“This place is a fucking joke,” she whispered back, “I’m a fucking engineer, not a dinner lady!”
The woman next to her frowned and pointed at the person behind me. Emily scowled back but obediently put a scoop on the empty plate.
The pressure of the people behind me forced me onward and I looked back to see Emily still watching me, but too far away now for any conversation to go unnoticed in the almost silent tent. I gave her an apologetic shrug and moved down the line, having a scoop of peas and a lonely frankfurter added to my meal before I followed the rest of my group to a set of tables in the middle of the floor.
We ate in silence, too tired to do more than chew mechanically as the ever present guards stood by the entrance and watched us. My stomach began to complain as long-denied food overwhelmed it, but I forced the rest down anyway, unsure when my next meal would be. If I could, I planned to escape that night, to somehow find Emily and get through the fence. I’d seen a few likely places that afternoon, dips in the terrain that were hidden from the guard towers that stood watch over the perimeter, and I hoped that with a little luck we would be able to use one of those to our advantage.
My fork had just scraped the last of the potato from my plate when one of the guards came in and looked around.
“Time,” he called, “curfew, come on.”
Several people hastily shovelled the rest of their food into their mouths even as they were standing, then filed out. As I left the tent, I was again pushed into a large group and we were herded towards another tent about a hundred feet away from the mess, this one made of heavy canvas with only one entrance and the sides firmly pegged down, and a white W-7 stencilled to the side of the entrance flap.
It could comfortably have slept ten, maybe fifteen people, but all twenty one of us were shepherded inside, everyone else groping towards a set of blankets and a pillow set on the ground in the dim light. I stood there at the entrance, looking around for a spare set of bedding.
“You waiting for an invitation?” It was the corporal, appearing at my shoulder and making me jump.
“No, but I don’t have any blankets,” I said hopefully.
He shrugged and put a hand in the small of my back, propelling me further into the tent.
“Well you can either find someone nice enough to share, or you’ll have to do without tonight. I haven’t got time to send someone running off just to make sure you’re nice and cosy.”
I stumbled form the shove and turned to protest, but the flap was closed and zipped in seconds. A few moments later I heard the sound of a padlock snapping shut, and I turned back into the gloom, hoping to hear someone, anyone, offer me a space in their blankets.
It was a long, cold night.
Chapter 35
I woke, shivering and cramped, from the few hours’ exhausted sleep I’d fallen into on the hard ground. Even with the days being hot, the earth under the tent was hungry for more and had leached most of the heat from my body.
No one met my eyes as the tent flap was thrown back, allowing morning sunlight to stream through the east-facing entrance. Despite the light, the sun was only just over the horizon as we were chivvied out and into the mess tent to be served a breakfast of stale bread, baked beans and black coffee.
As with the previous evening, we were barely given time to finish the meal before being ousted once more, first to the latrine ditch where we all stood or squatted next to each other in embarrassed silence and then on to the pile of wood.
Everything ached, even my bones. I didn’t know how I’d get through the first hour, let alone the day, but midmorning found me still carrying wood and setting it in place while others hammered nails in, making a piecemeal barrier that shut off my view of freedom piece by mismatched piece.
The sun beat down ferociously, making me feel like one of the nails being beaten into the wood, almost a physical force that made my head droop as I walked back and forth.
A little after midday, the pile of wood was finally gone, just a few offcuts too small to be of any use strewn in the grass. I expected us to be put to some other task, but instead the corporal ordered us to sit down and passed out a bottle of water each.
I almost cried as the lukewarm plastic was pressed into my waiting hand, my fingers trembling as I unscrewed the lid and poured water down my parched throat.
“Careful, you’ll be sick if you drink it too fast.” The woman who had given me the warning the day before sat next to me, her bottle still almost full as she sipped at it slowly.
I glanced around warily to make sure the soldiers weren’t too near, and seeing them busy talking to the corporal, I inched closer.
“How long have you been here?” I asked quietly.
“Since Tuesday, I think. What day is it now?” She shrugged. “Not that it matters much.”
I thought back over the days, trying to get it right in my head. I’d met Emily on Monday, the morning after the flare, and then we’d headed off to find Melody the next day. It felt like a different lifetime. We’d travelled together for three, or was it four days since? I was so tired I couldn’t remember, the days on the road together seeming to blur into one.
“I think it’s Saturday, or maybe Sunday,” I said finally, looking up at the sound of a vehicle coming towards us across the field.
It was one of the four tonners, the canvas stripped from the back so that it could hold more wood, taken from god only knew where and piled haphazardly so that bits were occasionally shed like unwanted skin.
It pulled up nearby and the driver jumped out, beckoning us over. With a collective groan, we stood and began to help in getting the load off the truck and into a pile so that we could continue our work.
And so the day continued. I expected to stop for lunch, but the bottle of water was all we were given, so I made it last, pulling it from my pocket whenever my hands were free and taking tiny sips to stave off the hunger. By the end of that day I had decided that whatever order The Secretary was trying to bring to the chaos, I wanted no part of it. I’d seen animals treated better than we were, and as the sun set on my second day working on the fence, I knew that I had to get out of here soon. Every day I was here was another day that I wasn’t on my way to Melody, and I knew that when the fence was completed it would be even harder to escape.
Throughout the day I’d been keeping an eye on the other work groups, tiny figures in the distance that scurried to and fro like ants as they built up their parts of the perimeter. From what I could see, the fence would be complete in another few days so the sooner I acted the more chance I had of winning free.
With that in mind, on my last trip to the woodpile I searched for a few seconds until I found a wood-shaving barely an inch across. Pocketing it, I picked up a large piece of wood and half carried, half dragged it to the fence. While I helped the man with the hammer hold it in place, I crouched to help keep the bottom of the wood against the frame with one hand while the other cast around until it closed around one of the nails. This quickly went into the same pocket. I didn’t dare look up to see if anyone was watching me, although I doubted they’d know what I was intending even if they had seen anything, but no one raised an alarm or came hurrying over.
Once the last piece of wood was in place we were herded together and marched back towards the mess tent. I squirmed and elbowed my way into the middle of the group, using their bodies to hide my hands from the searching eyes of the guards. Those hands worked frantically in the few seconds I had, using the nail to scratch and re-scratch two symbols into the wood-shaving before I pushed it as far into the crease of my palm as I could.
As I’d hoped, Emily was in the serving area again, her eyes catching mine the moment I stepped into the tent. The long, slow shuffle towards her was torturous, my hands sweating as I worked out how I was going to pass the shaving over to her. Of course I could have tried whispering to her, but if anyone overheard there was a risk that they would pass that information on, and after my talk with the Secretary I had to assume that everything I might say or do was being observed, and most likely the same for Emily. Why else would they have an Engineer, and a sergeant no less, serving in the mess tent?