by Sam Kates
“Why, Peter?” asked Ceri. “Why leave any of us alive?”
“We needed a workforce to prepare for the Great Coming,” he said. “A survival rate of around 0.02 percent gave us enough humans to do what is needed, but not so great in number that we are unable to control.”
“Once they’ve had half their brains fried, you mean,” said Tom.
“Yes,” said Peter. “I suspect that is what happened to the survivors when they arrived in London.” He glanced at Diane, who nodded but didn’t look up.
“Okay,” said Tom, “so once this Great Coming has happened. What then?”
Peter shifted on his feet, but didn’t drop his gaze from Tom’s.
“Once the remainder of our civilisation arrives on Earth, they will bring with them the knowledge of how to create new drones. This time they will be created without the urge to procreate or survive. Simple creatures to serve our wills but without the capacity to evolve. We won’t make the same mistake again.”
“You don’t already possess such knowledge?” asked Ceri.
“Our geneticists do but they remained on our home planet. It was considered too risky to send such expertise so vast a distance. Don’t forget, we don’t keep written records. If some disaster had befallen us who travelled here five millennia ago, the knowledge would have been lost for all time.”
“So when the rest of you arrive, you’ll create a new version of us,” said Tom. “A weak, unambitious, subservient version.”
“That’s about the size of it,” said Peter.
“And us?” said Tom. He glanced at Ceri. She was staring at Peter, her eyes wide and fearful. “What will happen to the surviving humans? There could be over a million of us spread throughout the world.”
“A million and a half,” said Peter.
“What will happen to us?”
“After the Great Coming, the strength of will of seventy thousand people will join with the five thousand already here. That combined strength will far exceed the force you felt during the recent Commune. I won’t be able to protect you from it.”
“They’ll hold another Commune?” said Ceri.
Peter nodded. “Once they’ve gathered together somewhere large enough to take them all so their psyches can be combined and concentrated. Probably some wide open space, like Hyde Park, or somewhere more contained, like a stadium. The surviving humans worldwide will be powerless to resist the compulsion that will be thrust upon them. They will have no choice but to act upon it.”
“And this compulsion?” asked Tom, though the churning sickness in his stomach was already suggesting the answer.
Ceri had guessed it, too.
“Mass suicide,” she said in a small voice. “They’ll tell us to kill ourselves.”
“Yes,” said Peter. “I am very much afraid that is precisely what will happen.”
Chapter Five
The only living thing Brianne and Will encountered as they looked for a safe place to spend the night was a rat. Large and brown, it had its nose buried in a ragged corpse that lay in the gutter, too torn apart for Bri to be able to tell whether male or female. The rat must have heard or sensed their approach, for it withdrew from its meal and rose onto its hind legs, nose aquiver.
“Scat, rat!” said Bri as they drew nearer.
“Scat, rat!” the boy echoed.
Will hadn’t displayed any ill effects from his encounter with the dogs, except that he stayed close to Bri as they walked and she was aware that he glanced around on occasion as though checking they weren’t being stalked. Now as they approached the rodent he tucked in by her side, so close her hip almost bumped his elbow.
The rat watched them but showed no sign of fear. Just as Bri was thinking of changing direction to avoid the creature, it dropped to its haunches, turned and scurried away along the gutter. The sky was darkening as evening drew in and the rat was soon lost to sight in the gloom.
Bri shuddered.
“I hate rats,” she said.
When they had walked three or four streets away from the house where she’d woken up, Bri felt a little safer. If the person who had taken her bike returned to look for her, he or she would not have any clue of her whereabouts. This housing estate must contain hundreds of terraced houses. Trying to find the one that she was in, without even knowing she was in one and with many of them locked by their former occupants, would be an almost impossible task.
Bri tested her own theory when she started approaching properties and trying the front doors. Most of them were locked securely. The few that did open let loose a waft of corrupted air, stale but as recognisable to her now as the smell that used to come from the fishery at the harbourside in Looe.
Darkness had fallen fully by the time they found a house with an unlocked door that did not emit the odour of old, rotted flesh.
Bri entered the hallway, Will close behind. She shut the door and inspected it from the inside. Made of hardwood, the door contained not only a keyhole from which protruded a brass key, but two sturdy-looking bolts. Bri tried to turn the key, but it wouldn’t budge.
“Damn!” she muttered.
She drew the bolts across.
“They’ll have to do,” she said, although she wondered quite how secure the door would prove against a determined intruder.
Will stepped forward. He took hold of the door handle and yanked it upwards. Bri heard a smooth sliding sound as some mechanism engaged. Will gripped the key and twisted it easily. He turned and grinned his goofy grin.
Bri took hold of the handle and tried pressing it down. When it didn’t move, she shook it. The door did not so much as rattle.
“Good boy, Will!” she said and punched him lightly to the shoulder.
The boy’s grin grew wider.
Bri dropped her backpack in the hall and blundered about until she found an understairs cupboard. A little blind rummaging produced a torch. The batteries were weak but generated sufficient light for her to explore downstairs.
The windows were all hardwood, double-glazed and securely fastened. The rear door was of the same material and already locked and bolted. It, too, didn’t budge under Bri’s shake.
The kitchen cupboards produced a variety of tinned food and, to her delight, boxes of candles and matches. She lit a candle and dripped molten wax into the bottom of two mugs. Before the wax could set, she stood a fresh candle into each puddle. She and Will could now explore the rest of the house without being splashed by hot wax.
The living room contained comfortable-looking furniture, a huge and defunct television, and a bookcase bursting with a variety of modern paperbacks and older-looking hardbacks.
Bri led the way upstairs, their shadows dancing ahead of them along the walls and ceilings like agitated elastic figures. Three bedrooms, beds all made, and a family bathroom led off the wide landing.
The house gave up no clues as to what had become of its owners. Although overlain by a thin coating of dust, everywhere they looked was well-maintained and tidy. A stale, unlived-in odour permeated every room, but the stink of decay was wholly absent. Quite why such a prosperous, clean household had upped and left without bothering to lock the front door Bri had no idea.
They sat side by side on the living room’s leather couch, which was indeed as comfortable as it looked, and ate a supper of tinned meat, baked beans and pineapples.
Appetites sated, they drank the pineapple juice straight from the tins.
Bri sighed. This was the safest she’d felt since waking up in London. But tiredness was creeping up on her. The headache that had been like a faint background noise for the last few hours was beginning to gain intensity.
Will’s eyelids looked heavy and dark smudges discoloured the flesh beneath his eyes. He yawned.
“You look like I feel,” said Bri.
The boy said nothing.
“Hmm,” she mused, “what’s the deal with you anyway? Do you have learning diffs or something?”
Without thinking about what she was doing, Bri s
tretched out her hand and touched it to Will’s brow. He blinked but did not shy away.
Leaving her fingers in contact with his forehead, she narrowed her focus until she was no longer aware of the flickering living room, only Will’s expressionless features.
They began to waver and soften so that she was seeing an abstract version of the boy, an artist’s impression. Then that, too, was gone as her gaze shifted inwards and she became incorporeal, a mind only, an untethered intellect that could extend itself. Reach out. . . .
If the boy gasped, she didn’t hear him. She was inside him, examining his psyche, viewing it as a swathe of shifting colours. Greens, blues, indigos, violets. Muted, pastel shades.
Anomalies: two dark marks, as incongruous amidst the soft swirls as fresh bruises on a bride’s cheeks. She looked closer, probing a little deeper.
Like furrows in a virgin hillside, two wide gashes cut through the boy’s mind. Black at the edges, they tinged to muddy green, to khaki, before changing to a vivid, violent orange at their centres. Beyond the gashes, or behind them, lay a limpid pool of pastels, losing definition as they faded to grey.
She sensed that within the colours more could be revealed: images and movie reels of events and emotions, of people and places. All shrouded in a mist, greying like the stagnant colours in the pool. To see more she would need to delve deeper, but something was yanking her back—
“Ow!”
Pain coursed through her head, beginning behind the cut on her forehead and spreading outwards to engulf her. She squinted at Will. He was gazing placidly at her, seemingly unaffected by her invasion of his mind.
She scrabbled at the pocket of her hoodie and extracted two painkillers. With a grimace, she dry-swallowed them.
“Come on,” she said to Will. “I need sleep. We both do. Whatever’s been done to you to make you this way, I can’t think about it now. My head hurts too much.”
She stumbled up the stairs, Will putting out a hand to steady her. The pain had begun to recede a little by the time she had seen the boy into one of the beds and had climbed into bed in the room next door. The duvet felt a little damp and smelled musty. She barely noticed.
* * * * *
It took Zach Trent a further three years to discover what Mr Benton had described as his ‘own way’ of keeping the demons at bay. Although wealthy beyond any measure he might previously have employed, contentment eluded Zach. The concept of using some of that wealth to put down roots, to become part of a community, repulsed him. He continued wandering, though now in luxurious train compartments or swish rental cars rather than by weary foot, alighting at towns and cities on whims, taking off again when the fever took him, and take him it always did.
Except for the occasional chilled beer, though never more than two at one sitting, he remained dry. When the fever came on him—the aching, shaking fever—he moved on, always moving, trying to stay one step ahead of the demons.
He dabbled in blackjack and roulette, lured by the glitzy façade, awed and at the same time appalled. When he began to lose big and felt the pull to keep placing the chips—he’d win them back and more, and if not this time then on the next spin of the wheel or turn of a card—he had gained sufficient self-awareness to see that he was replacing one bleak addiction with another.
He moved on.
On and on. Always moving. Never outrunning.
And everywhere he went, people.
Three years it took him to come to a realisation: that where people were, he oughtn’t to be. The demons found it easier to reach him in a crowd.
Mr Benton’s way was to immerse himself in the study and practice of law. Zach Trent’s would be immersing himself in solitude.
He moved again, but this time with a purpose. He bought a pick-up truck, a mule of a vehicle, sturdy and steadfast, capable of traversing all but the most churned terrain.
Passing through backwaters and one-horse burghs, he stopped and forced himself to approach gas station proprietors and grocery store owners, tapping into local knowledge. He knew that what he was looking for wouldn’t be found in the display window of any realtor.
After meandering through half a dozen or more states, he pulled in to a roadside diner in Maine. Tree-clad slopes rose in the background to white-tipped peaks. Summer had not yet given in to fall, yet the air contained a nip that made him pull his jacket tighter. A few battered pick-ups and flat beds occupied the diner’s parking area, suggesting the interior wouldn’t be crowded.
So it proved. Plaid-shirted, grizzled men sat alone in booths, paying attention to nothing but their food and mugs of steaming coffee.
Zach took a stool at the empty counter.
“What can I get ya?” The waitress looked late middle-aged and tired.
“Coffee,” said Zach. “What’s the special?”
“Corn chowder. Fresh baked bread.” She spoke with the eastern drawl that marked out a local.
Zach nodded. “Please,” he added.
The waitress seemed disinclined to try to engage Zach in small talk, which suited him just fine. He ate the chowder and the bread—both tasty—and drank coffee strong enough to clean ovens, in silence.
“Refill?”
He nodded and the waitress filled his mug. As she turned to leave, Zach cleared his throat.
She turned back to him, eyebrows raised.
“Them mountains,” he said. “Good hunting?”
“Bear. Elk. Deer.”
“Wolves?”
The woman shook her head. “No wolves in these parts since long before I was in pigtails. And that’s too long, mister.”
“Anyone live in them foothills?”
“Some. But most of the habitable land is being partitioned by the gov’ment for nature reserves and tourists.” She shrugged. “Ain’t much pioneering spirit left round here.”
“D’you know of any homesteads for sale?”
She narrowed her eyes. “Why you fixing to live out there? Ain’t nothing but trees. And snow for five months each year.”
“Splendid isolation,” Zach murmured. “D’you know of any for sale?”
The waitress hesitated, then sighed. “I guess the wilderness suits some folks and Old Ben’s place is as close to wilderness as you can buy. It ain’t much, mind. Just some ole log cabin and trees.”
“And Old Ben, he’s looking to sell?”
“Aye. That’s what I hear.”
“How do I get there?”
* * * * *
Will lay awake in the silent darkness, straining to sort his thoughts into a coherent pattern. Knowledge, experiences, memories, all lay shrouded in a dark, impenetrable fog. Occasionally, a snippet might rise from the cloud. An image of a young girl, pony-tailed and freckled: his sister, though her name remained hidden. A spotted, yapping puppy, jumping up, trying to lick his face while he laughed. . . .
“Pongo,” he murmured.
The memory of his puppy—at least, he felt it had been his puppy—brought a more unpleasant, more recent memory: snarling dogs chasing him through deserted streets. He tried to push it away by thinking about the girl who had saved him.
“Bri,” he muttered. “Like the cheese but without the e.”
He didn’t even know what that meant, but he liked the sound of it.
“Bri. Like the cheese but without the e. . . .”
The image of Bri comforted him. The sound of her name lulled him. Still whispering it softly under his breath, Will drifted into sleep.
A mile or two away across West London, Milandra and Grant sat in the hotel suite, discussing the Great Coming and the tasks that awaited once it had been accomplished.
“. . . in places like India,” Grant was saying. “That’s where we’ll need to concentrate our initial efforts. The reactor cores should remain stable for months yet, but we don’t want to take chances.”
“Have you spoken to our people who were in high positions of trust?” asked Milandra. “I’ve not had chance to. I doubt that you have, eit
her.”
“No. I haven’t,” admitted Grant. He had been too busy overseeing arrangements for ridding the surrounding area of decomposing corpses and for the forthcoming trip to Salisbury. “But I’ve had others talk to them and report back. It seems as if every government with nuclear facilities took every precaution to make them safe while they still could.”
“Hmm. Unusually noble, don’t you think? The entire human race is dying around you and you spend your last days trying to ensure that the world is as safe as possible for any survivors. Maybe those who say that humanity is weak and self-serving have it wrong?”
“I never thought . . .” Grant tailed off as he caught the sharp glint in Milandra’s eye. He cleared his throat. “No matter in how safe a condition they’ve been left, nuclear reactors by their very nature continue to degrade and each installation will need attention before the year’s out. That, in my view, will be the first task once this planet has truly become ours.”
“Earth Haven,” murmured Milandra. “I guess we can drop the Haven then. It will become our home.” The dreamy look that had briefly appeared in her broad face abruptly faded and she became businesslike once more. “What else?”
Grant had already been giving this a lot of thought. “Communication systems—satellites, servers and the like—will require attention if we want to maintain networks. Of course, we won’t need radio and the internet, but they are useful tools. With seventy-five thousand of us spread about an entire planet, they might be worth keeping.
“Energy and water supplies can be turned back on as and where required. The London Grid will be switched back on in the next few days since we require it at the moment. But later—” Grant shrugged “—it can be turned off again if nobody intends settling here. I suggest we share knowledge of these systems so we all can utilise energy resources if we wish wherever we decide to roam. They are basic systems, backward even, but they are here and those who want may as well make use of them.”
“But you don’t envisage having to mine for coal or drill for oil to keep power sources available?”
Grant shook his head. “We won’t need to. There are hydroelectric stations around the world that will require regular maintenance, but they will produce electricity for as long as the rivers flow. Those who don’t wish to settle near such stations may be happy to exist without electricity. After all, it is what they are accustomed to on Earth Home. And the boon they will receive from the sun will make notions of wanting artificial energy redundant. I can still remember the first time I stood in sunlight on Earth Haven. It was like being born anew.”
