Omega

by Stewart Farrar

  All in all, for eleven adults and three children, Garth Farm looked a viable proposition; rather a lot of mouths to feed, perhaps, until their production plan had been working for a season or two – but even that was taken care of; the Robertsons' place was about the same size but only had three adults and two children, so they were only too willing to offer food in exchange for help.

  'When you look at it, this place is a bloody godsend,' Harry decided. 'It could have been designed for people like us, in a survival situation.'

  There were others who thought so, too, and for years afterwards Philip found it hard to forgive himself for their naivete in believing that they could forget defence once the Madness was over. If they had been a little more realistic, a little more quick-witted, Harry and the others might still be alive.

  They had even, in a sense, had warning. A man and a girl on horseback had ridden up to the farm one morning, saying they were looking for relatives who had been somewhere in the area just before the Madness set in. Harry and the others had received them politely and given them a cup of their fast-vanishing tea but had agreed afterwards that they didn't like them much. They had been, as Tonia put it, 'too goddamn nosey', asking questions and peering around with a persistence that seemed somehow out of tune with their assumed friendliness. Everyone was relieved to see the back of them and promptly forgot them, instead of realizing the possible implication that the 'friendly visit' was in fact a reconnaissance for a raid.

  Luckily, Philip, Betty and Tonia had not yet moved to the cottage when the visitors came, so that piece was missing from the reconnaissance jigsaw puzzle. It was the missing piece which saved not only them but Harry's children, eleven-year-old Finola and seven-year-old Mark.

  They moved into the cottage, as it happened, two days later; and three days after that, just before breakfast-time, the raiders took Garth Farm.

  In the cottage, Betty and Tonia were tidying up and Philip was still shaving – ten minutes later, they would have been on their way past the orchard to the farm for the communal breakfast. Philip thought he heard hooves but told himself it was probably Harry and his wife out for an early ride on the two hunters Robertson had quartered with them because his stable was overcrowded and there was plenty of room in Garth Farm's. Or it could be old Bunty (as they had christened the farm's own veteran mare) frisking in the pasture behind the cottage, where she had spent the night after working yesterday pulling the cart which was kept in the cottage's lean-to. Bunty did have bouts of skittishness on fine mornings like this.

  Philip rinsed his face and was still drying it when he heard the shots. Ten, fifteen of them, maybe more; in the sudden fusillade he lost count but the firing was over by the time he had run to the upper window from which he could see the farm. Betty and Tonia were hard on his heels.

  'Oh, Christ – what the hell was that?'

  'Look – six, seven horses, tethered to the rail fence…'

  There was somebody with the horses, shotgun in hand; it looked like a girl, though it was hard to tell from this distance, as she or he was half hidden by a tree. Almost at once, two men walked out of the farmyard towards her; they too carried guns and moved with the confident ease of victors who need not fear a shot in the back. The girl -it was a girl, they saw now – stepped away from the tree to meet them.

  'It's that bitch who came the other day,' Tonia said, grimly. 'God, we were blind!'

  Philip took a deep breath. 'Look, girls – I'm afraid it's bloody obvious what's happened. They've raided the farm and they've won. A hell of a lot of shooting, over quickly, and then those three walking about as though they know it's over. The rest – there must be at least four more from the number of horses – they'll be inside, with Harry and the others either dead or prisoners. Question is – what do we do? Try a counter-attack, to rescue them if they're still alive?'

  'What with?' Betty asked. 'One pistol and a four-ten? We've got some rifle ammo but all the rifles are at the farm.' 'Hell!'

  'Our only chance'd be to hide in the woods and wait till dark. We might get away with something in the small hours.'

  'If there's anyone left to rescue,' Tonia said. 'That shooting sounded – well, kind of purposeful, to me.'

  "We'll have to get out of here, that's for sure,' Philip told them. 'That lot know what they're doing – and from their recce they know we three are missing. They'll take a look at the cottage any moment now.'

  Suddenly Betty gripped his arm and pointed.

  Running through the orchard, obviously keeping out of sight of the farm, were Harry's two children. Finola, awkwardly but determinedly, clutched a rifle. Little Mark, close behind her, hugged a carrier bag.

  'Get 'em in – quick!' Philip rapped. 'Tonia, you keep watch here – right? Anyone comes this way – downstairs like the clappers!'

  'Right.'

  The two children cannoned into their arms in the garden – Finola white-faced but calm, Mark sobbing quietly, spilling his bag of cartridge-clips on to the lawn.

  'They're all dead,' Finola said woodenly. 'Everyone but us.'

  Betty put her arms round the two children, tightly, and they clung to her. 'Catch Bunty, Phil,' she said over their heads. 'We'll chuck what we can into the cart. We'll at least try to get away on wheels. But if Tonia gives the alarm, we'll have to drop everything and run.'

  They did get away, the five of them, with a haphazard cartload of possessions and loaded weapons, making as little noise as they could as Bunty hauled the cart down the lane away from (and fortunately out of sight of) the farm. Tonia drove, Betty kept the children under cover behind piled bedding and Philip sat by the tailboard, rifle in hand. They had gone about three kilometres before the pursuers appeared behind them – two mounted men, one of them the man who had come to the farm before. Philip hid his rifle till they were within range and then brought down one of the horses with his first shot; the rider hit the road, either stunned or dead. The other man spurred forward, not pausing to unsling his rifle but firing with a revolver. Philip heard two bullets smack the tailboard before he got the second man in the chest. 'Pull up, Tonia!'

  Tonia reined in and Philip jumped to the ground. The first man had been stunned and Philip had no compunction at all about shooting him through the head; the man was a murderer anyway, and no report of them must get back to the farm. He collected the dead men's weapons and ammunition, caught and mounted the surviving horse and rejoined the others.

  They set off again, moving as fast as Bunty could manage and concentrating on finding unlikely routes to lose any other pursuers.

  Mark was still in shock, but Finola, a fiercely intelligent child who had been aware of the possibility of disaster throughout the slaughter of the past few weeks, managed to tell them the story. She and Mark had been upstairs with 'Uncle John', Harry's aggressive younger brother, when the raiders swooped on the farm. Everyone else had been caught unprepared and unarmed in the kitchen or the yard and had been herded into the yard. John had loaded the rifle he always kept beside him, and motioned the children to keep quiet. Then, from the bedroom window, he had tried to shoot the raiders' leader. Somehow he had missed ('the man must have moved just as he fired – Uncle John was a good shot') and as he re-aimed he was shot dead himself. Whether the family tried to seize the opportunity to rush the raiders, or were shot down at once in cold blood, Finola did not know. She was busy dragging Mark into the loft and through the trap-door to the water-tank space under the roof. But as they ran, they heard the fusillade. There was a skylight by the tank and peering cautiously through it Finola had counted the bodies in the yard and realized that she and Mark were on their own – unless they could reach the cottage unobserved. She had kept her nerve astonishingly well, quietening Mark as the raiders searched the upstairs rooms and miraculously missed the little trap-door, creeping out when they had gone downstairs to search the outbuildings, finding her father's rifle and ammunition in the bedroom, leading Mark down the back stairs and hiding with him in the fruit bushes t
ill the raiders were indoors" again. ('I'd have used the rifle if they'd found us,' she declared and Philip for one believed her.) Then they had slipped away through the orchard.

  'You did marvellously, darling,' Betty told her. 'It was horrible, but you're safe now.'

  Finola shook her head, gravely. 'Oh, no, we're not. None of us. Anything could happen any moment, couldn't it? Things are like that always, now. But I'm glad we're with you. Where are we going?'

  17

  Brenda liked Gareth Underwood. Not merely because he was clearly in love with her but because he really was a very nice young man. Both these facts were, she felt, out of character. Intelligence agents weren't supposed to be either emotionally vulnerable or nice. Sexual buccaneers maybe, in accordance with popular tradition – sweeping women off their feet with casual unconcern, but not politely, undemandingly adoring. Charming bastards maybe but not genuinely and transparently nice. She told herself, amused, that he must be a very incapable spy. Yet she knew he was not. He ranked high for his age in Beehive's Intelligence Section.

  Gareth was responsible every Monday (when he was not on some nameless mission on Surface) for bringing Brenda the weekly Intelligence Digest for filing in her library's Top Secret Archive Room. The drill was laid down. He would bring the sealed envelope to her personally; they would go, together and alone, into the TSA Room and lock themselves in; they would then sit on opposite sides of the table and Brenda would open the envelope and sign for the contents before filing them. Today, as she locked the door from the inside, she couldn't resist the quip 'We can't go on meeting like this' – and felt slightly ashamed of herself, for Gareth, while laughing politely at her conventional little joke, actually blushed.

  Brenda's security classification, of course, entitled her to read the Digest, and she always skimmed through it in front of Gareth before she filed it. She could have waited till he'd gone, but hell, the boy enjoyed the few minutes' privilege of looking at her, so why not let him? Besides, she could always ask him questions on it and she rather wickedly enjoyed seeing how far he was prepared to bend the rules in answering her.

  Today, however, the first page of the Digest jolted her into seriousness.

  ‘I knew it was awful, Gareth, but I hadn't realized it was quite as awful as this.' She read out: ' "It is now possible, therefore, to estimate that the total surviving population of England, Wales and Scotland, on Surface, is about 620,000, with a maximum error of ten per cent either way. To this must be added the known total of 11,374 Beehive personnel."… Gareth, that's less than one per cent!'

  'I know… At least the Madness is over. The survivors will survive. And multiply.'

  'And if there'd been no Madness or practically none? If people had known about the vinegar masks weeks earlier – even days earlier?'

  She should not have said that she knew, but Gareth did not freeze up as he might have done. 'I know, Brenda. That was… a terrible misjudgement, if you ask me this side of that locked door. But to be fair, you can't blame the Government altogether; they went on what the experts told them and the experts said a major Dust outbreak was unlikely.'

  'Was "unlikely" a firm enough prediction to gamble on?… Oh, I'm not trying to trap you into dangerous thoughts. I'm just a bit stunned, that's all.'

  'Aren't we all? And being safe down here, we've all got Guilt with a capital G nagging at us, so it's not enough to blame natural disaster.'

  'I haven't noticed all that much sense of guilt,' Brenda said. 'Mostly it's "I'm all right, Jack".'

  'Sometimes both – and that makes it worse… God, this isn't a dictatorship yet. We're still entitled to our own views on policy.'

  Not a dictatorship? Brenda asked herself – can he really believe that? But she said no more than: 'Even Intelligence agents.'

  He smiled. 'Even us.'

  She read for a while in silence and then asked: 'There are things that don't even go into the Digest, aren't there? That don't go down on paper at all?'

  'Well…' he said, cautiously. 'It's only Top Secret, after all. Which means it goes to quite a lot of people… What did you mean, anyway?'

  She tapped the page in front of her. 'For instance – it mentions the witch-hunt thing. More than mentions, in fact – it names the areas where it's strongest and weakest -lists the kind of incident that's taking place, everything from a form of trial claiming to enforce the Order in Council, to straight lynchings – says where witches are reported to have consolidated themselves in static communities or defensive bands – even analyses how well the Crusader network has survived and how much influence it has. The only thing it doesn't give is Beehive's attitude.'

  'To the Order in Council?' he asked, drily.

  'Oh, come off it, Gareth. To the witch-hunt. To these impromptu "trials". To the lynchings. It doesn't say if Beehive agents – putting it baldly – are trying to cam? things down or stir them up.'

  ‘You know I can't comment on that.'

  'I know you can't. I was just pointing to the omission which would strike any careful reader as deliberate.'

  He paused and then said: 'Let's just put it this way. I hope I’m never sent on that kind of job. Only for God's sake don't tell anyone I said so.' He smiled diffidently and all her instincts told her his smile was genuine.

  She had pushed him far enough. He must know that, as the Chief's mistress, she was perfectly well aware that the witch-hunt was a deliberate creation from the start to deflect anger from the Government, and as such was still being fomented and encouraged by Gareth's own colleagues in the field. Did he think she was testing his loyalty? Perhaps… She sighed inwardly. They were both trapped by love; she by her love for Reggie into the smothering of conscience, Gareth by his love for her into the abandonment of caution.

  'You know I'd never hurt you, Gareth,' she said gently. 'I may be… well, what everyone knows I am. But I am not a listening-post.’

  Gareth blushed for the second time, whether from the intimacy of her remark, or from jealousy of Reggie, or both, she did not know. She smiled at him anyway and got up to file the Digest away.

  When he had gone she took the file down again and reread the Digest from start to finish, thoughtfully.

  Moira and Dan thought very carefully before they even suggested the 'lighthouse' to the rest of the coven. The temptation to leave things as they were was strong; Camp Cerridwen was consolidating itself gratifyingly well, the central cabin was now roofed and warm, the cook-house was almost ready for use and thanks to an exceptionally mild autumn the ploughing and sowing had progressed faster than they had expected. Relations with the villagers of New Dyfnant, already excellent, were being cemented by growing personal friendships. From the point of view of geography, defence and natural and stored resources, Camp Cerridwen was probably as secure as any survival-group in Britain – and far more secure than most, if the reports Geraint Lloyd was exchanging with his handful of ham radio friends were at all typical. The handful had now increased to six in Britain and two in Ireland, apart from intermittent foreign contacts. Two of those who had fled from the floods had managed to return after the waters subsided, and having been prudent enough to seal their equipment in polythene sacks before they left, were able to get them working again. Another, whom Geraint had not heard from since before the earthquake because his set was mains-powered, had succeeded in converting it to battery power, and had rejoined the network. Recharging or scavenging for batteries remained a problem, of course; one ham had succeeded in building a water-wheel charging plant similar to Greg's, while another pedalled a bicycle-dynamo contraption the whole time he was on the air; their ingenuity, fortunately, seemed to match their compulsion to communicate.

  Four of the six reported active witch-hunting in their areas, of varying degrees of intensity. One of them, in Warwickshire, guessed shrewdly that it was being deliberately and centrally fostered. But it was the news from a ham near Marlborough that Moira and Dan found particularly disturbing when Geraint passed it on to them.
/>   'There seems to be a whole stretch of Savernake Forest where the situation's the other way round,' Geraint reported. 'It's a bunch of witches who are doing the persecuting and everyone's shit-scared of them, Joe says. A right black lot they must be, by the sound of it. They threaten disaster to anyone who offends them and if he goes on doing it, the disaster happens… Joe can't make up his mind if it's suggestion, real black magic or sabotage organized to look like magic; point is, people have found it does happen, so they toe the line. Most of 'em believe it is magic'

  'Are they camped in the Forest?' Dan asked. 'This black lot, I mean.'

  'They were, till a couple of weeks ago. Then they commandeered a village – a more or less undamaged one but there were only about a dozen survivors in it after the Madness. The witches simply ordered them out and they went. By then they were too scared not to. And -since then, more people have been drifting in – almost as if once they were dug in in the village, they sent out a call to their mates to come and join them.'

  'Does anyone know who they are? Any names?'

  'Joe says not – but their queen bee's got a local nickname: the Black Mamba. Joe's talked to people who've seen her. Young, good-looking, long black hair and a holy terror. She and some man are the leaders but when they deal with anyone she does most of the talking and she's the one they remember.'