by Sam Kates
The main road out of the village bent sharply to the south after about a mile.
“This is where we head across country,” said Tom, stopping to consult the map. He glanced at the fields that rolled away to the distance. “There’s a lot of military land around here that’s likely impassable. I was a little worried that we might have to approach Stonehenge by road. But this looks like farmland.”
They clambered over a metal gate and followed a dirt track eastwards for a few hundred yards. When it petered out, they crossed fields that might never again be ploughed and seeded, not speaking much. Now that they were so close to danger, they each became preoccupied with their own thoughts.
“What’s that?” said Ceri, peering ahead.
Tom shrugged off his backpack and extracted the binoculars they had found in an outdoor pursuits shop in Leeds. According to the packaging, the lenses were coated with an anti-glare substance that would prevent the sun glinting off them and revealing the presence of the observers to the observed. Marketed for bird watchers, Ceri had remarked that they would be useful for stalkers and perverts.
“Let’s hope these are truly anti-glare,” Tom commented. He glanced up. The sun hung low and wintry-weak in the sky, but behind them. He raised the glasses to his eyes and adjusted the focus until the distant object Ceri had noticed came into view.
“Well?” said Ceri impatiently. “What is it?”
“Not sure. . . . If it is Stonehenge, it looks nothing like the photos.”
“Well, it wouldn’t, would it? Let me see.”
Tom handed her the binoculars.
“Hmm,” she said. “Last time I was here, there were tall fences all around to keep people out who hadn’t paid.” She swung the binoculars slowly to the right. “I should be able to tell. . . . Yes! That looks like the car park the other side of the main road. There are coaches and. . . . they look like London buses. London buses?” She lowered the binoculars and shrugged. “It’s the site of Stonehenge, all right. It looks like they’re all set to go. It must be happening tonight.”
“Or has already happened.”
“If so, why are they still here? These binoculars aren’t powerful enough to make out people, but all those buses and coaches. . . .”
The roar of engines revving sounded in the distance. She raised the glasses back to her eyes.
“They’re leaving,” she said.
Ceri provided a running commentary on the number of coaches and double-decker buses pulling away in the opposite direction. She also mentioned a couple of yellow bulldozers and a crane leaving on the back of a flatbed lorry.
When the sound of the last engine had faded to nothing, she lowered the glasses again.
“They’ve all gone,” she said, rubbing her eyes. “We need to get closer to see if they’ve left anybody guarding it.”
Instinctively crouching, they moved across the fields towards the circle of stones that Tom had seen through the binoculars. They both wore drab-coloured clothes, but Tom was painfully aware that they were drawing near enough to be visible to the naked eye of anyone looking in their direction.
“I think this is close enough,” he said in a low voice.
Ceri nodded. Her face looked pale and drawn.
They lowered themselves to grass that was starting to stiffen in the cold air as the sun prepared to sink for the night. Tom placed the backpack down and they rested the shotguns on it to keep them off the ground. For the first time that day, Tom noticed his breath condensing in the late afternoon chill.
He took the binoculars off Ceri and trained them on the stone circle.
“It looks deserted,” he muttered. “No. . . . wait!”
Tom had moved the glasses away from the circle towards an area littered with huge stones that looked as though they had been flung to one side. A movement had caught his eye. He adjusted the dial and two figures came into focus. They were sitting on one of the stones that lay on its side. Between them, spread out on the stone surface, were objects that Tom could not make out clearly at this distance. The two figures were lowering their hands to the objects and then bringing their hands to their mouths.
“Two guards,” he said. “They’re eating. A man and a woman, I think. They’re wrapped up well against the cold so difficult to tell.”
Tom passed the glasses to Ceri so she could see for herself. When she lowered them again, she looked even more drawn, as though nearing the end of her fortitude.
“What now?” she said.
“Well, I can’t see any guns. . . .”
“Doesn’t mean they don’t have them.” Ceri bit her lower lip. “Just suppose they don’t have guns. There’s only two of them so they shouldn’t according to Peter be able to control us with their minds. . . .”
The last thing Peter and Diane had done before leaving Wick was to cast what Peter called a ‘protective pall’ over Tom’s and Ceri’s intellects.
“It will prevent them from sensing you from afar,” Peter told them. “It will also offer some protection against mental domination, at least against just a few of them. Any more than three acting in concert, if nearby, will probably be able to control you.”
Now Tom regarded Ceri closely. “What are you saying?” he asked. “You think we should take the guards out?”
“No!” She lowered her voice. “What I was going to say. . . . even if we can overcome them, what then? Push the stones over like dominoes? They’re sunk into the ground. And look at the size of them. Peter was right. There’s nothing we can do.”
“Please don’t give up on me now.” Tom thought furiously. “There probably isn’t much we can do right this minute. If only we could have persuaded that pompous pillock Irving. . . .” He sighed. “No use crying over spilt milk. Look. I’m going to stay. Watch them perform their ceremony or whatever they call it. Maybe during that. . . .” He tailed off as an image of him charging into the circle waving a shotgun about popped into his mind. His imaginary self looked ineffectual. Ridiculous.
He reached into the pocket of his jeans and extracted the car keys. He held them out to Ceri. “You leave if you want. Really, it’s fine. Go find Peter and Diane. Maybe they’ve picked up the doctor. Maybe they have the kids with them.”
Ceri stared at the keys and reached out her hand. Tom’s heart plummeted. Ceri’s hand closed over his.
“If you’re staying, I’m staying,” she said softly.
Tom’s vision blurred. He looked away, wiping briefly at his eyes.
“Thanks,” he said, his voice thick.
“So what do we do? Sit here and wait?”
“I guess so. That’s about all we can do.”
* * * * *
They cycled in from the north, skirting around fenced-off military areas. They arrived late into the evening—the fourth evening since they had left the crofter’s cottage outside Wick—in the garrison town of Larkhill. The town lay about a mile north of Stonehenge, according to the Wiltshire guidebook they had found in an echoing library the previous night.
Beyond the point of exhaustion, they entered the first building they came to that wasn’t locked, leaned their bikes against the wall and removed their helmets. They dumped their backpacks and sank to the floor next to them in the dark.
“Ouch,” said Will. “This floor is too hard.”
“I know,” said Bri. “My bum feels as though I’ve been tobogganing without the toboggan.” She let out a deep sigh. “I think we’ve made it in time.”
Will glanced in her direction, but said nothing. She had been saying weird things for the past four days, as though she knew stuff she had no right knowing. It made Will feel a little scared.
The four days seemed a kaleidoscope of endless roads, tortuous hills, snatches of corpse-like sleep and aches so deep that Will’s body had become numb, inured to constant pain. Bri had driven him on as though possessed of an all-consuming hunger that only continuous pedalling could come close to satisfying. Will had responded to her coaxing, her encourag
ement and her lambasting until his lungs felt they would burst from his chest and his legs into flame. There had been many times he’d wished she had left him behind in Scotland lying on the soft bed.
If still possessed of any energy when the sun went down, they had ridden through the night thanks to powerful lamps they had picked up along the way and attached to the handlebars, until sheer fatigue drove them to seek shelter for a few hours’ sleep.
“Wow,” murmured Bri. “Just wow.”
“What?”
“That was some ride. I honestly didn’t think we’d make it. You were awesome.”
She reached out and ruffled his hair.
“The motorways were the best,” said Will.
The wide, well-surfaced roads were only sparsely littered with abandoned vehicles and wreckage-strewn accident sites, as if people had realised early on in the crisis that they could not outrun the virus and had taken to minor roads in hope of avoiding it. Some of the hills they cycled up had been so long Will had thought they might never end. But the down inclines had been fun. Bri reckoned they had reached speeds of thirty miles per hour.
“I was a right cow at times,” she said. “Wasn’t I?”
“Yes.”
She laughed.
“Bri?”
“Yes?”
“Why are we here?”
“You know Stonehenge?”
Will shrugged. “Seen it on telly.”
“Well, it’s some sort of beacon.”
“What’s a beacon?”
“It sends out a signal. A bit like a radio. The people who did bad things to you. . . . there’s more of them coming. A lot more. Like Peter showed us.”
For a moment Will forgot his aches and pains. “Spacemen. Oh boy, oh boy—”
“No, Will. It’s not good. If they get here safely, they’ll kill everyone who survived the Millennium Bug.”
“Why? I don’t want to hurt anyone.”
“I think. . . .” Bri let out a long yawn. “Yes, I think they’re afraid of us.”
Will let out a longer yawn. His eyes kept closing of their own accord. He scooted closer to Bri and laid his head against her arm. She started to say something else, but Will had stopped listening.
* * * * *
In a suite of offices in Amesbury that had once been home to a firm of solicitors, Joe Lowden stretched out on a row of padded seats in the reception area. He had just been for a late evening walk after consuming a large dinner, and had been ordered to bed down for the night. Around him, snores and grunts indicated that those sharing these offices had already succumbed to slumber.
Sleep eluded Joe. Something was bothering him. If it was possible to experience an itching sensation in your mind, that is what Joe was experiencing. A maddening itch that can’t be scratched, like skin beneath the plaster holding together knitting bones.
Images of a small boy and a filthy man and a red-lipped woman still played across his mind, but something else was trying to intrude on those images, to break through them. Causing the itching sensation.
Joe turned onto his back and stared at shadows on the stippled ceiling. He whispered a word.
“Grimsby.”
His brow furrowed. He had no idea what the word meant. And yet. . . .
He wasn’t aware of it, but Joe had recently turned eighteen. He had been taking every recreational drug he could lay his hands upon with mad abandon for the past three years or more. The brain through which the electric shock was passed in Hillingdon Hospital was already a little addled, neural pathways already scrambled. Consequently and perversely, the damage caused to his brain when they attached the electrodes to his brow and flicked the switch was less than had been caused to the other people standing in line beside him.
Freed from the effects of drugs, his body still in the latter stages of development, some of the damaged pathways in his brain were mending. Only a little, and gradually, new concepts—at least, old ones that would seem new—were trying to make themselves felt.
He whispered again.
“Joe. My name is Joe.”
* * * * *
Almost three hundred miles from Amesbury by road, at the northwesternmost tip of Wales, lies the small island of Anglesey. Four people, two men and two women, were making their way through the night on foot across the Britannia Bridge. Both this and the other bridge that spanned the Menai Strait, connecting the island to the mainland, were blocked to traffic by knots of crashed and abandoned vehicles.
The people picked their way across the bridge, stepping around corpses, making startled rats break off from their meals and scurry away beneath cars. One of the men carried a black valise, handling it carefully as if it contained all his worldly wealth.
At the mainland end of the bridge, a bronze Range Rover stood waiting.
When at last the party reached this vehicle, one of the women paused as though reluctant to get in. One of the men—the smaller one, carrying the valise—spoke to her and eventually she relented. She stepped into the back seat with the smaller man.
The other man walked to the back of the vehicle and opened the tailgate. A black dog jumped out, barking excitedly. Although the dog’s tail wagged, it did not jump up at the man or seem to pay him the slightest attention.
The man waited patiently while the animal attended to its business, then motioned with his head for the dog to get back into the car. It obeyed and the man shut the tailgate.
He stepped around to the right-hand side of the vehicle and got in.
Peter turned and looked behind him. The doctor, Howard, offered him an uncertain smile. The young woman, Colleen, sat stiffly, casting nervous glances into the rear compartment where Dusty sat impassively.
“Really,” Peter said, “he won’t hurt you.”
“I don’t like dogs,” said Colleen in her Irish accent. “But I’ll be fine so long as he doesn’t jump up at me.”
“And how is your sense of balance now?”
Colleen gave a strained smile. “It still feels like we’re tilting from side to side. But it isn’t as bad as it was.”
Howard placed his hand on her arm and gave it an affectionate squeeze. “You did great. Not many first-time sailors can cross the Irish Sea without throwing up.”
Peter faced forward and started the vehicle.
“Remind me,” said Diane in the seat next to him, “why are we going south? Shouldn’t we just hole up here and wait for them to find us?”
Peter sighed. “You know why. We have to find the youngsters. Get Bri examined by Howard.” He shrugged. “They’re not here, so it’s likely they’ll be down there. And maybe while we’re there, we can save that idiot Tom from getting himself and Ceri killed.”
“Or perhaps get ourselves killed,” said Diane.
Peter glanced at her. “If you want to stay, I can’t make you come. But decide now. We don’t have time to debate it.”
Diane was silent for a moment. Then: “Ah, what the hell. I seem to have become a sucker for a good cause.”
The Range Rover’s headlights pierced the darkness. Peter drove in the direction of Liverpool. From there, they would head southwards. If the way was clear, they should arrive at Stonehenge in time for activation of the Beacon.
Chapter Twenty-One
The low thrum of engines roused Ceri from a fitful doze. She winced a little as the cold stiffness that had settled into her bones made her joints creak with protest. She scrabbled for the binoculars and nudged Tom.
“Huh?”
“Wake up. They’re coming.”
Through the binoculars, Ceri could see a glow on the horizon as headlights approached. After a minute or two, the glow resolved into two beams of light.
“One coach,” she said. “Two coaches. . . . three. And a double-decker. No, two double-deckers.”
She lowered the glasses. The headlights were clearly visible without them, drawing nearer away to their right.
“What’s the time?” asked Tom.
C
eri glanced down at her wristwatch. Faint starlight was sufficient to let her make out the luminous dial.
“Ten past four, but I don’t know how accurate this is.”
Tom grunted. He climbed to his feet and began to move away in the direction they’d come from yesterday.
“Where are you going?” she hissed.
“Loo,” muttered Tom.
Ceri rubbed her hands together and breathed on them to try to coax some feeling back into her fingers. When she raised the binoculars, the small procession had come to a halt. In the gleam of the headlights, she watched passengers step down from the vehicles.
After a few minutes she became aware of Tom returning.
“Better?” she asked without lowering the binoculars.
“I feel sick,” he said. “What’s happening?”
“A lot of milling around. They’re lighting torches, the old-fashioned type with flames. Those two guards have walked over to join them. There must be almost three hundred people in total. But, Tom, they’re two separate groups. Most of those who were on the London buses just sort of shuffle about. Vague, unfocused. I think they’re. . . . well, human, but not normal.”
“They’re the sacrifices,” said Tom. “If Peter hadn’t been with us when they were called to London, that’s how we would have ended up.”
Ceri grimaced and felt a knot form in her stomach. Taking deep breaths of frigid air, she continued watching through the binoculars. It felt less real to view what was happening through lenses, as though being once removed from the event placed her apart from it. Protected her.
“They’re crossing the road. . . . walking towards the stone circle. The buses and coaches are leaving.”
She was aware that Tom kept shifting about like a fidgeting four-year-old.
“Are you all right?”
“Need the loo again. Won’t be long.”
By the time he returned, the milling mass had started to form into something more organised. The humans—Ceri could not think of them as drones—shuffled into a line that began at the edge of the stone circle and snaked back towards the road. Torches had been thrust into the ground at regular intervals, casting the scene in a flickering, sepia glow. A trestle table had been set up next to the line of humans; on it stood two boxes. Another line was forming of what Ceri assumed were non-humans, starting at the table.
