World War Moo by Michael Logan

refuge was the act of a quitter, according to the ruthless businessman, and he wouldn’t have a quitter for a grandson.
    They settled at a wrought-iron table amidst a jungle of potted plants. The housekeeper brought them two glasses of peach iced tea. He could see Mary walking up the beach off in the distance. His gigantic crush on his former neighbor and math teacher had backed off completely. She would never replace his mother, but she was trying to fill that gap; thus thinking about her in a sexual way, as he’d once done constantly, now seemed very creepy. Perhaps sensing his reluctance to allow her to take on a maternal role, she’d started stalking the twin boys who lived in a nearby villa, who, despite not being evil little toerags, clearly reminded her of the sons she’d lost.
    Geldof’s grandfather took a sip of his iced tea and placed his hat on the table. “I thought I should tell you this to your face to try and ease into it, but now that I’m here I don’t know any good way to introduce it gently. So I’m just going to say it.”
    Here we go , thought Geldof. He’s probably booked me a place in some awful business school .
    â€œYour mother is still alive.”
    Geldof sprayed iced tea all over the immaculate white suit.
    â€œI thought that’s how you might react,” his grandfather said, dabbing at the stains with his hanky.

 
    6
    If this is the best Britain has to offer , thought Tony Campbell as he looked at the predominantly slack faces of the cabinet members gathered in Cabinet Office Briefing Room A at 70 Whitehall, then we are well and truly screwed.
    His advisors sat around an orange table so large they couldn’t lean back in their plush leather chairs without butting against the wall, which was painted a grotty shade of shit brown. Only the bank of monitors displaying a drawing of a human brain proved they hadn’t returned to the seventies, when the whole of Britain had been tarred with the same two-tone brush. The young Tony had even owned a brown corduroy suit, matched with a lurid orange kipper tie and a shirt with collars so wide that a gust of wind could have sent him soaring off like a hang glider—a sharp contrast to the sober blue outfit he wore today. His cabinet members were dressed just as conservatively, which would have given a casual observer the mistaken impression they actually knew what they were doing.
    In the days before the virus brought the country not so much to its knees as left it lying face down in the gutter soaked in its own piss, crisis meetings such as this one were known as COBRA after the location in which they were held. Tony considered the acronym too thrusting for the gatherings held by Brits for the Rights of the InfecTed, the self-appointed rulers of a formerly proud nation. His unspoken term SLUG—short for Sluggish Laggards in Useless Government—was far more appropriate.
    He leaned forward, the overhead strip light glaring off the smooth brown skin of the vertiginously high hairline he’d suffered since he was a boy. His young self had often buffed up the front half of his scalp in an attempt to redirect light and create a Dalek-style death ray. Had he that death ray now there would be piles of ash on the chairs where his advisors sat. Only a few members of the cabinet were remotely useful. To his right sat Glen Forbes, Secretary of State for Defense and Commander in Chief of Land Forces. A stocky man with tiny ears out of proportion to his bulbous, bald head and skin several shades darker than Tony’s, Glen had been a lieutenant general before the outbreak. After, as the highest-ranking military official left alive or in-country, he took up the task of marshaling the remnants of the armed forces and attempting to restore order through the standard military fallbacks of curfews and brute force. It was Glen, an old acquaintance from Oxford, who’d sought out Tony to head up a