World War Moo by Michael Logan

Surely they would have come to investigate and discovered a whole community of uninfected. Unless …
    â€œYou don’t understand,” Fanny said, reaching out even as Ruan began to back away. “We’re living proof that it does work. We’re all infected.”
    Ruan turned the leaflet over. There, in an oversized purple font, she saw the mantra every member of the community repeated when they saw her. They’d only been saying it because they wanted to kill her. The leaflet fell from her fingers and she turned to run. Behind her, in a semicircle blocking her escape route, stood the occupants of the hangar.
    â€œI know you are here and it makes me happy,” they said in their freaky one-mind voice.
    Ruan unsheathed her sword and blinked away her fear. She narrowed her focus down until it was just her, her gleaming weapon, and the targets standing between her and freedom. She set her sights on the apparent weakest point of the chain—a frail, wizened old man with soft brown skin and an Oriental hint to his features—and charged.

 
    8
    Geldof wheezed out the droplets he’d inhaled at the revelation his mum was still alive and stared at his grandfather with eyes so wide his contact lenses crinkled.
    â€œZounds!” he said once he’d recovered his breath.
    His grandfather gave up trying to wipe off the pink stains. “Still playing with medieval expletives, I see. Zounds, indeed. I didn’t want to tell you until now so you wouldn’t get your hopes up, but when I sent in my team to sprinkle your father’s ashes over the house, I had them go to the supermarket to look for your mother’s body so we could do the same. They found a trail of blood leading from an aisle to a walk-in freezer. No body.”
    â€œBut Terry said he saw the pigs kill her.”
    â€œI spoke to him. He was perched on top of a shelf and only had a few seconds to look before he fell and the pigs began chasing him. He didn’t have time to take a pulse. He thought she was dead, but she must have just been badly wounded. Your mother is a tough woman, Geldof. You know that better than anyone.”
    â€œWhy didn’t she come back to the house? We were there for at least another day.”
    Geldof knew he was trying to pick holes in the theory; not because he didn’t want her to be alive, but because he wasn’t ready to believe it. While he hadn’t come to terms with her death or his inability to say farewell, to have her resurrected so abruptly freaked the shit out of him. It seemed too much like a far-fetched plot from the cheap South American soap opera the housekeeper watched on her lunch break. Any minute now he would probably discover he had a moustachioed evil twin he didn’t know about.
    â€œMaybe her wounds were too severe to move immediately,” his grandfather said. “Or maybe she had to wait for the pigs to leave. All I knew was that there was no body. So I started looking around.”
    â€œYou mean you’ve found her?” Geldof said, aware his voice was rising so quickly in pitch it would soon only be audible to dogs.
    â€œYour mother didn’t know, but I knew exactly where she was after she ran off with you and that washed-up soldier husband of hers. I kept tabs on her movements and known associates, looking for some opportunity to either reconcile the family or, in the worst-case scenario, have her arrested so I could claim custody of you.”
    â€œYou would have done that?”
    â€œShe named you after that awful Irishman. That alone almost made the case for her parental rights to be revoked.”
    Fair point , Geldof thought. Even though he’d ditched his long-standing plans to change his name after the death of his parents, the reaction of others when he told them what he was called still brought choking embarrassment.
    â€œAnd then filling your head with all that woolly nonsense,” his grandfather