by Mark Morris
"That doesn't answer the question," growled Sue. "Did you cause the flood?"
The man's stare was impenetrable. "No."
"I don't believe you."
The man shrugged. "That's your perogative."
"What plans do you have for the survivors of the flood? For people like us?" Sue said, beginning to lose her cool.
"Why do you assume we have plans?"
"Do you intend to wipe us out?"
"Of course not. We're the same as you."
"You're not the same," Sue snapped. "We've seen what you're really like. One of your... kind killed our friend, and another one nearly killed me. I've still got the scars to show for it."
"I can't answer for all of my kind," the man said, emphasizing the word in a way that seemed almost mocking, "just as you can't answer for all of yours."
Sue glared at him, chin thrust forward pugnaciously.
"Where do you come from?" Steve asked.
"Why is that important?" said the man. "What would you do with that information if we gave it to you? Would you attempt to use it against us?"
"Of course not," said Steve. "We're not like that."
"Then what are you like?"
"We're just... people. We want to get by. Survive. Live a quiet life."
"Then do that. We're not stopping you."
"But you will," said Sue, 11 when you're strong enough."
"Strong?" said the man. "What's strong? You've got guns, we've got information. Who's the stronger?"
"Oh, I think you are," said Greg.
"Then give us the guns and we'll give you the infomnation," said the man, and suddenly he was smiling again. "So you see? We are the same, after all. You ask us who we are? Why don't you just hold up a mirror to yourselves?"
"You're not us," Sue muttered. "We haven't attacked you."
"He killed one of ouryoung," said the man,pointing at Max.
"That was a mistake," said Sue.
Still smiling, the man said, "Now who's lying?"
"This is our world," Sue shouted like a petulant child. The blandness of the man's voice made Sue sound like the unreasonable one. "It's ours too," he said.
"We didn't handle that well," said Steve.
They were back at the service station, sitting around the camping stove. It was late afternoon and the sky was already darkening. As they had trooped back from Whitthorpe, gray clouds had ganged up on the sun. Minutes later a blustery wind carrying cold, stinging rain had blown up out of nowhere. By mutual consent they had decided to stay at Woodall another night and strike out for new pastures the next morning.
"We asked the right questions," Sue said bitterly, "but they didn't give us any answers."
"At least they didn't kill us," said Libby. "That's got to be a positive thing, right?"
"The only reason they didn't kill us was because we were armed and right next to their precious eggs."
"That's one possibility," said Greg.
"Oh, come on. Don't tell me you believe that `We're just like you' bullshit? Humans and monsters living in perfect harmony?"
"Not harmony, perhaps," Greg said, "but mutual ambivalence may be possible."
"You mean it might be they just don't care about us?" said Max.
"Exactly. We're of no consequence to them. Perhaps they regard us in the way we regard... I don't know... cats, for instance."
"As cute little fluffballs they want to keep as pets?" said Abby.
Greg smiled. "Well, perhaps cats is not the best example."
"I still think they're out to get us," muttered Sue.
Libby sighed. "And why's that?"
"Well, why else would they make themselves look like us if not for the purpose of infiltration? It's a hunting tool. They do it to confuse us, catch us off guard. It makes us easier prey"
"Maybe on this planet our shape is just more practical," said Libby.
Greg was about to offer his opinion when something hit one of the windows of the service station restaurant with enough force to make them all jump.
Sue and Max were first on their feet, Steve a split second behind them. All three pointed their guns in the direction of the sound, but the day was now so dark that they could see nothing but their own candlelit reflections on the rainspeckled glass.
Libby said, "Maybe it was just a bird flying into the glass, confused by the candlelight."
"Better to be safe than sorry," said Sue. She reached the window, cupped her hands around her face and peered into the gathering dusk.
"Can you see anything?" Abby asked.
"There's something on the window here, a mark of some kind, but I can't make it out. Could someone bring me a torch?"
Libby unfastened Sue's rucksack, pulled out her torch and carried it to her.
"Thanks," Sue said, and turned it on.
The mark on the window proved to be a smear of sticky liquid, slightly more viscous than the rain, which was already diluting it. Sue frowned and touched her fingertips to the inside of the window. "If I didn't know better I'd say it was saliva."
"Looks like dog slaver," said Max. "My aunt Leanne had a long-haired retriever and a patio door into her back garden. Wilson, her dog, was always making marks like that on the glass. Used to drive Aunt Leanne mental." The trace of a wistful smile flitted across his face.
"But there aren't any dogs around anymore," said Sue.
"Just because we haven't seen any doesn't mean there aren't any," Libby said.
"But the only people who survived were the ones on the top floors of hotels and apartment blocks. Dogs aren't allowed in places like that"
"In some flats you're allowed to keep pets," said Libby. "It's not beyond the realms of possibility that some survived."
"Could you pass the torch?" Steve asked.
Sue handed it over, and Steve pressed it up against the glass, forcing ochre light to spill weakly into the shadowed world beyond. Everything at ground level-every building and tree, every overturned vehicle, every chunk of debris-was now melded together, as if blackness had seeped up from the earth and absorbed it all. The sky above was a smoky violet, deepening to near-black at the horizon.
The torchlight washed across the blackness, plucking out vague shapes. What made Libby gasp, however, were the half dozen or more pairs of eyes, gleaming and milky, that reflected the light back at them.
"You were right, Max," said Sue in disbelief. "It's a pack of fucking dogs."
"They must have been attracted by the candles," said Steve.
"Or the smell of food," added Max.
Sue glanced at Greg and Abby, who were still sitting beside the camping stove. "Quick, blow out the candles."
As Abby scrambled to do so, Libby said, "Where can they have come from?"
"Who knows?" said Steve.
"As long as they move on, I don't care if we never find out," said Sue.
The candles were extinguished now, the air full of bluegray smoke and the smell of hot wax. Steve switched off the torch too, and suddenly they were plunged into blackness. Libby couldn't decide what was worse: not knowing where the dogs were or seeing the baleful glow of their eyes in the darkness. She snaked out a hand, seeking the warmth of Steve's. For a moment she imagined touching sleek fur, a cold, wet snout, the bristly fuzz of a nuzzle curling back over sharp teeth. She shuddered and then she found Steve's hand and clutched it gratefully.
There was something about the dogs that bothered her. Something about the lean muscularity of their barely glimpsed shapes in the darkness. It had been troubling her since the torchlight had picked them out, but it was only now that she realized what had been preying on her mind.
She pressed her mouth to Steve's ear. "I've just thought of something."
His hair, longer than it had been when she had first met him, brushed her cheek. "What?" he whispered.
"The dogs. What kind would you say they were?"
"I don't know. They looked like guard dogs. Dobermans or something."
"That's w
hat I thought too," she said, "but don't you think it's weird that they're all the same?"
He went very still. "What are you suggesting?"
"I don't know," she said. "It's just odd, that's all."
They lapsed back into silence, each pondering their own thoughts. Libby wondered how thick the glass of the windows was; whether, if the dogs were still out there, she would be able to hear them. She wondered how long they would wait here in the pitch-blackness until someone decided it was safe to relight the candles.
And then, from somewhere over to her left, she heard the soft pad of footfalls.
Gooseflesh spread across Libby's shoulders and crawled down her back. She huddled closer to Steve, wanting to ask him whether he had heard the sounds too, but she was too terrified to speak. She had thought, back at the farmhouse, that if she could get through what was happening to her she would be able to endure anything; there would be no need to be afraid ever again. But she was wrong. Fear never went away. It just kept changing and coming back.
She gripped a fistful of Steve's grimy sweater as she heard a low, threatening growl from somewhere close to where Greg and Abby had been sitting. Next moment the torch that Steve had used minutes before clicked back on, releasing a cone of light that punched through the darkness. Illuminated in the light was a dog, which, for the brief second it stood there, seemed to Libby as big as a lion. Its fur was black and sleek as oil, its eyes an eerie combination of pearly white blindness and a penetrating and devilish fire. It seemed to absorb the light, or perhaps even to repel it-and then, with a flash of teeth, it leaped.
Libby screamed as the dog launched itself, snarling, towards Greg and Abby. Abby dived for safety, scattering mugs and toppling the unlit camping stove with a trailing foot. Greg's reflexes, however, were not nearly as quick as hers. He could do little but half raise an arm before the dog was on him.
The attack was so swift, so savage, that Libby could later remember it only as a sequence of images flash-framing through her mind. She saw the dog in midair; Greg's head snapping back; a sudden jet of red in the torchlight; the dog lunging and pulling back, something ragged and dripping blood hanging from its jaws.
Then the shooting began-Steve, Sue and Max all firing simultaneously. Libby pressed her hands to her ears, mouth wide open to reduce the pressure, but it still seemed her brain was being squeezed tight by the sheer volume of noise. Within the roar and the flash and the smoke, she saw the dog hurled sideways by the force of the bullets slamming into it, saw its midsection disintegrate, its body fold and then fall, lifeless as a sack.
It was only then, as the firing continued, that she realized the dog was not alone, that there were others in the room, and that now, with a flash of eyes and a clatter-scrabble of claws, they were turning tail, streaming away, towards whatever hole they had used to enter the building.
At last the firing stopped, leaving a pulsing pain in her ears. Through a soup of smoke and half-light she saw Steve and Sue scrambling over to Greg, saw torchlight weaving from side to side, half illuminating Max, who was heading towards Abby. Libby, realizing she was the only one not doing anything, forced her own legs to move. She too headed towards Greg's prone form, and was almost there when her foot skidded from under her.
Looking down she saw that the floor was a lake of blood. For a couple of seconds the room spun, the world grayed out. She dug her fingernails into her palms and took several deep breaths. Then she went to see what could be done for Greg.
Steve was holding the torch, directing the bean into Greg's face. Under the torchlight Libby thought Greg's blood was the deepest, brightest red she had ever seen. He was coated in it from jaw to belly, but despite his injuries Steve and Sue did not appear to be tending to him, did not appear to be trying to staunch the flow. Steve was sitting on his heels, his head bowed and his shoulders slumped. Sue was kneeling on the floor-in the blood-beside Greg, and resting a bloodied hand lightly, almost tenderly, on his grizzled cheek.
Then Libby looked at Greg's face and immediately she knew he was dead. Though his eyes were bulging in panic and pain, there was no life in them; they were fixed, glazed. His mouth was also open, and Libby realized that the reason he was covered in blood was because a flap of his lower jaw, from his bottom lip down, had been torn away, taking a sizeable chunk of his throat with it.
She turned away and retched, at first producing a thin gruel and then a splash of more solid stuff. She was straightening when she noticed the dog, the one she had seen annihilated in a hail of bullets. It was twitching, and flickers of blue-white light were dancing in its black fur. And then, before her eyes, Libby saw it begin to change....
Although she screamed with enough force to taste blood in her throat, her ears were still so blocked that she barely heard it. Steve and Sue did, though, and as they spun round Libby saw Sue's face turn from slack anguish to absolute fury. Next moment the ex-policewoman was on her feet, her bloodsmeared hand grabbing her gun, aiming it, firing....
To Libby, the creature's transformation seemed almost instantaneous. One second it was a dead and mangled dog, tics of light jumping in its fur, and the next it was a mass of... what? Black jagged shapes, strange dark angles, flickering filaments of bluish and somehow negative light. It looked awkward, cumbersome, wrong, and yet despite that it moved quickly, and in such a way that Libby could not tell whether it was slithering or floating or crawling. But that was partly due to the fact that, try as she might, she couldn't quite focus upon it. There was something about the creature that baffled her perceptions, disengaged her eye. It was like a distant radio signal, a staccato image cast by a bad projector, a phantom. One second it was there, and Sue was firing at it, and the next it was gone.
Sue continued firing until her gun clicked empty. Then she simply stood there, her body taut, her dark hair hanging around her face in sweaty ropes. Her combat pants were covered in Greg's blood, her teeth bared in rage.
She dropped her gun, which hit the blood-slicked floor, no doubt with a sharp thud, though Libby couldn't hear it. Then, abruptly, she was crying, tears streaming down her grimy cheeks.
Libby went to her. She wrapped her arms around her and she held her tight.
And as the two women clung to one another, Libby thought, Another one gone, another one of us dead. She couldn't help but wonder who would be next.
Tuesday, 24`h October
In the last week we've done about 120 miles, all the way up the Ml to Leeds, and from there on to the Al. We're now at the Washington Birtley Services, a few miles south of Newcastle. It won't be long before we're in Scotland-though we'll still have a way to go even when we cross the border. We're all knackered, and we're having to be careful about our feet cos we've all got blisters (and Max has got ath-lete's foot). We've got disinfectant cream and foot powder, which we put on every night, even if we're exhausted. It always goes quiet when we're doing it cos I think we're all thinking about Greg and how he always said it was important we didn't get infections. In a funny way, looking after ourselves and being careful to treat any cuts or scrapes that we get sort of feels like honoring Greg, cos we're taking his advice, keeping ourselves as healthy as possible.
Talking of infections, Dad's arm seems to be healing up okay now, and the scar on Sue's back, which she got when she was attacked by that creature in London all those weeks ago, SEEMS all right, tho the skin's gone bluish, and she says it's still tender like a bruise. She doesn't complain about it, tho. In fact, she doesn't complain about anything. Sue is a tough cookie, tho I know Dad's worried about her, and I am too.
She's changed quite a bit since Greg died. She's angrier now, less approachable, and there's a kind of wildness in her eyes, which is scary sometimes. After Greg died she wanted to go straight back to Whitthorpe and kill all the baby aliens in their eggs. Dad and Libby said that would be suicide, but Sue didn't care. She said we were fool-ing ourselves if we thought we could get through this, and that we might as well go down fighting. For a while it looked as
tho she was going to go off and do it by herself, but in the end Dad, Libby and Max persuaded her not to. She's been okay since then, but she doesn't talk much, and like I said, she seems angry most of the time. Dad says it's a pity Greg isn't here, because Greg was always the voice of reason and he could always weigh everything up and think of the most sensible thing to do. Dad says that Greg was the steadying hand on the tiller, and it's only since he's gone that Dad says he has been able to appreciate how influential Greg was.
It's weird, cos there are now more women than men in the group. When we started we had 5 men and 4 women, and now there are 3 women and 2 men. Dad calls it the `group dynamic," which is a pretty cool phrase. Every time someone dies the `group dynamic" changes. That's cos when you get together with people you all adopt certain roles, and so when the group changes, either the roles change with it or the group becomes unbalanced. I suppose in a way it's like `Big Brother' or 7'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here,' where the group gets smaller and smaller as people get voted off.
I don't know if our group has become unbalanced or whether it's just that things are more desperate than they were. We don't argue all the time or anything, but we don't sit around chatting like we did be-fore. Dad and Libby get on, and me and Max get on, and me and Dad get on (of course), but Sue has become a bit of a loner, which is sad. It was not long ago that me and her had a really good chat. I've tried to start a conversation a couple of times, but I never get much back. I always feel like she doesn't want me bothering her.
Part of it could be that we're just tired cos we're walking further now without the oldies to slow us down (Dad's the oldest at 40), and part of it could be that we're hungry cos food is not as easy to find as it was. We've had to cut down a bit recently, and we've all lost weight. None of us look bad on it (in fact we all look pretty lean-tho I can't say we actually look GOOD cos all of us have got messy, dirty hair, and Dad and Max have got these scruffy beards, and we're all wearing blood - and dirt-stained clothes, which are getting a bit ragged round the edges), but if it goes on like it is, it won't be much longer before we go from LEAN to THIN, and then from THIN to EMACIA TED.
