©Craig Saunders 2015

All rights pertaining to this work retained by Craig Saunders. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

The Dead Boy

by

Craig Saunders

(inc. bonus novel sample 'A Stranger's Grave')

Table of Contents

Part One The Dead Boy

Part Two Indian Summer

Part Three Cold Waits in Embers

Part Four The Man with Fire in his Eyes

About the Author

Also by Craig Saunders

Bonus Novel Sample A Stranger's Grave by Craig Saunders

Into my heart an air that kills

From yon far country blows;

What are those blue remembered hills,

What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content,

I see it shining plain,

The happy highways where I went

And cannot come again.

Into my Heart an Air that Kills/A.E. Houseman

Part One

The Dead Boy

I.

Death Rides Out

On any warm weekend in the fading days of late September, people drank and ate in last of the year's sun. Fridays, they bought barbeque meat and beer and chilled wine for wives or girlfriends. David Farnham knew how things worked. He wasn't immune to the charms of cut grass or cold beer in the sun. By seven or eight in the evening, all the beer and meat would be gone. It was just before six when he put the last case of twelve cans of Carlsberg lager next to a hefty amount of meat in the boot of his Ford. All the important shopping packed, and a tub of coleslaw, too, to show willing.

David nodded to his son - a bright, light-haired boy called George.

'Go on, then.'

George grabbed the trolley and with the air of a man about an important task set out to return it to the Perspex shack where the trolleys hung out.

The days were still hot enough to burn pasty skin, and the nights balmy and sticky.

Those long days were the domain of the old and the parents and their little children. The short nights and the shadows belonged to youth.

Soon, it would be that vague time where day slid into evening, and then night would fall whether it was light out or not. The shift change was arbitrary, nothing to do with the setting sun, and when it came the men and women in their teens or twenties would hit the supermarket for their alcohol and cigarettes. The parents and their young children would retreat to the safety of their brightly lit homes for bed or movies or home deliveries of pizza, Indian, Chinese, or, like the Farnhams, an early evening mountain of charred meat.

The aisles were full with good children, grubby children, and the ones that always seemed to wail (while their parents looked harassed or even frightened by their own offspring). The air was hot and still and the children had been back in school for over two weeks.

Kids and adults both were tired, bothered and pissy from yet another week in an endless procession of weeks.

A man sat in a van outside, watching the people go by in the evening sun. He watched and waited. Parents passed, women who shopped alone in the afternoon, a man who limped along pushing a collection of tied-up trolleys back to base, old and older people, children. He read a newspaper and did not seem to look up, though he did.

Then, at last, the right moment. Opportunity always, always, fell in that man's lap. The man's name was Wayland Redman and it was George Farnham he saw.

Redman remained calm, his heart's rhythm comfortable and steady, and shifted from inertia to action.

*

It wasn't the smoothest job Wayland Redman ever pulled, but it was sweet enough. He got the boy, he got away. Good enough.

He sat for three hours with a tabloid newspaper spread on the steering wheel before the boy crossed his path. During the hot afternoon he smoked a little, and sometimes squeezed piss into a Starbucks' Frappuccino bottle. Little dribbles, mainly. His prostate wasn't what it used to be.

Wayland had begun to think his day would be a bust. He grew sure he'd go home with nothing but a half-full Frappuccino bottle and a bladder he couldn't empty.

Fucking cancer.

He was an old man, and he thought of the cancer as a kind of balance - when he thought of such things at all. Wayland Redman rarely wondered about things like purpose, and worth, and the darkness in men's hearts. He wasn't a good man, and people said only the good die young. Maybe that was true, and all the old people in the world were left behind because they were like him. But death caught up with everyone, even old fuckers, no matter how sly.

Wayland's hair was stained yellow at the front, grey over the rest of his head, but a full head of hair still. He brushed it back from his forehead every morning as he had for most of his adult life.

This day, he wore a suit on the way to the job. He left his home and walked the short distance to his lock-up where the van waited. The van always started and ran without a grumble. He wasn't meticulous, or especially careful, but a man looked after his tools. He knew that well enough and he always had enough money for the important things - he was very good at what he did, and it paid well. A man with lavish tastes would have been well recompensed for his time, and Wayland's expenses were minimal. His tastes ran to kippers and eggs for breakfast, his expenses to the weekly fee for his room, upkeep for the van, and cigarette money. There was little more he needed.

He was 75 years old and had never been questioned by the police in all his years. He wasn't a pervert. He didn't care about the kids.

The man who paid his bills?

But that's his business, he thought. Not mine.

Wayland's business was the little kid who pushed a trolley toward a trolley shed, or hut, or whatever people called them. Wayland didn't know.

Wayland hadn't the foggiest how old the kid was. Could've been ten, or eight...might be short for his age, or tall, or just right. Wayland never could tell how old a kid was, and never had given a fuck either way. The kid's age didn't matter, nor what happened to him after. Wayland's concern was getting the kid in the van. Nothing else.

Worst case scenario? Some dumb old driver would pull out in front of the van as Wayland drove away. Old people in car parks were a bigger hazard than random policemen, or someone snapping pictures on their phone. He wasn't worried about the van letting him down, because it was in perfect condition. The plates were stolen, and it was old enough that it had no GPS fitted as standard, no anti-theft devices lurking within to fuck him.

The old things were the best.

A painter and decorator's logo was emblazoned down the side of the van. People, if they remembered anything, would remember the name on the side of the van. Show people something big and easy, they don't bother to look at the minutiae.

Old people, heroes, passing coppers...he wasn't worried. He was a lucky man.

He grinned a little at that thought.

With a certain economy of movement, he folded the tabloid newspaper and laid it precisely on the passenger seat. He tossed his cigarette from the window and turned the key in the ignition. The skin on the back of his hand was loose and thin as he gripped the steering wheel. Old man hands, but strong enough.

The van rolled out slowly from between the tightly parked cars. This was England, so he was on the right side of the car. The Ford and the dad were on the left. The kid and the Perspex trolley park or whatever were on his side.

Wayland swerved and stopped a couple of feet ahead, so the kid wasn't in the way of the opening door. He threw the door open. The trolley was in front, the door to the kid's left, the van at his back. Only one way to run, but either way the kid wasn't fast enough and not expecting to be snatched from a supermarket car park.

The old man reached out his gnarled right hand, grabbed the kid's collar and in one smooth movement pulled him across his lap. He jammed the accelerator to the floor and the door swung shut under the momentum.

Done.

*

David Farnham heard his son scream as whoever drove the van - he couldn't see from where he was - snatched his only child. For two or three valuable seconds he didn't have the wherewithal to move, let alone cry out. His feet set, heavy as concrete.

A woman yelled something unintelligible to his ringing ears and the urgency, or just the volume of her shout, set him running. His feet flew and he ran faster than he'd run since he'd been in school, harder than a man of thirty-five who'd not exercised since should. His heart pounded wildly mere moments into his sudden run, partly from the fat in his arteries, but mostly from sheer horror.

Fuck, fuck, fuck...

Thought was, by and large, pushed down until there was nothing but primal fear, though one thought flashed on and off in his burning brain with startling clarity - his mother will kill me.

The van already turned out of the supermarket car park and onto a short one-way road leading to a roundabout, which in turn led to a sloped road up to the motorway. David Farnham felt his son slip away.

His feet slapped on the hard tarmac, his work shoes ill-suited to running on any surface. One of legions of the middle-aged and out of shape men, his shins already ached, his legs tired quickly and his heart thudded so hard his vision wavered.

He imagined he could still hear his son's terrified cries, but the van door was closed and the volume drowned and there was nearly three hundred feet of dead space between father and son.

A deep, low part of David's mind catalogued anything that might be useful. His oxygen-starved brain still ticked away, etching memories into his mind. It was a red van. He couldn't read the license plate. Some bold script stood out on the side and back of the van. 'Archer and Sons Painters and Decorators'.

Fuck...fuck...

That refrain was in the top of his mind.

The rest of the information sank down, his subconscious imagining, perhaps, that at some point he might be forced to repeat it all, until he finishing his list with the words, 'And that's all I can remember, officer. It happened too fast. I can't...'

The van speed up the incline that led to the motorway while the father's footsteps slowed.

Why hadn't he got into the car to chase the van?

His phone was in the car.

Shitting hell...I can't even call the police.

His mind worked as fast as a mind can when stars dance in a man's eyes. He ran on, though, because George was in that van and people didn't take kids for a joke.

Ahead, the van joined the motorway. Farnham slowed to a little faster than a walk now. It was pointless, because he could never, ever catch the van.

A car, unnoticed by Farnham, approached from behind. The driver wasn't looking at the road ahead but was busy on his mobile phone arguing his girlfriend. Travelling at just over 50 miles an hour, it clipped David Farnham and did not slow. The driver didn't see Farnham. He wasn't expecting a man to be running on the slip road, and he wasn't thinking about driving at all. Farnham was on the left side of the road. The car's left wing caught his right leg, which snapped instantly and high up - the femur. Break a shin, and a person might stand a while. The femur's the big thigh bone, though. Not a little break. If something hits that one hard enough to snap it, a man will go down. Or, maybe, up.

David went up, over, and twisted in the air.

The driver panicked at the thud on the wing panel, imagining he'd hit a bird or a fox or a dog. In his panic, he dropped his phone in the foot well.

'Jon, for fuck's sake. Jon?'

His girlfriend, still yelling.

The phone slide under Jon's heel. His heel slipped as he tried to brake, then he reached down so his head was below the dashboard to retrieve the phone and joined the traffic on the motorway at the same time.

A baker's van, high-sided, hit the rear of the car. The impact helped the van sideways, only around three or four feet over into the outside lane, but enough for it to take out a Mini trying to pass in the fast lane. The Mini hit the central reservation, bounced, and took out two cars behind it.

Up ahead, clear of the accident, the red Archer and Sons van with George and Wayland Redman was gone.

George's dad lay on the slip road, screaming because his leg was broken badly, his skull cracked from the fall, and his son lost.

From the corner of one bloodied eye he saw the wreck on the motorway.

A Jaguar going too fast hit the pile-up. The car in front - a Vauxhall - flipped end-over-end with the rear impact. Metal flew into the air forty or fifty yards away. David didn't see where a piece of spinning, sheared metal landed because it killed him first and landed afterward. It tore part of his skull and brain away before the metal (just a muffler) bounced three times and rolled to a stop a hundred yards or so from the mess of cars on the road.

A green van with military plates and medical markings slowed as it reached the smouldering carnage. The car behind didn't. It smashed the back of the van in as fire licked slowly at the front of the pile-up. The fire spread quickly, driven in the wind and spilled fuel, toward the green van.

The flames caught fast. The driver, stunned, with blood pouring down his face, didn't react. The van burned, along with the contents of several vials. The chemical compound in the vials vaporised and rose along with the thick smoke - just as the man with fire in his eyes had always intended.

That man's name was Kurt William O'Dell. He stood in the supermarket car park and watched the flames flicker, then grow.

In the ashes that drifted from that fire, the dead days began.

*

Daylight began to fade sometime between six and seven that night, but the night stayed light enough for hours longer - from the fire, from the swirling glow of emergency lights, and headlights of traffic backed up for miles and miles in both directions. The sickly orange glow of sodium arc lights shone over the supermarket car park. The bright fluorescents still worked within the store.

By the time fire engines arrived to fight the blaze, the ashes were blown far and wide. The fire that raged through the carnage was hot enough to create its own thermal, rising on the warm September air. Ash drifted over the supermarket, where it was swept into the air conditioning system to be pumped into the lungs of the shoppers.

Near to the fire, most bodies were incinerated beyond recognition. But one casualty, a man missing the rear portion of his skull and his brain, was beyond the heat, forgotten by the side of the slip road. His teeth gnashed at nothing, like a man in death throes, but by medical standards he was already an hour dead come sunset. His heart no longer beat, his brain retained no higher functions, and yet David Farnham dragged his cooling body through the grass and roadside shingle toward the fire. Perhaps it was some chemical thing, or some memory, which drove him on to find his son, or maybe something simple and primordial like the pull of bright fire.

O'Dell watched this first field trial and understood that it was nothing more than a rare effect of the compound unleashed over the town. 'Moderate and short-term functionality presents post-mortem in a very small number of patients'. Nothing mystical or magical but a simple, mundane secondary effect of science.

It was the primary effect on which he focused, but until that moment came, the crawling man proved an interesting diversion. Well back from the supermarket and fire both, he watched Farnham's meandering progress through a small set of binoculars. Coincidence was uninteresting to O'Dell. The fact that the boy's father was the one crawling, ignorant of his own death, didn't worry him or cross his mind.

A man like O'Dell focuses.

As the dead man neared the burning upholstery, rubber, flesh and fuel, his hair caught fire. At a distance, it was difficult to gauge the man's injuries, but the man with the binoculars could see the dead man's jaw snapping. Some kind of compulsion, or misfire in his disconnected nerves, perhaps.

A paramedic set out at a run toward the crawling man, now burning quite merrily.

The man who watched took the binoculars from his eyes now that enough people gathered outside the supermarket. This, the reason he came, even more than the Farnham boy.

'Two birds, one stone,' he whispered, unaware he spoke to himself and that his left hand jittered on the binoculars held at his side.

Fire flickered in his eyes still, even as he turned from the blaze.

*

The emergency worker cried as he watched the awful deaths through the wavering heat and smoke. The haze was heavy and it took a moment to register the crawling, burning shape of David Farnham as human.

'Christ... someone help!'

The paramedic, Damien Cobb, didn't know if anyone heard his shout and didn't stop to find out. The heat licked at Cobb as he ran. It was uncomfortable, bordering pain, but he was only in pain - the man on the road was dying.

Smoke drifted, heavy enough that he lost sight of the man. When he came into view again, Cobb saw just how badly the man was injured. The fire roared in Cobb's ears and the smoke stole his breath, but he had to get the poor bastard clear of the heat.

And put him out. Shit.

Cobb reached him, and the burned man clutched at the paramedic with a hand more bone than flesh.

How in the fuck is he still alive? It was the only half-way coherent thought in Cobb's head. The heat from the road was burning through the soles of Cobb's shoes. If he didn't get away from the fire, he'd die, too. But he couldn't. David Farnham's hand wouldn't unclench. The fire ran from Farnham to Cobb and the paramedic's sleeve began to burn. His hair fizzled, curling wildly.

Left no choice at all, Cobb lashed out with his free hand and slammed the man who should have been dead to the molten tarmac.

Before he could flee, another of many explosions from the wreckage blasted Cobb hard enough to send him into the air, then to roll down an embankment away from the fire.

*

While the heat swallowed David Farnham and Damien Cobb began to burn, Ben North watched. He stood well back from the inferno at the edge of a long cordon of policemen and women, all of whom were colleagues, none of whom he would call friend. He was at the edge, like he always was, because he couldn't stand besides the others. The horror in their faces would be like looking in a mirror, and his was a face he could barely stand each morning. But reflected in a hundred faces?

Nope.

The flaming man latched onto the paramedic and the paramedic's sleeve begin to burn. North glanced to left and right. No one else saw. He could have shouted, but the smoke and the heat and the crushing fear in his chest wouldn't let him.

The paramedic's going to die, he thought. Pointless, that thought, because even knowing that, and knowing his job was to do something, he couldn't move.

Stupid fucker's too close to the heat. He's going to burn up too.

Against his own will, Ben set out at a run through the swirling smoke. Flames leapt, heat blasted against him. The inferno was to his right. The paramedic and the man (the man entirely on fire. Surely he's dead?) were ahead and to the left, by the verge and the embankment below. The embankment, lower than the surface of the road, would be cooler.

Safer.

The melting tarmac was more like thick mud than road. It slowed him, pulled at his shoes. He strove to think through his fear, tried to make it go away through control alone.

Stop running that way, dickhead, his fear told him. Run the other fucking way.

Control, he told himself.

But control was an illusion. There was no way to control fear. It was heavy. He fought it, like he did every day, but always lost.

Run away, coward.

The smoke filled his lungs, blinded him, but he didn't stop. He wanted to. Damn, he wanted to be anywhere but here, breathing in the ash of dead people.

One foot in front of the other, thought the policeman. Move.

The paramedic flailed at the crawling, grasping carcass that had no right to be alive at all. The paramedic might yet survive. Ben hit him sidelong at exactly the moment the blast from a secondary explosion reached them. The wave slammed North and a punch to his whole body like the fist of God himself blew him toward the verge. His head slammed against hard stone between the tarmac and the verge, and Cobb fell with him.

*

II.

Francis Drew Sutton

Around the time the accident happened, Francis Drew Sutton waited impatiently while a woman roughly her age rang Francis' purchases through the supermarket till. She only had a bottle of juice, an oat bar, some fruit, a pint of milk, a yoghurt - a single woman's lonely Friday night shop. She was married, but her husband was never around. She may as well have been single.

The woman at the till glanced at Francis with distaste, like she thought her customer just another rich bitch. Good, expensive, clothes fitted Francis' good, expensive body very well. She knew it, but what was she going to do? Dress down, get fat, just to keep other people happy?

Screw that.

Francis smiled sweetly at the woman in a way that said 'fuck off' more succinctly that a man ever could.

As a piece of debris killed David Farnham, Francis pushed her debit card into the slot underneath the keypad at the end of the till. She tapped out her PIN code, followed the instructions on the small screen and removed the card. She put the card in her purse, largely ignoring the photo sandwiched in the see-through plastic window, like most people do. You look at something every day, you hardly notice it anymore.

'Thank you,' she said to the woman at the till. The woman's teeth were slightly yellowed, like she was a smoker or a big tea drinker.

Francis' teeth were as near to perfect white as they could be. She had a confident smile, the smile of a woman who was beautiful and knew it.

She had a good walk, one that sort of swayed, perhaps practised once when she was younger, but now just a natural, unconscious thing. A woman who walked like she was dancing. Men noticed her, whether they were specifically looking at the women on a Friday night or not. Then, without fail, they looked away and pretended they hadn't taken an eyeful. Their looks were longing, like she was unattainable, definitely, but still a woman worth a second, third, and fourth look.

Francis was immune to the stares she got. She was used to it. 37 years old, she'd been living with it a long time. And she didn't mind at all. She'd had a little help as the years wore on, paid for by her husband's fat bank account. The gym did the rest.

Young guys, old guys...they were all pretty much the same. Most acted like dippy teenagers around her. She liked confident men, though, not the dippy kind that drooled after her. She didn't particularly like her husband, but he was away with his work more often than not, and she was far from unattainable. Even with an absentee husband, Francis Sutton was rarely short of company.

Stepping from the warmth of the supermarket, expecting frigid air, she found instead the night sky lit by fire. Maybe three or four hundred yards away, metal screeched, deep within the blaze, or careened into the air. Small explosions as petrol caught fire, the stench of burning rubber. Ash like snow drifted over a crowd with horrified faces who either pushed get a better look, or just get to their waiting cars and drive away.

Some took photos and video on their phones - the younger people, mainly. Others (mostly the older people) spoke into their phones instead, calling the emergency services.

There were already plenty of flashing blue lights up ahead, though, battling amidst the orange glow. Francis didn't bother calling anyone, simply watched the firelight, the blue glow, but the people all around her, too.

Look at them, she thought. The next good book won't be a bible. It'll be fucking Facebook.

Photos went to Instagram, or Twitter, or Facebook, or any number of sites. Older people spoke in panicked voices to the beleaguered operators at emergency desks around the county. All excited or frightened or shocked, some loud and some hushed voices. And all of them breathing in the ashes of the dead and miniscule particles of a compound first used over half a century before.

*

Ben North wasn't any kind of hero. He'd never told any of his colleagues, his brothers, or his wife that fear ate at him each day, and if there was one thing he feared more than anything else, it was donning his uniform.

He'd been transferred out of London to this town in Norfolk. A smallish town. The kind of place they sent people with mental problems in the hope that a quieter life would fix them.

Sure, there was still crime. It wasn't like he was some Victorian with melancholia bundled off to chill out and watch the sea. But countryside crime wasn't London-crime, in either scale or venom. A kind of holiday, then. But it wasn't far enough. The holiday Ben needed was on a beach somewhere sunny with no one else around. Perhaps for the rest of his life.

The blast that took Cobb and North the rest of the way over onto the grass verge and down the embankment also slammed the two men together. Cobb's descent stopped in a tangle of limbs just below the road, his neck broken from colliding with North. His sleeves and hair and shoes burned, then smouldered, then went out. He didn't notice anything but the pain in his head, as his hair burned to the scalp, then charred his skin. He felt nothing below his neck, but only for a short time. He didn't feel his chest stop working. Everything was cool, and dark, and that was just fine.

North didn't die. He bounced, rolled, bounced and slid.

Maybe it's Post-Traumatic Stress, thought North, before he hit the grass and his breath rushed out. Then, no thought at all as something inside cracked. The bolt of pain that came after couldn't be alleviated with a yell or scream, because he had no breath.

I'm dying, he thought. Just like I knew I would.

That should have been a comfort, maybe, but it wasn't.

He twisted one more time, his leg whipped around a tree and pain turned everything black and red. He came to rest somewhere in a sparse copse that was mostly saplings, unconscious.

*

Giant panels of glass ran the length of the supermarket front. Each pane was reinforced, thick and tough...but they weren't designed to withstand the blast that came from the motorway. The blast sent debris hurtling through the sky at over a hundred miles per hour, and accelerating.

Something large and metallic shattered the window directly behind Francis. It flew further, taking out two tills at the tobacco counter and killing three women who'd been gabbing beside the lottery instants.

Glass fell around the crowd outside in huge, deadly shards. When it settled, she stared at the gawkers. Not one had been hit.

'Shitfuck!' said a younger man, his voice high pitched with shock. Someone else giggled at the swear, or maybe the man's voice.

That seems about right, thought Francis.

A blackened hunk of metal rested in the supermarket's first aisle, and another jagged object had obliterated the counter where people prayed for a windfall they were most unlikely to ever win, and stocked up on impulsive chocolate, or cigarettes they needed and gum that wouldn't help take the smoke-stench away. She heard the tick of cooling metal from the debris in the first aisle - things burned and popped and hissed and exploded.

Furniture polish, she though. Things like that. Leather wax and shoe polish and air fresheners.

Inside, the sprinkler system kicked in.

People were screaming and crying now, their phones forgotten and expressions of gaping awe gone.

A large smear of blood and something more solid covered the little pieces of MDF wood of the tobacco counter. A tangled trolley, crushed and broken, the wire frame haphazard and grotesque, held onto some flesh and torn clothing.

That explosion was shortly followed by a third and a fourth. A wave of superheated air blew Francis and others backward. She landed on her perfect gym-bought arse. An old woman fell beside her. The woman's teeth clacked shut as her head hit the concrete.

Francis rolled, pushed herself to her feet, and tried to help the woman stand. The top half of a set of teeth, false, lay on the floor beside the woman. She didn't take Francis' offered hand, but instead clutched at her left arm with a grimace. Her face was grey as her hair, even bathed in the light of the fire and fluorescents.

The old girl's having a heart attack.

'Shitfuck ' just about sums that up, thought Francis.

No one in the small crowd seemed interested in helping. People were on the ground, or stood dumbly, bleeding or yelling. A man cradled a screaming child. Even to Francis' inexperienced ears, the cry sounded more of fear than pain. Many of them looked away, like they actively wanted nothing to do with the wounded or the frightened or the woman dying at their feet.

But for one guy. He looked, all right. But he wasn't the kind of man who helped. Francis understood that the second she saw him.

He grinned. A full on, toothsome grin, with every tooth in his head on show. He had dark, maybe black eyes. For a second Francis thought she saw flames there, within his eyes. But it was just the firelight reflected, nothing more. As his gaze turned toward her, Francis looked down. She knelt and took the woman's hand, thankful for the pretence.

She didn't want that man's help. When she glanced back he had gone.

The old woman's chest rattled loudly enough that Francis heard it over the next, smaller, explosion. She'd heard that rattle before. When her father had died, he'd made that noise.

That's a death rattle.

'Someone...please help...' she said, but not loudly enough.

Francis had no idea what to do, and then it was out of her hands. There was no pulse. What she wanted to do more than anything else right then was to get in her Mercedes and drive home, where things made sense. But the woman was dead, and she couldn't just leave, could she?

She closed the old girl's eyes with her fingertips, then took deep breaths, trying to calm herself. What did she care? Just some old woman. It wasn't like Francis had known her.

Don't be such a bitch.

The woman's eyes, which just closed, opened and those eyes were full of blood, haemorrhaged.

'Fuck,' said Francis, jumping back.

'Lady?' she said, before realising she didn't know where to go with the sentence.

The woman's eyes closed just as suddenly as they'd opened.

Just some kind of death burp, thought Francis, and though she'd nearly been scared enough to shit herself, she caught herself on the cusp of breaking out into nervous giggles.            Alone in a sea of stunned, confused people, Francis felt like the only sane person in an asylum. She began to move away.

Time to get the fuck out of this circus.

The woman was dead and the police could deal with it. There was nothing she could do about some dead woman she didn't even know.

As Francis turned away and took the first step toward the open air, and her car somewhere in the dark, she heard a click behind her. It sounded like a set of teeth closing on nothing.

*

The grinning man, Kurt William O'Dell, melted away from the crowd the moment the woman stopped staring at him. Even though largely immune to physical attractions, he had to admit that there was something arresting about her.

When he was safely shrouded once more in the dark, he took a mobile phone from his jacket - a slightly larger and heavier version than even the smartest of phones a civilian might own. He held the phone up, toward the supermarket entrance and the people there, rather than at the fire. The phone was in O'Dell's steady right hand, his jumping left hand thrust into his jacket pocket, the rictus-grin permanent on his lined face.

The live feed from the phone streamed directly to a man he had never met.

Everyone had to answer to someone.

'Sir, are you seeing this?' said O'Dell.

'Is this live?'

'Yes, Sir. The feed streaming now is current. Approximately sixty minutes since introduction, primary effects in two confirmed subjects. Secondary effects of airborne dispersal, I suspect, very shortly.'

'Culpability?'

'Response time from emergency services went as expected. Perimeter established with no contrary indications of post-event breach. Traffic diversions are all smooth. Primary area testing is still underway, and secondary area dampening is going ahead right now - they're good teams, Sir. It will be a full sweep before midnight. Zero residual effects, test parameters successfully limited to primary area of effect, and media in play as we speak. Clean and smart and all tidied away. Sir.'

Silence, then, from the other end of the line. O'Dell held his impatience in check, along with his natural tendency to yell at slow people and shoot outright idiots. The camera in his fist did not sway from the scene. Nothing wrong with his right hand at all.

'Sir?' he asked, finally, his hatred of waiting beating his studied calm.

'The effects in initial studies were variable, yes?'

'Yes, Sir.'

'I was given to understand that post-mortem animation was extremely rare. I have the statistics. I have your reports. Right here, in fact. 'An effect which presents in less than 1% of viable candidates.' Does this sound familiar?'

'Sir, yes it does.'

'And yet there are, in this first field trial, two confirmed incidents?'

O'Dell didn't assume for a second, ever, that he was the man's only source of information.

'Temporary. Two minutes for the first and below one minute for the second. Considerably shorter than our longest surviving subjects.'

'And in this report, you stated, 'Secondary effects are more common by far. Within a sample of one hundred subjects we can confidently expect seventy to exhibit greater or lesser degrees of confusion, anger, and volatility.' Is that also accurate, do you recollect?'

'Sir.'

'Then where in the fuck is my weapon?'

O'Dell lowered his head for a moment and stared at the ground. Not chagrined, but full of rage.

Bite it down, he told himself. Bide.

'Yes, Sir. I remember my words. If I may?'

'Please do.'

'The dispersal method necessitated by an early public trial is imperfect. Atmospheric saturation works well, but efficacy can only be adversely affected. Perfection was never the intention, Sir. Not at this time. It's a test run and the compound itself is still in developmental stages.'

This last he added carefully, though he felt like a parent explaining a simple concept to a slow child.

The first shouts of real fear from the gaggle of men and women by the supermarket doors began. O'Dell checked the screen to ensure he captured everything. He never allowed avoidable mistakes in others and applied the same criteria to his own actions.

'Ah,' said the man at the end of the line.

'Indeed. As you can see, even vastly diluted, it remains more effective than any other current chemical agent. Sir.'

So, fuck you, thought O'Dell, but he did not voice that thought, either.

The incident reached a natural conclusion in slightly under ten minutes. Only one man remained, exhibiting extreme confusion. O'Dell watched the man walk from the scene to the car park, where he sat on the bonnet of a Hyundai attempting to clean the blood from his hands with his tongue.

'I've seen enough. O'Dell?'

'Agreed, Sir. I think the footage, coupled with autopsy reports and data from any survivors of initial exposure should more than suffice at this stage.'

'Then get clean and clear. Good work.'

O'Dell closed down the phone and walked away. He left the bloodied man to his endeavours. The fire teams would clear the scene soon, and those from outside this tight circle of effect were already being loaded onto buses nearby.

All tidied away.

He drove away and took country lanes. He passed an army road block with no questions asked, then turned south.

'Good work,' he said over and over as he drove, with his teeth bared and bright in the dashboard lights, and his black eyes burning.

*

Ben North's first thought, coming around from the blow to his head, was that his back was broken. He could barely breath, and when he did the pain in his ribs - on the right side, at the back - was excruciating.

Blood ran along his scalp, tickling and wet.

Maybe brain damage, he thought, but in an idle way, addled by his injuries. The thought passed by without even a hint of panic.

He shifted a little, trying to feel the edge of his pain, and found it. Still short of breath, his scream gurgled in his throat, dragging bile up. The edge he found was something deep inside his lower leg. The smallest movement stabbed at every nerve ending in his leg, and more besides, up his back and through his guts, even.

Frightened tears welled in his eyes.

Then, after laying still and too scared to move again, he realised that his back couldn't be broken.

I can move. It's going to hurt...but I can.

He remembered, hazily, that he was a policeman. Policemen had radios. Gingerly, he checked his body for a radio, but found nothing.

Somewhere above him, torn loose, the radio lay by a dead paramedic.

North didn't remember the paramedic right then, and he couldn't see far enough to recognised the crumpled shape of Damien Cobb.

Nothing for it.

North jammed his teeth together, stood and took some weight on his legs. Something popped low down in his left shin. It carried right on popping - all the way through the muscle and skin at the side of his calf.

This time, he had enough breath for a real scream.

When he could think again, he wondered if he hadn't passed out for a while. This time around he remembered more. The paramedic he'd tried to save. The traffic accident just above him, and the explosion, and the awful heat.

The fire burned, still.

Ben thought he'd known fear, facing down drug addicts and tattooed lunatics with mean dogs. He didn't know...he hadn't known. Never could he have imagined just how deep fear could be. He felt it in his stomach, and then in his bladder.

If I pissed myself, would it smell like fear?

People were dead or dying up there in the flames, and he was too afraid to even shout out for help. Right then, he hated himself worse than ever.

If he could make it from the dark in the trees even as far as the reach of the supermarket lights in the distance, then someone would find him. At least then he could just get away. A hospital. Pension. Disability.

If he was lucky, he'd have a limp for the rest of his life.

Something else blew, up on the motorway, and Ben's bladder finally gave in.

Maybe his father had been right. The elder Mr. North always said Ben had a streak of yellow in him.

*

The clicking sound was the dead woman trying to settle her false teeth back in her mouth. Francis felt like laughing, for the same reason people sometimes laugh at funerals. Some weird response to shock, she guessed.

I can just walk the fuck away. This circus now officially sucks.

But the old woman latched onto her arm and pulled Francis close enough to clamp her false teeth on Francis' sleeve.

For a moment, Francis' confusion ruled, and she couldn't understand that the old, dead woman was actually attempting to bite her.

It didn't last long. Francis hit the woman with an open-handed slap and bounced back on her heels - away. The only direction she was worried about right then was away. The woman dropped and kind of slid out, arms and legs losing weight and strength and animation, so she looked just about as dead as any corpse Francis had ever seen.

'You okay?' a man beside her asked. She swore, startled, before her heartbeat settled back. The man who spoke had a weak, half-arsed ginger-looking beard.

Am I? she wondered. Am I OK?

Maybe this is what nutters feel like all the time.

'She's dead.' She tried to find the words to explain further, but she couldn't.

The guy took Francis' arm and helped steady her.

'Some weird night,' he said, letting go of her arm.

She nodded, looked back at the man and saw he was pulling his belt free of his trousers, and that what she took for a weak beard wasn't. A thin sheen of blood covered the man's lower cheeks. He scratched compulsively with the nails on one hand even while he undid his trousers with the other hand. He seemed entirely unaware he did either thing.

'Never taken a shit on a pensioner before. You?'

She stumbled, walking backward.

A kid of six or seven years kicked an adult in the shins. Probably the child's mother. The woman completely ignored the child and stared at the receipt for her shopping. She seemed to be absorbed in muttering the numbers on the print out.

'What in fuck's name?'

The man squatted down. 'What?' he said, like he was just buying a coffee or smoking a cigarette.

Some people, like her, were horrified. The man with the bloody cheeks desperately strained as he hovered above the dead old woman.

Everyone's nuts.

The old woman's dentures were still stuck in her sleeve.

Someone screamed, and it wasn't her. Francis still walked backward. She couldn't risk looking away. A few people tried to help others who didn't look like they could be helped. A woman with one of those burlap looking shopping bags threw herself face first into a thick metal pole, bounced back with a mashed nose and split lips, then tried again. Whatever she was attempting to do to her face obviously wasn't successful.

Run.

Francis Drew Sutton was a long way from perfect, but she'd never been stupid.

Other people, sane people, like her, decided on the same course of action when half a woman appeared at the entrance. She wasn't alive, like the old lady, Francis realised. A security guard from the store was pushing the broken thing toward the entrance. The remains left a slug-trail of blood and viscera in her wake. The security guard made train noises as he pushed.

'Choo-choo,' he was saying. Didn't matter at all to Francis. By then, she had a good head of steam going herself, headed wherever everyone else wasn't.

Twenty yards free of the insanity she still clearly heard someone say, 'Mind, you're on my foot.'

Francis felt that laugh bubbling up again. She bit down on it.

She dismissed the idea of getting away in her car because she could see the motorway was jammed. She thought about her husband, maybe calling him, and dismissed that, too.

Ahead, though, there were plenty of blue lights. Where there were blue lights, there would be police, and order, and sanity.

She ran at an angle toward the embankment, aiming to skirt the fires. The embankment led up to the road, but to get clear of the heat of the fire, and to the safety of those blue lights, she had to get through a narrow strip of trees. Saplings mostly, but some of the larger branches on the mature trees - poplars, she thought - snatched at her clothing and whipped at her face or caught her hair.

Even below the inferno the heat was immense, uncomfortable.

It was dark down there, thrown into deep shadow by the light of the fire and the sweeping blue lights on thick smoke. The long heels on her sandals stuck in the dirt, but there was no way she was going on barefoot. She imagined all the discarded things littering the embankment. Broken bottles, twisted cans and twisted pieces of wreckage. She strained to see, but it was pointless. She had no choice but to cover the distance blind.

She shook, even though it was hot. Life never seemed to matter until you saw real horror. Shoes, clothes, things - they seemed important. But all of those could be replaced. Being able to buy whatever she wanted wasn't the point.

The woman was cut in half...like a carriage, decoupled. Choo.

She thought this as she put her foot down and landed on something softer than the grass. The softer thing cried out, but the cry was little more than rushing air.

Francis yelped. Already panicked, she kicked out and was rewarded by another muffled shout.

Right then, on the border of the kind of terror that made people hurtle headlong until they ran out of breath, she figured fuck the dark and fuck the mud and fuck the fire; stumbling over person hiding in the trees below the embankment was incentive enough to get her running again.

Her gym-trained muscles bunched and tightened, ready to hit the incline, when she heard the person call out. The voice was weak, but the words were unmistakable.

'Help? Help me?'

Whoever it was, they didn't sound mad enough to shit on old women who tried to bite people with their stinking yellow dentures.

He sounded plain old scared.

You sure, Francis? How sure are you that the insane aren't cunning?

Then, another thought, and one she was more accustomed to thinking.

Just leave them. Get safe. Send someone back.

That sounded like something her husband would suggest, and advice she'd been more than happy to follow.

Her friends? Her family?

'Fuck 'em, Francis,' he would have said. 'You don't need 'em.'

That went both ways, though, didn't it? She'd taken his advice long enough to stop caring about him, too.

Didn't see that coming, did you? Prick.

'Help me,' said the man in the darkness again. Not just frightened, but in pain.

Of course he's hurt. I just stepped on him and kicked him in the mouth.

Maybe he was a survivor from the wreck, though. Maybe he was dying.

With fire ahead and madness behind and her and this man in between both, Francis made her choice, and met Ben North.

*

III.

Wayland Redman

Wayland Redman stayed on the motorway for just five minutes. He was aware of the cars that piled up in his wake, if not the extent of the wreck. He was aware, too, that a wider game was being played...if he could not see the whole picture, know the rules, or even recognise the game, though, it was because O'Dell willed it to be so.

Wayland thought perhaps his luck finally ran out, meeting a road block as he left the main road for quieter streets. It looked like a random thing, set up by the police - the kind they often lay on when they're bored, or really looking for something else other than drunks and bad car owners.

His sweat had yet to dry from the days' heat, and though the night was cooler, the van was not. Ahead, everyone else was stopped by a simple wave of the hand. Policemen half-heartedly spoke to drivers and made a show of checking tread on tyres.

Wayland glanced down, but the kid was out cold in the foot well beneath the passenger seat.

'Fuck it,' said Wayland.

The kid might be unconscious, but awake probably would've been better. No time to prop him up, or coach him, or scare the piss from him into pretending to be a grandson or something.

Screwed, thought Wayland.

But then he wasn't.

Of all the cars and vans that were stopped, his was the only one waved through without incident.

Wayland smiled and nodded and passed. Sometimes he was lucky. Sometimes O'Dell thought ahead.

He passed through the outskirts of the small town and onto an industrial estate, mostly comprised of large warehouses where things like old furniture or power tools were sold. Out the other side, he took a few turns around one of the country's many uniform housing estates. Ten miles south of the accident he took the bypass, then returned to the motorway. From there he drove at a steady 60 mph. The drive took forty minutes and ended at a concertinaed garage door.

The kid was still out. He had a welt the size of an egg on the side of his head.

Once, Wayland had been a killer. That was another life, though, and this was his life now. The kid was worth money. Dead, he wasn't worth a penny.

The old man stepped from the van to remove a thick padlock from the garage door before he pressed a button on the his key fob. The door rattled into the roof space while Wayland drove in, then eased himself from the seat of the van for the last time that day, kneading his back and wincing at the pressure in his bladder. He flicked on the lights and used the fob to close the door behind them, then hung it and the keys from a hook on the wall.

The kid stirred.

Eight, decided Wayland. The kid was eight years old.

A small sink and kitchen unit stood against the back wall, with a kettle on top and tea rings on the work surface. He filled the kettle with water from a five litre bottle before he set it going. A chipped and stained mug waited with a teabag and one sugar in it and a plate over it to keep out spiders and dust. He had only powdered milk, because he never knew when he was going to be able to make it to the lock up.

The kid switched from aimless movement to muttering.

'Waking up, are we?'

No answer, but he didn't expect one.

Time to get to work, then. Tea after. Kid first.

Wayland set his gut and lower back as best he could, then pulled the child out and over and onto his shoulder - the child weighed next to nothing, and although Wayland was in his seventies, he was still strong enough to pick up a little kid.

The boy mumbled, groggy, and his words didn't make much sense to Wayland. Either way, the kid couldn't have said anything to stop the old man carrying him down damp concrete steps into the dark room below.

*

George Farnham opened his eyes and in the meagre light of a candle set in front of him was an old man with a short cigarette stuck to his bottom lip.

'Now, kid, if you scream, I'm going to kill you. If you fight me, I'm going to kill you. If you're a good boy, you'll get out of this alive.'

He's lying, thought George. Or...he doesn't really know.

'Nod if you understand,' said Wayland.

George nodded.

'I reckon you're a smart boy. Do as you're told, and you and me'll get on just fine, right?'

George nodded again.

'Good. Now, sit tight. Sit right tight,' said Wayland. Then he headed up the stairs. He closed a trapdoor on a length of string behind him, and George was alone with his candle in the room.

The room was big enough to walk around in. It was bare of any kind of decoration or comfort. A simple, plain, rough concrete cell. George didn't get up and walk, though. What was the point? Run to the trapdoor and bash against it, or try to dig his way out, like a hero?

He wasn't a hero. He was a boy. He knew things, sometimes. Not everything, because nobody should know everything. Even at eight George understood that much about his talent.

He did knew perfectly well he wasn't getting out of the room by that old man's hand.

He pulled his knees up to his chest and hugged himself like that while he rocked and tried to find some kind of comfort. He cried, too, because he was eight years old, he was in a dark, dank basement somewhere, and because the man with the cigarette and the wrinkled old face was a liar. His words came from his mouth and not his eyes.

George was a smart kid. Smart enough to know he was going to die, but it wouldn't be the old smoking man.

He's waiting for the other one, thought George and when these strange thoughts came to him, he knew they were true. They always were.

*

Steam drifted from a cup of tea on a small table while Wayland sat on an ancient wooden chair with one broken strut and waited. Every time he moved the chair tilted a little, but that was fine, because he was a man used to that economy of movement that came from being old.

He tapped ash into another mug he used for an ashtray, whether needed or not. He checked his watch. The man who had only ever identified himself as Mr. O'Dell was late. Any later and Wayland knew he'd have to leave, and cut his losses.

It wasn't like O'Dell to be late. But when Wayland switched on his tiny portable television and saw the news, he thought maybe he'd been caught in the snarl up. The presenter sat at his desk, speaking to a reporter close to the scene, with just a few images that looked like stock photos. The kind of thing reporters did from inside hostile territory, like North Korea, or Iran. But that made no sense to Wayland; why would there be no film of the accident? Footage of a horrific blaze, maybe a blackened car that hinted at a painful death; these things were gold dust to news programmes.

The reporter said something about a chemical spill and with a sour face on him, like he wanted to call bullshit on the whole story. But everyone's got a job, Wayland guessed.

The TV droned on, but Wayland only half-listened to it, while his other half listening out for the boy, just in case he cried out. Not that it would do the kid much good - the lock-up was in a quiet side street and the kid was under a couple of feet of concrete.

He checked the watch on his left wrist once again (the watch, like everything Wayland owned, reliable) before he tried to tap ash from the cigarette between the fingers of his right hand and found he'd already smoked it to the filter.

Both measures of time were reliable enough.

Time to go.

The garage door jolted, then started to roll up. The fluorescents winked out for a second, then hummed back to life. And there he was; all suited up, that odd scar pale on his forehead, and his ever-present fuck-you grin. Mr. O'Dell.

Wayland was glad of the bright, unnatural light overhead. Few things could get his heart beating above a murmur. Perhaps the feel of another's blood on his skin, or a wet blade in his hand...he was well used to the dark and the things that happened there. Still, though, the man before him made Wayland's skin crawl and turn cold. O'Dell's eyes looked through Wayland, at something Wayland could never see, but whatever it was, it felt like a bad thing yet to come. Always there was a sense of some future pain when he met with O'Dell.

And that fucking insane grin that never left.

O'Dell stopped in front of the old man and looked down with eyes that were black and deep and always seemed alight with madness or mirth or both. O'Dell's teeth were a little yellow, as you'd expect. His skin pale and spotted with brown, and his unassuming hair that was always brushed back from a forehead that bore a single penny-sized scar. Though he looked maybe sixty, at a push, Wayland guessed O'Dell was older than sixty, maybe even the same age as Wayland. The madman just wore those years a damn sight better. Probably helped that he didn't smoke and didn't have cancer up his arse.

'The boy?' said O'Dell.

'Down in the cellar,' said Wayland.

'Then your job is done. I will have work for you again. Soon.'

O'Dell held out Wayland's payment.

Wayland had little need of those things money could buy - not any more. What he needed was respite from the cancer, and the man before him had his brand of medicine on tap, all wrapped up in enough cash to cover his room and board for a few months. The cash was fine. The pills, better. He didn't know what was in the pills. All he knew was that he should have been a couple of years in the grave. And yet here he was - playing hooky and loving it.

The man still gave Wayland the fucking creeps, though. Enough to keep their dealings simple and quick, enough that he never asked what happened to all the kids over the years. He never would ask, either, because there were plenty of things about O'Dell it wouldn't be healthy to know. Curious about their fate, definitely - but not enough to ask, or care.

'You may leave, my friend,' said O'Dell.

Wayland didn't need to be told twice.

O'Dell would sort out the kid and close up when he was done, and Wayland was quite happy to leave the weird bastard to it.

*

George had only been down in the dark for long enough for Wayland Redman to drink one and a half cups of tea. George had no idea how long it had been, but without any of the doubt that an adult might have entertained the boy knew he was as good as dead - he accepted it without question, while an adult might have wasted time railing against.

By the light of his candle George sent up a small prayer. He thought about his dad, his mum, his teachers, his friends. He didn't believe in God. Not really. But he prayed nonetheless, though without hope. Just him, the candle, but then...a feeling. A blankness.

The other one.

Now he knew why sensed no danger back at the supermarket. Whoever created this aura, this dead space, was far more gifted than George.

The man with fire in his eyes, he thought.

He was never sure where these thought came from, but not entirely surprised by them, either. These thoughts were natural for him, something he'd always had and never spoken of. The thoughts were clear enough - something of the mind, something of emotion. His gift came with words and wisdom beyond his years, too, so George understood very early on that to tell anyone would be bad.

The dark man has come for me and he wears so many crowns they weigh him down.

Brightness filled the cellar. A man stepped into the light, silhouetted for a moment in the fluorescents above, and began to descend down the wooden stairs. Some children might have screamed, or cried, or pleaded. George did none of these things. He blew out the candle.

Don't feed him, came the next thought. Flames will only make him stronger.

The other man laughed - a horrible flat sound, and far too close.

'George Farnham,' he said in a voice full of good humour and long teeth. 'I believe you know me already. We are well met.'

George would have been bright and intuitive even had he not known the answers to questions if they were in a person's head. Like how he knew his dad was DEAD. Like how he knew all the times his mum was COMING with her friend John.

Some words and concepts didn't resonate with meaning for George like they might an adult, but he knew enough to dread the dark man before him.

But, too, something blossomed deep inside George. A candle just for him, a brightness in his mind. Hope? A chance?

No, he thought. Not that. Not with this man.

But that light would not go out.

'Come along, George. Let's have a chat, shall we?'

The man's words were easy, but his tone wasn't. It was off, stinky, like fish. George hated fish.

'You're a dickhead,' said George, dragging out the strongest word he could muster. George's dad told him not to swear, but his dad was DEAD. This man was the cause of it. He couldn't bring himself to say the bad swears, even now. George was a good boy.

'George Farnham...such a tongue on you! I do believe we're going to have some fun before this is all over. What do you think of that?'

'Just let me go.'

'I can't, Master Farnham, because you're special, aren't you? You know that, right?'

George saw no sense in denying it. He knew the dark man was special, too. He felt it in the blackness that surrounded them both, heavier than the shadows in the cellar.

George nodded, and wondered. Could the man in front of him feel, see, hear the hope in George's head? Did he see the shape of things to come?

'You know things, don't you, young man? And you don't know how.'

CAREFUL, thought George. Don't say anything else.

'Do you see the future, George?'

George forced himself to say nothing. He wouldn't even let himself move, and looked away, too, like he'd learned to do if he ever had to lie to his parents.

'Good for you. Good for you, George.'

George didn't see the future, but it was all laid out before him. A jigsaw puzzle, but one with the big pieces for little kids.

Two words popped into his head. THE MILL.

Nothing but black, dangerous images when he thought of those words. People full of pain and empty of everything else. As those words came into his mind his fear grew and he could not help or fight it. His bladder let go. He felt ashamed and afraid...but that different thought, one of his older and wiser thoughts, came to him again and it was a whisper, like a secret: CAREFUL.

'Ah,' said the man. 'You see it. Yes, George. You're coming with me. We're going to the Mill. You'll like it there, George, because though you don't understand it...shit, you're only eight...I'm about to save your life.'

The man leaned forward. He might be able to read minds. Fire did dance in his eyes, and his whole face was dangerous and crazy - but the man lied with every word. He leant in further, and waved his left hand fast, right beside George's eye. George couldn't help but react. As he did, the man jabbed out with a syringe he held in the other hand, unerring even in the shadows, into the thin tissue of George's neck.

As George gawped, then later, while he drifted down, just two words remained in his thoughts: THE MILL.

*

Wayland Redman checked no one watched before he keyed in the number to enter his home. He was a careful man, a dangerous man, and a sneak.

Already he'd put O'Dell and the kid from his mind. Neither the dark man nor the boy mattered. He thought about getting a good night's kip, and a decent breakfast in the morning, and very little else troubled him.

Inside, quietly, he passed through the low lights set along the hallway that led him to his bedroom. His walk became a shuffle, his back stooped.

He made it to his room with no problems. There, he undressed swiftly, managing buttons and zips with deft, strong fingers - he didn't suffer at all with his joints. He took a set of flannel pyjamas from the wardrobe that stood against the wallpapered wall and slipped them on, along with his slippers and bathrobe.

The room had an en suite toilet, where he brushed his teeth well and pissed poorly. He was still grimed from the road and from the warmth of the day and the night. A little water on his face was the best he could do, and a good rub with a thin old towel instead of soap, which he never seemed to get.

His room was hot - stifling, even. It always was. The heating stayed on in winter and summer whether he liked it or not (and he didn't). He'd rather not sleep in anything at all, but there was only so much he could do. It wasn't, after all, up to him any longer. But at least the window opened. He pushed it out as far as it would go, but the night was still and there was no breeze. At his bedside, he removed the dressing gown and kicked free of his slippers, then popped himself up onto the bed. Someone came toward his room - just soft footfalls, out in the hall.

Bugger, he thought. He worked up some spit and let a small trickle loose down his chin, but it was only Roo. She was a good girl. He could get away with a little more when she was working the nightshift.

She insisted on being called Roo though her name was Rowena, but she always seemed to have a smile ready. She poked her head round the doorframe.

'Still awake, Wayland?'

'Yup,' he said, tailing back a bit on his act. Roo wasn't daft as some. Down the hall, Maureen yelled out and they both jumped, then shared a smile.

Maureen only ever said 'Help me'. Same thing, over and over again. It got wearing.

Wayland nodded and gave Rowena a wink.

'Easy, tiger,' smiled Roo. 'Can I get you anything? Glass of milk?'

Wayland shook his head and mumbled something unintelligible, like an old man with only half his marbles might.

'Okay, honey. Night.'

'Night,' Wayland muttered.

Roo left to check Maureen. Maybe the old bitch had fallen out of bed again. He hoped she broke her hip. People their age died of broken hips.

Could happen, he thought.

It was Roo who occupied Wayland's mind while he drifted into sleep, rather than the day's jaunt or George Farnham or the dark man or noisy old bitches.

Great tits, he thought while sleep crept over him. In the night, he dreamed about driving a kitchen knife right between them. In the morning he woke up with a wood-on like teak.

'Would you look at that,' he said to himself as he got up. 'A God-damned miracle.'

He even had to sit to piss.

'Miracle,' he said, and brushed his teeth while his old man cock fell to sleep again.

It was still hot, but the day hadn't started bad at all. Wayland slid into his slippers and gown and headed to the dining room of the residential home with the other doddery bastards, looking forward to his kippers and eggs.

*

IV.

The Orphan

George's mum's name was Eleanor. She liked it when John fucked her hard and called her name.

'Eleanor...sweet Jesus...Eleanor. God. Fuck...I'm coming.'

Things like that.

Eleanor's husband's name was David, but she didn't want to worry about that right now. Currently, Eleanor was on all fours, flicking channels on the TV while John bashed away at her enthusiastically from behind.

'John, wait. Stop...'

'Can't...not...now...'

'Just fucking stop!' she said, and pushed back hard with her arse just as he tried to stick his finger in it and got his fat finger jammed right up there.

Swearing, she bucked to one side, just as John came all over her duvet. His finger cracked as it popped free and he swore, too.

'Fuck's sake, John!'

'You nearly broke my fucking finger!'

'Fuck off, you shot a load on my fucking duvet! On my arse, I said!'

On the TV, the camera swung around from the reporter, and there it was - David's car, in the supermarket car park, right behind the woman with a microphone that was probably more prop than necessity.

Eleanor turned up the television and ignored John bitching from behind her.                     'Because of the dangerous nature of the spill, we can't film closer, but I can tell you the fire is still raging behind me. Government...'

'Fire?' said John.

'George...' she said.

'George what?'

Eleanor ignored John, who was busy wiping his cock on balsam tissues from a flowery box beside her bed. She scooted around so her arse wasn't poking up anymore.

'Once again, I must stress that these scenes were taken earlier, before the quarantine was put in place. In a statement given earlier this evening police admitted they were unable to extinguish the blaze and are now working solely on containment. Fire crews and rescue vehicles have been drafted from outside the county and the spokesman added that the quarantine is a purely cautionary procedure at this time...'

She listened for a while longer. John was already buckling his belt, getting ready to leave. Eleanor paid him no mind, and tuned into the report.

Quarantine?

'They were supposed to go to the supermarket, then across town for new shoes. That's David's car,' she said.

'What are you talking about?'

'I think you better leave.'

'Suits me,' said John. He finished buckling his belt, hitched his jeans a little higher and tucked his t-shirt in. He pulled a cigarette from his jean pocket, which he lit.

'Jesus,' said Eleanor. 'Not in here!'

'You're worried about my cigarette? Worry about my jizz on the quilt, love,' he said. He flicked his ash on the carpet before leaving.

'Fucking arsehole,' said Eleanor as she got up.

She stripped the bed, still naked, and put everything in a heap by the bedroom door. A quick shower and three text messages and two phone calls to her husband's phone later, she was out the door and on the way to the supermarket in her BMW X3.

*

John was an arsehole - Eleanor was in no doubt about that. She knew, too, that David was the best thing that'd ever happen to a woman like her. But she needed something her husband just couldn't give her. She needed someone who'd fuck her. She needed dirty, like she couldn't get from David, because he was so fucking nice.

And she always felt like shit after seeing John. She thought that maybe she needed that, too. Eleanor really didn't like herself very much.

I'm a bad wife, a bad mother, and a bad person. Full house, baby.

A couple of tears escaped as she drove, and the bright headlights of the oncoming cars nearly blinded her. She wiped her eyes clear and shook her head, like she was shaking off the bad then getting with the good persona that she strived for most days.

It wouldn't do to find David and George and for either of them to get wondering what was going on with her. Sometimes she thought George knew...something. He looked at her like he knew. Of course he didn't. He was just a smart kid, and he picked up on things. Nothing more than that.

She thought back to a conversation she'd had with George a couple of weeks before.

'It's OK, Mummy,' he'd said, entirely out of the blue.

'What's OK?'

'Oh...nothing,' he'd said.

But the thing of it was that he'd been helping her with the dinner - washing vegetables. They hadn't been talking, even, and George's tongue had been sticking out a little as he concentrated on his task.

Damned if she hadn't been wrapped in guilt about John while she cooked.

She shook her head again, this time at the red rear lights of a line of cars in front of her. A car pulled from the queue to make a three-point turn. Moments after it passed her, others seemed to get the message and do the same.

It took her forty minutes or so to reach the front of the line, and when she did she was good and angry. It wasn't even where she wanted to be. A roadblock, and still at least half an hour of driving left to get to the supermarket.

But even if she could get round the block, it probably wouldn't do her any good. It wasn't a police barricade. These were military vehicles.

It began to rain. Just specks, turning the lights ahead into red or white diamonds across her windshield. The air cooled, just a little, but not enough. Never enough, when it's hot and you're crying. As she waited, the rain got heavier and she put the wipers on full. Her attention drifted for a while as the sound of the wipers lulled her, and the tiredness that came from anger and boredom and frustration stole her energy.

As she nodded off her head fell forward and she grunted.

'Shit,' she said and wound the window down before shaking her head back and forth. Stationary or not, she figured falling asleep behind the wheel with the engine running was never going to be a safe thing to do.

There was now a gap in front, maybe five cars long. She put the car in gear and rolled forward slowly and as she came closer to the barricade, she saw it wasn't just some safety precaution, this quarantine. It was worse than that. The soldiers at the barricade were armed. Not with little pistols, either. They held rifles across their bodies.

The last time she'd seen soldiers holding their weapons like that for real, and not on TV, had been in Northern Ireland, nearly twenty years ago. Those soldiers hadn't been fucking around, and these weren't, either.

She rolled closer still, running her words through her head, discarding them. A soldier held up his left hand, palm up, to let her know to stop. His right hand remained on the grip of his rifle. Hers the fifth car in line now, and even though this was English soil and no one was at war, fear made her suddenly cold.

Another soldier, this one armed, too, walked toward Eleanor's car.

The sight of armed soldiers was frightening enough, to her, but she feared for her family more. George was her only reason for getting up in the morning at all, and David was a lovely, lovely man. Maybe not the man she needed, but she couldn't live without him, either.

Her heart pounded as she buzzed her window down. The soldier didn't ask her to step out.

'Quarantine, ma'am. You're going to have to turn around.'

'My husband and son were at the supermarket. I saw the news...I'm worried.'

'I understand,' said the soldier, his face stern and serious. 'Can you give me their names?'

She did, and he told her to wait in the car while he walked back to the barricade. He had a radio on his shoulder, which he spoke into for a while. Then he came back to her.

'I'm sorry,' he said. 'We don't have anyone by either name.'

'You have a list I can check? Can I take a look? Maybe there's been a mix up...'

'No mix up, Ma'am. You really have to turn around and go home. I'm sure they'll turn up. They probably left already and you just missed them on your way here.'

'I saw my husband's car on the TV. They must still be inside, or...God...hurt...or...'

'We've searched the entire area, ma'am. Everyone within the zone is accounted for... Now, turn around.'

Zone?

'But...'

'Ma'am,' he said, his voice still calm, but with something slightly harder just beneath the surface, 'I really must insist.'

She knew she wasn't going to get anywhere. She wasn't about to argue with a man holding a gun. The soldier was younger than her, for sure, but he had a gun and Eleanor could see in the soldier's eyes that he was prepared to use it. Maybe he'd feel bad about it, but not as bad as whoever it was he shot.

What kind of emergency warrants shooting people?

Hot after that thought, the fear became a crushing weight.

The soldier's radio squawked and he stepped back and away from Eleanor.

She considered just driving on through the barricade. What were they going to do? Shoot her? Really? Maybe they'd shoot out her tyres - did people actually do that? Maybe they'd just spray bullets all over her car...she didn't know, but her assessment was right: whatever was going on, whatever the spill was, it was dangerous enough to kill people just to stop them getting in.

Some kind of chemical, she imagined, or a toxin, or radiation...

No.

Because why would you shoot people to stop them killing themselves? The army wouldn't work like that. They'd shoot people to save people. That was army thinking.

Which meant something infectious, or contagious...didn't it? Something viral, deadly enough to use the army's kind of persuasion to contain. And George and David were right there. Somewhere behind this blockade, and probably plenty of checkpoints like it, all around the...zone.

'Fuck.'

She made a sharp three-point turn, drove sixty or seventy yards clear of the road block and pulled onto the hard shoulder. There, when the car was safely in neutral, Eleanor Farnham covered her eyes with her hands and sobbed.

*

Eleanor cried because she was afraid, but for her failings, too.

You're a bitch, she told herself. Her husband and son were missing, and her arsehole boyfriend's come was drying in a heap of washing.

She laid her head against the rest, tears still coming even though she closed her eyes and tried to wish it all away. No matter how she tried, she still hated herself, same as every day. She tried, desperately, to think through her self-loathing and her fear for her family, of some way to find them. With no mobile, no help, and the quarantine...

GPS on the car? Would the police help, or turn her away?

Fucking idiot, she thought. I know where the car is.

Her thoughts wouldn't move on. Like she was drunk or on drugs; her mind just kept turning, every thought cyclic.

There was no doubt in her mind that she'd seen David's car. Which meant that either the soldier was lying, or that her husband and son had left the supermarket without the car.

Which just wouldn't happen. So...the soldier lied. But he hadn't looked like he was lying. She lied every day. She knew what a liar looked like well enough.

But there was no other explanation. There was nowhere to walk to from the supermarket. Maybe if you walked for thirty or forty minutes. George would. David? No way. He'd have caught a bus before he walked more than ten minutes in a line that didn't go round aisles.

So what are you going to do about it, Eleanor?

Nothing. That's what she was going to do. She knew for sure that the soldiers weren't going to let her pass, and there wasn't a road into the supermarket that wasn't blocked or quarantined.

Impotent, she was left no choice but to go home and wait for news. It sucked, and she hated herself even more, because for good or ill, they were her men.

Just need some time to think, right?

That sounded sensible to her. Not great, not comfortable, but something. She twisted the key in the ignition and the big engine roared to life just as a bus sped past, rocking the X3.

There hadn't been a bus in the queue approaching the road block.

Then a second and a third bus passed her. For just an instant she saw inside - they were people on the buses. They were full of people.

People who were inside the quarantine. Like George, and David...

Her fog cleared.

She checked her mirrors and pulled out behind the last bus.            It was driven by a man wearing a black breathing mask and a soldier's uniform.

*

The BMW's fuel gauge was near enough full. Eleanor had maybe 200 miles before she had to fill the tank again. She worried, though, because she'd been behind the buses for forty-odd miles already. She had no idea how far a bus could travel. They were just ordinary county buses - two decks, advertisements on the side and back. Not like intercity coaches or something, more like they'd been taken from the local bus depot specifically for transporting the people from the supermarket.

What were those people to the army, or the Government, or whoever it was running this show? Prisoners? Witnesses? Infected?

She didn't know that, either.

She thought of her husband and her son on those buses, but of the other people, too. All bundled into a bus and driven out into the countryside, darkness all around and rain on the windows. Hot, tired, probably hungry, and every one of them frightened. Eleanor wondered if they'd been told the truth, or just some kind of pretty lie. She wondered if they'd believe either.

And what was she thinking? Did she think there was something rotten going on? The further they drove, the more she worried. She expected the buses to turn into a hospital, or an army base, but she was wrong.

It was late into the night. They used quiet, back country roads with few road signs. In following the buses out into these backwaters, she had entirely lost track of where she was. Clouds covered any natural light, and the only artificial light was her headlights and the tail lights of the buses ahead, both shining on the wet road, bouncing back from cat's eyes. She was tired from driving and the light was hurting her eyes, sore anyway from the strain of peering into the darkness, from the light of the buses, back to the road, to the light...

The country road wound and twisted and turned and was hard to navigate. The buses ahead were easy enough to follow, though.

Because they're fucking buses, she thought.

The further they travelled, the surer she became that her husband and son were in danger. Why would the army drive innocent people out into the wilds for over an hour? If her assumption was even near the mark, they might even be sick.

Dying, though?

It didn't make any kind of sense.

She rubbed at her eyes for a moment, and when she looked ahead again, the lead bus' brake lights glowed. The following buses slowed for something Eleanor couldn't see. They didn't stop, but turned.

She came this far. She could only follow.

Where the three buses left the road was a long fence, and a gate. It lead through some trees and out onto a small track surrounded by low shrubs.

Signs hung along the fence, each proclaiming the same owner: Ministry of Defence.

It was a simple choice, right then. Her husband and her son might be on one of those buses and they were the only two people in the world that made her better than she was.

No choice at all.

Eleanor switched off her lights and coasted through the gate. She used the ruts in the road as a guide, until she saw the buses ahead, lights off, just looming hulks of metal and glass in a wide expanse of nothing.

'What in the fuck is going on?' she whispered.

Only when she cut the engine did she hear them yelling. Distressed, or scared, and probably angry, too. Taken from a normal day, thinking about family, and chores, and the evening's television. Taken away from dinner or bedtime, or dates, or parents. Then they'd been driven to the middle of nowhere and left in the dark.

George. David.

If they were in there, she had to do something. Even if they weren't...those people...

For a moment, she recognised she was about to try to interfere with the army - men with guns, and the law, and power...

But only for a moment.

She had her right foot out of the car when a line of fire lit up the sky and the lead bus exploded.

'Oh...God...'

Fire trailed from the sky twice more. A forth bomb struck a beat later - this one spread a wall of fire over the wrecked buses, engulfing everything in some kind of chemical that turned the twisted buses and the fields around into bright blue fire.

There could be no people after that...only fire.

'My baby. My baby...no...please.'

Eleanor slumped back into her seat.

No accident.

Even through the horror, and her sorrow, she understood she'd just witnessed fighter jets raining fire down on three civilian buses full of innocent people. A cold, heartless murder.

And one that left nothing behind at all.

Fragmented images ran through her mind. Skeletons, their limbs curled inward. Tortured metal after plane crashes. Body parts sent home when the remains were not whole. War graves, with bodies forgotten in vast pits.

She closed the car door. In shock, unable to look away from the flames, Eleanor didn't realise a car pulled in behind her until someone rapped on her window.

A man stood calmly by her BMW, the side of his face lit by the distant fire. He didn't smile. He looked, if anything, a little bored.

She opened her window just wide enough so they could speak.

'Ma'am, I'm going to have to ask you to step from the car.'

'Who the fuck are you?' said Eleanor. Sure she was afraid, but she was good and angry, too. Terrified, heart-broken, sore, tired, yes, but above all that she was fucking incandescent. She'd just witness the death of her family. Mass murder, too, but right then she couldn't grasp that. It was just too big a thought to hold to.

The man at the window nodded in response, perfectly calm in the face of her anger. A good looking, confident man, with a straight stance, his shoulders back. He looked fit. He didn't have the tired, broken look of a policeman. If he wasn't a soldier, he had to be RMP - the military police - something like that.

He reached into his jacket - dark, almost black, but in firelight they could have been green fatigues. He pulled out a wallet and took out an ID card from inside. On it, his picture, and his name and rank within some branch of the military she didn't recognise, and Ministry of Defence, which she understood just fine.

Give yourself a round of applause, Eleanor. Now you're really fucked.

Eleanor didn't care either way. Her husband and son had been blown apart by missiles named after snakes or big cats or something like that. Predatory names given to deadly toys by idiot men.

'Now, step from the car, please.'

'You just...you killed all those people.'

'Ma'am, you're in so much trouble right now. I could put you in a cell with a bucket and no fucking posters for the rest of your life and not even your family would remember your name. I'm trying to be reasonable. Step from the car.'

He didn't raise his voice. Not once.

Eleanor felt like she'd just been slapped, and damn hard, but that was good. She needed it.

'My family won't remember me, you fucking prick, because you just killed them.'

He didn't even have the grace to change his expression.

'Out.'

You couldn't just get away with murdering three buses full of terrified people. You just couldn't. Humans. Her family.

But she had no choice.

'Thank you, ma'am,' said the soldier as Eleanor stepped out. Her legs shook and on the uneven surface she leaned sideways and held onto the car door to stop herself falling down. A woman came from the other side of the X3. Eleanor was so shocked she hadn't even noticed the woman.

In case I tried to get out on the passenger side, she thought. She was relieved to know she could still think something, even though she felt cold as death inside.

'Easy or hard,' said the man with a smile that showed no teeth.

'Easy,' said Eleanor. No point in fighting it, not right now. There was a time for fighting, and her way of fighting would involve every newspaper she could get to listen, or the court, or fuck it, if it came to it, she'd...

You'll what? It's the God-damned army.

'Good choice,' said the man.

He stepped back and the woman in fatigues from the other side of the car stepped forward, raised a pistol and shot Eleanor Farnham in the head.

The blood didn't hit the car or the man.

'Easy always best, isn't it?' said the man.

'Suits me fine,' said the woman.

No witnesses and no survivors - a happy circumstance which coincidentally suited Kurt O'Dell just fine, too.

*

V.

The Mill

In three or four days, the fire along the motorway would cool. Cars would fuse to the tarmac, as would the bodies of the dead. Ordinarily, parts would be sent, piecemeal, to the bereaved as they were slowly catalogued and identified.

ENGLAND MOURNS, O'Dell imagined. He should know. He wrote the headline.

That England - countryside, unseen in the darkness, or motorway haunted by disembodied white lights, or cityscapes with their different hues, lights and buildings and people, too - all scrolled by as O'Dell drove north in his quiet black car.

The English would rally. People would cry. But he didn't think they would have all that long to mourn all those poor dead they would never know.

That was how he thought of people. As 'them'. And only when he considered humanity at all.

Himself, his boss?

Us.

Them and us, us and them. No way both were going to be around when the fire started.

Somewhere far behind O'Dell and the clever child in his charge, a road accident he'd caused, and not the kind a clean-up crew simply scraped up and covered with dirt and sawdust. Their pain didn't touch O'Dell. Their pain. Not his.

Old news.

The kid slept sprawled over the back seat of the sedan. He wouldn't wake until he was safe in his new home.

O'Dell, his ever-present damaged grin on his face, wondered about the boy - like how he'd known where to find him. How the boy (no...his power) called out to him.

A boy, thought O'Dell, who was much like himself. Not just talented, like the others he'd taken over the years. The boy was different.

The Mill was the best place for different people like George Farnham.

George grunted something, just like kids talk in their sleep. O'Dell glanced, convinced the kid's eyes would be open, and he would be staring at O'Dell. Reading him.

But no. The kid was done. He wasn't coming back.

'No one's coming back,' he said. Then, his hand jittered on the gear stick and his eyes drifted - but the movement only small, and quick, and as ever O'Dell was unaware.

'They're sheep. Baa baa bleating sheep.'

O'Dell didn't need the radio or news to see the picture they saw. Sheep saw what they wanted to see, and if the picture didn't fit, their minds made it fit. Their own fucking minds, jamming facts into a comfortable box they could manage to hold.

The country in horror. Reporters, shocked. Ticker tapes on Sky News, or the BBC, updating housewives all day long with the same inescapable blather.

As long as the idiot masses got the message that it was a terrible accident and that people could die in their beloved England...well, they'd be happy enough. People loved a tragedy far better than stories about ducks and babies and wonderful gadgets and miracle cures for cancer that weren't real.

None of it is real for them...not really. Just us.

O'Dell had his own ticker tape that updated him on the real news (though just as unimportant, perhaps). Red text against the windshield up and to the right, the phrasing just as angular as the glowing display. It didn't distract him. O'Dell was very good at concentrating.

The car rolled.

Tenants of a farmhouse a mile from the epicentre: Debtors flee country. The inhabitants of five houses to the east: Carbon monoxide deaths. Seven teenagers hanging out in the park found later, faces stuck in their own dried vomit: New youth drug fatality.

Others besides, but nothing new, or urgent. Local news, mostly.

When the quarantine finally lifted the national (and international) news would report one hundred and ninety four people confirmed dead. Twenty-three missing; their bodies never found.

Maybe, given time, people would look closer and notice the obvious, massive discrepancies in the information released under the auspices of the MoD. O'Dell wasn't concerned in the slightest. They would have other things to worry about by then.

'We'll be fine. Us and them, right?' he said. He wasn't sure who he meant. Talking to himself, or the kid, or maybe just the night sky.

He shrugged his tired, narrow shoulders and settled down to a steady 80mph on the final stretch of the journey. By the time he pulled into a brightly light subterranean car park, most of that which passed on the journey was already forgotten.

His concentration was phenomenally, but Kurt William O'Dell had hardly any memory at all.

*

While the first of O'Dell's fire teams went to work, Francis Drew Sutton was wondering how to get help for the policeman. Now her eyes were better adjusted to the gloom, his uniform became clear. She could even make out insignia on his epaulettes and chest. Rank and force, probably, but the symbols alone didn't mean much to her.

'Have you got a radio?' she asked.

'Broke,' he said.

To her own ears, she sounded shrill and panicked. His was a quiet, tired, voice. Like a man who'd given up. She might have to carry him up the embankment, or leave him and run for help. She was reluctant to do either. To leave him meant they would both be alone, with insane people not too far away. To carry him up the steep slope in the dark would hurt him more, maybe irreparably. Maybe even kill him. She could probably do it, somehow, but not without risking injury herself. If that happened, they'd be fucked together.

'Shit,' she said, and squatted beside the policemen.

'You? Haven't you got a phone?'

'Sure. In my car.'

'Leave me. Go call for help.'

It was difficult to think through the noise around them. Fire, sirens, and helicopters high and unseen somewhere nearby. Sometimes a scream would reach her, shocking each time. People; dying and terrified and in pain.

I wish they'd fucking shut up, though, she thought. I can't get my head straight.

The thought came from someplace low and cold.

Nice, Francis.

But she really did wish they'd shut up.

'I'm not sure back that way is the best...'

'Shh,' he said.

'What? Don't tell me...'

'Wait.'

Interrupted a second time, she was ready to lash out, policeman or not. His hand dug into her arm hard, then. It hurt enough to stall her - a second later she forgot to be offended entirely. Gunfire. Harsh, understated, barking, and close.

It couldn't be, though. Why would anyone be firing a gun?

Not just one gun, but lots of guns. Like machine guns, unmistakable despite that she'd only heard those in action movies and the films about war that her husband sometimes watched.

Of course it's not gunfire. Doesn't make sense. But what does?

She crouched lower. Just an instinctive response. The policeman felt it, too. The air, suddenly full of menace.

'Don't go up.'

The fear in his face hit her hard. He was supposed to be the one dealing with this. If he was frightened...

'Is that gunfire? Like real guns?'

'I think so,' said the policeman. He paused. 'Yes. It is.'  Certainty enough in his voice for Francis to believe that all of this wasn't some crazy hallucination, or a madness inside her. It was real.

The shots were no longer sporadic, shy sounds, but sustained - powerful, filling the night - a wall of noise louder than the fire and the screams both.

'What the fuck is going on?'

'Don't know. Army? A terror attack. Not an accident?'

The intensity lessened. Back to sporadic bursts, then all the way down to single shots. Finishing up, she thought. They'd killed everyone there was to kill and were moving closer. Making sure.

'What should we do?'

The policeman was silent for a moment.

'They're not here to help,' he said.

'I get that. But what should we do?'

'Stay right here?'

A few more shots rang out, then, nothing.

'You're asking me?'

'Shit,' he said. 'I don't know any better than you. What about the supermarket?'

Francis shook her head.

'I tried to tell you - everyone's mental back there. That's where I came from.'

'Mental?'

She nodded. 'Hurting themselves and each other. Maybe it is some kind of terrorist thing. A virus. Something like that?'

'But is it better than guns?'

She wasn't sure, but she didn't say it. The policeman was unsure enough for the both of them.

'Hold on,' she said.

'I'm not going anywhere,' he replied, but to her back, because she was already heading through the copse of trees to take a look at the supermarket.

*

Francis crouched in the cover of the darkness between the saplings and low branches. Ahead, the supermarket was engulfed by fire.

Clean up on aisle five, she thought. Then wondered if maybe she was going crazy after all. In the car park, men who moved like soldiers raised their weapons. Small bursts of fire spat here and there, and whatever they hit fell down.

Not whatever.

Whoever.

Bullets hit the crazies, the crazies lay still.

Maybe they were thinking the same as her, just doing their cleaning with bullets instead of a mop and bucket.

This isn't just serious, she thought. I'm going to die, and if I don't die from whatever it is making people nuts, those bastards are going to kill me.

If it came to it, she'd look out for herself first, everybody else second, but she wasn't going to run and leave the policeman.

Where the hell could she run to?

The soldiers wore protective gear, like body armour, but their clothing was entirely black. They wore masks.

What kind of soldiers wore masks?

Ones exposed to chemicals and poisons. Like me.

Whatever was in the air, or the smoke, or wherever - she and the policeman had breathed it in, too.

She crawled away from the slaughter with bile burning the back of her throat. But if she puked, they might hear. If they heard...

Sick rose, but she swallowed in down. That burned, too.

All the way back she hunched low, expecting a bullet but finding only the shadows and the damp ground beneath. A little rain, but not enough to for the fire...nothing would be enough. These were fires that would burn in a deluge, in a monsoon. The stench in the air couldn't be washed away. She imagined, even there in the cool grass with the red and blue lighting the sky above, that she could smell gunsmoke. But how could she smell anything but the heavy reek of burning bodies and fuel and rubber from above?

The policeman lay where she'd left him.

'Can't go that way. Soldiers shooting anything that moves.' She wondered if she was going to cry.

Nope. I'm not.

Shock covered any sorrow, fear overrode any compassion. Revulsion, though - that still roiled, somewhere low down that took her breath and stole her energy.

The policeman said nothing. Francis knelt down and felt his pulse, suddenly sure that he was dead. But he wasn't dead. Just passed out.

'Shit,' she said. She sat next to him, not worrying about dirt on her expensive trousers, or the cold.

What to do?

She didn't know. Any action might be wrong. But she was tired, and that didn't require any kind of mistakes.

Lay down, she thought. It sounded, to her, like the most sage idea she'd ever had.

For a few minutes, maybe ten, she lay in the dark listening to the man's breathing, the fire and the sirens, a distant fire alarm, random gunshots. Eventually, all the sound went away. Francis shut down. Her adrenaline fled. She fell asleep in the dirt.

When she woke her clothes were damp with rain and the night, and it was light. She curled up, like a baby might, facing the policeman. He looked at her as she opened her eyes. Slightly cute, she thought, before remembering why she was nestled with a stranger among these trees, in this dirt that stank of ash and burned rubber.

A slight turn of her head was all it took to completely ruin this new day. A soldier in black clothing and black mask and a serious black gun.

He flicked his head. Up.

Maybe he couldn't talk with the mask on. The message was clear enough.

'Fuck,' she said.

No way the policeman could stand. She was sure the soldier would shoot them before he helped. She dragged him up. He cried out. In the new daylight, his misshapen leg became obvious.

Broken leg? Maybe he's tougher than he looks, she thought.

The soldier wasn't moved by the policeman's pain. He said nothing but spoke with the barrel of his rifle - they had no choice but to go where it pointed.

*

George Farnham woke on his second day of captivity someplace unfamiliar. Barren walls of crumbling plaster. Concrete floors caked with excrement, maybe blood. A rusted metal cot bed with a stained mattress on which he had slept.

A bare single bulb flickered like it was on its way out.

The man with fire in his eyes stepped forward, so that as George looked up from the bed the light was directly behind the man's head. It might have looked like a halo on someone else. Instead, it threw his grinning face into shadow. George thought maybe that grin was always there.

'Hi there, George! My name is Kurt William O'Dell,' he said, with a false and frightening voice that didn't sound happy at all. 'All my buddies call me Mr. O'Dell, though. Have a question for me, George? Mate? Buddy? Got a question?'

George wanted to go to the toilet. This wasn't the friendly joking thing that his Dad sometimes did. This was the mean kind of joking.

'Go ahead, young man. You may speak.'

O'Dell sat beside George and tried to pat the boy's knee. George scooted back up the filthy bed to get away.

The man didn't bother to move at all. Where was he going to go?

'Where am I?' said George.

'You like it? Welcome to your new home. Nice, isn't it?'

No, thought George. It's evil.

'Yes. An evil place, George. It is mine, though, so please be mindful of that. And of course I know what you're thinking...just like you can pick up some of what I'm thinking too, can't you?'

George's face gave him away.

'Tell you what, George,' said the man. 'Let's play a little game, shall we?'

George didn't want to play any game with the man, but he didn't get a choice. Immediately, the name of the place came into his head. Normally, it was like hearing tiny voices, but the man was shouting in his head and his mind-voice was powerful and strong.

George thought about maybe trying to get the name wrong. Maybe the man would let him go if they didn't think he was special...

Who are you kidding?

Himself, he knew. He couldn't kid this man. Couldn't fool him, couldn't outwit him. Couldn't win. Besides, he was an adult and George was just a child.

'Where's my mum?' he said, instead of saying the words that the man shouted inside his head.

'Dead, George. I'm so sorry,' said the man with the wide grin.

George knew the man told the truth.

Dad...and mum...

He thought he'd burst into tears, but he held them in. He wouldn't cry.

But something else whispered to George...

The man with fire in his eyes thought he told the truth. He believed it...but that truth he plucked from O'Dell flickered. And that was the strangest thing, a thing he'd never experienced with this gift before; uncertainty.

'Now, I've been a good sport. How about you tell me the name that's in my head? No more fucking about.'

The swear came with venom. Like a slap, and then, on its heels, the man thought the name of the place again with such force that a small trickle of blood ran from George's nose and he cried out in agony. A stabbing, deep pain, that hurt from the base of his skull right into the back of his eyes.

'The Mill! It's the Mill...please...'

'Please what?'

'Please don't shout.'

The man - O'Dell - nodded. 'Very well, George. Very well. Rest up. Big op tomorrow, eh?'

George didn't register what the man had said until the door was closing, and then, an image from the man's mind that still lingered.

George knew what the 'big op' meant. He knew what was going to happen, and there was nothing he could do about it.

Yet, George frowned in concentration. Tears would come later. But that something else he felt, or simply was given to understand, niggled at him. Like trying to remember how to reset the chain on his bike, or pluck a difficult spelling from the air.

Uncertainty, yes. But while he'd been in the man's mind, a mind that seethed like snakes might, sliding over each other, George thought he'd taken something away with him. That perhaps Mr. Kurt William O'Dell might well hold all the cards, but George was sure the man with that nasty grin had no idea he was simply playing solitaire.

*

Mr. O'Dell scratched at the back of neck while he spoke on the phone. When he spoke or smiled his teeth were on show, just like the small scar on his forehead. It was part of who he was, a facet of the landscape of his face, like a ruby birthmark or a pair of glasses might be on another man.

Sometimes, he forgot things - random things, unimportant things - but never the big picture. The grin came with the puckered scar on his forehead and the nerve and brain damage from having a bullet lodged in his brain. A two-for-one deal.

Sometimes his hands shook. The pain in his head was constant. But since the bullet seemed to have triggered the remarkable awakening of his particular talents, he bore it stoically.

Just like he bore the idiot on the other end of the phone.

'The boy is officially an orphan,' said the man on the phone. 'I saw her myself, Sir. No doubt.'

Mr. O'Dell was happy with that, because he'd felt what George felt - uncertainty - and he hadn't liked it at all.

Happy at the outcome, for sure, though not so much with the man on the phone.

'You did kill her?'

'No. Jess pulled the trigger. Shot her in the head,' said the man, speaking of Eleanor Farnham, of course.

Mr. O'Dell worked at something stuck in his teeth, and scratched the back of his neck again. Damn, he had the fidgets.

He stilled himself. It took a colossal amount of willpower to work against his own body. His hands, his feet, his neck and head...all of him wanted to jitter and jive. But he gritted his teeth, silent on the phone for a moment, and then he was back in the game.

'So...we have complete containment?' he said, finally.

'Yup,' said the man.

O'Dell grinned some more. 'Good.'

A clean sweep. The supermarket, the motorway, the buses...everything exactly as it should be. Exactly as he'd hoped, he'd planned, and known.

'Go and do something useful, then,' he said, and put down the phone.

Everything, absolutely everything, he had achieved came thanks to that single bullet in his brain and the power it gave him - the power to read minds, manipulate, to foretell the future.

For a second, O'Dell's head swirled at the thought of what that one small calibre bullet had granted him.

He was about to remake the whole fucking world.

He didn't realise it, but as he dreamed the future in his head, his feet tapped crazily under his desk and his right eye drifted as he seized. Petite Mal - yet another gift from that bullet.

He was entirely unaware of the episode, but as he often did, O'Dell came around swiftly. The seizure passing, nothing but a tired residue to mark it. O'Dell still grinned, and his teeth ached, but then didn't they always?

He nodded to himself and decided on a new course of action. The future might be what he made it, but he felt more than happy to tinker along the way. He dialled an internal number and drummed his fingers, though he waited a few seconds for the man on the other end to answer.

'Doc? We're moving it forward. The boy's powerful, and I don't trust him. We're doing it tonight. And the specimens from the field trial? Incinerate them. We don't need them.'

He put the phone down again. Grinned and scratched and felt, somewhere deep down, that perhaps, just perhaps, he was missing something.

'Nope,' he said to himself in his grim office in the basement of the Mill. 'All present and accounted for.'

*

The place called The Mill was full of so many souls, so many minds; the battered and abused, the crippled and the blind. Then, too, the dark memories of the men and women who worked there. George found it difficult to draw his thoughts back into himself, travelling as it was through the miasma and tumble of fancies and sorrow inside The Mill.

When George opened his eyes again, his emotions reeled from his trip into O'Dell's remarkable mind. His young bright blue eyes - bloodshot now, from the effort - regained focus slowly.

The operation to come was huge in George's mind. Like a mountain that blocked out even the sun. But he strove, hard as he could, to pull all the things he learned from the minds around him, into some kind of shape he could understand.

One thing he knew for certain - there was no chance an eight year old boy could escape The Mill alone. He was small, and weak, and slow. He was tired and frightened, surrounded by soldiers with long guns and short guns and no conscience at all. He knew these things because he had seen inside their minds.

They would shoot him dead and worry more about the loss of a bullet.

What he couldn't know for certain was if he could get someone else to help him...maybe even reach out and make someone save him.

It was something he'd never tried, nor had he ever thought to try. Why would he? It was a bad thing to do.

But now?

He thought his dad and mum, in heaven or wherever thoughts went, would understand that he was left no choice at all. If he didn't try, he was dead.

Did he have enough strength left to do it, even if he could?

'Won't know just by wondering, will you?'

His teacher's voice, he remembered. Asking a question during computer time, his teachers extraordinarily thin finger tapping a logo on the screen. The logo said 'Google'.

I'll Google it, thought George.

His body fell still and his eyes flickered and rolled back and the locked door and the rank cell didn't matter any longer.

He wandered The Mill once more, sifting through the broken and tortured minds within its awful walls for a mind that might, perhaps, be willing to listen.

*

Francis held Ben's hand as they sat on their cot in a rotten cell. His face was white with pain and she was powerless to help him.

No help would come. They had disappeared. The world would never find them. She understood this perfectly well. Whatever was in store for them, there wasn't any doubt that it didn't have a happy ending. Soldiers don't snatch people at gunpoint, then confine them in a horrific cell, broken bones ignored, only to let them go later with a handshake.

This wasn't the kind of thing you saw on the news. This was the kind of thing that news reporters never heard about...if they ever did, Francis was in no doubt that the reporters, too, would be in there right along with her and Ben.

She figured Ben - they'd finally exchanged names, the last time he'd been conscious - would be pretty much useless for what she needed to do. He was banged up pretty badly. Broken ribs, leg, probably with a concussion, and that at the very least.

Unconscious now for hours, she wondered if he might even die.

Whatever she was going to do, she would have to do alone. 'Whatever' summed it up neatly. She was in such deep shit. This was the part where the heroine died. She wasn't immune to bullets. The door wasn't going to spring open to reveal some swarthy adventurer. There were no windows, no secret passages, no loose bricks. On the way to the cell, everyone they'd passed had been armed with at least a pistol, if not a rifle, too. Dark eyes, the lot of them. Like they'd killed before and were entirely comfortable with it. These were not ordinary soldiers. This was not an army installation. This was not a game.

She'd never met a killer until the night before.

Must be, what...twenty-four hours now?

No way to tell. But she figured she'd been around killers for that long at least. Once, worried about the gym and yoghurt and granola bars. Now, surrounded by death and waiting for it to knock on a locked door.

We're fucked, she thought.

Another thought popped into her head, though, and this thought wasn't hers.

Help me.

Francis, startled, stared around the stark cell, imagining there was someone with them.

But no.

She looked around the walls, the ceiling. Maybe there were speakers. Maybe this was all some kind of experiment, like a CIA thing, hallucinations, psychological warfare...

No.

She shook that thought away, because that was easy, a lie, and she didn't want false comfort. At the end of this, there wasn't going to be a form to sign, or a questionnaire.

You know this doesn't end like that.

'Ben,' she said, softly at first. He didn't want to wake up. She forced the issue and pulled both eyes open.

'What?' he said. Groggy voiced, and his face only a couple of shades off pure white.

The thought, or whisper, or voice, whatever it was, came again. Help.

'You hear anything?'

'Like what?'

'Listen, Ben. Shh, and listen.'

Help me.

'There. You hear that?'

He shook his head very slowly, and closed his eyes again.

Great, thought Francis.

But the voice in her head didn't want to be still.

HELP ME.

'Fuck!' she said. She slammed her palms over her ears to block out the words - it was deafening. But it wasn't from outside.

A trickle of blood ran from her nose.

'What?' said Ben, blinking wildly, like he was scared, but at least more awake than he had been for hours. 'Your nose...you're bleeding...Francis?'

Francis couldn't tell him right then. The not-so-little voice spoke, and she found herself listening...except she knew she wasn't exactly listening. Someone was dialling her internal number.

'Shut up,' she told him. 'Let me listen.'

The voice belonged to a boy, for sure. She listened and muttered her replies, but it was her thoughts that spoke to the boy, not her words.

Ben said nothing. After a few moments, she wasn't aware he was with her at all.

No sight, or vision, but pure sound. Her eyes drifted closed, and there he was, entirely in her mind and her hearing, as though she wasn't in a filthy cell at all, but on a couch somewhere, maybe, with good headphones and blissful, cool, dark.

A child, only, but the owner of the voice in her head had the confidence and surety of an adult.

And she liked what the kid said, too.

Is this real? Is anything that happened since yesterday real?

She imagined that thought was her own, but the child picked up on that, too.

If it is just a dream, Miss...does it matter?

The kid made a hell of a lot of sense. If she listened, maybe they'd get out alive. Maybe they'd die trying, but then, they were going to die anyway. This was life or death.

A kid speaking in her head was the least of her worries, and if the whole thing was just in her head, then it was a very persuasive hallucination.

Only one way to find out for sure, said the child. In a minute, two soldiers outside your door are going to come in and shoot you and the man.

'Shit,' said Francis, this time out loud.

'What?' said Ben, pulling her some way back to the room. 'Francis...Jesus...talk to me.'

She glanced at the policeman. He could barely move. He had blood on his chin. She didn't remember him having blood there before. She thought maybe it was from inside him.

The kid was talking, though, and she wanted to listen to the child more than she wanted to be in the cell.

I can't stop them, she thought back to the boy. I'm on my own.

You have to, came the reply. I'll show you how.

The door opened in her head half a second before it happened for real. Francis saw everything play out and did it just like the images in her head. Acting, but for real. Fuck up her mark and she'd die for real, too.

Move to the back of the door.

Francis moved, quickly, from the bed, just like the kid told her, as the first man entered. Ben looked up, confused. The guard expected two prisoners and only saw one. There was nowhere else the woman could hide.

Push the door. Hard as...

She threw her whole weight hard and fast against the door. The door hit the hand holding the gun - a sharp wooden edge against bare knuckles.

Duck.

She ducked as the second guard pushed through the doorway and fired wildly toward her. The shot deafened her, but she listened to a voice that was inside, not out.

The first man through the door had dropped his pistol when the door smashed his knuckles. He recovered quickly, slammed the door back at her, trying to push her away so he could pick up the weapon at his feet. But, low now, she was closer to the gun.

Pick it up.

She did, partly following instructions, partly moving on her own, intuitively.

KICKSTANDSHOOTLOWSHOOTHIGH.

She did all four things in almost perfect time with the words in her head. Her foot caught the one with the broken knuckles at the juncture of thigh and hip. She stood and fired low, then recoil she hadn't expected send her second shot higher. Two shells hit the floor. The guards were still standing, but only because each propped the other up in the doorway. One shot somewhere important in the chest, dead instantly. The guard whose gun she held wouldn't need it back. He wasn't dead, but made a horrible sound, like a groan and a plea in one.

Francis didn't need a voice in her head to tell her she needed to toughen up. Finish it now, or she might as well shoot herself and Ben both right here.

Wincing, almost apologetic, she fired a third bullet into the groaning man's forehead.

There was no time to freak out. Blood hit the wall, splashed on the back of her hand and the top of the gun (slide, she thought). Her ears rang, but she didn't need to hear anything outside. She'd just fired a gun in their room. The sound would have travelled. Other soldiers would hear. They'd have guns and be a damn sight better with theirs than she was with hers.

MOVE NOW.

Francis' nose steadily dripped blood and her eyes glazed. She thought, distantly, that maybe the voice wasn't just talking to her, but controlling her, too...

But if the owner of the voice could save them, she would let him.

TAKE THE SOLDIER'S KEYS. SAVE ME.

Please.

She took the keys and the man's pistol with her, too. Ben spoke, saying something, but any sound outside faded away, everything blocked but that voice. Ben shook, pale, so weak he could barely stand, and then only on one leg. She dragged him up and out.

Let the voice lead, she thought.

She took one last glance at the soldiers on the floor, dead because of her, but because of the voice, too.

Let him lead, and live.

Ben's didn't seem to be able to focus. If he didn't get help, he was going to die. No doubt about that. With the boy in her head, maybe they could all get free. Either way, it wasn't like anyone was offering better options.

*

MISS - THERE'S SOMETHING YOU HAVE TO SEE.

Don't shout, she thought back to the voice in her head. Whatever you're doing, I feel like my head's going to explode.

SORRY. Sorry. I'm eight. Better?

Better, thought Francis.

Stop just here.

Kid's got some balls, she thought on reflex.

Thanks, he thought back at her, though she hadn't meant to communicate that last part. She smiled, even though she was afraid. Sweat poured down the small of her back and between her breasts, from both fear and half-dragging Ben along. Ben tried to take some of the weight from her. The pain must have been awful - his leg broken so badly the bone jutted into the trousers of his filthy uniform. Blood ran from his lips and down his chin now, probably, she thought, from a lung. His breath came in ragged gasps even though she had almost all of his weight. He'd hardly said a word since they'd got out of the cell. Dragging a man with just the one leg wasn't something she was used to, or ever wanted to be.

'Ben? You coping?'

His only reply was a curt nod.

She almost wished he would offer to stay behind.

Here, said the kid.

Francis and Ben halted before a wide window looking into what was once maybe a maternity ward - the room where the babies were kept in incubators. Ben paled, looked like he was about to puke. Francis' vision wavered, too. But while Ben looked away, she forced herself to look. To fill up on it, so the next time she pulled the trigger she wouldn't flinch.

Is this what they've done to you? she thought.

They're going to. The boys you see - they're all 'gifted'. The man who burns, Mr. O'Dell? He says they're important, so he's looking after them. But he's not. He's a liar.

On the other side of the window there were fourteen boys. Their ages ranged from little kids who could probably barely speak...probably hadn't even understood where they were or what had been done to them. Some of the other kids were older. They would have seen it coming and known.

She could barely imagine such fear.

Who would do this? Who could?

The children were unsupervised - they weren't going anywhere. Everyone of them was in a wheelchair. They drooled, covered in old food from the untended tubes that fed them through some kind of automatic dispensers. Their eyes were blank and blind. Their necks were broken - surgically, no doubt. But their heads were caved and cut, too. Portions of their brain matter taken away. Whatever was left was no doubt pure mind, no function remaining but thought. They would drift until what was left of them simply gave in, and faded away.

Maybe, until then, they lived in a nightmare land, or some kind of beautiful fantasy.

Francis hoped it was the later. God, she hoped so.

A room full of humans forgotten, like a workman's tools left to rust in the rain. What a terrible price to pay for a 'gift' most of these kids probably hadn't even known they possessed.

This is what they're going to do to me, said the kid, and that was the startling reality. That was the cost.

We'll get you out, she thought at the voice in her head. We'll do it, or die trying.            Ben gripped her shoulder.

'Come on,' he said.

She nodded.

Can you tell us where to go?

Yes, said the voice in her head. She followed the voice.

'What's going on, Francis?'

'What's going on is we're burning this fucking place to the ground,' she said. That was as much as she knew for sure. Everything else would either make sense later, or not matter at all, because they'd all be dead. But then, if something could be worth dying for, then some things, some abominations, must be worth killing for.

'Might have to do that alone,' he said. He coughed, blood and phlegm hitting the floor at their feet.

'I'm not giving up yet,' she said. She shifted his weight, his arm, higher across her shoulders and his eyes drifted down. His weight fell entirely on her. She staggered, sweating and short of breath.

Again, she considered leaving him behind. Her back hurt, her neck. He was dragging her down.

Don't be a bitch.

But the fact remained. She wasn't helping him any longer - she was carrying him.

*

The woman was Francis. The man with her was Ben. George could 'see' through Francis' eyes like he could others - the same way he saw the soldiers' movements. He saw their thoughts and their actions a fraction ahead of their conscious minds.

But Francis was different. He could talk to her. With her. He'd never done that before.

To George, it felt as though the two of them were somewhere dark, at night, whispering dangerous secrets, like kids after bedtime or spies behind enemy lines. George was eight, but the later, he knew, was right. He wasn't playing.

Through O'Dell's eyes, he'd seen his future. Through Francis' eyes he'd seen just how that looked, just how it felt.

He'd felt blood, too. Felt her revulsion, or at least understood it.

At the time, he'd felt the same.

After seeing the other boys like him, and what O'Dell had done...the revulsion was turned to the man with fire in his eyes, inward no longer.

The Mill was that man's playground, jail, hospital...it was large enough to be many things. But Francis and Ben were not out in the further reaches of the place.

Soon.

George hoped the keys from the dead soldiers would fit the lock to his cell. He didn't know, nor could he, because the soldiers hadn't known.

Blood poured from George's nose, just as it did Francis. Bright red blood mixed with the darker blood that had dried since he left his body behind to travel with nothing but his mind. He searched for 'dead spots' while he spoke to Francis, the effort burning up both their bodies. He couldn't know the effects of something he'd never done before.

Dead spots were what he wanted.

Where there were no thoughts, there were no people.

Turn here, he would say, or, stop now.

Once, he had Francis drag Ben into a toilet to hide from two passing soldiers. She was tired from carrying him. He could feel her fatigue. He understood that for them to live, others might have to be hurt. Worse, some might die.

But he wouldn't kill them if they didn't have to.

The soldiers passed, Francis moved on, up a flight of stairs rather than the elevator. When they reached his level, he saw Ben was hardly breathing and Francis was pale, her breath ragged from the effort.

The connection became easier, closer now, until finally, he told her to stop.

Here, he told her. Here. I'm in here.

He felt his and her desperation. Neither couldn't help that. His fear amplified hers, hers strengthened his.

Can you open it? Hurry.

He saw the key in her hand. Felt the thought, the concentration, as she moved the key to the door and it turned.

But not to happiness, or freedom. Only to silence.

Shit, thought the woman and then she was gone.

Her mind, thoughts, presence...soul. Like she'd died. The man, Ben, gone too.

I felt it, he thought. I felt it! A dead spot.

But...

George's eyes flickered in his cell, his body forgotten and his mind working with his thoughts and reason and his power, too.

The dead spot had been...

Huge.

It was huge. It wasn't the absence of thought at all, but the absence of humanity. It was the feeling Mr. O'Dell carried inside.

George panicked and pushed with his mind.

He could push all he liked. He couldn't save himself, or Francis, or Ben. He understood that, at least - because just as there was no handle on the door, there was no handle in this dead spot, either.

*

O'Dell grinned, as always.

'You...I saw you.' said Francis. 'At the supermarket.'

'I know,' said O'Dell. 'I wanted you to.'

'Just let us have the kid,' she said. The gun taken from a dead guard weighed heavy in her fist, but stayed by her side. The other side, she held Ben.

O'Dell's face, his eyes, everything became entirely blank, for only a second. A tiny amount of blood dripped from his nose.

Shoot him. Shoot him now.

But as quick as the thought itself, that blank state was gone and his crazed eyes were back, all his focus bearing down on her. Into her.

'Of course you can have him. I wanted you to have him all along. The Mill is...how would you say? Mutton dressed as lamb?'

Something happened...and he doesn't know.

She expected the boy to answer, in her head, but the kid was silent. No one to guide her, no one to tell her what to do.

She couldn't beat this man, with his black eyes that seemed full of fire and all those clenched yellow teeth.

It didn't matter. No sense in trying.

Just give him what he wants, she thought.

'Mutton?' said the man, thinking out loud.

Still, Francis couldn't lift that gun.

I'm weak. Too weak. I know nothing.

Somewhere deeper, though, she did. She knew perfectly well he was insane. Yes, she understood that.

That fucking grin, stuck on his face. He jittered, too - his left hand flapped at his side, a fish on a riverbank. Nothing wrong with his right hand, though. Steady as a rock, gun in his old, narrow fist.

The gun was on Francis. He ignored Ben.

'Past the sell-by-date may be a more appropriate expression? Doesn't matter,' the crazy man continued, seemingly ignorant of the blood pouring from his nose and dripping from his top lip. 'Take the boy. Get out of here. Burn the place down, if you wish. The Mill has served its purpose.'

He had perfect teeth, if slightly yellowed with age. He would have looked almost like a normal older gentleman...if not for that crazed rigour mortis-grin and that puckered scar on his forehead.

Francis didn't reply. Having a gun in her face with a maniac at the end of it dried up all her words. He was mad enough to shoot them just for fun, no matter the words that came from his mouth.

But instead he flipped the gun and held it out to Francis.

He grinned at her confusion. It was the only expression he had, really.

'Go on. Take it. A goodwill gesture, young lady. Francis...Drew Sutton. You'll have two guns. I'll have none. The door is open. Have a nice day,' he said.

For a second, she honestly believed she was going to live. For a second.

Then he winked.

'Only...you know...no sense in carry around dead weight.'

She helped Ben rest against the corridor wall.

'He's not dead,' she said, though she wasn't sure. He stayed where she put him. Other than that, he might as well have been.

'If you say so,' said the man.

He still held the gun out for her. She moved as fast as she could and snatched it, expecting the man to whip it up and away and simply kill them both. But he didn't flinch.

Now Francis had a gun in each hand.

'Finish the job, then,' said the old man.

'I have no fucking idea what you're talking about,' she said.

The grinning man's eyes seemed to drift into her. A moment later blood gushed from Francis nose, but her ears, too. She cried out and fell to her knees.

'Now you know what to do,' said O'Dell.

Francis did. She knew exactly what she needed to know. All she had to do was point and pull the trigger.

O'Dell turned away as if she merely held water pistols and it was a hot day anyway.

Shoot him, for fuck's sake!

But the guns were heavy. She could barely hold them, let alone lift one. The one in her left hand dropped with a heavy thud to the floor. The one in her right fist hurt her fingers, pulled at her shoulder.

God...it's so heavy. I can't hold it. I can't...

But Francis fought. It was something deep inside, a core truth. While some give in, Francis would always, always fight.

'Fuck you!' she roared it out, dragged the gun up. She squeezed her eyes shut against at the sudden fire and the deafening sound of the shot and found the man was gone and that she'd shot Ben North through the heart instead.

*

Ben's slumped sideway to the floor. Francis threw the gun down and rushed to his side.

Instantly dead, no doubt, no mistake.

'Bastard! Bastard! Fucking bastard!'

She thumped at Ben's bloodied chest, but of course, nothing happened. She swore at the grinning man, not herself, not Ben.

She rose to follow the man who did this.

Was it him, though? Or was it me?

She didn't know. She just wanted to put a gun against the old fucker's chest and pull the trigger until it all just went...away.

But George was back, inside her head and he wouldn't let her.

Francis. Let him go.

Get out of my head! she told the kid. I'm done.

When he replied she had no choice but to listen. It was a child's voice, but something more than that. It had power.

If you chase that man down...we both die. Then he wins.

'Please leave me alone,' she said as she slide to the floor outside the boy's cell, Ben North's cooling body right beside her.

The boy's reply was simple.

No, Francis. Save us. Live, instead.

For a second, she stared at Ben's dead eyes.

I wonder what he sees, she thought.

But the kid was right. She closed Ben's eyes and stood.

Whatever he saw, she didn't need to know just yet.

'I'm sorry,' said Francis. She left the man.

She'd hardly known him, after all.

The key was already in the lock. She turned it all the way and opened the cell.

*

The kid lived in mind alone and he didn't know because the man with fire in his eyes, that devil with the grin, had told him it was so.

George was strapped in a wheelchair. His neck had been broken, and angry, badly stitched wounds crossed his shaven head where parts of his brain had been cut free.

The kid was the best part of dead. A mind without a body.

Francis cried for him, and placed a hand on George's cheek, like people might show love, or say goodbye. His cheek was cold. He didn't flinch, or smile. How could he.

She cried and placed her fingers against the side of his neck and held them there and felt nothing, just as he would.

The veil the man had put over the child was lifted and George, at last, saw himself through Francis' eyes. Francis' mind, her thoughts, were his for the taking. He saw what she saw, thought what she thought.

Kid's fucked up. Drool, shit, blood. He's a fucking mess. I can't take him. I can't. He's practically fucking dead. Jesus, he's just a little kid. What have they done to him? Poor kid. You poor, poor bastard. Those fucking bastards.

He felt, too, what she felt. He felt that absence...his own death. No heartbeat. No breath.

Take me, he pleaded, because he couldn't take her thoughts any longer. Take me.

I can't, she thought. I can't. You're already dead. George...are you...are you ghost? Am I mad, too? I'm so sorry.

She couldn't take him. Why would she?

'George...whatever you are...don't you understand? You're dead. I...'

My name is George. And I'm not dead. I'm not. I'm NOT!

Francis screamed at the full power of the boy's voice in her mind. The pain was the most intense she ever felt.

Please, don't shout anymore... don't shout.

Francis fell away from the body in the chair, terrified, confused, aching. Her mind ached. Her heart, too.

'You poor boy. I don't know how we're talking...if we even are. But you're a ghost...don't you understand? You're a memory...I'm sorry. Can't you see, feel? You're dead...please. Please just let me go.'

You'll take me.

How can I? she thought, but he heard that, too.

You'll take me.

She rose, shook her head.

The dead boy was silent for a second, and sanity seemed to settle over Francis.

You'll take me.

She walked to the door.

My neck. Francis. Touch my neck.

She shook her head again.

I AM NOT DEAD.

She tried, really tried. But it was like pushing and pulling against a riptide.

Against her will, compelled by his, she knelt once more and laid her fingers against his neck.

God help me, she thought.

His heart had been still. Now it wasn't.

Maybe he wasn't as powerful as the man who did this. But Francis found she was just as afraid of George as she was of O'Dell.

'You were dead.'

He's very strong. He fools people. He tricks and pushes them...like he tricked me. And you.

The man lied, without a doubt.

She took the handles of the wheelchair, but she didn't push.

'You lied, George. You lied, and you pushed.'

I...

'Don't lie to me again. Don't push me.'

Something inside The Mill exploded.

O'Dell's burning it, said George. Oh...oh...

She heard the same things George heard - but for George, it was inside his mind. Their feelings. Their fear. All their tortured voices crying out together.

HE IS KILLING US.

KILLING US.

Switch off, George, Francis thought. You don't need this.

But perhaps he did.

The key code to the exit was someplace in Francis' memory - placed there by O'Dell, for whatever an insane man's reasons could be. She opened the door and pulled the wheelchair through behind her. The door closed. The Mill burned, behind the door. The door, the fire, everything final.

Francis turned around with the chair and looked.

She expected gunfire, or madness, or a blue sun, maybe.

But the world was calm. It was evening and there was just a black road before them, far away from everywhere, it seemed, or maybe close to nowhere. Nowhere sounded pretty good to Francis.

Behind, the screams were muted by doors and walls to her ears, but loud in her mind.   George was silent.

Maybe for those ruined children, she imagined, fire was better.

'God rest them,' she said. 'And fuck the rest.'

She pushed George along the road. It didn't matter where it led, or didn't lead, as long as they didn't go back. No going back, she knew, for either of them. The life she had before the Mill, and George, and insane soldiers or crazy old ladies with false teeth, before saving Ben, before killing him...all that was done.

'George? We're on the road. Can you see? Through my eyes?'

Still he didn't say anything. She could feel him there, though. A presence somewhere inside, watching everything.

Francis...are you crying, too?

Everything she had before O'Dell was done. No husband, no friends. No home. Now a life on the run with a boy who'd willed himself back to life.

Francis?

She smiled and wiped at her eyes.

'Don't worry, George,' she said. 'I'm not tired of living yet. You?'

No, he said, and for the first time she felt something of the boy he should have been - one who smiled.

In her mind, though, she could still hear the echoes of the dying, because George could. Gradually, their cries faded away, until all Francis and George could understand was the last word.

'US,' they said, but it was no more than a whisper.

*

Many years ago a man had shot O'Dell in the head with a .22 calibre revolver. That man's name was Kurt William O'Dell. He didn't remember why he'd shot himself in the head. He forgot many other things besides.

While the past was a mystery to O'Dell, the future was an open, his path clear and bright, because his remarkable, scarred, enhanced mind showed him the way.

Perhaps he'd never know why he shot himself. Did it matter?

Not anymore, he thought.

He'd caught up with himself, at last. A new world was coming, and with it, fire like never seen before.

The phone set in his car's dashboard rang, loud in the speakers. O'Dell answered.

'What is it?' he said. His words were short, but he felt rather cheerful.

'Mr. O'Dell. The Farnham woman? The boy's mother?'

'Yes. The one your colleague kindly shot. I remember.'

'Sir. Jess and I...we made a slight mistake. We neglected to remove all identification. Left her wedding ring. Jess thought of it. Just in case...some people have names or whatever engraved...'

'Get to the point. If you just called to let me know you fucked up, just go ahead and shoot yourself and save me the bother.'

'Ah...she showed signs of animation. Sir. Two hours post-mortem.'

'Well...' O'Dell wondered whether he should make the man eat a bullet anyway.

Maybe not yet.

'Forego the bullet and bring her in, then. Well done.'

'Sir. On route to The Mill as we speak.'

'Go to the bunker instead. Things move on, do they not?' he said. He almost suggested they put the mother next to her son.

But I let him go, didn't I?

He had no idea why.

I'm sure there's a perfectly good reason...a man can't micromanage everything.             Instead, he turned his mind to the future, and fire to come.

He cut the call and drove on and while his left hand shook wildly against the steering wheel, he smiled.

Grinned.

*

Part Two

Indian Summer

VI.

The Cold Hand

September passed, gave way to October and a heat wave. Old people always say they've never know it so hot, or so cold. Young people know better, but both young and old agree the weather's always too hot, or too cold, or too wet. The weather is never just right. The English are never satisfied, not even when they grumble.

The truth is, it's often hot in October, and sometimes warm right to the end of the month. People called these late hot days an Indian Summer. Young or old, it's the last they'll know. Winter will be the coldest in living memory, and they'll be right about that, at least.

Things move on, don't they?

O'Dell moved pieces on a vast board that stretched into the futures. George healed. Kids heal faster than grown-ups. Not usually the dead ones.

Things move on, even in a small town at the heart of England where the air shimmered over sticky roads and dirt on playing fields and weedy back paths dried and hardened. Shops and stores ran their air conditioning high enough for sweat to chill and damp shirts stick to backs. Polite signs on shop windows begged men to keep their shirts on. People with dry throats drank warm lager while they sat on rotten benches in pub beer gardens beside slow stinking rivers, or by busy stinking city streets.

In that small heartland town, a man named Edgar Burroughs passed wilted fruit and vegetables on market day. His head pointed from somewhere between his narrow shoulder blades. A stick man, and one who'd snapped. The spoiled fruit and vegetables were both sweet and putrid and the smell sparked memories he didn't want.

The cloying stench of lilies dying in a green vase. Something brown and wet and rotten in the bottom of a fridge. Last summer's grass cuttings, mouldering in the grass box. Blue-green steaks ripe with flies on a barbeque that was never lit.

These smells reminded Edgar Burroughs of his wife and the way she was dying. A human shouldn't wilt until there was nothing but a lingering corpse, even though she breathed, still.

He kept his head down and walked slowly, deep and low in his thoughts, and Francis Sutton followed right behind.

*

Mrs. Burroughs - Sarah - had known something was wrong with her as early as spring that year. Maybe she'd worried she wasn't right in the winter, but by April, she knew. She didn't have to tell Edgar. She wasn't obliged to share. She didn't, either.

Sarah went to the doctor's surgery alone. She took the news well as could be expected, hands folded around her handbag, sitting in the uncomfortable chair in Doctor Darpec's office.

'Lymphatic Cancer. Nodes. Spreading. Blah blah Edgar's going to be alone blah blah. Stage Four. I'm so terribly sorry. Can I get you a tissue?'

Something along those lines. People don't really listen, when they're told they're terminal. Darpec saw her glaze over, but there's a rhythm to these kind of things. He finished his spiel.

'I'll give you the number of the MacMillan nurses, but they'll be in touch. They're a great help. I'll pass on your details...'

'Thank you,' said Sarah Burroughs and rose, and left, and didn't even cry.

She didn't need to tell Edgar, because Edgar knew things without being told.

*

A man over fifty grew to expect a certain amount of attrition among the people in his life. For most children, death didn't really exist. It was a distant, alien concept. In a man's middle years, it became a spectre, but one that was all too real.

By old age, it was almost an acquaintance, a passer-by you might consider taking in for tea on a cold day.

Edgar Burroughs wasn't quite on good enough terms to be taking tea with death. But he knew him well enough. A fifty-year old man, he was under no illusions about death's part in his future, or his wife's. Sarah Burroughs was forty-seven.

Edgar had always known he would outlast her, but he loved her the instant they met and enough that he would bear the loss her for the chance to share the time they had. They loved well, and often. They never had children. It had always made Sarah sad, though with the heavy booted footsteps of her death march getting ever closer, Edgar was almost glad. He could bear her loss, perhaps, because in twenty-two years he had time to prepare. A child of theirs would be spared this tearing of the heart, and his was sundered with each pound she lost. Her face grew pale, then gaunt, then skeletal. She groaned and her breath rattled in her chest. Their bedroom smelled of death and shit and awful fetid breath which came with every gasp. Edgar fell asleep with the smell, and woke with it, because he slept on an armchair he had carried upstairs so he could watch Sarah and tend to her needs. He didn't want to do this, but he did. He stopped going to work to feed her watered soup until all she could couldn't take that. Then morphine and ice water, then just ice on her lips.

She seemed so dry he watched her, he wondered if he opened the window on the summer heat, would she catch light in the warmth to float on the breeze like burning paper?

He couldn't remember why he'd gone to town for a moment. He looked at his hands, strangers to him suddenly.

Morphine, he remembered. He'd gone to collect her morphine, leaving her...thinking: If she dies alone, while I'm out, I won't have to watch.

Had he really thought that?

His hands were empty, because the chemist had been closed.

Absent-mindedly, he'd wandered all the way back with nothing. He barely remembered getting to town, or getting back, or even where he'd put the house keys when he came in.

Edgar stared at his wrecked wife for a moment. He felt like shit for having nothing for her pain and worse for hoping she would just...slip.

'Sorry, honey,' he said, but as he spoke that last shudder racked her barren chest and he got half his wish. She slid away from him, but he still had to watch.

A second, unexpected exhalation made him jump, but the MacMillan nurse told him this might happen. The nurse hadn't told him that his wife would grasp his throat in death and that her milk-eyes would open.

*

Edgar wasn't a weak man. Not strong, or fit, but probably somewhere around average. But shock stayed him, and the hand on his throat cut off his voice.

His wide eyes stared into his wife's white gaze and saw nothing there. No flash of her; no soul, no life. An empty vessel strangling him slowly, her hands implacable and solid and her face nearer as she pulled him down toward her last embrace. She stank of death, her teeth bared and snarling and feral, breathlessly, just an expression and a hunger. His vision, rather than growing dim or dancing with air-starved white spots, grew sharp. Colours that had been black and white and shades between turned back, bled, at last, into the world. Her skin was pallid and yellowed, but for the first time in weeks Edgar saw the bright pale light of the sun in her grey hair, the slice of light that cut through the bedroom window and brought life to their floral bedspread. Green, and heavy red roses, carnations, like blood blooms from a wound into cloth.

Unreasoning and almost unthinking, stunned the impossibility of her rising, but by the colours and smells and the sharpness of waking, too,  he put his hands on hers. He pulled.

She was taking him with her and he found he did not want to go.

She would not give. The simple muscles of an ordinary man against...

What? Death? His dead wife, rising?

He could not break free. Could not, he realised, hear anymore. His grip seemed ineffectual, pointless, despite the fight within him he'd found. Like they merely held hands rather than what they were really doing, which was fighting over Edgar, the survivor of their marriage.

This isn't an embrace. She's killing me.

As the bright colours left and his sight began to darken once again, something flashed beside him. Whatever it was seared his face and a terrible pain blasted his left ear. Blood, cold rather than hot, washed over the sheets and the rose pattern and spotted his face and hands.

The blood cooled the burn. A relief.

He would remember that thought later and feel sick.

For now, he was free. He rolled to one side, his weakened hands fluttering at his face and saw a woman stood over the bed. She held a gun, and the gun smoked.

Edgar waited for her to shoot him, not caring about her reasons at all.

*

He expected to see the dark barrel of the gun turn on him, but she moved the gun aside, though her eyes stayed on him.

'Come on. Move.'

Edgar neither rose, nor moved. He lay on the carpet in the bedroom he'd shared with his wife for over a decade. The carpet had burned his elbows almost as badly as the powder burn down the side of his face.

His ears rang, but he heard the woman's voice just fine. Somewhere down deep, either actual hearing, or piecing her words together from her manner; a little movement of her lips, or her head. But her meaning didn't quite register. His wife's handprints were still warm and harsh on his neck. His throat burned, and blood choked the back of his throat.

'Get up!'

Still, Edgar could not move.

'Fuck this,' said the woman. Blonde, long hair. Attractive, but not to Edgar. He was a one woman man, and this woman looked around twenty years younger, and she'd just shot his wife in the face.

She held the gun beside her leg as she strode toward him. Edgar didn't back away. He craned his head toward her. He wanted her to shoot him, too. But she didn't - with a surprisingly powerful left hand she dragged him to his feet, like he weighed no more than a bag of potatoes, rather than his thirteen stones. Her right hand remained tight on her gun.

'Fucking hell...do you want to die?'

That seemed like a strange question. But he knew the answer to that one, even though the words swam through his confusion and fluid ran down his neck from a ruptured eardrum.

'Yes.'

She shook her head. 'For Christ's sake. Brilliant.'

Edgar heard tyres outside, screeching, then the squeal of metal on metal. Other sounds, distant, like you might get two or three times a day in a small town, of sirens and shouting. Then...a gunshot.

He frowned.

'You might want to die. I shot your dead wife...get over it. I don't want to die, and I'm not going to.'

She pulled him and he could either follow or fall down. He followed, thick-headed, and on wooden legs. Like a marionette, and she held the strings.

But it isn't me that's the puppet, he thought. She is.

Through her hand, like a jolt of lightning, he saw the puppet master. A man with a straight, hard face, with fire reflected across the surface of his eyes, as though his eyes were mirrors and he stared straight into a burning world.

The man who sees fire?

Something like that. It was all he could pick up from the woman.

'What?' she said.

He shook his head. He didn't want to say anything. She was his saviour, but she was nothing more than a tool, a hand being told what to do, a gun pointed at whatever and whoever the -

Puppet...man with fire...

He turned himself away from the thought with effort. Whoever that man was, he was dangerous.

So what if he is? Why do I care?

She dragged him through his open front door.

Outside, the world had turned to hell.

She strode toward a black scratched and dented Mercedes. He watched the set of her shoulders, her long legs, the work boots she wore. She yanked the passenger door open and flicked her head.

The gun was still in her hand.

Edgar got in. She slammed the door behind him. Another gunshot, somewhere closer.

The woman slid into the driver's seat and jammed the gun down into the side pocket of the door. She turned the key she'd left in the ignition, reversed and hit someone that bounced back into the road.

Edgar turned to look, afraid she'd kill him too.

Why do I care? he thought again. It was a refrain he already disliked.

The man she'd hit lay across the verge. She'd knocked him from the pavement to the brown grass. The man was naked.

'You killed him...'

Why do I care? I want to die...

'I bloody well hope so,' she said. 'Time's short, Edgar, so I'm not going to fuck around with you. The town, around ten miles out, too...it's quarantined. There's an experiment going on. They put something in the water. It's making everyone crazy, and I don't think it's turning out like they hoped.'

'They? What? Like...Sarah?'

The woman shook her head. She didn't look at Edgar but at the road, the houses, then, the buildings around them as they drove through town. She drove fast, almost recklessly, but she was confident enough.

Looking for someone else to run down, or shoot. Maybe both.

'Not like your wife. Your wife...' The woman sighed and swerved round corners like she didn't expect to meet a car coming the other way.

'The way I understand it, it's like a temporary, very rare side effect. It's not permanent. The dead aren't coming back to life, Edgar. That's not what's happening. People are killing each other. That's the problem.'

'A side effect...' said Edgar. 'Of...?'

'You think I'm a nut? That's fine. You go on believing your wife just wanted a cuddle and it's normal for a town like this to be empty. Edgar, wake up.'

Edgar fell silent for a moment. She was right. She drove like a maniac, unmindful of the chance of other traffic but not because she was reckless - because there were no other cars. None at all.

He noted small things on the street. Bins, overflowing and forgotten. A postman's trolley with three beer cans on top, like the postman left it out all night and youngsters from the off-license had used it for a table.

Something wet dripped from the bottom of the trolley.

As they neared town, he remembered walking, head down, past the market. But now, through the market square empty of people, he realised he wasn't even sure what day it was. He wasn't thinking straight. He was...confused. It couldn't have been market day when he walked back. There weren't any people. That didn't make sense at all.

That's right. No sense at all...because I'm confused. Stress...my wife...

But the burn on his face was real. The ringing, whistling sound in his ear on that side. The dimming of sounds all around him. Did he imagine the whole thing...if he did, who the hell hallucinates pain, too?

And who is this woman? Why me?

'Who are you?' Another thought hit him. 'How do you know who I am? What are you? Some kind of Special Forces, soldier-type?'

'No,' she said, then laughed. The sound seemed to surprise her, even from her mouth as it was. 'My name's Francis. I'm not a soldier. I used to listen to Luther Vandross in my bedroom,' she said, and laughed again. Her laugh sounded to Edgar much like the feelings that ran in him.

She's afraid, too.

She glanced at him, but remained sure on the road. 'I'm not special.'

'Why did you come for me? Where did you get a gun? I don't understand.'

She didn't answer that, but waved her hand at the town as they sped through the high street. 'Look around, Edgar. Tell me what you see?'

He did, again, waking and seeing, cataloguing.

Bright sunshine. Fruit and crates and baskets and punnets and wooden pallets, tumbled to the ground. A fishmonger's van, crawling with black flies...and over everything, even in the car was the stench he'd barely registered, head down, walking through town on the way to his wife.

No people at all. But now his eyes were truly open, he understood that wasn't true.

There was someone. A man leaned against a shop window and there was a long, dark smear behind him.

'Is that...blood?'

'Yep. Blood. It's like that for ten miles in any direction. And how I know who you are? A boy told me your name. He sent me to get you.'

'Me?'

'Yeah. Don't know why, but the kid thinks you can help us stop the man who did this because you're special, too, aren't you, Edgar?'

The man who saw a burning world, he thought. No...

'The man with fire in his eyes,' he said, and knew that this time he was right.

'Yes,' she said. 'His name is O'Dell.'

*

Something struck the windscreen at the outskirts of town. The screen shattered. Francis swerved. Edgar saw everything slow, though in reality everything happened fast.

Blood on her. She didn't cry out. The thing, grey and heavy, tore into Edgar's arm and he felt nothing. It was rough, and hard. My arm's broken, he thought, pain on the heels of thought. Not a rock...a piece of concrete. Two feet long, maybe one foot around. Iron or steel inside the concrete. It flew through the space between the front seats to the back, where it speared the material and smashed against the metal inside the boot. His shoulder burned and he understood that the blood on Francis' face and shirt was all his. She bounced the car against something. She spoke but he didn't hear her words. The car hit the kerb and the gun in the side pocket jumped, jounced about, hit her head then landed in the foot well beneath the brake pedal. She didn't touch the brake but stamped on the accelerator instead.

Stop, he tried to say, but he was weak. He put his left hand over his right shoulder. Blood poured around his fingers. Might as well have been trying to stop a river with a stick. The car sped. Around forty...he checked her dashboard and saw she was up to fifty miles per hour. The lights at a junction ahead were red.

Her face was grim. Red lights didn't matter. There was no one around to hit. Everyone was dead, or insane...or...

I've been drinking the water, too, and if what she says is true...

Thoughts popped into Edgar's head, passed through, left nothing behind. Like the people he said 'hi' to on his walks into town to buy groceries, or Sarah a birthday present. The blood through his fingers and along his arm was a torrent. He felt dizzy, sick.

At fifty miles an hour Francis leaned the car into a tight bend that led not south, to the bypass, but north and out into the country.

No one around. All fine. Everything's fine.

Edgar's left side was soaked. His eyes drifted and his vision wavered but he still saw the white van coming at them.

A delivery driver who missed the memo, he mused.

Then he saw the driver's face. A mask of blood.

At the last moment before the impact Edgar though the driver had no lips - just long teeth, red with blood and froth and spit.

At fifty, on a tight bend, Francis had no chance. The guy wasn't trying to avoid them, either - he was trying to kill them.

The Mercedes front end was crushed, the car turning the wrong way up so Francis was above Edgar, before they rolled. Edgar's head hit the window as the car hit the ground.

Finally, the car skewed and slid on the roof. Distantly, Edgar heard the roar of the engine, or the wheels - something still turning. Francis' head rested on his shoulder. Shattered glass covered them both. The smell of hot rubber, along with petrol, exhaust dirt, a tang like the gun smoke he'd smelled earlier from split airbags. Hot tarmac by his burned cheek.

There should be a window there.

The thought was muzzy. Everything was fading away. His hearing took longer to go. He heard footsteps, the woman's breath, the slow tumble of sharp things falling through the wreckage of the car, and a voice.

'Kshh. Kssahh.'

The words made no sense, but as Edgar wondered at the meaning, he slipped all the way into unconsciousness, along with Francis beside him.

*

VII.

U+03BF

Darren Sewell Jones clicked his ballpoint pen repetitively - nib in, nib out - while he stared at the computer monitor in front of him, hardly seeing the website he'd been designing.

The computer was a high-end Mac. A crisp screen, great graphics. The colours were vibrant and everything seemed to shine like crystal. All around his desk, post-it notes were stuck down with benign messages upon them. Some bore smiley faces above the 'i', some little winking faces, like people thought in emoticons instead of English now. He hated it. The walls to his cubicle were some kind of fuzzy felt thing. He could have stuck a picture of a farm on it, or Mr. Men, or Sesame Street characters. As long as they were made of felt, too, because nothing else would stick there. The wood of his desk was laminated, or covered in some kind of lacquer. He didn't know shit about wood, except this 'wood' got slick with sweat from his wrist as it rubbed on his desk just beneath his mouse mat.

The post-it messages, bland and cancerous at the same time, peeked back at him every time he looked at them. There was one in particular that troubled him. He hid this beneath his ergonomic keyboard, which he lifted on occasion to remind himself exactly what was written there, like he did now.

Mick Ranse is trying to fuck your daughter in the ring. Dirty fucker is a snatch rapist. Watch him.

The note was signed, simply, 'A FRIEND'.

Jones' daughter was five.

Jones looked up over the parapet of his cubicle and saw Ranse emerge from the door that led to the small kitchen and the toilets.

It was the smile the man wore that sealed the deal.

Snatch rapist.

Jones had a picture of his daughter and his wife on his desk.

'Ranse,' he called.

Ranse didn't look like Jones imagined a paedophile should. The man looked like a tired drunk. His tie wasn't straight after the toilet. Everyone knew Ranse put a shot in his coffee after lunch. Maybe he'd been sick, puking in the toilet and writing it off to a weak constitution. He was an alcoholic and people pitied him.

They didn't know what Jones' knew, though, thanks to his friend.

'What's up, brother?'

Ranse, talking to Jones like they were friends or something. They weren't.

'Here. Got Daze a new shirt. What do you think?'

Daze, his pet name for Daisy. His daughter. Five years old.

'Damn,' said Ranse. 'You're going to have your hands full. Great shirt.'

Fucker's getting off on the picture.

Jones almost checked Ranse's trousers for a shift. But he didn't.

'Here,' he said, standing and freeing his chair so that Ranse could sit. 'Anyway, wanted you to look at this. New design I've been working on. I could do with an opinion. Can't see the wood for the trees, been at it so long, you know?'

'Sure, bud,' said Ranse. Jones stood, Ranse sat. Jones took the phone from the cradle. Everything was wireless these days. The computers, the printers. Everything except the phones. It had a curly wire which Jones put round Ranse's throat.

Jones pulled it tight as his strength would allow. Ranse gurgled, but the cable shifted and he almost got loose.

Jones' used his body to ram Ranse into the desk, thumping his face hard enough into the keyboard to crack the black plastic. The monitor wobbled on its stand, but didn't fall. Ranse fought, but didn't say anything because he couldn't. Jones panted from the effort of strangling the nonce bastard.

Ranse's feet kicked out beneath the cubicle. There was a smell of piss, not just Ranse's, but Jones, too. He felt the warmth on his leg. He felt sordid, embarrassed about that - an adult, pissing himself at work - but he was just fine with killing.

Finally, Ranse stilled.

No one watched. There wasn't anyone else in the office.

Good, thought Jones. That's good. Because I just killed a man.

Everyone's going to know I did it, but it's fine because the man was trying to fuck my five year old daughter. Public service. Protecting my family.

It's fine.

'It's fine,' he said, and smoothed his jacket as he walked to the office door. It would lead to fresh air, a shingle-covered car park, his Audi. Home, a family that he'd just looked after like a man should.

Jones opened the door and stepped into a dark room instead of a car park.

'What the...'

He didn't finish his sentence.

A bullet entered the right side of his head, exited through the left, tearing and fragmenting and ruining anything that might have remained of Mr. Jones' awful insanity. He fell onto a plastic sheet. A man in a hazardous materials suit stepped up and folded the sheet over Jones' body, there in the dark, and dragged him away. That man was followed by another with a full body suit and respirator, who switched off the cameras which covered the work simulation and then set to cleansing the room, but only after he'd tidied away the other body.

*

Kurt William O'Dell had no memory, but he didn't live for the past. He was all about the future - the one he could see, and the one he was making. He wasn't a chemist, though, or a scientist, or a soldier. That was why he made sure owned the men and women who were, and the ones he owned were very, very good at what they did.

He watched the video from the simulation until Jones exited the room. The footage showed different angles, each angle displayed on a bank of screens. When the show was finally over, O'Dell looked over the readouts from various sensors on a smaller monitor beneath the screens.

'What am I looking at?' he asked.

'The test you just viewed was the last test phase of the second iteration of the compound. Sir, we are officially ready to rock and roll.'

'But not, Mr. Boyle, the only reason I am here?

'No, Sir,' replied Boyle, shifting from foot to foot like a restless child. Already, the motion grated on O'Dell's nerves. If Boyle wasn't so brilliant, he would have happily put a bullet in the man's spine, if only to make him still.

'The rarest effects, Sir,' continued Boyle, blithely unaware that only O'Dell's will was holding back a bullet, 'Such as increased cognitive ability, or even the rather mild regenerative capabilities some subjects exhibit, have proven impossible to replicate reliably. Far too many variables, perhaps genetic, synaptic variations, mutations, even. But telepathic awakening, telekinesis, precognition, hyperawareness, increased perception...these things aren't just rare, Sir. They just don't happen. In one thousand plus test subjects, one showed a moderate increase in mental capacity, but coupled with a case of the crazies. Ah...Sir.'

'Boyle...please stop blathering. I take it these...side-effects...have become so rare as to be dismissed. That they are irrelevant, then?'

'Yes, Sir. Reanimation of any kind hasn't been replicated under controlled conditions at all, on living or dead subjects, not any of their samples. The only examples we have are from field footage.'

'Your conclusions?'

'The modified compound - we're calling it U+03BF - is damn near perfect at what it does. Other effects may be random, even so, but in affecting the actions of those exposed? Brilliant, Sir. The team has done a Stirling job.'

'U+O3BF, Boyle?'

'It's an organophosphorus compound, Sir. We have taken the original formula, based more heavily on a composition similar to LSD, but Novichok agent...'

'Boyle?'

'Sir?'

'U+03BF?'

Boyle smiled. 'Are you familiar with unicode, Mr. O'Dell?'

'Facets, certainly. This is unicode?'

'It is. It represents the Greek lower case letter, 'omicron'...Sir...I...'

Boyle wilted in O'Dell's glare.

'One of the team is a great fan of Futurama...'

'Mr. Boyle, you are aware I carry an automatic pistol.'

Boyle looked down.

'Should your team decide to saddle me with a name like U+03BF, which I will have to use in future conversations with my superior, are you in any doubt as to how this will make me feel?'

'Irritable?'

'Close enough, Boyle. Tell your team to restrain their cleverness to the task at hand. The same might well be applied to you.'

'Sir,' said Boyle, considerably less cheerful than he had been.

'Now, to the point - reliable effects?'

'From massive psychosis, hallucinations, paranoia. The mechanism is quite...'

'Have I not been clear? The point, Mr. Boyle.'

'Short term? Drop this on the enemy and they're fucked. Long term...well...it's basically an atomic bomb without the fallout. Sir.'

'That's your considered scientific opinion, is it?'

'Yes,' he said. Boyle wasn't scared, now. He was excited. His enthusiasm would have been contagious, had O'Dell any capacity for such things.

'And the effects are...uniform? Total?'

'In scientific terms? The science is mostly boring, I imagine,' said Boyle, quite rightly, 'But my team has increased efficacy to very near 99.8%.'

'Okay, Boyle. Perhaps I won't shoot you.'

Boyle seemed unsure, which was fine by O'Dell. He understood that many people did not understand when he was joking. He wasn't. Ever. His grin confused people, he figured.

He really had decided against shooting Boyle, though. Scientist were plentiful. Chemists with the flare Boyle exhibited were not.

'Anything else?' said O'Dell. Impatient as ever, he certainly hoped not. He was ready to move to the next thing.

Boyle's moment was far from done, though. O'Dell sighed and waved his hand for the man to get it over with.

'How long since you saw her, Sir?'

'The woman? Farnham?' O'Dell shrugged. Memory was around the only thing that made him uncomfortable. 'She's still going? Honestly...I expected she would have fallen to pieces by now.'

This was a lie, though. It was only now that Boyle brought Eleanor Farnham to his attention that O'Dell remembered his initial interest in her at all.

How in the fuck is that I forget these things?

He didn't know. It made him angry right then, but it wasn't Boyle's fault. By his side, his left hand began to jitter. He slid that hand into his jacket pocket. It tended to unnerve people, and he wanted Boyle to continue. He was curious.

Boyle nodded. 'Please,' said Boyle. 'Perhaps it's best seen. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised.'

Kurt O'Dell wasn't a man who enjoyed being surprised in the slightest, but no sense in spoiling it - O'Dell thoroughly expected Boyle to be dead within the year at the latest anyway.

No sense in upsetting a dead man.

They rode an elevator to the holding cells. Boyle was bursting to tell O'Dell his little secret. O'Dell remained studiously silent. He would much rather, he found, see this for himself.

A short walk down one of the many identical corridors within the facility, and he understood Boyle's excitement completely.

Eleanor Farnham was quite...marvellous.

O'Dell was surprised, and very little surprised a man with such an affinity with the future.

'You were correct, Mr. Boyle. This is quite remarkable.'

A researcher made notes and observations on a PDA. She looked up as O'Dell and Boyle entered.

'Out,' said O'Dell. She didn't argue.

'Go ahead, Boyle. We all deserve a day in the sun.'

'It's not just animation, Sir. It's regeneration.'

O'Dell peered through the thick glass at the woman.

'How interesting. Does she feel any pain?'

'Oh yes,' said Boyle. 'She's heavily sedated now. She becomes agitated, and the constant pain medication makes her...grouchy.'

'Dangerous?'

Boyle shrugged, noncommittal. 'Very marginal, Sir...with the right tools. Give her a gun and she'd probably pose some kind of threat. As she is? A kid could fight her off.'

'Contagious? Infectious?'

'Well...no. Even when she came in, she tested negative for exposure. She must have assimilated the compound at a remarkable rate. Perhaps on some cellular level she was always a fast healer, or...honestly, Sir. We haven't got a clue as to the how or why. We're still taking samples. Blood and tissue every day, but she's showing no signs of degradation. She's healing at a faster rate that you or I could, and that was when she was dead.'

'Boyle? Was dead?'

Boyle couldn't contain himself any longer. He laughed, now, grinning like a lunatic, like a comedian who'd hit a punch line with God-like timing.

'Field footage puts the longest reanimation at three minutes and eleven seconds. But she was never like those cases. She arrived with a bullet to the head, no cognition, effectively blind and deaf. No sign of cardiac activity. But after three days, she wanted to eat.'

'What?'

'Yes, Sir. She was hungry. At first, we thought it no more than some idiot, base impulse. Chewing motions. Bringing her hand to her mouth. Almost like rudimentary sign language. Like an ape.'

'So you fed her?'

Boyle nodded. 'A living human needs fuel to replace lost cells, repair damage...something similar seems to be happening with her. We know she digests the food because she defecates. But that's not the limit - lung function, brain function, a gradual return of her dexterity. A heart beat.'

'Excuse me?'

'Yes, Sir.'

'Well, Mr. Boyle, you were true to your word. You really are full of surprise.'

O'Dell pointed to Mrs. Farnham. 'I think I would like to meet our guest,' said O'Dell. 'Open the door.'

*

Boyle's excitement felt like a tingle on O'Dell's skin and it was a distraction he didn't need. He closed the door behind him so he and Eleanor Farnham could be alone.

She was clean, but that was the best that could be said of her appearance. As a woman, a human, she was repulsive to the eye. The flesh around the exit wound was shaven and the flesh angry and her brain, exposed, pallid and damp. One eye was white, probably dead and useless, but her other eye roved wildly. He imagined anything that she did see would only translate to her mind as a confused ramble of pictures. The ragged stumps where two fingers had been amputated were open wounds, but neither injury bleeding or scabbed.

Samples of skin, muscle, brain had been excised.

Dead people don't breath, but he could clearly hear the soft whistle of air as she inhaled and exhaled.

'Wannwn...fashe...fush...'

O'Dell took a step away from the woman, confused, rather than afraid. He was unaccustomed to either feeling.

'She talks? '

'Same thing so far,' said Boyle from the adjacent observation room. His voice sounded sharper than usual through the tiny speakers set high within the walls. 'But she only speaks to male attendants, Sir. We think she's asking if we want to fuck.'

O'Dell nodded, to show he understood.

But it was Eleanor that held his interest.

Eleanor? Is anything going on in there, Mrs. Farnham? Eleanor? Would you like to talk? A cup of tea, perhaps?

Nothing.

Eleanor. Poke your eye out. GOUGE it out. Go on.

There were very few people able to say no to the man with fire in his eyes, when that fire rose. But from Eleanor Farnham there was nothing at all.

Like O'Dell himself, her mind was just dead space.

He stared into the woman's crazily roving eye for a moment longer, then nodded to Boyle once more.

'I've seen enough,' he said. 'Boyle, open the door.'

O'Dell stepped outside and headed away from the cell, his phone already out and ready in his hand. Right then, neither hand shook and his eyes were bright with purpose.

*

The only man in the world above O'Dell answered at the first ring.

'O'Dell. I assume you have something useful to say?'

'Yes. We have a breakthrough. A single case only, Sir. But we have a test subject exhibiting remarkable regenerative capabilities.'

'Mr. O'Dell?'

'Sir?'

'How does the expression go? I don't give a monkeys? Or is a rat's arse?'

'But, Sir...'

'O'Dell. It's time. Are you ready? Because I need you on form, not fucking around with side projects. Miracles are not our business, are they?'

'No. No, Sir.'

'Good. Let's leave that shit to the Catholics. They'll be happy as pigs in shit soon enough. Now, I repeat...are we ready?'

O'Dell thought about the woman. He thought, too, about the boy he had freed for reasons he knew he'd probably never recall.

But if the boy was alive...together, he and his mother might hold the key to something that might even pale his interest in fire. Some new genetic...miracle.

'Sir...I have interesting parties in the field.'

'Interested?'

'Interesting.'

'Are they important?'

Kurt considered the question. The boy might be dead. Probably was.

'Possibly. Short term.'

There was no sense in lying. The boss didn't want the boy, or his mother. It wasn't like he didn't know most of what O'Dell reported far in advance.

The boy, though. That niggled at O'Dell.

Why in the hell did I let him go? O'Dell could not answer that question

'Long term is the only thing that matters. Hear me?'

'I do.'

The man on the other end of the phone hung up. O'Dell made a second call to a man with a very dangerous finger.

'Go ahead,' he said. 'All clear.'

'Code?' replied the man.

O'Dell gave it to him, relayed from memory. That, at least, he could remember. But so much else pushed aside, too, he thought. That made him angry, as it sometimes did.

'Understood, Sir. Awaiting verification.' A pause, while the man checked counter codes and fail safes on a simple screen before him. 'Verification received.'

Some people needed a push. Some just like to watch things burn.

Like O'Dell.

His eyes brightened and his vision darkened. Fire in London, Paris, Berlin, St. Petersburg. That's how it would start.

'Sir?'

'Execute,' said O'Dell.

'Understood. Scheduled 0800.'

'Good day,' said O'Dell.

*

VIII.

Charnel

Francis woke to terrible pain. Pain like dying, surely. Agony crashed in waves along the torn flesh of her back from being dragged across a rough (road? I was in a car?). Her feet burned inside the bones. She wasn't bound, but her back rested against a wooden post and for some reason she couldn't move.

I was driving. There was a passenger.

She closed her eyes, one of which was swollen perhaps as far as her cheek. She tried to remember how she'd been hurt so badly (why am I not in a hospital?). The pain pushed back, though. Thought was difficult when the pain ebbed, impossible when it crashed back again. She ducked her head and puked on her own clothes, with no bucket and movement denied her, it was the only place for it to go.

I can see, though. Barely.

But better than blind.

Night time, she figured. She wasn't inside, like in a house.

I'm not in hospital because of the quarantine...there are no ambulances. I'm still inside...

Edgar, she remembered. She'd come to get the man named Edgar.

She couldn't see him, but she couldn't see much of anything. Wherever she was, it was night and doors were closed. But not a house. The feel of the air was different, the way the quiet felt...like it was larger. And something else, too...a deep stink. Animal smells.

A barn.

The animals were all gone, but their smell lingered, in the hay.

If Edgar (older man, she remembered, her mind rousing despite the pain) had been in the car, then maybe he'd died. She couldn't hear anyone else, there in the dark. Just herself, for a moment, her breath and the slight rustle of her clothes.

The pain was constant, made worse, she thought, because she couldn't see it. Now, though, her eyes adjusted to the dark. She saw, and found seeing was worse.

My feet...oh. My God.

The barn floor was wood, not dirt, and someone (kssh...ksash...she remembered it all now and wished she didn't know anything at all) had driven thick nails through her feet and pinned her to the boards. The sight of it, disgust at such a thing and fear, too...all those things snapped at her. Panic rose. She could only think of dying and nothing else. She shook, cried, ground her teeth against the pain.

Finally, she stilled. Fatigue dragged at her. Maybe blood loss, too. But it was fear that sapped her strength and it was pain that took her will. She might have slipped into sleep, or unconsciousness, one more if not for a groan somewhere in the dark.

The sudden sound pulled her attention from her feet. Wide-eyed in the dark, she flicked her eyes. It wasn't the 'kssh, ksash', man. Edgar was in the barn with her. He hung upside down, his feet tied in thick rope. A hook had been pushed through the tear in his shoulder and someone had hung a sack of something heavy on the other end of the hook.

Like butchery, she thought. Edgar, being bled.

Kssh ksash. His teeth were sharp.

Edgar was going to die.

But even through her fear and pain, that cold part of Francis' mind still worked for her. It calculated. She was a woman who had ice inside her. She'd shot and killed a policeman named Ben, hadn't she?

If I hear kssh ksash from the man with no lips I'll scream 'til I burst.

But that was her panic talking.

The cold mind that made Francis want to live, no matter the cost, looked back to Edgar. The hook hadn't torn free because it was caught on his collarbone. It'd take more than a sack of potatoes to tear through bone.

Dead men don't bleed, do they?

Maybe a trickle, she thought. Like a draining cow or a pig - hung to get the blood out so you could eat it.

Eat it. Kssh...

'Fuck you,' she said.

The man with no lips had long white teeth. Blood had stained his teeth. Suddenly, she understood what happened to Kssh Ksash man's lips. He cut them free with a shard of glass or mirror, placing the wet flesh into his mouth and chewed.

She didn't doubt it was true. She didn't have to be George to understand that.

Edgar grunted.

'Edgar,' she whispered. She strained, eyes closed, listening for footsteps or (kssh...kassh... eat your facshe). Nothing. Yet.

Francis jammed her teeth together so she couldn't scream and stood.

The bones in her feet grated against the nails.

Edgar's eyes rolled toward her, fluttered and then drifted shut again. And in the distance, outside the barn, she heard a door slam.

'Jesus...no...'

She let herself scream, then - let her fear and pain strengthen her. Never give in...never. She wanted to live. She always did.

With all the strength she had left, Francis she tore her right foot free, the head of the heavy nail surely breaking bone, or severing some tendons. She fell and didn't need to worry about the nail in her other foot. Her weight freed her. Spots drifted around, bright stars like fireflies in the distance, dancing in evening-light, and pain stole her breath.

But none of that change the slap, slap of heavy boots on summer dry dirt, or the obscene sound of the Kssh Ksash Man chattering to himself in low, happy tones.

Slap. Slap.

'Ksnnng. Shnnn. Ksash...kash. Kash ksash...'

Edgar grunted, like he, too, registered death's approach. Francis dragged herself to him.

Got to stand, she thought, but even fear of death wouldn't give her the courage to use her ruined feet. She couldn't do it.

I can.

If I can make it this far, I can take some pain. If I have to - to live.

I have to save us because no one else can.

She tried. She really tried. Agony floored her again.

A metallic sound, then - as though the man were taking a lock from a hasp. Something else, too - quiet metal thunder. Metal sheets in high wind, like the sidings on a warehouse might make.

The door slid away on runners in the dirt.

'Kss? Mm-nn?'

His face was in shadow from light behind him - a house, fifty yards distant.

Backlit, Francis could tell what he held in his hand. A two-man saw, like lumberjacks used.

Probably uses it to quarter his meat, she thought, horrified and scared at once.

It quivered.

The thunder.

She had nothing to fight with. No strength. No courage.

The hook in Edgar's shoulder.

A desperate last chance.

'Shkksh...shaash...krrssh.'

Insane noises from a lunatic mouth. Closer, now, his teeth looked like pottery shards, ceramic and sharp.

Francis grabbed Edgar's hand. She felt his good shoulder give as she pulled herself higher, onto her knees.

A dislocated shoulder's better than dead, right?

She yanked the sack free of the lower end of the hook.

But while the man was insane, he was still quick. He swung the saw like a sword and the long metal teeth sank into Francis' back. Searing pain buckled her entire body, she convulsed, spittle flying and puke rising, but the hook came free.

Edgar's flesh hung from the steel.

She impaled Kssh Ksash foot against the floorboard, just as he'd done to her.

'Shaaa?'

With both hands this time, adrenaline and joy pushing the pain back, she swung the sharp curve up between his legs, and as he doubled she hit him a third time in the back of the neck. The mad man and Francis both lay in the dirt and straw, panting.

The man died. Francis didn't.

*

Later, early light roused Francis, and a dog's high bark somewhere nearby.

She wondered if Edgar had died during the night. She wondered if maybe she had, too.

Nope. Dead chicks don't bleed.

Francis reached out and poked Edgar's dislocated shoulder. He grunted and growled, unable to bring himself back from whatever nightmare he'd retreated to. She'd have to do it.   Edgar's blood, the dead man's blood, her own - all splashed out on the dry boards. What little she had in her stomach came out. It splattered her hands and hair and she didn't care.

I'm alive. Edgar's alive. He's not.

The heavy saw was there, too. Whatever the man had severed in her back made her right hand tingly and numb, but she thought she could still manage to heft the saw and cut through the rope from which Edgar hung. But she couldn't get to the rope. Even the lowest point was around four feet too high for her to reach, because she could only kneel. Mangled and messy, her boots were the only thing holding her feet together.

She hurt, but it was total pain, and so complete she felt suffused with it. A sensory deprivation experience, but one that left agony rather than free-floating thoughts and meditations.

And pain like that was a goad to Francis, because as long as she hurt she couldn't be dead. While she bled, her heart still beat.

She clenched the saw in her fist and put her right foot down. One hand on the floor, the other bunched around Edgar's collar, she dragged herself up.

She shook. She wavered.

But the saw, angled upward, now reached the rope.

The teeth were brilliant peaks along the blade. Two long cuts was all it took. Edgar fell and hit the filthy, bloody floor head first. Even that didn't rouse him.

'Fucked if I'm carrying you out of here,' she told him, still breathless from fighting against the pain. 'Fucked if I am.'

She stuck a finger in the hole in his shoulder. That did the trick.

Edgar screamed and stared at her, his eyes huge and confused.

The Kssh-ksash man's van was right there, just outside the barn. At this point she'd be a bitch if she had to. She really wanted to get the hell out of the nuthouse.

'Stop being such a pussy, Edgar. I've got two broken feet and that lunatic ran a saw over my back. Your feet work. My arms work. Get the fuck up! We're getting out of here. I nearly died, saving your skin. Get. Me. Up!'

The effort hurt, but it was rain in the ocean.

It hurt to see a man cry in pain, but she understood. Pain was...painful.

'Let's go,' he said. He was pale but for spots of blood across his face. Seeing the old man like that dragged back an uncomfortable memory of another man, Ben North.

It was unwelcome. When she took Edgar's belt buckle and took some weight on her feet, she cried just as he had.

'Can you walk at all?' he asked. Everything about him was weak.

But she needed him, if only to get the hell away.

That again, Francis? How deep does being a heartless bitch go?

'What...fifty, sixty yards?' she said, trying to make her voice light enough to carry them to the van, at least. 'Pfft. I can make it. We can...right? Team GB, Edgar.'

Get him involved. Be cold, if you have to. Warm if that works...but get the hell out.

Sure, she was calculating. Not a nice thing to be thinking about herself, maybe, but Francis was a survivor. If it came to it she'd kill to keep going.

I already have, she thought.

Together, Edgar and Francis covered those yards. Slowly, achingly and agonising.

Kssh fucker didn't bother her at all. Yet every time Ben's dead face surfaced, she hated herself just enough to take the pain.

Pain wasn't just on the outside. And pain wasn't just useless, either.

Edgar stumbled and nearly took them both down. As it was, the shift in her weight hurt enough for her to cry again. Tough or not, broken flesh hurts. Broken bones hurt a hell of a lot worse.

'Francis?'

'Still alive.'

'Are you sure about this? Can you drive?'

'I hope so,' she said.

'Do it anyway,' said Edgar. 'Fire's coming. The man who brings fire? O'Dell. Right?'

Movement was agony, but it wasn't going to go away, was it? Why be a little bitch about it? It was her pain. Pain was better than him.

'I can deal with it,' she said. Now they were just ten yards from the van.

Another horrible thought came to her. What if the keys aren't there?

'Good, Francis.' Talking was tiring him, but he didn't give in, either. Maybe because of what he said next. 'Because I can see it. His fire's coming, Francis. It's coming now.'

Chilled, the thought spurred them both on the last few feet. The keys were there, hanging from the ignition.

'Sometimes, God is good enough,' she said.

The van stank of rot. Behind the only two seats, the interior was covered with old blood, shards that were probably teeth, and clumps of hair. The mess in the back crawled with flies.

It was good enough. Both clambered into the passenger side. Francis shuffled across the bench seat and turned the key.

Despite the dents in the van, the still heat, the human remains, the flies, and even her pain, the engine sounded just as good as a peal of childish laughter.

'That's the best thing I've ever heard,' she said, and pulled away from the farm. The engine rumbled like it agreed.

*

The van balked at any speed over fifty. It probably sustained some engine damage from swiping the Mercedes. It didn't matter - for a while, with the windows down and the rushing wind to blow away the heat and the stench, it felt wonderful.

Silence, but punctuated by Francis' swearing - whenever she had to shift gear, or even just to take a corner. Turning the wheel pulled at the drying wound across her back.

Her mind still sparked, though. A slow fire, perhaps, these thoughts, like coals burning and glowing a low-orange in the early hours. After ten, twelve miles, she checked on Edgar and found him staring at her.

'What?'

'You're bleeding.'

'Aren't we both?'

'No...you've a nose bleed.'

Francis brought her finger to her nose and wiped. There, on the second knuckle, a bright line of blood on her filthy hands.

'Would you look at that,' she said. She shrugged, then hissed at the pain the gesture brought.  'Could be worse, I suppose. My feet are fucked, and I can still drive. I can handle a little more blood.'

'You swear a lot.'

'Yeah. I do. If I stop swearing, it'll be because I'm dead. And if I'm dead, we'll both be fucked, won't we?'

*

O'Dell waited on confirmation in his black Audi. A phone call would have sufficed, but he'd waited over a half a century to see the first of his fires light the sky. Things he'd never be able to feel - blast radius, fire, shockwave, radiation - would always be denied to him. But it was a clear day, no weather dampening, low atmospheric detonation - four miles and change, there would be almost total devastation. Maybe ten miles out, heavy radiation, depending on what the weather brought in the next few days. But radiation's not instant. It takes a while. The Audi, ten miles out, was far enough for O'Dell to live and close enough to watch.

For so long he'd balanced the world in his hands, and he was tired of holding it. When things become tiresome, or heavy, or old - a sensible man puts them down.

The car was cold, the air condition in the car set as high as it would go. The glass was heavy, as were the doors and floor and roof. The car's suspension was modified, too. An executive model made just about as good as car could be.

O'Dell sniffed a little, not noticing a dot of blood beneath his nose. Air conditioning often gave him the sniffles. He didn't worry, just wiped with a handkerchief.

He glanced at his watch, not the handkerchief.

0759.

'Boom boom,' he said. No cigar or brandy for him, though. When you set out to destroy the world, one little bomb was nothing to get stiff about.

*

The temperature spiked suddenly and rapidly in the charnel van Francis' drove. The wind through the open windows no longer a relief, but dry, uncomfortable. With the wind, a weird, electrical fire-smell. Like the breeze from an old electric fan, dusty and dangerous, bare wires heating up someplace inside a plastic shell. Francis glanced in the wing mirror. Edgar glanced at his. An automatic response, partly, but also because they were expecting an explosion.

Just not this.

A double flash just beat a cloud that rose skyward. No rain fall from this cloud, but earth, instead. Not falling down, but blasted up, like a cloud that could only work backwards. Everything was suddenly upside down, everything suddenly wrong.

Dust and fire, the shockwave and the radiation, and an entire town vaporised in the first nuclear explosion on British soil.

'Was that...?' Edgar couldn't seem to finish the sentence. He blinked, compulsively, but so did Francis. Her eyes felt full of sand, or grit. Watery and sore both, but she wouldn't take her hands from the wheel. If she stopped, or crashed, they were dead.

'I think so,' said Francis.

'Are we going to die?' he asked.

Francis shrugged.

'How far is that going to reach?'

'I don't know.'

'All those people...all...are they...?'

Francis slammed her fist against the centre of the wheel. 'I don't know! Stop fucking asking, for fuck's sake.'

She took a calm and slow breath of hot air. Maybe full of poison already.

Her own panic wasn't helping, and wouldn't ever help. She had to be a cold hand now, more than ever.

Because this is the end.

She tried to speak like a normal person, but she was unable to think her way around that simple sentence. It became a barrier in her head.

'This is the end.'

Just that. From a song, a film, she couldn't remember. Just four words on endless repeat.

'They're dead,' she said when she could think and not scream. 'If they're not, they will be. Let me drive, Edgar. For the love of God...leave me alone so I can drive.'

*

They were thirty or more miles out, too far for the shockwave to affect them.

A few miles more and they reached their destination. Francis found herself nearly blind when she pulled the van into the shade beneath an underpass. Traffic thundered across the road above, and rocked the van on the road below. Panicked drivers, but none careened or crashed or drove their cars from the bridge in a fit of despair while the cloud rose to the south.

The underpass was the best shelter she and Edgar could get. Thick concrete above and all around. Like those old Cold War survival tips - hid under a table. She figured that was against falling debris, rather than the radiation.

But their table was concrete. Better, she hoped, against blast and the invisible killer that would follow. She'd seen those old films of nuclear experiments on unnamed islands, sat in cinemas, gazing up at CGI apocalypses more times that she knew.

None of which told her how far could be safe.

'How far do you think we got?' Edgar's ragged words were soft, hard to hear against the constant roar of traffic. The van sat half-in, half-out of the near side lane. Cars sped by. Some people yelled at them from open windows, others just honked. More just swerved around the van and fled wherever they could.

Francis was groggy, filthy, covered in blood and pain.

No respite yet, she thought. No showers, no four poster beds or morphine drips.

She wondered if those things were done, or if they would come again. Comfort, or safety.

'Don't know,' she said, tired of most everything, including Edgar. 'You want to sleep on in the van, go ahead. Or, you could sleep like a king on a bed of splintered pallets here. This is the best there is. It's where I've been hiding. Might be the best there is for a while.'

'Here?'

'What do you think? O'Dell just blew up your hometown. With a nuclear bomb. You think I'm going to go rent a flat in Kensington, get a shih tzu in a fucking handbag and go looking for the paparazzi? I'm on the run, Edgar. So are you. Jesus, wake up!'

'What about a hospital?'

'Can you hear yourself? We'd be dead five minutes after we get there. Dead. Don't you get it? If you want to live, stay away from everything. Everyone. And if you think one bomb is the end for a man like O'Dell, you're an idiot.'

'I need stitches...doctors... '

'And I need a good man, cheap gin and two new feet. None of those things are happening, either, are they? Get out of the van,' she said.

Edgar's cheeks flushed, anger the only colour left in his skin. 'What happened to you?'

'O'Dell,' she said. 'And if you hadn't noticed...he just happened to you, too.'

She was too tired and hurt to yell more than that.

It was maybe a foot from the seat to the tarmac.

Getting out of the van was going to hurt enough to shut them both up. But staying inside wasn't particularly comfortable, either. She hurt, he hurt, too. She got it, but God, did he have to bitch about it all the fucking time?

'You want to come, come. Meet the boy who saved your life. Or, you're welcome to drive to the nearest hospital and take your chances.'

'I can't drive!'

'No?' said Francis.

She wrenched the door opened and slipped and hit the road. She cried out. Pain pulsed through her, head to toe. But she didn't give in.

She never did.

Fuck my feet, too. I'll crawl.

A metallic, grinding noise echoed from the concrete. Francis looked, but flash-blind and deep in the shadows, the direction was impossible to gauge.

Unbidden and unreasonable, fear touched her.

O'Dell found George.

He's coming from the shadows, close by. Scrapping something against the surface of the road. Wordless but for a noise hissing between his sharpened, insane teeth. 'Kssh,' he's saying. The scrapping blade is rising.

'KSASH!'

Against terror, Francis would never give. She crawled from the sound.

'Fuck you,' she said. 'I'm not screaming for you.' Her fingernails snapped against the rough road while she dragged herself away, slow, but better than turning her face to the sun and waiting for a blade to fall.

Why won't he say anything? That fucking screech, screech, screech...

O'Dell's blade didn't fall. Instead, George's wheelchair stopped beside her, the sound just metal on the road, but not a blade. Simply rubber shredded from a steel wheel.

Francis, half-blind from the flash, knew it was him, though it couldn't be.

'George?'

It couldn't be.

When she'd left him two days ago, with food and drink on his lap, he'd been no more animated than a zombie. He hadn't been able to move at all.

Now, though, he could. George reached out with a weak, shaking hand and Francis tried to raise her head toward his palm, desperate to know if he was real or if he, too, was just a cruel dream.

When they touched, that was when he could speak and Francis could listen.

Francis.

Outside, there was only destruction. Inside, her fear was pushed aside and there was only George. Like a child might hold a parent's leg, not wanting them to go, Francis clung to George.

I was afraid. But for myself. For me, she said. A thing she would never say aloud, and never to any other child.

We're safe here, said George. Are you angry with Edgar? You shouldn't be. He's afraid, too.

You're just a kid. But you're pretty smart.

Yeah, he said in his voice, not that wiser, somehow older voice. I'm not a div.

People think they can't smile in their thoughts. They're wrong.

George? What they did to you? I don't know how we can go on. I think Edgar's dying. I'm a mess. You're...

Don't sweat it, sister, said George. Just a flesh wound.

He was right, too. She felt it. Where once his eyes were blank, now there was life. As he could see through her, she could see through him. Her body was on the road while they spoke, eyes closed. But she could still see.

He was healing. He wheeled himself to her, didn't he? When she left, he could only take water.

In just two days?

He didn't answer, but his hand burned against her head. A warmth like a too-hot bath, making her head swim and her muscles give in.

It's okay, Francis, he said. It's okay to sleep.

Francis' strength and resolve broke and the last of that fight in her, innate, left. She tumbled all the way down to a long sleep, sheltered from the poisoned skies.

*

Edgar's watched the dead boy move, reach out. The kid was such a horrible mess that Edgar, at first, thought the kid was dead in charge of a wheelchair.

Points on your licence, he thought as he fumbled at the handle for his door, but his hand was clumsy and helpless. He had to shuffle across the seat until he could hop down from the driver's side.

'You're the boy...'

Edgar got no further. Close enough to see the kid (everything blurred, but close enough) he saw how badly the kid was messed up. His head was horrifically scarred, his eyes blank. He looked like death. He smelled like death.

He couldn't speak. Of course not.

Because he's the better part of dead.

Lobotomised. A corpse in a chair. A Halloween mannequin for a fire...who could never have spoken to Francis. How could he have told Francis to come for him?

Because...he's special. That's what Francis said, wasn't it?

But not just that. Edgar knew the kid was special. He could feel it, like heat that rose straight from the kid's skin to his.

Edgar moved his disjointed left hand to take the boy's hand from Francis. At that touch, he lost himself and fell to the tarmac right there alongside Francis.

Edgar, said George, directly into the old man's mind. Pleased to meet you.

'You're George,' mumbled Edgar.

Why does he need me? he wondered, thinking his thoughts careless, like human's do because they think no one listens. But George listened.

It's not me that needs you, said the boy, Francis will.

Sometime later, George released Edgar and told him the same thing he told Francis: It was fine to sleep.

She was right. You're something, alright, thought Edgar, but lazily, as he slid toward welcome sleep. George wasn't sure about that, but a ghost of a smile flickered on a face he couldn't yet control, and he watched over them both.

*

Part Three

Cold Waits in Embers

IX.

Retirement

In the weeks Edgar and Francis and George hid, and healed, the world turned.

The seasons of the apocalypse hadn't, yet, begun. Nuclear winters and ultraviolet summers that would last decades were a bad sunrise yet to break the horizon.

O'Dell ate, slept, drank.

Dormant, almost.

He watched the world begin to fall. Earth, an undignified drunk who staggered with his hands out to stop a fall he knew he could not avoid.

O'Dell wore his crazed, yellow-toothed grin all the while and thought he was content enough - maybe even happy - to be a mere passenger now, just a last observer to the end.

The first of many heavy rains to come hit England during the fourth week after that first crown of fire. For now, the weather was just a foreshadow. When the reign of fire ended, snow and storms of ice would succeed to the throne.

In Norway, the lead singer from a death metal band named 'Jotunheimr' emerged at the head a cult of lunatic wanna-be Vikings, seeking to appease the frost giants that ravaged the world. They and their exulted ruler began with murder and finished only when he and his followers surrounded The Storting and detonated themselves. If this was Ragnarok come, if Fenris' cold, stinking breath filled the abyssal skies, then at least they died believing they had been right.

Many believed they were right. Either they were all right in their beliefs and there always had been room for a thousand gods, or all but one, or none at all.

O'Dell, warm, ensconced with his concrete walls, watched and grinned while fire danced in cities. Reporters yelled and the world went mad as O'Dell's money (he was never short of money - he had whatever he needed and whenever he needed it) paid nearly twenty thousand people across the world a handsome fee to pour vials of U+03BF into city water supplies. Madness even before the compound took hold - paid in coin to kill the world where greed might have been worth something.

The Boss watched, O'Dell knew, but mostly left O'Dell to manage his own affairs. The first call after the first missile:

'Let the madness take hold, and they'll burn themselves, like a man might set a match against a leech on his skin - the only sure cure.'

'Sir,' replied O'Dell.

The call O'Dell waited on wouldn't be for another three weeks. He was just as impatient as ever, but he'd waited nearly sixty years for that call, hadn't he?

But the world was burning itself to cure the madness...his boss right on that count. Mostly, he was right. So O'Dell waited, itchy, but he watched night and day, sleepless as ever, as riots lit the night around the globe, in places U+03BF touched, but places it did not reach, too, as hatreds old and new spread. Mosques or Synagogues or Churches were attacked, first. Immigrants - first, second, third generation, illegal and legal, native born or otherwise.

News outlets fuelled panic because fear sold. Later, they tried for a quieter, calmer approach: Fear sells, but if everyone's dead, there's no one left to sell it to.

News, as O'Dell knew very well, was an unruly and wilful child.

U+03BF - invisible and insidious - just like O'Dell and his boss. Like US, too.

'They'll all burn, and they can't touch us,' he whispered once, bloated on glee at his victory, and didn't know he spoke. There was no 'US' in his room. Just him.

Madness caught like a disease. People assumed contagion. Panic ruled and people fled. They crossed bridges and then, later, they crossed states or provinces and mountain ranges, only to find there was nowhere left to run.

China, Vietnam, Cambodia, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Japan, the Philippines. Parts of Australia, as far as New Zealand. In Eastern Africa, from Asmara, south to Nairobi, war erupted and escalated. Cairo burned from incendiary bombs, but by then, no one was sure who was dropping what on whom. Power stations failed. Institutions fell. Men and women were dragged from expensive offices high above cities and murdered savagely beside those who cleaned those offices and made the wealthy their sandwiches.

Madness catches and like disease, it did not discriminate.

Then, the future O'Dell saw so many years ago arrived.

NATO recalled soldiers from foreign fields, as did the US, the British, the Australians, the Canadians. Ships headed for home.

But beneath the sea, submarines full of hidden fire lurked and hunted and planes that fly at high altitudes headed elsewhere.

*

O'Dell felt it, like he understood and sensed so many things - a tingling, a strange sensation of turning inward and seeing things happen inside his head. Not imagined, but a foreshadow. He reached a hand toward the telephone on his desk before it rang.

'Sir,' he said.

'Okay, O'Dell. It's time. The children are yours.'

'Thank you, Sir,' he said. He thought it was maybe the only time he'd ever said those words to his boss. Probably the last, too.

Smiling, or grinning - there was no real difference - his body shaking in anticipation and seizing, too, he closed his eyes and called his children, so that he would no longer be just one man, but all of them.

'All of US,' they said together.

O'Dell alone was nothing. But he was not alone. The children, the work of decades...these were his tools. His army of children against the world. They were US and together, they pushed. A war of mind against matter in a world that worshipped steel and stone and atoms.

*

Sensible, erudite men and women shook hands across airwaves and via satellites as their governments began to understand the extent, and danger, of these worldwide acts. Not viral, but chemical. Yet while the United States denied any involvement in the terror of Vladivostok or Hangzhou, the Russian and the Chinese looked away as Philadelphia rioted. Cameras captured bodies burning and eviscerated, hanging from city windows. It would soon be Christmas. This year people were the decorations.

Even so, even pushed so hard, for a beat, the sane held sway. Then, confusion.

Retaliation is the only recourse, said so many while their minds bled and red stained blouses and shirts in bunkers and seats of power around the globe.

Sudden, explicit anger, the kind that lashed out with angry fists. Panicked chatter across secure channels that covered the world like a thin skein of silk, or a web spun by paranoid spiders, followed by blindly stabbing fingers on buttons with no clear enemy in mind.

Nothing inside their minds except US.

*

That night, while bombs rained down, O'Dell closed his eyes and released US.

Returning to himself was a relief and like a tearing of his soul.

Moments later, the phone rang. Blissful, tearful, but sated at last, O'Dell let his moment last a while longer before he took the receiver in his right hand. His left hand was spastic and useless, his lip and white shirt blood-soaked and him unaware of either thing. He was full of fire. The fires he'd seen so long ago, fires that had burned in his black eyes since that first flame.

'O'Dell?'

'Sir,' replied O'Dell.

'Congratulations.'

'Sir,' said O'Dell and laid the receiver down slowly.

Rare praise.

But deserved.

He pulled a single malt from a drawer in his desk. A retirement party, of sorts. A very short one, attended by one, thrown for himself.

After that first drink, his first in many years, O'Dell decided it wouldn't hurt at all to have another. Or two. He placed the bottle on his console before him and he drank, slowly but steadily.

Nearly sixty years.

No pension. No garden to tend 'til I die.

Just this.

He smiled, or grinned. The alcohol and his unique brain ticked all the while, his eyes jittered and his left hand shook. The glass in his right was steady enough, though. After a while, he noticed his tie, and his jacket - stained with cool and cracking blood.

He sniffed.

'Fuck it,' he said and downed another glass of good scotch. As the seventeenth missile hit near the Chinese border, O'Dell was somewhat tipsy. Drunk, even.

Drunk and full of power - he could feel it, still - the echo of US. Like adrenaline that needed to be burned before he could rest.

He pushed a button and waited for the man the other end to wake. Middle of the night. He didn't begrudge people sleeping. Ten second later, his fingers tapped. Drunk or not, he was ever impatient.

Eventually a groggy and confused Dr. Boyle answered him.

'Mr. O'Dell? It's...'

'I know what time it is, Boyle. Come to my office, would you? Congratulatory drink.'

'Three O'Clock in the morning?'

'Oh yes.'

'Sir, I'd rather...'

'It's not optional, Boyle. And stop by the lab on the way. Good man. Bring my some of that fine U+03BF. If we're to celebrate in style, we'll need more than this half a bottle of scotch.'

'Sir?'

'Not optional, either,' said O'Dell, and used just a tiny bit of that residue to push Boyle, and those guarding the lab, to do precisely what he wanted. Thirty minutes later Boyle, bleeding from ears and nose came by for that drink. O'Dell didn't mind sharing at all. After, he shot Boyle through the forehead and finished the rest himself while gunshots, screams, roaring anger began to fill the bunker. That was nearly an hour before the first missile hit U.S. soil. Two hours later, seven Russian cities were nothing but ash. By then, O'Dell was so drunk he couldn't see straight or even speak.

But then he didn't need to speak. The only person who called him wouldn't begrudge him this. Even the man who killed the world needed a night off once in a over half a century.

'Wouldn't begrudge US a night off, would he?'

Not me, but US.

Had he even realised, he'd never know why. Just as some men are made to push, there will always be others who will push back and sometimes there are other forces which push harder than us all.

Around seven O'clock in the morning, O'Dell fell into his first sleep for over a year and dreamed of his children, all inside him, listening to the many deaths US had called.

'You are US, too,' they whispered in his dreams.

It was a fine sleep, and so long overdue that it lasted an entire day.

*

Rested at last, O'Dell picked himself up from the cold office floor where he slept. Despite the hard bed, he found his old bones hardly ached at all. He straightened his suit jacket and ran his shaking, palsied palms over his hair.

Bit of blood, here and there, he thought, but good to go.

What did that matter if he looked slightly dishevelled? After over close to sixty years work, and never a single day's rest.

He checked, but the phone had not rung in the night.

The boss had a heart after all.

O'Dell was the one who'd done all the work, wasn't he? He'd pushed and pulled both the great and the meek to his will. Decades spent thinking, travelling, planning, moving people and events the way he needed. Decades with no respite, waiting on technology to progress, with his eyes and mind always on the future. Waiting for this moment.

In September, the world's population was estimated at somewhere in excess of seven billion people. Before he left the office, O'Dell glanced at his screen at the decrypted message from a small enclave beneath Whitehall. That missive would fly through airwaves and wires to secure locations in places as diverse as Hong Kong, Osaka, Auckland and hidden facilities deep beneath the Nevada Desert and mountain ranges flung wide across the earth - the Rockies, the Urals, the Kunlun.

A reduction in the world's population of around 30%. Attrition of up to a minimum of an additional 25% expected to within three months.

More, O'Dell knew, would follow. Because he had seen it, and he had made it happen.

On the way out, and on to the cafeteria, he stepped over Boyle. Boyle didn't move. O'Dell vaguely remembered shooting the chief of his science team in the head.

Outside, his actions were clear enough, bad memory or drunk. The walk toward the elevator was like a game of hurdles in the Olympics.

A game, is that? he wondered idly. Or is that a kind of race?

Blood splatter here, spray there. Gunshot men and women, some still moving, or people broken by hands or teeth driven by the madness Boyle put in the air filtration system.

In the elevator he found a lone woman who'd pulled her cheeks away. She grinned at him while he pushed the button to travel down three floors and eat his breakfast.

'Morning,' he said.

He whistled and she picked up the tune. He shot her before the elevator opened, and was forced to shoot one of the cooks (he remembered, vaguely, that he'd always thought of her as a dinner lady) who roared and ran at him with a serving spoon. Not an especially deadly weapon, but it was the look of the thing.

I might be going slightly insane myself, he thought. The hot counter was still filled with the night's food, because everyone caught a case of the crazies after U+03BF hit their lungs. He found this more disappointing than the fact of his entire staff's demise. He hated cooking.

'I don't think I know how to cook,' he said to a man masturbating into beef stroganoff with someone else's hand. 'Do you?'

'Lend us a hand, boss,' said the man.

'Rather not,' said O'Dell, and shot the man. He figured making his own bacon probably wouldn't be that hard at all, but damned if he'd embarrass himself in front of a man wanking with a borrowed hand.

*

A short retirement, but earned.

Those left behind, though, in towns and villages of the world? Of England?

When madness and nuclear war both ran their course, the world was darker; souls and skies.

Men and women searched for those they loved, or settle for someone, at least, for comfort or consolation until then. Survivors travelled together, or alone. Some were fighters, some ran when they could. Food emptied, taken by the car load. People took more than they could eat, then died and the food went to rot or simply lay forgotten and lost in one of the millions of homes throughout the country.

Others stayed where they were. Those people went about their business as they always had, either because they were insane, or because they felt such a sense of duty or place that they would not give up. Like a policeman who died trying to disarm a murderer with a machete in some Northern town. A woman who wept over her dead Red Setter dog and refused to follow her husband when he and her daughter fled their town died three days later with her blood pooling around her, on her shining tile floor she'd been so proud of, her wrists slit by her own hand. Her daughter and husband both were raped, partially skinned and impaled beside the motorway that ran north-to-south, south-to-north. A man cut himself with a simple thorn while trying to dig out his rosebushes to save them from the awful rain. The wound festered. He squeezed the pus from it for a while, and then, later, just sat in a deckchair in the deluge and let himself slip away. Three teenagers ran riot across Sussex for a fortnight, until an elder farmer shot two of them dead with his shotgun. The shotgun was more accustomed to partridge, but it turned out it worked just fine on the little bastards on his property. Two nights later, the third boy snuck in while the man slept and stuck a knife in his chest. The old man never even woke.

Those that survived the initial insanity fought through hate or need. Sweet old folk and thoughtful younger people, people who were kind enough, but bastards and psychopaths, too who preferred this world, and the voices of the angry and the mean were always the loudest, the most shrill. The good fell quiet, the bad shouted.

When the end of the world came, people didn't change. They polarised, perhaps. But people don't change, not really. It's just that they stand out more when the background noise falls away.

*

X.

The Underpass

It was three days after Francis left Kssh-Ksash man's van until she could face moving, but bare the outside world, too. The maintenance room small and mean, but it was her refuge from the growing storm that had begun already and this deluge - madness, not wind and rain - came in hard and fast.

Cars sped by full of fleeing, terrified people after that first crazy day when the bomb tore the heart from England, and the world, too. That constant hum of sound over the country soon quieted. The rumble of cars someplace in the middle of field and city, but the drone of planes overhead, and people talking or arguing or kids yelling and screaming.

Francis figured they were in that middle place - the byways that joined the country like the veins of England's bottom-heavy body. Where that traffic would ordinarily flow, constant, it fell to night-time volume within a day. By the time she ventured outside again, Francis saw barely any movement at all.

On the horizon, perhaps five or twenty miles away (it was impossible to guess) smoke filled the day, fire lit the night.

Francis' concerns were closer. Ten feet away was a Nissan - a family car, high. The kind she'd never had cause to drive. But families with kids kept things, didn't they? The family was gone - wherever, it didn't matter to Francis. They'd been a day with nothing but crisps and a few biscuits. She imagined she'd drool if they found baby food, even.

Ten feet, she thought. Fuck's sake.

Her left foot - the one she'd torn free of the lunatic's farmhouse floor - was far worse than the right. The right, she'd bound with duct tape and called good. The left was seeping, a bandage of torn and dirty shirt held down enough to keep the foot together, but not good enough to heal.

Edgar's got it worse, she thought as she stared at her goal - the car that might contain food, drink, or medical supplies. A simple first aid kit would be better than what they had now - caretakers' things.

George has it worse, she thought, trying to push her fear of more pain away.

He doesn't complain.

Edgar, the old bastard, complained endlessly. He was near to delirium with the pain, but it didn't change the fact that he wouldn't fucking shut up.

But then George is mute and paralysed.

'Fuck off, Francis,' she told herself, because her thoughts were turning mean. As was she. She was tired and hurting and her left foot was infected, the bones inside broken without doubt. Duct tape can only cure so much.

Barefoot and crawling, she still didn't want either foot to take any weight, or touch anything at all. If she was still, the pain brought tears. If she knocked either foot the pain became bright enough to blind.

Concerned yourself living, not dying, she thought. Death's got enough on his plate.

Those distant fires and the dried-up traffic weren't hard to understand. People dying all over. O'Dell's work?

No doubt at all.

It was just hard to mourn, even cry, when you were busy mourning for yourself - all the things you lost, all the pain you feel, your hunger and your fear - a mind gets overfull, sometimes. We bail our thoughts out so we don't sink.

Crawl, then, she said, almost baiting herself, winding herself up. Minds need to be tricked sometimes, too, into doing things they rail against.

In the distance, small shapes moved over the fields, roaming wild. Herds, but people, rather than animal.

But wild, for sure.

'Crawl,' she said, not needing trickery any longer.

She did. Hands and knees toward the abandoned Nissan. The short distance hurt.

The car was empty except for two crochet blankets, like babies had from grandmothers who knew the makings of such things.

The world's going to need a hell of a lot of grandmothers, she thought, disappointed and angry, too. She took the blankets, though, because something was better than nothing. Not as good as food, water, or medicine. They would die without these things.

She swore, eyed the herd (still distant) and began the slow, aching crawl to the next nearest car. Dark wasn't far off.

At the next stop she found two chocolate bars in the glove compartment, and a packet of Anadin in a side pocket. A pair of sunglasses, too. They were prescription and no good for anyone, probably. When she took them off, the wild people walking in the distance were closer, brighter.

Time to get back.

Those people weren't her friends. The first of many people who weren't friendly. In those first few weeks, the mad ruled.

*

The maintenance room was cramped but it was beneath tons of concrete and steel, the door hidden in shadows during the day and close enough to invisible at night. There were plenty worse places to wait on the apocalypse.

Nights darkened after the fires died down. No one came to fight those blazes. They burned until there was little left for the fires to feast on. The crazed forgot the lighting of fires, then, almost rabid in their madness, and their fury. Some recovered quicker than others, some not at all, and some liked it.

But O'Dell brought new fire.

The herd thinned. The strongest would survive...but the weak, too. Deer and wolves...a place for all in the new world.

*

The three survivors slept like people did before electricity, or even candles - when it got dark, they closed their eyes and slept or listened for noises in the night. They ate the way people had before times of plenty - when they could.

The small stocks of food that Francis' stole or found or scrounged did not last. They spent long, slow days by talking and telling their stories out loud and in their heads. Healing was a large part of it - willpower and time and luck - but mostly will. The mind leads and the body follows because it is told to. Broken bones, severed nerves, torn or excised flesh...these things never heal completely. Injuries like that are pains that can be mastered, though. A limp, or writing re-learned. It takes months or years, perhaps, but people adapt, and that fact remained true.

They waited to see if they'd die. If they didn't, they weren't going to.

Only once did anyone scream closer enough for them to hear. High-pitched, but a man. A few days later Francis found the man and didn't vomit or cry and knew she could handle it.

Still handling it, she thought, but that night she woke from a nightmare and screamed just as the dead man had.

She took to roaming in the dark after a fortnight. In the day, she could see danger, but it could see her, too. Somewhere out there, the mad roamed and she didn't want to endure what they would do.

She thought of the Kssh-Ksash man. Questioning, hungry.

He was dead, but others weren't - not yet.

*

Edgar slept, sometimes raving, sometimes lashing out with his left arm, scattering paint, glue, tape - things long forgotten, perhaps for road crews or used by the men who attacked weeds along the roadside with industrial-sized strimmers.

Edgar swore at Francis, even George, with the hardest, cruellest words he could find. He heard the words that tumbled from him and hated them, someplace deep that he couldn't reach; calm and peace a deep, clear pool lost under a cover of oil and scum.

His infection raged. He sweated and smelled rot in his ruined arm. Sometimes Francis was there when he woke. George, always.

His respites were few, though.

But hospitals were things of the dying world. Will was all they had.

*

While Edgar raved and burned inside George reached out and took away the worst.

He hurt, but Francis was right. He didn't complain because he was muted, and paralysed. But he did hurt.

He had something else to pull him through, though.

Wait, George. Wait. It will get better.

That voice was older, and the voice that always seemed to know what was true and what was not - the voice wiser than George's eight years by far.

Those older thoughts knew that Francis would always hobble, and Edgar's right arm would end as a dead lump that hung from his side and that George himself would be just fine.     Francis and Edgar were mortal.

What was he? Something more than human...or less, or a short sideways step from a twisting ladder?

None of them knew.

Telepathy, regeneration, precognition.

'If one thing can be true,' Francis asked on one of those long, slow nights, shortly before they left their own small bunker, 'why do the other things have to be a lie?'

If one remarkable thing were true, could others be equally possible?

Edgar thought they could.

*

Francis tried to find some kind of feeling, to cry, even, when the rain came, heavy with the ash of distance cities.

She couldn't.

Instead, she concerned herself with survival.

'We're going to have to move on,' she said. George watched her and Edgar (brighter, if only a little) and listened. Francis moved easier with the aid of a pair of crutches she'd found nearly a mile away. The truth she understood, if they did not, was that without the crutches she might not have made it back. Luck was the only thing keeping them alive right now.

Maybe George's will, too, she thought. But that couldn't feed them.

'I'm going further and further each day. While I'm sure the exercise is good and all that - if I have to fight? If I have to run? I can't. That's as simple as it gets. I could probably go a couple of miles. I could maybe take a car. But if I do get in trouble...if I don't get back?'

George and Edgar could see the truth of it. Without Francis, they were done.

And the truth of her situation was different now. It took a while for her to recognise it, even after all the time she'd spent with George, and now Edgar.

They were her responsibility.

She was the parent she'd never wanted to be, and if her children could not run...neither could she. The underpass was simple, perhaps dull, and human minds sometimes relish simplicity and a well-earned break from care and concern.

But respite ends.

'You're right,' said Edgar. George managed the smallest of nods.

*

XI.

Passing On

Edgar sat beneath the underpass while dirty rain fell either side - like they were inside a charmless, manmade waterfall. Cold, too. Near November now, but no one had a watch or calendar. The weather wasn't a good indicator of season any more. It would be a long time before they might just the time of year by the weather.

George was inside, away from the chill. Edgar was there because when she brought back the car she'd found a few days ago (if it would start, even, after nearly a month idle) she'd need his eyes, and his ears, and his one good arm. She supposed she would have driven the white van full of blood, if she had too. The concrete beneath the bonnet was black with grease or oil, though. It wouldn't start, and she wasn't upset about it.

The rain was hard and nearly black and certainly poison...but it hid her from those who roamed; those lost in the dead days.

'Are you ready?' Edgar asked.

She patted his good arm - once dislocated and still sore and weak, but connected by nerve and tendon at least.

'Close enough.'

She put her hand on the cold concrete and began to push up.

'Wait,' he said.

'If I don't go now...'

'I know. But wait.'

'Edgar?'

He looked away for a second, like he was trying to tidy his words before he let them out.

'Francis...when I touched you, that first time,' Edgar said, 'I felt him. Like you and George are connected? I worry O'Dell can see us through you.'

'That's an easy one,' she said, and rose. He was on a slight slope, higher, and now they faced. 'He can't,' said Francis. 'George holds him at bay. Sure, we don't know what O'Dell can do. But then we don't know what George can do - and George is just getting started.'

'Okay...but O'Dell...'

'Edgar, you think this is about bombs and poison in the water? It's not. It's not unimportant...but Edgar, the world is going to end - maybe it already has. And there is nothing we can do.'

'Then what's the point? Why?'

'O'Dell's already won. Do you see what I'm saying? The world's lost. Something will survive. But we were never going to win. But the world isn't the battleground. It's not the battleground. The battle isn't for buildings and land and shopping precincts, isn't it? And you and I? We're not fighting. He is,' she said.

She meant George, of course. 'It's us, Edgar. O'Dell didn't die in the madness, or the fire. He's still alive, and we have to fight...and it's us against him - but you and I, even George, we're not the soldiers. We're the battlefield.'

'If that's it, Francis...how are we going to protect him?'

She took Edgar's hand. 'We're not, not now, or later. George is protecting us. The kid, O'Dell...they're fighting for what's left and O'Dell doesn't know it yet.'

She walked into the hard rain, and away, toward a car she prayed would start. Edgar watched her until the rain swallowed her.

*

The car was two miles distant.

Francis' limped through the rain. The best she had was a jean jacket she'd found - some woman's jean jacket, short and nearly useless. It grew heavy and barely kept the cold out. Maybe it cut down some of the wind that seemed to grow stronger day by day. The weather, the temperature, the wind, the dark rain...everything was miserable.

And even though it should be daylight, it was dark. In the dark, she knew, people like her roamed and took what they wanted. Some were just like her. They wanted medicine and shelter, warmth and food.

Some took the other things they wanted - people.

Each step she took she glanced, her eyes wide and full of rain. Sight was next to useless anyway, hearing not much better. Senses she didn't know she had came into play. Thoughts she wished away. There, behind a car...was that a shadow, a shift, a tiny movement?

Or was it just the rain drumming of roofs and bonnets?

Can I fight on crutches?

If it came to it, she would.

She'd found the man who screamed. She'd seen what men (and women) could do. Not just crazed cannibals with filed teeth and long saws, not only grinning old men who wore suits and destroyed the world. But the small people, too. Nobodies. People with murder or torture in mind, or rape and mutilation or flesh ornaments for their bloodied homes. Gangs would roam, she imagined. People would follow those stronger than themselves, perhaps, and violence would become a badge, thigh bones topped with skulls sceptres in the new world.

Stop it.

Each step dark, every sound possible death.

The walk was slow, the rain full of fear, and when she found the car, and it started, she wept.

She thought it was the longest walk of her life, the most miserable she'd ever felt, the hardest thing she'd ever done.

It wasn't.

Her life was once shoes and good meals and credit cards. In the dead days, she found you had to earn what you needed, and pay for things you bought in different ways. She learned that in the next town.

*

When she pulled up in front of the white van, pointing to the north, Edgar's smile was almost worth the fear.

She wound down the window. 'Hey handsome, how much to go round the world?'

Edgar, to his credit, did laugh. She thought it might have been the first time she'd heard anything but questions and complaints.

Maybe hope for him yet, she thought. Maybe for me, too.

'Where to?' said Francis when Edgar was beside her and they'd got George in the back and the wheelchair in the boot.

'Does it matter?' replied Edgar.

It didn't.

The car was a Cherokee Jeep, or a Jeep Cherokee. Francis wasn't sure and didn't care. Not as large as a Range Rover, but sure on the muck and mud that covered every road.                         They found a town just five miles down the road.

Fire and violence and madness left its mark.

Heads adorned the street. Not on pikes, like might have been done in some medieval war, but arranged neatly in rows along the streets.

Rows of buildings burned or smashed, cars stuck down with rubber, debris from street battles, too - what looked like bullet holes, here and there, as though the military or police, perhaps, had been involved at some point.

No people, just their heads.

They drove on, through the littered streets, looking for a way out. Further out, there were no heads lining the dark streets. The silent stares of all those dead eyes was heavy, and when they were gone Francis at least felt lighter.

Further still, near the place where the town seemed to turn to road again, was a small, one row car park that served a pharmacy. Here, it seemed quiet. Less oppressive. After town, it looked like an oasis.

Medicine, bandages...painkillers.

Not an oasis...it might be heaven.

'Don't stop,' said Edgar. 'Don't.'

'We need to. Anything is better than nothing. Edgar...you need medicine. We need supplies...we might not get another chance.'

'Don't,' he said. 'It's too...'

But she pulled in.

'Get in the driver's seat,' she told Edgar. 'Keep the engine running.'

'I can't drive one-handed,' said Edgar.

'I can't whistle, either. But if you hear me scream, drive. Understand?'

'Francis, you don't have to.'

'I don't, do I?' she said, but opened the door, took her crutches and made her way through the rain to the pharmacy.

*

It was almost heaven. Close as she imagined she was getting. A hot bath, a warm, soft bed, chocolate, a book...

These things were mostly gone.

But the shelves were nearly full, and there was a basket.

She laughed, actually laughed, a hearty, belly laugh. She didn't hear the wet words until she stopped.

'Please.'

All her joy dried up in her throat.

A trick?

Someone hurt?

Her only weapons were her crutches. If she tried to hit someone with those, she'd just fall on her arse.

'Pleaseeee.'

Whoever spoke was hidden behind the chemist's counter. The till, the rows of dextrose sweets and cough candies like Fisherman's Friends. Bottles of pink medicine for acid guts...the simple stuff in a line.

The good stuff - codeine, morphine, penicillin, amoxicillin - over there where the owner of the voice hid.

In pain, or waiting?

'Please.'

Weak, she thought. But she couldn't be sure. Madness was full of cunning.

Don't speak...just sneak. Look...get the fuck out if you have to...

She argued with herself, but her mind was losing. She walked to the counter and looked over, half-expecting to see a weapon for a mere instant before it plunged through her eye.

She didn't expect to see a man, arms and legs cut off. She didn't expect to see anything like the misery and agony (and fear) in that man's eyes. She didn't think she'd see it again.

Like the man on the motorway.

Like a gang tag?

'Please...'

She couldn't speak. She wanted to vomit, or run, but she couldn't do those things, either.

'I can't help...I...'

She turned away, her body winning once again, her mind shutting down, walking to the door.

'Kill me...please...'

She stopped. The basket was still in her hand.

I can't go. I can't go, because we need medicine.

She hated herself afresh for a moment. Survival over compassion.

Her husband would have been proud.

But he's probably dead, too, isn't he?

They needed medicine. She didn't need to leave the man like that.

She walked back to the counter. She couldn't figure out how to open the hatch without putting her crutches down and using both hands. She couldn't look at the man, and she couldn't break her crutches.

Because she needed them, just as much as they all needing medicine and all the other sweet treats right here.

Francis climbed over the counter. It was awkward and hard and it hurt, but it had to be done.

'Just...'

She didn't need to hear whatever he had to say, though. That would have made it worse. She put the edge of the basket against the man's throat and laid all her weight against it, while she closed her eyes and looked away. It would have been obscene, to look at him. She didn't want to hear, but that, she couldn't help.

Francis thought she stayed that way for maybe two minutes.

Long enough.

She worked around him and took all the medicines she recognised, and then climbed back over the counter and filled another basket with bandages, scissors, butterfly staples, energy sweets, anything at all that might prove useful.

When she got back to the car she emptied everything into the back seat and threw the baskets down.

'Was it all right?' asked Edgar.

'Shove over,' she said. 'No problem.'

Later that day, before night fell, she felt George's eyes on hers in the rearview mirror. Without touching, they couldn't speak. Francis glanced at Edgar, head against the window, asleep.

To George, she shook her head.

Don't.

She watched the road instead. Nothing come up behind them to worry about anyway, was there? She ignored George and drove on in silence and when night did fall it was a relief to have no eyes on her.

*

When they stopped, Francis did what she could with Edgar's arm. It smelled, but not as bad as she thought it would. Green and yellow and ugly, but not putrid.

He screamed when she splashed the entire wound with iodine.

'Sorry,' she said. She was, too. His face was a picture, though, looking at her with some fire and a ton of hate. She couldn't help a small laugh.

'Here,' she said, popping antibiotics and codeine into his palm before strapping him with the broadest bandages she'd been able to find. 'Consider it my apology.'

Francis let Edgar make George comfortable and busied herself with things she didn't need to do - like watching their surrounds for danger - so they could sleep in the car.

She knew there was nothing out there. The only eyes she felt on her belonged to the strange boy behind her.

It was cold - near freezing, even, and the windows misted with their breath. There might have been a thousand madmen outside and they wouldn't see them until it was far too late. But she didn't need to worry. Something inside her, like George had, maybe, and Edgar, too, told her it wasn't dangerous. It felt open and wide. The kind of place where people aren't.

My senses are changing, thought Francis. I'm changing.

Edgar slipped back into the passenger seat and closed his eyes. 'Goodnight George. Goodnight Francis.' Before the interior light switched itself Edgar opened one eyes and looked over at Francis. 'Thank you.'

'It's okay,' she said. 'Night.'

Lights off, George was invisible in the back seat.

She didn't touch him - she wasn't ready for him to know, or say a single word inside her head. But after a few minutes of reaching out for sleep and missing it, Francis found she was unsettled, no matter how far away she pushed all the horror.

She nudged Edgar.

'I'm awake,' he said. 'What's the matter? Are you okay?'

There, in the dark, it was easier to speak.

'Do you think about your wife much?'

He sighed. She thought he might have shrugged.

'Her name was Sarah,' he said. 'I do...but...not all the time. I thought I would.'

'I don't think about my husband at all. You know that? Not at all.'

'I thought you weren't married...'

'I don't think I am. Not anymore. I used to have a picture. In my purse. I lost the purse, and...I don't remember what he looked like. Is that cold, Edgar?'

He stared out of the window.

'I think it's what you need it to be, Francis, and that's okay, isn't it?'

They sat like that, in the dark, for a while longer, both half-stoned on codeine.

I killed a man with a fucking shopping basket, Edgar, she thought. I shot a policeman in the heart. I shot your wife. I killed a man with a meathook, or a bailing hook. I'm not sure it matters...what about that, Edgar? Are those things, those deaths, cold?

Am I cold?

Pain floated away. Sleep came, but it wasn't easier. Sleep was full of fresh new nightmares. She took more from the pharmacy than medicine.

That's fine, though, she thought in the morning. The old nightmares were getting stale anyway.

*

XII.

John Wake

Francis drove with no real direction in mind but north. They were on their fourth car. Petrol, rather the car, being the problem - hoses for siphoning weren't as easy to find on the road than in gardens. It might have been two days, or three, when the three survivors passed something other than destruction. It might have been Cumbria, where they found the airfield, but the skies were darker, people rare, and in the grey sleet directions and time and even day or night became guesswork.

Francis pointed. Edgar squinted through the windshield and a sheet of dark sleet. Behind a wire fence, the dim outline of aeroplanes - unmistakeable. Small planes, though, rather than the larger commercial jets and airbuses. A private airfield, for hobbyists and rich folk.

'I can't fly, Francis,' said Edgar. 'George probably isn't quite up to it.'

George, safe in his seatbelt in the backseat grunted.

Edgar raised an eyebrow at Francis. 'Did he...'

She nodded. They smiled. Both smiles were rusted.

'Maybe there's someone there who can fly... If not, at least there's bound to be something useful. Take what we can, right?'

'And what if there are people? They're probably insane, or dangerous.'

'We're not dangerous, are we?' she said.

Not you, Edgar. Not you, George.

Me, I'm not so sure.

She didn't voice these thoughts, but added, 'There must be other people like us.'

George nodded, his eyes not missing a thing. Maybe two months since his neck was snapped and half his brain taken away...and he could move his hands, nod. Grunt.

She reached in the back seat and held George's hand for a moment, to hear what he thought.

'O'Dell's not looking for us right now, he says. But he will be. He says he's getting stronger...because he has help now. O'Dell's...George, wait, I don't know what you mean.'

I don't, either, said George in her head. All I know is he's not O'Dell anymore...he's US.

She let George go.

'He says he's us.'

'O'Dell is us?'

'I don't know what he means. George doesn't know. Does it matter? Do we go in?'

She waited while Edgar stared through the gloom at the planes beyond the fence.

'Okay,' he said. 'First sign of trouble...'

'I'll sic George on 'em,' she said. She pulled away and drove half a mile along the road, looking for a gate, or a break in the fence, until she tired of it and smashed the car through the fence.

*

A helicopter sat idle in a hanger at the strip. Outside, everything was covered in grey, cold sludge. The helicopter seemed to gleam after so long without shining surfaces.

The pilot must have looked after it. Himself, maybe not so much. He laid out on a desk. They thought him dead until he groaned and puked out vodka-stinking vomit. His eyes were red, there was blood on his knuckles.

'Fuck me,' he said, bleary-eyed, blinking.

'Maybe,' said Francis. She imagined she looked a lot like some kind of tramp or beggar. Crutches held her up. She was covered in grime, in a mix and match outfit taken along the way. Stinking, greasy-haired.

And I might still be the best-looking woman in the world, she thought. Eminently fuckable.

'Can you fly that helicopter?'

'Sure,' said the drunk.

'Then we'll see about that fuck. Get us the hell off this island, and we'll see.'

She had no intention of screwing the man, but...

She wiggled her head, side to side, for him. Maybe, the gesture said. Maybe not...

She put it out there, let him think what he would. Edgar, beside her, started to speak, but George, still in his chair but moving better then, laid a hand against Edgar's.

He's not just moving, she noticed. He's moving quicker. His control's returning.

She guess George told Edgar to shut up, because Edgar nodded, but didn't reply. George might be moving more each day, but he didn't seem able to make a word - not out loud, anyway. The words were there, in his head, but that's as far as his words got without someone to touch, and even then, conversation was limited to her and Francis. Maybe because they were different. She didn't know. They hadn't met any other people interested in conversation.

She understood Edgar's caution. But caution wouldn't keep them alive forever.

The pilot weighed up his options, then shrugged. 'I'd sure like a fuck,' he said, honestly. 'But keep it. I can fly the thing...but I won't.'

'Why?' said Francis. 'Should I be offended?'

The man laughed. Hungover (and possibly still drunk) or not, Francis knew they'd get along just fine.

'No. Hell...no. Trust me. Finest looking woman I've seen in weeks. No. It'd be suicide.'

'Why?' asked Edgar. 'The weather?'

'Yeah. The helicopter's fine. Does what it's supposed to. Only thing is, it's not supposed to fly through a shit storm. In this weather, it'd work like a vacuum cleaner and be just about as useful.'

'I get the picture,' said Francis. 'No way?'

The guy shrugged. 'Maybe a short hop. Never make it across the channel.'

'Fuck it, then,' said Francis. 'Got a drink?'

He looked from Francis to Edgar, then down a short hop to George. He thought about it for a minute.

'Sure,' he said. 'Coffee, too. Probably.'

Francis raised an eyebrow at the man.

He laughed again. 'Fair enough. Drink. Coffee'll keep.'

Francis liked him, but she glanced at George before she let her guard slip even a little.

George nodded. That sixth, or seventh, or whatever sense he had was far more reliable that her judgement.

'Thank Christ. I really, really want that drink.'

Edgar nodded. 'Can't say I'd turn it down, either.'

They followed the man into the back of the building. There, in a cabinet beneath a paper-strewn desk, the man showed them his stash: Tequila, Whiskey, Gin.

'Had more, a couple of weeks ago. But...you know how it is.'

'End of the world, and all alone?'

'Yeah,' he said as grabbed the tequila. 'That's how it is.'

*

The man's name was John Wake. He hadn't lied about making it to the continent. France was out of their reach. 'Oil rig?' he said. 'Maybe.'

What did they have to lose?

I think the real war starts soon, George said before they boarded the chopper. It doesn't matter where we are. But away is safer for our bodies. O'Dell isn't the only danger.

Francis remembered the unmade man on the motorway and wire shopping baskets with grateful eyes dying inside that cage. She let herself remember and held George. She couldn't keep it from him. He was just a kid, maybe, but she didn't want secrets between them.

Absolution was what she needed, but there is no forgiveness or peace from such things. Just living.

You did what you could, and what you had to, Francis, he said.

She wasn't sure he was right about her...but he was right about people. They could be dangerous. People did change.

George, too, she thought when she release him.

More often, lately, when they spoke inside their minds, he sounded older.

Wake put them down on the rig in a storm suited for the ending world. The wind was stronger with the passing of each day. Off the ground in a flimsy helicopter, the gusting wind became terrifying. Their pilot wasn't wrong about the engines, either. They coughed and died before he switched them off.

Francis sat in the front and wished she'd taken the back seat. George was just a boy, but she'd rather be holding his hand than anyone else's in the whole world.

But while the weather tried to kill them, John Wake kept them alive.

If he could do that drunk, she thought Wake might be the best pilot left on the planet. Her heart beat so hard her chest hurt. Beside her, Wake was pale. She turned and checked on George and Edgar. George managed his half-smile. Even Edgar smiled, though he wasn't pale, but green.

'Good job,' Edgar told Wake and vomited down the front of his coat.

Francis kissed the man beside her on the cheek.

'Thank you, John Wake,' she told him.

'Won't hold you to it, you know,' he said.

'I know,' she'd told him.

She almost wished he had. It had been a long time since she'd felt a man. Been a long time, she supposed, since she'd even thought she might want to.

She screamed for the first time in months. A man stood out in the storm, and must have been freezing even under all the layers.

He waved, hands wide.

'Come inside,' he seemed to say.

He proved no threat. Luck, and nothing to do with judgement. His name was Bors and he showed them they weren't the only people in the world not bent on killing.

Francis, George, Edgar, Wake - they'd all assumed they would weather the storm or die starving, or even just drift away, lost inside their minds just like George. But it was good for men and boys to see what humanity could be before they went to war.

*

Out on the North Sea, it was always cold, and the seas, always rough. The green-brown waves ravaged the rig, high and foam-tipped.

Riggers would stare down at the sea and imagine their families as they settled in for a four or six week stint on a platform isolated above the surface, where the wind whipped mercilessly around girders and scaffolds and abraded bare skin.

In normal times.

But these times weren't normal. The men on the rig wouldn't be going home. Maybe knowing that changed them. Maybe they were good men before.

This storm, this cold, were harder than they should be. It was early for ice, yet any moisture in the air froze into stubble along the cables and the steel and the plates that made the platform itself; everything became dangerous. To rush was to slide. No one wanted to slide high up on frost and ice covered steel, while cold winds battered them from the skies.

It wasn't the nuclear winter of fable, yet. But it was a winter that was quick and dirty, and the sleet that assaulted the rig promise worse - bitter, evil weather to come.

Inside, with everyone jammed into the cafeteria that served as a common room, it was as warm as it was going to get.

Francis watched Wake doing his only party trick, saying his name like he was John Wayne, but with a broken nose. It was stupid, but it made her smile, at least. Wake must have been around Edgar's age. Who else would still make jokes about John Wayne? Youngsters like her probably never knew who he was.

Charlie Chaplin, Marilyn Monroe, Clint Eastwood, Paul Newman, Audrey Hepburn, but Brad Pitt, Scarlett Johansson, Ethan Hawke, Charlize Theron, Angelina Jolie. Actors in movies or television, singers and bands before their crowds in stadiums, long dead or young or someplace in between...the rich and the famous. Now, dead, or nothing, and never remembered.

Would people, if they lived, even think of films or books or long-dead politicians, philosophers, poets?

Wake wasn't a handsome man. He was short, slightly crooked. Did that matter?

She could take him to a room, now. He'd come. She might. He'd do it because he wanted to, but she wouldn't because she wouldn't do that to a man she liked. Use him like a vibrator. If it wasn't right for a man to use someone like that, then it wasn't right for a woman, either, she figured.

What the fuck am I even thinking about?

She laughed at herself. The burly, bearded rigger Bors glanced, then laughed at her, laughing. She didn't begrudge him that. There was precious little joy out here.

Outside, the wind howled, and even in the huts on the platform with tight steel doors and half-arsed insulation, it was cold enough to get into a person's bones. She wore a dead man's jumper. He died on the rig early on. No one spoke about it, but she thought he might have taken a few too many pills on purpose. At least he hadn't cut his throat or something. The jumper was clean enough though she'd have worn it even if it hadn't been.

George turned nine on the rig. The cook (never a chef, he told them) made a cake. He didn't have icing, but George grinned and told the man thank you with a nod of his head and a happy smile. The cook seemed pleased enough.

It was the little things that people still clung to, and those little things kept them going. Sometimes, they laughed.

Mostly it was hard.

But those little things were just enough. For Francis, always childless and perfectly happy about it, her thing was watching the kid heal. It was remarkable. By the time they'd landed on the rig, his arms were working just fine, his hair grown back. Ragged, uneven, but a good head of hair. Dark, probably like the boy's father or mother, though she never brought either up. God knew it was hard enough to live, let alone drag past sorrows around with you.

Even his skin, despite the storms and the darkened skies, rebounded. Probably just being a kid, but he had colour again. He breathed, ate, took shits and pissed outside the toilet bowl like any other kid his age even though he sat to do it. How he managed to miss, sitting down, she had no idea.

Feeling returned to his legs, though he wasn't walking. Another month, maybe two, and Francis thought he would be. The only shame was that his humour and his smart, quick way of talking in her head couldn't be shared. He couldn't talk at all, not even mutter a sound. There was nothing wrong with this tongue or throat. Whatever damage had been done to him in The Mill would take a long time...but one day.

I hope so, she thought. She wanted to share him with the world. She was proud of the kid. Maybe even loved him a little. He was a remarkable boy, after all.

Francis worried, though. The chances of anyone making it out there were next to none. But that went both ways. They might be safe from O'Dell's guns and bombs...but they were trapped.

And O'Dell wasn't restricted to his body any more than George.

I think the real war starts soon, he said. She couldn't get that out of her head, and the fact remained; the helicopter would never fly again.

This platform was their tomb just as sure as any cell in a place called The Mill might have been. They would all die on the rig. Wake, too, and that was shitty payment for a good deed.

*

Part Four

The Man with Fire in his Eyes

XIII.

Redman and Roo

Sometime later, Kurt William O'Dell parked outside an old peoples' home in a small town near to the east coast. A woman called Rowena continued in her work with the elderly and infirm within. She was one of those infinitely good people who stayed because of a sense of duty. Mostly, the compound U+03BF created savagery. A rare few were unaffected, others changed in more subtle ways.

Most of the old folk Rowena tended were dead, though one hung on. He wouldn't last much longer. He couldn't. She was running down and when she stopped, he would die. But until then, there was no one else.

In the first weeks after the nuclear explosion that began it all, she buried the dead. Then she tore something in her back lifting one heavy old girl. After that, she just shut the doors to their rooms.

The home smelled bad, but then, it always had.

Rowena's back popped when she got out of bed the morning of her death. She had no idea what the time was, or what day, only that she'd finished sleeping and the old man downstairs needed feeding.

She headed into the kitchen to make breakfast for them both.

'Morning, Sasha,' she said. The cook, slumped with her head in a bowl of soup at the counter where she'd always eaten her lunch, didn't say anything.

Rowena put a knife and fork on tray, busied herself with a gas stove she brought from home a week before she moved in with the old folks permanently. She cooked the old man's porridge in water and added a little salt. Milk was a thing of the past, now. Maybe someday a thing of the future, but that wasn't her problem.

The porridge didn't look nice, but it was food. She managed two cups of tea with the water that remained, with plenty of sugar to cover the awful taste of the water.

'Silly moo,' she said to herself when she was done. 'How's he going to eat porridge with a knife and fork?'

She swapped them for a spoon, then carried the tray along the hall to Wayland Redman's room.

*

'Morning, Mr. Redman,' said Rowena in that bright voice the insane love so much.

'Morning, Roo,' said Wayland, not turning around. He watched a crow and some kind of grubby seagull fighting over some small scrap. The crows feathers had mostly fallen out. He imagined it couldn't fly any longer. Feathers were important for birds.

'Piebald, Roo. Is that word?'

'I think so,' said Rowena as she placed the tray with cooling porridge and oily tea on his bed. She walked over the window where Wayland continued to watch the birds fight.

'Why do you ask?'

'Wondering what you call it when an animal's hair falls out. Or feathers. Piebald seemed like the right word. I'm not sure.'

'I think...I think it's a kind of horse. Something like that?'

'A horse?'

'Sure. Like...the colour. Something.'

'Oh,' said Wayland.

'Porridge, Mr. Redman.'

'Porridge?'

'For breakfast. I managed a cup of tea, too. Dreadful thing.'

'The tea?'

I think he needs something else to eat. He looks...yellow. Might be the porridge. Or malnutrition. Probably malnutrition.

Rowena wondered if there were multivitamins in the medicine closet, or something similar. Maybe one of those weight gain shakes. She took out a small pad from her pocket, and a biro pen.

Check for weight gain the old man is dangeroUS, she wrote.

'Can I borrow a sheet of that and your pen, Roo?'

'Of course,' said Rowena. She tore a sheet free of the pad and passed paper and pen both to Wayland. Wayland gripped the pen like a piece of cutlery.

He's pretty far gone. Cancer, dementia.

'Mr. Redman...you're holding it wrong. You can't write like...look, you want me to write for you?'

Still, he's got no one else. Come to that, neither have I.

She'd decided right at the start to see it through.

So had Wayland.

Rowena leaned down to take the pen and paper back from Wayland. With the pen gripped as it was like a piece of cutlery, a knife, perhaps, he stabbed her three times in her throat.

*

O'Dell held the handle to Wayland's door in one hand. In the other, to his ear, a mobile phone.

He wasn't really concentrating on the phone. He mostly listened to Wayland as he began to chat up the dying woman on the other side of the door.

Interesting foreplay, he thought. Hell of a monologue. Hell of a thing.

'O'Dell?'

'Sir,' he said.

'This Wayland...is he stable? Can you control him?'

'Everything's in hand, Sir,' said O'Dell, and cut the connection to the boss.

Is he stable? Of course he fucking isn't, thought O'Dell, and opened the door without a sound.

*

'Patronising cunt,' said Wayland as Rowena wheeled around his room, bounced off the bed and then lay on the floor gasping, blood gushing between her desperate fingers.

Wayland did have prostate cancer, and dementia was just settling in, though the dementia didn't really bother him. He'd die from the cancer long before he started dribbling into his shitty porridge. All to be expected.

His first boner in weeks was a pleasant surprise, though. Rowena writhing and bucking and all red and wet with her great heaving tits there on the floor.

Sometimes, he drifted, largely unaware. Not this day.

'Lucky for you, Roo, I still know my way around a lady.'

He pulled his cock out. Truth was, he didn't know if it'd work all the way to the end, but he was willing to give it a go. She'd be dead in maybe a minute, probably less. But she'd be warm for long enough, he reckoned.

His knee, hip, back popped as he knelt and swiped her kicking legs apart. He swore at the pain, but he remained hopeful enough. No sense in wasting a damn good hard-on, and a rare one at that.

Hopeful.

Rowena slowed, then she went still.

'Ah well,' he said to her. 'Show us your tits, then, eh? Don't mind, to you?' He yanked her blouse aside with one hand. The other was busy trying to keep his erection from shying away from the job at hand.

'Never fucked a dead woman. I think.'

He leaned back, smiled at the sight of her still chest, her nipples pert enough, still a bit of buoyancy there, even if she was pushing fifty. Not a bad rack. Not bad at all.

He didn't hear the door open. He didn't hear the shot. The bullet tore off the first couple of inches of his cock and most of his palm, thumb, middle and index finger. For a second, Wayland stared, confused as to why blood spewed from him. Red come instead of white? Maybe his prostate? Then he saw the ragged mess.

'Wayland. How the hell are you?' said O'Dell.

*

Wayland rolled to one side, leaking onto the woman's leg and the cheap carpet.

O'Dell sat on Wayland's bed with a grateful sigh.

Nice to take the weight off.

'Nice,' he said, pointing his gun at the dead woman. He didn't have any designs on women or men. Sex seemed, to him, little more than a distraction. He said it appreciatively, though. Like one man might to another. How men of the world might talk, or so he imagined. As O'Dell spoke, he concentrated on removing the tip of a bullet that appeared between his fingers. A short knife in his left hand worked at the bullet in his right. He slipped, cut his fingertip, and stared at bead of blood growing there.

'Look, Wayland,' he said. 'Try to help people, and look what happens. I cut myself. It really hurts. I cut myself trying to help you. Say thank you.'

'Fuck you.'

'Confused, obviously. Dementia, Wayland. It does that. But I accept your gratitude.'

Finally, the bullet popped free of the casing. O'Dell sniffed the powder inside. 'Better than cocaine. Anyway,' he said, turning his gaze from the shell in his fingers, to the woman, to Wayland. 'I've got a job of work for you, Mr. Redman. End of the world and all that. I thought perhaps you might want to...go out with a bang?'

Redman puked in response.

'Fuck...cunt.'

A dying man probably thinks he can get away with being rude, thought O'Dell.

'I forgive you that, Wayland. As I was saying...'

'You shot my fucking cock off!'

'Please don't interrupt again. I have a job. A final job. We'll consider accounts between us closed amicably thereafter.'

'I'm dying.'

'You always were, Wayland. Now, don't be a baby about it. Here. Let me help.'

'Fuck...fuck you!' Spittle flew from Wayland's mouth, which O'Dell ignored as he knelt beside Wayland. Then, with a finger tapping the shell in his fingers, like a man who's particular about how he salts his dinner, O'Dell covered the ragged end of Wayland's penis with powder, and lit it with a swift click of a lighter. The flash was hopeless. The powder was wet and didn't catch. The dry parts of Wayland's skin flashed and burned instead. The wound itself just carried right on leaking.

'Well...fucked that up, didn't I?' said O'Dell, peering into Wayland's rolling eyes. 'I really thought that would work.'

Wayland passed out and O'Dell smiled, all teeth, but a little mirth, too.

'Oh, no. Not that easy,' he said to the unconscious man. 'Cunt? You don't know the half. One job, Wayland. Then I'll let you die like a good dog.'

Wayland bled badly but O'Dell couldn't let him die. There weren't many people left he could call on any longer.

O'Dell stood, old knees aching and popping, and went to hunt for something more medicinal than wet gunpowder. He found a gas stove, some incontinence pads, and no painkillers.

Later, dragging Redman to his car, O'Dell tired almost instantly. Not because the old murderer was heavy. He wasn't.

I got old, thought O'Dell, and though he knew it well enough, sometimes his age surprised him, still.

*

XIV.

More than Dead

Eleanor Farnham couldn't remember the last time someone came to her, or what they looked like. She remembered, oddly, what they said, even though back then she'd been...more not right.

'Water will be fine. Food. You understand? Food. I'm sorry.'

How long ago?

It was difficult for her to think and to remember. She retained no sense of the passage of time. The lights were always on, so the room was always bright. But while the water wasn't going to run out, and while the toilet in her cell that she did not understand would continue to flush, those things alone would not sustain her.

'You understand? Food. I'm sorry.'

Then the woman left. Eleanor had only been able to stare after her. Perhaps she should have tried to get through that door, but she'd been unable to entertain such a thought. The steel door closed, and it had been loud.

It was the last sound she heard until the Man came back.

She ran out of toilet paper. There was a time when she hadn't known to use toilet paper, then a time when she did, and now she couldn't. She took to washing herself in the shining steel sink beside the toilet bowl, but had no soap. Even ruined and broken and once-dead, she understood filth, and stench, and disgust.

How long had one roll of toilet paper lasted? How long had her food lasted?

She didn't know but guessed one, maybe two weeks. A few days alone before she worked out how to open the foil packet with the powdered food. Another two days or so to figure out that adding water from the tap over the sink made the food edible.

Three, four days now since she'd had anything but water?

A long time, too, since she'd had any kind of medication.

Every few minutes, Eleanor let out a horrible scream and her brain, pulsing within the permanent hole in her skull and scalp, shifted. Sometimes she remembered what they'd done. She cried until she forgot again.

She began to think about who caused this, how she'd died, the woman who was sorry, who she might be, what had happened to all the people that had cut her or fed her.

Her capacity for thought returned, and what she thought about was getting out.

*

Kurt O'Dell wasn't much of a doctor. His medical knowledge pertained to hurting people, not healing them.

Wayland's cauterised wounds were full of local anaesthetic. O'Dell pumped some broad-based antibiotics into his patient before he splashed iodine over the wounds, and thick padding and surgical tape over that.

He thought he'd done a pretty good job, considering. Wayland, though, proved to be an ungrateful patient.

'Cunt...fucking cunt...fuck...'

O'Dell tried his hardest to ignore the man strapped into a wheelchair.

I could just shoot him, he thought, but idly. He knew he couldn't do everything himself. His anger had got him in this mess. And, frankly, when everyone else was dead, you didn't have much choice but to scrape up the leavings at the bottom of the barrel.

I brought this on myself.

He knew that was true, so he said nothing until Wayland sat before the wide window to Eleanor Farnham's room. O'Dell's arms and legs were tired from pushing Wayland's wheelchair. He leaned against the window and Wayland stared into the cell.

'Christ... Why? What the fuck did you do? Thought I was a mad man... '

'You are a mad man, Wayland. Sorry to dissent, but you really are insane. Me? I'm not mad. I'm...like a doctor. Old school, you know - Napoleonic, maybe. Big saws, bits of wood, burning pitch. Surgery, Wayland! The world was rotten, full of pus. Gangrenous. I merely excised the flesh.'

'What is she?'

'Once? She might have been the answer to all the world's problems,' said O'Dell, with a shrug. 'She came back from the dead, Wayland.'

'What?'

O'Dell nodded, smiling broadly. Grinning. 'Wonderful, isn't it? You don't need details, do you? Because I killed all the people who might have understood the science.'

'Her head...'

The woman behind the window cocked her head to one side, then screamed, though they couldn't hear anything until O'Dell flicked a switch on a console and the scream came through speakers on the control panel.

Wayland would have put his hands over his ears had he not been strapped down. He'd heard his share of screaming, but this...it hurt.

'Turn her off!'

O'Dell nodded. 'Fine. Pussy.' He flipped the switch again.

O'Dell squatted beside Wayland. A man hunkering down, imparting great knowledge.

'Wayland, I want you to understand, we're all going to die. Me, too. Her? Probably not. Imagine that, Wayland. In there, going mad, constant agony...unable to die. Are you imagining it, Mr. Redman? Are you?'

'I get the point. I fucking get it. What do you want?'

'I know this man, Wayland. He's a man who needs killing. I've gone to all this effort to bring about a glorious, magnificent end...only to find that I still have a boss. And Wayland - between you and I? That gets right upon my tits. I think it's time I set up on my own, so to speak. Obviously, I'll have to get some kind of accountant to sort out the taxes, things like that. I'm hopeless with numbers...'

'You're insane, O'Dell. Insane.'

'Oh yes, I know. Believe me, I know. No one as insane as US. They think I don't hear them.'

O'Dell rubbed beneath his nose and looked at his finger.

No blood. Good.

'You kill this man for me and I'll let you die. You fuck it up...I'll bring you back. Maybe I'll put you in with her. Forever. Until you eat each other, or just sit dribbling or doing crosswords or whatever fuck-ups do with their spare time. And you'll have a lot of spare time.'

O'Dell patted Wayland on the knee. 'Who knows? Maybe your cock will grow back and you and her can hump for all eternity down here.'

'Who am I killing?' asked Wayland. He was a mess, but the medicine O'Dell had pumped into his veins gave his eyes a bright, watery sheen.

'I took the liberty of preparing a file in anticipation. You'll take my car. The car is in the car park. The file is in the car. The gun in the car. The car swallowed the file to catch the fly...I don't know why.'

He checked his nose again.

GET THE FUCK OUT, he thought, hard.

'Here...a stopwatch, too. Oh, I thought of everything.'

O'Dell pushed a stopwatch, a cheap black plastic thing, into Wayland's bound right hand. Wayland stared at O'Dell. O'Dell chose to ignore the look.

'Careful with that, eh? It's running. You have...' O'Dell checked his own watch. 'Precisely five hours thirty-two minutes to kill my boss...no...thirty-one minutes...time flies, doesn't it?'

'I can't drive. I can't fucking walk.'

'Oh, don't harp on. Anyway, of course you can't walk. You're sitting down.'

'You shot my cock off, my hand...you...'

'Don't be a baby about it,' said O'Dell. He tore Wayland's straps away and dumped him out of the wheelchair. Wayland screamed and rolled, then struggled onto his knees.

'There you go,' said O'Dell, throwing his hands into the air. 'It's a miracle!'

O'Dell put the muzzle of his gun in Wayland's ear. 'Or, I just kill you now, bring you back, and we'll call it quits?'

'Fuck off.'

'Thought so.' O'Dell fired into the large window. The report was tremendous, huge, in the tight room. The bullet ricocheted from the thick glass and hit a bank of speakers before it tore through and into the plaster wall behind.

'Starter's orders, Wayland.'

Wayland began to shuffle toward the elevator, O'Dell watching him all the way.

*

Eleanor didn't know that the man who left had stolen her son. If she'd known, still she would only have been able to stand before the wide window as he walked away.

The man in the suit stared into her cell. She thought of him as the Man, but today he seemed different. Something red and furious in his eyes, and his hair, messed. He left her alone and she knew he would not be back.

Eleanor seemed intent on standing still forever, merely to stare at the spot where The Man had been.  An observer might have been convinced she still saw him, or some kind of afterglow, as though she waited for the memory of the Man to depart.

But she wasn't staring after him, nor fascinated by his shape, style, even that peculiar aura of power that filled any space he entered.

She stared at the mark he left behind.

Now and then, she would cock her head, as though in thought. When she did, the shift in pressure around the bare section of her skull sent her into a long, painful fit of screaming. When the pain passed, she returned and stared with a slow, patient kind of thought, like a child might stare at a puzzle and wonder which colour went where, or which shape. She did the same thing for perhaps twenty hours.

Stare, cock her head, scream. Then repeat her actions over again.

Eleanor no longer slept. She felt only the barest sense of fatigue.

Finally, her mouth dry, her bowels and bladder complaining, she ate the last of her food - just dust from the discarded packs of dried out nutrients. She drank, leaning to do so while she emptied herself into the toilet bowl. She didn't know, yet, to flush, and though she remembered toilet paper, she had none.

Her gaze returned the spot where O'Dell had stood.

She walked forward and laid her hand against the window. Her eyes closed for a moment. She knew what she had to do.

Eleanor dug inside her head and began to pull, one hand each side of the rent they had cut into her. Long, filthy nails scraped at the exposed part of her brain and one leg became numb, but jittered with spasms. Her other leg and the window held her up. She carried on yanking until she tore the metal clasp in her head free. Blood, bone, some brain matter, hair, skin, all torn.

When it was done she sagged, then slid out on the floor in a wretched heap.

Later, when she rose, Eleanor remembered why she hurt herself. To heal, but not only that. The metal was a tool.

The only hope the Man had ever allowed her was right there - the long, shallow rut in the glass that his bullet left behind.

And if a bullet could mark the glass, then the steel from her head could, too. If the steel could scratch, it could carve.

Eleanor began to scrape at the glass slowly and carefully, and with the patience of the dead.

*

XV.

A Short Walk, for Some

In some dystopia, the rig might have been violent, horrifying - certainly for a lone woman. And yet it felt safe. Something in the atmosphere, perhaps. She could feel violence, now, as a vibration on the air. For months, she'd been surrounded by danger, suffused in it. Now, she could often sense it before it came. Violence was sudden, yes, but like a squall or summer lightning storm, there was a smell on the air that almost always preceded it.

Still, Francis knew such things could catch you out, even when you imagined you were safe. So she shared a room with Edgar and George, not because she needed the comfort, but as an added layer of security. She wasn't some super soldier, trained in martial arts. She could no more defend herself with a knife than some clever, improvised weapon. She could pull a trigger. But so could anyone.

There were no guns on the rig. Probably a wise and sensible choice, too. Men, plenty of them, confined for long stretches of time. There was alcohol, but that had long gone. Men had died, through accident and idiocy and pure bad luck. There were thirteen people on the rig. John Wake, the three of them, and nine men who'd survived this long. But they wouldn't last forever.

They had to get off.

If they didn't, they were dead, and maybe a hundred or five hundred years in some unimaginable future, a new people would find them frozen against the steel. More likely, perhaps, that the rig would just give in and slip beneath the rough seas without anyone to notice at all.

She lay in the dark, worrying, listening to the night sounds. The blast of the wind, so constant that it became white noise. The sea's efforts to swallow them continued. Sleet hit the metal sides of their quarters slantways, a hollow drone that reminded her of distant holidays in caravan parks. Rain would thunder against the tin roof, keeping her awake. As a child she'd hated it, hated the hard sound, the viciousness of storms. As a teen, she'd grown to love that sound, and sought it out. When she'd bought her first car she often sat with the engine off, somewhere away from traffic, and waited for a dark cloud to bring the rain. Then, she would sit still, her hands in her lap or tight on the wheel. She'd close her eyes, and just listen to that wonderful sound. Drumming on tin, right above her head.

So thinking, she lulled herself  to sleep.

A hand on her leg brought her sharply to wake. She kicked out, instinctively, and the hand was snatched away.

The instant before natural reaction freed her, though, George's words reached her mind.

Francis, he said.

'Shit, George? Are you alright? Did I hurt you?' she spoke aloud, forgetting to speak mind-to-mind.

He didn't reply, because if they weren't touching he couldn't speak.

Edgar, on the top bunk opposite her, stirred at the sound of her voice. She quieted, trying not to wake him. If George had wanted Edgar, Edgar would be awake, too.

She could see nothing, so reached out a tentative hand, and George's hand found hers at the same time. This time, expecting his touch, she did not flinch, but let herself listen to his strange, silent voice.

Francis. Will you walk with me?

'Walk?' she whispered. 'Can you?'

If you can manage, I can manage. We'll help each other.

With his voice, in her mind, Francis sensed and felt as much, if not more, than his simple words conveyed.

'Are we leaving, George? We are, aren't we?'

I'm not sure, he told her, but the way he said it sounded like at least half a lie. Yet. But we need to learn to walk. Let's teach each other.

She pushed herself from the bunk, his hand in hers.

'Sure?' she asked one final time.

Sure, he said.

She pulled him up. He staggered, his legs too weak to hold him, but she was there. Her arm under his, around his tiny chest. The pain in her feet was constant, and standing without her crutches sent needles of pain stabbing, it seemed, as high as her hips. But she gritted her teeth, because he needed her.

I need him, too, she thought. But she tried to keep this to herself.

*

Wayland Redman's agony was of a different kind. His felt personal, like hatred, or some kind of betrayal. Worse, too, because no one had ever hurt him like this. He'd killed kids, women, a few men. He'd poured pain onto people like boiling water into his morning coffee - no big deal. Just something to wake him up.

He was a sick man. The kind who'd get hard, or laugh, at another's pain. Sometimes, too, it affected him. He could find a person in death touching. Once or twice he'd cried, and plenty of times he'd said sorry, over and over, while he made people bleed and scream, but it wasn't a thing he'd been able to stop. He was an alcoholic. Murder was his tipple of choice. He might feel ashamed, dirty, sometimes, but he always came back to it. On the wagon, for years at a time, then it would lure him again. A glass like ruby port, though, rather that something amber, tinkling and full of ice.

But no one had ever hurt him before.

Sheer agony coursed through him each time he shifted gear in the borrowed car. His left foot would push down the clutch, or his right, the accelerator. When he moved his legs, bolts of horrible energy coursed through his balls, his spine, into his groin and guts. So many times his sight dimmed and his hearing switched from the roar of the wet road to that peculiar underwater echo that people get when their consciousness wavers and they feel that slip from the edge of waking to the long abyss of sleep.

To sleep would be to die.

He remembered the woman in the cell.

O'Dell was a liar, yes, but when it came to pain and retribution, the man's promises were solid as steel. Wayland did not believe for a minute that the woman's condition was a lie. She was not some simple test experiment, a torture victim or dumb captive. O'Dell said she came back from the dead, then she had indeed come back. He brought her back.

He'd do it him, too. Wayland had seen into the woman's eyes. He knew she wasn't some idiot husk. She knew what had been done to her. A corpse, raised, only to learn humanity again and fall to dust after years, perhaps even to find the insanity of the grave once again, all the while watching it creep over her.

Wayland could not bear that. Better a clean end...or...

He imagined finishing this job, and then hunting O'Dell. The pain, the chance, would be worth it.

'But I'd never win.'

He spoke to himself in the sturdy car, his words deadened, and it was true, of course. O'Dell would always win, because O'Dell saw the future, didn't he?

The wastelands Wayland drove through were testament to that. Burned factories, flattened supermarkets. The remnant of petrol stations and service stations along the road he drove, perhaps burned for fun or simple by accident. Fireballs from gas lines obliterated whole rows of houses. Brickwork remained in random spots along the road like shattered teeth after some brawl. Bodies, just grey lumps under a coating of sleet and ice. Cars, bigger bumps on the landscape and the road ahead, or pile-ups, lorries torched and gutted, craters from small military engagements near the end. Some of the larger cities would be nothing but dips on the landscape, their girth now only broken by skeletal towers where people once took elevators to their jobs in the sky.

O'Dell's doing, all of it. A man who'd burned the world. A man Wayland could not fight.

Would not.

When he weighed his fear of O'Dell against the insult of his missing parts, O'Dell proved heavier.

So he bit down on the pain with each gear shift, or when he was forced to brake or speed up. Every time he had to use his right hand, so much of it just nubs of bone, he thought of O'Dell, and the horrible fire that burned in his insane eyes, and he took the pain.

Four hours he drove, sometimes crying out, sometimes simply crying.

Pure torture until the satellite navigation system in the car told him to take his final turn. A synthesised voice, granting a short reprieve. He expected a giant steel and concrete maw that opened to a secure underground bunker, but it was a simple row of tower blocks. Old things, with a web of walkways connecting three buildings. As little as seven or eight weeks ago, men and women had probably barely survived in places such as this. Old, poor people would die in the cold of winter. Young men with short, dangerous dogs would have prowled those high walkways. Men who wore coats all year long probably sold vials or packages of the kind of medicines that let people live in such places without going mad from despair and throwing themselves thirty floors to a grateful death.

He counted the windows, from the first floor to the last.

It wasn't thirty floors, but twenty-three.

The ruined parts of him throbbed at the thought of it. Then, he balanced that against O'Dell's face, leering at him endless through a thick plate of glass.

'Cunt,' he said. He took out the gun O'Dell allowed him.

Phone in one pocket, a stop watch on his wrist, and the gun in his left hand.

Tears ran down his face as he walked through the grey deluge that splattered against his downturned face.

'Fuck you, O'Dell,' he said when he was inside the tower block, looking at the first of hundreds of concrete steps. 'Fuck you.'

*

George's brow was damp with sweat and his breath laboured when he and Francis reached the end of the short, dimly lit hall. He leaned heavily on Francis' arm. Both legs shook, his left more than the right. His grip on her weakened, too, until she was all but carrying him.

'Hey, this is supposed to be exercise for both of us. You're like a sack of potatoes.'

He smiled wearily. But he happy. That much was obvious.

'You should be happy,' she told him. 'A week ago you could barely stand. You're getting stronger. That's you, George. Not some virus or magic potion or whatever they gave you. You. Understand? It's okay to feel a little pride, sometimes.'

Thank you. He didn't speak in her mind this time, but mouthed the words, simple enough for Francis to understand.

'You done for the night? I don't know about you but I could sleep.' She could, too. Her feet pained her, her back sore from lugging George down the hall. Bed seemed like a good place to be right now.

George, however, shook his head. This time, when he touched her hand, she knew he had something to say that couldn't be read on his lips.

It's late, Francis...but we have something to do. Somewhere quiet. Away from Edgar.

'You're sly, George, you know that?'

Like a fox. He grinned. But this is dangerous, Francis.

'It's him, isn't it?' she asked.

George nodded. He's...occupied. Don't ask how I know. I just do. If his mind's on other things, we might be able to...

'Sneak in?'

George nodded again. Are you up for a bit of spying?

'Always,' she said. 'Come on. It should be quiet in the common room.'

Sometimes, if a man couldn't sleep, he might be in the common room. But the remaining men agreed to ration food and drinks and cigarettes before Francis and her friends even thought about trying to hop the channel and failing. No television or radio. Plenty of old, well-thumbed magazines, and very few books. The end of the world, it seemed, was a shitty place for insomniacs.

By the time they sat opposite each other on plastic chairs, a table between them, both George and Francis shook from the strain. George on atrophied legs, Francis on healing bones. George, short of breath and pale, held his hand out for Francis to take.

'Take a minute, George,' she told him. 'Let's catch our breath, at least.'

But the boy shook his head, his ragged hair flicking away from his eyes.

He grabbed her, his expression serious.

We haven't got time. We might not get another chance, Francis.

She sighed, but relaxed and held him back, palm to palm, as though they were going to shake on it. She knew the deal they were shaking on, too. She was the highway. George one end, O'Dell the other. Like she'd been laid by...

Francis!

She stopped that train of though. He's nine, she reminded herself. It was easy to forget the kid's age, and even easier to forget how deftly he could pick what he chose from her thoughts.

'Do it.'

She felt him squeeze her hand tighter...and then she was gone.

*

George didn't understand his talent at all. It was autonomic, like a person's beating heart, like digestion.

He was aware of Francis' hand in his. Her smooth, warm skin. Aware, too, of his heart beat - just a steady, slow thud somewhere deep inside.

Follow her heart...follow the highway.

He concentrated that part of him that usually ticked alone. Sometimes, before this - before the man with fire in his eyes, he had known things he never wanted to. Even as young as four or five. Perhaps younger, too, but too young then think it in anyway remarkable.

He feared he would see things inside the man's mind that no one should see - boy or adult.

Francis, he thought. Think of her heart...the beat.

The beat inside Francis was calm. He let her heartbeat inside that wonderful place in his head, where all the highways he'd ever known remained. Most of those highways led to death; his father, his mother, teachers, childhood friends, his grandmother. Those roads were crumbled and disused and forgotten. But other highways he'd once touched remained, though distant and unreachable. The twins on his street, Jamie and Anna. Anna still lived. He didn't take her highway, because tonight wasn't about friends. Maybe she'd be thinking about cartoons. Teen Titans, The Simpsons. She'd loved cartoons.

Darker highways were there, still. The awful man whose mind felt and tasted like foil from a chocolate bar, something bitter and unexpected between your teeth. Wayland Redman.

And the worst of all: The one he must travel.

George turned his mind from the hundred dead roads in his head, from those few still brightly lit, and sank deeper into Francis' unconscious mind. The road he needed was the strongest he'd ever seen, and it ran from Francis' mind into the distance. This one had cats' eyes along the edges and between the lanes. One lane out, one lane in. George might have even been able to add street lights, had he wanted, but he could have found his way along a dark country road now. His power grew as he healed. Something about this new world - the distractions and bright lights of life were winking out, and so the darkness was becoming easier to see by.

Everyone had highways. Those made of memories, or emotions. Road that lead to people who touched their minds. O'Dell never touched George. Their connection was too weak. But he and Francis were close. Dangerously close, because O'Dell had been inside Francis' thoughts, and for George to travel there was a great risk.

The road, from Francis to O'Dell, looked bright enough. Inviting, even. George understood though that bright did not mean safe. There would be mines along that path, and potholes, traps, blind bends.

But I have to go. Because it isn't over. Now he's killed the world, what is there left but to remake it?

And a man like O'Dell? What would his creation be?

George forgot his body entirely. Francis' heartbeat became just a distant memory, like (rain on tin...) and he placed his left foot upon the road to O'Dell. His right foot followed and he moved, not walking, but so fast that the darkness growing either side of the road would not see him, could not find him.

Dead hands along the road reached and clawed as he sped past, faster, and then faster still. Wind rose behind him in cloud of dust until even he could not see himself. All he could see was O'Dell, and O'Dell rushed toward him.

*

XVI.

1962

Kurt William O'Dell was nineteen years old in 1962, it was a warm June, and he had just finished his degree at Oxford University two years early. Smart and driven, far beyond the capabilities of even his brightly shining peers, and even as a young man O'Dell's mind was never at rest.

Three days after his last exam O'Dell sat alone in a pub named The Eagle and Child, where C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien once drank. Workmen hammered outside, knocking some part of the old pub around, but O'Dell wasn't bothered by the noise, not so much. He waited, nursing a pint of dark, thick and almost sickly ruby ale, for a rather well spoken man from the Government. A strange place for an interview, but at nineteen, O'Dell was full of confidence in the world and his abilities, and his great worth.

Like plenty of pubs with old, unsure tables, there was a beer coaster beneath a table leg. This one read 'Courage'. The table was dark and scuffed, the beer inexpensive. Smoke was in the air, dry tobacco and wet, sweet pipe smoke. The pub hummed with gentle conversation. O'Dell was happy.

The man he'd met the day before outside his campus ducked in, bending just at the neck to clear the low lintel. He nodded and smiled to O'Dell, like they were old friends, which they were not.

'Mr. O'Dell,' said the man by way of greeting. The man wore a suit, fine cut. No hat, no glasses. His eyes were blue and intelligent.

'Sir,' said O'Dell, who had yet to learn the man's name.

'Another?'

'Please,' said O'Dell. 'Just a bitter - Tetley? This is awful.'

'Of course,' said the man. O'Dell watched for a second as the man walked to the bar, then shrugged and drank the dregs in his glass while he waited. No sense in sitting looking at the man's back.

He returned with a pint of bitter for O'Dell, and a cup of tea for himself. Unapologetic about it, too. The man shrugged. 'Beer disagrees,' he explained, and that was that.

'Thank you,' said O'Dell. 'Appreciate it.'

He took the shallow head together with a healthy bite of the beer below while he waited for the man to get to the crux of it.

'Well, shall we?' said the man after slowly adding a cube of sugar to his tea, and stirring. Sugar, no milk.

Odd bird, thought O'Dell, but he inclined his head. A job offer before he even graduated was not to be sniffed at.

'My name is Mr. Fenchurch. I work for a small, largely autonomous branch of her Majesty's Government. It's a rather secretive thing, I'm afraid, and I'm far from at liberty to divulge more than dusting of what we do. Would you be interested in working for the Government, O'Dell? Mostly desk work, very little footwork. Not, perhaps, for everyone...'

'I'm not against the idea, Sir,' said O'Dell.

'Good lad,' said Fenchurch. 'Remarkable aptitude for mathematics, haven't you?' He didn't wait for O'Dell to agree or disagree. 'The potential for growth in man's intellectual endeavours is exponential when the burden of analysis and storage is removed. Consider current systems, libraries, other, older and less efficient repositories of knowledge. The modern mainframe could serve in this capacity, and more, and as technology advances so too would the efficacy of computing.' You wrote that, O'Dell?'

'My University application? Sir? Is this to do with my studies?'

'Your field, O'Dell. Fairly broad, but our research encompasses technology, yes. Artificial Intelligence, O'Dell...outlandish concept, but then so was space flight. Adelson-Velsky, a very clever bastard, Russian, or Israeli, something like that, published some new method of organising data in March...people are looking at leaps in storage capacity, new algorithms, programming languages...the cusp of a new era. But I'm getting ahead.'

'AVL tree? I read the paper.'

'In Russian?'

'Sir.'

'Well, then one-nil to you young, my friend. Let's just say it's a job doing clever stuff. I think I'm outgunned,' said Fenchurch. He took his tea in a fist, ignoring the small handle, rather than drinking with a pinky sticking out like a toff. 'Nothing sordid, mind you. Nothing like that.'

'Sir?'

'MI6 and the like, O'Dell. We are not the cloak and dagger type.'

'Sir,' said O'Dell, now halfway through his pint, 'I'm not entirely sure I understand what the job is.'

'Good,' said Fenchurch with a smile. 'I shouldn't think so. The thing is, there is a small...cadre? Yes, cadre. Gifted, Mr. O'Dell. A number of men just like yourself will be attending a short interview. A test, of sorts. Tomorrow at ten in the morning. We have a modest office near Marble Arch. I'm am simply offering the opportunity to apply for the job. The test is a step along the path to a new career. Shall I put you down for it?'

'Sir? I'm still slightly unclear as to the nature of the job I would be applying, or testing, for.'

'I am aware of that, and please understand that an element of wooliness is quite essential at this early stage of affairs.'

The man passed over a ticket for the train, from Oxford station to London, along with several notes. 'Travel expenses,' he explained. 'For a sandwich or a cup of tea or something,' said Fenchurch. He placed a type written note, folded, alongside the money and the ticket.

'Directions. Easy enough to find.'

O'Dell picked up the paper and glanced. A hand drawn map beneath a simple set of typed directions and the address.

'I'll expect you along tomorrow, Mr. O'Dell,' said Fenchurch, rising. As though O'Dell's attendance was a foregone conclusion.

'Sir,' said O'Dell. Fenchurch and O'Dell shook.

They met again at precisely ten in the morning on the following day.

*

The train ride was entirely forgettable. O'Dell reached an unassuming grey stone building after the long ride to London, and then the short ride on the central line to Marble Arch.

He rang on a doorbell press beside the tall black door, but didn't hear anything. There was a knocker, brass - a lion's head with a thick, heavy ring hanging from its mouth. He waited for thirty seconds or so, unwilling to seem overly eager, but because he was English and patient and polite, too. After thirty seconds and a simple, single knock of the heavy ring, the door opened.

A woman answered. Her hair was worn tight against her head. She was older, maybe forty at a guess. Her white shirt and her black skirt were both sensible.

'Mr. O'Dell,' she said without a smile, but not quite curt. 'Please. Come in.'

'Thank you,' he said.

'The others are waiting. Up the stairs, the larger room on the left.'

O'Dell needed the toilet, but he didn't feel like he should ask where the lavatory was on arrival. He elected to wait.

'Ma'am,' he said, and took the stairs up. She returned to whatever business she had - whether she was a receptionist, or an aid, or a lady butler of some sort, he had no idea. He put it from his mind and entered the larger of the two rooms on the left. It was easy enough to find - the door stood open and he could see three young men, around his age or a shade older. Mr. Fenchurch was seated behind a large desk. The three men were seated facing him. There was no one else.

The stairs, marble banister, the old wainscoting. Red carpet, paintings of old dead people in gold-painted frames on the walls. Everything spoke of money, of old school charm. O'Dell did not come from money, but he had spent two years in Oxford - he knew the smell of money.

'Good morning, Mr. O'Dell,' said Fenchurch. He didn't rise from his chair, simply motioned to the only free chair in the room. 'Please.'

O'Dell nodded to the other men in the room, then took a seat furthest from the door. The woman he met downstairs appeared at the door.

'Will you need anything, Mr. Fenchurch?'

'No, Elsie. Thank you. Close the door.'

No please, no thank you. It was 1962, and the woman worked for a man who was comfortable behind an old dark wood desk wearing a good, tailored suit.

'Well, gentlemen. Rather an odd situation, this. A test of sorts. Those who pass will move into the career of a lifetime. Those who fail will, I am sure, find gainful employment elsewhere. To fail is no shame. Only the best are expected to excel here. Each of you is gifted and intelligent. We, however, are looking for a higher degree of excellence. Now, I will need you to sign a short document, and then we may proceed. Our activities here are matters you will not disclose. Your signature on this document will be your consent to this simple term. I assume none have any objection?'

No one did, though the other three young men did not seem entirely certain. Fenchurch no doubt did not expect questions. He did not offer the chance, and they did not take it.

O'Dell signed the document that Fenchurch passed to the front of the desk, with his own pen. Each of them had brought a pen, at least, expecting the kind of test they were used to.

This was not that kind of test.

'Gentlemen,' said Fenchurch, glancing at each paper in turn. 'Shall we? Please, follow me.'

*

In turn, each young man was led to a private room and told by Mr. Fenchurch that someone would be along shortly to explain the next step.

O'Dell listened to the men's names as each was dismissed, but for some reason he could not hear their names, as though Mr. Fenchurch was somehow masking his voice as they headed along the corridor.

It was a strange sensation.

'Mr. O'Dell,' said Fenchurch as they reached his room last. 'Someone will be along shortly. Please make yourself comfortable. You will take lunch in your room after the first test. There is a toilet adjacent to the room, should you need it. Good luck.'

Shortly after, O'Dell sat in a comfortable chair. A man came into the room and passed O'Dell a stack of papers, and a plain sheet for O'Dell to write on, along with a board so that he could rest the paper somewhere. There was no desk.

'Read the papers. Write down your analysis and thoughts on the subject matter. You will be given one hour to read and complete the test. I will return with sandwiches and tea. How will you take your tea?'

'White, please. No sugar.'

The man nodded and passed O'Dell a handkerchief.

'Your nose is bleeding, young man.'

O'Dell wiped the handkerchief beneath his nose and saw that the man was telling the truth. Bright red blood from a burst capillary inside his nose.

'Thank you,' he said.

Strange. O'Dell had never suffered a nosebleed before.

He looked up, and saw that while he wondered about his bloody nose, the man had gone and the sheet on the board was full of his own handwriting, a small drop of blood in the bottom right corner.

I don't remember writing any of this, he thought, staring at his tight, neat script. He read some, and still had no recollection of either reading the material or writing his analysis.

He looked up and saw the man who had originally give him the test taking the papers from him. In place of those papers, the man gave O'Dell a tray. The tray was silver, the cup and saucer with tea was china. There was a china plate, too, with a sandwich. Pink salmon. To one side was a cherry tomato and a glass of water and beside the water were three pills, each of different colours and sizes.

'Sir?'

'Your consent form is already signed, Mr. O'Dell. Please, enjoy your sandwich and tea and make sure to take the medication.'

'Is this part of the test?'

'It is. No further questions, please. I will return for your tray in ten minutes and the second part of the test will commence. Sir.'

The man left. After O'Dell ate the sandwich and drank the tea, he took the pills with a sip of water for each tablet. They were chalky, and coated his mouth.

In seconds, he found he could get no moisture in his mouth. His tongue stuck against the roof of his mouth. When the man returned to take his tray, O'Dell's nose was a torrent of blood and he could barely see.

The man took O'Dell's pulse, nodded, and then handed O'Dell an even thicker stack of papers. Readouts, data, some schematics. Maps and news reports from various newspapers, photographs of men and women that O'Dell did not know, and a few that he did.

'Same test, Mr. O'Dell. One hour, then you may return to your business.'

O'Dell's vision wavered while he read over the information.

As he read, he began to see things.

A boy with a scarred scalp only sparsely covered by hair.

Barbaric, he thought. He didn't recognise the boy, but other images he did. Trains on fire in some Asian country he could not place - China or Japan, perhaps. A church on fire in America, the president of the United States of America with blood on his face, the Beatles, a ship burning and sinking into the sea, men and women with serious faces in Government rooms, none of whom he recognised though while these pictures were in his head his hand moved, constantly, over the sheet of paper. His handwriting was far from neat this time, but a hurried scrawl.

The boy with the scars on his head peered over his shoulder, looking at what he wrote.

I know this. I've heard of this. It's called acid. They gave me acid. I'm hallucinating.

'The test is over, Mr. O'Dell. You are free to go. I suggest you clean up before you leave.'

O'Dell glanced at the notes he had written. Page after page of insane ramblings, drawings, graphs, pictures which were mostly dark and simple - doodles of men burning, or blown apart, or screaming figures dying.

'What...'

'Good day,' said the man and swept the papers up.

O'Dell did not hear from anyone again until January, 1964.

*

People make millions of memories in a lifetime, if not more. A cup of tea every morning for  decades, or more. Cigarettes smoked, magazines read on toilets in different houses, winters and summers and storms and time spent in the garden, or in a pub, family weddings, a funeral, good dinners, bad dinners. Among those memories, a few will make people who they are. A few, like pins that hold a soul together, to which the memory returns. A single moment, or ten, but things that affect each individual powerfully enough to mark them.

For George, his memory was short - just a boy, still. As he grew, he would remember a place called the Mill. He would never forget his friend Francis. Other people's faces would pass. In a year, his father's face would be no more than a blur. The men on this very rig would mean nothing to him, their names, their faces, simply gone.

For Edgar, the moment he met his wife, and the moment she died.

For Francis, of all her memories, she returned time and time again to the one that made her happiest - the sound of rain on a tin roof.

O'Dell's core memory was 1962 and it would not let go.

O'Dell shuddered, hundreds of miles distant, his nose bloodied. On a rig battered by storms far out to the North Sea, George and Francis held hands, still. George's too-large jumper was awash with red. Francis' nose gushed across the table top. She jittered in her seat, her eyes white, her feet kicking out. Like a woman having a seizure. Her tongue bled from her snapping teeth.

George could feel her distress, deep inside O'Dell's mind, but when he tried to place a foot on that dark highway and run from O'Dell, to return to Francis, to set her free, he found it impossible to leave. The pull of O'Dell, the lure of 1962, was far, far too strong.

In a pub, again. The Eagle and Child.

George felt O'Dell's confusion as the man walked toward them - he and O'Dell both, George peering, hidden within.

'Hello again, Kurt.'

'Please excuse me, but I think you have to wrong man, Sir,' said O'Dell, and George felt his confusion.

'Mr. Fenchurch, Mr. O'Dell. You remember me. Of course you do.'

'Have we met before?'

'Certainly. We met last year.'

'Last year? I don't...Sir? Were you one of the lecturers?

'Mr. O'Dell, you graduated in 1962. It is 1964.'

'Sir?'

'Please, Mr. O'Dell. Not here. Shall we walk a while? It is a beautiful day.'

George had no choice but to follow. Outside, it did indeed to prove a beautiful day. The sun was warm. George was deep enough within O'Dell's mind to feel the warmth, and to forget a frozen oil rig.

'Mr. Fenchurch,' said O'Dell, walking beside the man, through the town and toward the river. 'I'm sorry, but I honestly have no idea who you are.'

'Understandable, Kurt. Understandable. In June 1962 you were the subject of a test. Experiment, perhaps.'

'What? How dare you? You...who the hell do you think you are, Sir?'

Mr. Fenchurch did not reply, but took a sheaf of papers from a briefcase he carried. O'Dell noticed a pistol in the case, but it was the papers Fenchurch passed to O'Dell. 'Before you lose your temper, Mr. O'Dell...this is what you wrote during the test last year. It is your handwriting, yes?'

It was. A scrawl, unlike his usual script, but unmistakably his.

'Mr. O'Dell, at first we failed to understand the significance. But we believe you have worked out original, vast improvements to integrated circuit technology, replicated equations we can't even understand from work as yet unpublished. The compound you took allowed this to happen, but more. We believe some degree of precognition is there in your writing.'

'I saw the future. Sir.'

'There is a date, there, isn't there? You wrote over and over that date. Do you know what that date is?'

'Sir?'

'22nd November, Mr. O'Dell. Ring a bell?'

'Kennedy?'

'Yes indeed.'

'What is this? Fake? A joke?'

'No joke, my friend. The drug you were given is an early iteration of an experimental treatment. We, the branch and I, are working toward something great, Mr. O'Dell. And now, I'm offering you the chance to join us.'

'Why can't I remember...'

Fenchurch wavered in O'Dell's memory and his sight, and George felt himself dragged forward, like a ghost brought out into the light. For just an instant, O'Dell's gaze was on George, rather than Mr. Fenchurch.

Then, gone.

O'Dell clutched at his head. Blood ran from his nose, and Fenchurch stared at him.

'What's happening to me?'

'Similar effect to LSD. This, I suspect, is rather like a flashback. Extensive research was undertaken by America's Central Intelligence Agency. The compound you were given is rather different, though the basic, primary effects are comparable. The secondary effects, however, are more unpredictable. Like precognition, telepathy...'

'Are you saying I...saw the future?'

'Mr. O'Dell, that is precisely what I am saying. We would like you to participate in some further test on your abilities, with a view to including you in our bureau. A bunch of thinkers, really. Philosophy of the future, seeing patterns and the like. Trying to stay ahead of the game, as it were...'

'Mr. Fenchurch,' said O'Dell, but he fell to his knees. Fenchurch reached out to steady O'Dell. And as they touched, something happened that O'Dell had never expected.

He saw everything that would be, and the fire that must follow.

*

George saw through O'Dell's burning eyes and recoiled from the sights to come.

He ran, his legs pumping and his young heart pounding, back into his own memories.

He was just a frightened boy in a basement. The cold concrete on his bum made him want to pee. He had a can of fizzy orange before the supermarket.

There was a man above him.

He's dangerous, thought George. Then.

But he'd been wrong. It was The Man with Fire in his Eyes. He was the one to fear.

George understood, deep down, that he was lost. His remarkable inner voice, that wiser and older heart that beat in time with his, tried to push George from that memory, and be the boy he was now.

You're inside O'Dell's mind, it told him.

But O'Dell's mind was crushing George's thoughts. O'Dell's mind was cavernous. It reeked of smoke, of ashes and dirty fires that burned in plumes of blue. The sickly feel O'Dell smothered George. Everything was suffused with that awful, rank stench.

Concentrate, George told himself. His own voice, but an older him.

Concentrate.

It was hard, trying to breach O'Dell's mind. Like how sometimes he'd knock over a drink, misjudging the length of his arm, perhaps. Then panic, overreact, move too fast, and instead of small spill he would pitch the whole cup on the floor and O'Dell would shout at him.

No.

O'Dell was never there.

Go slow, thought George, with a child's thoughts. His mind is one of mum's glasses. She let you have a big boy glass. Don't break it. Go slow...

There, in that great cavern, something glinted. Not entirely bright, like platinum or polished steel on a kitchen draining board. But metal, unmistakeable. Hanging there, inside the cavern.

A memory?

No, he thought. Not a memory. A...keepsake of a memory. Something left behind, maybe, to remember something taken.

It was a bullet. The bullet was the doorway to the past.

Run along the bullet, George. Run it down.

George ran, following the bullet back to the past, to the right moment. From O'Dell's brain, through skull and skin, through gun smoke and a steely barrel full of fire...

He looked back along the line the bullet would fly. Into O'Dell's eyes.

Not madness, or hate, or fury.

George saw sorrow.

*

Kurt William O'Dell's eyes filled with fire for the first time. In that instant, George, the child he was and the wiser man he would become, saw why O'Dell put a bullet in his brain.

George...get out. This is too powerful. This is the core of him.

George always trusted that voice. It was never wrong.

He ran along the path of the bullet, back through the sadness in O'Dell's eyes.

As he did, he saw it all. Decades of history, and O'Dell ruling it all along. A man with no memory, no conscious, but a singular drive and terrible power.

His goal was to burn the world. The only thing that saved the world for fifty years was technology.

George understood O'Dell's frustration, the man's impatience. To know his life's work, to know how to achieve it, and yet still be forced to wait over half a century.

O'Dell bending politicians to his will, guiding scientist in their studies. Paying for research into computer technology with money that he persuaded rich men to give him, and forget.

A man who could see the future, and who had the power to push the world toward it. He saw O'Dell speaking to soldiers, statesmen, travelling the world and shaking hands or holding a gun to heads. Scientists, whirling test tubes, slides under microscopes. Old towns, a lecture hall or a classroom, figures and numbers like complicated maths on blackboards. A dog, somewhere deep and distant, maybe when O'Dell had been a child.

But George hated O'Dell, too.

Wayland Redman was there, in O'Dell's buried, dislocated memory.

All the boys who were taken, in wheelchairs like him, row upon row, all dead except for their remarkable minds.

George ran all the way through O'Dell's life and lost memories, until his feet rested on the highway home.

One glance behind him, and he saw a last memory O'Dell didn't even know he had.

His mother, behind a large plate of glass.

'Mum?'

He faltered.

Heat rose, but inside his mind rather than on his skin. Agony crippled George all over again. His mother wavered and disappeared. In her place, O'Dell was left and he leered at George with his horrible, yellow-toothed grin.

'George Farnham. Honestly, I forgot about you.' This wasn't O'Dell before the bullet. This was O'Dell after - mad and dangerous and without pity or compassion. O'Dell tried to kill himself to stop becoming The Man with Fire in his Eyes. He succeeded, and in doing so allowed this madman to be born.

It's not real, George told himself, because he had to. He's distracted...he's not that powerful.

'Not that powerful? You think? You're a kid. A boy. You don't know.'

There was no help here. Nothing and no one to save him.

I...messed up.

'You did, didn't you?'

George bowed his head and saw his blood drip from his nose. It dripped onto a black surface.

The road.

'Look at me, boy. You want to burn, don't you? You're cold, alone? You miss your mummy, don't you?'

He killed her...he killed everyone.

'Cute. You sneak into my mind and try to whisper?'

For a second, George thought that maybe O'Dell wasn't even talking to him. O'Dell's nose bled, even here safe and confident in his own strength.

'Fucking kids,' said O'Dell. Talking to George, or some distant memory the boy could no longer touch?

It didn't matter.

George concentrated on his blood dripping on the road.

Tarmac, blood, drip.

Like a heartbeat, regular, steady. Drip. Comforting. Like...

'Rain on a tin roof, George. Listen to US. Rain on a tin roof. You are one of US. Rain on a...'

It wasn't George's voice, but it was similar enough to his. Like his, he knew this voice was never wrong.

Rain on a tin roof. Follow the sound home.

He glanced up, smiled at O'Dell.

Rain on a tin roof.

'What?' said the madman.

George gave O'Dell something he learned from Francis in reply. His middle finger.

*

XVII.

The Boss

O'Dell glanced down at the watch on his wrist.

0047:03:56...55...

Plenty of time for coffee before Wayland's call. He got up, walked the few steps from his desk to a coffee machine on a counter against the wall. He clicked the kettle on, then, his watch began to vibrate against his wrist. A shrill alarm sounded, too. Loud, but all treble tones.

What?

He checked his watch again, his frown deepened.

0009:59:55...54...

'What in fuck?'

His alarm, set for ten minutes before his ultimate freedom from the man on the phone, the man calling in the hits and tugging O'Dell's strings. But...

O'Dell checked the phone in his pocket, woke it from standby and checked the time. It was right there, no lie. If the phone wasn't wrong, and neither was his watch. He laid his hand against the kettle. Warm, not cold like it should be, and the switch was off even though he had just pushed it down. Like the kettle had boiled, switched off, then cooled. Like time had passed with O'Dell simply standing by the kettle and sink, staring at nothing like some gormless cunt in a supermarket, looking at three for two offers and trying to work out the maths.

He'd forgotten things before, sure...but thirty-seven minutes?

He looked again, worried now and he wasn't accustomed to being worried about anything.

0009:07:08...07...

I stood here for thirty-seven minutes? Watching the kettle boil and cool...and don't remember anything?

He might not remember anything, but he hadn't suddenly become stupid.

Somehow, someone took those minutes away. Only someone remarkable could do that.

He searched his thoughts, forced his memory to come back. It was like punching a cloud, like turning his rage and power on the weather and expecting it to obey.

Nothing.

There can't be nothing.

But, that wasn't true, was it?

For some reason a memory surfaced, nothing to do with his effort and more to do with his subconscious throwing him a lifeline. He focused, then unfocused and just let it bob to the surface.

There...

A vision. Children, vacant and dead-enough, their minds reduced to nothing but computers, parts of their brain matter removed. Nothing more than mannequins, nothing more. Yet there was something there.

Something.

The children, half-height, strapped to their idiot wheelchairs so that they couldn't fall out. Finding the children had been hard.

Many grew into adults in those chairs. Many more died.

Nearly sixty years in the making, forty-eight, now, since he began to build the mainframe.

The human mind was remarkable. Thousands of talented human minds, though? Working in unison?

Brain-dead except for the functions he wanted of them. Remarkable children turned to his purpose...but nothing children, too. Missing, diminished...and yet...

O'Dell, before a long glass window, looking down at them and smiling and a memory of one of the few times he had felt such a chill as now.

'You burned us,' they said. 'US.'

As one, every child, adult, carcass left inside those triple towers turned their blind eyes toward O'Dell.

*

George opened his eyes before Francis. The table, their jumpers, even their hands were sticky with blood. Not dripping. The sound of sleet, hard on the metal over their heads. The freezing air in the common room. Even the smell of the two of them, unwashed, covered in nose blood. These things were wonderful.

George thought perhaps that was enough talking for one night. He released Francis, and instead of calling her, but before he went he placed a dream in her head.

She would dream of warm rain on a caravan, a holiday, and a time without pain.

It would be enough, until she woke.

He laid his head on the table, same as her. Francis slept, but George could not. His mind whirled, a storm of thoughts. His mother, O'Dell's sorrow, now dead. O'Dell's rage, still alive. For how much longer?

Did it matter?

Thoughts a child should not have to think alone. About his death, and the death of everything that remained. O'Dell was done. Why fight any longer? What was there to win?

Round and round those thoughts ran inside his nine-year old mind. That older voice tried to calm him, but he could not calm himself.

His sobbing must have woken Francis from her rainy dream, because some time later he felt her hand on his.

'George? Why are you crying?'

He liked Francis a lot. He'd nearly killed her.

O'Dell's mind wouldn't leave. The taint was inside George now. The man's memories and thoughts and the awful things he'd done, but more than all that it was the sorrow that hit George, and kept hitting him. The sorrow would not let him be.

O'Dell knew he would have to watch everything die, and that he would make everything die, and he'd still tried to stop it.

Now George was following right along. Everything he touched was dying.

Edgar would die. Francis. His father was dead. His mother...

The image of her, her skull torn open, was bile inside his small boy's thoughts. Her highway made small, a winding dirt track, leading nowhere.

George shook his head. He couldn't talk about it. He wouldn't. But he and Francis were connected, and even though he tried to keep it all inside, she took some of it. She picked it up, despite that he tried to quell it. But then, perhaps he wanted her to understand. Perhaps he didn't try hard enough. Perhaps...

'George. Stop it. It's okay, George. It's okay.'

She didn't ask what he saw through the highway in her mind, all the way back to O'Dell. Some, she saw. Some, he hid.

George couldn't stop sobbing. Huge, heavy sobs. A muted wail from his broken mouth, clogged with blood and snot. He was disgusted with himself, with the feel of O'Dell, with the whole rotten world.

But Francis was not the kind to give up. She never was. She didn't push George away. She was not repulsed by him, by what he was, or could be. She didn't shy from the thoughts that swamped his mind. She moved to George's side of the table and held him.

'I'm tired Francis. I'm trying to be brave...but I can't. I'm scared.'

Francis kissed his head and stroked his hair. She made simple, soothing noises. After a time, he pushed himself into her and she held him tighter and he let her.

'No one needs you to be brave, George. It's okay, you know? You're nine. You're not supposed to be doing this alone. And you're not. I'm here.'

She kissed his hair over and over while he cried.

'You're the only one who forgot you're just a boy, honey.'

He was glad that Francis remembered. Then, he remembered something.

A winding dirt road...a road leading off. Narrow, strewn with weeds and debris and blown over with dirt and dust...but a road.

Francis, he said. My mother. She's alive.

*

The stairway to the twenty-third floor was enclosed, protected from the weather that battered the old concrete with enough power for the structure to sway. Inside, away from the elements, ice still coated the walls and risers. Each step was lethal, and Wayland Redman bled. His heart struggled, weakened by age and pain. But he kept on, driven by fear, and by anger, and by hate.

At the seventh floor he slipped and hit his ravaged right hand hard. He overreacted and fell forward, hands out. His hands were too weak to stop his fall. He opened a gash on his chin and his remaining two fingers broke.

Between the twentieth and twenty-first floors he let go of loose, watery shit inside his trousers. He didn't mind, then. At least something was warm, if only for a short time.

When he reached the top floor, then the last corridor, then the last room, he thought he would die. Exhausted, old, every single thing aching and hurting and pounding.

Seventy-five, he thought. Fucking did it.

He opened the door, unlocked.

Silent, for perhaps two, three minutes. He couldn't find any words.

'Fuck.'

Rows of computer readouts. Vital signs. Thousands of them, on monitors all around a stark room of steel and glass.

Images on monitors. Names along with each. Within a minute, Wayland understood just what the tower block was. Perhaps, he thought, even all three.

One vast computer. O'Dell's boss was O'Dell, and he had invented him from a thousand tortured human parts.

*

O'Dell seized, remembering the children. When his vision returned, awareness of his endeavours faded once again, as it always did.

For O'Dell, the transition was seamless. He lost time, and it was because someone had been inside. In his thoughts and memories. Someone with talents like his. Power like his.

Who? There were none left, were there?

Then he remembered.

'The woman? Her?'

The woman at The Mill. He'd given her his gun, turned his back on her.

What the fuck was I thinking?

Jesus, he thought. That was before everything...the field trial...

Memory was an elusive adversary, for O'Dell. His white whale, hunted time and again. This time he snatched it before it could sink back to the depths.

'She took a kid.'

How the fuck did I forget something like that? Why in the name of fuck would I let them go?

She took one of the dead boys...but she hadn't been like the kids. The woman had been nothing special. But the kid.

'A fucking kid did this? Got in my head?'

Suddenly, other memories surfaced...memories that the sneaky fucker had taken from him.

His watch trembled against his wrist again. The shrill reminder brought O'Dell back from the brink of rage. He breathed deeply.

He was dangerously angry...the kind of angry he got when people died. But there was hardly anyone around to kill, was there?

He could shoot himself in the head. But he'd tried that, once, long ago, hadn't he?

While he couldn't kill anyone with his hands...he could with another's. He looked at his watch again, and calmed himself until he was cold and his sweat cooled and his breathing steady, solid.

All fine and good, he told himself. Back in the game. For some reason he couldn't imagine, he saw the game he played.

It was solitaire.

Annoyed, again, O'Dell shrugged off the image. He checked his watch a final time and stared at the phone until it rang, that tight-jawed grin hardwired into his brain by a bullet and his immense rage.

*

The phone shuddered on the counter beside the kettle. O'Dell picked his coffee mug up, empty, and hurled it at the wall. Shards still moved as he straightened his shirt and jacket, then answered, calm, courteous, to the man who was about to die.

'Sir,' said O'Dell.

I should be happy. But I'm not.

Any minute now...now...come on...now...

'O'Dell. Excellent work. I understand there is a slight discrepancy, however, in the number of remaining test subjects...the telepaths? Missing one, are you not, Mr. O'Dell?'

How? He'd only just worked it out. How the fuck did he know?

Come on...come on, Redman. Now!

'Sir. Soon sorted. I'm not concerned.'

'I am concerned, though, O'Dell. I am. And if I'm concerned, so are you.'

'Of course, Sir. Of course...'

Wayland, you cunt.

O'Dell's voice remained smooth, but beneath his jacket his fist twisted around the handle of his automatic.

'Perhaps the time has come to take a greater hand in affairs.'

'That won't be necessary. I have it in hand. I assure you...I...'

'Are you interrupting, Mr. O'Dell? Fucking with my flow?'

'I wouldn't dream to...Sir.'

'Remember who you are. You are who you are because of us.'

O'Dell kept his mind still and calm. Yet, inside, in the deeper parts of his mind, Wayland Redman's face leered. Wayland...

US. That word grated on his nerves, but he couldn't grasp the reason. All he could think and feel was rage, at Wayland Redman.

Wayland. I promised you an eternity of pain if you fucked me.

He'd deliver. Sure he would.

'Sir,' he said on automatic to something he hadn't heard.

Then...silence. The line was quiet.

US.

A second of silence on both ends, as O'Dell listened for breathing, or Wayland's tortured breathing...but...nothing.

O'Dell kept the phone against his ear. Redman had to speak first. There could be no mistakes.

'O'Dell?' Wayland's voice. O'Dell was, for an instant, happier than he thought he could ever be because of a lunatic like Wayland Redman. But only for an instant. That discrepancy finally sank through to him. US. The boss said, 'US'.

But he hadn't...had he?

Was he mistaken?

'Wayland. Good man. I was beginning to think...'

'Beginning to think, were you? First time, is it?'

'What? Redman...you know what I can...'

'Yes, yes. I know all right. But you won't. You're done, you fucking nutjob,' Wayland's laugh drove spikes into O'Dell's brain. 'You double-crossed yourself, you crazy bastard.'

Wayland's words drifted away. A flash of memory, and with it O'Dell's usual, crushing, anger. He was, for a second or two, back there...then. He remembered the look of the hole that ran down to the bullet that meant salvation. He remembered the steel against his forehead, his finger, trembling on the trigger.

I wanted it.

His face had been wet before he pulled the trigger. Wet before the blood came...before memory died.

Why now? Why now?

I should be here, in the present. Find Wayland. Cage him, make him immortal, cut the limbs from him and pull his fucking eyes fucking...

'Wayland...nowhere is far enough. I'm going to hurt you so badly your mind will fucking break. I will...'

Spittle flew from O'Dell's mouth. He ranted and raved and roared, his eyes red and his voice breaking, sore in his chest and throat from the effort and his rage. His heart pounded, hard and heavy, sweat ran down his scarred forehead and into his eyes and still he swore hatred into the phone.

Wayland said nothing until O'Dell slowed for a beat.

'You done, cuntface?'

'Cunt...face?' O'Dell's mouth dropped.

He couldn't have. Redman? Calling me...?

'Yeah. You, O'Dell. You know I'm looking at you right now? And you know what? Your face. Looks just like a cunt. You know that?'

O'Dell felt stupid, slow. Confused. He was the one who ran the show.

'No longer,' said the Boss. 'We run this show. US.'

But those words were beneath Wayland's horrible, cheerful insult...they both arrived at once, overlapping, impossible.

One voice through the telephone.

One in his head.

'No, dickhead. You think I'm there, watching you on a monitor, a camera, something? No. I'm looking at your jabbering face. I'm looking at you on a screen, sure. A bank of monitors, O'Dell, with your ugly-cunt-mug plastered across all of them and thousands of those dead kids you had me take...and people before me, too, eh? How long? What is this? Like some kind of computer? The kids like a hard drive, or a CPU...you know what? I don't fucking care because it's the funniest thing I've ever seen and a good joke's worth dying for. Best. Joke. Ever. I don't need a gun to kill your boss, O'Dell. I just need to switch them off.'

'What the fuck are you...what...?'

'Your boss is you, O'Dell. You made it. The tower, the kids? They all serve you. Do they tell you want you want to hear, O'Dell? Oh, daddy, you're so fucking smart. Oh, daddy, we want to be just like you. Cut out our brains, just like yours. That scar's so cool.'

'Wayland...'

O'Dell staggered against the counter, put his palm down to steady himself. A shard of the broken mug sliced his hand, but he didn't feel it.

'You always were a crazy bastard...this is...fuck, man...you're such a lunatic. You  killed the world on your own. You told yourself what to do, didn't you? Built this computer out of those weird kids to help you out and believed in your own madness...I'm nuts, O'Dell. I don't think there's even a word for what you are. You're the man who killed the world. Who would have believed it?'

'You're lying. You're lying.'

'Really? Then fuck you about that, too. Well done, O'Dell. Give yourself a hand. Don't believe me? Here. Ask yourself.'

There was the voice again. Tinny, like it was coming through a phone...but...

'O'Dell...we've been talking and you haven't been listening, have you?'

'Sir...Sir...are you...?'

'Spit it out, man. I never took you for an idiot. Something to say, say it.'

'Sir...' O'Dell's head reeled. He didn't want to talk anymore. He wanted to lay down, somewhere quiet, somewhere dark. Let the flashing lights in his head become still again. The fire he saw all the time, the flare of gun powder, the great fires that burned in the cities of the world, the flames flicking high from the forest...

'Sir, are you me?' This last, he whispered. Hating himself, his weakness, his trembling legs.

'O'Dell, are you losing the plot? Of course we're you. We created each other. Don't you remember?'

'Wayland!' he shouted, his voice quavering, sudden panic. 'Wayland.'

'What?' said the man, a smile in his bastard voice.

'Shut it down. Shut it down...kill it...pull the switch...please...'

'Fuck you, O'Dell. Fuck your computer, fuck your kids and your great big mad brain. And you know what? Find me, bring me back, torture me. Because I'd like that. An eternity spent laughing in your face sounds just fine to me.'

'Wayland!'

But no matter how long O'Dell shouted into the phone, Wayland would still be gone. O'Dell shouted until his voice ceased to work. Then he remembered what he did to the man named Fenchurch. And he remembered how he built the most powerful computer in history over the course of more than fifty years across three tower blocks made from children with powers just like his.

*

XVIII.

Various Means of Escape

Once, Eleanor Farnham was a dead woman in a tomb, waiting to rot. A cadaver that moved, but really, it was little more than electricity and idiot impulse. Now she was alive, she had become a woman buried in error, clawing at the lid of her coffin. She survived on nothing but water. The hole in her skull, the flesh they sliced from her for their microscopes and laboratories began to mend, and as she healed some semblance of intellect returned. Her coordination, perhaps, taking longer, but still far faster than a child might become accustomed to the use of its body. She wasn't learning but remembering.

A flash of somewhere sparsely lit, the place where she slept when she had been young with a small light and paper she held and read late (Hardy...Boys? 'Small' and 'Light' comparisons, images, feelings, rather than words). A sense of herself, who she was and who she became stemmed from this. The concept of her, as a person, as an entity.

She scraped the metal implant from her skull on the window all the time these things drifted into her thoughts, and while they floated away.

Brief images of people. Parents. More dimly there were grandparents, teachers, friends, bullies, the lollipop lady who helped children cross the school when she'd been shorter. Herself, smiling.

She recalled herself from the past, from the bottom up, childhood and on.

A gouge grew in the window. Shallow, yes, but a mark.

Perhaps days later, perhaps just hours, the mark became deeper still. A valley, the edges etched and dirty, like a rough cut diamond.

Later, she recalled a time surrounded by yellow metals, white metals. Stones that glinted like glass. Her, smiling, a man beside her. A ring on her hand.

Her hands were bare and dirty. There was nothing upon her finger but blood and dirt. Her long nails, grimy and dull, that had snapped and torn over and over again. She dredged back that memory of her hands as they'd been in the past. It was a nice memory (warm, comfort, fullness...). The metals and stones gleamed, so had her nails. Her hands had been clean.

Eleanor stopped scratching at the window and dropped the implant to the floor. She walked on steady legs that at last felt they belonged to her to the tap she only drank from.

For the first time since rising from her thin grave in a lost and forgotten field while metal still smouldered in (rain...water like this but from up high...) she no longer remembered, Eleanor understood something like pleasure. The feel of that crisp, cold, filtered water over her sore hands. Dirt, sweat, blood, all of it washed away from her hands. She rubbed at one hand with the other, and saw that this sped the feeling. She was aware of the coolness against her skin and the relief from the aches in her flesh. Even the cuts she hadn't realised were sore felt...

Better.

Getting well.

I am...healing.

She cupped her hands. Then, not knowing why, she filled her hands and splashed the water against her face, on her hair, and she gasped at the cold. Soon after, she stood naked and dripping, most of the soil washed from her body. Some clung, couldn't be reached or loosened with cool water alone. But...

'Nice.'

She jumped at the sound of her voice, silent since those early days when she had tried to please the people who cut her...tried to make them happy so that they would stop.

But they hadn't.

Her stomach growled at her, and she knew it was hunger. While she healed well, she was weaker. Her efforts on the window were becoming less effective, each scratch hurting the glass less.

Healing took fuel. Food was fuel. Water was life but food made her move. And soon, she wouldn't move. She would die like before. But not come back, because no one would bring her food. There was no one.

She remembered O'Dell, but did not know where the other people went - the ones who were sorry and carried knives and secateurs (clippers...calipers...scissors?). She hadn't seen them leave, and she could hear nothing outside her home unless the bad people let her.

But after no sound from outside for so long, when a sudden and awful, unbelievably loud noise broke through to her home, she threw herself to the floor and covered her ears. It wailed, and over it there was a voice so huge she could not help but feel small. The voice thundered through Eleanor's head and tears sprung from her eyes. Her hands did nothing to shut it out. Her eyes flicked, her movements fast and sharp. Something changed. The wailing voice and the piercing noise grew louder.

She didn't hear the click of the door as it unlocked, but she'd been in the same room for more than two months. She knew it better than she knew herself and she felt the change in the air. The noise was louder, now.

Eleanor turned around and around, until she saw it - that tiny slice in her home that hadn't been there before. A split between her world and the worlds where people were sorry.

A doorway to someplace else.

Her curiosity proved more powerful than fear. Scuttling across the floor, flinching at each gargantuan and misunderstood word, she reached the door and pulled rather than pushed. Some innate understanding of the mechanics of small things, or just luck - but perhaps, sometimes, powerful forces push luck where it needs to go.

The door came toward her.

She frowned, tried to think.

A word danced before her, an elusive memory.

Free?

On her hands and knees and slowly, slowly, Eleanor looked out into a new world, one clean and white and full of sound.

Bright. Huge. New.

Wonderful.

Perhaps wonderful meant the same as free. She crawled carefully over some of the Sorry People to find out. They looked like her, now. Smelled worse, though, and they weren't getting up, and she wasn't sorry about that.

*

The human body is remarkable. Sometimes it heals. Sometimes it cannot, but still strives for life, long after it should be dead.

After the tower block, after O'Dell, Wayland should have been dead. But he made the stairs, then, the car. He drove without a thought to where he was heading. South, he thought. He drove through the destruction and the endless, freezing rain, or sludge, and sometimes snow. England no longer made sense to him. He knew England well. He'd travelled long before O'Dell and his jobs. Many years after, too.

But he could have been anywhere at all. For a short while, he kept the phone beside him in the hope that O'Dell would call him. He wanted to laugh again. It felt good. But O'Dell didn't call, and the further he drove, the less brave Wayland became.

The pain was a constant thing, now, a throbbing that settled into his hips and spine, the kind of pain so overwhelming it swallowed thought, wave after wave. The further he drove, the less he remembered. He hadn't pissed in two days. He didn't want to. Such a thing, he thought, might kill him, though he was wrong.

The fact that he hadn't, and wouldn't piss - that was killing him. Infection was already rife, and he was warm. His insides were failing, and delirium rode a nightmare steed somewhere below the horizon.

His bladder leaked, but between his wound and his cancer, he thought it was just blood. Either way, the little that seeped did nothing to empty him.

The petrol gauge dipped but he saw a break in the landscape ahead and took the first road he could find toward that nothingness. It looked like a good place to die.

He ended up at the northern banks of the Thames River. He didn't know it was a river. It might have been the sea. Visibility was down to maybe a hundred yards, and the first real snowstorm since the end was settling in. Snow that blinds and steals away the land, leaving behind only white and cold.

He nearly drove into the water before he found a small jetty that stood behind a wooden house. Probably someone's summer house, or maybe it was a boathouse. The boat at the end of the jetty wouldn't need a house. A small boat, an outboard motor. Looked like there might be a cabin, beneath the deck. Somewhere to lay his head and wait to die.

He stumbled from the car and found the snow he pushed against soothed his fever. He boarded the boat and when he did, he pulled the lanyard to the motor. He did so with no real goal in mind. The thing started. He jumped, startled, swayed and fell against the side of the boat. That pain was fresh and sent him down into insensibility, but just for a short time.

Woozy, but within the relief of what was now delirium, Wayland Redman loosed the ropes that held the boat against the jetty and headed off, out into the water. Maybe he'd hit France, maybe just drift and starve. Either way, he'd die. But not by O'Dell's hand.

The only thing Wayland was sure of right then was that when he died, he wouldn't be coming back.

His eyes couldn't focus, but he found the phone in his coat pocket. He took it out and threw it into the poisoned water, then turned the little boat out to sea. The sea and Wayland both were mad and ragged, but Wayland's madness was good humoured. He howled out his laughter as the heavy snow and the spume plastered and froze his lank hair to his head.

*

Klaxons, the woman's droning and repetitive voice - both were heavy enough in the tight corridors and hallways of the underground shelter to make O'Dell's ears pound, close to rupturing. He paid the discomfort no attention as he headed for the exit. He dropped the fob to the command console on the floor.

He wouldn't be coming back here. Why would he? Everyone was dead.

They're all dead, he thought. Or, at least, someone thought for him. Forces that made luck, maybe, or pulled when others pushed.

'All personnel are to evacuate immediately. Leave personal belongings behind. Proceed to the nearest elevator. '

'Facility shut down in five minutes.'

'All personnel...'

The noise meant nothing to O'Dell. The voice in his mind drowned out the announcement.

It's all falling apart. All falling down.

On automatic, O'Dell opened the elevator doors and stepped inside. He chose the button for the car park two floors below ground, but several floors above his head.

You think you let the boy go? You think you found the boy? It wasn't you who found him. It was US. You know this is true. You know...

The voice in his head spoke and O'Dell didn't want to listen. It was not his friend. He hated it, even though they'd only just met. He had no choice but to listen, though, because it was in his head and US were louder than any alarm.

You don't even remember US, do you? You're insane. You don't remember yourself.

'Fuck off,' O'Dell thought, though he didn't realise he spoke out loud.

The elevator's motors hummed along the cables that pulled it up toward the surface. His knees buckled as another flashback hit, more powerful that those that came before.

'Fenchurch. Give me your gun.'

Fenchurch, blank, passing a gun from a briefcase to O'Dell. O'Dell pulling the trigger. Fenchurch falling.

He came back to himself, rocking and using the wall of the elevator to keep himself from falling.

When you die, we'll be there. We'll watch you...like watched us.

'Fuck you!' he shouted. 'Fuck you! I don't know you.'

We are not you. We are US.

You tried to put yourself aside. You never could. We are not you. You are not US.

WE ARE US.

The voice towered, immense, deafening. His head pounded and his nose bled. Then, mercifully it, them, US, stepped back.

The door to the elevator opened, and O'Dell walked on loose, numb legs, to one of the many cars. He clicked a key card from his pocket and a 4X4's indicators flashed once. He opened the door, pulled himself inside. He tried to start the ignition, but when he did, his shaking hands betrayed him and flipped the key into the foot well.

'Calm down. Calm. The. Fuck. Down.'

He forced himself to sit still, eyes closed, until his pounding heart slowed, until his hands settled. Only then did he reached down, find the key, and start the engine.

For the first time in over half a century, O'Dell did not know what the future held. Everything behind him was black, everything ahead dark, too. But the past was becoming brighter, and that, more than any other horror imaginable, terrified the Kurt O'Dell. He saw no fire. He'd seen the future, and the fire had always been the last of it. What came after was a mystery like everyone else faced each day they woke.

*

Memory crippled O'Dell, but it bolstered Eleanor. The past spurred her on.

That voice pounded down on her, trying to break her, but her legs moved faster now and she enjoyed the feeling. It felt as though they were doing precisely what they were made for. As was she. Some new remembrance would flood her, some new delight in her mind at each step she took, and soon even the roar of klaxons and the ever-present words the woman (shouted?) didn't touch Eleanor, despite the volume.

She came to a steel door. It was sliced cleanly down the middle. She could go no further. The words changed, the siren-sound, too.

'One minute. Final warning. Exits will close in fifty-five seconds. Final warning. Exits will close in fifty-seconds. Final warning...'

The words meant little, but something about the sound, the change, the way it repeated and then changed, repeated then changed again. Some urgency in the tone and the voice both.

The woman with the huge voice was trying to tell her something. She should understand. Frustrated with herself, Eleanor scratched at her face hard enough to draw blood.

No. No.

Whether she told herself no, or the voice, she wasn't sure.

There was nowhere to go...and then, there was.

See red on the wall instead, Mother. Red on the wall.

She had seen red on walls, all the way. Red in strange arcs, rainbows made only of red, and red that seemed darker and larger, hard pools on the floor.

She didn't want to see that red.

Brighter than blood.

A round, red spot was there. She slapped at it and those steel doors split, and there was a room behind them. She stepped inside. Buttons, unlit, in a line that went up to down, down to up. Green, though, not red like outside. She didn't need to know what to do. The doors closed, automatic. She panicked, thumping the hard, cold metal, but nothing gave and then she/US thought: Top. The one at the top. Top, like your head. Up.

She pressed the uppermost button and screamed when the room moved.

There was nothing to hold, no escape. Her palms splayed against the metal and her back pressed against the steel. Her skin puckered from the cold.

The large voice was quieter inside the elevator. The words remained a mystery, but the numbers...

Cleansing in nine...eight...seven...

The sensation of movement ceased and Eleanor leapt out as the doors opened.

...two...

The elevator door slid closed behind her. She didn't hear the final word, but she knew what it was, and that she was the same, too.

'One,' she said.

*

XIX.

The Memory of Warmth

Above, cold was all there was. Eleanor was at first fascinated by it and relished the feel of her skin tightening and grinned at her breath puffing out like smoke into the air.

Soon after, the cold ceased to be intriguing. It began to hurt. First, at her fingers and toes and nose, then, as she started to shiver, it hurt her nipples, her lips, the place where she...

Fucked.

The word sprang to mind, and like other words she grasped, she knew it had more than one use.

'I am fucked,' she tried to say out loud, but her teeth chattered and her jaw would not work, frozen or freezing like the rest of her.

Warmth. I need to be warm...warmer...

The elevator had opened out into this room, and she knew it would not take her back to the warmth. Even if it would, she would not go. She wanted, needed, to move on. To learn more. But the cold slowed her. Her limbs jittered and thoughts danced away.

Move. Move. Move.

She walked again, her nostrils and lungs hurting from the cold air, far colder than her body. It stung, and she let it. That pain, perhaps, would keep her moving.

A door at the far end of the large room stood half-open, so she followed her instinct; to get away, to be free. The walls of the room were very far away. After her cell, the warehouse that hid O'Dell's bunker seemed a world itself.

In room beyond - an office, once -  she found a man. His blood, old, had frozen into crystals. His clothing and his skin seemed to have hardened in the cold. Ice, or frost, whitened the dead man's hair. The cuts which had killed him didn't seem awful, but more like lines on a sheet of paper, like she remembered drawing, long ago. A child, with a red felt tipped pen, drawing in a colouring book.

She stepped over him as her legs began to seize up. She stopped, turned, and looked at the body again.

With hands that were claws, she tore at the hard, frozen clothing on the man. Buttons on his shirt and jacket were impossible, so she yanked them loose. As she moved, her body warmed a little and that lent her the strength to break the clothes free of the floor below the dead man. Some of the material tore free, blood crusted harder than concrete. One of his arms snapped, some place inside, and made stripping him easier. She pulled his clothes on, the ice in the clothing colder than the air against her skin. She managed to free his shoes, his trousers, his belt. She pulled the trousers high as she could, just below her wasted breasts, over the top of her jacket and shirt. The belt defeated her. Taking it off had seemed simple. Using it again, impossible. The man's shoes were huge on her feet, but better than the feel of ice on her toes. She didn't even consider the laces, but found, by chance, two giant pockets in the side of the trousers.

'Pockets,' she said, her teeth still chattering. The material moved again, not so hard, but feeling cold and damp. She put her hands in the trouser pockets and used them to hold her new clothes on her thin body. Then she followed the corridor to find more bodies...more things.

A row of coats on hooks over on a far wall were better. She put those on instead of the man's clothes. They helped, later, as her hands, feet, lips and nose turned blue. She pulled the coats free (cold, but not damp), one by one, and pulled them over her shoulders, thrust her arms inside and wore as many as she could. They were warmer, not frozen or frosted hard. These had pockets, too. In the third coat she pulled on, she found cigarettes and a lighter. She looked at each in turn, and even tried to eat a cigarette, which she spat out immediately. Then she turned the lighter in her hands, round and round, fascinated. She ran her thumb along the wheel and it ground against the flint beneath. A tiny spark flew and she laughed, delighted. She did it again and a flame flickered weakly. She stared and held her finger over it, unfeeling as her fingers were nearly frostbitten.

Three or four seconds later she yelped and snatched her finger free of the lighter, but the flame heated the metal against her other thumb, too. She dropped the lighter.

Then, realising what she held, Eleanor picked it up again.

*

Outside, wet snow stung her face until she found her hood and pulled it over her head, then hunched and strode into the growing storm. This snow was new to her, but new to England, too. Cold that froze roads and halted traffic she remembered, but not this - the kind of storm that killed people from frostbite, from hypothermia.

But there were no people.

Eleanor didn't think such things strange. She'd been alone a long time.

Moving was enough for her, and moving kept her from dying right there. She might heal fast, but nothing could heal if it was frozen in the ground. Movement meant living.

She seemed to be in an area with nothing but tall metal buildings, or squat ones, but nothing that reminded her of warmth or home or comfort.

Fighting to keep moving, weak from starvation and the air itself which chilled her chest from within, she headed from building to building. In one, she found a frozen sandwich. Food. It was hard and she could not eat it, but later, perhaps, she might.

Warmth, she thought. Warmth was all that mattered. She found a small bottle of liquid that was the colour of piss, but she was thirsty, and it was one of the few things she found that wasn't frozen. She tipped a little into her mouth and felt it burn her tongue and then, as a little slipped into her throat, a burning warmth that sank all the way to her insides.

At first she gasped, then smiled, and drank a little more.

'Warmth,' she said.

In the same place, she found some huge coveralls and a pair of heavy black boots that were better than the shoes she wore. In the next building, she killed a man.

*

As she would for the next five weeks, or thereabouts, Eleanor worked her way through the industrial estate in roughly a straight line, for no other reason than to get somewhere.

The first time she killed a man, it proved to be quick and painless. For her.

Violence after that became more sporadic, and she got better at avoiding it, whenever she could, because she soon learned how fragile people were...herself included.

She turned to leave that next building, nothing found but a row of tools, more boots that were no improvement over what she wore, no clothes better than the ones on her back that were finally starting to warm her. There, in the darker shadows thrown by the dim daylight, was a shape. She shouted, startled. Somewhere deep inside she recognised it as human. It shifted, and she was afraid because it had been so long.

'Hello?' she said, finally finding the right, lost word.

The shape, large and bulky because of the clothes it wore, stepped forward and she saw that it was a man. He was disfigured, some kind grey, thick growth on the right side of his face, his eye on that side useless and lost inside the mass. His teeth, she saw, were darker than they should be, crusted with whatever the man ate.

Instinctively, some animal part of her cautious, she stepped back. He came forward, and she held her hands up, but he began to run. She understood nothing of the situation, but her core...her core tensed. When he pushed her roughly to the ground, she held him back with all her strength, but her strength wasn't enough. He proved stronger. She understood his intent as the stinking man breathed heavily in her face, his rancid breath and spittle on her face. His hands, gloves, tore at her clothes, pulled at her over-large trousers. She kicked and flailed, but each time his strength and weight pushed her down.

For mere moments, she fell still.

She remembered pain. She remembered being a captive, and men coming to her. She remembered offering them fuck if they would just not cut her, just not hurt her. No more.

She remembered those early words she uttered, hopeful, each time they came to her with knives and drugs to make her sleep and give in.

Wanna fuck.

'Wanna fuck?' she said. The man paused, grinned and nodded.

In that pause, she brought her hands up and thrust her ragged thumbnails into his eyes. Both eyes at once, as deep as she could, until his reflexes pulled him clear of her rage. She wasted no time. She was weak, but he was blind. She pulled the first thing she could find into her grip. It was almost too heavy for her to lift, but her anger and fear helped. The weight of the sledgehammer did the rest as it fell.

She did not feel bad, because she didn't know how to. All she knew what that she wanted to live, and that she would not be hurt again.

Afterward, she was more careful, and before she left the building, she took the man's gloves and a smaller hammer with some kind of claw at the end along with her as she walked, in as straight a line as she could manage - going somewhere.

*

Wayland Redman drifted in his small boat, mostly covered and sheltered from endless snow by a tarpaulin he found on the first day of his jaunt across the sea, to freedom, to France. He smelled something wrong, something repulsive, as his boat bobbed hard in the rough estuary that should lead out to the impossibly wild North Sea, the channel between this island and the great expanse of Europe. The smell brought back memories of fish stalls on London markets in the summer. A hint of food poisoning, sometime later in the day, from crabmeat more green than white, or prawns rancid, somewhere inside.

The smell was him, and he was well over into delirium even by the end of his first day on the boat. Night fell, his flesh burned with fever, but he didn't know. He drifted like the boat, in and out of consciousness. Once, bleary eyed, he imagined he saw a port, perhaps Calais, and whooped at the sight of France. But it was merely the docklands around Tilbury, and further up river than he had started. His boat roamed on the high, heavy water, going nowhere.

The temperature was a long way below freezing, colder during the night. He woke in the morning, burning despite his blackened, frozen fingers. He grinned and snapped one off, threw it into the water to tempt the crabs.

Crabbing off the pier. Nothing finer.

Something heavy bunted up against Wayland's boat, and the noise and sudden leap against the thick water brought Wayland to life, for a moment.

Caught a big one! Granddad, look!

Boots thudded against the wooden hull, though, and even in delirium, crabs aren't supposed to wear boots. The footfalls stopped, close to his head. He looked up, saw a man shape, his head haloed by grey skies.

'I think I need help,' said Wayland, his voice no more than a croak, nearly lost in the howl of the rain and the screaming wind that frozen his face. Wayland's cheeks, too, had turned black now.

'Don't worry, buddy,' said the man. 'We'll help you. Take it easy.'

'Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.'

He felt strong hands beneath his armpits, pulling him up.

'Throw him back, man. He's fucking rotten. Look at him. He's full of poison.'

'Fuck you. I'm starving. Got to be something worth eating on him.'

'You're on your own, Matt. On your fucking own. I'll starve.'

'Then fucking starve. I'm eating.'

The words made no sense, and Wayland's eyelids were heavy.

'Thank you,' he said. He smiled, and saw a woman's face. Roo the Kangaroo, he thought. Brought me porridge. I liked her.

*

Later, in the kitchen below decks on a fishing trawler that had found nothing worth leaving the sea when it came home, a man named Matt laid a knife against Wayland's flank and started to slice off thin steaks, which he threw, green-faced, into a hot skillet.

'Tickles,' said Wayland.

'Jesus fucking Christ, man. That reeks. Fuck...don't eat that. You'll die like him. Look at him.'

The man's friend, named Don Wood, gagged at the smell of Wayland's rotten flesh, the smell of the pus that soaked his trouser.

Matt nodded. The stench was sickening.

'Fuck it. You're right. I'd rather die hungry.'

'Better, Matt. Got to be better than...' the man Don, who'd once had a wife and two children and a vicious little terrier waiting for him after each trip, waved his hand at Wayland's ruined body. 'Die right, Matt. Don't die some kind of cunt.'

Matt's head dropped. 'I'm just so fucking hungry,' he said.

'Me, too,' said Wayland.

Matt laid the knife against Wayland's throat, and the old man grunted as Matt cried and slipped the knife through his throat. Then, he gurgled, still clinging to life. Wayland's blood stank of rot, just like the rest of him.

The men watched. The man on the work surface sounded like he was trying to say something.

Whatever it was, Matt and Don watched the man die, grateful at the last when that awful burbling monologue ended.

Don moved to hold his friend, but Matt held up a hand not holding the knife, palm out.

'Don't, mate. Don't.' said Matt. Don's friend for near enough eight years, he had such a terrible, hollow look in his eyes.

'Matt...'

Matt shook his head, then plunged the knife he'd used on Wayland through his own scrawny neck.

'Ah, fuck, Matt,' said Don.

He sat right where he was on the kitchen floor and cried until he had nothing but snot left in the tank. He sniffed and snivelled for a while longer, then he dragged the bodies topside, one at a time, where he heaved them over the side to sink deep beneath the grey waves.

Grey, like everything left.

Don staggered on slow, tired legs back below. He touched a picture on the wall, then took a quarter bottle of whiskey from the locker beneath his bunk. He left his thick yellow slicker and his undercoat behind. Then, he drank the last of the whisky on the deck in the freezing storm and wished he could see his family again.

Even my shit dog, he thought.

He sat until he didn't feel the hunger any longer.

*

Eleanor walked. Snow and ice hung from the wires in the sky above her head. The ground, whether road or field, deep in snow or frozen but barren, was always hard going. The towns she passed were silent, dead things. Often, she didn't know it was a town until she was deep inside the boundaries. She could barely see fifty yards ahead.

She didn't stop. She couldn't.

Along the way she found food, frozen, which she part-thawed in the warmth of her coats. She wore goggles over her eyes, not for glare, for there was none, but to protect them against the temperature. At night, she sought shelter. To walk utterly blind would be idiocy.

After she killed the man in the factory or warehouse, whatever it had been, she was more cautious. She killed others, but only when given no choice at all. And, as she took each new step, words returned. Muffled, beneath a scarf over her face and a balaclava that saved her face from being bitten by the cold, she mouthed the words, tried out the shape of the names of things.

'Cold. Snow. Telegraph Pole. Car, burned. Car, buried. Road. Body. Leg, no body. Alone. One. Walk. Tired.'

Inside, sheltered for the night, she would roam dead people's houses, nothing to listen to but the endless wind and the sound of her own voice.

'Stairs,' she would say, just to be haunted by something other than the ghosts in the wind. 'Carpet. Cooker. Window. Wood. Cabinet. Wooden cabinet. Drawers...cupboards...glass and glasses and tap and sink and...'

In her sleep, in tents made of ice-crusted bed sheets and quilts, never lighting a light lest someone kill her while she slept, to eat or steal, she continued learning all through the night. Softly, in her sleep, she would speak words she remembered, or words US taught her, or sometimes just repeat remembered conversations that drifted through her dreams. Many nights she screamed and kicked her way back to waking. But as time moved on, Eleanor screamed less. She got better at sleeping, and better at surviving, too.

January the first was the coldest day she'd ever known, and it made her risk fire. She found firelighters, stinking of a fuel that promised heat, and a wood-burner, a basket of wood. She had three lighters hidden in the depths of her coats now. It only took one lighter, but all of the firelighters to get the flames burning. It was glorious. She stared at the fire the whole night, ate a tin heated on the metal top of the burner, the tin and paper label blackening while the food inside thawed, warmed, then bubbled.

Something like minced beef, in gravy, and the single greatest thing she had ever eaten her whole life. She cried.

She fell asleep in front of the fire. When she woke, it was dark. She touched the metal, ticking quickly as it cooled. She took the memory of that fading warmth on the road with her.

*

Maybe it was the memory of warmth that did it.

When the roads were no more, entirely lost beneath ice and snow, she headed straight on, unerringly toward the edge of the island. She had no destination in mind, but to walk, to achieve something, to see an end to her pointless task. But she did not give in, nor stop and sit in the snow and freeze like so many others. Occasionally she passed an iced form, laying or sometimes simply sitting. They must have been tired, she thought, those people who had died and could not even find the energy to lay still in the comforting blanket of snow.

Whenever she found herself thinking how nice it would be to rest under the white sheets, to stretch her aching legs and wriggle her toes under crisp cotton, she didn't give in. She walked harder, faster, until she could find shelter and rest and not die.

Not dying, though, was not her goal. It was too close, too immediate. To move, she needed something further away to aim for, and that was the coast. She knew that when she got there, she would go no further, but that didn't matter. What mattered was reaching the end, looking ahead, rather than down at her feet. So doing, when the roads became hidden, she created her own road, one that she could see in her mind. It was not white, like snow, or black like a road that cars might travel. Her road wasn't lit by cats' eyes, or artificially glowing lamps set high on concrete poles. Her road was a summer thing, of the countryside. A dirt road, the weeds at the side high and running along the middle. A single lane track, hard from the sun she imagined shining down. The sun was warm, the air still and hot and insects and birds made the song she walked through. Butterflies flew, sometimes, silent. Partridge clucked, startled, and bounced across the road, or pheasant that ran back and forth, idiotic but wonderful there in her memory and her imagination.

Sometimes the real road wavered, over streams, river, around burned, stinking cities and down meandering streets through old towns. Her path was always there, in her head, though, and for her it was far more real than the battered, frozen landscape all around.

She did not know it was January when her foot hit sluggish water that carried on and on, far into the murk that hid the distance (sometimes, when a blizzard hit, she could see nothing at all). She frowned, wondering for an instant if this was a river, or some lake. But it shifted, back, forth. Like waves.

She squatted, pulling the scarf and balaclava free for long enough that the tang of briny, salted water hit her freezing nostrils. She put them back on, and closed her eyes.

But the path didn't go. The things she saw in her mind merely grew brighter.

So easy. So easy to step out into the sea and walk until she felt nothing. Until she ended, like everyone else on the planet, perhaps.

Maybe, though, it was the memory of warmth that made that path so solid and real. She shrugged, the gesture lost beneath the many coats that kept her living.

And she was, wasn't she? She was alive. Still. Not just a dead thing come back to life any longer, a soulless shell, wandering blindly. She was...

Mortal.

Human.

At that thought, the road seemed to shift from her imagination and become real enough that she could feel it beneath her feet. Then, in that moment, a look of wonder flitted within her swathed face, a brightening in her eyes that she thought was gone forever. Up ahead, on the path in her mind, there was a young boy. Distant, still, but he held up a hand and she imagined squinting against the glare of the sun. Was he waving?

She thought he was. She thought, too, that maybe she recognised the boy.

'George?' she asked, and when she said his name, Eleanor Farnham remembered her son, and why US called her Mother.

*

XX.

The Last Flight

Men and women aren't creatures divided into the dark, or the light. Each has a monster inside them, each has a saint.

When those that remained on the rig in the North Sea began to work on getting the helicopter running, it could have gone either way. They could have bickered, fought, plotted to kill George, throw Edgar into the sea, perhaps keep Francis to themselves as some kind of toy, something to take the sting from the cold for a while until they all died anyway. They could have easily overpowered John Wake when the decision to fly was made. They could have taken the helicopter instead, and forced him to fly them to France, or England. But they did not. Sometimes, when human beings know death approaches and know it is a death they cannot fight, they can be heroes. Men who look into Death's hollow eyes and stand just that bit taller.

Few things polarise human spirit so well as death.

The riggers worked. They grumbled about the work. Two men died in one day, braving a terrifying squall that brought the heaviest snow any of them had seen in their lives. The two men, one a blunt, short man from Lancashire, the other a Brazilian geologist more used to boats that studied soundings on the seabed, were both swept into the sea and no one saw them fall away.

When the helicopter gamely sputtered it last, and landed Francis and her two companions on the rig, John Wake entertained no hope of ever flying again. For a while he cursed himself for abandoning his chopper to the elements, but they were all resourceful people, all made more so by necessity. They built a rudimentary shelter around the chopper, a clever thing that could stand the wind, but needed it, too - when they were ready to fly and finally released the bolts on the shelter, the roof and one metal side would simply be blown free.

It would probably fly further than the chopper itself, but Wake tried not to think about that. Mostly, he succeeded.

On the day they began work, Bors, now with a beard to match his frame, took Wake to one side, to a room with photographs on the wall. He pointed at one photograph in particular.

'The fact you made it here was a miracle. When we knew the end really was happening, the company put on three flights a day. Mostly, people left. On this, though,' he said, meaning the larger helicopter in the picture - far larger than the one which Wake was accustomed to piloting. It looked like a mini-bus. A thing build for purpose, fitted for rough conditions. Wake's chopper was commercial, for sight-seeing, and short hops at that.

He understood well enough.

'We do it because we have no choice, Mr. Bors. We're dead anyway, right? Might as well try for something amazing.'

'This I understand,' said the man. He stood a foot taller, and probably outweighed the pilot by thirty or forty pounds.

'Can you help? Give us a better chance?'

Bors shrugged. 'It's dangerous enough in one of these big choppers. I don't know how often they crash. Maybe ten, in a bad year...I don't know. The men and pilots wear dry suits. These things have two engines...your chopper has just one.'

'Yes.'

'These have floats, too. The land, they roll over in the sea...like...' Bors didn't have the word, but Wake did.

'Capsize?'

'Yes. Then you are upside down. The water freezes you, and you are confused and upside down. You understand this?'

'Dangerous,' said Wake.

'Yes. You would die.'

'Cheers,' said Wake without rancour. Bors smiled.

'But your helicopter will not...capsize. It will simply sink.'

'You're a ray of sunshine.'

'Thank you. But...your chopper, it is like a car in water, I think. Water will enter, if your tiny helicopter snaps. If you do not die in the first second. Men snap, too, when the chopper hits - their backs or legs. Spine goes crack. Far out from shore? No. The cold will kill you and then you'll drown, too. About three times dead,' Bors shrugged. 'Death flying in this weather.'

The pilot shrugged, too. 'We die...we die. It isn't a thing we can just not do. The kid wants to go. You know what? I want to, too. I'm not built to sit still, Bors.'

'Then, listen. If a thousand things happen or don't happen, you must get out...but you will not be able to. The pressure?'

The water would push against the windows and the doors, holding them shut, all the while the chopper would be sinking in freezing water. Even if they still lived, they would not make it to the surface. They would be confused, perhaps upside down, in heavy, frozen seas.

Wake understood.

Bors took something from his coat and passed it to Wake. 'The other men...they do not know I took this. We have small security on a rig, but hard men. I took this before the last men left, before they emptied the gun locker.'

Wake took the small automatic pistol Bors held out to him.

'Loaded?'

'Of course. You shoot out the windows. Small hole, perhaps...the glass is not like glass, you know?'

'Sure...I...'

'You, Francis, Edgar...you will have to kick. There are emergency handles on your helicopter. These you will you have to fight. When the cold hits, even if you can get out...you will need to fight more. You must want to live.'

'Bors, seriously...thanks for the pep talk. Thanks.'

Bors laughed, a booming thing from deep within his broad chest. 'I am helpful.'

'You are. Thank you.'

John Wake thought back on his conversation with Bors. He'd taped the pistol beneath his seat so it was easy enough to get.

Because Bors was right.

They were coming down. It was just a matter of when...out to sea, they would die for sure. On land, they'd probably die, but might stand a chance if he could manage to not break all their spines. Shallow water, they'd hit with a fair bang and then the cold would kill them.

Either way...he put their chances at around 1%.

The day he and Bors spoke the intakes were clogged, oil and engine frozen, seized up. The rotors sported beards of ice.

It's an old man, thought Wake, bundled into three coats and still freezing.

By the end of December, it was past its best, certainly. A man in his middle age, one that felt his years but thought he was still twenty. A man who knew he'd die...but not today.             On the day of the last flight, John rose long before his passengers and went outside, through the storm. In the metal shelter, while the wind raged outside, the pilot lay his hand against the chill metal plates.

'You die today. You know that? You die, but you lived well. Make it there, you hear me? One last time. Carry us home.'

He wasn't sure if he was talking to the chopper or himself. Maybe it was both.

*

Edgar turned in his sleep. The bed was more narrow than his memory, but it was because Sarah was on his side on the bed. She always was. He opened his eyes and turned toward her, to move her knee from the small of his back. But she wouldn't move, even with his hand pushing at her. Her knee was cold, cold enough to wonder if she'd forgotten her hot water bottle. She often did, then snuggled into him. He was always warm. He shoved, this time, smiling. She slept heavy, she always did.

'Jesus, Sarah, shift over, would you?'

She turned then, smiling. He could see her perfectly well, because it seemed they'd slept past sunrise. It didn't feel late, but early still. That bright, early-hour sunshine of summer. Their bedroom was hot, boiling, bright. Her smile was genuine, though, and something stirred in him that seemed to stir slightly less often in his fifties, but he was fifty, wasn't he? Not dead. He could feel that gentle push of a slow hard-on growing against his pyjamas.

'Morning,' he smiled at her, in that way men have with their wives, that special smile when they wake up just right and they've got a little time before work, or maybe when their kids are downstairs or still sound asleep. Their breath would smell, but he'd push his head into her shoulder, and she would do the same with him.

'Edgar. Soon, now. It will be soon.'

His wife kissed him, and Edgar woke with the memory of cold lips on his. Then he remembered the helicopter, and knew what the dream meant.

It was just fine by him. The boy sought him out. He knew why, ever since the first day they met. Not because George needed him, but because Francis did.

For a nine year old boy, George was pretty damn smart.

He looked across at George. Francis was still asleep. George's eyes peered back at Edgar in the dim light.

'Will you look after her, George?'

George nodded, then he beckoned Edgar to him. Edgar laid his good hand on the bed, and George put his own, smaller hand, on top.

Always.

'Then, I think I'm good to go.'

You don't have to. You could stay.

Edgar smiled sadly, and shook his head.

'I see things, like a sixth sense, maybe. I'm not like you, George. Or him. I'm just...'

I don't know everything, Edgar, said George. The voice in my head? It's older than me. I think it is me, Edgar. I've been thinking about it. All the time, I think about everything. About him, about me, about why me, what I should do. But most of it, doesn't matter how hard I think - I don't understand. I think that older voice is me, talking to myself. Like an older man, telling his younger self all the things he wished he'd known?

'I think that's a good wish to come true,' said Edgar.

But I'm nine. I don't get it. But I do know you needed saving, and so did Francis. Maybe that was enough?

Edgar leaned in and kissed George's cheek.

'That sounds quite noble, my friend. And I won't stay. This way's better. To the end. And you know what? I know something even you don't know. Your mother's proud of you, George. When she sees how good you are, she'll cry, George. Trust me. While you're busy saving everyone else...maybe she'll save you.'

George squeezed Edgar's hand hard. Edgar squeezed back. 'Goodbyes aren't so bad, George.'

He let go, then reached down to the bunk below and not too gently shook Francis awake.

'Time's wasting, young lady.'

'Fuck off,' she moaned, half-asleep still. Edgar and George shared a smile. Edgar figured there were worse ways to say goodbye.

*

The seven men who would stay, waiting for death in whatever form it chose did not complain. They didn't cry, didn't plead. Francis waited for one to snatch them back, to drive a knife into one or all, insane and wild with iron and steel.

But that was the roads she'd travelled. This was the sea.

She didn't want to hug the seven men who remained, but she didn't want to simply walk across the ice to the chopper without something.

Everyone stank. Every face was bearded, now, but for herself and George. George stood beside her. Tears pooled in his eyes, but he was nine. She was an adult.

A killer.

She wished her emotions were as easy and close to hand as George's.

So she went to each in turn with nothing but a kiss to offer. Then, she followed Edgar and Wake across the slick surface of the rig to the chopper, holding George tight and tied to him, too. She would not lose him now.

No one looked back.

The chopper was quieter than the outside world, but not by much. Wake prepared the helicopter, checking everything like he had three times a day for the last week. Each of them wore dry suits, though George and Francis were far smaller than the men on the rig. Their suits were bunched in the arms and legs, their heads and hands the only parts not covered by the suit. Because of the cold, though, they wore gloves, but their faces they left bare so that they could see, move, and don the headphones needed to communicate when the chopper's engines started.

'Are we wrong? John? To leave them behind?'

'We're all dying, Francis. We're carrying one too many as it is. I'd stay, but I can't teach you or Edgar to fly without getting in the air. No, Fran. The right thing. The only thing. They know that, too. They know, they agreed, they accepted it. So should you.'

She remembered this.

Wake reached back and she took his hand for a second, and then he turned back to his gauges and dials, checking levels, checking functions.

'Jackets on. Belts on. Strap in. Be ready.'

They sat, sombre, with their headphones on so that they could talk if they wanted. They did not. Even George did not reach out a hand to touch. His eyes were closed.

All they had to do was stay out of the sea and head west.

Such a simple thing. Such a hard thing.

The rotors ready, steady and fast and unbelievable loud inside the chopper, John flicked a hand and the man waiting outside.

Bors raised his own hand, then he pulled a length of cable attached to two heavy rivets that held the chopper's tin shelter down.

The shelter blew away. They didn't see Bors.

Maybe he made it, thought Francis.

She hoped he did, but the chopper bucked then and rose into the storm and fear swallowed most of all their thoughts.

'Pray if you've got to. Maybe pray if you don't want to, either. Nothing else doing,' said their pilot.

Francis and Edgar nodded. Francis wondered if her face was pale as Edgar's.

Probably.

Only George seemed calm. Francis considered reaching for him, to comfort him. But she thought the gesture would be more selfish than selfless. After all, it was her who needed comfort. She reached, instead, to her right, and Edgar's hand was there for her. They gritted their teeth. Francis prayed, even though God probably thought nothing of her and that was fine - the feeling was mutual.

*

Ice began to build up on the rotor tail - probably elsewhere, too. It made the chopper heavier and harder to handle. No one in their right mind would fly a chopper like this in weather this bad.

Wake wasn't in his right mind. He was desperate, without hope, and when people get to that point, they'll do anything or nothing, just for something to change. This, though...this was worth doing.

Flying to certain death at the end of the world, just to get a boy back to his mother? Nothing more. There would be no reward. No money, no women, no crate of alcohol. Not even to save the world. Just a gesture. Something nice.

And that was fucking awesome.

The thought made him smile, a smile that stayed until they started to lose altitude. He said nothing, but they headed toward the snapping surface of the North Sea. It became a battle Wake couldn't win. The chopper fought him harder than he'd ever known. As a pilot, he was skilled enough to handle bad conditions, but few were mad enough except perhaps army pilots and sea rescue to fly in really heavy weather. This wasn't just heavy weather; ash, snow, sleet, wind - everything the sky had, forcing them toward the water.

The helicopter bounced in the air, listed, righted. George, in the back seat, puked. Edgar's face turned green.

The gauges gave in shortly after.

At that point, the pilot was 100% there was no chance of landing unscathed. Before, he'd only been 99% sure.

Below, the sea was a grey and white quilt, ruffling and the sky ash-grey and off-white snow. Frosting on the windows was patterned, and in places crystalline. The rotors swirled, then smoked spewed somewhere above, a loud cough, rather than a bang.

Wake pulled the pistol from beneath the seat, turned, and fired two shots, one each side. Edgar, Francis and George jumped, panic on their faces.

'No choice. Kick the windows out!'

The rotor slowed and the chopper just a coffin in the sky. It span as it fell. The ice slowed the rotors, the ash killed the engines. A horrible sensation like plunging in a roller coaster for an instant, only. Francis and Edgar grasped onto their harnesses.

The force of the crash smashed through the shocks under Wake's seat, and he felt his legs...go.  The glass by his feet, where he would look down to see the landscape, had shattered like they'd hit rock rather than water. His legs were intact, but distant.

Broke my spine, he thought. He wasn't getting out, and if he did they'd die trying to save him and his dead weight in rough waters would drag them all down.

He didn't give them the option.

George. The kids was the reason.

Doesn't matter if I die. I got to fly.

'Wake...' Francis didn't finish.

Would've liked that fuck, I think. He turned so she couldn't see his eyes and put a bullet into his head.

*

The dry suit Francis wore behaved like a balloon when the window smashed and the water rushed in. She didn't know if she was up or down, but somehow the door opened under her panicked grip. George was tied to her, but strapped in. Beneath the water, shocked, she fumbled wildly and blindly to release him.

There wasn't time to fight for Edgar. Edgar knew the same as she did. George was all that mattered.

George came free and the two of them tumbled inside the sinking helicopter, unable to figure how to get through the opening. The cold water hit like a hammer. Their dry suits pushed them upward, buoyant, but at the mercy of the gushing, pounding water.

The sea turned them, and they were out, up, toward the unreliable surface. A breath, snatched, then back under a wave and water in her lungs.

Fuck the shore, she thought, somewhere deep where nature takes over. Get air. Air...

The feeling and strength in her limbs was gone. Her organs taking all her heat and energy. Her grip on George began to slip, and his from hers, too.

They were tethered.

But if the tether broke?

Once more, she found air and gulped it in. Puke tried to rise, but she swallowed it. She couldn't see George, or feel him pulling at the tether between them.

Somewhere, just a glimpse, she thought she saw fire. A wave pulled her under, and under the water George's hand was right there. She snatched it, and that touch gave her hope. One handed and burdened with her other arm beneath George's armpit, she lashed out against the water.

People die in cold water. The people who live are those who don't give in.

Everything was confusing and muddled, but just yards from the shallows the only battle left was with herself.

It was a fight Francis always won.

Always.

Her body shook badly, and her vision wavered, but she fixed that distant flame in her mind, closed her eyes against the bitter sting and pulled.

Fire.

Was it him? Did the man with fire in his eyes wait for them on the shore?

Hope, not fear, made her fight harder, still.

*

A red and black lump came to shore first, pushed and pulled by the sea. Eleanor ran from the fire, into the sea. Each wave pummelled and fought her and pulled the shape - a man, for sure - out of reach. Then he bumped her hard in the legs and she hit the water, the shock nearly stopping her heart once again. She stumbled in the waves, gripped him by the hair, then dragged the man through the frozen sludge at the shoreline, through the spray and the salt, and heaved him from the sea, half in, half on icy sand. His face and lips both were blue.

She could do nothing, though - George was everything.

George! she called out along the path in her mind, but there was nothing there.

He can't be...

Eleanor waded into the surf again.

Was that a hint of colour?

She didn't pause, or wonder longer than that. If she was wrong, her son was dead anyway, and what did she have to live for other than him? That road she'd followed so long lead to George and if he wasn't there her mind would break.

The weather and the sea tried to stop her. The shape she sought became no clearer, but it was red like the man on the shore. She struck out harder until she was swimming, not wading. Through the blinding snow and spray, she caught sight of the shape again.

Two, she thought, not one.

Only one swam, though. The red-swimmer, blinded by the sea, hit Eleanor with a flailing hand. Eleanor found a small hand in hers and it gave her the strength she needed.

George.

On one side, Eleanor, on the other, a woman, and between them was George. Eleanor's knee struck the sand, a moment later, her toes. With their hands under George's arms, and one each side, they dragged him toward the fire on the beach.

*

XXI.

Fire on the Beach

They were all long past shivering. In the light of the fire, Francis, George and Eleanor spat out the sea, or let it run streaming onto the sand from guts or lungs. Panting, blue in their hands and faces and feet.

Edgar didn't stir.

In the time it took for Eleanor and Francis to drag George from the sea, Edgar lay in the freezing wind, his lower half lapped by icy water. He ceased to breath. His heart slowed and then stopped.

Eleanor got her son to the fire first. Francis next, thinking the older man had not been in the water as long. Thinking his chest was still rising and falling as she pulled Francis past him. But his chest wasn't rising. It was the tide, pushing the air in his dry suit up, then retreating so his dry suit would fall back again.

She didn't know. It probably wouldn't have made any difference. By the time she dragged Edgar to the fire and laid him down under her rude shelter by the huge fire, he was dead.

*

Francis' battered consciousness returned, and she burned. Agony engulfed her entire body and her arms curled in, her legs curled up. All she saw was a tower of flame.

Thinking she was burning alive, she tried to roll, to scream, but all that came out was a stream of sea-puke. Convulsions wracked her muscles, spasms cracked her spine. Vomit poured from her, over and over. The fire was huge. There were sparks in there, blackened char and its heat was a furnace against her skin. She was naked...embers flew up, together with snow. Someone pulled a blanket over her, and that too burned her skin. Her head throbbed and pounded, her guts roiled. She looked for whoever had placed the heavy blanket over her, but she was blinded by the fire. Fire was all she could see, the only colour orange.

She passed out again.

*

The next time Francis' eyes opened, the pain had lessened, except for her hands, which were like claws beneath a thick blanket. There was no snow, no embers, though a fire burned. This time the fire was within a stove.

Inside. Somewhere.

She could hardly move and found that she didn't want to.

'You're awake,' said a woman watching over her. The owner of the voice sounded sleepy. Francis heard shuffling, down by her feet.

I'm on a mattress...low down. Someone's front room.

Francis' had trouble focusing on the woman who knelt by her face.

'Thought we'd lose you. You're safe. Drink this. Vodka. Might warm you up. Either way, there's not much else.'

The woman's hair was sparse, thin, and dirty.

Like mine, Francis thought.

Who could have a shower, now? Shampoo, soap...things she could barely remember. Unfrozen water, let alone warm water, would be a push.

The woman tipped a small amount of vodka between Francis' lips, one hand behind her neck to help her lean forward. Francis' didn't complain. She couldn't. She was too damn weak to do much of anything at all, and opening her eyes and taking the small drink drained her.

The alcohol burned her mouth and her throat. It sank lower very slowly, but she relished the feeling. Her skin felt as though it was burned black, but inside, in her guts and her lungs, there was nothing but cold.

'Thank you,' she managed. For a second, her eyes drifted closed. She felt sleep slamming her down, but she fought it and opened her eyes again. The woman was still there, looking down at her.

'How did you know? You pulled us out...built the fire?'

'George,' said the woman, simply enough, but Francis, even tired, felt the pride in the woman's voice.

'You're George's mother.'

The woman nodded. Francis managed a small nod of her own as she drifted down, down below the waves again. But this time, the waves were warmer.

'Good kid,' she muttered, and floated away.

*

She opened her eyes again to find that weak daylight of the apocalypse framing Edgar's hunched form by the window. She tried to move, and found that she wasn't as sore as she thought. She was naked, but that didn't matter. She and Edgar had been through enough together. Fuck, she'd shot his wife in the face. If that didn't make them friends, nothing would.

She grinned at the thought, but wrapped her blanket around her shoulders as she rose from the dented mattress by the stove and walked toward him. No sense in giving the old man a hard on she didn't plan on using.

'Hey,' she said.

'Hey,' he said. He smiled as she stood beside him at the window. They didn't need to say much else for a minute.

Outside, in the meagre light, they stared at what remained of England. They'd wound up in a seaside town. She didn't know which one. To her, they'd always looked much the same. Maybe a pier, fish and chip shops, arcades, ice cream on sale at low counters in the summer. Not much for sale right now.

Everything was white, and there was a subtle fog hanging in the air, too, probably wind picking up ice crystals and snow. She could hear the wind howl around the buildings below. They seemed to be two or maybe three stories higher than most of the small town. Perhaps in a flat, or an expensive house. The kind rich people who lived in London bought and rented to less wealthy holiday makers.

Not costing us anything now, she thought. Shame the view's a bit shit.

There wasn't much to look at. A car had gone half into one of the shop fronts, but that seemed to be it. Mostly, it was just a wasteland. Desolate and dry, a frozen desert now, like the poles, maybe. Water everywhere, but to eat that snow would be to die. Poison, radiation, ash, and cold enough to freeze a person from the inside out.

She'd seen cold before. Places in Russia, frozen houses both inside and out, the people hunched in furs. Pictures on the television, on the internet. But she'd never see this cold in person. A certain kind of beauty, yes, but a frightening beauty to this endless frost.

'Eleanor's a nice woman. Not what I expected.'

She nodded. 'Saved us. We'd be dead.'

Edgar smiled, and looked at Francis. He was hunched, but he still stood above her. She looked back, then understood.

'She didn't, did she? We're dead. This...all this...it's just a dream.'

'It's a dream, yes. But you? She saved you. Looks like I'm done.'

'Edgar?'

He ignored her for a moment, but held her hand, with a small smile on his face, staring out at the white expanse before them. The whole country, the world, perhaps, asleep under the chill white blanket.

His hand was cold and light.

'We really fucked it up, didn't we? Everything's dead. No birds, no animals. Nothing.'

She didn't want to cry. By the window it was cold. Her eyes would probably freeze.

As though he knew what she thought, he squeezed her hand a little tighter.

'We didn't kill it, Francis. He did.'

'I know. But the tools were there, weren't they? We're culpable. Humans. You, me.'

Edgar smiled, but carried right on staring at the snow.

'For a while, I really thought I might make it,' said the ghost.

'It was close though, huh?' said Francis, and laid her head against his cool, cool shoulder.

'I'll take it,' he said.

'We lost, I guess.'

Edgar's ghost put his hand around Francis' shoulder and pulled her tight. 'Lost? Are you sure, Francis?'

'You know me better than I do now?'

'Sure I do,' he said, and she felt his stubble brush the top of her head. 'Sarah would have liked you, you know.'

She nestled against the old man's chest. Old, she thought. Fifty?

Not that old at all...fifteen years older?

'I always thought of you as old.'

'I am, Francis. But you're catching up.'

Ghost or not, he smelled comforting.

'And, Francis...you think you don't know how, you think you've lost something. But it's down to you.'

'What is?'

'To teach them. What it meant to be human.'

'Edgar, I don't know how anymore.'

'This, Francis. Remember.'

'Sadness?'

She thought, for a moment, about that feeling in her dream, and thought she understood. Understanding flitted away.

It was just a dream, after all, wasn't it?

'Now, Francis Drew Sutton...what are you really going to do?'

'Kill O'Dell,' she said, and knew it was true. No doubt, no confusion, no fear. What was there to fear? Death?

'Good girl,' said Edgar. 'That seems...fair.'

He kissed the top of her head, like a father might have.

*

Francis opened her eyes with her dream, vision, or whatever it had been still fresh in her mind. But happy, too, because Eleanor and George both stood before her. The room was warm.

This is as good as it's going to get for a long, long time.

'Come here,' she told George. He knelt down. They stayed on the mattress on the floor for a long time, arms around each other. Then she nodded and kissed the boy on his cheek, holding him back so she could see him better.

'Edgar,' said Eleanor, tentatively.

'I know,' said Francis.

'I'm sorry. He was your friend?'

She thought about it for a second. 'Maybe. I don't know. Probably as close as it gets these days? The man who flew us to shore, John. He died too. I don't know if they were friends.'

George smiled and kissed her cheek.

Liar, he said.

'I liked them,' she admitted. But she didn't want to cry, so she shook her head at George.

Don't.

She pretended she didn't care, but she did. Of course she did, and George saw right through her.

'You've been delirious for days. Four, I think. You're getting better, though.'

'You saved me. Thank you. Eleanor?'

Eleanor nodded. She would have been a good looking woman. Tired, drawn and scarred now, but she had something in her eyes. Life, Francis supposed. Will.

She hoped that same look still shone in her eyes, too.

'We...George thought you died,' said Francis. 'Nice to know he's wrong, sometimes.'

'I did,' she said.

'Oh,' said Francis.

Eleanor laughed, softly. George smiled, standing beside her. She was struck by how similar they seemed. Both hard worn, but bones, stance, and not just the colour of their eyes. Something else. Something inside them.

She drifted again. This time she didn't dream of warmth or dead men. She just slept, and George watched over her like he would until the day she died.

*

XXII.

That Which Makes us Human

The only highways left uncovered by January were those which remained in peoples' minds. Two led to O'Dell. And from O'Dell's shattered thoughts were roads that led on, into those whose lives he touched, and broke. Towers full of those he filled with memories he could not bear.

US waited in those towers, below their creator. Nearly five hundred children, some now grown into men. Long ago, O'Dell hollowed them out and filled them with a past he didn't want. US held powers like their tormentor, their creator...but more, too.

He thought he had emptied them of everything but his will.

He was wrong.

Empty things can be filled again. They weren't separate, lonely, or trapped, even, within their ruined bodies, but an entity far beyond, far greater, than O'Dell's imagining.

*

O'Dell's blood-stained, blood-crusted suit was littered with crumbs, splashed with coffee or whiskey - filthy, full of the smell of a man lost. The man had always been fastidious about his appearance, but cleanliness seemed of little importance now. Often, he found himself adrift, and would rouse to find fresh blood had joined the dry stains that spread from collar to his wasting belly. He ate, but sparsely, and his gaunt, grinning face was just skin tight over hard bone. No fat left - a man pared down to the absolute necessities.

His hands ached from daily seizures, his back pained him from sitting so long, his clenched teeth cracked somewhere at the back, a fissure that sang at each cold sip of whiskey, or the occasional burning coffee, or just the air from a deep breath.

The pain was just an irritation. It was his constant confusion that troubled him.

He spoke to himself either inside his head, or this strange twin on a screen before him. He didn't remember creating the other him.

Perhaps there had been a point where they created each other.

You killed US.

These words got through to O'Dell sometimes, but his mind was powerful. He'd made himself forget, hadn't he? He'd created US. Kurt William O'Dell. They were his idea. They existed because of his talents. A man who turned these children's mind to his ends, a man who had killed the world could ignore whispered words easily enough.

US. Sleep. O'Dell, sleep. Put the gun in...

'Shut up, for fuck's sake. Shut up. I'm the one who whispers. You're babies.'

Older. All of US. Older. Take the gun, O'Dell. Take...

O'Dell pushed himself from the seat that was his bed and day chair. On the floor across the room, beneath one of many monitor banks, was a whiskey crate. Once full, three of twenty-four bottles remained. He winced, leaning down to take one, then returned to the chair and twisted off the top and drank from the bottle.

'Not long now,' he said, and saluted himself on the screen before him.

Two days before, he'd shut down every life support system throughout the three towers.

US was dying.

*

US called to George in the night.

George walked his own road in dreams. His road was much like his mother's - a personal thing, nothing like the broad, paved highways of so many others. He walked an alley between rows and rows of vast buildings, but sometimes the alley strayed between playing fields or playgrounds, or beside the banks of rivers, or city streets he knew.

A voice called out to him, somewhere to the right on his alley. He found a door set in an old walls - brick, flint, mortar or cement, grown high with ivy and other creepers. The door was strong but old and green from the elements. A black latch on a black handle - wrought iron, cast iron, he didn't know - moved easily.

On this alley, he could be large, small, weak, strong, old, young. Imagination and reality blended. Memories' pathways, but ones full of other possibilities, too.

Behind the door a well-tended garden. Hedges and mown grass, stone statuettes and benches. A patio, flagstones. But where he imagined a house should be - like a stately home, in the centre of such grand gardens, was a shimmering, wavering presence. Not quite smoke, or dust, or even swirling. Sparks and lights flicked between clouds that sat or moved - every movement but those sparks was languid and perfect, in unison, like clouds that danced, but to no rhythm or pattern that he could discern.

Are you US? he asked, but of course he knew the answer.

He's killing US, George. It must be now.

I'm not strong enough, he said inside his dream. Francis isn't strong enough. She nearly died.

Those flickers are thoughts, he realised. When US spoke, the sparks were brighter and more numerous than lightning within a simple cloud.

It isn't a cloud, either. It's a mind, free of flesh.

The cloud brightened and darkened, too, when it thought of one thing or another.

Francis is strong enough. The Mother is strong enough. You must be. You will not be alone.

The cloud was gone. George found himself outside, on his alley. The door, too, was gone.

If they die, O'Dell wins, he thought.

The world was lost and maybe it was always meant to be.

George opened his eyes and his dream was gone. In its place was knowing - an older voice than his.

Without US, humanity is lost, too.

*

George still walked with a limping gait that was unnatural and confused, like a man might after a stroke - trying desperately to achieve things which people did every day with no thought or effort.

He did walk, though. He combed his hair with his fingers, felt the cold in his bones each day, despite the fires they mostly managed to keep burning.

When he came from the dining room where they all slept (there was a second floor, but the cold beat back the heat where the bedrooms were) Francis and his mother were at a small round table where they ate a simple meal heated on the stove-top.

Sleep was still in George's eyes, but his mother and Francis knew him well - his mother all his life, Francis just as long, perhaps, though more intense - time, compacted.

'Is it happening, George?' said Eleanor. 'It is, isn't it?'

George nodded. The food, simple beans in a tin, smelled wonderful. He was nine, and often hungry, but he ignored the food.

He sat so they were in a rough triangle, and took a hand in each of his so he could speak to them without one having to interpret. Speaking to two minds at once didn't prove as difficult as he imagined.

'George?' said Francis.

It's US, he said. O'Dell is killing them.

'So we stop O'Dell? Now? Shouldn't we...'

There's nothing we can do that we haven't done. No guns, no...press-ups.

The two women smiled, but George did not.

I think this is why I'm here. They called me, and you, Francis, and Mum, and Edgar and John and all the others... they looked out for us. I know they did. Because they need us. But we need them. The world's gone. We have to made it new again.

George, said Eleanor, her words inside Francis' mind, too. Is that you? Or...

Mum...I'm me, however old I am. Close your eyes.

He closed his eyes and felt their pain. US cried out to him. Their mind hurt, rather than their body...but all they had was thought.

Remember the Mill, Francis? When he let us go? Remember the cell, mum? He let you go, too. O'Dell didn't mean to do those things. I met them last night, in my dream.

George the child only thought US pushed and pulled all this time, but that older voice in his head knew it. And he trusted that voice, not because it was always right (it was). He trusted that voice because it was him.

Guide them, said that voice who spoke only for George.

George tried, with the words he had at nine and the thoughts he would have in years to come, to show his mum and Francis the way back, to O'Dell.

Don't think of O'Dell. He's a...slip road. He's a small road, just a single lane, that leads to the motorway. The motorway is where we want to be.

I'm ready, said Francis.

Go, George, said his mum. And come home safe.

He drew their highways together, so the road was fast and true.

For George, O'Dell's mind was just dead space. It was a black spot where he could not go. Not alone. Once, perhaps, in a place called the Mill, he thought he had been inside O'Dell's mind. But he hadn't. He never could do that.

It was US.

O'Dell thought of the dead boys as nothing but husks. But he'd freed them.

He'd destroyed everything and in doing so created an entity comprised solely of that which makes us human. Humanity, but a giant.

Where Francis' and Eleanor's roads ended, George's path did not. He sped right through and out the other side, onto the wide motorway beyond. There was no traffic. His feet were light and sure, nothing like those he struggled to control in the physical world. He could have been a car, had he wanted, or simply flew along the road, but George understood walking.

The motorway led everywhere George needed to go and nowhere he didn't. All those directions he could choose led to boys and men in beds and wheelchairs, or forgotten on cold, bare floors. Broken minds, each of them.

George passed through those roads, cul-de-sacs, blind bends and dead-ends, and beyond roads and mortal constructs entirely to the place where US existed.

George, the dead boy, the boy who came back.

Before him, all the others who stayed behind.

Hello, he said.

Hello, George.

Am I one of you? Am I one of US?

No. You are George.

Are you strong enough?

With you, George. We are.

And with those words, purpose.

One thought, and just like lightning in that shifting cloud, only one place to go.

*

It was 1964. O'Dell drank alone in a pub named The Eagle and Child when a man he didn't remember approached him. This time a small boy walked behind and took a seat. The boy was handsome, but his head bore bad scars beneath a good head of hair. Once, the child's hair had been blonde. Now, grown in after being shaved bald, it was darker. The boy watched.

The man spoke.

'Hello again, Kurt.'

'Please excuse me, but I think you have to wrong man, Sir,' said O'Dell, and George felt his confusion.

'Mr. Fenchurch, Mr. O'Dell. You remember me. Of course you do.'

'Have we met before?'

'Of course, Mr. O'Dell. We met some time ago,' said Fenchurch, who took a seat opposite O'Dell without having the courtesy to ask first.

'I'm afraid I don't recall...'

The boy still watched.

O'Dell found he could not take his eyes from the child. The child gaze was unnerving. O'Dell, distracted, afraid for no reason he could discern, leaned in close and whispered to the man named Fenchurch. A boy shouldn't be in a pub, alone, and this one shouldn't be here at all.

'Fenchurch...someone's here, watching us. Watching me.'

'Paranoia, Mr. O'Dell. An unfortunate but common side effect. Do relax, Mr. O'Dell. I came to offer you a job. It seems...'

O'Dell tore his eyes from the boy, and stared with dark, burning eyes at Fenchurch.

'Mr. Fenchurch,' he said, and his voice shook. 'What is happening to me? I feel...I think I can see the future.'

'Precisely, Mr. O'Dell. Did you foresee me coming here today? Remarkable, if so.'

'We always come here,' said O'Dell. 'We're always here.'

'Where?'

'This pub. Now.'

'This is only the second time,' said Fenchurch. But it wasn't Fenchurch's face. Fenchurch was gone. It was the boy. The boy was older, by twenty or more years. No longer a child, but a man.

I remember that I will meet him, thought O'Dell. I remember the future...how in fuck can I remember the future?

'No,' he told the boy, or man, or...there was something else inside the child. The boy was light. Like a cloud made flesh, solid, but...a wisp, moisture, all joined with lights that glinted like lights beneath waves.

O'Dell's head began to ache. He wiped blood from beneath his nose.

'Do you remember?' asked the man that was not Fenchurch.

He used to be a boy. He was dead. He...I killed him. I will kill him?

'I don't want to remember!'

'How does it go, O'Dell? Shall we walk a while? It is a beautiful day.'

They sat in the pub, then, with no transition at all the walked outside by the river. The boy took a sheaf of papers from a briefcase he carried.

We were in a pub, thought O'Dell. The Eagle and...Child?

We were in a pub. How are we here? By the river? How?

There was a pistol in the case, but it was the papers Fenchurch passed to O'Dell.

'Before you lose your temper, Mr. O'Dell...this is the culmination of your work. Is this your work?'

Jesus...what's happening? It's not Fenchurch.

But he found he couldn't voice his thoughts. He was too afraid. With shaking hands, he glanced down at the reams of paper in his hands. Photographs, rather than the untidy scrawl that he had seen that day.

'I don't want this.'

'But you have it. You thought you could make people into nothing more than components in a computer. Yet you made yourself a part of that, too. You put your memory in US. We hold everything you placed into tidy folders, parcels of information. Things that should have made a soul, but you couldn't bear the weight of it. You gave it to US. Look, Mr. O'Dell. That's Michael Bryant. That boy? His name is Sam Tully. The boy with the larger scar, on this page, you took him in 1978. Still learning your trade, I think. Or, the doctors who you made to work for you. Far from perfect, isn't it? I think you took out too much of his brain. But he's still a part of US.'

'Us?'

US.

O'Dell stumbled, then took a knee, there in the grass beside the river. A path ran by the river, but they were to the left. The grass had been mown. Everything was bright, and sharp. The light hurt his eyes. He looked down and saw his nosebleed had stained the grass red. The photographs were strewn all around him. Dead boys and men, their skulls all bearing horrible dents, or welts, or scars. Wires led to monitors. Tubes that went in, tubes that came out.

He looked past the boy. To what he had left behind.

Hundreds of torn humans. Thousands. Not ghosts, but real. Naked or in hospital gowns, on their feet, eyes that should be vacant and dead all staring into him.

US.

'I saw the future.'

'You did,' said the man. 'But you lost the past. We're giving it back to you.'

'I don't want it.'

'Take it, O'Dell. It's yours.'

The man took the gun from the briefcase. It should have been Fenchurch's gun, but it wasn't. It belonged to O'Dell. It always had. The boy held it out.

Once, O'Dell had asked for it. Now it was being offered, he did not want it.

'We are working toward something great, Mr. O'Dell. I'm offering you the chance to join us.'

'Fuck you. I won't,' he said, but his right hand held something heavy and he could not throw it away, no matter how hard he tried.

'You could never make a human a machine. But you knew that. So you tried to take away everything that made a soul. But souls are full of memories, Mr. O'Dell. Memories make US. All you could see was the future. Whatever made you human died a long time ago. US isn't the machine. You are.'

O'Dell could see everything that made US human, roiling and flashing like a storm inside the dust that was this made. A cloud, but one made of passion, joy, thought, love, memory, invention. Humanity, yes, but whole, and humanity is dark, too. It is vengeance, and rage.

'You thought you created us, Mr. O'Dell,' said George, one with the entity. 'You did not. You saw mankind's change and you were afraid. You saw the end and you could not bear it. You thought yourself a genius and assumed my family were results of your cleverness. We were not. You thought yourself a result of an experiment, and you were not. People move on, Mr. O'Dell, don't they?'

'I wanted to die. I tried to die!'

'Everything evolves, Mr. O'Dell, and that which does not is left behind.'

O'Dell put the gun to his head and pulled the trigger.

George and US watched. They would remember for him.

*

XXIII.

When Dead Wings Beat Again

O'Dell didn't create US, or those like George, and Eleanor. He simply cleared the road.

Things last until they wear thin, or are thrown out when something that might be better comes along. Better or worse, though, some things were always worth holding onto.

That, George knew when he was just a boy of nine.

*

In the years that followed, George often fell quiet. Sometimes when he stood outside the house they'd taken for their own, there by the sea, he would drift away as though he was listening to a distant conversation that none could hear.

His speech returned, but he used it rarely.

Eleanor and Francis were his parents, and they understood George where George did not understand himself, like parents often do.

But the older George understood just fine.

'Talking to yourself again?' said Francis one day. They were inside, playing cards at a round table. It was a rare day when snow did not fall. George was nineteen.

'No. Listening.'

By the time George was twenty-five years old, days with no snow became more common.

When he reached thirty, the ultraviolet summer nudged aside nuclear winter and he began to laugh again.

'I forgot I was funny,' he said. 'As a kid.'

'You weren't that funny,' said his mother. Francis shrugged, apologetically. 'I don't remember many laughs, either.'

George wondered, just for an instant, if he could change that right now. Tell eight year old George something to make them laugh, and then ask now if they remembered.

Only for an instant, because thirty year old George spoke to his younger self and he was wiser, but because thirty year old George listened to a different, much older self, and that George was wiser still.

*

'She won't last forever, George. She's human...us? We're something different.'

Whenever his parents used the word 'us', George remembered those that came before, the people who were like Francis. In a way, he wished he and his mother were just like her. The idea of leaving a parent behind hurt, still.

'I know, mum.'

Eleanor and George stood in the open, a hard sun beating down that would kill and mutate. It couldn't hurt them. Francis remained indoors, now. She was weaker, and older, and this light could kill.

'You think there are many others, mum? Like us?'

'I think there might be, George. One day, maybe we'll meet. Until then, we have Francis. Some things, I think, should never be rushed.'

Eleanor kissed her son on his cheek, bearded now but still youthful, and went inside to help Francis out of bed.

*

Francis and George sat on a porch he built with scavenged wood and watched the late sunset. Seasons, months, weeks, days; they didn't seem important anymore. It was warm, and Francis was too old for the nights and the dark. She wanted to sleep earlier as she grew older.

Francis smiled, watching the sun set. When it was full dark, George asked if she would like to go back into the house.

The house was lit by candles. They had fire when they needed it, jumpers when they did not. Once, people had too much. Now they scavenged, people only took what they needed. Francis thought maybe it was better this way.

'Not tonight, George. I think I want to sit out tonight. Sit with me?'

'Shall I call mum?'

'We've already said goodbye, George. Don't be thick.'

The older Francis got, the more brusque she became. George enjoyed it - Francis, who never seemed to give a damn, giving less of a damn. And just as bad at covering how she really felt.

'Is this it?'

'I'm ready, George. I've been ready for a long time. How many years, now?'

'Forty-five.'

'Jesus,' she said. 'That long?'

'I think. I might have missed the count by a few.'

'You don't look more than thirty.'

'You don't look a day more than...'

'Shut up,' she said, but she smiled and they held hands, sitting on faded garden chairs on the porch with just candlelight behind them.

They sat hand in hand like that for two or maybe three hours. Eleanor brought them tea, boiled in a metal pot on the old wood stove.

Francis raised an eyebrow at Eleanor. Eleanor shook her head. 'Really?'

'Don't be tight. Tea?'

As the years passed, Eleanor and Francis became less like sisters and more like a daughter and a mother. A daughter who loved her mother, despite that the elder woman was blunt and liked a drink now and then.

Eleanor went away, and when she came back, she put her arms round Francis and kissed her on the forehead, like young people do when they love their elders.

Eleanor left a packet of cigarettes, a box of matches and a quarter bottle of vodka there in Francis' lap.

'Survivors,' said Francis after watching Eleanor go inside. Eleanor, hunched and hiding her face.

Francis thought mourning wasn't such a bad thing at all. Nothing wrong with being sad when only memories remained, and entirely human to know it. People should remember their dead, she thought, and as always with this came images of the dead she'd left behind. Men she'd killed, and people she'd left behind, too. Her mind was still sharp enough, and those images always ended with Edgar's face, but as he was the last time she saw him - in a dream. The two of them at a cold window, staring at the world beneath a coat of ice.

'Sadness,' he said.

Humans were sad, weren't they? Did George and Eleanor feel that? Would others, like them, understand what it meant to know how short, how fleeting life was, and mourn at the same time as holding onto it? Would life be dear, or cheap for the ones who owned a world where the old had been swept away?

George watched her, and she saw how he felt clearly there, even though the light was at his back and his face to the dark.

She thought maybe they would hold the important things close.

She sighed and looked down at the cigarettes, still in their cellophane wrapper. She didn't smoke, but it seemed like a good time to take it up.

'You mean us? We're the survivors?' said George, the word still resonating, after so many years.

'No. Actually, I was talking about the vodka and the cigarettes. But we did it, eh? Animals will come back, George. You'll see. When they do, your people will follow. You'll see.'

They shared the vodka for a while. George took a cigarette.

'George?' she said later.

'Yes?'

'Did you ever wonder?'

'What?'

'Why they helped the three of us? Why they got us from The Mill, and your mum? Did you ever wonder...'

'If they could do all the things they did, why they didn't stop O'Dell?'

'Yes,' she said. 'Yes. I wonder. I often wonder.'

'I wonder, too, Francis. I don't have the answer.'

'But you have an idea, don't you? Did he tell you? The older you?'

'No. He doesn't talk about things like that. Doesn't tell me things I don't need to know. I think that's the point. O'Dell knew the future. But that's not what life is. It shouldn't be. It's not supposed to work like that. I think I knew that back then, when I was eight. Maybe I told myself. Maybe I just worked it out.'

'You think we're just not supposed to know everything, George?'

'I think maybe US did the best they could. Or, maybe they wanted things this way. Saw this was how things had to be. Most of all? I think we should just take it for what it is.'

Francis fell silent for a while longer, sipping the vodka and smoking.

Dawn wasn't far away.

'George?'

'Francis?'

'Will you watch over me? One last time?'

He moved his chair closer and put his arm around her.

I will, he said.

The End

7th October 2012 - 23rd April 2015

Final Draft: 13th July 2015

About the Author:

Craig Saunders is the author of over thirty novels and novellas, including 'Masters of Blood and Bone', 'RAIN' and 'Deadlift'. He writes across many genres, but horror, humour (the 'Spiggot' series) and fantasy (the 'Rythe' tales) are his favourites.

Craig lives in Norfolk, England, with his wife and children, likes nice people and good coffee. Find out more on Amazon, or visit:

www.craigrsaunders.blogspot.com

www.facebook.com/craigrsaundersauthor

@Grumblesprout

Also by Craig Saunders:

Novels

The Dead Boy

Left to Darkness

Masters of Blood and Bone

Damned to Cold Fire (previously published as 'The Estate')

A Home by the Sea

RAIN

Vigil

The Noose and Gibbet

A Stranger's Grave

The Love of the Dead

Spiggot

Spiggot, Too

The Gold Ring

Novellas

Death by a Mother's Hand

Days of Christmas

Flesh and Coin

Bloodeye

Deadlift

A Scarecrow to Watch over Her

The Walls of Madness

Insulation

Short Story Collections

Dead in the Trunk

Angels in Black and White

Dark Words

Writing as Craig R. Saunders:

The Outlaw King (The Line of Kings Trilogy Book One)

The Thief King (The Line of Kings Trilogy Book Two)

The Queen of Thieves (The Line of Kings Trilogy Book Three)

Rythe Awakes (The Rythe Quadrilogy Book One)

The Tides of Rythe (The Rythe Quadrilogy Book Two)

Rythe Falls (The Rythe Quadrilogy Book Three)

Coming Soon:

Unit 731

Bonus Novel Sample

A Stranger's Grave

by

Craig Saunders

And death shall have no dominion.

Dead mean naked they shall be one

With the man in the wind and the west moon;

When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,

They shall have stars at elbow and foot;

Though they go mad they shall be sane,

Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;

Though lovers be lost love shall not;

And death shall have no dominion.

- From ‘And Death Shall Have no Dominion’ - Dylan Thomas

In Prison Still

There’s a cemetery in a small Norfolk market town. It’s a peaceful place, a haven for the dead and the bereaved. There is birdsong in the trees no matter the time of year. Surrounded by hedgerow, the cemetery is hemmed in with roads running east and west to either side. The roads were there before cars, when people travelled in carriages, and before.

It’s an old place. The earliest headstone dates back to the year 1756. The trees are much, much older.

Nobody knows how far the trees go back, but in 1956 a great oak that overhung the small chapel was cut down, and should any have had a mind to look there were a hundred and seven circles around that stump, that fat stump that wasn’t anywhere near the fattest grown among the dead.

The chapel is old, too. The stone, brick and flint and granite, is long tarnished, occasionally cleaned, but not often enough.

The shine has gone from the marble headstones. The sandstone, the granite, the limestone, long illegible.

Trees grow from forgotten graves and roots crack the pathways and tunnel through the old dead.

But something older than all of this came in 2007. A trio of angels carved from basalt and polished to a black sheen.

The evil those angels brought was the oldest of all.

*

1.

The big gates shut behind Elton Burlock and for the first time in twenty-six years he breathed free air under a free sun.

The sun that shone back in 1985 was the same sun. The air he breathed back then, the same. The clouds drifting through the sky were no different.

But time brings subtle changes. The sun didn’t seem as bright. The air didn’t smell as clear.

This road, before the gate, was only twenty-six years old. Probably once fresh and wet when he’d left the world, it was now potted and cracked and repaired time and time again.

Clouds drifted across the sun and the air was instantly chilled.

When he’d gone into prison he’d brought a coat and a bag with the things he might need again on the outside. He hadn’t planned on staying so long, though. It wasn’t that his coat wasn’t warm enough for a mild spring day – though it seemed out of fashion now – nor was it that the day was especially chilly.

He shivered because prison was always warm. Now he was sixty-one and he was cold because age had somehow caught him out, too.

Elton turned his face up to the sun, taking what warmth he could. It felt good, his skin tightening, his eyes burning behind his eyelids.

Was the memory of the sun worth it?

He was still a powerful man, still strong enough when it mattered. His hair might be grey, a little thinner, and his stomach a little thicker. Maybe his skin was paler, too. He’d missed sunshine. You didn’t see a lot of the sun in prison.

He stroked his stubble, thick and rough. He saw his face most days in jail, but somehow it felt new, puckered and tight, even though he’d only stood in the glare of the sun for a few minutes at best.

Hard time done, then soft time. Once he’d hit fifty and transferred to Wayland prison it seemed like he was set, all hope of freedom gone, an educated man with no other purpose in life than to live.

Now, shifting his weight on feet that were once spry, once used to a boxer’s stance, shifting his bag in strong scarred knuckles, he set out on the road into town to meet the bus.

He wasn’t the same man out that went in. Back then, at thirty-five, he’d done what he thought was his share of fighting, in the ring and out. Maybe he’d have been wary, then, walking down the street on his own in the night, past pubs kicking out piss heads and druggies and punks.

Thirty-five, he’d been married. Settled. Comfortable. His first degree earned, a teaching position, and his baby...

Thirty-five years old with a wife and a child on the way he might have been worried by these young people passing, wearing hoods and walking like hard men, even though they looked like they were made of twigs. Once, back when. Now?

He wouldn’t even touch them. He’d been down that road. Twenty-six years worth of it.

Prison didn’t take your pride. It didn’t take your strength. It didn’t take your will.

The thing of prison was...

The thing of prison...

He stopped walking. The bus pulled up in town and he watched people get off, get on while he thought about what it was that was niggling away at him.

What had prison given him? A second degree that would never get him a job. Eyes in the back of his head. A stomach like cast iron from eating shit food and arms like steel from curls and bench presses for the last twenty years. A broken hand, a once broken knee that ached all day long and a shit shoulder since he took a wild stab with a sharpened toothbrush for his trouble.

But what had prison taken?

He’d been fed. He’d been happy enough, late on.

Maybe not back in the early days, when he’d fought it, railed against it, but late on, when he’d all but given up on getting out? Yeah, he’d been happy then.

Soon enough now he’d be on a state pension, living out an empty life, somewhere he didn’t know with strange people all around him. Nothing to do all day. Food he didn’t recognise.

He blinked at the receding bus, unable to make out the number.

He looked at the directions to the doss house on the print-out he’d been given. Hoped it wasn’t his bus he’d just missed.

It wasn’t dying he was worried about, either. Prison didn’t make you afraid of dying, not at all.

He was afraid of living.

Prison didn’t hurt you when you were in. It was when you got out. It was only then that you knew you were in prison still, and you always would be.

He pulled his coat tighter as he sat at the bus stop and stared at the sun for a while, until it hurt his eyes. It felt good - like it was worth the wait.

*

2.

Two fat policemen sucked their lips and looked down at the grave. Dirt was thrown up on one side, grassy clods still wet with spring dew. That alone and it would have been down to the gravekeeper, or maybe the council, at best, but whoever desecrated the child’s grave had also sprayed a swastika on the headstone and kicked it over.

That was why two fat policemen stood beside the grave.

‘Was he a Jewish kid?’

‘Don’t know for sure. Not, like, a hundred percent,’ said his partner.

Local policemen didn’t really have partners. Mostly it was just plodding, keeping the old ladies happy. PC James didn’t like the cemetery, though, so he’d persuaded his mate to come with him. ‘Don’t think so, though.’

‘Samuel. That’s Jewish, right?’

‘Biblical, maybe. Jewish? Don’t know,’ said PC James, biting his tongue.

‘What about Smith?’

‘Samuel Smith.’

‘Yeah. Samuel Smith,’ said PC Davis.

‘Sam Smith,’ said PC James.

‘Could be.’

‘Sam Smith, Ewan? Sam fucking Smith?’

‘What?’

‘No, Ewan. I’m not a hundred percent, but no,’ said PC James. ‘I don’t think he was Jewish.’

What PC James thought was that someone with roughly the same IQ as Davis had thought Sam Smith was Jewish. Some kind of neo-nazi idiot, listened to death metal in his mum’s basement kind of idiot. But he didn’t say that, because he didn’t want to make work for himself if he didn’t have to.

‘Well, I don’t fucking know, do I? It’s fucking Norfolk, alright? What do I know about Jewish people, or anyone else? Apart from the eastern European immigrants in the carrot packers, maybe. Or that fella runs the Portuguese shop with all them weird sausages...’

PC James sighed.

‘Bump it up?’

PC Davis kicked at a clump of grass and dirt. Made out like he was seriously considering it.

‘OK?’

‘Pub?’

‘OK?’

PC James liked PC Davis. You knew where you were with PC Davis. Generally in the pub.

He clicked his radio and called it in.

*

3.

Henry Harrison watched the two policemen at the grave. He didn’t want anything to do with it, and they didn’t want anything to do with him. They didn’t stop to ask him any questions, and that suited him fine. He’d been walking round the cemetery for two hours, trying to keep Emily asleep. The last thing he needed was someone waking her up.

Emily was his beautiful daughter, tucked up tight in an all-in-one suit against the chill, bundled into an old Silver Cross buggy. It had a small place to store baby stuff underneath. The space was filled with nappies, wipes, bottles – already sterilised – and a change of clothes, because babies’ doings had a way of getting out.

Henry Harrison liked things orderly. Baby stuff in the buggy, none in his pockets.

His pockets were full of pipe and pipe tobacco, a penknife for clearing the bowl, and a box of matches. He always used a match to tamp down his tobacco and a match to light his pipe. It tasted better that way.

He pushed Emily away a little, now she was sound asleep.

People thought maybe the most beautiful sound in the world was the deep roar of an expensive sports car, or a woman’s orgasm, or a symphony. It wasn’t. It was a baby snoring.

He filled his pipe, already clean, and pushed the tobacco down into the bowl. He flicked the match alight on the rough old arm of the bench, puffed a while to get it going, and sighed in satisfaction as he sat on the same bench.

Now he was down he didn’t plan on getting up for a good while, either.

It was his favourite bench. It was dedicated to the memory of Lily Anne and Frank Holt, whom he’d known, way back when. That wasn’t why it was his favourite bench. It was because it was smack in the middle of the cemetery, out of the way of the roads that ran parallel either side, at the east and west entrances. It was the quietest. You could barely hear the traffic, and the birdsong was clear.

It had the best view, too. The cherry blossom was out, spring in bloom. The trees were green again. Seemed like the older you got, the more you appreciated making another spring.

He would have been what, now? He would have been...?

Christ, he thought. Time flies. How many years had he been coming to this cemetery? Since he’d known the Holts, for sure. Since his wife had passed? Maybe that was when he’d started using the cemetery like his own personal park. Maybe that was when.

There was something comforting, being surrounded by the quiet dead, because at home his wife was with him all the time, no matter that she’d been gone for so many years.

Henry puffed his pipe for a while. Quiet, peaceful. Birds singing in the spring, baby snoring softly, with a slight snuffle from a little spring cold, but nothing drastic, and a pipe on the go.

For an old man with a young baby in tow, life didn’t get much sweeter.

- Sample End -

Thank you for reading.