White and Other Tales of Ruin

by Tim Lebbon

  Where that centre was, few people knew any more. Those who did were dead, mixing themselves with the scientists who had killed them, the laboratories they had been working in, the clothes there were wearing, the test tubes and the microscopes and the particle accelerators and the cultures and the notebooks full of folly…

  “Dad, I want a pee,” Gemma whined.

  “Oh honey, you’ll have to hold it for a while,” Lucy-Anne said.

  Doug glanced across at his wife. He’d been ignoring her. He saw her afresh for the briefest instant and realised how much he loved her. He held back a startled sob.

  “But Mum —”

  “Your mum’s right, Gemma. Hold on tight and you can go soon.”

  “When?”

  “Soon.”

  “But —”

  “Gemma,” Doug said, his voice low, “did you see the man on the TV?”

  “Yes,” she said quietly. “He was all … going.”

  “He had a nasty … it was a bug, Gemma. It’s in the air where he was, and it’s spreading. We don’t want to catch it, and if we stop —”

  “And I don’t want you to catch it!” she spurted out, bursting into tears and gasping great hitched sobs into the car. “I don’t want you and Mummy to catch it!”

  Doug felt his temper rising and hated himself for it. She was terrified, she’d seen people dying on TV, dying for Christ’s sake. At her age the worst he’d ever seen was a squashed cat by the side of the road. He’d put flowers there, tied to a lamp post. The cat had gone the next day. His child’s mind had seen death as a temporary state.

  Lucy-Anne had turned fully in her seat and was hugging Gemma, soothing her with gentle Mum-words that Doug could not hear. He reached out and patted his wife’s behind, giving her a quick squeeze: all going to be alright, he tried to impart. He knew she’d know he was lying, but comfort was important. Civilisation was important. Without routine and hope, civilisation would crumble.

  He remembered the pictures from Rome, beamed in seconds before the cameras were swamped and stripped and dismantled to their component atoms by the nanos: a great cloud looming in the distance; a soup of all things organic, metallic, plastic, historic, rock and water and air. The nanos took it all, dismantled everything and spurted it across the land like reality’s white noise.

  Oh my God, Lucy-Anne had gasped, squeezing his hand, spilling a tear of red wine from her glass. Surely they can do something about it?

  They?

  Well, the scientists. The … But she had trailed off as the view jumped further north, showing the whole horizon as an indistinct blur, the land and air merged. Armageddon moved with the wind, the nanos flowing with the air and crawling through the ground itself, so it was said.

  “Doug, she really needs to pee.”

  He looked in the rearview mirror and saw Gemma rocking in his wife’s grip. A horn tooted, tyres squealed, he glanced forward and slammed on his brakes just as he heard the doom-laden crunch of metal and glass impacting. The accident was several cars in front of them in the slow lane, a Mondeo twisted under the tailgate of a big wagon. The wagon was still moving. Even as a terrible flame licked from beneath the Mondeo’s bonnet, and as the driver struggled to open a door distorted shut, the wagon was still moving. It’s driver knew that to stop was to die, eventually.

  “Oh Jesus,” Lucy-Anne whispered, and Doug put his foot down on the gas. At least something had changed — rubber-neckers had altered their priorities, and they now wanted to leave the scene as soon as possible. Maybe it was the danger from fire, but more likely it was the heat of guilt.

  “You can go on the floor in the back,” Doug said. “You hear me, honey?”

  “I can’t pee on the floor,” Gemma said in disgust. “It’s horrible!”

  “Do as Daddy says if you’re really desperate. If not hold on, and you can go when we stop.”

  “When do we stop?” Doug asked, and wished he hadn’t. He saw Lucy-Ann staring at him but he kept facing forward.

  “I don’t know. What’s the plan? Do we have one, other than leaving our home like … like rats from …?”

  “Hey, come on, it was you as much as me! When they reported the first case in Paris —”

  “I’m sorry Doug,” she said quickly, and she squeezed his leg. He liked that, he always had. A touch could speak volumes.

  In the back, Gemma worked her way down between the seats. Soon the acrid smell of urine filled the car.

  Doug wanted to close his eyes, cry refreshing tears. There was a hot knot in his stomach: fear for his family; love for his daughter; a hopeless embarrassment at what she had been forced to do.

  “Urine is sometimes used to treat the effects of jelly fish stings,” Gemma said suddenly, “especially in the tropics. Sometimes they can’t get normal medicines quickly enough, so they pee on the victims.”

  He glanced over his shoulder at his daughter, crushed between the seats, knickers around her knees. What a strange thing to say …

  She stared back at him wide-eyed.

  He looked at Lucy-Anne, who appeared not to have heard, then decided to say nothing. There had been something in Gemma’s young eyes—an uncomfortable sense of loss in a day full of terror—and he did not want to scare her any more.

  An hour later they left the motorway. Doug turned north, and Lucy-Anne did not object. Her silent acquiescence depressed him more than he could have imagined.

  Within half an hour of leaving the M4 the traffic had thinned out considerably. People could leave the city, but it was not so easy for most of them to relinquish the motorways, as if the main roads could lead them somewhere safer.

  It was almost midday.

  Doug turned on the radio and scanned the channels. Mindless pop, classical tunes linked end to end without a presenter, a conversation on football which he recognised as being about a match played a year ago. A semblance of normality, but underpinned with the terrible hidden truth: that things had gone bad, and may never be good again. He slipped a tape into the player and REM started to piss him off.

  Lucy-Anne twiddled her thumbs and only occasionally looked through the windscreen. Doug touched her leg now and then to reassure her, and also to comfort himself. He wished she would do the same back, but he had always been the more tactile one, the one who needed a touch as well as a smile to make him feel good. He glanced at her every now and then, wanting to do more but knowing that there was nothing he could do. She knew as well as he that they were not escaping, but merely prolonging the inevitable.

  He thought about death, and tried to divert his mind elsewhere. “You okay, honey?”

  Gemma whispered that yes, she was okay, but she did not look up.

  “So where are we going?” Lucy-Anne said to her hands.

  Doug did not answer for a while. A recent signpost had pointed north to Birmingham and Coventry, but their direction so far had been dictated by chance as much as design. “North,” he said, because away from France was the best idea.

  Lucy-Anne looked up. “Scotland,” she whispered.

  “Well, we could try, but it depends on fuel and —”

  “No, we must go to Scotland! Uncle Peter lives near Inverness, we can go there, he’ll have us, he’ll look after us.” She was looking at him now, and her face had come alight. He hated the false hope he saw there.

  “Who’s Uncle Peter?” Gemma said from the back seat.

  Doug snorted. “Precisely.”

  “Doug, he’s not a bad sort.”

  “You haven’t seen him in over ten years. Hell, I think the last time was our bloody wedding!”

  “He’s a bit eccentric, that’s all.”

  “Does that mean he does odd things?” Gemma asked. “Only, I don’t mind that. I quite like people who do odd things.”

  “We’ll go to see him, then,” Lucy-Anne said. “Won’t we, Dad?”

  Doug nodded slowly, already beaten. They would go to see him, sure they would, but what then? That’s what was truly bothering
him: what then? He had no answer, and seeking it would make him give in, curl into a ball and die.

  “Edgar Allan Poe’s dying words were Lord help my soul,” Gemma muttered under her breath.

  “What?” Doug asked.

  “Huh?”

  “What did you say, honey?” Some cars passed the other way, one of them flashing its lights, but he ignored them. As far as he knew Gemma had never read any Poe, let alone read about the man.

  “Nothing, Dad.”

  “She’s tired and scared, Doug,” Lucy-Anne said quietly, so that the sound of the engine would cover her words. “Let’s just aim north and leave it at that. When we get there …” She trailed off without substituting the word when with if.

  Doug mentally did it for her.

  Another car passed with flashing lights, its driver waving frantically as he sped by.

  “Now what?” Doug slowed the car and eased it around a bend in the A-road. When he saw what faced them his foot slipped from the accelerator, and the car drifted onto the grass verge and came to a halt. He forgot to use the brakes. For a while, he forgot even to breathe.

  Lucy-Anne was a good mother. She twisted in her seat and motioned Gemma to her, holding her yet again and shielding the girl’s eyes with the back of her seat.

  “Get us out of here,” she said. “Doug, get us out of here, Doug, wake up …”

  As the men looked up and saw him staring at them, Doug shoved the car into reverse. He slammed his foot on the gas and glanced in the rearview mirror. If there was another car coming they would meet, crash and burn. At least he hoped they would burn; he did not want to be left alive for these men to be able to get him, and to Lucy-Anne and Gemma, and do to them what they were doing to the family on the road ahead.

  It was the dog that shocked Doug more than anything. Why the dog?

  The engine screamed as the car slewed across the road. He glanced back at the scene receding in front of them and saw that the men had gone back to their business. It did not matter. He did not let up on the gas until he had clumsily steered back around the bend and spun into a farm gate to turn around. He smelled an acidic burning, the car crunched against a stone wall, Gemma finally struggled from Lucy-Anne’s grip and screamed.

  Doug felt like screaming as well. Yesterday, normality, tainted with disquiet over what was apparently happening in the Mediterranean, and a subdued fear that it may come closer.

  Today, this.

  He shook his head and flicked tears across the dashboard. “We’ll try another road.”

  Lucy-Anne did not answer. She was still trying to hug Gemma, protect her, hide her away from whatever had gone wrong with the world today. If only it were so easy.

  That afternoon there was a government announcement over the radio. The Prime Minister gave ‘grave news’ about the southern suburbs of London — they were gone — but he assured people that everything was being done that could be done to find a solution to this crisis. Doug wondered just how far away the bastard actually was. The Arctic Circle, perhaps?

  Gemma laughed childishly and said: “Tibia, fibula, tarsus, metatarsals, phalanges.”

  Early that evening they saw the first signs for Edinburgh. The radio had said no more.

  Uncle Peter was more than eccentric, he was plain insane … and he wanted people to recognise his insanity. His whole estate was floodlit against the night, revealing all of what he had done. Some of it, Doug thought, should have stayed well hidden.

  As they cruised along his long, winding driveway, the first signs of this madness presented themselves. Every tree bordering the road had had its lower branches lopped off, the wounds daubed with black tar to seal them, the dead timber disposed of out of sight. Nailed to the naked trunks were animal corpses, a species for each tree: a squirrel on a sycamore, a sparrow on an elm, a deer on an oak. It was as if Uncle Peter were a game hunter, but he had run out of room for trophies inside his house.

  And the house … this was fairly unusual as well.

  “Holy shit,” Doug muttered under his breath as they rounded the final bend in the drive. It was a huge old monolith, stonework sills crumbling with age, windows distorted out of shape by the deadly subsidence plaguing the property and promising to drag it, eventually, back into the stony ground. From plinth to eaves the house looked quite normal, if dishevelled.

  Above that, the gargoyles took over.

  They were all huge, fashioned from plastic and fibreglass instead of stone, and more gruesome because of that. Garish colours and unsettling designs shouted across at them as they coasted to a halt. Bloody teeth, split throats, dragon-eyes, sabre toothed monstrosities that would surely be more than able to fulfil their duties … if, indeed, these things had the same employ as their more traditional greystone cousins. Stark artificial light gave them an added sense of the grotesque. They looked like a kid’s book made real.

  “Mad as a hatter,” Doug said. “Uncle Peter has gone AWOL I think, Lucy.”

  “He always was a bit offbeat,” she whispered, aghast.

  “Wow,” was all Gemma could say. “Wow.”

  The car stank. All three of them had urinated — Doug had refused to stop, even when Lucy-Anne had begged him and cried and cursed as she tried to miss her seat as she pissed — and they had not opened the windows for eleven hours. The fuel gauge had been kissing red for fifty miles, and for the last twenty Doug had been silently blessing Volkswagen’s caution. The food they had managed to bring with them had gone bad in the heat, a pint of milk had spilled, the oxygen cylinders had run out hundreds of miles back … the engine was making a sickly grinding noise … basically, they were on their last legs.

  The car rattled and sighed as he turned off the ignition. He was certain it would never start again, not without a great deal of pampering and cajoling. He was equally certain that he would never need to do either.

  They sat staring at the house. Doug was expecting mad Uncle Peter to come running out at any moment, a shotgun in one hand and a bottle of Scotch in the other, pumping a hail of lead at the car as he toasted his own questionable health. But the door remained closed, all was calm. Several crows flitted to and fro across the roof, confused by the light, avoiding the gargoyles wherever they could.

  “Crows,” Gemma said. “Family Corvidae. For instance, Corvus corax, Corvus corcone, Corvus frugilegus, Corvus splendens and the magpie, Pica pica. Chiefly insectivorous, in winter it will become omnivorous. Earthworms and grubs. And seeds. It eats … it eats grubs and seeds …” She drifted off, leaning between the front seats, staring through the windscreen at the frolicking birds on the roof of the house.

  “Where …?” Doug said. “Honey? Where did you learns stuff like that? They teach you that at school?”

  Gemma turned to him, glaring blankly. Her mouth hung slightly open and a string of drool was threatening to spill out. “Huh?”

  “Honey, what’s wrong?” Not now, he thought. Don’t let her be ill now, not with so little time left …

  “Dad, I’m so thirsty,” she said. Her voice was weak, diluted. Not as strong as it had been moments before. Not as definite.

  “Gemma, how do you know all that about crows — ?”

  “Leave her, Doug,” Lucy-Anne said. “Let’s just get her in, can we? For God’s sake? We need a rest.”

  Doug nodded, smoothed Gemma’s hair behind her ears, tried to stretch his legs. He could hear the concern in Lucy-Anne’s voice, and the doubt, and the fact that she was as unsettled as he. Gemma had never been very good at school … had never taken much of an interest in anything …. had been on the verge of being sent to a special school for slow learners.

  Corvus corax, Corvus corcone, Corvus frugilegus … Christ, where the hell did she get that from?

  “Ahhhh,” a voice boomed, and Doug’s door was snatched open. He jerked back, gasping in relief at the fresh air gushing in, wondering at the same instant what he was inhaling, whether the nanos were here already, inside him now, starting work on his lungs
so that the next breath he drew and let out would mist red in front of him.

  “Uncle Peter?” Lucy-Anne said.

  “Thought I might see some of my folk over the next day or two,” the voice said. Then a man leaned down next to the car to give the voice a face. A wild face indeed, with unruly tufts of hair and cheeks veined with evidence of years of alcohol abuse. His eyes though, they were different. Mad, but intelligent with it.

  “Sorry to say,” Uncle Peter said, “there’s nothing I can do for any of us. But still. It will be nice to have company when the time comes.”

  Doug, his wife and daughter heaved themselves from the car, all of them patiently helped by Lucy-Anne’s Uncle Peter. He held them when their legs bowed, their muscles cramped, and he wiped tears from Gemma’s face when she cried. When Lucy-Anne went to him he hugged her close and closed his eyes. Doug felt a brief but intense moment of jealousy, unreasonable yet unavoidable, and he gathered Gemma into his arms as if to ward off his uncertainty.

  “Amazing house,” he said, staring up at the grotesque decoration three stories up.

  “Made them myself,” Peter said. “I must be a fucking fruitcake!”

  Laughing, they left the mad night behind and went inside.

  “London went hours ago,” Peter said. “So it said on the TV.” He was peeling potatoes while Doug diced some vegetables. Lucy-Anne and Gemma were washing and changing in one of the upstairs bedrooms. None of them felt like sleeping. “Haven’t been there in a decade. Now all I want to do is to go to Trafalgar Square and feed the pigeons.”

  “My father lives in London,” Doug said. He took his time with each carrot he slit, relishing the hard, crunchy sound. It was a solid sound. Firm. Not too far south of here, solid and firm were words that no longer held meaning.