The Veil (Testaments I and II) Page 8

  At dusk, I wake. We’ve cleared the mountains. In the distance there’s another city. Larger by far than the one we left behind us. Probably one of the largest cities in the world. In this light and at this distance there’s no way to tell what has happened there. We’ve seen no people on the journey. No animals. It can’t bode well. But maybe in that city, that huge city, there will be more like us. Greater numbers than we had back at the Station. And maybe they’re making a difference. Fighting back better than we ever could.

  Ike pulls up in a tree-lined road. From here we can’t see much of anything in front or behind. The shelter is pleasant but, of course, it could be dangerous too. He sets up the tent and I make the dinner – instant mashed potatoes and two cans of stew. It actually smells pretty good but even so, I can only manage about half of it. This time I split what’s left between Ike and Trixie. Just to be fair. Just to be nice.

  “How’re you feeling, Sherri?”

  Ike is all concern now. Determined to prove himself a better man. Or maybe he really does care. I don’t. I stand up and wander away from the campsite, out beyond the trees farther from the road. I can sense the looks passing between Trixie and Ike. I guess they must both be worried and that’s good. That’s what I wanted. Each of them worried in their own special way. Each of them ready to help me when I need help.

  Out here beyond the trees, the stars are out again. I want to reach up and pluck them. Pop them into my mouth and swallow suns. I’m excited about going to the new city. I think of all the things there that we can have. Abandoned shops full of everything we could possibly ever need. Houses of luxury and beauty – no servants, of course, but that would be a small matter. Anything we want. It’s all there in that city.

  And the stars. And the worlds that circle them. We could have all that too if we wanted. Why not? I’ve got this hunger. Not for food but for satisfaction, for fullness, for a surfeit of everything. I simply want. And isn’t that a good thing? Isn’t that so much better than the blankness I’ve been feeling these last months? Isn’t it better than wondering how I’ll face the next day; the next night?

  I giggle and stifle it. Laughter is too loud in the darkness.

  I’m alive and full of desire. This is good. I’m changing. Waking up. Me and my baby, we’ll go to the city and we’ll have whatever we want. And there will be people there to share it with. Yes, we need more people with us.

  But then what? After we have everything we could ever want or need, what then? What comes after that?

  Something’s wrong with my feet. They’re pressing against the insides of my boots like they’re swollen. And it’s—

  Ahh. That’s better. My roots have split out of the leather and the relief is… God, that feels good. I’m gripping the ground with two hundred fingers. Pulling at it. Taking away from it. In the starlight my hands have become very much like my feet. Long tendrils reach out and wave in the night air. They want to go to the city and take… everything.

  But what comes after everything? The question just won’t go away.

  I know what the answer is but I don’t want to think about it.

  When everything you have is not enough, there is nothing else. You can never be content. An emotion swells within me, coming up fast and huge and I’m not sure I have the strength to hold this kind of feeling. Nothing will ever be enough. Nothing will ever satisfy. And yet, I must pursue satiety. I must consume. I have to at least try to fill the emptiness. The emotion bursts up and out through me, destroying all hope, and with it comes the bitterest tears.

  Beneath the richness of the stars, I howl with loss for what I’ll never have.

  ***

  Sherri was smart. She knew Ike would try to protect her if it turned out she beat the thing that was taking her over. She knew if she made it to term, we’d both look after the baby. But she also knew both of us wouldn’t hesitate to blow her away if she turned. She had it all worked out.

  But she was wrong.

  When we heard the wailing we both grabbed our guns and ran out to the field she was standing in. Her hands and feet had roots like claws and she was weeping to the sky. It was awful to hear that sound out here in the country. I’d prayed we’d never hear that sound again. But we’d brought the sickness of the Commuters with us. Inside Sherri.

  Inside my best friend and the only woman that ever earned the name ‘mother’.

  She came toward us, reaching out those arms like all she wanted was to take us both to whatever hell she’d discovered. Ike couldn’t raise his shotgun at first. Not until she got real close. I could see the tears in his eyes. He wanted forgiveness and – what do they call it? – redemption, I think. Like the priests give out at confession on Sundays. I couldn’t give it to him. Sherri was his last chance at it. His last chance to be a good man. Because of that, he didn’t raise his gun until the last possible moment. When he did, he couldn’t fire it.

  So I stepped up to the plate and I shot my mom. The first person I ever killed, and she was the one that mattered most. If the Commuter sickness didn’t take away her soul, I pray she’s in heaven thanking me for it. I know I was only doing what she expected me to do. Just the way she planned it before she lost control.

  So, it’s just me and Ike now. A man that will never be my father, even though he could be my real dad’s double, loves me in the same screwed up kind of way.

  When we see the brown areas that have spread out from the city, we turn back. There’s no reason to get into trouble. We could go in for a few hours while it’s light but we know what we’ll see so what’s the point?

  Ike finds a road that leads north. He says we’re going to Canada. Maybe what happened here didn’t happen up there, he says. I don’t think he really believes it though. And neither do I.

  All we need is a reason to survive. Some sign that there’s going to be something else apart from the Commuter sickness and the way it’s spread through everything. I don’t know if we’ll find that here or in Canada. I don’t know if we’ll ever find it anywhere.

  I can relax though. Sherri gave me something I can’t even thank her for - not to her face. I do it in my prayers instead. She taught me how to use Barnaby. I can use him to protect myself from Ike if he stops being a partner and starts trying to be my dad. But the real power she gave me is the power to not be like the Commuters. Not ever. Because if it comes to that, she’s given me the power to make my own decision.

  She knew that’s what she was doing the day she taught me how to shoot. It can’t have been easy for her, giving me that power. That means a lot. She gave me the freedom to choose my own way. I think that means Sherri was the only person who ever truly loved me.

  EPILOGUE

  We’ve been driving for two more days since I killed my mom.

  More and more, we see the rusty brown fingers of the Commuter sickness spreading out into the land, sucking the life out of it. Ike has stopped talking to me now. I guess any moment he might pull the truck over and try to get what he wants from me just once before he gives in to the truth: fact is, we’re running out of places to go.

  I slip my hand inside my backpack and finger Barnaby’s safety to off.

  TESTAMENT II

  THE FAILING FLESH

  The tendrils cradle us, suspended upright high above the floor of the cavern. Occasional evanescent flashes from above light up the surroundings for a few moments. The rest of the time it’s utterly black. I don’t know what’s worse: seeing our situation as it is or replaying it in the dying afterglow of those purple and green strobes.

  No one speaks.

  We communicate only in whispers or screams – whispers to share stories or words of comfort, screams when someone is drawn upwards. If we cough, as many often do because of the dust at the surface, we stifle it into a shoulder or the crook of an elbow.

  Dangling like this, it gives you vertigo. No one knows exactly how high we are but it’s higher than anyone wants to be. If the tendrils released, we’d plummet into the void,
rupturing our legs like sacks of mince and gristle on the cavern floor. Hanging here in the dark, it’s easy to believe that slip, that drop, could come at any time.

  Terrified we might fall at any instant, we neither rest nor sleep longer than a few minutes at a time. And yet, the more likely outcome is that we’ll rise, propelled upwards in the darkness by the thick, serpentine tendrils.

  I decided hours ago that falling would be better.

  ***

  I remember the last ‘normal’ thing we did together as a family; our Sunday evening ritual.

  Two large, stone-baked pizzas from a tiny local Italian restaurant. Jake chose toppings for ‘his’ pizza and Tara chose something less extreme for her and I to share. Jake never finished, of course, but that wasn’t the point. It was our sacred night of the week. If he wanted triple pepperoni and extra cheese, that’s what he got. When he was done, Tara and I finished up what was left. We took this meal on the sofa, Jake sitting between us in his PJs, our pizza boxes before us on the split-log coffee table. Sunday night was movie night and, again, the choice was Jake’s. It didn’t matter that we’d seen Ice Age thirty times or more. That almost made it better. More familiar. More reliable.

  We laughed at the familiar gags, especially Scrat and his doomed love affair with the acorn. We gorged ourselves on pizza. We cuddled up, close and comfortable. A Neolithic family might have done something similar, aeons before, huddled around the fire in their cave, eating deer off the bone. Over the next few days, I thought about that night a lot. It wasn’t the togetherness I missed; we still had that. Sort of. It was the pizza. For a few days, I kept believing there was still a chance for special family time, even without the home-delivered junk food and funny movies.

  On that last night, Jake fell asleep before the end of the movie, as he usually did. I lifted him up, ragdoll-slack, and took him to his bed. Tara followed, standing a little too far away as I tucked his duvet tightly around him – he was a thrasher and within an hour would be uncovered. You did what you could. One at a time, we knelt to lay a kiss on his forehead and retreated. Even that gesture was ritualistic, as though we were lighting candles in a silent church.

  Back on the sofa, it was quiet and chilly. Without Jake between us, the hole in our marriage was a ragged tear. We touched feet across the cushions but it was a sticking plaster on a bullet wound. Without Jake and the movie and pizza, there were only threads left holding us together.

  I think if the world had continued, if we’d had more time in that context we might have worked it out. Jake might have been spared losing both the world and his family. But that’s a pointless observation now, isn’t it? No one had that luxury. All of us were out of time. The new context was upon us and it was unrecognisable.

  Tara went to bed soon after Jake. I spent the last night of civilisation masturbating over fetishist internet porn, knowing it was only love I needed to fill me up. Long after midnight, I went to bed wondering how I’d managed to end up in the wrong life. Only a few years before, everything had seemed so perfect. As I fell asleep it occurred to me that it was safety and familiarity, not perfection, I had pursued.

  Pursued? I’d cornered it, roped it and slung it over my shoulders. I wore blandness as my yoke.

  ***

  The Hush – that’s what Tara and I called it – began at the end of the summer.

  Rumours were that a massive solar ejection had spiked our atmosphere. Whatever it was affected everything with an electrical circuit in it. Just like that, every iPod, TV, computer and phone died. Vehicles, too. On Friday the third of September, planes, helicopters and microlights dropped out of the sky in a hail of steel. No one searched for survivors. No one came to assist a population suddenly severed from itself. If I was a religious man I’d have said it was as though God had hung up on his creation. Slammed the phone down and left the room.

  After that, things got very quiet.

  But it wasn’t all silence. At night, gangs – of individuals somehow changed – roamed the streets and conurbations, snatching people from their homes. Snatching them and dragging them away. There was something driving the gangs; a sickness of some kind. They were stricken.

  We heard about people ‘getting organised’ and ‘making a stand’ but I wanted nothing to do with it. It was the cities that were hit first, the places where people had already chosen to congregate. It struck me that we’d have a better chance if we stayed away from everyone. Even Norton-on-the-Marsh got dangerous after dark. Each morning there were fewer people looting the abandoned shops for food and water; each night the weeping of the Stricken grew louder as their numbers multiplied. Sooner or later they were going to find us in the cellar and break in. I couldn’t allow that.

  I’ve been an estate agent for one small company, Forbes Foster, ever since I left school. I’m a house-hawker, spilling the same half-truths to the same kinds of ladder-climbers day in and day out. The only time I didn’t hate the job was the day I moved Tara and Jake out of Norton and into the nearby countryside. There was a house in the hills to the east that had been on the market for almost three years. It was beautiful and relatively new, made of Cotswold stone in the traditional way, but the location was awful. It rested about a third of the way up a shallow hill and faced north. To its left was a dense pine wood. Even in summer, the house only sat in direct sunlight for a few hours. It was robust, roomy and beautiful, but it was a dungeon.

  At first light, when the wailing stopped and the Stricken retreated to wherever it was they hid during daylight hours, the three of us hefted our packs and hiked the seven miles to Compton House. If it hadn’t been for my career, we probably wouldn’t have lasted another forty-eight hours in Norton. Compton House extended our lives for three weeks.

  ***

  A ripple passes through the tendrils.

  Gasps whisper and echo off the cavern walls. I’ve been dozing and I come to consciousness with a spasm that racks my whole body. For a moment I think I’m falling. I reach into the darkness for a handhold, pulling back as I realise where I am. There’s no need to hang on. Like everyone else, I’m held in a firmer grip than my hands could ever exert.

  And anyway, I’ve touched the tendrils before with my fingertips. I’ve no desire for more contact than there already is. Their surface is similar to a cow’s tongue – rough and sticky, with uncountable tiny barbs angled upward. Dripping endlessly down over their sand-papery surface is a viscous fluid. If the abrasive contact didn’t hold you up, this gluey mucus would. It’s thicker than honey but oozes in partially-congealed streams, like a resin of some kind. Whatever it is, it smells of supermarket vegetables left to sweat too long in their plastic bags. When relaxed and extended, the surface of the tendrils is similar to the bark of trees. When agitated and contracting, they thicken and bunch like the tentacles of jellyfish. It’s like dangling from phlegm-coated Velcro. If you’re very quiet and very still, you can feel a pulse inside the tendrils. It’s too slow to be a heartbeat but it makes one thing irrefutable – the tendrils have some kind of life, even if we can’t say what kind of life it is.

  The seam of my jeans is cutting me in half. I try to get comfortable, moving as gently as possible, and manage to shift the thicker band of material to the right side of my groin. If you struggle too much the tendrils squeeze you until you’re quiescent again. It happened to me once and I thought my ribcage was going to collapse. I must have passed out with asphyxia. When I came round I was in agony from my upper arms to my ankles. I haven’t struggled again since then.

  I’m fortunate to be wearing durable clothes. Others have had a tougher time. When I first arrived here, trying to make sense of where I was and what had happened, I heard a woman’s voice, somewhere to my left in the hanging forest of python-thick vines.

  “Jimmy? Jimmy! Can you hear me?”

  If Jimmy was among us, he didn’t or couldn’t reply. “Jimmy, please. Don’t play with me. I know you’re here. You have to be here.”

  Silence.

>   The silence of a vast cathedral with a full congregation whose very breath was hushed to secrecy.

  I heard the whisper of fabric over nylon. A swaying began as the woman’s struggles affected the tendrils nearest her – mine among them. Our rough, sticky bonds began to ripple and pulsate. The woman screamed.

  “Jimmy. JIMMY. What is this fucking stuff? Get it off me!”

  Lilac and emerald lightning burst soundlessly far overhead.

  I saw the woman. She wore a white dress with a rose-pattern print. The hem had already ridden to her hips, exposing long slender legs in sheer pantyhose. She wore one red high-heeled shoe. All I could wonder was where she might have come from dressed like that. Even her hair, though tossed and tangled by her writhing, looked recently coiffed and highlighted. Her lipstick was smeared and tears had caused black streams to run down her cheeks. One of the tendrils contracted on her left side, splitting her tights and tearing them from her legs. Like a balloon bursting, the nylons just disappeared.

  I watched her struggles get wilder as she tried to kick and punch the muscular stalactites draped around her. Her screams became more panicked, higher pitched, the words becoming indistinct. Above us, the iridescence intensified.

  Finally someone whispered, “Don’t move. Don’t make a noise. It only excites them.”

  The woman took no notice.

  The tendril that had scrape-sucked her tights away had also torn her skin. She looked like she’d slid ten yards over broken glass. Other tendrils came to life around her and her dress disappeared; ripped away like cheap wrapping paper. The sheer weight of the tendrils was enough to dampen any movement, no matter how strong or determined she was. The woman weakened fast but she didn’t stop screaming. By the flickering, gaudy lights, I thought I saw her blood evaporate off the surface of the tendril that had first moved against her. It wasn’t evaporation, though. The tendril had absorbed the fluid into itself.