The Nature of Balance

by Tim Lebbon

  “It’s not the ambulance,” Holly called clearly into the mouthpiece. “Hello? I’m not the ambulance service. Who is this?”

  “What?” the voice called, anxious, stunned. “Wrong number. Get off the line. I’m waiting for-” She hung up even before she finished her sentence.

  “Where was that last number?” Blane asked.

  “London, I think.”

  There was silence for a while, as the enormity of what they had heard sank in.

  Henry stood and walked slowly to the door. “Have to find my brother. Got a young family. Two girls.” He stood in the doorway for a moment, staring out at his family where they lay dead by the side of the pond. “Twins.” He closed the door and passed the windows on his way back to the tractor.

  Nobody went to stop him. None felt they had the right. Besides, they could barely move with the weight of dread crushing their guts and wringing their brains with cool, tenacious fingers.

  “Maybe we should try further afield,” Paul said, staring at the phones. “Here. Let me have a go.” He was thinking of his mother. He had been all the time they’d been in this little room, but now he had to try. He had to. He thought of the dream – his mother the only hint of colour in a nightmare of grey dread – and a lump came to his throat.

  Oh, to hear her cheerful voice crackling from thousands of miles away, berating him for wasting money on a ‘phone call.

  He grabbed the handset and punched in the number from memory. It rang. And rang. Then rang off.

  The line went dead. He hung up and tried again, but this time there was not even a dialling tone. He felt like he was listening in on the eerily still bedrooms of a million victims this morning.

  “Line’s gone.”

  He closed his eyes, and conjured the dream-image of his mother. He had to keep it there. It may be all he had left. A tear squeezed from the corner of his eye, but the others were kind enough to not notice.

  “What does that mean?” Holly said, frowning. “Why the fuck has the line just gone?”

  No answer was forthcoming, because nobody had one.

  “We should move,” Paul said, “leave the area. Drive until we find help. Maybe Gloucester? South to Chepstow? We can’t just hang around-”

  “I’m not leaving my George,” the old woman said, shaking her head and stamping her foot like a petulant child. “He’s never left me alone, and I can’t leave him alone, even if he is…”

  “Well, I’m all for going,” said June. “I want to leave this place. There’s only dead people here, now. We don’t belong here any more.”

  “Blane?” Paul asked the short man who was leaning against the window, forehead pressed against the glass, searching the village for the fleeting shadow he had seen earlier that day.

  Blane felt suddenly cold, spied upon. He watched the farmer kneel by the side of his dead family, tenderly touch their heads through the stained sheets and then climb onto his tractor. He headed across the square and disappeared down the main street without a backward glance. Blane hoped he would find his brother and family alive, not dead like everyone else.

  “Blane?”

  What was happening? The animals, his animals, were turning, and all around him bodies were stiffening into the shapes which would carry them into decomposition. The world had flipped sideways. While he was sitting in the woods last night, something basic had changed, a natural law which maintained order had dropped a function, allowing in a dose of true, unbridled chaos.

  And who the hell had been in the churchyard?

  “Blane!” Paul almost shouted, and Blane turned around suddenly. His eyes were wide as if he had been startled from a dream.

  “Day dreaming,” Blane said lamely.

  “Do you think we should leave?” Paul was asking him as a leader, an advisor.

  “Who put me in charge?” Blane asked, instantly regretting it when he saw Holly avert her gaze and frown. “I’m not even a villager. Neither are you, Paul. Elizabeth, perhaps you should decide-”

  “I’m asking you because you know better than us what’s been happening these last few hours,” Paul said.

  Blane could not answer. Paul was wrong. He was so wrong.

  “I can see it in your eyes. The way you’re always looking around. Like you’re searching for someone.”

  Blane shook his head. “You’re so wrong. I know less than anyone.” He glanced back through the window at the churchyard, recalling the sickly chuckle in the woods and the gay laughter tormenting his memory. “I think by knowing more, I know less.”

  “What do you mean by that?” Elizabeth asked. Her grey hair hung lank over her forehead. Her husband was dead. Blane wondered how she could possibly handle something like that. He suddenly felt in awe of these people who had lost family and friends. He could never recall losing anyone in his life. There was a void, true, before memory began, and this he mourned desperately. But could he ever really equate that with losing someone near and dear?

  It was as if another voice provided his answer. You have lost someone near and dear. You just don’t know it yet.

  “More answers breed more questions,” Blane said, and left it at that. He nodded at Paul. “I suppose Paul’s right. We should go for help. South, I think, towards Chepstow. If it’s bad there too, we’ve got a choice of direction from there. Into Wales, Newport and Cardiff. Or over the old bridge, Bristol, then London.”

  “Why even bother,” June said. “After what we’ve heard, why bother?”

  Blane shook his head. “I don’t think we should assume anything from what we heard.” But he knew his voice betrayed his own sense of hopelessness.

  They were silent for a while, five shattered people who had been rudely awoken by a nightmare. Around them, brash adverts exhorted the merits of National Savings Bonds or stamps in books of ten, and on the counter a rack of National Lottery Instants shouted in loud colours that the next one would be the winner. The place stank of the normality of yesterday: cold coffee in a mug behind the counter; a pack of paperclips, spilled across the floor like robot confetti; the cardboard smell of secret parcels, piled at the collection point and destined never to be delivered.

  “Chepstow it is, then,” Paul said quietly. Heads nodded. Elizabeth, small and cold and shaking, was the first to the door.

  The population of Rayburn had once been over five hundred. It seemed that there were few survivors.

  “I’ve got to stay,” Elizabeth said. “You all go on. I’ll only be a hindrance, anyway, old woman like me.”

  They were standing in the square, not far from the pond. Blane and Paul had gone on a walk around the village, shouting and banging on doors. The sun was high and strong, gazing down on the world as if nothing had happened. If there had been no survivors at all, it would have done the same.

  “No, you must come.” Holly could not bear to leave Elizabeth behind. The place was full of dead people, she would be almost alone, and besides … besides, everything felt wrong. Holly was sure that they were not doing the right thing, and that if they took Elizabeth with them it would make everything seem better.

  “I’m staying, young lady!”

  Holly held her hands out, palms outward. “Elizabeth, please, okay! But promise me you’ll stay indoors.”

  “Why should I have to do that?”

  Holly went to tell her, but realised she had no valid reason. “Just a hunch.”

  “Well-”

  “Elizabeth, something terrible has happened. We don’t know how far it’s spread. There may be people around, desperate people, survivors, who would do anything.”

  “You don’t have much of a faith in human nature, do you Holly?” The woman’s eyes were severe, but kind. Shadowed by a grief whose full impact she was trying to delay by staying here talking.

  Holly shook her head, shrugged. “I’ve always believe we were on a knife edge. That’s just the way things exist. I never dreamed we’d fall off.”

  Elizabeth looked at her intensely for a few s
econds, then grabbed her arm. For a small woman she was strong, and Holly had to tense her lips to hold in a gasp of pain. “My George always said that there’s one thing that set humans aside from the animals, Holly – being human. We’re so different in all sorts of way. I know all the arguments about thumbs, or language, or what-not. But inside, here,” she tapped her head, “there’s a basic kindness that doesn’t exist in nature. An awareness of others. Why do you think we’re all here, in this square, instead of home with our dead or running around like idiots?”

  Holly shrugged.

  “We care about each other.”

  “But animals-”

  “They care too, yes. But not for long.” Elizabeth let go and turned to watch Blane and Paul walking back alone, shaking their heads. “You come back for me,” Elizabeth said. “When you’ve got help, bring them back. I think I will have said my goodbyes to George by then.”

  She reached up and patted Holly on the shoulder, then turned and walked away. She merely nodded at Paul and Blane, and Holly could tell by their expressions that she was crying.

  “I wish she was coming with us,” Holly said.

  “Never persuade her,” June said. “Stubborn old bitch.”

  Holly glanced at the woman. June stared back as if ready for a confrontation. Holly said nothing.

  Four of them left the village. They took time to collect belongings, but there was a general feeling that none of them wanted to spend time with their dead. Most merely left in the clothes they wore.

  Paul, Blane and June went in June’s car, a Mondeo. Holly followed in her Mini.

  From the window of an old cottage, unseen, Elizabeth waved them off.

  Paul drove, Blane sat in the passenger seat. June exuded disaffection from the back. She had refused to drive.

  “There’s going to be hell to pay,” she said. “When the press finds out about this, the lack of response from the emergency services. Hell. Heads will roll. I’ll make damned sure of it.” She glared at Paul in the rear-view mirror as if it was all his fault.

  “I’ve already seen an ambulance, I told you,” Paul said. “It was-”

  “Abandoned, yes. Well, there’s more than one, isn’t there? What about Derek? What about my husband?” Her voice hitched on the last word and descended into a series of harsh, bitter sobs.

  “I’m sorry,” Paul said. June did not answer.

  Can’t adapt just like that, Blane thought. Whatever had happened had affected a wide area, changed the very nature of things. Even now the hedges bordering the roads seemed to be crowding in on them, appearing heavy with autumn growth rather than young and keen as spring. Birds flurried to and fro ahead of the cars, as if preparing an ambush at any moment. Even though the sun burned bright ahead of them, darkness gathered beneath the trees, and there was a genuine coolness in the car.

  As they left the village behind, Blane felt an unaccountable loss. He had only ever felt at home with nature, and to him nature was homeless. A valley in Scotland was as welcoming as a shaded cove in Cornwall; a common in London held as much allure as a hilltop in the Lakes. True, he had been in Rayburn for years, but the woods were his real home, not the run down shack he had been so suddenly and completely excluded from. He tried to analyse his feelings, and could truly feel no real emotion of loss when he considered the village itself.

  Perhaps it was dread. Maybe whatever he had seen in the churchyard waited for him out here, and the village was the only safe place for him now. Lightning never struck the same place twice…

  …Except it did, he knew that. Today more so than ever.

  As if conjured by his thoughts, a shadow emerged from beneath the trees a hundred yards ahead and darted across the road.

  “Deer!” called Paul.

  “No. Stop the car.” Blane had seen it. It had not been a deer. It had looked like one, yes. Had the guise of a deer. But it had been something else entirely.

  Singing again, in his head, high and musical…

  “It’s only-”

  Laughter, tinkling like ice-drops into water. “Stop now.”

  Paul saw and heard how serious he was, and braked the car to a halt.

  “What is it?” June asked.

  “Something.” Blane jumped from the car and glanced back at Holly in the Mini. Before anyone had time to stop him he ducked between two trees, emerging into a ditch. He heard crunching footsteps from further along, but tree branches conspired to hide his view. Paul’s concerned voice called from the road, but Blane headed on anyway, determined to catch up with whomever, or whatever was following him.

  Following? It’s always ahead of me.

  The ditch was shielded on both sides by shrubs and trees, forming a natural tunnel that curved to follow the line of the road. There was no standing water, but the compressed leaves of past years had rotted down into a pulpy, damp layer on the ground. The smell of rot permeated the air, even though spring was here. Some of the plants were shrivelled and distorted; the bark of small trees hung dry and brittle from the dead wood beneath. It was as though some great heat had come this way, killing everything where it stood.

  Blane’s old leather shoes were soon darkened with moisture, and dirt stained his trousers halfway to his knees. He could hear birds ahead of him and behind, but as he moved along the ditch a zone of silence accompanied him. They were still there, though. He could feel them watching.

  The ditch opened out suddenly to the right, the hedge giving way to a gap facing into a field. Blane squinted at the sudden glare of the sun. There was a fallen tree not far from the hedge, and someone was straddling its dead back. For now, they were merely a silhouette. This was enough.

  Memories, both good and bad, exploded into Blane’s mind. The sudden input was so intense and loud that he gasped, clasping his hands to his head to hold it together against the pressure. There was laughter, bitter and low, though he could not tell whether it came from the shape on the tree or his own curtailed visions. Images and smells and sounds vied for his attention, forming a glut of sensory data to clog his perceptions. Scents inspired recollections of motion; the sound of splashing brought the taste of salt to the air; a laugh prickled the skin of his neck with a gentle touch. Reality and memory became one, so that even though Blane was on his knees with his eyes shut, still he could feel damp sand between his toes as he ran through frothing surf. The thumping of hooves and the smell of a million migrating caribou made him raise his eyes to the stillness. Everything was here, now, and it was all too much. Try as he might, he could not grab onto one definite memory, draw it to him, treasure it and store it for future reference.

  First there was everything.

  Then there was nothing.

  The visions were purged from his mind, like gasps into a vacuum. The shock was stronger than before, because emptiness is so much larger than anything else.

  “Who are you?” Blane managed to mutter. He could still make out nothing of the person sitting on the dead tree; the sun hung behind their head like a halo, dazzling Blane and throwing their features into deep shadow.

  “My, you’ve let yourself go. Put on weight, I’d wager. All those bad meals. Sitting around in woods.” The voice was low, throaty. The sort of voice that could so easily have chuckled that morning, when the deer had died before him.

  “Who are you?” he said again.

  “Got your gang together, I see? Right little orgy you could have now, though I don’t think June would be up for it. Holly, though … I’ll bet she likes it hard and fast, with one at either end.”

  “Were you in the graveyard? Did you do that to the boy?”

  “Graveyard?” The voice was mocking, full of false bewilderment. “Boy?” The speaker stood and walked to where Blane was still kneeling on the damp ground. The shape slowly resolved itself against the sun, and for the first time Blane could see who he was talking to.

  She was tall, haggard, hair long and knotted. Her eyes were glazed and dead. Her body was shapeless beneath loose-fittin
g clothes. And she had rusted chains piercing her temples, running down into her mouth. Recognition shouted for him to grasp it, but doubt crowded in as well.

  “I’ve seen you before,” he said, trying to phrase it as a question.

  She laughed. A low, growling chuckle. He shivered, remembering the deer twitching in its bloody death. He looked at her hands where they hung by her sides, trying to imagine them twisting the animal’s neck. They looked thin, but strong.

  “You may have seen me, once or twice, from a distance. But … I can’t tell you any more. I’m enjoying this as it is.” She smiled, but it did not fit well onto her face.

  “What? Have you lost someone? In all this?”

  The smiled faded, relaxing her face into its natural sad posture. “Oh yes, someone very dear to me. Long, long gone.”

  “We don’t know what’s happened, but-”

  “You, of all people, should know,” the woman cut in. “It’s easy. It’s the ruin. The end.”

  The chains moved as she spoke, stretching, raking her skin. Blane could see now that the skin at her temples was not only pinched, it was pierced by two small screws.

  “What are they?” he asked.

  She bent down close, her face only a few inches from his. Her eyes looked dark and flat, devoid of emotion. Her smell was more basic than animal. “It’s a secret, don’t you know.”

  “Do I?”

  She stood again, shook her head, snorted. “You’ve gone way downhill, Blane.” She picked at her mouth. “I’m so sad.” She plucked something from between her teeth, held it up to the sun and examined it.

  “You know my name?”

  “Damn hair.” She shook her hand, then abruptly turned and ran across the field, arms pummelling the air, feet pounding and throwing up clots of dried sod behind her.

  “Wait!” Blane called, standing and starting after her. But she had already crossed the field and disappeared into the trees at the other side. Branches swayed slightly, then became still once more. As though she had never even been there.