bastard things carried.
Ally seemed okay. She followed Jude, taller and bigger than him yet at that moment doing as he said. Huw watched his daughter, looking for signs of trauma or injuries, but he guessed anything serious was on the inside. That would have more of an impact on her later, but right now it meant that she was still strong and capable.
We’re all going to be fucked in the head, he thought. Maybe the same, maybe in different ways. He blinked slowly and behind his eyelids everything was red.
They had to bathe, clean and dress their wounds, but proper treatment would have to wait. Everything would have to wait. Because they had to get away.
Jude and Ally gathered together everything they could use. The broom handle, now a one-ended spear, the knife stained dark with vesp blood. The holdall he’d brought down from the bedroom, packed with warm clothing and a couple of boxes of shotgun shells. He’d tried loading the weapon but Ally had gently taken it from him, placing it on the table.
Every few seconds Jude went to the window and looked out. He scanned left and right, shading his eyes against the glass to block out the kitchen’s weak light.
Huw knew that they might come at any moment. He didn’t really know how many of the Hushed there were, and although some might have been injured or killed, there were probably more who had escaped. He might have hit two or three with the shotgun blasts. He felt cool about that, calm, and even if regrets came later, he was glad there was nothing now. The tall man who had grabbed Ally was almost certainly dead, along with Lynne. Maybe the Reverend, as well.
Hopefully the Reverend.
They might attack again. They could be fleeing into the countryside. It could be that the few survivors were huddled down under trees or against walls, adrift now that their leader was vesp fodder.
Huw didn’t care. As long as they stayed away, he didn’t give a shit about what might happen to those poor, wretched people. That felt harsh, but it also felt right. Every single thing he loved and cared about was in this room.
Jude and Ally stood by the table, Jude frowning and looking around as if to assess what he had gathered. He glanced at his parents and away again, not wanting to look at them for too long. Huw had noticed this, and hardly blamed his son. Huw’s face was a bloody mess and he swayed where he stood, and Kelly seemed lost.
Huw squeezed his wife’s good shoulder, trying to bring her back to them. She let out a heavy gasp and looked around the kitchen, gaze resting on Huw. She assessed his face, seeing his wounds and his blood, then stared into his eyes.
Huw tried to smile. It hurt his broken nose and split lip, and he could feel tooth shards on his tongue.
Kelly pulled away and went to her children. She buried her face in Ally’s hair, then dipped her head and did the same to Jude, and Huw realised that she was smelling them.
Tears blurred his already fluid vision. When he wiped them away Kelly was in front of him again, checking his wounds with a calmer eye.
“You walk?” she whispered.
“Yeah.” He touched her face. “You okay?”
She laughed once, softly, then rested her hand on his cheek. “Yeah. Dandy. We need to go.”
“I know. Jude and Ally…”
“They’ve got all they can. But there’s one more thing Ally needs.”
Huw frowned, confused.
“Her iPad.”
“It’s upstairs?”
Kelly nodded. “I’ll go with her.”
“No, I—” Huw moved away from the table and the world swam, and his wife’s gentle hands eased him back again.
“I’ll go with her,” she said again. She lifted the shotgun from the table, broke it open and reloaded. “Jude, stay with your dad and keep watch. Hold the knife. If you see anyone coming…” She trailed off, unable to suggest a signal that might be safe. There were vesps in the house now, and broken windows, and any noise might bring down the chaos again.
“Kel,” Huw said, “get the old woman’s medicine bag.” They’d seen it in her room, a carrier bag filled with dozens of bottles, foil packets and sachets of medicines they mostly didn’t know.
Kelly nodded. She looked across the room at the range cooker, seemingly lost again, eyes distant. Seeing her mother die.
Ally touched her arm, and the two of them went to the hall doorway.
“Won’t be long,” Ally signed to Huw, and he nodded and smiled, ignoring the pain, loving her more than ever.
* * *
Mum went first, taking each stair slowly, shotgun held out in front of her. If she had to use it she’d doom us all, but somehow I still felt safer knowing that she was armed. Maybe I’d watched too much TV, too many horror films.
I carried a knife and the roasting fork. I was shaking, but confident and determined. We went to my room first and I snapped up the iPad from beneath the bed. I took shoes and a jacket too, and in Jude’s room we gathered more of his clothes.
There was a vesp roosting in my parents’ room. It sat on a dressing table just inside the smashed window, moving gently from side to side as if trying to hypnotise the open space. I thought about crossing the carpeted room and stabbing the thing, but the thought of such sudden violence scared me. It might squeal, thrash, knock things around and bring more of them. So I stood ready with my weapons as Mum walked slowly, so slowly, across the room, gathering up the bag of medicines from beside the bed, bending and picking up Dad’s boots, backing out slowly. Each footfall might creak a floorboard. Every movement could shush clothing, click a knee joint, nudge a piece of furniture.
I noticed the smear of blood around the creature’s mouth and across its strange, arrow-shaped head. Maybe it was satiated, and slight, subtle noises no longer interested it. It was a possibility I should consider, and when I had the chance I’d write it down. I tried not to imagine what or who it had been eating.
It was another fact that might help us fight them. And now we all had first-hand experience.
* * *
We left the house ten minutes later. Dad and Mum held each other up, my mum carrying the shotgun. Jude hefted the holdall of clothes and food, and I carried two hessian shopping bags tied across my back.
Heading for the lane meant that we had to cross the garden. Dawn was breathing across the hilltops to the east, and I could make out three shapes lying on the ground, one of them a little girl. There was no need to go closer because I knew what they were. I wondered what Dad thought. One or two of those he had shot, the others had probably died when the screams of the wounded attracted the vesps. I was sure he noticed the bodies, but he did not even slow his pace.
I was glad. He shouldn’t feel guilty. He’d been protecting us, and right then he was the best, bravest father in the world.
When we reached the gate, Jude went ahead and examined the catch. He turned and shook his head, signing, “I think it’ll make too much noise.” So we climbed, Jude and me first, then Mum, and finally we all helped Dad over the gate. I was pleased to see that he looked better. He seemed stronger in the weak light, his wounded face no longer bleeding so much.
Mum paused and looked to the right. Over there, around a curve in the wall, lay her dead mother. I remembered again that smile as she’d run past, and I wondered what had been going through her mind. She’d known that she was about to die, and in great pain. But she was also doing her best to protect the family she loved so much.
I couldn’t bear thinking about it for too long. It was painful and confusing, and it also felt so hopeless. No one else would know about her sacrifice. No one would care.
Lynne had been a true believer. She and I had often talked about God, and sometimes I saw her unhappiness at my disbelief. But she also respected my opinion, and my insistence that I could not simply change my mind to please her. She’d never tried to force ideas upon me. I hoped her faith had helped her in those final awful moments.
I touched Mum’s arm and gestured along the road. She looked at me blankly, then shook her head. She walked along the wall to where Lynne must have been lying. We saw her standing there and looking down for a while. She didn’t bend to get any closer. She just looked.
Then she came back, and the only thing she signed was, “No Reverend.”
We started walking. Only a couple of minutes later Jude looked back and paused, pointing.
The lights in the house had gone off.
“The Grey?” Jude signed.
I nodded. It made sense. Just when things were so bad, they got worse.
* * *
He was waiting for us on a small footbridge spanning a stream a hundred metres from the road. Jude saw him first, and when Mum spotted him she lifted the shotgun and aimed it. For a loaded moment I thought she was going to shoot, but Mum was not so foolish, though her rage radiated from her in fearsome waves.
The Reverend came to us. He was on his own. He was limping properly now, right arm held awkwardly across his chest, his white collar speckled with blood. Perhaps he’d been hit by a few shotgun pellets, and I hoped they hurt. I was sure that later I’d think of him as a wretched, pathetic victim, but right now he was a monster.
I had no idea how he’d escaped the storm of vesps that had taken the tall man and my grandmother. But I would never give him the satisfaction of asking.
There was a ditch beside the road and he stood on the other side, squinting at me. He’d lost his glasses. He didn’t even seem to notice the rest of my family. I looked around frantically, suspecting a trap or an ambush of some sort, but there was no one else there. Maybe the other Hushed were all dead, or perhaps they’d abandoned their Reverend after he had failed to get them what he’d promised.
Mum was still aiming the shotgun at him. She was shaking, and I could see that she was breathing rapidly, but the barrel held steady and true. The Reverend did not even seem to notice the weapon. The longer he stared at me, the more I wished Mum would shoot. If we ran fast enough, perhaps we could get away before his screams doomed him.
But of course we would not escape the vesps that would zero in on us. Not out here in the open. I could see several of them now, in the trees and bushes, and a few flying past close enough to reach us in a matter of seconds.
We’re under siege, I thought. It had only become obvious after we’d left the cottage. We were prisoners of the vesps, even out here in the wild and beneath the widest, deepest skies I had ever seen.
Jude stepped close to the edge of the ditch and gave the Reverend the finger. It wasn’t funny, not really. But it broke some of the tension that had been building, and it also seemed to break his gaze. He looked at Jude, then at our parents. There was very little communication, even with his eyes. He simply looked us over and turned away, limping back the way he had come. He did not stop at the bridge but kept going, soon consumed by the evergreen forest’s shadows as the sun finally broke above the hillsides behind us.
“We need to walk,” Dad signed. “Get as far as we can as quickly as possible. Then we’ll pause at noon, find somewhere to rest and sort ourselves out.” I knew that we should be treating the wounds now—his broken nose and slashed forehead and lip, and especially my mother’s vesp bites. But I also knew that he was right. We needed to get away from this place.
Walking as quickly as we could with the injuries we carried was our way of running.
Jude and I took turns helping Dad. He seemed much better, but still sometimes had to pause to gather himself, shaking his head softly as if to clear it. Mum’s injuries didn’t seem to bother her too much. But even though we had to walk in silence, she seemed further away than all of us.
I tried not to imagine what the night would bring, now that we had all fallen into the Grey.
* * *
We walked for several hours, pausing often so that Dad could try to shake his dizziness away. I was worried that he was hurt worse than he was letting on, but he refused to let anyone examine him closely. He signed that his nose was too sore, so painful that it hurt to breathe, and even breathing through his mouth hurt his damaged lips and broken teeth. Maybe it was that. Perhaps he was simply breathless because it hurt to breathe.
We followed bridleways north along the valley, then down towards the shores of the lake. Windermere, perhaps, or maybe one of the smaller ones. I wasn’t sure and it didn’t seem to matter. The winter sun beat away the cold, and I was relieved that the rain had finally cleared away. The cool blue sky was a welcome sight.
Vesps flew around, a few higher up, most skimming only metres above the ground. They used their sonar to avoid trees, following the landscape and occasionally skipping around us. I could smell them everywhere, even during those rare moments when there were none in sight. It was as if they were making the world their own by spreading their rank odour.
Several times during that morning’s walk, Mum back-tracked the way we’d come. She was worried that the Reverend was following, and while the rest of us slowed down, she would hide a few hundred metres back to wait. It was always tense, me and Jude glancing nervously at each other while we waited, Dad taking the time to close his eyes and rest. Several times he rooted through the bag of medicines, but none of them were labelled. He told me that he had a pounding headache, but I worried it was more than that.
Mum always came back within twenty minutes. She never saw any sign of pursuit. But I could not shake the idea that the Reverend was still following us. I remembered his staring, mad eyes, and the way he’d wanted me, ignoring everyone else. He had removed his own ability to communicate and craved another, and perhaps in his skewed view of the world I might have been the Hushed’s salvation. But he had corrupted everything supposedly good about himself.
It was terrifying how quickly everything had gone bad. I’d heard the saying about how if you take away three square meals you end up with anarchy, but I’d always had more faith in society, had thought people were mostly good. I’d thought that it was a minority that caused trouble. But it now seemed that we had always existed on a knife-edge, and the vesps had pushed it home.
Close to the lake we saw the first group of people. There were maybe fifteen adults and children, walking along a narrow lane that headed down between beached sailing boats to the water’s edge. Our two groups saw each other at the same time. We all paused. Tentative waves were offered. I saw a couple of guns resting on shoulders, and several long-handled gardening tools. One man carried a toddler on his shoulders. An old man used a walking stick. They were refugees.
“We need to stay alone,” Dad signed, and I nodded in agreement.
Two people approached us, a fat man and a short, attractive woman. He wore a suit and coat, completely ill-prepared. She wore running tights and a waterproof top. They seemed familiar with each other, and their uncertain smiles put me at ease.
“No signing,” Dad mouthed at me, and I nodded. I understood.
It was Jude and Mum who went across the field to meet them. Mum left the shotgun behind. When they met they shook hands and started jotting messages on writing pads, the fat man and Jude keeping a watch out for vesps, the two women talking. They conversed for some time, then parted company with another handshake. I was surprised and moved to see the woman draw my mother into a hug.
As Jude and Mum returned, she was writing on the pad, still eager not to reveal our signing abilities to the other group.
We agreed to stay apart. More people, more risk of noise. They’re heading for the west coast, Whitehaven. Most of them come from this side of the Pennines. They’ve gone through it, too.
I raised an eyebrow and pointed at this. Mum mouthed her response.
“Not the Reverend. Other stuff. All bad. There were eight more of them four days ago.”
You told them about the Reverend? I jotted on the pad, and Mum nodded.
We watched the people move on along the road, the short woman glancing back several times as she went. As they turned out of sight around a bend in the lane she offered one last wave. I waved back.
We ate a little of the food Jude had gathered, tearing a loaf of bread to share. It was already stale. I knew we’d have to find more food soon, and also shelter. But the idea of approaching houses or settlements worried me.
We continued down to the lake and followed a footpath along the shore. There were more houses, holiday rentals dotting the shoreline and several larger settlements the further north we went. We skirted around these silent, dead places. Vesps sat on rooftops and circled above the villages, and I could only imagine how many bodies they guarded, how many dormant eggs waiting to hatch at the first sign of noise.
Around two in the afternoon we topped a small rise and looked down on what was left of a small town on the lake’s edge. There were several hundred buildings arranged around a bay, with a marina, a handful of boats moored, and several larger tourist vessels adrift on the open water.
Some of the town had burned. Blackened buildings pointed charred roof timbers at the sky. Gutted rooms lay exposed to the elements, the remnants of personal belongings blackened and sad. Walls had fallen, and gardens and roads were smeared with charcoal shades of ash and soot. The flames were long gone—I guessed the fire had happened days ago, if not weeks—but the smell was still there. Damp ash, the memory of flame, the waft of rot. It was a sobering sight. I had never seen anything like it, not away from a computer or TV screen, and I hoped I never would again. But I knew that with that hope was a certainty that there were more terrible sights in my future than in my past.
The stillness was disconcerting.
Jude pointed past the town then turned to us, his young face grim. He should be smiling more, I thought. He should be laughing and playing and making things up, not wishing things away.
“I think we should check one of those houses,” he signed. He’d pointed past the gutted lakeside community at a rise in the land, where several big, isolated houses commanded priceless views out across the lake.
Nobody disagreed.
* * *
The house was huge, pristine, abandoned. It didn’t look like it had been lived in for a while, and I guessed it was a holiday home. We checked that all the outer doors and windows were secure, then Dad sent us back to the other side of the garden while he forced a side door. He took his time, using a shovel from the shed and easing the lock slowly, gently, so as not to make too much noise.
Inside we did a full circuit of the house checking for vesps. And once we were sure that it was empty, and as safe as anywhere could be, we sat in the kitchen and relaxed for the first time that day.
Dad was asleep in seconds.
* * *
He dreamed of getting there just in time to stop the car crash that had killed his parents and injured his beautiful daughter. He ran onto the road with his hands held out and shouted, “Stop now or everything will change!” The car skidded to a halt, bumper mere inches from his knees. But he was not about to move. He knew what would happen if he did—he’d seen it all in a terrible nightmare of hospital beds, recovery, and then silent monsters that sought to finish what this crash would begin—and he was nothing if not a good father. He’d do anything to save his little girl.
His parents sat in the front of the car, looking surprised and angry at his intrusion. They were far older than he had ever known them, perhaps the age they would have lived to if the crash had not shortened their lives. But it was not them he was concerned about. Ally opened the car’s rear door and jumped out, smiling when she saw her dad and about to ask what was wrong, why he was here, what he was doing in the middle of the road, and he would hear her just once more, remember those sweet tones and the way her voice dropped deeper when she was being cheeky—
She opened her mouth to talk but no words emerged. All she managed to utter was the sound of cold winds across deserted hillsides, heavy rain pummelling mountaintops in endless, eternal efforts to erode them, echoing booms as chunks of ice fell away into shadowy valleys. Distance and time, both stretched out into mindless, endless infinity. The sounds of desolation.
Huw fell forward onto the car bonnet but hit nothing.
* * *
“Dad,” Jude said. “Dad. Wake up.”
Huw opened his eyes. They hurt. Everything hurt, and it took him a while to come to his senses. Jude was standing beside the sofa on which he had been sleeping in the huge family kitchen, tapping his arm lightly as if scared to hurt him.
“Dad?”
“What is it, mate?”
“Mum said to come and see.”
“See what?”
“Don’t know. Neither does she. That’s why she said to come.”
That stirred Huw from his prone position, and he groaned past the pounding headache and pains in his face to stand and follow his son. He only then noticed how much the light had faded.
“How long have I been asleep?”
“A couple of hours. Mum said you needed the sleep and that she’s worried you’ve cracked your skull.” Jude looked up and back at him with such a wide, innocent expression that Huw had to laugh.
“Don’t worry, Jude. If I’d done that my brains would be leaking.”
Jude smiled and ran through to the living room, but Huw followed slowly. He’d been trying to assess the pain in his face and head all day. Skull fractures didn’t have to be severe, did they? He could still walk, talk and function, couldn’t he?
The living room was even larger than the kitchen. At its centre was a U-shaped sofa, big enough for twenty people, which faced out towards a decked veranda with metal and glass balustrading. The first thing he saw were the three vesps hunkered down at the base of the balustrade, sheltered from the weather and motionless. The next was the fire.
It was way across the lake, miles away on the facing hillside, and it was big. It pulsed and reduced; flames seemed to shrink and grow again as if the distance between the house and fire was constantly changing. Huw knew that air conditions could alter the way something so distant appeared.
“Huw,” Kelly whispered. She was propped with Ally on one end of the leather sofa, not too close to the window, not too exposed. As she turned to him the reflected fire barely touched her face.
“What time is it?” he signed.
“Gone five. Wanted to let you rest, but then we saw that.”
He walked to her side, touched her shoulder, and they watched together.
“What do you think it is?” Jude signed.
“Someone setting fires,” Ally said. She’d been watching them, not the distant flames, eager to be involved in the conversation.
“Why would they do that?” Jude asked.
“Trying to kill vesps?” Ally asked.
“Or maybe just because they can,” Huw said. Since they’d met the Reverend, he’d been thinking about how this sudden change in society might affect some people. Most would simply be doing their best to survive, like him and his family. But even he had changed, moving on from that strange, stressful, ostensibly civilised society he had inhabited only weeks ago. He had killed people last night, he was sure of it. At least one with the shotgun, maybe more, and if he hadn’t killed them outright then his shooting of them had led to the vesps finishing the job. But he had barely thought of them since. They were shapes in the shadows that had threatened his family. They were dangers, they meant nothing to him and he had put them down. Perhaps they would revisit him in nightmares, their tongueless mouths weeping and sad. But he thought not.
He remembered Lynne leaving the kitchen. He’d seen her through a haze of blood and pain, rushing out into the darkness, and he’d already had an inkling of her intention. That death was not meaningless. Her death he would remember.
“There’s something else,” Ally said. She moved across to the wall and flicked a light switch. Nothing happened.
“The Grey,” Huw said, and his daughter nodded. Part of him had hoped it was just the house they had left behind that had lost its electricity. Now it seemed that it was the whole region.
“I want to go,” Jude said. “I don’t like the fires. I want to get away from here.”
“Not by night,” Huw said. “We’ll stay here, all in this room. Two of us sleep, two of us stay awake and keep watch. How about that, mate? You and me keep watch together?”
Jude looked sad but he nodded.
“I’ll bet there are candles somewhere,” Kelly said.
“I don’t think we should light them.”
They found some tinned food in the kitchen and ate a meal of cold beans in curry sauce, followed by fruit cocktail in syrup. The food of the gods. Then they sat silent in the darkness, watching the fire across the lake pulse like a giant, blinking eye.