Chapter Twenty
“Giant jungle nymph,” said Charlie.
“We’ll squeeze into two cars,” I said, scraping the bottom of the jam jar.
“Hercules beetle,” said George the First.
“I had driving lessons,” said Jack. “Well, one. I could drive your old car, and then we’d have three?”
“Assassin bug,” said Charlie.
“Could you boys play Bug Bingo somewhere else?” I said. “We’re trying to talk.” Jack kept pressing the button on the car fob, the LED reddening his face as the dingy morning light seeped into the cavern. I took it off him, before the battery was also a thing of the past. “We don’t have enough petrol for three cars. And anyway, it’s a moot point until we find Woody. What do you think, Joni?”
She was kneeling over a gas stove that wouldn’t light. “It’s too risky to go outside.” She looked at Lola, checking that she was listening. “So he’s going to have to find his own way back. We have one more day, tops, before we need supplies. Then we need to move on. And Harry’s burnt fingers look infected too, no fever yet, but—”
“So we need to get something for him,” I said. “Maybe we could get to a shopping center. Hide inside—”
“Listen to this, Mum,” said Charlie. “The assassin bug wears a coat of ant corpses! Perfect disguise—its only natural predator thinks it’s a giant ant.”
“Seriously, boys, sit over there and play your game.”
“It’s educational,” Charlie said.
“Good. Educate yourselves over there.”
They shuffled across the cavern, past the younger kids building rock towers, taking the crackers and jam with them.
“All right,” said Jack, “I’ll check the map for one of those out-of-town shopping centers.”
“But what if the Cleaners are watching them?” said Lola. “Seems kind of obvious.”
“If we’re out of food, we don’t have a lot of choice,” I said. “We have to move.”
“Sacred scarab,” bellowed Charlie.
I slapped myself with both palms on the forehead.
“Are you okay, Mrs. Greene?”
“We can hide in plain sight”—I pointed at the roof of the cavern to indicate the sky—“so the Cleaners think we’re giant ants.”
I was about to explain the full genius of my plan when a shrill whistle from outside got Woody’s gang running toward the clearing. We trailed after them down the tunnel, into the thin daylight.
Woody stood at the center of his minions’ orbit, his arms limp while they exalted in his glory. He was covered in mud, apart from his face; maybe he’d splashed it with water in the river, or he’d pushed the tears away with the backs of his hands until they formed two curtains of grime, pulled aside to reveal his anguish. His friends didn’t acknowledge his distress—or didn’t know what to do with it—and instead harried him for details of what he’d done on his adventure.
He scythed them down with a dismissive “Stuff.”
“I’m glad you came back,” I told him, after his friends gravitated away.
He looked off down the ghost railway and made one of his soft pops. “We don’t need you to look after us.”
“Apart from all the food—and the car,” I said. He stepped around me toward the mine. Like my kids, he didn’t realize that I needed them.
The sound of scuffling feet brought my attention back to the clearing, where a line of boys was breaking into a run, scuttling toward the portcullis gate. Instinctively, I turned to check on the whereabouts of my kids. Then Jack appeared from the trees on the other side, pulling up his trousers and hollering. I scooped Billy up in my arms and caught Maggie’s hand as I started to run toward the tunnel, away from the spanking sound of a helicopter.
“You led them right to us, Woody!”
I could hear him protesting as the last kid scurried in through the gate, which Lola struggled to lock with a padlock. I glanced around the yard outside, but there were no obvious signs of habitation. Car hidden. No rubbish. Jack had us well drilled. But the sound of the helicopter expanded to a rapid heartbeat. I could imagine trees cowering in the downdraft.
“Hurry, Lola,” I said, just as the lock ground home, and she raced into the darkness ahead of me. I staggered behind her, Billy bumping against my thighs in the crouching run. We reached the cavern, which was full of noise and orange light.
“Stupid little pecker!” one of Woody’s own minions yelled.
“It’s not Woody’s fault,” I said, “and we don’t have time for squabbling.”
Joni moved round the cavern, extinguishing lamps as she went.
“Where does that tunnel go?” I asked Jack, pointing to the passage on the far side from the entrance. “We should get deeper into the mine.”
“There are tons of them. We haven’t explored them all, but if we stay left, we’ll come to an old water shaft that leads to the surface in case we need an escape route. Comes out by a big farm, like a dairy. There’re other ways out, but they’re flooded—”
“No, the dairy is perfect,” I said. “Let’s hope the cows are still alive. If we get in the shed, the helicopter won’t tell the difference between our heat and theirs.”
“Assassin bug,” said Jack.
“Exactly.”
Angry shouts of “little pecker” bounced off the hard stones of the tunnel. Scuffles broke out in the darkness. Woody moved toward the tunnel that led back to the bolted portcullis. I blocked his way.
“Where you off to?”
“I must’ve led them here,” he said, staring down the tunnel, the sound of the helicopter rising over the hubbub.
“And you’re thinking you could lead them away again?”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m not going to let you, Woody. Look, I can never make it up to you, what happened to Lennon, but I can at least do what’s best for you now. And you know, if there’s one single thing I’ve learnt from my half-arsed attempts to be a mother, it’s that you don’t give kids what they want; you give them what they need. Even if they hate you for it. So going out there, getting yourself shot, that’s not what you need. It won’t bring your brother back. But these kids, they follow you. You can help them.”
His hand went to his mouth, knuckle between his teeth. I took hold of his wrist and drew it down. From beyond the iron gate, the spanking of the helicopter was unmistakable. It had found us.
“Please?” I said to Woody.
He snorted, but turned into the cavern, back to his boys. When I stepped into the fray, Charlie and Billy gripped my legs. The cavern was teeming with shrill voices and the clattering of rocks underfoot. Chaos. Joni emerged out of the dark next to me. Maggie was standing with the Lost Boy, holding hands, talking close into his ear. In fact, I realized, she was singing to him. I nudged Joni and pointed two fingers at my lips. She gave one of her long piercing whistles. Silence, but for one of the Harrys, who stumbled and got shushed.
“We’re leaving right now. Quickly and quietly. Jack will lead the way. We go crocodile-style, do you remember that from little school? So get into twos, like this.” I pushed Maggie and the Lost Boy into the center of the circle to show how. Pulling other pairs of boys into line, clamping their hands together. Most of them groaned. “You will hold hands,” I said, “because we need to help each other. The path is rocky, uneven, and if one of you stumbles, the other will hold him up. But if one of us goes down, the rest will fall over him. And we don’t have time. Understand? So hold hands. And we’re going to sing—quietly, mind—a marching song. To keep in time, and so we don’t get split up, right?” I moved along the line, spacing the pairs out. Joni came along the other side, telling them to leave their stuff, it wasn’t important. “Who knows a song?” I asked.
“Dumb Ways to Die,” came a wobbly voice from the front, feet stamping a rhythm on the spot. The others picked it up.
“Not that one,” I snapped. “What about this—‘I don’t know but I been told.’”
“I don’t know but I been told,” Jack echoed as he set off down the tunnel.
“St. Govan boys are made of gold,” I said, pushing the first pair after him.
“St. Govan boys are made of gold.” The next two strode away in time.
“I don’t know but I believe,” I sang, gesturing at Lola to go halfway down the line.
“I don’t know but I believe.” The whine of the helicopter engine threatened to drown me out, and I had to shout over it.
“Chopper’s coming, it’s time to leave.” I hefted Billy into my arms.
“Chopper’s coming, it’s time to leave.”
The light faded as the lamps swung down the passage. Joni ducked in a few pairs behind Lola. I counted them all out; seventeen people, with my party and the St. Govan boys. When all the kids had gone, I pushed Maggie and the Lost Boy ahead of me. The cavern dropped into darkness with the leaving of their lamp. Outside, the trees thrashed beneath rotor blades, obliterating the echoes of footsteps in the tunnel, the small voices still chanting. I pushed my Maglite into Charlie’s hands. “Stay close,” I said and gave him a little shove into action.
“I got one,” he said, matching his stride to mine, pointing the torchlight so that we both hurried to catch up with it. “I don’t know but it’s been said.”
His voice whispered round the tunnel: “I don’t know but it’s been said.”
“Let’s get gone before we’re dead.”
Down the mine proper, the air was swollen with noise and effort. There was the odd cry as someone stumbled and twisted an ankle, scraped a knee—but tears were for later; we all sensed that. The boys were quicker than me, and I lost sight of them when the tunnel bent farther into the hillside. I lumbered on. My arms were so numb that Billy’s body fused into my own. His skull beat a steady rhythm against my collarbone. The darkness loomed behind me, so that its heat bore down on my neck like an outstretched hand. The Cleaners must move faster than us, even in those biohazard suits. And I won’t even hear their footsteps over all this racket. I could sense fingertips on my collar. Once, I glanced over my shoulder, but the movement spun me off course into a jagged wall. There was no one there. Just darkness. I staggered past the occasional dark mouth that led to one side tunnel or another, but I pushed ahead, not wandering from the path: kept my head down, kept my boots straight, kept expecting a shot through the back of the head.
“Billy,” I whispered to him, “if Mummy falls down, you start running, okay? Okay?”
But his head just nodded against my shoulder as it had all the way down the tunnel.
The passageway slowly cleared of rocks and leaves until it was smooth and flat. We might have walked for hours or just minutes; I was quarry now, intent only on eluding that outstretched hand. We descended again onto bigger stones, a rockfall perhaps, and a few puddles had formed along the path. Billy drew his legs up from the splashes. Then the tunnel narrowed again, and I had to bend at the shoulders to fit under a corrugated iron tube that fed us into a small, wet cave with a jagged, flinty ceiling and further corrugated iron tubes shooting off into the rock. Lola was there, and Charlie and Maggie clung onto her, but I urged them on, my voice brusque. Now we were climbing. An orange glow ahead caused my breath to stall in my throat—we’re back at the cavern!—but then the light glowed brighter and whiter, and I saw it wasn’t oil lamps but real sunlight. The ground was again littered with rocks and leaves, and the scrabbling of feet over stones was joined by a hiss of wind in the trees. Stick-figure silhouettes stepped into the sunshine ahead of me, and I followed, until we all emerged into painful brightness.
I dropped Billy onto cushiony grass at my feet and rubbed my fists into my eyes like a blubbing baby. As my blindness cleared, I could literally not believe my eyes. We stood outside a stone hut, which looked more like a privy than a mine shaft, on the edge of a manicured garden. The shag-pile lawn was fraying at the edges, but the topiary hedges retained their shape—nothing fancy: pyramids, balls—and the flower borders were thriving with late-summer blooms. A long row of purple agapanthus heads stood bolt upright on long stalks, caught in the act of sunning themselves.
I got my breath back along with my focus. This didn’t seem like a farm. We must have come out at the wrong place. It was impossible to see outside the tiny walled garden—we could be right near the mine for all we knew. But then the boys started filing away around the side of a greenhouse, following Jack’s voice, and I hauled Billy back up off the grass before I could lie down in it and just capitulate.
It was a farm. We stepped out of the secret garden and dashed across to the dairy. Gangrene clogged the air. The kids recoiled, but we pushed them inside and slumped down in groups next to the high metal gates, where the surviving cows kept themselves away from the dead ones. One heifer came and leaned over us, breathing a hot reminder down my neck, making me shudder back up to my feet. Their water trough was trickling and fresh, so I got Charlie and Maggie to drink and scooped up some handfuls for Billy. The cow just stared at me with her big eyes. I told her I’d open the gates before we left.
We sat down on the concrete. I rubbed the back of my neck, trying to scratch out the feeling of being prey. The helicopter had been coming in to land as we left the cavern. Surely the Cleaners realized right away that we were inside the mine. We must have left footprints. By rights, I should have felt that shot, that hand in the dark.
I twisted to speak to Lola, just as Jack bent to the ground and pressed his face into his hands. He gave a short bark of anguish. Lola spun toward me, one hand spread in a starburst of shock over her mouth.
“Do the roll call again,” she said, pulling at the neck of Jack’s shirt. “I’ll do it myself.” And she ticked her long finger at each of the boys. “There’s sixteen of us here. Is that right?”
Eeny, meeny, miny, moe, I heard in my head, who got left back down the hole?
“We were seventeen, including myself,” I said. “I counted as we went out.”
“Harry from 5b,” said Jack, muffled by his hands. “Harry Whatsisface.”
“Berman,” someone said.
“Harry Berman,” Jack confirmed.
There was a long silence. Two of the cows pushed at each other and seemed to stir up the air, so the gangrene reek caught in my throat, and my mouth filled with saliva. I swallowed it down.
“Do you think they got him?” Lola whispered. The question mingled with the rotten air.
I nodded. “I think maybe he distracted them from us.”
Jack stood up. “I’ll go back for him.”
“I’ll go. I led the Cleaners to us.” Woody.
I squeezed my nose between my fingers until flesh-colored stars appeared. I had taken a short philosophy course at university once, half a module when I was trying to round out all that maths and economics, and I remembered a problem the ethics tutor set: There’s a group of you, hiding from a murderer in an old house, and you have a baby that won’t stop crying. If the murderer finds you, he will kill you all. Do you suffocate the noisy baby for the sake of the group? There was another example: something to do with being trapped in a cave and a fat person gets stuck in a hole that’s the only way out. “The morally good action benefits the greatest number of people,” we parroted. We were eighteen, narcissistic; we killed the baby, we hacked the fat kid with our crampons. We held aloft our hefty moral code and brought it down repeatedly on the heads of anyone who threatened our principles. I looked over at Charlie and Maggie sitting on the dungy ground, Billy sucking his thumb. Nowadays, my principles were about as firm as my pelvic floor. And yet the outcome was the same: neither maternal instinct nor higher intellect has time for heroism.
We had to leave Harry Berman. It was the right thing to do, a no-brainer: sixteen lives versus one. Morally good odds. And yet—and yet I couldn’t formulate the words. Woody and Jack were still bickering over who most deserved to go back and get themselves killed, when Lola jumped up and raced outside. Coming round the corner from the walled garden was a sopping wet Harry Berman, who ran into Lola’s arms and let her drag him inside the cowshed.
“What happened, you numpty?” said George the First, who had been crying for his classmate only moments before.
“Lost a shoe and stopped to put it on. I shouted but no one else stopped, and I didn’t have a torch. Took the wrong tunnel into a flooded bit.” He squirmed under all the eyes turned on him. “I wasn’t in a pair, was I?”
They all slapped him on the shoulder and congratulated him on finding his way out in the dark. I stood back and watched my hands shaking with relief.
“Thing is, Mrs. Greene,” he said. “The Cleaners are down the mine. I could hear them in the tunnels.” We had to go. Hiding among the cows would shield us from heat cameras overhead, but not the Cleaners on foot. We had to run again. Outside the dairy, on the far side of the yard beside the farmhouse, stood a huge double cab pickup truck. It wouldn’t be comfortable for the kids under the tarpaulin in the back, but we didn’t have a lot of choice.
“Right.” I pointed at Jack and Woody. “If one of you still wants to be heroic, you can get into the house and find the keys to that truck.”
Woody felt most inclined to redeem himself, and while he braved the buzz to get the keys, I marched through the stackyard, into a shed, where I found a selection of lawn mowers and a stash of fuel. I slid a can behind each seat of the truck. Then we loaded the schoolboys into the bed of the pickup, lying top to tail like sardines, and secured the tarpaulin so we wouldn’t lose any more on the way.
The cab stank of petrol and stale smoke and unwashed bodies, and even opening all the windows did little to improve the air quality. The truck clawed at the gravel as we spun across the yard and out through the gate. We followed the narrowest roads, heading as directly east as we could manage, putting distance between us and the mine. The long chassis pitched and rolled like a boat, and I nearly lost it on a tight corner, swearing as I slowed down, before my speed crept up again, one fear taking precedence over another. We shot across a junction, not bothering to stop and look, and the miles clocked up. Our knuckles returned to flesh color. Eventually, we started speaking again.
“What am I looking for?” Lola fished in the glove compartment, pushing aside CDs and empty cigarette packets to produce a lurid map of tourist attractions: England was covered with enormous standing stones, roller coasters, and llamas. She spread it out across her and Jack’s laps, both crammed into the front seat next to me.
“I bet there are Cleaners everywhere by now,” he said. “Especially in high-density areas.” His fingers slid over the gray blob ahead of us.
“Let’s stay on the back roads and out of the towns,” I said. “Take us somewhere remote. What about all this national park?” I waved my hand over the green areas that flanked us. Cannock Chase. Hop up into the Peak District. On into the Moors. But then what? Jack was right: we were probably moving from one search area into another.
“I’m hungry,” said Billy, but without much urgency. I twitched the rearview mirror down to see him in the back seat.
Joni sat by the far window. My three and the Lost Boy were crammed in the remaining space. Two schoolboys who couldn’t squeeze in the back were scrunched into the footwells.
“Have you got your belts on?”
Charlie helped the younger ones cross the strap over their laps and click it home. I smiled at him via the mirror, but he just stared back. The rolling of the vehicle swayed his chin from side to side in a repetitive motion that made me think of disturbed animals in a zoo. They were all doing it. I tilted the mirror up so I could watch the sky behind us.
“We’ll get something to eat soon, kids,” I said.
“There are mints down here.” Jack started rummaging in the center console, stretching out his long legs to make room to open the flap and get at the sweets. His knee banged into the radio and the car filled with loud static. I jabbed at the illuminated buttons, but only set the thing searching through stations with the same high-pitched wail and rhythmic tone that had provided the weird soundtrack to my nighttime search for Billy. It was only then I remembered that I’d left the shortwave radio behind in the cavern. I looked away and caught sight of myself, silent screaming in the wing mirror: gargoyle face, all teeth.
“What about this?” Lola yelled over the noise and held up a section of map. “There’s a wildlife park. About”—she measured the distance in thumb-sized increments—“eighty to one hundred miles away?”
“Good, but no motorways,” I yelled back. “Turn that bloody noise off.”
Jack was prodding at the radio. I found the right switch on the steering wheel, and with a final beep it cut out.
“No!” he said. “Turn it back on, Mrs. Greene. Listen.”
I pressed the switch and he swore under his breath, until the dial came round to a high frequency, where it locked on to a signal.
“There,” said Jack. “Listen.”
A rush of static and then a montage of repetitive pips and birrs. It meant nothing to me, but still I knew it was a lifeline. Morse code.