She turned to face them. Her mum’s head was resting on her dad’s shoulder, and they looked more peaceful than she’d seen them in years. Their faces were pale, except for a spot of colour on each cheek. Their eyes were closed. They didn’t look real. They looked like plastic models of her parents, like the waxwork people she’d seen once at Madam Tussaud’s – so close to human and yet so obviously not.
But there was no denying the truth. These were her parents, her mum and dad, the people who had created her and brought her up, who had seen her every single day of her life, who had nursed her when she was ill and fed her when she was hungry and hugged her when she was sad and—
Daisy felt a scream building in her head, her mind reeling as if reality had slipped off the tracks and was now ploughing in a new and frightening direction. She no longer felt like crying, she wasn’t entirely sure if she could remember how to. She looked at her mum’s hand, cupped in her dad’s, both of them as still as a photograph. Next to this was another sheet of paper, folded in half, her name printed on the front. Daisy reached over and lifted it, opening it up. It was her mum’s handwriting – scratched and scribbled in big, frightening, insane letters – and there was a lot of it. She scanned the lines, unable to make sense of it, as if it had been written in a foreign language. Only the final paragraph was clear, inscribed in letters twice as big as the rest:
Please forgive me, Daisy. Didn’t you feel it? Something is coming, sweetheart, something bad, and it would have made us hurt you. I felt it already, something inside me, something pleading with me to do terrible things to my little Daisy, to my sweet beautiful daughter. I don’t think it’s the disease. No, it’s definitely NOT the disease. I have taken care of your father for you. I don’t know for sure if he would have hurt you but I think so. We both would have. Be safe, be strong. We love you, Daisy, we had no choice. We couldn’t bring ourselves to hurt you. We couldn’t do anything to hurt you. We WOULD have hurt you.
That last ‘would’ was underlined so hard that the pen had been pushed through the paper. Daisy didn’t read it again. She carefully folded it and laid it onto the bed. Her head was stuffed tight with cotton wool and packing chips, no thoughts allowed in or out. She stood, wanting nothing more than to get out of this room with its sickly orange light and its fat stench of death. She made her way calmly downstairs and back into the kitchen, pulling the cordless phone from its cradle and dialling 999. Somebody picked up on the third ring.
‘Emergency, which service do you require?’ said a woman.
‘An ambulance, please,’ said Daisy, like she was ordering a pizza. ‘My parents are dead. My mum killed herself. She killed my dad too.’
There was a pause, then the woman said: ‘Oh my saints.’ It was, thought Daisy, a stupid thing to say. ‘You hold on now.’ There was a click, then Daisy was talking to somebody else, a man. She answered his questions without really thinking, just staring out into the garden, not seeing the flowers or the grass or the sky, not seeing anything at all.
‘The ambulance will be with you real soon, okay?’ the man said. ‘I’m going to stay on the line with you until it arrives. Just a couple of minutes and we’ll be there.’
Cal
Oakminster, 4.00 p.m.
Cal sat in his living room, waiting for images of himself to appear on the television, waiting to see his own screaming face as he ran from the hunt. The house was empty, as it always was at this time of day. His dad, a businessman who never liked to talk about what kind of business he did, was abroad and his mum volunteered at the charity shop round the corner in the afternoons, Tuesday to Friday. He was glad that they weren’t here. As much as he wanted to talk to them, to hear them say that everything would be okay, he didn’t know what would happen when they saw him – They might come after you too, Cal. They might chase you and kick you and stamp you into the pavement just like everybody else wants to – and he needed to find out what was going on before they came home. He needed to work out what to do.
His whole body shook. The last few hours didn’t seem real, couldn’t be real. Those kinds of things didn’t happen, except in the movies. And yet ugly purple flowers were blossoming on his arms, his chest, his neck and his back where they had grabbed and beaten him. He had a bite mark on his hand which he couldn’t even remember getting.
He almost hadn’t made it home. The car had seemed to pull people off the pavements like a magnet, random strangers throwing themselves at it, bouncing off like bags of meat, squirming in his rear-view mirror. He’d expected to see the police behind him, had wanted to see the police there just so they could make sense of it all. But there were no police, no ambulances, just an army trying to batter its way inside.
The crowds dwindled the further from school he had got, disappearing altogether when he reached his road fifteen minutes later. He’d parked the gore-encrusted car inside the double garage, so that nobody would see it, before staggering inside. He hadn’t quite made it to the sofa, collapsing onto his knees beside the television where he still sat.
The 24-hour Sky News channel had pretty much run its headlines and there was nothing there about a savage mob attack on a seventeen-year-old boy in East London. He left the telly on, pushing himself up, forcing his numb legs to navigate across the living room to the computer desk by the French doors. He slumped in the chair, switching the machine on and closing his eyes while he waited for it to boot up.
Images flashed against the dark canvas of his eyelids: gaping mouths, blunt teeth snapping, fingernails stained with his blood, and a hundred pairs of eyes all brimming with hatred, overflowing with it, straining right out of their sockets.
They had meant to kill him, without reason and without question. But why? What the hell had he done to provoke them?
He opened up Internet Explorer, loading the Yahoo home page. He scanned the links down the left hand side, not quite knowing what to do. He was clicking on the News page when his pocket started to vibrate, making him jump so hard that his knees cracked against the bottom of the desk. He pulled out his phone. It was Megan. He stared at her pixelated name, laid over a photo of her with two pens in her mouth pretending to be a vampire, for what felt like hours. Then he answered.
Silence. His mouth felt too dry to form words.
‘Cal?’ she said eventually, and he was relieved at how far away her voice sounded. ‘Did you hear the news?’
That you all tried to kill me? But all that came out was a grunt.
‘Georgia’s in hospital, she got trampled. Where did you go, Cal? We needed you.’
Cal lowered the phone, rubbing his eyes then looking at her picture again to make sure the call was real. He heard Megan shouting his name and he put it to his ear.
‘Are you okay?’ she asked. ‘Things got a little weird at school. They think there was a problem with the stands, that the kids at the back thought it was collapsing or something. We almost had our own Hillsborough.’
‘Megan,’ he managed eventually. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘Today, during the match,’ she said. ‘You must have seen it. We thought that’s why you’d run off. Thanks very much for that, by the way, my hero.’
Did she not remember chasing him? Did she not see what happened outside the English block, then on the street? Maybe in the confusion she hadn’t realised what was happening – But she was there, you saw her in the pack, reaching for you through the fence, her face boiling – had just got carried away in the heat of the moment, some kind of group hysteria or something. He’d heard about that sort of thing happening, loads of people fainting at the same time or going crazy. She was still talking, fast, the way she always did when she was emotional.
‘You tried to kill me,’ he interrupted. Megan must have said two-dozen more words before it sunk in.
‘What?’ she said after a moment’s pause. ‘Be serious, Cal, this isn’t a joke. Georgia’s got a broken leg and a fractured collarbone or something and I’ve . . . Well I sprained my finger, w
hich isn’t much but it still hurts, and it was scary, Cal, all those people.’
You think? he almost spat.
‘Cal, please, will you meet us at the hospital? We’re in the children’s bit. Georgia didn’t want to stay there, but they said she was too young for the adult wing. There’s an Xbox. Please, Cal?’
There was no dishonesty in her voice, no sense that she was trying to lure him out so they could attack again. There was just Megan, scared and hurt but the same girl he’d known for nearly eleven years now, the same girl he’d once gone out with for two months when they were in Year 5, who’d made him a little heart out of multicoloured paper clips that still sat on the windowsill in his bedroom. Even though he could see her running after him, teeth clenched, her face a mask of pure fury, he couldn’t work out how to be angry with her.
‘I’ll be there,’ he said softly. It was a lie, but it seemed to calm her down. ‘Just give me a little while, okay? And say hi to the others. I hope they can fix your finger.’
Megan laughed.
‘Thanks Cal. Love you.’
He didn’t reply, and after a second or two she hung up. He sat there with the phone against his ear, unable to make sense of the conversation. Why didn’t she remember? Had she blocked it out from shock or something? It didn’t make any kind of sense. He thought about dialling Georgia, to see whether she knew what had happened. Nas’s number was floating around somewhere in his address book too. But what exactly could he say? Hey, Nas, just calling to ask why you tried to strangle me to death on the school field. It was crazy, and he threw the phone onto the desk with a grunt of frustration.
Think, Cal, he said to himself, rocking back on his chair. What do you do?
There were rules to surviving a natural disaster, he’d read about them. They were designed for earthquakes and volcanoes and hurricanes, stuff like that, but he guessed they’d work for this too. Rule one, find a safe place. He’d done that, he was safe here, for the moment anyway. Rule two was to check for injuries and do the utmost to ensure your own survival. Well, he was pretty beaten up but he wasn’t going to die from bruises and bites. Rule three was to look for other survivors, to make sure nobody is trapped under the rubble or cut off by lava or stuck on the roof of their house. Rule three, essentially, was to find out whether anyone else was in the same situation.
Cal leant forward, clicking in the Yahoo search box. He paused for a moment, trying to work out the best way to phrase his question, then wrote:
‘Why is everyone trying to kill me?’
Daisy
Boxwood St Mary, 4.13 p.m.
‘How did it ever get in such a state?’
Daisy spoke the words beneath her breath as she brushed her mum’s hair. It was easier than usual because her neck was really stiff, almost locked in place, which meant her head didn’t jiggle. She worked it into a ponytail, trying not to notice how cold her mum’s skin felt.
She crawled over the bed, looking at her. It was so easy to forget – Don’t say it, don’t think it, it isn’t true, the ambulance people will fix them – that they wouldn’t be waking up this time. That they wouldn’t yawn and stretch, that her dad wouldn’t pat her head and her mum kiss her on the lips, that they wouldn’t order Chinese as a treat and eat it in front of the telly.
Daisy felt like she should be crying but she was still numb all over, inside and out. The only thing she could really feel was a great big pressure in her chest, like something was sitting on her. It made it hard to breathe, and she had to keep taking great big gulping swallows of that horrible boxed-cat smell so that the room would stop going spinny and weird. She knew, or at least she thought she knew, that she was in shock. Although she didn’t actually feel shocked, like she’d got a fright or put her hand in the plug socket. It wasn’t like that at all. It was more like a big nothingness.
The room was shifting, and Daisy looked up to see waves of thin blue light flicker across the window, like she was underwater. She went to kiss her mum on the cheek but froze halfway at the thought of that damp, waxy skin against her lips. Instead she blew one, climbing off the bed as much to hide her guilty expression as to look out of the window.
‘They’ll look after you,’ she said, pulling back the net curtain to see an ambulance outside, parked right behind their car, two wheels on the pavement. One man in green overalls climbed out, arching his back. The other was inside. Daisy couldn’t make out his face because of the glare of the sun on the windscreen. The blue lights flashed, and Daisy suddenly realised that these strange men would be taking her parents away inside that thing, away to be buried or burned.
That awful weight on her chest seemed to double and she had to rest her forehead against the cool glass to stop from keeling over. The man in the street looked up. He squinted into the sunshine, putting a hand up to shield his eyes. Then he smiled sadly and waved. Daisy waved back but she couldn’t manage a smile. Her face felt as tough and plasticky as her mum’s and dad’s. He glanced back inside the ambulance then started walking towards the house, carrying a bag with him. He didn’t seem in much of a hurry.
Daisy made her way to the top of the stairs. She’d left the front door off the latch so the ambulance people could come in, but the man rang the bell anyway, turning the handle as the chimes of Big Ben filled the house. From where she was standing she could only see the bottom of the door, a pair of black shoes trampling over the mat.
‘Hello,’ Daisy said. The man replied, but she couldn’t quite make out what he’d said. It had started off like a word – hello, she thought – but by the time it had reached the lls it was stretched out of shape, becoming more like a groan, a throaty purr that seemed to fill the hallway below. He took a lurching step forward, his legs coming into view, then snorted.
‘Hello?’ she said again, uncertainty turning the word into a question. Ambulance people were nice, weren’t they? They were supposed to be friendly and helpful and heal you when you were really sick.
Then why was her tummy going funny?
Because they’re here to take your mum and dad away, that’s all, she told herself. That would make anyone’s tummy go funny.
The man took another step, then another, his chest appearing and then his shoulders and then his . . .
It wasn’t the same man. Somebody else had come into her house. No, not somebody but something, something wearing the man’s clothes and his hair and carrying his bag but something that wasn’t here to be friendly and helpful. This was something bad, something using the man’s face as a mask, its mouth drooping open, like a horse’s mouth, the teeth huge and blunt and yellow.
He lumbered up the steps, in more of a hurry now than anyone Daisy had ever seen in her life, so fast that he tripped on one and banged his forehead on the wood. He didn’t seem to notice, just crawled up them on all fours. The noise was deafening.
Daisy waited until he was halfway up before the part of her brain that was saying Don’t worry, he’s here to help was completely and utterly consumed by the part which screamed GET OUT OF HERE! YOU HAVE TO RUN! HE’S A BAD MAN! She backed away down the landing, unable to take her eyes off him. He reached the top of the steps, trails of foam hanging from his lips, the whites of his eyes blazing. He used the banister to pull himself up, wrenching it so hard that the rail splintered free from the post.
Daisy screamed, spinning round and running for the back room, the man’s animal grunts right behind her. She made it, slamming the door closed and leaning against it. The man struck it a second later, the wood making a sound like a pistol shot. All the doors in the house had tiny privacy locks on, and she flicked it across just as the handle turned. The man threw himself at the door, a jagged tear running down the side. Daisy staggered back. This was the box room, barely big enough for the single bed against the wall and the piles of old clothes which slept on it, and by the time she’d taken three steps she’d hit the window.
The door crunched again, specks of plaster drifting down from the ceiling. She could he
ar more footsteps too, hammering down the hallway. Fists and feet pounded the door. Why were they doing this? Why were they so angry with her? Did they think she’d killed her parents?
‘I didn’t do it!’ she shouted, her voice lost in the thunder. ‘I didn’t do it!’
The door flew open so hard it ripped a chunk out of the wall. The man seemed to take up the entire room, a giant whose braying horse’s mouth looked big enough to swallow her whole. Daisy’s legs gave out, but before she hit the floor his massive hands connected with her chest, shoving her through the window.
Glass exploded, the universe shattered into a thousand sparkling shards as Daisy fell. She hit the roof of the kitchen extension, pain like fire in every part of her body. She rolled, tumbling over the guttering, in mid-air once again until the rhododendron bush broke her fall.
Even past the agony, past the roar of blood in her ears, Daisy could hear the screams of the men above her. She sat up, seeing nothing but fizzing silver light for a second before the garden popped back into view. She rolled out of the flowerbed, not trusting her balance enough to stand up, crawling sideways down the garden like a crab. Only when she was past the sprawling bulk of the laurel hedge did she dare look back.
The box room window was empty.
The shed sat at the bottom of the garden. It wasn’t locked because it was falling apart, the roof all but caved in. She wrenched open the door and tumbled into the far corner. A fog of damp wood and slushy grass from the mower washed over her but it was so much better than the stench in the house. She breathed it in, hearing the familiar squeak of the back door.
The Fury Page 12
