by Sam Kates
She would have liked Bri and Will to sleep in an adjoining room—she didn’t want them sneaking away in the middle of the night again—but it made more sense for Howard to be nearest them. Not that the youngsters were still in mortal danger from their injuries, but it didn’t hurt to be careful. Will and Bri slept in the double bed in the main bedroom of a family suite, Howard and Colleen in twin beds in the room leading off it.
When they broke into the hotel they were met by staleness and mustiness, but no smell of decaying people. Beds were made up, minibars and tea-making facilities fully stocked, clean towels hung on handrails. Not a corpse to be seen. The spa pool had been drained, and beer pumps and coolers disconnected, but otherwise the hotel looked ready to resume business.
Fresh and frozen produce in the kitchens had, of course, spoiled, but a hotel this size stocks a great deal of canned, jarred and dried products. They had eaten like kings at first when the only guests were nine people and one dog. As newcomers began to arrive and their stocks began to dwindle, Peter organised what he called ‘foraging parties’ to supermarkets and town centres to bring back more supplies. There was enough food lying about to last them well into the following year, even with their swelling numbers. Dying before summer of starvation was not a danger they faced. Living beyond the summer seemed a little more problematic.
Before people started to arrive from the continent, Peter and Tom had gone off in the Range Rover, Dusty in the back seat, and travelled the coastline, calling at every major port to put up handmade warnings to steer clear of London. Nearly three weeks it had taken them of hard driving.
“Travelling the coast of Britain was always something I’d planned to do,” said Tom on their return. “Lisa—she was my girlfriend—liked the idea. We reckoned we could have done it in a leisurely six weeks over a school summer holiday.” He grimaced. “Never imagined I’d do it in a little under three weeks, not once stopping to take in the scenery. And being extra cautious in the south-east not to attract attention from alien invaders. Pah! It’s impossible to say that without it sounding ridiculous.”
“It would have taken us longer, but we decided not to do Devon and Cornwall,” added Peter. “We placed notices prominently on all the major roads leading from those counties.” He glanced at Tom. “Not to be argumentative, but technically you humans are as much ‘alien invaders’ as we are.”
Tom opened his mouth to retort, but Ceri was in no mood for a fight. She laughed and grabbed Tom’s arm.
“He’s right and you know it. I’m just glad the three of you are back. Let’s have a drink to celebrate.”
Ceri had spent the three weeks of their absence getting to know the new members of the party. She liked them all.
Howard possessed a gentle disposition, and had earned her eternal gratitude by saving the lives of both Bri and Will. He had been helped in no small part by Diane Heidler, which softened Ceri’s heart towards her. Ceri couldn’t claim in all honesty to have begun liking the woman, whom she still found to be aloof and distant, but she now accepted her as a valued member of their small group.
The Irish girl, Colleen, had a certain sweetness about her; an attractive sweetness, not the cloying kind. She also possessed a degree of frailty, which she hid behind a haze of alcohol. Once or twice, when Colleen thought no eyes watched her, Ceri had seen a haunted expression pass over her features, the look of a young girl, lost and alone.
‘The eternal night’ is how Colleen referred to their existence these past few months. Ceri had spent an evening in the bar with her, matching Colleen vodka for whiskey until they had both become barely capable of ascending the stairs to bed.
“That’s what it’s felt like to me,” said the Irish girl, not yet slurring her words. “The eternal night. Ever since I woke up to find Sinead rotting in bed beside me, I feel as if I’ve been living through one endless period of darkness.”
“Ar Hyd y Nos,” murmured Ceri.
“Sorry?”
“It’s a Welsh hymn my dad’s choir used to sing. It means ‘All Through the Night’.”
“All through the night. I like it. All through the night, the endless, eternal night. Would you sing the hymn for me?”
Softly, falteringly, with tears running down her cheeks, Ceri did.
Then there was Joe with his northern accent and reticence about his past. Apart from telling them he was from Hull, a single child who lost both parents to the Millennium Bug, he spoke very little about what he had done before the world went crazy. He talked freely about what had happened to him upon arriving at Hillingdon Hospital. Ceri had nodded as he related the part when he tried to run and was stopped in his tracks by nothing more than an intense stare from a group of people.
“The same thing happened to me in Stonehenge,” she said. “They took control of my body. My mind was still my own but I couldn’t move.”
“They made me move,” said Joe. “Like a puppet.” His eyes, grey and grim, held no humour. “They marched me behind a curtain and made me lie down on a piss-covered bed. They attached things to my forehead… er, what d’you call them?”
“Electrodes?”
“Aye. That’s when I screamed like a six-year-old girl. Probably pissed myself, too. Don’t remember much after that. Until the town outside Stonehenge.”
Joe spoke about his senses returning a little at a time, about being bussed to the ancient monument and the feeling that something bad was about to happen.
“I hung back,” he said. “I didn’t know what they were going to do to us, but no way did I want to be near the front of the queue.” He sighed. “Just as well for me. They slit the poor bastards’ throats then set them on fire.”
While he talked, Joe fiddled with his hands, clasping and unclasping his fingers, cracking his knuckles, making intricate finger shapes. Occasionally, he would stand and pace to and fro as though he couldn’t bear to sit still for long. He reminded Ceri of herself the last time she had tried to give up smoking.
“When they–” he almost spat the word “–began to come out of the stone circle, they made the few of us who remained return to the buses. I slipped away when no one was looking. At least, I thought no one was looking, but I’m not too sure. The woman in charge, a fat, black woman—Sandra… no, that’s not right. Milandra! I think she saw me, but she didn’t tell anyone.” He frowned. “That’s odd. Wonder why she let me escape.”
“It seems that Milandra has some sympathy for humans,” said Ceri. “She helped Peter and Diane send out a message to Europe and America. And someone else helped; one of her Deputies, I think Peter calls them.”
“Pardon me for not feeling grateful. I don’t trust them further than I can throw them.”
“What did you do after you’d slipped away?”
“Nothing much. Just hung about in the dark listening to the shooting. I was dying to get my hands on a gun. I’d show the fuckers. A dog ran past me; turned out it was Dusty. Not long after, a woman came out of the circle, crawling backwards on her arse. One of them. I stepped forward, but she had already stumbled away towards the buses. A good-looking lass, that one.”
Ceri had not, at the time, paid the woman he was talking about much attention. Her focus had been elsewhere. “She was with a man,” she said. “He’s the one who shot Will.”
“I saw him,” said Joe. “He came out not long after the woman. His cheek was swelling and bruised.”
“Tom whacked him with the butt of his shotgun.”
“Good for Tom. I gave him a bruise the other side. He fell down. I wanted him to fight back. I wanted to hit him again and again. But he scrambled away, not even looking at me. It wasn’t long then before Peter appeared. Another one of them, but he said he was on our side. I was going to thump him anyway but he ran into the circle. Then another one came from the darkness—Diane. I thought about thumping her, but I was still not quite right in the head and she’s a woman. If I learned anything when I was a kid, it’s not to hit women. I didn’t want to end up l
ike him, bitter and twisted and stinking of fish.”
Ceri did not know to whom Joe was referring, but didn’t want to interrupt.
“Mind,” he continued, “Diane’s not exactly a woman, is she? Still, I’m glad I didn’t hit her. She helped save the young ’uns.”
Ceri did not point out that Joe himself was only a year or two older than Bri so probably also qualified as a ‘young ’un’.
“Diane led me into the circle and, well, the rest you know.” Joe shrugged. “So what happens now? We can’t just sit around here waiting to die.”
“We wait for others to arrive from Europe and, hopefully, America. Then we decide.”
“What’s to decide? There’s only one thing I want to do. Go after them. Take the fuckers down.”
“Well,” said Ceri slowly. She could see the fervour in Joe’s eyes. There would be no dissuading this one. Nonetheless she made the effort. “We have to make them see that we are worthy of not being completely eliminated as a species. That we have a lot to offer and are capable of living alongside them in peace and harmony. Going to war against them might not be the best way to demonstrate that.”
Joe’s eyes opened wide. “You have got to be shitting me. Live alongside them? Peace and fucking harmony after what they’ve done? Bollocks to that! I don’t think we should stop until every last one of them is dead.”
“Or we are,” Ceri said quietly.
“From what I hear, that’s going to happen anyway.”
“Maybe. Maybe not. When you said ‘every last one of them’, I hope you weren’t including Peter and Diane?”
Joe looked at her long and hard, but didn’t reply.
Dusty raised his head again and uttered a soft whine, interrupting Ceri’s memories.
“It’s okay,” she whispered. “Go back to sleep.”
She turned towards the window. Daylight peeked around the edge of the curtains. She might as well get up.
A tension pervaded the hotel. Ceri had sensed it all about her in the bar the previous afternoon. The more people that poured in to South Wales, the greater the tension grew, like a vast beast feeding on their fears. They had no way of keeping accurate records, but Tom reckoned that more than three thousand people had so far made it to the Celtic Manor. Most of them now occupied the neighbouring towns and villages.
He had agreed with her that there was no point in further delaying the meeting. Without something to aim for, the tension would cause someone to snap. A couple of scuffles had already broken out. People needed to be told what had happened and why they had been called to Britain.
Today they would hand-print some simple notices and pin them to lamp-posts and shop doorways in those nearby settlements. The meeting was scheduled for the day after tomorrow.
It was time for the remnants of humanity to make a call.
Chapter Six
Spring morning sunshine bathed Will as he stepped out of the shade of the portico outside the hotel entrance and turned up a steep hill. His strength was gradually returning, but he was panting with exertion by the time he made it to the top.
To his right lay the fifteenth green, beneath which they had buried that poor French girl. It was during the funeral that Will had glanced in this direction and caught a glimpse of something that piqued his interest. He was fed up of sitting around the hotel or lying in bed trying to get comfortable. While eating breakfast of muesli soaked in apple juice—Ceri insisted he eat the vile stuff to help rebuild his strength—he’d determined that this morning he would do a little exploring.
His objective lay before him: a fenced-off area with miniature bridges, windmills and other structures guaranteed to attract the attention of a ten-year-old. He stood for a moment to catch his breath.
When Will was five, a baby tooth became infected, making his cheek swell like a hamster’s and throb like a banged thumb. The ache in his shoulder now was worse than that abscess. With the aid of an extraction and a course of antibiotics, the abscess had disappeared in a few days. The shoulder pain had been present, in varying degrees of intensity, for weeks. The pain was bad enough; the itching was even worse. Will longed to tear off the bandages and gouge beneath the skin for there, in the torn flesh between chest and shoulderblade, the itching was at its most unbearable.
He had left the breakfast table before Howard and Colleen had appeared with his morning dose of painkillers. To try to forget the urge to scratch, he reminded himself why he had the pain and what he would be missing if it didn’t exist. More accurately, who he would be missing.
If he hadn’t shoved Bri out of the way, she would have been shot. He understood that he had been lucky on many levels. The bullet could have hit him in the heart or in the lungs or in a nartery (Will didn’t know what a nartery was, but it sounded nasty). It could have been the type of bullet that broke up inside him. It could have been a bullet that lodged in his shoulder, not passed conveniently through. He could have lost too much blood or gone into shock.
He understood that he might have died; that he had already endured a whole heap—a shitload, his mum would have said—of pain and that he had a lot more to look forward to; that he would probably never regain full use of his left arm. Yet he would not, if offered, relieve himself of any of these burdens if it meant that Bri would have to bear them in his place. She had saved him from the dogs. She had lifted the fog from his mind that made him forget who he was. She had saved him from the nasty spacemen when they tried to make him obey their will. She had protected him from the rats as they made their way around London.
Will would be eleven in August. He also understood from all he’d overheard from the grown-ups that it was unlikely he’d make it to his birthday. Neither would Bri or Tom or Ceri; he was less certain about Peter and Diane, but he didn’t think Dusty was under threat. More spacemen were on the way, their destination marked out by the bacon-thingy that they’d activated in the ring of stones. Will could still close his eyes and see blood-stained stones, slumped bodies and the flicker of flames licking over them; he could still smell the stomach-churning sweetness of the smoke that had filled the circle. But if he’d experienced nightmares about what had taken place at Stonehenge, he experienced them no longer; they were lost in the drug-swirled delirium into which he’d sunk while his body teetered on the verge of giving up. If he ever worried about what might happen when the rest of the spacemen arrived, how they would kill him and his friends, it was only in some abstract, shadowy way upon which he found it impossible and unnecessary to focus.
Such are the minds of ten-year-olds. Will was far more excited at seeing a spaceship than the prospect of what its arrival might herald.
Now that curiosity returned to the fore. His breath regained, he went to see what lay behind the fence.
For the next twenty minutes, he forgot the nagging pain in his shoulder as he followed the path around the crazy golf course. How he yearned to be able to take hold of a golf club and hit a ball up the ramp to clear the stream. His gaze strayed to the wooden hut, which would contain the putters and balls, but with a stab of adult clarity he knew that to swipe at a ball using only his right hand would lead to the temptation to wriggle his left arm free of the sling which kept it tucked tightly to his chest, and that in so doing he could set back his shoulder’s recovery by months. Instead he contented himself with tracing the course with his feet, imagining hitting shots over the stone bridge or into the dark mouth of the tunnel.
So loud was the imaginary crowd of onlookers that cheered wildly his every masterful stroke as if he played for the deciding point of the Ryder Cup itself, that he did not notice the other’s approach. The first that Will became aware of the spectator was when he passed through a man-shaped shadow that hadn’t been there earlier.
Will raised his head sharply, drawing a deep, hissing breath as the action jarred his wound.
A large man in a dark leather jacket stood leaning against the fence. From Will’s perspective, he looked a giant. Will wasn’t concerned now th
at his initial fright had dissipated. New people had been arriving at the Celtic Manor for weeks.
“Sorry if I gave you a scare,” said the man. His voice was soft, not deep like a giant’s should be, and he had a strange accent. He stood with his back to the sun, his features masked in shadow. “So which player were you pretending to be?”
Will named his favourite player, an Irishman.
“Ah. One of the finest players ever to come out of the north. I caddied for him once. Before he became famous, you know.”
“Oh, wow,” breathed Will. “Are you from Ireland?”
“Born and bred. Not spent much time there in the last ten years, mind. Too busy travelling the world. With my work, you understand.”
“What did you do?”
“Ah, if I told you I’d have to kill you.” The man gave a soft laugh. A light chill touched Will’s neck, though the air remained still and warm. “Top secret work, you see. Government business.” The man raised a hand to his face. Will couldn’t make it out clearly due to the back-glare of the sun, but he thought the man was tapping the side of his nose.
Before Will could ask the hundred and one questions about spies and James Bond that sprang to mind, the man stiffened as a voice—a similarly accented voice to his own—called from the direction of the hotel.
“Will? Will? Where are you? It’s time for your meds.”
“I’m up here, Colleen.”
The man remained leaning against the fence. Perhaps Will only imagined that he crouched a little as though trying to make himself look smaller.
