Breeding Ground

by Sarah Pinborough

  “What are they doing?”

  Daniel stared with George into the monitor. “I think they’re trying to figure out what to do next. A few got fried on the fence last night trying to get in. We counted about ten, in fact. These ones turned up about twenty minutes ago, but so far they haven’t touched the metal. They’re coming close, but not close enough.” The distaste and hate in his voice was like a low hum buzzing under every word.

  “They won’t.”

  The finality in my words made Daniel’s head snap round. “What makes you sure?”

  “They’ll have learnt from the mistakes of the others. Even if they weren’t here last night. They’ll know.”

  Help me . . . pleeease . . .

  Those hissed words were never going to leave me, just as the first time I heard them would stay etched in my brain.

  “Trust me. We’ve learned a little bit about these things on our way here.”

  Whitehead shuffled behind me. “It sounds like we’ve got plenty to share with each other over dinner. Daniel’ll stay out here. We’re aiming to keep this room manned twenty-four/seven, and now that you’re all here that should be easier.”

  We turned to follow him out of the slightly claustrophobic, sweaty building, but George stayed staring at the screen for a moment or two before squeezing Daniel’s shoulder.

  “Widows. That’s what we call them. It seemed right given what they came from.”

  The other man nodded at him before pulling the headphones back up and staring at the monitors, where silent red shapes moved amongst the trees.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  I don’t know what I was expecting to be served up, but sizzling chicken fajitas and a Mexican beer weren’t on top of the list. They were, however, just what was needed, and within minutes of the dishes being served, I had juice dribbling down my chin, never having been very good at wrapping the damned things.

  The canteen was cosy, the long tables and benches made of pine, creating a less austere regulation atmosphere. It felt more like we were eating in a school than a government facility. The chef for the night, Michael, came out of the kitchen and joined us, but took his seat at the far end of the table opposite Nigel. He was older than Whitehead and Daniel, easily in his fifties, and I noticed with a glance down that he had a wedding ring on. For a second I considered telling him that it really would have made no difference if he’d left the safety of the compound and gone home, but I figured that was for him to work out by himself. He smiled and seemed friendly enough, but didn’t really make any effort to join in the conversation.

  “I thought you said there were five of you left?” John swilled his messy mouthful of food down with a long swig of beer. “Where are the other two?”

  Unlike the rest of us, Chris rolled his tortilla with precision, not a drop of juice or sour cream escaping. “They’re out doing a patrol. Checking the perimeters. Obviously the cameras keep a pretty good overview of things, but it doesn’t hurt to be safe.”

  George nodded. “It seems you’ve got it all pretty well sorted out, given the situation. Remember, we’ve got those two guns with us if you need some weaponry on patrol. We’ve taken on a couple of the widows. You’d need something.”

  Whitehead smiled. “Don’t worry, we’ve got guns. This is a government place after all, and until a couple of days ago we had a pretty large contingent of army chaps here.” He left his beer untouched, sipping water instead. “We have our own armoury, and a few grenades and equally delightful toys the boys in green left behind in case we needed to defend ourselves.”

  Most of the meal was taken up with the retelling of our trip to Hanstone, and how we’d all met. I left out the detail of Katie and the widow in the pub, how it hadn’t attacked us. With everything else that had happened, it didn’t seem important anymore. I said a little bit about what happened to Chloe, and I noticed Michael listening pretty intently to that. Rebecca shared a bit, slowly answering questions on paper, or with nods and mimes if it was quicker.

  She lived in a flat annexed to the home where she worked for handicapped children—Meadowbank. That was where she’d got the bus from. The children weren’t deaf, but had severe difficulties, mainly a combination of physical and mental handicaps that made it difficult to do anything for themselves. She spent most of her time trying different light therapies and vibrations with them, as well as the ordinary day-to-day nursing things like bathing and feeding them.

  She hadn’t really noticed anything wrong around her. Most of her days were so involved in just taking care of the children that she didn’t have time to see if nurses were off sick, and it was the kind of place where people did have time off. It was stressful work, and if you weren’t at your best it was no good coming in. She did notice that a few had put on weight, though, but she hadn’t mentioned it. A flicker of tired humour had crossed her face as she’d scribbled, Women don’t mention putting on weight. Only losing it. Not to each other’s faces, anyway. And then she’d got gastric flu and been really sick. Sicker than she’d ever been in her life. If you were sick at Meadowbank you had to stay off until you were completely better or you’d risk infecting the children, and so by the time she was well enough to go back in it was all over.

  She paused, put her biro down and took a long drink from her beer, taking almost half the bottle down in one go. The rest of us stayed silent, just staring at her as she shut us all out for a moment, and for the first time since I’d met her, I saw the true depths of her soul in those dark eyes. I wasn’t the only one to see it. She was a special person. A good person. I wondered how many were left amongst us. I felt ashamed for how I’d treated her when we first met. I should have seen her properly then. Not been so caught up in all my own crap.

  Unlike the rest of us, she hadn’t tried the radio and phones, and her first real knowledge that something was very, very wrong was when she’d stepped into the main building of Meadowbank that morning. Like Oliver Maine, she’d missed day one of the new world completely, lying in her bed feeling sorry for herself.

  The reception area was covered in the white stuff. Huge ropes and strands spread across the surfaces along with some foul smelling slime. When she went upstairs, she found the children all dead. Not cocooned, not being eaten, just dead. There were pillows on the floor that maybe hinted at suffocation. She didn’t know what had happened. She didn’t really want to know.

  As she recounted this part of her story, her face had tightened and her scribbling became more frantic. She wanted this bit of the story to be over quickly; you didn’t have to be a body language expert to tell that.

  There were three of the widows in the building that she came across. Two were eating their way through the cocooned bodies of Nurse Harold and Nurse Garner in the small playroom. The third dropped from the ceiling in front of her as she ran back down the stairs. It stared at her, it’s jaws working and then leapt over her, leaving her free to run. And run she did. It wasn’t long after that she found the rest of us. She’d been going to head for London.

  “I wonder why it didn’t attack you?” While the stories were being told, Katie had gone and made coffee, and George spooned three sugars into his mug.

  Rebecca shrugged. Katie gave me a stern warning glare, but I didn’t feel the need to share our experience at The Plough with the rest. If it meant anything, we’d figure it out when the time came. I poured myself some coffee and lit a cigarette. I figured that the severe NO SMOKING signs plastered to every wall were no longer relevant and if anyone tried to enforce them then I’d tell them where to shove it. Not particularly liking my newfound aggression, I inhaled and asked the question I’d been waiting to get to all evening.

  “So, what’s the cause of all this, Chris? You’re the doctor, the geneticist. You must have some idea.”

  He leaned forward, his elbows resting on the table. “Genetically modified food. That’s where the smart money is. They, or I suppose I should say we, let it get out of control.”

  “GM foods?
But we’ve been eating those for years and never had any problems.” Nigel sneered from behind his beer, and it was nice to see even our friendly mad scientist send him an irritated glance.

  “That’s a fool’s argument. I think we can definitely say we’ve got some problems now. Just because the results aren’t immediately apparent, it doesn’t mean that things aren’t definitely going on beneath the surface. Remember Thalydomide?”

  George stuffed his pipe, and I hoped he’d remembered to pick up a couple of packs of that tobacco when we’d been in Woburn. He lit it before speaking. “But how? How could they mess with the genes of crops to this extreme? It sounds crazy, even for our government.”

  Whitehead raised an eyebrow. “That’s if it was our lot that did it. As far as I can see, it’s a mixture of everybodies mistakes.”

  “Oh, good. The one time we all work together and we leave the world screwed. That’s just great.” Katie seemed less than surprised despite her sarcasm.

  “No, they didn’t work together, but a lot of people messed with a lot of genes. And then the cross-pollination started, creating new genetic hybrids. But the worst were the modifications that weren’t advertised to the public. I know that we started to play with hormones in plants and animals. To make them more productive, larger, tastier.” He was becoming agitated and excitable now that he was in his own field. “Some of that work was made public, but not all of it. The ordinary man on the street definitely didn’t know just how much tampering was going on.

  “And there was a Scottish research centre that started to think about how they could make plants repellent to insect life, so farmers could cut down on insecticides. They had problems with protesters. News of their research leaked, as it invariably does.” He shrugged. “Can you see where it’s all going? A little bit of the experiment floats away on the wind, meets up with a little bit of another experiment and then who knows what could happen.”

  George frowned. “So, you think that’s the cause?”

  I felt my own anger rising. “So you guys fuck about with nature without having a fucking clue what you’re doing and the world pays the bill. Jesus fucking Christ, don’t your lot ever think?” My cigarette jabbed at the air in front of him as I levelled my accusations directly at him, our sole remaining perpetrator of crimes against humanity.

  “No, we don’t. Not really.” He met my gaze and his frank honesty deflated me. “We’re too busy with wanting to know rather than thinking about the consequences. That’s how we end up with nuclear bombs as well as radiation therapy. If we thought about how it was all going to end up we’d never be brave enough to try anything. We’re a bunch of selfish bastards. Too focussed on the curiosity. We forget it killed the cat and cats have nine lives, ergo curiosity must be pretty fucking dangerous.”

  Hearing that kind of language in his neat delivery was almost comical, and John snorted in his beer. He held out his bottle. “Well, cheers mate. Just don’t do it again.”

  Whitehead smiled sheepishly and chinked his mug against the glass. “I think the lessons have been learned. No more research for me.”

  “Although of course we are going to need some kind of pesticide to kill these things with, so I wouldn’t make a statement like that in a hurry.” George’s comment may have been made with a touch of tongue in cheek, but there was truth in it. “We still haven’t figured out how the widows intend to reproduce, but I’m banking on them not obliging us by dying out all by themselves.”

  “You’re right.” Whitehead was nervously earnest again. “But there are facilities working on that. I came up here from one in north London. They loaned me out, as it were. It was a top research centre with better defences than this place, and an army presence. They’ll be working twenty-four/seven to come up with something. As soon as they realised there might be a problem they started working on it. We haven’t got hold of them with the radios yet, but they probably don’t have such basic communication equipment. That’s not their primary function, after all.”

  Jane, who had been almost dozing against her sister, sat up. “You really think they’re going to find a way out of this?”

  “I don’t see why not. If there’s one thing that scientists are good at, it’s producing dangerous chemicals.”

  Jane and John looked convinced, but I wasn’t so sure. “But you haven’t heard from these guys in the past couple of days?”

  “No, but there are people out there. People like us that are surviving. We’ve made contact with them, and eventually the army will come. I’m sure of it. We are only two days in, remember.”

  His enthusiasm was hard to fight, and when we’d finished our coffees, we only had time to say a brief, tired hello to the two men who’d been out checking the perimeters before heading back to the dormitory, Whitehead with us. I was glad to see he was finally wilting, too. There was something a little too superhuman about all that energy.

  Dave was still sleeping, and without turning the main lights on, we all undressed, leaving on enough to be decent, and slipped beneath the duvets of our single bunks. Nigel had taken a bed at the end by the door, as far from the rest of us as he could get, and from what Dr. Whitehead had said, that was where the rest of his team also slept. That was fine by me, and bad luck to them. I couldn’t imagine that they’d like Nigel any more than the rest of us, even if they hadn’t been exactly welcoming themselves.

  I waited until the others had finished and then slipped along to the washroom to brush my teeth. The strong taste of fajita still lingered and it was good to shake it off with a quick scrub, rushing the hard bristles over my gums, enjoying the burn of peppermint.

  Idly, I wondered how long our supply of toothpaste would last. It was funny the things that suddenly became matters of concern, ideas popping into my head out of nowhere. What would we do when it ran out? There were probably several lifetimes of toothpaste for each of us out there in the untapped shelves of supermarkets around the world, but I wasn’t too keen to get back out there and retrieve it. Not today, at any rate.

  “I like a man who takes care of his teeth.”

  Despite the softness of her voice, I almost leapt out of my skin. “Jesus, Katie!” Spitting the foam out, I rinsed with water from the tap. “You made me jump.”

  She giggled. “I could tell.” Holding up her own toothbrush, she nudged me out of the way with her hip. The unexpected contact sent shivers through me, and I was suddenly aware of how close to naked we both were, in just T-shirts and underwear. And it had to be said hers was slightly more revealing than mine was, hinting at the curves of her small breasts beneath the black cotton, her nipples pressing against the cloth as she brushed. She’d taken her bra off, that much was obvious.

  Swallowing, I looked away, feeling my own heat rising, uncomfortable and awkward, trying not to think about how closely we’d spent the night before, and how warm and good she’d felt sleeping in my arms. If she tried that tonight, dressed as she was, I didn’t think I could be trusted to keep my hands to myself. Not wanting my thoughts to be too evident, I decided it was time to retreat.

  “Anyway, good night.” Stepping backwards, I felt as if I might trip over my own feet, and having dropped my eyes from her breasts, all I could see now were her slim, toned legs, disappearing at the thigh under her shirt.

  I turned to leave, my heart beating fast in my chest, but she called me back. “Wait.”

  “What is it?” I peered through the doorway, as if the wall between us would provide some kind of protection—for her or for me, I wasn’t sure which.

  “Jane’s sleeping in with Rebecca.” Her skin looked paler in this light, smooth as marble under her loose somewhere between auburn and brown curls. She took a step closer to me, her voice dropping. “She’s Jane’s new best friend.” There was a hint of something a little like jealousy that made her mouth turn down for a split second, and then she smiled again as she came another foot nearer. I could feel blood racing to all parts of my body, and I knew that if she came much clo
ser she’d be able to see it, too. There was no way I was going to be able to hide my desire in just Calvin Klein underwear and a T-shirt.

  “Anyway,” shrugging, she leaned into the doorframe, “that leaves me alone in my room.” The green in those hazel eyes shone as she stared at me, waiting for some kind of response. Despite her attempts at adult seduction she chewed on her bottom lip, slightly giving away her nervousness. Her twenty-one years didn’t seem so very old as she stood there, leaning into me so that I could almost feel her body heat. I don’t know what she would have thought if I’d told her it was that chewing that tilted the balance.

  I didn’t move away. Maybe I should have. Maybe I should have felt an overwhelming sense of grief for Chloe, said Thanks but no thanks and then like a gentleman taken my frustrated body back to bed to toss and turn sleeplessly. Maybe I should have done those things. And maybe if Katie had been more like Chloe, like Rebecca was, darker and more sophisticated, a curvy woman of the world, any man’s match, then maybe I would have stood back. Maybe it would have been too much. Maybe the guilt or the memories would have forced me to turn away. Maybe. And that’s what the small part of my brain that was rationalising was telling me as I stood there, my body shaking slightly.

  But if I’m honest, and I’ve got to try to be, because, shit, this may be the last thing I ever leave to the world, and if anyone is around to read it I sure as fuck want it to be the truth, because otherwise what the hell is the point, if I’m honest, then I think none of that would have made a difference. Standing there in that bathroom, after two days of living in pretty much constant terror, I felt safer than I had since I ran from my house, I felt more alive than I had in a long, long time, and there was a beautiful young woman, maybe one of the last few in the entire world, wanting me to have sex with her. Asking me. So was it guilt I felt? No. Somewhere deep inside maybe it lingered, but the world had changed too much for that. Life had become shorter and harder. And that’s what I responded to.