Sixteen Horses by Greg Buchanan (readict TXT) 📕

off. I’d – I’d never work again, and I – I had to help – I didn’t know what he’d do, I—’

Cooper hit her head on a wooden beam as she picked up her boots.

‘It’s in you now, too. What’s in me, it’s in you. I never meant this. I never meant any of this.’

‘What’s in me?’ Cooper asked, starting to shake, her head pounding.

Lights came through the curtains.

‘I found a message . . . when I woke up, I found it,’ she whispered. ‘He loves you.’

The lights were red and blue.

There were men outside their homes.

‘For Ewe . . .’

It was the last thing Kate would ever say.

The men’s biohazard suits were pure white, almost fluorescent in that dark.

The hotel’s halls were deserted, just like they’d always been.

Outside, an ambulance waited for her. Multiple vehicles all around, a roadblock a little way along the shore keeping a smattered crowd back.

They gathered as they always gathered.

Reality began its collapse.

Boats headed out into the night.

‘We have reason to believe—’

Cooper couldn’t hear. She couldn’t think.

‘Infection—’

She thought of the horses, of the eyes in the earth.

She thought about that number, sixteen. That strange number. Not once had she wondered about it before; not once had she said a thing about it.

They gave her a sedative.

The world went black.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

Charles Elton woke up and found his wife gone.

He made the bed again, pulling the duvet back. It was 3 a.m., but he’d had five hours of sleep. He often found it difficult to get much more.

He shaved and showered, his face strangely red, or maybe it had been this red for a while, he didn’t know. He felt like it was a new start, somehow. Like the weather had broken. Like the air was clear.

He was supposed to go to the station today, or they’d arrest him, wouldn’t they? That was the threat.

He got dressed and went downstairs, calling out for a coffee from his wife.

There was no answer.

He went looking for her around the house and noticed some things.

He went outside, and her car was gone. Down the slope, the stables stood empty, too, their roofs wet. He didn’t remember it raining. Perhaps it was a trick of the night. It was hard to see. The fields were empty but for the red tractor, abandoned weeks ago, not moved since then.

Sometimes, Louise went for walks.

So she’d gone for a walk, then. Taken the car somewhere to get away. Who could blame her, what with the day they’d had?

He got his phone and went to the kitchen and made a list of groceries they might need. He texted them to her on the off-chance she might still be out and about in a few hours’ time.

He made himself a coffee, and a ham and cheese sandwich with brown bread. He waited and decided to tidy, to make the place nice.

He waited, and it was almost light, and still Louise had not answered. He checked his phone. She had seen his message.

It would be the last message she would ever send him, that notification, that ‘seen’. He lingered over his phone in the minutes to come, holding it there, thinking of what to say, what to type. Charlie is typing no doubt appeared a hundred times on her phone, but he never sent a message in the end, not then.

He found it a while later.

In his wife’s office, tidied now of all the photographs, there was a letter on the desk.

On the piece of paper there was a request, pasted in newspaper letters.

KILL YOURSELF.

Louise must have opened it. Must have seen it.

His name was on the front of the envelope.

The password to his encrypted hard drive lay below.

Are you coming back? he finally texted.

No reply came. He went to the bedroom, looked through his wife’s cupboards, her drawers. All of her jewellery was gone. Most of her clothing, too: their suitcase, absent from the loft.

He went down to his study, letter in hand, and sat amongst the horse plates, the horse paintings on the walls.

He sent a final message.

I love you, Louise. I love you.

There were still things he needed to do outside. Rubble that had to be cleared. Things he had to move. He tried to concentrate on that.

He burned the letter in the fireplace.

He went upstairs.

He took the gun from the safe, put it into his mouth, and pulled the trigger.

GRUINARD ISLAND, 1942

Three.

Two.

One.

Five men stand in gas masks. They are of different shapes and sizes, looking almost like a family huddled for a photograph. One of them has a camera. They direct it at bleating sheep.

The air is cold. The sea around them is peaceful.

The sheep have been accumulated in tethered masses near the detonation sites. The men stand far enough away that they are at little risk.

The countdown over, Vollum 14578 manifests in a cloud of dust. The air becomes brown near the sheep. It all happens on the end of a stick, the detonation toppling it, spores inhaled by all living things within a prepared radius.

The strain had been discovered in a cow in Oxford.

The man who discovered it gave his name to it, and Vollum was all that remained of him in the world, the final memory of his life.

The sheep die and are incinerated within days.

Men make the world warmer.

No one ever lives here again.

PART TWO:

THE HOLE IN THE WORLD

Day Four

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

There was an image in Cooper’s head, the last image.

The flesh of a horse’s face, laid out across a board.

Numbered tags poking into each lesion, ready for examination, for recording.

That was the final thing she could remember, the last remnant before she came to.

The skin from the face stretched out against the chrome and the white lights.

Skin that had been stroked a thousand times in rain and sun, a map of trauma and love.

She woke up.

Specialists from Public Health, police officers from surrounding areas, they had come for her on the roads.

What’s in me, it’s in