Chapter Seventeen
“The younger boys are hopeless, though. They keep touching things they shouldn’t—like fire!—and they’re always fighting and stealing each other’s stuff. It’s like”—Lola searched for the right phrase—“it’s like Lord of the Flies. Jack said he half expects to find a pig’s head on a stick.”
“Sounds like every Saturday morning in my house.” The hedgerows blurred past my window.
“You have to tell Mom they needed me.” She glanced toward the boot, where Joni was wrapped up amid the sleeping bags. “I thought she’d understand.”
“Where’s this turn, Lola?” In the wing mirror, I scanned the sky, but there was no movement, nothing to stir up the dense clouds that hung above us like the thick globs of ash we’d dropped on the path to Peter’s grave.
“We’re going so fast, it’s hard to—no, it’s further down. I’ve never seen Mom this bad before. Oh, it’s here—right, right!”
Lola gripped the dashboard as I swerved into a narrow lane, where a line of grass down the middle had grown so high I could feel it scraping the underside of the car. The hedgerows had shot up, too, and provided a degree of cover. Still, I kept up the pace. Better to get off the road. “Your mum’s had a rough few days,” I said. Inadequate words, as though she’d had a run-in with her boss or a marital dispute. Some first-world problem. I took a bend too fast, heavy braking, someone’s head bopping against the glass behind me. I dropped two gears to get back up to speed. Rev counter fingering the red.
“We need to go all the way to the far side.” Lola pointed to a gateway into a field, and we turned in and rattled onto the pitted ground. Her juddery robot voice would normally have caused hilarity among the kids, but our sudden departure had muted them. They held themselves steady on the back seat as though good behavior might help them. I followed the lay of the land until the field ended in a scrubby open space. The car was well hidden from the road, but I pulled up close to the tree line to shield it from the air and then scrabbled the hermit’s silver heat blanket over the bonnet. No idea if it would make much difference.
“Where are we?” I asked Lola. We stood on shattered concrete that was covered with a cargo net of brambles.
“This is the old railway line. It was decommissioned in the nineteen sixties by a man called Beeching, who closed over two thousand train stations across the country.”
Lola was shiny-eyed with her new knowledge, and I knew right away that Jack must have taught her this fact. Along with goodness knows what else.
“Look, this is the old train station,” she said, high-stepping to the far side of a boggy pond, where a stone arch rose in a sea-monster hump from the ground. Lola scrambled onto the hard-packed earth of the platform, where passengers holding parcels must once have stood and peered down the line waiting for loved ones, or for escape. Any buildings or signals or rails were long gone. But the wind flailed across the scarred landscape, as though it were being dragged along invisible tracks.
The kids opened their doors and climbed down from the car. Billy came over to be picked up. I grappled him onto my back to leave my hands free to carry bags.
“So where is it?” I called to Lola, who was beckoning us onto the railway platform.
“We have to walk about two miles north.”
“Two miles?” I could run it in less than twenty minutes, but at toddler pace it was too far to walk.
“The railway leads us to an old lead mine. That’s where the boys have their camp.”
Very secure hideout. Good plan. But I hadn’t forgotten them raiding and hacking my car outside the supermarket. And what if they recognized me? We needed to keep mobile, just in case.
“We’re too vulnerable on foot,” I said. “We’ll drive.”
Lola held out one palm like a traffic policeman.
“Jack wants the site to look unused from the air. Because of the helicopters. We leave nothing outside that suggests habitation. No bikes, no rubbish, nothing.”
“We’ll hide the car when we get there.”
“We can come back for it if we need it,” she said.
“Do you have any idea how long it will take four children to walk two miles?” I started ushering the kids back toward the car. “We have to drive.” I turned around to see if Lola was coming, but she was on the far side of the platform, pulling a bike out of the trees. She ran a few steps and hopped on, her black top billowing out behind her straight back like Mary Poppins’s umbrella.
We rumbled along the path of the former railway, which carved through the land like an ancient riverbed. After a mile, a few buildings cropped up, their slate roofs burst open by saplings. Farther on, another stone platform surfaced. I followed Lola’s dust cloud around a wide bend to where two stretches of rusted track started, one traveling a few pointless yards into a pile of dirt, while the other curved round and disappeared into a hole in the side of a hill. The entrance was a stone arch and an iron gate, as solid as a portcullis.
A shrill whistle sounded, and Lola appeared from wherever she’d stashed the bike.
“You can’t leave the car out there,” she said.
“I don’t know if we’re staying yet.”
“It’s a lead mine, Aunt Marlene. Are you going to find a better refuge from helicopters with heat-seeking cameras?” She turned toward the portcullis with a shake of the head. “I mean, do the math.”
I did the math and calculated that I would move the car under the cover of one of the least tumbled-down outbuildings. I pulled as deep inside as I dared, wincing as the tires popped and crunched over broken debris. There were gaping holes in the slate roof that a heat camera could presumably see through, so I fixed the heat blanket over the bonnet again and emptied the sleeping bags to drape them on top. It was the best I could do, and when the kids started to get down, stumbling over half bricks and rusted nails, I diverted myself to help them. We dragged our belongings to the iron gate, where we stood in an anxious group like evacuees waiting to board a train. We just needed cardboard tags slung round our necks. Joni lumbered across the clearing to join us, standing with her arms held in front of her chest as though something might strike her at any moment. Maggie, Billy, and the Lost Boy were holding hands. Charlie stood alone, twisting his trousers into buds.
With a deep groan, the iron gate swung open, and Lola motioned us inside. I tried to usher the kids ahead, but they balked at the darkness, so I bent my head and knees and led the way into the narrow tunnel. They trailed behind me, and we stopped to let our eyes adjust. I told them to watch their heads and not trip over the railway tracks. Charlie asked why the hill didn’t fall down on our heads. He ran his hand over the stone walls and seemed reassured that it had stood here for more than 150 years, so there was no reason why it would collapse today. Joni finally shuffled in but failed to shut the gate behind her, so Lola tutted and squeezed back past us all to do it. We followed the tunnel—me stooped and awkward—toward an orange glow up ahead.
As we moved farther inside the hill, the crisp tang of minerals was overwhelmed by the pall of oil lamps. My boots crackled over sharp pebbles, and I didn’t need to check that the kids were keeping up because I could make out their crunchy footsteps bunched up behind me. Charlie gave a whimper, and I twisted my bent neck up to see a grinning skull, sprayed in glow-in-the-dark paint onto the stones, beside a slogan that declared, “Keep Calm, It’s Already Happened.” I shifted my load onto one arm and used the other to scoop Charlie along beside me. Joni brought up the rear, her wild hair silhouetted against the bright sunlight like a yeti.
A burst of tinny recorded laughter drew my attention down the tunnel, followed by a real outburst of hilarity that echoed toward us. We crept forward to a soundtrack of more laughter and a car engine. The passage expanded until I could stand upright, and then the orange glow spread out to reveal a mucky cavern, where a group of equally mucky boys were watching an old TV show on an iPad that had been hot-wired to a car battery: my car battery, I couldn’t help but notice, the one I had requisitioned.
The rippling lights illuminated half a dozen enthralled faces. The soundtrack pealed around the cavern. A quiver of anticipation ran through the rapt boys, who tensed for the opportune moment, and then shouted as one:
“Can we please stop talking about my mother’s vagina!”
I exited the tunnel into their midst. One by one, their laughing faces startled to stone, but their outburst lingered in the air, bouncing around us like a mischievous imp. Boys of various ages littered the floor. Several of the smaller ones scurried into dark recesses. The older ones gathered themselves up more deliberately, saving face. One glanced at another, the crumbs of a smile stuck to his lips, to see if his friend might be up for some rebellious smirking. But the friend looked ashen.
“Hello,” I said. “I’m looking for Jack.”
By the time they worked out who was best able to reply, Joni and our kids had materialized behind me and were blinking around the cavern. Lola strode across and flicked off the iPad, muttering under her breath about it. Most of the boys got to their feet, and I estimated that the oldest was maybe fourteen, while the youngest wasn’t much older than Charlie. There was a lot of shuffling.
“I’ll find him,” said Lola, and disappeared farther into the cavern.
I stashed our luggage on a pile of rocks against a slimy wall. When I turned, the boys dropped their eyes from my face. I glanced over them but couldn’t see the electric filament hair of the one who’d slashed my tire.
“Are you boys all right?” I asked. There was lots of nodding.
“How long have you been here?”
Some shrugging, looking at each other for confirmation: “A few days, yes, a few days.” A couple of the smaller boys shuffled forward and looked up at me with Oliver Twist eyes.
“Is anyone hurt?” Hands pointing to the back of the cavern: “Him, Harry Berman, he burnt his fingers.”
“Have you got anything to eat?” They indicated a mess of crisp packets and biscuit wrappers.
“Any proper food?” Heads shaking.
I sighed and looked around their dank home before leaning down to their height.
“Are you really all right?”
“Yeah,” said the one who’d wanted to smirk. He pulled rapidly at the end of his nose, tugging the septum between finger and thumb in a ferrety gesture. But another little boy stepped forward, and I put my hand on the back of his head, and he stepped forward again and pressed his face into my hip. His body shook against mine.
“Don’t cry, you wuss!” said the ferrety one, but no one else laughed.
A stream of white torchlight appeared in the second tunnel, bounding around the stones, followed by two sets of crunching footsteps. Lola emerged first, flanked by a youth who unfolded himself to my height, though a great, bohemian forelock of curly hair made him look even taller. He occupied that boy-man space whereby his scaffolding held up his T-shirt, but the rest of the structure was yet to be filled in. The pair crossed the cavern, his palm beneath the Lady Lola’s elbow as they stepped in time over strewn rocks and small boys, then Jack overtook his consort in two long strides and held out a hand.
“Hello, Mrs. Greene,” he said, with a firm grip and brisk nod. “I’m Jack Ingram. Sorry this place is so rubbish.” He stepped over to Joni. “And you must be Mrs. Luff.” But Joni seemed to have traded places with the teenager and was leaning, surly and pock-skinned, against the wall. She didn’t respond. Both Lola and I stepped in to bustle Jack away, though I couldn’t be sure which one of them I was trying to protect.
“Lola tells me you had a close call with the helicopter?” he said. “We thought they might be humanitarians or peacekeepers at first, but when it failed to land or show a standard—”
“What’s a standard?” asked Lola.
“A flag,” Jack and I both said at the same time. The boy shrugged. “My father was in Afghanistan and Iraq. He was offered a job with one of those private military companies once. Good money, but he didn’t want to be called a mercenary.” Jack had excellent manners, straight back, neat clothes amid the dishevelment around him. I recognized the type from my time at boarding school. Jack had all the military bearing of a forces kid.
I explained how the biohazard-suited mercenaries—as he had no doubt correctly identified them—hunted down each person they detected with the heat camera for extermination.
“The flyover must have been a recce,” he said. “Then they came back to carry out the op. Clean up.”
As I saw the scene play out again in my head, I noticed for the first time the accents of the voices saying, “Clean?” and “All clean.” Two different accents I couldn’t precisely place, though one I recognized as a twangy white African. Maybe Rhodesian? The other, Eastern European? Hired guns, most likely, covertly paid by some foreign government that was too impatient to wait for the official wheels to turn because by then it would be too late; the epidemic would be a pandemic. William Moton’s phrase came back to me: they don’t see us as survivors, only carriers.
“Well, the Cleaners won’t find us in here,” Jack concluded, though his voice pulled up the end of the sentence to leave it hanging from a string between us. A tiny chink in his confident armor.
I offered Lola some cream for the injured kid’s fingers, but Joni intercepted it and ducked off into the dark to see to him herself. Lola and I exchanged significant looks about this new burst of activity, while Jack gave us a roll call. I lost track after the second Harry and third George. It didn’t help that their faces all looked the same, monochromed by the torchlight, all round eyes and upside-down mouths, as though they’d sketched unhappy faces and stuck them on. The appearance of an adult had popped the balloon of their bravado, and only one of them had any puff left in him: the ferret, who produced a school tie and fixed it around his head to cover one eye. I lifted the dangling end to inspect the insignia.
“St. Govan’s College,” said Jack.
Posh boys. And I’d taken them for a bunch of hoodie hoodlums. Jack had the same emblem on his polo shirt.
“I’m head of house.” He tapped his chest. “We were on this orienteering course when Mr. Holden got a call, and he went down to the village, but then he never came back, so Mr. Thomas left me in charge and went to check what was happening, and that was the last we saw of him, too.”
“And you’ve been here ever since?”
“Just the last couple of days, after we saw the helicopter. Some of them ran out and tried to flag it down.” He indicated the smaller boys with his chin, and they lowered their own in shame. I remembered standing in the field beside the Bury Ditches, screaming and laughing that we were being rescued, while all the time the Cleaners were totting us up into a head count: collateral damage. “So we decided to leave the Hoar Wood,” Jack went on, “but then we had to get everyone back together after the schism—”
“Schism?”
“It’s like a splinter group.”
“I know what a schism is.”
“Of course. So this one fifth-former who’s a total—” He pulled up short, seeking a replacement for a rude word.
“Botheration?” I offered.
“Right. He went off with some of the younger ones for a couple of nights, said they were going back to school, but ended up sleeping in some hay barn—”
He broke off, and we both spun round in response to the honking din of a car alarm. Jack ducked down the tunnel, and I crabbed along after him, through the iron gate, back out into the white glare of the day. He was racing across the clearing toward my poorly concealed car, where the sun streaming through the broken roof revealed a lanky boy bent into the effort of breaking the door open with a crowbar. His hair flashed in the beams of sunlight, glowing white like an electric filament.
It was the same feral little shit who’d slashed my tire at the supermarket.
Jack tackled the boy from the side, grabbing the crowbar with both hands, forcing the younger one to stagger back. They squared up to each other, the lanky kid shouting and gesticulating at my car, but his words were carried away by the whooping alarm. Jack threw the crowbar out of harm’s way. I dragged the key fob out of my pocket and popped the car doors to silence it.
“—the heat from the engine!” The kid was yelling and jabbing Jack in the chest with a pointed finger. “Just think about it!”
Jack glanced over his shoulder toward us with the drowning look of someone who’d gotten into a debate and only then realized they’re wrong. He took us all in—me standing next to Lola, surrounded by the other amassed children—and snapped his head back.
“Agreed. We have to hide the car better than this. Can you deal with that, Woody? Get it covered over?” He said the last part for my benefit: “But don’t wreck it, yeah? We might need it.”
Jack held the boy’s eye for another couple of seconds before walking back toward us.
The younger kid swaggered along behind him, followed by a gang of smaller boys who cruised in his slipstream. “All right, Boy Scout. Don’t get your woggle in a knot.” The gang sniggered at this witticism.
Jack didn’t react, but his shoulders sagged under the tension, and even his hair slumped a bit. Lola held out one hand as he passed, and her fingers trailed the length of his arm. Several boys wolf-whistled.
“Oo-oo, let’s hope the Boy Scout came prepared,” the lanky boy brayed, to the mirth of his minions.
“Your name is very appropriate, Woody,” Lola scolded him. “Peck, peck, peck with your little pecker.” And she turned to follow Jack.
Woody forced himself to laugh, looking round the group until his eyes rested on mine. He glanced back to the car and returned to me, visibly working to put it all together until his face crumpled into a frown and his lips wrenched down further into a furious snarl.
“That’s that witch!” he yelled, shooting his pointed finger toward my throat. “She’s that witch who took my brother.”