On the fourth day, a new recruit came in with one of the couriers—a middle-aged man who appeared to give physical form to the phrase “mild mannered.” Ruan was confined to quarters to head off any potential incidents but watched from her window as Fanny sat him down cross-legged on the pier and took him through a series of breathing exercises. After a while, Fanny brought out a chicken and sat it in front of him. He lunged forward, grabbed the bird and bit its head off. Fanny let him pull off the wings and beat the body on the ground until he was spent and blood speckled his glasses. Nayapal led the newcomer, now weeping and spitting out feathers, to one of the hangars. Fanny saw Ruan watching and came over.
“We’ll keep him there until he can be trusted,” she said. “You won’t be in any danger.”
“Was that a test?”
“Yes, to judge his levels of anger.”
“You mean it varies?”
“Absolutely. Some people are better at reining themselves in; women more so than men.”
“You have more men here, though.”
“Andy, Scott, and Tom were pacifists. And they’re pretty metrosexual. We have more women in the network across the country.”
“So that guy was one of the angry ones? He looked so harmless.”
“It’s always the meek ones you have to watch out for. They’ve usually got a lifetime of rage to come out.”
Ruan thought again of her parents. Perhaps she’d been deluding herself that they loved her. Sure, they’d backed her in whatever she wanted to do and never showed any overt signs of resentment at the sacrifices they must have made for her and her brother, but that’s what all parents did for their children. It was an automatic response, built into the genes just as much as the urges that the virus amplified. There was nothing special about a parent caring for the fruit of their loins, no matter how intense and wonderful that relationship seemed to the child. Her whole life may have been a lie.
“Why use a bird?” Ruan asked, trying to distract herself from this painful train of thought. “Couldn’t you just annoy him? Call him speccy or something and see how angry he gets?”
“The point of this is ultimately to reintegrate with the world, and that means being able to control ourselves around uninfected beings. We don’t get angry enough with each other to really test it.”
“So was I a guinea pig?”
Fanny looked uncomfortable. “Not purposely. I mean, I didn’t help you for that reason. But it did cross my mind when you came back.”
“Human testing always follows on from animal, right?”
“I know it sounds bad, but I wasn’t taking any risks. I controlled myself, and I trusted everybody else to do the same. They all graduated by not killing the bird.”
“But they all killed it the first time?”
“More or less. Some did it straight away, some held out for a few minutes. This one will take a bit of conditioning. If it’s even possible. Some people just can’t help themselves. We’ve had to let a few go.”
That almost everybody killed the bird could serve in mitigation for her mother and father, and for a moment Ruan seized on it. Then again, she wasn’t a bird. She was their child. Fanny had said that people needed to choose which side of the line they stood on. Her parents had made their choice, and that knowledge cut Ruan far deeper than any of the physical wounds she’d suffered. Even when the newcomer was locked away and Ruan was free to roam the camp once more, she lay on the bed, blinking until her eyes ached as she rewrote history. Time and again she replayed the scene of returning home, gradually replacing the reality with an alternative scene in which she pressed the buzzer to no avail. When she emerged from the room, she’d just about convinced herself that her parents were dead. This was her home now.
She encountered one other wrinkle in her attempt to build this new life—something she’d been expecting ever since she met Rory. He began following her around, not quite brave enough to talk to her, and she began to find little origami flowers on her bed in the evening. One day the flowers were accompanied by an unsigned note that said, “I fancy you.” She tried to ignore it, as she’d ignored so many such clumsy advances in the past, but she could tell from the way Rory was beginning to look at her more openly, a hurt look on his face, that pretending it wasn’t happening wouldn’t cut it. Then, the day before, the approach she’d been dreading occurred. She was down by the water’s edge, washing the dishes after lunch, when she heard tentative footsteps on the pebbles behind her. Turning, she saw Rory standing there, swishing the stones with his trainers.
“Have you been getting my flowers?” he said, looking at the tops of his shoes.
“Oh, they’re from you,” she said. “Thank you. They’re lovely.”
He looked up briefly and gave her a shy smile. He was kind of cute, she supposed, but God was he young. His cheeks were ruddy with the bloom of adolescence behind soft fuzz that heralded the beard that would one day, many years from now, take root in the Noel Edmonds–manner of his relatives. She couldn’t stand such coyness. What she looked for in boyfriends was a confident maturity that only began to take shape once the early hormone storm settled down, usually in the early twenties. Her problem had been that most of those men wouldn’t come near her despite their obvious desire—the French geography teacher who’d taken her virginity during a blissful weeklong exchange trip aside—as she was the very definition of jail bait: underage, fully developed physically, and looking for somebody way out of her age bracket. Now it didn’t matter, as she’d celebrated her sixteenth birthday alone in an abandoned house with a bowl of Pedigree Chum topped with a single candle.
So, Rory just didn’t fit her profile, even if you put aside the fact he had the virus. It didn’t matter in terms of infection risk, but she suspected that once an infected person’s dander was up violence could follow if they were getting it on with somebody uninfected. Her room was next to the one shared by Eva and Scott, and she’d heard them going at it. Their lovemaking involved lots of slapping and guttural, angry shouts, although she supposed they could always have been into S&M. Anyway, if she were to take the chance, it wouldn’t be with a downy-faced boy who would probably spurt in his pants if she so much as cocked a hip in his general direction.
Rory stepped closer. He was wearing tight jeans, and with horror Ruan saw a lazy stirring of denim. She jumped up, clutching the bowl of dishes to her chest to hide the obvious spur for his growing arousal. “I’d better be going now. I need to stack these.”
“Wait!” Rory said as she edged away. “I was wondering if you wanted to have dinner tonight. Just you and me.”
His voice was tinged with desperation. She felt sorry for him, but it would be kinder to put a stop to it right now. “I’m sorry, Rory. I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
If his face had fallen any farther it would have slipped off his skull and plopped to the ground. “You don’t like me.”
“It’s not that. I’m just not ready to see anybody.”
“So you might be in a while? Once you feel more comfortable?”
Shit, she thought. Now I’ve given him hope.
To illustrate the point, his trouser front twitched further. In an effort to ease her discomfort, she imagined it as a wobbly slug balancing on two new potatoes. This image made her giggle.
“You’re laughing at me,” Rory said, his fists clenching. Ruan edged sideways, looking to move around him, but he blocked her path. “You shouldn’t laugh at me.”
The bowl of dishes was just about to be tossed into his face when Scott, who’d been composting vegetable peels nearby, hurried over and placed his huge paw on Rory’s shoulder. “I need you to help me with the vegetables.”
Rory started. The petulant look of a little boy caught with his hand in his dad’s wallet replaced the gnarled tension of his jawbone. “We were just talking, weren’t we?”
Backing his lie with a dip of her chin, Ruan hurried off. For the rest of the day Rory avoided her as much as possible, eating
his meals alone and no doubt nursing a sense of injustice. It was something he would have to get used to, for the world had become a very unjust place. That night, she’d locked her door again. Even now, as everybody else ate, she could see him crouched by the water, staring disconsolately into the lake—the wilderness equivalent of sitting on the stairs at a party and hoping a girl will take pity on you.
Ruan had just swallowed her last mouthful of stew when the throb of engines disturbed the calm. Suddenly everybody was on their feet and running to where they kept their weapons. Fanny picked up her bow, Scott grabbed a large wooden staff, and Andy returned with an egg in each hand. Ruan sprinted to her room to gather her gun and sword, and returned to join the line that faced the entrance. The engines cut off and a tense silence followed. When somebody came running down the road, Ruan flicked off the safety. The figure resolved into a young boy with red hair and a flopping gait. She drew a bead on him, but Fanny slapped her arm down. She was too far away to stop Andy, who’d coiled back his arm. An egg arced through the air and exploded on the boy’s forehead. Ruan almost applauded.
The intruder stopped to wipe off the sticky mess. “Who throws an egg?” he shouted. “It’s in my contact lens.”
Ruan relaxed. A raging infected human wouldn’t have been stopped by something as paltry as a well-thrown chicken fetus. She felt an immediate kinship. This boy had to be immune, like her.
“Geldof?” Fanny said, half stepping forward.
What kind of idiot calls their kid Geldof? Ruan thought.
“Mum?” Geldof said, wiping egg out of his eyes. “Mum!”
He broke into a wobbly sprint again.
That answers that question, Ruan thought. Lucky I didn’t say it out loud.
20
Geldof ran toward his mum, forgetting the egg slicking his forehead, the anguished months when he thought she was dead, the years when their relationship had been defined by strife. He became a young child again, with no complications to get in the way of the simple yearning to toddle toward his mum and be enfolded in arms that felt like an impenetrable shield against the world.
Fanny almost fell under the force of his charge. After a moment’s hesitation, she curled one arm under his armpit and stroked his hair with the other. Even as Geldof wet her T-shirt, his heart swelled with a joy so fierce that it forced a torrent of words up through his throat like a burst water main. “I thought you were dead and I never got to say good-bye and I’m sorry I was so rotten to you and I never listened to you and I never appreciated you and I wanted to eat meat and I pretended to pray and never told you I loved you and masturbated all the time…”
He stopped, realizing he’d gone too far with the confessions. Ignoring the titters from the others gathered around, he took a shuddering breath and pulled back to look his mum in the eyes. He’d never seen tears on her face before, but they were there now, glistening in the gullies of the awful scars. The pictures hadn’t prepared him for how brutally she’d been savaged. Her face looked like the surface of the moon, ragged white craters rammed in by the force of passing asteroids. He wanted to kiss them away.
“I love you, too,” Fanny said, mercifully glossing over his masturbation revelation—not that a sixteen-year-old boy admitting he was rather fond of tugging one off could be considered much of a revelation. “I should’ve told you every day.”
He couldn’t remember the last time he’d heard those words pass her lips. He hugged her tighter, as though the years of distance could be erased by this one moment of intense closeness. Fanny’s thin body trembled as she took great sucking breaths through the ruin of her nose. A sudden heat flushed her body. In combination with the other physical ticks, it made her seem like an old boiler about to blow.
“You need to let go now, Geldof,” she said.
As though he were holding a knitting needle jammed into the main socket, Geldof couldn’t release his arms. Fanny’s trembling became violent. With sudden force, she put her hands on his shoulders and pushed him away. She staggered backward, rapidly and repeatedly chanting a phrase that he couldn’t quite catch.
“Are you okay?” he said.
“Just give me a minute,” she said, squatting and holding up a hand. “Please.”
When Geldof tried to go to her, somebody grasped his arm. He looked up to see a girl with astonishing green eyes.
“Seriously, you have to give her some space,” she said.
He became fully aware of the other people, around half-a-dozen, who crowded around his mum. A bear-sized man Geldof recognized as another of Fanny’s old cronies knelt down and began whispering in her ear. Eva, who’d followed on behind Geldof, stroked her cropped hair. Something wasn’t right here. He still didn’t know what happened after the pigs left her for dead. Perhaps she’d had a mental breakdown. All he could tell was that she was fighting some raging internal battle. A year ago, Geldof would have been hurt and resentful at being pushed away, but he’d changed. And so had she. He could see it in her eyes, hear it in the softer tones of her voice, understand it in the way she’d held him and told him she loved him. He stood at a respectful distance until Fanny’s breathing began to return to normal and she got to her feet. Scott and Eva flanked her, holding her elbows in what looked suspiciously like a move to restrain her.
“I’m fine now,” she said. “It was just the shock.” With a look at each other, Scott and Eva dropped their hands. Fanny took one last whooshing breath and turned her eyes on Geldof. “I know you are here, and it makes me happy. But are you insane? You don’t have the virus. You were out. Why did you come back? And how did you find me?”
Something about what she’d said niggled Geldof, but he focused instead on delivering the good news. “We’ve come to get you out.”
“We?”
Geldof whistled. In response, engines started up, and down the track rode the mercenaries. They’d all agreed it would be wise for Geldof and Eva to go in together in order not to spook anybody—a plan he’d ruined by breaking into a run the moment he saw his mum. Fanny stared at them, her face darkening. “This is your grandfather’s work, isn’t it? He found you.”
“Yes,” Geldof said. “When he found out you were alive, he put up the money to get you out.”
“And he sent you here with these men?”
“Not exactly. He didn’t know I was going to come. But don’t you see? None of that matters. A helicopter’s coming back for us in a few days. It can sneak us out. We can be together again.”
Sadness dulled Fanny’s eyes. “I can’t leave.”
“I thought you might be stubborn enough to stay here for whatever crusade you’re on now. I came to convince you to leave.”
“You don’t understand. I want to come with you, but I can’t.”
“Why not?”
Fanny looked at the mercenaries again. “Because I’m infected.”
“No,” Geldof said, backing away. “You can’t be.”
Even as he denied it, he knew she was telling the truth. Now her reaction to him made perfect sense. She’d been fighting her urges—hopefully just a desire to kill him rather than have sex with him first, which would have been a far more disturbing fate. He heard a chorus of clicks and looked at the mercenaries. Automatic weapons had materialized in their hands.
“This is turning into a right royal fuck-up,” Scholzy said.
“We’re all infected, apart from her,” Fanny said, indicating the girl with the green eyes. Her voice was calm and authoritative, so unlike the shrill badgering Geldof remembered. “But we’re not a threat to you.”
“I prefer not to take any chances,” Scholzy said as he locked the barrel of the gun to his shoulder. “Nothing personal.”
Infected or not, she was still his mum. Geldof stepped in front of her. “You’ll have to shoot me first.”
“Considering I still have your puke on the back of my jacket, I’d rather like that.”
“Go ahead. Then you won’t get the rest of your money.”
Not taking his eyes off Fanny and her gang, he turned his head. “James, get Sergei on the satphone. Make sure the drunken moron remembers where and when he’s supposed to pick us up. We’ll hole up somewhere else until the rendezvous.”
Geldof, still faint at the risk he’d taken, felt a light touch on his shoulder.
“We need to talk,” Fanny said. She held out her hand, and Geldof looked at it nervously. “I won’t bite, and you can’t get it from just touching me.”
“It’s not that,” Geldof said. “I just can’t remember the last time we held hands.”
“Does it matter now?”
In response, he curled his fingers through hers and they walked off toward the lake.
* * *
Once they were settled on a large rock, breath visible in the cold air, Geldof gave Fanny the news she needed to hear.
“Dad’s dead,” he said. “He got shot.”
“I know.”
In a flash, he realized what had niggled him earlier. She’d said that he’d got out with a certainty that meant it wasn’t a guess. Now she knew that her husband was dead. “How do you know this stuff?”
World War Moo: An Apocalypse Cow Novel Page 19
