World War Moo (8 page)

Amira, who was shaking her head so vehemently that her dangly earrings almost slapped Tony in the face, spoke up. “I have one,” she said. “You're off your bloody rocker.”

Her voice broke the paralysis, and suddenly everybody was talking at once, hands waving and fingers stabbing the air. Amira was up on her feet, her composure gone for the first time since Tony had known her. Glen ignored the storm of voices and slid one of the briefing papers along the table to butt up against Tony's fingertips. Tony hesitated. Their gazes met, and Tony realized that the military man, normally so volatile, seemed utterly calm.

“It's the only way,” Glen said, his strong voice cutting through the hubbub.

Tony picked up the document and began to read.

 

7

Ruan awoke at the stealthy click of an opening door. She opened her sleep-encrusted eyes to a boxy room, where the single mattress she'd slept on was the only furniture, and prepared to bolt. She always slept fully clothed, shoes and all, in preparation for just such a moment, but when she threw back the duvet she found she was wearing only a T-shirt and frayed white knickers. Even her rucksack and sword, normally packed and ready to snatch up, lay discarded in the corner instead of beside the window. She thrust a hand under the pillow and settled on the reassuring heft of the pistol. At least she hadn't been totally lax. Still disorientated, she had no idea where she was, how she'd gotten here, or why she'd been so careless, but she knew that she would have to sacrifice her belongings.

She was up on her feet, fumbling at the catch on the window with nerveless fingers, when the door swung open fully and a soft female voice said, “You don't have to run.”

The gun rose as Ruan spun and tightened her finger on the trigger. She saw the woman and her arm dropped. It all came flooding back: her failed stew heist, the flight through the forest, the hand reaching out to her.

After they'd been sure the pursuers were shaken off, the woman had doubled back. Ruan had tried to talk, but her new companion held a finger to her lips. She led Ruan high around Arrochar at a jog and curved back toward the road, following it around the loch from just inside the tree line. There were no streetlights on this bank, so when the woman crossed the road and plunged into the bushes Ruan was surprised to find more tarmac beneath her feet. After a few more minutes they came out onto the side of the loch.

A hulk of a building sat on a pier that ran out into the water. At the end of the platform, Ruan spotted a small group sitting in lotus position around a roaring fire, encircled by flickering candles stuck into glass jars. Beyond, the reflection of the moon shimmered on the black water. It would have seemed almost idyllic were it not for the jumble of old machinery and rubble by the water's edge. Ruan moved toward the light, but the woman put a hand on her shoulder and shook her head. It had been seven months since Ruan had spoken to anybody—in fact, she'd barely said a word, since she considered talking to herself an early sign of going loopy—so she didn't know how to break the silence that had built up between them. Ruan allowed herself to be led into the house—one of around a half-a-dozen that sat shoulder to shoulder. She'd collapsed onto the mattress and, her guard lowered by the thought of so many clearly uninfected people around her, shucked off her clothes and slipped under the sheets to fall instantly asleep.

Now, in full daylight for the first time, she took in the woman's face properly. With no shadows to act as a soothing visual balm, the scars presented themselves in full pink and twisted glory. The worst was a bite mark on her left cheek, a crater so deep Ruan could have put her pinkie in up to the first knuckle. The same bite had removed a chunk from one side of a long, sharp nose. Other deep grooves and troughs pitted her face, running up into the gray hair she wore close to her scalp and plunging below the neckline of a long-sleeved black cotton top. Strangely, her face looked peaceful, like the ruins of an old castle. Her watery blue eyes betrayed no signs of bitterness at what had befallen her. When she smiled they seemed to lighten in the same way as a sun-dappled swimming pool.

“I see you've noticed my scars,” the woman said.

Ruan's cheeks flushed and the instinctive urge to apologize nudged her vocal cords into life. Her voice sounded low and hoarse. “Sorry, I didn't mean to stare. It's been a while since I've had company. My social skills are a bit rusty.”

“It's okay. If it was a problem, I would wear a mask. I want people to see them.”

Something about the forthright way the woman spoke, about the way her gaze was challenging and encouraging at the same time, emboldened Ruan to ask a question that seemed rude the moment she said it. “Why? I mean, not that you should hide your face if you don't want to, or that I don't want to look at it…”

Ruan trailed off. She was sounding even more insulting with every word she added. The woman seemed unfazed. “It reminds me that I'm not the person I used to be.”

Staring into the ravaged face, Ruan felt she'd seen this woman before. She closed her eyes and held the face in her mind. Ruan had always been highly visual, able to store near-photographic shots of any face or scene and conjure up images of startling clarity. She examined the mental picture of the face, turning it left and right like an animator playing with a 3-D model. There had been no scars, so she filled them in with healthy, if rather pallid, flesh. The woman's hair wasn't right. It had been longer; something scruffy and unwashed. Dreadlocks, that was it. She scribbled them in and then she had it.

“I've seen you before,” she said. “At a demonstration in Edinburgh last year against Trident. You…”

Ruan thought it best not to continue. The protest had been one in a series of many against the U.K.'s nuclear weapons program, which was housed at Faslane naval base on Gare Loch, not too far from where they were now. The protests were normally rowdy but peaceful affairs attended by a mix of students, Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament activists, professional crusties, and genteel gray-haired old ladies. This particular protest involved a “die-in” outside Scottish Parliament, with everyone lying on the ground and feigning death during a visit by the defense secretary, who'd no doubt wished that they would stop pretending and get on with really being dead.

The woman had stripped off her green caftan, thick purple tights, and skimpy knickers, hurling each item at the line of police. The knickers landed right on a policeman's hat. When everybody else ignored her shrill cries for mass nudity, she kicked off the hand grasping her ankle, which belonged to the ponytailed man lying next to her, and skipped through the prone bodies. She hurdled the barricade and dashed toward the startled politician as he was about to climb into his car. The police intercepted her and dragged her off as she screamed abuse. All of this had been caught on camera and played repeatedly on the news, accompanied by smirking jokes from the presenters.

The woman looked at the ground. “As I said, I'm not that person any longer.”

Ruan realized that she'd just repaid the woman who saved her life by reminding her of an incident she clearly wanted to forget. She hadn't even expressed her gratitude for the intervention. “Thank you for helping me last night.”

“You're welcome.”

“What were you doing out there anyway?”

“Hunting.”

“Ah. That explains the bow and arrow. Which, by the way, you're very good with.”

“Thank you. I used to do archery when I was younger, before I became a pacifist.”

From the way she'd ended the dog, it was clear pacifism had only been a phase. “I don't even know your name. I'm Ruan Peat.”

“Fanny Peters. Come on, let me show you around.”

“Can I get dressed first?”

“Ah, of course. Old habits die hard, I'm afraid.”

They smiled at each other, and Ruan felt the warmth that only human companionship brought bleed through her. She had to fight to stop it thawing the emotions she'd done her best to keep on ice to maintain her sanity. She pulled on her clothes. As she did so she noticed that the smartphone she'd lifted from an empty house was plugged in and charging. She grabbed the phone and her sword through force of habit and walked to the door. As she approached, Fanny's breathing slowed. The ruined nostril quivered as she drew in deep breaths.

“I know you are here and it makes me happy,” Fanny said quietly, repeating the phrase she'd uttered upon their first meeting.

Ruan frowned. The lines on her forehead deepened when she passed through the door and noticed the key. It protruded from the outside of the door. Fanny had locked her in.

I'm sure she had a good reason
, Ruan thought.

The state of the hallway didn't help her discomfort. Fungus bloomed around the skirting board, while only a few scraps of wallpaper remained on the blistered walls. It smelled and spoke of ruin.

Fanny seemed to sense her unease. “Sorry about the state of the place. Nobody was in this one, so we left it. We'll decorate it for you if you decide to stay.”

Ruan stepped into the fresh air, reaching out to flake stones from the gray pebbledash covering the walls. As she did so her arm brushed the guttering, which creaked and swayed. The view outside was just as cheerless. Across the overgrown lawn sat the building she'd seen on her way in. It formed a large part of the pier that ran out over the water on a lattice of warped and worn wooden struts. Scudding layers of gray cloud and the houses and shops of Arrochar across the loch were visible through the charred skeleton of the building. Underfoot, weeds and clumps of moss sprouted from what appeared to be rails set into the concrete. The rails led from the ruined pier to semicircular stone structures with heavy steel doors. Hangars, perhaps.

“What is this place?” she said.

“It was a torpedo testing station, shut down in the eighties and left to rot.”

“Why do you stay here? I don't mean to be rude, but it's a bit skanky.”

“Lots of reasons. It's remote. It's easily defensible. And it has a rather appropriate symbolism considering what we do.”

“And what do you do?”

“Let me show you.”

Fanny followed the tracks to one of the hangars and rapped on the door. A steel plate slid open and a cloud of smoke puffed out. It held the same sweet, pungent fragrance that used to emanate from her brother Bryan's room when their parents were out. A pair of gold-rimmed spectacles appeared, from behind which lidded blue eyes peered out. The glasses darkened in reaction to the sun outside.

“Are you ready?” Fanny said.

The man took several deep breaths and said, “I know you are here and it makes me happy.”

Bugger
, Ruan thought.
Just my luck. This is some crazy cult.

As Fanny and the man talked in whispers, Ruan pulled out her phone and opened her messenger app to send a quick note to her best friend, Bridget. “Had a crazy night,” she wrote. “Just got more mental. Walked into a den of FREAKS! More later.”

She hit send and, as she always did, allowed herself a brief moment of hope that she would see the two little ticks that showed communications were working again and her friend was listening. When the clock icon indicated the message had gone nowhere—just as in the hundreds of other messages in her one-sided conversation—she squeezed the phone so hard the plastic case creaked.

She blinked rapidly, took a step backward, and considered running for it. For all she knew the hangar contained a sacrificial slab and dozens of robed acolytes with sharp knives, ready to sacrifice her to some freaky god. On the other hand, these were the only uninfected people she'd come across, and Fanny had saved her life last night. Metal scraped as a bolt was drawn back and Ruan stepped inside, fingers tightening around the hilt of her sword. The man who'd answered the door shuffled backward until his head butted up against the curved hangar wall. Instead of a robe, he wore a red and blue tie-dyed T-shirt and a pair of jeans. He was enormous, towering over Ruan by almost a foot, and had a bulky frame to match. The sparse covering on top of his scalp became a waterfall of blond hair that cascaded down his back in a long ponytail.

“This is Scott McDonald,” Fanny said.

“Ruan,” she said, holding out her hand.

He flinched, as though she were offering him a dead mouse lollipop instead of a handshake. Fanny stepped over and put a hand on his shoulder.

“It's okay,” she said. “You can do it.”

These people are seriously weird
, Ruan thought.

Then again, it was little wonder after all they'd been through. She'd developed her own strange habits, such as enjoying the taste of Pedigree Chum with fish oil and chicken, a tin of which she'd discovered at the bottom of a skip around the back of a supermarket at a particularly desperate moment. Perhaps it was just that serendipitous combination of hunger and thirst, but the moist, meaty chunks had electrified her taste buds and, as a regular taker of cod-liver oil in her old sporty life, she'd been aware of the benefits of added omega-3s. Since then, she'd always kept an eye out for that particular brand and flavor and ate it even when human food was readily available.

Scott, after a long puff on the joint he was clutching, reached out to take her hand. The contact from the massive paw was limp and fleeting, but it seemed to prompt palpable relief in him. Ruan turned her attention to the rest of the interior. A metal grille with an inset, padlocked door separated her from a windowless room lit by three harsh fluorescent strips. It seemed Fanny had a thing for locking people in. Bog-standard office furniture was crammed into every space above a snaking mess of cables connecting battered computers, monitors, and printers. The room was a fug of dope smoke, emanating from fat joints clutched between the fingers of three men and two women who'd risen from their seats to stare at her. Ruan curled her fingers around the grille.