The Plague Chronicles
Author: Guy N. Smith
Date: 2022-07-05 00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Horror
Description: Book 2 in the Dark Imperium series. In the void and upon the worlds of Greater Ultramar, the battle for the Imperium continues. Intent on rebuilding his home realm and using it as a base to reconstruct the ravaged stellar empire of mankind, the returned primarch Roboute Guilliman proceeds with his war to drive Mortarion and his Death Guard Traitor Legion from the domain of the Ultramarines. But when Guilliman brings his brother to battle upon the diseased plains of Parmenio, the intervention of a greater power in their fraternal struggle threatens to upend the Imperial Regent’s understanding o
Publisher: Black Hill Books

The Plague Chronicles - Kindle Version 1.01

(c) Guy N Smith 1993 - 2012

Published by Black Hill Books, November 2012

ISBN : 978-1-907846-58-8

First Published by Piatkus Books December 1993.

Converted to Ebook from original paperback by Scan2Ebook.com

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Contents

Title

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

The End

The Drought

And the fish in the river died; and the river stank; and there was blood throughout all the land.

Exodus c. VII v: 21

Chapter One

‘Just look at that!’

Susan Chibnell turned the tap full on. A jet of sandy water gushed into the sink, sprayed off the stacked dishes, over the units and on to the window like dirty raindrops. She stared in horror and revulsion, and said angrily, ‘We can’t use this water. We’ll catch some terrible disease, typhoid or diphtheria.’

She turned slowly, regarding her husband, who sat reading the paper at the Formica-topped table. Damn him, he couldn’t give a shit about anything except himself. Even in his office clothes he exuded that macho image he had been cultivating over the past five years. Body building in the gym, jogging, pistol practice at the club range, anything that he thought put him a muscular head and shoulders above other men and 6 foot 2 inches above women! And Mark was shaping up that way, too – worse. She didn’t know how much longer she could go on like this; she was clinging on to her marriage by her fingertips for the boy’s sake, no other reason.

‘Boil it, then, and drink bottled water if you’re that worried.’ He barely looked up from the sports page. ‘I drank far worse than that in Egypt and it never did me any harm.’

She half wished that she hadn’t said anything, knowing what his reply would be. He boasted of his globetrotting but this was cushioned from hardship; it had to be since he ran a travel company and took tourists to far-flung places. They wouldn’t put up with poor hygiene and living rough; even on safari they expected the best of everything to be brought along. Anyway, right now Trevor was drinking Perrier and lemon. He looked after himself, make no mistake about that.

‘There’s a water shortage.’ He folded the paper and held it up, tapping the front page. ‘Maybe you have difficulty reading. Five months and virtually no rain. A drought. Restrictions; no car washing or watering backyards; conserve every drop you can. We have to be grateful we’ve got any water at all. There’s even been a run on bottled water down at the drugstore; this is the last bottle they’d got and they won’t be getting any more till next week. I’ll try and get a crate uptown to take with us tomorrow.’

She sighed, turning back to the sink. A week’s vacation and they were going up to the cabin. They could have gone to exotic places for free, but oh, no, not Trevor. ‘I see those places all the time, they get boring. What I need is to relax, some fishing and hunting. You can do whatever you please and you’ll have all day to do it in. Please yourself, feel free, but just don’t get under my feet.’

She tried to figure out ways in which she might pass the coming week; it wasn’t going to be easy. Sunbathing? That would have been fine on a beach so long as she kept well away from the water’s edge and the chance of a shark coming in close. But there wasn’t any coastline up at the cabin, just a dirty pool that Thompson, the farmer who owned the land, had the nerve to call a lake. It stank in hot weather; worse, it was full of fish and Trevor and Mark would catch them, bring them back and expect her to clean and cook them. Ugh! Slimy with dead eyes – the very thought had her wanting to throw up. And there were snakes and insects in the brush; she dared not sunbathe in case one slithered up on her, stung or bit her.

And there was no TV, just the radio. Susan wasn’t a big reader, either. Women’s magazines were about her limit; she couldn’t see the point in reading a novel, it was just somebody else’s imagination, a story they had dreamed up. As for romantic books, that was a bloody laugh! Romance in books was about as far from reality as you could get. They were a con, led you into something that was a damned sight harder to get yourself out of.

Trevor would be off the whole time with his fishing rod and gun. God, she hated guns, they ought to be banned from private ownership, just kept for the police and armed forces. Now Mark was getting interested in them and his father was encouraging him. Mark was unpredictable, even dangerous. A sudden uneasy thought crossed her mind.

‘Trev?’

‘Uh?’ He was engrossed in an account of the Eagles’ match the previous evening.

‘Trev, where’s Mark?’

‘In his room.’

‘Have you checked?’

‘He went in there after supper.’

Susan dried her hands and threw the dish cloth on the unit. ‘I’ll check, right now.’

‘Christ!’

She ignored her husband and pushed past him to fling open the adjoining door that led to Mark’s bedroom. A stench of stale sweat hit her. She saw the unmade bed, a rumple of sheets spilling down to the floor, strewn camouflage clothing, an unsheathed fishing knife. The computer was switched on, symbols flickering across the screen. But there was no sign of her son. Early-evening sunlight slanted in through the open window.

‘He’s not here!’ A shout that bordered on panic, her stomach cramping.

‘He’s around.’

She turned back into the kitchen, her attractive features anguished, her blonde hair awry. She punched a fist into the palm of her other hand, yelling, ‘He’s not, he’s gone! He’s probably gone uptown to play the video machines while you sit on your ass.’

‘He’s maybe in the john.’

She looked but knew that Mark wouldn’t be there. Because he’d gone out the window, shinned down the waste pipe, two storeys to the street below. It would have been all the same to the boy if it had been fifteen or twenty. Trevor had made him like that, a daredevil, and it could only end in one of two ways; death or a prison cell. The boy was bad and getting worse by the day.

‘I’ll strap his ass when he comes back.’

‘Which is your answer to everything. God, how I wish he had a father!’

‘Don’t let’s start that all over again.’

‘Trev, we have to talk. Soon. About us.’

‘We’ve talked.’

‘And what’s it come to? Back to square one, worse than before. We’re getting nowhere and Mark will suffer. Already he’s been in trouble with the police, stealing from stores, vandalism. Soon it’ll be court, they’ll take him away.’

‘I’ve done everything I can. Hell, I’m taking him fishing and hunting next week.’

‘Exactly. All you think in terms of is killing and hurting. Soon it’ll be people, not animals. His education is shit, his reading age is nine and struggling. He plays hookey at least once a week.’

‘He’s backward and that’s your fault as much as mine,’ he mocked her.

‘We’ll talk next week, for definite.’ She walked past him back to the sink. That water had a smell that reminded her of the lake up by the cabin. ‘I’ll make sure we do. In the meantime, I think you ought to go out and look for him.’

‘It’s a big city.’

‘Sure, but you know where the look – the video arcades.’

‘He’ll come back when he’s out of money.’

‘Or else he’ll steal some.’

‘All right, I’ll go and look for him.’

‘Thank you.’ Sure, Trevor would go uptown to one of the arcades. He’d probably be home long after Mark, the worse for drink. Susan sighed. The only consolation was that it would get him out of the flat for the evening. When their relationship got to that stage, there was little left. She had thought a lot about leaving him lately. It wasn’t easy; she’d be abandoning the boy; he’d stick with his father and that would be the end. That was the only reason she stayed.

Had they been living in Britain, she would in all probability have gone back to her mother. For a cooling-off period, anyway, an attempt to sort out her life. In the end it might yet come to that and she would leave her husband and son to wallow in their Rambo-type fantasy world. But not right now; the long journey was a daunting prospect in a time of stress.

Secretly, she had been pining for her homeland for a long time now – London with its unique atmosphere, and the surrounding countryside. The States had been a promised land when she first met and fell in love with Trevor. A new beginning. Disillusionment had been a gradual erosion of her dreams. She missed her own friends; everybody she knew was connected with Trevor in some way. He had conned them in the same way that he had conned her in the beginning; with smooth talk. People believed his every word until they found out otherwise, and maybe she was the only one who had ever found him out, because she was close to him.

She was prepared to believe that he hadn’t always been the way he was now. Success in a cut-throat industry had left its mark on him, changed him. Dirty tricks were all part of the game when you had to get one up on your rivals just to survive in a commercial jungle. The city was a cruel place; you didn’t know who your neighbour was; he might be the one who mugged you next time you stepped out into the street. Even if it wasn’t him, he wouldn’t come to your rescue when he heard your screams.

People got mugged every night. Sometimes somebody would phone the police from the safety of their apartment, but mostly they didn’t; they left it to a patrol car to find the victim. Routinely the cops didn’t waste time looking for the attacker because there was no hope of finding him, anyway.

Trevor called it ‘minding your own business’. So long as you were all right, that was fine. It wasn’t like that back home. At least, it used not to be.

Sometimes Susan eased her homesickness by remembering Trevor the way he once was, those heady days when he had lived in London for a couple of years.

Her folks had taken a dislike to Trevor from the very first time she’d taken him home to meet them. She had been twenty-two then, already pregnant, and they had married in the autumn. Even before they had left to live in the States, Trevor had stopped visiting her parents. Whenever she went back home, she always went alone. He hated her mother for hating him. She knew that her mother would stand by her if she left her husband. But there was a lot of thinking to do first. It wouldn’t resolve anything – Trevor never listened – but at least she would have tried. For Mark’s sake.

The drought was worrying. The environmentalists had come up with all sorts of reasons for it, from the destruction of the rainforests to volcanic eruptions. Some were still blaming the burning oil from the Gulf War a few years back. Trevor scoffed at that; he saw the war in a different light, like Vietnam. The killing was all that mattered to him, the guns and the bombs. He had books and magazines detailing them. A weapons nut, he was turned on by guns the way some guys jerked off over porn mags. Neither was healthy, and she hated sex, too.

Trevor had his pile of dirty books under the bed. When he was mad at her he read aloud from them. He got angry on occasions when she refused to live out his fantasies with him. There came a time when a woman couldn’t go through with acts like the ones they wrote about in those books. He would lie there and expect her to … ugh! Not any more. Last night had been the last time. There had been innumerable last times, but this time she meant it.

What would happen if the water supplies all dried up? Couldn’t they invent some method of turning sea water into drinking water? She thought of the harbour and decided that it wasn’t a good idea; they’d have to extract the oil, filth and unmentionable substances.

She finished drying the dishes and threw the filthy cloth into the washer. She stared into the brownish foam of the sink while letting it drain. It left a kind of sediment behind. She ran the tap and tried to wash it away, but it clogged the plughole and she had to poke it down. The water wasn’t fit for washing either dishes or clothes. The outer door slammed, making her jump.

‘Mark?’ Trevor wouldn’t be back for another couple of hours yet.

‘Yeah?’ The door was kicked open arrogantly. The boy leaned against the frame, arms folded, defiance in his expression. He was underweight and undersized for his twelve years. His hair was cut short, and he might have been good-looking had his features not worn a permanent leer. His trainers were scuffed and torn, his frayed jeans dirt-streaked. His rumpled T-shirt had food stains on it.

‘God, just look at you, what a mess! Where have you been, Mark?’

‘Out.’

She resisted the temptation to slap his grinning face. As she had told her husband, it wouldn’t do any good.

‘You’ve been playing the videos in the amusement hall?’

‘It only cost three dollars.’ An exoneration.

‘Where’d you get the money in the first place?’

‘I did a job for Mr Carpentia on Twenty-Ninth, took out his trash.’

‘All right, you did a job to earn the money.’ She had an uncanny knack of knowing when he spoke the truth. ‘He paid you for the work but you did it for nothing, because you gave it to the sharks who run the videos.’

He shuffled his feet, looking down at them.

Susan shrugged her shoulders. ‘You won’t learn. And your father’s going to larrup you for climbing out of the window.’

‘No, Mom!’ His attitude changed; gone was the arrogance, in its place a pleading whine.

‘Well, I guess you’d better get right to bed, pretend you’re asleep even if you aren’t when he gets back. Tomorrow we’re going up to the cabin for a week, maybe longer.’

‘Great! We’ll go hunting and fishing and –’

‘Doubtless you will.’ She turned away. ‘Fun for you two. And, Mark, please don’t give us any hassle while we’re there. No going off on your own, there’s snakes and …’

‘I’ll catch one, put it in a box and –’

‘No, you won’t. All right, enjoy your vacation but please …’ She hesitated. ‘Please think what you’re doing to me.’

‘I don’t mean to, Mom.’ He was suddenly close to tears.

‘No, I don’t expect you do. Now, get on to bed, and let’s hope your father’s late back.’ Which he doubtless will be. Her thoughts returned to the week that lay ahead, trying to work out some way of passing the time. She couldn’t think of anything, but one thing was for sure, she and Trevor were going to have a long talk. This time they really had reached the crossroads.

It was after midnight when Trevor let himself into the apartment. Sleep had eluded Susan, but she would feign it. She turned over to face the wall, and tried to regulate her breathing, rhythmic in spite of the tautness of her body.

Trevor came into the bedroom, switched the light on and asked in a voice that was slightly slurred, ‘I take it Mark got back okay?’

‘How did you guess?’ She gave up her rehearsed act. He probably wouldn’t have noticed, anyway.

‘You wouldn’t be in bed if he was still out. I guess I’d better go and thrash his ass just for good measure.’

She turned over, seeing his trousers slide as he tugged the belt free of the loops. Any other time he might have looked comical in singlet and briefs, his cords around his ankles. But not now. He was drunk and that was no state in which to strap a kid.

‘Do you have to keep me waiting?’ She kicked back the bedsheets and in the same movement pulled her negligee up above her waist. She hated herself for what she was doing but right now it was the only way.

‘Eager, eh!’ He stood there looking at her shapely body. She forced a smile to her trembling lips as she saw the belt fall from his fingers, watched his arousal fighting the liquor. She made up her mind that when they talked next week she would tell him why she had done this. In the meantime, she reached out, pulled a drawer in the bedside table and fumbled for the vibrator. Trevor’s favourite turn-on was to watch her use it, so tonight she would oblige him. Just one last time.

Drink and sex made for a good night’s sleep, Trevor always said, the perfect relaxation technique. Tonight would be no exception. He rolled away from Susan, tugged the light pull and turned over in the same drowsy movement. He felt pleasantly drowsy.

An uneasy thought nagged at him; something he had heard in the bar that night. Chuck hadn’t turned up. Normally he never missed a night. Somebody said he was ill, had been rushed to hospital with suspected cholera. Bullshit; you only got that in underdeveloped countries with poor sanitation. Somebody had written a letter to the Post, Trevor had read it that evening, about the possible dangers of extended water-recycling schemes during severe droughts. Scaremongering. Chuck probably had contracted something from all that junk food he ate.

Anyway, they had their own borehole up at the cabin. Whatever happened in the city, it wouldn’t worry the Chibnells. Trevor drifted off to sleep fantasizing about an idyllic lifestyle where he hunted and fished for their food, and had a large enough stock of beer in the big cooler to keep going indefinitely.

Chapter Two

Of course, Trevor would take the truck, that was predictable. Susan stood at the window, watching her husband and Mark load the Ford pickup. It was a kind of cowboy symbol, the hunters driving off into the hills. It was all part of the game.

She would follow in the station wagon, and would not even attempt to keep up with them. She thought she could remember the way; filter off at the turnpike and 20 miles down the road there was a rough track to the left. There was a giant poplar at the top so you couldn’t miss it. Three miles down a winding, rutted, unsurfaced road that would surely break a spring if you exceeded 25 miles an hour. Through a ford – it had probably dried up – and the cabin stood on the edge of a pine wood. The lake lay directly opposite; when the wind changed direction they could smell its stagnant odour in bed at nights. Maybe, with luck, the lake had dried up, too.

She went into the bathroom, bolted the door and ran the taps. The water was brown, darker than on the previous evening, and there were tiny particles of something floating in it. She tried not to think what they might be, probably some dirt out of the pipes.

She didn’t have to bath, she was clean and, anyway, in a couple of hours they would be at the cabin where there was ample crystal-clear water from deep down in the ground, cold and pure, better than any bottled water from the store. Bathing here at the apartment was symbolic, a psychological cleansing; she had to wash off the filth that Trevor had grimed her body with the night before. Even this water was cleaner than that. Her shame and guilt had to gurgle down the waste pipe, only then would she have any respect for herself. Once again she consoled herself with the thought that she had done what she had to save Mark.

‘We’re ready.’ Trevor banged impatiently on the bathroom door.

‘I’ll catch you up.’

‘Jeez, what a time to have a bath!’

‘I’m not holding you up. You go on ahead.’

‘We’re going.’ She heard him stomping away, the door banging shut. From down below she thought she detected the truck starting up, the way her husband revved it in defiance of the inner-city traffic. Get outa my way, you punks! A sudden rush of vehicles as the traffic lights changed on the junction of Twenty-Third and Lincoln drowned its squeal of tyres. Susan breathed a temporary sigh of relief. They were gone.

For a few moments she relaxed. She thought about not following behind them, but instead stopping here or maybe going somewhere else. No, it wouldn’t work; Trevor would come looking for her, or report her to the police as a missing person. When it came to the crunch he was possessive, frighteningly jealous. She remembered a time a few months after they had got married when they had gone to a dance. A guy had asked her to dance. She had thought nothing of accepting: Trevor was at the bar and wouldn’t notice, certainly wouldn’t mind.

He had minded. It was a slow number, she and this other fellow were holding each other close; there was nothing special in that. Suddenly Trevor was there, pulling this guy off her, shoving him so that he lost his balance and fell. Then Trevor had led her back to her seat, deposited her there and gone back to the bar. He had stayed there drinking all evening, hadn’t said a word about what had happened, had never mentioned it since. It was a warning delivered in its own way: Keep away from other men.

About five years ago he had got this idea into his head that she was having an affair. She wasn’t, she had just got into a routine of going uptown shopping twice a week, without telling him. He had phoned from the office on a Tuesday and received no reply. Nobody answered on Thursday, either. So each week for a month he had phoned the apartment on Tuesdays and Thursdays without getting through – which to him all added up to an affair.

The following week he had returned from the office midmorning and waited there until she showed up in the early afternoon. It was the sight of him that had frightened her; the way his features were suffused with blood, his eyes boring into hers. Asking questions and getting the wrong answers, he saw her fear as guilt.

‘Who’s screwing you, Susan?’ The veins on his forehead bulged and his collar was suddenly a size too small for his neck.

‘You’re crazy.’ She might have fled from him, but her legs would have let her down.

She had told him where she’d been, even quoted stores where they might have remembered serving her. Go on, check me out, humiliate me. He hadn’t because she might just have been telling the truth.

‘If ever I found out that you were sleeping with somebody else’ – he thrust his face close to hers, and she recoiled from the beer fumes – ‘I’d bloody kill you. And him as well.’

Trevor was cunning, though, and that was what scared her most. They hardly spoke for a week; at least it spared her the ignominy of his sexual demands. On the Saturday he had suggested that they went downtown for a meal, a kind of kiss-and-make-up. His mood changed; it was the first time he had ever bought her flowers. And back home afterwards she had really turned it on for him. He had apologized for his unreasonable behaviour. He obviously did love her deeply.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said as he lay on top of her, kissing her. ‘It’s just that I couldn’t bear the thought of losing you. Look, if you are having an affair, tell me. I won’t mind if I know who it is and that you’re not going to leave me.’

Her blood had run cold at the expression in his eyes.

‘There isn’t anybody else.’ She had tried to make the truth sound convincing. ‘I promise.’

‘All right.’ He rolled over and turned off the light. ‘I believe you.’

He had set a trap, but it hadn’t sprung because there was nothing to spring it. If there had been, she would, in all probability, have told him.

She had tried to make excuses for him; Mark was the cause of all their problems, without him it might have been different. But she knew it wouldn’t have been. Trev was Trev and she had found him out too late. And marriage was for life, for better or for worse.

She got out of the bath and dried herself. Her smooth skin had the kind of colour that she might have expected after a week upcountry, a slight browning. If she rubbed hard enough the tint came off, staining the towel. She let the water out, did her best to flush the sediment away, then put the plug back in the hole in an attempt to stop the sour, decaying odour that wafted up.

She oiled herself, then dressed in a cotton blouse and denim shorts. The station wagon was already loaded. She took the stairway down to the street. Outside it was stifling hot. A group of youths across the way saw her and wolf-whistled. She ignored them, hurrying on to the car. It was a good job that Trevor had already left.

The traffic was heavy all the way to the city limits, mostly trailers and holiday cars with loaded roof racks. Maybe other people of the city had the same idea as the Chibnells; head for the country, find some shade and some pure water to drink.

The countryside off the turnpike had a parched and dead look about it. Fields were scorched and brown. A dead animal lay in a ditch; Susan thought it was a horse. Trees had lost their greenery, dulled as though they anticipated autumn three months early.

A Lincoln had broken down. A guy in a red baseball hat was walking along the roadside carrying an empty water container. He thumbed but she speeded past him. Trevor would be angry with her if she gave him a lift.

The poplar stood at the head of the lane. Its foliage seemed to wilt, and some of the lower leaves were yellowing. She turned off, slowed right down, and winced as she hit the first pothole. Behind her a cloud of dust marked her progress for anyone who might be remotely interested in where she was going.

Eventually she saw the cabin up ahead. It might have survived from the last century, log-built with a veranda and small windows from which the settlers could shoot at circling Indians without exposing themselves to a hail of arrows. It had a wooden roof with just a single chimney for the stove. Thompson, the farmer, and his son had built it in their spare time to sell to some city slicker at an over-the-odds price. Trevor, of course, had talked him down and struck a deal. Maybe the old man resented it afterwards. The cabin was basic or comfortable, depending upon your standards of comfort. Susan preferred the flat with its amenities. She also preferred the city to the outback.

The truck was parked in front of the veranda, its crimson dulled by a film of dust. The tailboard was down but there was no sign of either Trevor or Mark. They probably couldn’t wait to go hunting. Well, whatever they returned with, they could clean it and cook it themselves. She had brought along some canned foodstuffs for herself, so she wouldn’t starve.

Looking towards the lake, she squinted and shaded her eyes in the bright sunlight. Somehow it looked different; the reeds on the waterline appeared to have wilted and furled, and the water had taken on a greenish-blue tinge as if it had a coating of matt paint that did not scintillate in the sunlight. It was probably an optical illusion. Whatever it was – she wrinkled her pert nose – it stank, a rank odour that came at her like the smell from a garbage tip.

She clicked the door lever and, as though activated by the metallic sound, a dog came bounding out of the open front doorway, a golden-haired retriever cross, barking at her. Its tail wagged in greeting.

Susan tensed, recognizing the animal as belonging to Matt Frame, an occasional hunting colleague of Trevor’s. Two seasons ago they had gone down to the big flyway and returned with a wild goose which Trev had insisted they ate instead of turkey for Christmas. This dog, she couldn’t remember its name, had retrieved the bird from the water. Obviously, Trevor had borrowed it for the week, and had not thought to tell Susan.

‘Good boy.’ She eased the car door open, ready to slam it shut if the dog came down the steps. It stood its ground and barked again.

‘Sioux, ease up, will ya!’ Trevor appeared in the doorway. He looked flushed and angry.

Susan remembered the dog’s name now; at first she had thought it might have been named after her even though it was male, but it was a canine reminder of frontier days. Matt had, in all probability, never associated it with ‘Sue’, and would have been offended had she suggested it. The creature was a hunter like its owner and his friend. Father would indoctrinate son into the killing game.

‘Where the hell’ve you been?’ Trevor stood atop the steps, regarding his wife with suspicion.

‘Nowhere. I drove straight here.’ She felt guilty again and that was a bad start.

‘What kept you?’

‘Nothing special. I didn’t hurry; saw no reason to.’

Mark stepped out of the cabin. His arrogance had returned; he was grinning. Maybe he got a kick out of these domestic confrontations. Susan hated herself even more for the previous night, wishing now that she had let Trevor flog the boy. She was the stooge, the meat in the sandwich; they both used her.

‘We’re hungry. If we don’t eat soon, it’ll be too late to try for a fish.’

‘I’ll get something as quick as I can.’ She tried to stop herself from hurrying up the steps, panicking inwardly, but it didn’t work. She had pandered to their whims for too long by now; it came instinctively.

The interior was larger than might have been anticipated from the outside. A short hallway led off into a large kitchen and living room. A fridge and freezer were operated by a generator, and there was ample cupboard space and units, all pine. Toilet and bathroom, a large and a small bedroom. Outside the back door were a woodshed and a borehole, the latter also worked by generator. Logs were already cut and stacked, should the wood stove be needed. Phil Thompson, the farmer’s son, would doubtless be looking for a tax-free $50 bill for his thoughtfulness in supplying fuel.

Susan was tired and had a slight headache. Trevor could have lit the stove, but he hadn’t. So she opened some cans, salmon and sweetcorn, and cut up some tomatoes. Her husband would probably complain about makeshift meals. She’d cook the next day.

The dog followed her relentlessly around the kitchen. She got an urge to scream at it, even kick it away. It didn’t have the disposition of a pet, having been trained to hunt. Food was its second nature, it didn’t know anything else. She tossed a biscuit; it leaped and caught it, swallowed it and looked for more. She tried to ignore it.

Susan put the food on the table and went out on the porch while Trevor and Mark ate. Maybe she would eat later, maybe not. Right now she felt sick and it wasn’t entirely due to the smell that wafted over from the lake. She shuddered in spite of the heat; an icy tingle began at the base of her spine and travelled upwards. Her skin goose pimpled.

And suddenly, for no explicable reason, she was tense, fighting against an illogical unease that was more disturbing than anything that she had ever experienced before.

Inside the house, Trevor and Mark were scraping their plates noisily, hurrying to get down to the lakeside. Susan wanted to scream at them not to go but she knew that her pleas would be futile, that they would ridicule her.

Standing there on the veranda, the shadows lengthening across the parched grassland, she watched them go. She could sense that this remote place was hostile towards those who had dared to invade its domain of escalating evil.

Chapter Three

‘What’re we fishing for, Dad?’

‘Pike.’ Trevor’s reply was abrupt. He increased his pace, his son almost running to keep up with him. Sioux bounded on ahead, ignoring a whistle to come to heel. The dog had learned to obey only his owner; anybody else he would take liberties with.

‘Will we catch any, Dad?’

‘We might.’

‘Why don’t we bring the gun, Dad?’

‘Because we’re going fishing and ducks aren’t in season yet.’

‘Can I have a shot with the gun tomorrow, Dad?’

‘We’ll see.’ No, you can’t, and for Christ’s sake shut up for just one minute. Trevor was irritated; family holidays always turned out this way, no matter how he tried to arrange them. With hindsight, it was a mistake bringing Susan and Mark along. Trevor could have cooked all he needed to eat and for ten bucks Phil Thompson would have cleaned up the cabin at the end of the week. As it was, Susan would sulk because she was bored, there would be a constant whining about insects, frogs and anything that hopped, crawled or ran. Mark would chatter incessantly, and when he got bored he would go off and get into mischief. Trevor had given up on the boy; if the school couldn’t do anything with him, then how the hell did they expect a father to perform miracles?

‘What’s the stink, Dad?’

‘The lake.’ Trevor cleared his throat and spat. ‘Hot weather makes water smell. The lake’s fed by a stream but in all probability the running water has just about dried up. So there’s no movement in the water, it goes stale and, with the hot sun beating on it all day, it smells.’ There, digest that bloody lot, work it out for yourself.

‘Why?’

‘I’ve just bloody told you, Christ almighty! Sioux, come back!’

The retriever had topped a small rise, obviously seen the expanse of water and run on ahead. In this weather a cooling swim was irresistible to most animals. Trevor groaned. The last thing they needed was Sioux splashing in the shallows and disturbing the pike.

‘I’ll get him, Dad.’

‘Mark, come here!’ But both dog and boy were obviously determined to disobey. Trevor slowed his pace. Sod the pair of them, let them balls it up! Tomorrow he’d leave both of them to make a nuisance of themselves with Susan, and come here and fish by himself. He heard a splash; the dog had leaped into the water.

‘Dad, look at this!’

‘I can see for my – Jeez!’ Trevor Chibnell stopped, staring at the scene that greeted him. Sioux was in the water, all right, if you could call it water.

The water level was lower than he had ever known it. The usually narrow shoreline on the near side of the reed beds stretched on beyond, in an expanse of baked and cracked mud, and the entire surface was covered with a thick, bluish-green slime. The reeds had wilted and yellowed as if the first hard frost of autumn had nipped their broad leaves.

Sioux was wading because the water was not deep enough for him to swim. His body was covered with the weed, trailing it and gathering it as he wallowed in the thick mud, his unwanted burden restricting his progress. He snuffled, coughed and spewed a mouthful of brackish water.

‘It’s slime, Dad.’

‘No, it’s algae, about five acres of it.’

‘What’s algae?’

‘Water weed.’ In layman’s terms. ‘Billions of tiny weeds that all cling together. It’s caused by the heatwave.’

‘Sioux’s getting all tangled up. I’ll help him.’

‘Mark, come back!’

Ignoring the command, the boy plunged through the rushes and squelched in the mud. He extricated a foot, left a trainer behind, and almost overbalanced. Another step; he was shoeless now, but fearless of the danger, just as when he climbed down the waste pipe. Trevor started in pursuit. Dog and boy were one combined bloody liability!

‘I’ve got him, Dad!’

Mark’s fingers were clawing at the weed covering the dog, pulling away huge strings of it and shaking his hands as the growth entwined them. ‘God, it stinks!’ Sioux was beginning to panic, trying to pull away. Trevor’s fear was that if the dog went further out he might drown in the deeper water, and take the boy down with him.

‘Hold still.’ Trevor reached them. He secured a grip on both dog and boy, but felt his own feet being sucked down in the mud. ‘Keep still, the pair of you!’

Somehow, forcibly, using the strength of the muscles he had cultivated in the gymnasium adjoining the pistol club on Fifty-Ninth Street, he dragged Mark and Sioux back up to the reeds. The retriever collapsed under the weight of the plant life and lay panting. The boy was breathless, scared to hell, plucking at the weed that had wrapped itself around his mud-soaked body.

‘Calm down!’ Trevor shouted. Raking at the slimy vegetation, he scooped some away and flicked it clear. ‘You’re safe now.’

Sioux whined pitifully; he was frightened, too.

‘You’ll be okay, both of you.’ There was relief in Trevor’s voice. ‘Best thing we can do is to get back to the cabin and hose you down.’

Struggling upright, the dog shook itself, showering man and boy with minute particles of weed, and began licking at its hairy coat. Mark was beginning to cry.

‘It’s no good crying about it.’ Trevor gripped his hand, and felt Sioux nuzzle up to him. ‘Now, both of you, stick close to me.’

Well, that had sure ruined the fishing prospects for the coming week. Trevor turned to stare back across the lake. Already the path which they had cut through the constricting weed was closing up, the algae knitting together again. Within a few minutes it would be as though it had never been disturbed.

Something else attracted his attention; he stared, shading his eyes against the glare of the setting sun beyond the pine forest. The weed-coated surface of the lake was dotted with floating forms that glinted, many of them already partly covered by the creeping growth; elongated, they were somehow familiar, not flotsam as he had at first thought. His fingers trembled as he grabbed for his binoculars and focused the lenses.

‘I don’t bloody believe it!’

‘What is it, Dad?’

Trevor stared again, trying to will those distant objects to change shape, to become pieces of driftwood or garbage thrown into the lake by trippers. In the end he gave up; he lowered his glasses and did not want to look any longer. Because his worst fears had been confirmed.

‘What’s the matter, Dad?’

‘See those things dotted all over the surface, floating in the algae?’

‘Yeah.’

‘They’re dead fish. Pike, mostly. The algae have polluted the water and just about killed every goddamned fish in the lake.’

‘Oh, shit!’

‘Let’s go home, Mark. Grab that dog, hold on to him, make sure he doesn’t go off anywhere.’

‘Guess we’ll have to go hunting if there’s no fish left, won’t we, Dad?’

‘Maybe.’ Trevor didn’t want to discuss it. The implications of what had happened out there on the lake were too terrible to contemplate. He remembered the discoloured water that had gushed out of the apartment taps, smelling of decaying vegetation; and hearing that Chuck had gone to hospital and folks were saying that he had cholera.

Suddenly you got to believing what people said. And it scared you more than you’d ever been scared in your life before. First job when they got back to the cabin would be to check the water out of the borehole.

‘The dog’s not well.’ Susan came back into the bedroom with two mugs of coffee and set them down on the bedside table. That was her first job of the morning; no matter how early Trevor had to leave for work, he never got up until he’d drunk his coffee. Then she would start breakfast while he washed and shaved. Mark was getting the habit, too; if she didn’t take him a drink in bed he’d retaliate by playing hookey.

‘How bad?’ Give me a rundown and when I’ve had my coffee I’ll go see for myself. Shit, Matt would go crazy if anything happened to Sioux.

‘He’s just lying in a corner of the kitchen, doesn’t want to get up. I lifted his head but it just flopped back down.’

‘He could be just tired.’

‘He isn’t eating or drinking.’

‘Probably pining for Matt.’

‘You’d better see for yourself, Trev.’

‘I will. Just now.’

‘Mark’s all right,’ she added.

‘Any reason why he shouldn’t be?’

‘What, after that scum he was covered in? It can’t possibly do him any good.’ She felt like reminding him of the time Mark broke his leg skateboarding and Trevor stopped off at the bar on his way to visit his son in hospital, arrived an hour after visiting time finished and had to plead to be let in.

‘Nor any harm. Just algae, it grows on lots of pools in hot weather.’

‘It killed the fish, didn’t it?’

‘We don’t know that.’

‘What did then?’

‘I’m not a bloody scientist.’ He slurped his coffee the way he often did, deliberately to annoy her; vulgar provocation.

He was in a bad mood because he couldn’t go fishing; it had happened countless times over the years. He would probably go hunting instead. She had to rely upon the death of poor defenceless creatures to placate her husband. At least he hadn’t pestered her the night before, but it was a high price to pay for being left alone. He leaned across her to flick the switch on the radio, another of his predictable diversions. ‘You’d better go and look at that dog, Trev.’

‘When I’ve heard the weather forecast and drunk my coffee.’ He held a finger upright to silence her.

‘Reports are still coming in of algae-infested waters throughout the country, caused by months of warm, dry weather …’

Trevor tensed, slopping some coffee on the way to another slurp.

‘While most algae are relatively harmless, the blue-green species is known to be particularly toxic. There have been instances of fish dying in infested waters and livestock being poisoned from drinking the water. The public are warned to be especially careful and to avoid lakes and rivers with an infestation of this species of algae. Maps are being prepared by state health authorities showing waters which are already polluted. For advice on this, telephone –’

‘What did I tell you?’ Susan interrupted.

‘Shut up!’ He drained his coffee. The weather forecast followed; there was little change predicted; if anything, Midwest states would be a couple of degrees hotter than the last few days. Coastal areas would be tempered by the sea breezes.

‘We ought to go home,’ Susan said.

‘Sure, and drink that bloody foul tap water you were whingeing about before we left! At least the borehole’s pure here.’

‘So far.’

‘Look, that water’s being pumped from 128 feet. Nothing can get down the well except via the liner and that’s sealed.’

‘You’d better go and check on the dog.’

‘I’m just about to.’ He reached for a pack of Camels off the shelf and lit one. Susan hated smoking, especially in bed. ‘If I’m worried about him we’ll get a vet.’

‘Where from?’

‘Thompson will know, he keeps livestock. But I doubt we’ll need one.’

He swung out of bed and began to dress. This was one shit of a start to a holiday. He shouldn’t have brought Sioux. It was Matt’s idea, anyway, because he wanted to pop down to Miami for a few days. If anything happened to the dog, Matt had only himself to blame.

Trevor padded barefooted to the kitchen and saw the retriever lying in the corner just as Susan had said. He stooped down and lifted up the dog’s head, but it thumped back down on to the floorboards.

Sioux was already dead.

The Plague of Frogs

And the frogs shall come up both on thee and upon thy people and upon all thy servants.

Exodus viii:4

Chapter Four

‘I think you should report it,’ Susan said after breakfast when Trevor had finished burying Sioux in the half-acre that served as a backyard for the cabin.

‘Bit late when the bloody dog’s dead, isn’t it?’ he snapped. Telling Matt was going to be the hardest part; Matt had loved that dog as if it was his own son.

‘I don’t mean for the dog’s sake, I mean because the authorities want to log the algae-polluted waters. I’ll bet they don’t know about this one,’

‘Too right, and if Thompson doesn’t tell them, I certainly won’t. Take a tip from me, avoid governmental departments like the plague. You don’t know where it’ll end. They might close the borehole down, class it as polluted because it falls within half a mile of the lake. Then what’d we drink?’

‘Better that than poison ourselves.’

‘Crap! Half this is the media scaremongering, something to sell their papers. Okay, it was the algae that killed Sioux, but we don’t have another dog so it won’t go near the water. Right?’

‘We’ve got Mark.’

‘And it didn’t hurt him, did it?’

‘Not yet.’ She twisted her fingers together. ‘I think we should get a doctor to check him over.’

‘We’ll keep an eye on him. If he looks to be sickening for something, then we’ll put him right in the truck and drive him to a doctor. That satisfy you?’

She sighed. Of course, it would have to be the truck, not the station wagon. ‘I guess we’d better give him a good look-over right now. You, I mean, Trev. He’s getting to the age when he doesn’t like me seeing him without his trousers on. Go and check him all over, every bit of him. Please.’

‘All right. Where is he?’

‘Probably in his room playing with his computer.’ Games, of course, nothing intellectual. That’s where I saw him go after breakfast. I think he’s upset over the dog.’

Which wasn’t likely, Trevor thought. Mark was interested in animals only as gun targets. He strode across the hallway and flung open the door of the smaller bedroom. It was empty.

‘He must be out back.’ He heard Susan following him to the rear door.

Mark wasn’t in the back yard, neither was he to be seen on the area of parched grassland in front of the cabin. Trevor’s gaze completed a full circle, taking in as much of the lake as he could see, and finished up on the edge of the pine forest. Nothing moved.

‘Oh, God, Trev, where’s he gone?’ There was anguish bordering on hysteria in Susan’s voice, and the knuckles of her clasped hands showed white.

‘Gone for a walk, I guess.’ An uneasy thought troubled him. ‘Just a minute …’

Trevor went back inside and checked behind the kitchen door close to where Sioux had died. There should have been a double twenty-gauge over-and-under shotgun propped in the corner. There wasn’t. Like Mark, it, too, was gone. Trevor checked the shelf over the units and saw the red and yellow carton with the emblem of a mounted rifleman on it. It should have been full, unopened. He could tell by its weight when he took it down that some of the shells were gone.

‘What’s the matter, Trev?’ She guessed, but needed to hear it from his lips, confirmation of her worst fears. She closed her eyes. All this had to be some fevered nightmare.

‘He’s taken the gun. Shells, too.’

‘Oh, God!’

‘He won’t help you.’ Trevor’s atheism was another wedge that he drove between them, using it even in moments of crisis. ‘It’s up to us. Me, in fact. Stay here in case he comes back, I’ll go look for him. You can bet he’s headed for the woods; kids with guns think that’s the obvious place to hunt. I tell you, I can track a deer over two or three miles, so Mark Smartass doesn’t stand a chance. And this time I’ll flay his bloody ass for him!’

‘I want to come with you, Trev.’

‘Don’t be bloody stupid. He’d hear us coming a mile away.’

‘I don’t care.’

‘He’d hide, he’s not that stupid.’

‘You said you could track him.’

He glanced heavenwards. He had never hit Susan yet, but there was always a first time. ‘Just go back inside and wait until I get back. I shouldn’t be too long.’

He set off towards the big wood, scenting the sweetness of the pines long before he reached them. They smelled real good; he wanted to breathe their fragrance in deep, hold it in his lungs for as long as he could, cleansing them of the foul stench of the algae and the rotting fish it had killed. It was cool in there, too, shaded with even a hint of dampness in those places where the burning rays of the sun never reached. A carpet of pine needles deadened his footfalls; grass in the clearings would reveal where a human foot had trodden.

A wide track led deep into the forest. That, surely was the way Mark would have gone, the easiest route. Trevor did not bother to look for tracks, just hurried on. And as he walked he loosened his belt in readiness.

There wasn’t going to be any fishing this vacation, Mark had decided as he idled with his computer. His parents had bought him the duck-hunting game for Christmas. By the New Year he was getting the ducks every time; he didn’t even curse when one got away because it broke the monotony.

Back home it was the next best thing to being allowed to fire Dad’s twenty; out here it did not compare with the lake across the way, with real ducks flighting in to the expanse of water. Ducks wouldn’t give a duck shit about the algae, nor the dead fish.

He scored twenty, then let the symbols flit across the screen without shooting at them. He was sure they flew slower when they were worked by battery instead of mains electric. He and Trevor hadn’t seen any ducks on the lake last night because they hadn’t been looking for them; they had been too busy extricating themselves from the trailing slime. Sure there were ducks there, there had to be.

He sat listening to his mother and father talking, arguing. They always quarrelled; vacations made no difference. It got on his nerves, made him want to do things to hurt them, to get his own back. Dad strapped him, so he got his own back, one way or another, sort of kept a score. He’d beaten him over going to the amusement arcade, got away with that one. He could go two up if …

Dad was in the john, he heard it flush. He caught the sound of movements in the bedroom; Mom was making up her face. As if it mattered out here!

Mark had about half a minute, maybe less. It was now or never.

It took him about twenty seconds to creep across the hallway to the kitchen. The door was open, and a glance behind it showed him that the gun was still there. There were shells in the carton on the shelf above. He broke the seal, dropped half of them into the pocket of his jeans, and picked up the twenty. He was outside and clear of the yard before his acute hearing picked up the sound of the lavatory door opening and closing. That was when he ran and hoped they didn’t spot him. When he reached the reed beds and there were neither shouts nor pursuit, he knew he’d got away with it. So far.

There was a slim chance that he might get away with it altogether. His folks were rowing; Dad would probably go off somewhere, Mom would go and lie on the bed, cry herself to sleep. Provided Dad hadn’t planned on going hunting and needed the gun, he might not miss it.

Mark settled himself down in a dried-up watercourse, the one that fed the lake during times of normal climatic conditions. He’d seen pictures in his father’s hunting magazines of how duck hunters hid themselves; usually they set up decoys to lure the birds in range but he did not have any so he would have to do without and trust to luck.

If he had had any interest in reading, he would have been able to learn the art. He thought that the hunters went at daybreak or dusk, but did it really matter? He was determined to fire the gun, just to see how it felt, whether or not there was any recoil. But before he did that, and drew his parents’ attention to his whereabouts, he would wait to see if there were any ducks about. He also had to find out how to load the gun.

By trial and error he discovered that the top lever opened the breech. He inserted two cartridges into the chambers, and clicked the gun closed again. There was some writing on the barrel; ‘Eig. Brescia. 3-inch Magnum. Made in Italy.’ That would not help him any, whatever it meant.

It was hotter than ever that day, and the heat made the stench of algae and decomposing fish all the more nauseating. Mark thought that he should have gone into the woods to look for a deer or a cottontail, or whatever other quarry there might be. But it was too late now; he couldn’t reach the forest without crossing back in front of the cabin.

He settled down to wait out the limit of his patience. He scanned the algae-covered water until his eyes ached in the glare of the sun but he could not see anything out there that moved. All that floated on the surface was dead and rotting. He fidgeted with the safety catch, clicking it backwards and forwards. He was tempted to pull the trigger but forced himself to wait a while longer. A crow cawed over in the pines; Mark wished he had gone there in the first place.

He heard some more crows, again in the forest. It was as though they were congregating there, waiting for something.

Another noise; he had been aware of it for some time but hadn’t really taken much notice because it did not relate it to huntable prey. It was a kind of thrumming sound that vibrated the air, like an overhead power cable, but there were no electricity lines out here. Rising to a crescendo, it seemed to be everywhere and yet nowhere in particular. Insects, perhaps, except that it was too loud for insects.

His mouth was dry; he should have brought a drink from the cooler with him, and something to eat, too. Still, if something targetable did not show up before long, then he was going to fire the gun, both barrels, and head for home.

The throaty humming noise was throbbing in his head; it felt like listening to his own heartbeat magnified a hundred times. It set his ears roaring, it was frightening. He didn’t know what it was; there was nothing in sight. He made up his mind to leave, run for the cabin, and with luck they wouldn’t have missed him. He would replace the gun behind the kitchen door, put the shells back in the box and nobody would be any the wiser. That duck-hunting game was better than the real thing; at least you got some shooting, you didn’t have to swelter beside a stinking lake and have your brain numbed by a sound you couldn’t identify. He stood up to leave. That was when the movement by the lakeside attracted his attention.

God alive, whatever were they? The entire lake seemed to be moving, coming ashore, a morass of greenish-blue that shimmered in the morning sunlight; thousands of them, creatures the size of his fist that moved jerkily, draped with slime-like cammo netting to hide their invasion of the land, only their bulging eyes and wide mouths visible, jaws agape as they gave off a cacophony of croaking.

Bullfrogs!

Mark recognized them, having seen them in the pool in the park back home. He remembered a cartoon picture book about a bullfrog named Barney which his mother used to read to him when he was five. A caricature, but it was identifiable with what he saw coming out of the brackish water now, thousands of Barneys labouring under their burden of algae just as he and Sioux had dragged themselves free yesterday.

Their slimy bodies bloated and contracted as they wheezed their plaintive cries of distress into one mighty lament of death. Reptilian bellows that drew in air and squeezed it out, they were seeking some place in which to die, away from the flotilla of poisoned weed.

The entire shoreline heaved, the dying rushes crackled beneath their advance. They trailed slime and algae up on the parched grassland, shedding their unwanted haulage as a snake might cast off its old skin. Their eerie battalion left its dead in its wake, bloated corpses drying out in the hot sun, trampled underfoot, the fallen ignored in that awful squelching rush to be away from the lake of death.

Mark edged up the bank of the dried-up stream. He drew up his legs in an illogical fear of their slippery touch, and puked his breakfast until he was retching on an empty stomach. They saw him and parted ranks so that they passed him by on either side, watching him with unblinking eyes that were like air bubbles about to burst. Their noise grew in volume, and still they came, an unending sluggish stream of bullfrogs fleeing their domain.

And then came the crows, lines of them flapping out from the distant forest, black scavengers with ragged wings that had scented death and gathered in the pines to await its coming. Wheeling, soaring, swooping, beaks snapping at the moving multitude of food, a banquet of bullfrogs upon which to gorge themselves. This time there was no lengthy, concealed ambush rewarded with an unwary reptile that had foolishly ventured ashore; they were there in numbers, to be gorged, there was no escape.

In an unprecedented slaughter, the huge black birds swooped and stabbed with their bills, then flew up with their prey, a delicacy that struggled feebly, destined to end its suffering in a winged predator’s belly.

Mark knelt there amidst the slowly moving mass, vomit drying on his T-shirt, suddenly aware of the gun that was clutched in his sweaty hands. Realization of its power checked his escalating terror. He brought the stock up to his shoulder. It seemed an aeon ago that he had lusted to kill but there had been no prey in sight. Now there were hundreds, usually wary crows ignoring the presence of man in their gluttony. Suddenly, the hunters had become the hunted.

The sound of the shot was almost an anticlimax amidst the cawing melee. The weapon bucked in his hands, the twin barrels throwing the shot charge wide of their intended target. The second shot was accidental, his novice finger catching the rear trigger in the force of the recoil.

The birds parted, screeched their anger at this unexpected interruption, but none fell from the sky. Their ranks opened, then closed again. They massed, cutting a swathe through the bullfrogs, and landed to feed, a fluttering mass of black wings, beaks ripping, claws tearing. The air was heavy with the stench of death from a massacre that was a coup de grâce, an act of mercy in Nature’s own cruel guise to end the suffering of the bullfrogs.

Bloodlust is infectious. Mark Chibnell caught it from the crows. He reloaded the twenty-gauge with shaking, fumbling fingers. He craved to kill – anything. Again the gun was mounted and directed at a squabbling mass of crows. The double discharge was simultaneous this time, a hail of leaden death blasting a path through the birds, a swathe of feathered bodies that flapped and then lay still.

Crows rose en masse, circled, alighted again. Mark went crazy. He ejected the spent shells and reloaded. Another double blast. Blood splattered the still-moving bullfrogs, polka dots on the heaving slime that nothing could halt.

Mark fired until he was out of shells, yelling insanely, the smoking gun warm in his grasp. Then he was running, fleeing the battlefield, bodies ballooning and bursting beneath his feet. Once he slipped and fell; he arose dripping with a foul-smelling substance clinging to his sweat-soaked body.

Through smarting eyes, his vision distorted, he saw the cabin ahead of him, and called upon every reserve in his exhausted body to enable him to reach a safe haven. He clutched the shotgun by its barrels, dragging the stock on the hard earth. There was a haze before his eyes; it was darkening, tinged with streaks of red that might have been crows’ blood. Fighting for breath, he tasted the foulness of the lake, smelled the algae and the decomposing fish.

He made it to the veranda steps before his legs buckled beneath him and threw him to the ground. He lay there, the croaking of the bullfrogs and the angry screeching of the crows still in his ears.

And somewhere, it seemed far away, he heard his mother shouting.

The Plague of Blood

The waters which are in the river shall be turned to blood.

Exodus vii:17

Chapter Five

Susan didn’t bother to close the door; she just stood there in the hallway, mind and body numbed. This vacation was less than a day old, and already it had turned into one awful nightmare. Something had happened to the lake, and as a result the dog had died. She could smell and taste the algae from here. It wouldn’t take much to make her throw up; her stomach had balled with revulsion.

She couldn’t blame Mark entirely; much of the blame lay with her husband. In a lot of ways he was responsible for how their son had turned out. Most of the time he ignored Mark, but on those occasions when he displayed a paternal trait it always turned out a disaster. Hunting and fishing weren’t healthy recreations, she decided. Far better to have played ball games, some kind of sport.

Mark hated his father, she knew that. And the boy had a gun and shells. There was no way of guessing what might transpire during a heated confrontation in the forest. She prayed that Mark might return first and give her a chance to defuse the situation. Things had been bad back in the city but they were a damned sight worse out here.

She went into the kitchen and slumped into a chair by the table, burying her face in her hands. Oh, God, get me out of this! She considered returning to the city, once Mark was safe, of course. At least there were people back home; out here their closest neighbours were the Thompsons, two miles on down the rutted track. She didn’t care for either Chris or his son, Phil. Backwoodsmen, they had not moved with the times. They would eke a living off the parched land, hunting for their food, for the rest of their lives. She groaned; back to fishing and hunting again. The Thompsons were partially justified; they killed for food. Trevor and Mark didn’t need to kill, they enjoyed it.

Susan would leave Trevor this time, for good. She’d work out what she was going to do and when. At least planning would give her hope, a possible escape route. And she wouldn’t look for another relationship; she didn’t need a man in her life any more.

Where was that boy? Out in the forest, of course. With a gun. I don’t want to lose him!

She forced herself to think about leaving; it was therapeutic. She wouldn’t tell Trevor, she’d just go. Either leave a note or phone him from wherever she ended up. That way he wouldn’t be able to stop her from going. She could do it right now, there was plenty of petrol in the station wagon. No, not until Mark was back. Even then she’d have to wait her chance.

There would be plenty of chances. Trevor would be off somewhere every day, all day. In all probability, though, he wouldn’t take Mark with him after this. That was her dilemma. You fancy going some place with me, Mark, for good? He wouldn’t because there wouldn’t be any killing. He’d stay right here even if his father thrashed his behind so that he had to sleep on his stomach. Tomorrow he’d sneak off somewhere again. Wherever she might go, she’d be better off without her son. Guilt flooded over her because that way she’d just be abandoning him. Trev wouldn’t give a shit about the boy, he’d leave him to do whatever he had in mind, and if the police came and took their boy into custody, then that was fine, they’d have to look after him.

Susan sobbed. The time for leaving wasn’t right. Would it ever be? Her balled fists beat a tattoo of frustration on the tabletop. She wanted to scream, Let me go!

Something plopped in the hallway. It sounded as if a saturated dishcloth had fallen on the floor, a kind of thwack, greasy water oozing out of it. But it couldn’t be that because the cloth was draped over a tap on the sink unit, squeezed out and left to dry. She could see it from where she was sitting. Maybe an item of clothing, then, one of Mark’s stinking muddy socks from last night, hooked on a peg because he was too idle to put it in the dirty-linen basket.

Splat.

Susan jerked round but couldn’t see anything through the gap in the doorway. There was a soft sound, a kind of slither, then plop again.

She stood up, knocking over her chair, which clattered on the floor.

‘Who’s … there?’

There was no answer, just another liquid thump. The sound reminded her of the time when Mark had been laying the machines in the arcade and had coined some condoms out of the vending machine. He’d brought them home, filled them with water and thrown them at the kitchen wall.

Thwack.

She jumped, and took a step towards the doorway, then stopped. I don’t want to know what it is, I don’t want to see.

It can’t be anything very much, she attempted to reassure herself. Might be Mark back already; perhaps he hadn’t gone up to the forest, just been hiding out in the back yard.

‘Mark?’

No answer.

‘Mark, is that you?’

He was being stupid, playing childish tricks as when he hid in the cupboard in the flat and jumped out at her.

‘You don’t scare me, Mark.’

It had to be Mark, it couldn’t be anybody else, not out here in the backwoods. Her mind was made up; she rushed for the door, stumbling into the hallway, because she knew that if she waited any longer she wouldn’t go. Looking for Mark, knowing in her heart that he wouldn’t be there. He wasn’t.

Susan recoiled, tasted bile, felt it scorch her throat. Oh, my God!

She didn’t recognize the creature squatting in the middle of the floor as a bullfrog. Blue-green weed was draped over its bloated body and trailed slimily on the floor like tentacles. The creature expanded and contracted as it breathed laboriously. Its eyes watched her, twin orbs that reflected its pain and hopelessness; its mouth was opening and closing, as it willed itself to die. The vegetation made it look three times larger than it really was. It croaked plaintively, a wheeze that echoed in the confined space.

Susan backed away, missed the doorway and bumped into the wall. No! Keep away, whatever you are! she cried silently.

The creature bunched, poised for another leap, but its strength had waned. It flopped down, belly on the wooden planks, and met her gaze. Kill me, please.

Her shaking hand felt along the wall behind her and located the doorway. The door creaked when she touched it. She began to edge towards it, her eyes fixed on that loathsome thing. It was going to attack her, she was certain of that. Any second …

She fell back through the doorway and sprawled on the kitchen floor. Kicking the door, she heard it thud shut. Oh, thank God!

She could hear breathing, stentorian wheezes. Surely whatever it was wasn’t strong enough to force entry. Somehow she got to her feet, leaning her full weight against the heavy door. She felt sweat running down her face and stinging her eyes. A glance showed her that the window was open; she dared not risk leaving the door to close it. Pray God that no monstrosity like the one out there in the hall could gain entrance through the window.

She let her legs buckle beneath her and sank down to the floor, then sat with her back pressing against the door. Trevor, Mark, where are you?

That putrefying stench was stronger now, an overpowering odour of decay that wafted in through the window, filling the kitchen with an almost suffocating atmosphere. Flies buzzed on the walls and ceiling as they delighted in this new, stinking paradise.

Trevor squinted in the gloom of the deep woods. It was akin to dusk, a weird formation of shadows and sunlight slanting down through the foliage. In places the brightness dazzled so that he had to wait for his eyesight to adjust to the gloom.

‘Mark!’ Trevor’s shout was blanketed by the dense trees, he scarcely recognized his own voice. Yelling was a waste of time; if the boy was close by there was no way he was going to show himself. He could hide in the bushes; Trevor could pass within a yard of him and not know he was there. The little bastard!

There was no way Trevor was going to find him, he admitted to himself. He could search all day in here, probably end up getting lost. Looking at his watch, he had to move into a sunbeam in order to see the dial. Christ, he’d been gone an hour already! Well, he might as well head back to the cabin. In all probability Mark was home by now. Trevor’s fingers strayed to his belt in anticipation of the punishment he would mete out; the boy would squeal for mercy by the time he’d finished with him.

Something stank. Trevor sniffed the air, wrinkled his nose and coughed. Like rotting corpses. He found himself glancing behind him nervously. It came from further on down the narrow track, beyond that clump of cottonwoods.

He didn’t really want to know what it was, he didn’t have the time. All the same, he was curious. It reminded him of the smell by the lake; he thought that the wind might have blown the obnoxious odour over to the woods. No, it was too strong, too close.

He reached the trees. A path led off to the left, probably made by wild animals, deer or cottontails. Up ahead he could see a patch of bright sunlight; there was obviously a clearing of some sort. The smell was stronger now, overpowering. He remembered childhood stories about an elephants’ graveyard in Africa. Maybe the creatures of the forest had one here and that was what he could smell. No, that was silly. All the same, he might as well satisfy his curiosity.

The brightness of the sunshine dazzled him as he emerged from the trees, wincing as the stench hit him. Phew! It was like a sewage-disposal unit; it had him holding his breath, turning his head away.

The clearing was about fifty yards in diameter. Tall pines on the far side would shade it once the sun was past its zenith. The grass petered out where the reeds began. At least, he thought they were reeds, a mass of browning sword-like leaves that had wilted and now floated on the surface. There was obviously a pool here, though it was impossible to see the surface of the water beneath the thick, stinking layer of algae that spread from shore to shore. Blue-green, that very same creeping water weed that grew on the lake, its vile stench rising in the hot sun. In places it had a reddish tinge, almost as if a wounded beast had staggered here in search of a drink, and had bled profusely into the water. Trevor shivered in spite of the heat.

Something moved in the grass by his feet. He sensed it rather than saw it, and stepped away instinctively. It was a … he thought it was a bullfrog. It was difficult to tell because its body was hidden beneath a mass of algae in which it had become entangled. It had given up trying to extricate itself and was dragging its burden with it. He heard a croak, a pathetic cry for help. He backed away another step; there was no way he was going near that!

The grass was rustling as though a strong breeze had risen; he saw the stalks moving. Throaty, weakened croaks grated in the stillness, a cacophony of anguish. Trevor’s mouth went dry, the sweat on his body chilled. There had to be hundreds of them. The undergrowth round the pool was alive with a mass exodus of bullfrogs, forced to leave their domain by the poisonous weed, dying from its toxin just as Sioux had died.

There was another sound. At first he had difficulty in recognizing it; like a sharp clapping noise, intermittent. The grass moved in every direction.

Trevor turned, quickening his step. At a guess those were snapping turtles, maybe the nearest link with prehistoric times today, vicious reptiles that wintered and survived in the deepest mud, and emerged from their hibernation with the coming of spring. They took their toll of newly hatched ducklings, preyed on smaller creatures that ventured close to the water’s edge. One snap of their powerful jaws could amputate a finger. He wasn’t risking a close encounter. The toxic growth was driving even the turtles from their home, a pool which they had inhabited since time immemorial.

Back on the wide track, he headed in the direction of the cabin. With luck he would make it in half to three-quarters of an hour. And then he heard two shots.

They were far off, somewhere in the direction of the lake, muffled by the forest, but he recognized the double reports as those of a twenty-gauge shotgun, crisper than that of the conventional twelve.

‘That bloody kid!’ Mark had fooled him. Somehow he had headed down to the lakeside unseen and surprised some ducks at their daytime rest. He wouldn’t hit them, though, just scare the down off their asses.

A second double blast, this time almost simultaneous. Shit, the boy was gun-crazy, loosing off in all directions. He’d use up all the shells just for the hell of hearing them go off.

Trevor forgot about the frogs, the algae and the snapping turtles, and broke into a fast trot that was powered by anger. Shots were going off all the time now; that boy was firing as fast as he could reload. Suddenly the shooting stopped, most likely because Mark had run out of ammunition, Trevor decided.

Trevor was forced to slow to a walk. The heat was oppressive and the flies were troublesome, a black swarm following him, intent on landing on any exposed part of his body. He swatted at them and had to wipe his sticky palms on his trousers to remove the squashed insect corpses. A hornet dive-bombed him but missed. Then he heard the crows.

Even at that distance their raucous chorus was deafening; they had come from the eastern end of the forest, congregated for some reason. Crow hunting was fun; you could spend more on shells than it cost to heat your house but it sure got your eye in for the duck season. Maybe Mark was shooting at crows.

Finally Trevor emerged from the forest into the fringe of pines, shading his eyes in the bright sunlight. Crows and more crows, nothing but crows. The sky was filled with them, wheeling and swooping, alighting and taking off again, some kind of prey clutched in their talons that dangled streamers like old man’s phlegm.

Of course, it was bullfrogs enmeshed with algae; they had fled the lake just as their cousins in the forest had deserted the pool. An exodus of death, a dying army to feed the ravenous predators.

Trevor stood there, feeling sick. Not because he liked bullfrogs or snapping turtles, but because a landscape was being destroyed before his eyes, a lake and its inhabitants, the surrounding grassland scorched by the unrelenting sun, lush rangeland becoming a parched desert.

The sun beat down on the lake. Something had changed. That familiar bluish green was streaked with red, a crimson pattern edging its way across the surface, as in the forest pool.

As if the lake was haemorrhaging.

Trevor scanned the shoreline for Mark but there was no sign of his son, no human form visible. Just thousands of black crows feeding on the dying bullfrogs, stabbing with their bills, flying up with their prey, squabbling over one when there were thousands for the taking. The scavengers would clean up the corpses.

He headed towards the cabin, trying to step over the bullfrogs but on occasions slipping on dead ones, squashing them and streaking their remains on the hard ground.

The cabin stank of vomit. Mark had thrown up in the hall, Susan had spewed in the kitchen; deathly white, they were slumped at the table. The shotgun was lying on the floor, a smell of burned powder emanating from its twin barrels.

Their eyes met his; their expressions were blank. Their brains were numbed with shock. Trevor’s fingers toyed with the buckle of his felt, but fell away. This was no time for a strapping. Later, perhaps.

Susan spoke in a cracked whisper. ‘It was awful, Trev. The frogs, they were like a … a plague!’

‘I saw them.’ He looked away, remembering how that pool in the forest – the lake, too – was turning scarlet. Like another plague. The Plague of Blood.

Outside, the crows were still cawing and quarrelling. Their noise was deafening. He thought about what they were eating, and what had happened to Sioux. Maybe they would die also.

Perhaps the whole world would die.

Chapter Six

The Spode nestled in a hollow on the far side of the big forest where the brushwood sprawled right up to the foot of the mountains. A wild and desolate place, it sheltered the only habitation north of the Thompson homestead, a tumbledown stone-built dwelling which still bore scars of the last Indian attack a century and a half ago. Burning arrows had taken the roof and gutted the interior. Now it was patched up with sheets of rusted corrugated iron that rattled in a north-westerly. A stovepipe chimney jutting out of one of the holes wisped sweet-smelling woodsmoke into the hot, still air.

Donk had never known any other place; he had never been further than the mountains or the forest because he had no reason to. Everything he needed in life was to be found within a twenty-mile radius of his home except tobacco and rifle shells. When the Thompsons made their monthly trip to town, they brought his ammunition and tobacco back with them. At one time he used to grow his own weed but in recent years he had developed a taste for commercially processed cut plug. Apart from these two items, his lifestyle was self-sufficient.

He reckoned he was around seventy-two, couldn’t be sure to a year or two but what the hell. His clothes had belonged to his father, the jacket and trousers crudely fashioned from deer skins and laced with thong. Stiff and sturdy, they might see him out; they’d have to because he wasn’t buying any of those fancy togs that they made today. No, sir!

He didn’t even know if Donk was his proper name, whether it was his first or second, because he didn’t know of another. His mother had died soon after he was born and his father had just called him ‘Donk’, and had brought him up to hunt because if you caught nothing, you starved out here. There was no school; it wouldn’t have mattered if there had been. He couldn’t read but he knew how to count; his father had made him count stones into a pile on winter’s nights to keep him occupied, and when he’d counted them all it was time to start over again.

His huge black beard had gone grey a long time ago. There were still streaks of black in his hair but maybe that was due to the fact that he kept it tucked inside his rabbit-skin cap. His headgear had shrunk the day when he had washed his hair in the stream and his hat had fallen in the water. It had never been the same since and he had to pull it down real hard these days to make it stay on.

He had a scrawny body; there wasn’t an ounce of surplus flesh on his lean frame. He weighed around 160 pounds but he had never had the means nor the inclination to check. The only time he had ever seen a doctor was when Dr Wycherley from North Falls had paid him a social call when he was visiting the Thompsons. That was the time when young Phil had fallen and broken his leg, and that was sure to be four, maybe even five years ago. The doc was a nice guy, sat and smoked a pipe of tobacco with him, but that didn’t mean Donk was going to let the other examine him.

Donk didn’t need a doctor, he had never been ill. If you kept away from folks, then you didn’t catch any of them diseases which they passed from one to another. Right? And all their fancy foodstuffs and soft living couldn’t do them much good, neither.

Donk tended his back yard meticulously. Each spring old Chris Thompson brought him a truckload of cattle manure. Donk didn’t need anything else in the soil; all those chemical fertilizers took the goodness out of it and slowly poisoned people in the process.

He grew a patch of rye and made bread from it. Potatoes were his staple vegetable, along with greens and garlic. If you ate garlic every day you’d live to be a hundred, his father used to tell him. But you couldn’t live without meat and that was in abundance up here.

Next to his yard, his pride was his Harrington & Richardson .44-calibre rifle, made back in 1902, a single-shot breech-loader. He seldom needed more than one shot, whether his target was a deer in the forest or a rabbit grazing out on the grassland. Donk had no use for a shotgun; he could kill a flying bird with a single bullet as easily as most men could with a blast of birdshot. Autumn was his favourite time of year, when the woodcock came in with the moon and wild duck flighted into the pool in the forest. Once he had surprised a gaggle of geese, shot one on the water, reloaded and dropped another as they honked up in alarm. He’d had to swim out to fetch the geese but that was all part of the hunt.

He didn’t have a freezer to store his meat, so it had to be shot regularly and eaten fresh. Venison was often a bit high by the time he’d finished the beast but that added to the flavour. When he was busy with the vegetable patch and didn’t have time to hunt, there were always rabbits and doves within range of the Spode. He could drop one at half a mile, no problem. There was nothing wrong with his eyes.

Now the drought was worrying him. He had survived droughts before but none like this one. The stream that ran down to feed the big lake was already dried up, which meant he couldn’t irrigate his crops just when they needed water most. He would have to start making daily trips on foot to the Thompsons’ to fill a canister with drinking water. He wondered about the pool in the forest; he had never known it to dry up, even in the drought of 1954. The water was brackish and tepid, but at least it was wet. And when you were parched with thirst you didn’t give a damn. Today he’d kill two birds with one shot, literally; take the rifle and the water carrier the two miles or so to the pool, drink his fill while he was there, fill the big bottle, and knock down a couple of doves for supper that night. It was a pleasant way of life; he had never known any other.

He left his jacket back at the Spode and walked bared to the waist, in just his trousers and his hat; Donk never went anywhere without his hat. He even slept in it. The rifle was carried in the crook of his arm, the empty gallon bottle roped to his belt.

He wondered about that cabin that Thompson had built and sold to some city slicker. That was really asking for trouble – inviting the new generation of softies out here so that they could bring all their illnesses with them and spread them among folks like Donk who had lived in isolation all their lives. Not that he knew anybody like himself but there had to be a few scattered around the country.

Donk had lain on a rocky outcrop and watched the stranger hunting last autumn. He had felt grudging admiration for the way he walked tirelessly, knocked over a cottontail and then bagged a pheasant that flushed out of the brush at his first shot. But the guy was using scattershot; he wouldn’t have got either with a rifle. That was the difference between a hunter and somebody playing at it.

Now the guy was back again. Donk had been down to the bottom end of the forest the day before and seen him arrive, a boy and a woman with him. That was taking it a bit far, turning a hunting cabin into a vacation lodge. Donk was jealous, too, feeling that the wild game that abounded in these parts was his by heritage. Thompson didn’t hunt, so why let a stranger come and shoot the birds and beasts for fun when a backwoodsman’s living depended on it? He wondered if the feller might be out hunting today. If so, he’d go carefully; he didn’t trust city types with guns. Donk smiled through his beard. There was no chance of that guy being within half a mile without his knowing it, because he could read the woods and mountains like some of these educated folks read a book. The creatures of the wild would let him know if anybody was about.

Donk paused, a puzzled expression on his weather-beaten features. Now what in hell were all them crows massing down the far end of the forest for? In the distance he could see them wheeling, settling, weighing down the boughs by sheet weight of numbers.

He hated crows. They robbed the nests of game birds and didn’t make up for their nuisance value by being good eating. There was no point in shooting them, though, because there were too many of them and it was a waste of cartridges. Sometimes Thompson gave him strychnine and he dosed some bait, cleared a few that way. But the crows never seemed to get any fewer.

A jay screeched in the deep woods. Donk pursed his lips. That city feller was prowling the tracks, maybe hunting a pheasant out of season. But it didn’t explain all those crows.

Donk moved stealthily, stopping to listen every so often, but all he could hear was the distant crows cawing and squabbling among themselves.

All the fish in the lake had died; he couldn’t understand it. Unless that guy from the cabin had been poisoning the water with cyanide, the way poachers made huge hauls of salmon from the rivers. That was probably it. He tensed with anger; tomorrow he’d go and speak with Chris Thompson about it. First, though, Donk’s priority was water from the pool, after that something for supper.

Somebody was shooting; it sounded to be down by the lake, it certainly wasn’t in the forest. The sky was filled with crows, they’d spotted food of some sort. More shots. Those dandy slickers were firing at the crows; that was no bad thing but even if they did kill a few they wouldn’t make much difference to the population. After a time the shooting stopped; they had given up, become bored because they couldn’t hit any.

He smelled the forest pool before he reached it. Obnoxious odours seldom troubled Donk, he merely noticed them and dismissed them. When his meat was going bad, he ate double helpings to use it up rather than waste it. The foul stench wafted to him on the warm breeze; he smelled dead fish and decomposing vegetation. Anger made him tense; they’d been poisoning the pike here, too, leaving them to rot; they were so damned rich that it wasn’t worth their trouble to gather in the fish and sell them to a trader.

He thought of a lot of things he could do to the strangers; he could set fire to their cabin or their vehicles. No, not the latter, they might be forced to stay here then. He could shoot them and burn their corpses in the cabin fire. The only problem was that whatever he did, the sheriff would be short on suspects; there was only Donk and the Thompsons.

Donk stood in the clearing, staring in dismay and disgust at the scene before him. A few pike floated among the algae; there weren’t many in the pool, anyway. Bullfrogs everywhere; they had fled the water but it was too late, they were dying. Their death croaks vibrated the sultry atmosphere. Snapping turtles snapped but there was no strength in their jaws.

The surface was red, turning to a deeper crimson. At first Donk thought it was blood, but his scent told him it wasn’t. More than likely some chemical those bastards had tipped in to kill all the pond life.

He walked to the water’s edge and crouched down. No, the scarlet was simply a change of colour in the weed growth, like the way the leaves of the chestnut turned dark red in the fall. He reached out, parting the algae with his hand, and saw how it stirred round and knitted together again. There was water underneath and it didn’t look much different from how it always looked, dark and brackish. He licked a finger with his tongue. It didn’t taste any different from how it had tasted the last time he had slaked his thirst here. And Donk was very thirsty right now. He was almost crazed with thirst.

It tasted good. He scooped it up with both hands, coughed on algae and spat it out. Then he filled the canister, holding the neck below the surface and listening to it gurgling. A snapping turtle floated up, rolled over on to its back and sank again. Donk screwed the cap on, and lifted the container. One thing he had overlooked; he needed to hunt, he’d better put that right without any delay. Behind him in the trees doves were cooing contentedly; the algae didn’t worry them, obviously.

The rifle came up to his shoulder. He had spotted a grey shape huddled in the topmost branches of a giant pine. A sharp crack, and the tree tops seemed to explode with doves, clattering frantically in all directions. Except one that topped off its perch and hit the ground below with a soft thud.

Donk ejected the spent shell, reloaded and waited. One of the doves wheeled and came back round, its sharp eyes searching for the cause of the disturbance. It spotted him and swerved; too late. When a bullet took it in mid-flight, it seemed to have run into an invisible wall. Its wings folded and it hurtled earthwards.

He walked and retrieved both birds, stuffing them unceremoniously into the capacious pockets of his trousers. Their plump breasts would roast to a delicious tenderness, their flavour enhanced with slices of garlic.

He picked up the water carrier and set off on the long trek home, well satisfied with his mission. For the time being he would fetch his water from the woodland pond. Only if it dried up would he prevail upon the Thompson’s kindness to allow him to use their well. Donk took a pride in living off the land.

Later that evening he feasted on the doves and drank a strong herb brew, made from a recipe handed down to him by his father. At dusk he made ready for bed; like the creatures he hunted, he slept the full hours of darkness.

Donk awoke at first light and knew at once that there was something wrong with him. His head throbbed. He sat up and waited while a wave of dizziness passed. His vision was so blurred that he could scarcely make out his familiar surroundings.

His stomach cramped, he retched and bile strung from his hairy lips. On a full stomach he would have vomited uncontrollably. His parched throat burning, he grabbed for the water jug. Such was his thirst that this time he did not attempt to spit out the particles of algae. Seconds later his stomach rejected the water; it spouted from his mouth and jetted on to the wall.

Suddenly he was very frightened. He knew he had to go for help, to the Thompsons, they would call out Dr Wycherley. Struggling to his feet, he had to clutch at one of the pine posts that supported the sagging roof of the Spode or he would have fallen. He made it to the doorway, clinging to the frame.

Outside it was getting light. Doves were clustered in the branches of a tree, preparing to fly out in search of their first food of the day. Crows bunched in the firs, a huge flock of them, watching him.

Donk was very scared. A lot of things were wrong besides himself. Fish, frogs and turtles were dying by the score; the crows were acting strangely. Usually they flapped away at the sight of a human, but this morning they stayed, unafraid.

Just watching him. As if they knew, and had roosted here in readiness.

He thought about the rifle propped up in the corner. He didn’t have the strength, there wasn’t time, he doubted his stamina to make the two miles to the homestead. But he had to try or else he would die here.

It was the water, of course; those city folks had poisoned it. They had poisoned him.

Donk made ten yards, stumbling most of them, then his legs gave out and crumpled him to the hard-baked ground in a cloud of dust. He lay there staring up at the early-morning sky, a roaring in his ears like the stream in winter when it was in full spate. His eyesight was fading as if the day had raced and dusk was here again.

Then the crows came in a swishing of powerful wingbeats; they didn’t call. Donk saw them, black silhouettes that darkened the false dusk; he felt them alighting on him and around him, hustling one another, jostling for his exposed flesh.

They took his eyes first, stabbing him viciously into total darkness; then their razor bills were pecking at his wizened skin, their feet raking, clawing.

His screams were strangled in his constricted throat, his body twitching, deprived of the strength even to writhe in pain.

Feathered frenzy broke out because they saw and smelled blood, crazed by the bright crimson that reminded them of the lake and how it, too, had provided them with food.

More crows were arriving, battalions of them streaming out of the forest, landing atop their colleagues, fighting for a morsel.

Donk had already slipped into blissful unconsciousness.

News flashes interrupted all radio and television programmes. ‘As reported yesterday, fish and other pondlife are dying in water affected by the toxic blue-green algae. There were instances where dogs have died from drinking the infected water. This afternoon a human death has been reported, a teenager in Minnesota who had ignored the warning and swum in a contaminated lake.’

It appeared that when the algae took on a crimson hue it was at its most lethal, through a chemical reaction which scientists were investigating. In the meantime, the public were urged to boil all water before drinking it, even mains supplies, for such was the spread of the algae that no water authority was prepared to guarantee purity. Supplies of bottled water were being rationed by most chain stores as demand escalated beyond existing stocks.

There were reports coming in of infestations of frogs in many parts of the United States. These creatures were deserting their natural habitat because of the contamination, and then dying.

The public were urged not to panic; water department laboratories were already working on an antidote that would dissolve the algae.

Weather forecasters regretted that there was no sign of a let-up in the drought.

The Plague of Flies

I will send swarms of flies upon thee, and upon thy servants, and upon thy people, and into thy houses.

Exodus viii:21

Chapter Seven

‘I’m never going outside again.’ Susan raised her head from her arms and looked at Trevor. He just sat there on the opposite side of the table, shocked. It had scared him, too, but he’d pull himself round, bluff it out. For him this was only a temporary setback, he wouldn’t give in. He never did.

The window was wide open. Flies buzzed in and out, and crawled over the working surface, the walls and ceiling – everywhere. She tried to will it to close. An insect with a black-and-orange striped body flew in, hit the wall, dropped to the floor and lay there droning.

‘Ugh! Kill it, please.’

Trevor got up and crushed it with his foot, leaving a slime mark on the floor. ‘A larch beetle.’ There was a hint of contempt for her in his expression. ‘Quite harmless. Still, it’s dead now, on your conscience.’

Mark was in his room; she thought about going to him. This was one escapade that had backfired badly on him. He had learned his lesson, it had affected him far more than any strapping with Trevor’s belt could have done. She was frightened of what it might have done to him; he could be mentally scarred for life.

‘I’m going home,’ she said at length. ‘I’m taking Mark with me.’

‘Don’t be bloody stupid!’

‘I’m being perfectly logical.’ She met his gaze. ‘It’s not safe here. Anything might happen … after that!’ She waved a shaking hand in the direction of the window. ‘The land’s littered with frogs, dead and dying. Like a … a plague.’

‘You're overreacting.’

‘No, I’m not. That lake’s turned scarlet like it’s bleeding.’

‘It’s only the algae, a colour change.’

‘They’re warning about it on the radio. It’s lethal. You saw what happened to Sioux. If it can kill animals, it’ll kill humans. Somebody’s died already, it was on the news. Minnesota.’

‘The guy might have had something wrong with him.’

‘Excuses. Well, I’m not taking any chances. You can pack the station wagon and Mark and I’ll be leaving today.’

‘What makes you think you’ll be better off in the city? They’re already warning folks not to drink the water without boiling it, and the bottled water supplies are running out. At least we have pure water here from the borehole.’

‘At the moment. For how long?’

‘Look’ – he was becoming impatient – ‘the bore hole will be okay, it draws from an underground spring far below the surface. It only takes three feet of soil to filter water. Whatever happens, we’ll be all right for water.’

‘Until the spring dries up.’

‘For Jesus Christ’s sake! It takes months, even years, for a deep spring to dry up. We’ll take it steady, not waste any, wash all the dishes at the end of the day. That way we could last out for a year, maybe more.’

‘A year! We’re going home Saturday, anyway.’

‘Okay, okay, I’m only looking on the black side.’

She paled still further. ‘Why … why shouldn’t be we going home at the end of the week, Trev?’

‘Maybe we will, I don’t know. It’s just that, well, there’s panic starting. If the city’s water supply becomes polluted so that it can’t be used and there isn’t enough mineral water to go round, everything will grind to a halt – industry, commerce. The people will start drinking wine, there’ll be an alcohol problem, and the law won’t be able to cope.’

‘You mean riots?’

‘Perhaps.’

‘I don’t want to stay here any longer.’

‘I know.’ His mood softened. ‘Look, I’m only trying to do what’s best for us. There’s a climatic freak, the water’s drying up, which is killing all water life. But it only has to rain and everything will be okay.’

‘But it isn’t going to rain. The weather forecasters can’t find an area of low pressure anywhere. All this reminds me of the biblical plagues; frogs, blood and now … these!’ She watched the flies with revulsion. There seemed to be millions of them, all shapes and sizes. A swarm of corn bugs was knitting together on the far wall, just as the algae had on the lake, turning it black. ‘It’s something to do with the ozone layer or the greenhouse effect. Maybe even the aftermath of the burning oil wells in the Gulf. We’ve been warned about this for years, now this is the crunch.’

‘We’ll just have to monitor the situation.’ He tried to smile. ‘Maybe tomorrow I’ll take the truck into North Falls, stock up with some supplies.’

His words cramped her guts. He was already thinking of staying on here, had made his mind up. Because there wasn’t anything to go back for. The recession had hit the travel business hard, and if this scare was worldwide it might kill it off. She didn’t know how Trevor’s finances stood; he wouldn’t tell her if they were bad, so it was pointless asking him. He’d bluff it all along the line, play his credit right to the brink. This cabin was something he had bought as a failsafe, a hideaway. He’d be content to stay here for the rest of his life, hunt and fish for their food. And he’d brought her along only to do the chores.

‘Would you close the window, please, Trev?’ A request, she never gave him orders.

‘It’s too hot, we’ll die of suffocation. Leave the bloody window open.’

‘I want to spray some fly killer.’

‘All right.’ He stood up, crunching a couple of beetles on his way. Flies flew past him as he wrestled with the sash, and some hard-shelled insects pinged on the pane as he swung it closed. ‘Don’t know that it’ll make much difference.’

She opened a cupboard, reaching for a can of fly killer. It was not environmentally friendly, but it might be too late for all that anyway; the warnings had gone unheeded. Flies swooped, one settling on her arms; she knocked it off. Take this, you bastards!

The spray hissed, a vaporized jet aimed in all directions, its aroma sickly sweet. Susan held her breath.

‘We’d best go out, leave ‘em to it.’ Trevor clicked the door handle.

She was taut, riveted. I don’t want to go out there, she thought, not even into the hallway, there’re things to be shovelled up.

‘We’ll go in the bedroom.’ He took her hand and coaxed her with him. ‘The windows are closed there, there shouldn’t be any flies in the room.’

She followed him, closing her eyes because she didn’t want to look upon bloated frog corpses or anything else that might have crept in through the front door. She whispered, ‘We’d better see that Mark’s okay.’

‘I’ll check on him in a minute.’ He ushered her into the bedroom. She heard him go out, his footsteps padding across the hallway.

Susan sat down on the bed, scanning the room fearfully. A fly droned behind the curtain – just one. The room was stifling, but at least it was safe. The curtain had remained closed since they had got up this morning, and the bed was still unmade. It seemed like an oasis, so reassuring, a place she could shut herself away from the world in.

‘He’s fine, just sleeping.’ Trevor came back in and leaned against the door. ‘And judging from the sounds in the kitchen, those flies are dropping in their hundreds, buzzing their last on their backs. Give ‘em a while and then I’ll sweep ‘em up.’ He began unbuttoning his shirt. ‘Guess we’d better take a leaf out of Mark’s book, take a siesta while things cool down a bit.’

Her clothes were sticking to her; she experienced an urge to peel them off. A pang of self-consciousness quickly passed. This was how it used to be in the early days, before Mark was born. They’d go on vacation, just the two of them, go up to the hotel room in the afternoon and make love. And again at night.

I’m supposed to be leaving, she thought whimsically and ran a zip. She knew she would be staying, for the time being, at any rate.

It had been good, very good. Susan couldn’t remember the last time she had had an orgasm; today she had hit dizzy heights, gone into orbit. Now she lay trembling, pressed against Trevor’s powerful body, listening to his breathing and his heartbeat slowing. She didn’t know if he slept or not. At least this time he hadn’t turned over when he’d finished. She closed her eyes, wishing it could have been like this over the years. She was glad she hadn’t left.

Listening. Just an oppressive silence, not even the buzzing of a fly – they were all dead. The bullfrogs weren’t croaking, either; they were all dead, too. She wondered about the lake of blood; maybe the algae would die off now that it had grown to maturity. Then it would rot down and everything would return to normal.

‘I guess the flies are all finished now.’ He spoke drowsily.

‘We’d better wait a while longer just to be sure,’ she murmured into his torso.

‘Guess you’re right.’ His fingers strayed back to her and she shifted slightly to make it easier for him.

He kissed her and she felt his hardness against her thigh. She shuddered involuntarily with anticipation, recalling that time when, in her mother’s words, he had ‘got her into trouble.’ She had become pregnant the first time they ever had sex, herself a naive virgin. He’d been trying for weeks to get her to go the whole way, but until then she had stalled him, held him off. She let him feel her and rub her, but always knew when to say ‘stop’. That time he hadn’t stopped and she’d gone right out of control. She’d felt her climax beginning and there was no way then that she could have called a halt because she wanted it as badly as he had. A sensation that was new to her, exhilarating, ecstatic. Frightening. Like now.

Oh, God, I’m pregnant again! She pulled herself free of him, jerking back.

What the hell?’ He stared in amazement, with a hurt that bordered on anger.

‘I’m pregnant!’ Her whisper held anguish and fear.

‘Don’t be stupid. How can you be? We’ve gone all these years without any problems?’

‘I just know.’ Her intuition overruled her logic. The coil wasn’t infallible. Almost but not quite. There was no reason why it should let her down, it hadn’t over the years.

‘You’re overwrought from everything that’s happened today. It’s all in the mind.’

She bit her lower lip and fought back her tears. Another baby would make her trapped for another fifteen years. Trevor wouldn’t change; this was just a crisis that had brought them together briefly. Back in the city it would be the same as before. ‘Maybe I’ll be okay.’ She tried to sound convincing and failed.

‘Of course you will. If you aren’t, so what? Most couples have two kids, some three or more. Me, I’d like another.’

Liar, you wouldn’t want to know. I’ll be left to bring him up and when he’s old enough he’ll be off to the video arcades or stealing. ‘We’ll have to wait and see.’ She groped for her clothes. For a brief while she had been fooled into thinking that they might get back together again. Now she knew that they wouldn’t.

They dressed and lay on the bed, not talking. Outside it was hot and still, the only sound the constant hum of insects.

Mark dozed in the heat. Sure, he had panicked out there earlier, who wouldn’t? He wasn’t scared of either bullfrogs or crows, it was just their numbers that had taken him by surprise. Neither had harmed him – the reverse, in fact. If he had had enough shells he would have stayed there shooting at the crows all day. The only reason he’d fled was that he had run out of ammunition.

He thought about the twenty-gauge back behind the kitchen door, the remaining half-box of cartridges up on the shelf. It was a tempting thought but he discarded it. No chance; he wouldn’t get away with it a second time. Only the very magnitude of the crisis, and his mother’s near-hysteria, had diverted his father’s attention and saved him from a good strapping.

Mark was exhausted; he was also very bored. All the fish in the lake were dead so there wouldn’t be any fishing this vacation. In all probability there wouldn’t be any hunting, either. At least, not for him; Dad would go and purposely leave him behind, a punishment that would be extended for the duration of their stay. It was a pretext for Dad to be rid of him. Too often in the past, promises had been broken at the last minute. This would be no exception, and Trevor had a ready-made excuse.

Mark listened to the hum of insects outside; he had never heard them so loud; crickets, wasps, bees, Nature’s orchestra serenading him outside his bedroom window. It was stuffy in there, he needed some fresh air. Damn it, he was almost too tired to get up and open the window. Almost, but not quite.

He knelt on the bed, his fingers stretching out for the sash. A gasp of horror and amazement escaped his lips. He could barely see out through the pane for the mass of insects that crawled and squirmed on the glass. Thousands of them, earwigs and centipedes, bugs of a dozen different species, bees buzzing angrily. If we could get to you, Mark Chibnell, we’d sting you to death.

He squinted through the heaving mass. The parched grassland outside appeared to be moving; it was a kaleidoscope of colours, bright red and orange spotted with black, as the manifold crawlies joined forces into one unbelievable army. Thunder bugs hitched a ride on the backs of beetles a hundred times their own size; centipedes wriggled over the masses in their hurry to reach some unknown destination. Unlike the bullfrogs, none of these was dying. They were alive and seething with anger; Mark sensed their fury in the way their sounds vibrated the stifling atmosphere. Their habitat had been destroyed by man’s abuse of the environment, and now all that was left to them was revenge.

They were trying to get in through the window but there was no gap, not even a crack through which they might squeeze their tiny bodies. Whatever his faults, Trevor Chibnell had been meticulous in applying the finishing touches to this cabin after he had purchased it from Thompson; a hunting lodge had to be proof against winter climates, its doors and windows fitted snugly, with back-up draught excluders on the former. Icy winds would seek out flaws where even a corn bug was denied entry.

Mark stared, his flesh goose pimpled in spite of the sweltering heat. These creatures had come out of the parched grass, the scorched undergrowth, the dried-up forest, even up out of the earth itself. They scented a veritable fortress where humans hid in terror, and they were determined to breach its defences. If that was impossible, then they would bide their time, sit out their prey, wait until hunger forced the occupants to emerge.

Mark contemplated shouting to his parents, even going out into the hallway and hammering on their bedroom door. Only the thought of the flogging which was still a possibility deterred him. There was nothing Dad could do; these creatures would not be frightened off by a shotgun the way the crows had kept their distance.

He wasn’t particularly scared of insects, not in small numbers, anyway. A few years ago his father had bought him a pair of stick insects in a glass cage. Mum was terrified of them, and one day they just disappeared. She told him that they had escaped, but he could always tell when his mother was lying because she so seldom told an untruth. On another occasion, on one of his illicit rambles in the countryside, he had come upon a giant anthill. Fascinated, he had watched from a distance, amazed at how the inhabitants busied themselves transporting pine needles to extend their domain. In the end he had become bored and thrown stones at the edifice, partly demolishing it. That had made the ants very angry and they had streamed in his direction. He had fled, easily outdistancing them, until a sharp pain inside his sock had caused him to pull up. Between the nylon and his flesh a couple of those ants crawled, biting viciously. He swatted them, squashed them, but not before their bites were stinging him painfully. His mouth went dry at the thought of what would have happened to him if the seething columns had caught up with him.

He lay back on the bed. He was confident that the insects could not get indoors; maybe they would get fed up and return whence they had come. He felt tired, his thoughts switched to the video machines in the arcade back in the city. There were insects on some of those, brightly coloured beetles, and you had to monitor a guy with oversize boots, crush all the crawlies within the specified time limit. Mark had long learned to annihilate the lot.

He scratched at one bare foot with a toe. Both feet were itching and the feeling started to spread right up his shins; he shifted to reach down with his arms. A sensation akin to the sharp pricking of a hundred needles had him jerking upright. He saw. And he screamed.

It was as though the sheet upon which he lay had come alive, a mass of heaving red insects that crawled and swarmed, seethed towards his bare flesh. Ants, like the ones he had stoned that day, only three times their size. They had bided their time and now the moment for vengeance had arrived.

As Mark drew up his legs, the insects came with them, clinging on to his flaying, kicking limbs, impervious to his slaps; several were dislodged, but the vacant spaces were filled immediately. A relentless advance, biting every inch of the way, crawling over one another in their eagerness to reach the tender flesh that lay up ahead of them.

He could hear them now, seething like water on the boil, columns of them coming up from the floorboards where they had found some means of entry. Ravenous, deprived of food and water by the drought, they now sought to satisfy themselves with human flesh and blood.

He writhed and rolled over on his stomach; they were above and below him, in his hair and in his ears, a mass of them darkening as they covered his eyes. He screamed hysterically and they poured into his open mouth as if to stifle his cries for help. Wriggling down his throat, they were choking him, squirming on his intestines, those still outside trying to eat their way through the layers of flesh to join their comrades.

Somewhere, it seemed far away for they jammed his ears, he heard the door open and shouts. He recognized his father’s voice; his mother was also yelling. Human hands were slapping at him, trying to knock away the beasts that were devouring their son while he still lived.

‘Mark! Mark, are you all right?’

He wasn’t all right, surely they could see that? They were slapping his face and shaking him roughly. His vision returned with a brightness that dazzled him in spite of the restricted sunlight through the window. He stared up into his father’s face, seeing concern that was rapidly turning to annoyance. Behind stood his mother, anguish on her features.

‘Mark! Mark, wake up!’

Mark slapped with them, beat at his own tortured body until his father grabbed him by the wrists and held him. The boy struggled and shouted. His mother’s slender fingers came across to stroke his fevered forehead soothingly. Still he writhed, closing his eyes because he didn’t want to see, he could still feel those ants wriggling inside him.

‘Mark!’

His panic slowed. Realization came that there was something wrong and it had nothing to do with columns of soldier ants pouring up through the floorboards to eat him until he was skeletal. Weak and frightened, he lay there, opened his eyes and steeled himself to look.

There were no ants in the small bedroom, just those crawling with a host of other insects on the outside of the window, trying to get in. There was not a single ant either on the damp, rumpled bedsheets or on his own body.

He stared in disbelief. He saw his father’s expression soften, his mother’s turning to one of sheer relief.

‘You’ve been dreaming, Mark,’ said Trevor. ‘A nightmare.’

‘Is it any wonder?’ Susan stole a glance in the direction of the window, but quickly jerked her gaze away.

‘Ants …’ Mark spoke feebly. He raised himself on an elbow, unable to believe that his body was not crawling with vicious insects. He could still feel them; his skin itched and stung with their bites. ‘They were …’

‘No, you were dreaming.’ His mother squeezed his hand, leaning over to kiss him. ‘Just a terrible nightmare. They can’t get inside, darling.’ Her confidence was forced; her body was also beginning to itch.

‘No way.’ Trevor smiled. ‘Doors and windows are shut tight. Like the bullfrogs, they’ll die soon.’

He, too, looked towards the window. But, whereas the bullfrogs had struggled to make it up here from the lake, using every last resource in their poisoned bodies, the hordes of insects were squirming with a determination to wreak vengeance on their most hated enemy – mankind.

The Plague of Flies had brought an unlimited army of allies with them.

The Plague of the Murrain of Beasts

There shall be a very grievous murrain.

Exodus ix:3

Chapter Eight

Chris Thompson, like his father and grandfather before him, had been born and bred on the homestead. Short and stocky with a ruddy complexion, he was never seen without his faded blue overalls and his leather Stetson; the latter had been made in India for export, a souvenir that was to be found in all corners of the globe. When it became saturated in a torrential downpour, the badly cured leather smelled of cow. But Chris didn’t mind that; cattle were his livelihood.

His wispy grey moustache was nicotine-stained from the hand-rolled cigarette that smouldered permanently between his lips. A God-fearing man, he toiled six days of the week and rested on the seventh. On Saturdays he ensured that all the chores were in hand, wood cut and stacked for the stove. If that had been overlooked, then he and his son, Phil, went cold on the Sabbath.

He had never travelled further than North Falls, and even the monthly trip into town was becoming irksome in latter years. But no way was he going to allow Phil to drive in alone. Not that the boy couldn’t handle the truck, there was no question of that, but North Falls had become a place of iniquity these days. There was a ‘gambling den’, an amusement arcade where machines promised a handsome payout and rarely delivered; and painted ladies hung around the bars on the lookout for young men – like Phil. The number of bars had doubled, liquor flowed freely and there were drunken fights; a man had been seriously injured in a bar brawl only the previous month. And Sheriff Taggart didn’t do a darned thing about it, except maybe booking a motorist because his licence sticker was out of date; he thought he could justify his pay check that way.

Phil Thompson was tall, handsome and muscular; his powerful chest strained the buttons on his blue-checked shirt. He was content with his way of life and had never known any other. He would have preferred to work on Sundays; they were damnably boring days just sitting around the house, and frustrating, too, when there were jobs that needed doing. But he had long ago learned to avoid a confrontation with his father. ‘You do as you’re told, son, because one day all this will be yours. You can please yourself then, but I hope I’ve brought you up the right way and you’ll carry on as you’ve always done.’

Father rose late on Sundays, and became irritable if his son was up and moving around before him. There was no chapel this side of North Falls so Chris read from the Bible after breakfast, prayed aloud and expected Phil to join in with him. Dinner had been prepared the previous day, so it only needed to be heated up. They rested in the afternoon, joined in prayer again in the evening.

‘Your mommy died on the Sabbath’ – the weekly reminder came with regularity after the evening prayer session – ‘November 1965. She stood right there by the stove making cookies when the Lord took her. He had his reasons and it’s not for me to question them. But I brought you up the way she would have wanted me to and I hope I’ve made a good job of it. It’s the least I can do for her.’ The old man’s eyes misted up. Maybe if he’d forbidden Elspeth to make cookies on the Sabbath she would still be here now; this nagging guilt had plagued him for nigh on thirty years.

Money was his father’s god and in a way Phil despised him for that. It was only after his mother’s death that Father had had the telephone connected. If he’d done it before, they might have saved her. Nobody would ever know for sure. Mom had lasted maybe two hours; Doc Wycherley could have made it from North Falls in that time in a spray of mud all the way. Whether or not he would have saved her was beside the point; at least she would have had a chance.

Doc had helped Phil’s father to raise him; he had brought learning books over from the library, and between them they had taught the boy to read and write. Basic stuff, none of the big words because they weren’t necessary, but enough to get by on. Father taught him how to cook, how to tend the back yard, and all about cattle. ‘Because you won’t be going no place except here even after I’m gone, son. You’re safe here.’

Phil had helped his father to build the cabin up by the lake. Throughout its construction Phil had no idea what it was for; maybe Dad was planning for them to live up there. Then, out of the blue, the old man sold it to some city people. Just for money; dollars to hoard and secretly gloat over. He’d even had a borehole drilled for them, while down at the farm they had to rely on the old well, dip a bucket to fetch their water up.

Now, standing out on the veranda and looking across the scrubland up to the mountains, Phil realized just how much they needed water. With a borehole they could have piped it up to troughs, it would have saved time and labour. But Chris Thompson didn’t see it that way. The Lord put you on this earth to labour six days out of seven, and to rest in between was as much a sin in his book as working on the Sabbath.

This place wasn’t much, either, Phil decided, not when you compared it with the cabin. Like the Spode, Donk’s place, it bore scars of the last Indian attack. Legend handed down by word of mouth from one generation to another, told of a band of renegades that had attacked the homestead but were beaten off. They went on up to slaughter the occupants of the Spode before a detachment of US Cavalry cornered them in a gully. Not a single Indian came out alive from that final encounter. An eye for an eye …

There was a lot that needed to be done to the house but Father wouldn’t allow it; he wanted it kept just the way it had been when Mother was alive, as a kind of memorial to her. One day, maybe … Phil shaded his eyes against the bright sunlight, scanning the land up ahead. There wasn’t a cow in sight; they were probably grazing that one last stretch of grass alongside the forest that was partly shaded so that the sun hadn’t burned it off. After that …

‘Son, I reckon you’d best go and get us some fresh meat.’ Chris Thompson emerged from the lean-to clutching a gun in his hand, some blue-cased shells in the other.

Phil nodded and reached out to take the weapon. It was a strange gun, a double sixteen-gauge with a 9mm rifle beneath the twin barrels. Known as a ‘drilling’, it was German-made by Thieme & Schlegelmilch in Suhl around the middle of the last century. Somehow it had found its way over here. It was designed for pheasant shooting but if a wild boar was flushed then you slid the top lever, popped up the peep-sight and you had the hardware to deal with it. The back trigger worked the rifle once it was primed. Father had taken it to Shaeker, the gunsmith, in North Falls a couple of years back to get a trigger spring fixed. Shaeker had offered to buy it off him for $200, which meant it was worth about $600.

‘Proofed for black powder,’ Shaeker had gloated behind his rimless glasses, pointing to some markings on the action. ‘You’ll blow your damned head off using nitro cartridges in this. If you don’t want to part with it, then you’d best get it proofed for nitro – cost about $50. Trouble is, if it don’t pass the proof then you’ll get a lump o’ twisted metal back and still lose your fifty bucks. Me, I’d take a chance on two hundred.’ Father had taken the gun back. If it burst, it was the will of the Lord and Elspeth would understand when he or Phil got to wherever she was right now. It was a good gun, good for another fifty years.

‘Couple o’ rabbits, or doves.’ Chris turned back towards the shed. ‘Don’t bring no more ‘cause they won’t keep in this weather. Skin ‘em or pluck ‘em, whichever, soon as you get back ‘cause tomorrow’s Sunday.’

Phil nodded that he had understood. He saw a black and white collie of dubious age slink round the corner. Patch wouldn’t miss out on a hunting trip, it was a change from rounding up cows. The dog balanced on three legs, scratching at its underside with a rear paw. Got a flea, probably, Phil decided. He’d see to that later – nothing that a salt-and-water drench wouldn’t cure.

It was hotter than ever. Phil unbuttoned his shirt. He would have gone bared to the waist except that the birds and beasts of the wild had sharp eyesight and could pick out the paleness of human flesh against the undergrowth. He debated which direction to take; those city folk were up at the cabin, so Father said, so he’d head the other way just in case they, too, were out hunting. Up towards the Spode. He thought about the old feller, Donk – he might be out with his gun, too. It was dangerous having too many hunters around in one area, somebody might get shot. But he could tell if Donk was home or not; if he was, then he’d go east, skirting the Spode.

The cattle were where he’d thought they would be, right up against the forest fence, hugging the shade. Some were lying down; they looked more than just hot and tired. Emaciated. They wouldn’t fetch a hundred a piece that way. All the Thompsons could hope for was rain but, according to the weather forecasters, there wasn’t an area of low pressure in sight. Which meant carrying water; the old well wouldn’t stand it, he’d have to take the water cart, carry some from that pool in the forest. Stagnant as it got in hot weather, that old pond never went dry.

The land was sloping gently uphill. The brushwood and undergrowth was brown and brittle. On the brow Phil saw the stark outline of a tumbledown dwelling, a corrugated roof with a stovepipe chimney sticking up out of a rusted hole. Even as he looked, a flock of crows jumped, wheeled and cawed, swooping back down to settle. They were scavenging something, probably rabbits that had died in the drought. That was what crows had been put on Earth for, Father had told him on more than one occasion, to clean up, to stop the spread of disease. God catered for everything in his own way.

It was a sure sign that Donk wasn’t at home; crows wouldn’t have fed that close to an inhabited human dwelling. Donk wouldn’t shoot at ‘em, he wouldn’t waste shells on anything that wasn’t palatable. The old feller was away, probably hunting in the forest. Again Phil debated which direction to take.

Patch tensed, and Phil could read the signs; the gun was halfway up to his shoulder before two rabbits bolted from a clump of withered gorse. One to the right, the other to the left; he swung with the first one, followed through it, pressed the trigger while the sixteen was still moving. The rabbit appeared to have run into an invisible barrier; it cartwheeled, then lay on its back with its feet kicking.

Without lowering the gun, Phil arced on the second. Seeing only a bobbing white tail, he elevated the barrels and took a trigger pressure. The rabbit rolled sideways, did not move. The still, hot air was heavy with the pungent aroma of gunsmoke.

Patch had the first one already, but was having some difficulty carrying it in his jaws; the limp form slid; he caught it, got a better grip. Phil took it from him; it wasn’t kicking any more. Holding it by the back legs, he walked to where the other one lay, motionless in death. Patch made no move to retrieve it, he considered he had done enough for one day.

The homesteader experienced a brief sense of satisfaction; the thrill of the hunt and 100 per cent marksmanship. Father had said they needed two rabbits, and he would have them within the hour.

Phil did not reload. There was no point; anything else he shot would only be wasted. Two rabbits were enough, and whatever he and his father didn’t eat, Patch would finish. Trickles of smoke wisped up from the twin barrels.

He passed the cattle again. Most of them were lying down now but somehow they didn’t look right; they were ill at ease, shifting and twitching. Heads turned towards him; even at that distance their expressions were miserable, almost pleading. Because they needed water, some fresh grass, he decided, that was all. Later on he would return with the water cart, bring some stagnant water from the pool and fill the old tin trough. Last week when he’d had a check on the pool there appeared to be some kind of water weed growing on the surface but that wouldn’t trouble the cattle. He considered opening up the fence, letting them go into the forest and drink for themselves. No, there was always a danger that they might wallow too deep, get stuck in the mud and drown. Father would be furious then.

Patch had lagged behind, and Phil turned to look for him. The collie was fifty yards to the rear, seated, twisting his body so that he could bite deep into his thick, hairy coat.

Fleas, undoubtedly. He called, ‘C’mon, boy, the sooner we get you bathed, the better.’

Patch looked up, then went back to nuzzling himself. Phil clicked his annoyance; he’d better fetch the dog or else they’d be here all day.

He grabbed Patch’s muzzle, forcing it out of the dense hair, and saw the place where he had been biting. A patch of raw flesh with something white embedded in it like a half-buried snail, approximately the size of a fingernail.

‘A tick!’ He had seen them before on the cattle, parasites that buried themselves in the flesh, bloated with blood. Revolting, but it was almost impossible to pull them out; the top half might come away but the rest would remain in the host to feed. There was only one way to deal with them, the way Father did; burning them out with a cigarette. A couple of fleas jumped, disappearing into the fur. ‘Let’s get back, we’ll soon get you fixed.’ He ruffled the dog’s head, and it followed him reluctantly.

Chris Thompson was waiting on the veranda. His pale blue eyes gleamed when he spotted the rabbits Phil carried.

‘Good boy!’ He turned back into the doorway. ‘Let’s get ‘em skinned and cooked so they’ll only need warming up tomorrow. Tomorrow’s the Sabbath, don’t forget.’

His skinning knife slit the belly of the first one and his gnarled fingers drew the paunch. In the open doorway Patch whined.

‘Darned flies!’ The old man swatted at some bluebottles with the bloodied blade. ‘Never seed so many afore. It’s –’

Suddenly he threw the rabbit down. The knife followed, clattering on the stone floor. Phil stared in amazement. It was as if the creature had come to life; its whole coat was moving in rippling waves.

‘Fleas!’ Chris Thompson stepped back a pace, staring aghast at the multitude of moving bodies, the way they gathered on the rabbit’s head. They had lain in hiding, deep in the grey fur. Now the dead flesh had cooled and they had no use for a corpse as a host. ‘Millions of ‘em. They’re on the other one, too!’

‘Patch’s got ‘em, a tick as well.’ Phil was aware that his voice was a hoarse, frightened whisper. ‘I reckon the cattle have got ‘em, too, by the way they’re behaving.’

‘It figures.’ The older man moved to the window and looked out on the dry landscape. ‘The frogs, the way the big lake’s turned red like it was filled with blood. Then the flies. Don’t you understand, boy?’

Phil did not understand, but looked at his father in blank amazement.

‘Don’t you listen when I read the Bible to you, son?’ A reprimand tinged with awe.

‘I listen,’ Phil answered, ‘but I don’t see …’

The Plagues, the Plagues of Egypt are here, reborn into a world of iniquity!’ Chris Thompson thrust his face close to his son’s, his lined features a mask of fear. ‘God has seen fit to punish mankind for their sins. They have destroyed his earth, now they have brought that destruction upon themselves. He has sent the Plague of Frogs, the Plague of Blood, the Plague of Flies.’ His voice rose to a pitch, his shaking finger pointing first to the rabbits, then outside. ‘Now d’you see what He has sent upon us?’

Phil still did not understand. He was scared because his father was scared, he had never seen him this way before.

‘You see it before you, on those rabbits, on the dog. Out there you’ve seen the cattle. They’ll all die, us too, because the Lord has sent the Plague of the Murrain of Beasts!’

Chapter Nine

It was stifling hot, almost to the point of suffocation, in the cabin.

The three of them sat in the kitchen. The light was on because the crawling, heaving mass of insects on the outside of the windowpane had darkened the room almost to nocturnal blackness. Susan had closed the curtains; she could not stand the sight of the seething insects, but her mind was incapable of shutting them out. Trevor had swept the floor and scraped up the slimy corpse in the hallway. The waste-disposal bin beneath the sink was full to overflowing with tiny, sticky bodies.

Mark, clad in just a pair of boxer shorts, sat with his folded arms on the table, his head resting on them. She saw that his eyes were closed and his body trembling. That nightmare had been a bad one, it still was. Terrifying dreams had become stark reality, you only had to pull the curtains to see that for yourself.

Trevor busied himself cleaning the shotgun, wiping it down with a rag, spraying it with WD-40. He clicked the breech, opened it and shut it a second time. Somehow guns gave him a feeling of invincibility; his personality changed at the very touch of cold steel barrels, a macho instinct which in his own mind might have spurred him to take on this entire insect army.

Susan turned the radio off, not wanting to hear any more. This crisis stretched the entire length and breadth of the United States, maybe even further when overseas reports came in. Masses of algae were appearing on previously unaffected waterways and had spread to backyard ornamental ponds; no drinking water was safe. Fish and pond life were dying in their millions, creating a stinking atmosphere; the authorities’ greatest worry right now was the spread of disease. There had been a dozen reported human deaths so far, and there would be many more. Once the growth turned blood red it was lethal; contact with the skin spread its poison through the pores.

Bullfrogs, newts, lizards, all amphibians had fled on to dry land and died. Birds fed on the corpses. Probably they would die, too; it was early yet. Then came the insects, plagues of flies to carry the contamination to human food. Swarms of wasps and bees were plaguing towns and cities. There were already deaths from stings.

Oh, God, she thought, this is doomsday, the end of the world.

Trevor looked up, asking, ‘How much canned and packaged food have we got?’

She glanced at Mark. He appeared to be asleep, and she didn’t want to alarm him further. In a hoarse whisper she replied, ‘Enough for a week, ten days at the most. We weren’t planning on staying any longer.’

‘We can stretch it, maybe.’ He continued cleaning the gun as though for him it was the most important task he had ever undertaken. ‘If the water life dies, then surely the insects will. Maybe in a day or two I’ll be able to make a trip to the city, bring back some more provisions. I’ll go to the Thompson place and phone the office, get a first-hand account of how things are back home.’

She nodded. Right now, though, nobody would be going anywhere. The silence in the room was heavy, the heat was building up. One thing that had been overlooked in fitting out the cabin was an air conditioning system. Nobody could have guessed that it would ever be necessary. Nobody could have forecast anything like this.

‘Trev?’ Again it was a whisper, a barely audible one that trembled.

‘What?’ His impatience and frustration were audible.

‘There’s … there’s something I want to ask you?’ Something that had been nagging her for weeks, but maybe this wasn’t the time or the place.

‘Go on, then.’ This time he didn’t meet her gaze; he meticulously tried to polish out a scratch on the stock where Mark had dragged it along the ground.

‘Is … is everything … all right?’

‘Christ!’ He waved a hand towards the window. ‘You can see for –’

‘I didn’t mean that.’ She averted her eyes. ‘I meant … the office, the business.’

His attention remained with the gun, which he polished feverishly. ‘What makes you ask that?’

‘Intuition, little things I’ve noticed. I get the feeling money’s tight and I don’t just mean the recession.’ They had never discussed finances throughout their married life; Trevor gave her money and she never enquired further. They had never gone short but lately there were things in the apartment that needed replacing that had not been attended to.

‘Things aren’t good generally. Interest rates are sky-high, the banks are squeezing.’

‘Your bank?’

He didn’t look up and when he spoke his tone was subdued, something she had never heard before. ‘They could repossess by the end of the week, the office and the apartment.’

‘Oh, God!’

‘I don’t know for sure. I’m trying to remortgage, get an increased loan.’

‘And the chances?’

‘Virtually nil.’ He laid the gun on the table; his shoulders sagged. ‘They won’t go much further. With anybody.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me before?’

‘It wouldn’t have helped, only worried you.’

‘I’d’ve understood. I’ve been living in a fool’s paradise, then?’

‘Everybody is, just hoping things will get better. The Gulf War was the killer punch, cut out Middle East holidays and business travel. Bomb fears, too. Then the recession deepened and folks didn’t have any spare money even to travel to safe places. There’s only Elaine left in the office and she finishes at the end of the week. Might be sooner if the bank forecloses.’

‘What’re we going to do, then?’ There was despair in Susan’s voice.

‘Nobody knows about this place. I paid cash for it when times were good. They’ll maybe take the apartment and the office but at least we have a roof over our heads.’

Susan closed her eyes and shuddered. The prospect of living here for the rest of their lives was too terrible to contemplate.

‘I’ll try and get over to the city as soon as I can.’ Trevor spoke with a forced confidence. ‘I’ll take the truck, load up everything I can, food as well. That way we’ll last out till these freak plagues are over. At least we’ll have a fresh start, a clean slate.’

‘Then what?’

‘I’ll think of something.’

‘The police might be looking for you. How many travellers are going to be left stranded abroad, kicked out of their hotels, their return flight tickets invalid?’ There was guilt and anger in her voice; it was a story she had heard and read so many times recently. People lost their vacations, a year’s savings. When they tried to sue a bankrupt travel agency, if they were lucky they maybe got twenty cents in the dollar.

He didn’t reply, only went back to polishing the gun stock.

‘Well, how many?’

‘It’s peak vacation time.’ He didn’t look up this time. ‘It’s not my fault. Blame the world’s economy, or Saddam, if you like – he’s virtually made the Middle East a no-go area for tourism.’

She sighed. Chibnell Travel would be emblazoned across the front pages of the dailies; lawyers would be filing writs, cops trying to trace Trevor. They’d find him, one way or another.

‘Thompson will shop you,’ she said. ‘He’s that kind. Self-righteous …’

‘He doesn’t read the papers, doesn’t have TV. I doubt if he listens to news bulletins on the radio.’

‘He goes to town once a month.’

‘Yeah, but he doesn’t gossip, just picks up what he needs and can’t get back fast enough to his cocoon.’

‘I’ll make some coffee.’ She scraped her chair back. She wondered how long they’d be able to sit out this insect siege, cooped up in this heat. Some hard-legged beetles were tapping on the window, a tattoo that sent shivers up her spine in spite of the 100-degree temperature. You might as well open up and let us in, they seemed to say, in the end you’ll die in there.

Mark still slept peacefully. He was the lucky one, now that his nightmare was over. She let him sleep on because there was tonight to face. And tomorrow. And the day after that.

Night. It was dark early because the hordes of incessant, crawling insects shut out the waning daylight so that it did not penetrate the curtains. Those millions of creatures outside never rested, their night sounds were incessant: scratching, tapping, scraping. Their relentless tide grew by the hour as they squirmed out of the wilderness, scenting man and determined to conquer his last stronghold. If they couldn’t reach him, then they were determined that he would die in his impenetrable fortress.

‘Maybe we should go to bed.’ Susan glanced at Mark, who had slept for nine hours now, but showed no signs of waking. ‘We could carry him to his room. Or ours.’

‘What’s the point?’ Trevor had long since finished cleaning the shotgun; the scratches on the stock were virtually invisible to the naked eye. ‘It’s as hot in there as it is here, and they’re all over every window. Every room is pitch dark.’

‘We could leave the light on. At least we’d be able to lie down.’

He nodded, moved over to where Mark sprawled, and lifted him up in one easy motion. The boy did not wake, not even when Trevor laid him in the centre of the double bed in the far room. Trevor and Susan stretched themselves out on either side of their son.

Outside, the insects continued their ceaseless, futile onslaught on the window glass, tapped and scratched, their numbers building up until they were three deep. On the ground below, the crickets serenaded their efforts long into the sultry night.

Morning. The Chibnells had slept late; the hot sun was already slanting on to the bed before Trevor stirred. Memories of yesterday flooded back, and he groaned aloud. Another day of intense heat and terror lay before them. He glanced sideways. Susan and Mark still slept, and there was no hurry to wake them.

The misfortunes of Chibnell Travel seemed a minor setback by comparison. If the insects were in the cities, then nothing mattered any more; his firm would go under with the rest of civilization; nobody won, everybody was a loser.

They might last two weeks here in the cabin, he decided. They would need to ration the food sparingly; he had read in one of his survival books that you could keep going on water alone for quite some time. That was provided that the borehole held out. Okay, a month then, but what was the point in prolonging life for a few weeks in a burning hellhole when your fate was inevitable? His thoughts strayed to the shotgun; he went cold at the idea. He wouldn’t have the nerve even if it was the kindest way out for all of them.

He tried to formulate a plan whereby he could run the gauntlet of their attackers, reach the vehicles and drive off. It wouldn’t work; the truck and station-wagon windows had been left open because of the heat, so in all probability the creepy-crawlies were a foot deep in there. Most likely they had clogged the engines so that they wouldn’t start. Maybe he could make it on foot – no, no chance. And, anyway, even if he got out of here, there was nothing anybody could do. There wouldn’t be any help to fetch.

‘Trev?’ A husky whisper; Susan was turned towards him, propped up on one elbow. Mark was stirring, too.

‘Yes?’

‘How is it that the sun’s shining in through the curtains?’ Her question was apprehensive as if she hardly dared to ask it.

‘Because it’s … Christ!’ He swung himself off the bed, stumbled over to the window and clawed at the curtain.

A hornet buzzed feebly on the sill outside, otherwise there was nothing to obstruct his vision. The vehicles were where they had been parked, looking much the same as they had a couple of days ago; a film of dust, a few squashed insect corpses on the windshield, natural road casualties. Beyond, the dried-up grassland stretched away up to the forest and down to where the lake was hidden by a fold in the landscape. Parched and barren, not a living thing in sight …

Not a living thing in sight.

‘They’ve gone!’ He hardly dared voice what he saw through the dirt-streaked but otherwise transparent window. For a moment he thought it might be a hallucination brought on by the heat and the tension. He closed his eyes; opened them again. Still nothing seethed and crawled out there.

He heard the others coming to join him, hustling him for a look outside, with gasps of astonishment.

‘Where are they, Dad?’ The relief weakened them, had them clinging to one another for support.

‘Where’ve they gone, Trev?’

‘I … don’t … know.’ His own voice seemed far away, as if somebody was talking to him through the adjoining wall, mimicking him.

They stared in silence, Mark standing on the balls of his feet so that he could see out of the window. Wherever they had gone, the insect armies had left their casualties in plenty behind them; a carpet of beetles and wasps littered the veranda; a heaped line of them encircled the cabin and the vehicles like snow that had melted from the guttering and piled up beneath. As if the multitude of squiggling beings had simply died in their efforts to maintain a hold, and dropped down. Many of them but not all of them …

Susan stared in disbelief; Mark was crying. Trevor stood there, letting them hold on to him; at one stage he feared for their sanity. Finally, they sank down to the floor with their backs against the wall. Later, they would go outside to check. Not yet; they didn’t have the strength.

The hornet’s buzzing slowed and petered out. In the stillness they heard a faint plip;it, too, had given up the struggle for survival and fallen to the ground.

‘But why?’ Susan asked the question again, not expecting an answer. Suffice it that those awful creatures were either dead or flown; reasons didn’t matter.

‘I don’t know, not for sure.’ Trevor’s features were white and strained, his suntan was temporarily not in evidence. ‘Just a guess. You know, seasons, weather conditions can affect the movements of most species of wildlife. In the fall the wild geese move south in their thousands, the flyways are full of them. Hard weather comes, lakes are frozen, they’re forced to look elsewhere for a habitat. And food. Okay, the frogs were poisoned, they deserted the lake for that reason. Now take all these insects, the bees need pollen, most of the wild flowers and shrubs are shrivelled up so there’s no food. Nothing for most of them because they rely on a natural harvest which the drought has deprived them of. They stick it out as long as they can, but in the end they have no choice. So it’s a mass exodus; one makes a decision, the rest follow. They swarmed on the cabin because by some sixth sense they knew there was food inside, even if it was in the cooler or in cans. Sheer desperation. Insects are short-lived, many of them died of starvation. Those that had the strength decided the cabin was a lost cause and they’d better look elsewhere while they could. It wasn’t us they were interested in, although the bees might have stung us, others bitten us. Primarily, they wanted food. They couldn’t stick it out as long as we could. As I said, I’m just guessing.’

‘I reckon you’ve cracked it, Trev.’ Susan’s arm linked with her husband’s and she kissed him. ‘You think it might be safe to …’ Her voice trailed off. They wouldn’t be able to return to the city for reasons that had nothing to do with the drought or its side effects.

‘I’m going to try,’ he said. ‘Just me, nobody else. Tomorrow, maybe. I’ll take the truck, bring back as much as I can carry. First, though, I’ll have to clean the truck’s engine off. There’s a lot of things I have to do before I go.’

In case I don’t come back.

He went to the kitchen, filled the kettle and switched on the radio. It crackled; reception was bad, probably static due to the weather. He kept it turned low, putting his ear up against it. A newsreader was giving a rundown of all the catastrophes.

A swarm of killer bees had terrorized Mexico and was believed to be headed for Texas. More deaths from the algae across the whole of the United States. Dead fish floated on lakes and rivers, amphibious creatures were dead or dying on dry land. The flies were the worst, though, gigantic swarms of them feeding on the poisoned corpses, then spreading the contamination. Hospitals were at full stretch treating diseases for which they had not enough serum. There was an outbreak of typhoid in New York. Bottled water had trebled in price, manufacturing plants had come to a standstill because of the water pollution. There was a rush on wines and spirits in the big stores, and drunken riots in most of the major cities; looting, too.

Trevor switched off the radio. He went to the bedroom with three mugs of coffee. Susan and Mark were sitting on the bed; their moment of euphoria was over. Maybe they, too, realized the consequences of these plagues.

Later Trevor began making preparations for his expedition to the plague-torn city. He swept out the truck, cleaning the engine off; it started at the first attempt, thank God.

He contemplated taking the shotgun with him, but changed his mind. Instead, he went to the top shelf of the wardrobe, rummaged beneath some folded sheets, and found what he had secreted there on his arrival, something he always kept hidden from his wife and son. His back to the door in case one of them came in, he handled it with loving care, admiring and worshipping it as only a gun-lover could. An 8mm automatic pistol, an ME-8 Bruni Police model. Its touch was exhilarating, electrifying, it gave him a sense of invincibility. It invigorated him, excited him; in a way it was akin to the feeling that Susan used to give him in the early days ever time he saw her naked.

It also gave him an urge to kill. Tomorrow he would return to the riot-torn city, and nobody would stop him.

Chapter Ten

The shabby clapboard building on the North Falls dusty Main Street bore a hand-painted sign above the doorway: ed parker, vet. The door itself had not latched properly for years; it was propped wide with a brick, allowing passers-by on the pavement to see into the gloomy reception; a table and chair, an untidy medicine cupboard with an array of shelves containing tins, jars and disposable syringes.

An adjacent door led out to the ‘surgery’ at the rear, an outbuilding that stank of decomposing lambs and calves from the spring when fatalities were at their peak; the stench became impregnated in the walls and floor and lingered for the rest of the year.

A stranger to the town might have been forgiven for conjuring up in his mind a picture of a middle-aged man of the same generation as Doc Wycherley and Sheriff Taggart, a tradition in this place where change was not encouraged; you followed in your father’s footsteps and hoped to have a son to follow in your own. That way a lifestyle would be preserved.

On mounting the flight of rickety steps and entering that uninviting room, the stranger might have been mildly surprised to be greeted by a large woman wearing a soiled suit of overalls with irremovable traces of bloodstains; big-boned but not fat, her fourteen-stone frame had barely an ounce of surplus flesh. Her working clothes – not that she ever wore anything else – made her shapeless; her short-cut, dark hair, flecked with grey, was evidence of a seven-day working week rather than an outright rejection of fashion. Yet there was an attractiveness about her features that might have gone unnoticed at first glance, and her lips might have given a wider smile had they not been engaged in gripping a half-smoked cigarette with an inch of ash that cascaded down her full bosom when she spoke.

Her age was indeterminable to a decade, but she was probably in her early forties. Nobody in North Falls knew for certain; they had long ago given up guessing, and had anybody been rude enough to ask, or even to hint, her reply would have matched that of either the doctor or the sheriff. And both Wycherley and Taggart were colourful in their choice of words.

She showed no offence at being mistaken by strangers for the vet’s wife or daughter; it had happened on innumerable occasions.

‘I’m Ed Parker,’ she told them, ‘and how can I help you.’

Only the doctor and the sheriff, and perhaps Morgan, the bank manager, knew that she had been christened Edwina, for medical documents, driving licences and bank statements demanded names in full. But they were confidential papers and nobody else saw them.

Ed had bought the practice from Jud Larkin when the old vet had retired in 1970. She had looked the same then as she did now. The only time she had anything to do with men, apart from Wycherley and Taggart, was when she was called out to one of the farms to tend a sick cow or sheep; clients were clients, regardless of sex. Naturally, there had been whispered rumours about her when she first arrived in North Falls but those jokes soon died; Ed didn’t fit the ‘butch’ category, she was a breed folks hadn’t met up with before, but, most important, she was a damned good vet. She would turn out at any hour and if there was a chance of saving a sick animal, whether farm livestock or a pet, she would sit up with it all night.

There was a genuine sadness in her tone when an animal died on her. ‘Some you win, some you lose,’ was one of her catch phrases.

There were other stories told in low voices in the bars, about how she was descended from Isaac Parker, the notorious ‘hanging judge’. Lafayette, the travelling farm-machinery salesman, had heard it somewhere, but Lafayette was a smooth talker and not to be relied upon.

Others hinted that Ed shared the beds of the doctor and the sheriff, but that was just malicious gossip. Taggart’s wife had passed away three years ago and the doc had never married. Sure, they both spent a lot of time talking with her over a glass of whisky in their respective offices, but in a way they belonged to the same breed; they served the community throughout every waking minute and often sacrificed their sleep to the job, too. That, in itself, excused anything they might care to do with their personal lives.

Whatever people chose to believe was their business, it did not matter. If her ancestor was Isaac Parker, then it added to Ed’s charisma. It would have been a pity to pry too deeply and destroy a colourful myth, for these days North Falls was sorely in need of a little colour. A cattle town that had once been a mecca for drovers, it had become a mushroom overspill for industries that have moved out from the city in an attempt to cut their overheads. Many of the new factories had closed down because of the recession and North Falls looked like becoming a ghost town again, and a bigger and uglier one than before.

Ed had listened to the plague reports on the radio with grim concern. Wildlife was being destroyed to the point of extinction; the effects would, in the long term, be far more disastrous than ever the sensation-seeking media guessed. The Ballingers’ dog had died yesterday after swimming in the river on the edge of town. They had wanted Ed to do a post-mortem but she had refused. There was no doubt in her mind of the cause of death, and she wasn’t prepared to risk her own life just to confirm the obvious. The dog was dead, nothing would bring it back.

Right now the flies were the worst. They crawled on every wall and ceiling in town; meat that was fresh in the morning was hatching bluebottles by evening. The flies would spread diseases in many forms.

The call from Chris Thompson came in towards midmorning. Ed took it on her mobile phone. Any other time the request might have been routine – to help cattle plagued by lice and ticks – any other time, too, they could have been dealt with.

‘I’ll be right out,’ she grunted and clicked the phone dead. She went outside to where her old Chevrolet truck was parked against the kerb.

The trip was an excuse to get out of town, escapism in the guise of duty. There would be innumerable dead and dying cats and dogs, animals that she wouldn’t be able to save, anyway. She gunned the engine, dispersing a cloud of flies in a burst of exhaust fumes. In the mirror she saw them returning to settle on the mush of fries that somebody had jettisoned in the gutter. The whole damned town needed cleaning up, it was a paradise for scavengers of every species.

She left the passenger-door window up; the slipstream only invited every kind of insect to home in on the cab. The vents were open and already the gauze was clogged with crushed flies; the windscreen was a mass of tiny squashed bodies. Ed didn’t relish the trip any longer, just hoped the patched-up radiator wouldn’t boil over before she reached her destination.

She liked old Thompson; the guy belonged to a bygone era, the last of a breed of small ranchers who had survived the open ranges. His son would try to follow in the same tradition because he didn’t know any other way, but the system would beat him. Like it or not, you had to move with the times.

Longhorns were fine in the days of long cattle drives; they were durable, suited to drought lands because they needed little water, but they produced less meet than imported breeds of French origin like the Charolais. But old Chris was too stubborn to see that; he stuck to what his father and grandfather had raised, complained when he didn’t get his price, but continued in the same way.

He didn’t need drought-resistant beasts because he only had to drill a borehole and there would be water aplenty. An investment of ten thousand bucks a year or two ago would have reaped a tenfold reward. But now it was too late. Ed knew what she’d find up there; animals that were nearing dehydration and starvation, victims of this new murrain of beasts.

There was an outbreak of foot-and-mouth in Missouri; it would spread. In Arkansas there was a suspect case of BSE, known as ‘mad cow disease’, probably carried by some cattle imported from Britain. Many of the British herds had been ravaged by it and had had to be destroyed. A self-inflicted, preventable illness, it was caused by mixing infected sheep offal in cattle feedstuffs. As a result of the scares, folks were going off eating meat; meat prices had slumped, farmers were going bankrupt. Guys like Thompson wouldn’t be able to make a living before long.

Thompson was on the veranda when Ed bumped the truck down the track. Maybe he had been watching out for her ever since he’d phoned, pacing up and down. Ed killed the engine thankfully; the temperature gauge had been hovering on the red zone the last mile. She must remember to check the radiator before she left.

‘Phil’s up there now,’ Thompson greeted her, looking at the Chevrolet as if maybe the vet would use that instead of the farm truck, and save him petrol that way. ‘We’d better go on up.’

‘Damned truck’s overheating.’ Ed climbed out, letting the door bang behind her.

‘We gotta cart some water from the forest pool later.’ Chris walked towards his own battered vehicle. ‘Cows’ve run dry.’

‘No!’ Ed Parker stopped in her tracks. ‘Don’t get givin’ ‘em pond water, it’s sure to be contaminated with this algae.’

‘Other cattle are drinkin’ it, right across the –’

‘And that’s why there ain’t gonna be no cattle left in the country, and not much of anything else, either,’ the vet said sharply. ‘Way things’re goin’, this is gonna be a dead planet by the end o’ the summer.’

‘The Lord will provide.’ Thompson had to use both hands to force open the badly hinged door on the Dodge. ‘And if He don’t, then it’s His will.’

‘Somebody’s coming.’ The vet looked back, hearing a vehicle coming down the track. A dust cloud screened it from her view.

‘It’s that feller from the cabin.’ The dust swirled, giving them a glimpse of a red Ford pickup. ‘Now what in tarnation’s he want? Mebbe his new-fangled borehole’s run dry and he’s a-looking for a water loan. Well, he’s outa luck because we need every drop that’s in the well.’

The vehicle braked; the dust settled.

‘It’s Chibnell,’ Chris Thompson announced by way of an introduction. ‘Everything all right up at the cabin?’

‘As right as everywhere else.’ Trevor had a couple of dollar bills in his hand, and made sure the farmer saw them. ‘I’d like to use your phone if I may, Mr Thompson.’

‘One thing you missed out on up there.’ Chris had always shown open disapproval of ‘them gadgets’ which the other had fitted, the cooler and the freezer, not to mention the borehole. ‘Always need a phone out in these parts, just in case of an emergency.’ It wouldn’t have helped his wife that time because the Lord had called her and there was no way he was going to dispute that.

‘I’m going to make a trip into the city,’ Trevor said. ‘Probably tomorrow, provided there’s nothing catastrophic happened there. If you want anything …’

‘We’re stocked up, thanks. Mebbe Donk up at the Spode could do with some baccy. As Ed and I are going up in the truck, we’ll call on the way back. Check on your way out tomorrow and I’ll let you know. The phone’s in the hallway.’

‘Thanks.’ Trevor headed towards the veranda steps.

Ed climbed up into the passenger seat and Thompson let out the clutch. Flies of innumerable species covered the windshield; he used the wipers to dislodge them, leaving a swathe of corpses on the glass. The washers didn’t work.

‘Saw Doc Wycherley yesterday’ – Ed made small talk – ‘said he hadn’t been out this way for weeks. He’ll call in on you some time, hopes it’ll only be a social call.’

‘Darned right it will.’ The suspension groaned over a rut. ‘Don’t need no doctor, just a vet.’

The forest loomed up on their left, its greenery struggling to maintain a degree of lushness. Many of the pines were already browning.

‘There’s Phil,’ Thompson said. ‘Only just got up here, by the looks of it.’

Ed dabbed at her sweaty forehead with a handkerchief. The boy could have waited and ridden up with them; the old man’s impatience hadn’t gained him anything. The cattle were up against the fence, hugging the shade. All of them were lying down except one, a scraggy longhorn cow.

‘What’s up with her?’ Ed’s eyes narrowed. ‘Take the truck up close, Chris, I want to look at that one first.’

The animal heard them coming and turned its head. Even from this distance, through a fly-covered windshield, the vet saw the creature’s expression; a mixture of anguish and confusion, its eyes burning hollowly. It moved, the unsteady legs staggering, taking the scrawny body round in a circle. The tail swished at the flies. A bellow came out high-pitched, the head went down and seemed to have difficulty lifting back up.

‘Christ!’ Ed said.

Thompson glanced disapprovingly at his companion, often in the past he had reproached her for taking the name of the Son of God in vain. This time he checked the instinctive reprimand because in all his years of cattle raising he had never known a cow act this way before. Now it was facing the truck head on, a pathetic attempt at preparing for a charge which it had not the strength to make.

‘Over she goes!’ The vet slipped the door catch, jumping down even as the longhorn crumpled and lay twitching, its emaciated flanks expanding and contracting. Bovine eyes watched from the resting herd but none made any attempt to get away.

She reached the stricken beast in two strides and knelt by its head. She saw some things she understood; flies swarming, fleas that jumped, ticks that burrowed and fed on blood. The rest she guessed from reports she had read, bulletins that came through the post.

‘BSE.’ She didn’t look up. ‘Mad cow disease!’

‘That’s impossible.’ The farmer’s voice was tinged with fear. ‘My herd doesn’t come into contact with any other cattle, and I don’t feed ‘em any fancy polluted foodstuffs.’

‘You don’t need to.’ Ed Parker straightened up. ‘The disease can travel in a variety of ways, most of all in these conditions. It’s BSE all right and the rest will get it. If they survive, that is.’

‘They have to!’ A hint of panic.

‘Well, first you have to get rid of this one.’ Ed had her euthanasia syringe in her bag in the cab. ‘Then burn it. The rest have to be moved to a fresh pasture where there’s grass and fresh water. I’ll have to make a report; there’ll be a destruction order on the herd but with what’s happening all over right now, it’ll take time to enforce it. I don’t have any choice, Chris. Believe me, it hurts me as much as it hurts you.’

‘Here’s Phil coming.’ The old man turned at the approach of his son. Phil just might know of some fresh water and grass, though he knew it was unlikely.

‘She’s dyin’.’ There was alarm in the young man’s tone. He looked down at the beast and backed off a pace.

‘Ed’s goin’ to put her down, son. You know of any grass, fresh water?’

‘There’s that patch behind the Spode – not much, ‘bout a couple o’ acres. Donk fenced it that time he kept them cows.’

‘It’ll do; let’s go see. We’d better tell the old fool, it don’t rightly belong to him, it’s ours. We could move ‘em in there. Don’t know ‘bout water, though. Guess we’ll have to use what’s in the well, cart it up here, fill a trough.’

Father and son returned to the truck. They didn’t want to watch Ed Parker destroy the stricken cow, and they didn’t have to because a fresh swarm of flies had settled on the windshield, blanking out their view. After a few minutes they heard the vet coming back, her footsteps dragging. She had done what had to be done.

‘Let’s go.’ She slammed the door shut. Phil thought his father’s eyes might have been misty but he took care to face out the side window.

‘We have to stop at the Spode on the way down.’ Thompson’s voice was husky. ‘Probably Donk won’t be home so we’ll just move the cattle in anyway. Better check, though, he’s a funny old cuss.’

A wasp was crawling on the inside of the windshield but none of them had the heart to swat it. Thunderbugs coated the dusty fascia; they came out of the corn at harvest time, usually preceding thunderstorms. But Chris Thompson could tell by the atmosphere that there weren’t going to be any storms. Just one isolated deluge would have gone some way towards solving their problems.

‘Look at those crows.’ Ed leaned forward, pointing to a flock of cawing birds that rose suddenly up ahead of them. ‘Mebbe there’s another of your cows lying dead up there, Chris.’

Thompson did not reply; they would see for themselves soon enough. He changed down a gear.

Even so, he almost ran over the near-skeletal human form that lay across the track in front of them.

There was a sharp intake of breath from Phil; he clutched at Ed Parker and both of them were jerked forward as Chris hit the brakes. The truck skidded on the powdery soil, slewed and came to a stop with its front wheels barely a foot from the crow-scavenged remains.

‘Merciful Lord!’ Chris Thompson closed his eyes.

The crows were circling, cawing angrily at having been disturbed from their feast. A splat of white hit the windshield, trapping some fluttering insects in its sticky mess. Then the occupants of the cab smelled whatever lay in front of them, a sickening stench of rotting meat. Phil heaved and nearly vomited.

‘We’d better check.’ Ed forced the door open and got out with reluctance. The other two followed her; they couldn’t let a woman go to look on her own.

At their appearance a swarm of flies flew up, a black buzzing cloud that seemed intent on discovering whether living flesh was as appetizing as corpse meat. Arms swatted at them to no avail.

‘It’s Donk!’ Phil gave a half-scream, then spat out a fly which had flown into his open mouth.

Only the clothing, the home-made garment with its rawhide thongs, was recognizable; the rest was an assumption because it could not possibly be anybody else out here. Empty eye sockets stared pitifully up at them; the lipless mouth cavity screamed, a warning: Flee, before this happens to you! The stomach had been gouged open, entrails spilling out like a nest of scarlet serpents. Remnants of flesh hung in bloody ribbons from the bones; the genitals were long gone, a delicacy which had been gorged by the early arrivals at this predators’ banquet, along with the eyes.

The others heard Phil finally throw up. The smell of his vomit was sweet by comparison with the stench that came from the ravaged remains of the backwoodsman. Already maggots were beginning to hatch in the sun-heated flesh, newborn blowflies joining their companions. Many were settling back on the mutilation; its flavour was, after all, preferable to that of the living.

‘We can’t do anything here.’ Ed helped Phil back into the truck; Chris clambered up into the driving seat. Doors slammed, windows with rusty winders were forced closed. The stifling heat and the insects that were inside were preferred to what lay out on the track.

Thompson slammed the gears and revved. He would have to go round that, and he prayed that the tyres would secure a grip on the sloping bank, that they wouldn’t sink in and get wheelspin. The engine roared its protest; at one point the vehicle slid, almost slewing on to the fly-blown corpse, but righted itself with inches to spare. The tread gripped, the detour was completed and they were back on the track, winding down the windows again and gasping for hot air.

‘Poor soul!’ Chris Thompson would have crossed himself had he not been driving, negotiating the narrow track. ‘God rest him, pray that he died quickly. We must see to it that he has a Christian burial.’ He glanced meaningfully at Phil.

‘I’ll report it when I get back to town,’ Ed cut in quickly. ‘There’ll have to be a PM, a coroner’s report. Doc Wycherley will have to come out. Don’t you get doin’ nothin’ in the meantime, else you could find yourself in trouble with Sheriff Taggart. Mebbe you might cover the body with a tarpaulin out of respect, though, keep the crows off it.’ What’s left of it.

‘The boy’ll see to it.’ Chris glanced again at Phil. ‘You goin’ to report this BSE or whatever you call it, Ed?’

‘I’ll have to, I’m afraid.’

‘What about the other cattle – lice, ticks, whatever? Can’t you treat them?’

‘Frankly, no. It’s a plague, Chris, not just an isolated outbreak. I saw all I needed to. Move ‘em into that enclosure you mentioned, give ‘em some fresh water from the well. You can’t do no more. I’m afraid there’ll be a destruction order on them. You’ll get compensation, mebbe more’n the meat on them is worth right now.’

Chris Thompson didn’t reply. The gnarled fingers on the steering wheel trembled, and there was a lump in his throat that would have made talking difficult. That strain of longhorn went back to his great-grandfather’s day, they had kept it alive here since the days of the Indian raids. It was as much a piece of history as that arrowhead in the beam of Donk’s hovel. Slaughter those cattle and the last remaining link with the past was gone for ever.

They topped the brow. He changed down again to negotiate the slope that ran all the way down to the ranch house. Through misted eyes and a fly-splattered windshield, Chris Thompson noted that Chibnell’s truck had gone. The other had made his call, maybe found out what was going on in the city. Or not, as the case may be. Either way it didn’t worry the old farmer, his only concern right now was that he might lose the herd of cattle which he and his ancestors had preserved through changing times. And be danged if he was going to start raising any of those fancy breeds!

‘I’ll be heading for home.’ Ed Parker declined the offer of coffee, checked the radiator on the Chevrolet. The water level was holding, it was just the heatwave that had made it run hot. Or a faulty thermostat. She’d make it back to North Falls. ‘I’ll be in touch as soon as I can. Probably Doc Wycherley will be out tomorrow to check that body.’

Something else worried the vet, but it would have been unfair to voice her suspicions until she was certain and only a ministry check would confirm or deny them. Maybe her diagnosis of BSE had been hasty, influenced by recent warning bulletins. She had been instructed to look for signs, and she jumped to conclusions sometimes even after a lifetime of experience.

The cow had a fever, she could tell that by its eyes, the mucus. There were ulcers, but they might have been caused by a severe infestation of ticks. Probably the cow had pneumonia as well. It had staggered on its feet, but that could have been due to weakness, not BSE. Added up, the symptoms all fitted something else, something far more frightening than mad cow disease. If the latter affected man, it could take a decade before it showed itself; even the scientists were arguing over whether it spread to humans. And right now man’s chances of being around in ten years were decreasing daily.

If it wasn’t BSE, then it could be … Ed Parker hardly dared to think of the disease: anthrax.

Anthrax was the most serious disease of cattle and sheep and could be passed on to mankind by contact with the animals, their hides or their meat. In the old droving days it was relatively common, and was known as ‘the staggers’.

And that beast had staggered, all right. And Donk had died out there in the wilderness, dropped down dead the way cowboys used to on cattle drives in the last century, the buzzards picking their bones clean.

All of this was a very good reason for getting the ministry and Doc Wycherley out to the Spode as quickly as possible. Because by the time the crows had finished with both human and cattle corpses, a post-mortem wouldn’t reveal much.

Chapter Eleven

‘Chibnell Travel. Good morning, can I help you?’

Trevor was momentarily deprived of his power of speech. He had not really expected the office telephone to be answered. He had anticipated a monotone signal indicating that the line had been disconnected on account of an unpaid bill, or a dead line because the city phones weren’t working. He had listened to it ringing out with mild surprise, but believed it wouldn’t be answered because his secretary would have left yesterday or the day before, knowing that there wouldn’t be any wages for her at the end of the week. Or, if it was answered, it would be a bailiffs voice, austere with officialdom; The company you are calling has ceased to exist. Please put all communications in writing.

But it had rung out and Elaine had answered it, just as though everything was normal.

‘Chibnell Travel. Can I help you?’ A slight irritability had entered her voice now; maybe she suspected a hoax or even a dirty call.

‘Elaine!’ For a moment he thought she might not recognize his voice; it certainly didn’t sound like him, he was convinced of that.

‘Trev!’ Surprise, delight and relief all mingled into a shrill squeal.

‘Yeah, it’s me, love.’ His pulses quickened, he felt his heartbeat step up a notch. He pictured her in his mind with her auburn hair immaculately groomed as it always was, her pert, freckled features, her slim, petite figure. She was probably wearing the turquoise blouse and matching skirt which he had bought for her with his American Express card for her twenty-first birthday last month. At least, he liked to think that she was, and the ring he had given her for Christmas, for which he was now behind with the instalments. He imagined her naked, too, the way she often was after the office closed at six and they had the place to themselves. Any other time just thinking about her aroused him. Right now that was difficult.

‘Trev, are you okay? I’ve been worried sick about you.’

‘I’m fine. You knew I was on vacation so why worry?’

‘Sure, but … I’ve closed the office, almost everybody’s closed up. There’s no business for anybody.’

‘What are you doing there, then?’ His stomach started to cramp.

‘I … I was hoping that you might call. God, I need you, Trev.’

‘I’m going to make a trip into the city, probably tomorrow.’ He said it in a rush, hoping it reassured her. ‘Fill me in on the latest.’

‘Just about everything’s happening, I guess. If I didn’t need you so bad, I’d tell you not to come. But please come, Trev, promise me you will?’

‘I promise, baby. Now, give me a rundown on city life.’

‘I haven’t been back to the apartment since Sunday. It’s too risky for a woman to be out alone, for one thing; second, there wasn’t any point in going home. I managed to get a crate of water before the stores ran dry, some food, too. I … I used the cash float in the till.’

‘That’s fine.’ The sweat on his body chilled.

‘What water comes out of the taps stinks, I daren’t even wash in it. But the flies are the worst. Christ, I’ve never seen anything like it! You have to keep all the windows shut, and now the damned air conditioning in the block has packed up, it couldn’t keep pace. I’ve sweltered, I can tell you, but rather that than the flies.’

‘How’re the streets?’

‘City centre’s relatively quiet. Most of the offices and shops have closed, mainly because there’s nothing to stay open for. Once you’ve sold out of food and drink, insect sprays, repellents, fly swats, there’s nothing anybody wants to buy. There’s cops all over the place. I heard on the radio that there’s been riots, several killed, including two policemen. They’re using rubber bullets and tear gas now, and the White House is expected to declare a state of emergency tonight. Which means they’ll send the army in. They’re talking about a curfew during the hours of darkness. All because of bloody flies!’

‘Nobody’s called the office?’ He held his breath.

‘No. I’ll tell you one thing, you won’t see any bailiffs while all this is going on. Flies just love to swarm on shit!’

They both laughed. It eased the tension a little.

‘Trev?’

‘What?’

‘Can’t you … can’t you come before tomorrow? Tonight, before they bring in a curfew. I’ll tell you, this whole city is going to explode for every reason you can think of. Looters and rioters are in the downtown suburbs, there’s racial unrest, too. Like everybody’s been waiting for this as an excuse to spark off riots. It can only get worse.’

He sighed. It wouldn’t be easy; he’d told Susan he might go tomorrow. He thought of Elaine again, and came to a decision. ‘Stay right there, sweetheart. I’ll go to the apartment first, load up with everything I can. Then I’ll come to the office. Don’t open for anybody until I get there. Two rings, one short one, and it’ll be me. I’ll phone if I have any problems.’

‘I need you, Trev. ’ He sensed that she was close to breaking down.

‘I’ll be with you by evening. Just you –’ The line went dead and he knew he wouldn’t get through again. He’d beaten the communications collapse by a matter of minutes.

He went outside and came to a decision. He’d go back to the cabin, tell Susan that he had to make that trip right now, tomorrow would probably be too late. And, no, she couldn’t bloody well come with him.

The worst of the insects had moved on, leaving only the flies. They were bad, but not nearly so bad as Elaine had described. If you kept the doors and windows shut, and used a fly-killer aerosol every hour, you kept them at bay.

Tanning’s Amoco on the turnpike was open and still selling petrol. Trevor tanked up there, that would see him through. There was a jam on the freeway, vehicles leaving the city; everybody was heading for the wilds, having got the idea that things might be better there. They might, if you had a snug cabin with everything you needed. Sleeping rough, you were likely to contract some disease spread by the flies, and if you didn’t have any water you’d die of thirst. Or else you could slake your thirst from a stream and get poisoned.

The 8mm was in the glove box of the truck within easy reach. He would not hesitate to use it if he had to, for Elaine’s sake. He knew also that he was going to have to take her back to the cabin with him, but for the moment he would meet his troubles one at a time. They had often talked about the day when the shit hit the fan. That day wasn’t far off; it might even be tomorrow. With positive thinking, he was already assuming that he would make it in and out of the city.

There were yellow taxis among the outgoing traffic; folks who didn’t own a car were blowing what little money they had on escaping. Before long money wouldn’t count for much, he thought wryly, it would be back to the bartering system.

He wondered if Elaine and he would ever have got round to going off together; they had discussed the possibility but she hadn’t pressed him too hard. Maybe he was waiting for Mark to grow up, or just putting off a decision. He knew he loved her. He didn’t doubt that she loved him, she wouldn’t have hung around so long if she didn’t. She knew the score, she hadn’t deserted a sinking ship. And she had stayed at the office hoping he’d call.

Their affair had been a gradual process. When Pam, his former secretary, had left, he had advertised for a replacement. There had only been one applicant: Elaine. When she came for the interview she’d been a shy twenty-year-old, fresh from college. Pretty, but he hadn’t thought of her as anything other than a secretarial assistant; she was bright, did her job efficiently, and she had a regular boyfriend from uptown. They planned to get married. You might prise a wife away from her husband, Trevor had done that before, but you didn’t stand much chance of splitting up young love.

Then this guy jilted her, just like that. Elaine hadn’t come in for two days, had called to say she was down with a bug. On the third day she turned up, looking so ill that he had told her to go back home to bed. She hadn’t. Later that day she’d told him her troubles, sobbed on his shoulder. He’d felt damned sorry for her and taken her out to a bar for a drink, finishing up at a restaurant. It was two months before he took her out again. Even so, nothing happened for another six months.

They’d had some pretty heavy petting sessions in the office after it was closed to the public. She told him she didn’t want to go the whole way. He said fine, he lied that he didn’t want to either.

She let him take off her bra and kiss her tits until the nipples looked like marlin spikes. After some coaxing she let him feel between her thighs, her underwear got soaking wet but there always came the point when she gasped, ‘Stop, please!’ She was scared what she might do if she had an orgasm.

On one occasion she was playing with him, kissing him and making sure that she never looked down, as if she was frightened of what she might see, when he lost control and came all over her fingers. She snatched her hand away as if he’d shot boiling water on her, and said that in future they’d just have to stick to kissing.

It was frustrating for Trevor but he respected her wishes and didn’t go any further than her tits. Then, one night, she dropped her bombshell. Ironically, it was just a year ago last week; he had remembered the date, even reminded her of their anniversary. They laughed about it now but not in a frivolous way.

They’d been kissing in his office, lying on the carpet. It was hot, but not as hot as this year. She’d got her blouse off, letting him kiss her breasts. Suddenly, without any warning, she said, ‘Trev, I want you to screw me.’

They hadn’t been drinking. It was a decision she had been wrestling with for weeks and she didn’t know how to go about letting him now that she wanted it as much as he did. Embarrassed, she had just blurted it out and left the rest to him.

He had fantasized about that night ever since; the pair of them naked, Elaine lying there with her eyes shut, frightened to respond. Only when she was close did she start to embrace him, wrapped her legs around him as if she feared that he might suddenly change his mind and she wasn’t going to let him go.

It had been beautiful, for both of them. It was as though a barrier between them had been breached, and after that night they admitted that they couldn’t do without each other. There were problems, of course, but they agreed to meet those when they came to them. Now they were at the crossroads.

Trevor thought there was a road block up ahead. He spotted police patrol cars and saw the traffic slowing, bunching. Apparently, the law were just keeping an eye on things, making no attempt to halt the flow of incoming vehicles.

In the city the traffic was light; odd buses with just one or two passengers, empty taxis. Broken windows, shops and offices that had been looted, shards of broken glass littering the pavement.

It was the flies that were keeping the people home or wherever they were holed up. In places the buildings were blackened as if they had been fire-scorched; if you watched carefully, the patches moved.

Trevor wound up his side window, mostly to keep the smell out. It hit him at the junction on Forty-Third, an overpowering stench of putrefaction. A mountain of garbage sacks had been piled up, the polythene ripped open by scavenging cats and dogs, the contents spilling out. The garbage moved; for one moment he thought that the bags were sliding, about to avalanche. It was flies, millions of them, a carpet that was inches deep, crawling and feeding. He heard their buzzing above the noise of the traffic.

He parked in the street outside the apartment block, and made a run for the stairwell. He dared not risk the lift; even if the power was working, it might suddenly cut out, leaving him trapped. The stairs were littered with empty wrappings and drink cans that rolled and clinked if he caught one with his foot. Wasps fed on a basket of discarded plums; he hurried past them.

‘Help me!’

Trevor recoiled when he spied the pitiful figure slumped in a dark corner of the third-floor landing. A dropout who probably stank of meths except that the garbage stench overpowered it; a ragbag in filthy denims, a grimed hand outstretched. The features were swollen, contorted with pain. Trevor edged along the stair rail, not wanting to look.

‘Help me. Water!’

One glance almost made him throw up. He saw the face in a shaft of dusty sunlight, puffed and ulcerated with massive hives that were like miniature volcanoes, erupting a seepage of pinkish pus. The eyes were closed, the nostrils clogged with mucus that bubbled as the vagrant struggled to breathe. Yellow saliva strung from the open, engorged mouth.

Wasp stings, Trevor thought and prayed selfishly that it wasn’t some dreadful, contagious disease. He recalled classroom accounts of bubonic plagues, and wondered what the symptoms were. He told himself again that the guy had been attacked by a swarm of wasps, he was beyond help. So long as he avoided the insects himself, he would be all right.

Miraculously, the apartment hadn’t been burgled. He turned the key, stepped inside and closed the door behind him. He tried the light switch but nothing happened. The power was gone.

There was ample light to see by; the place looked much the same as when he had left it. One or two flies crawled on the walls and working surfaces but the fact that the apartment had been shut up had kept them out. He went to a cupboard, found a pile of empty carrier bags, and began filling them with the canned and packaged foodstuffs that had been left behind. He ignored the freezer; anything from there would thaw out and begin decomposing before he could get back to the cabin. The weight of the pistol in his pocket was comforting; the journeys to and fro to the truck down in the street below would be the most risky.

But the street was deserted except for flies and wasps. Trevor sweated, running up and down the stairs. The hobo wasn’t moaning for help any longer, just a motionless heap of rags in the corner. In all probability he was dead.

The final load; he clicked the door shut behind him. He had most things on board; all the food he could find, clothes, make-weight items like ornaments and anything that was of sentimental value. The looters could help themselves now; what they didn’t take, the bailiffs would.

The engine fired at the fourth attempt. He guessed that either the carburettor was flooded or else the heat was evaporating the petrol before it reached it, as it had done that summer when they were touring Arizona. It finally caught, and he pulled out into the road.

That was when he saw the youths. There were three of them, vagrants like the one he had left up on the apartment-block landing, sewer scum, predators. They came from behind some garbage sacks, human shapes that were black with feeding flies and stinging wasps, grotesque monsters from a low-budget TV movie. Mouths agape, roaring their pain and madness, spitting out flies, they staggered into the roadway.

Trevor’s instinct was to pull the pistol as they came at him. They spread out to block his path, seeming to sense that the truck was loaded with food and canned drinks. His foot touched the brake pedal, slowing the truck momentarily, then jammed hard down on the throttle. The vehicle shot forward.

He thought, prayed, that maybe they would part. They didn’t; they stood their ground. He braced himself, closed his eyes for a second, and jerked with the impact.

The wheels went over one of them; he fought to control the steering. Another was on the bonnet, face impacted for a moment against the toughened glass of the windshield. He saw crushed flies like bursting blackheads, then a rush of scarlet. A spiral of flies and wasps revealed what was beneath them; grimed, raw flesh. The wasps never shifted, they stung again even as the body began to slide. A hand clutched at the radio aerial, snapped it and took it over the side.

Trevor winced, thinking he heard the skull crack on the tarmac; in his mind he saw the seepage of grey like bullfrog spawn. He pulled himself together, and checked his rear-view mirror in case there were cops around.

There weren’t; just three bodies lying in an otherwise deserted road. One of them had a ballooned stomach where the tyres had gone over it, a mighty bubble that would burst at any second and explode bloody entrails from one side of the street to the other.

He jerked his gaze away, clipped a kerb. Then he turned left at Fifty-Fourth and pulled into the side. He was sweating, he wanted to vomit. He got out, walked unsteadily across to the office block, and rang twice, one short one.

As he waited, he started to panic in case Elaine didn’t answer because the flies and wasps had got her, too.

Chapter Twelve

Phil Thompson could not remember ever having been ill before. Lying there in the stifling darkness of his sparse bedroom, he was frightened by the sensation. Something was wrong with him, he didn’t know what.

His head throbbed. He clutched at it with his sweaty hands, pressing hard on the skull because he was sure that it was about to split open. His eyes burned. The walls seemed to move in, the ceiling lowered; he braced himself, almost screamed in case they crushed him like a cider press. Then they retracted. In the half-light mundane objects appeared different; the water jug in its stand was huge, he could have bathed in it; the wardrobe had shrunk to the size of a bedside table.

There was a roaring in his ears like that of the rapids in the river below North Falls in the spring thaw. Flies buzzed incessantly, deafeningly; he felt them crawling on his naked body, sticking in the perspiration. He barely had the strength to kick the sheet away.

He began to itch all over. Perhaps he had been itching for some time but hadn’t noticed it because his thumping headache had distracted him. He relinquished his hold on his head and began scratching at himself with his grimy fingernails. Initially, the relief was ecstatic, then it was almost driving him mad. He scraped at his stomach, his thighs; there was a place on his back that it was impossible to reach. Writhing, tossing. Scratching. Growing weaker.

He fell off the bed, sprawled on the bare floorboards. Somehow he made it up to his knees, using the headboard as a lever to get to his feet. Waves of dizziness hit him as he staggered in the direction of where the light switch should be. Feeling the wall to the right and left, he groped blindly, until finally something clicked, flooding the room with stark artificial light from an unshaded bulb.

He cried out as pain stabbed his burning eyes. He staggered back, fell on the bed and sat there, waiting for his eyesight to adjust to the brightness. His stomach churned; he leaned sideways to throw up, felt the scalding vomit gush from his mouth. It stank, but that didn’t matter. Only then did he look down at himself. And screamed.

Merciful God in heaven! Not just his body but the entire room crawled with lice, a sea of them that moved, jumped, hungered for his flesh.

Phil slapped at them, but they did not seem to notice. His skin was covered in lumps, swelling hives where they had bitten. They burrowed into his hairy torso, his pubes, like rabbits digging warrens in the scrubland. He remembered the rabbits he had shot, how fleas had emerged from their fur, but two animals could not possibly have been hosts to this number. They had come in from outside, driven by the drought to seek fresh blood because everything out there that they might have fed on was either dead or dying.

A sharp pain doubled him up and brought another cry to his lips. His fingers went instinctively to his groin, but almost immediately he snatched his hands away as a sense of guilt engulfed him. He heard his father’s voice echo in his tortured brain, a warning that was stern but kindly, advice intended for the wellbeing of a boy on the verge of puberty.

‘Don’t touch yourself there, son. Only when you wash. For ‘tis a sin in the eyes of God and He will punish you for it. You’ll become blind, weaken until you die!’

But it hurts there, Father. Phil’s hands strayed back; the pain in his genitals was unbearable, and he scrabbled feverishly to discover the cause. Fleas darted in every direction but he ignored them. He saw it, heaved and vomited again, hot bile dribbling from his cracked and swollen lips.

A tick! A repulsive thing, bloated with his own blood, burrowed on the underside of his foreskin. He panicked, gripped it, tugged and screamed as the exposed half of the body burst and came away in a rush of scarlet. The remnant was still in the soft, mutilated skin, now biting with a vengeance. Lice swam in the wound; oblivious of everything else he grabbed for the water jug. His flaying hand knocked it over, and he was too slow to catch it; it crashed to the floor, the pottery shattering, its contents spilling.

‘Father, help me!’

The room darkened, his vision blurred. His father slept heavily; nothing penetrated his sleep until the first light came creeping in through the window. Phil held his wound guiltily, trying to staunch the flow of blood. Icy shivers spread over his heated body, chilling the sweat. He shuddered. He would not have believed that anybody could have felt so abominably ill.

In his fevered mind he saw Donk again, or what remained of the old backwoodsman; the mutely screaming skeletal features, the tortured rictus. The insects had got him, too, had lain in wait in the dry undergrowth, ambushed him, pulled him down. Then other predators had come to join the feast, ravaging the age-hardened, wrinkled flesh. Because there was nothing else left to eat out there. Now, in sheer desperation, faced with starvation, they were invading man’s own domain, infiltrating human habitations in search of prey.

The pain was excruciating. He drew himself up into a ball on the bed, clutching at himself. The fleas didn’t matter any longer, they could go where they pleased; he had a dim awareness of them in his hair, exploring his ears. There were other insects, too; that cobweb in the corner had trapped some flies, a monster spider was greedily feasting. A centipede crawled across the bed and disappeared over the side; maybe it was a resident that had just come out to see what was going on.

He had to get that tick out. He might have made it to his father’s bedroom, but he was too embarrassed. Dad would be very angry with him for touching himself there, too. Maybe the old man would claim it was a punishment from God. You’ve been doing things, boy. I warned you what would happen if you did.

Phil couldn’t stand the agony much longer. You burned ticks out of cattle but there was no fire available. They hadn’t lit the wood stove because of the hot weather; they used it only briefly for cooking. He thought about his father’s cigarettes; the old man kept them in his room, matches, too. ‘Jut in case you ever got a hankerin’ to smoke, son. If God had intended man to smoke, he’d’ve made a chimney in your head. Me, I smoke ‘cause … well, grown-ups do sometimes.’

His vision dimmed, then came back again. He writhed, kicking his legs. Out of the corner of his eye he saw his clothes draped over the bedside chair, his Levis still with the embossed leather belt threaded through the hoops. And the sheath containing his hunting knife …

A last resort; the very idea had him feeling faint, shying away from it. What else was left to him? He reached out a shaking hand and grasped the bone hilt. The knife slid easily, the honed blade glinting in the bright light. No, he daren’t. He had to.

He laid the knife on the bed beside him. It had a frightening, hypnotic effect on him, and transmitted another, even more terrifying idea. He turned his hand over, saw the wrist, the corded veins; there was an artery somewhere there …

No! Taking your own life, son, is the next worst sin to murder.

Phil swallowed, gulped his guilt, and found himself apologizing both to his father and to God. He wouldn’t dare, it was just a thought that came from elsewhere.

From Satan.

Picking up the knife, he tested its sharpness with his thumb and drew a trickle of blood. He had honed the blade only that morning before his hunting expedition. It would slice through most things.

A blowfly settled on the blade, maybe scenting the guts of those rabbits Phil had paunched with it. When he lifted up the knife, the fly buzzed away in alarm.

His free hand gripped the soft flesh, pulling it taut. He located the severed tick, and knew that he had to slice beneath it. He trembled, almost chickened out. This was gonna hurt real bad, but not half as bad as it was hurting already.

Fleas jumped and bit, but he resisted the temptation to scratch; he didn’t have a free hand, anyway.

The blade nicked the stretched skin just below where the parasite fed. His head pounded with even greater ferocity, the roaring in his ears was louder than the rapids. Sweat ran, stinging his eyes. A moment’s hesitation, but he knew that he had to go through with it. Forgive me, Father, if I sin.

And on the eighth day …

Then Phil was screaming. He felt the warmth of fresh blood spurting on his thighs, something soft with a hard lump inside it clutched between his forefinger and thumb. He tossed it away in terror and disgust.

Blessed oblivion came quickly, sparing him the trauma of the flies that swarmed greedily on the wound.

It was the flea bites that awoke Chris Thompson; he had been scratching at them through his long johns in his sleep. He pulled up his shirt, his gnarled fingers moved from lump to lump. His head throbbed and his throat was parched. Unlike his son, he knew a fever when he had one, remembered the winter of 1944 when he had caught pneumonia and almost died. The snowdrifts had been too deep for his father to ride and fetch the doctor. That was before Doc Wycherley’s time; Josh Myers was the medic in North Falls then and mostly too drunk to diagnose or treat an ailment. Somehow Chris had pulled through, and his father said that the illness had immunized him against all other sicknesses. It had seemed the case, until now.

He made it out of bed and switched on the light. He had never seen anything like this in his life and hoped never to again. Lice everywhere, earwigs, flies on the walls and ceiling.

The Plague of the Murrain of Beasts had moved in off the livestock and was searching out human prey.

Thompson’s legs were unsteady; they threatened to fold beneath him and crumple him to the ground. His bare feet crunched on things it was better for the eyes not to see. Whatever it might be, he and Phil had to flee the house, go douse themselves in the old cattle trough that stood alongside the well behind the ranch house. Sit in it all night, cool off, wash themselves clean. Cleanliness was next to godliness, he had told the boy that a thousand times, yet Phil still went to bed unwashed if he thought he could get away with it.

‘Phil!’ A cracked shout that the heat in the house seemed to muffle. ‘Boy, get outa that bed and down into the yard!’

The old farmer stood on the landing, clutching at the handrail to steady himself. Darn it, the boy slept like an ox. If you didn’t wake him at first light, he’d sleep right through to breakfast time.

‘Boy!’

Chris was forced to scratch again, and almost lost his balance. He’d have to go and wake Phil, drag him down the stairs. If they lost any more time, both of them would be eaten alive!

Letting go of the rail, he launched into a shambling gait, hit the door opposite with his bony shoulder, and threw it wide. And stared in disbelief at the scene inside the small bedroom.

A whimper escaped his toothless mouth; he swayed and almost fell. Phil was sprawled on the bed, his powerful body seeming to heave beneath a mound of insect life. There was blood on the undersheet, he could see the scarlet through the crawling mass. A wound of some kind, it might be serious … Then he saw his son’s face and knew that the other was beyond help.

A face stared at him with eyes that were puffed and dulled, unseeing. Flies queued at the nostrils like cinemagoers at a top billing, a full house but they would await the next showing. The mouth screamed silently, hung open, tiny bodies crawling in and out of it. A sudden expellation of wind caused some flies to fly up, but they settled back down again. This body was theirs for the taking, they would not be deterred.

Shakily, Chris Thompson made it down the stairs. No longer was the answer as simple as the trough by the well; he had to get help. Fast. Grabbing for the phone, he knocked the receiver off its cradle and had to catch the swinging flex, a bizarre metronome that taxed his arthritic fingers. Dialling wasn’t easy when your vision was blurred. Twice he missed a digit and had to start all over again.

A loud monotone was the result, ear-piercing and brain-jarring. He held the receiver away from him. At first he thought that he had misdialled, but on the third attempt he knew that he had not, that the phones were no longer working. That Chibnell fellow had been the last to use it, maybe he had done something to it.

Chris did not curse because profanity was a sin. Neither did he panic because Phil was beyond help, even Doc Wycherley wouldn’t be able to do anything for him. There was just himself left now and he had no right to ask for an extension beyond three score years and ten. God called when He was ready for you; Elspeth had gone, now Phil. All the same, the old man was not prepared to surrender his life without a fight.

The truck stood in the yard. He knew he had to get to North Falls. He had never driven at night – the dark hours were for resting – but there had to be a first time. He went outside; it was marginally cooler in the open air, and there was a faint greyness in the eastern sky that heralded the dawn. With some difficulty he climbed up into the cab.

He pressed the starter. The engine whined, faded. He tried it again; the starter motor turned, laboured, but did not fire. Half a dozen attempts later it was dead. He knew that the battery was flat.

He sat there in the darkened cab, staring with unseeing, smarting eyes. Only then did he remember that he had a fever. It was more than the heat that was making him sweat; every so often he chilled and shivered. He experienced an air of unreality, as if all that had happened back in the house was some nightmare and if he went inside again everything would be normal.

Deep down, he knew that that would not be so.

He thought about walking to North Falls; he had done it back in his father’s time when the horse had gone lame. It had taken him three parts of the day and he had been lucky enough to hitch a ride back as far as the turnpike. It had been dark when he arrived home. He knew that he wouldn’t make it even one way now.

There was only one alternative left to him: the cabin. Chibnell wasted his money on all kinds of gadgets but he had neglected the telephone that could mean the difference between life and death. But they had vehicles, two of them.

With difficulty Chris Thompson descended from the cab. He stood for a moment, holding on to the door, while a dizzy spell passed. It might take him the best part of an hour to reach the cabin; he’d have to rest frequently. But it was better than lying down right here and dying, as Donk had apparently done.

It was getting light now, a greyness which enabled him to discern landmarks like that twisted poplar where the track began. Funny, he couldn’t hear any insects now, not so much as a cricket in the dead grass. They were all indoors. He tried not to think about it.

Barefooted, swaying, each step unsteady, he set off. Once he stumbled and fell. It was some time before he found the strength to get back on to his feet.

The light was coming fast now, before long it would be sunup. Then the heat would begin again. He had to make it to the cabin before the heat of the day began in earnest.

His rests were more frequent, every hundred yards or so, his strength waning by the minute. He could smell the lake. The algae were just one of the plagues that the Lord had sent upon mankind, he knew. Really, there was no point in struggling to survive because the world was doomed, God would destroy it and maybe not even bother to start all over again. Chris prayed for forgiveness for his own sins, which, he detected, weren’t half as bad as those of many others.

Almost too weak to stagger any further, he topped a rise and came in sight of the cabin. The curtains were all closed, so no movement could be seen inside. Just one vehicle was parked outside; the station wagon. There was no sign of the pickup; Chibnell had said something about making a trip into the city. Maybe the others had gone with him and there was nobody left here.

Chris Thompson fought against despair. He had to make it at least as far as the cabin, and muster up enough strength to pound on the door. And if there was nobody home, then it was God’s will and he would lie down and die just as Donk had done.

Chapter Thirteen

Thank God, Elaine was still in the office, and be damned if she wasn’t wearing the turquoise blouse and skirt which Trevor had bought her!

‘Trev!’ Close to breaking point, she buried her face in his sweat-stained shirt. ‘I never thought you’d make it.’

‘Why ever not?’ He tried to sound flippant.

She didn’t answer; there were a thousand different reasons why he might not have got through.

He glanced around the office. As in the apartment, nothing much had changed. Elaine was an efficient secretary; everything was organized, travel brochures neatly displayed on the long table, a batch of mail franked and ready to go. In all probability it would never be sent.

‘Any messages?’ It was a stupid question to ask but in a way it restored some sort of normality, the boss just having returned from vacation, eager to get into the swing of things again.

‘No.’ She tried to smile. ‘Apart from the radio, there are bulletins every half-hour. Things are going from bad to worse.’

He felt her hand tremble in his. ‘Then the sooner we get out of this, the better. I’ve got the truck loaded down in the street, essentials that I’ve taken from the apartment. We might as well take anything we can carry from here, anything that’s worth anything.’ Which wouldn’t be a lot in a business that had run down.

‘I …’ She hesitated. ‘Where … where do you plan on us going, Trev?’

‘Back to the cabin up on the other side of North Falls.’ He averted his eyes, but heard her catch her breath.

‘We can’t go there! Your family’s there, your wife …’

‘There’s no place else to go. Nowhere that’s safe, that is. At least up at the cabin we have food and water, shelter, and we won’t get stormed by rioters in search of food and drink.’

‘I don’t want to go there!’ Elaine’s mood changed, suddenly she was defiant and sulky. ‘I can’t, you know that as well as I do. We’ll have to find some place else, Trev.’

‘We have to.’ He called upon all his persuasive powers. ‘Look at it this way, the whole country’s in a state of emergency, there’s a strong probability that there will be a breakdown of law and order. Even if it doesn’t go that far, the business here is finished, the bailiffs will be moving in, taking everything, the apartment, too. Nobody knows about the cabin, there’s no mortgage, we have a roof over our head. And I’ve got a small amount of money stashed away that will tide us over until I can start up again in something. Be realistic, Elaine.’

‘I take it all this includes your wife, too?’

‘For the moment, yes.’ He sensed her hostility towards a woman whom she had never met. ‘Whoever was living up there, I couldn’t just kick them out at a time like this, could I?’

‘I suppose not.’ She withdrew her hand from his. ‘It won’t be easy, Trev. For anybody. You … you do intend to leave her, don’t you?’

‘Of course.’ It had been his intention for years, something he had always put off. The last few days had made it difficult; that time after the bullfrogs came it was as though he and Susan were getting back together again. He had almost wanted it that way. But he had still phoned the office; he couldn’t do without Elaine, either. ‘Once things get back to normal.’

‘Good. Because we have another problem now.’

‘Oh?’ Trevor’s stomach knotted, he felt himself tense.

‘I think I’m pregnant, Trev!’

Her words hit him with the force of a physical blow, making him feel slightly sick. ‘You think?’ She might not be, probably wasn’t. Maybe it was some kind of sick ruse to prise him away from Susan right that minute. You can’t take your pregnant girlfriend back to shack up with your wife, can you, Trev?

‘I’m more or less certain.’ Her hand found his again and squeezed it. ‘But no doctor is going to want to bother with things like pregnancy tests with all this going on. All the usual signs. I’m pretty sure.’ She was willing herself to have a baby.

‘That’s fine, absolutely fine.’ He tried to make it sound convincing. A bloody kid would ruin it all. Forced to stay home nights, in the end he’d take to going out on his own and find somebody else; a rerun of everything that had gone before. If he stuck it out, the kid would creature pressures and tension between the parents. Mark would end up in prison, Trevor had no doubt about that. He didn’t want two jailbirds.

‘You don’t sound exactly delighted.’ Her tone was sullen and resentful.

‘I said it was fine.’

‘You said. It’s how you really feel that counts.’

‘Look’ – he spread his hands – ‘we’ve got problems, everybody’s got problems right now. The priority is to get both of us away from the city to somewhere safe. A pregnant woman is an added problem but I’ll accept it. Everything will be okay, but you have to leave things to me. You’re coming back with me to the cabin because we don’t have anywhere else to go. My family are there, I can’t do anything about that. Later, when everything’s back to normal, we’ll find a place of our own. That’s the best I can offer under the present circumstances.’

‘I’m sorry.’ She stood on tiptoe to reach his lips with hers. ‘I was just being selfish. I want you so much, Trev, all to myself. I can’t bear the thought of sharing you with anybody else, I’ve been doing that for too long as it is.’

‘Right, we’d better get moving. He looked around the office once more and saw that she had a couple of travelling bags packed; obviously she had no intention of returning to her own small apartment. ‘We’ll take everything we can carry that I’ve got room for in the truck; typewriter, VDU …’

‘Whatever are we taking typewriters and VDUs up to the cabin for?’

‘Better than leave ‘em for the bailiffs or the looters. We can always sell ‘em if we don’t need ‘em in the future.’

‘It makes sense.’ She laughed. ‘I’ll give you a hand.’

‘You be careful in your condition.’

‘I’m not that bad. Yet.’ She laughed again, and began rummaging in the desk drawers. ‘I get the feeling what it’s like to be a looter!’

Trevor moved across to the window and looked down into the street below. That was when his guts contracted, his legs went weak and he had to clutch at the sill to support himself.

‘Trev, what is it?’ Elaine heard his sharp intake of breath, and stared aghast.

‘Stop there!’ He motioned with his hand, stepping back from the window enough to see without being seen.

‘What’s the matter?’ She had paled. Some ballpoints fell from her grasp, clattered across the desk and avalanched on to the floor.

‘Cops.’ He spoke in a whisper, although there was no need; no one down in the street could have heard him even if he had shouted, for the windows were sealed to keep out the insects.

‘There’s cops everywhere, looking for looters.’

He did not answer, he was too intent upon the scene directly below. The street was deserted except for his own truck and the police cruiser which had pulled in front of it. Had the latter been parked, drawn up level with the kerbside, his fears would have been minimal; it would probably just have been a routine check. But the patrol car was slewed in front of the pickup at an angle, so that if the driver of the empty vehicle appeared, there was no way he could leap behind the wheel and pull away.

Two uniformed officers were walking around the pickup, scrutinizing every detail. One stopped and crouched to examine the fender, the offside wing. The other leaned across for a closer look at the blood which smeared the windshield, had trickled down and congealed. He produced a notepad to write down some details; make, model and registration number, presumably.

The second policeman returned to his own vehicle, lifted the hood and struggled with a heavy implement. There was no mistaking it, Trevor had seen one at close quarters only a couple of months previously; it had cost him fifty bucks to have it unclamped and for the return of his illegally parked station wagon.

It was a wheel clamp, and now the two men were fixing it to the nearside wheel, checking the tyre at the same time.

‘Shitfire!’ Trevor wanted to beat his fists on the wall with frustration, yell down at them to sod off, to mind their own bloody business. He even thought about the 8mm Bruni pistol in his pocket, but decided against it. Even when law and order was on the brink of total collapse, you thought twice about shooting policemen.

‘Trev, please tell me what’s going on!’ Elaine was at his side, clinging to his arm. There were the beginnings of hysteria in her voice.

‘Some dropouts blocked the road, trying to force me to stop.’ He spoke as calmly as he could but his voice trembled nevertheless. ‘I didn’t have any choice but to drive at them. I thought they’d jump out of the way. They didn’t.’

‘Oh, my God!’

‘I guess those cops found the bodies in the road, then cruised around looking for the vehicle that had run those hoboes over. And found it right here!’

‘They might come up here and arrest you!’ Elaine was starting to panic, tightening her grip on him. ‘I don’t want them to take you away, Trev!’

‘Keep away from the window.’ He pulled her back still further. ‘No way will they tie it up with this office. There are about a dozen other offices in this block, and other blocks adjoining. They’re not going to check every one, mostly because all the offices are closed. Right now they’ll clamp the pickup, go back and consult their records, check the ownership. Which will show me at the apartment. No mention of Chibnell Travel or this office. So, for the time being, they’ll be lumbered.’

‘If they go away, maybe you could get the clamp off?’ She was clutching at straws.

‘I doubt it, I don’t have any tools. And there’s always the chance that another police patrol might stop us; doubtless they’ll circulate the details on their computer.’

‘So we don’t have a vehicle to get away in?’ Elaine was close to tears.

‘No, but once they’ve gone we can unload the stuff, food especially, and bring it up here.’

‘Then what, Trev?’

‘I’ll think of the next move then.’ He watched them finish clamping the wheel and walk back to their cruiser. ‘If they come back and find the truck empty, they’ll blame looters. At least we won’t starve, even if we have to hole up here for a few days.’

‘If I have to stop here another night I’ll go stark raving crazy!’

‘They’re moving off now.’ He stood watching the patrol car draw away. ‘Give it a few minutes and then we’ll go down and grab whatever we can.’

His thoughts switched to the cabin, to Susan and Mark, to the insects which were plaguing the land. He didn’t like being away. Once he had Elaine back at the cabin, everything precious to him would be under one roof. That way he could face the world and every danger that it cared to throw at him.

‘Give it five minutes’ – he checked his watch – ‘just in case they go round the block and come back in the hope of catching somebody trying to get the clamp off. I guess in due course they’ll send a vehicle to tow the pickup away.’

He flicked on the radio that stood on the desk, just for something to do to ease his frustration. The station was midway through its half-hourly news update.

‘… reports of two outbreaks of suspected typhus. These are yet to be confirmed but are thought to be due to the heavy infestations of lice, fleas, ticks and mites. We will bring you a further update in half an hour. In the meantime –’

Trevor flicked the radio off. Typhus was a terrifying prospect; he wondered where the suspected outbreaks were. If the station had given them, he had missed them.

He looked at his watch again. ‘Come on, let’s start getting some of that stuff off the truck and up here.’

Chapter Fourteen

Susan had let Mark share her bed. It was comforting for her as well as her son. He had apparently got over his terror and that in itself was worrying. Her fear was that he might go off again, sneak out with the shotgun because his father wasn’t around.

Where the hell had Trevor got to? He had talked about the possibility of a trip into the city tomorrow, but when he had returned from the Thompsons’ after having phoned the office, there was a sudden urgency to set off right away. Susan had wanted to go with him, her argument had been that it was preferable for the three of them to stick together, not split up. Trevor had refused adamantly; indeed, his vehemence had sparked off a suspicion that he wanted to go back for some reason other than to collect stuff from the flat. He pointed out that time was not on their side, that with a total breakdown in law and order imminent, the city boundaries might soon be closed. It was logical but she wasn’t altogether convinced.

She lay there staring into the darkness, unable to sleep. Briefly, the other day, she had thought that everything might be all right between them again, that this environmental catastrophe had brought them back together. Now she was disillusioned. He was the same old Trevor, cunning and deceitful, a born liar. An awful thought had her biting on her lower lip. She might never see him again; there were riots in the city, death was an hourly occurrence from disease and violence. And, apart from the obvious dangers, it was possible that he did not plan to return.

‘Mom, isn’t Dad back yet?’ Mark stirred, turned over to face her in the darkness.

‘Not yet. I thought you were asleep.’

‘I was, but I can’t sleep any longer. I slept most of the day, remember?’

‘We both have to get as much rest as we can, darling.’

‘Where’s Dad got to?’

‘I’ve no idea. It’s a long way into the city.’

‘He should’ve been back by now.’

Too right, he should. ‘Maybe it’s taken longer than he thought. In a way it’s like moving house, packing everything up and loading it into the truck.’ But she knew Trevor would accomplish this in a very short time, heaping everything into the back of the pickup.

‘Mom, I’m sorry.’

‘What for?’

‘For … for stealing. And for taking the gun. Everything.’ She found his hand and squeezed it. ‘Maybe everything will be different from now on.’ In a lot of ways, Susan preferred not to think about them.

‘Mom …’

‘Yes?’

‘Are things better between you and Dad?’

When she replied, her voice trembled. ‘I’d like to think so.’

‘Good.’

They lapsed into silence, lying there holding each other, both listening for the sound of a vehicle coming down the track. But there was only a stifling, awful silence, the silence of the land of the dead.

‘What will have to happen to put things right, Mom?’ Mark was in one of his rare talkative moods; he usually reserved them for times when Susan wanted to watch a favourite television programme.

‘I guess the rains might put it all right again. The grass will grow, the rivers and lakes will fill up again. Give it a few months and everybody will forget that all this has happened.’ Susan knew that she would never forget. This nightmare would linger for the rest of her life.

‘Mom, what’s – anthrax?’

‘Anthrax?’ She had to think, search her memory. Something clicked, she remembered a western film she had watched on TV about a rancher whose cattle were dying of this disease, how he’d tried to hide it and all the cowhands caught it and died. ‘It’s a cattle disease, not very common. Why?’

There was something on the radio about it. Some cows have died somewhere and the farmer caught it off them. He died, too.’

‘It’s probably an isolated instance.’ She tensed, her breathing went shallow. ‘You might have misheard.’

‘I didn’t. Mom, what’s typhus?’

Oh, Christ! ‘A disease. It’s only found in very hot countries where the sanitation isn’t good, where –’

‘Like things are now?’

‘Yes.’ She swallowed. It was wrong to lie to the boy; they had spent years trying to instil into him that you always told the truth, that if you lied you were inevitably found out. ‘There’s some cases of that, too.’

‘Oh!’ What could she say?

‘They think it might spread. Like a plague!’

‘There are a lot of plagues right now, all around us.’

‘At school we were told about the ten Plagues of Egypt. I can’t remember all of them.’

‘Don’t worry about them now.’ Because I don’t want to hear. I’m scared what the next one will be.

‘How long do you think Dad will be?’

‘I’ve no idea.’

Mark lapsed into silence. They were both listening. A faint, grey light was beginning to filter through the curtain. Somewhere, far away, crows were calling, maybe gathering to go in search of another carrion breakfast. A new day was beginning.

‘I can hear something, Mom.’ Mark’s grip on her hand tightened.

‘I think it’s crows.’

‘No, it’s like … somebody’s walking around outside.’ Susan stiffened. She whispered, ‘Perhaps it’s your father, the pickup’s broken down and he’s had to walk back.’ Then why the hell didn’t he come into the cabin?

‘No, it isn’t Dad. Listen.’

Susan listened and knew only too well that it wasn’t Trevor out there. Slow, dragging footsteps, feet scraping in the dirt; a wheezing cough that ended in retching. Oh, Jesus God, who was it?

‘I’ll go see, Mom.’

Susan caught him, pulled him back. ‘No! Stay here, be quiet!’

Whoever it was, he was on the veranda, she heard the boards creaking. A moment of silence and then somebody rapped on the door, a faint knocking that was a thousand times more terrifying than a loud banging.

A voice rasped, a wheezing sound that was scarcely recognizable as a human voice. ‘Help … help me!’

She pressed herself back against the headboard of the bed, clutching at Mark.

‘Who d’you think it is, Mom?’

‘I don’t know.’ And I don’t want to know. I’m not opening the door to anybody, except Trevor. And I know he won’t be coming back.

‘We’d better go see.’ Mark was off the bed before Susan grabbed him, gripping his waist tightly. He was strong for his age; if he struggled seriously with her she doubted whether she would be able to hold him.

‘I told you to stay here!’

‘He sounds in awful pain, maybe he’s dying.’ Mark began to pull and almost slipped her grasp.

‘We daren’t go to look.’ Perhaps he’ll go away. Or die. She winced at her own selfish thoughts.

‘Mom’ – Mark gave up tugging – ‘we can see through the window, we don’t have to open the door.’

Now, that made sense. Almost. Another illogical fear crept into her thinking, had her still holding back. Suppose the person out there, moaning in agony, was Trevor! God forbid! Something could have happened to her husband, something like … whatever had happened to the bullfrogs!

‘Let’s wait a minute or two.’ She stalled. She had never been a positive person, which was probably why she had stuck with Trevor all those years. Wait and see, a safe policy.

‘Please, Mom.’ Mark started trying to free himself from her hold again. ‘He sounds real bad and maybe we can do something to help him.’ Whatever his faults, her son never ignored anybody in trouble. She admired him for that.

Susan wasn’t sure whether Mark pulled her through the hallway and into the kitchen or whether she just followed him. Certainly she would never have gone of her own volition. She needed to be led, as always.

With the curtains drawn, the room was sinister in the wan dawn light. Like a tomb, she thought, and shivered uncontrollably. Her glance was drawn behind the door to where the twenty-gauge was propped up, the box of ammunition on the shelf above it. She had always hated guns, but now she found the presence of the shotgun uncharacteristically comforting.

They stood listening. The silence was total; even the crows had ceased their calling.

‘Wait!’ Her whispered command was ignored. Mark was already upon the low bench below the window, his fingers clutching the curtain.

Oh, God, I don’t want to see, whoever it is? Please don’t let it be Trevor!

Mark gripped the flimsy material and pulled. It snagged. He pulled again.

And Susan screamed.

A face was pressed up against the window, the features flattened on the fly-stained pane, a cadaver that pleaded with its wide, blistered lips. Hollowed eyes burned with fever, reflecting the anguish within. Grey hair, damp and matted with sweat, gnarled fingers tapping and scratching weakly on the glass.

Thank God, it wasn’t Trevor!

Suddenly, it was gone. The eyes closed, the features seemed momentarily at peace, relaxed. The head tilted, swayed, and dropped from view like a huge sideshow puppet that had made its last bow to its audience.

‘It’s Mr Thompson!’ Mark shouted. ‘We’d best go see if we can do anything for him.’

The old farmer was slumped on the veranda, a damp bundle of grubby long johns and a black and white nightshirt. Even as they watched, he stirred, his head lifted and those festered lips again pleaded for help.

‘He’s ill.’ Mark stood over him. There was no reason for either of them to be afraid of Mr Thompson.

Susan felt helpless, she had never pretended to be a second Florence Nightingale. The very sight of blood made her feel faint but what she saw now was a thousand times worse, an old man dying of some hideous disease. Yet another plague had been sent upon mankind.

Thompson was attempting to speak, his diseased lips moving. Saliva strung from his mouth, phlegm rattled in his throat, his words came out in a series of hisses.

‘Phil … dead … fleas … get doctor.’

Susan wrung her hands together. If only they had a telephone. There was one down at the homestead, though. Trevor had used it only the previous afternoon.

‘Phone … not working.’ He seemed to follow her train of thought.

Oh, Sweet Jesus, that’s all we need!

‘Maybe we could get him into the house, Mom.’

The crows were calling again. They seemed much closer; perhaps they had scented another feed of human carrion.

‘Are you able to crawl, Mr Thompson?’ she asked in a voice that shook. After all, you did manage to walk here from the farm. I don’t want to touch you.

Silence. His head moved backwards and forwards, twice. Maybe, I’ll try.

Unbelievably, that fever-ridden body moved in a kind of belly crawl across the veranda boards, Susan backing away in front of it, Mark following. After what seemed an eternity all three of them were inside the small hallway.

‘Fetch Mr Thompson some water, Mark.’ Susan nodded in the direction of the kitchen. ‘Fill the yellow beaker by the sink.’ The one that we keep the dishwashing brush in, because I don’t want him drinking out of any of the glasses. We’d have to destroy them.

She heard Mark running the tap, and looked away, anywhere but at that. ‘Help him to drink, Mark.’

Mark knelt by the sick man, holding the beaker to those cracked lips. Chris Thompson tried to drink but spilled most of the water down his chin, saturating his shirt. He began to cough uncontrollably, an awful sound as if he might vomit his lungs.

‘There are some blankets in the cupboard in our bedroom,’ she said when the beaker was empty. ‘Fetch some, make up a bed on the floor as best you can.’

She moved into the doorway. The flies were becoming active outside now that it was fully light. She thought about closing the door, but hesitated. It would mean shutting Thompson in the house with them, enclosing whatever awful disease ravaged him.

She looked across at the station wagon; there was petrol in the tank, the key was in the ignition. Half a minute, maybe less, provided the engine started without any trouble, and she and Mark could be away from here. To where? That was the problem.

Trevor should be home soon. She tried to think logically; he had gone to the city, probably decided to stop overnight at the apartment, which was the sensible thing to do, rather than risk driving back after dark through a plague-ridden countryside. He’d be very tired, so in all probability he would sleep late. Sundays, unless he was going hunting or fishing, he didn’t usually get up before midday. She groaned. If he followed his norm, he wouldn’t be back here until mid-afternoon at the earliest. By which time she and Mark would undoubtedly have a corpse on their hands. The flies were building up, she watched them swarming, and they would spread whatever germs Thompson had …

She decided to close the door, swung it shut with her foot. A moan escaped the man lying on the floor as though the thud had jarred his tortured brain.

‘Mom, couldn’t we drive into North Falls, get the doctor there? We don’t have to go all the way into the city.’ Mark had made Chris Thompson as comfortable as was possible. The boy’s logic was disturbing.

‘I don’t know.’ Susan wasn’t sure of the way; it was probably signposted but her own sense of direction was abysmal. She didn’t know, either, what dangers lay beyond the end of the rutted track. What was happening here might be minimal by comparison. They might break down, and what on earth would they do then? They wouldn’t be able to get a rescue organization out, that was a certain fact. Suppose Trevor arrived while they were gone …

‘Why not, Mom?’ Mark was eager for adventure; being confined to the cabin was more frustrating for him than it was for her.

‘We’ll wait a bit.’ Stalling again.

‘Why?’

For Christ’s sake, just be quiet for five minutes! ‘In case your father comes back.’

‘How long do you think he’ll be?’

‘I’ve no idea!’ Her tone was sharp. ‘Probably later on today, this afternoon. I’ve just thought, he’s probably decided to spend the night at the flat, and you know how he likes to lie in at weekends.’

‘This isn’t the weekend, though.’

‘Just be quiet for a little while, Mark. Why don’t you’ – she tried to think of something for him to do to occupy himself – ‘go and tidy up your room? Please.’

‘All right, Mom.’ He turned away, dragging his feet.

She stole a glance at the farmer. He was lying on the blankets, his head resting on a cushion which Mark had had the sense to bring. Thompson’s eyes were open, regarding her steadily.

‘My boy’s dead.’ He spoke weakly but with less effort than before. Possibly the rest was already proving beneficial. ‘House is full of lice, never seen anything like it.’

Susan experienced a sudden urge to scratch herself. ‘How awful!’ It sounded trite.

‘Cattle are dyin’, too.’ He puffed out his sunken cheeks, his lungs wheezing. ‘God has sent the Plagues of Egypt upon us for our sins. The frogs, lakes and rivers turnin’ to blood’ – he coughed – ‘flies … the Murrain of Beasts. Just like it was in them days. Next’ll be …’ His eyelids drooped, his voice tailed away.

Susan turned her head. She thought maybe the awful prediction was the old man’s swan song, that now he’d spoken he had no reason left to live any longer. The thought of death was terrifying, she had never seen a corpse in her life, had no reason to. Some people went along to the funeral home to look upon their loved ones after death. Ugh! There wasn’t any point; far better to remember them as they had been in life.

She went into the kitchen, on tiptoe out of reverence in case her suspicion was true, and closed the door softly behind her. She had done everything possible for Thompson, her conscience was clear. She didn’t want to go back into the hall with a dead man lying there.

The flies were swarming on the outside of the window, buzzing angrily. We know you’ve got a corpse in there, let us in so that we can feed. Susan closed the curtain again, the gloomy half-light was preferable to watching a host of filthy insects.

Footsteps in the hallway. She tensed when the door started to open.

‘Mom!’ It was only Mark, thank goodness.

‘Mark!’ Susan was edgy, she had not meant to shout. ‘I thought I told you to –’

‘Mom, I can hear an engine coming down the track. Dad’s back!’

Oh, thank God! Her sudden relief had her feeling weak; she sank down into a chair by the table.

‘Mom, let’s go outside and –’

‘No, stop here, Mark, you’ll only let the flies indoors. Wait until Dad gets here.’

They waited, listening. The sound of the engine was getting nearer, louder. Mark’s head was tilted to one side, an expression of puzzlement on his features.

‘What’s the matter, Mark?’ Susan sensed that something was wrong, but didn’t know right now what it was.

‘That’s not the pickup.’ The boy’s interest in motor vehicles stretched as far as engine capacity and their level of noise. ‘No way. Somebody’s here but it’s not Dad!’

Momentarily the kitchen swam, it was like looking into an aquarium where the fish had suddenly rippled the water. Vertigo had Susan clutching the edge of the table. There was a dead man in the hallway, and now a stranger had arrived, could walk right in here through the unlocked door.

The engine died in stages via a spasm of pre-ignition. A door slammed metallically. Booted feet scraped across the dirt track, and came up on the veranda steps.

That was when Susan’s nerve broke and she screamed.

Chapter Fifteen

Doc Wycherley was short and stocky, his once powerful frame running to fat. Balding, he looked maybe ten years older than his fifty-five years. He was rarely seen without his curved Peterson pipe; he had his favourite brand of Latakia smoking mixture stocked especially for him by the drugstore across the street from the surgery. He constantly advised his patients to kick the cigarette habit; pipes and cigars were exempt from his ban.

His suits were specially tailored for him by Gardeners in the city in an effort to make them fit. They didn’t, never had and never would, hung awkwardly on his pear-shaped body. He wore a suit every day of the week; nobody had ever seen him in casuals.

Doc was abrupt and of uncertain temper; those who did not like him certainly respected him. None doubted his diagnoses, though sometimes his remedies were harsh and old-fashioned. Like Ed Parker, the vet, Dr Winston Wycherley had built his own legend during his thirty years of practising medicine in North Falls.

He had arrived in the early sixties from ‘somewhere in Montana’, exactly where had always been a matter of idle curiosity among the townsfolk. When he was a young aspiring medic, one of his first patients was Ella Ryker, the wife of one of the biggest ranchers in those parts, who also owned a sizeable part of North Falls. They were not a family to be trifled with.

Mrs Ryker was a keen horsewoman, but saddle-soreness had resulted in a very painful boil on her buttocks, which coincided with Wycherley’s first week in practice. Arrogantly, she had demanded a prescription, unwilling to allow him to view the offending part of her anatomy.

‘I’ll have to have a look at it,’ he had replied bluntly. ‘Can’t do a damned thing until I see it. Get your ass up on the couch and let’s have a look-see!’

Offended, she had stalked out of his consulting room. A week later she had been rushed to hospital with septicaemia. She had died shortly afterwards.

From then on the doctor’s brusqueness became part of the legend. Those folks in North Falls who didn’t like it, accepted it.

His hobby was entomology, which was one reason why his concern for the environment and its recent freak plagues was greater than that of most people. He did not accept that a sudden change back to former climatic conditions would immediately restore everything to normality. All this had been building up for decades; the drought was merely a contributory factor that had brought everything to a climax.

He had been fascinated with insects from an early age; he caught and kept ants and crickets in captivity, and studied their behaviour. Often his mother would destroy them because she had a revulsion for ‘crawlies’; she also swatted night moths that flew into the house and flitted around the lampshades. She didn’t understand.

Asthma sufferers in North Falls had increased by 20 per cent over the past six months; Wycherley kept meticulous records, hoping to find a common denominator for any sharp rise in a particular ailment. People blamed the high pollen count, but that was only instrumental. The real cause was house mites, the town was alive with them. Mostly they lived in carpets, and vacuum-cleaning wasn’t the answer; they burrowed into the fibre, survived and multiplied. They spread both asthma and hay fever at an alarming rate. Wycherley had just finished compiling a feature for one of the medical journals on this particular curse, and decided to send a copy to the North Falls Courier. Folks probably wouldn’t take much notice, the average housewife would deny the existence of the bug in her home. Still, he’d try to get the message over.

Bedbugs were at plague proportions, too, and had been building up these last few years. On his visits to the sick, mostly elderly patients, the doctor had suspected the presence of these bugs in many households. They pierced the human skin and injected an anticoagulant as they sucked the blood of unwary sleepers. This led to anaemia, blood poisoning and a general state of debility.

Bedbugs weren’t just found in the sheets, they lurked in cracks in furniture and in the walls, to emerge during the nocturnal hours. Every house in North Falls should be decontaminated, but people were obsessed with flies and other insects that they actually saw. They didn’t realize the unseen dangers.

They swatted crane flies, but there was a sharp increase in those, too. Virtually harmless to humans, they were a threat to agriculture, devouring farm crops. Like moths, they swarmed into human habitations after dark, lured by the lights. Wycherley had read somewhere that an acre of arable land could harbour up to a million crane flies.

Things were going to get worse, he was sure of that. The suspected cases of typhus fever had been confirmed, and the fact that they were thousands of miles from North Falls was of no consequence. Plagues travelled by innumerable means. The cities would be worst hit; the water supplies were already contaminated, as the authorities had reluctantly admitted. Next, the sewage systems would cease to function efficiently; that was when disease and death would spread on an unprecedented scale.

Winston Wycherley was not a religious man, he never attended church but he had his own private beliefs. Somewhere there was a God, maybe not in the accepted form, but life could not have evolved without Him. Just as He had created, He would destroy. Because He was disillusioned with his Plan. In the meantime the doctor could only do his best.

Wycherley heard a vehicle pull up in the street outside, a door slam. He was just finishing the paperwork from his evening surgery, notes on patients’ progress with their various ailments which would be filed by Donna, his assistant, in the morning. His teeth clamped on the stem of his pipe. Doubtless this was somebody who had overlooked surgery times, inadvertently or purposely, knowing full well that they would not be turned away. When eventually he retired, the new breed of medic who would replace him would not conduct these open-hours surgeries.

‘Yes?’ he grunted in answer to the tap on the door, and shrouded himself in a cloud of aromatic tobacco smoke. He didn’t look up to see who it was, he would keep them waiting until he had finished writing.

‘You busy, Win?’

Wycherley laid down his pen – he never used a ballpoint, they were blotchy – peered over the top of his rimless spectacles. ‘Come in, Ed. Take a seat.’

The vet looked even more dishevelled and travel-stained than usual. Her features were lined and drawn. The doctor admired vets, they needed to be a whole lot shrewder than a human practitioner; people could give you some idea of what they thought was wrong with them, but animals couldn’t, you had to find out for yourself.

‘Tough day?’ Ed Parker seated herself in the chair opposite.

‘Tough enough. Each day’ll get worse from now on, you know that as well as I do, Ed.’

‘Sure thing. Thought I’d better let you know. I’ve been out to the Thompson ranch. We found a dead guy up by the Spode.’

Wycherley nodded. Death was an everyday occurrence, nothing to get shocked or excited about, least of all right now. ‘I’ll call McKinnon’s funeral parlour, they’ll have to fetch the body in.’

‘Maybe you ought to take a look yourself, Win.’

‘I’ll check it in the mortuary, do a PM.’

‘The crows got to it, made a job of it. Could be natural causes, but I get an uneasy feelin’ myself.’

‘Why?’

Ed Parker hesitated. ‘Well, a guy drops down, maybe doesn’t die right away. Heart attack, in a lot of pain. But the way this feller was, he’d been screamin’ right up to the time he died. Not much left ‘o his face but there was more than just pain in his expression. Terror, like no man should experience. Just a feelin’ I got.’

‘You got something more to tell me, Ed?’

She coughed and cleared her throat. The doc was a shrewd one, you couldn’t fool him, he sussed you out. ‘There’s cattle dyin’ on the Thompson spread, which ain’t surprising ‘cause they’ve got precious little water and grass. I thought mebbe it was a combination of the drought and the lice, then I thought with one that dropped dead while I was there that it was BSE. You know, mad cow disease.’

‘Go on.’

‘Been thinkin’ on the drive back … well, it could’ve been something else.’

‘Like?’

‘Anthrax.’

‘Maybe. There’s suspected cases already, according to the radio. But you’re a vet, I’m a doctor.’ Ball’s in your court.

‘It’s the Thompsons I’m worried about.’

‘I see. They ill.’

‘No, but, well, I can’t sleep with a clear conscience. If that is anthrax, then they’ll need some sort of inoculation. I thought maybe you and me ought to take a trip out there. I’ll check the dead cow, there’s maybe more died since, and if I’m right, then you could see to the Thompsons. Just a thought …’ Because you never tried to tell Doc Wycherley his job.

‘We’d better get some rest first, neither of us is as young as we used to be. Pick me up around 3 a.m. We’d best go at night, at least avoid the heat on the trip out there. And we’ll bring that corpse back with us in the truck.’

Ed Parker looked relieved. For a lot of reasons she didn’t fancy the idea of going back there alone.

It was still dark when they reached the Thompson spread. They sensed that there was something seriously wrong even before they had parked in the yard. Lights burned in the house, the door was open and the truck was still there, so Chris and his son had to be around somewhere.

Phil was there, all right. Even Doc Wycherley stared aghast at that bedroom, the blood-soaked bed with the body sprawled across it, fleas feeding while the flesh was still warm. Soon the lice would move on elsewhere in search of another, living host. Wycherley backed out on to the landing, pulling Ed Parker with him.

The vet’s keen eyes had noted the piece of severed, bloody flesh lying on the floor, the remains of that tick bloating itself inside it. She got the gist of what had happened, nodded her conclusion to herself. The insects had driven the young man crazy, he had panicked and removed the parasite in the only way he knew how. He would probably have died, anyway.

‘Question is, where’s old man Thompson got to?’ They were back down in the yard. The doctor watched the dawn breaking in the east.

‘Panicked and fled, most likely.’ Parker’s gaze scanned their surroundings. ‘Maybe when it’s properly light we’ll find him. He needed help, the phone wasn’t working, so –’ her forehead furrowed – ‘there was no point going on up to the Spode. He left the truck, maybe couldn’t start it. So, the only place I can think of is that cabin he sold to some folks from the city, ‘bout a mile and a half from here, close to the lake.’

‘Let’s check it out.’ The doctor was already heading towards their own truck. ‘There’s no point going on up to look at that other corpse. I guess there’s a worthwhile trip out here for McKinnon’s Funeral Services. Let’s see if we can find Chris Thompson.’

They smelled the lake before they reached the cabin, a stench of rotting that came on the soft, warm breeze and had the doctor puffing hard on his pipe. At each bend they expected to come upon the old farmer lying dead in the road but, if he had stumbled this way, it looked as if he had made it to his intended destination.

‘Well, there’s a station wagon parked outside so somebody has to be home.’ The vet eased the truck alongside the other vehicle, and killed the engine. ‘You want me to come with you, Win?’ I hope you don’t because I’ve seen enough for one night.

‘Wait here, I won’t be long.’ Wycherley climbed down, slamming the door behind him.

He could hear movements within, but even as his fist reached out to pound on the door, a woman’s scream came from inside. He tensed, came to a decision, and pushed open the front door.

And that was when he found himself staring down the twin barrels of an over-and-under twenty-gauge shotgun. He elevated his eyes and met the defiant stare of a young boy.

‘Come any further and I’ll blow your bloody head off, mister!’ The other’s features were white, there was stark terror in the eyes, and the hands holding the weapon trembled so that it shook. This was far more dangerous than being confronted by a hard-bitten gunman.

‘Easy, boy.’ Wycherley smiled. A woman peered from the kitchen doorway, a hand clasped to her mouth. At the far end of the hallway a still form was stretched out on some blankets. Wycherley recognized Chris Thompson and knew at first glance that the farmer was already dead. He had made it to the cabin but it hadn’t done him any good.

‘Keep right there, mister, or I’ll shoot.’

‘I’ve no doubt you will.’ He smiled again, knowing that he had to defuse the situation fast. ‘I’m Dr Wycherley from North Falls. Ed Parker, the vet, is out there in the truck. We were looking for Mr Thompson.’ He nodded towards the motionless form. ‘Seems like we’ve found him.’

‘Mark, put that gun down.’ Susan moved into the hallway. ‘I’m sorry, doctor, but we couldn’t take any chances.’

‘Of course not.’ He moved past them and knelt beside the inert man. His fingers moved swiftly, unbuttoning the grubby nightshirt. There was still evidence of the high temperature, Thompson had only been dead a matter of minutes, at a guess. The rash was unmistakable, the doctor had seen it once before, at medical college. Holy shit, this is all I need! He straightened up and pulled the blankets up to cover the body. ‘Doctor, is there anything …?’

‘Nothing, I’m afraid, thank you all the same,’ Wycherley answered. ‘Miss Parker and I will take the body back with us. In the meantime, though, I’m going to give you both an injection.’ Because I’ve brought some typhus serum with me for the Thompsons and they won’t be needing it.

‘No, Mom …’ Mark shrank back. Susan gripped the barrels of the gun and removed it from her son’s grasp.

‘You and I will do just what the doctor asks.’ She propped the twenty up against the wall. ‘One injection each, just to be on the safe side. Doctor, what has this man died from?’

‘Can’t tell without a post-mortem,’ Wycherley said, trying to sound casual. ‘Could be any one of a number of things. Now, I’ll just go out to the truck and get what I need.’

The needle hurt. Susan gasped, felt faint for a few seconds; Mark cried out and clung to her.

‘There.’ The doctor returned the syringe to its case. ‘You’ll be okay now.’ He tried to sound confident for the boy’s sake. He had anticipated anthrax in the farmer’s case, and came doubly prepared with the limited supply of typhus-fever inoculation which most medics kept for a dreaded emergency. There certainly wouldn’t be enough to go round if there was an outbreak of typhus fever. These folks were lucky; he just prayed that he was in time.

‘Doctor?’

‘Yes, ma’am?’ She was pretty, and he wondered what the hell she was doing out here alone with the boy.

‘My husband went into the city yesterday afternoon, just to fetch a few things we might need. He … he hasn’t come back yet.’

Somehow the doctor controlled his expression. A lot of folks had fled the city, those lucky enough to get out in time. He had heard on the radio that the riots were spreading, police and civilians had died. ‘The city’s not an easy place right now, ma’am. Everybody’s trying to get out and there’s traffic jams a couple of miles long on most outer-city roads. My guess is that your husband’s stuck in one of them. I wouldn’t be expecting him for a while yet, if it was me. Tomorrow, even, perhaps.’

‘Thank you, doctor.’ There was no mistaking the relief in her voice.

Susan took Mark into the kitchen and closed the door. She heard the doctor and his companion struggling to carry the corpse out to the truck. A pang of fear griped her, terror of the unknown. What had Thompson really died of? What had Dr Wycherley injected her and Mark against?

‘Mom?’

‘Yes?’ Oh, Jesus Christ, can’t you shut up for just five minutes?

‘How long do you think Dad will be? The doctor said –’

‘That it might even be tomorrow.’ She turned away so that he could not see her expression. ‘Don’t let’s start worrying until then, okay?’

There were flies in the cabin again. While the door was open, they had swarmed in to feed on Thompson’s body. She swatted at one which landed on her cheek. God alone knew what disease they were spreading. She prayed fervently that the booster injections might immunize Mark and her from whatever had killed the farmer.

Chapter Sixteen

Every radio and television channel carried its own regular update on the crisis. Mostly they were half-hourly bulletins, covering not just the United States but worldwide reports. No longer was it necessary to rely on the soaps for ratings; plague news was commercial. The networks looked for sensationalism, and sometimes the facts were distorted; already the White House had criticized one channel for ‘scaremongering’. Newspaper sales nose-dived; printed news, however bad, was always out of date when there were fresh horrors every hour. TV crews did not have far to travel to capture some local catastrophe.

Saturation point was bound to be reached. To keep public hysteria whipped up, a few TV stations tried showing old horror movies in which nature was presented as menacing: armies of soldier ants on the move in a South American jungle, devouring all before them; Hitchcock’s The Birds. The idea was a nonstarter; truth held a greater attraction than fiction.

If people were confined indoors, however terrified, they switched on the TV. It was logical. What was needed then, one station decided, was authentic documentaries, repeats of past crises, presented in an educational manner. That way they could not be accused of scaremongering.

A researcher came up with a film on cockroaches that had been made in 1990 after plagues of these insects in both Moscow and New York. Cockroaches were doubtless on the increase again, though nobody had so far got round to verifying this.

The night sounds in any city are strange; the nocturnal hours magnify and distort.

Trevor and Elaine had gone through the motions of bedding down for the night. They had lain on the plush carpet in Trevor’s small private office on many previous and happier occasions; had they had blankets, they would have cast them aside. Even if they didn’t have a cooler, they had food, a four-can pack of Slice, some cheese biscuits and overripe plums which Trevor had found in the kitchen at the apartment.

It was perhaps the first time that, alone in the office together, they had not undressed fully, just loosened their garments in an attempt to cool off. The situation was not conducive to making love.

Elaine broke a lengthy silence and said, ‘They haven’t been to tow the truck away yet.’

‘They’re probably far too busy to bother. Let’s face it’ – in the distance he thought he detected more sporadic gunfire – ‘there are cops and citizens getting killed by the hour. Who’s going to give a shit about a couple of dropouts?’

‘You going to try to shift that clamp?’

‘I’ve thought about it. It might be easier to pick up another vehicle.’

‘Steal one?’ There was alarm on her features.

‘Borrow one.’

‘It’s risky.’

‘So is unclamping the truck when it’s already connected with a hit-and-run killing.’

They lapsed back into silence. Trevor looked at his watch: 1.25 a.m. If he was going to do anything about finding a means of transport, he needed to get moving. Daylight would be too dangerous. But it was Elaine who moved, struggling to her feet.

‘I won’t be a minute.’ She needed to relieve herself into the already overworked sewage system.

He heard her go through the outer office to the small rest room at the rear and close the door. The bolt snapped shut; even an environmental crisis couldn’t break that habit. He remembered there was a hacksaw in there, which just might cut through the bolts on the wheel clamp. Maybe, after all, the truck was a lesser risk than stealing a car. When Elaine came out, he’d get it and see if –’

That was when he heard her start to scream.

For a second or two he couldn’t move, his limbs refused to coordinate with his brain. Elaine was still screaming by the time he was on his feet, making a stumbling rush through the main office. The bolt creaked as he hit the door with his shoulder. You stupid bitch, bolting the door when there’s only me here!

She was still screaming.

He shouted incoherently at her to open up. A number of possibilities were jamming his shocked and confused brain. There was somebody hiding in there; they had been in there for hours, waiting. Elaine was being raped, maybe worse! Or …

The door flew open as he hit it a second time, the flimsy bolt torn free, screws flying in all directions. Thank God, she was alive, her features deathly white and anguished, trying to speak but the words wouldn’t come, and when they did they were incoherent. She pointed with a shaking hand but he didn’t need her directions. He saw them, all over the walls and ceiling, crawling on the cistern.

Twenty, thirty of them, no more than an inch in length, their beetle bodies a light brown in colour. Cockroaches!

She fell into his arms; if he had not held her she would have fallen to the floor. And there were more of them crawling over the cracked linoleum, he could hear their feet scratching on the surface now that Elaine had stopped screaming.

‘Darling.’ He backed away, still holding her, and dragged the door shut behind him. ‘It’s all right, they won’t hurt you.’ They’ll just give you hepatitis, or polio. Or typhus fever.

‘It was awful.’ She was shaking; in a moment she would start to sob. ‘Whatever are they?’

‘Cockroaches.’ He led her back into the office. By morning the bastards would probably be in here, too. ‘There was a plague of them in the city two or three years back.’

‘I … I can’t stop here any longer.’ She began to sob. ‘Oh, Trev, please take me away.’

‘We’ll leave as soon as we can.’ He remembered the hacksaw; he’d have to go back in there. ‘Now, just lie down, I won’t be many minutes. With a bit of luck I might be able to get that clamp off. And if I can, we could just be out of the city before daylight.’

Trevor found the hacksaw, dislodged a cockroach from its handle, and heard the insect ping on the floor and scurry away. He let himself out into the street. The pickup was still parked where he had left it, and there was nobody in sight. It was almost as though he and Elaine were the last two people left behind in this city; everybody else was either dead or gone.

He knelt down and began to saw steadily.

Elaine was tense and frightened. The cockroaches had scared her but the brooding city by night was a thousand times worse. The side streets looked deserted but from close by she could hear shouts, voices raised in anger, the whine of police sirens, shots designed to keep a mob at bay, and screams of hate and abuse.

It had taken Trevor over an hour to saw through the wheel clamp. At one stage he had almost given up. It reminded him of the time some kids had tried to steal the wheels off his parked car; they had used a spanner and managed to remove three nuts after a struggle, then abandoned the theft. Only the wheel vibrations had warned him; he had pulled into the side of the road just in time to avert a serious accident. Amateurs, as he had been tonight. But he had won in the end.

He had consulted an A-Z street map, deciding upon his route to avoid the busy areas; the rioters would concentrate on the streets lined with big stores. A circuitous detour would bring him on to the turnpike and from there to the freeway. Route 551 was a straight run right to the turn-off for the cabin.

The windshield was still blood-smeared; the washers were unable to remove the stains. The fuel gauge showed half-full, enough to make it to the cabin with a couple of gallons to spare.

He gave Elaine the map and a pencil torch out of the glove box. ‘We’ll take it steady’ – he tried to speak reassuringly – ‘check every turn-off. We can’t afford to go wrong.’

Night moths flitted in the headlight beams, clouds of them swarmed round every streetlamp. Elaine wound her window up; like Susan, she had a revulsion for anything that flew or crawled.

‘Police!’ She gave a frightened whisper as a car turned out of a junction and came towards them. It had no flashing beacon so it was just a routine patrol, probably radioing a documentary on the state of the city back to headquarters. The kind of crew that might stop anybody or anything, just checking.

Trevor’s breathing went suddenly shallow and his pulse rate increased. He felt slightly sick. But the oncoming cruiser didn’t slow, the driver barely spared them a second glance. Trevor breathed normally again.

‘Next but one on the left.’ Elaine was hunched forward, studying the map. ‘Eighty-first. About a mile and then we come to the turnpike.’

Trevor flashed left, swung the wheel over, and then stood on his brakes.

Eighty-First Street was a no-go area. A barricade of cars had been erected across the road, some on their sides, heaped furniture stretching from pavement to pavement. Behind it, like defenders peering through the battlements of a besieged fortress, grim faces watched, their eyes reflected in the headlamps like beasts of prey surprised on a lonely road.

‘Shit!’ Trevor grated the gears, crashed into reverse and shot backwards. Half a dozen figures emerged from the wreckage and walked forwards. They carried something in their hands; in the uncertain light Trevor wasn’t sure whether it was clubs or shotguns. Whichever, he wasn’t taking any chances.

The pickup’s tyres screeched in a U-turn. It had almost completed the half-circle that brought it back on to Eighty-Second when a hail of buckshot struck the bodywork. The passenger side window starred but didn’t shatter, the nearside headlamp was extinguished.

‘Keep down!’ Trevor pushed Elaine into the well in front of the seat and accelerated.

A volley of booming reports echoed and rolled through the streets. Birdshot pinged on the tailboard, ricocheted into the night, played pinball off the buildings.

‘Holy shit!’ Trevor glanced in the wing mirror but there was no pursuit, the mob had no reason to follow them. Probably they were just a bunch of ordinary nice guys who had lived on Eighty-First most of their lives, intent only on protecting their homes and families; clerks, factory workers, your average Joe Public. He couldn’t blame them, there would be thousands like them all over the city. He just had to keep out of their way.

‘Try Eighty-Fourth.’ Elaine was still crouched down, reading the street guide. ‘You can skirt Eighty-Third and still hit the freeway. It’s about a half-mile further.’

He nodded, accelerated. ‘It’s no good trying to reason with –’

‘What’s the matter, Trev?’

Like him, she was aware that the truck suddenly bumped, juddered and rattled.

‘A flat!’ He eased the vehicle into the side, checking the street both ways as far as he could see. There was nobody in sight.

‘What’ll we do?’ She was on the verge of panic again.

‘Change the wheel, no problem. You stop there, keep a lookout. I can put a spare on in two minutes flat.’

He had to move some of their load to locate the spare wheel, he dragged it out, loosened the nuts and jacked up the truck. Some pellets had hit the tyre and punctured it; he listened to the hiss of escaping air. The spare went on; he lowered the vehicle and finished tightening the nuts.

The hissing seemed louder now. He threw the punctured tyre up on the truck. Only then did realization hit him with the shock of a jet of icy water.

He stood there aghast, staring in disbelief at the wheel he had just fitted, seeing the tyre steadily deflating, flattening. Hissing under the pressure of the loaded vehicle.

He watched it all the way down, was still staring at it when it was compressed between the rim and the tarmac. It gave one last hiss as if to taunt him, then was silent.

Elaine had got out, seen and understood. He half expected her to freak out but she didn’t, and he admired her for her calmness. She just said, ‘I guess we’d better take what we can carry and walk the rest.’

‘I guess so.’ Behind them those resolute defenders fired another barrage of buckshot. Somebody was screaming; this time the unfortunate trespassers in their domain had not managed to drive away.

Trevor checked to make sure that he still had the 8mm, clasped Elaine’s hand and held it. They began walking in the direction of the freeway.

In another hour it would be daylight.

The Plague of Locusts

And the locusts went up over all the land.

Exodus x:14

Chapter Seventeen

‘Lake smells real bad,’ Ed Parker commented as she eased the truck down the rutted track that led away from the cabin. She had to convince herself that the odour that filled the van was caused by decomposing fish and bullfrogs, rotting algae – anything except the two corpses in the back. The dead smelled much the same, whether animal or human.

They had wasted a lot of time going back up to the homestead to collect Phil Thompson’s body. It was almost midday, it was hot and it would get a bloody sight hotter. Half a day’s work had been lost. Something would have to be done about those cattle, too. Right now there wasn’t much she could do, it would have to be an ‘official’ job, she’d report it to the authorities. They’d probably send somebody out to destroy the herd, do some post-mortems. No way was she going near those beasts. No, sir, she wasn’t risking anthrax just for the hell of it!

Doc Wycherley was silent, deep in his own thoughts. ‘Death is a way of life’ was one of his favourite quips. Up to a point, it was true; a doctor’s duty was to save lives wherever possible. Before long, though, he might be seeing more corpses than he had seen so far in his whole career. In fact, it was a certainty, and it was making him depressed.

‘Ed, when we get back to town, after we’ve dropped them at McKinnon’s’ – a backward jerk of his thumb – ‘I want you to come round to the surgery for a jab.’

‘Eh?’ She was startled, missed a rut and jerked the truck. ‘What for?’

‘Just a little prick.’ It was a feeble attempt at an old joke to relieve the tension, take the sting out of it. It didn’t work.

‘Just to be on the safe side, there’s probably no real cause for concern, I have no doubt that you’ll be okay. Like I gave the Chibnells a jab, I don’t believe in taking chances.’

‘Maybe I hadn’t ought to ask you this, Win.’ Ed Parker glanced in her rear-view mirror and caught a glimpse of the back of the truck. She might, in different circumstances, have kidded herself that they were carrying a load of asphalt or coal slack, except that the black mass in the back heaved and crawled. ‘I … what did the Thompsons die from?’

‘You ought not to ask, but I’ll tell you just the same.’ The doctor’s expression was grim as he stared straight ahead of him through the dirt-stained windshield. ‘It isn’t anthrax, ‘cause I know that’s what you’re thinking. Their cattle might have got it, probably have, and I’ll give you an injection to cover you for that, too. The Thompsons died from typhus fever.’

Oh, shit, Ed Parker thought, and there are about a million flies in the back of the truck that are going to spread it. She asked, ‘Is it wise taking them back to North Falls, flies and all?’

‘Maybe not, but we couldn’t leave the old man at the cabin, could we? And as we’ve got to bring him back, it made sense to bring the son back, too.’

‘Sure.’ Logic didn’t make it any easier. ‘You reckon it’ll spread?’

‘I’m certain. Not just from the Thompsons and their flies, but from a hundred different sources across the States. There won’t be enough serum to go round. Which is why I want to give you a shot at the outset.’

‘Thanks.’ She meant it. The doctor would be fighting typhus fever, they would both be fighting anthrax.

The truck would probably overheat before they got back to town; the temperature gauge needle was dangerously high already and they hadn’t gone more than a mile yet. Up ahead they could see the traffic on the freeway, all heading north – as far from civilization as they could get.

‘Sky looks to be darkening over yonder.’ Wycherley stabbed a finger on the side window. ‘Maybe a storm.’

Ed nodded, puzzled; somehow those clouds didn’t look quite right for thunderheads. Too compacted. ‘Maybe. A downpour wouldn’t do no harm even if it didn’t do much good, at least it’d cool things down a bit.’ And drown those corpse flies. She wiped at her forehead, her hand dripped sweat.

The traffic was bunching; most of the vehicles were travelling too close, too fast. Soon there would be a build-up, a tailback, the doctor thought idly. It didn’t matter to him and Ed, even if the cars queued all the way back to the city boundary, because they were driving against the flow.

The sky was just a shade darker than when he had last looked.

They eased out on to the turnpike. The oncoming traffic was denser than they had thought. Three cars and a truck were broken down, parked on the side with their bonnets lifted. Steam billowed up from two of the engines.

Ed checked the back again; the flies were almost up to the tailboard. A smell of putrescence pervaded the cab; she told herself it was psychological, they were too far from the lake now. Maybe there was another stretch of algae-infested water somewhere close that wasn’t visible. It wasn’t the corpses that stank. Sure, it wasn’t.

The sun had disappeared behind that cloud up ahead; the daylight was eerie, a peculiar shade of purple. The air hung heavy, stifling.

‘There is gonna be a storm,’ the doctor said. He was tense, electric storms always made him edgy.

‘Damn right there is.’ Ed flicked the wipers once, just to ensure that they still worked. The blades smeared twin swathes of squashed insect bodies across the windshield. She tried the washers; they made it worse.

Which was why they probably did not see the oncoming cloud until it hit them with the force of a hailstorm.

‘Christ!’ Ed Parker braked; the pickup slewed, squealing its tyres.

It was as though a blanket had been thrown across the windshield, plunging them into instant darkness. A blackness that crawled and seethed, clogged the radiator grill so that the water boiled, jammed every working part in the engine, killed it even before the vehicle had skidded to a standstill.

An impenetrable night when there should have been daylight. No dusk, straight into darkness. The atmospheric temperature soared another couple of degrees. Both medics clawed at their faces. The vet groped for the window winder, wound it up, yelling in terror as dozens of tiny bodies clung to her face and hands. She heard her companion threshing at them and spitting them off his lips.

‘What the hell are they, Win?’

No answer; the doctor was choking, coughing, slapping and spitting.

Outside the noise was deafening, frightening. Tyres screeched, vehicles crunched, torn metal squealed. People were screaming in a cacophony of terror. The already choking atmosphere was filled with the lung-searing stench of burning rubber.

Something exploded in a vivid flash of orange that lightened the darkness. A second followed, a third and fourth, like a series of timed detonations. Ed and Winston covered their eyes, momentarily forgetting the swarming invaders in the cab.

‘Fireball!’ Wycherley croaked. ‘The whole bloody lines of traffic have gone up!’

Whooshing and booming, the opposite side of the freeway was a battleground in which there would be no victors. The casualties were incalculable as cars and trucks slammed into one another, their petrol tanks igniting, relaying the huge chain of fiery death.

‘Oh, my God!’ For once the doctor felt helpless. Absently he kept scraping tiny bodies from himself; whatever these insects were, it was immaterial. One horror had been instantly superseded by another.

The fireball explosions lit up the interior of the cab like intermittent sheet lightning, a flickering magic lantern picture show like the ones Ed’s and Win’s fathers had in their boyhood. A horror show.

Amidst the roar of petrol flames and the thunderous ignitions, they heard the creatures. The sound was increasing to deafening proportions, a myriad of musicians fiddling their death tune.

Ed saw them between flashes; their sharp heads with prominent eyes that seemed to glint evilly in the eerie glow, wings; antennae the length of their bodies, green armour reflecting the fire flashes. That was when she knew. Oh, God, she knew what they were, all right!

‘Locusts!’

Wycherley scooped a handful from his neck and flung them away. At least locusts didn’t sting or bite, or feed on human flesh. Their lives were devoted to searching out growing crops and devastating them. They were harbingers of starvation. This was the final blow to a drought-scorched landscape; once-lush rangeland would be an arid desert before the autumn.

He fumbled for the door catch, and almost fell into the road. A fog of thick, pungent smoke swirled, hitting him as if it had been waiting for him to emerge.

‘Win!’

‘Get out!’ Doc Wycherley shouted, bent double with a spasm of coughing.

Ed Parker followed. There was no sense in staying in the pickup; the heat from the burning vehicles might ignite the fuel tank and cremate them both in a metal coffin. On the opposite side of the freeway, traffic was mangled into an unrecognizable blazing metallic mountain range, cars crushed flat with huge trucks reared up atop them. Faces were glimpsed and lost again in the smoke, features pressed against toughened glass windshields and windows, screaming because they were being roasted alive.

A woman held up a baby, then both of them were gone. A few had got out; their silhouettes could be seen staggering dazedly, uncomprehendingly. One was ablaze, collapsed into a burning heap.

‘No, Ed!’ Wycherley caught his companion by the arm, dragged her back. ‘There’s nothing you can do, absolutely nothing at all!’

The vet didn’t resist; she knew that the other spoke the truth. She wouldn’t be able to get near because of the heat, and even if she could, she wouldn’t know where to start. Many would be burned to unrecognizable cinders because there were no firefighters to cut them out of the wreckage. The dead were the fortunate ones; there were dozens who would linger. Maybe a few rescue teams would arrive eventually, but the majority of them were at full stretch in the city, fighting fires started by the looters, and rescuing people trapped in burning buildings.

The doctor felt the sweat being dried on his body by this bizarre 4th July fireworks celebration. The explosions were still coming fast, further away now. He prayed that those further down the line would have the sense to flee their vehicles, run from the fiery freeway.

Through the smoke, like monster fireflies swarming, they both saw the locusts swirling, spiralling up into the sky. The insects had homed in on the freeway’s dried grass verges; starving, they could devour anything that was edible. They had blanketed windshields, causing this unprecedented carnage. Now the heat and the smoke was driving them on elsewhere.

Ed was reluctant to abandon their vehicle. It had not crashed, and this section of the freeway was clear of wrecked vehicles. There was nothing to stop them from driving back to North Falls.

‘The engine will be thick with locusts.’ Wycherley had lost his hat, his bald head was grimed, and he was still knocking clinging insects off himself. In his hand he carried his black bag – a doctor never went anywhere without it. ‘We’d best get clear of the freeway, up on to the fields. Like I said, it’s hopeless here.’

They began walking up a steep incline, holding on to each other because the ground was slippery in its dryness, soil that had baked in the hot sun and then powdered. Two more explosions; they might have been a quarter of a mile away but it was impossible to see because of the smoke pall.

Another sound; at first they thought it was the crackling of the flames, but it came from the opposite direction. They reached the brow of the freeway bank and stared in disbelief at the scene which greeted them beyond.

A plain of once golden ripe wheat stretched almost as far as the eye could see, thousands of acres that had withered in the heat, fallen short of its expected yield because of the dryness. Now it was green again, and heaved like an oncoming ocean swell, crackled like popcorn; crunching, grinding, the stalks were weighed down, flattened by an army of predators that would strip the ears before sundown, leaving behind them a barren wasteland.

The heat and the smoke had driven the locusts off the freeway, and now they had found the food they were seeking. ‘And the locusts went up all over the land. They covered the face of the whole earth, so that the land was darkened; and they did eat every herb of the land, and all the fruit of the trees, and there remained not any green thing in all the land.’

Behind them, another explosion, close enough for the two medics to feel the blast of hot air. They turned and caught a glimpse of Ed Parker’s blazing truck before the smoke swirl hid it from them.

Doc Wycherley bowed his head and prayed for a moment because there was nobody else around to pray for Chris and Phil Thompson. Father and son had suffered and died; now they were cremated. God had His own mysterious ways, it was not for mortals to question them. The Plague of Locusts had arrived.

‘Guess we’d better start walking.’ The doctor opened his eyes and draped an arm around his companion’s shoulders.

‘Guess so.’ Ed fell into shambling step with him, following the sunburned verge, keeping level with the road. It was one helluva way into North Falls on foot. Secretly, she doubted that they would make it.

The Plague of Darkness

They covered the face of the whole earth so that the land was darkened.

Exodus x:15

Chapter Eighteen

Mark had resigned himself to the probability that he would never see his father again. He came to that conclusion shortly after Doc Wycherley and Ed Parker had driven off with old Thompson’s corpse. He had overheard the doctor telling the vet that they had better go back to the homestead and pick up Phil’s body. The farmers had died, what chance had Trevor Chibnell of returning alive from the city? Very slim.

‘Come and lie on the bed with me, Mark,’ Susan said kindly. ‘Your father won’t get here any quicker for us pacing up and down and looking out of the windows.’

‘I’ll be okay, Mom,’ he replied. ‘I’ll go to my room, maybe read a bit.’

That, in itself, was odd, Susan thought. Mark almost never read unless he was forced to. Except when he nicked those girlie mags which Trevor kept under the bed back home.

‘You don’t like reading,’ she pointed out, her eyes narrowing with suspicion.

‘I’ve got some comics I brought with me,’ he answered almost arrogantly.

‘Oh, I see.’ She didn’t want to see; she had found one in his room at the flat once, a crude underground publication, worse in many ways than a porno book. She had shoved it down the garbage chute. ‘Well, you go and read, then.’ Because I’m too upset to bother right now.

She heard the door close behind him, the bedsprings creak. She was going to lie down herself, anyway. On her way to the bedroom she went back to the kitchen, picked up the twenty-gauge from behind the door, and took down the remaining shells from the shelf. Just in case there were any unwelcome visitors. Mark wouldn’t be able to go off with the gun again, either. She didn’t trust him; reprimanded and punished for some misdemeanour, he always showed remorse, but within hours he was quite likely to repeat his wrong. She tried not to think about what he might be reading.

She stretched out on the bed, knowing that she was going to find it impossible to relax. If only there was some way she could get in touch with Trevor, if she knew that he was all right, wherever he was, then it wouldn’t be so bad. But they didn’t have a phone, and even if they had, it wouldn’t be working.

Mark lay on his bed but he didn’t read a comic book. He didn’t have one. He wondered what life would be like without Dad around. Overall, it wouldn’t make much difference because his father wasn’t home most of the time. The boy had wondered lately why his mother didn’t leave his father, when all they did was row. Mark thought it was because of him. That made him feel guilty; he would have enjoyed life with just his mother around. He could do much as he liked then; she couldn’t strap him, she wasn’t strong enough. She’d give him money, too, if he asked for it, provided he promised not to waste it on the video games. And she’d never be able to find out what he did with it, anyway.

Dad was a shit, there was no getting away from that. Mark wouldn’t wish him dead, but he wouldn’t cry if he was. His father always broke his promises. ‘I’m going to take you to the movies on Saturday, son, if you don’t get into any more trouble.’ Come Saturday, even when Mark had kept a clean sheet, there was always a reason why they couldn’t go to the cinema. Because I have to go over to Matt’s and you know I can’t take you there because last year you stole some money out of his house. Or, I have to work all weekend at the office. That was the most frequent excuse.

So, Dad wouldn’t be coming back. Money might be a bit tight but Mark could look out for himself. His train of thought led back to the Thompsons, and gave him an idea that set his pulses racing. It was now or never, just in case Trevor did show up.

Mom would hear him if he crossed the hallway and went out through the front door. There was a much easier and quicker way to get out of the cabin. He eased himself off the bed, making sure that the springs didn’t twang nor the boards creak.

The window opened noiselessly. He stuck his head out, looked and listened for a couple of minutes. Phew, that lake stank worse than ever, the pike had to be in the last stages of decomposition. There didn’t seem to be so many flies as there had been earlier, they must have followed wherever that plague of insects went to yesterday. He watched the track with narrowed eyes, right up to where it curved to the left and went out of sight over a rise. There was no sign of Dad; there wasn’t likely to be because he wouldn’t be returning. No chance.

Mark dropped on to the veranda, his bare feet making scarcely a sound. He paused to put his trainers back on. He’d be back before his mother missed him. If a dying old man had walked here from the homestead, then Mark would be able to run there and back in no time at all.

Dad had once said that old man Thompson was the biggest miser he’d ever known; he had accumulated money over the years, didn’t spend a dime more than he could help, and he didn’t believe in banks. There wouldn’t be anybody at the ranch house, for sure. Mark increased his pace, brushed away the odd fly that settled on his face, and never even noticed the stink from the lake.

He came in sight of the house about half an hour later. In the shade of a grove of trees, he stood looking down on it. He shuddered, and momentarily the sweat seemed to chill on his body. The place was … spooky. As if … there was still somebody there.

He told himself that was nonsense; both the Thompsons were dead, there wasn’t anybody else. A noise attracted his attention, startling him until he made out some cattle in a kind of corral to the left of the farmyard. A bellow that came out high-pitched, as if it was the best that the beast could manage. It was the only one still standing; the rest were lying stretched out on the dead grass. They might just have been asleep. He wasn’t going any closer to find out.

He began to walk towards the house, but kept glancing around him, listening. Nobody would come because there wasn’t anybody to come. He wondered where old man Thompson might have hidden his cash. Under a floorboard or just in a cupboard in the kitchen?

The front door was wide open. Mark could see right through the hallway and vaguely made out the kitchen. He stood in the doorway, waiting for his eyesight to adjust to the gloom. Christ, it bloody stank in there, of shit and all sorts of rotting things! Probably there was food left lying about that had gone bad.

He stepped just inside, poised to flee if he had to. Silence, except for the buzzing of flies. There were flies everywhere these days, they didn’t bother him any longer. He forced himself to think of the money he might find, thousands of dollar bills all banded up with rubber bands, as he had seen on television. That was the impetus he needed to go on through the house into the kitchen.

A cloud of blowflies flew up from a couple of mangled, rotting furry things on the floor. Jeez! He thought they might once have been rabbits, but what little flesh was left crawled with maggots. He almost threw up.

To check a cupboard, he had to tug the door open. A can toppled out, thudded on the floor and rolled. He jumped back. Almost panicking, he scrabbled among the contents, sweeping them out in his haste and showering them around his feet. Nothing but bloody rubbish, string, yellowed newspapers for lighting the wood stove, and rusted tin mugs.

A search of the rest of the kitchen did not reveal anything that could possibly have been any use to him. His father had been right, they lived frugally.

Perhaps there wasn’t any money in the house. But there had to be.

He mounted the rickety wooden staircase with trepidation. The rail was loose and broken in places, there weren’t any carpets and his footsteps echoed eerily. A bedroom door was open and he crept towards it.

God almighty! He drew back, almost fled. The inside of that room resembled a slaughterhouse; rumpled bloodstained bedsheets, dried blood on the ceiling and walls. A cloud of flies erupted off the dark stains, then settled again. Maybe they liked the taste of bloody sheets. That was one room he wasn’t going to search.

The other bedroom smelled musty, a stink of old man, unwashed flesh and dirty clothes, sweat and shit stains. Sunlight shafted in through a small window, enough to search the room by.

Mark looked under the bed first, retching at the discovery of an unemptied chamber pot. Underneath was thick with dust. When he touched it, it billowed out, making him cough. There were some cardboard boxes, layered with filth, just the sort of place a dirty old farmer would keep his hidden wealth.

Rubbish again! Faded sepia photographs – Mark threw them to one side, they didn’t interest him. A wedding dress, in which the moths had enjoyed an uninterrupted banquet; he scrabbled through it with his fingers just in case. There wasn’t anything there.

Documents all tied up with grubby red ribbon; he tipped them out, left them where they fell. Some toy soldiers, scratched and broken, probably Phil’s when he was a boy, all boxed up ready for his second childhood.

Sweet bugger all! Mark kicked the boxes in his rage. Some dusty bone china shattered and tinkled. He turned his attention to the ornaments, some pots and vases on a shelf along the wall. Tipping them out, he strewed their contents around his feet; cufflinks, marbles, a couple of rusted diaper pins. Ah!

Mark’s fingers shook as he eased a paper roll out of a narrow-necked jug. He knew they were dollar bills, everything else was forgotten. What the hell did anybody roll notes up so tightly for? By the time he had straightened them out, the wad wasn’t nearly so thick. He separated the bills with difficulty. Fives; six of them. Thirty bucks!

He shoved them in the back pocket of his Levis and ran back downstairs. He wasn’t stopping up there a moment longer!

Then he saw the door leading off from the hallway opposite the kitchen. His mouth was dry. He deliberated, pretending he hadn’t noticed it. Christ alone knew what might lie on the other side.

He looked back, right out into the yard. If necessary, he could be back outside in three leaps. He’d just push the door open, and if there was anything … anything like in that bedroom up above, then he’d get the hell outa here and still be thirty dollars better off for his trouble.

It was a sitting room, dusty but neat and orderly in contrast to the rest of the house. Armchairs and a rocking chair, a fire laid in the hearth so long ago that the paper was yellowed and soot from the chimney had fallen on to the kindling. Moths had been at the carpet but there weren’t any flies in here because the room had been shut up.

A row of faded cards adorned the mantelshelf; birthday cards that looked very old-fashioned and had warped with age. A couple had fallen off into the grate.

Sunlight shafted in through a small latticed window, a single beam that had the dust dancing. A sudden thud caused Mark to whirl round – the door had swung closed behind him, as if to trap him in there. You’re trespassing, burgling, boy. You’re sentenced to imprisonment for life. In here!

He grabbed the knob and cried his relief aloud when the door pulled open. His foot kicked against a doorstop; he wedged it open.

It was as if the room went back decades, was exactly as it had been then. Once a cosy haven in a sparse ranch house, it had been closed up and left like that. Because something had happened. Mark was shivering again. It was like a tomb.

But this was the kind of room people hid money in because nobody came in here. Greed overcame his misgivings, and he began a systematic search.

The cards fluttered off the mantelshelf as he looked behind them. He opened the back of the mahogany clock; just dusty works that had long stopped. He lifted the sides of the carpet; part of it was stuck to the stone floor beneath, and shredded when he pulled. Cushions were flung off the chairs, his trembling fingers searching the material for anything that bulged. Nothing did.

Absolutely nothing again! He was on the verge of losing his temper, about to kick a pile of books which he had thrown from the small bookshelf by the fireplace, when something halted him. At first he did not know what it was, which was all the more frightening.

Just the hum of a few flies that had flown in through the open door to explore. Nothing moved, but something was different …

The sun wasn’t shining any more. Outside it was like dusk. He could barely see in the room now.

Sudden panic; he must have been here much longer than he’d realized, so engrossed in his search for loot that he hadn’t noticed the passing of time. Afternoon had merged into evening …

Into night. It was almost pitch black outside.

Even as he ran from the room, he heard a rush of air like a sudden twister that had sprung up from nowhere. A gale-force gust spiralled down out of the dark sky and deposited its winged burden in the farmyard; on the dilapidated buildings, the house, everywhere – no corner was spared.

He saw them hit the open doorway in a tumbling, whirring multitude of green-shelled bodies with wings that whirred furiously, insect musicians that fiddled and screeched as they crawled inside the porch, their incessant hunt for edible matter beginning all over again.

Mark screamed. He ran back into that silent shrine to the long dead, kicked the doorstop and heard the door slam shut. He leaned up against it and began to sob his terror aloud.

Oh, God, what were they?

Whatever they were, he could hear them flying and settling on the other side of the door, scratching and fluttering, trying to get him. No light came in through the diamond-paned window; those beetle bodies covered it in a moving curtain, tapping on the glass as they moved.

He began to sob for his mother, cried also because his father was dead somewhere back in the city. There was nobody to help him this time, he was trapped all alone in this dreadful place with that bloodstained bedroom upstairs.

Sentenced to remain here, imprisoned for burglary, for the rest of his life.

Chapter Nineteen

‘Trev, I can’t go on any longer.’

Trevor felt Elaine’s full weight sag against him. If he had not been supporting her, she would have fallen headlong on the hard, scorched roadside verge.

‘We’ll rest a while.’ He lowered her down to the ground alongside himself.

Shit, they were really in trouble now. There was no way they were going to be able to make it back to the cabin on foot. Both of them were parched with thirst, and all they had left were two tepid cans of Slice.

The traffic was building up, as if everybody in the city had waited for daylight, had lain low throughout the night hours. Because they were scared of the dark. Now it seemed that every conceivable make and model of car and truck was road-bound, heading full throttle away from the metropolis of death. If you had to die, far better to do so in the wide open spaces than in a plague-ridden city.

‘Perhaps we could hitch a ride?’ she suggested, and rested her head on his shoulder.

A van hurtled by, showering them with dust. It was as if the entire landscape was turning to dust. Cars, bumper to bumper, overtaking, cutting back in. Klaxons blared, drivers yelled abuse at each other through open side windows. Up ahead a car was flashing that it was going to pull in to the side. Steam was gushing from its radiator.

‘I’ll try to stop somebody.’ He pulled her close and kissed her dry, cracked lips. ‘But I don’t hold out much hope.’

‘What’re we going to do, Trev?’ There was a note of despair in her voice now.

‘We’ll make it somehow.’ He struggled to his feet and stood there, arm extended, thumb up.

Vehicles roared by; he doubted whether the drivers even noticed him. Bastards!

Way back he noticed a jeep, a vintage Willy, its frayed canvas protecting the driver from the glare of the sun; it was doing about 40 miles an hour, probably flat out. As it trundled along, the other traffic pulled out to get by. Trevor’s arm dropped back down to his side. What was the bloody use?

‘He’s stopping!’ Elaine sat up and pointed.

Sure enough, the jeep was indicating that it was going to pull in. It rolled its nearside wheels on to the verge and eased to a halt only a couple of yards from the travel-stained couple. Trevor looked for steam coming out of the engine, or maybe a flat. There did not appear to be anything amiss, but he was reluctant to build up his hopes only to have them shattered.

‘Hi, there!’ The driver had a deep, almost musical voice. He was maybe twenty-five; he wore just a pair of khaki shorts and a floppy, faded camo hat. Bearded, he might have come straight out of a jungle movie of the fifties. His attitude was carefree; he was probably a jeep-freak, Trevor decided, living out his fantasies in a time of crisis. But what the hell, the guy was on his own, there was room in the jeep for two passengers …

‘Call me Jimbo.’ A sunburned hand was extended over the door.

Christ, he is a nut, Trevor thought. The name was probably derived from Jungle Jim. ‘I’m Trevor, this is Elaine.’ Trevor helped her up to her feet. Suddenly her waning strength seemed to be revitalized. ‘Two flats and we’re on Shanks’s.’

‘No problem.’ The bearded man leaned across to flip the catch on the passenger door. ‘Where you headed? Any place in particular?’

‘I’ll tell you where we want to get out.’ Trevor helped Elaine in to the back. ‘It’s too complicated to explain from here.’

‘Fine.’ Jimbo watched his rear-view mirror; it wasn’t going to be easy to get back into the flow of traffic. ‘It’s the typhus scare that’s driving everybody out of the city.’

‘The what?’

‘Typhus fever. On the radio this morning. Two confirmed cases. It’ll spread.’ He spoke in short jerky sentences; maybe he had cultivated it for effect in the beginning and had got stuck with it.

Trevor felt Elaine tense against him and grip his hand.

‘Me,’ Jimbo said with a laugh, ‘I was set to hit the road, anyway. Just passing through.’

It was then that Trevor noticed the gun lying on the floor, a double-twelve shotgun, English make. Gallyon. A class piece, had cost maybe five grand. This guy was a hunter, all right.

There was a short gap in the oncoming traffic, and Jimbo lumbered the jeep out. Headlights flashed, a klaxon sounded. He didn’t even seem to notice.

‘Where you from?’ Trevor made it sound casual, the sort of question any hitchhiker might ask, and hoped his curiosity didn’t come over too strong.

‘No place in particular right now.’ It sounded genuine, and Jimbo smiled into the rear-view mirror. ‘I’ve been abroad for three years, just travelling. I got back to the States two weeks ago. No real plans, just some hunting, if I can find some. Maybe head north to the flyways for the fall, get me some honkers.’

‘I’m tempted.’ Trevor gave the other his cue, and waited.

‘You hunt?’

‘Whenever I get the chance. I’ve got a hunting cabin about two hours’ drive from here, that’s where we’re heading now, a lot safer than the city.’

‘Like I said, I’m going no place in particular.’

‘There’s good hunting there at the right time of the year. We’re a bit short on accommodation, though. My family are up there, we’re on our way to join them.’

‘I got my camping gear.’

Elaine’s grip tightened on Trevor’s arm. Maybe she didn’t want anybody else along; Susan’s presence at the cabin was embarrassing enough for her. Trevor gave her a meaningful glance; with luck, we’ll have a ride right to the cabin. If this feller wants to camp out for a few days, fine. He won’t be any bother to us. Chances are he’ll move on then.

‘Care to join us? Camping out isn’t exactly idyllic these days.’

‘Couldn’t be any worse than Nigeria and Kenya. That’s where I first got malaria. Get recurring bouts from time to time even now. Thanks, I’ll accept your offer. My line’s archaeology, by the way.’

Trevor didn’t reciprocate with a rundown on the travel industry. Right now, that was in the past, dead and gone. There wouldn’t even be any bailiffs come to clear up, just cockroaches.

They drove for about an hour at a steady 40 miles per hour, cars and trucks overtaking them the whole time. The jeep was possibly the slowest vehicle in the twin lines of exodus from death and disease. Elaine had fallen asleep against Trevor, and he felt drowsy himself.

‘Jesus alive!’ Jimbo’s shout jerked them both back to wakefulness. ‘Look there!’

They saw where he pointed. There was a darkening of the sky way up ahead, an ominous cloud formation that seemed to be lengthening and thickening.

‘A storm.’ Trevor didn’t think it looked quite right but it couldn’t be anything else.

‘Storm be damned!’ Jimbo had slowed to thirty, and the car behind was hooting. ‘That’s locusts or I’m an elephant’s prick!’

A chill ran through Trevor. Elaine was already clinging to him. Sure, locusts turned up in the States in very hot weather, but only in small numbers, not enough to do any appreciable harm. If what Jimbo said was true, that mighty swarm up ahead might have come direct from Africa, relentlessly hunting a drought-ridden continent in search of food.

‘We’d better play safe, take evasive action.’ Jimbo flashed, eased the jeep off the road, and bumped it on to a patch of rough ground. He killed the engine, which died in stages. ‘There’s a roll of mosquito netting under the seat.’ He turned and reached behind him. ‘Maybe it’ll come in useful, after all. Never throw anything away, I always say.’

The cloud was growing, getting closer. Jimbo got out of the jeep. Trevor helped him unroll the length of fine nylon mesh; they draped it over the vehicle and crawled back beneath it. They sat there and waited. It was abominably hot.

The sun was lost behind the approaching cloud, it was like deep dusk merging into darkness.

‘They’re locusts, no doubt about that.’ Jimbo’s strong white teeth flashed in the half-light. For him this was just another adventure, one more episode in his carefree, globetrotting life. He seemed to relish the oncoming swarm.

‘Oh, God!’ Elaine covered her eyes and huddled even closer to Trevor.

‘No need to worry about them.’ Jimbo was busy checking the netting, which enveloped the jeep like some bizarre cocoon, making sure that there were no gaps. ‘Not unless they catch you out in the open. Might smother you then, suffocate you.’

‘Where in the hell did they come from?’ Trevor fingered the pistol in his pocket. It wouldn’t be any use in this instance but somehow its feel was reassuring. Not even a scatter gun would have the slightest effect on the swarm that was heading this way.

‘A build-up, probably.’ Jimbo was engrossed in watching the approaching, living storm. ‘You know, one small lot joins up with another, and so on, all looking for food because this drought has brought on starvation conditions. So eventually you end up with that!’

The three of them were bracing themselves for the inevitable impact when the first explosion rent the sultry atmosphere asunder. A blinding flash lit up the night sky; a second and a third followed even before they heard the boom of the first.

Elaine screamed. Trevor dragged her down behind the tailboard and covered her slim body with his own.

‘What the hell?’

‘Guess they’ve covered every windshield between here and Fort Canton.’ Jimbo was unperturbed. ‘Drivers can’t see where they’re goin’, travelling too fast, too close. Shunt after shunt. Here the buggers come!’

The first locusts hit the net. It sagged beneath their weight. The humans beneath the jeep heard them fluttering, struggling, tiny feet scrabbling on the paintwork. Total blackness surrounded them. The ground vibrated as a series of fuel-tank explosions started, one after another, sometimes simultaneously, in a front-line battleground that stretched the length of the freeway.

They heard the crunching and tearing of tortured metal as cars and trucks ploughed into one another, and the screaming of trapped passengers. The lucky ones were those who had died instantly. The survivors would be few and far between. Silently, Trevor thanked Jimbo for sparing them a terrible cremation out there. Their companion had recognized the cloud for what it was and had pulled off the freeway just in time.

Minutes became hours. They lost all perception of time in that endless, suffocating night in which vile rubbery smoke came and went, cleared and drifted, swirled and returned. The heat beneath the netted jeep was almost unbearable. They gasped for breath, coughing as their lungs filled with the suffocating fumes. Trevor’s greatest fear was that the petrol tank might go up; they just had to hope that it didn’t. There was no way they could leave their refuge.

How much longer? Oh, Christ, how much longer could they survive this hell on tarmac?

The fluttering of the trapped locusts intensified, like an uneasy shrubbery roost of an infestation of starlings. Then, progressively, the laden mesh became lighter and patches of orange-streaked smoky daylight appeared. Here and there insects struggled to free a trapped leg or wing, and broke away.

‘They’re leaving!’ Trevor peered out from under the tailboard, an arm still draped around Elaine. ‘The bastards have almost gone!’

‘It’s the smoke.’ Jimbo adjusted the hat he still wore, and grinned. ‘Like most creatures, they don’t like fire and smoke.’

The three of them stared out at the blazing wreckage. A pall of smoke mushroomed high into the sky, blotting out the sun again. Petrol tanks were still going off; the inferno stretched as far as it was possible to see, with unstoppable flames that raced and crackled greedily, spreading north and south in the windless atmosphere.

‘Guess we can take the net off now.’ Jimbo plucked a locust out of the mesh and held it by the wings; it struggled frantically.

‘Ugh, it’s horrible!’ Elaine turned her head away.

‘Little bastard!’ Jimbo squeezed with forefinger and thumb. The watchers heard a sickening crack and saw his fingers covered with a phlegm-like substance. ‘One less!’ He laughed and wiped his hand on the netting. ‘We’d better fold the net up and take it with us, just in case we need it again.’

‘But we can’t go anywhere.’ Trevor stared at the blazing wreckage and felt its heat on his face. ‘The freeway will be blocked for miles; there’ll be no emergency services to clear it. It won’t be possible for weeks.’ If ever.

‘Who says we’re gonna travel by road?’ Jimbo’s teeth flashed again in the smoke-filled half-light. He patted the heated bodywork of the jeep lovingly. ‘This little baby don’t care much for tarmac. Boring, mile after mile, no challenge. She likes real rough ground where she can bump and climb, show us what she’s made of, cock a snook at all them fancy automobiles getting stuck in the ruts or bogged down in swampy places. Four-wheel drive, they call it. She wasn’t made for roads.’

Trevor nodded; he began to understand, but didn’t dare to raise his or Elaine’s hopes at this early stage.

‘You reckon you could find this hunting cabin of yours across country, friend?’

‘I dunno, I don’t have a map.’

‘Another problem solved.’ The other leaned inside the vehicle to produce a worn and creased map from the glove compartment. He unfolded it; a section of it hung loosely by threads of fraying cotton. ‘Take a look, Trev.’ He used his companion’s first name as though they were lifelong buddies. ‘Tell me, can you guide us to your place?’

Trevor spread the sheet out on the hot car bonnet and began to follow a thick red line across it with his forefinger. ‘Here’s the freeway. Now, let me see, here’s where we are now …’

A dotted line denoted an unsurfaced road led off to the right, then swung in a loop. There was a maze of tracks, then the unpopulated terrain began, with just the odd ranch. His finger followed the lines, feeling the heat through the map, and found a name: the Spode. Below it was the homestead.

‘Well?’

‘I’ve got it, or thereabouts. It’s a long way, these tracks turn back on themselves in places. But if I can find the Spode, I can find the homestead. The cabin’s not far then.’

‘All aboard!’ Jimbo swept his hat in mock cavalier style. ‘All aboard for the Spode.’

Elaine managed a faint smile. In the background the mangled vehicles were blazing fiercely. Somewhere down the line a woman was screaming. Her screams ceased abruptly.

‘We can’t help anybody.’ Jimbo read her thoughts. His expression was sympathetic, maybe his deep blue eyes even misted slightly. ‘Nobody can do anything here, believe me.’

She climbed into the back of the jeep, Trevor following her. He spotted a locust on the floor and crushed it beneath his sole, hoping that she didn’t notice.

The engine fired at the first touch of the starter button; the bodywork vibrated as if relishing the challenge that lay ahead. Then they were moving, bumping over the uneven surface until they reached the rutted dirt road that led away from the freeway of blazing death.

Behind them the thick black smoke poured from the line of entangled crashes.

Nobody was screaming any longer.

Chapter Twenty

Doc Wycherley and Ed Parker had found a patch of shade about a mile from the freeway. It was cool and refreshing after the intense heat of the direct rays of the sun. Now the sky was murky and smoke-laden, and out there it was hotter than ever. But not here.

Their clothing was filthy and torn, their features so fire-blackened that nobody from town would have recognized them. They would probably have been taken for a couple of hoboes at a passing glance. Sitting with their backs against the bole of a giant pine, they looked back whence they had stumbled.

It had begun to snow, black flakes that drifted in the windless atmosphere. Ed made a joke and laughed at it because her companion didn’t. The doctor’s expression remained impassive.

‘It can’t snow in a temperature of 100 degrees, Ed.’ He decided to humour the vet. He had seen folks crack under pressure before, and referred them to the hospital for the insane in the city. First, you had to try to get them to talk sanely, to reason. ‘It’s impossible, you know that. What you see is smuts, particles of burned paper, clothing, any kind of material. You understand?’

‘’Course I bloody understand. Stop bein’ so miserable, crack that po-faced look of yours, Win. C’mon, let’s have a smile.’

‘You feeling okay?’

‘I’m fine. Just fine, Win.’

‘You don’t look it.’

‘I am!’ The vet yelled. ‘I’m bloody fine.’

‘All right, you’re fine.’

They lapsed into silence. Privately, they both accepted that there was no way they were going to make it back to North Falls. No emergency services had showed up, not one single fire tender. They were all dealing with emergencies in the city and, by now, probably in North Falls, too.

‘Maybe we should’ve fetched that other body, Win.’ Ed looked thoughtful.

‘Which one?’

‘That guy up at the Spode. Donk.’

‘It wouldn’t have made any difference.’ The doctor pointed wearily back towards the blazing carnage. ‘The Thompsons are both cremated by now.’

‘Would’ve got rid of the old feller’s disease, whether typhus fever or anthrax.’

‘Wouldn’t make any difference, it’ll spread just the same. Probably by the time it does, it won’t matter anyway.’

‘I could do with a drink.’

Doc Wycherley did not reply. He could have used one, too, even a glass of tepid water, and he’d’ve risked the algae. But they weren’t likely to find any; talking about it made it worse. At their current rate of progress it would take them a week to make North Falls. They would both be dead by then, collapsed and the crows cleaning off their bones.

‘Wonder where those locusts have gone,’ Wycherley said after a time. They needed to keep talking, keep awake. It was like getting lost in the snow; if they slept, they died. Out here a thousand and one things could get them.

‘Two miles, maybe a hundred. Like us, they’ll keep going until either they find food or they drop. There’s plenty of parched, unharvested crops around; they’ll clean ‘em up, field by field. Until in the end there’s nothing left for either man or insect to eat. That’s when the curtain comes down for everybody, old friend.’

The doctor nodded. ‘We’d better wait for night, it’ll be cooler then.’

‘We won’t make it back to town. That’s as much an impossibility as it snowing. You got any ideas?’

‘Nope. Our only hope is to find an outlying ranch where they’ll take us in or lend us a vehicle. And as I don’t have a map, and this is one helluva big place, we could pass one by within a quarter of a mile and miss the next one, too.’

‘We can’t stop here.’

‘Nope.’ We don’t have any choice. The only thing in its favour is that it’s somewhere to sit down. Somewhere to die.

After a time, the doctor said, ‘I have to try to get back to town, Ed.’

‘Why?’

‘Folks’ll be dying.’

‘You said there was no hope, that them plagues’ll be too great to cope with.’

‘I still have to try. At least I can maybe make it so that people will die peacefully. The same applies to you, you’ll have lots of animals to put down. Rather euthanasia than let them suffer.’

‘I guess you’re right, Win. We going to try to find a ranch?’

‘I guess it’s the lesser of the two evils, and if we don’t make it, at least we’ll have tried. We’ll leave it till dark, find a track, a dirt road, follow it and hope we come to some form of human habitation.’

They lapsed back into silence again. The flies were so bad that they gave up trying to repel them, and just let them crawl. After a time they became impervious to them. At least black flies didn’t bite, only looked for blood or shit.

Their eyelids drooped, they couldn’t hold out against sleep any longer.

They slept.

Winston Wycherley came to the subconscious conclusion that something was crawling up his leg. It was probably a fly. Several flies, in fact. And as they had walked all over his face and neck for the past three hours, there was no reason to become alarmed. His hand was too tired to pull up his trouser leg and swish the insect away; their reactions were too swift to him to squash them, they only dodged out of the way and came back. It was a waste of energy ; the simplest way was to try to ignore them.

Until they bit you.

He winced, shifting in his uneasy sleep. A sharp sting. It hurt. His arm felt too heavy to lift, and the slap directed at his calf lacked power, didn’t even make a thwack on impact.

The insect bit him again. Twice.

Blast it! His skin itched right the way up from his ankle where tiny feet had irritated it. He tried to scratch, but it was more of a feeble rubbing. He groaned and shifted his position, one leg drawn up, the other pushed out in front of him.

There was a crawling sensation on that leg now, right up to his genitals. Damn it, he felt too weak even to scratch, couldn’t be bothered to wake up.

Just let me die right here, in peace.

His throat was dry and swollen, he didn’t even want to think of water. His headache had worsened to migraine proportions. He knew that he had a raging temperature. He tried to remember whether or not he had brought his bag this far. If so, he would give himself a shot of antibiotics. Ed, too.

Oh, Lord, he wouldn’t have the strength. He had to find it somehow.

‘Ed?’ He gave a cracked whisper. Maybe his friend was in a slightly less bad state than himself. Ed was skilled in giving injections, she’d know what to do. ‘Ed, is my bag around?’

No answer. He’d have to do it himself. He lay there psyching himself up for the effort. There were flies crawling all over him; they’d got up his trouser legs, found a way in that way. His thoughts turned to ticks, and he remembered what Phil Thompson had done to himself in an attempt to get rid of the parasite. No, these weren’t ticks, they moved too fast, too lightly. They were …

Doc Wycherley forced his eyes open, then went rigid with the shock of this latest hallucination. It had to be a hallucination because there was no way Ed Parker could have looked like that.

He wasn’t sure that it was Ed lying next to him because the features bore no resemblance to his friend. The whole face had changed into a mass of dark brown that seethed and hissed with so many bodies that they blended into one heaving facial distortion. The eyes were gone; the flared nostrils were clogged as if mucus was being snorted out and sniffed back in. A cavity showed where the mouth should have been, an opening into which streams of living beings scuttled, climbing over one another in their haste. Her clothes rippled as the hordes explored beneath shirt and trousers, even now queuing to enter via the trouser bottoms. They came from all directions, regiments of them scuttling over the parched ground, terrible to behold in their almost human orderliness and discipline.

Soldier ants, millions of them.

Somehow, Wycherley found the strength to lumber to his feet, swaying precariously. The bastards had got Ed first because she was nearer to them. Swarming up on to her, they had started to strip the flesh from her bones, eating her alive because she was too weak to resist or even to cry out for help. Pray God that she was already dead.

They had seemingly only just noticed that there was a second human there for the taking. A battalion had broken away from the main army in a thin brown line that ran over Win’s boot and headed straight up inside his trousers. And now the main bunch was altering course, homing in on their second victim. There wouldn’t be enough flesh on Ed to go round.

Doc turned, staggered into a stumbling run, and took those with him that were stinging him. The earth was seething with ants; he trod them and squashed them; others got a hold on his boots and began the long climb upwards. But at least he had escaped the main army. He had to keep going, in the hope that he might outdistance them.

It was almost dark; he didn’t know whether it was smoke or locusts that blotted out the sun or whether night had cast its cooling mantle across the land. He didn’t care. All he wanted to do was to flee those enraged, flesh-hungry insects and find some place of refuge.

His heart pounded like a sledgehammer inside his chest and there was a roaring in his ears. He could barely see where he was going. But somehow he found the strength to keep moving.

The ants bit him, as if venting their fury on him because he had dared to try to escape.

The doctor had no idea where he was going, and didn’t care. Anywhere. And then, through his sweat-blurred vision, he made out a square of orange light somewhere ahead. It might have been a hundred yards or three hundred, he had lost all perception of distance. It winked at him like a mischievous swampland jack-o’-lantern trying to lure an unwary traveller into a hidden bog. Even that would have been preferable to this.

His chest hurt, he was breathless and slowed to a walking stumble. Ahead lay habitation of some kind. He would thump on the door with his remaining strength and yell if he could find the voice. They would let him bathe, give him water to drink. The thought of this spurred him on to one last supreme effort.

The light was definitely nearer. Now there was a second one, an upright oblong which shafted an elongated beam out on to a rough yard of some kind. A figure was framed in the doorway, slight and boyish, something clasped in his hands.

The figure crouched, whatever he held was raised, pressed tight into his shoulder. Wycherley tried to shout but only a parched, inaudible whisper escaped his blistered lips. He staggered to a halt. The ants were still biting inside his clothing but they offered no threat now.

It was as much as he could do to remain upright, tottering, arms raised, waving. The lighted doorway and window could be no more than forty yards away now. He had to ensure that he was seen; he feared he might collapse, so near and yet so far, and lie here unseen until daylight came. By that time he would undoubtedly be dead.

Something hit him with tremendous force, struck him in the chest and stomach and splattered his face. In instant agony he staggered back, his swollen fingers clutching at a spray of wounds, feeling the warmth of the seeping blood through his ragged clothing.

Only then did he hear the report, the unmistakable detonation of a shotgun, and knew what had hit him even as he sank down to the ground, his bloody fingers trying to stem his scattershot wounds.

Chapter Twenty-One

Mark wasn’t sure whether it was actually dark or just those awful flying beetle swarms clogging up the windows and blotting out the daylight. His initial panic lasted maybe twenty minutes. There was just light enough to discern silhouettes, and he made out the shape of a storm lantern on the kitchen table. A box of matches lay beside it.

He got it going at the third attempt. At first he shied from the shadows it created, eerie shapes that crept up on him, darting back when he whirled round. He tried not to think of that abattoir upstairs. Somebody had died horribly in that bedroom.

The way he might die, too.

It was then that he saw the gun. It was propped up behind the door just like the twenty-gauge in the kitchen in the cabin. It seemed that everybody stored shotguns behind doors.

The locusts shifted as though at a given signal, forming a carpet that moved. As they changed position, they let in a brief shaft of daylight. That was when Mark grabbed the gun.

It was much heavier than his father’s, and a brief examination revealed why: there was a third barrel beneath the twins. Even in his terror, Mark was fascinated by this. He pushed the top lever to the right; nothing happened. He tried to force the breech open, and held it across his knee. It was only then that he noticed the under-lever, and found out how it worked.

It was a weird weapon, all right. It had probably never been cleaned; there was rust both on the barrels and the action. He snapped it shut, and had to exert pressure on the triggers in order to click the firing pins.

His fear receded temporarily. Everybody and everything was scared of guns. Those things that had landed in the yard and all over the house would doubtless be, too. He could cut a swathe right through them. First, though, he needed some ammunition.

He found what he was looking for on top of that first cupboard which he had ransacked. Loose shells; shotgun cartridges that were bigger than twenties, and some rifle bullets.

He soon got the idea; scattershot in the upper chambers, a rifle shell in the lower. Neat, really bloody clever!

Mark stood there listening to the insects outside. He came to the conclusion that they were some species of cricket, sawing away like violinists. Their noise gave him the creeps; he shuddered, his flesh goose pimpling.

Well, he wasn’t staying here until night came properly, not in this house where folks got killed and their bodies disappeared. If those things outside didn’t move soon, he’d move ‘em. A double charge of birdshot right into their midst, that’d shift ‘em. All the same, he was hesitant about opening doors or windows, in case the insects might all spill indoors. They probably bit or stung like hornets.

He wondered again about his father, whether he was back at the cabin yet. He knew he wasn’t; he had a gut feeling that something had happened to Dad in the city. If not, then he would surely have been home before Mark had left; all this about him stopping overnight was bullshit. Dad wouldn’t hang around, nobody in their right mind would these days.

It was his mother who worried Mark most. He ought not to have left her there alone, it was irresponsible. But he didn’t think at the time, he never did. Now he was sorry – for an awful lot of things. He was close to tears and it had nothing to do with his own predicament.

He had stolen, more times than anybody ever knew; he had got away with most of it. All to fund his addiction to the video machines, hundreds of dollars gobbled up so that the proprietors of the arcades could live in luxury. Mark had thieved regularly from old Mr Hartenstein, a kindly old man who had extended the hand of friendship and enjoyed the company of a young boy. Hartenstein even gave him pocket money and that made the thefts a thousand times more despicable. He’d always keep his milk money aside in a tobacco tin on the hallway table, $5.60 every week. Mark took a dollar regularly out of it. Apparently, his thefts had gone unnoticed. Hartenstein was going blind, it was easy to make a mistake.

Even worse was the shooting of the Fomby boy. Mark had found an old air pistol on the playground off Eighty-Third Street. Maybe some kids had stolen it and dumped it. It was a Gat import, and there had been a pellet in the barrel. He had cocked it, standing in the bushes wondering if it really worked. He could have set up a drinks can and tried it out on that ; he had been contemplating it when these kids had come down to play on the swings, seven- and eight-year-olds, yelling and screeching.

One, a fair-haired boy, had climbed on a swing, the others pushing him, propelling him to such heights that he was screaming to get off, holding on to the chains in sheer terror. Mark considered the possibility of hitting the brat from where he stood in the cover of the rhododendrons; twenty yards, a fast-moving target. A near impossibility. A challenge.

Nobody had heard the phut, not even Mark; he just felt a faint recoil from the Gat in his hand. The next second the Fomby boy was airborne, a rag doll with blood pouring from his head, hitting the concrete ramp below with a sickening thwack.

Mark had stared in disbelief. Still standing in the bushes, he had watched the other children cluster round the still form, screaming for a different reason now. He tried to tell himself that it wasn’t the pellet that had fetched the Fomby kid off, the range was too great, it wouldn’t have the striking velocity. The boy had just got scared, panicked and jumped.

Nobody had spotted Mark; they hadn’t any idea what had happened. He crept away, then ran all the way home, dumping the pistol in a rubbish bin on the way.

It had made the newspapers, a column on page nine; police were hunting a sadistic marksman, parents were warned the keep their children from going to recreation parks unsupervised. The victim, Kim Fomby, had lost an eye, and broken an arm and a leg in the fall.

Mark gave up trying to convince himself that it was an accident. He had picked his target and hit it. Luck, bad luck, but that didn’t change anything. If they had caught him, they would have put him away. He lived in fear of a ring on the doorbell, cops coming to the school, questioning the kids. Nothing happened, and after three months he guessed he was safe. All the same, he’d never got it off his conscience.

He had stolen from his mother, too, raiding her handbag so that in the end she’d taken to wearing a money belt. She never told his father, she was afraid of what Trevor might do to him.

‘I’m sorry, Mom,’ he said aloud, sobbing in the locust-darkened kitchen of that stinking farmhouse. ‘I won’t ever do it again. And I’m sorry I ran out on you.’

The least he could do to make amends would be to return to the cabin as soon as possible. Sitting there, gripping the heavy sixteen-gauge drilling and listening to the locusts sawing their melody of starvation and death, he told himself that the only way he was going to rejoin his mother was to open that door and get the hell out of here.

But his terror was greater than his remorse.

The lamp flickered a couple of times and almost went out. He wondered how much oil was left in it; he wouldn’t know how to fill it, anyway, or even where the oil was kept. If it went out …

The flame adjusted itself, threw a brighter light to keep the shadows at bay. Mark’s mouth was dry, he was desperate for a drink. He recalled hearing his father say that the Thompsons got their water from the well. But that meant going outside …

A sudden noise upstairs had him stifling a scream, then leaping up and bringing the gun to bear on the stairway. Nothing moved. But something had just a few moments ago. He listened intently, but heard only how his heart was thumping. He thought again about that bedroom, the bloodstains. Whatever had killed Phil Thompson – and the boy recalled the old man babbling on about how his son had died, blaming the fleas – had eaten the body! Fleas certainly were not capable of devouring a human corpse, no matter how many of them there were. So it had to be something real big.

All right, the doctor and his companion might have come back here and collected the corpse. That would explain its disappearance, but not the bloodstained walls and ceiling.

Phil had died violently, killed by something that had left a bloody mess behind.

The noise came again, a scuttling to and fro, directly above where he stood. He gripped the gun, his fingers resting on the triggers. He was tempted to blast a double charge right up those stairs, just to let whatever it was know that he was armed; that way it might stay up there.

A movement on the stairway caught his eye; something was watching him out of the shadows. The lamp flickered again, just enough to make a pair of eyes glint redly, malevolently.

Jesus! Mark took aim. His arms shook so much that he could barely hold the weapon steady; the barrels wavered, poking at the shadows. But it wasn’t like a rifle, he didn’t have to be spot on, just thereabouts. The shot spread would catch whatever it was even if he was slightly off target.

He closed his eyes and pulled hard on the trigger. The report was ear-bursting; the recoil punched his shoulder with force enough to stagger him back, and jerked the barrels upwards so that had he accidentally pressed the second trigger he would undoubtedly have brought the ceiling down on himself. And maybe whatever lurked in the bedroom above would have fallen through, too.

A blinding flash momentarily lit up the stairway with a stab of flame that was bright enough for him to see the whole wooden structure move and come to life, in a river of blackness that flowed uphill.

Mark screamed. He was too shocked even to consider firing the second shot. A rush of creatures went past – big ones, little ones – a frenzied flight up to the landing that emptied the steps so that he could see them again. Three bodies stayed behind, their bloody fur blasted almost beyond recognition; the third rolled and kicked, squealing at the pain from its severed rear legs.

Rats!

He heard them up above him, no longer stealthy. In a thunderous rush they retreated to their daytime hiding place, maybe under the floorboards or up to the attic. These starving scavengers had eaten the farmer’s son, even his bones, and, Mark quavered at the thought, they had been massing on the stairs to rush him. By the grace of God he had spotted a movement and fired just in time.

With shaking fingers he extracted the spent and smoking shell, and reloaded. He had maybe half a dozen shot shells left, and approximately the same amount of rifle ammunition. He wondered how long he could keep the rats at bay; they knew they were dying of starvation, so eventually they would rush him, chancing their luck with the gun.

He had to get away from here.

He crept towards the door. The locusts were still playing their melody of death, a cacophony of insect music that grated on his nerves. He wasn’t sure what species they were, whether or not they bit or stung, that was all that held him back. Gun in one hand, with the other he lifted the heavy iron latch. Sod it, it creaked; he had to exert pressure and suddenly it gave, clanging. Outside, something fluttered.

Mark edged the door open a couple of inches, just enough to peer out. And that was when they moved. They squeezed in through the gap in a sudden rush that dive-bombed crazily in the darkened room, hit the walls and ceiling, and dropped to the floor.

Shit! This time he didn’t scream, just threw his shoulder against the door in an attempt to close it. But the insect army had filled the gap. They were clogging the jamb, seeming to sense how to stop the besieged occupant of the house from keeping them out.

Mark called upon every reserve of his waning strength. Sweat oozed from his pores and dampened his clothing. He almost got the door closed; he heard tiny beetle bodies cracking and crunching, and though he could hear their hissing screams. Just a wafer-thin crack remained, not enough even for one of them to push through. They were trying, though, massing in the narrow space between the door and the post, kamikaze locusts sacrificing themselves so that a wedge of corpses might prevent the door from shutting, allow their living comrades to gain entrance, breach the human defences.

Mark sensed them as a mulch of bodies; in his mind he saw them being pulped like cider apples, juices oozing and trickling. He grunted, digging his heels into the uneven floor; somehow he forced the door closed as one might in winter with a fitted draught excluder.

As the latch dropped back into place, he gave a moan of relief. At least the bulk of them could not get indoors now, but neither could he get out. Outside, this insect army waited, hungered for him; upstairs the rats bided their time. Eventually exhaustion would claim him, or else the oil in the lamp would run dry. When either of those happened, the rats would take him.

He could hear those insects that had forced an entry, taken him by surprise. They had crawled under the table and resumed their bizarre melody where they had left off, almost as though they were conversing with the others outdoors.

This last stand seemed so pointless. Mark was holding out by sheer determination; his body, weakened by fatigue, cried out for food and water. Even if he made it back to the cabin, it would only be a temporary stay of death. Civilization was crumbling; before long there would only be the insects and the rats left. They would rule the world.

‘I’m sorry, Mom, for what I did.’ If he could just tell her that, it wouldn’t be half so bad.

It was as if the gun was transmitting thoughts to him, ideas that made him want to cast it from him. No, I won’t do that, not ever! Not yet, anyway. Not until the rats were swarming over him, biting him, and all he had left was the strength and means whereby to spare himself the ultimate in pain and degradation.

But not yet.

He fought to keep his eyelids from drooping, stared into the deepening darkness of the stairway, saw shapes that moved, huddled and massed. But when the wick flared casting its yellowed radiance up the steps, there was nothing there. Even the insects under the table were silent.

He didn’t know whether it was morning, afternoon or night; his body clock was totally disoriented. As if he had jet lag without having been aboard a plane, he lost all sense of reality. In the end he almost convinced himself that this was just an ongoing nightmare, like that one where the ants had come up through the floorboards in the cabin and smothered him. If he waited long enough, his parents would come and slap him awake. It’s all right, Mark, there’s nothing to worry about, everything’s perfectly normal. Here, we’ve brought you a drink of fresh orange juice, straight from the cooler.

He almost believed it.

Then, suddenly, it was daylight again.

The entire stinking room was filled with a soft golden glow, latticed patterns elongated on the filthy walls. Mark blinked, dazzled by the brightness. He was afraid to close his eyes in case when he opened them again the darkness had rolled back.

He looked to the stairs and saw two torn rodent corpses; the third had also died and lay stretched out on its back, its revolting pink feet stuck straight up in the air. The locusts underneath the table had huddled together, about a dozen of them. They no longer fiddled, and he fancied that their button eyes had an expression of terror in them. Fear of him, because if he chose he could crush them into oblivion.

He gripped the gun, knowing that he still might need it. Fearfully, one shaky step at a time, he crept over to the window and steeled himself to look out. If all this was just a nightmare …

It wasn’t. Dead insects littered the farmyard like withered leaves after autumn had merged into winter, clusters of them in corners as if the wind had blown them there. Here and there a pair of wings fluttered feebly, a body vibrated on its hard shell back.

For some reason the swarm had decided to move on; it had left as suddenly as it had arrived.

Mark stood there staring out, still disbelieving. It might all be a trick; the insects had withdrawn, hidden themselves from his view. Come on out, Mark Chibnell, it’s safe now, we’ve all gone.

Whoosh, we’ve got you!

How long he stood there he had no idea. The shock had dazed him and rendered him nearly immobile. By the time he moved towards the door, the sun had long dipped in the western sky and the late-evening shadows were stealing across the yard as though to hide the last of the horror from his view.

Struggling to open the door, he had to prop the gun up against the wall and tug with both hands, using his foot as a lever. It came open with a suddenness that threw him sprawling on the floor. The sticky insect mass had held it like a fast-drying glue, forming elastic strings, now threatening to slam it shut again.

It was almost dark outside, a sultry deepening dark that smelled of rubbery smoke and had him coughing. He looked around, holding the sixteen-gauge waist-high, cocked and ready to fire. But nothing moved.

Absolutely nothing at all.

He saw the well on the far side of the house, and staggered across to it. The empty bucket dangled temptingly on a length of frayed rope. He began to unwind the crude handle fashioned from a length of broken rafter. The bucket clinked its way down into the black depths, on and on. Soon the rope would be unwound, at the extremity of its length. Oh, God, the well’s dry!, he thought. Then he detected a faint splash, and felt the hemp tauten as the bucket began to fill.

Exerting the last of his strength, he wound feverishly, sobbing. His fear was that the rope might snap under the weight, or else its load would tip up and empty itself. His fears were groundless; it came up brimming full, overflowing with pure, ice-cold water.

Mark drank greedily until he vomited. Then he drank again. Finally, his thirst slaked, he lay there on the hard-baked dirt watching the first stars twinkling in the saffron sky.

He knew he would not make it back to the cabin; there was no way his legs would hold up. It was as much as he could manage to stagger back to the house. He needed to rest, to sleep, but he was afraid of the house, the terror it held upstairs; likewise, he feared the outdoors and what might creep upon him.

The door banged partly shut. The lamp was still burning, but it surely could not last much longer. If he could survive the night hours, he knew that he could make it back in the morning. He thought about his mother, and got the urge to cry again.

It was fully dark now, the long night had begun. He sat in a chair at the table, the shotgun laid out in front of him. His eyes closed, his head sagged forward. And then, suddenly, he was wide awake and reaching for the gun.

Somebody was coming.

He heard them clearly in the still night air. The dragging footsteps made him envisage a body that stooped and stumbled, some carnal beast of the night that had scented his presence in the house, a starving victim of the plagues coming to feast on human flesh. His flesh.

In a strange way he was not as scared of what it was that approached the farm as he had been of the rats. The rodents were numerous, and savage in numbers. That out there was, he decided, human. Or half-human, an emaciated survivor resorting to cannibalism, maybe even the thing that had fed on Phil Thompson’s body.

The gun did not seem so heavy now; its touch sent a thrill coursing through his veins. He remembered how he had felt when he had lined the air pistol up on the Fomby boy on the swing. The means to kill from a distance gave him a sense of supreme power over his fellow creatures.

Moving to the door, Mark stood with his fingers resting on the catch, listening. A wheezing spasm of coughing was followed by a voice that called out unintelligibly. The grunting stopped, then the footsteps came again.

He judged that the stranger was on the track where it sloped down into the yard. The gradient behind it would silhouette it against the starlit sky. A shape, an outline – a target.

Gun in hand, Mark stepped out on to the sun-warped veranda. The starlight cast a silvery, ethereal glow across the landscape. He might not even need a silhouette to aim at. His pulses raced when he saw the figure standing thirty to forty yards away, a faceless figure that waved its arms threateningly. It was calling out again.

Sod you, Mark thought, and fired. Just once. As with the rats, he didn’t need the second barrel. A stab of flame showed in the half-light; this time he was braced for the recoil. The crash shattered the stillness, rolling on up to where the big forest began above the Spode. It was still echoing long after the distant figure had crumpled and hit the ground.

Mark didn’t go to look, there was no point. Whatever, whoever, was out there was dead; he had hit him hard, a head and chest shot. A brief sense of remorse passed through his mind, like his feeling over the Fomby boy, but this time he shrugged it off. Out here it was kill or be killed.

He had killed.

He went back inside and resumed his seat at the table. As soon as daylight came, he would start out for the cabin. Mom, please be there, ‘cause I need you.

Only then did he begin to cry. Sobs shook his body; the tears came, wet and salty. All he wanted right now was his mother, nobody else. Because he had a lot to tell her, about all the thefts she guessed but had never accused him of. About the shooting in the playground and how sorry he was.

But he wasn’t sorry about the latest killing. In a frightening sort of way he had enjoyed it, and knew he would gloat over its telling.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Susan knew when she awoke that Mark was gone. She knew even before she ran into his room and saw the rumpled bed and the open window, flies crawling and buzzing, dirtying the walls; before she rushed out to stand on the veranda staring out across the empty landscape and screaming hysterically.

Finally, she came back indoors, threw herself on the bed and lay there looking up at the ceiling. She wasn’t ready to cry – not yet. That would come later. In the meantime, she had to wait for the numbness to pass.

She didn’t care about Trevor any more, hadn’t for a long time, if she was honest with herself. She had stuck with him for Mark’s sake; that one brief attempt to resurrect their marriage had been for their son, no other reason.

Now she didn’t have either of them. She was all alone in a dying, plague-ridden world.

Mark hadn’t taken the gun. She went and checked; the twenty was still behind the kitchen door. She wished he had, because that way he might have stood a chance. There were more terrors out there than it was possible to dream up in a fevered nightmare. Law and order was collapsing in the cities, and like the plagues the chaos would spread out here. If people didn’t die from some fearful disease, there were a thousand other ways to perish.

Trevor was to blame, almost entirely, for how Mark had turned out. In her mind Susan catalogued her husband’s path to disaster; the macho image, the fixation with guns and killing. She had a nagging fear in her mind, and always would have, that Mark had shot that boy in the playground. She would never ever know for sure, he would deny it to the bitter end, so better to give him the benefit of the doubt.

Trevor had never spent any time with the boy. ‘I’ll take you fishing and hunting,’ he would say, but he seldom did, and on those occasions when he kept his promise, the trip always turned out a disaster. Trevor openly scorned schooling and homework, so Mark skipped them, playing hookey. And hookey meant time on his hands, which was how he got to playing video games and became addicted to them. And to play in the video arcades, he needed money. So he stole.

She tried to blame herself as well. She should have spent more time with Mark. But he had learned from his father that women were second-class citizens, just there for housework and screwing, so he had avoided her whenever possible.

Now it was too late. But he was her son and she loved him. She turned over and wept into the pillow.

It was nearly dark when she awoke. Lying there listening to the awful silence, she knew that nobody would be coming home. There was a faint, unpleasant smell in the balmy atmosphere, reminding her of the time when they had gone on vacation to Virginia and there had been a tyre depot behind the hotel. There was always a stench of burning rubber in the air where they burned the waste tyres. It was like that now, just a hint of burning rubber. She coughed, but pushed it from her mind.

She went to the kitchen and made a cup of coffee which she didn’t really want but it was something to do, a hint of normality in an abnormal world. Her gaze alighted on the shotgun behind the door. That was the easy way out but she wouldn’t take it. Whatever happened, she wouldn’t do that.

Her intuition had told her for a long time that Trevor had another woman; he always had. She had a suspicion that this time it was the girl who worked for him in the travel office. Some flighty wench who was there for one reason only, probably hadn’t got a clue about office work. That was where her husband was now; when the chips were down he had abandoned his family and fled to his whore. You bastard!

Susan didn’t want to think about the future because there wasn’t one. For anybody. She wouldn’t even switch on the radio, she didn’t give a shit what was happening out there.

It was getting dark, so she switched on a light. She was lucky in that there was a generator in the cabin. She knew vaguely that it worked on oil, but Trevor had never shown her how to fuel it. Maybe tomorrow she’d have a look, see if she could work it out.

She still had the station wagon, so she could always drive to North Falls. But what the hell for? There was nothing there.

She took her coffee out on to the veranda and sat in a canvas chair. There were an awful lot of dead insects lying around, mostly some kind of beetle. She hadn’t noticed them earlier; they must have come while she had been asleep, landed and died. A brittle corpse cracked under her foot. Ugh!

A breeze had sprung up, just a faint one. It wafted her tear-stained cheeks, warm and gritty as if it was blowing dust with it. It was making her eyes smart so she went back indoors and closed the door. She took a gulp of her coffee but spat it out in the sink and tipped the rest after it. There was a kind of sediment on it, fine grit that floated, forming a scum.

She went back into the bedroom and stretched out on the bed. It was going to be a long night because she wasn’t waiting, listening, any more.

From now on she was all on her own. She would just exist, from day to day.

Until she died.

Chapter Twenty-Three

John Taggart had been sheriff of North Falls for three years, having been promoted after a drunk had shot Wilbur Gorfin. The job had not really taxed him. He was forty-three and overweight. He shaved every third day; he had contemplated growing a beard and saving himself the bother, but whiskers made him scratch.

North Falls was a quiet town, depending upon how you ran it. If you looked for trouble, there was trouble to be found, mostly on Saturday nights. Taggart’s philosophy was that if drunks wanted to fight, let ‘em fight, so long as they didn’t bother law-abiding citizens. Those who ran the bars knew what they were taking on, they sold the alcohol to the customers, they had only themselves to blame. John was teetotal so he had no sympathy for either side; Sheriff Gorfin would still be alive today if he hadn’t gone down to Rochin’s to try to arrest a violent drunk. Live and let live, Taggart told his deputy, Frank Dilmot.

Dilmot was young, tall and gangly, and inclined to be impetuous, maybe out to make a name for himself. He had already set his sights on the sheriff’s job, and had an unhealthy fixation with guns. John knew he was damned well itching to blast somebody with that pump they carried in the cruiser. Guns were a last resort, you only used them when talking had failed.

‘Things’re goin’ from bad to worse in the city.’ The deputy returned to the office, poured himself some coffee from the jug, and slurped it noisily. ‘Riots everywhere; fires, too. They reckon there won’t be much left of uptown. The army’s been called in.’

Taggart grunted. He sensed that the other was gloating. ‘What’s it like out in town tonight?’ It wasn’t far off daylight; the sheriff had stayed on in the office just in case he was needed. Officially Dilmot was on night shift.

‘Bad.’

‘How bad?’

‘There’s been fightin’ at Rochin’s.’

‘Always is.’

‘Sure, but not like tonight. A mob broke in after it closed. They ransacked the place, emptied every bottle that had something to drink in it. I got the call.’

Taggart straightened up in his chair. ‘Then why ‘n hell didn’t you call me?’

‘Didn’t need to. I fixed it.’

Arrogant bastard. The sheriff hardly dared to ask, ‘How?’

‘A shot or two dispersed ‘em, scattered ‘em.’

Frank had been after doing just that for weeks. ‘And the booze.’

‘Guess they took it with ‘em.’ Sheepish, averting his gaze. ‘In effect, you fired shots when they was runnin’ anyhow.’

‘I wouldn’t say that.’

‘I would! Anybody hurt?’

The deputy paused. Mentally the sheriff was already writing the next line of the script. ‘Not much, I reckon.’

Which meant he had fired and driven off. ‘Guess we’d better go see ‘case anybody needs patchin’ up.’

‘Doc’s outa town. Ed Parker, too. They left together earlier’ – he glanced at the clock on the wall – ‘yesterday. They ain’t come back.’

‘So we don’t have a doc in town.’ The hospital was full of disease cases. Sister Patini would do her best but she didn’t have either the skill or the drugs. ‘Now where’ve they gone, I wonder?’

Dilmot shrugged his shoulders. ‘An outlying ranch, maybe. Doc Wycherley covers three hundred square miles; the vet, too. Could be anywhere.’

‘Anywhere on Freeway 66.’ Taggart locked his desk and pocketed the keys. ‘Reports are that there’s upwards of five hundred vehicles burned out in that fireball. Army tenders have gone out, there’s nothing else free. It’ll take ‘em a week but I guess there’s no hurry. Just corpses left and most of them’ll be cremated.’

Deputy Dilmot swallowed; he hoped the sheriff wasn’t going to go out there. He didn’t want him checking on Rochin’s, either. Frank had fired lower than maybe he ought to have done but the mob was in an ugly mood. Sure, a guy had dropped on the sidewalk, he was maybe just diving for cover. The other had perhaps stumbled or been pushed when the crowd fled.

‘Let’s check Rochin’s first.’

Dilmot didn’t like the ‘first’, there was no knowing where they might go second. ‘You leavin’ the office untended?’

‘Sure am, they don’t pay enough manpower in North Falls to provide for an office minder.’

It was starting to get light as the two men stepped out into the street. A wind had got up; Taggart felt its grittiness in his two-day stubble. ‘Guess there could be a sandstorm. Last one we had was in ‘76, half the buildings on Main Street had to be rebuilt.’

A call was coming in just as they reached the cruiser, relayed by the city police department, a roundabout system used when the North Falls office was unmanned; emergency calls went through to police headquarters and were bounced back.

‘On my way. Out.’ Taggart gunned the engine. The deputy had to jump for the passenger seat.

‘Rochin’s?’ Shit, somebody had reported the shootings.

‘Tanning’s Foodstore. The mob went on to there from Rochin’s, they’ve set the bloody place on fire. This wind’ll fan it, maybe take half the town.’ Tyres squealed on the junction of Ford Street as the patrol car shot the lights on red. Already they could see black smoke billowing up into the sky.

Dilmot glanced at the rear seat. The pump action twelve-gauge still lay there, and he could smell burned powder smoke coming from the barrel. A spilled carton of 00 shells lay beside it.

Daylight was coming fast, the sun would be up in half an hour. The smoke column was beginning to stream horizontally, caught by a westerly wind that would take the flames straight into town.

Taggart screeched the car to a halt and parked it diagonally across the middle of the street. It was the best he could do in the circumstances; he dared not go any closer. The North Falls fire crew was already there, a seemingly paltry effort, five fire-fighters and a single jet of foam that might have been all right for a chimney blaze. A crowd had gathered, some three hundred lining the pavements on both sides of the street. Doubtless the looters were among them.

‘What’re we gonna do, sheriff?’ It was always ‘sheriff’ when the deputy was unsure of himself.

Taggart didn’t answer. There wasn’t anything anybody could do except stand back and watch the town burn. Any other time there would have been a convoy of tenders hammering down the freeway from the city. No, there weren’t any tenders left to come, and even if there had been they wouldn’t have been able to get through.

‘I’ll tell you shortly. In the meantime, just hang around.’

Some of the crowd were swigging from bottles, part of the haul they had got both from Rochin’s and here; beer, wine and spirits, Taggart guessed. Fire or no fire, there was going to be real trouble before long.

‘You gonna shoot us, sheriff?’ A huge black-bearded man in a smoke-grimed checked shirt swaggered into the road. ‘Your deputy’s killed Odwin and Bromberg, and they wasn’t even looting, just watching.’

An angry murmur greeted his words. The drink was already beginning to take effect.

‘We don’t want no trouble.’ Taggart cupped his hands to his mouth, trying to make himself heard above the inferno. ‘Just disperse peacefully, go back to your homes and collect your belongings. We may have to evacuate the town.’

‘We’ll decide on that.’ Another man moved out to join the first; others followed him. ‘You listened to the radio lately, sheriff? There ain’t no law now, it’s every man for hisself. That goes for here, too.’

‘We can’t do nothin’.’ Deputy Dilmot glanced uneasily back at the car. Maybe the shotgun would help check a few rising tempers. His hand strayed to the butt of his holstered .38.

‘You leave that gun where it is, deputy.’ Taggart’s eyes were smarting, his vision was blurred. Damned dust was blowing in his face. He felt the heat scorching his skin. ‘Take a look up at that sky. Tell me what you see.’

‘Holy shit!’ Dilmot stared in disbelief. Sure, the smoke was darkening the sky but not like that. Where previously there had been an expanse of grey dawn, tinted with the roseate glow of a sun which was yet to show itself above the eastern horizon, now there was black night moving in from the west. A twisted spiral, a mighty pillar that grew by the second, a giant that breathed clouds of darkness to vanquish the daylight. Even as he stared aghast, he felt its hot breath on his face. His hat was whisked from his head and went bowling down the street.

‘Twister!’ Sheriff Taggart yelled, but it was doubtful if even his deputy, standing right by him, heard him.

The flames roared horizontally, scorched the clapboard building next to the grocery, igniting it with the swiftness of kindling in a morning fire. Sparks showered in a macabre fireworks display, settled on an adjoining roof, and smouldered with venom. Somewhere a length of boarding was wrenched loose and whisked high over the roofs.

The watching crowd panicked and broke up. They were screaming, but nobody heard them. That imposing figure that had openly challenged the law was cut down, poleaxed by some flying object that bounced and was lost to view.

Corrugated tin sheets were ripped loose, flying in all directions, bouncing in the street, taking off again. A dark-suited man, a preacher with arms upraised, praying to his God to save his congregation, was beheaded with the neat efficiency of a French Revolution guillotine. His headless body was held upright by the tearing wind, the neck stump spouting blood like a bottle of claret that had blown its cork, the feet still moving.

With the wind came sand, gusting clouds of fine particles that blinded, choked, filled in any sheltered gap, rippling waves of it covering the street from side to side.

Taggart had made it back into the cruiser. The driver’s door was gone, torn from its hinges; the floor was fast filling with sand that could have come all the way from Nevada, nonstop, building up like a snowdrift. It covered the windshield, but the wind cleared it almost immediately. A wiper snapped and was gone.

He gunned the engine, and miraculously it fired; the trunk was windward, perhaps the engine was still protected. The lights worked, the beams bounced back off the smoky blackness; the rear window was blocked, so it was pointless even trying to see behind. He slammed the gears into reverse and let go; he felt the vibration of the protesting engine but it was impossible to hear it above the storm.

Shapes whirled by; folks that had lost their hold and had been taken by the wind bounced from walls to tarmac and back again, suffering broken limbs and amputations, their bleeding wounds staunched by the sand.

All was blackness except for the orange glow of the spreading fires and the twin beams of the police cruiser. Taggart tried reversing; the rear end was lifted off the ground, then dumped back down again. Springs cracked, the chassis sagged. He felt a sickening crunch and knew the rear window had shattered because fragmented glass and sand hit the inside of the windshield and cracked it. He ducked down, covering his face with his hands, and tried to breathe.

Where had that deputy got to? Taggart didn’t give a lizard’s shit. Out there nobody was going to survive. He had lived so far only because he had managed to get into the car and right now it was starting to fill in through the doorless gap. He tasted the sand, ground it with his teeth and retched.

He couldn’t get his breath. The wind swirled into the cruiser, creating a miniature sandstorm. He tried to protect his eyes but it was futile.

The sand was up to his waist, his legs were trapped; he felt like a kid who had dug a hole in the beach, stood in it and then filled it in. Something fell on the roof, caved it in to within inches of his head.

He couldn’t even see the glow of the fire now. Maybe the sandstorm had doused it. Sheriff John Taggart whimpered softly to himself, praying that he would die quickly and painlessly.

The Plague of Darkness was upon all the land.

Chapter Twenty-Four

The jeep’s engine had been spluttering for the last mile, twice nearly cutting out, but picking up again. Jimbo was forced to drive in low-ratio bottom gear to keep any momentum at all. The jerkiness, combined with the rough terrain, had Elaine feeling sick.

‘How much further?’ She clung to Trevor, her features deathly white in the gathering darkness.

‘Can’t say for sure.’ His main concern was that they were still on course for the Spode; there were so many tracks leading off from the main one that he feared they might have missed the turning. The landmarks were unfamiliar since the locusts had stripped every vestige of foliage from trees and shrubs, leaving a barren wasteland in their wake.

Travelling after dark could be both tricky and dangerous. They might be safer pulling in somewhere, trying to snatch a few hours’ sleep and then continuing on their way once daylight came. Trevor thought about suggesting it to Jimbo when the jeep beat him to it and petered out altogether.

The three of them sat there, not speaking, trying not to look at one another in case somebody asked the question they feared most. The sudden silence had an air of grim finality about it. That’s that, we’re not going to be able to go any further.

‘She’s been building up to that’ – Jimbo turned in his seat – ‘it was on the cards ever since we left the freeway. Locusts or dirt in the carburettor.’

‘Can you fix it?’ Elaine’s words came out in a rush. I know you can’t but please tell me you can, I want to hear what I want to hear.

‘I can fix it.’ Jimbo groped beneath his seat; something clinked and rattled. ‘Got a travelling workshop right here. But not in the dark, we don’t want to run the torch down, and there probably wouldn’t be enough light, anyhow. Tell you what, we’ll kip down for a few hours. Me, I’ll go and stretch out over there, leaves you two to it.’ In the deepening gloom Elaine thought he winked. She felt a surge of embarrassment.

‘Good idea.’ Trevor was relieved. He watched the other man drag the shotgun out from behind the front seats. Jimbo obviously wasn’t taking any chances of being surprised by nocturnal intruders. He attended to every detail.

‘Do you think he will be able to fix it?’ Elaine whispered.

‘Sure he will.’ Trevor kissed her reassuringly. ‘He’s that kind of man. I’ve only known him a few hours but I’d bet everything I’ve got left in this world that there’s not many things that Jimbo can’t do.’

‘I wonder what his real name is, and where he comes from.’ She was peering into the darkness, trying to determine where Jimbo was bedding down for the night.

‘Who knows?’ Trevor shrugged. ‘If he wants to tell us, he will. If he doesn’t, he won’t. It’s as simple as that. For me, he’s just Jimbo, and he’s the best friend we’ve ever had.’

They climbed out of the jeep and stretched out on the ground below the tailboard. The earth was warm, its hardness didn’t matter. Trevor coughed. It would take weeks to get that smoke out of his lungs.

Elaine lay staring up at the sky, watching the first stars making their appearance. She wondered what traumas lay ahead of them; one in particular was worrying her more as each hour passed. She knew now how a mistress felt when faced with the prospect of meeting her lover’s wife. She had read a story about such a confrontation once, a piece of fiction in one of the women’s magazines. She trembled at the memory.

‘All right, love?’ Trevor turned on his side to face her. ‘A dollar for your thoughts.’

‘You wouldn’t like them.’

‘Try me.’

She swallowed. ‘I … I don’t want to meet your wife, Trev.’

‘Look.’ He took her hand and squeezed it. ‘I’m sure Susan will like you.’

‘She won’t. She’ll hate me, and can you blame her?’

‘She doesn’t even guess –’

‘You wanna bet? God, you don’t know anything about women, Trev. Nothing at all. She knows. I’ve never met her but I know that she knows. Because I’d know if I was in her position, no matter how cleverly you covered your tracks. Okay, she’s never said anything, because she knows it wouldn’t do any good. Sometimes a woman chooses the easiest way out, the one that suits her. She’ll let you go on having an affair so long as you come home at the end of it, pay the bills. And all along she’s gambling that eventually you’ll get fed up with me, throw me over and go back to her. Then she’ll pretend it never happened and everything will be fine again. If she confronted you, brought things to a head, then you might just walk out on her. Get me?’

He did not reply. Her words caught him right in the guts, and he hated her for saying them.

‘It’s a bastard of a trick taking me back home with you, Trev.’

‘What else can I do?’

‘Precisely. How do you think I’m going to feel? Whose bed are you going to sleep in? And if it’s hers, as it’s got to be if we’re all going to shack up amicably and continue with this charade, then how d’you think I’m going to feel when I listen to you screwing her on the other side of the bedroom wall?’

‘It won’t be like that.’

‘How will it be, then? Her lying there listening to us? Or do we all get together for a threesome? Or even a foursome, invite Jimbo to join in.’

‘I’ll tell her everything.’ Trevor meant it but it didn’t come out as convincingly as he wanted it to.

‘I’ll duck for cover while you do.’ There was contempt in her voice. ‘What is it they say, “hell hath no fury like that of a woman scorned”? Jesus, I’ll go for a walk and let you get on with it, you can send up smoke signals from the chimney if you want me to come back.’

‘What do you want me to do, then?’ Her words had shaken him. She was shrewd, shrewder than he’d thought.

‘I don’t have any choice, do I? I can stay out here and die or else go back with you to your wife and maybe live a little longer than the people in the cities. Maybe I’d be better off dead, get it all over with, solve mine and your problems.’

‘We may have to move out of the cabin, anyway.’

‘And leave your wife and kid to fend for themselves? You won’t do that, you know it as well as I do. No, I’ll string along, play number two, see how it goes.’

She turned over to face away from him. She knew that neither of them would sleep much that night.

‘That should do it!’ Jimbo lifted his grimed head up from under the raised hood of the jeep and began dropping tools back into the canvas bag. ‘Just some dirt in the carburettor, mangled locust bodies. Now, let’s see if she goes.’

She did, fired first time. He sat there listening to the tick-over, smiling his approval.

‘All aboard and – Jesus!’

Fear knotted Trevor’s intestines instantly. He looked where Jimbo pointed, saw the dark pillar that blackened the sky, and felt the first rush of hot air scorch his face and dust his eyes so that they smarted.

‘What is it?’ Elaine’s question bordered on a scream.

‘Sandstorm, a twister!’ Jimbo flung the bag into the jeep. ‘We got about thirty seconds to find cover. That bank over there, get down beneath it, cover your face and don’t look up, whatever you do!’

Even as they flung themselves down below the shelter of the overhanging ledge, an old watercourse that had long dried up, night reclaimed the new day with terrifying suddenness. A mantle of blackness blotted out everything within sight. They felt the wind tearing over them, swirling the sand back on to their bodies as though it was determined not to overlook them.

Nearby there was a tearing and crashing as mature, locust-stripped trees were uprooted and hurled into the air. A metallic clang told them that the jeep had overturned; Jimbo’s emergency repairs had been futile.

The ground beneath them shook and vibrated as if with a series of earth tremors; the storm howled its rage, destroying everything that was exposed to it. It turned and came back in case anything might have found shelter on the leeward side. That was when it buried the cowering human trio in a swirl of sand and dust so that they had to scrape the deepening drifts from their faces and turn their heads in an effort to breathe.

Some time later, much later, the storm passed on. It left behind it a stillness and a wasteland that was even more barren than that created by the swarm of locusts.

‘Well, I guess we’ve had the Plague of Darkness.’ Jimbo extricated himself from a deep fold of powdery sand, stood up and dusted himself down. ‘That mound over there, I guess, will be the jeep. I’d appreciate a hand digging her out.’

‘You what?’ Trevor stared in amazement. Nothing was ever going to get that engine working again.

‘Mostly the engine’s sealed’ – the other seemed to read his misgivings – ‘they’re made to cross deserts and the like. I guess I’ll have to take the carburettor to pieces again but with luck we’ll have her mobile within the hour. C’mon, let’s get cracking!’

It was almost two hours before Jimbo restored the tick-over to his satisfaction. He had produced a small shovel and a stiff bristled brush, and instructed his companions to clean the sand out of the interior while he worked. The jeep had tipped on its side in the fury of the wind but appeared to be none the worse for its topple. Now they were mobile again, cautiously descending the sand-drifted track that skirted the Spode.

The tyres crunched over something buried beneath the sand, an obstacle that cracked beneath the weight of the vehicle. Trevor decided that it was probably a dead branch. They didn’t slow. Below them the homestead nestled in a hollow. The sandstorm had demolished the remains of the dwelling, reducing it to a heap of rubble.

‘That’s the Thompson place.’ Trevor leaned forward and pointed ahead of them. ‘I called the office from there. Maybe we should stop and see if the old man and his son are all right.’ The house had survived the worst of the twister, though part of the roof was gone, and an outbuilding stood precariously. There was no sign of anybody about.

‘Maybe we should –’

Jimbo’s reply was cut short as a double report from the open doorway scattered birdshot along the side of the jeep. It pinged on the wheel arches.

‘What the hell?’ Jimbo swung the vehicle sideways on, piled out on the far side and helped the others down to where he crouched, the jeep a shield between themselves and the farm.

‘Old man Thompson isn’t taking any chances,’ Trevor muttered. ‘Either that or the plagues have sent him crazy.’

Another shot rattled the side of the jeep.

‘Range is too far to do more ‘n tickle,’ Jimbo muttered. ‘Lucky for us he loosed off when he did, else he could’ve made a mess of us. Any way we can get round the house, keep outa shot?’

‘No. The sand will have drifted the slopes like snowdrifts, we might get stuck. Guess we’ll have to try to let him know it’s only us.’ He cupped his hands around his mouth, shouted, ‘Mr Thompson, it’s us, it’s –’

Another charge of shot skated off the hood. Obviously the armed occupant of the Spode wasn’t prepared to negotiate.

‘Guess we’ll have to go get him.’ Jimbo reached inside the jeep and lifted out the twelve. The action was gritty when he opened the breach. He blew down the barrels, making an eerie hooting sound. Then he loaded up and snapped the breach shut with a determined click.

Trevor’s 8mm was in his hand. He found himself wishing that it wasn’t the Thompsons down there.

‘We can get right up to the house without being spotted.’ Jimbo outlined his plans with the cool efficiency of one who might just have done it all before. ‘You take the slope to the right, I’ll go left. The line of outbuildings will give us cover right up to the front door. We can rush them then; it ain’t easy to swing a scattergun indoors.’

Trevor’s mouth had gone drier than even the hours without water could have made it, and his stomach had balled. They were planning on stalking a fellow human being as if it was a rabbit or deer hunt. He dared not look at Elaine; maybe she was the reason why he did not try to find an excuse for not going down there.

He nodded to his companion and the set off in opposite directions.

It took much longer than Trevor had anticipated to reach the walls of the farm house. In places he had to crawl on his belly, not daring to lift his head for fear of having it splattered by a charge of birdshot.

It seemed hotter than ever now, and the drifted sand made his skin smart. The sky above was a deep blue, cloudless; there wasn’t even any breeze. The one element the storm had not brought was rain. The land was drying up, and it was too late to irrigate it now.

The cattle penned in the corral were dead. The flies had somehow survived the sandstorm and were back to feast on any exposed parts of the buried animals.

Trevor flattened himself against the wall the way he had seen it done in the movies, and edged his way along towards the open doorway. He got the idea that Jimbo was deliberately hanging back; you go in first, Trev, in case he shoots. Or else he was testing him.

Whatever the reason, Trevor found himself up against the doorpost. He checked that the safety catch was in the downward position on his pistol; the Bruni seemed to weigh a kilo in his sweaty grip.

He thought about calling it, mimed the words. We don’t want to hurt you, Mr Thompson. There’s two of us, you don’t stand a chance. It’s me, Trevor Chibnell. Whatever he said, it wouldn’t make any difference. Thompson was either crazy or shit-scared, he’d shoot, anyway.

One last moment of hesitation – cowardice, maybe, in case he got hurt. He could hear somebody indoors, making a noise that puzzled him. It wasn’t the kind of sound he’d expected from an old man, nor from his grown-up son. A kind of – it took him several seconds to place it – whimpering.

He glanced towards the opposite wall and saw that Jimbo had not advanced any further. The other was definitely waiting for him to go in first.

Trevor moved fast, trying not to think about it. He went in low, the pistol held in a double grip. He saw a slender figure standing by the table, barely strong enough to lift the heavy treble-barrelled gun.

And that was when Trevor Chibnell almost shot his own son.

Chapter Twenty-Five

Susan heard an approaching vehicle some time around midday. Only mild surprise showed in her expression; the steady drone was not the sound of the pickup, it was probably city evacuees. If they wanted water, there was ample in the borehole. She would offer them food, too, because she wasn’t bothering to eat. They could have anything they wanted.

There were more dead flies on the floor than on the walls and ceilings. They were struggling to survive because there wasn’t anything left for them to eat. They didn’t bother her any more.

The storm had come and gone. Part of the veranda railing had been torn away but the cabin had withstood the elemental onslaught. She had lain on the bed throughout, barely noticing it. At least it had blown away all those dead beetle-like insects; there wasn’t one left in sight.

She had no plans. None at all.

The vehicle was closer now; its wheels were spinning, probably where the fine, powdery sand had drifted on the track below the slope. The engine revved, she heard it break free of its obstruction. That was when she got up, walked through the porch to the veranda.

It was a jeep; she recognized it from a model Mark once had when he was five, which had come with set of plastic toy soldiers. She wondered if her visitors were army, maybe checking on outlying folks. The guy driving, she could make him out now, certainly looked military.

The jeep swung in a half-circle and parked alongside the sand-drifted station wagon. There was a boy sitting in the passenger seat, and a couple of people in the back.

‘Mom!’ The boy fell from the door, picked himself up and ran towards her. Only then did realization seep into her dejected, stupefied brain, shock waves that had her clutching her bedraggled, dirt-grimed son to her, leaning her full weight on him because without his support she would have fallen. She wanted to cry but instead she laughed hysterically.

Her blurred vision picked out Trevor and the woman with him. The driver lifted the hood and busied himself checking on something in the engine. Maybe he was too embarrassed to involve himself in this reunion.

That was when everything went grey for Susan and spun crazily. She sagged against Mark, then Trevor caught her just before she lost consciousness.

A week had passed. The sun did not burn with the intense heat of the past few months and after daybreak there was just a hint of dew on the barren ground surrounding the cabin. Apart from that, nothing much had changed.

The cabin resembled a vacation campsite. Jimbo had pitched a tent out where the back yard used to be, and covered it with his mosquito netting. Trevor and Susan slept in the main bedroom with Mark between them; their son was subdued, spoke little. His experiences at the homestead had left him withdrawn into the living nightmares of his memories.

Elaine used the smaller bedroom. When she wasn’t sleeping she lay on the bed reading. Susan thought that the pile of magazines were just a façade to conceal her unease.

The radio batteries had run down; the last bulletin which the occupants of the cabin had listened to had been five days ago. The death toll was incalculable and still mounting. Power supplies had gone with the sandstorm, and there was little hope of their being restored in the immediate future. The armed forces were attempting to cope, but failing miserably. Many of the major cities still burned. The only consolation was that fire was the greatest cleanser of all, and might check the spread of disease.

Only the looters seemed to have survived, because their casualties would go unreported. They had formed roving bands that lived in the debris. Emergency hospitals had been set up on the city outskirts but they were little more than hospices. Vital medical supplies were fast running out.

Now there was no news.

The two men had gone hunting and had persuaded Mark to accompany them. Perhaps a few rabbits had survived in their warrens above the Spode. Fresh meat of any variety was soon going to be vital if starvation was to be avoided. The supply of packaged and canned foodstuffs had almost run out.

‘Coffee?’ Susan switched on the kettle. From the next day they might be drinking just water. At least the borehole was holding out.

‘Thanks.’ Elaine had come into the kitchen, wearing a dress which the other had given her. It was a size too large but nobody was going to notice. She played with her fingers nervously.

‘I hope you’re going to like it here.’ Susan was ill at ease, too, wondering how much longer either of them could stand the tension. They couldn’t go on keeping out of each other’s way for ever. ‘It looks like we’re going to be here for quite some time so we may as well get to know each other.’ She smiled disarmingly but her lower lip trembled, nevertheless.

‘I guess so.’ The younger woman stared down at her feet. ‘I’m sorry if I’ve intruded but I didn’t have any choice. If you want me to go …’

‘Don’t be silly, I don’t want you to go and I know Trevor doesn’t. Like I said, we have to have an understanding, don’t we?’

‘I … I don’t know what you mean.’ Elaine swallowed, blushing so that her freckles stood out starkly.

‘You can have him if you want. I mean that.’

‘Oh!’ It sounded stupid. Elaine could not think of anything else to say. A denial would have been ridiculous; an outright confession might have had dire repercussions. Susan could be playing a hunch, setting a trap.

‘I knew he’d got another woman, I’ve known for a long time. I suspected that it might be an office affair. If it hadn’t been you, it would have been somebody else. I’m really glad it’s you now that I’ve met you.’

Whatever Elaine had meant to say, the words got stuck in her throat. She found herself nodding, trembling uncontrollably. Finally, she said, ‘I’m sorry, Susan.’

‘No need to be sorry.’ Susan poured two mugs of coffee, pushed one across the table to Elaine and sat down opposite her. ‘I just wanted to let you know that I’m the odd one out here. I’ve been keeping up pretences for Mark’s sake, that’s all. This is the first opportunity I’ve had to chat to you. I think we both need to know what we’re going to do.’

‘I didn’t want to come back here.’ Elaine was close to tears. ‘I told Trevor that but there was nowhere else to go. There’s something else I think you ought to know …’ She dropped her eyes; she couldn’t hold her tears back any longer.

‘Go on.’ Susan’s hand stretched across the table, found Elaine’s and squeezed it reassuringly. ‘You can tell me anything.’

‘I … I’m going to have a baby. Trevor’s!’

‘Oh, I see.’ Susan’s immediate instinct was to snatch her hand away, maybe throw a tantrum. Her stomach curdled. Telling another woman that she could have your husband was one thing, discovering that she was carrying his child was quite another. How bloody stupid could Trevor get? ‘Have you told him?’

‘Sort of.’

‘What do you mean, “sort of”? Either you have or you haven’t.’ Her tone was sharp now; she checked herself. Getting angry wasn’t going to help.

‘I wasn’t sure, even when he brought me back here. I am now.’

‘Well, congratulations.’ It sounded sulky. ‘I think the first thing you’d better do is to tell him. We’d both better put the ball in his court.’

Elaine dabbed at her eyes with her last remaining Kleenex. She took a drink of coffee in an attempt to steady herself.

‘Well, I hope he does better for you than he did for me.’ Susan turned her head; she didn’t want the other to see that her eyes were misty, too. ‘I really hope he does but … but I have to warn you, you might not be the last.’

‘I’ll tell him,’ Elaine mumbled, finishing her coffee, ‘as soon as he comes back.’

‘Just one thing.’ Susan’s tone was determined now, no trace of tenderness in it. ‘I’m keeping Mark, whatever happens. I know for a fact, Trev wouldn’t want him. And’ – she smiled bitterly through her tears – ‘neither would you.’

There were rabbit tracks in the sand above the Spode, fresh spoor leading from the warrens to where a stubborn patch of rye grass had refused to capitulate to either the drought or the locusts. Dead scrubland surrounded it; there was not a leaf of greenery but it provided cover for the rabbits. Jimbo moved forward cautiously, the twelve-gauge held at the ready.

A couple of rabbits broke cover. The twin reports from the shotgun were almost simultaneous. Both rabbits rolled over and lay limp on the sand.

A third bolted. Trevor missed it with his first barrel, the shot charge kicking up a cloud of dust behind it, but he toppled it with the second. Jimbo’s expression said, We don’t have shells to waste.

Three rabbits were enough for one day. They would have to hunt them sparingly, leave enough to breed. Tomorrow they might try for doves in the forest. Crows were edible, too, if you were pushed. Remembering the bullfrogs, Trevor hoped they could find some doves.

It was dusk by the time they came in sight of the cabin. Jimbo stopped and stood surveying the landscape, his gun held across his chest, like some explorer of yesteryear gazing upon virgin lands. His nostrils flared, he sniffed the air, wetted a finger and held it aloft.

‘What is it?’ Trevor was curious.

‘See’ – Jimbo’s free hand swept in a wide circle – ‘the evening mist has gone, you can see the far horizon as clear as a bell. Atmosphere’s softer, too, kinda damp.’

‘Meaning?’

‘It’s gonna rain before tomorrow’s out.’

Neither Trevor nor Mark questioned this prediction. If Jimbo said it was going to rain, it’d rain. The long hot summer was on the way out; autumn was only a matter of weeks away.

And then winter would come with its heavy rains and snow. Moisture was the only element that might save a dying planet. But, Trevor reminded himself, it would only save it from total destruction. It wouldn’t restore it to the way it had been before; that was a long process, maybe many generations hence. Almost another evolution.

Chapter Twenty-Six

Deputy Frank Dilmot had achieved his lifelong ambition. Yes, sir! He sat alone in the dusty, unlighted sheriff’s office, his booted feet upon the desk the way they did in western movies, his favourite pump-action twelve-gauge across his lap. Idly, proudly, he toyed with the badge on his lapel. It was the only thing that got polished around there these days.

No two ways about it, this was no daydream, it was for real. He, Frank Matthias Dilmot, was sheriff of North Falls. Official, as laid down in the statute book. When the town councillors had sworn him in as deputy, Frank had promised faithfully to stand in for the sheriff should circumstances render the chief law officer unfit to carry out his duties.

Those circumstances had come in with the plagues and climaxed with the sandstorm. Taggart’s body was still in the cruiser up on Main Street near Tanning’s Foodstore – what was left of it, anyway. Most of the un-interred corpses in town rotted where they fell, or else the rats made a good job of cleaning up. In the meantime, the law had to be upheld.

There were maybe twenty people left in town. One day, Sheriff Dilmot would take a census and list the names in his untidy handwriting on the last remaining notepad in the office. Maybe some day, when folks started breeding again and there were people to get the town shipshape, they’d erect a memorial to those who had perished, a kind of cenotaph with the names of the dead inscribed on it. It’d have to be a sizeable monument to fit all the names on.

Of course, Frank knew he wouldn’t have got the job if Doc Wycherley and Ed Parker had still been around. No way. They didn’t actually dislike him, but they thought he couldn’t handle the responsibility. And they were mighty powerful on the council; the rest just nodded and said ‘fine’ to everything that the doctor and the vet suggested. Like a kind of dictatorship.

Still, that pair wouldn’t be coming back; if they were, they would have been here by now. Frank wondered what had happened to them; they’d maybe got caught out somewhere, couldn’t get home, died wherever they were like most other folks in and out of town.

There wasn’t much left of North Falls. The twister had spread the fire right down one side of the street from Tannings, then turned and blown it back up the other. A real systematic job. Frank didn’t know how he himself had survived. If he had managed to get back into the car with Taggart, he wouldn’t be here now. The deputy – now sheriff, he reminded himself – had been one of the lucky ones. He had been saved even if he hadn’t listened to that weirdo doomsday preacher who promised salvation with provisos. Sheer luck, but Frank had earned it. So it was his duty to repay whoever gave him that slice of luck. Thinking about it, he mused, you could almost start getting religious.

He sat there listening to the rain on the windows. It hadn’t stopped raining for a whole week and if it went on much longer he’d have to sandbag the rear door. The water had come in there back in 1989, flooded right down to the cells, and Taggart had had him mopping up for three whole days.

The sand drifts out in the streets were turning to mud, thick gooey stuff that would pull a man’s boots off if he stepped into it. Still, there would be water in the wells again.

Frank hadn’t been on his rounds for several days. He felt guilty about it, neglecting his duty on account of the weather. Still, there wasn’t any trouble in town these days, mostly because Rochin’s was gone and there wasn’t any liquor to be had. All the same, he had to check, sign the book to verify that he had patrolled.

‘When you gonna let me out, you stupid bonehead?’

The shout came from the cells and echoed in the empty building. Frank grinned; old Tobias was getting itchy again and serve him damned well right. Looting was an offence, and he had caught the town’s oldest dropout sifting through the ruins of Tanning’s, looking to see if by any chance there was a can or a bottle that had surfaced in the ashes. Third offence. Last time he had locked Tobias up for two days. This time it would be four. Feeding the old bastard was the problem; one day the food in this town would run right out. It was cheaper to let him out to scavenge, but you couldn’t turn a blind eye to a persistent offender.

‘Shaddup!’ Dilmot yelled.

Tobias shut up. In spite of all his faults, Tobias respected a law officer these days, though he never used to in Taggart’s time. The deputy smoothed his fingers over the shotgun; he really liked the feel of it. Guns earned you respect, provided you could use ‘em. Like the other day when that jeep had appeared from nowhere, driven down Main Street until it came to the big drift, reversed all the way back out. Two guys, they couldn’t be up to any good, maybe touring the States looking for ghost towns where there was nobody left alive to loot.

Yes, sir, the deputy had sent them packin’. Sure had. Two rounds straight across the front of the jeep; the second had rattled the hood. Those fellers had lit right out of here and you could bet your ass they wouldn’t be coming back. Not if they had any sense, now that they knew that North Falls had a sheriff who was still doing his duty.

‘Hey, bonehead, how about some grub?’

‘Aw, shaddup, there ain’t no grub!’ Dilmot got to his feet and swaggered down the corridor to the cells, still carrying the pump. He didn’t go anywhere without it.

Tobias was old and his small, almost skeletal body was grimed with the unwashed years. He had thinning grey hair, a straggling beard and moustache, and a torn and shredded set of Amoco overalls, two sizes too large, which he dragged with him whenever he moved like a blanket. His gnarled fingers gripped the bars of the door.

‘You ain’t got no right to starve me, deputy. I’m gonna report you.’

‘Who to?’ Dilmot grinned. ‘Ain’t nobody left ‘cept me.’ He jangled a bunch of keys tantalizingly. ‘Mebbe I have been a bit hard on you, Tobias.’

The hobo’s eyes narrowed, suspecting a trick. A key grated in the lock. The door creaked open a couple of inches. ‘What’s the grub stakes like in town?’

‘Eh?’

‘I mean, there’s still food around if you can find it. Just a few folks left after the big storm, they didn’t have time to loot it.’

‘Reckon not.’ Tobias stroked his beard, puzzled.

‘So, if you went out there, hunted up food, cans and packaged stuff, and we kept it all here, you and me, locked up in one of these cells …’

‘Uh-huh. ’ The other understood and nodded. ‘Just for you and me, huh, deputy?’

‘’sright. Those out there will find enough to keep ‘em going.’

‘Till everybody dies.’

‘No.’ The deputy shook his head. ‘I reckon not. Look at it this way, Tobias. Them as are goin’ to die from the diseases, have died. A few have survived, like you ‘n’ me. Why?’

‘Luck, I guess.’

‘In a way. Lucky because they were immune. Me, I didn’t feel too well a time back but it passed. It’s like when Doc Wycherley used to inject you against something so’s you wouldn’t catch it. You felt a bit groggy for a while, then it passed and you were fine. After that, you didn’t catch whatever it was. These here plagues, they won’t kill everybody. There’ll always be a few left. Immunity and being able to survive, that’s what counts. You ‘n’ me have done just that. Get it?’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘We still have to uphold the law, though, Tobias.’

‘We? Sheriff Taggart’s dead.’

‘Sure, I’m sheriff now. Official, according to the statute book. But I don’t have no deputy, and it’s a big job just doin’ it on your own. Don’t get time to attend to the little things. Come through to the office.’

Tobias followed him. Dilmot rummaged through the desk drawers, produced a tarnished badge and held it out.

‘Like I said, can’t do the job on my own.’

Tobias stretched out a hand for the badge, then held it at a distance as though he was frightened of it.

‘Deputy’s badge.’ Dilmot grinned. ‘Used to be mine, don’t need it no more. There’s a gun in the drawer that goes with it. You ever used a gun, Tobias.’

‘Have I ever used a gun?’ There was indignation in the other’s expression. ‘Back in ’34 I won the William Cody target prize at the North Falls rodeo. Used a .44 rifle. Can I shoot!’

‘Pistol’s different.’ Dilmot unlocked another drawer, took out a Smith & Wesson .38 and laid it on the desk. It needed cleaning and oiling; Tobias would busy himself with that chore. ‘There’s ammunition for it, a belt, too. All goes with the badge. Just one thing there ain’t, though.’

‘Wassthat?’ Tobias backed away, pistol in one hand, badge in the other.

‘There ain’t no pay check. ‘Cause there ain’t no money any more. I guess until things start to get better, what folks don’t steal, they’ll barter.’

‘Uh?’

‘Swap. To start with they’ll want food more ‘n anything. So’

– he watched for the other’s reaction carefully – ‘I need a deputy to help me stop folks looting. We collect the food, official like, so that nobody starves. Lock it in here, we got guns. After all, we have to preserve law and order, don’t we?’

‘Guess so.’

‘I’ll have to swear you in properly, make it official.’ Dilmot crossed to the other side of the office and squinted at a row of books on a shelf. ‘Should be a statute book here some place. Ah, this looks like it!’ He reached down a dog-eared, grubby manual. ‘You game, Tobias?’

‘Swear me in, deputy.’

‘Sheriff. There’s some clothes of Taggart’s in the back that’ll fit you as near as it matters. And have a bath – we got water now, rainwater that’s as pure as it ever was.’

An expression of reluctance crossed the old man’s features. ‘Bath, too?’

‘Yep, all part ‘o the job. Says in the book that deputies have to be clean and presentable at all times. Go get yourself fixed, old-timer, then we can get down to business.’

Frank Dilmot’s foot patrols took in most of the town. Walking down past where Tanning’s had once stood, he cast an almost reverent glance at the wreckage of the police cruiser. No need to worry, John, I’m doing the job just as you would have done it. Better, in fact. Going up on Willoughby Avenue , down Montrose Street and back into Main Street, he saw folks he thought he once knew – Tom Larkin, Ethel Streiber – but they had all changed. Their facial expressions had altered. They had moved into the clapboard houses which had partially survived, and were attempting to rebuild them with timber from the storm damage. There was a determination about the way they worked that was good. Sure, they resented the law, always had deep down, but they didn’t cause any bother.

For the moment they were finding enough food to get by on; after that they would have to come up to the office and make some kind of deal. He would offer them food for labour. Once they’d got their own living accommodation sorted out, there were other places to rebuild. A kind of Forward Programme, Dilmot called it. Plans for the new North Falls.

Several of the younger women had survived and that was a good omen for the future. Their husbands and boyfriends were dead but there were enough men to go round. Only yesterday evening Dilmot had stolen a glance into one of the partially renovated houses on Willoughby Avenue; he had stayed watching for longer than he intended. Curtains were bottom of the list of priorities.

Sheila Horan, who used to go with Brad Emmett, God rest him, was overweight but none the less attractive for it; she wouldn’t have looked right slimmed down. It was the first time the sheriff had seen her unclothed – as much of her as he was able to see, that was, because Harry Silverman was astride her on the couch, shafting her as hard as he could go.

Never thought you had it in you, Harry, and don’t you go worrying yourself none about this contraception business, Dilmot mused as he watched. These dark rainy nights had their compensations. He felt a faint stirring in his own lower regions and his thoughts switched to Dorothy McNicholls who used to work behind the bar in Rochin’s.

Dorothy was no comely wench, but she knew how to make herself up. Taggart used to reckon that after closing time she was available in the accommodation room upstairs if you made her the right offer. Old John seemed to know all about it …

Dorothy was still around; Frank Dilmot recalled having seen her a few days earlier, just a glimpse as she crossed the street. He was sure it was her; though her hair had grown long and straggled, and her ass stretched a pair of jeans she’d got from somewhere. Underneath, she’d be much the same.

He’d go look her up, leave Harry Silverman to his pleasures. Now, the betting was that Dorothy was living on Patchemn Avenue with Mrs Bedella; they had always been buddies. And Mrs Bedella would be all right, too, on a night like tonight, so long as you didn’t light up a lamp.

Women respected a sheriff, no matter who he was. Dilmot quickened his step. It was all in the course of his duty, his duty to rebuild North Falls out of its ashes, put the houses back up and find folks to fill ‘em.

What was it they called it? Procreation, or something fancy like that. Dilmot called it Forward Planning.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Jimbo and Trevor had seen as much as they needed to see of North Falls. Fire-gutted, it held only a handful of survivors who skulked in the ruins and shot at any strangers who infiltrated their domain. The inhabitants would eke out a miserable existence until either the plague or starvation killed them.

It would be the same story elsewhere. The cities were in an identical situation but on a much bigger scale, and would have more human scavengers, probably the sewer people who had become immune to everything there was to catch, and when starvation hit them they would turn to cannibalism. They would, in all probability, be the next generation, what was left of them.

There wasn’t much point in exploring any further at this stage. Jimbo said what Trevor was thinking. You had to leave Jimbo to put it into words or else he thought you were making excuses, ducking out.

It was possible to travel along the freeway if they kept to the verges, used a four-wheel-drive vehicle and made detours across the fields when they met an obstruction. They had gone to North Falls that way, and could maybe even have got into the city. But it was pointless.

‘Guess we know the score now.’ Jimbo seemed undeterred. He was a natural survivor in any situation. ‘So it’s up to us. There are rabbits, a few deer in the forest, and the doves seem to have survived remarkably well. So we plant the yard, and if ever self-survival was a fantasy of yours, Trev, it’s now reality.’

That was last autumn. The winter rains had filled up the dry watercourses and the lake. When the algae died with the first frosts, the water lost its blood-redness. The snows came in mid-November and covered the land right through to February. The hard winter had been almost an apology from Nature, as though she was trying to make amends. The cold would kill the bugs and wipe out the plagues. But it was too late, the damage was done.

With the coming of spring, Jimbo began work on a cabin adjacent to the existing one. He laboured tirelessly, felling timber in the forest and dragging it back with the jeep. The fuel pumps at the nearest freeway station were nearly full and untouched; he helped himself and nobody bothered him. Because there was nobody.

Jimbo cultivated a yard of his own; there was also a rack of seeds in the station kiosk, everything he needed to start. After that, he let his plants go to seed and begin his own cycle.

Two cabins. Two yards. Two families.

Susan had moved in with Jimbo in March as though it was the obvious thing to do. Mark had gone with her. He now hunted with Jimbo when Trevor did not have the time to go, using the drilling which he had brought back from the Thompson place. Often the three of them hunted together, usually at weekends. Somehow Saturdays and Sundays were still holidays from work; convention prevailed.

Elaine’s baby was due in April, so she spent most of her days resting up. Susan came round frequently to check that everything was fine; there was no animosity between the two women, they accepted that this was how it was meant to be.

The plagues had come and gone, leaving widespread death and devastation in their wake. The world would fight on, struggle to rebuilt and repopulate. It might, or might not, make it. But for the Chibnells, Elaine and the man who called himself Jimbo, a lot of problems had been solved. Everything had worked out just fine for them.

The End

Thank you for purchasing this ebook.
I hope you enjoyed the read!.
Guy.

This ebook is the fifty-ninth book to be published as part of a project to convert Guy's entire back catalogue to ebook format. Beginning July 2010 it is expected to have all books available by the end of 2012.

The list of books so far published is :

1. Werewolf by Moonlight.

2. The Sucking Pit.

3. The Slime Beast.

4. Night of the Crabs.

5. The Truckers 1 - The Black Knights.

6. The Truckers 2 - Hi-Jack!.

7. Return of the Werewolf.

8. Bamboo Guerillas.

9. Killer Crabs.

10. Bats Out of Hell.

11. The Son of the Werewolf.

12. Locusts.

13. The Origin of the Crabs.

14. Caracal.

15. Thirst.

16. Deathbell.

17. Satan's Snowdrop.

18. Doomflight.

19. Warhead.

20. Manitou Doll.

21. Wolfcurse.

22. Crabs On The Rampage.

23. The Pluto Pact.

24. Entombed.

25. The Lurkers.

26. Sabat 1: The Graveyard Vultures.

27. Sabat 2: The Blood Merchants.

28. Sabat 3: Cannibal Cult.

29. Blood Circuit.

30. Accursed.

31. Sabat 4: The Druid Connection.

32. The Undead.

33. Crabs' Moon.

34. The Walking Dead.

35. Throwback.

36. The Wood.

37. The Neophyte.

38. Abomination.

39. Snakes.

40. Cannibals.

41. Alligators.

42. Bloodshow.

43. Thirst II: The Plague.

44. Demons.

45. Crabs: The Human Sacrifice.

46. Fiend.

47. The Island.

48. Mania.

49. The Master.

50. The Camp.

51. The Festering.

52. Phobia.

53. The Unseen.

54. Carnivore.

55. The Black Fedora.

56. The Resurrected.

57. The Knighton Vampires.

58. Witch Spell.

59. The Plague Chronicles.

The next book will be :

60. The Hangman.

"Life has not been kind to fat, unattractive Lawrence Prendergast. He has passed from bullied schoolboy to an oppressed and lonely adult. But with the passing of his disciplinarian father … he can be himself. Someone is responsible for his life. Someone must be punished for the years of frustration and misery. The former headmaster, a former employer who delighted in humiliation and the beloved girl-friend who refused to have his child. So justice must be served … slowly and surely."

Recently published (but not part of back catalogue conversion) :-

Night of the Werewolf

The Eighth Day.

Killer Crabs: The Return.

To view all ebooks currently available, including the one above, please follow the link below.
View Ebook Catalogue

Best regards,

Guy and all at Black Hill Books.