The Fury (15 page)

Brick couldn’t believe what he was reading.

It was right at the bottom of the page, posted by somebody called EmoTwin3 literally two minutes ago. It was the twelfth answer. Above that was the eleventh, by JoeAbraham:

They’d both just appeared the last time he’d refreshed. Brick scrolled up the page, his hand trembling so much that he kept losing his place. He’d read the other entries over and over. Not all of them were serious; somebody had written ‘You guys are massively weird’ for answer number seven. But the rest were so similar that they could have been left there by the same person. He scanned through them for the billionth time, shaking his head as the same sentences leapt out at him.

They pretty much all ended along those lines, too –
please help
– like Brick was some messiah who could lead them all to salvation. The hell with that, though. He didn’t even know what was going on himself.

He put the laptop on the floor so he could stretch out his legs. Pins and needles radiated from his backside. He could just switch the laptop off and ignore everything he’d read. He could delete his question and the answers would vanish alongside it. He might even be able to convince himself he’d never seen them.

No. He couldn’t do that. He could no more leave a bunch of people to die than he could run over the ocean.

And they sounded so young too. That was why the messages had all seemed similar – the language, the spelling, the lack of grammar – they were written by kids. He couldn’t be sure, of course. There was just something in those messages that made him fairly confident that they weren’t adults.

The laptop sat open, the screen almost fully dark to conserve the battery but those messages still visible, staring up at him, imploring.

‘Okay, okay,’ he muttered to them. ‘But not before I know you’re not all gonna go psycho on me, okay?’

That was the best solution. He’d go out and meet CalMessiRonaldo, and if they didn’t end up tearing each other’s throats out then maybe he’d send word to the rest of them. This other guy might have some better ideas too.

He checked the clock. It was only a twenty-minute walk to the car park from here but he could do with stretching his legs properly, getting some air that didn’t smell of bird crap and rot. He pushed the lid closed with his foot, hearing it go to sleep. Then he set off back down the maintenance corridors, stopping at the top of the basement steps for no more than a second –
It’s fine, it’s quiet, no need to check, no need to go down there, she’s fine
– before it felt like his heart was about to slip from his throat and plop down the stairs like a slinky. And
was
it quiet down there? Wasn’t that a gentle scraping he could hear? Nailless fingers on wood? He almost ran the last few metres to the fire door, crawling and kicking through the chains like a man pulling himself from his grave.

This was bad.

Really bad.

And it had been going so well, a clear path out of Oakminster, the main road free of traffic despite the fact that everybody was leaving work. He’d had to stop once, at the set of lights they’d just put in for the
giant
new Asda, but nobody had crossed. The woman in the car behind him had started to get out, but the lights had changed before she could stagger over.

The satnav had offered him a choice of routes: via Ipswich or Norwich. Some inner voice had drawn him irresistibly to the second option. Now he was wishing he’d ignored it. He’d taken the back roads onto the M11, happy keeping the Freelander at seventy in the middle lane, passing people too quickly for them to see him or
sense
him or whatever it was that was going on. Traffic had been fast on the motorway, and it was only about an hour after setting off, when he finally let himself think that he might actually be okay, that luck took a massive crap right on his head.

The electronic boards were flashing a warning at him – accident, long delays between junctions 8 and 9 – and he could see the gridlocked traffic from half a mile away. The inside lane had been barricaded by a police van, its flashing blue lights multiplied a hundredfold in the windows of the cars that purred motionlessly alongside it. Further down he could see a pillar of smoke rising almost perfectly straight into the calm blue sky. He slowed, keeping to the middle lane as the cars started to converge around him.

‘Take the next exit,’ the satnav lady suddenly barked at him, making him jump.

‘I’ll try,’ he replied. ‘But it isn’t going to be easy.’

The brake lights from the car in front blazed and he slowed from forty to twenty-five. Something big trundled by on his left, hydraulic brakes hissing, plunging him into shade. Behind him an old Mercedes was pulling up fast, the driver a hunched shadow behind the wheel.

This was really,
really
bad.

The car in front reached the back of the queue and stopped dead. Cal slammed on his brakes at the last minute, the Freelander rocking to a halt. Another lorry pulled up to his right, squealing, and it got even darker inside the car, the steep-walled containers on either side making him feel like he was inside a grave.

Stay calm, just stay calm
, he told himself.
They don’t know who you are, they’re not going to come after you
.

Then why was the guy in front climbing out of his ugly green Fiat? It was a middle-aged man, dressed in sweats and trainers like he was going to the gym. He stopped with one leg in the car and one leg on the motorway, stooped over, frozen. The Mercedes behind was closer now, the driver gunning the engine. Was he
speeding up
?

The Fiat man seemed to remember what he was doing, dragging his left leg out of the car. Then he turned to Cal.

‘Oh no,’ Cal said as the man’s face changed, his cheeks sagging like old cloth, his lower eyelids drooping to reveal the red-veined orbs of his eyes. He staggered forward like a marionette, throwing himself at the raised bonnet of the Freelander just as the Mercedes slammed into it from behind.

Cal’s car lurched into the back of the Fiat, the man caught in a bear trap. There was a crack, a spurt of blood from his misshapen mouth, then he vanished between them. The impact threw Cal forward, his face hitting the centre of the wheel hard enough to honk the horn. He crashed back, wondering why the airbag hadn’t gone off, trying to make sense of the world through the supernovas that detonated in his vision.

Fiat guy had to be dead, Mercedes guy wasn’t moving. But Cal could make out other people climbing from their cars further down the queue. There were seven or eight of them making their way towards him, all with looks of concern, some with phones out, others beckoning urgently to the police van in the inside lane. One by one, as they stepped past an Argos lorry maybe twenty metres away, their expressions changed, their pace increasing as they lurched and stumbled towards his car.

Cal fumbled it into first gear, praying that the crash hadn’t done any damage as he hit the gas. There was a deafening crunch, the squeal of metal against metal, but the Freelander didn’t budge. He looked over his shoulder at the Mercedes crammed up against him, its bonnet crumpled and smoking. He was pinned tight between them. He swore, wrenching the stick into reverse, flooring the pedal and shunting the car back a metre or so.

A hand thumped his window, somebody trying the handle. Cal didn’t look, just threw it into first again and rammed the back of the Fiat, freeing up another bit of space. Somebody was screaming, half-words buried in the noise as they battered the glass with their fists. One of the people from the queue – a teenage girl – was trying to climb onto the bonnet but Cal reversed again and sent her tumbling to the floor. He managed a little more momentum this time, knocking the Merc back far enough for him to break out.

He swung the wheel all the way to the left, nudging the wrecked Fiat out of the way. There was hardly any room between it and the lorry to his side but he didn’t let up, squeezing through, serenaded by more shrieking metal. Somebody was on the back of the car trying to tear through the canvas roof, two black blisters of eyes boiling through the hole he’d made.

More people were surging up the aisles between traffic, and for a second Cal thought they had him, that there was no way out. Then he squeezed past the lorry to see that the car in front of it was a Smart car. He pulled hard to the left again and rammed it. He was only doing twenty but the weight of the Freelander pushed the tiny thing in front out of the way like it was a toy, rolling it onto its side and clearing a path onto the hard shoulder.

Cal accelerated onto it, passing the police van close enough to rip its bumper off, hitting fifty in five seconds. The man on his roof had gone. Up ahead he could see the source of the smoke he’d spotted earlier, a car that had come off the road, punched through the barrier and down the bank to the side. It sat in a field, surrounded by people, hundreds of them, swarming all over it the same way they had swarmed over him back at school. They didn’t seem to care about the black clouds that billowed from the engine, they were just tearing and scratching and kicking and even biting at the metal like starving rats trying to get at the meat inside a bin.

He eased his foot onto the brake as he drew level, slowing to about twenty before realising what he was doing. Some of the people on the smoking car looked up, a couple of them tumbling free from the pack and starting to run up the slope towards the road. The crowd behind was catching up too, a tide of flesh filling his rear-view mirror.

Then he heard it. Although heard was the wrong word because this was nothing to do with his ears. There was something in his head, something that wasn’t him, a voice that at the same time wasn’t a voice. It seemed to grab time and pull it to a halt, the people all around him running in slow motion like those new hi-def cams they used for the football. The voice seemed to be the opposite of noise, a profound silence that cushioned the world and yet which still somehow communicated with him. And in that instant Cal knew exactly what was inside that car.

It was a person, somebody just like him.

And they needed help.

The world unspun like a clockwork toy that had been wound up tight, reality snapping back. The screams from outside were deafening now, more people pounding and scraping at the Freelander. Past faces ravaged by hate Cal could make out the car below, bodies squirming all over it. He accelerated hard, swinging to his left, grinding past flesh and bone as he headed for the broken barrier. He didn’t know what he was going to do when he got to the wreck, but he had to do something.

The lightning came before the thunder. The car in the field erupted in a ball of white heat that sent charred corpses spiralling out in all directions. Cal had time to see a fist of smoke punch up towards the heavens – and something
inside
that smoke, an impossible shape of blue flame which opened its mouth and howled – before the shock wave hit the Freelander, peeling away the people outside and blowing in the passenger windows. He shielded his face, poisoned air clawing into his lungs, the 4x4 bouncing on its wheels so hard he expected it to roll over.

By the time he lifted his head the worst of the explosion had passed. Smoke still gushed skywards like liquid from the blazing car, but there was nothing in it
except
darkness. The engine had stalled and Cal turned the key to bring it back to life. He swung the wheel to the right, accelerating away from the carnage, away from the burning shapes that ran and howled and fell in his mirrors.

There was one police car on the hard shoulder but he passed it with plenty of room. The queue continued up the motorway, faces peering out of car windows at the smoke-darkened skies, but the exit was clear.

‘Continue on the current road,’ said the satnav. Cal wiped the ash from his stinging eyes, trying not to think about the people who had been on the car – twenty, thirty, maybe more, all dead; trying not to think about the person inside it, the wordless voice somehow begging him for help, which had vanished like a radio being turned off the moment the car had exploded; trying not to think about the shape in the smoke, that figure of flame which screamed as it rose.

He let the fresh air empty his head, and drove on.

Daisy crawled through the garden like a lioness, the ones she enjoyed watching on the telly. They were so graceful, so quiet, and she tried to imitate them as best she could as she crept forward on all fours, making sure to always stay hidden in the overgrown bushes.

She hadn’t seen anyone inside the house for ages. The horrid ambulance man had last appeared maybe half an hour ago. It might have been less. He’d gone back inside after smoking a cigarette, chatted to some police in the kitchen, then they’d all filed out and that was the last she’d seen of them. Of course they might still be inside, hiding in the shadows, ready to jump out at her . . .

The thought of it, of that ambulance man’s horse face braying at her, his rough hands pushing her out the window, stopped her dead. She twisted her hand in the long grass, locking herself to it, smelling the roses and the rhododendrons and the buddleias. It reminded her of her mum. Her poor mum. It had come back and had been eating her brain, just like before. The tumour had made her act weird last time, but only twitches and tics and the occasional word that came out wrong. This was so much worse. She had killed Dad, she had killed herself.

It wasn’t the cancer, though
, Daisy thought, remembering the note.
She said it wasn’t the disease. It was something else. She knew what was coming, that she was going to hurt you.

The thoughts were painful and she pushed them away, untangling her hand and creeping towards the back door. There was a big, bald patch of lawn between the last bush and the house. If she crawled over that then anybody inside would be able to see her. She glanced right, the flowerbeds full of thorny things, and past them the passage up the side of the house. To the left, Mrs Baird’s garden. The nice old lady’s apple trees hung over the low fence, a pool of shadow beneath them.

Daisy skirted towards them, grateful when she plunged into the shade. She could hear something on the other side of the fence. It might have been Pudding and Wolfie, Mrs Baird’s cats. She started forward again.

About ten metres or so from the bush where she’d landed after her fall from the box-room window, Daisy saw the first shard of glass – about the size and shape of one of the steak knives in the kitchen. It was nestled in the dirt, a line of blood down one side. Sunlight shone through it, painting the grass a vivid shade of red, making Daisy think of cathedral windows. She half thought about picking it up and putting it in her art box, it was so beautiful, until she remembered it was
her
blood.

She stood up, not wanting to cut her knees and elbows on the twinkling scalpels of glass between here and the house, squatting to stay below the fence. It was hard walking like this but there wasn’t far to go. The noises to her left were louder now, but she could definitely hear the familiar ‘briiiow’ of the cats. It was the noise they made when Daisy snuck out some prawns or tuna for them after dinner, the noise they made when they were being fed.

But if
she
wasn’t feeding them . . .

Daisy glanced over her shoulder to see a figure half hidden behind the knotted trunk of one of the apple trees. It was wearing an ancient brown dressing gown, and smoky puffs of thin white hair billowed out from the pink scalp beneath. One small, black eye peeked out from the shade, looking right at her.

‘Mrs Baird?’ Daisy asked, coming to a halt, still on her haunches. ‘Is everything okay?’

The nice old lady was breathing hard, almost grunting. There was a clatter of wood and one of the cats – Daisy could never tell them apart as they were both black – jumped onto the fence. It wobbled, catching its balance, rubbing its head on Mrs Baird’s sleeve and making the same ‘I’m hungry’ protest. Mrs Baird ignored it, still staring at her with that one dead eye.

Daisy straightened, taking a few steps towards the back door. And she’d just grabbed the handle when the old lady threw back her head and screamed. It was a horrible sound, like she was having a heart attack or something, and Daisy almost went to her, her first instinct to help.

With a phlegmy cry Mrs Baird hurled herself against the fence, the wooden panels bowing under her weight. She lost her grip, disappearing with a sickening snap.
That’s a broken bone
, Daisy thought as her neighbour reappeared, her whole body trembling, great trails of saliva hanging from her pale lips. She was still grunting, the noise a pig might make. Daisy turned the handle, pushing the door, almost banging her head on it when it wouldn’t open. She tried again, using both hands this time.

It was locked.

There was another gut-wrenching noise, then something thudded to the ground. Daisy looked to see that Mrs Baird had managed to flop over the fence and was now lying in a heap trying to get up. Her arms and legs wriggled in the air, like a beetle on its back, her dressing gown open to reveal the velour tracksuit underneath. One of her slippers was gone, and there was something wrong with that bare ankle. It was pointing the wrong way.

Daisy turned back to the door, wrenching the handle, kicking the bottom hard enough to make the glass rattle.

‘Come on!’ she screamed at it, suddenly wishing that the police were still inside, that
anybody
was still inside. Mrs Baird was no longer trying to get to her feet. She had flipped herself over and was scuttling across the garden on all fours the same way Daisy had been earlier, her wrinkled fingers pulling out clods of dirt as she clawed forward.

Daisy kicked the door once more then backed away, heading for the side passage that led to the street. Mrs Baird was gaining, her sagging face filled with exhaustion but those piggy eyes more determined than Daisy had ever seen them. Her glistening mouth gaped wide, breathing in the same short, piercing double-shriek cries that might have been her name –
Day-seee, Day-see, Day-see
– broken and clogged with spit. She ploughed across the grass, her arms and legs moving too fast for an old woman, like there was a horrible clockwork machine under her skin.

Daisy turned and fled into the passage, not knowing where she was going, not caring about the voices she could hear from the street outside, just wanting to get away from the thing that crawled after her, that called her name with each wheezing breath.