Apocalypse Cow (33 page)

Terry hadn’t figured out what to do with Brown. Taking him along had been a spur-of-the-moment decision, and now they were saddled with a dangerous prisoner. Brown was slumped in the corner, looking like a beaten, bloodied captive. Yet something about the way he held himself suggested a tensed readiness to pounce at the slightest opportunity. James was also clearly concerned, sitting at an angle so he could divide his attention between Brown and the pilot.

‘Is the military running the airspace?’ James asked the pilot, still keeping a watchful eye on Brown.

The pilot nodded.

‘Then keep her just above the trees. I don’t want to be spotted.’

‘If I keep her low, we’ll have to stop soon,’ the pilot replied. ‘I don’t want to hit a building.’

‘Fair enough, but we’ll be keeping an eye on you,’ James said.

They flew on, passing a village barely visible in the gloaming. It was strange to see the small community so dark: no sodium glow from the street lights, no car headlights sweeping through the narrow roads, no welcoming light burning in the pub. All was still, dark, dead. There was no way of knowing if people were alive beneath the impassive slate roofs sliding below the helicopter’s runners.

‘Fancy telling me where we’re going?’ the pilot asked.

‘France, ultimately,’ Terry replied.

The pilot snorted. ‘No way. We’ll be shot down the minute we hit French airspace. Britain is sealed off. Nothing goes out and the only thing that comes in is food aid. Even that’s dropped from a great height.’

‘I said we’re going to France, I wasn’t asking you to take us there,’ Terry snapped, annoyed it hadn’t occurred to him that they could try to fly over the Channel.

‘What about Ireland?’ Lesley asked.

‘Same thing, love. The world’s ganged up on us. They’ve got coalition warships patrolling the Irish Sea and the English Channel, ready to launch attack helicopters against anybody trying to cross the water by boat or plane. Nobody wants this virus to get out. And another thing: if you’re going any further south than Manchester, we’ll need to refuel. This thing only has a range of three hundred kilometres.’

‘Let’s cross that bridge when we come to it,’ Terry said.

He got even more vexed when Geldof decided to chip in.

‘Why do we need to leave Britain now you have this guy?’ Geldof asked, nodding his head at Brown. ‘Wasn’t he the only one trying to kill you? You can just stay here and publish the story.’

Brown lifted his head. Terry noticed for the first time that somehow his glasses had stayed on his face despite the beating, although the left lens was cracked. He smiled, showing bloodstained teeth.

‘It makes no difference if you try to get the story out here or in France.’ His eyes glittered coldly in the dying light. ‘You’re all dead. There is not even an infinitesimal chance a single one of you will live.’

James leaned through the gap in the seats and thumped Brown on the side of the head with the gun butt. Brown screwed up his face.

‘If you so much as breathe on my son, I’ll cut your balls off and play golf with them,’ James hissed. ‘And I don’t even like golf. Understand?’

Brown’s features slowly unfurled. He stared at James, who held his gaze for what felt like an eternity. James only looked away when the pilot nudged him and pointed. Up ahead loomed the silhouette of a huge rectangular structure, jutting out from the middle of a concrete island carved from the hillside.

‘It’s a printer factory,’ the pilot said. ‘We can land on the roof.’

‘Do it,’ James said.

The pilot buzzed over the building, sweeping his searchlight across air-conditioning units, skylights and a small brick
structure
that housed the staircase. When he was satisfied the coast was clear, he doubled back and put the craft down. Gradually the din of the blades faded. James got out first and crossed around the front of the helicopter. He hauled Brown out and pushed him against the fuselage as the others clambered onto the roof.

‘What’s your name?’ James asked the pilot.

‘Bernard.’

‘Tell me, Bernard: can this be opened from the inside?’ James indicated a hatch at the rear of the helicopter.

Bernard shook his head.

James opened the hatch, revealing a small luggage compartment, and pointed the gun at Brown. ‘In.’

Brown hesitated.

‘In, or I kill you now. Just be aware I would prefer the second option.’

Brown did as he was told, sliding head-first into the cramped space and pulling his legs up behind him. James slammed the compartment shut and turned the latch.

‘Is that necessary?’ Terry asked. ‘He’s beat up pretty bad, and it’ll get cold tonight. He might die. I don’t want that on my conscience.’

‘If we take that man lightly, he’ll murder us without blinking,’ James replied.

‘I’ll take that as a professional compliment,’ came a muffled voice from within the bowels of the helicopter.

James ignored it. ‘Once I’ve checked out the lie of the land, I’ll find a better place to put him,’ he said, rummaging around in his rucksack and pulling out a torch. ‘I’m going into the factory. Wait here. Lesley, you keep an eye on the pilot.’

Off James went, his torch beam dancing along the roof.
There
was a crack as he kicked open the door to the stairwell. Then he was gone.

Terry stood by the hatch for a few minutes, listening to see if Brown was up to anything, and then wandered over to the waist-high wall surrounding the roof. They were maybe twenty metres up from the deserted car park, way too high for any animals to climb, which was just as well, because on the side that backed onto the fields Terry could see dark shapes moving in the murk. He fell into a daze, staring into the darkness and straining to hear any sounds of human life – laughter, the strum of a guitar, even a blazing argument – from the housing estate he had seen on the other side of the field as they flew in. There was only the wind that whipped out of the trees and blew the faint smell of smoke into his nostrils, whether from the distant burning camp or a bonfire of bodies he didn’t know.

Lesley appeared beside him and sat with her back against the wall, keeping the gun pointed at the pilot, who was sitting on his haunches and staring at the ground.

‘Can you do me a favour and get me a cigarette?’ Lesley asked. ‘I don’t want to put the gun down.’

Terry fished in her backpack and pulled out her cigarettes. He lit one for her and put it in her spare hand. The glowing tip of the cigarette described uneven circles in the air as it travelled up to her mouth.

‘Are you OK?’ he asked.

She took a long drag. ‘I always used to wonder how my dad felt when he came back from a war. He never said anything, but you could tell he wasn’t right: there was this coldness that got worse every time. Now I know how he felt. Shitty.’ Lesley took another lung-bursting draw. ‘How about you?’

What Terry felt was incredibly horny, and that suited him just fine. He didn’t want to agonize over the events of the last few weeks, relive in his mind his friends being slaughtered, Fanny ripped apart, David and the boys being cut to pieces, the unbridled chaos of the camp. There would be time enough for that later, when they were safe. Right now he wanted to bend Lesley over the wall and bonk her – and himself – into a state of blissful ignorance of all their woes.

‘Pretty shitty too,’ he replied.

Lesley had somehow managed to smoke a whole cigarette in about sixty seconds flat. She tossed the butt over her shoulder. The glowing end tumbled in a long arc until it hit the car park in a shower of sparks.

‘Another?’

She nodded.

‘It’ll be over soon,’ Terry said once he had handed her the next cigarette. ‘Tomorrow we’ll be at the Chunnel. Then the next stop is France. And we have Brown, so we don’t need to worry about him following us.’

‘I know. It’ll be fine,’ she said. The way she was sucking greedily at the cigarette suggested she felt otherwise. ‘I’ll be fine.’

Terry wondered how best to make a move without appearing awkward. He had never experienced one of those situations where things just happened naturally, the would-be lovers moving towards each other at the same time in a synchronous moment of lust. He thought he was getting the right signals. But he had been wrong before and ended up with a well-slapped cheek. His plotting was interrupted when the door to the factory opened and James emerged.

‘It seems clear,’ he called across the rooftop. ‘And they have a cafeteria.’

‘Great, I’m bloody starving,’ Lesley said, tossing the second butt after the first. ‘You coming?’

Terry suddenly realized how hungry he was. His last meal had been the sweets. The prospect of food pushed all thought of sex from his mind.

James led everyone – including Bernard, who he seemed to have decided wasn’t a threat – down to the factory floor, a cavernous space that carried echoes of their footsteps back to them from all directions. Their torches lit up conveyor belts filled with printer shells in various stages of assembly, work stations littered with half-stuffed circuit boards and the blank, dark eyes of computer monitors, all waiting for the power to come back on and the line to begin rolling. It struck Terry that the country must be suffering massive economic damage. Even when all the animals were dead, getting Britain back on its feet would be a huge task. Aside from the devastated agriculture sector, companies such as this one would struggle to recover from months of inactivity and lost revenue. Maybe the bio-weapon wasn’t as stupid as it seemed.

They entered the cafeteria through a set of swing doors on the other side of the manufacturing space. James headed off to fetch Brown, leaving them to delve through the sliding metal cupboards in the kitchen area, where they found massive tins of beans and sausages, crisps, bottled water and some bananas just the wrong side of ripe. The five of them sat around a table near the door, a torch at each corner and the food dumped in the middle.

‘Should we wait for James?’ Lesley asked.

Terry’s stomach grumbled a negative. He filled up plates for the ladies and Bernard first, and then handed over a heaped serving to Geldof, who stared at the food.

‘Something wrong?’ Terry asked as he spooned cold beans onto his own plate.

The kid looked up. His skin was milky white and his eyes shone in the torchlight. He looked like a wan angel, at least until a grin split his face. ‘No, not a thing.’

Geldof speared a sausage with his fork and shoved it into his mouth whole, letting out a moan. Terry remembered the boy was vegetarian. Not any more, it seemed. Terry dug into the sausage tin himself and emerged with a big fat one dangling pink and wobbly from his fork. As he transferred it to his plate, his dream or hallucination or vision, whatever it had been, came rushing back. The sausage transformed into a tiny pig, its snout and trotters hanging limply over the prongs. Suddenly he was aware of his own meat stink, stronger than ever. He dropped the sausage back in the tin and instead heaped more beans on his plate.

Terry had munched his beans and two bags of crisps, and was eyeing a banana, when James returned with Brown and several lengths of rope. Geldof was about to stuff another sausage – his seventh by Terry’s count – into his mouth when he saw his father looking at him.

‘I couldn’t help it, Dad,’ the boy said, clearly caught between dropping the sausage and jamming it whole into his mouth.

There was a tense silence as James stared at his son. ‘I know. I used to pay Malcolm and Tony to bring me Big Macs when Fanny wasn’t looking. If you want to eat meat, you do it.’

The sausage disappeared.

James stood over Brown as he ate, and then bound him hand and foot to one of the metal tables bolted to the floor. Only then did James serve himself. While James ate and the others lolled around, dopy with all the food in their stomachs
–
except for Mary, who had done little more than pick at her meal – Terry went to the toilet next to the cafeteria. It had been a few days since he had last bathed. That was probably why the smell was so bad. He stripped off, and had a major head-to-toe wash in the sink, splashing soapy water all over the floor as he scrubbed as hard as he could, both at his body and his muddy clothes. Even after the wash, he could detect a faint undertone of meat.

When he got back to the canteen, yawns were travelling around the cafeteria.

‘Bedtime, I take it,’ Terry said. ‘Where do we sleep?’

‘There are some offices with comfy sofas on the mezzanine,’ James replied. ‘You guys go. I’ll keep an eye on our friends here.’

Terry, Lesley and Geldof, leading Mary by the hand, trooped out of the cafeteria, while James ripped off the glued-on cushions from some chairs to fashion a bed for himself. Their footsteps clanked, creating an eerie metallic echo, as they climbed to the mezzanine, where three offices led off from the hallway. Geldof ushered Mary into the first one and made to move on.

She held on to his hand.

‘Don’t leave me,’ she pleaded.

With a shrug that seemed very adult on his slight shoulders, Geldof followed Mary into the room.

Terry and Lesley faced each other on the nylon carpet outside the second office.

‘I guess this is yours then,’ Terry said, making no effort to step away.