Caitlin gave Daphne's arm a squeeze, silently cursing the impotence of the gesture to convey all the razor emotions but not knowing any other way to express them.
'I think we'll have a little time alone, dear,' Eileen said, her eyes brimming. She led Daphne away to a quiet corner where they crumpled into each other. Caitlin watched them with feelings so raw they made her throat burn. That one symbol summed up everything she had felt over the past year: the suffering and the strength, the heartbreak and the hopelessness. The humanity. Too exhausted to cry, Caitlin pulled her battered all- weather parka on tightly and forced her way out into the storm. The rain was cold and hard, the roaring wind buffeting her. Yet she felt swaddled in cotton wool, and that the harsh, uncompromising world was just a dream.
The sense of unreality had been growing since the Fall. It had started with the Government's unspecified announcement of some threat on the home front and the subsequent imposition of martial law and a media blackout. Travel had been limited, and with the telephone network down, the only available information was always leavened with an unhealthy dose of rumour, gossip and downright lies. Newcastle had been wiped out. The Royal Family was in exile. Nuclear disaster, a military coup, an attack by some rogue state — never identified — an epidemic of some awful bioengineered disease. She'd always discounted that last one, but the evidence of the past week had made her think it was probably the truth, or part of it. Perhaps the Fall had been caused by some conglomeration of all the rumours.
Whatever the answer, life in the intervening months had been too hard to give it too much consideration — the first weeks of near-starvation when the shops and supermarkets stopped being stocked, the slow crawl to set up the distribution of locally supplied food, and even more months on subsistence level while new sources were established. But slowly, slowly, they had got back on their feet… until the plague had come.
She didn't know whether it had swept the country or if it was a localised phenomenon. It had come too fast, too hard, to comprehend. She bowed her head into the gale and attempted to dodge the puddles, but without streetlights it was a struggle to see. They had some power during the day thanks to a wind turbine erected by a local engineer and solar panels scavenged from a nearby health farm, but it was conserved at night. The national grid hadn't come back on line; the nights remained black, friendless and frightening, filled with all the stories she had heard from the more superstitious residents.
It was just a short walk along the High Street, but then she had to negotiate the winding lane to their barn conversion; she wished they'd bought a place in the centre of the village. When she reached the rutted track, it was even darker than the built-up area, where at least a few candles had glimmered through the window panes. The trees, just coming into bud, pressed tightly on either side, the hedgerows wild and untrimmed. Before she stepped into the lane, she couldn't help succumbing to the primal desire to glance behind her. It was then that she saw something strange and disturbing. They'd kept the electric lights on at the village hall since they had started using it as an infirmary-cum-mortuary and from her slightly elevated position she could now see the bright windows clearly above the rooftops of the houses at the lower end of the village. Yet when she had turned back, briefly those windows had been obscured. No swaying trees lay in her line of sight; something had passed in front of the hall, but from her perspective she knew it would have to have been something much larger than a person. It was a simple thing, barely worth comment, yet inexplicably it touched a nerve, triggering a ratchet of fear. She hurried along the lane, overhanging branches reaching down to grab at her hood. The lane was half a mile long, doglegging to the left before rising sharply to the ridge on which the converted barns rested. On the slope it became more exposed to the elements and she had to struggle to make progress against the gale which thrashed the trees on either side. Nothing could be heard above the maelstrom of the storm, yet she couldn't shake the feeling that there had been footsteps, or hoof beats, on the road behind.
It was irrational, stupid even, but it pulled tingling sparks up from the pit of her belly. She looked back again, saw nothing but darkness and the movement of shadowy vegetation.
Get off the road! a voice in her head said. The notion was so powerful and so unexpected it was shocking. There was no reason for her to be scared, but then an overwhelming sense of presence came upon her from nowhere, a feeling so frightening that she fought the urge to run. Someone was behind her.
She looked back again. The storm rushed all around. Stupid. She was getting as superstitious as some of those villagers who had come to believe there were ghosts and devils and mythical beasts away in the countryside.
When she returned her attention to the path ahead she was startled to see a big black bird standing in the centre of the lane. It was a hooded crow, bigger than any she had ever seen before. That it was there at night, in the middle of a storm, was discomfiting enough, but the way it kept one beady eye fixed on her brought a chill to her spine.
Caitlin took two steps forward to shoo it away, but it still didn't budge. She had never experienced anything so unnatural. Everything about the bird frightened her. She had the uneasy feeling that it wouldn't let her pass. Hesitating, she gave in to her irrationality despite herself and clambered over a gate into a field before moving into the trees that lined the road.
Peering over the hedge, she saw that the crow was no longer there. Typical, she thought, uncomfortable as the wet undergrowth soaked her jeans. That'll teach me to be childish. Yet the feeling that something was coming up the lane behind her was still growing; goose pimples ran up and down her arms.
Caught in the wind, the trees, bushes and grass moved with an eerie life of their own. She forced her way through the dripping vegetation, the wind slowly dropping as the storm finally began to move away, the staccato drip of rain from branches the final percussive reminder.
Caitlin realised she was holding her breath; her instinct was responding to something beyond her senses, but whatever was out there gradually crept into the edge of her perception. At first she thought the wind was picking up again, until she noticed that there was structure to the sound.
Whispering, she realised with a strange chill. People talking in rustling voices, yet making no attempt to remain unheard. The conversation floated amongst the trees, insinuating itself within the drip-drip-drip of rain, growing louder as it approached.
It sounded so bizarre. Caitlin wondered who would venture out at that time of night in such a fierce storm. The lane only led to four barn conversions and Caitlin couldn't imagine any of her neighbours talking in such a strange manner.
Yet as the whispering intensified, Caitlin realised it was not becoming any more comprehensible. It seemed to her a foreign language, at times like Russian, something northern and guttural, at others incorporating the florid clicks and glottal stops of an African tribal dialect. The hairs on her neck grew erect.
With a feeling of rising dread, she quickly dropped to her haunches, holding her breath tight in her chest. The road was just about visible through the hedge.
The whispering surrounded her like icy fingers playing along her spine. Although she couldn't understand the words, it carried with it an air of menace, cunning and, floating underneath it, something profoundly despairing. The complex sounds did not appear likely to have been formed in a human throat.