“Dad?” the boy enquired querulously, frightened at the expression that was now etched on his father’s face.
“Rotten…” Colm intoned, eyes wide and turned towards his son. “It’s all rotten…”
The backpack trembled where it lay, split open, and a cloud of black flies issued forth, filling his vision forever.
“SSSISSTER,” NAUSEA MURMURED, face wreathed in the steam emerging from the cauldron. “I’m channelling sssomething… I’ve got a trace.”
“Oh, yesss? Our errant ssssibling?”
“Aye, I think sssso. Ssshe’ssss panicking, in dissstressss… It’sss forced her to drop her guard.”
“We mussst be quick, dear heart, before ssshe realisssesss. Can you pinpoint a location?”
“That’sss up to Cafferly,” Nausea replied, casually motioning to the disembodied head suspended above the wide pot. Its eyes rolled in their sockets, and its jaw ground relentlessly as if it was chewing cud. “Ssshe’sss our tracker.”
“What are you reading from the ssssubject?”
“Excesssive levelsss of adrenaline… heartbeat’sss raissssed… fear factor’sss ssspiking. Rapid pulssse is making her psssignature flasssh like a sssiren.”
“You’re sssure it’sss her?”
“Without quesssstion. The tassste is ssso familiar.”
Phobia joined her sister at the cauldron, glancing up as she did so. “Cafferly ssseeemss more animated than usssual.”
“Ssshe can’t dissguissse familial recognition.”
“I guesss not.” Phobia laid her arms on the receptacle’s lip and placed her chin upon them in a juvenile fashion, watching the strands of vapour curl in the air, colours morphing within them, like a child studiously fascinated by a soap bubble. “She’sss been sssoo hard to pin down up to now… I wonder what’sss got her goossssey-gander up.”
“Fright’sss a primal inssstinct. It’sss impossssible to manage or control. If ssshe’sss in fear of her life, there’sss no way ssshe’d be able to ssstop usss tracing her thoughtssss. The barrierssss are down.”
“Ssshe could be about to die. In which cassse we may well lossse her forever.”
“There isss alwaysss that risssk, though death, of coursssse, is a sssomewhat moveable feassst thessse dayssss. The sssignal’sss weak ssso ssshe’sss not nearby. We’d have to mobilissse unitsss ssstraight away.”
“Then work your magic, darling Rachel,” Phobia sang, swaying and raising her arms above her head in Cafferly’s direction. “Find your sssisster. Find Misssha. Direct usss to her sssso we may reunite the two of you!”
TEMPLETON WASN’T SURE when his own larder started to creep him out, but the feeling was unmistakeable now. It was weird—like a creeping sense of unease, or déjà vu from a dream he could no longer remember, just trace impressions lingering in his mind. He would stand on the threshold and pause, reluctant to enter, hand hovering next to the light switch, convinced that something was lurking within, or there was an unexplained reason why he should avoid stepping inside. At first it was just a moment’s hesitation—an instinctual glance round the door frame as if expecting a figure to be there, a second blink when a blur at the corner of his eye caught his attention—but the room would give nothing away, stubbornly prosaic. Now, though, the sensation that something was very askew was overwhelming, as if it was radiating maliciousness, and a sick gnawing dread clawed at his gut whenever he approached it.
It had been a full five days since he’d eaten anything substantial, such was his refusal to go near the chamber. He had some root vegetables sprouting in the patch round the back of the house that he’d tried to chew on, but they tasted rancid, as if the soil itself was poisoning them, their skin filigreed with black cankers. Boiling them, mashing them, it made no difference—the rot was deep in the fibre. The hunger might’ve been eating him alive, but it was the knowledge that he had canned produce at his fingertips that he could consume if he could only summon the courage to retrieve it was worse. All that stock he’d carefully hoarded, all those measures he’d taken the moment he’d seen the riots on TV, the districts on fire around the Grand Hall, and he was going to skeletonise right in the middle of it, waste away surrounded by so much. He felt like one of those ancient pharaohs he’d read about at school, buried with their fortune to aid them in the afterlife; or perhaps more pertinently, one of those misers that got locked inside their own vaults at the end of the story in a horror comic, doomed to suffocate within the golden walls of their own privilege and greed.
Could this be divine retribution, he wondered. It seemed personal, a fate precision-engineered just for him by a deity with an eye for the ironic. But he didn’t feel he deserved this, that it was a worthy punishment. Being prepared, reading the runes accordingly and taking steps to make sure you had enough when the world fell down outside your door—that surely wasn’t a crime. Yes, he’d had to turn away many looking for sanctuary—a mansion like Templeton’s attracted more than a few hungry, exhausted refugees, who saw his estate as easy pickings, and were willing to negotiate the high walls and motion-activated garden defences in a bid to gain access to what they assumed (rightly, it had to be said) was a bulging kitchen. You didn’t protect a house like this to the extent of hiding tripwires in the topiary if you didn’t have something worth stealing. He’d watched them on the CCTV, ripping themselves on the barbed wire or blown sky-high by the landmines, and felt not an ounce of responsibility. If they’d done as he had—filled their basements or outhouses with the supplies needed to survive the apocalypse—then they’d have no need to take what wasn’t theirs. But no, they’d ignored the warning signs, and so were reaping the consequences. That wasn’t his problem. The few of them that managed to enter the inner grounds and made it almost to his front step he met with his shotgun and gave a short, uncomplicated directive. Few, if any, complied, and he had no hesitation in pulling the trigger, their bodies ending up heaped over by the compost bins. But wasn’t he justified? Wasn’t he within his rights to preserve what was his? Share, and you’re left with nothing.
No, this felt a cruel, vindictive response to a perfectly reasonable belief in one’s own private property. To be surrounded by the spoils of one’s canny foresight and not be able to touch it—to starve mere feet away from sustenance—was simply… well, evil. Templeton had never believed much in a deity before, but if one did exist, this simply proved that it was a very capricious entity. To plant this seed in his head, to allow it to fester, were the actions of one that delighted in suffering. As he’d explained to the last raggedy urchin that had circumvented the armed turrets and razorgrass to rap on his parlour window, he was the real victim here.
“Don’t you see?” he’d wailed, one hand clutching at his breast, the other pointing both barrels at the teen. “I’m dying here! I’m being tortured to death! I have no more than you do!”
The kid hadn’t understood, of course, and dismissed his cries as the ravings of a madman; in fact, he’d tried to push past Templeton and sought access to the house, so the man had no choice but to blow him in two. He’d taken no pleasure in the act, but felt instead that he’d been forced to demonstrate just how desperate he was—the hell that he was living through, that he wouldn’t want others, even his worst enemy, to experience. He had no doubt that if the youngster had been in his shoes, he would’ve done the same. Keep away, he would’ve said. Keep out. There’s nothing for you here.
Since that boy, there’d been no further survivors that had tried to scale his walls, which Templeton put down to the Judges’ increased efficiency in wiping out stragglers. The uniforms had yet to knock on his door, but he had no doubt they’d turn up eventually. What they’d find, he didn’t know—he suspected he wouldn’t be around to welcome them. The hunger pangs were making him delirious, and he felt weak and sick, as if he was one fall away from never getting up again; all his strength was deserting him. Often his feet instinctively guided him back to the larder in the hope that he would finally overcome his anxi
eties and manage at last to eat something, but it was never successful—no matter how nauseous or shaky he felt, he couldn’t take that step. He was afraid of what was in there, and it was going to kill him.
He reeled where he stood outside the kitchen, crying, starving and in pain, a man alone in his mansion, ravaged by starvation yet surrounded by opulence. He felt like he was shrinking, that the great house was consuming him; he was becoming insignificant, translucent. In yet another fit of frustration, he lurched towards the foodstuffs cupboard, knowing he wouldn’t be able to touch anything but desperately needing the comfort of a full belly.
Turn away, turn away, the voice in his head said as he flittered in and out of consciousness. This is not for you. It’s all ROTTEN—
Templeton yelled and tugged open the door, and a cloud of buzzing black flies emerged, stripping him of what remained of his sanity.
“HOW GOESSSS IT, Mortissss?”
The Dark Judge looked up from his deliberations and paused before answering. It was impossible to say if there was any sense of surprise in his expression, given the skull was as inscrutable as ever, but from his physical demeanour, he evidently wasn’t expecting visitors. He looked back at his machine briefly, adjusted a few controls, then returned his baleful gaze to the new arrival.
Is he afraid of me, Nausea pondered. The notion should be beyond any of the apocalyptic horsemen she and her sister had helped usher into being—such emotional responses had long been burnt out of them by the Fluids. Yet there was certainly a hesitancy about him that she found deliciously intriguing.
“The network issss online and operational,” Mortis answered.
“And issss it working?” the witch prompted, feeling like a schoolteacher extracting a response from an especially slow student.
“By all accountssss. Of courssse, you and your sssibling would have a better idea than me.”
Touché, Nausea thought. Wasn’t he the prickly customer? But he was right, naturally—she and Phobia could easily cast their minds out and pick up the distress flooding the ether, register the pain, fear and confusion that the Mosquito was causing. It was plain that Mortis’s great project was achieving its function—she merely had to dip her toe in, psychically speaking, and she could feel the psychological wreckage that it was racking up. It was flying from receptive victim to receptive victim, spreading its disease.
“Yesss indeed,” she said, smiling. “The devassstation it’sss wreaking isss mossst impressssive. What you’ve achieved here issss highly commendable.” Nausea’s smile hardened. “But my quessstion remainsss—issss it working? Are we sssseeing an acceleration in the numberssss judged?”
Mortis looked away again, tapped his taloned fingers against one of the receptacles housing the brains wired to the mainframe; it glowed from whatever sludge the Dark Judge had concocted for it to sit in and conduct its energy through. “In the long term, I think—”
“‘Long term’ doessssn’t interesssst my massstersss. They want to ssssee resssultssss.”
“The Red Mosssquito will kill millionssss, given the time and right application. Posssibly not right away, but the ssseedsss are in place—”
“And there’sss the rub,” Nausea interrupted. “It’sss been live for closssse to a week. We expected to sssee a more… immediate essscalation.”
“You have to give it the ssspace to perform—”
“The powersss are not willing to be ssso patient. They want a world picked clean, and they want it today, not yearsss down the line.”
“They asssk the imposssssible—”
“Are you denying them?”
“…No.”
“Then I sssugessst you turn up the heat, Brother Mortisss.” She looked around at his set-up. “Get thessse minds working overtime. What do you sssay?”
“I will sssee what I can do, ssssister.”
“That’sss the ssspirit.”
…AND JESSICA PUT a flaming torch to the supply stores, holding back her protesting, weeping fellow survivors at gunpoint. “Don’t you see?” she asked, watching the black flies spiral into the air to escape the blaze. “It’s rotten… contaminated. We mustn’t touch it.”
Her stomach ached sympathetically as she watched the food burn, tears pricking her eyes. “We mustn’t eat any of it.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
MISHA RECALLED LITTLE of how she came to end up in the compound. She remembered the lights emerging through the swarm, the high-powered beams of what turned out to be a pair of dune buggies dazzling her as they approached, and the fact that she couldn’t get the ever-present drone of the locusts out of her head; it had been lodged there like tinnitus, a white-noise hum that echoed in her skull in the quietest of moments. But the events beyond that were decidedly hazy—she suspected she’d blacked out, though she couldn’t say for certain that she hadn’t been deliberately knocked unconscious. She ached like she’d done ten rounds in a ring with an enraged gorilla, that was for goddamn sure.
When she woke, she’d found herself lying on an honest to goodness bed, complete with sheets and a pillow. She hadn’t lain on one since the night before the Fall, and it took her aback a little, like she wasn’t sure if it was part of a dream she’d hadn’t entirely disentangled herself from. She’d run her hand over the cool smoothness of the linen for several minutes, pushed her head back against the mattress’s soft yield, listened to the creak of the springs as she shifted position, and—once she’d established that it was real and not a product of her mind—felt a raw pang for a simple luxury that she’d taken for granted back in her old life. The texture of it was so easy to succumb to. Briefly, she never wanted to be anywhere else, and curling up in the bed’s embrace seemed as good a place as any to see out the end of days. But eventually curiosity overcame her torpor, and she rose, swinging her legs over the side, noting that someone had undressed her and robed her in a white shift. She looked around, but her clothes were nowhere to be seen.
Placing her bare feet on the wooden floorboards, she made an attempt at standing, then tried again several more times until she felt she could do it without the aid of the bedframe’s support. Looking down, she realised that clean bandages had been strapped around her calf, and putting her weight on her limb made it feel tender and tight, though manageable. Whatever she’d done to it—a torn muscle or a sprain rather than a break, she suspected—it would take a while to feel back to normal. There was another bed on the other side of the Spartan room, upon which Hawkins was slumbering, and Misha limped across to her, suddenly aware of how fragile and old the Judge looked. Her breathing was shallow. She’d taken quite a beating from the crash, her face and arms a mosaic of bruises and lacerations, and surgical tape had been wound round her scalp. She too had lost her uniform, and perhaps most pertinently her gun. The young woman tentatively reached out to clasp her shoulder and see if she could rouse her, but decided against it, figuring she had plenty more healing to do. Of course, whether they had time to rest and recover was, as of this moment, unknown.
The chamber’s only other features beyond a few sticks of furniture were a nearby window and a door, and Misha hobbled to the former, peering out at a street in what looked like a relatively untouched town. The room was evidently on the second or third storey, and it afforded her a decent view: she saw tall narrow houses lining a main thoroughfare , fronted with small, scraggly gardens, and at the end of a short side street was a grandiose civic building complete with Doric columns and large clock dominating its façade. None of it looked like it had suffered under the greys. What caught her eye in particular were the towering corrugated metal walls at the edges of the town, presumably encircling it entirely, with sentry posts at regular intervals. Somebody had turned this once small-town haven into a fortress, and had so far done a successful job at keeping genocidal forces at bay—or perhaps it had up to this point operated under the Grand Hall’s radar.
It was quietly surreal, watching people go about their business—and there were a fair few regul
ar folk conversing on the sidewalks, or sweeping their front steps or hanging out laundry—without any notion that they should be scrabbling for their lives. Misha’s last few months had been purely about the need to survive, and anyone else she and Hawkins had met had equally been scared, starving refugees, fleeing systematic slaughter—but these people seemed to have been preserved in a bubble, unaffected by events beyond those high forbidding walls. They looked well fed, clean and serene, a snapshot of a Midwest community from years ago, well before the shit went down. If she didn’t know better, Misha would’ve wondered if she’d gone back in time.
One detail that did stick out, however—and set alarm bells ringing—was the clothing: they were all, men, woman and children, wearing the exact same outfit ( cream-coloured shirt and trousers, with workboots and wide-brimmed straw hat), which immediately screamed one word in the girl’s head: cult. There was some enforced regulation or religion going on here, despite the seemingly civilised surface. It was a uniform, from what she could see, and it was unlikely that outsiders would be welcomed that didn’t conform. That would no doubt explain why her and Hawkins’ duds had been taken away.
She tried the door, but it was locked. Rattling the handle several times in vain, she knew there was nothing she could do but retreat to her bed and wait. As it happened, minutes later a key turned in the lock and a tall, handsome middle-aged Asian woman entered, clad like the others, bearing similar outfits in her arms. She smiled warmly when she saw Misha, closed the door behind her, and walked over, placing the folded shirt and trousers on the sheets beside where the teen was perched.
“Here,” she said.
The girl glanced down at the clothes she’d been offered, then turned her attention back to the woman. “Where… where are we?”
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