Chapter Seven
In hindsight, I probably should have consulted my lists. I sat on the empty cooler, poking at the fire with a long stick. But there was nothing to cook. And nothing to drink except water. The kids sat on logs on the far side of the clearing, eating salt ’n’ vinegar crisps in a steadfast rhythm, licking their fingers down to the knuckles to get the last few crumbs. They were hushed and dopey, humbled by hunger.
At my insistence, the kids kept their distance from the Lost Boy, but Maggie still subjected him to a stream of information about the camp and our life here. Joni had him out of his filthy pajamas and into some of Charlie’s clean clothes and, even with the trouser legs rolled up twice, the family uniform of head-to-toe Boden meant he looked the part. He remained mute, wide eyes taking everything in, while he dabbed every last speck of salt off the foil of his crisp packet and sucked crumbs from his chapped lips. The boy was hungry. How many days had he been alone? I cut up our last apple into a bowl for him. Maggie never stopped talking while he ate.
I watched them while I pondered a fact that had been pushed to the wayside while we were busy disagreeing over what to do with the Lost Boy: his presence meant there were definitely other survivors.
“Did you bring medication?” Joni was stamping to and fro between the cars and the camp, dragging back to the tents all the stuff we’d hauled the other way only that morning.
“A few bits.”
“Disinfectant?”
“No.”
“What about food?” Lola chimed in.
“Nope.”
“You were supposed to be getting supplies.”
“There was a dead bloke in the kitchen.”
Only now I thought about the tools in the garage. The fully stocked pantry in the utility room, which opened into the garage. The massive gas barbecue on wheels, also in the garage. In hindsight, I probably should have gone into the garage. In hindsight, I should have gotten my ducks in a line. And, thanks to Julian and his lovelorn e-mail to Aurora, I’d even forgotten to let the bloody rabbit out.
“Lucky I stopped and got this,” said Joni, coming up the slope holding the yellow feet of a headless chicken. “And this.” An axe landed in the dirt. I didn’t ask for details, but she answered anyway. “We passed a farm, and I grabbed this old girl from a little coop in the yard. She’ll do us for tonight. I should’ve brought them all, they could roam free.”
“The foxes would have them,” I said.
“Take this,” said Joni. She held out the chicken by the stump where the head used to be. “Come on, I’m going to skin it—quicker than plucking.” I reached out and took the bloody stub, which slipped straight through my hand. I caught the chicken before it hit the ground. “You’re going to have to stand up, Marlene. I can’t do it down there.” I straightened up, juggled the chicken so that I was holding it with one hand around the throat and the other under its backside. Joni went to work on its neck, pulling back the skin, using a penknife to cut away the white tissue that held skin to flesh. “Higher,” she said. I raised my arms to hold the chicken right in front of my face. Joni’s fingers ripped down under its collar, and one of its taloned feet kicked up and clawed at my chin.
I jumped back and dropped the chicken, feeling my chin for blood. “It got me.”
Joni chuckled, bent to pick up the hen.
“Just a reflex.” She handed me the chicken as I inspected my fingertips. “There’s no blood.” I took hold of the chicken again. Joni smiled as she worked. Again, she tugged sharply at a gristly bit and, again, I dropped the carcass into the dirt.
“Jesus, Marlene—shall I get one of the kids to do it?”
She started nipping away at the white tissue again, and when she was ready to tug said, “Hold on,” so I managed not to drop it. We stood face-to-face over the chicken, feet planted wide for stability as we worked. “Hold on.” I gripped the stump. “Hold on.” I held on. The feathered layer peeled down until the headless animal looked like it was wearing a tutu, its ugly feet dancing beneath my hands. Lola came up and prodded the swollen food sack that hung from its neck.
“That’s her crop,” said Joni. “Some people eat that. It’s a delicacy.”
“Gross,” said Lola. “But it’s about all we’re going to have left for breakfast tomorrow.” She huffed off to find the kebab skewers for dinner.
“I’ll make a broth, we’ll be fine,” Joni called after her daughter. She stared at me until I raised my eyes to hers. “There’s food all around. We’ll be fine.”
“Banana,” said Billy, an hour later when dinner was served. I explained again that we didn’t have a banana or a mango or a minty Viscount biscuit. He would have to eat his food if he was hungry because there wouldn’t be any more. He didn’t believe me, of course, because that’s what I said in our kitchen at home, leaning over his booster chair with my back turned to the cupboards stuffed with food. But now, with my back turned only to the darkening void between the trees, I realized he would have to work this one out for himself. He would go hungry. And learn to eat. I took away his plate.
Charlie and Peter descended to finish off Billy’s chicken kebab and watercress salad, which they still couldn’t believe was made with actual watercress that Joni found in actual water in the actual forest. There was also a bucket of blackberries for dessert. They lolled around afterward on their logs, as stuffed as Romans. Joni hunched over her stove, boiling up leftovers into a soup for the morning. But unlike those of us who were confident our survival was assured by the presence of watercress, I couldn’t stop thinking about the garage at home. It was too far to drive back now, but a garage was a garage. They all contained roughly the same things, didn’t they? Things we needed.
“Can you get the kids into bed?” I said to Joni. “It’s my turn to go out foraging.”
“Now?”
It wasn’t dark yet, but night was just over the hill and coming our way. I kissed the kids and went down to the car. “I’m taking the axe.”
According to the map, there was another village south of the camp, in the opposite direction to Wodebury. With luck, I would see a farm or a house on the way and check it out for useful kit. I started up the hill to the lane and by habit switched on the radio, but there was only static. I let it scroll through the stations, the regular bursts of white noise forming a bleak soundtrack like a marching song. The frequencies scurried past and started all over again. I began to hum during the pauses between bursts of static.
The lane turned onto a bigger trunk road, where I switched on my headlights, although they didn’t venture far into the gloom. The road pitched and rolled between the high walls of hedges. I accelerated past a black-and-white pub with a couple of hatchbacks in the car park—I didn’t want to repeat my pub experience. Less than a mile on, I braked hard and just made the turn into a mechanic’s yard. I stopped in the driveway, with the security barrier lifted high above me, its open padlock dangling up in the sky. As I got out, metal chimed against metal to sound a feeble alarm.
The sliding doors of the workshop were open on one side to reveal a long slit of blackness. I picked up the axe and held it by the heavy end in one hand, the Maglite in the other. My boots scuffed across puddles of gravel, then fell silent over mossy patches that had reclaimed the forecourt. At the shed, I laid my hand on the wooden door, feeling the blue paint crumble and patter down over my toes. There was no buzz, so I used all my weight to press the door farther back. Inside, the darkness gathered in corners. The only sound was my own breath going in, in, in and out; in, in, in and out. I fumbled the torch on.
An ice cream van took up most of the space, straddling the mechanic’s pit with its serving window open. My light revealed pictures of cones and sundaes and something called a “screwball,” which evoked a distant memory of childhood desire. The gaudy images emerged from the dark like the hieroglyphs of the future.
It was hard to linger, though, with the dark tweaking my ponytail. I swung the torch down into the pit and around the sides of the workshop. Along the back wall hung the tools. I glanced the light down into the dark pit again, just checking, before I stepped over and grabbed a crowbar, a hammer, a saw. A pair of pliers. Working as quickly as I could. In and out. I spotted a car battery. I scraped it across the floor to the entrance, dumped the lot, and went back for a sledgehammer and some metal cutters.
On the way out the door to fetch the car, I struck gold: fuel canisters. I washed the flank of the Beast with most of the first one, but got the knack and topped the car up to overflowing. The heady smell of the jerry cans took me back to Africa: my father loading the roof rack of the safari truck before dawn, while I huddled in the warmth of the headlights. The Beast’s headlights glinted off the sopping canisters, and I wondered if I was just imagining the shimmer of rising vapors. Those fumes would be overwhelming in the car. I found a short ladder and some bungee ties inside the workshop. The ladder swung into place on top of the bike rack. Securing it was simple, but hauling a full jerry can onto the roof was not; it weighed as much as Billy. A dead weight. I apologized to the Beast as I gouged scars into its side by pushing the canisters up onto the bonnet and then scraping them over the windscreen, swearing all the way. Finally, the fuel was fixed onto the modified roof rack, and I jumped back down into the gravel.
“It’s okay.” I patted the Beast where I’d scratched it. “You look the part now.”
I slid the workshop doors closed to hide the ice cream van, a strange little secret for someone else to discover.
The first gray houses of the village straggled down the hill, but I flashed past them, braking hard when I spotted the green sign of a grocery store up a side street. I reversed and turned up a steep concrete ramp into the small car park. Empty. A good sign. I bumped up onto the pavement and across a short pedestrian area to stop right outside the double doors, leaving the lights on full beam. The windows were covered by vibrant pictures of tempting delicacies: red wine gushing from a bottle, tomatoes as big as my head. But the doors were shuttered. I picked up the axe, crowbar, and sledgehammer from the passenger seat.
I found the lock at the bottom of the shutter and heaved at it with the crowbar. The metal slats roiled and clattered, the loudest noise I’d heard for hours. I glanced up and down the street, reassuring myself there was no one to disturb. The windows of the surrounding bungalows were as blank as their inhabitants. As if to brazen it out, I grabbed the sledgehammer and slammed the lock, felt my spine rattle like the metal slats. I tried lifting the shutter an inch or so with the crowbar and hacking at the lock with the axe. Nothing budged. I stood up and arched to stretch my back. The moon was just rising over the slouching rooftops. I was grateful for the light.
I picked up my tools and switched on the Maglite to look for a back door. In fact, there was a side door, which did little to resist the crowbar. I shone my light down a corridor, strode past a staff toilet and a windowless office, pushing through swing doors into a loading area, and then into the shop itself. I listened for buzz, but there was just the sticky sound of decay. And a smell like the bottom of the fridge after my longer business trips. With the crowbar, I forced the main entrance doors from the inside, and found a simple padlock that held the shutters closed. An axe blow to the chain and the shutters rattled up to knee-height. I pushed them up, letting moonlight luster the checkout and magazine racks.
Outside, I dropped the tools on the passenger seat and walked over to pull free a trolley. It bucked out of my hands, and I realized that it was chained, needing a coin. “You are kidding me,” I muttered. My handbag was back at the camp. I had no money. I checked the car for coins—the center console, the door pockets, under the seats.
“Fuck’s sake!” I shouted into the night. Ache, ache, ache, the echo came back down the street.
“Fine.” The axe was back in my hand and I swung it high, bringing it down onto the tinny little chain that held the trolley. “Don’t worry,” I shouted to the other trolleys as I dragged one out, “the rest of you can go free.” I swung the axe and smashed chain after chain, pulling a few trolleys out and pushing them off into the car park, where one collapsed onto its side, but two others gathered speed down the slope toward the road. “That’s it!” I called. “Go! Go on, run free!” I hacked more trolleys from the pack and sent them off in singles and pairs, shouting after them as they jiggered away like shackled ponies. When I had freed a line of trolleys, I let the axe drop onto the paving stones and caught my breath. I rubbed my hand over my face. “Ducks back in a line,” I said, and pushed my trolley into the supermarket.
I finished stacking the first trolley-load in the boot of the car. The shop was small, but densely stocked, so I went back for more. Against the back wall, I compared types of charcoal. Decision made, I shone the torch across and saw disposable plates and cutlery. As I pushed the trolley along the aisle, I heard the twin rattle of a trolley outside.
I stopped dead.
Silence. I opened my mouth to breathe more quietly.
Another burst of trolley rattle from the car park. I clicked off the Maglite and crouched down to the floor, instinctively looking for something to crawl under, but there was no cover.
Silence again. Long silence.
Maybe a trolley had rolled down the hill by itself?
I waited a few minutes longer and stood back up. I clicked on the Maglite, moved to the end of the aisle, keeping the torchlight low to the ground. I could see the moonlit entrance, the railings outside, the headlamps streaming in from where the car stood out of sight to the left. I should turn those off, I thought, in case the battery dies.
As I took another step toward the entrance, a moonlit shadow darted across the path. Tall, fast, human. I hit the floor again, scrabbling the torch off. As I did, the shutter came rattling down in a shower of noise, and I was huddled in darkness.
“Quick!” A voice outside signaled a burst of trolley rattle. Running footsteps, fast and light. I crawled back toward the loading bay and crouched along the corridor to the side door. Creeping round the outside of the building to the pedestrian area, I saw dark shapes engulf my car.
They were everywhere. I held a hand up against the glare of the headlamps and saw that they were inside as well as out, small silhouettes pulling out stuff and dumping it into trolleys: raiding the car. Their scuffling footsteps consolidated, and I gathered there were about eight of them, a couple inside the cabin, the others clustered around the boot. A box came flying out of a side door, and round shapes the size of hand grenades rolled away: avocados. “Gross!” said a shrill voice, and another one giggled. One trolley left the scene, pushed down the slope by someone who jumped on and rode it as it picked up speed and jangled off.
They were children, boys. Behaving like a pack of wild things. Like the dogs back in the city. They were taller than mine, older than Charlie, not little ones; old enough to know better. Injustice burnt in me, and I fought an urge to run forward and grab my stuff, fight for our supplies. Our lifeline. I stood upright and stepped out into the light.
“That’s my food.”
The scuffling stopped, as if a bunch of mice had been caught in the glare of a cat. There was a beat, and then one of them shouted, “Leg it!” The shapes streamed away from the car and scattered, some pushing a second trolley away, while others vaulted the railings and dropped the few feet to the pavement below, where they had bikes. I chased the closest figures, but they separated, so I headed down the slope after the trolley, but it was already turning into the dark alley of another side road. I stopped after a few steps, too slow to stand a chance.
“Little shits,” I yelled after them. “I’m coming after you.” I turned back up the slope toward the car. Ahead of me: a quick footstep and the scrape of the axe as it was lifted from the paving stones. A taller boy, the one who had closed the shutters, swung the axe into the air.
He darted through the headlights, the beam bleaching out his electric mop of hair so it blazed for a second like a filament. His face fell again into darkness and he swung at the wheel. “No!” I screamed as the axe landed with a muted thud in the tire. The breath left my body with the same dull rush as air through rubber. The Beast sagged like a wounded bull. The axe clattered to the ground, its clang echoing down the now-empty street, as the boy leapt onto the pavement below. I ran after him and teetered over the railing, pivoting on my hips and flailing at the air through which he’d fallen. I leaned out and screeched a long cry of pure fury into the night—the sound of outfoxed prey. Below me, the boy made a running jump onto a bike.
“Witch!” he shouted back, his voice cracking. “Get a broomstick!”