Storm (29 page)

“I am a keen amateur historian,” she says.

Under normal circumstances, before the rain, someone saying something like that would force me to crack up laughing. Like, really, I wouldn't be able to help myself. Under the current circumstances, the fact that she is a “keen amateur historian” is somehow supposed to be some kind of explanation. I roll my eyes to demonstrate that it is no kind of explanation.

“If you knew your twentieth-century history you'd
know
what phage therapy was…” she starts up.

Oh, lady, I know my history.

Didn't Simon, my stepdad, test me on it when we were trapped in a car in a parking lot with hundreds of people dying? It's just that…

“It wasn't on our syllabus.”

She smiles a lemony smile. “In any case, it's basic biology,” she goes on. She's not even speaking to me; she's speaking to all of them. “Everyone knows about vaccines.”

People nod. Honestly. What are they like?!

There is no point even trying to tell them they don't know what they're talking about. This is all going hideously wrong, isn't it?

“You could help people,” says Bridget, but in a vague sort of way, like she's thinking out loud. I wish she wouldn't. There are mutterings of agreement. The Princess edges closer to me; I do a microscopic head shake at her: stay back.

“I already did. There's a cure.”

That's shut them up. Even the keen amateur historian.

“Yeah—that's right. They made a cure and—hey—guess what? They don't want anyone to have it. So if you want to
discuss
this further, you're just going to have to go to Salisbury and ask the army about it…but I wouldn't recommend it. They are not nice people. They kill kids.”

The silence deepens.

“They've been experimenting on people. They were gonna experiment on her.”

Hn. Telling Darius was easy in comparison to this, because he'd already worked out the whole Sunnyside thing, hadn't he? Telling Xar was easy because he's a psycho and so he enjoyed every minute of it. Telling the soldier and the driver was easy because Beardy was on hand to explain. Telling these people…is dreadful.

“I cannot help you. Do you understand? I can't help. So I'm going now, all right? I don't want to stay here anyway. But I want you to take care of
her
. She's just a kid on her own, and she has had nothing to do with any of this.”

I gotta get out of here.

“I'm going to go and get Darius now,” I tell the Princess.

I head straight for the car—going as fast as I can without it looking like I am running.

The Princess follows me.

“You can't come,” I tell her, opening the car door. “You have to stay here.”

I suppose this is how things were in olden times—before email, before phones, before there was even mail. You'd say good-bye to someone not knowing if and when and how you'd see them again. I reckon people must have kept it brief, or you'd be blubbering all the time.

She nods her head—but quickly, like she gets this already—and then…and then, she lurches forward and hugs me, tight, her face pressed into my tummy.

“You'll be OK,” I tell her. I am looking all around—no one must see this, her touching me. I peel her arms off me. I crouch down to speed-whisper to her. “See? Don't tell
anyone
. No one must know about you; don't let
anyone
see the rain doesn't hurt you. Just act like the other kids. Promise?”

Her eyes have tears in them. Mine do too.

“
Promise me
, Princess?”

She nods.

It's bawl or drive. I get in the car. Slam the door shut. Start up. She knocks on the window. I do not have time for this. I can't do this. I hit the button and lower the window.

“Priti,” she says. “My name is Priti. P-R-I-T-I.”

“Priti,” I say.

Oh, and she smiles.

Bawl or drive. I drive.

Here's how I would like the rest of this story to go:

I go and get Darius. (Like I said I would.) Somehow we manage to find the Princess—Priti—and the Lancaster people. And the Lancaster people are delighted to see me, welcomed me with open arms, etc. (Bit of a flaw here already, huh? They're leaving, and I've forgotten to ask where they are going.) And somehow my dad has also found them (and Tilly: she's allowed to be properly in the story now too).

And…we all muddle along—i.e., no one else dies and life is OK.

I would probably have to turn into some kind of slave-gopher for everyone, dashing out into the rain to get stuff, but I'd be prepared to put up with that just as long as they were really nice to me and didn't boss me around
too
much.

Oh, and I get to live in my own place, done up just how I please with absolutely everything I want. Not that far away from my dad and everyone, but just out of immediate nagging range.

And if, for some reason, I don't manage to get Darius (like I stand no chance)…well…maybe, in time, there'll be a new boy—and we can console each other because he, like me, will also have experienced utter appallingness and heartbreaking loss.

The End.

It might not be the happiest of stories, this story of my life, but at least it is not totally, gut-wrenchingly miserable and bleak. It is OK. And OK is the new spectacularly good.

The only trouble is…I cannot see him. I cannot see what this new boy will look like.

But, yeah. That's how it should go.

What happens in reality is:

As I drive off down the road, I feel like my heart is about to burst with hurt and fear and rage. It is too awful; every single bit of this is too awful. Like, really, I think my heart is going to—

BA-THAM!

FTHHHHH!

My tire bursts instead of my heart. I don't even know that's what's happened. All I know is I suddenly can't steer. The car
careens
into the hedge.

Careens
, that is an excellent word. I read it in a book and now—right here, right now—I feel for myself what it means.

I have no control over this vehicle. It
careens
.

I brake. I stop. I glance in my rearview and see Angry Catherine being relieved of the shotgun. (Yeah… See the picture: People are tearing it out of her hands.) Still I don't get it. All I think is: crazy lady wants to kill me. I don't understand what has happened. I put the car into gear; I have to slam on the accelerator to make it move. It feels like the car is all crooked, limping, flopping about all over the place, and when I try to go on, it doesn't want to do it. I bump up and down, up and down before something bites the road, and I churn about—going nowhere—until suddenly the car decides to go somewhere and I sail—smash!—straight into the hedge on the other side of the lane.

My heart is pumping; I look into my rearview—all I see is the other hedge. I look around… All I see is a bunch of people marching up the road.

I switch off the engine.

I get out of the car.

“Stop!” Bridget yells.

Hello?!
I am SO stopped.

She's the one who has the gun now. Priti tries to run to me—but a woman grabs her hand and pulls her back. Behind them is everyone else. Behind them, the glaring man, Barry, is cuddling Angry Catherine.

I put my hands up…I walk slowly to the back of the car. Angry Catherine, whom I might have to rename Psycho Sharpshooter Angry Catherine, has taken out my back left tire. As in, totally taken out: the dead rubber body of it lies in the road. I was driving on a wheel rim. Which explains the
careening
.

They puff up the road after me. Their breath snorts out white against the cold sky of this morning. They are like an angry, frightened herd of snorting things. And me? I guess I'm a rabbit. Suppose I could run. I have this feeling Bridget wouldn't shoot.

Is that enough to act on, ever? A feeling?

They stand before me. Snorting white puffs of human fear and anger. I feel like I have oh-so been here before.

I fold my arms. (As no rabbit has ever done.)

“Ruby, we just need to think this through,” Bridget says.

“You call
this
thinking it through?” I rabbit-spit.

She is pointing a gun at me. I am being supremely teen ironic—as in, “At gunpoint?! That's how you think you can sort this out?!”—but no one seems to register that.

It doesn't really matter. All I do know is I have a gun pointed at me…and, in fact, I am fairly deeply grateful it is in the hands of someone who is saying, “We need to think this through,” because if it were up to Psycho Catherine, I swear I'd be dead already. Or that historian, she'd be slashing open veins and drinking my blood.

“We just need to know more,” Bridget says.

Uh. What is it with “adults” and needing to know everything?

“We need to know about the kids,” says the woman who has hold of Priti's hand.

“When the army came here the first time, they didn't just take swabs. They took two of our kids,” Bridget says. “They told us the parents had been found.”

Ah
.

I walk back down the lane. They part to let me go first. Even Glaring Barry holds back Psycho Catherine to let me go past.

As I head toward the house, kids scuttle back indoors; kids' faces reappear at windows.

“No,” Bridget says. “The shed.”

“You're kidding!”

Apparently not. They're afraid of me, aren't they? They're afraid of the
FREAK
.

I go into the shed, and Miss Vaccine, the keen amateur historian, shuts the door on me. (I see a glint in her eye that suggests she is already thinking about where she can get ahold of a scalpel and a syringe.) I hear a bolt slide.

“Cup of tea would be nice!” I shout.

When they bring the cup of tea and a blanket and some food, I get a glimpse of the outside world—which consists of a semicircle of adults sitting on chairs on the drive. Ha! They are sitting having a cup of tea and a chat with a shed.

Countries are probably being bargained for right now, millions of cars' worth of oil being shipped. Nuclear missiles are probably being pointed in different directions…but this is the British apocalypse, where we all have a nice cup of tea and talk to a shed.

It does occur to me to withhold information from them, but the way I see it, I've already messed things up by telling them stuff in the first place, and adult minds are mischievous and panicky things that can make two plus two equal a trillion, so I may as well give them the complete Emergency Public Service Broadcast. It will be factual overload, I'm sure, but better that than have their skittish minds messing with limited information. Plus, I want to get out of this shed. If they think I'm holding out on them, I could end up locked up with the spiders for days on end.

So I tell them EVERYTHING. I do a SUPER-BLAB.

Then I listen to their discussion. It is nothing like the radio programs my mom and stepdad listened to. It is, frankly, worse than that time our history teacher got us to listen to a debate in Parliament—and, possibly, even more nasty and shouty. And pointless.

They go on, a lot. When just one person gets to speak, they love it. The person speaking, that is. The rest of them mutter so loud, I can hear it from inside the shed, and when the person speaking has stopped, when it comes to the “discussion” part, you just so realize none of them were listening at all. They were just keeping quietish for a bit so it looked like they were listening, when all they were doing was cooking up what they wanted to say.

They don't listen to each other at all.

A variety of
cockamamy
plans are proposed—but in the end there are just two standout proposals:

1. They try to trade me in for their kids.

2. They keep me and make a vaccine out of me.

The “discussion”—a.k.a. blazing argument—becomes somewhat emotional and then fairly science-y as well as emotional (Miss Vaccine is having a field day) as Glaring Barry (husband of dead Chrissie) and Psycho Catherine (dead Chrissie's BF) are painfully forced to agree that the army are a bunch of
who would probably just take me, say, “Thanks very much,” and shut the gates again without letting the kids go.

Glaring Barry doesn't care; he thinks it's worth a try. He is not without support because everyone feels awful about the lost kids.

Someone points out that Glaring Barry could get killed trying—and then what? Glaring Barry says he doesn't care.

At this point, Miss Vaccine pipes up with the PLAN OF PLANS. She swears blind that it could be as easy as injecting some of my blood into someone else.

Uh. I have managed to keep quiet for ages, but honestly! “I told you! It's not in my blood!” I yell from the shed.

Like, really, I don't know why Miss Vaccine doesn't just go and offer to swap herself for the kids because the army would absolutely LOVE her. She's FULL of ideas. What she is coming out with now is that, as everyone really wants this whole thing to stop (quite a lot of people have wasted quite a lot of breath saying they wish this whole thing wasn't happening in the first place) (Dur!), and as the army are a bunch of scheming rats that no one can trust, they would be insane to lose this opportunity to find out whether a quick dose of my blood would fix everyone.

I have this terrifying vision of myself as a human pincushion, strapped down and getting stabbed by two dozen greedy needles while Miss “Keen Amateur Historian” Vaccine consults some weird medieval map of where a human's veins and arteries are supposed to be.

Glaring Barry starts on about the kids again, and Miss Vaccine tells him that as the army might not hand over the kids that were taken and/or they might be dead already (she is in charm overdrive; Darius Spratt couldn't do better) and given that he says he doesn't care if he dies, he should volunteer for testing.

A hush falls. Even Psycho Catherine has put a sock in it now.

“How would we do that?” asks Bridget.

“We'll just take some blood out of the girl…”

I HAVE A NAME—and, honestly, Miss Vaccine, how many more times do you have to be told IT'S NOT IN MY BLOOD!

“…and inject it into Barry.”

YOU'RE A KEEN AMATEUR HISTORIAN.

No—oh no!—Bridget, sensible Bridget is
listening
to her.

“So, we take some blood out of…”

BRIDGET! THE WORD YOU'RE LOOKING FOR IS “NO.”

“It won't hurt her at all,” says Miss Vaccine.

RUBY. RUBY, RUBY, RUBY. MY NAME IS RUBY.

“Yes, but how would we test Barry?” asks Bridget.

“We'll do what the army's been doing. We'll dip his finger in water, and if he reacts, we'll chop it off.”

BARRY! THE WORD YOU'RE LOOKING FOR IS “NO.”

“And then I'm going for the kids,” he says. “Whatever happens.”

NOT IF YOU END UP DEAD, BARRY.

“Yes, of course,” says Miss Vaccine.

AS IF. If he reacts and survives the whole amputation thing, Miss V is only going to want to have another go—and another, and another, until Baz is out of fingers and toes and she's eyeing bigger limbs. If he survives…

Mercifully, at this point someone notices the sky's looking questionable (I could teach them all a thing or two about correct cloud classifications; I know twenty-four different kinds, did I mention that?) and they get a panic on and drag themselves and the chairs inside. Like really: they've been so busy discussing how they're going to save themselves and the world, they almost got themselves killed.

“Are you OK, Ruby?” Bridget manages to remember to ask.

“Yes. I. Am. Fine,” I manage to say with superb control.

I guess they all make it indoors, because when I hear the rain start to fall on the tin roof of the shed, it is not accompanied by screams.