Omega

by Stewart Farrar

  'It'll look better when we've harrowed it,' Greg said hopefully.

  Moira, Rosemary and Eileen felt a little guilty and frustrated about the building and ploughing, because being young and healthy they wanted to help more but simply had not the muscles for this stage of the work. Even Dan and Greg, town-bred as they were, were exhausted at the end of each day.

  The camp-fire was very welcome in the evenings, for the first chill of autumn was in the air. They dug a second hearth farther away, for use on the odd evening when the wind (which mostly was funnelled either up or down the valley) blew at all strongly towards the trees. It was round this more exposed fire that Geraint Lloyd found them huddled one evening when he rode up to visit them on his bicycle, as he did fairly regularly to give them what news he had been able to pick up on his ham radio and to bring up batteries for recharging. Greg had jury-rigged a water-wheel to drive his alternator, pending a more durable structure and was only too glad to help Geraint keep his radio going. (Geraint, as ingenious as Greg in his own way, had converted an old baby-carriage into a trailer for his bicycle to carry the batteries.)

  Geraint found them more depressed than usual this evening; it had been a tiresome day, full of problems and false starts, and everyone seemed to feel that not much progress had been made. Nor had a gusty wind and a couple of rain-showers improved tempers.

  'We've got to get the first cabin roofed and weathertight pretty bloody soon,' Greg was grumbling, 'so we can get cracking on the cook-house. We can't have the girls cooking in the open once the winter sets in.'

  'We can always cook in the caravans,' Angie said.

  'And use up all our gas bottles when we've got a wood-burning range? Not bloody likely. Anyhow, the caravans are bedrooms. Ought to keep 'em for that, if we're going to have any kind of comfort.'

  'I know today's been a bad day. But you'll get it done.'

  'If we have a month of rain?' Greg asked gloomily.

  Geraint listened for another minute of semi-bickering and then interrupted: 'At least you can get on with it. D'you realize what it's like outside? Damn lucky you are and we in the village, too – tucked away in a defensible cul-de-sac. You should listen to my ham friends.'

  Everybody fell silent. They were well aware that the Madness had become, by unspoken agreement, almost a taboo subject at Camp Cerridwen. It was now a fortnight since the first madmen had been shot in New Dyfnant, and at the Camp only Dan, Greg and Peter knew, from the villagers, how many had since been shot at the barracades on the two approach roads – forty-three men, women and children so far. More than one villager who had hitherto been regarded as tough had had to be taken off the sentry roster, because he had come home from a necessary execution sick and trembling. And those forty-three could only have been a random handful of the insane, because they wandered aimlessly with no evidence of the purposeful seeking of shelter. Any who came up the approach roads did so by chance and against the odds, for the main road was steep and the other one winding and long. Only Geraint Lloyd, crouched for hours on end over his radio exchanging piecemeal local news with his fellow-hams, had any kind of perspective of the overall picture.

  Dan and Greg had good reason to keep the news to themselves and they had no difficulty in persuading Peter to do the same. As in most witch covens, so in theirs, it was the women on the whole who were the more psychically sensitive; Moira unusually so even for an experienced High Priestess, Sally to a lesser degree but consistently, while Rosemary's came and went unpredictably but could at times find her painfully vulnerable. Greg seemed resigned to the fact that, after years of trying, he still 'couldn't pick up a bloody thing' – but he nevertheless had great psychic power which the others could tap, and with which he could surround Rosemary, in her vulnerable moments, like a wall. Dan himself was more mentally than psychically sensitive, so although he did not 'pick up' a great deal, he was remarkably astute at interpreting what he did pick up (a process in which many otherwise gifted clairvoyants mar their own gift).

  From the first days of the Madness, the sheer magnitude of the violence raging in the psychic atmosphere, as it did over the physical Earth, had hung over the women's aware-nes like a thundercloud. On the fifth day after the earthquake, the astral shock-wave had hit them. Moira, shaking, had ordered a Circle; Dan had taken one look at her and assumed command (a thing he very rarely did), casting it himself. He had included everyone but Father Byrne; to the priest he had explained quickly what they were doing and why, and had suggested that he might be happier -and more effective – in the caravan confronting the powers of darkness in his own way. Father Byrne, who was anything but insensitive himself, had nodded, said 'God bless you all', and gone not to his caravan but to the little open-air sanctuary he had made for himself in a clearing in the forest. Dan had then taken charge of the building up of their psychic defences; Angie, Eileen and Peter had cooperated willingly and very soon the whole group had felt stronger and calmer. Moira, rejuvenated, had taught the non-witches the basics of psychic self-defence – concentrating particularly on Eileen, who although quite untrained in psychic manners was all too factually aware of the nature of the Madness and therefore specially vulnerable.

  Since then, everybody had borne up well during the day and a nightly Circle had been cast around the camp to protect their sleep. (Dan, half-teasingly, asked Father Byrne if he minded sleeping inside it. Father Byrne had replied that if God had forgiven Naaman for the political necessity of bowing down in the House of Rimmon, He would doubtless forgive a somewhat aged priest for the domestic necessity of sleeping in it. He had then hastily added that he was only joking and that as far as he was concerned, the camp was protected by a circle of love and goodwill which was more important than the formula used.) And when Peter brought back the first news of the grim operation at the barricades, he had readily agreed with Dan and Greg that it should be kept from the women unless and until it was necessary to give it to them. 'They're our psychic antennae,' Dan-had said. 'Let's keep the air as clear as we can for them.'

  Nevertheless it was Moira who asked tonight: 'It's really bad, Geraint, isn't it?'

  The schoolmaster nodded. 'I'm afraid so, Moira… In the first week after the earthquake, I was in touch with eighteen hams still operating in Britain and two in Ireland. Now I'm in touch with five British and one Irish. That's fourteen gone. Four of the British and the Irishman lived in coastal areas so they'd announced they were getting out; whether they got clear, God knows.' He looked apologetically at Eileen. 'I hope you don't mind – but they are all my friends, even if I've never met most of 'em, so I tipped 'em off about the vinegar masks in time. So no one got caught that way. And the Irish knew in any case. But that's still nine out of the twenty who survived the earthquake but have since disappeared – and none of the others picked up a signing-off message from any of them, though we'd all promised to broadcast one if we could… And all those nine were in bad areas, big towns and so on… Some of them had pretty dreadful stories to tell, locally -and the ones who are left are still telling them. We're damn lucky here. We hate what we're having to do at the barricades – but that's nothing to what's happening in the towns and the open country. The sane minority are having to kill the insane majority, whenever they meet face to face. Either that or get killed themselves. And since not one in a thousand of the sane ones has a gun or anything, a hell of a lot of 'em are getting killed…… Ireland's been better off, as far as my friend there can tell me, because they got the Dust warning and only a small minority were caught by it. But about half their population, North and South, live in seaports, and the casualties there must have been ghastly. It looks as though Ireland got the tidal waves first, and worst, on top of earthquakes just as bad as ours… Can't tell you much about the rest of the world yet, I'm afraid. I've been too busy trying to build up the British Isles picture and cooperating with the other hams to do it. Anyway, long-range radio conditions were lousy after the quake and they're only improving slowly. But from the odd contacts I
have had, I'd say our state of affairs is pretty typical It's like the end of the world.'

  They were all silent for quite a while. Moira looked around them; Father Byrne with his eyes shut, his lips moving, the rosary slipping rapidly through his gnarled fingers. Eileen rigid, unmoving, the tears trickling down her cheeks from her unblinking eyes. Peter watching her, longing to put his arms round her in protection and love, and not daring to. Ginger Lad, sensing the tension, snaking himself round Angie's ankles and staring up at her anxiously. Rosemary clinging to Greg, her shoulders quivering…

  'You said "the sane minority", Geraint,' Dan asked at last. 'How many?'

  Geraint hesitated. 'Christ knows, Dan. I've been trying to make a wild guess, piecing together everything I've been getting. For one thing, it depends on how long the mad ones last. Everyone says they don't eat unless food's right in front of their noses, they hardly sleep and then it may be a field or a pavement, they injure themselves and do nothing about it – they must die off before long, from malnutrition or exposure or disease or injury; they can't just go on rampaging about indefinitely…' He drew a long breath. 'And when that's all over – my guess, for what it's worth, is that if one person in fifty in Britain is still alive, sane and healthy enough to go on living, then Britain will have been damn lucky.'

  16

  There were times, during the two or three weeks of the Madness, when Philip thought the killing would never stop.

  The little Garth Farm community had been better prepared than most, because Philip had been able to warn them of the violence and incurability of the Madness: After the first incident when a madman blundered suddenly into the farmyard and half-strangled Harry's wife before Harry shot him, there was no argument about what had to be done.

  From then on, a duty roster of armed sentries was drawn up and nobody was to be out of sight of them at any time. There was plenty of work to be done in the fields if the farm was to be kept running but they always went out in parties of at least three, with an armed look-out who kept round his neck the binoculars they had found in the house. The madmen were easily identifiable even at a distance; after you had seen one or two, you could no longer mistake them for sane people who were merely distressed or ill. So since the defenders of Garth Farm had good Army rifles, the binoculars, by giving more warning, helped to make the necessary act a little less gut-wrenching by depersonalizing it slightly. The attacker could be picked off at a greater distance, according to how good a shot you were, instead of waiting until you were face-to-face as would have been necessary with a shotgun. At first the defenders had hoped that a warning shot might scare the madmen off, because none of them had any desire to kill them unless they actually attacked. But the first few tries proved that this was an illusory hope. The madmen ignored bullets. They even ignored wounds if the first shot merely winged them. They seemed motivated by one consuming obsession – to close with and destroy any sane person they saw. (For some reason no one could explain they rarely attacked each other.) So the rule became simple; shoot on sight and shoot to kill.

  Garth Farm seemed to attract.them – perhaps because it stood alone on a slight rise, visible from several kilometres away in the Kettering direction. Once the Madness took hold there were shootings every day. The toll ranged from two on the most peaceful day to seven on the worst. Light seemed to increase the attacks – bright sunlight meant maximum danger, an overcast night apparently none at all but there were several attacks around the full moon when the sky was clear.

  Disposing of the bodies was an unpleasant and time-absorbing business; an old quarry in the woods about a kilometre away provided a cliff over which they could be tipped into mercifully concealing trees, for burial was out of the question. But they had to be carted there under armed guard as always and this made the farmwork intermittent.

  None of the defenders managed to become indifferent to the slaughter, with the possible exception of Harry's younger brother who had a vicious streak and seemed ' almost to enjoy it. Strangely, Harry himself betrayed the most distress; he had been a regular soldier and had seen action in both of the small localized wars which had disfigured the 1990s. But that had been the killing of armed enemies as sane as himself, and this, by its very contrast, went against all his soldier's instincts. So in some ways it was even harder for him than for the others who had never been trained in 'honourable' warfare. For Harry was both briskly practical and unsubtly honourable, so while he did not hesitate over the necessity he could not hide the anguish. He never put it into words except in the simple phrase 'poor sods', but somehow that muttered epitaph was more poignant than most graveside orations.

  After two weeks of shooting came the first signs of a change. They began finding the bodies of madmen who had died of their own accord.

  They had expected it, logically, having reached the same conclusions as Geraint Lloyd; the exposed, underfed, self-injuring lunatics could not survive for long. All the same, the first bodies took them by surprise. They all seemed, by some bizarre mercy of Providence, to have died in their sleep; they were curled up under the lee side of hedges or against haystacks (one had even crept into an outlying barn), as though in the hour of death they had rediscovered their lost instinct to seek shelter. That they had been madmen and not mere refugees was beyond question – they had the torn and festering fingernails, the encrusted eyes, the strangely emaciated necks and the yellowish pallor which the defenders had come to recognize as symptomatic.

  There was in fact one other phenomenon of these 'natural' deaths to which only Betty was a chance witness and of which she could not bring herself to tell even Philip: a last-minute return of sanity. It was she who discovered the shelterer in the barn. Philip was a hundred metres away, on armed guard, and Tonia was near him. Betty, needing a bucket, had gone to the barn alone – breaking the rules a little but all was quiet (the madmen were usually heard before they were seen) and she had an automatic in her belt. She came across the man without warning, when she was almost on him, lying foetally curled in the hay. He was unmistakably a madman and her hand flew to her gun, but he did not move, merely stared at her, and Betty (breaking the rules again) hesitated. After a few seconds, the man smiled, said 'Hullo there!' in a calm friendly voice, closed his eyes and died.

  Betty somehow knew, beyond a shadow of doubt, that he was dead. She was so certain that she put away her gun and knelt beside him, bursting into tears for the first time since the earthquake. Philip heard her sobs and came running. When he found her with the body, he helped her up, soothing her, saying 'I know, love, it's bloody… I know… I know…' again and again.

  No, darling, you don't, she thought as she clung to him; not this new heart-breaking thing. And I'm not going to tell you. I hope you never find out. One of us is enough.

  Over the next few days, the number of discovered bodies increased and the number of attacks grew fewer. At last the attacks ceased altogether. The Madness was over. They carted the last bodies off their land and began, warily and a little increduously, to relax.

  Even the BBC, in the first of its brief bulletins that had meant anything at all since the flood warnings, announced that 'reports from Government agents throughout the country' showed that the last of the madmen (whom the bulletins called 'afflicted categories') was dead. It ended with a vaguely worded exhortation to 'those of us who have survived' to form small self-supporting communities and live off the land.

  'Thanks very much,' Harry said scornfully as he switched off. "We're doing that already and so's everyone else with any sense, I imagine. Bloody so-called Government!

  Whose fault was the Madness anyway? Who didn't tell us about the vinegar masks till it was too bloody late?'

  'Did you notice the "Government agents" bit?' Philip asked. 'That was deliberate, I'd say, knowing how Beehive thinks. Plant the idea that Big Brother is watching you, wherever you are.'

  'You bet I noticed… Why didn't they tell us something useful, like how many people are still alive, and where?
Let their bloody spies earn their living… I wonder how many are alive? We've seen nobody for days, except the Robertsons at the farm down the hill and that small bunch we saw on the move yesterday.'

  'Yes… I wonder why they didn't stop? They saw us, too.'

  'Just being cautious, I expect. People will be, for quite a while. You can't blame them.'

  In the sudden empty peace of the land, the Garth Farm group were not, as it turned out, cautious enough.

  Half a kilometre from the farm stood an isolated, practically undamaged cottage to which Betty and Tonia had taken a fancy. Sleeping accommodation at the farm was a little cramped and if Philip, Betty and Tonia moved into the cottage, the three single men could move out of the dormitory into warmer bedrooms. They could still cook and feed communally but everyone would have more elbow-room. It seemed a good idea to all concerned and the move was made.

  Now that they were able to concentrate on the work, they made fair progress. Harry and his wife, Harry's brother, and Tonia all had some agricultural knowledge and were able to direct the efforts of the others; and the farm, though it was not large and seemed to have been under-capitalized, had been well cared for and the land was in good condition. It would be hard work without fuel to drive a tractor or other machinery, but unlike the vanished owners they would be concerned not with cash crops but with feeding themselves, so they could horse-plough enough for vegetables and increase their livestock -their neighbours the Robertsons, grateful for the gift of one of the Army rifles during the Madness, had already promised help with that. The Robertsons also owned more than thirty hives and had offered them half a dozen. Honey would be vital in the absence of sugar and none of them had any idea if beet-sugar production was possible on a domestic scale or how to set about it if it was. Garth Farm had half a hectare of orchard and a sizeable soft-fruit garden, while the Robertsons had virtually no fruit at all, so the beginnings of a mutually beneficial barter relationship already existed.