Chapter Sixteen
The hermit sat on his porch, wrapping an extensive willow-pattern dinner service in newspaper and loading it into a wheelbarrow. He startled to his feet as Horatio ran up the Lonely Steps, but lowered himself back down and continued his packing when he recognized the dog. He greeted me with a lift of the chin.
“Going somewhere?” I asked.
“As I explained in the letter, I’m clearing out. Take my advice and do the same—just friendly advice, mind you, I know how you begrudge interference.” When I didn’t rise to the bait, he carried on talking. “It’s not safe here now those helicopters have spotted us. Well, spotted you.” He looked up into the blue circle of empty sky that split the canopy above the clearing like a child’s drawing of a duck pond. “I thought they would take longer to find us out here. They’re organized, I’ll give them that.”
“Who? Who are you talking about? Why are you so worried about this helicopter? There was only one, and it just flew overheard, doing a recce, perhaps. Granted, I don’t understand why it didn’t pick us up, but it didn’t threaten us, either—”
“That’s what I wanted to tell you. Chatter suggests Johnny English hasn’t been made entirely welcome on the Continent. Treated rather poorly, in fact. The problem is, they were homegrown terrorists, and opinion seems to be that we should keep our homemade virus to ourselves.”
“I know they were homegrown terrorists, but that’s not our fault, is it? Surely the world has a duty to protect us?”
“The world is protecting itself.”
I looked away from him, away from the truth of it. “Well, even so, couldn’t the helicopter have been from the Red Cross?”
“Was it a Red Cross helicopter?”
“No, it was black, but—”
He closed his eyelids for a long second, as though praying for patience with an exceptionally dimwitted child.
“That doesn’t mean anything,” I said. “The humanitarian effort must be huge, bigger than anything they’ve ever dealt with before. They could be using whatever they can get their hands on—private helicopters, like the little ships at Dunkirk.”
“No, I rather think we’re on the other side of history this time, the wrong side. The world doesn’t want a plague. They’ll do anything to stop it.”
“I find it hard to believe they’re going to exterminate us. You’re talking about genocide.”
“Have you forgotten Hiroshima? Nagasaki? And why did we sanction the extermination of hundreds of thousands of people in Japan? To prevent loss of life. To save ourselves. So don’t underestimate what fear can do to the human mind.” He stopped and looked down at the pile of crockery, lying forgotten at his feet. A dinner plate shook in his hand as he picked it up, and he steadied it as he resumed polishing. “Are you one of those people, Marlene, who believes in the power of positive thinking? My wife used to say that if she visualized a parking space, she would always find one.” He placed the plate into the wheelbarrow with an under-the-breath “there.” “But she didn’t always get what she wanted.” Wife in the past tense, fussing over her china. So this is what happens when death cuts you adrift from your family, when there is no weight of responsibility to anchor you down. You just float until you’re lost. After my parents had died, when I found myself alone, I hooked on to Julian; for better or for worse, he was ballast. And then the family came and there was something to work for, and I stayed on course. They set my course. If nothing else—if Julian resolutely failed to ever support me in even the smallest way—at least he gave me the solidity of supporting him. Now, watching the hermit adrift among his dead wife’s belongings, haunted by past horrors, I thanked Julian for the first time.
“I never really understood positive thinking,” I said. “We’d all just be fabulously wealthy and thin. I guess I believe in luck.”
“And are you a lucky person?”
“I’ve survived this far. As have you.”
“More luck than judgment, if I may say so. On both our parts.” He bustled off into the shed, and whatever he said next was obliterated by tap water pounding into the sink. I stepped onto the porch. He was drying his hands on a tea towel, rubbing it over each fingernail as if polishing them.
“Thank you for the food parcel.”
“Oh, yes, yes. Welcome. The Aga up at the house runs on oil, most convenient in the circumstances. I wanted some rations for my long march. Dead bodies in the kitchen, unfortunately, but that’s a necessary evil. Excuse me.” He blustered past and added an old-fashioned leather suitcase to the wheelbarrow. Then he went back inside and set about putting on his socks and boots.
“You baked the bread in a kitchen with corpses in it?” I said.
“It’s a big kitchen.”
“But the virus—”
“Doesn’t seem to have killed me yet. So I rather think the bodies are little more than an inconvenience. Needs must.”
Inconvenience. The thought of eating those buns—the kids eating those buns—filled my stomach with a buzz of disgust. And yet we were still here. Maybe it was time for needs must?
“So is that the ‘news’ you mentioned in the letter—this chatter?”
“There wasn’t a lot of detail. And some of the messages went too fast to decipher.”
“Decipher?”
“Some of it’s in Morse code. I learned Morse as a boy, of course, but I’m woefully rusty, only got the gist. And many of the shortwave channels are foreign—Radio Moscow and the like. Do you speak Russian?”
“No.”
“No. Shame, that. They’re coming through strong. Can’t understand a damn thing. Apart from ‘Angliyskiy.’ Seems to be every other word.” He prattled on about the vagaries of foreign broadcasts, but I had a hard time concentrating; his voice sunk away, and only the odd phrase surfaced into my consciousness. “Quarantine.” “Atrocities.” But inside my body, a giddy sparkle spread from my extremities to the core. Only once it reached and gripped my heart did I realize that it was euphoria. People living, people talking. Politics and religion. All the usual shameful human behavior. But life, nonetheless: not this paltry survival, but actual living. Terrorism, murder, state-sponsored inhumanity, I’d take it all, so long as I didn’t have to watch my children suffer one more day in this bloody awful Eden. Something like the relief of aircraft wheels squealing onto tarmac—only magnified beyond tolerance—sent a punch of adrenaline through me. So what if we are under quarantine? If they won’t come to us, we can go to them. Joni can go home. Billy can forget. All of us can heal.
“So what exactly are they saying?” I needed him to get to the point.
“Picked up some Arabic, Chinese. Scandinavians broadcasting in English, but keeps getting interference. The raving Christians would be quite amusing if they weren’t such”—he ground his fist against his ear in a toddler-like movement—“dreadful, dreadful people. But shortwave is not your simple car radio, you can’t—”
“The signal’s better at dawn and dusk. Okay, then I’m going to pack up the camp, and I’ll come back later,” I said, and in reaction to his undisguised surprise at my old-school knowledge, I added, “I grew up with shortwave. Expat kid. You said you caught the gist of the Morse code messages? Any clues to where exactly we should go? There must be someone offering help. For the kids at least.”
“‘Quarantine’—they repeat that word a lot—‘quarantine.’ And don’t go south.”
Don’t go south. So much for a gentle new life on the Mediterranean.
“And the rest is much as I told you before,” he said. “The scale of it has taken them by surprise. They’ve come down hard on the Continent—whole villages sequestered, refugees in isolation camps, some say mass exterminations.” He stopped, and the horrific images seemed to wraith around the clearing for a few seconds before evaporating.
“Whatever happened to ‘women and children first’?” I said.
“That seems to have been replaced with ‘each man for himself.’”
“So where are you going?” I asked.
“I’m going to hide in a cave, and when I come out the land will be cleansed. And then I can return to this corner I call home. The humble Mr. Mole after his adventures on the river.”
He turned and surveyed his domain. Whatever he saw added up to more than the sum of scrawny trees, three stone steps, and a shed. It was time to go and get packed up, but I lingered, sure there were more answers if I could only find the right question.
“What is this place?” I asked.
He smiled. For the first time, I saw his neat teeth, oddly childlike in his elderly face. “These are my ancestral lands.” He waved his arm in a wide circle and turned back to the wheelbarrow, picking up the handles. “The Lonely Steps are all that’s left of the ornamental gardens. In medieval times, the hall was over there. The woodland fought back, but nature can’t obliterate the family tree, eh?” He looked pleased with himself, despite the tears in his eyes. “Of course, my ancestors managed to lose the lot.”
“Every tree has a few bad apples.”
“Indeed. But now the apparatchiks at the county council are no longer with us, I will rebuild it. One more winter, perhaps.” He pointed up to the sky. “Patience, William Moton, have patience.” He grinned at me and pushed off toward the path that led to Moton Hall.
Horatio came gamboling out of the wood and stood alert on the grass. I followed his gaze into the trees, but everything was listless and undisturbed. Then I picked out a high drone.
“Farewell, Marlene,” the hermit’s voice floated over the strangled squeak of the wheelbarrow wheel.
“Can you hear that?”
“I can barely hear a thing at my age.”
“Helicopter.”
He let the wheelbarrow thunk to the ground and dashed back to the shed, scrambling underneath the bottom bunk and pulling out a silver heat blanket, which he wrapped around himself as he folded his limbs down onto the floor.
“Get inside! Otherwise they’ll see you; the cameras will pick up your heat signature,” he yelled.
I stepped backward under the green canopy, watching the circle of sky. It was hard to place from which direction the sound was approaching until the tops of the trees bent in submission, and the upsurge of noise told me the helicopter was close and low. It must have skirted the clearing on the side of Moton Hall. The thrumming receded as quickly as it had appeared.
William Moton shot out of the shed, trailing the blanket as though he’d just finished a marathon.
“They’ll be back! Get away from here.” In his panic, he let the silver blanket go, and it floated for a moment in the air behind him, still bent to his form, and then crumpled to the ground. He snatched up the wheelbarrow and jostled off down the path.
“Good-bye, William Moton,” I called after him, “and good luck.”
“Get away from here,” he yelled. “And don’t go south.”
As the hermit fled into the trees, I hauled Horatio inside the shed and pulled the door closed. Of course the outside world would do anything to prevent the spread of the virus—wouldn’t we do anything to protect our own? Hadn’t I done exactly that? But if I was going to rally my troops, I needed a plan—a better one than “hide in a cave.” Part of me wanted to run like William Moton, but I also had to hear for myself the outside world that had turned against us. A tremor of fear made me fumble and drop the headset that was attached to the radio equipment. I’d expected a transistor handset, like the Roberts I had stupidly left behind in my house along with all the other lifesaving items. But this was more complicated. He must have built it out of scraps: coils and diodes brought to life by red-wire veins. I flicked a switch, and the shed filled with a crazy oscillating wail. I changed the channel to heavy interference, changed again to a mournful foghorn. I needed a hint of where to go next. Anything. The Bakelite dial clunked between electrical howls and sniveling static. The sound of mayhem.
I switched it off and let the quiet settle back into place. The lilt of birds bickering over the life or death of a worm. Reception was best at night; we needed to get away, but if we packed up the camp now, I could come back and get some sort of steer before we set off. I exited the shed and scooped up the silver heat blanket. Horatio froze on the grass, facing the trees with his head tipped to one side.
“What is it, von Drool?” I called to him, walking toward the stone steps. He tipped his head to the other side. “Let’s go—”
Then I heard a noise like whooshing radio static. But it wasn’t coming from the shed: it was the slap of rotor blades spanking the air. Out of sight, the engine whined as the helicopter came in to land, and then steadied to a violent buzz. The sound had such physicality it seemed to crane over the trees to grasp at me. I could imagine it hunkering on the grassy lawn, its brutality crashing the elegant facade of Moton Hall.
Horatio gave a gruff and scuttled past me, jumped down the Lonely Steps in one bound and onto the path through the trees in the direction of our camp. A rapid clattering made me turn back to face the clearing. William Moton appeared, still pushing the wheelbarrow, its cargo of porcelain bucking over the bumps. He pushed it right up to the door of the shed before he noticed me standing on the steps and hissed, “Run, you idiot woman!” As he turned to look behind him, the wheelbarrow tipped and the contents slid across the grass. He bent to try to lever the stack of plates back upright, but gave a cry of anguish as footsteps crashed through the woodland, the heavy tread audible over the distant buffeting of the helicopter. He left the plates and scooted behind the shed, where he leaned up against his home, peeping round the corner once before sliding to the ground. His despair startled me into action, and I leapt down the stone steps and slipped into the trees just as the first figure emerged from the path into the clearing.
It strode forward on stiff legs, rendered into gigantic proportions by the bulk of a biohazard suit. The impact of every footfall juddered aftershocks through the rigid uniform, starchy-white in the sunlight. It stopped, and the wasp eye mesh of its helmet whipped from side to side, the jerky movements belying the menace of its intense focus. It raised its legs and descended on the shed, as two more suits appeared from the dark hole of the wood.
“He’s here.”
The deep voice was so human it jolted me. I couldn’t tell which one had said it, but it must have been the one who was pointing an arm at the stricken wheelbarrow. The first figure moved toward the shed, toward the hermit who was slumped behind it, toward the steps, toward me. My legs wanted to run, as though they possessed instincts superior to my own, but the route to the farm track was too open, too exposed. I shrank into the undergrowth. My hands weren’t even shaking anymore. My body was thick and numb and helpless, disabled by a fear as powerful as an epidural.
The white figure ate up the ground. He slapped the door open and glanced inside, then rounded the shed and stopped when he saw William Moton, turning his wasp face back to the others.
“Target.”
“Go ahead.”
The white figure reached into a deep pocket in his trouser leg—as coolly fastidious as the man prone before him had once been—and withdrew the dark shape of a weapon. His arm scissored up, and he fired a single shot into William Moton’s forehead. The hermit flopped with his head lolling to one side, like a child playing dead.
“Clean?”
“All clean.”
The white figure pocketed the gun and moved back to the others. They said a few words I couldn’t hear, their voices too low against the background drone of the idling helicopter. Two of the soldiers cast a final look around the clearing and moved toward the trees. A soft rustle behind me and I whipped my head round, expecting to see Horatio. Instead, peeping round a tree on the verge of the farm track, was Charlie. Some twenty yards away. Nothing between him and these killers but a few trees. His eyes locked on mine and his composure chilled me to a steely focus: I made a zip motion across my lips, then raised both hands and held them over my eyes: hide. He slipped behind the foliage. A voice from the clearing drew me back round again. The third suit brought a tablet computer close to his wasp face and finger-pinched the screen.
“Wait.”
The white figures turned from the tree line.
“There are two here.”
They accepted the information with robotic indifference. The one with the tablet held out the computer as they came back onto the grass, gesturing to details on the screen. He pulled out a walkie-talkie and muttered into it. I turned to check on Charlie. No sign. My legs twitched to go to him, but the path was too open, and the undergrowth too noisy. Stay behind the tree, I willed Charlie telepathically. For God’s sake, don’t come to me.
“Let me see.” Back in the clearing, the shooter took the tablet and zoomed further in, turning it this way and that to get his bearings. Then he handed it back and pointed down the path that passed right beside me. He crossed the grass, past the overturned wheelbarrow, to the top of the steps. Just three stone steps and he’d be on the path. At least he would see me before he got to Charlie. I wanted to look back again, but I couldn’t take my eyes off the white figure, so close now. He stopped and looked around him, computing the strangeness of the Lonely Steps. His boot made contact with the stone acorn, a steel toe cap sending it arching down the slope to rest just ahead of me, where the undergrowth of the copse gripped the edge of the pasture. One starchy stride onto the middle step. He turned to the others and waved his arm at the dead man.
“Look at this place. The guy’s a loner. Are you sure there are two?”
“There’s two on the screen. We got two.”
The shooter shrugged and stepped onto the path. A few strides and he would be parallel with me. Then just one glance to his left—if I moved, he would hear me. If I didn’t move, he would see me. If Charlie moved—I would have to stand up, deflect the attention. Mother bird, lead them away from the nest. I could run. The biohazard suit might slow the soldier down, but I had nowhere to go. The undergrowth was too thick. The path led toward Charlie. And my legs were numb.
But how can I just stand there and die? What sort of mother leaves her children? Even to die. I put my hands on the ground and pushed myself into a crouch. If I ran to the right, the trees would provide some kind of cover—I could lead him away from Charlie and reach the farm track farther down toward the ford. If I could distract him, it would give me a head start. I picked up a hard twig knuckle. If I threw it behind him, made him turn away for just a moment—
“Target!” The voice from the clearing called out the warning. The soldier on the path took two steps forward. I dropped chest down onto the ground again. His arm levered up, gun pointing not at me, but farther down the track. I craned my head up as instinct shouted in my head—Charlie!—but Horatio was on the path, standing with his head to one side. He had come back for me.
“Just a dog,” the suit called. His wasp face bore down on Horatio.
Heavy footfall, and the white figure holding the tablet appeared at the top of the steps.
“Big dog, though,” it said, examining the screen, considering.
I heard Horatio’s tail bat the ground once as he looked up into the gun, confused by the featureless mesh of the face: the single eye of the barrel that watched him.
The white figure on the steps slid the tablet into his pocket, turning away.
“Yah, looks like our target. Clean it up.”
The suit fired a single shot into Horatio’s muzzle: the dog gave a low gruff, his long legs tried to steady the load, his claws gripping at dust. The suit turned away before Horatio even hit the ground. He pocketed his gun and followed the other white figures back up the Lonely Steps toward Moton Hall, crushing the dead wife’s plates underfoot as he went.
Corn stubble clattered against my boots as I ran. I left stealth behind in the wood and gave in to a blind urge to run, towing Charlie behind me like a balloon on a string. I careered to the bottom of the field and scrambled a fence to get to the camp. The buzz of the helicopter had receded, but I knew we would hear it again before too long. I gave Charlie the car keys and told him to start the engine. I didn’t want him to launch into a story about Horatio, or we’d have all that to deal with, too. No time.
I was calling their names as I reached the tents. They were all there—bar Joni—sitting on logs around the campfire. For a second, it was like the first day we arrived. The scene was everything I had been looking for back then: the team, together, collected and calm. But their expressions were inhuman. Like gazelles on the plain, heads snapped up as I ran in.
“We need to go. Now!”
Lola flitted off to find her mother while I stuffed some supplies inside sleeping bags. I shepherded the children toward the car, taking advantage of their compliant bewilderment to hurry them along. We stopped in a huddle beside the Beast, and I didn’t know whether to get in or not. Any second now, one of the little faces would split open and ask, “What are we going to do, Mummy?” and the question would burst the dam of my inundated mind, and I would scream, “Run or hide, take your pick!” Laughing hysteria into their startled faces. “Because you think I know what to do, don’t you? But that’s the big secret adults keep: we have no idea what to do. So your guess is as good as mine. Run or hide, kids? Run or hide?”
“You decide,” I would tell them, “because I don’t know how to help you. I just don’t know.” I slapped my hand over my mouth to hold it all in.
A grip on my shoulder made me jump. Lola.
“We should take Mom’s car. Yours is knackered.”
I looked at the Beast: battered and filthy, windows missing, the smashed headlamp slipped from its socket again. But that car had never let me down; it never stopped going. It felt disloyal to leave it.
Lola was asking, “What do we do, Aunt Marlene?”
The Beast’s engine was running. I put my hand on the bonnet. Warm. Leave it running. If the helicopter picks up its heat signature, the Beast can do one last thing for me and distract them for a few minutes.
“We go. Now.”
Lola started lifting the kids into the back seat of Joni’s car. Billy was fighting to get out, shouting something.
Wabbity.
“I can’t get Rabbity, Billy. We don’t have time.” I wrestled him into his seat belt, pressing my head into his stomach to hold him down.
“Effie Elephant!” Now Maggie joined in, taking her belt off and scrambling back out. I held up my palms like two white flags: I would have to surrender this battle to win the war.
“Stay in the car!”
I ran back into our tent. Scrambling among the bedding, I found the various soft toys, their beady eyes looking alarmed by the turn of events. Outside, Joni moved toward the car in slow motion, as though getting accustomed to sea legs. I pushed her into the boot on top of whatever belongings and food we’d grabbed in the rush, and ran to the front seat. Lola climbed up next to me.
“What are we running from?”
“Guys in a helicopter. Tracking us with a heat camera, I think. They killed the hermit.” I hissed: “And Horatio.”
“The boys heard that helicopter a couple of times. No one could agree whether to trust it or not. Jack thought it might be mercenaries.”
“We can’t trust it, believe me.” I pulled the car round so that we faced the dirt track, but stayed under cover of the trees. “It landed at Moton Hall, which is beyond that woodland.” I pointed up the path to the left. “The main road goes past it. So we need to go the other way and hope they don’t fly overhead. But that lane is narrower, slower, and I don’t know where—”
“I know a place to hide,” said Lola. “We won’t be on the road for long.”
“Where are we going?”
“To the railway. To find the boys.”
The Wild Things. I closed my eyes for a moment. Maybe Lola didn’t know about the first boy, the one I’d run over. Maybe Joni hadn’t had time to tell her. Would these boys know it was me? Would they give us shelter if they did?
“What are we waiting for?” Lola shouted. I grappled with the unfamiliar gear stick, and the car lurched down the dirt track toward the railway.