by Mark Morris
She pointed at one of the mounds of glistening blue jelly. "Something I want to try. Abby pass my rucksack,would you?"
Abby snagged one of the straps of Sue's rucksack behind her and, helped by Max, swung it over. Sue unfastened it and extracted two of the carefully-packed petrol bombs.
"Are you thinking what I'm thinking?" Steve asked.
Sue grinned. It was the first expression of real glee Abby had seen on her face since Greg's death. "Let's see how flan-nmable these bastards are, shall we?"
Libby stood up so that Steve could unstrap himself from his seat.
"Try not to move around too much," Adam said. "This isn't a passenger plane, you know"
Libby sat back down as Steve moved across to help Sue unpack more of the petrol bombs. Nervously, Libby asked, "Are you sure this is wise?"
"What are they going to do?" replied Sue. "Fly after us?" She asked Adam, "How low can we go?"
"Low as you like. Fifty feet?"
"Perfect. And we're okay to open the door?"
"As long as you wait till I'm in position," he said, easing the aircraft into a gentle descent arc.
Libby felt a vertiginous thrill as the ground seemed to swoop towards them. The blue mound of gelid eggs-which reminded Libby of a mass of festering boils the color of bread mold-was situated slap bang in the middle of Princes Street Gardens. Libby had come here as a student, had spent an idyllic August, in fact, helping out at Theatre Workshop during the Festival. She had earned extra cash face-painting in the Grassmarket with her best friend, Claire Fleetwood (who used to pretend that her uncle was Mick, of Fleetwood Mac fame). Libby remembered the gardens being full of flowers and statues, remembered the many happy hours she had spent here. She had marvelled at the glory of the famous Floral Clock, had sipped white wine spritzers as she listened to a Dixieland jazz band playing in the summer heat. She had sat beside Ross Fountain and looked up at the Rock at twilight and watched the sun setting spectacularly over Edinburgh Castle.
Where is Claire now? she thought. Probably lying dead somewhere, rotting away with the other 99 percent of the population. As Adam leveled the helicopter, Libby looked down at the gardens again. They had once been a haven of beauty and tranquility, but were now nothing but a debrischoked mud bowl. Rubbish clung to the denuded branches of the water-blackened trees; the statues, caked in silt, had a formless, molten appearance. Ever since that summerwhat?-thirteen years ago, Libby had been promising herself that one day she would come back, do the whole Festival thing again. But she never had, and now it was too late.
Though the sky was not bright, the helicopter was now close enough to the ground to be casting a dragonfly shadow across the mud. Adam had maneuvred the aircraft so that they were hovering directly above the blue mound. From this dis tance the shadowy creatures shifting inside the semitransparent sacs looked to Libby to be in torment. They reminded her of insects trapped by predators, struggling to break themselves free.
All at once, in her peripheral vision, she glimpsed movement on the ground, and looked towards the trees lining the edge of the gardens. There was a woman there, a young woman with long red hair, wearing only a miniskirt and a sleeveless T-shirt despite the cold. The woman was running towards the mound, a look of intense concentration on her face. And immediately Libby saw others, some emerging from the trees as the young woman had, some crossing the road that led to the park, having presumably appeared from the cafes, restaurants and retail outlets on the north side of Princes Street.
"Here they come," Libby said. "Hurry."
But Sue was grinning, relishing every second. She crossed to the door and opened it, knees bent to maintain her balance. Although the helicopter was more or less stationary, a chill wind immediately sprang into the cabin. The din of the rotors doubled so they had to yell to make themselves heard.
"Enjoy the barbecue!" Sue shouted at the ground below and held out her hand. Steve, his hair blowing about his face, handed her the first of the petrol bombs. A tight funnel of fuel-soaked cloth jutted from the sloshing contents of a Tizer bottle. Sue lit a match and touched it to the cloth, which flared with a fierce and sudden flame.
A second later the bottle was falling, not thrown but dropped, to prevent spillage. Libby saw it become a ball of whiteness and exploding glass an instant before it struck the mound. Yellow flame spread across the cluster of glistening blue birth sacs as though they were doused in alcohol.
Instantly the "people," gathered below or rushing towards the mound, began to scream. It was an awful, chilling sound, high-pitched and somehow metallic. Libby had to remind herself that these were monsters, not people, and that they, or their kind, had been responsible for the cold-blooded killings of Mabel and Greg. Even so, she felt the hairs standing up on her arms, felt distress gnawing at her gut, and felt compelled to raise her hands to her ears to block out the sound.
Sue had no such misgivings. Even though the creatures were screaming as though they themselves were on fire, she held out a hand for another petrol bomb. This one exploded in midair, raining white fire and shards of glass down on the mound. As the birth sacs swelled and burst like blisters, releasing a blackish liquor in which shapes thrashed feebly, the screaming of the "people" intensified. Some even collapsed and writhed in the mud, as though in grotesque imitation of their offspring. Others began to change, their human bodies seeming almost to fold inwards, the flickering black formlessness of their true shapes pushing out from the inside.
For Libby, watching the transformations was a disorientating experience. She could see the people clearly enough, but try as she might, she couldn't focus fully on the creatures they were becoming. Her gaze kept skidding away from them, and afterwards, when she tried to recapture that exact instant of transformation in her mind, she could only liken it to a reversible glove puppet she had owned as a little girl that had been a dog until it was turned inside out, whereupon it became a cat.
If Sue was having similar problems of perception, she was not showing it. She was lost in her own joyous vitriol, screeching insults down at the creatures. She dropped another petrol bomb, and then another. When she stretched back her hand for a fifth, Steve shouted, "I think that's enough."
She turned on him, scowling. Before she could say anything, however, Steve held up another of the bottlesGordon's Gin, this one had once contained-and shouted, "We've done the job. No point wasting any more of these."
Sue looked with longing at the burning mass of blue goop below, and then, albeit reluctantly, she nodded. She closed the door of the helicopter, and though the rotors still made a racket even with the door closed, the cockpit suddenly seemed a bubble of tranquillity. For Libby, the best thing was that the stomach-churning screams below were muffled to a thin, high-pitched keening, like the passage of wind through the crevices of an old house. And as Adam took the helicopter up and away, an angel of vengeance rising into the heavens from whence it had come, even that sound faded into nothing.
They flew across the Firth of Forth, where all manner of flotsam bobbed in the water. They passed over Dunfermline, where they spotted three more of the alien mounds. After that it was mainly moorland and lakes, dark green forests and craggy black mountains, until, at around three P.M., they reached Inverness.
Though they had enough fuel to get them to Castle Morton, Adam decided it might be an idea to call at the airport here and top up. After all, he said, it wasn't as though they would have to make much of a detour, and as they would be heading over some bleak country from now on, he didn't believe in looking a gift horse in the mouth.
The approach to the airport was a tense affair. As it came into view, a gray-black patch of ground across which three passenger planes (one of them upside down) and around a dozen vehicles were scattered like children's toys, they fell into a nervous silence. The reason for this was not the potentiality for trouble, however. Rather, it was the fact that Inverness Airport was integral to their long-term plans and well-being. If they were going to use the helicopter on a reg ular basi
s, they were going to need a refueling outlet fairly close by, and for them Inverness was pretty much it. "If the fuel pumps are out of action here, we're buggered," Adam had said. Beyond Inverness, the closest airport was Aberdeen, or maybe Wick, both of which were a good hundred miles in the wrong direction.
As it turned out, however, luck was with them. Not only were the storage tanks intact, but two of the pumps, though crusted with silt and dried salt, were operable. As the fuel began to gush, Adam said, "We're in business." Max and Abby high-lived each other. Steve, Libby and Sue exchanged relieved grins.
Within twenty minutes they were airborne again. They flew over Inverness, over the site of the Battle of Culloden, which now, as then, was strewn with the leavings of the dead. Their first sight of Castle Morton, or rather the building that dominated the town and gave it its name, came less than half an hour later.
"There it is!" Abby squealed, grabbing Max's arm. "Look, Max, that's my school!"
Built on a high hill, the medieval fortress jutting through the surrounding pine forests was gray and impressive.
"It's a weird shape," he said. "Kind of like... I dunno... a wonky car."
Abby laughed. It was true. Viewed from the air, St. Catherine's did vaguely resemble a cartoon car. Its "wheels" were the two rounded towers flanking the huge main doors (in days gone by this would have been a drawbridge and portcullis), and its "bonnet" was the square chunk of buildings built on to the right-hand side of the main structure. These buildings had originally comprised the banquet hall, extensive kitchens and a whole rash of stables, and Abby knew their present-day function was not so very different. The school kitchens and dining hall were more or less on the same site as their medieval counterparts, though where the stables had been there was now a gymnasium and swimming pool.
"The main bit dates from the twelfth century," Steve said, "but they kept adding bits on until the seventeenth, which is when the family who'd owned it for six hundred years moved out. What was their name, Abby?"
"The Tavistocks," she said.
"So how did it come to be a school?" Libby asked.
"After the Tavistocks moved out or died or whatever, no one could afford to keep it going," replied Steve. "Even the Scottish Tourist Board and the Heritage Commission weren't really interested-too remote to attract tourists, you see. So for two or three hundred years the place was abandoned, falling to rack and ruin. Then in the 1950s a bunch of local rich folk got together and decided to turn it into a school for girls. They did the place up, enticed staff out into the middle of nowhere by paying them top wages, and within a few years the place was paying for itself. They started with thirty pupils, and now they have three hundred. Two-thirds are boarders and a third-like Abby-are day girls. You get girls coming here from all over Scotland-Dundee, Montrose, Oban, even as far south as Stirling and Falkirk."
"Did, you mean." said Libby, quietly enough so that only Steve could hear.
"What?"
"They did have girls coming from all over Scotland. You're talking as though the flood never happened."
"Oh, yeah," said Steve, suddenly somber. "Even now I sometimes forget. Stupid, isn't it?"
Libby shook her head and squeezed his arm. Steve smiled at her and glanced at Abby. She was leaning forward, eyes shining and cheeks red, and Steve thought that, for the moment at least, his daughter had forgotten too.
"Where do you want me to land?" Adam shouted over his shoulder.
"There's a courtyard right behind the main doors," answered Steve. "There's a fountain over to the left, but if the area's clear it should be big enough if you can take us straight down."
"I think we should check the place over before we think about landing," Sue said. "Can we circle the place a few times, Adam?"
Adam made an OKsign with his fingers and took them in for a look-see. They flew round the castle several times, their eyes peeled for any indications of life.
"I can't see anyone, but the castle looks okay," Abby shouted. "It hasn't got that black stuff all over it anyway, like a lot of buildings we've seen."
"There's plenty of flood damage in the town below, though," Sue replied, pointing straight down.
"She's right," said Max. "There's wrecked cars and all the usual stuff down there. Where's your house, Abs?"
The town was in a dip beneath the castle, sheltered from the biting winds that tore down from the Atlantic by a surrounding mass of pine forest. Abby pointed to the left, away from the main cluster of buildings, towards a patchwork of boggy-looking fields threaded through with a black tangle of single-lane roads and farm tracks.
"See those four fields and those five houses just above them that look like barns? Well, that one on the end is ours-oh!"
"What's the matter, honey?" asked Steve.
"The trampoline's gone. And look, Henrietta's greenhouse has collapsed. And Mum's garden and our drive and the patio... it's all underwater. And there's a tree on next door's roof...." She put her hands over her mouth, as if half believing the devastation might somehow disappear if she stopped talking about it.
"You okay?" asked Max, slipping his arms around her waist.
"Yeah, it's just... a shock, that's all. Seeing everything messed up, knowing that the flood has been here too." She was silent for a moment as she strained forward to look. "One good thing is that I can't see any bodies."
"That's probably because they've been collected up and used for food," said Sue.
Steve didn't think she intended to sound callous, but her lack of tact infuriated him nonetheless. "Thanks for that, Sue," he said as Abby's face fell.
Sue shrugged. "What's the problem? Would you rather not face up to reality?"
"Of course not. I just think you could have been a bit more sensitive, that's all."
She shook her head. "We're living in a shitty world. You can't shield her from what's happening out there."
Steve looked ready to argue further, but Abby said, "I'm all right, Dad. Really. And Sue's right. You shouldn't try to protect me from what's going on."
Sue gave a nod of approval. "Well said, girl."
Steve raised a hand in acknowledgment, but he didn't look entirely convinced.
"Hold on to your Stetsons, guys," Adam announced. "I'm going in."
He took the helicopter in low. So low that Abby felt herself drawing in her knees, half afraid that he would scrape the underside of the machine across the crenellated turrets of a tower. As they sank towards the stone courtyard behind the stout main doors, she couldn't help thinking there was something a bit James Bond about all this. She looked around at the internal windows, which now rose around them on all sides, half expecting to see the astounded faces of her school friends pressed against them. It all looked so normal, so unaffected by the disaster that had befallen the rest of the world, that she believed she would have been only mildly surprised if her headmistress, Mrs. Beecham, had suddenly appeared from the archway that led to her office, dressed in her trademark blue blazer, demanding to know the meaning of this intrusion. But all Abby saw in the black windows were reflected white chunks of the R44 sliding past as it slowly descended.
Of course, if the flood had happened during tern time, she might have seen girls' faces pressed against the windows. Then again, if it had happened during tern time she wouldn't have been in London with Dad in the first place. She would have been here in school, doing maths with Mr. Gordon or geog-raphy with Miss Whittaker. She would probably have been staring out the window and thinking about riding Flash at the stables later, or maybe just wondering what was for tea. How would she have felt if she had seen the water creeping up through the trunks and branches of the pine trees below, filling in the gaps with an almost tarry blackness? If the girls had felt the rumbling that had preceded the water, no doubt they would have assumed it was an earthquake. Abby could almost hear Mrs. Beecham's voice: "Sit tight, girls (she would have pronounced it gurruls), there's nothing to be alarmed about." But for once she would have been wrong. On this
occasion there would have been everything to be alarmed about.
The helicopter touched down with barely a bump. Adam turned off the engine and for the next minute or so, while the rotor blades slowed and eventually whickered to a stop, the six of them merely sat in silence, looking around. It was almost, Abby thought, like taking a breather at the end of a long day like coming home, dumping yourself in your favorite armchair, and for several minutes just sitting and doing nothing. Taking stock.
Now that they were on the ground, Abby saw that the school had not been completely unaffected by the flood, as had appeared from the air. Water had evidently seeped beneath the main doors, and had left deposits of the all-too-familiar silt crusted between the cobbles like black cement. What this meant was that, if the water had risen so high, then the entire town below must almost certainly have been engulfed. The only way anyone down there could have survived, therefore, would have been by somehow making it up to the refuge of the castle. Abby knew what a tall order that was, especially given the time of the flood, but she consoled herself with the fact that it was not beyond the realms of possibility. And partic-ularly heartening was the evidence that a clear attempt had been made to shift as much of the silt as possible. In her mind's eye Abby pictured a team of townspeople, among them Muni and Dyl, hard at it with shovels and bin bags and sweeping brushes.
"It all seems pretty quiet," Steve said eventually. "Shall we look around?"
Sue was scanning the windows that looked down on the courtyard. "Yes, but stay alert and keep your weapons ready."
Abby shared her observation about the silt, and Sue nodded. "Yeah, I noticed that too. Well spotted, Abby"
Libby raised herself off Steve's lap so he could open the helicopter door. When Abby jumped down, her feet went from under her on the slippery cobbles, and she would have fallen if Steve hadn't grabbed her arum. Adam slammed the helicopter door shut behind them, then turned with an easy smile, palming blond hair back from his forehead.
"Not sure whether getting you here in one piece qualifies me as a member of the Scooby gang," he said, "but I just thought I'd point out that I'm the only one without a gun."
