The Deluge

by Mark Morris

  "Yeah," Dylan was saying, "he decided to stay at school for half-tern, so he was all right. It's him who made that gas that knocked you out, by the way. It was only supposed to be used against the slugs, but when you arrived in that helicopter it threw everyone into a panic. None of us had ever considered an attack from the air."

  "It wasn't an attack," Abby said. "It was an arrival."

  "Yeah, well, we know that now, don't we?"

  "So what was in that gas?" Abby asked, wondering about long-term effects.

  "God knows," Dylan said. "It's pretty strong stuff, though, isn't it?"

  "That's an understatement," she said. "So how many of you are there?"

  "Eleven. There were fourteen, but five of us went out on a scavenger hunt and we got ambushed by slugs. Only two of us got away-nze and Andy Poole. He's a couple of years older than me."

  "Don't his mum and dad own the Malt Shovel?" asked Abby.

  "Did. Not anymore."

  "'Course," Abby said. "So who else is here I might know? There's you, Muni, old Westy, Andy Poole..."

  The sudden look that Dylan gave her made Abby feel as though her guts had turned inside out.

  "What is it?" she said. "Dyl, don't-"

  "Mum's dead."

  His voice was flat, toneless. Abby gaped at him.

  "No, she isn't," she said angrily. "What do you mean? How can she be?"

  "She died in the flood," he said dully. "I mean, I never actually saw her body, but..." his voice tailed off.

  "But you're here," Abby said. "How can she be dead if you're here?"

  He looked at her with something like exasperation. "We weren't joined at the hip, you know"

  "But if you were both at home-"

  "I wasn't at home."

  She glared at him almost accusingly. "Where were you then?" "I was staying at Callum's. Except inc and Cal had come up here to smoke some blow. We were sitting out by the tennis courts, looking over the valley, when the flood came. It was dark and we couldn't work out what it was. There was this sort of rumbling, then a whooshing sound. Then the water came and it was... just black...." He shivered and shook his head.

  "What happened to Callum?" asked Abby. It was maybe not the most pertinent question to ask, but her mind was in turmoil.

  "He was okay," Dylan said. "We both got wet, but conpared to most people..." He shrugged and then almost casually added, "He's dead now, though."

  Abby made a small sound. So much death, so much misery. "What happened?" she found herself asking, aware she was talking simply to avoid having to think about Mum, about the terrible, impossible fact that she was gone.

  "The slugs got him," said Dylan. "He was one of those who died on the scavenger hunt."

  "Oh." It was all she could think of to say. On a subconscious level she sensed there was a dam inside her, a dam which was holding strong for now, but which was liable to collapse at any moment. She touched her brother's cheek, noting almost detachedly that her hand was trembling.

  "My poor Dyl," she said. "How have you managed here on your own?"

  "I haven't been on my own," he said. "The people here have been looking after me... or, what I mean is, we've been looking after each other. They're a good bunch, Abby. You'll like them."

  "I'm sure," she said. "But how have you managed without us, without your family? I don't know how I'd have got through this if Dad hadn't been with me."

  Dylan shrugged. "You just... do, don't you? I mean, what else can you do? You can't just... lie down and die."

  "No," she said. "No." When she next spoke her voice seemed to have been dredged from deep inside her. "I can't believe Mum's gone. I felt sure you'd both be okay. I felt it in nay bones."

  She slumped forward. Dylan leaned towards her until their foreheads were touching.

  "That was a good feeling to have," he whispered, "because it was the feeling that brought you here. I thought I'd lost everything... and then you and Dad showed up, and suddenly it's like... I've found something worth carrying on for."

  She felt the dam crumbling then, and suddenly she was scared. "Hold me," she pleaded, reaching out blindly for him.

  He put his arms around her, and she clung to him as if he had just dragged her to safety from a collapsing building or a raging inferno. She thought about what she had found and what she had lost, the miracle and the tragedy, and she found herself crying with such ferocity for both that pretty soon she could no longer distinguish one from the other.

  Tuesday, 7th November

  It's funny how quickly people adapt to new stuff and settle into rou-tines. Dad says it's the human instinct for order and structure. Prob-ably not all people are like that, but I think on the whole we don't like messes. I don't mean untidy rooms and stuff, I mean bigger messes-chaos.

  I haven't written since the day after I found out about Mum, which was a week ago. Sorry, but I've been too upset. It's weird how the horrible things affect you most. The brilliant things, like finding Dyl alive, are just kind of, not taken for granted exactly, but got used to really quickly. The horrible things, tho, like finding out about Mum, stay with you and make you feel upset and awful all the time. It's not fair how good things only make you feel good for a little while, but bad things make you feel bad for a long time.

  Dyl's been brilliant, and so has Dad, and so has everyone, really, but it doesn't help. Mum's still gone, and every night, on my own, I've cried, knowing I'll never see her again. Part of me still can't believe it, and it's that part, I think, that lets me carry on doing normal stuff. But even that feels weird. When I'm getting dressed or eating breakfast or talking to someone, I feel guilty, as if being able to do those things means I don't care enough about Mum. There's a part of me that thinks I should just lie on my bed crying all day and refuse to eat and wash and all that. I even feel guilty writing this diary.

  Does this make any sense or am I just odd?

  Anyway, we've been here for a week, and like I was saying, it's funny how quickly we adapt and settle into routines. The people here are pretty nice, tho I don't know some of them that well yet. They've accepted us, tho, and Mr. West appreciates what we've brought to the community (the guns and the helicopter), tho he usually only tells us when he's got something he wants to moan about. He'll say, "We appreciate what you've brought to the community, but," and then he'll have a go at one of us f or not doing a job properly or something.

  He's all right on the whole, tho. He just likes to organize everyone. Dad and A dam and some of the others make fun of him behind his back, which is funny but sometimes a bit cruel. Max calls him "the walrus" because he 's fat and bald with a big gingery moustache. Sue and Mr. West don't get on AT ALL, but then Sue never gets on with ANYONE who tries to tell her what to do.

  Altho Mr. West is the only teacher here, he's not the only person from the school. Mr. and Mrs. McGregor, the caretaker and his wife, are here too. They're both about 60 and they're really nice, tho Mr. McGregor's got such a strong Scottish accent that I can't tell what he's saying half the time. I don't think he likes Mr. West much either, tho he gets on with everybody else, and he and Sue get on great. Although Mr. McGregor is quite old, he's very fit and he's practical and sensible (he can fix things and come up with ideas for stuff). He was in the army for a long time, and he's like a friendly sergeant major.

  Mrs. McGregor is plump and she's always trying to give us food. Even now, when we haven't got that much (altho the school kitchens are well stocked with tins and stuff), she's always trying to give us bis-cuits and making us cups of tea. She's like a mother hen, and when I was at school all the girls thought she was cool. Her and Mr. McGregor never had any kids (I don't know why), but there are 3 girls here who stayed at school over half-term cos their parents were abroad or something, and Mr. and Mrs. M have become sort of parents to them. Well, what I mean is EVERYONE looks after them, just like everyone looks after everyone else (Dad says it's like a hippy commune from the 60s), but Mr. and Mrs. M look after them the most.


  I don't know the 3 girls all that well cos they're younger than me. I'd seen them at school, but I hadn't really spoken to them before. 2 of them, Marcie Willets and Victoria Teague, are 11, and are in year 7 (or were before the flood). They seem nice, but they're both really quiet (tho Marcie is quieter than Victoria-she hardly says ANY-THING). The other girl is called Portia Paige-Harvey, and she's a good laugh. Her dad's a Scottish MP and her mum was once an African Miss World contestant or something. Portia's got lovely light brown skin (caramel-colored, Dad says) and curly black hair. She's only 12 (year 8), but you can tell she's going to be really beautiful when she grows up. She's dead nice and cheerful and we get on really well (it's SO NICE to have someone more or less my own age to hang out with), and altho her mum and dad are probably dead (they were in Holland when the flood came, at a political conference or something), she says until she finds out for sure she'll keep thinking they're alive. She says I should think the same about Mum. She says it's like dissing your parents to think they're dead when they might not be. She says thinking of her mum and dad alive, maybe living with other survivors, is what keeps her going.

  She's right, I suppose, but I find it hard to think that Mum might still be alive. I keep thinking that if she was, she'd have managed to get to the school.After all, there's nowhere else to go around here. Plus things would have been against her from the start. Our house is on such low ground that the fields around us always used to flood just when we got heavy rain for a couple of days. So when the wave came it would have hit Mum and our neighbors pretty much before anyone else. Also I'm sure Mum wouldn't have been awake at 4 in the morning, or whatever time it was. She always sleeps well and doesn't set her alarm for 7. And even if she had been awake she didn't have a boat she could have escaped on or anything (that's how most of the others got here, but more about that in a minute).

  The thing is, if Mum lived far away, then maybe I WOULD be able to think about her in the same way Portia thinks about her mum and dad. But being here and seeing the flood damage, and hearing from Dyl about how the water rose above the town and the forest and came right up to the castle, makes it all much more real. I think if Portia went to Holland and saw the place where her mum and dad had been she might feel differently. I'm not going to tell her that, tho. Why should I be the one to spoil her dreams?

  Like I said, there were only 6 survivors from the town (6 we know about anyway) and 5 of them arrived crammed into the same boat. They were really lucky, but then I suppose everyone who escaped the flood was lucky. On the other hand, I sometimes think we survivors are the UNlucky ones. Plus what about those who survived the flood, but have died since? Were they lucky, then unlucky? Or does luck even come into it?

  The 5 survivors (tho there are only 4 of them now) are the Poole family-Andy, who was with Dyl when they were ambushed by aliens (or slugs, as everyone here calls them) a few weeks back, and his mum and dad, Joe and Moira, and their neighbors, Daphne Mclntee and her son, Gregory. Mrs. Mclntee is 67 and Dyl told me her husband died 15 years ago. Dyl says he was in the shower on holiday and it suddenly went "live" or something and he was elec-trocuted.

  The reason the Pooles and Mclntees survived the flood was because a) they lived a bit outside the town, in 2 cottages next to each other on one of the steep roads thru the forest that leads up to the cas-tle, and b) Mr. Poole and Andy had got up early to go fishing that morning, and happened to be loading their rowing boat onto their trailer when the wave came.

  Mr. Poole told us that the water rose so quickly that even tho they had the boat they still nearly drowned. He said that by the time they'd woken up Moira and Daphne and Gregory, and they'd all got into the boat, the water was up to their knees, and they had to form a human chain to avoid being swept away. He said the boat got thrown about all over the place, and that as the water carried them up they were nearly impaled on trees further up the hill a few times. He told us there was all sorts of stuff in the water that bashed into the boat, and that it was a miracle they didn't capsize. He also said that when they arrived at the castle they were all as bruised "as old bananas."

  We were all sitting round the big table, having a meal, and when he said that (not the thing about the bananas, the thing about the miracle) Mrs. Mclntee said, "Miracle is right. It was God who kept us alive that night."

  "And why would he do that?" asked Dad, who I know doesn't believe in God (and after everything that's happened, I don't think I do anymore either).

  Mrs. Mclntee, who's very fat (sorry, but she is) and can't walk very well, looked at him as if he'd asked a stupid question and said, "Be-cause He is merciful."

  "Not to 99.9 percent of the population, he isn't," Dad said.

  Max (who was sitting next to me and whose Mum had also been quite religious, I think) laughed quietly and whispered, "Way to go, Steve."

  Mrs. Mclntee huffed and puffed at what Dad had said, and said something about us being Saved for a Special Purpose and that it was not our place to Question His Judgment. She seemed to speak in capital letters all the time, which is why I've written what she said like that.

  (By the way, this version of the conversation is taken a bit from my memory, but mostly from Dad's.)

  Dad laughed (at this time we didn't know that Gregory had been killed in the alien/slug ambush) and said, "There IS no judgment. It's just law of averages. It doesn't matter how devastating a disaster is, there will ALWAYS be survivors, even if it's only a handful of people out of millions. But the REASON those few survive is nothing to do with God. It's purely down to luck, which in most cases boils down to being in the right place at the right time and being favoted by a particular set of circumstances." He pointed round the table with his fork and said, "Look at us. You're not seriously telling me we're God's chosen ones? And don't say that God works in mysterious ways, because that's just a way of trying to explain the randomness of what happens on this little planet of ours."

  I could tell he was quite angry, even tho his voice was calm. Libby knew he was angry too, cos she put a hand on his arm. It was weird seeing that, cos it was what Mum used to do when they were together, and it made me feel sad for Mum, and angry at Libby for taking Mum's place, but also kind of thankful to her, cos it meant that Dad had somebody who really cared about him (and I know how weird all that sounds, with all those different feelings jumbled up, but that's how it was).

  I'm not sure why I'm writing all this. It just seemed important somehow. It made me feel proud of Dad and it also made me think that maybe there isn't a meaning to everything, even tho we always keep trying to find one.

  Mrs. McIntee said she felt sorry for Dad, and that she was sure he would eventually see the Light or whatever. And Dad, who I know didn't really want to argue and had been feeling upset about Mum even tho they weren't a couple anymore, said that he doubted that very much, but that he hadn't meant to cause any offense and that it must be nice for her to have her faith to fall back on.

  It wasn't until the next day that we found out one of the other people who'd died in the alien/slug ambush was Mrs. Mclntee's son, Gregory. It's funny that both groups should have someone called Greg killed by aliens, but maybe that's one of God's "mysterious ways." Maybe it also explains why Mrs. McIntee is so religious. I wonder whether she was religious before her husband died or whether she just took it up to try and make sense of stuff.

  The only other person I haven't mentioned is the 3'a person who died in the alien/slug ambush. It's funny to be talking about someone I've never met and who I'm never going to meet, but if I don't leave a record of who he was, I don't suppose anyone else will.

  His name was Peter Atwell and he was an art student from Glasgow. He was doing a project or something, traveling round Scotland, painting a load of castles. He had permission to camp in the castle grounds over half-term and was there in his tent when the flood came. I don't know much else about him except that he was 22 and that (according to Dyl) he was a nice guy.

  So that's it. For the past week we've bee
n catching up on our sleep, sorting out our various aches and pains, and making new friends. I've been talking to Dyl a lot and (like I said before) thinking about Mum and crying and stuff. There are SOME jobs to do here, like keeping the place clean and washing clothes and sheets and preparing food, but not that many. Portia and I have been hanging out, and we've even been playing board games and listening to music (they've got a stock of batteries here, so my iPod's working again) and I've been reading. Like I said, the kitchens are pretty well stocked, but Adam's taken teams out in the helicopter a few times, either to try and pick up things we keep running short of (bottled water, toilet rolls, gas canisters for the camping stoves, booze (!!), petrol for the petrol bombs, cleaning stuff, matches, candles etc) or to see what's happening with the aliens/slugs, and firebomb as many of their eggs as possible.

  Actually things have been quiet on the alien/slug front since we've been here, by which I mean they haven't attacked US even tho we've been attacking THEM. I think it's cos they've been preoccupied with their babies hatching out (if you can CALL them babies) to fight back.Alex took Dad and Mr. McGregor out on a firebombing mission this afternoon, and cos they weren't landing, and cos I kept nagging at Dad to let me and Portia come along cos I said it was important for us kids to know what was going on, we were allowed to sit in and watch.

  There are now so many egg hills that we didn't have to go far to find ones that hadn't already been firebombed. Dad said that altho we've been making a stand, we've hardly even scratched the surface. I'm not sure how many aliens/slugs come out of each lot of eggs, but I'd say it was a few hundred. The places where the aliens have already hatched out are pretty gross. The egg hills aren't shiny and blue anymore, they're just black pools of goo with human bones sticking out of them. In some places the baby aliens are moving about near the egg hills in big groups, surrounded by huge circles of adult aliens in human form. The babies are packed so tightly together that looking at them is like looking at a bluey black moving carpet of kind of lumpy electric-ity. It's hard to look at them full on, even tho there's loads of them. If you try too hard your eyes ache, as if you're looking into the surf. couldn't watch the aliens/slugs being firebombed and dying, cos it was too horrible. Even above the noise of the helicopter I could hear them screaming, and that was bad enough. When I put my hands over my ears, Portia looked at me as if I was a wuss and said, "They're vermin. They're like rats. They deserve to die."