White and Other Tales of Ruin

keep the cylinder open.” There were three compressed air cylinders on the back seat next to Gemma. One had already run out, the second had been opened for several minutes.

“What about when they run out, Dad?” Gemma said sensibly. Damn her, she was so sensible. “What then? Will the air come in from outside?”

“It already is,” Lucy-Anne muttered from the passenger seat.

Doug glared at his wife but she did not turn, did not register his attention.

“It won’t, honey,” he said instead. “The pressure inside will keep it out.”

“But what if those things can crawl.”

There was no answer to that, so Doug did not attempt one. Instead he glanced at the man on the screens, saw that his stomach was already possessed of a sick, fluid motion. He leant on the horn. “Get a bloody move on.” He wanted Gemma to see as little of this as possible.

“If they were here, honey, we’d know it by now.” Lucy-Anne sighed. “They’d have started on the car.”

“Don’t talk like that!” Doug said.

“It’s true!”

“Yes,” he replied weakly, “but not… in front of Gemma.”

“Why is nobody helping him?” his daughter asked without conviction. She was only ten, but she had learned a lot over the past few days. Like sometimes you just can’t help people. If they can’t help themselves… and against this, no one could… then it’s best to leave them and forget about them, pretend that they never were.

In minutes, this man they were watching from afar would no longer exist, and hours later the same thing would be happening right where they were.

As the traffic moved off Doug heard his daughter turn up the air release valve on the second cylinder. He took one last glance at the TV screens and saw why.

The picture was flickering and spinning as the nanos started work on the helicopter.

Half an hour later they edged out of the city, along with what seemed like a million other people. Doug was unsure as to why the countryside seemed to offer any better protection from what was soon to come. It was survival instinct, he supposed, an urge to flee that was perhaps a racial hangover from all the wars and ethnic conflicts there had been down through the centuries. As children his grandparents had been evacuated to families they did not know to live lives they could not understand, and now he was subjecting his wife and daughter to the same. Leaving what they knew for what they did not. Except in this case, there was no escaping the reason for their flight. No running from what could — and would — be everywhere. May as well try to leave gravity behind.

But he had to do something. There was no argument. There was always a chance.

He kept in the fast lane of the motorway doing little more than twenty miles per hour. His right ankle was aching where he had it tensed on the gas pedal, yearning to press it down and lay out more miles between them and the city. Other cars tried to dart in and out as and when spaces became available, and there were more than a few fender benders. Normally motorists would stop and help. Now they simply slowed down, joined forces temporarily to shove the bumped cars aside with their own, and went on their way.

It was a scorching summer day. Everyone had their windows up. Doug caught the eye of a few drivers and there was always mistrust there, an animal fear of the unknown — even unknown people — in these times of peril. It made him realise how little it had all really changed, how far humanity had not come, even though it liked to think itself way and above the rest of nature. There were those scientists who had claimed to be a few years away from the Theory of Everything. Now those self-same egotistical bastards were clouds of gas radiating outward from the hub of humankind’s doom.

Where that centre was, few people knew any more. Those who did were dead, mixing themselves with the scientists who had killed them, the laboratories they had been working in, the clothes there were wearing, the test tubes and the microscopes and the particle accelerators and the cultures and the notebooks full of folly…

“Dad, I want a pee,” Gemma whined.

“Oh honey, you’ll have to hold it for a while,” Lucy-Anne said.

Doug glanced across at his wife. He’d been ignoring her. He saw her afresh for the briefest instant and realised how much he loved her. He held back a startled sob.

“But Mum — ”

“Your mum’s right, Gemma. Hold on tight and you can go soon.”

“When?”

“Soon.”

“But — ”

“Gemma,” Doug said, his voice low, “did you see the man on the TV?”

“Yes,” she said quietly. “He was all… going.”

“He had a nasty… it was a bug, Gemma. It’s in the air where he was, and it’s spreading. We don’t want to catch it, and if we stop — ”

“And I don’t want you to catch it!” she spurted out, bursting into tears and gasping great hitched sobs into the car. “I don’t want you and Mummy to catch it!”

Doug felt his temper rising and hated himself for it. She was terrified, she’d seen people dying on TV, dying for Christ’s sake. At her age the worst he’d ever seen was a squashed cat by the side of the road. He’d put flowers there, tied to a lamp post. The cat had gone the next day. His child’s mind had seen death as a temporary state.

Lucy-Anne had turned fully in her seat and was hugging Gemma, soothing her with gentle Mum-words that Doug could not hear. He reached out and patted his wife’s behind, giving her a quick squeeze: all going to be alright, he tried to impart. He knew she’d know he was lying, but comfort was important. Civilisation was important. Without routine and hope, civilisation would crumble.

He remembered the pictures from Rome, beamed in seconds before the cameras were swamped and stripped and dismantled to their component atoms by the nanos: a great cloud looming in the distance; a soup of all things organic, metallic, plastic, historic, rock and water and air. The nanos took it all, dismantled everything and spurted it across the land like reality’s white noise.

Oh my God, Lucy-Anne had gasped, squeezing his hand, spilling a tear of red wine from her glass. Surely they can do something about it?

They?

Well, the scientists. The… But she had trailed off as the view jumped further north, showing the whole horizon as an indistinct blur, the land and air merged. Armageddon moved with the wind, the nanos flowing with the air and crawling through the ground itself, so it was said.

“Doug, she really needs to pee.”

He looked in the rearview mirror and saw Gemma rocking in his wife’s grip. A horn tooted, tyres squealed, he glanced forward and slammed on his brakes just as he heard the doom-laden crunch of metal and glass impacting. The accident was several cars in front of them in the slow lane, a Mondeo twisted under the tailgate of a big wagon. The wagon was still moving. Even as a terrible flame licked from beneath the Mondeo’s bonnet, and as the driver struggled to open a door distorted shut, the wagon was still moving. It’s driver knew that to stop was to die, eventually.

“Oh Jesus,” Lucy-Anne whispered, and Doug put his foot down on the gas. At least something had changed — rubber-neckers had altered their priorities, and they now wanted to leave the scene as soon as possible. Maybe it was the danger from fire, but more likely it was the heat of guilt.

“You can go on the floor in the back,” Doug said. “You hear me, honey?”

“I can’t pee on the floor,” Gemma said in disgust. “It’s horrible!”

“Do as Daddy says if you’re really desperate. If not hold on, and you can go when we stop.”

“When do we stop?” Doug asked, and wished he hadn’t. He saw Lucy-Ann staring at him but he kept facing forward.

“I don’t know. What’s the plan? Do we have one, other than leaving our home like… like rats from…?”

“Hey, come on, it was you as much as me! When they reported the first case in Paris — ”

“I’m sorry Doug,” she said quickly, and she squeezed his leg. He liked that, he always had. A touch could speak volumes.