World War Moo (25 page)

“Wait!” Rory said as she edged away. “I was wondering if you wanted to have dinner tonight. Just you and me.”

His voice was tinged with desperation. She felt sorry for him, but it would be kinder to put a stop to it right now. “I'm sorry, Rory. I don't think that's a good idea.”

If his face had fallen any farther it would have slipped off his skull and plopped to the ground. “You don't like me.”

“It's not that. I'm just not ready to see anybody.”

“So you might be in a while? Once you feel more comfortable?”

Shit
, she thought.
Now I've given him hope
.

To illustrate the point, his trouser front twitched further. In an effort to ease her discomfort, she imagined it as a wobbly slug balancing on two new potatoes. This image made her giggle.

“You're laughing at me,” Rory said, his fists clenching. Ruan edged sideways, looking to move around him, but he blocked her path. “You shouldn't laugh at me.”

The bowl of dishes was just about to be tossed into his face when Scott, who'd been composting vegetable peels nearby, hurried over and placed his huge paw on Rory's shoulder. “I need you to help me with the vegetables.”

Rory started. The petulant look of a little boy caught with his hand in his dad's wallet replaced the gnarled tension of his jawbone. “We were just talking, weren't we?”

Backing his lie with a dip of her chin, Ruan hurried off. For the rest of the day Rory avoided her as much as possible, eating his meals alone and no doubt nursing a sense of injustice. It was something he would have to get used to, for the world had become a very unjust place. That night, she'd locked her door again. Even now, as everybody else ate, she could see him crouched by the water, staring disconsolately into the lake—the wilderness equivalent of sitting on the stairs at a party and hoping a girl will take pity on you.

Ruan had just swallowed her last mouthful of stew when the throb of engines disturbed the calm. Suddenly everybody was on their feet and running to where they kept their weapons. Fanny picked up her bow, Scott grabbed a large wooden staff, and Andy returned with an egg in each hand. Ruan sprinted to her room to gather her gun and sword, and returned to join the line that faced the entrance. The engines cut off and a tense silence followed. When somebody came running down the road, Ruan flicked off the safety. The figure resolved into a young boy with red hair and a flopping gait. She drew a bead on him, but Fanny slapped her arm down. She was too far away to stop Andy, who'd coiled back his arm. An egg arced through the air and exploded on the boy's forehead. Ruan almost applauded.

The intruder stopped to wipe off the sticky mess. “Who throws an egg?” he shouted. “It's in my contact lens.”

Ruan relaxed. A raging infected human wouldn't have been stopped by something as paltry as a well-thrown chicken fetus. She felt an immediate kinship. This boy had to be immune, like her.

“Geldof?” Fanny said, half stepping forward.

What kind of idiot calls their kid Geldof?
Ruan thought.

“Mum?” Geldof said, wiping egg out of his eyes. “Mum!”

He broke into a wobbly sprint again.

That answers that question
, Ruan thought.
Lucky I didn't say it out loud
.

 

20

Geldof ran toward his mum, forgetting the egg slicking his forehead, the anguished months when he thought she was dead, the years when their relationship had been defined by strife. He became a young child again, with no complications to get in the way of the simple yearning to toddle toward his mum and be enfolded in arms that felt like an impenetrable shield against the world.

Fanny almost fell under the force of his charge. After a moment's hesitation, she curled one arm under his armpit and stroked his hair with the other. Even as Geldof wet her T-shirt, his heart swelled with a joy so fierce that it forced a torrent of words up through his throat like a burst water main. “I thought you were dead and I never got to say good-bye and I'm sorry I was so rotten to you and I never listened to you and I never appreciated you and I wanted to eat meat and I pretended to pray and never told you I loved you and masturbated all the time…”

He stopped, realizing he'd gone too far with the confessions. Ignoring the titters from the others gathered around, he took a shuddering breath and pulled back to look his mum in the eyes. He'd never seen tears on her face before, but they were there now, glistening in the gullies of the awful scars. The pictures hadn't prepared him for how brutally she'd been savaged. Her face looked like the surface of the moon, ragged white craters rammed in by the force of passing asteroids. He wanted to kiss them away.

“I love you, too,” Fanny said, mercifully glossing over his masturbation revelation—not that a sixteen-year-old boy admitting he was rather fond of tugging one off could be considered much of a revelation. “I should've told you every day.”

He couldn't remember the last time he'd heard those words pass her lips. He hugged her tighter, as though the years of distance could be erased by this one moment of intense closeness. Fanny's thin body trembled as she took great sucking breaths through the ruin of her nose. A sudden heat flushed her body. In combination with the other physical ticks, it made her seem like an old boiler about to blow.

“You need to let go now, Geldof,” she said.

As though he were holding a knitting needle jammed into the main socket, Geldof couldn't release his arms. Fanny's trembling became violent. With sudden force, she put her hands on his shoulders and pushed him away. She staggered backward, rapidly and repeatedly chanting a phrase that he couldn't quite catch.

“Are you okay?” he said.

“Just give me a minute,” she said, squatting and holding up a hand. “Please.”

When Geldof tried to go to her, somebody grasped his arm. He looked up to see a girl with astonishing green eyes.

“Seriously, you have to give her some space,” she said.

He became fully aware of the other people, around half-a-dozen, who crowded around his mum. A bear-sized man Geldof recognized as another of Fanny's old cronies knelt down and began whispering in her ear. Eva, who'd followed on behind Geldof, stroked her cropped hair. Something wasn't right here. He still didn't know what happened after the pigs left her for dead. Perhaps she'd had a mental breakdown. All he could tell was that she was fighting some raging internal battle. A year ago, Geldof would have been hurt and resentful at being pushed away, but he'd changed. And so had she. He could see it in her eyes, hear it in the softer tones of her voice, understand it in the way she'd held him and told him she loved him. He stood at a respectful distance until Fanny's breathing began to return to normal and she got to her feet. Scott and Eva flanked her, holding her elbows in what looked suspiciously like a move to restrain her.

“I'm fine now,” she said. “It was just the shock.” With a look at each other, Scott and Eva dropped their hands. Fanny took one last whooshing breath and turned her eyes on Geldof. “I know you are here, and it makes me happy. But are you insane? You don't have the virus. You were out. Why did you come back? And how did you find me?”

Something about what she'd said niggled Geldof, but he focused instead on delivering the good news. “We've come to get you out.”

“We?”

Geldof whistled. In response, engines started up, and down the track rode the mercenaries. They'd all agreed it would be wise for Geldof and Eva to go in together in order not to spook anybody—a plan he'd ruined by breaking into a run the moment he saw his mum. Fanny stared at them, her face darkening. “This is your grandfather's work, isn't it? He found you.”

“Yes,” Geldof said. “When he found out you were alive, he put up the money to get you out.”

“And he sent you here with these men?”

“Not exactly. He didn't know I was going to come. But don't you see? None of that matters. A helicopter's coming back for us in a few days. It can sneak us out. We can be together again.”

Sadness dulled Fanny's eyes. “I can't leave.”

“I thought you might be stubborn enough to stay here for whatever crusade you're on now. I came to convince you to leave.”

“You don't understand. I want to come with you, but I can't.”

“Why not?”

Fanny looked at the mercenaries again. “Because I'm infected.”

“No,” Geldof said, backing away. “You can't be.”

Even as he denied it, he knew she was telling the truth. Now her reaction to him made perfect sense. She'd been fighting her urges—hopefully just a desire to kill him rather than have sex with him first, which would have been a far more disturbing fate. He heard a chorus of clicks and looked at the mercenaries. Automatic weapons had materialized in their hands.

“This is turning into a right royal fuck-up,” Scholzy said.

“We're all infected, apart from her,” Fanny said, indicating the girl with the green eyes. Her voice was calm and authoritative, so unlike the shrill badgering Geldof remembered. “But we're not a threat to you.”

“I prefer not to take any chances,” Scholzy said as he locked the barrel of the gun to his shoulder. “Nothing personal.”

Infected or not, she was still his mum. Geldof stepped in front of her. “You'll have to shoot me first.”

“Considering I still have your puke on the back of my jacket, I'd rather like that.”

“Go ahead. Then you won't get the rest of your money.”

The gun remained pointed at his head for a few seconds before Scholzy laughed. “Now that, I wouldn't like.” He lowered his weapon. “You've got one hour to say your good-byes. Then we're getting out of here. The mission's blown. And I warn you all: anybody who comes within spitting range of us gets a bullet in the skull.”

Not taking his eyes off Fanny and her gang, he turned his head. “James, get Sergei on the satphone. Make sure the drunken moron remembers where and when he's supposed to pick us up. We'll hole up somewhere else until the rendezvous.”

Geldof, still faint at the risk he'd taken, felt a light touch on his shoulder.

“We need to talk,” Fanny said. She held out her hand, and Geldof looked at it nervously. “I won't bite, and you can't get it from just touching me.”

“It's not that,” Geldof said. “I just can't remember the last time we held hands.”

“Does it matter now?”

In response, he curled his fingers through hers and they walked off toward the lake.

*   *   *

Once they were settled on a large rock, breath visible in the cold air, Geldof gave Fanny the news she needed to hear.

“Dad's dead,” he said. “He got shot.”

“I know.”

In a flash, he realized what had niggled him earlier. She'd said that he'd got out with a certainty that meant it wasn't a guess. Now she knew that her husband was dead. “How do you know this stuff?”

“I read Lesley's stories.”

“How?”

Fanny pointed toward a large satellite dish atop a hangar. “That's how.”

“You have Internet access.” For the first time since seeing her again, Geldof felt that familiar combination of frustration and anger she'd always engendered in him. “You have Internet access! Why didn't you send me an e-mail?”

“I sat in front of the computer so many times, but I could never bring myself to type anything. I thought you'd be better off without me. I wasn't a good mother. And I may as well have been dead. I was in a place I thought you could never visit and I can never leave.”

“Don't you think that was my decision to make?” Geldof said, straining to keep his voice calm. She said nothing in response. Looking at the pain in her eyes, at the scars that ran not just over her face but down her neck and up her arms, Geldof forced himself to swallow his hurt. This was a new beginning. He didn't want to ruin it by falling into the same old pattern of arguments. “What happened? Terry said you were dead. He just ran away when they attacked, the villain.”

“Don't blame him. He did try to save me. He did save me. If he hadn't come back, they'd have finished me off. They ran after him instead. While they were gone, I dragged myself into a freezer and closed the door. They came back and followed the trail of blood, but couldn't get in. After a while, they wandered off.” She paused, her eyes distant with recollection. “Once they were gone, I got bandages and painkillers from the shelves and dressed my wounds as best I could. I was too weak to come after you, so I locked the doors of the supermarket and stayed there for two days. When I finally found the strength to make it back to the house, you were gone, and David and the twins were dead on the floor.”

“What did you do then?”

“I buried them in the back garden and stayed. What else could I do? I had no idea where you'd gone and no way to contact you.”

“Did you have the virus then?”

“No. It hadn't mutated yet.” She rolled up her sleeve and showed another wound, a smaller bite mark than those from the pigs. “Courtesy of Mr. Brownlee in number 15 about a week later.”

“The obsessive car washer.”

“The very one.”

“I don't understand why you're not like the others, though. Didn't you get it as badly?”

“I got it badly, alright. After he bit me, I smacked his head off the bonnet of his car until he passed out. Then I went roaming. When I saw my first uninfected person, I felt this unbelievable tide of anger rising up in me. All I wanted to do was kill.”

“And did you?”

She shook her head. “When I was lying in that supermarket, sweating and feverish, I had an epiphany. I'd spent my whole life campaigning for animals, not eating meat, but it made no difference to those pigs. I'd always thought that all living beings were the same, but I realized then that we're different. Animals always act on their instincts. We don't.”