“Where are you going?”
“Nowhere – I’ll kip here.” His long limbs only just fit into the front; his head was brushing the ceiling.
“No, I’m alright here,” I said. “I can tip the seat back. You get in the back, bit more space for you.”
So much for old-fashioned gallantry. He agreed straightaway and got out of the driver’s door and into the back. He leaned over and rummaged behind the seat, then passed a blanket over to me.
I wrapped it ’round my shoulders and wriggled down, trying to make myself comfortable. I closed my eyes, but all I could see were the images from the TV: the space where the pod used to be on the Eye, bits of blue parka, a shredded straw bag. I could see the queue again, those faces looking at me. I opened my eyes, but there was no relief, nothing to focus on, just the wretched blackness of a country lane. The darkness was so dense, there could be anything out there. There could be a bloody great bloke with a knife just a few feet from the car, and we wouldn’t see him until he loomed up to the windows, pressed his hands and face against the glass, grotesquely distorted, yanked open the doors, and…
“You awake, Spider?”
“Yeah.” I could hear him shifting around. “I’m so knackered, but I can’t sleep. My brain won’t switch off, it’s like I’m wired.”
“I’m scared. I don’t like it here.”
I felt his hand reach ’round the side of my seat, patting my arm. I got my hand out of the blanket and intertwined my fingers with his. His hand felt like it was twice the size of mine – long fingers and knobbly knuckles. He gently stroked the base of my thumb with his, soothing me without words. I guess I must have nodded off, because the next thing I knew a gray, silvery light was filling the car through fogged-up windows, and Spider was getting into the driver’s seat.
“Time to go, Jem. We’ll find some nice wheels and get some miles behind us before everyone wakes up.”
He turned the car around, and we headed back to the suburbs of the sleeping town. I was flung forward as he suddenly slammed on the brakes. A fox was crossing the road in front of us, a big bugger. Spider smiled as it melted away into a hedge.
“Glad I didn’t hit him. He’s the same as us, Jem. A thief, out and about, nice and early. Respect, Mister Fox.”
We carried on, soon finding some quiet suburban streets full of parked cars. Despite it being God knows what time, Spider was wide-awake, his eyes flicking along the rows of cars, checking things out. After a bit, he pulled up and nodded toward the other side of the road, where a big old station wagon was parked.
“That’s the one, Jem. Get all the stuff in the bags. Let’s do this quickly, and no noise.” He held his long, bony index finger up to his mouth and winked. He was loving this.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“Stay here. I’ll just suss it out.”
Spider swung out of the car and darted across the road. He did a quick tour ’round the station wagon and came back.
“Yeah, that’s fine. No wheel lock or nothing. Get all the stuff together, blankets and everything.”
“Just a minute.” I reached into the glove compartment and pulled out the bill to McNulty. I scrabbled about for a pen and found an old pencil stub. In the smallest print I could manage, I wrote in the corner of the letter: The end-12252023. A parting gift to the cruel bastard.
“What the hell are you doing?” Spider hissed at me. “We’ve got to go before the neighbors’ curtains start twitching. Come on!”
I dropped the letter onto the floor, gathered up my stuff, and got out of the car. Spider was already at the driver’s door of the new one, fiddling at the lock with some sort of tool. It gave a satisfying click, and he got in and opened the passenger door. I went ’round, chucked all the stuff onto the backseat, and got in quickly, trying not to make too much noise as I shut the door. Spider was doing his thing under the steering column, and soon the engine sparked into life and we were off, easing through the sleepy streets, nice and quiet.
It took us ages to get out of Basingstoke. What a complete nightmare, like they’d designed the roads to keep you trapped there forever. We drove ’round in bloody circles for about twenty minutes, until I spotted a sign for Andover – I’d seen on the map that that was one of the next towns west. As we headed away, Spider heaved a sigh of relief. “Reckon they should bomb bloody Basingstoke, leave London alone.”
Even at half-six there were plenty of cars around.
“Try the radio, see what’s happening,” Spider said.
I didn’t want to know, kind of wanted the outside world to stay outside, for it just to be me and Spider in a car, traveling, but I switched the radio on anyway, and pressed a few buttons randomly until I found some news.
“The death toll from the London bombing has risen to eleven overnight, with twenty-six of the injured still hospitalized, two of them in critical condition. Forensic experts are now engaged in a painstaking search of the site, sifting the debris for evidence of the perpetrators and for clues confirming the identity of the dead. Police are still appealing for two youths seen running from the scene minutes before the explosion to come forward, and are set to release security camera photos at a press conference later this morning.”
“Switch it off, Jem. Don’t say nothing about the car, does it? P’raps they haven’t sussed it’s us yet.”
“They probably wouldn’t say everything they know, though, would they? It’s not going to take long, is it? Karen will have reported me missing, and they’ve got the security camera footage…”
“The best thing would be to find somewhere to hide out, camp out somewhere in the woods. Wherever there are people around, it’s danger for us.”
My heart sank. What the hell did either of us know about camping out? Two kids from London? “Spider, have you been camping before?”
“Nah, but how difficult can it be? We just need enough food and water, and some blankets, find somewhere sheltered. We’ll be fine – commandos, yeah?”
I laughed. “I’m not going commando.”
“No, you retard, living off the land. Catching stuff, eating berries. We can do that.”
“We’ll be in the bloody hospital ourselves by tomorrow night if we’re picking stuff and eating it. We’ll be poisoned. If we don’t freeze to death.” I looked gloomily out the window at the alien patchwork of fields and hedges. It was about as friendly as the surface of Mars: no shops, no houses, no people, no life. True enough, London was a dump, but at least it was some sort of civilization, not like this endless, muddy, dull green wasteland. “Why can’t we just stay in the car? Park it out of the way?”
“Yeah, maybe you’re right. Listen, I think we should drive for another half hour or something and then park up out of sight until it gets dark. We’re much less likely to get spotted in the dark.”
We drove on, past bleak, rolling hills, farms here and there. Every now and again, little clusters of houses and the odd shop sprang up – they had names, but you couldn’t really say they were places. There was nothing to them. Some of the houses had straw on the roofs, like it was the bloody Dark Ages or something. It reminded me of “The Three Little Pigs,” one of the stories my mum read me. Stupid little pig building its house out of straw, and the big bad wolf blowing it down. The wolf ends up boiled in a pot, doesn’t he, with the three little pigs safe in their brick house? I don’t know why they tell children all these lies. It doesn’t take long to figure out that in real life the wolf always comes out on top; little pigs like me and Spider don’t stand a chance.
“What you thinking about?”
I came to with a start. I hadn’t been asleep, just thinking sodeep I wasn’t there for a while.