“How did you manage for food?”
She stirred the mustard paste. “I told you before.”
“I mean before you had to resort to—”
“Cannibalism.”
“If you want to call it that.”
“Might as well.”
“But before that?”
“We had enough supplies for three years. We planted what we could. There were plenty of vegetables you could grow if you put your mind to it. We couldn’t keep many animals. Couldn’t fence off enough pasture to let them graze. Then we started raiding the nearby villages.”
“What happened to the villagers?”
“Have a guess.”
It wasn’t difficult to imagine: villagers falling ill, dying one by one and revenning, their families unwilling to put them down. “Did you try to help any of them?”
“Of course not. Do you think I’m stupid? They had the flu! That’s what started the last outbreak. They were dropping like flies and getting up again ten minutes later. If I’d have let them in, we’d have all been dead.”
“Did the villagers ask to be let in?”
“You’re desperate to find something I feel guilty about, aren’t you? How about asking how I managed to get beaten up and nearly dead in a bus crash on this planet? And how come we’re all the way out here where it’s even more dangerous?”
“We’re as safe as we can be, Olivia, and I’m sorry you had to endure some injuries. But you’re avoiding the question.”
“Of course they tried to get in. Of course I stopped them. I had to.”
“How did it happen?”
She sighed as she stirred. “Keep an eye on that clock. Let me know when ten minutes have passed. I need to add the vinegar then. And yes, I’ll answer your damn question. They wanted us to let their children in but they were all wiping snot off their faces so I said no. They thought I’d go all mushy if they brought up the children. No idea of psychology. I had children on my side of the gate, which ones did they think I was going to protect?
“So they buggered off and came back with shotguns. I wasn’t having that. Our guards had rifles, good revenant hunting rifles. We shot them and shot them again when they revenned. Hah. If I’d known what was coming I’d have put them in the pens with the others.
“So the villagers died. I’m not ashamed of it. We would have all died if I hadn’t kept them out. That’s why I was in charge and not some laboratory man. They wanted someone who’d been in the first outbreak and wasn’t going to get everyone killed.”
“How long was it before you went back out?”
“Two and a half years. Once we saw no one was coming for us and we were going to have to find our own food. And that was a mess, going down to the village. No more than a mile and it looked empty but as soon as you opened a door the revenants came out. The first expedition lost two men, after that we did a full scale extermination, got a lot of them in the pens as well. Not so short sighted any more. Anyway we got all the food that was left in the village. Lot of tins. They hadn’t had time to eat much of it before they started dying. We lasted nearly a year on what we got from there. Ten minutes.”
I’d completely forgotten the clock. “So what now?”
“Vinegar sets the mustard. Keeps the flavour good while it’s still strong. Not too much…” She poured a small measure of vinegar into the mustard paste, and mixed it in. “And now I need a jar.”
I called the infirmary and had them send over a sterile specimen jar, marked with a biohazard symbol, which made Olivia laugh. She then decided to make herself a picnic, and invited me along. We set up a small table outside in a meadow overlooking a plunging valley and Olivia demonstrated how to make a sandwich such as she had enjoyed on her world: meat and bread and butter and mustard and nothing else.
“How long is it since you’ve had one of these?” I asked.
She thought about it. “About a year after we locked ourselves in. That’s when the mustard ran out. We got a bit more when we started raiding but then there wasn’t enough grain for bread. Not proper bread. Do you want one?”
“Er…”
“I’ll spread the mustard thin.”
“Okay. I’m glad I brought some water.”
“You won’t need it. Here.”
She made me a sandwich, and I tried it as a child might, nibbling at the edge. But the mustard filled my nostrils with fire and I choked. Olivia chuckled to herself.
“Too strong?”
I nodded as I gulped back water. Olivia ate her own sandwich with every sign of contentment.
“So,” I coughed, “what were you actually doing there, at Tringarrick?”
“Research. It was a research station. I told you that. Little place in the middle of bloody nowhere stuck in a load of hills. Damn hard to get into or out of. Nothing there except a couple of villages and a little coal mine. Somebody decided it would be a good place to hide in an outbreak, and you know what, they were right. That’s why so many of us went there.”
“Okay, but what kind of research were you doing?”
“Anything that would kill revenants. We tried making a spray out of the marinade to stop a crowd, but that was no good, it just killed their skin. Lots of work on antibiotics, but we never got anywhere, just made a mess of the test subjects.”
“You kept revenants, then?”
“Had to. Had to have something we could run tests on. There was never a shortage. Whenever we ran out, we just opened the gates and made a noise.”
“Were you completely isolated?”
“Not to begin with. We lost the cities but the government moved into castles and forts and all that. We had a lot of those left over from the wars of the last century. We kept in touch with radio, just had to keep the dynamo wound up. All those knobbly knees taking turns on the bike! Bloody hilarious. Children loved it until they realised it was work.”
“Were your children there?”
“Yeh.” She took a bite of her sandwich.
“What was it like for them?”
She shrugged as she chewed. “They thought it was an adventure. To begin with, anyway. All the researchers brought their children to the station when we realised things were going to get bad. They were in the local school and all the kids spoke the language thereabouts, which was Wealsc. Our ones started coming back home speaking bits and pieces of it. Then the flu came and we had to close the gates and that was it.”
“How did they take it?”
“They didn’t understand. Well, some of the older ones did but they didn’t like it. We had them in the storage bunker during the battle so they didn’t see that.”
“How old were they?”
“All sorts. We had a couple of two year olds, then everything up to sixteen.”
“I mean your children.”
She munched on her sandwich for a moment, thinking. “Ten and twelve.”
“Did they know by then? About their father?”
“Yeh.”
“What did they think?”
“I was the one telling them what to do and daddy was the one who used to give them presents and never told them they had to do their shoelaces up. Oh, they loved him.”
“Did you have any therapists they could go to?”
“I wasn’t sending them to those bloody witch doctors! It wasn’t like here. They’d have had them taking pills all day, I saw what that was like, children taking those were like revenants without the hunger. I wasn’t having that. They had to lump it.”
“But you saw therapists.”
“They made me. And they weren’t therapists, they were psychiatrists and they didn’t have the faintest idea what they were talking about. Kept wanting me to erase engrams or some other nonsense. One thing I’ll give you lot, you don’t talk rubbish. You know how brains work.”
“Hm. So your children were resentful?”