The Reckoning (Earth Haven Book 3)

by Sam Kates

  Nevertheless, her stomach lurched at the sight of so many bodies. Thirty, forty, maybe more. Unlike the blackening, bloated corpses back home, these people had died in violence, only minutes earlier. The steady drizzle was not heavy enough to wash the blood away entirely, so thick did it lie on the ground, but was discouraging it from congealing so that wounds still dribbled or glistened.

  White-faced survivors, some injured, stood or sat amidst the bodies and blood and excrement and lumps of unidentifiable flesh. A woman writhed on her back, clutching at her stomach, whimpering in pain.

  Zach turned and shouted back to Frank, gesticulating down the hill.

  “Go back and get those empty vehicles up here. P’raps forty-five corpses; twelve injured. At least one severely.”

  Frank, coming up at Elliott’s pace and still yards away, blanched, nodded and turned back. Elliott continued on until he stood by Amy’s side.

  “Oh my god,” he muttered.

  Zach stepped forward. Amy, her stomach still in turmoil, wanted to turn and run down the hill, but the compulsion not to stray far from Zach’s side was stronger. She might have made new friends in the form of Sarah and Elliott, developed and overcome a crush on Frank, but it was still to Zach she looked for guidance and protection when the serious shit went down.

  Stepping gingerly as though that might prevent her getting blood on her boots, Amy followed Zach through the carnage.

  The woman who had been whimpering had fallen quiet. Her hands had dropped to her sides. Pink and purple rolls of intestine spilled from the gaping hole in her stomach.

  “Forty-six corpses,” Zach muttered as he passed her.

  Further on, a woman sat on the road, staring at the body of a thickset man missing the back half of his head. Zach stopped and lowered himself to his heels with a grunt.

  “Miss?” he said.

  The woman, fair-haired with flecks of grey showing at her temples, turned to look at Zach. Her face resembled a gory mask, the rain struggling to rinse away the blood that covered it, but her eyes were strikingly blue and clear, giving lie to her generally dazed appearance.

  “He was my friend,” she said. Her voice was thickly accented, though she enunciated clearly and Amy had no difficulty understanding her; her tone was matter-of-fact, as if remarking on the drizzle. “The only friend I had left in the world.”

  “What happened here?” asked Zach.

  “They were people. Like us. Jerzy and the Croatian. I never did remember his name.” She shuddered. “They shot at us. Jerzy killed Levente. He tried to kill me.”

  “Did you see any others? Er, anyone who wasn’t a person?” Zach glanced at Amy and grimaced as if to say, ‘What a ridiculous question.’

  “You mean them.” The woman shook her head slowly.

  “They were in black four-by-fours,” said a voice.

  Amy and Zach both glanced at the speaker. It was Joe, a drawn, pale Joe with splashes of blood on his jacket and hands that shook.

  With a grimace and a popping sound from his knees, Zach stood.

  “How many?” he asked.

  Joe shrugged. “Tinted windows. They reversed out of sight as soon as I pointed my gun at them.” His voice was toneless. “I tried to go after them, but that’s when the shooting started. I killed three people.”

  “Your first?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s why you’re in shock.” Zach glanced at the fair-haired woman. “Don’t think you’re the only one. It doesn’t get any easier, though you’ll reach a level of numbness.”

  “I don’t want to kill any more humans. I want to kill them fuckers.” Joe’s eyes grew brighter and he seemed to mentally shake himself, sloughing off some of his lethargy. His eyebrows drew together in thought. “They have to be nearby.”

  “Huh?”

  “Them. They control us by combining their minds. To make us burn bodies and rats and mattresses, they just told us what to do and let us get on with it. At least, once we’d been treated at… um, hospital, can’t remember the name…”

  “Hillingdon?” suggested Amy, surprising herself by remembering.

  Joe shot her a smile. “That’s it.” He raised a hand, which had stopped shaking, and ran it through his hair, dislodging rainwater as though squeezing a sponge. “Do you know, they refer to us as ‘drones’. Once we’ve been treated at the hospital, that’s what we become. Mindless, drooling drones.” He gestured at the corpses. “That’s what these people were.” He bit his lip pensively. “The point is, they only had to combine their minds and tell us the once. Then we’d do it and keep on doing it until someone told us to stop. But that was for the menial stuff. I don’t think that’ll work when they want us to kill other humans.”

  “Why not?” asked Zach. “If the humans have become mindless drones, as you put it, why won’t they obey all orders?”

  Joe frowned. “I can’t explain…”

  “Because,” said a new voice, “it goes against the grain.” It was Elliott; he had come and stood next to Amy. “If I understand correctly, young man, these people have been subjected to some sort of electrical treatment that has damaged their brains, but not destroyed them entirely.”

  Joe nodded. “I’m proof of that. I had help to get better, but I’d started to recover without it.”

  Elliott nodded at the bodies lying in the road. “Even those poor souls must have retained basic thought processes as otherwise they would not have the capacity to obey the simplest instruction. They cannot, therefore, be accurately described as ‘mindless’. At the very least, their basic humanity must be preserved, their instincts as to what is right or wrong. Being made to burn dead bodies would be unpleasant, but not fundamentally wrong. On the other hand, killing people in cold blood without reason is, to every right-minded person, morally repugnant.”

  “Yes,” said Joe. “I could never have said it like you, but that’s what I mean. They are trying to get us to do something that’s so wrong they can’t just tell us to do it then bugger off. They have to be nearby so they can keep telling us to do it. Otherwise, we’d stop doing it.”

  “Okay,” said Zach. “They have to stay close to retain control. How close?”

  Joe shrugged. “Twenty, thirty yards?”

  “Do they have to be able to see the people they’re controlling?”

  “I don’t think so. When they reversed the four-by-fours, they dropped out of line of sight of the humans. Yet the humans hadn’t started firing then so they must have still been able to control them even though they couldn’t see them.”

  Zach’s brow furrowed in thought.

  Amy looked around. The assortment of empty vehicles had arrived and Frank was helping to load the injured onto the bus for transport back to Hillingdon for treatment.

  “We’d better give Frank a hand,” she said.

  Zach nodded distractedly.

  “Mortars,” said Joe. “You’re thinking about mortars.”

  “I don’t know how you knew, but that’s precisely what I was thinking about.” Zach’s eyes narrowed as he regarded the boy. “We’ll need two lines. One to lay down covering fire to keep the humans they’re controlling at bay. The second armed with mortars to fire beyond the humans at them. If they have to be nearby to exert control, there lies their weakness. Let’s take advantage of it.”

  Joe’s eyes shone. “Yes!” He clenched one hand into a fist and punched the air. “Let’s send these fuckers back to whatever hell they came from.”

  * * * * * * *

  The featureless countryside slipped by. Ceri longed to see hills and valleys again. All this flatness looked weird to a Welsh girl. Alien.

  Never mind. They would soon be out of the Fens and then the landscape would become more familiar. She was happy to sit and watch it; let Tom do the driving.

  “I went on honeymoon to Cornwall,” she mused. “A week in a little fisherman’s cottage overlooking the harbour in Polperro. That’s the cottage that was little, not the fisherman, tho
ugh he might have been.”

  She knew her tone was wistful, but couldn’t help it. Tom didn’t seem to mind; he grunted and smiled.

  That honeymoon seemed a lifetime away. Paul trim and tanned, before his hairline began to recede like an outgoing tide. She had been wrinkle- and stretchmark-free with no sign of the pot belly that she hadn’t been able to shift since giving birth to Rhys. Long, sun-filled days of eating freshly caught crab and mussels; longer, sultry nights of little sleep.

  “Polperro,” said Tom. “Think I’ve been. Narrow streets with tiny smugglers’ cottages?”

  “Aye. That’s the place. Bri comes from Looe, the next town up the coast.”

  “If she wants, we can pay a visit.”

  “I doubt that she’ll want to. Her parents and brother are still there, in their house.”

  “Ah.”

  They lapsed into silence. Ceri doggedly kept her thoughts turned to happier times. Anything not to think about the events of the previous day.

  Not being in any particular hurry, they stopped often. Sometimes they’d snack. Usually one or more of them would pop behind a hedge or wall to attend to business. Ceri would smoke a cigarette and Dusty would go off exploring, though Tom would never let him go out of sight.

  “Too many feral strays about now,” he said. For that reason, they kept a loaded firearm within easy reach whenever they left the safety of the vehicles. So far, they had not had cause to use it. The only animal they encountered had been, of all things, a pig. It had come snuffling along the side of the road, but stopped in its tracks when it heard their voices. Snout twitching, it stared at them in silence but bolted with a startled squeal into the adjoining woodland when Dusty trotted towards it. Bri had to talk Will out of chasing after it to capture it for a pet.

  “Do you think she’ll be all right?” Tom asked when they were once more underway after a comfort break.

  “Who, Bri?”

  “Sorry, you’re not a mind-reader. I was thinking of Colleen.”

  “I don’t think she intends to drive the scooter off a cliff, if that’s what you’re asking. But, no, I don’t think she’ll be all right. She was close to Howard.”

  “He was a lovely bloke.”

  “Not to mention the only doctor we had.” Ceri shifted in her seat. “I’m trying not to dwell on yesterday. Never having killed anyone before and all that.”

  “Sorry.”

  “It’s okay.” She let out a long, shuddering sigh. “What have we come to, Tom? It’s not like we don’t have enough problems without going around killing each other. I expect there’s killing going on in London, too.”

  “No doubt. Not that it’s any consolation, but at least they haven’t gone there looking to kill other human beings.”

  “You’re right. It’s no consolation.”

  “Well, let’s hope that their actions don’t jeopardise our chances of surviving beyond the summer.”

  “Jesus, Tom, you’re a barrel of laughs. And, no, don’t say sorry again.”

  “Um…”

  Ceri quickly cast about for a topic with which to change the subject. She remembered something she had meant to ask Tom earlier. “Bri.”

  “What about her?”

  “Have you noticed anything, er, unusual about her?”

  “How d’you mean?”

  “Unusual. Strange. Out of the ordinary.”

  “Give me a for instance.”

  “Okay. She seems to be able to tell when someone wants something without them having to say it. When we stopped just now, I was thinking I’d quite like a chocolate biscuit. Bri reached into the snack bag and passed me the packet.”

  “Huh. You mean, she read your mind?”

  “Not sure. I think she picked up the thought, but without even realising it. She acted as if I’d asked for the biscuits, but I’d only just had the thought. I hadn’t said a word. And Will made a move towards the biscuits a moment after Bri. As if he, too, had picked up on my thought. When Bri handed them to me, he sat back as if what had happened was perfectly natural, as though he also believed I’d actually asked for the biscuits.”

  “Maybe he wanted a biscuit himself.”

  “Maybe. So you haven’t noticed anything unusual?”

  “Can’t say that I have.”

  “Forget it, then. Perhaps I’m imagining things.”

  Yes, that must be it, she thought. Imagining things. How could a sixteen-year-old girl suddenly start reading other people’s thoughts? This was real life, not a Ray Bradbury novel. And yet Peter said that Bri’s brain, as a result of her injury, had changed, become more like his and Diane’s. Something about fresh neural pathways and activated synapses. Perhaps one consequence of the alterations was the ability to pick up on electrical impulses given out by others’ brains. If that were true, it didn’t explain how Will appeared to have acquired the same ability, even to a lesser degree.

  “Are we doing the right thing?” said Tom.

  “How do you mean? Going into the lions’ den?”

  “Ha! That’s one way of putting it.”

  “All I know is that Bri was determined to go and I don’t want to let them out of our sight again.”

  “And we have little to lose.”

  “True. I can’t see why this Milandra would want us there, but it will give us the chance to ask her why they murdered our families.”

  “Do you think she’s going to tell us anything different from what Peter and Diane have already said?”

  “Nope. But I want to look her in the eye when she replies. At least we might get the satisfaction of seeing her squirm.”

  “Satisfaction? You reckon? I think we’re far more likely to feel hugely frustrated and angry when the smug bastards try to justify their actions.”

  Ceri glanced at Tom. There was an unusual edge to his voice. He stared at the road, his knuckles white on the steering wheel. “You okay?”

  “Not really. I feel—and I make no apology for saying it—that we’re probably heading to our doom.”

  She looked out at the passing countryside. They had left the flatness of the Fens behind and the uniformity of the landscape was broken by rolling hills and tree-clad dales. Crops of rapeseed flowered in a profusion of dazzling yellows; hedgerows and avenues bloomed white and pink blossom; varied shades of green of field and hillsides, meadows and forests, provided a verdant backdrop. The world could be a beautiful place.

  Struggling to keep her voice steady, she said, “No need to apologise. I think you may well be right.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  To her surprise, Simone Furlong found that activities which used to keep her amused for hours had lost their attraction. Not even her favourite video game, Grand Theft Auto, or her favourite movie, Clueless (Simone was convinced that Alicia Silverstone’s character had been modelled on her; she didn’t allow the fact that the time she’d spent in Hollywood had been during its infancy in the 1920s spoil a good fantasy), could maintain her interest beyond thirty minutes or so.

  Maybe it was the chance to find more rats to kill but, come rain or shine, she preferred being outside to sitting in front of a flickering screen. This caused her to spend time in contemplation, a very un-Simone-like activity. Beyond essential sunlight regeneration she had never been an outdoor sort of girl, especially now that she was living in a place with such a crummy climate.

  If introspection resulted in any firm conclusion, it was that the sudden liking of fresh air could not be down to rats alone. True, she had spent a lot of time outside in London, when her eyes had been opened to the fun that could be had with small, furry rodents, but she didn’t think that she was so shallow as to have her entire outlook dictated by such fleeting pleasure.

  No, the real clue lay in the way her glance kept creeping skywards, peering between clouds in daylight or between stars at night, looking for a sign of the imminent arrival. She had one sunny morning wandered along with her face turned up imagining a tiny black spot appearing in the sky and
growing larger and larger, only to abruptly find herself lying on her back, a sharp pain in her ankle where she had badly sprained it in walking off the mini-cliff that had appeared unnoticed in her path. She’d had to lie there for hours, channelling the sun’s healing rays to her ankle to tighten her stretched ligaments sufficiently that she could hobble back to the hotel where she ate like a bear preparing for hibernation until her ankle was as good as new. This was an incident she kept to herself; she could imagine the hilarity with which Wallace would greet the tale if ever it were to reach his ears.

  Had Simone been the type to self-analyse, she might have considered the fact that she was born on Earth Haven to have something to do with her increasing sense of excitement and renewed purpose. Unlike the other Deputies, she had never set foot on Earth Home and had therefore always harboured a feeling of being different, set apart from them, not a sensation that rested easily with her people’s mantra of strength in togetherness, that the whole is infinitely greater than the sum of its parts. Perhaps, then, the arrival of the remainder of her people would remove that sense of separation. Her promotion to Keeper would close the loop, make her feel at last an integral link in the chain; more than a link: the concrete-set ring to which the chain was secured.

  She did not pursue such a line of reasoning; at least, not with conscious thought. All she knew was that the impending arrival of her people from Earth Home filled her with anticipation. Ambition, too, one that she could prepare to achieve by jockeying herself into a better position by being the Keeper here on Earth Haven when the Great Coming took place.

  With April fast disappearing, Simone sought out Wallace and Lavinia, waiting to catch them with no one else within earshot. Her opportunity came one afternoon when the two of them were heading out to surrounding settlements in search of more diesel for the generator.