Chapter Eighteen
I sincerely hoped the lead mine was a long way off the helicopter’s radar, because the heat was rising. We stood outside in the clearing, a massed group of sitting ducks, flapping and honking to draw attention to ourselves. I glanced at the sky and saw a pop of light in the gray depths. A storm could work in our favor, assuming the helicopter couldn’t fly in a storm. Or maybe it could, one of those big rescue helicopters. We needed to get back under cover, but Woody was still railing against me.
“Is it true?” Lola cut Woody off. My own niece clarifying if I had, in fact, killed a child. I had to drag the air into my lungs so I could draw enough breath to answer.
“There was an accident when I was out looking for Billy. The first night you were away. A boy fell off his bike, and I ran him over.”
Woody started shouting again. His earlier faux-gangster posturing was gone, replaced by genuine apelike arm swings and lunges. I could see him riding the fumes of his anger, avoiding the loss of face that crying in front of his friends would entail.
“Can I call you ‘Woody’?” I asked, when he ran out of steam. Lightning skittered through the clouds; we needed to get under cover soon, but if this scene was going to turn nasty, I’d prefer to be within reach of the car.
“It’s my fucking name.”
“Thought it might be a nickname. Boarding school kids always have nicknames, don’t they? Mine was Bogey Greene for a while, and then Stick. Because I was tall.”
“Woody’s my real name. I guess my parents gave me a stupid name. My stupid dead parents.”
Smooth, Marlene. Smooth.
“Can we talk by ourselves?” I pressed on. “So I can explain what happened to your brother—Lenny, is it?”
“Lennon. Just tell me now.” His face flinched for the blow. I saw then that he still had hope. Woody must have come back looking for his brother, maybe finding blood on the road. But, just as I had when Billy vanished, he refused to believe the worst. I turned my back on the rest of the group so they couldn’t hear me.
“It’s going to be upsetting, Woody. You don’t want to do this in front of everyone.”
His eyes darted between me and his minions, whirling like a slot machine. I waited to see which instinct would hit the jackpot: his innate deference to an adult or his bullyboy’s need to keep up appearances. Or maybe another spinning reel would win out: his simple desire to find out what had happened to his brother.
“Lola?” I said, and she gave a rabbit-like nod. “We need everyone under cover and some food inside them.”
Lola regained the use of the arms that hung by her sides and marionetted away. The kids edged back toward the tunnel, still shooting me under-the-eyelashes looks, leaving Woody and me alone in the clearing.
“Is there somewhere under cover we could go to talk about Lennon?” I asked him. “Somewhere private?” The storm was sweeping black shadows across the land, and the sky spooled through a time-lapse movie of itself. Woody hesitated long enough to show that it was his choice, he was in charge, then he slunk off toward a deep railway tunnel on the other side of the clearing, and I followed, rehearsing in my mind how I might tell someone that his baby brother was dead. And I was the one who had killed him.
He didn’t ask a single question. I inched my way through it—from Billy’s disappearance to the all-night search, my crash and the chase to the accident, and the funeral to Billy’s reappearance. I explained about the vigil and the ashes and how I marked the grave with a small cross. I admitted that I couldn’t face the burial, but it sounded like I felt sorry for myself. Poor, traumatized me. I stopped talking. Outside the tunnel, the wind toyed with a tree branch that it had broken off and was pushing around the yard.
I sat with my back to the wall and waited for Woody to speak. He sat opposite me for a long time, fiddling with his fingers, biting off hangnails. Then one of his index fingers slipped in and out of his mouth in a compulsive way that made me want to tell him to stop, but of course I couldn’t, so I looked away and tried not to hear the sound of his teeth grating over his knuckle bone. He pulled the finger out of his cheek with a soft pop.
“I should’ve—” he began.
There was a flash of lightning outside, and we both counted under our breath until the sullen rumble arrived. Ten miles away. But closer than the last. As I waited for Woody to speak again, I counted the railway sleepers as they merged into the darkness.
“I told my mum I’d look after him,” he whispered.
Woody’s guilt acted like a catalyst for my own, and I had that same desire I’d had before—after Peter died—to grind myself into the earth. The shame crawling out from under my skin. I was supposed to be the adult here, the one most able to take the high ground. But instead I was wallowing at a grieving boy’s feet, awaiting forgiveness. Because, being honest, that’s why I was hunkering in this dank, dark place. No high ground here.
“How old are you, Woody?”
“Fourteen. Lennon was only nine. It was his first term.”
“I used to ask Charlie—he’s my oldest—to look out for the younger ones. In the back garden. Or the playground. But I just meant for him to keep an eye on them. Shout if they were wandering off, that sort of thing.” I leaned forward to catch Woody’s eye. “Your mother didn’t expect you to save Lennon from all this.” I waved outside. “You can’t hold yourself responsible—”
“Nobody’s perfect, yeah? We all make mistakes. Learn from it and move on.” His lip curled as he spoke. “You sound like my mum.”
“She’s right, though.”
“She didn’t know what I’m like.” He was gnawing on his knuckle again.
“Were you mean to your brother? Did you tease him, hurt him sometimes, let the big boys steal his comics?”
He nodded.
“And now you feel guilty?” I said.
He nodded.
“But that’s what people do, Woody. People are just walking bags of impulses. Not just teenagers—all of us. We do shitty things because we think we have time to make amends. But sometimes we run out of time.” A flash of lightning jolted me out of my rant. It lit up Woody’s sharp features, his electric hair and keen eyes. “And just because we survived this virus, I’m afraid it doesn’t mean we’ve been reborn, all perfect. We’re still just shitty humans. We can try to imagine that we’re going to forge a new civilization with better values. But we won’t, will we? Because it’s never happened before.”
“Like the Romans and that.”
“We just live with the guilt. We survive and live with the guilt.”
Woody’s finger went to his mouth, and he gave a soft pop as it slid from his cheek.
“But how come Lennon died? When he was the good one?”
“I’m sorry, Woody, I can’t answer that. And I’m sorry about Lennon. I’m sorry about your parents and all of this. I’m sorry I can’t make you feel better, but I can’t make myself feel better, either. I don’t know how.”
He got to his feet. I did the same.
“I’m hungry,” he said.
“We brought pasta. There should be some left.”
He stood there while we counted another rumble of thunder: five miles. Then he gave a final pop and walked into the wind toward the hill.
I went the other way to the car. They were right about the helicopter picking up the heat from the bonnet; it would still be warm. I reversed out of the overgrown building, revving the engine to force the wheels over some rubble. A yellow light lit up the console: the petrol gauge was on empty. I slapped both palms against the steering wheel; we had left the fuel canisters under the hedge at the camp. It was only a couple of miles—the remaining fuel would get me that far—but it meant breaking cover again. I cursed my easily distracted mind. The railway tunnel swallowed the car beneath several yards of earth and stones where it could surely not be detected from above. As I trudged back out of the darkness, a querulous cry pealed through the air. I thought I knew all my children’s noises, penguin-like, but here were Charlie and Billy hugging each other in the mouth of the hill, dissolving in snotty tears, making sounds I had never experienced. They mewled again as I reached them.
“Don’t go,” Charlie managed. Billy contributed a vast mucous bubble that burst wetly into the air.
“I’m not going anywhere. I just moved the car,” I said, gathering them to me.
“I thought they made you go away.” Charlie gulped at the air. “And I had to stay here and be awful.”
“Orphan.” I herded them inside for pasta and platitudes. “You don’t have to be an orphan, not today anyway.”
The storm passed, but the children were rattled, and, though it was late, only the youngest slept. I gathered that the Wild Things had grown seminocturnal, larking about late into the night, keeping their spirits up to cover their fear. Joni had helped Lola to cook dinner and was now telling them a story. She was still heavy and dull, like a sedated version of herself, but it was a start. She got them settled down. But little surges of giggling would set them off again; it would be a long night.
“Madrid,” said Charlie. “Too easy.”
“Croatia?” I said.
“Zagreb. Still too easy.”
“Malta?”
“Valletta.”
“Nice one,” said another voice in the orangey darkness off to our right.
Charlie shifted position to curl up against my chest like a shell. As well as all the other things he liked to hoard, Charlie collected capital cities, and his favorite game proved to be soothing.
“All right: Slovenia?” I said.
“I don’t know how to say it, but I can spell it: L-J-U-B—”
The ferrety boy, George the First, as he was now known, shuffled closer and cut in over Charlie to pronounce “Ljubljana” perfectly.
“Slovakia?”
“Bratislava,” they both said at once.
“Sounds like a cake,” added Charlie.
“I’ll have a cup of Earl Grey and a large slice of Bratislava, please,” I said. It was a relief to hear a smile in their voices as they went off on a tangent, ordering outlandish fantasy food items.
Two shapes loomed up, and I warned Jack and Lola not to step on Billy, who was asleep next to me. Maggie was curled there too, gnawing on her thumb, next to the Lost Boy. The teenagers folded themselves cross-legged beside me.
“We’ve been wondering,” Jack started. “If you have a plan?”
Between us, we decided to wait in the mine until there was no sign of the helicopter for long enough that we could assume it had given up trying to trace us and moved on to another area. Then we would go back and get the hermit’s radio, find out where it was safe to go, and head there after stealing a second car from Moton Hall. But our fuel supply would only get us so far. Sooner or later, I realized, we’d be forced to stop running.
“All right,” I said. “Bright and early tomorrow morning, we start waiting.”
A crunching footstep, and another small face appeared in our circle of lamplight. One of Woody’s boys. His eyes darted over mine but rested on Jack’s.
“Is Woody here?” he asked.
“Thought he’d be with you lot.”
“Nope.”
In my head, I heard the soft pop of footsteps across soggy ground: searching, I assumed, for a muddy grave in the night.
Our camp stank of foxes. I could smell it from the car when I stopped next to a bike that looked the same as the one Lola had ridden earlier to the mine. I switched off the engine—the car was already running on fumes, and I didn’t want to get stranded in the middle of nowhere—but let the headlights roar through the dark trees. I followed shadows of myself up the slope to the tents. We had left it in disarray, but animals had obviously been through too. Food scraps, rain puddles collected in the white canvas of the yurt, muddy paw prints stamped all over. The place didn’t belong to me anymore, and I had an uncomfortable sense of being oversized and conspicuous, lit up like a beacon. I rushed through the camp toward Lennon’s grave. The darkness between the trees was no more comfortable than the light, though. I shrank and crept along behind the will-o’-the-wisp trail of my torch, every step forced by the pure desperation to get it over with. In the moonlit field, Woody was crouched beside the small cross.
“You found it,” I whispered.
“Lola already told us where your camp was.”
“Aren’t you scared of the dark?”
“Shitting myself.”
A shrill fox bark carried across the field. Eerie in the fog that followed the rain.
“Let me know when you’ve said good-bye, and I’ll drive you back,” I said.
“I got a lot to say. I’ll get back all right.”
“I’ll wait in the camp, give you some privacy.”
“Just go!” His shout lacked punch in the wide-open space. He felt it and got up, turning to face me. “Why are you following me? Do you want to kill me, too?”
I handed him the torch from my key ring. “I’ve got something to do near here,” I said, “which will take about ten minutes. Then I’ll come back and pick you up. It’s not safe out here.”
He didn’t reply, and I walked—scurried—back into the white shards of the headlights. The Beast’s engine was no longer running, its final mission accomplished. Under the hedgerow, I found the remaining fuel canisters. I needed to top up Joni’s car, but darkness slithered out from between the trees, so after spilling more fuel than I got in the tank, I gave up and hauled the cans into the trunk. I’d have enough to get me where I needed to go and back to the mine.
I drove up the path toward the ford, turning off to the hermit’s shed. This time I killed the lights. In the glove compartment, the heavy Maglite. From the back seat, a plastic carrier bag. I started into the trees. Almost immediately, my torchlight picked out the dark form of Horatio. I angled it away; I didn’t want to see him, not now. Not when I wanted to be in and out, no messing around. No Horatio, no William Moton; that was the plan. Just the radio. I kept to the edge of the path, one foot skidding on blood, iron tang in the air, then three quiet, scuffing Lonely Steps, and I was in the moonlit clearing, everything silvered and flattened like a stage set. I couldn’t resist darting the torch across to the hermit’s body, checking it was still slumped by the shed, just picking out his sprawled feet. Fear galloped into my stomach, and I pushed myself to go quicker before it bolted and took me with it. I lunged into the dark shed—somehow even darker than the dark outside, ever increasing depths of darkness—and clawed at the radio receiver. The wires tangled round the bed posts, and I whimpered as I tried to pull them free; the sprinting panic wanted me to rip them out, but I fought to keep thinking: I mustn’t break them or leave vital parts behind. I slid the machine into the bag, folding the wires and cables on top. I felt all around the bottom bunk; nothing left. I had it. When I picked up the plastic bag by the handles, one snapped and the set clattered to the floor with a crash that made me yelp like the fox in the field. I gathered it all up, pushing wires back inside, and cradled it in my arms. Back out of the shed and down the steps in one leap, but the Maglite flew from my hand and landed ahead of me in the grass, pointing straight at Horatio, lighting him up. His eyes still open, his teeth showing, his stomach eviscerated to the white ribs. I grabbed the torch and ran past him to the car, throwing the radio set into the passenger seat, hauling the wheel round to get away. I screamed down the track to the camp, back into the acrid fox musk. Stinking animals. Fucking scavengers. Pounded through the trees to the grave. But Woody wasn’t there.
Back by the car, his bike was already gone. I set off toward the mine. Reckless little—I squeezed my eyes closed for a second. What did I expect? Teenagers think they’re invincible. I raced along the road with my lights dimmed, more from an instinctive urge to hide than a belief that it would let me go undetected by the helicopter. I only realized I had missed the turn to the railway when the dark bulk of the Bury Ditches rose up ahead of me. My wing mirror clipped the gatepost as I skidded into the car park, grinding to a halt on the scree. I dropped my forehead onto my fists that gripped the wheel. I could still smell Horatio’s blood on my shoes. Peter was inside that tree, totally exposed. What did it matter, I tried to console myself, there were bodies everywhere. In the road, in cars, in homes. Nature would take its course. What difference did it make if nature took its course with one more boy?
The difference, I thought as I got out of the car and lifted the boot, is that I promised his mother I’d look after him. I gathered all the bags of charcoal and a half-full petrol can. After seeing what became of Horatio—no, I had to do it properly. This was how we did things. With dignity.