by Alex Bell
At the shoreline below him, things moved in the water. Drowned-looking things, wet and raggy-looking, limp and tangled, sodden-haired. Perhaps they had drowned. But they wouldn’t lie still.
The first of them stirred and crawled out of the water, up the slope towards the house.
One by one, the other stormcats followed.
They trooped in dozens from the murky water. In places he could see the bare skin through the sparseness of their coats. In others he could see the bare bones through the sparseness of their skin. And none of them had eyes.
The stormcats spread out to surround the house and sat there, waiting. Those who still had tails swished them back and forth. They watched the house, watched him, with the holes that had been their eyes.
Aaron didn’t look at them; instead he watched the rain. Sometimes, if you looked at it just so, you saw shapes in it. Faces. And you always did when the stormcats came.
But that was how he wanted it.
Soon enough, he saw them.
‘Maria,’ he whispered. His voice was a cracked and grating thing, old stone and rusted iron, long unused, in the damp-aired stillness of the room. ‘Jamie.’
He shut his eyes, then opened them again, took a deep breath and went downstairs. At the front door he put his hand on the handle, went still.
Not yet.
He knew it was today; had to be. Knew he couldn’t take the mingled dread and hope of waiting for the next time, wondering if he’d bear it the next time. No. Today he’d reached the limit. Today he went.
But not just yet.
Aaron opened the curtains, peered up at the sky. He saw nothing but clouds, and the ones coming in towards the cottage were almost black. The storm would be here a long time; and while the storm remained, so did the cats, and so did Jamie and Maria.
Time enough.
He went into the kitchen, sat out the table, took out paper and pen – his old Mont Blanc, and a school exercise book Jamie had never had the chance to write in.
It might never be read, he knew; there might be no one left to read it. But he had to do it, as much for himself as anyone else. For atonement, there must be confession.
So he began.
With my greed, he wrote, I killed the world.
*
Of course, that was a dramatic way to put things; he’d hardly done so single-handedly. There were others – some, perhaps, more culpable than he. But he’d played his part.
He’d worked in public relations for a long time. He’d begun as a salesman, worked later in advertising; he’d been good at presenting a product well, emphasising its strengths, glossing over its weaknesses. As he’d done with himself; he’d done well to get Maria, whose father had been a company director and who’d gone to all the best schools. No, he’d not done shabbily at all, for the boy from a sink estate who’d left school at sixteen without a qualification to his name. He’d clawed his way up, and he wasn’t going back down.
PR was the natural place for Aaron; he was handsome, well-dressed, and thanks to elocution lessons and the like he could sound as posh as they came and always remember the right spoon to use at a formal dinner. But the street was always there and he could always use that too, to give him that rough-edged, man-of-the-people charm.
It was inevitable, maybe, that he’d end up working for Carapace Fuels. They were offering phenomenal amounts of money, after all. They had to, really; they needed the best. They’d had an oil-rig blow up in the Gulf of Mexico, killing sixteen people and half the ocean, and they’d cosied up to any number of unsavoury regimes to get their hands on the black stuff. Plus, they’d been moving into fracking and tar sands extraction – more than enough to get the eco-warriors up in arms.
But, of course, the big one, the one that wasn’t going away – the elephant in the rapidly flooding room – was climate change. Rising sea levels, melting icecaps, weather going crazy – all of it pointed to a major crisis, and pressure for curbs, safeguards, controls. And that wouldn’t do; there were profits to be made. Every year there had to be more.
For a long time the changes had been so small-scale they could be ignored. But now it was happening in front of people’s faces.
Jamie had just been born and Maria had given up work to look after him; not long after, her father died and it turned out he and his company were near enough bankrupt. It was all on Aaron; keep the wolf from the door and his family safe.
Of course he’d done it. What was that line he’d heard in a film? I’ve been rich and I’ve been poor; believe me, rich is better. He wasn’t going back there, no matter what. With the money Carapace paid, he’d be set for life. Jamie would have all the advantages he hadn’t had.
So he took the job at Carapace, and he smilingly did his bit. They needed lies; they needed smears and disinformation, what-ifs and reassurances. And at the end of the day most people wanted to be lied to anyway. Who wanted to accept how fucked the world was? That would mean changing things. That would mean accepting you couldn’t have everything you wanted. That would mean giving stuff up.
While if you just accepted it was all a lie – the government trying to steal your freedoms, the scientists making a new religion or scaremongering to shake down research grants that wouldn’t add up to a fraction of the salary Carapace were offering Aaron – accept that, and you didn’t have to do, give up or change anything. Business as usual. Carry on regardless. Ignore the silly tree-huggers.
He did his part, and it was easy. And the money rolled in. More than most people could ever hope to earn, but never enough.
He could have left; could have salved his conscience working for Greenpeace or Friends of the Earth. But he chose to lie to himself, even when report after report crossed his desk – classified information, bought and paid for, that left no doubt of the part Carapace were playing in the planet’s destruction. To pretend, for five years, that nothing was wrong.
Until nobody could pretend anymore.
*
They came to the cottage, that last time, in a terrible rain worse even than today’s.
‘For god’s sake, Aaron, we’ve got to stop.’
‘No.’
‘Aaron, look at it out there.’
The BMW’s wipers were beating hard, but still the windscreen streamed with rain.
‘Daddy,’ said Jamie. His blue eyes were huge in his pale face, inside the halo of reddish-blond hair.
‘You’re frightening him,’ said Maria.
‘We can’t go back,’ he said. ‘They’re declaring martial law tomorrow. Restricting all movement.’
He glanced at her; she was a thin woman, black-haired and dark-eyed, with her Italian mother’s olive complexion, but she was pale in the dull light. ‘How do you –’ she began.
‘Senior management rang me,’ he said. ‘It’s a lot worse than the news are making out. They’re clamping things already. A storm surge came down the Thames Estuary this afternoon. The Flood Barrier failed, and…’ he shook his head. ‘Upwards of twenty thousand confirmed dead already, the same number again missing, and god knows how many homeless.’
Maria put a hand to her mouth, glanced at the backseat. ‘Read your book,’ Jamie,’ said Aaron. He looked ahead, trying to peer through the windscreen. He daren’t take his eyes off it in this weather.
‘It’s the same everywhere,’ he told her, keeping his voice low. ‘Massive flooding across the country, dozens of rivers bursting their banks. Another storm surge hit the Suffolk coast. Devastated it. They’re trying to prevent a panic. It won’t work, not for long, but – it’ll give them enough time to get the army in.’
‘And what then?’
‘God knows. Prevent movement. Keep everyone where they are – last thing they’ll want anyway is people rushing round, pouring out of the cities into the countryside. But it helps keep a lid on it.’
‘How can they? The internet—’
‘The internet’s down for the duration. It’s been arranged.’
‘Arrang
ed?’
‘Stops rumours spreading. Certain special networks will stay up, though. I can connect to it from the cottage, so I can work from there.’
‘Oh well, that’s all right then, isn’t it?’
‘I just meant—’
‘Whatever, Aaron.’
‘Mummy?’ said Jamie. ‘Daddy?’ His voice cracked, full of tears; he was afraid.
‘It’s all right,’ said Maria through her tears. ‘It’s all right.’
‘Look,’ he whispered, ‘we’ll be fine at the cottage. Safe. It’s got its own generator. And food for months. We’ll be safe there.’
Normally, they’d have reached the cottage in another five minutes but in that weather, with that visibility, it took closer to half an hour; Jamie was sobbing inconsolably by the time they arrived. Aaron turned off the motor; they ran to the cottage through the battering rain.
Inside, Maria was calmer. In here, she was in control; there were practical things she could take charge of. She got the lights and heating on, had Aaron get the log fire going, reheated containers of frozen stew in the microwave while tickling Jamie to make him laugh and reading him a story. All very good-little-wifey stuff, the sort of thing that would have made her feminist hackles rise in the past, but for now it was helping her and the boy.
After they’d eaten, she went upstairs to put Jamie to bed. Aaron set up the computer, poured himself a brandy. He sat by the window; by now it was dark and he could see nothing but the rain streaming down the glass. A couple of blurred lights glimmered in the distance. From upstairs he heard Maria’s voice, low and gentle; she was reading to Jamie again. He liked that. When had Aaron last read to him? Christ, he couldn’t even remember the names of the books his son liked nowadays.
Thinking like that wouldn’t help. He managed after several attempts to connect to the internet, but it was hard work, slow, and the signal was nowhere near as strong as he’d expected. He’d do his best tomorrow, but working from here wouldn’t be easy.
Still, he managed to send Heidi, his head of department, an email letting her know they’d arrived safely. When that was done, he shut the computer down; vaguely, he was aware of Maria’s footsteps, descending the stairs.
He was still gazing out of the window when she came up silently behind him; he didn’t even realise she was there till her hand rested softly on the nape of his neck.
‘Sorry about before,’ she said at last.
He held her hand and kissed it. ‘It’s okay.’
‘It’s not, though, is it?’ She was looking out of the window into the storm. ‘It’s not okay.’
But he didn’t mind too much, because he knew she wasn’t talking about them.
‘Jamie was asking about Coppertop,’ she said.
‘Shit,’ said Aaron. Coppertop was a ginger tom they’d had since Jamie was two; the boy adored him. But Coppertop had been out and about, roaming, as cats will, when it was time to leave. In truth, Aaron hadn’t even given the beast a thought.
‘God,’ said Maria. ‘What do we tell him?’
‘It’s just a bloody cat,’ he muttered.
‘Not to Jamie!’
‘Sh.’
‘Don’t tell me to—’ Maria closed her eyes and sighed. ‘Okay. Don’t worry. I’ll think of something to tell him.’
Aaron nodded. ‘Okay.’ He raised his brandy glass. ‘Want one of these?’
‘No. Thanks. Want to come to bed?’
Aaron smiled and put the glass down.
That night, he dreamt of the flood, their street underwater, and Coppertop’s bedraggled body bobbing in the current – battered and broken, barely recognisable, except to him.
*
The storm didn’t let up that night; if anything, when he got up the next morning, it was pelting down even worse than before, the wind using the icy rain to flail the cottage. Further down the hillside it looked as if one, maybe two large trees had been blown down; Aaron saw with dismay that the brook at the bottom of the valley had burst its banks.
He sent another email to Heidi: What’s the situation?
She replied half an hour later; whether she’d taken time to write her message or the internet connection had laboured to deliver it he was never sure. Bad. There’s nowhere to put all the people made homeless by the flood, nothing to feed them with. Word is, there’ve been cases of cholera and typhoid. There’s been rioting. I think I heard gunfire earlier. They said there could be
And the message just ended there. He guessed she’d hit send by accident, although the thought of what might have caused her to do so haunted him long afterward; he didn’t know Heidi that well, but they’d worked together for years. She’d have been at home in Guildford – she commuted from there each day. He imagined her in her office, then hearing it, the sound, looking up, maybe through the French windows to see—
To see what Aaron saw less than a minute later. He heard the sound first, even over the howling of the storm. There was a great rumbling roar and a noise like splintering ice. Thunder? No; this was loud enough, but too protracted, too prolonged. It went on and on. And the cottage itself began to shake.
From upstairs, he heard a cry of alarm.
Aaron got up and went to the window, peering through the rain. Beyond the entrance to the valley, past the road to the village, there was something. Something that glittered silver in the air.
‘Mummy,’ he heard Jamie shouting.
A moment before the vast, rushing wave hit the valley entrance and exploded through it with the speed and fury of an express train, Aaron understood what he was looking at. Then he was knocked sprawling by the impact. Plaster dust rained from the ceiling; one of the windows shattered.
Water spilled through the window into the room, poured in under the front door, but not too much of it. When he staggered to the broken window and looked out, the brown, surging water surrounded the hilltop, ending a few feet from his front door. The houses below, the village – all were gone, leaving only a few scattered hilltops poking out above the floodwaters.
Upstairs, Maria cried out. Jamie was sobbing; Aaron heard her voice trying to soothe him. He stumbled around the cottage’s main floor, checking for any major damage. He didn’t find any; the worst was the broken window. He fixed it up – at least for now – with cardboard and Scotch tape, then went upstairs to his family, knowing, already, that they were all that mattered now.
*
Over the next week, the waters slowly subsided, sinking slowly away from the cottage. They finally stopped a hundred or so feet down the hillside. The rain continued intermittently; the sky never really cleared.
They had several months’ worth of food, and fuel to last the generator almost as long. And they were going to need it; Aaron watched the skies for any sign of a plane or helicopter, but found none. Nor was there any sign of a boat on the choppy waters.
The emergency network was down; the television and the old radio set provided only useless static.
‘We’ll be all right,’ Aaron told them both. ‘Things are in a mess, but they’ll get on top of it eventually. They’ll come looking for us sooner or later.’
He didn’t convince himself; too late, he knew he couldn’t believe his own lies any more. But what else was there to do? They’d survive a while yet. In the mean time he did his best to fashion snares – there’d been rabbits on the hills, some of whom might have survived, and there were still birds.
But no cats, except in his dreams. Funnily enough, he didn’t dream of Coppertop – or at least, there was no picking the tomcat out from the multitude of feline bodies drifting in the current. Sometimes he looked down at them from above, a limp wet tangle of sodden, particoloured fur and skin and bone. Other times he was beneath the dirty waters, sometimes able to spot a familiar landmark – their old house, Nelson’s column – through the murk where the dead cats spun like astronauts in freefall, jaws wide in final, unfinished yowls, while fish came to eat their eyes.
No cats, until—
‘Daddy?’
He was round the side of the house, where he’d broken the earth and was trying to get a garden going from carrot tops and old potatoes that had started sprouting. Hopeless, he suspected, doomed to be drowned in the constant rainfall even if they flourished, but he had to try, had to eke things out as far as possible. He was about to go in anyway; the rain was picking up, and he’d just heard a rumble of thunder; an incoming storm. When Jamie called out, he was glad of the distraction.
‘What is it?’ He got up and went round the front, wiping earth from his hands. ‘What—?’
Jamie was standing a few yards from the front door. He looked down the slope, then back up at Aaron.
Aaron looked, and went still.
At the bottom of the slope, where a shore of silt and loose stone was forming where the grass had been washed away, lay a tidemark of straggly fur.
Aaron went down to the water’s edge. Rats, maybe? But he already knew they weren’t.
Cats. All along the shoreline – there had to be thirty or forty of them, washed up at his door. All dead, of course, long-drowned. None, that he could see, still had eyes. Movement in the water – he looked up to see more limp, furred bodies being washed in.
‘Aaron?’
He looked up; Maria was coming out of the house. Jamie was already starting down the slope. He didn’t look scared any more; if anything, he looked happy. Of course; he loved cats.
‘Coppertop!’ he said.
‘Get back, Jamie,’ said Aaron. ‘Maria, get him inside.’
He heard Jamie start to bawl as Maria grabbed him and pulled him back; by then, Aaron was already looking at the corpses in the water. More and more of them were washing in to shore. Christ, how many? There must be hundreds. His skin, his scalp all prickled; this wasn’t right, wasn’t natural, whatever that word may mean.
Enough of that. What to do with the bodies? They looked too rotten to eat – even if they weren’t, the thought of doing so was somehow revolting, but they couldn’t just be left. Burn them, perhaps. He looked down at the cats again, prodded the closest one with his foot.
