She ate up the ground with the intention of hurdling the guardrail. She’d been a serious modern pentathlete before her life fell apart, so she could ride, shoot, fence, and swim as well as she could run. She could lose her pursuers out in the loch, although that would mean ditching the rucksack. Unfortunately, the road was no longer deserted. Beneath the streetlamp were two men, again in beards and jumpers. The wind was at her back and blowing toward them. They looked at her and took simultaneous deep breaths through their noses. Lines of shadow slashed across their orange faces as muscles bunched, the viral rage seeming to open a vortex that sucked all their features toward one gnarled point between the eyebrows. Lips pulled tight across teeth clamped together by straining jaws. Their bodies snapped rigid as though their clenched hands were clutching high-voltage wires.
At the beginning of her ordeal she’d tried to conjure up silly images to soften the impact of this change, which she’d witnessed more times than she cared to remember. She’d imagined them as sufferers of extreme constipation straining on the toilet or woeful community theater actors overemoting in a desperate attempt to engage an audience of bored school kids. After a near miss, she’d realized this was one thing she shouldn’t allow her imagination to gloss over: she needed the fear to put her body into fight-or-flight mode.
“This is our village,” the one on the left screamed. “No strangers.”
Ruan’s hand dipped to the holster, but the floral oven gloves she still wore frustrated her attempt at a quick draw. She shook them off and kept running, resisting the impulse to shoot as the occupants of the bar poured out behind the two men. Freeing the weapon, clicking off the safety, and firing would slow her down and do little to increase her chances of escape: infected on the hunt were either fearless or thick as shit. Plus gunfire would attract the attention of any others in the area, if the shouts hadn’t already done so. The houses she sprinted past seemed empty, but the infected had a habit of multiplying like fruit flies on a rotten banana once the chase was on. She glanced toward the water, wondering if she could still get over the rail. She dismissed the option. At the speed she was moving, there was every chance she would twist her ankle at the end of the drop. Equally, remaining on the road would give the dog a chance to catch up. One bite to the leg could fell her and it would all be over. Even if she kept ahead of the chasing rabble, the roadblock she’d avoided was only a few hundred meters ahead.
The row of houses gave way to woods, and, despite what might be lurking amidst the shadows, she cut left into the trees in the hope of losing the pack. The light died off beneath the canopy, and her shoulder cannoned off a trunk, sending her body spinning. She caught herself and began weaving through the dark columns. It didn’t take long for the animals to find her. The squeak came first, followed instantly by a small furry blur that streaked through the air, paws akimbo. She ducked and the animal sailed over her head. Seconds later, another furry missile launched itself at her. This squirrel managed to snag its front paws on her shoulder and nip her ear with its buckteeth. She grabbed the bushy tail, swung the filthy rodent round once, and hurled it high into the trees. It squealed all the way, sounding like a cheap firework. Rustling came from all around now, but she didn’t look to see what else was coming; she needed all her attention for the slalom through the trunks. The trees cleared and the moon once again lit her way as she vaulted a wooden fence into a field that tilted upward into the foothills of the mountain. She turned back to the right to avoid tiring herself too quickly. That was when she heard the shuddering chorus of moos.
“You’re taking the piss!” she found the breath to shout.
The fence vibrated behind her as her pursuers leapt over. She chanced a look back, and what she saw brought hysterical laughter bubbling up. A handful of cows, several squirrels, a posse of rabbits, a young deer, what may have been a badger, the Alsatian, the barman, and seven variations on Noel Edmonds were strung out in pursuit. They all lent their baying, shouting, barking, cursing, and mooing voices to the air. It hadn’t been that many years since she realized that the whole Disney princess thing she loved as a little girl was sexist drivel, and she couldn’t help but be reminded of how the animals in the cursed forest had flocked to help Snow White. Only the birds were missing; even the Noels could have passed for dwarves if she squinted. She bit down on the hysteria and focused on running; these woodland animals weren’t coming to sing a merry song and lead her to the safety of a cabin until a handsome prince slung her across the back of his horse and hauled her off for a life sentence of sewing dresses and looking pretty. They wanted to chew out her eyeballs. At least the small animals were already falling behind, and just before she turned her attention forward again the two front-running Noels collided and went down in a bearded, jumper-clad heap. Only the dog was gaining, now lolloping along a good five meters ahead of the others.
Ahead, she saw tiny globes of light floating in the far corner of the field. In happier times they could have been mistaken for fireflies or even sprites of the forest by those of a more imaginative bent. Ruan knew what they really were. As they rushed onward, the sheep, whose eyes were reflecting the moonlight to produce the glowing orbs, materialized at the gallop. Ruan bared her teeth at the sight of the animal she hated above all others. Her right hand pulled the sword from its scabbard in a smooth arc. She transferred it to her left without breaking stride. Still tracking the flock with her eyes, she unholstered the gun and flicked off the safety.
The sheep were close enough for her to see their eerie silvery-blue eyes and teeth jutting out from their waggling lower jaws. A few seconds later, she was amongst them. She slashed at the nearest one’s snout. Snapping jaws brushed against the sleeve of her fleece and she shot the attacker in the mouth. She shimmied past the falling body, slammed another sheep between the eyes with the butt of the gun, and leapt. Her right foot landed square on the back of a particularly matted and shaggy specimen, prompting a winded bleat, and she jumped again. As she sailed upward, a savage joy seized her. She pointed the gun downward and squeezed the trigger once more. She felt rather than saw the bullet burrow into its target as her heels cleared the top of the fence by inches.
The impact of landing jarred her knees and spine, but she kept her feet and disappeared into the trees. She raised her head and let out a primal, adrenaline-fuelled howl. Too busy giving vent to her elation, she ran full tilt into a tree and toppled backward. Above the wheezing of her stuttering lungs, the din of the pursuers grew louder. The thrill of the chase knocked out of her, part of her welcomed the end. She was so tired: of the constant stress of flight, of the loneliness, of the tormenting memories that kept slipping through her mental defenses. But her survival instincts remained, so when she saw a figure slip through the shadows ahead she drew in a rasping breath and lifted her weapons. The silhouette raised its hands, pointing the left in front and drawing the right back.
A bowstring twanged and the air whispered as an arrow flew past. The dog yelped. The silhouette lowered the bow and stepped into a shaft of moonlight breaking through a gap in the foliage. At first, Ruan couldn’t make sense of the shadows on the woman’s angular face. Then she realized she was looking at deep scars running across jaw, cheek, and forehead. The woman shouldered the bow and held out her hand.
“Come with me if you want to live,” she said.
Ruan took the hand. She hadn’t touched another human being for what felt like an eternity—not counting violent encounters—and the contact sent delicious signals scampering along her nerve endings. The woman must have felt something similar, for she gasped and squeezed so tightly that Ruan’s bones clacked together.
“I know you are here and it makes me happy,” the scarred stranger said, emphasizing each word.
The report of splintering wood echoed through the forest, and the chorus of animal and human voices grew louder still. Ruan snapped back to herself. “That’s very sweet, and I’m happy, too, but can we get the hell out of here?”
The wo
man opened her eyes and yanked Ruan to her feet. They ran through the woods together, leaving behind the sounds of pursuit.
3
Lesley McBrien waited at a tiny table in Nancy Whiskey Pub, where laughter and the click of pucks from the shuffleboard table added random and incongruously cheerful percussion to the somber music of Arcade Fire drifting out from the stereo—rather like an uninvited and enthusiastic busker playing the bongos at a funeral. The dissonance did nothing to ease her frazzled nerves. In front of her sat a Jameson’s and lemonade, her second in the twenty minutes she’d been here. She fought to stop her regular sips from turning into gulps as she kept glancing toward the front door.
She’d arrived early to the bar on the corner of Lispenard, Sixth Avenue, and West Broadway to give it a quick once-over. Her contact had chosen well. A close-packed affair with a long wooden counter behind which twinkling fairy lights wove through row upon row of liquor bottles, the bar wasn’t the kind of high-end place frequented by New York’s contingent of highly paid UN twats. It was instead full of a mainly young, casually dressed crowd swigging on beer, chatting, and casting occasional glances at the muted television screens overhead.
It was refreshing to be away from the UN staff, diplomats, and hangers-on, most of whom were as useful as a fart in a spacesuit, a one-legged man at an arse-kicking contest, or any of the other overused similes the pathologically cynical journalist crowd working the UN beat bandied around. They did nothing but form working groups, a misnomer if ever she’d heard one; craft resolutions full of loopholes so large a grinning dictator could, and often did, merrily lead a convoy of tanks through them on his way to massacre his own people; and hold meetings, meetings about meetings, and meetings about meetings about meetings. It could take two years to decide whether to deploy lemon- or orange-scented urinal blocks in the delegates’ lavatory, never mind whether to deploy an intervention force.
Lesley was too recognizable to take the chance of one of these numpties seeing her chatting with the man she awaited. She was the leading pundit on the infection: her face was plastered over the news, and her book about her flight from Britain as the virus turned animals into killing machines had sold a hundred thousand copies in the first week. The advance had swollen her bank account to bursting with money she couldn’t bring herself to touch. Her dream of eclipsing her famous war correspondent father had come true, much to his chagrin: on the rare occasion they spoke he dropped snide comments about how her efforts didn’t compare to his former exploits. He had no idea how right he was. As if to demonstrate her ubiquity, one of the screens flipped to a promo for the interview with Jay Leno she’d recorded the previous evening. Her fingers tightened round the glass, which she wanted to hurl at the screen. Instead, she put her head down and let her hair hide her face.
The book portrayed her as a sparky journalist who—with grit, determination, and a firmly starched upper lip—had uncovered a moronic secret government weapons program aimed at decimating enemy nations’ food chains. In reality, she’d chanced on the story and made a big hairy dog’s cock of the ensuing investigation. Only blind luck allowed her to escape with the world’s biggest scoop. The sole thing she’d done right was to shoot dead the pursuing Alastair Brown, the government security operative who’d been the first recorded case of the virus crossing to humans and a glistening purple bell end to boot. In the first draft of her book, she’d stuck closer to the truth, only glossing over her more idiotic moments—such as allowing herself to be lured to an out-of-the-way location, on a flimsy pretext any decent journalist would have seen through, and kidnapped. Her editor, unimpressed by the fecklessness of the “lead character,” had given the facts the kind of brutal massaging normally only dealt out by a heavyset, moustachioed woman in an East European bathhouse. Once the fiction of Woodward in high heels had been created, Lesley couldn’t back out of it.
Worst of all, her success had been bought with death. For the hundredth time she ticked off the victims: Gregory Strong and Constance Jones, the scientists who gave her the information about the viral program—dead because she hadn’t got the story out in time; Fanny Peters—dead because she had to go on a food run when Lesley turned up at her house with extra mouths to feed; James Peters, David Alexander, and his twin sons—killed by Brown because they were in her company; Bernard the helicopter pilot—dead in a crash because they’d hijacked his aircraft. She tried to pay homage to these people by talking about them in interviews, but the host always turned the subject back to her. They wanted to celebrate the heroic tale of a survivor, not dwell on the grim topic of the dead.
The kiss of death had even followed her to New York. She’d witnessed—probably caused—two fatal car crashes, a pedestrian squashed by falling scaffolding, and a woman struck dead by lightning. Animals were not immune either. She and fellow escapee Terry Borders had bought three rounds of goldfish as they tried to build a cozy domestic life. Each of them had quickly floated belly-up in the murky water for no discernible reason other than Lesley’s malicious proximity. She was a jinx to every living thing in her vicinity, the rose that grew strong and bright as its roots burrowed into the fertile depths of a mass grave.
It had gotten so bad that she suffered a recurring nightmare in which she stood alone in the middle of a desolate landscape. Off in the distance, the crumbling buildings of a ruined city clawed at a sky blackened by storm clouds. As she stepped across the desiccated soil, her foot crunched on something. This was the only variable in the dream: sometimes the animal she’d stepped on was a cockroach, sometimes a mouse, once an unbearably cute chinchilla. Always, though, as the creature expired she was seized with the certainty she’d killed the last living being on Earth apart from her. She would wake with a scream dying in her throat. Terry assumed she was having nightmares about being back in Britain; she didn’t disabuse him of this notion. He would try and convince her it was a delusion, like the smell of death he’d thought clung to his skin when he worked in the abattoir. Unlike Terry, she had proof of her curse: the corpses that trailed in her wake.
Her phone rang, interrupting her self-flagellation, and she looked at the caller ID. Her finger hovered for several seconds before she accepted the call.
“Hi, Terry,” she said.
“Hello. Just wondering when you’re coming home. I’ve made vegetable risotto.”
“Sorry. I meant to tell you I was going to be out late.”
There was a long silence. “Right. Working again. I can tell that from the music.”
“I’m meeting someone about a tip,” Lesley said, her voice tight.
“There’s always something, right?”
“You know why I have to work so hard.”
“I suppose I do. It would just have been nice to have some company.”
Terry never said anything direct about how their escape had been presented. She wished he would, wished somebody would confront her about the damage she’d done so she could take her punishment now rather than store it up for the day of reckoning that must be coming. Instead he only referred to it obliquely, in snide little comments like, “I suppose I do.” She knew he thought her selfish, pouring everything into her career to become a star. He didn’t believe her when she told him she didn’t want to be so lucky, that she only wanted to deserve whatever success came her way without having to clamber up a pile of bodies.
“It’s not my fault you don’t have enough to do,” she said.
A heavy sigh flooded the speakers. “I just meant it would be good to see you, specifically.”
He hung up without saying good-bye.
She thumped the phone down, her mouth dry, and tried to focus on the night’s business. Ever since she’d been posted to New York, the Security Council had been meeting regularly behind closed doors to discuss the British crisis. She knew from sources that they’d talked about using nukes—a proposal vetoed by the Brits, who wouldn’t have a country to go back to, and the French, who would have to deal with the fallout. Recently, tho
ugh, there’d been a sense of growing momentum: whispers in the corridors of power and tougher language in off-the-record briefings that pointed toward the decisive military action many—including North Korea and Iran, who were delighted that a new pariah state had displaced them from the top of the international hate list—had been calling for. Tonight, she hoped to find out exactly what was afoot.
Jack Alford was a member of the delegation from the British government in exile, which had kept its role as one of the five permanent members of the Security Council despite being responsible for the virus in the first place and not having a country to govern—two pretty fucking compelling reasons for their being kicked off, in Lesley’s view. She knew he was uncomfortable with the use of force, so when he’d slipped her a note asking to meet, she suspected he was going to tell her a lot of things he shouldn’t.
The door swung open and in walked Jack—a tall and rangy man in his early forties, with short black hair verging on curly, a cute face, and an easy way that meant he was often buttonholed by female journalists looking to pump him for information, as well as just pump him. After a quick detour to the bar, he picked his way through the crowd and air-kissed Lesley. The soft rub of his cheek sent a shiver down her spine. She pulled away abruptly, picturing Terry sitting alone at home and staring resentfully at her untouched plate.
Every meeting began with a game in which they created farcical scenarios that the pallid UN chief would condemn, strongly condemn, or ignore. Lesley plowed right in. “I’ve got a good one for you tonight. Germany invades Poland again.”
“The Germans are the only ones keeping the European economy afloat, so they can invade whomever they bloody well like,” Jack said. “Ignore or encourage.”
World War Moo: An Apocalypse Cow Novel Page 2
