World War Moo (2 page)

Ruan again blinked five times in quick succession, the physical cue she'd picked up from a sports psychology book to change unhealthy thought patterns. She then employed her other technique to ward off this miserable reality, which was to fill her mind with ridiculous images. She pictured the bar full of bearded and smirking Noels cavorting in Christmas pullovers so garish they should have carried an epilepsy risk warning, playing pranks on each other and grinning smugly. Not that she could mock anybody's clothing choices these days. The ankle boots, skinny jeans, and designer tops she wore before the virus had long been ditched. She sported hiking boots, cargo pants, and a thick fleece—all of them black, to help her dissolve into the night, and tattered from countless miles of hard traveling. She wore a WWI-era saber across her back under a stuffed rucksack. A Glock handgun was strapped to her right hip. All these items had been salvaged from abandoned homes, hundreds of thousands of which now gathered dust across Britain.

Even with the harmless images playing in her head, she knew she should return to where she'd left her mountain bike on the outskirts of the village, a few hundred meters down from a roadblock where an indistinct figure held what looked like a shotgun. Instead she edged closer, drawn in by the faint chance of pilfering some hot grub. Her boots emitted a worryingly loud crunch on the loose scree of pebbles as she crossed the beach. Coming through the trees would have provided better cover, especially since the moonlight glittering on the lake's surface framed her creeping shadow, but the dark woods held worse dangers. Water dulled her scent, and in the open she could at least spot incoming trouble at a distance and scarper. Seven months spent as a mobile buffet for every living creature on this forsaken island had developed her acceleration to the point where it would startle a cheetah.

She grabbed the edge of road, which was raised six feet above the beach, and pulled herself up. Streetlights shone sodium orange light onto the deserted road. She'd been to Arrochar, a small village huddled on the northern tip of the loch in the west of Scotland, once before on a school trip. Then it had been a dinky hamlet with a population of a few thousand. As in every village, town, and city across the U.K., the carnage would have slashed that number. She would never forget the bonfires of bodies, animal and human alike, which had cast a smoggy pall of organic matter across the land for months after the outbreak.

Don't go there
, she thought, blinking so hard her eyes hurt.

She refocused on the seam of flavorsome odor that had attracted her in the first place. If she wasn't mistaken it came from a freshly cooked beef stew. Warm saliva slicked her lips. She hadn't eaten a proper hot meal in months, living on increasingly scarce tins retrieved from cupboards in empty houses and scraps raked from bins in the dead of night. Nor had she touched a morsel of fresh meat. What little meat remained was infected, but anything that passed her lips couldn't harm her. She had no idea why the virus slipped off her like an overly moistened spitball from a distracted teacher's back, didn't even know if it could be called good fortune considering the life it forced her to lead, but there was nothing she could do to change that.

She glanced along the road one more time and hauled herself over the guardrail. Her long legs swiftly carried her to the shelter of a thick tree trunk. Beyond lay an overgrown lawn strewn with tables that in summer months gone by would have been packed with hikers slapping at swarms of midges nibbling on the pale legs that protruded from khaki shorts. She scuttled to the wall of the building and chanced a peek through the closed window. Five men ranging from teenage to late sixties were gathered around a rectangular wooden table, staring at a flat screen fixed to the rustically bricked wall. Weirdly, they did all look rather like Noel Edmonds. Either Noel had gone on a sexual rampage in his wild years and impregnated every woman within a twenty-mile radius, or the village's gene pool wasn't deep enough to wet the shins of a toddler and had created a weird anomaly.

The window was thin enough for her to hear a former
Big Brother
contestant called Amy something-or-other tongue-trip her way through a news bulletin presenting the government propaganda line that “all was, and would be, well.” Keep Calm and Carry On. God, she hated that phrase, which was plastered on banners and advertising hoardings in every town and city. In her experience, calm was in as short supply as razors seemed to be in this town.

“Another round,” said one of the Noels, a stocky 1980s model with thick chunks of hair curling from behind his ears like warthog tusks.

“No bother,” said the barman, who bucked the trend by being clean-shaven and wearing a plain white T-shirt. “That'll be 140 quid.”

“The last round was only 120!”

The barman shrugged. “Hyperinflation. Blame market forces.”

“Who do you think I am, Richard Branson?” the first man said, his fingers curling up into a fist.

“Aye, well. You're a dick with a beard so that's close enough.”

“Just sell us the bloody beer.”

A sneer crossed the barman's face. “Wait a minute. Prices have gone up again. A hundred and sixty quid or you can find another pub that's open. Oh wait, there isn't one.”

The youth kicked back his chair, lunged at the counter, and slammed his fist into the barman's face. Every man in the room threw himself into the fight, teeth bared through bristling beards. A woman came running through from the kitchen and shouted at the combatants, although she stopped short of wading in to separate them. Given the empties strewn around the table and the all-male rural Scottish company, Ruan couldn't be sure if the fight was down to tempers inflamed by the virus or business as usual. It made no difference to her. She'd learned to take her chances when they presented themselves, so she quick-stepped to the kitchen and glanced around the doorframe.

Steam curled up from a casserole dish, seeming to form a hazy beckoning finger. She scampered in and slipped on the oven gloves next to it. Just as she was about to snatch up her bounty and disappear into the night, a growl rose beneath the bawling, clattering, and profuse swearing from the bar area. She froze as a creamy white Alsatian raised its head from a basket in the corner. Its hackles rose and the growl turned into a bark—and not a friendly “can I have some stew” one at that. Ruan was out the door, not even giving herself time to curse her stupidity, before the dog got to its feet. Even so, she heard the sounds of the fight die away. Every living being in the bar would be on her tail in seconds.

She ate up the ground with the intention of hurdling the guardrail. She'd been a serious modern pentathlete before her life fell apart, so she could ride, shoot, fence, and swim as well as she could run. She could lose her pursuers out in the loch, although that would mean ditching the rucksack. Unfortunately, the road was no longer deserted. Beneath the streetlamp were two men, again in beards and jumpers. The wind was at her back and blowing toward them. They looked at her and took simultaneous deep breaths through their noses. Lines of shadow slashed across their orange faces as muscles bunched, the viral rage seeming to open a vortex that sucked all their features toward one gnarled point between the eyebrows. Lips pulled tight across teeth clamped together by straining jaws. Their bodies snapped rigid as though their clenched hands were clutching high-voltage wires.

At the beginning of her ordeal she'd tried to conjure up silly images to soften the impact of this change, which she'd witnessed more times than she cared to remember. She'd imagined them as sufferers of extreme constipation straining on the toilet or woeful community theater actors overemoting in a desperate attempt to engage an audience of bored school kids. After a near miss, she'd realized this was one thing she shouldn't allow her imagination to gloss over: she needed the fear to put her body into fight-or-flight mode.

“This is our village,” the one on the left screamed. “No strangers.”

Ruan's hand dipped to the holster, but the floral oven gloves she still wore frustrated her attempt at a quick draw. She shook them off and kept running, resisting the impulse to shoot as the occupants of the bar poured out behind the two men. Freeing the weapon, clicking off the safety, and firing would slow her down and do little to increase her chances of escape: infected on the hunt were either fearless or thick as shit. Plus gunfire would attract the attention of any others in the area, if the shouts hadn't already done so. The houses she sprinted past seemed empty, but the infected had a habit of multiplying like fruit flies on a rotten banana once the chase was on. She glanced toward the water, wondering if she could still get over the rail. She dismissed the option. At the speed she was moving, there was every chance she would twist her ankle at the end of the drop. Equally, remaining on the road would give the dog a chance to catch up. One bite to the leg could fell her and it would all be over. Even if she kept ahead of the chasing rabble, the roadblock she'd avoided was only a few hundred meters ahead.

The row of houses gave way to woods, and, despite what might be lurking amidst the shadows, she cut left into the trees in the hope of losing the pack. The light died off beneath the canopy, and her shoulder cannoned off a trunk, sending her body spinning. She caught herself and began weaving through the dark columns. It didn't take long for the animals to find her. The squeak came first, followed instantly by a small furry blur that streaked through the air, paws akimbo. She ducked and the animal sailed over her head. Seconds later, another furry missile launched itself at her. This squirrel managed to snag its front paws on her shoulder and nip her ear with its buckteeth. She grabbed the bushy tail, swung the filthy rodent round once, and hurled it high into the trees. It squealed all the way, sounding like a cheap firework. Rustling came from all around now, but she didn't look to see what else was coming; she needed all her attention for the slalom through the trunks. The trees cleared and the moon once again lit her way as she vaulted a wooden fence into a field that tilted upward into the foothills of the mountain. She turned back to the right to avoid tiring herself too quickly. That was when she heard the shuddering chorus of moos.

“You're taking the piss!” she found the breath to shout.

The fence vibrated behind her as her pursuers leapt over. She chanced a look back, and what she saw brought hysterical laughter bubbling up. A handful of cows, several squirrels, a posse of rabbits, a young deer, what may have been a badger, the Alsatian, the barman, and seven variations on Noel Edmonds were strung out in pursuit. They all lent their baying, shouting, barking, cursing, and mooing voices to the air. It hadn't been that many years since she realized that the whole Disney princess thing she loved as a little girl was sexist drivel, and she couldn't help but be reminded of how the animals in the cursed forest had flocked to help Snow White. Only the birds were missing; even the Noels could have passed for dwarves if she squinted. She bit down on the hysteria and focused on running; these woodland animals weren't coming to sing a merry song and lead her to the safety of a cabin until a handsome prince slung her across the back of his horse and hauled her off for a life sentence of sewing dresses and looking pretty. They wanted to chew out her eyeballs. At least the small animals were already falling behind, and just before she turned her attention forward again the two front-running Noels collided and went down in a bearded, jumper-clad heap. Only the dog was gaining, now lolloping along a good five meters ahead of the others.

Ahead, she saw tiny globes of light floating in the far corner of the field. In happier times they could have been mistaken for fireflies or even sprites of the forest by those of a more imaginative bent. Ruan knew what they really were. As they rushed onward, the sheep, whose eyes were reflecting the moonlight to produce the glowing orbs, materialized at the gallop. Ruan bared her teeth at the sight of the animal she hated above all others. Her right hand pulled the sword from its scabbard in a smooth arc. She transferred it to her left without breaking stride. Still tracking the flock with her eyes, she unholstered the gun and flicked off the safety.

The sheep were close enough for her to see their eerie silvery-blue eyes and teeth jutting out from their waggling lower jaws. A few seconds later, she was amongst them. She slashed at the nearest one's snout. Snapping jaws brushed against the sleeve of her fleece and she shot the attacker in the mouth. She shimmied past the falling body, slammed another sheep between the eyes with the butt of the gun, and leapt. Her right foot landed square on the back of a particularly matted and shaggy specimen, prompting a winded bleat, and she jumped again. As she sailed upward, a savage joy seized her. She pointed the gun downward and squeezed the trigger once more. She felt rather than saw the bullet burrow into its target as her heels cleared the top of the fence by inches.

The impact of landing jarred her knees and spine, but she kept her feet and disappeared into the trees. She raised her head and let out a primal, adrenaline-fuelled howl. Too busy giving vent to her elation, she ran full tilt into a tree and toppled backward. Above the wheezing of her stuttering lungs, the din of the pursuers grew louder. The thrill of the chase knocked out of her, part of her welcomed the end. She was so tired: of the constant stress of flight, of the loneliness, of the tormenting memories that kept slipping through her mental defenses. But her survival instincts remained, so when she saw a figure slip through the shadows ahead she drew in a rasping breath and lifted her weapons. The silhouette raised its hands, pointing the left in front and drawing the right back.

A bowstring twanged and the air whispered as an arrow flew past. The dog yelped. The silhouette lowered the bow and stepped into a shaft of moonlight breaking through a gap in the foliage. At first, Ruan couldn't make sense of the shadows on the woman's angular face. Then she realized she was looking at deep scars running across jaw, cheek, and forehead. The woman shouldered the bow and held out her hand.