World War Moo (6 page)

He should have felt worse about making such a fool of himself, but he couldn't bring himself to care. Perhaps it was down to finally being able to express how he felt, albeit to an unwilling audience, or the catharsis brought by punching twelve bells of shit out of a roasted pig. Or maybe it was the freedom brought by the understanding that now, with his reputation as a weirdo cemented, he would never be accepted by the local kids. After the way they'd reacted, he no longer wanted their approval. They were children housed in adult bodies, unable to relate to what he'd been through and far too quick to turn their faces away from his pain. He didn't want to build friendships that would rely on his pretending to be happy all of the time.

Whatever the reason, he was able to close his eyes and enjoy the simple warmth of the sun on his face, his mind momentarily stilled. He was on the verge of dozing off when the crunch of wheels on gravel and the purr of an engine announced the arrival of his sole surviving relative. Grandfather Carstairs, dapper as ever in a linen suit, white hat, and bushy silver moustache, eased his way out of the black Mercedes and shook Geldof's hand as the chauffeur carried his leather valise up into the villa.

“You're looking good, my boy.”

“You, too, Granddad.”

This was something of a white lie. His grandfather was approaching eighty, and even the few months since his last visit had been enough to deepen his stoop, which was now so pronounced he had to raise his eyes to look at Geldof. Beneath the gray pallor of his cheeks, blue veins fluttered as his blood tried to summon up the enthusiasm to make another weary circuit of his body.

“How's business?” Geldof said.

In contrast to his appearance, his grandfather's voice remained strong and even. “Recovering. The U.K. crisis hit profits hard, but at least I don't have to pay wages there any longer, and we're diversifying into new markets. Your legacy is secure, my boy.”

That at least was good news. Geldof was living in the villa at his grandfather's expense, and if the company were to collapse he could well find himself not only an orphan, but a homeless orphan. From there, he may as well throw in glue-sniffing, drug use, and becoming a rent boy—which would at least lose him his virginity on a technicality. He supposed if there'd been any sign of collapse his grandfather would have divested himself of all the assets, uncaring about the jobs lost, to safeguard his personal fortune. Geldof still marveled at how far apart his mum and grandfather were, or had been, on the pragmatism/idealism scale. Then again, Geldof had spent most of his time in Scotland trying to be as dissimilar to his mum as he could, so he supposed it was natural that she'd done the same thing with the father she'd fled and whose continued existence she'd hidden for so long.

Geldof's grandfather took off his hat and dabbed at his brow with a handkerchief. “Let's have a nice cool drink on the balcony. I have some news for you.”

Frowning, Geldof followed him up through the cool interior of the house and onto the large balcony overlooking the sea. Recently, his grandfather had been sending e-mails full of hints that it was time for Geldof to move on from his seclusion. He kept raising the prospect of business school so Geldof could take over the coffee empire one day—a day that would come soon enough. As much as Geldof liked the idea of being obscenely rich and knew he needed a goal to stop him drifting along like the flotsam and jetsam the sea washed up on the beach, he didn't fancy having to run a corporation. He wanted to study mathematics and get a research job probing the mysteries of the universe, not spend his days worrying about coffee prices and exploiting poor workers on plantations. Increasingly, he felt like he'd escaped one set of expectations for another: from being encouraged to bring down The Man to becoming The Man. Nobody seemed to think about what he wanted.

Anyway, discussions of his future were moot. Geldof had no doubt about the inevitability of the virus—which he thought of as a malicious, sentient entity—escaping the cordon around his former home. He'd tried to encourage his grandfather to cut loose enough cash to buy a small island and had identified several likely candidates in the South Pacific and Caribbean on
privateislandonline.com
, where he could live an idyllic life of fishing, swimming, and not being munched up by hordes of angry infected. The six million dollars or so required would be small change to his grandfather, but the old git refused to part with the cash. Buying such a refuge was the act of a quitter, according to the ruthless businessman, and he wouldn't have a quitter for a grandson.

They settled at a wrought-iron table amidst a jungle of potted plants. The housekeeper brought them two glasses of peach iced tea. He could see Mary walking up the beach off in the distance. His gigantic crush on his former neighbor and math teacher had backed off completely. She would never replace his mother, but she was trying to fill that gap; thus thinking about her in a sexual way, as he'd once done constantly, now seemed very creepy. Perhaps sensing his reluctance to allow her to take on a maternal role, she'd started stalking the twin boys who lived in a nearby villa, who, despite not being evil little toerags, clearly reminded her of the sons she'd lost.

Geldof's grandfather took a sip of his iced tea and placed his hat on the table. “I thought I should tell you this to your face to try and ease into it, but now that I'm here I don't know any good way to introduce it gently. So I'm just going to say it.”

Here we go
, thought Geldof.
He's probably booked me a place in some awful business school
.

“Your mother is still alive.”

Geldof sprayed iced tea all over the immaculate white suit.

“I thought that's how you might react,” his grandfather said, dabbing at the stains with his hanky.

 

6

If this is the best Britain has to offer
, thought Tony Campbell as he looked at the predominantly slack faces of the cabinet members gathered in Cabinet Office Briefing Room A at 70 Whitehall,
then we are well and truly screwed.

His advisors sat around an orange table so large they couldn't lean back in their plush leather chairs without butting against the wall, which was painted a grotty shade of shit brown. Only the bank of monitors displaying a drawing of a human brain proved they hadn't returned to the seventies, when the whole of Britain had been tarred with the same two-tone brush. The young Tony had even owned a brown corduroy suit, matched with a lurid orange kipper tie and a shirt with collars so wide that a gust of wind could have sent him soaring off like a hang glider—a sharp contrast to the sober blue outfit he wore today. His cabinet members were dressed just as conservatively, which would have given a casual observer the mistaken impression they actually knew what they were doing.

In the days before the virus brought the country not so much to its knees as left it lying face down in the gutter soaked in its own piss, crisis meetings such as this one were known as COBRA after the location in which they were held. Tony considered the acronym too thrusting for the gatherings held by Brits for the Rights of the InfecTed, the self-appointed rulers of a formerly proud nation. His unspoken term SLUG—short for Sluggish Laggards in Useless Government—was far more appropriate.

He leaned forward, the overhead strip light glaring off the smooth brown skin of the vertiginously high hairline he'd suffered since he was a boy. His young self had often buffed up the front half of his scalp in an attempt to redirect light and create a Dalek-style death ray. Had he that death ray now there would be piles of ash on the chairs where his advisors sat. Only a few members of the cabinet were remotely useful. To his right sat Glen Forbes, Secretary of State for Defense and Commander in Chief of Land Forces. A stocky man with tiny ears out of proportion to his bulbous, bald head and skin several shades darker than Tony's, Glen had been a lieutenant general before the outbreak. After, as the highest-ranking military official left alive or in-country, he took up the task of marshaling the remnants of the armed forces and attempting to restore order through the standard military fallbacks of curfews and brute force. It was Glen, an old acquaintance from Oxford, who'd sought out Tony to head up a largely civilian government in order to make the new rulers seem less of a jingoistic military regime to the world.

By virtue of his experience, Glen had a working knowledge of the process unfolding across the Atlantic, where the UN was drawing closer to passing a resolution authorizing military action. Sure, they were keeping the food drops going and sending reassuring messages about researching a cure, but every article Tony read portrayed the infected as bloodthirsty beasts who loved nothing more than snacking on a dollop of brains washed down with a nice chug of blood. He entertained no doubt the media was being encouraged to demonize and dehumanize the infected so there would be no public outcry when the hawks swooped in to eradicate the threat of a global apocalypse. Only the nuclear missiles BRIT still controlled were delaying that moment. That deterrent wouldn't hold forever.

While Glen possessed certain skills, he was himself a ferocious hawk with claws far sharper than his brain. He'd been a firm backer of the Iraq invasion and unrepentant when the WMDs proved to be as hard to find as a four-quid pint in London in the days before the virus. He adhered to the school of thought that there was little point in possessing weapons if you weren't going to use them. Or as he'd once put it, “Why buy a Ferrari if you aren't going to take it out for a spin?” Glen's attitude helped convince Tony that the clock was ticking down to the moment when the warships and warplanes maintaining a protective cordon around Britain would dump their deadly payloads on the mainland: if Glen was representative of most generals, they would be champing at the bit to play with their toys.

To Tony's left sat Amira Farouk, his spin doctor. A rotund woman with protruding teeth and thick, sweeping hair, she'd been Tony's trusted media advisor for years. She came up with the BRIT acronym, using the word “infected” to emphasize that they were sick and thus could be cured; the Keep Calm and Carry On campaign; and the tactic of whipping out a picture of Tony's daughter during his first televised interview—recorded in the fledgling weeks of his job as leader of the new infected Britain—to remind the world that the lives of millions of children were on the line.

It hadn't been Amira's fault that the CNN interview had gone as tits up as Pamela Anderson in zero gravity. The stress of his new job, the lingering sores and sniffles from the early stages of the virus, and the high stakes of the attempt to present a softer face to the world had put him on edge. So, when that sodding journalist Lesley McBrien goaded him, the virus had awoken and he came across as a slavering maniac with his threats—futile, of course, since she was in a studio in Paris—about unravelling entrails and gouging out eyeballs. After the interview, the world's media had focused on his pointy teeth, speculating that he sharpened them with a file to make it easier to tear human flesh. That was completely unfair. He'd always had sharp teeth and had worn a moustache for over twenty years to partially shield his dentally challenged mouth. That now was gone, thanks to Amira.

“You need to lose the moustache,” she'd said in her post-interview debrief. “It makes you look like a mad dictator. You do know you pet it when you're nervous, don't you? You looked like a Bond villain stroking his cat.”

“Oh, come on. It's just a bit of hair.”

“No, it's a symbol of all that is dark, cruel, and twisted in mankind. Think about all the evil leaders with moustaches. Hitler being the obvious one.”

“Mine isn't a toothbrush moustache though, is it?”

“You're right. It's more like a dental floss moustache. Still has to go.”

“I'm not going to cave in just because you brought up Hitler. Who else you got?”

“Genghis Khan.”

“That was more of a beard-moustache combo.”

“How about Ming the Merciless then? You can't deny that was one evil mouthbrow.”

“He was a bloody movie villain.”

“Exactly. The all-consuming evil of moustaches is so well accepted that it's become a trope in Hollywood. Bad guys are either effeminate English toffs or they have facial hair. Sometimes both.”

“Don't we have bigger things to focus on than the contents of my top lip?”

“I know it seems trivial, but after that psycho performance we can't afford to have any more negative associations. You don't want to give
cracked.com
the chance to put you in a Top Ten Evil Moustaches list. Just humour me and shave it off, okay?”

Tony, a regular on the satirical Web site, had complied.

Beyond Amira and Glen, the cabinet swiftly ran out of talent. Tony's gaze tracked along the other dozen individuals who, through blunders or lack of ambition, had butted up against low glass ceilings in their careers before everything went to shit. It didn't help that many of them were doped up on the diazepam and nitrazepam the UN included in its aid drops. While the drugs were useful for dampening tempers, they turned the users into the sluggish laggards of Tony's acronym. Tony avoided the drugs, preferring to deal with the bursts of anger in his own way. The advisors were the best he could scrape up given that the greatest minds in the U.K. had buggered off before the quarantine. It had all been a question of money: those who could afford to go abroad did so, leaving behind those who couldn't afford the rocketing ticket prices as the virus bit. Of course, not every Brit with the skills he needed was able to make it out in the panic, but of those who remained, many had either been killed or were lying low.

When Tony's gaze fell on the sorry excuse for a chief scientist, one of the chief pill poppers, he ground his teeth. Before the outbreak, Tim Roast had been a biology lecturer at a provincial university—one of those pokey affairs that somehow attained university status and ran around trumpeting its credentials like a lottery winner flaunting his newfound wealth. This position was a step down from a government research post, from which he was sacked when he contaminated crucial samples with his own saliva. He looked exactly the way Tony felt a lecturer should: V-neck pullover, badly knotted tie, and a pair of glasses so enormous they made his eyes look like snooker balls. This, unfortunately, was the man who was leading their hunt for a cure. The problem, apart from Tim's utter crapness, was that the government facility where the virus was developed had been blown up in an overzealous cover-up. That journalist had smuggled out the data, but the world wouldn't share it; presumably they were concerned BRIT would use it to synthesize more of the virus.