We Hear Voices Read online

  BERKLEY

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  penguinrandomhouse.com

  Copyright © 2020 by Emily Barr

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Green, Evie, author.

  Title: We hear voices / Evie Green.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Berkley, 2020.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020002363 (print) | LCCN 2020002364 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593098301 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593098325 (ebook)

  Subjects: GSAFD: Horror fiction.

  Classification: LCC PR6102.A77 W4 2020 (print) | LCC PR6102.A77 (ebook) | DDC 823/.92—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020002363

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020002364

  Jacket image of child by Cat Simpson / Shutterstock

  Jacket design by Katie Anderson

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  pid_prh_5.6.1_c0_r0

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  Chapter Fifty-Seven

  Chapter Fifty-Eight

  Chapter Fifty-Nine

  Chapter Sixty

  Chapter Sixty-One

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  For Craig, my husband

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  This book is arriving in a very different world from the one in which it was written. When I finished writing, late in 2019, the novel coronavirus was just beginning to appear on the horizon, and we had no idea about what was to come. So I find this post-pandemic novel being sent out into a pandemic-altered world. As I write, the world has just passed one million cases of COVID-19 and life has changed dramatically for all of us.

  This book is not a response to any of that. It was already written. It’s just a piece of fanciful fiction inspired by a John Wyndham novel I read when I was nine.

  To all the health workers, all the scientists working on a response to the virus, and particularly to my friend Kevin Fong, who talked space travel through with me in that different era and who is currently working flat-out in London fighting the virus: thank you more than words can say.

  Evie Green

  April 2020

  ONE

  Rachel threw the medical mask on the floor, climbed out of the quarantine suit, and took her son in her arms. He was so light and bony that it was like picking up a stray cat. She buried her face in his hair. He smelled like sickness and plague.

  Billy had been sick for a month. For almost all of that time she had believed he would get better, but tonight she knew he wouldn’t. Rachel was living in a single moment: she felt it had lasted a thousand years, and she wanted to stretch it to infinity, because she couldn’t bear to step into the moment that would come next. She bargained with the universe. She would take any future it could throw at her as long as it involved Billy staying alive.

  She was supposed to wear her full mask and quarantine suit, and she had done it until now. She had followed the rules to the letter, trusted the government, done everything she was supposed to do to take care of her boy, and none of it had worked.

  She sat on his bed and shuffled back so she was leaning on the wall with Billy lying in her arms. Downstairs, she could hear Al talking to Beth, and Henry talking to Nina. She loosened her grip a little, because she didn’t want to hurt Billy, and she kissed him all over his face, but he didn’t respond. He was breathing, though. Those sickly breaths were still coming.

  Billy’s bedroom was tiny, with a single bed, a bedside table, a chair, and a chest of drawers. The walls were a dirty white (the landlord wouldn’t let her paint them, and when she tried to clean them, the paint rubbed off), but she and Billy had covered them with drawings, posters, things he liked. All that was gone now. Rachel had taken it all down and put it into a box, then washed the walls with disinfectant, like the rules said. Once, a million years ago, the room had been a giant mess, with Legos and dirty clothes and drawings and books all over the floor. Now it was sterile, pristine. The government guide to dealing with the pandemic was on the bedside table, along with a glass of the powdered drink that had come in sachets with the guidelines, with a metal straw and a pile of medication that was mainly placebo.

  She had done everything by the book. She had sent Nina to live with her dad, even though that had almost killed her. This room was separated from the rest of the house with two sets of the plastic sheets the government had sent out, and the only person who ever walked through them was Rachel, and then (until now) only in her quarantine suit and mask. It had been logistically difficult, with baby Beth, but she had done it.

  Tonight, though, they had taken turns using the suit. She had lent it to her ex-husband so that he could say good-bye to Billy, their son. She had sat downstairs with a cup of tea while Henry spent an hour with him. Then Al, and then Nina had gone in, one by one, and now there were only Rachel and Billy in the
world. She was glad she had ditched the suit and the mask. She was just herself now, wearing her baggy sweater and pajama trousers, holding her child. Billy needed to see his mother as he died, rather than a figure in a space suit, and he was hardly going to be infectious now. She picked up his toy rabbit from the pillow and put it on his chest.

  He took in a breath. Nothing happened. He breathed out. Still alive. Billy is alive, she thought. Still Billy right now.

  She would carry on living after this, because she had to. She had to do it for Beth and for Nina. She thought of the times she had shouted at Billy for being slow, or had been cross with him for being cheeky or for his table manners. What, she wondered, had been the point? What had been the fucking point? If she could go back, she would let him spend all six years climbing trees and watching telly and eating cake. She would grant him six years of perfect happiness, even though she supposed that might mean staying with Henry for longer than she would have liked.

  Billy was so pale that his face was a bluish green color. His hair was slicked back with sweat. His temperature soared while he shivered. She waited for the next breath. When it didn’t come, she pulled him tighter against her chest, trying to use her heart to jump-start his.

  “Billy,” she whispered into his hair. “Billy, it’s Mum. Stay. Stay with me.” She looked up, her child in her arms. “Universe,” she muttered. “God,” she added, hedging her bets. “Allah. Whoever you are. Give me Billy back. Give me my Billy, and I promise I will do anything. I’ll sell my soul to anyone. Let me keep him.”

  Nothing changed.

  Millions of people had died. Billy would add one to the number of casualties. Children under ten were particularly at risk. Plus one for the children-under-ten statistics.

  “Please,” she said. She kissed his head one more time. One more. One more. “I love you, Billy.” She pushed her face into his and rubbed her warm cheek on his cooling one and tried to imagine her life without him.

  He wasn’t moving. He wasn’t breathing. He had . . .

  “Let me keep him,” she said. “I don’t care what else. Let me have Billy.”

  His body jerked in her arms, and he opened his eyes, just a fraction. She felt his lungs expand. She heard him exhale, felt the sour breath on her face. He inhaled again with a rattling noise, a vibration. He was breathing.

  “Mumma,” he said, his eyes still closed.

  Downstairs, the baby started to cry.

  * * *

  • • •

  Nina was downstairs, waiting. Her father and stepfather were waiting. Their stilted conversation had long since dried up. Dad had never been in this house before, and he would, she knew, have raised an eyebrow at its shabbiness under normal circumstances. But these circumstances were not normal. Right now Al was getting Beth ready for bed, and Dad and Nina were staring at their phones because it was easier to sit in silence if you had something to look at.

  “Cup of tea?” she said.

  “Sure,” said Dad, forcing a smile. “Thanks.”

  Billy was going to die. She knew (because how could you not?) that the trajectory he had taken would end that way. That was how it went. The pandemic had arrived, and the people were dying, and somehow she, Nina Stevens, was waiting for her mother or her stepfather to walk into the room and tell her that her brother was dead.

  Everyone knew people who had died. From her observations, about one in five people who caught the J5X virus died from it. That was what had happened at school, and as the illness was no respecter of money or class, it was about the same at her boyfriend’s very much more exclusive school. Even Princess Louisa, the heir to the throne, had disappeared from view a few months ago; she had been only a little older than Billy and had obviously died, although it had been kept secret because of public morale, et cetera. People got ill, with a soaring fever, and quite a lot of them died. Schools had closed, opened again, closed, and then opened. Nothing really seemed to change the way the virus traveled.

  Nina had been reading about the bubonic plague. If you’d caught the plague in this same city, nearly seven hundred years earlier, your chances of dying would have been more than half. There had been other pandemics since then over the years, some more severe than others. No one seemed to know quite why this one was called J5X, and most people ignored that name. As it became more familiar, it had become almost universally known as “flu.”

  She had seen her brother tonight for the first time since the beginning of December, last year. But it had not been Billy. He had been a husk, barely there at all. In a sense, to Nina, he was already dead. It had been the worst Christmas ever.

  * * *

  • • •

  Mum had called her yesterday. “Come over,” she’d said, her voice husky. “And . . . I think you need to bring Dad. Billy won’t last the night. You need to see Billy to say . . .” She hadn’t been able to say the word. Nina had tried to be strong, but as soon as the call ended, she had cried and cried and cried. She went to Dad for comfort because he was all she had, and he hugged her and pretended that Billy would be fine. Then he agreed that they should both go to Mum’s house to see him, and now here they were, in the rented house with its drafts and its peeling paint, letting their tea go cold.

  But Mum stayed upstairs until after midnight, and then when she did come down, the news was different.

  * * *

  • • •

  On that same night, in a different part of London, a man was sitting at his wife’s bedside. Her face was waxy, her skin white, with blotches that sometimes looked pink, sometimes almost blue. She was sixty-seven years old and she, too, was dying of the flu. He pushed the hair back from her face and talked without stopping.

  “Imogen,” he said. “Immy, I’ve been an idiot. You are the most wonderful person in the world. I love you. Please, don’t go. Please. Please. Please, don’t, darling. Please, stay and let me look after you. I’ll make it up to you, I swear. Please, stay with me.”

  He said it all, and he meant every word of it.

  TWO

  Two days later, Al came home furious. He walked straight into the living room, switched the television on, and flicked around with the remote until he found the news.

  “Sorry,” he said to Rachel. He was still standing up, and he paused and kissed her. “So rude. I’m really sorry. How’s Billy? Where’s Beth?”

  Al and Billy had lived in the same house for all these weeks, but they had barely seen each other since the terrible night when they’d realized Billy was sick. Billy had lived in his tiny sterile zone, and until they had taken turns to go in and say good-bye two nights ago, it was always just Rachel who put on the suit to go in.

  “Billy’s sitting up in bed,” she said, smiling. “He’s watching cartoons. Beth’s in the kitchen playing with bricks. What’s the matter?”

  “I saw a news flash on a screen,” Al said, sitting down to watch. “He got off! The bastard got away with it! That’s what it said.”

  “No.”

  She went to fetch Beth, who shouted in delight at the sight of her father. Al set her on his lap, and they watched the news report together.

  They had been following this trial through Billy’s illness; it had been a landmark case. This man, Ben Alford, was probably not much older than Rachel was, but he had the red face and the air of entitlement of a powerful man from any era. He could have been a Victorian mill owner, a medieval baron, a disaster capitalist from the more recent past. The gist of the case had been that he employed many thousands of people in this city and had invented a new scheme whereby he was gleefully paying them nothing at all.

  For the past few years, Starcom had been buying up housing all over London. They would aggressively step in and make impossible-to-refuse offers for whole terraces, blocks of flats, anything at all. Then they would rebuild the property as “workers’ accommodation.” They gave their workers a p
lace to live and paid them in vouchers and free things. “Cash-free living,” he called it, as if that were a positive. A group of citizens had crowdfunded to challenge the legality of the “worklifeplus” scheme, and now, it seemed, they had lost.

  Al, who worked with the homeless and saw exactly what happened when you bought up all the affordable housing from a city that was already struggling, had been desperate for Alford to lose.

  “Mr. Alford is delighted to be vindicated,” said a spokeswoman with shiny hair and a steely smile. “He looks forward to expanding the worklifeplus program across the city and beyond.”

  “Our landlord is going to sell to Alford,” said Al. “I know he is. That’s why he’s letting the place fall apart around our ears.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Mumma!” Billy was shouting down the stairs. She ran up, leaving Al swearing at the television, and Beth, who was eight months old, attempting to join in, yelling at the screen. Beth seemed to be as angry as her father about this.

  “How are you doing, darling?” Rachel said, then kissed Billy’s head and straightened his duvet. He was not, in fact, watching cartoons on the old iPad his father had brought over for him, but was watching the same news report about Ben Alford. He looked pale, with blue bags under his eyes, but he was bright eyed and interested in everything.

  “Doing OK. Thank you,” he said. “This man is boring. I want to see the proper news.” Billy considered “proper news” to be anything about the J5X virus or the space program. He wanted to know everything there was to know about the thing that had happened to him. He studied the reporters who stood outside government departments talking about the epidemic. He nodded along to what they were saying, writing down numbers and random words, with no context, on a piece of paper by his bed.

  She would have preferred him to be watching cartoons, sleeping, or drawing meaningless pictures, but she wasn’t going to complain. She still couldn’t believe the miracle.

  “How are you doing?” she said, taking the iPad out of his hand and putting it on the table. “Warm enough? Hungry? You know it’s nearly sleep time.”