by Sam Kates
“Hull.”
“Right. What were your parents’ names?”
“Er…” Joe wrinkled his nose with the effort of trying to remember. He could see their images—him grimy and dark-eyed, her lip-painted and pie-eyed—but their names remained elusive. He shook his head.
Bri pointed to her forehead again. “They damaged you in there. Zapped you. Like they did to Will. I made him better.” She shrugged. “Dunno if I can make you better, but I’d like to try.”
“How?”
“Don’t resist me.”
Before Joe could comprehend what she meant, he felt it. A sensation inside his mind. Not like when they had taken control of him in Hillingdon—that had been a sense of violation, a sort of mental rape, which he had been powerless to resist. This was gentler, less invasive, more a feathery tickle than a full-frontal assault, and he understood that he could block the intrusion if he wished.
Don’t resist me.
Joe stared into the girl’s eyes. They had taken on a slightly glazed appearance, like those of a mannequin. They swam out of focus as his attention shifted to what was happening inside his mind. To what was returning.
As morning mist on the Humber scatters in the rays of summer dawn, the fog overlaying his memories dispersed.
He barely noticed the girl grimace and wipe at the dribble of dark blood that had appeared on her top lip, rise unsteadily to her feet and turn to lurch away.
“Bri,” he called before she reached the door.
She half-turned. Ashen. Blood ran freely from her nose; she clutched at it with smeared fingers.
“Michael and Brenda,” said Joe.
“Huh?”
“Michael and Brenda. My parents’ names.”
Bri smiled. It left her lips almost as soon as it had appeared, but it reignited the youth in her eyes. In that moment, Joe felt more warmth for her, a girl he barely knew, than he had ever felt towards anyone.
Whatever Bri had done to him had not driven the fog away entirely. Tiny pockets remained, small gaps, the odd word that he had to reach for if he could recall it at all, or the occasional friend or distant relative whose name he could not conjure from the depths. But all in all his mind was pretty much whole. Healed.
The wide void that remained within himself was not one of absence of memory. More an absence of longing, or fulfilled longing. He recognised it for what it was: an insatiable appetite he had fed for many of his teenage years. There were words for what he had been on his way to becoming: crack head, e-tard, psychonaut, speed freak. He did not know how much time had elapsed since he had unwillingly stepped into the curtained cubicle in Hillingdon Hospital, for how long he had been clean, but the need for chemical stimulation had not returned with his memories. Yet the void remained and he realised with a reformed addict’s cold certainty that he’d better fill it or sink back into it. And once he was back down, there would be no second reprieve.
He did not have to look far for a substitute. The desire for vengeance might seem to some as irrational as the need to pop pills or snort powder, and with Bri’s help Joe had made almost a full recovery from the harm dealt to him by them—indeed, a strong case could be made for them having done him a favour in a roundabout way by curing him of his drug habit—but rationality rarely has a part to perform in the sordid cycles of addiction and abstinence. Joe hated them, from the sandy-haired Aussie in her tight jumper who had ‘directed’ him at the point of a gun to the casualty department of the hospital, to the black-eyed man who he’d knocked down at Stonehenge, and every dominating, indifferent bastard he’d encountered in between. He hated them with a passion that equalled or surpassed the old longing. Thus the void was filled.
During the longer days after Bri had been operated on, while both she and the boy recuperated, Joe planned. He spent many daylight hours in a place that would have held little attraction to the old version of him—Salisbury Library. There he learned that everything he would need he was likely to find within a thirty-mile radius of Newport in South Wales where they were next headed. If not, then a fifty- or sixty-mile radius.
When they arrived at the Celtic Manor, he went quietly about recruiting his team. In the nearby once-Roman town of Caerleon, he befriended two recently arrived and gung-ho Americans, and one Albanian with mechanical skills who spoke excellent English and who didn’t seem to care about Joe’s tale of mind-controlling aliens just so long as he would get to fight someone.
Suitable transport was easily located in the town and restored to working order by the Albanian.
Joe waited until he knew the proposed day of the meeting—he wanted to be back in time for that—and for the funeral of the young French girl to take place. He guessed that people’s minds would then be too preoccupied with their own sense of mortality to notice he had gone.
If anyone did remark on his absence, or that of the Americans or Albanian, over those few days leading up to the meeting, Joe never learned of it. Not that it would have mattered. The meeting itself was to overshadow all else that took place in those first weeks of April.
* * * * * * *
Amy followed Zach along the landing stage to the white boat. She hung back a little, tired of feeling afraid, unsure how to feel anything else.
The young woman—Sarah—had reached the boat and climbed lithely up the plastic ladder that had been lowered over the side. Sarah was young and slim and sexy. Just looking at her snug jeans reminded Amy how overweight and frumpy she was.
And prejudiced. Her momma had told her things about the blacks that lived in the apartment above theirs in Portland. Things that Amy had believed without question and that skewed her views of all people with skin darker than hers. Savage; subhuman; as likely to ravage Amy as look at her; liable to take her purse along with her purity.
Momma had spewed her bile into the impressionable mind of a naïve girl who already believed, due to the actions of one man, that all men were violent and perverted. ‘Selfish, slap-happy dimwits with brains in their dicks’ was a typical Ann-Marie Kerrigan description of the male species.
The black man, Frank, had also climbed the ladder and Zach was following. Amy took a deep breath. Laboriously, ungainly, making the plastic creak ominously, she climbed up after Zach. At the top, she perched precariously while she tried to swing her leg over the rail.
It wasn’t Zach who turned back to help her. Amy felt her upper arm taken in a firm grasp. Her leading leg completed its forward swing and her other followed in a rush. She stumbled against her helper and felt two strong arms wrap her in an embrace that prevented her falling headlong onto her face.
“Thank you,” she muttered and stared into the clear eyes of Frank.
He loosened the tight embrace. When she had steadied herself, he let her go.
“You’re welcome.”
Amy felt the blush rise from her neck. When she realised that Zach and Sarah had turned to watch her impromptu display of ineptitude, the warmth spreading into her cheeks became a blaze. Zach wore an expression of mild amusement. Sarah’s lips pursed into a look of disapproval. Amy understood with a flash of feminine intuition she had not known she possessed that Sarah was sweet on Frank.
Surely, she thought as she dropped her gaze in confusion, this sexy girl would not view Amy as competition. And how could she, Amy, even consider the notion, what with her poisoned upbringing? Not for the first time since waking to find her dead, Amy questioned her mother’s philosophies, something she would not have dared to do when her mother was alive. Momma had been possessed of a way of peering into her daughter’s soul, to the dark secret thoughts, and seeing them for the filth that they were. Or, at least, the filth that Ann-Marie Kerrigan made them appear with her lashing tongue and tainted passions.
When she felt that her high colour had faded enough not to dazzle, Amy lifted her head. Near the back of the boat the deck widened into a seating area. Zach was sitting on a comfortable-looking chair alongside the older couple. The rifles were no longer in evide
nce. Frank sat to one side; Sarah stood a little behind him, leaning against the deck rail.
Amy stepped hesitantly forward. The grey-haired woman looked up at her approach and smiled. It was a pleasant smile, the first Amy had seen in months, and she found herself returning it.
“Hello,” said the woman. “My name is Nancy. But call me Nan. Everyone does. Please, won’t you take a seat?”
Resisting the urge to curtsey, Amy sat in the empty chair next to Zach.
The older man also smiled at her. What hair remained on the sides of his head was white and fuzzy, like unteased wool, and his face was as lined as crumpled paper. But his eyes were sharp behind the spectacle lenses.
“Hi,” he said. “I’m Elliott.”
Amy nodded. She felt tongue-tied, overawed by this new company. Even had her mother not kept her closeted from other folk, to the point of insisting that Amy spent work breaks by her side, the sort of people she might have been allowed to interact with would not have been like these. Nan and Elliott, Frank and Sarah, in their confident, diffident manners, their speech and their bearing, looked cultured and assured, a social world away from her and Zach.
Her momma had kept Amy away from other folk, so she said, to protect her innocence. Since spending time in Zach’s company, she had already concluded that her mother’s views on men were jaundiced, corrupted by the wastrel who had been Amy’s father. Amy’s own faint recollection of him confirmed that, in this at least, Momma had been correct. But that did not mean that all men were like him. She suspected that Zach was far from a perfect sample of modern-day manhood, but even he gave lie to her mother’s generalisations.
As for black people, Amy had begun to guess at the truth before the Millennium Bug put paid to black, white and every colour in between. Once or twice, when Momma allowed her to descend alone the six flights of stairs from their apartment to put out the trash, Amy had passed the young black man who lived above them. Far from leering at her or trying to grab her butt or wristwatch, the youth stepped aside to allow her to pass and had even offered to help. Amy had glanced away and shaken her head as she hurried past, but doubt had set in.
Now Frank was extending that doubt; changing it to certainty. Amy stole glances at him when she thought Sarah wasn’t looking. Everything about him added weight to the mounting case against Ann-Marie Kerrigan being a domineering, lying bigot. If slow to outright merriment—but who wasn’t in this drab new world?—Frank was quick to smile. He was often quiet and thoughtful, listening to others speak, not rushing to interrupt, yet expressing himself eloquently and efficiently when moved to join in.
Amy paid scant attention to the conversation, happy to let Zach do the talking for them both. When she had first sat down, she sensed a degree of tension. Zach seemed wary—after all, these people had been pointing guns at them only minutes before—but every time she broke off her surreptitious observation of Frank, the talk appeared to be less stilted, more relaxed.
“You don’t say much.”
Amy looked up. Sarah had stepped around Frank to stand in front of her. The others continued their conversation; Zach was saying something about how he had taught himself basic mechanics.
“Um, I guess not,” Amy said.
Sarah nodded towards Zach and lowered her voice. “You with him?”
“We been travelling together since Portland.”
Sarah rolled her eyes. “Are you with him?”
“You mean, like sleeping with him?” Amy shook her head. “Uh-huh.”
“Well, see him?” Sarah put out her hand and rested it on Frank’s shoulder. “I am with him.” She brought back her hand and rubbed at her stomach, bringing into relief the bump that had previously been concealed by her sweater. “I’m carrying his child.” She dropped her voice to little more than a whisper. “So, missy, keep those cow eyes off him.” She held Amy’s gaze for a moment before turning away.
Amy looked down at her feet, cheeks burning once more. It was only the movement of people standing that made her glance up.
Zach, Frank and the older man were on their feet.
“The engine room’s this way,” said Elliott. Amy would not forget that name; E.T. was one of her favourite movies. “Sarah, you’re the closest thing we have to a mechanic. You’d better come, too.”
“Sure,” said Sarah and followed the men through a door into the body of the cruiser.
The grey-haired lady—Nan—looked at Amy and patted the seat vacated by Zach.
“Come, my dear,” she said. “Sit by me and let’s get to know each other.”
Amy moved seats, feeling like the country bumpkin smelling of cow manure who’s just stumbled into the mayor’s ball. To hide her unease, she said the first thing that came into her head.
“Sarah’s a mechanic?”
“Not really. Her father was an auto mechanic and she picked up a lot of useful knowledge. But only of car engines. She hasn’t been able to identify what’s wrong with The Lady’s engine.”
“The Lady?”
“You are sitting on the deck of The Lady Jane. She’s a fine launch. Whoever owned her must have been extremely wealthy.”
Amy shrugged. “Don’t know nothing ’bout boats.”
Nan gave a light laugh. “Nor me. But I do know a little about the cost of quality. My Larry was a self-made millionaire, but we could never have afforded anything like this. Not even if we’d sold the Ranch.”
Amy gasped. “You had a ranch?”
“Not really a ranch. Leastways, not a working one. A few miles out of Pittsburgh. Far enough away to be in the country, but near enough to take advantage of city life if ever Larry or I felt the call. ‘The Call of the Riled’ was how he referred to it, on account of city folk always coming across as being worked up over something.” For a moment, the woman’s eyes grew misty. “I was a housewife, or that’s what it would have said on my resume, if I’d ever needed one. Don’t let that job title fool you. I can bake apple pie that will make angels sing on your tongue, but that rifle I had pointed at you earlier… Larry and I used to hunt together. It never bothered him that I bagged more deer. I could have shot you through either eye or taken off your nose if you’d turned sideways.”
“Um…”
Nan leaned forward and patted the back of Amy’s hand companionably. “Don’t look so worried, dear. You were in no real danger so long as you didn’t act threateningly. There was a moment when you stepped toward Frank that I almost…” She chuckled. “Elliott said to me, ‘She only wants to shake hands, Nan. Don’t shoot her.’ So I didn’t. And I’m glad I didn’t. I think we’re going to be good friends.”
Amy wasn’t sure what to say. She had never had a friend before, not unless she counted Zach, the crusty old coot. She wasn’t entirely certain that she wanted her first friend to look like a kindly grandmother who talked about shooting people with a strange glint behind her old lady spectacles.
“Er, do you think we can join you?” she asked.
“Well, we sure need another two people to share the driving, though I think they call it piloting, and to keep a watch on the instruments. Radar, that sort of thing, so we don’t go ploughing into a whale or iceberg. Elliott reckons the navigational and warning equipment will still work out at sea. Most probably. And we sure as heck need someone who knows a thing or two about engines. We’ve been chugging up and down the shore not only to get us all used to steering The Lady, but to attract attention of anyone in the vicinity. Now if your companion can smoothe out the clink in the engine, I’d say your passage is secure. We daren’t set off to cross an entire ocean with doubt about the engine. It’s a long way to England.”
“Ain’t never been further than Jersey before.”
“Where you from, Amy? I’m judging New England from your accent.”
“Portland in Maine. Lived there with Momma. She’s dead.”
“So’s my Larry.” The old woman’s eyes misted again. “We had three children. Every Christmas they’d come home to the
Ranch, no matter how far away they’d moved. Having children of their own didn’t stop the tradition. Five grandchildren, from a toddler still in diapers to a twelve-year-old tomboy, who’d have grown up to be belle of the ball. They brought the virus with them.” A single tear rolled down her cheek. “Two of them were coughing and sniffling, complaining about how bright the light was. Within thirty-six hours, we had all retired to our beds with the drapes tightly closed. I came round from the fever in a house filled with wrapped presents and festive food waiting to be cooked. I thought from the smell that the food had started to spoil. The power went within a day or two, but it was still on when I woke up so the food hadn’t started to rot. It was my family.” The tear reached her jowls and hung suspended for a moment like a chip of pure ice.
Amy watched it fall, more unsure than ever what to say. She was saved from further discomfort by the vibration of the boat’s engine, sounding just like it had earlier to her ears.
“Oh,” said Nan. She had removed her spectacles to wipe at her eyes. Now she replaced them and peered at Amy. “Maybe Zach could fix the problem.”
Moments later he appeared, wiping his hands on an oily rag, followed closely by a smiling Elliott.
Zach looked at Amy.
“We’re going to Britain,” he said.
“Great,” she replied, and found that she meant it.
* * * * * * *
The main hotel building overlooked the motorway. Ceri and Bri had raided the hotel’s shops for nail varnish and lipstick. Together they painted a huge multi-hued arrow on a bedsheet. Colleen had helped them attach the sheet to a motorway sign; anyone approaching by vehicle could not miss it.
Ceri lay in bed thinking about the last six weeks or so since they had left Salisbury and driven here. It was she who suggested they try the Celtic Manor. If she had to die, she wanted to be at home in South Wales when it happened.
In the other bed that occupied the room, Tom snored softly. Dusty, curled up at his feet, raised his head and looked at her. His tail wagged once before he laid his head back down and closed his eyes. Ever since the hotel outside Wick where they had discovered the Watson family rotting in their beds, Ceri had shared a bedroom with Tom and Dusty. Not being alone in the dark hours helped keep the fear at bay and she generally slept soundly these days, despite the approaching menace. During the two or three weeks that Tom and Dusty had gone off with Peter on what Ceri privately considered to be a fools’ errand, she had slept alone and awoken every night, bathed in sweat, throat dry and hoarse as if she had screamed herself awake.
