The Beacon (Earth Haven Book 2) Page 10

  Now and again, she would wander away to the wooden rail that bounded the boardwalk in front of the stores. There she would pause, lightly gripping the rail, running her fingers along it almost playfully. Her features were plain, nondescript, but she gazed off into some unseen distance, a hint of a smile playing at the corners of her mouth. In those moments, in the pale December morning, she looked angelic.

  Then she turned back to the stores and was in front of him, grasping the handle of the door to the hardware store. This time she did not change her mind, but pulled the door open and entered. Zach hurried up the steps to the boardwalk and followed her in.

  The familiar smells of paint and creosote and wood shavings assailed his nostrils. The interior, as usual, was not well lit and he stood for a moment inside the doorway allowing his vision to adjust to the gloom.

  He noticed her immediately. She was wandering among the shelves, picking up items apparently at random then replacing them. Tools, cans, packaging, she seemed intent on touching objects for the sake of touching them.

  As she approached the door to leave, Zach found that he couldn’t bring himself to lower his gaze in his customary fashion, but continued to watch her. The woman halted before him and stared up into his face.

  Zach was distantly aware of a faint scratching somewhere. It sounded crazy, but he had been sure at the time and he was sure now with hindsight: the ‘somewhere’ was inside his head. The woman’s eyes widened; then her features softened. She regarded him with something akin to pity.

  “Never mind, honey,” she said gently. “All the pain will soon disappear.”

  The woman raised her hand to Zach’s cheek and caressed it. Befuddled by the sensation in his head, Zach did not obey his instinct to shy away from her touch. By the time he thought to do so, she had dropped her hand, stepped past him and disappeared out of the door. When he emerged a few minutes later, clutching his purchases in his arms, she had gone from sight.

  Once or twice on the drive home, Zach raised a hand to his cheek where she had touched him.

  That night, he heard on the radio the first reports of a strange virus that had killed some people in Los Angeles and Sydney, Australia. A few days later, he was coughing and shivering, and the weak December light had become too bright.

  In the hours before he retired to what he assumed would be his death bed, Zach listened to the radio as it became apparent that what they had taken to calling the Millennium Bug was a full-blown pandemic of epic proportions. As civilisation teetered on the brink and slowly toppled, airtime was given over to an increasingly zealous-sounding string of people propounding weird and wonderful theories of why the Millennium Bug had been visited upon humankind. Most of these theories were so outlandish as to make him laugh, despite his growing sense of doom, but there was one that struck a chord and made him think again of the woman in the hardware store.

  “. . . cannot prove it, but I believe the Millennium Bug was started deliberately,” said the earnest voice of the theorist, a young-sounding male.

  “Deliberately?” said the incredulous voice of the talk-show host. “But how? By whom? And why?”

  “How is probably the easiest of your questions to answer,” said the theorist. “There are many possible methods from infecting water supplies to releasing spores into the air on a windy day. But the most likely to my mind is to manufacture the virus in the form of an organic powder, one that can be spread by contact. Of course, that only works if you have sufficient disciples to be able to spread the powder globally. Which brings us on to your next question—by whom? Extreme right-wing cults are the most likely suspects, though I have heard speculation that it might be aliens. . . .”

  Zach had stopped listening at that point. His mind was replaying the scene: the woman dipping her hand into her bag and touching things. Touching him. . . .

  When Zach pulled out of his brush with the Millennium Bug, he was probably more fortunate than many other survivors, if there were any. His electricity and water supplies still worked. He had fresh food in his greenhouse and preserved foods in his pantry.

  He had fully recovered, been out and shot a deer, when it happened. He was sitting on a log behind the cabin, skinning the buck and musing on whether to take a trip into town to see what supplies he could salvage, and whether indeed there were any other survivors around—the answer to this question wasn’t a burning issue as far as Zach was concerned, but he was curious nonetheless—when he felt the same scratching sensation inside his head that he had experienced in the hardware store when the woman stopped and stared at him. This time, the sensation was stronger; he could hear the scratching, like fingernails scraping the inside of his skull. With a low moan, he dropped the knife and raised bloody hands to his temples.

  Do not seek out others said the voice. Zach glanced wildly around but there was nobody to be seen. Remain here. Burn bodies. Do not seek out others.

  The only time Zach had obeyed orders was when he had been a grunt in ’Nam and even then he had privately resented being told what to do. This voice, wherever it had come from—he knew it had come from somewhere; he didn’t believe he was mad despite evidence to the contrary—this voice was compelling.

  Zach obeyed.

  Chapter Eight

  All five of them braved the wind and rain. Only Dusty seemed to enjoy it, loping by their sides, scooting away to investigate a curious scent, reappearing with his tail wagging and tongue licking at raindrops on his muzzle. Nothing else moved on the streets, except blown litter and the fairy lights strung overhead that swayed in the gusts.

  Peter pointed at a plaque attached to the wall of a building.

  “Look. They have a small-bore rifle club here in town.” They crossed the road and Peter tried the wooden door to the building. “Hmm. This door’s sturdy and very firmly locked. Not sure how we’d break in. Probably have to ram it with something.” He let go of the handle. “Doubt there’s any shotguns in there. You don’t want to be messing around with rifles, not with your lack of experience. You’ll be better off with shotguns.”

  They moved on through the streets. The raucous cries of gulls sounded overhead and, in the distance, they could hear the rattle of spinnakers from the boats in the harbour.

  The shops were all locked, many shuttered. If there had been any civil unrest in Wick during the last days of the plague, they saw no evidence.

  After twenty minutes of trudging through the rain, Tom was beginning to feel damp in both body and spirit. He stopped. Ceri and Peter stopped, too, but Diane carried on walking.

  “I don’t think we’re going to find a hardware shop,” Tom said. “Is there even such a thing any more?”

  “Not likely,” said Ceri. “It’s all charity shops and fast food bars these days.”

  “I think you may be right,” said Peter. “Let’s walk to the end of this street. If there’s nothing, we’ll try to find an out-of-town store.”

  “Hey, guys!” Diane had stopped twenty yards ahead in front of a plate-glass window. “This place has tools.”

  Tom stayed outside with Dusty to keep him from cutting his paws on broken glass, while the others entered the shop through one of the doors. Tom and Peter used a cast iron litter bin as a battering ram and it made short work of the plate glass of the door.

  They emerged after ten minutes, carrying canvas tool bags.

  “Got hammers, pincers, screwdrivers, chisels, rasps, hacksaws,” Peter informed Tom.

  “Bolt cutters?”

  “Nope. Some powerful pliers, though, and a huge screwdriver that we’ll be able to exert a lot of leverage with. And I’ve got a cordless drill with some charge in the battery. Brought a load of spare batteries as well. If all else fails, we might be able to drill through any locks we encounter.”

  Peter handed a bag to Tom. “We won’t need to break into the camping shop. We found oil lamps and camping stoves that use lumps of paraffin. There are enough in there to keep us going for weeks. They’ll be useful if we decide
to cross to Norway.”

  “That’s a big ‘if’,” said Ceri.

  “Norway?” said Diane. “You folks are thinking of going to Norway?”

  “No,” said Tom. “Peter is. We’re not.”

  “Maybe now isn’t the best time,” said Peter.

  “No,” agreed Tom. “Let’s get going. I want to call in that shop we passed that sells pet food.”

  Ceri stifled a giggle. “Except we’ll have to bash the door in and our ‘purchases’ won’t cost us a penny.”

  They also broke into a small supermarket and a clothes shop, and were heavily laden by the time they made it back to the hotel. They left the food, for person and dog, and the cooking equipment in the hotel kitchen. They each exchanged wet outer garments for dry ones they had brought back with them. The tools they loaded into the back of the Range Rover. The body of the vehicle was dented and scraped as a result of its encounter with a drystone wall in Herefordshire, but the engine and tyres were undamaged, and it still handled well according to Peter.

  Tom took the passenger seat. Dusty sat in the middle of the rear seat, between the two women, but curled up tightly against Ceri with his head on her lap. While he did not display open antagonism towards Diane, he seemed more wary of her than he was of Peter, and avoided her whenever he could.

  Although unused for a few days, the engine started first time. Peter pulled away from the kerb and headed out of town.

  “So,” said Tom, addressing Peter. “This beacon thing, er, Stonehenge. . . . ?”

  “What about it?”

  “What is it?”

  “It’s a beacon.”

  “O-kay. Can you elaborate?”

  Peter sighed. “It won’t do you much good, but all right. When configured correctly, it will send out an electromagnetic pulse. A powerful one. It will be picked up by our people who are making their way through Earth Home’s solar system as we speak. When they are free of that system’s gravitational fields, they will hitch a ride on a, well, for want of a better word, a current. The pulse will ensure that they leave the current in the correct solar system. It will also ensure they land on the correct planet. We almost chose the wrong one when we arrived.” He uttered a short, humourless laugh.

  “What will they have to do to configure it correctly?”

  “Well, Stonehenge—the original one that I saw constructed almost five thousand years ago—consisted of sixty-three stones, each with a strong electromagnetic potential. Bluestones they’re known as.”

  “Are they the ones that came from the Preseli Mountains in West Wales?” asked Ceri from the back.

  “The very same. When our craft landed in the Atlantic and we made our way to land, some of our people came ashore in West Wales. They discovered the stone on their way to Salisbury Plain. After we had called the drones to us, we set them to quarrying and transporting the stones. It took many months.”

  “And we still speculate as to how they were transported,” mused Tom. “Or at least we did. So how was it done? Wooden rollers? Rafts?”

  “A combination of both,” said Peter. “And a lot of manpower. There were many drones and our control over them was absolute.”

  “You could work them until they dropped?” asked Ceri, an edge to her voice.

  “Yes,” said Peter. “Be angry at me if you like, Ceri, but I’m not going to apologise for cruelty that took place five millennia ago to creatures that you and Tom would barely recognise as human if you were to meet them today.”

  “Oh, that’s all right then,” said Ceri. “If they were only creatures. . . .”

  “Look,” said Peter, “if you want to start debating the rights and wrongs of the way drones—”

  Ceri pointedly cleared her throat.

  “Okay,” said Peter, “the way humans were treated back then, you’d better be ready to defend the way humans have treated animals and each other during the intervening years. Battery farming, slavery, genocide. . . . Need I continue?”

  “Back to this beacon,” said Tom, before Ceri could respond. “The bluestones were brought to Salisbury from West Wales. . . .”

  “Yes,” said Peter. “They were each upended into pits to form a circle.”

  “Why sixty-three? Is that some magical number?”

  “There were sixty-three stones because sixty-three was sufficient to do the job.”

  “But I’ve been to Stonehenge,” said Ceri. “The bluestones don’t form a circle. They’re dotted about between the other stones, you know, the huge ones placed on top of each other like goalposts. They’ve got a name. Begins with ‘s’.”

  “Sarsen stones,” said Tom. He glanced back at Ceri and shrugged. “My class did a project on Stonehenge.”

  “That’s true,” said Peter. “But the sarsen stones weren’t brought to the site, from a quarry much nearer incidentally, until a few hundred years later. The bluestones were moved from their original positions at around the same time. It had nothing to do with us. The Beacon had served its purpose by then. Since we can’t be certain the source of the pulse that was transmitted five millennia ago hasn’t been lost or forgotten, we will need to send another to be sure.”

  “So how can we stop it?”

  Peter took his eyes off the road for a moment to favour Tom with a look of incredulity. “We can’t,” he said. “We are four. They are almost five thousand. And they probably have control of at least that many humans.”

  “Not humans any longer,” said Diane. Tom had almost forgotten she was with them. “All survivors who arrived in London have been treated so that our control over them is once more complete. Whether Ceri and Tom like the expression or not, they are nothing now but drones.”

  “Yes,” said Peter. “And there is nothing we can do against so many.”

  “But surely they won’t all need to go to Stonehenge to do whatever they have to do to get it working again.”

  “Maybe. I don’t know.”

  “Actually,” said Diane, “Tom’s probably right. They only need take sufficient drones to reposition the stones and to reactivate the Beacon. And only sufficient of our people to control the drones.”

  “That’ll still be too many for us to be able to interfere,” said Peter. “Way too many.”

  “We could get a tank,” said Tom. “Machine guns. Hand grenades. Missile launchers. There must be tons of this stuff just lying around waiting for us to pick it up. Wait! We could probably get hold of a nuclear warhead. Blow them all to hell while they’re gathered in one place.”

  The vehicle slowed to an abrupt halt. Ceri gasped from the back and Dusty uttered a soft whine.

  “Sorry,” muttered Peter. He turned to face Tom. “Can you hear yourself? Tanks? Missile launchers? Nuclear bombs? Even if they were just lying around, which they most certainly won’t be, do you seriously think we’d know how to use them? I was in the merchant navy, Tom, the merchant navy. I’ve not fired a gun since 1945 and that was a bolt action Enfield. And you’re a schoolteacher, Tom. A schoolteacher. Not bloody Rambo!”

  Tom felt his face reddening under Peter’s onslaught. He opened his mouth to say something, though he was not sure what, but Peter hadn’t finished.

  “And Ceri,” Peter said, turning to gesture towards her. “Ceri’s a school dinner lady. You want to stick a rocket launcher in her hands and send her up against a couple of thousand people? Armed people, at that. Diane and I can protect you to a point against their mind control, but we can’t stop their bullets from cutting you in half. Which only leaves Diane. Unless she’s trained in modern guerrilla warfare. . . . ?” Peter glanced at her.

  Diane shook her head. “Can’t stand guns,” she said. “They frighten me.”

  “With good reason,” Peter said. “Tom, I said it was a good idea for you and Ceri to arm yourselves—and it is—but for protection against animals. Not so that you can take it into your head to launch some sort of charge of the light brigade. Seriously, you need to dismiss such thoughts right now. Or I’m going to have
second thoughts about helping you to find weapons.”

  Tom chewed on his bottom lip, the gesture a throwback to when he was a child being scolded. His mind broiled with possible retorts, but ultimately he knew that Peter was right. He let out a deep breath.

  “I don’t know what I was thinking.” His shoulders sagged. “I feel so helpless. I want to be able to do something. I don’t want to just sit around for the next five months waiting to die.”

  He felt a hand squeeze his shoulder. Ceri had leaned forward, tears glistening in her eyes. He laid his hand on top of hers and squeezed back.

  “Okay,” said Peter, the anger gone from his voice. He gestured through the windscreen. “There’s your castle. Let’s go find your guns.”

  * * * * *

  The man—his name was Luke—had washed and changed out of his blood-stained clothes. He stood before Milandra and the Deputies, scrubbed and shiny, rocking a little from foot to foot as though uncomfortable under their scrutiny.

  “Luke. Please, sit,” said Milandra, nodding to the chair nearby.

  Luke sat and folded his hands in his lap.

  “Tell us what happened,” said Milandra.

  He cleared his throat. “I was out on patrol this morning.” He spoke with a hint of an eastern European accent: ‘was’ sounded like ‘voz’. “Three of us in a team. Looking for rats. And, wow, we didn’t have to look too hard. They are everywhere!”

  Simone giggled. “They’re pouring into the Burning Fields and running into the bonfire.” She clapped her hands like an excited schoolgirl. “It’s like, ‘Phooey!’ but you can hear them exploding. They sound like popcorn. Can I go back soon?”

  Milandra glanced at the Chosen and tried to mask her irritation. “It is important that we all hear this, Simone. Once we’ve digested what Luke has to tell us, then maybe.” She turned back to Luke and nodded. “Please, continue.”