Omega (35 page)

The three of them returned to the wood and called a conference, at which Philip told the others the truth about the effect of the Dust, and the coming need for the utmost in self-defence. The debate was not long. Within an hour, they had packed their cars and moved to the farm - six men, five women, two girls aged fourteen and eleven, and a seven-year-old boy.

It was plain from its equipment and the bills and receipts that littered an old roll-top desk that the farm had not commanded many hectares. But the building itself was old and rambling, probably a relic of more prosperous days, and it had bedrooms enough for all of them if the three single men used the loft as a dormitory. It was also virtually undamaged; four broken windows and a fractured pantry wall.

They had two milch cows, a somewhat elderly horse, three young pigs, some poultry, a questionably adequate stock of hay and other feed, plenty of potatoes and vegetables and a water-pump that worked. They also had enough adults for round-the-clock sentries, five rifles, a shotgun, a revolver and some, if not much, ammunition.

Given luck, they reckoned that they could manage.

Fewer of the Vyrnwy river valley people had survived than their neighbours in New Dyfnant had hoped, and most of the scattered handfuls that did fell to the madmen.

In the first minutes after the earthquake, the majority had managed to reach the vinegar masks they had prepared. But house damage had been greater than in New Dyfnant. Many had been trapped or crushed; vinegar and gauze carefully kept ready had often been buried in wreckage; the untrapped desperately trying to free the trapped had often forgotten about their masks till it was too late. And almost at once, into the middle of this chaos, had swept the great wall of water from the burst dam.

How the few refugees from the flood who had been able to reach higher ground on the other side of the valley had fared, New Dyfnant did not know as yet. But thirty or forty of them from the near side had reached the village and been taken in by families with relatively undamaged homes or housed temporarily in the village hall. All but three of them had arrived holding vinegar masks to their faces and claimed to have been using them from the start. The three without masks had been locked up with Tom Jenkins -
two of -them were too numb with shock to protest. The third resisted so violently that Dai Police had had to handcuff him till he cooled down, which had taken half an hour while Dai talked to him, using up time the constable could ill spare.

Over the next few days, the four prisoners loomed large in the village's conscience and its fears. Everybody knew what would happen to them but nobody knew what would have to be done with them. Dai Police had no cell, so they had to be kept in the safes
t place available - one of Jack
Llewellyn's lock-up garages, which they made as comfortable and warm as they could for them.

Once Eileen had made sure that everyone in the forest camp was well and safe, she had come down to the village to offer her help to Dr Owen. The doctor, rushed off his none-too-young feet, was very grateful, not only because of the number of injured he had to attend to, but because Eileen was the only person with direct experience of handling Dust victims. Her advice was grim but inescapable: strait-jackets would have to be improvised as quickly as possible and they would have to be worn continuously from the third day. She insisted (which Dr Owen considered very brave of her) on explaining this to the four men herself. She softened the facts as much as she could; they knew that the Dust would drive them mad because they had been told so when Eileen's warning had first been passed to them - this had been essential, both to drive home the warning's importance and to prevent the unafflicted from being caught unawares. But in talking to the four, she deliberately gave the impression that this madness came in fits, intermittently, with periods of sanity in between and that the strait-jackets were needed because the fits were unpredictable and they might injure themselves and each other when they were seized by them. It would be more cruel than they could bear to tell them the whole truth, that very soon the madness would be continuous and without hope. They were sick enough and frightened enough, already.

She managed, she hoped, to persuade them and to keep her poise while she did so. But as soon as she was out of their hearing, and the lock-up door clanged down behind her, she burst into tears in Dr Owen's fatherly arms.

'I'm sorry, Doctor
...
I...'

'Don't you say that, Eileen fach. You were a bloody marvel and that's a fact. Have a good bawl now and be done with it.'

'But what's to become of them?'

'God alone knows, my dear. I daren't think of it or I'd weep myself. Come along now. Let's see how they're getting on with those damn jackets.'

Dai Police's wife Joan had organized a sewing party who were hard at work making the jackets from sail-cloth commandeered from a dinghy in somebody's back garden -a dinghy that would never sail on Lake Vyrnwy again, because Lake Vyrnwy was now a sea of mud with a stream in the middle. 'Feel as though we were plaiting hangmen's nooses, we do,' Joan said glumly but got on with it.

The strait-jackets were never used.

They were ready on the third day with Eileen growing increasingly nervous and impatient, but there had been delay in finding adequate thread. Dai Police, the doctor and Eileen set off for the lock-up with two strong men as escort in case of trouble. The escort carried shotguns; there had been a noticeable tendency, since the earthquake, for those who possessed them (as most families did, with so many rabbits and other game to hand) to keep them within easy reach. Carrying arms went against the grain with Dai Police; he had in his safe a .32 automatic and a hundred rounds of ammunition which had been handed in by the executors of a retired colonel, recently dead, but so far he had not overcome his reluctance to wear it.

When they reached the lock-up it was empty. The door had been smashed open from the inside.

For a moment nobody spoke; they all stood staring, perplexed and paralysed, at the ruined door. Then a faint call from the garage forecourt set them running to where Jack Llewellyn lay, bloodstained and half-stunned. Jack waved a feeble arm along the street and croaked, 'After them, for God's sake
!'
before he collapsed again.

The doctor cried, 'See to him, Eileen!' and the four men sprinted away up the road. It was just as well Eileen was occupied with attending to Jack's injuries, because it saved her from witnessing what followed.

They caught up with Tom Jenkins and the others outside the school. That Tom himself, and one of the valley men, were completely in the grip of the violent madness was obvious at once. The other two seemed disorientated and hesitant, as though they had been infected by the first two's madness and swept along by it, but were uncertain what was happening. All four turned to face their pursuers, glaring
at
them wild-eyed, and Tom gave a terrible wordless roar like a bull.

'Easy, now, Tom,' Dai said, with little hope of getting through to him, but feeling the attempt had to be made. 'Easy now. You know us. We want to help you, man.'

For a fraction of a second the eight of them were a frozen tableau - whether the madmen would attack or take flight seemed to hang in the balance. It was broken by the sound of children laughing and running.

Geraint Lloyd's contribution to the crisis, after the first day, had been to keep the school working and parents had been only too glad to have the children off their hands. Now, at just the wrong moment, a dozen of the younger ones poured out of the school door into the street.

The high-pitched clamour seemed to infuriate the madmen. Snarling, they turned on the children.

Dai and the others raced forward but Tom reached the children first, snatching up seven-year-old Becky Reece in his great hands, holding her
at
arms' length, roaring, crushing
...

By chance, Becky's father was one of the escort. Without a word, he put his twelve-bore to Tom's head and fired.

The whole scene was over in seconds, but it stuck in Dr Owen's memory for the rest of his life. Geraint yelling to the children to come back in. Three more shots. The children's stampede back to the schoolhouse. The sudden silence. The four dead madmen in the village street. Becky's father, his gun dropped, clutching his bruised and weeping daughter, babbling reassurance to her.

They held a village meeting that evening. It did not last long; even the pale and shocked Rev. Phillips acquiesced in the decision, though by common consent he was excused from voting.

From that night, until the madness danger was known to be over, a rota of armed men would guard the approaches to the village from the valley. Dr Owen had described the symptoms of the madness in detail, though in fact they could not be mistaken. Healthy refugees would be admitted. Refugees with bronchial symptoms would be locked up in Jack Llewellyn's garage, which would be repaired next morning and made impregnable; they would not be released until the doctor had pronounced them clear.

Madmen - and madwomen, even mad children - would be shot on the spot, as both safety and mercy demanded.

Reality, even grimmer than the reality of the earthquake, had come to New Dyfnant.

In the forest, Peter O'Malley was facing a reality of his own and dealing with it single-handed. His employers, the Forestry Commission, had presumably ceased to exist and the statistical side of Peter's work had become too academic to continue. But the animals remained and one thing Peter had to know, even if only because human life and health might be involved - their reaction to the Dust. Peter and Father Byrne had become part o
f Dan and
Moira's camp, moving Peter's trailer into the laager the day after the earthquake. But the others had been quick to understand the importance of what Peter had to do and he was excused all camp duties to get on with it.

Day by day, he roamed the forest, watching carefully. Birds and insects seemed completely unaffected by the Dust; so far, so good. Fish too; the camp had eaten several trout before it occurred to them that the fish might have taken in Dust from the water surface, and the eating of fish was immediately banned. But no one developed any symptoms and after a few days it was considered safe to lift the ban. This was a relief because although they had built up quite a stock of tinned and other preservable food in the cave, winter was coming and all fresh food was precious. The longer the cave stocks could be made to last, the better.

Mammals were another matter; they were affected in varying degrees. The camp goats, Ginger Lad the cat and Peter's own two whippets - merely seemed listless and reluctant to eat for a few days; then they picked up and within a week were back to normal. (Meanwhile the goats' milk, too, had had to be banned.) Peter also kept as much of an eye as he could on New Dyfnant's livestock, asking the few village smallholders to keep him informed of any symptoms developed by cattle, sheep, pigs or horses. The villagers were glad to help him, because the nearest veterinary surgeon had been in Llanwddyn and nobody knew his fate. Mainly they had reacted like the goats, though two cows and a sheep had failed to recover and had died.

Of the wild animals, stoats, weasels and the few pine martens Peter knew of came through fairly well. They simply went into hiding while they felt ill and about eighty per cent of them re-emerged a few days later, apparently recovered. Badgers, for some reason, seemed totally immune and only one or two deer showed the temporary listlessness.

Two species, however, were badly hit. Squirrels, both grey and red, developed symptoms unlike any other species; about three-quarters of them were affected and they died slowly and painfully, becoming increasingly helpless, rather like rabbits with myxomatosis. (Rabbits themselves reacted like their enemies the stoats and weasels.)

The other victims - the foxes - were the only ones who were affected in the same way as humans, even to the time factor. Three days after the earthquake, Peter was attacked by an enraged vixen, who flew at him snarling in a forest fire-break. He had managed to dodge her first snapping onslaught and to shoot her before she could renew it. Within a week there were no sane foxes to be seen and Peter had issued an urgent warning to camp and village.

For many days, Peter was occupied hour after hour with a tragic but necessary slaughter of doomed squirrels and crazed foxes. He had been stockpiling ammunition ever since the Midsummer tremors had given him a foreboding of crisis, and was probably better supplied than anyone in New Dyfnant or the camp. But he knew his reserves were not limitless and he guar
ded them carefully, using traps
and snares when he could, and even gassing fox-earths (a thing he hated doing). He hoped with all his animal-loving heart that a few immune foxes would survive somewhere to revive the species, but he dared not be anything less than ruthless with the affected ones and so far he had come across none unaffected.

He piled the corpses, both squirrel and fox, in a clearing not far from the camp, being reluctant to let them lie where he killed them because he had no way of knowing if their bodies might be infectious to living animals. Once a day he lit his crematorium bonfire. On the fourth day of the slaughter, Eileen came out of the trees just as he was lighting it.