Without waiting for her response Michelle ran upstairs to get the others.
Ten minutes and she’d managed to prise open the bedroom door and get enough of their stuff together. They loaded it into the Zafira, still more helicopters circling overhead as they worked. The road out of Thussock was a steady stream of traffic now, an exodus. The military retreat told them all they needed to know.
‘Where are we going, Mum?’ Phoebe asked.
‘Home.’
‘What, to—’
‘Redditch, yes. Home, home. We’ll go and stay with Granddad.’
‘What about Scott?’
‘What about him?’
She started the engine, waited for another truck to pass, then pulled out onto the road. She glanced back in the rear view mirror at the house they were leaving and felt relief, nothing else.
They’d barely driven more than half a mile when they followed a bend in the road and reached the military blockade. The other vehicles had made it through, but she was unidentified and was flagged down. Guns and soldiers everywhere. For the briefest of moments she wondered if Scott had been right. Should they have stayed back at the house? Had she made a huge mistake?
Familiarly faceless figures appeared at every window. A solider opened her door and pulled her out. George began to scream. ‘Follow me,’ a voice barked. ‘All of you, now!’
Too tired, outgunned and outnumbered to even think about resisting, Michelle pulled her children close and did as she was told. The family were pushed roughly into the back of a large trailer which began to move, a lab on wheels from what they could see. There were no explanations as DNA swabs were taken from the inside of their mouths and blood samples drawn, but they were beaten now, way past the point of being able to resist. The vehicle began to pick up speed, part of a convoy heading south.
It felt like forever but it could only have been a minute or two later when one of the faceless figures took off her mask. ‘All clear,’ she said. ‘Lucky escape there, Mrs Griffiths.’
‘Lucky?’ Michelle said, still struggling to speak with a mouth full of broken teeth.
‘Yes, lucky. You managed to get away before the accident.’
‘What accident?’
‘The accident at the fracking site.’
‘When?’
The woman paused, glanced at a colleague, then looked at her watch. ‘Anytime now.’
Two low flying jets raced over the convoy, travelling in the opposite direction, back towards Thussock. And in the distance, the infected town died. A moment of silence, then a series of explosions and chain reactions tore the place apart. From the fracking site to the leisure centre, from the centre of town all the way to the grey house on the road south out of Thussock, the place was consumed by fire, heat, and intense white light.
FIFTEEN MILES SOUTH OF THUSSOCK
The van juddered to a halt. ‘What the hell are you doing?’ the soldier in the passenger seat said.
‘Just checking. Christ, can’t you hear her? They’ll have our bollocks if we don’t get her back in one piece.’
‘You know what they said.’
‘Yeah, I know what they said.’
Before the other man could argue – as he usually did – the driver climbed out and walked around to the back. He slid the viewing panel across and looked at her through the wire-mesh. ‘You all right there, Jackie, love?’
She was more than all right. She was bloody gorgeous. She sat in the corner of the cage just looking at him… wanting him.
But he’d seen enough tonight to know better. The noise from the explosion which had destroyed most of Thussock was still ringing in his ears. He slid the viewing panel back across.
‘Everything all right?’ his mate asked.
‘Perfect.’
FALRIGG
‘Told you sumthin’ like this was gonna happen,’ Arthur had said to his wife before he’d set out this morning. They’d known something had been wrong in Thussock all day yesterday. Bloody army had stopped them getting anywhere near the place. He’d missed his doctor’s appointment because of the road blocks. Inconsiderate buggers.
When they heard the explosions last night, ten of them had set out from the village to try and see what had happened, to see if they could help. They’d made it as far as the first of the peaks before being turned back. They’d seen all they’d needed to see, mind. It had been the fracking site, all right. Arthur had been telling people from the start that place was an accident waiting to happen. It was some kind of chain reaction caused by gas deposits buried underground, Jock had said. It was all over the news now, of course, but Jock had heard first. His son was a teacher at a school in Glasgow. If anyone knew what had happened, it’d be him. Probably no bad thing that Thussock had been wiped off the map, though, after everything that had gone on there over the last couple of weeks.
Still, life goes on.
Arthur found her by the stream which ran along the bottom edge of his lowest paddock. Poor thing looked like she’d barely managed to get away in time before the town had gone to hell last evening. She’d been caught in a blast, that much was clear, and quite how she’d lasted this long, he didn’t know. He didn’t think she’d be alive much longer. Maybe the water had helped keep her alive, or the shock, perhaps.
Her legs and the right side of her face were badly burned. Some of her clothes were fused to her flesh. She’d no hair left on one half of her scalp. That was what upset him more than anything. She’d probably been a good looking woman before this, he’d thought. She’d groaned with pain when he’d lifted her up and laid her down in the back of the Land Rover. The dogs had gone crazy, but he’d just shooed them away. Bloody animals.
She watched him through her one good eye, the left eye blistered and burned, glued shut with discharge, and she reached out for him with the one hand that still worked. She pulled him closer until he could feel her breath on his face, then closer still until their lips met.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
David Moody grew up on a diet of trashy horror and pulp science fiction. He worked as a bank manager before giving up the day job to write about the end of the world for a living. He has written a number of horror novels, including AUTUMN, which has been downloaded more than half a million times since publication in 2001 and spawned a series of sequels and a movie starring Dexter Fletcher and David Carradine. Film rights to HATER were snapped up by Guillermo del Toro (Hellboy, Pan’s Labyrinth, Pacific Rim) and Mark Johnson (Breaking Bad). Moody lives with his wife and a houseful of daughters and stepdaughters, which may explain his pre-occupation with Armageddon. Visit Moody at www.davidmoody.net.
ALSO BY DAVID MOODY
“Moody has the power to make the most mundane and ordinary characters interesting and believable, and is reminiscent of Stephen King at his finest.”