Apocalypse Cow (37 page)

He hauled out the skeleton with one hand, sending dislodged scraps of skin and flesh pattering onto his shoes, and propped it against the side of the vehicle, where it slid into a
seated
position, head dangling to one side in a parody of repose.

‘Looks like we’re in luck, we can drive out,’ James said, looking at the fuel gauge. He turned back to smile at his son. ‘The first burger’s on me when we get to—’

James stopped talking as a chunk of his head transferred itself to Lesley’s face in soggy clumps and the report of a gunshot, shockingly loud in the confines of the tunnel, rent the air. The torch slipped from James’s fingers, spinning as it fell. It shone briefly on his face from beneath, revealing a twitching mouth and a ragged hole the size of a ten-pence piece in his forehead. The torch turned off when it hit the ground. In the darkness that followed, James’s body thudded to the concrete.

‘Dad!’ Geldof wailed.

Lesley could hear him scrambling towards his father. The boy butted up against her and scrabbled to get past. She grabbed him – it was the first time she had laid hands on him and she was amazed by his slightness – and put her hand over his mouth.

‘Be quiet, or we’re all dead,’ she hissed into his ear.

She pulled him to the ground and lay flat, hoping Terry was smart enough to do the same. Something gloopy slid down the side of her face. She ignored it. A sticky wetness was spreading across the ground, moulding itself around her leg. She ignored that too. To think about it would be to run screaming into the darkness, either straight into a wall or into the gunman, who had to be Brown. There was nobody else.

The strange thing was that after all the fretting and worrying as they crept through the tunnel, she felt clear and focused in the absolute darkness. She had known there would be
one
last hurdle to clear. At least now she knew what it was.

‘Hiding isn’t going to save you,’ Brown said.

His voice was thick, and his breath ragged. The injuries sustained in the fall from the helicopter had clearly taken their toll, but somehow he had managed to keep up with them. Lesley was almost impressed. It was impossible to tell how close he was. Certainly close enough to shoot James. At that point Lesley wondered where Brown had got the gun. She reached into her jacket pocket and found it empty. The gun must have fallen out during the crash.

A sneeze ricocheted out of the darkness.

‘Aren’t you going to say Gesundheit?’ Brown asked.

He does have the virus
, Lesley thought. That spelled stupendously gigantic trouble for Britain and maybe the rest of the world. But she was too fixed on the immediate threat to dwell on the full consequences.

‘It’s a funny thing, this virus,’ Brown said quietly. ‘I feel entirely like myself, except I have this urge to fuck somebody and tear their throat out.’

‘If you lay a finger on her I’ll kill you,’ Terry said.

Brown cackled. ‘Who says I want your little girlfriend? I’ve got my eye on you, Terry. I would have loved to pay you a visit in your cell. You have such cute little buttocks, like juicy little apples. I wanted to bite them. But that would have been unprofessional. Now I have a delicious urge to ride you senseless and then munch those little apples right up. I can’t resist. I don’t want to resist.’

There was a pause, during which Brown hauled in a deep, snuffling breath.

‘Feel free to defend my honour now,’ Terry said across to Lesley.

‘If you lay a finger on him, I’ll kill you,’ Lesley yelled.

‘Oh, I’m going to lay more than a finger on him.’ Brown giggled, a low, unpleasant sound.

Lesley could hear cautious footsteps as Brown crept closer. Somehow he was ignoring the imperatives of the virus coursing through his veins enough to be careful, which demonstrated an iron will on his part. Either that or the virus had yet to fully take over his system.

Something brushed her hand, and she had to stifle a scream.

‘It’s me,’ Terry whispered. ‘What are we going to do?’

‘Kill him.’

Lesley braced herself for the unpleasant task to follow. She dipped her fingers into the river of blood and followed it back to the source, up in the highlands of James’s body, which was still twitching. The gun was in his inside jacket pocket. She pulled it out and sat back up. Brown was advancing, his footsteps soft scrapes. Lesley groped around until she found Terry’s face. She followed her hands to his ear and pressed her lips against it.

‘I want you, Geldof and Mary to get under that bus,’ she said in a whisper so soft the words barely made it out of her lips. ‘When I say, stick your torch out and turn it on.’

Terry’s lips moved against her ear. ‘What are you going to do?’

‘When he shoots at the torch, I’ll shoot at him.’

‘So I’m bait.’

‘I’m afraid so.’

Terry turned his face, stubble rasping against her cheek, and planted a kiss in the general area of her lips.

‘I can hear you whispering away over there,’ Brown said.

Even though she could see nothing, Lesley sensed Terry’s face had moved away. Geldof bumped her with his elbows as he too slipped under the carriage. Lesley rose into a crouch. The metal side of the vehicle was cool as she put her hand on it to orient herself, then she backed away until she was butted up against the wall on the other side of the tunnel. She turned left, facing back the way they had come, and lay down. The footsteps sounded closer now. Lesley clicked off the safety as gently as possible, and, supporting her wrist with her other hand, pointed the gun down the tunnel.

There came another sneeze and Lesley took her chance.

‘Now!’ she shouted.

The torch flicked on. Instead of revealing Brown, as had been the plan, it spotlighted Lesley like a convict trying to crawl across the prison yard. The torch began to swing immediately, but it was too late. Brown must have seen her.

I’m dead
, she thought.

She saw the muzzle flash, heard the crack and was even sure she could feel the bullet as it bullied the air aside on its deadly trajectory towards her brain. But it was the skeleton, also caught in the beam of light, that took the force of the bullet. Shards of bone spun through the air as the light swivelled onto Brown, who was down on one knee, the gun held out before him in both hands. He saw Lesley and began to swing his arm across, but her muzzle was already pointing at him. She tried to recall her shooting lessons as best she could, squeezing the trigger rather than snatching and keeping her arm steady. As her first shot rang out, Brown dived to the side. Lesley followed his trajectory, pulling the trigger repeatedly until the gun clicked empty.

The torch still shone on the spot where Brown had been. It
was
now vacant tunnel. Motes of dust spun in the torchlight as Lesley waited for Brown to reappear, gun in hand. He didn’t. Lesley tentatively got to her feet and walked forward. She picked up the torch and shone it under the vehicle. Three petrified faces peered out at her.

‘Did you get him?’ Terry asked.

A hacking cough answered the question. Lesley spun round and there, seated against the tunnel wall, was Brown. The left side of his face had been tenderized into a bloody mulch by the blunt impact of his fall from the helicopter. His eye might have been missing, or just lost within the battered mess, it was impossible to tell. However, his right eye remained and was focused on the gun, which lay just out of reach of his groping hand. Whatever little blood he had left in his body after the crash was pouring from his mouth.

Brown switched his gaze to Lesley.

‘Come closer,’ he gurgled. ‘I’ve got something to tell you. For your story.’

‘That’ll be right,’ Lesley said, keeping her distance.

Brown puffed out air in what could have been a laugh, and then opened his mouth wide. He spat out a thick rope of blood in Lesley’s direction. It failed to clear his splayed feet.

‘It was worth a try,’ he said softly.

The glitter faded from his eye and his head fell back.

‘He’s dead!’ Lesley called out in a voice that sounded like an eighty-year-old version of her own.

Her legs didn’t so much wobble as morph into strawberry laces, with all the attendant weight-bearing capacity. Terry was at her back in a few seconds, hugging her. She dropped the gun between her legs and allowed herself to fall back into his chest, which was heaving just as hard as hers.

‘Are you OK?’ he asked.

‘I’ve just killed a man,’ she whispered.

She buried her face in Terry’s bulging upper arm.

‘Hey, it’s OK,’ he said, turning her round. ‘It was either that or he was going to have his wicked way with me.’

Lesley let out a hiccupping laugh, and some of the strength came back into her body. ‘I wasn’t going to let him anywhere near that cute little arse. It’s mine.’

Strong thumbs brushed her cheeks, wiping away trickles of tears and sticky clumps of brain. She suddenly remembered to whom the brains belonged and, fighting off the urge to gag as Terry picked flecks of goo off her cheek and tossed them into the shadows, she turned to look at Geldof. The kid was on the margins of the torchlight, an indistinct shape hunched over the body of his father. She had lost nobody; in fact she would come out of this whole sorry mess ahead if things worked out with Terry. Geldof, on the other hand, had been deprived of both his parents. She pushed herself off Terry’s chest to walk over and offer him some words of comfort, or just a hug. Mary got there first, wrapping his head in her arms and cooing softly into his ear. Lesley let Terry fold her in his arms and squeeze the air – and the hurt, pain and trauma of the last weeks – out of her body.

The service vehicle trundled through the tunnel, its headlights splashing a reassuringly full glow ahead of them. Terry was keeping the speed down in case there were any more surprises up ahead, but the closeness of the walls helped give the illusion they were rushing towards France and an end to the saga that had claimed the lives of over half their group.

Geldof sat in the back, his head on Mary’s shoulder, staring
at
his dad’s body. James’s head and shoulders were covered by Terry’s jacket, a dark stain marking the exit wound. Brown had been left behind to rot. At first Geldof, supported vociferously by Mary, had wanted to reverse the vehicle back and forth over the corpse until it was ironed into the concrete like a cartoon character, or drag it behind them until it was grated away like a block of cheese. Lesley had forced him to keep a wide berth, so he had to be satisfied with imagining maggots burrowing through Brown’s face and the flesh slowly peeling from his bones in putrid clumps.

Geldof had always thought of himself as an emotional orphan, disconnected from his parents by their oddness. Now, as he stared at his father’s shrouded corpse, he realized he was an orphan in the literal sense of the word. No more would Fanny’s admonishing finger ambush unsuspecting eco-offenders; no more would CEOs of unethical companies find themselves pelted by rotten eggs; no more would Geldof’s ears be assailed by the grunts, shrieks and guttural moans of a never-ending tantric sex session.

He didn’t know how he felt about that. He had often longed for the moment when he would be free to do what he wanted: wear jeans, eat steak, seduce Mary by devising a series of simultaneously complicated and sensual equations that would describe their up coming volcanic lovemaking. He had always thought this freedom would come through a degree in mathematics and a highly paid job at a prestigious university, not by virtue of his mother being devoured by pigs and his father having the top of his head blown off by a government agent attempting to suppress his superiors’ involvement in the release of a deadly and idiotic virus.

The last few weeks had been so intense, so unreal, he
wondered
if he was going to wake up from an early-evening nap, study notes stuck to his face, and find Fanny standing unashamedly naked above him, demanding he come down and finish his lentils. But the body of his father lay before him, solid and very real, and the hand that stroked his forehead did not belong to his mother: it was too maternal, too assured for him even to pretend it was Fanny, whose idea of comforting Geldof when he was upset had been to hand him a self-help book and encourage him to work it out independently. The only thing Geldof knew for sure was that even if Britain somehow returned to normality, which was very unlikely given that the virus now seemed capable of infecting people, life was going to be very different.

The rubbery squeak of tyres brought Geldof out of his reverie. The vehicle was slowing down.

‘We’re here,’ Terry announced.

Up ahead, the tunnel ended abruptly in a metal shutter. There were no obvious controls to raise the corrugated sheet.

Lesley turned around in her seat. ‘We’ll need to try and talk our way in, so let’s be clear: nobody mentions Brown had the virus. If they find out humans can get it, they’ll never let us in.’

‘Do you think he really had it?’ Mary asked. ‘Maybe he was just pretending, to scare you.’

‘It’s possible, but we keep quiet anyway,’ Lesley responded.

They clambered out and walked up to the shutter. It was mated with a recess in the ground and resisted all efforts to get their fingers under it. They banged on the metal sheet, which shuddered with each thump of a fist, and shouted themselves hoarse. Nobody came.