had failed. And Ma? Ma lay under six feet of dirt, hundreds of miles away.
“No!” She made to sit up, but Ma’s hand pressed down on her chest. “Calm, Billy, calm.” Her voice was strange, deeper, half hers and half another’s. Suddenly, she had dark streaks running under her eyes.
“You’re not Ma!”
“No.” The fair, motherly expression had become a hard stare. Ma’s teardrop jawline now jutted out several inches more, square and trim. The cheeks had sunken, revealing sharp high cheekbones. “Time to wake up, Billy.”
“You!” She struggled, but the strange noise was closer now, and she sensed urgency in the morphing figure’s gaze.
“Stay alert, Billy. Stay safe. All is not as it seems,” the Panda Man said.
“Where’s Ma?” she cried, struggling under his hand. The muttering separated out into two distinct voices. She had the sudden sense that the light and the face hovering above her was only a veil, and behind it something else was going on altogether. She could feel her body now, heavy and weak, slowly stirring. She fought to sit up. “Where’s Ma?”
The face above her smiled, and suddenly it was Ma again, marked by the same pair of dark streaks under her eyes. But when she spoke, the voice was still that of the Panda Man. “Wake up, now. And remember, you have a job to do. Unless you want Daddy to end up like me.”
*
“Daddy!” Billy was sitting up, gasping and cold. The Panda Man was gone, as was the pool of white light. Now she was surrounded by a murky, grey gloom. She was almost certain that this had been the reality hiding behind her vision of Ma all along. Her mind had retreated to a safe, happy place. An echo ran through her mind, a voice charged with urgency. Be safe. All is not as it seems.
She stopped, breath held in her throat. The whispering came closer. Before she knew what she was doing, she was patting around on the ground, ignoring her throbbing head, until her fingers ran across the rough canvas of her bag. She pulled it towards her, hugging it briefly before thrusting her hand inside for the paring knife, hidden in a side pouch. She ran her hand over the cold blade gingerly and pulled it out, invisible in the darkness.
Then before she knew it, something alien forced its way up from the pit of her stomach, and she was coughing on her hands and knees. The attack lasted for only a few seconds, but in that time a coppery-tasting slime dribbled from her lips, and her ribs ached from the strain of such hacking contractions. Then it had passed, and she was gasping.
Daddy’s cough had started like that. She shivered.
The voices were just outside now. Both had a rough-edged bass, overlaid by a high-pitched whine. Their accents were strange, nothing like how people spoke back home. She had heard people speak strangely before, like the tradesmen who had come south from Dublin or Derry, but these accents were very different. All people in New Land spoke like the monsters who had taken Grandpa.
“How can they’s be all gone, eh?” rattled one, almost a screech.
A deeper rumbling voice answered. “I dunno, but they’d all been burnt to a bloody right crisp.”
“That’s the third this week. We’re gonna run out of places to hit if we ain’t careful.”
Billy pushed herself up onto her hands and knees and began crawling back, away from the voices, blind to whatever lay behind her. The voices echoed metallically around her head. She guessed she was in some kind of backroom. Her hand met vertical concrete, damp and slimy, cold to the touch. She gasped and darted sideways, but met another flanking wall within a few feet. She had crawled into a corner.
“We ain’t there yet,” the first voice was saying.
“S’pose we do.”
“Then we move on like always. They was gonna find us out sooner or later.”
“I don’t like all these stories they’re telling about this ghost army.”
“Don’t be daft! They’re just pulling your leg. It’s one of them Chinese whispers they tell to people like you who are stupid enough to believe it.”
The first voice, wounded, gave a grunt. “I dunno. It gives me the willies.”
“Shaddap. I’m done thinkin’ for the day. My dogs are killing me and I need a little … refreshment.”
A pair of high-pitched giggles floated across the darkness. Billy’s heart leaped a beat, and she squeezed herself as far as she could into the corner. For a moment