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“Speaking of which,” Whitehead was standing by Dave’s body, his composure a little recovered, “someone better go and break this news to Jane before she comes wandering in here looking for her sister.”
My heart sank with the prospect, but George took the burden from me. “I’ll go. By my age, you’ve had a little experience of handling these things.” The expression on his face, however, told a completely different story.
“I’ll come with you.”
I stared at Phelps, not sure that I’d heard right. “I’m not sure that’s such a good idea. I mean, she doesn’t know you that well and-“
“Please. I need to start somewhere. I need to do this. I was a father, after all, of a girl the same age.”
Was. The past tense. It unsettled me, but George nodded.
“Okay. But let me do the talking.” He didn’t sound like he wanted Phelps along at all, but I guess he decided that this new truce was too delicately in the balance to risk cutting Nigel out. I doubted it was going to make too much difference who told Jane. You couldn’t make something like that less painful. It was going to destroy her. I was sure of it.
“And I’ll start preparing the autopsies.”
“Jesus, Whitehead.” I turned my disgust on him. “Can’t you give it at least an hour?”
He shrugged. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to sound so bad taste. Not thinking straight.” His eyes were sad, and with him I felt none of the anger that I would associate with Phelps’s crassness. There was nothing intentional about Chris.
I nodded back, my eyes still filled with tears that I
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was desperately holding within the red rims of my sockets, and then coughed, trying to clear my voice.
“I’ll go and get on the radio again while you two speak to Jane. I said I’d let them know how things had turned out, and I may as well do it now.”
Leaving Whitehead there amongst our dead, I went back out into the sticky air and, feeling as if I could cry forever, let the tears loose for a few private moments before reaching the hut.
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Chapter Twenty-one
It took me an hour or so of numbed transmitting to get a response from London, my brain slowly adjusting to the horror of what Dave and Katie had done as I sat there, repeating words without listening into the microphone on the desk. If I’d waited much longer I think I would have been in an almost semi-vegetative state, the constant repetition working like a mantra. When the same voice came back through the headset that I’d heard this morning, my whole body shook as reality took hold again.
The man at the other end still sounded tired or drunk or whichever. It was difficult to tell. I wondered if he thought the same hearing me.
“Our man killed himself. With one of the women. She was getting fatter.” The words felt heavy just leaving my mouth. “I guess they figured that it was better to go out together and in control than wait for whatever was going to happen to them.” All I could see as I spoke was Katie’s death mask, and I wondered if I would ever be able to remember her as she had been
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alive. I doubted it. It was hard to picture Chloe before she started getting fat. I could do it, but it took concentration, and I figured my memories of Katie would be damaged in the same way.
“It was probably for the best.” There was little sympathy in the words, but then I hadn’t really expected it. The world was hardly full of hope these days, and so Katie and Dave really hadn’t stood a chance of any miracle recovery. He continued to slur slowly into my ears.
“Have you seen any black widows at your end? Smaller than the normal ones?”
“No.” My stomach tightened slightly. Were they evolving again? “Why? Have you?”
“No, but I caught the end of a broadcast from somewhere in Wales. It didn’t really make sense, it was just some bloke laughing very loudly and talking about these black spiders. He didn’t seem to be transmitting to anyone in particular, just randomly. I tried to get a fix on him from some of the others, but it seems that less and less people are out there on the airwaves.”
He didn’t need to spell it out. If they weren’t on the airwaves, then it was likely that they were gone, dead, over and out. More Katie’s and Dave’s. The precious remnants of humanity slowly being wiped out.
“I was planning on contacting you this evening, actually. I’ve seen something that might interest you. Something fucking positive for once.”
“Oh really?” God, I needed something good, but I didn’t think there was much that was going to cheer me up today.
“Yeah, I’ve been outside today. Didn’t really have a fucking choice-no food or water. Anyway, there’s some activity out there. Human activity.”
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“Like what?”
“It’s the army. Well, more like small squads of mercenaries in scruffy army clothing, but they seem pretty organised, so I can only reckon that they’re something to do with whatever’s left of the central government. I’ve seen three lots of them out there today, and they’re all doing the same thing.”
“Which is?”
“Spraying the widows with blood. They’re going into buildings and attacking them. I saw them get one of the bitches out on Pall Mall. They squirted the blood at them and it worked like fucking acid. The thing was dead in seconds. It was fucking amazing to watch.”
Great as it sounded, it was too confusing. “That can’t be right. The widows eat people. How can they do that if our blood is poisonous to them?”
“I don’t know. I don’t even know if it’s human blood, or even if it’s blood at all. Maybe it’s blood they’ve tampered with.” He paused, as if his few moments of animation had exhausted him. “Whatever it is, it smells like blood. The streets are covered with it, and there’s much less widow activity out there. I’ve decided that next time I hear them pass, I’m going to try and join them. It’s better than sitting here and doing nothing but trying to survive and fighting a losing battle.”
The desperation was clear in his voice, and I got the impression that he was the last of that band of survivors to still be with us. It was probably the best thing for him to do, but my heart ached with the thought of losing more contact. As each day passed, it seemed that we were alone in safety in the whole of England. I
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knew that couldn’t be the case, but that was sure as hell how it felt, especially on days like these.
“Well, good luck mate. If you do go, make sure you let whoever’s out there know that we’re here.” “I will. And good luck to you lot, too.” I’d only just signed off when Rebecca came into the hut, her dark eyes sad and damp. Without trying to communicate, she sat on my lap and hugged me tight, maybe as much for herself as for my comfort, and for a split second I couldn’t help but wonder what was growing inside her taut olive skin. Still, she smelled good and as we quietly cried together, her fingers running through my hair, I let all my emotions out.
Jane sat quietly picking at her food at dinner, her eyes alive but dulled. Rebecca had left me to join her, Chester’s head resting on her lap as he sat between them. The little girl seemed isolated, a little of her closeness with Rebecca gone, as if she didn’t trust the older woman to always be there, and I couldn’t blame her for that. Everyone she had known when this had started was gone, leaving her in the same boat as the rest of us, but so, so much younger. On top of that, she and Rebecca had to deal with the fear. The fear that what had happened to Katie was going to happen to them. It made me feel guilty for my moments of selfpity earlier.
Nigel sat opposite them, dishing out big smiles of sympathy and trying to make conversation with John. It seemed that his new sense of camaraderie had spread to the others, as earlier they had all traipsed back with their belongings to rejoin us in the original dorm. Something about that had made my heart sink, but I figured it had to be for the best. I might never
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learn to like Phelps, but we were going to have to learn to rub along. John didn’t look too comfortable about it either, sitting there talking to Nigel, but then he’d have to learn, too. Beggars couldn’t be choosers, and the world was getting slim on people.
George took the seat opposite me, his eyes glancing over to where the girls were. I swallowed my food.
“How did she take it?”
“It depends how you look at it. She cried, but she wasn’t surprised. She just kept saying that she knew because of the smell. Something tells me she’d come to terms with Katie’s loss before today.” He took a mouthful of food and chewed it without enthusiasm. “Still, she’s a very disturbed little girl now. She’s going to need lots of love and attention.”
Across from us, Jane yawned long and hard.
“She must be in shock. A long sleep will do her good.”
I was nodding in agreement when the door opened and Whitehead came in. Not bothering to get himself any dinner, he came and sat down. His face was on the green edge of pale and covered in a slick sheen of sweat. He may have been a scientist, but pathology wasn’t for the fainthearted. I hadn’t really thought about that when he said he was going to do the postmortems, but now, looking at him, I could see that he’d really been through it.
I put my own fork down. “What did you find?”
His bright eyes shook as he leaned forward. “Well, that white stuff was all the way through Dave. Some strands were getting thicker, too. I can only think that it cocoons you from the inside out. I guess eventually it would have completely covered him. A bit like the original victims were cocooned.”
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The thought was repellent. “So, even if you get bitten, kill the bitch and get away, the bite ensures that you’re still food for another one?”
“That’s about the size of it.”
“Jesus.” I seemed to be calling out to God quite a lot recently, but I figured there wasn’t fuck he’d be able to do about this shit. He’d given us our free will and this was what we’d done with it. I guess it was our turn to sort it out.
“What about Katie?” George asked the question that I’d avoided.
“Well,” Chris blew into the air at an invisible fringe, “it wasn’t what I’d expected, but it explains the weird lumps of fat.”
“What does?”
“In a human the baby gestates in the womb, starts small and grows from there, right?” Now that he was talking science, some of that sickly look had faded from his face.
“Yes, even we know that much, Chris.”
“Not with the widows, though.” He paused, ensuring he had our full attention. “It seems that small parts of them develop in different areas, mutating from the host’s original organs, and then each of those sections make their way to the womb, where they finally come together.” He shrugged. “Or so I think. The widow growing in Katie was only just starting to form, so there was nothing in her womb but a few strands of white stuff linking all the other bits together. I guess those contract at some point to pull it into the womb before it comes out.”
We all stared at each other for a moment, George and I trying to take in the complete alien nature of these creatures.
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An image crept into my head, sending a shiver down my tired spine. “It’s definitely dead though?” The idea of that thing continuing to grow in Katie’s corpse revolted as well as terrified me.
Whitehead didn’t look so confident. “As far as I can tell, yes. But then again, I don’t know shit. I took some precautions with her body and, needless to say, I locked the door behind me.”
I didn’t want to know what he’d done to Katie to make sure that thing was dead, but I comforted myself with the idea that she would have wanted anything done to stop the thing inside her from surviving.
“What about the blood thing the guy in London told me about? What do you make of that?”
“Who knows? I tried some samples on a section of the widow that had been growing inside Katie, but no reaction. I’ll try again tomorrow. Maybe take some from Chester to see if animal blood is any different.” He looked tired. “Maybe whatever it is only works on live widows.”
We’d kept our voices low so that Jane wouldn’t hear, but I doubt she was listening, anyway. When I turned to check on her, she was staring into space, leaning her head against Rebecca. It wasn’t long before she was being carried out by Nigel, fast asleep, and by ten o’clock most of the rest of us had joined her.
Someone’s leg banging hard into the bottom of my bed woke me, along with curses and low voices telling someone to be fucking quiet. By the time I’d dragged my brain awake and sat up, I wasn’t alone, George reaching for the light switch to dispel the grey gloom of dawn. My vision still hazy, I saw John falling out of his bed and a booted foot kicking him hard in his
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naked stomach as the leg passed. Swearing and wheezing, he curled round on himself, sucking in his breath, obviously in pain and unable to move. What the fuck was going on? It was all happening too quickly for my sleepy eyes to take in. Slowly adjusting to the light, the figures spread around the room became clear to me and as I realised what I was seeing my blood chilled.
Down by the door, Nigel had Jane held close to him, her young eyes wide over the thick barrier of his arm, and a couple of steps closer to my end of the dorm Michael had Rebecca held in the same way. It must have been his leg that banged into my bed as he passed, and I stared at the mild-mannered, middle-aged man that had barely spoken two words to me since we’d arrived. What the fuck was he doing and why?
Only when he swayed slightly did I catch the glint of metal against Rebecca’s slim throat as her hands pulled at his arm with no hope of getting it off her. He couldn’t meet my horrified gaze and turned a little, dragging Rebecca with him despite her attempts at resistance, to where Daniel stood, pulling open the door.
“Jesus, Nigel. You’re not really going to do it, are you?” Jeff was on the far side of the room, staring in disbelief. Very slowly, I reached down and pulled on my jeans, not wanting to provoke any kind of reaction that could result in the girls getting hurt. My heart pounded hard against my chest.