Blood Crazy (25 page)

I shivered against the tree until my legs buckled and I sagged against the ropes.

Eventually, I made up my mind. If they killed me, they killed me. But I wanted to see the sunlight.

No one bothered me as I twisted round like a Houdini wannabe, working out of the ropes, then eventually the sack.

There I sat on the forest floor. Not a soul in sight.

I found my way back to the canal. The barge had gone.

For half an hour or so I tried to follow it, but I wasn't sure which direction it had taken.

At last I turned my back on the canal and headed deeper into the forest. I was alone again.

But it wouldn't be for long.

I reached the edge of the forest. The ground sloped up ahead of me to the brow of a low hill. The sun shone on the frosted grass. Any other time it would have been great walking weather.

All I felt was cold, hungry and miserable. For all I knew I could be hundreds of miles from Eskdale. Sarah probably thought I was dead. And so would Curt. When he knew I wasn't coming back how long would it be before he went looking for Sarah?

As I trudged up the slope I heard the trucks. Four of them rounded the edge of the forest to growl up the incline toward me.

For some reason they came in pairs, two side by side.

A pair of trucks stopped right next to me. I saw that metal bars had been welded to the front making them look like homemade snowploughs. A head came out of the window. The kid was as surprised to see me as I him.

‘Damnation … Where do you think you're going?'

‘Home,' I shouted above the snarl of motors. ‘If I can find it.'

‘What's your name?'

‘Nick.'

‘Nick – if you don't get your arse up here, the only place you'll be going is straight to Baby Jesus.' The kid pushed open the door.

From the look on his face I didn't hang around. In three steps I was in the passenger seat and banging shut the door.

‘Nick, old mate, haven't you seen the beggars? The whole place is cheesy with them.'

‘Seen who?'

‘Kaybees. That's who.'

I shook my head, lost. ‘Kaybees?'

The kid exchanged a grin with the eighteen-year-old girl driving the truck. Her dark eyes flashed as she laughed.

‘Kaybees. Short for Crazy Bastards. I'm Sheila, by the way. This gangster's Jigsaw.'

‘Jigsaw on account of the face.' Grinning, he pointed at his face criss-crossed with scars. ‘When my parents decided I'd look better without a head I decided the quickest way out was through my bedroom window. Which I didn't bother opening first. I'm the human jigsaw. Sheila had to tape all the pieces together.'

‘From memory. I think it's an improvement.'

‘You brother and sister?'

‘Neighbours,' she said. ‘That first night in April, when the shit started flying, the first I knew about it was the sound of Jigsaw breaking glass with his face … Excuse me, Nick.'

She picked up a CB handset. ‘We've picked up a traveller. Name's Nick. We'll take him along for the ride.'

‘Okay … Okay.' The voice vibrated the speaker like a robot on speed. These people were tense. ‘Let's do it! We haven't got the fuel to hang around!'

Sheila expertly slipped the gear and we rolled forward up the hill. The truck to our right stayed by our side like it had been welded there.

‘So where are the … Kaybees, then?'

‘Nearly at the top of the hill. We should see them any time … Now.' She let out a scream, a blend of excitement and pure, pure terror. ‘There they are, God love 'em.'

Shit. Creosotes. There must have been thousands of them. They stood on the grass plain like a forest of saplings in the sunlight.

‘Jigsaw. Sheila. I know I'm only a hitchhiker … But shouldn't we be driving away from them?
Not toward them
.'

Sheila accelerated the truck across the grass. The other truck stayed by our side.

‘You've got us wrong, Nick. We're not running away from
them. We're farmers,' she yelled. ‘We're going to crop some weeds!'

Over the CB a voice hollered. ‘Go … Go … Go!'

We picked up speed, wheels crunching across the frozen turf. The truck at our side started to peel away from us. It stayed parallel, running at the same speed, but the gap widened.

I twisted round to get a better view. The other pair of trucks was doing the same, occasionally the steel plough on their noses would splatter a bush … Shit. There was a steel cable tied between the two trucks.

I looked back at the gap of blurring grass between our two trucks. It, too, had a silver cable that stretched out between them at maybe waist height.

‘Now! Go for it!' Sheila shouted into the CB mike. ‘Turn when I turn!'

Jigsaw gripped the rail on the dash. ‘Hang on tight. Here we go!'

I looked forward as the Creosotes came up in front. They did not move. They only stared at us with those light-bulb eyes.

We plunged into them.

The trucks were hitting fifty and we were like the scythe of Mr Death himself. I couldn't take my eyes away, as the cable, pulled tight now, cut through men and women as easily as a blade. Windows splashed red.

More Creosotes popped like balloons on the steel plough bolted to the front of the trucks.

Sheila hit the wiper switch to scrape away the spray that turned the glass crimson. Now the ground was more bumpy, or at least the tyres bumped over lumps there.

And all the time someone yelled hysterically into the CB. God knows what – the volume distorted the voice into a mechanical crashing sound.

Then it was over. The trucks were slowing. I looked at Sheila: her dark eyes burned out from her face, sweat dripped off the end of her nose. Muscles stood out in her neck like rods.

She shot me a look. ‘Hang on tight, Nick. We're going back. That's right, buddy, we're going to do it all over again.'

I gripped the dash rail and stared forward through the strawberry
jam on the window. My teeth clenched. The engines roared. I saw the faces of the Creosotes getting nearer and nearer.

This time I closed my eyes. But I could not close my ears.

After we'd driven a couple of miles in formation the trucks stopped. The Creosotes were a long way behind us now.

One kid from each truck jumped down and unhitched the cables, then using sweeping brushes, they wiped the red shit off the sides of the truck. Jigsaw pulled at pieces wedged in the snowplough (or should that be meatplough?) I heard him shout to a kid working on the next truck, ‘Can you manage that, Smithy? Here, let me give you a hand.' He threw something at the kid who ducked and laughed.

I felt sick. I turned to Sheila. ‘Why did you do that? The Creosotes, I mean the Kaybees, are different now … They're not violent. What you did was a bloody massacre.'

Sheila's dark eyes widened. ‘Where have you been, sunshine? The North Pole? In the real world we're fighting for our lives.'

I told her where I'd come from and about the few Creosotes we'd seen in Eskdale. ‘Until a few days ago all they'd done was watch our camp.'

‘You said until a few days ago. What happened then, Nick?'

I told her how I'd been kidnapped and carried by barge to this place. Wherever that was.

Sheila nodded. ‘Then they just let you go.'

‘Yes, how do you know?'

‘Same pattern, sunshine. They came, they watched us for a bit. Then a few of us were taken when we were out foraging. Some were taken by their own mothers and fathers. They carried them a hundred miles or so then they turned them loose. Most got back safely.'

I shook my head. ‘What the hell do they do that for?'

‘At first we guessed it was nothing more than a loony game of cat and mouse. Now we know they were studying our behaviour … what we'd do in certain situations … Hey, Jigsaw, hurry it up. We can't hang around here forever. I'm hungry.' She turned back to me: her smile died. ‘Then, five weeks ago, I remember it because it was my nineteenth birthday, the Kaybees came back. I mean
they came back mob-handed. We woke up one morning to find thousands surrounding the camp, pressed right up to the fence.'

‘And I take it they weren't there to sing you happy birthday.'

‘Correct. They just piled in at us, Nick. Oh, we'd got guns by the crateful. We blasted them … They kept on coming. They just don't know fear. They walked over the ones we'd shot, then we shot them, then some more and more.'

‘What saved you?'

‘Not guns … In the end it was our brains. Or rather a kid we call Doc. We'd dug a ditch all around the camp. He got us to dump most of our kerosene stocks into the ditch, then lob in a burning rag. And that was the end of the attack. And the beginning of the world's biggest barbie.'

She laughed but she wasn't smiling. A muscle twitched in her face. ‘It was awful. I've been terrified ever since. I can't sleep … Every time I close my eyes I see burning men and women.' She took a deep breath, looked at me keenly for a second then smiled. She gripped my hand and slapped it onto her stomach and held it there. ‘Feel that. I've lost twenty pounds in five weeks.'

Instead of taking away her hand she held mine there against her warm stomach, while searching my face – for what, I don't know.

I licked my lips, feeling suddenly hot. ‘So what's the business with the trucks? Surely you can't kill them all.'

‘No. And we're running short of diesel. We're having to cut down on the cull runs. But the cull was the Doc's idea. He noticed after the first attack, when we killed so many of them, they didn't touch us until more Kaybees joined them. He thinks they need a critical number before their instincts tell them to attack. You know, like sparrows flap around for a few days before they've got enough in their flock then, bang, a switch flicks in their heads and suddenly they're off south. So we do our best to keep the number of Kaybees as low as we can. And it seems to be working. We've had no mass attacks since the big one five weeks ago.'

‘But surely you can't go on like this?'

‘No. And lately we've had a few individual Kaybees attacking us. It usually turns out to be one of the kids' parents. But that might be something to do with their building projects.'

‘Building projects? What do you mean? What are they building?' A horn sounded. ‘I'll tell you later. It looks as if you've got a lot of news to catch up on since you hid yourself away in the back of beyond.'

We drove along a dirt track. Jigsaw had jumped back in the cab and was wiping at something with a rag. I saw they were gold rings. He slipped a couple of wedding rings onto his little finger and sat admiring the way they glinted in the cold sunlight.

I sat there trying to work through what had happened that morning. I'd wanted to catch up with the barge, then at the first opportunity release Trousers and the other kids. But they would be miles from here by now; also their situation didn't seem so perilous now I'd heard what the pattern would be. Sheila was confident the captives would be released as part of the Creosotes' experiment.

Another event that morning that I found almost shocking was making contact with another community of sane human beings. In Eskdale we'd come to accept that we were the only ones left on the face of planet Earth. Now it looked as if there were communities of kids dotted all over the place.

Most troubling was hearing about the behaviour change in the Creosotes. They were murderously hostile again. They were flowing back north from wherever they had migrated to. My only hope was that Sarah would be safe. Maybe the Creosotes wouldn't find a place as remote as Eskdale.

Sheila sang out, ‘Home sweet home.'

The place seemed to be little more than a collection of farm buildings and farm labourers' cottages. Around the place was a high barbed wire fence making it resemble a prisoner of war camp. Outside the fence ran a ditch. That still had lumps of burnt stuff clinging to the sides.

The leader was a nineteen-year-old called Boss. He'd been a trainee security guard when civilization went belly-up and he appeared to rule the place firmly but reasonably fairly.

I did see, though, beneath his eyes, black half-moons and when he spoke his breath nearly cut me in two. The last five weeks of virtual siege had taken their toll on Boss. He was boozing hard to get through it.

First off they took me into the farmhouse kitchen and fed me with bowls full of rabbit stew and pancake-shaped things that they called bread.

It hit me as I troughed out on the stew that these different communities were each developing their own cultures. At Eskdale the thing was to tattoo your face. Here it was jewellery. Everyone wore gold bangles and rings; so many, in fact, that if someone waved you were blinded by the flash.

Another thing I saw was that they were less reliant on scavenged stores for food. The vegetables in the stew were fresh, they had hutches full of rabbits, chickens roamed all over the place, and everyone looked fit and lean from hard work. If it wasn't for the four thousand-odd Creosotes thirsting for their blood they would've seemed certain to survive.

Sheila stuck close by me, listening to what I'd have to say. Those big dark eyes of hers constantly watched mine.

Doc, the brains of the community, reminded me a lot of Del-Coffey. Same wire-rim glasses and a fuzz of blonde hair. He didn't show off as much as Del-Coffey, though, and I found myself liking him. Christ, I was changing. Ten months ago I'd probably have spat in his eye.

‘Tell me about Eskdale,' he said eagerly. ‘Did you get a chance to observe the Kaybees much? At first everyone thought they were just plain crazy. But there seem to be patterns to their insanity. They go through distinct stages – like they are evolving.' He rattled on, pumping me for what I knew. I told him some secondhand stuff I'd got from Del-Coffey.