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  Peter and Tom sat in the darkness of her living room, the only light coming in from the still-open front door and the flames from the log fire in the hearth. The afternoon was stretching towards evening; it would soon be dark outside. Peter had glanced at Tom once or twice while the woman’s head was bowed and motioned at his wrist, but Tom had shaken his head angrily. It was clear that the woman needed to get a few things off her chest before she would even begin to think straight.

  Tom stiffened as a high-pitched howl reached his ears. Both Peter and Ceri turned towards the open door as Tom ran to it. He had left the driver’s window of the Jaguar open when he had come to investigate the house and it was due to this that the dog’s howl reached the house as loud and clear as though Dusty was standing on the path outside the front door, not on the back seat of the Jaguar. Tom glanced wildly around but could see nothing out of place. No-one and no thing had approached the car. So why–?

  A rough hand grabbed Tom by the upper arm and he was yanked back into the house.

  “Quick!” hissed Peter’s voice in his ear. “Grab my hand! No time to explain!”

  “But—”

  “GRAB MY HAND!”

  The force of Peter’s yell shocked Tom into obeying and his right hand was engulfed by Peter’s. In the gloom, he could just make out that Ceri grasped Peter’s other hand, her face twisted into a grimace of terror.

  “HOLD HANDS! FORM A CIRCLE! DO IT!” As he shouted, Peter yanked them towards each other.

  Tom reached out his left hand and grabbed hold of Ceri’s free hand.

  “What—” he began, but wasn’t silenced this time by Peter. Something slammed into his mind with the force of a runaway truck. He gasped and was only vaguely aware that Ceri was making a high-pitched keening sound. From somewhere further away, he could still hear Dusty howling.

  His mind was being examined. An intelligence, far superior to his own, infinitely superior, was probing, deeper, deeper . . .

  As the gloom deepened to blackness and he felt his knees begin to buckle, the pressure lessened, lifted like removing the lid of a pressure cooker, and was gone.

  Tom sank to his knees, still clutching the others’ hands. He looked to his left. Ceri had also fallen to the floor; her head hung down on her chest and she gulped deep convulsive sobs.

  Other than the sound of Ceri’s sobbing and his own ragged breaths, silence had returned. Dusty had stopped howling.

  Tom looked up at Peter. Peter’s eyes glittered darkly in the firelight as he returned Tom’s gaze with a grimness that Tom hadn’t seen before.

  “I have delayed too long.” Peter’s voice was as toneless as a broken whistle. “They are coming.”

  Part 3:

  Auld Lang Syne

  Chapter Sixteen

  The nation that had stood almost alone against the might of the Third Reich and had refused to bow even when defeat to the mighty Nazi war machine had seemed inevitable, was brought to its knees—rather, flat on its dying face—by an organism invisible to the naked eye.

  In England, Scotland and Wales, the Millennium Bug had left alive a little under eleven thousand people out of a combined population of fifty-nine million. Around three thousand of those had since perished by suicide or starvation or accident. Nearly all of the remaining eight thousand now headed for London.

  Not many had tried to resist the calling. Minds still numbed by shock and loss had proved an easy target, wide open to intrusion. Those who did resist performed a brief exercise in futility: the sheer mass of intellect brought to bear against their comparatively puny minds made it a one-sided contest.

  Cars, vans, motorbikes, boats, bicycles . . . whatever was at hand was utilised in obeying the compulsion to head to England’s capital. One middle-aged man, paralysed from the waist down in a skiing accident, travelled the sixty miles from his home in Northampton in his wheelchair, forcing himself up steep inclines until his hands were raw and bleeding. An elderly woman, who could not drive, set off from Portsmouth on foot, a trek of around one hundred miles; she almost made it as far as the M25, the motorway that rings Greater London, when her heart gave out just outside Guildford.

  Despite a few incidental deaths like that of the elderly lady, the vast majority reached London alive. The calling of the Commune had not been sufficient to override the survivors’ basic instinct to keep on surviving. Minds that might have been open to suggestions to walk off a cliff or slit wrists had already taken those and similar options.

  No, the Commune did not possess the strength to achieve mass suicide. Not yet.

  * * * * *

  She stared out of the car window as they passed through villages and skirted around towns. The car juddered over potholes that had appeared during the cold snap in November and would never now be repaired. The wind had strengthened, whipping up old newspaper and crisp packets that had come free from bin bags deposited at the roadside and never collected, now torn open by cats and birds.

  Scrawny dogs and stringy cats darted away at their approach. Cows and horses watched them from fields, surviving on grass and rainwater. Sheep blundered across roads in search of richer pastures. Birds rose at the sound of the vehicles and circled until they had passed. But she saw no people.

  “A land of song that’s lost its voice,” she murmured, too quietly for her companion to hear.

  Strings of forlorn fairy lights swung in the wind; plastic santas and snowmen leaned crookedly in gardens; they had to slow down to steer around an almost life-sized plastic sleigh and reindeer that had been blown into the roadway.

  “My dad was in a choir,” she said, a tear trickling down her cheek.

  “Sorry?” said Tom.

  “My dad. He was in a male voice choir,” said Ceri. “He and Mum went almost immediately. Neither of them had been well for a while so the virus got them within hours. I think. . . .” She paused to swipe angrily at the tears. “I think they must have infected Paul. He came with me to the hospital. And Paul infected Rhys.”

  “Paul’s your husband?”

  “And Rhys was my son.”

  Tom said nothing more and they lapsed into silence for a few miles. They were heading north, through the middle of Wales. They had started off following the A470 towards the Brecon Beacons, but had found it blocked near Merthyr by a multi-vehicle pile-up that they could not find a way around. They had been forced to backtrack, the further delay making Peter jittery judging by the anguished look he’d shot them as he’d turned the Range Rover around, and had since been following winding B roads and lanes.

  “Peter knows about the virus,” said Tom, breaking the silence.

  “What do you mean?” She half twisted in her seat to face him.

  “He knows how it started.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know. But he said it was started deliberately. I don’t know whether to believe him.” Tom continued to look straight ahead, following Peter’s Range Rover closely. “He said he has something to show me. When we stop I’ll make him show me. Show us.”

  When they had arrived at Peter’s cottage the previous evening, Peter had refused point-blank to discuss anything. He had looked drawn and haggard so Tom hadn’t pressed it. As soon as they had loaded the Range Rover with the containers of diesel, food and water, and camping equipment, Peter had wanted to leave, but it was Tom’s turn to be obstinate.

  “Absolutely not,” he said. “I’m shattered. That thing that happened in Ceri’s, it’s left me feeling exhausted. It was as much as I could do to drive here. I can’t drive any more tonight, especially through the dark. And look at Ceri. She’s drained. Truth be told, you look like shit, too. We all need to rest.”

  Peter opened his mouth to argue, then closed it again as his shoulders slumped. “You’re right. But we have to leave at first light. Put some distance between us and here. Then we’ll talk.”

  They had spent a fitful night, Ceri in Peter’s bed, the men on the settee and armchair, but all looked slightly improved in mor
ning’s light. They had left Peter’s village a little after eight o’clock and had been driving constantly since.

  Ceri craned her neck to look into the back of the Jaguar. “Dusty’s still fast asleep,” she said.

  “Good,” said Tom. “I was worried that he’d be affected by all that howling, but he seems fine. Just tired, like all of us.”

  Ceri drew in a deep breath. “That . . . whatever it was yesterday in my house . . . I think Peter stopped it doing something to us.”

  “I think so, too. But I want some answers. Are you hungry?”

  “A little.”

  Tom pressed the heel of his hand into the centre of the steering wheel, sounding the horn. When Peter slowed down to glance back at them, Ceri mimed forking food into her mouth and Peter stopped in the middle of the road. Tom did likewise and killed the engine. He glanced around. Dark spindly fir trees grew to the edge of the road on one side; on the other was a drystone wall with empty shrubland beyond.

  “Hmm. . . .” said Tom. “The middle of nowhere.”

  Ceri smiled. He wasn’t much for small talk, but she was starting to like Tom. She had been very unsure at first, had very nearly allowed them to drive away. It maybe had been the shock of discovering that she wasn’t the last person left alive, but she felt glad that she had come out of it in time to call them back. She hadn’t done so with any intention of going with them; she merely craved human company after almost two weeks of grief and solitude. Until that invasion of her head, if that is what it had been. If the other man hadn’t been there to do whatever it was he’d done, she dreaded to think what would have become of her. She had felt her sanity beginning to slip away like sand through fingers . . .

  After that, going with them had seemed the obvious thing to do. She barely gave a glance at her house after she closed the door behind them. It had stopped feeling like home when she had returned from the hospital a widow and mother without a child.

  Ceri opened the car door and got out, glad to be able to stretch her legs. Peter had spread a tarpaulin in the middle of the road and was setting out tins, bottles of water and plastic plates.

  “A proper little picnic,” she said. “Da iawn.”

  “I know that one,” said Peter with a smile. “‘Very good’. I married a Welsh girl.”

  Tom also got out and opened the rear door. Dusty bounded out, seeming to grin, and almost knocked her over in his delight at seeing her. She noticed that he didn’t run over to Peter. Instead, the dog ran to the treeline and squatted.

  “Erm,” said Tom, looking from Dusty to her. “I’m just going to nip into the trees for the same thing. Ah, not precisely the same thing, you understand. What I need can be accomplished standing up. . . .”

  “Well, I’m going behind that wall,” she replied. “Either way, I’ll be twttying down.”

  “Twttying down?” said Peter, eyebrows raised. “Don’t recall that one.”

  “Squatting,” she said and almost uttered a giggle.

  While she protected her modesty with the stone wall and conducted her business, Ceri wondered at how good it felt to smile and joke, no matter how feebly. It didn’t make the grief and pain disappear, but pushed them away a little. For a few moments, she felt human again.

  * * * * *

  Joe Lowden was a northern boy through and through. Born and raised in the fishing town of Grimsby, he had never been further south than Nottingham. That had been on a school trip to Sherwood Forest when his class had been studying the legend of Robin Hood. Joe hadn’t been particularly impressed; unsurprisingly, the forest had amounted to little more than a bunch of trees. The ancient oak in which Robin was reputed to have hidden from the dastardly Sheriff of Nottingham was fenced off so that Joe couldn’t do the one thing he had been looking forward to: climbing inside. The best part of the trip had been the journey home when he and his classmates shot at each other with the plastic bows and arrows they’d bought at the gift shop, until the spoilsport teachers confiscated them. It hadn’t been Joe’s fault that one of his arrows had ended up stuck to the driver’s bald head—the boy he’d been aiming at had ducked.

  School had never been Joe’s strong point. He left the first chance he had when he reached sixteen. He told the careers officer that he intended going to work on his father’s trawler, but that was a lie. His father had once or twice suggested that as a possible career path for Joe, but without conviction. He knew that the sea didn’t run in Joe’s blood as it did in his own. If that made him wonder about the source of Joe’s blood, he never mentioned it to Joe. In truth, he never mentioned much of anything to Joe, which suited Joe just fine. The less interest his father took in him, the more he could pursue his own ambitions.

  His mother, even when sober, showed even less interest in her only child. Occasionally, she’d thrust a tenner into his hand for him to run down the offie for a packet of fags or a bottle of cheap wine, telling him he could keep the change. Most of the time, she sat in front of the TV drinking or had her awful friends round and they’d all get drunk together.

  When his father came home, filthy and stinking of fish, they would row, he would start drinking and occasionally slap her, then they’d storm off to separate bedrooms.

  Joe tended to stay out until late into the night, creeping back in to his tiny bedroom long after they had passed out, her from wine and vodka, him from whiskey and exhaustion.

  Unlike many boys his age, Joe had no love for football or sport in general. He didn’t read, though he could so long as the author hadn’t used too many big words; he simply couldn’t see the point. He didn’t have a computer or games console. He occasionally went to the cinema to see an action film or anything with zombies; they could keep the arty-farty stuff, though.

  Nevertheless, Joe had developed an interest; one he had discovered when barely into his teens and one that, now he was approaching eighteen, had become an all-consuming passion. Not one that he could share with his parents, though they unwittingly funded it in part by helpfully leaving purses and wallets lying around the place, and by not being careful enough with their valuable items of jewellery. Petty theft and the occasional burglary provided much of the remaining necessary cash. Any shortfall he made up with his fortnightly benefits—as if they seriously expected him to use it to try to find a job.

  The onset of the Millennium Bug and the swift demise of his parents and everyone else he knew had given him a new freedom to indulge his passion. He had fallen sick himself, but had barely noticed. He spent most of his days in a fug of delirium anyway; a touch of flu made little difference.

  He wondered briefly if his parents had found release from the pain of their existence, then found that he didn’t much care. Quite why his maker had deemed it fit to spare him, he spent not a moment pondering. He had no time for traditional gods. He worshipped the gods of cannabis, ecstasy and mephodrone. Soon, he thought, he would graduate to the higher deities: the gods of cocaine and heroin.

  Joe knew where most of the dealers in Grimsby and the surrounding areas lived. He had never passed a driving test, but that needn’t stop him now. The Filth had gone the way of everyone else and he could drive where and how he pleased. And if he banged up a few cars along the way, who was there to give a monkey’s?

  Within days of the streets falling quiet and deserted, Joe had accumulated a good-sized suitcase-full of every leisure drug that had been doing the rounds in the North-east when the virus had hit. He took the case to the poshest hotel in Grimsby, to the poshest room that didn’t smell like an abattoir, and indulged. Boy, did he indulge!

  When the wave of mental energy hit him like a brick one afternoon, Joe was lying on a king-sized bed, eyes open but glazed, dreaming of rainbow bridges and flying serpents and subterranean lakes of molten white gold. As he slowly came out of the fugue, he felt a longing to go to London.

  He didn’t pause to wonder why he suddenly had this urge, but it seemed as good a place as any to find more drugs. No he chided himself Better. The best. L
ondon—where the streets are paved with marijuana.

  An image, as clear as a multi-pixel photo, shone bright and clear in his mind. Plastic bags of weed and amphs and angel dust and blues and . . . everywhere his mind’s eye looked, the bags waited, on pavements, on walls, in bus stops, to a backdrop of St Paul’s dome and Big Ben and a red double-decker bus, for him to pick up.

  Clutching his suitcase of somewhat depleted goodies, he headed out of the hotel, found a car containing petrol and set off for the Big Smoke.

  * * * * *

  Lunch consisted of cold beans and meat, followed by tinned pineapples. Tom suggested heating the beans with Peter’s camping stove, but Peter insisted they didn’t have time.

  Ceri passed on the pineapples. Instead, she took a battered packet of cigarettes from her pocket. She offered it to her companions who both shook their heads.

  “Yeah, it’s a bad habit,” she said, “though don’t suppose it much matters now.” She lit the cigarette and gave a satisfied sigh. “I can stop feeling guilty about fags now.”

  Tom smiled at her, then turned to Peter. “So where exactly are we headed?” he asked.

  “North,” said Peter. He avoided Tom’s gaze. Tom suspected he knew why.

  “I’m not going any further, you know,” he said quietly. “Not without some answers.”

  Tom was aware from the corner of his eye of Ceri pausing in mid drag to watch the two men closely.

  “I meant to talk to you about that,” said Peter. Now he did look at Tom. “They’re coming after me. You and Ceri may not be safe. Perhaps it would be better if we separated.”

  “Who are coming after you, Peter?” Tom still spoke quietly and deliberately. Otherwise, he felt, he would explode with his need to know.

  Peter sighed. “Okay. I suppose it’s time to tell you a little more.” He glanced from Tom to Ceri, then back to Tom. “Showing you would be better. And quicker.”

  Tom nodded. He glanced enquiringly at Ceri who also nodded. “Show us.”