World War Moo (13 page)

While Blair had been a fee-paying student, Tony reached both prestigious establishments through scholarships awarded for academic brilliance. While the public school education had influenced the centrist policies with which Blair infected the party, it made Tony more of a leftie. He didn't encounter any racial discrimination, but there was plenty of snootiness directed his way from the Tory students for being a working-class lad from a poor background.

At first, in a party still dominated by the old left, Tony could give full rein to his politics. As it drifted to the right, though, and those who couldn't adapt dropped out, Tony kept quiet about his discomfort. He knew that to be too obviously leftist would lead to his being frozen out. To change the system, you needed to be in it. He'd played along, all the while thinking that once he was in a position of real power he would subtly fight to drag the party back where it belonged. So, all in all, he wasn't too impressed with Blair's presence.

Ostensibly there to support the party in this moment of national crisis, it took Blair thirty seconds to get his first subtle dig in at Spencer, saying that Labour now had a golden opportunity to get back to the glory days of the late 1900s and early 2000s. Spencer clenched his jaw so hard you could almost hear his fillings squeak, and, despite himself, Tony stifled a laugh. Blair was just warming to his theme when the emergency exit crashed open. A chambermaid, her uniform clinging to a heaving chest streaked with red, swayed in the doorway. Tony's first thought was that she'd been chugging red wine from the minibars and was horrendously drunk. He wasn't alone in that assumption.

“She's pissed as a newt,” somebody said. “Get her out of here.”

Before the security guards could move, the woman streaked toward the stage. Blair crumpled sideways under the impact of a flying tackle and landed hard with the chambermaid on top of him. She writhed and wiggled until she slipped past Blair's defending arms and sank her teeth into the easy target of one of his jug ears. The former prime minister screamed like a little girl. Suddenly everybody was on their feet. Three delegates joined Blair's burly bodyguard, and together they managed to disengage the kicking, screaming, and snapping chambermaid.

“I'm okay,” Blair said loudly, getting to his feet. “It's only a flesh wound.”

“I think she bit part of your ear off,” Spencer said, peering at the side of Blair's head.

“She's done him a favor then,” somebody near Tony whispered, prompting a few giggles.

Blair shook his head, as though trying to clear it. “I suppose you think this is funny,” he said.

“Of course I don't,” Spencer said.

Yells continued to come from the posse trying to restrain the chambermaid, who'd somehow managed to free her damaged hand and was slamming it into the face of the bodyguard. Blair ignored the commotion. “Yes, you do. In fact, you probably set it up.”

“Steady on, Tony,” Spencer said, his large brown eyes goggling. “You're obviously in shock.”

“You ruined my party, you smug little Tory-lite fucker, and now you're trying to make me look stupid.”

Spencer lost his patience and stepped closer to Blair. “You're calling me a Tory? You had us goose-stepping all the way to the right when you were in charge.”

Blair yanked Spencer nose-to-nose by his blue silk tie. “At least I was a strong leader. You should resign and let me take over. I am the Labour Party. I am Britain!”

“Just go back to your lecture circuit, you washed-up old loon,” Spencer said.

With no warning, Blair delivered Spencer a crunching head butt and followed the falling man to the ground. The crowd surged forward, voices raised in protest. Tony found himself carried with the masses even though he longed to go in the opposite direction. Something was very wrong here, and he had an awful feeling he knew what it was. The crowd tried to change direction as a wail rose from ahead. With the opposing masses pressing up against each other, the middle collapsed like a rugby scrum. Blair had abandoned Spencer, who sprung to his feet with a guttural yell and leapt into the heaving crowd like a stage diver. Blair was momentarily still, his glittering eyes roving the room. Tony had always thought Blair looked evil: particularly the grin that seemed to stretch beyond the confines of his face, as though the skin was about to peel back and reveal a grinning imp skull, ears working as demonic wings to take the head flapping off the body. Now, with blood staining those huge teeth beneath glittering pinprick eyes, Tony expected exactly that to happen. Unreality washed over him.

As more people began to struggle with each other and the din grew, Tony scrambled toward the emergency exit. This was no hallucination. The only thought in his sputtering mind was to reach the room where his wife and daughter were waiting. He was almost at the exit when somebody grabbed his ankle. He looked down to see Melissa Braithwaite, the shadow home secretary, half trapped beneath a pile of writhing bodies. She reached up with her free hand.

“Help me,” she shouted.

Tony reached down and grabbed the hand. Braithwaite promptly sank her teeth into the gap between his thumb and forefinger. Yelling at the jolt of pain, Tony pulled away and looked at his hand. Tiny beads of blood welled up from around a perfect circle of teeth marks. Braithwaite looked up at him, blue eyes swimming with confusion.

“I don't know why I did that,” she said, and lunged at his ankle.

He skipped backward to avoid her snapping teeth and dived for the exit. He skidded as he landed, cracking his head against the far wall. Braithwaite was clawing at the bodies around her, crying as she did so, while chairs, microphones, and even plastic water bottles were put to use as blunt objects elsewhere in the chaos. Tony, vaguely aware of a thrumming sensation racing up his arm, got up and staggered to the lift. As the door slid shut, gunfire crackled from the conference area.

When he emerged into the corridor on the third floor, somebody was screaming. He ignored it and ran to his room, thinking only of protecting Margot and Vanessa. He inserted the key card with shaky hands and clicked open the door. Vanessa looked up at him from where she was working on a jigsaw puzzle, smiling from behind a mass of curls.

“Daddy!” she shouted.

Tony staggered backward as a shockwave of rage battered him. His heart rate soared and his body flushed with a roaring heat. Margot came out of the toilet, a white towel wrapped around her body, wet strands of black hair clinging to her bare freckled shoulders. Her eyes widened. “Tony, are you okay?”

“You're dripping water on the floor!” he yelled, the anger finding a focus.

He could smell them both, the scent of clean skin and warm blood pulsing through their veins as enticing as freshly baked bread. His mouth dropped open to bare his sharp little teeth. He took a step forward. It felt like his rational mind was trapped in a tiny cell, watching in horror through the bars as somebody else, this savage beast that had been locked away in the recesses of his mind, ran amok with his body.

What would Spock do?
he asked himself, the voice so quiet amidst the tumult of his rage that he could barely hear it. Yet somehow it was enough to stall his forward advance. He roared at the ceiling and turned his despairing eyes on his wife.

“Lock yourselves in the toilet,” he said, voice straining with the effort of speaking.

Margot didn't move, so Tony began punching his balls as hard as he could in the hope of incapacitating himself. He hardly registered the pain, but it felt so right to be hitting something that he kept going until he sank to his knees. It was the sight of her husband pummelling himself in the groin that sent Margot sprinting across the room to snatch up Vanessa. They disappeared into the toilet and the lock clicked. Still he could smell them and it drove him crazy. He fought every inch of the way as his arms hauled his body toward the door. He could hear his daughter sobbing. This only made him angrier, reminding him of all the sleepless nights he'd passed when she was a baby, fighting the urge to slap her. Now he would slap her, all right. This strange voice, so alien and harsh, gave him enough of a jolt to attempt to reclaim his mind one last time.

“This is highly illogical, Captain,” he screamed, trying to force his trembling fingers into the steeple position and falling on his face as the support left his arms. It was just enough to allow him to divert his course. He knew he couldn't hold on much longer and, focusing his mind on the one thing that could save his family, beat his head against the heavy metal legs of the bed until he passed out.

*   *   *

Tony fingered the scars the bed legs had left, the memory of what he almost did to his beloved family setting his cheeks burning. Vanessa, who'd either forgiven or forgotten that awful moment, flew over and grabbed his legs. “Daddy! Let's dance!”

God knows dancing was the last thing he felt like doing, but he let Vanessa drag him to the stereo and put on Katy Perry's “Firework.” He shuffled around while Vanessa skipped, rolled, and threw some disturbingly adult poses. Margot smiled softly, and the heat of shame bled out from him as he twirled the little bundle of energy and threw her up in the air. He'd hated this song, had even been embarrassed to download it in case any of his friends noticed it on his iPad, but ever since Vanessa saw
Madagascar 3
she'd been obsessed with it. So he'd made the sacrifice, as parents always did for their children, and didn't force her to listen to Desmond Dekker instead. He'd even developed some affection for the song, which brought him these little moments of happiness that were so sorely lacking in his life. For a while he forgot he was anything other than a father lost in the simple pleasure of bringing happiness to those he loved.

He spent the next half hour calming Vanessa down with a relaxing bath and bedtime story. After she was asleep he ate a quick dinner and sat on the sofa, Margot's head resting on his chest as the
Eastenders
theme played. He'd intended to take a last half hour of downtime before getting back to work, but as ever his mind wouldn't let him find peace, analyzing all of the decisions he'd taken and wondering if they were the right ones. One of his first priorities when he took up the reins of power had been to get the BBC back on the air. The British public could stand just about any privation, but take away their flat-screen televisions and it really would be anarchy. Fortunately they had enough uranium stockpiled to keep the nuclear power plants servicing the reduced electricity demand for decades, and Tony was looking into reopening as many coal mines as possible just in case a plant went down and they couldn't fix it.

As part of his plans to give people something to do apart from roam around and kill each other, he'd considered reviving the English Premier League, and so set up a friendly between Chelsea and Spurs to test the waters. It hadn't been his greatest idea. Ten thousand spectators showed up to watch two teams full of cloggers, promoted in the absence of the skillful foreigners, lump the ball up and down the pitch. Eight minutes in, a heavy tackle prompted a brawl, which then transmitted to the stands. It made the football violence of the 1980s look like a slap fight in a nursery. When a performance of
Hamlet
he authorized at the National Theater ended just as badly—the audience took offense at the lead actor's bad performance and decorated the stage lights with his intestines—Tony realized that the passivity on the part of the viewer and the distance separating the performers from the audience made TV the safest form of entertainment. Reruns, with a heavy focus on
Doctor Who
, dominated the programming. The only shows they produced were
Eastenders
and the heavily censored and positively slanted news broadcasts—both filled with people whose only experience was fucking each other under bedcovers on reality TV or acting in infomercials on crap cable channels.

The
Eastenders
episode began with the usual plots of infidelity, business skulduggery, and family squabbles. Then the camera focused in on Dot Branning—the only character portrayed by the same actress as before the outbreak, who appeared to have been alive since the dawn of time and was probably immortal—standing outside the Queen Vic with cigarette smoke wreathing her cadaverous face. A rustle came from the center of the square, and the camera panned in on a shadowy figure raking through the bins. Dot's nostrils flared and the cigarette dropped from her fingers. She opened her mouth to unleash an ululating scream and, displaying surprising agility for a woman who was at least one hundred, burst through the gate in the park and caught hold of a teenage boy, who'd tripped over a fallen branch. As Dot set her gnashers to work on his face, the regulars came pouring out of the Queen Vic to lend their hands to the bloody task. Tony got to his feet, drawn toward the screen as though he could cross over and join the fray. The scene ended with everybody standing silently over the ruined body as Dot lit another cigarette, staining the end with blood rather than lipstick.

As Spock fought the virus in his mind, Tony turned to Margot. “I can't believe they did that. Everybody's going to be going mental.”

Margot, still seated, took a deep breath. “It's social commentary, love. That's what the soaps do.”

“But I told them to keep the themes light.”

Margot put her hands on his shoulders. “You can't control everything.”

“I can't control anything,” Tony said, rubbing his forehead. “My government is the very definition of an omnishambles. I must be the worst prime minister this country's had.”

“That's hardly fair. Nobody else has faced the problems you have. And, anyway, there are plenty of positives.”

“Name just one.”

“Well, the Tory cuts to the welfare state have been reversed. We're all dependent on handouts now.”

“I'm sure Red Ken Livingstone and Arthur Scargill would consider that a glorious triumph for socialism if they were still alive. Considering the country had to be turned into a big pile of shit to bring back the social safety net, it's a bit too Pyrrhic a victory for my tastes.”