“God damn it!” I screamed.
I kicked what was left of the fire and sent red embers flying in all directions. Justin twisted his body away and moved back to avoid being hit. His eyes were wide and his face started to drain white. As the last of the red embers turned black and fell to the earth, I picked up my bag.
“We’re moving.”
Justin didn’t move. He had his knees drawn up to his chest and rested his head on them.
“Get up. You’ve wasted enough of our time.”
He still didn’t move. I took a deep breath and walked over to him. Was he crying? I couldn’t tell. I felt a pang in my chest, and the hot feeling that was burning through me started to fade. This wasn’t me. It was just the situation making me feel like this. It was like everything turned to shit at the slightest opportunity, and my options were narrowly dwindling away.
We had no supplies, no energy and we had a group of hunters close on our tracks. Now the only thing we could do was get a car, and to do that I had to go see my brother-in-law, David.
***
We crossed the road and walked by the side of the reservoir. Something about the pool of water and the way the hills were positioned around it collected the wind and made it snap around our heads. My ears started to hurt, and I could see Justin’s turning red.
“Put your hood up,” I said.
He reached behind him and lifted his hood over his head, but he didn’t say anything. He hadn’t spoken since I had gone mad and kicked the fire. For me, there was nothing wrong with the silence. But I couldn’t have him in a mood. I needed him to listen to me and do what I said, so I needed to snap him out of it.
We reached the merchant’s pathway that turned away from the reservoir. If we followed it for ten minutes, we would reach the old building that David had taken as his home sometime after Clara died and we went our separate ways.
“Sit down a minute,” I said.
I sat down on a bench next to the reservoir, and Justin did the same. Behind us the waves gently lapped. Today would have been a perfect day for wind surfing.
I looked at the kid. There were dark rings under his eyes, and his face was drained of colour. “I’m sorry,” I said.
He looked up at me and arched his eyebrows quizzically.
“It’s important to me,” I said, “Getting to the farm. And when you do something to fuck it up, I can’t help but get a little upset.”
He cleared his throat. His voice was the quietest I’d ever heard it. “What’s so special about it? You obviously can’t stand having me around, so what’s so good about the farm you put up with me to get there?”
His voice sounded hurt, and I knew everything he said was true. If I could have had my way, the GPRS would be working and Justin would have been back in Vasey. But things hadn’t worked out like that, and you had to work with what you had. Besides, there were some things he could do that came in useful, I guess. He wasn’t a total pain in the arse.
I looked at him and I suddenly saw him for what he was; just a lonely kid with no family. He wanted an escape route, and when he saw me, he took it. He knew he didn’t belong with the people in Vasey, that he was different from them all. Maybe Justin and I were similar after all.
I thought about his question and what to say to him. It was hard, the feeling of having to share something, but the hurt in the boy’s voice stung me. It wouldn’t kill me to tell him a little more about the farm.
“I promised someone very special to me that I’d get them there. It was a few years ago, after all everything kicked off.”
“Who was it?”
I took a deep breath. “My wife. The farm was her father’s. We didn’t live up North; we’d driven here to visit his farm when all of this kicked off. That’s why I still had it programmed into the GPRS.”
“You’ve got a Northern accent though.”
I smiled. “I was born here, but Clara and I left Lancashire and moved to London. My mates never forgave me.” I smiled to myself when I remembered the stick my friends would give me for becoming what they called a ‘London yuppie’.
Justin wiped his nose. “So you’ve been to the farm before then, if it was her dad’s?”
I shook my head. “All the time I knew her – Christ, a decade – Clara never spoke to him. No family meals, no birthday cards, nothing. They couldn’t stand each other, and it was over something so damn petty. And then one day, completely out of the blue, he picked up the phone. So we loaded up the car and drove up here.”
“How come you didn’t make it?”
I looked into the water of the reservoir and tried to see to the bottom, but it was too dense to make out anything but a dark brown tint. The wind nipped at my ears.
“Before we got there,” I said, “the world ended.”
There was a few seconds of silence as we both stared into the pool of water. Somewhere above, a bird squawked. I turned my head to Justin. The boy was leant forward with his elbow propped up on his leg and his chin resting in his palm. His eyes were deep and engrossed in thought.
I cleared my throat. “I made a promise; I told Clara I’d get us there; that whatever state the farm was in, we would fix it up and make it our own. It wasn’t the greatest plan in the world, but it was the best we had. Better than living day to day with a target on your back. We could get crops plants, fix the farm up. We’d never need anybody every again.”
“Sounds like a great plan,” said Justin.
***
We walked through the merchant path. Years ago it had been a stone walkway that cut a clear trail through the grass, but after fifteen maintenance-free years it was covered in weeds and the stone was cracked. The hills to either side of us offered a little protection from the cutting wind.
As we got nearer to David’s house, my heart hammered. I hadn’t seen him in years, and the way we left it hadn’t exactly been friendly. I knew he’d be pissed off at me, especially when I came to him asking for his car. If I could have thought of any solution, no matter how difficult, I would have turned around in an instant.
Justin kept his head down and walked, which hopefully meant his curiosity about me was satisfied for the time being. I still felt anger faintly twisting in my chest over what he’d done, but I knew it wouldn’t do us any good to take it out on him.
“Your steps are getting quieter,” I said.
He nodded.
I tried to smile at him. “Well done.”
Ten minutes later we reached what passed for David’s house. It was a red-bricked building that had once stored pumps that helped in some way toward filtering water from the reservoir. The pumps had been removed years ago, and ever since then the building had been left to fall apart. There were four windows cracked with dust, and at one side of the building there was a power generator, though it wasn’t switched on. There was space at the back of the building for a yard, which is where his car would be.
Justin started to walk ahead, but I put a hand on his shoulder.
“Steady on, kid. Wait a minute.”
“Isn’t this where your brother lives?”
“Brother in law.”
“Whatever, what’s the problem?”
I scratched my chin. “You’ll see. David’s…not quite right.”
I stared at the building for a few minutes, trying to find a sign of life, but I couldn’t see anything. I looked at the generator again. Despite that it wasn’t humming right now, I knew it would be a working power supply. David was a genius at things like that, mechanical stuff. Electronics, cars, computers, power, you name it, he had a working knowledge of it. These days, that was a valuable skill to have. It was a pity his personality made people want to get a hundred miles away from him.