When Ewan thought about it, he treated the memory of Mum exactly how he had treated the real woman when she was alive. Nearly a year on from Mum and Dad being gunned down inside their barricaded house, Ewan still couldn’t think of her without digging up his worst times.
It was nothing personal. Ewan had loved her. But enduring the pain of those memories wouldn’t bring her back. She was dead. Dad was dead. His aunt and uncle and eight-year-old Alfie were dead, along with Raj and Charlie and all the others on that bloody Memorial Wall.
The pain of missing someone is always worth it for the joy of having known them, said a wise man’s voice in his head.
Shut up, McCormick, Ewan’s mind said back.
‘Ewan,’ came a voice behind him.
The breeze came back into existence. As did the rest of the world around him. They weren’t far from the edge of the field now, and a tree line that would give them cover.
The stream of tears across his face became real too.
‘Ewan,’ Jack repeated, ‘I gave comms the news, and told them not to expect us back for a while. Shannon… Shannon passes on her best wishes.’
Ewan didn’t answer. Shannon’s company would have been welcome at that moment.
‘And I told them we’re splitting up even further,’ Jack continued. ‘You can go on your own, and me and Gracie will stick together. We’ll meet up at the house in Lemsford – the one we slept in last time. Might take a whole day to get there, but it’s better than getting followed to Spitfire’s Rise.’
Ewan grunted, but didn’t turn around. Jack’s unwelcome fingers landed on his shoulder.
‘I told them we were splitting up to lose anyone chasing us. And because it’d make us all faster. I didn’t tell them the third reason. Figured you’d need some time alone.’
Screw you, Jack, Ewan thought again. Screw you for knowing me so well. For knowing where I’m weak, and…
…And for being my friend.
Chapter 9
Kate twitched in fright as Mark’s brick smashed her geography teacher’s car window. To their left, Simon shook his head frantically.
‘You’re making me do this,’ Mark growled as he opened the door from the inside. ‘You’re both slow as hell, and the clones are coming. Either I break the no cars rule, or I leave you both behind.’
You had no problem leaving my brother behind …
‘Get bloody running, they’re not worth it’, you said. You had no idea how much James was worth.
One day, when I’m my better self, I’ll confront you about it. Not today, but one day , Mark .
They had stumbled for about a hundred metres before Mark had realised the hopelessness of escaping on foot. Before Kate knew what was going on, he had ordered them back to Oakenfold where he had picked out Stuart Lincoln’s car: the one which just happened to be the newest in the car park, and perhaps the most reliable.
Mark reached somewhere behind the steering wheel. A crunch sounded, and a couple of wires appeared. Kate didn’t understand what happened next, nor how Mark knew the science of hot-wiring a car, but it didn’t surprise her. A few moments later, she heard the rev of a car engine for the first time in a year.
‘You getting in?’
Kate started to move. Simon, rather tellingly, headed straight for the back seats as if he weren’t allowed to sit in the front. Once Kate was in the passenger seat with the door half-closed, Mark pulled away. Her door flung open again and bashed against the first car they passed, and the resulting bang sent some much-needed adrenalin through Kate’s veins. She closed the door properly on the second attempt, and glanced through the window as something moved in the early morning light.
They were clones. Angry clones, and they were running.
‘Mark!’ she shouted, her first and only word since her boyfriend had blown himself to pieces.
‘Heads down!’ he yelled back as the car accelerated. Kate obeyed, and squeezed her eyes shut too. It would not shield her from bullets, but would help with the sensory overload that would surely come. Mark must have ducked his own head, as the car’s path became wonkier and more chaotic. A short spray of bullets attacked the car, hitting nothing but its metal back. Mercifully, the tyres were unaffected. Simon did not follow Mark’s command, showing unexpected independence by sticking his head out of the window and firing back at the distant clones. Kate did not look back to see whether he hit any.
Mark turned a corner, and the clones’ gunfire fell into silence. But it did nothing to help Kate calm down. The engine was still roaring, the floor still shook beneath her, and Raj was still dead. Two more corners later she opened her eyes, if only to keep an eye out for more hunters.
The urban drive felt like a ride on a post-apocalyptic ghost train. Some buildings were burned-out shells. Some shops had been looted by bands of survivors following Takeover Day. The blood on the tarmac had long faded, but the occasional skeleton in faded clothes still occupied a space on the pavement. The meat had long been picked clean from their bones: perhaps the crows above Harpenden had developed a taste for human flesh.
That’s what lies in wait for Raj…
‘My house was down the M1,’ Mark shouted, ‘I used to take this route every day to Oakenfold.’
You barely came to Oakenfold. You vanished for a year after you got sentenced, and after that you only turned up when you felt like it.
‘Of course, if we hit the Takeover Day traffic jams on the M1, we’ll be waiting a bloody long time for the traffic to clear. But it’s better than getting shot to death here.’
Kate felt something warm on the back of her neck. Simon was panting behind her, the whole of his body frozen except his lungs, which took rapid, erratic breaths. His panic and Kate’s overload left Mark as the only truly active member of the team.
When they arrived at Britain’s oldest motorway – the birthplace of their country’s worst traffic jams – they discovered the M1 had ended its life with the worst blockage of all. Vehicles were strewn across the road as if a toddler had thrown their toy cars across a fabric floor map, forming a metal hedge maze of vans and people carriers and articulated lorries. Regardless, Mark found a way to manoeuvre through the vehicles whose owners had tried in vain to escape the clones almost a year ago. Kate’s seat rocked beneath her whenever he moved onto the grass, and her fingers twitched in discomfort each time her door scraped along a neighbouring car.
They must have travelled nearly a mile before the explosion.
Every window in their car – and the cars surrounding them – shattered with piercing shrieks. The rusted Astra three cars ahead flew out from the flames, knocked aside like a golf ball from its tee by the raging fireball at its side. The ground trembled so much that Kate was sure their own wheels left the tarmac. She watched the Astra smack the line of trees at the side of the motorway; it had landed behind their car, suggesting the explosion had happened in front of them. The smoke mirage faded from the crater ahead, and she saw what had fired the shell. It was half a mile beyond the overhead bridge in front of them, crunching its way over the dead vehicles in its path.
‘Bloody hell,’ yelled Mark, ‘that’s an actual bloody tank!’
It’s a Challenger 2 . Ewan was in my English class, and did tanks for his Speaking and Listening presentation .
It had been the only presentation delivered with any enthusiasm, so it was the only one that stuck in Kate’s memory. She mainly remembered the worst parts: that it could kill from up to five miles away, and that the only thing ever to destroy a Challenger 2 had been friendly fire from another Challenger 2.
‘How the hell did Marshall get his hands on one of them?’ asked Mark.
‘I don’t think anyone tried to stop him,’ she whispered.
Mark seemed to not hear her answer – or more likely did not care – as he found a way around the crater and continued their path along the M1, straight towards the tank.
Simon made a yelling noise in the back seat.
‘Yes, we�
��re going towards it,’ Mark muttered. ‘If we retreat it’ll get us for sure, or chase us back to Harpenden. If we go towards it, there might be a one per cent chance we’ll get inside its range.’
Kate didn’t mind the odds being against her survival. Not at that moment. Her intellect told her she could still contribute to this war, but the rest of her brain told her she had nothing left to offer.
‘And yes,’ Mark muttered, ‘I know about its secondary weapon. But I’d take my chances with the chain gun over those shells.’
Ahead, the tank surged over another row of cars. Kate watched as the first car – a large black people-carrier – crumbled and flattened in submission. Her parents’ lawnmower had never cut grass as efficiently as the Challenger 2 mowed its way over a carriageway of vehicles.
The tank fired a second shot, which smashed into the brow of the bridge above before it could reach its intended target. Half a tonne of concrete left the bridge, flew through the sky and tumbled its way into the nearest caravan, which exploded over all four lanes like a wood and metal supernova.
The remainder of the damaged bridge collapsed into the road, leaving just one gap underneath the part blown away by the tank. Mark bit his lip as he found a way through the dust, squeezing through a gap between two cars, a gamble which cost them both wing mirrors. There was an even tighter gap ten metres ahead, between a painter’s van and a petroleum tanker.
The gap between them and the Challenger was closing. Kate gasped as she finally realised the flaw in Mark’s plan: that even if they got close enough to escape its long-range weaponry, and even if the chain gun operator were a useless shot, the tank could just crush them underneath its tracks. In fact, the clones inside might find the experience more satisfying.
The third blast roared from the barrel, but the humans’ lives were saved by bad timing. The tank reached the end of the set of cars underneath it, and dipped forwards. The barrel sank by about ten degrees, sending the third shell several hundred metres too short.
If they’d fired correctly, we’d be dead. A shell anywhere close to the tanker would have done the job.
‘OK, their sight is blocked by the dust cloud,’ Mark said. ‘Get out.’
Simon obeyed as expected. Kate wanted to follow, but her body wouldn’t let her. Mark leapt out of the driver’s seat, and took the time to stare back into the car before closing the door.
‘Kate,’ he said, ‘I’m sorry Raj is dead. He was a nice lad. And I wish we had time for you to go through your I’m-so-sad-my-life-is-over phase. But we don’t. The tank is coming now, so I’ve got this plan and I really hope you can pull yourself together quick enough to be part of it.’
Pull yourself together… that’s what the teachers back in mainstream used to say.
Mental health issues don’t just ‘ pull themselves together ’ Mark, you bloody numpty . You don’t stop grieving by ‘ pulling yourself together ’ . Even now, I don’t know how people do it.
She felt angry, an emotion she had not had the energy for all night. It squeezed itself between her fatigue and her misery, and motivated her to move herself. She huffed as loudly as she could manage, and opened the passenger door.
For a split-second, a small but important realisation entered her brain. One of her therapists had once talked about humans’ ‘fight or flight’ instincts: that when a situation got too much for them, a person would either face it head-on or get the hell out of there.
Last time someone had told Kate to ‘pull herself together’, she had not left her bed all day. It had been better to waste a whole day than approach something that scared her, especially for the sake of a person who didn’t know how anxiety worked. That morning, on the abandoned M1 in the midst of her grief, she was taking action just by getting out of the car.
The war against Nicholas Grant had changed her instincts. A year ago she chose ‘flight’ every time without fail. Nowadays she could fight, even after losing somebody she cared about.
Kate stepped out of the car into the morning light, and followed Simon to the grass bank. Mark stayed at the car for a few moments, busying himself with the petrol cap.
She followed Simon until they reached the other side of the bank. Now on foot, they could get to some proper shelter: even the best aim from a tank wouldn’t kill them if they hid behind a small hill.
Next to the car, Mark had removed his shirt. He produced his bottle of whisky from somewhere – the same whisky that had spent a year in his Oakenfold locker awaiting his return – doused the lower half of his shirt with it and stuffed the dry half into the petrol tank.
Kate had expected Mark to reach for his lighter without incident, but he leapt suddenly at the sound of a horrifying ptat-ptat-ptat, followed by what looked like miniature fireless explosions spreading across the cars around him. The muzzle flash behind the dust cloud revealed that the Challenger’s chain gun was firing blindly, and its huge bullets were ripping apart the abandoned cars.
Mark – crouched low, for all the good it would do against chain gun bullets – tore the pocket fabric out of his trousers, brought out his lighter, and turned the bottle of whisky into a Molotov cocktail which he hurled straight at the tank.
The tank got through the dust cloud not one moment before its sight was lost again, as the bottle struck not far from its visor and spread flames and smoke across their field of vision. Mark used the distraction to run from the car, out of the way of the random path of chain gun bullets, and arrived behind the peak of the grass bank alongside Kate and Simon. He even found the time to put his hoodie back on along the way.
Kate focused her eyes on the petrol tank, as if trying to force the flames to do their work by willpower alone.
A n exploding car won’t be enough to destroy a Challenger 2. Even if it goes off right next —
Their vehicle blew itself apart, spreading its burning shrapnel across the M1 and flames over its injured chassis. The tank, still fifty metres away, was unaffected. A white cloud burst from the visor, as one of the crew took care of the whisky fire with an extinguisher.
‘Do we run?’ she managed to whisper. Mark shook his head. The tank headed straight for the burning car, perhaps looking for their victim’s burned remains. Their colleagues across Hertfordshire would want to know when to stop hunting survivors.
When ten metres remained between the tank and the burning vehicle, Mark leapt to his feet.
‘You numpties cost me my whisky…’
It had been so long since they had used their firearms that Kate had forgotten about the assault rifle hanging from Mark’s shoulder. He pointed it straight towards the tanker behind the car and emptied the rest of his magazine into its side. A dozen leaks sprung from the side of the tanker, and Kate buried her face into the grass as the flurry of petrol spilled onto the carriageway and spread towards the flames.
Unlike the car explosion, miniature by comparison, the shockwave of the exploding tanker threw all three of their bodies down the side of the bank.
Mark later said that her sensory overload had lasted several minutes. All Kate remembered was coming to her senses as if waking up from some kind of empty hallucination, and staggering to the top of the bank. Once she was lucid again, she noticed that the tank lay motionless, in flames but undamaged.
‘It’s not destroyed…’ she mumbled.
‘We didn’t need to kill the tank,’ answered Mark, ‘just the clones inside. They either burned to death or lost all their oxygen. Don’t know which, don’t care either. Now let’s run home.’
Kate followed as instructed, too tired and deep in grief to appreciate the brilliance of Mark’s achievement. Maybe someday she would care that an eighteen-year-old youth offender had become the second person ever to destroy a Challenger 2, but it would not be that day. And, most likely, not for as long as she mourned Raj.
Chapter 10
As he passed the welcome sign into Lemsford, Jack checked his watch. Four in the afternoon. Their strike on Oakenfold had started thirte
en hours ago, and he had barely stopped moving since.
Gracie, to her credit, was only five steps behind. She had slowed on their approach to the village, but despite her worries about this place she had never been to, she had kept up.
‘Where now?’ she whispered.
‘The Hunters’ house. Eighteen, School Lane. Follow me.’
‘You remember the way?!’
‘I was here less than a month ago. And I have the memory thing. Now come on.’
Jack was thankful that Gracie didn’t offer a response. In the old days, any discussion about his Asperger’s traits – positive or negative – usually resulted in the other person giving some kind of belittling response, such as ‘you don’t look autistic’, or ‘oh, I’m so sorry’. At that moment, the predictable response would have been ‘oh, but I can remember directions too! That’s not an autism thing!’
They would never be able to see what the memory of the house looked like inside Jack’s head: the well-mapped, in-depth and painfully specific details of each minor event. Kate’s conversation with McCormick to tell him they had arrived. Alex taking little Matthew’s room and sleeping under dinosaur bedsheets. (Everything related to dinosaurs stuck in Jack’s head like the intro to ‘The Final Countdown’, while most people wouldn’t have even remembered the little boy was called Matthew.) That joke he had made about Dawn Hunter, asking if she was some kind of vampire assassin, and nobody getting it. Charlie saying ‘the last time he kissed a woman he still called her “Mummy”’, and everyone laughing.
It wasn’t the joy or the pain that made the night memorable. Jack Hopper simply didn’t get a choice in what he remembered. Once a memory was in his brain it stayed there like a fly stuck to insect paper, never to leave. Sometimes it meant memorising fifty-eight species of sauropod at the age of six. Sometimes it meant remembering number plates of random cars on long journeys, whether he wanted to or not.
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