His throat ached for cold beer. The whisky was too strong to drink greedily, and he could do a good session, he felt he deserved a night on the lash. Thirsty, he went back to the tent and drank from the bladder. Becky and Aidan were in the same positions he’d left them. He heard the scrabble of pebbles loosed from a bank of earth, the hush of dead vegetation kicked to dust as bodies hurried by it.
‘Show yourselves,’ he whispered. ‘Talk to me.’
He fell asleep sitting upright, in an awkward position. Aidan nudged him awake as he hopped from foot to foot, trying to unzip the tent’s entrance so he could go out for a piss. Jane’s neck flared with pain. He stood up, rubbing at it. Cold had seeped into his bones.
‘Where’s Becky?’ He blinked, looking out at the pale morning, finding it hard to believe that he had been asleep for any length of time; the darkness, and the sounds, and his uneasy thoughts seemed to have been the product of only a few seconds previously.
‘She said she was going to try to find us some breakfast. She said she was sick to the back teeth of dried apricots. She said don’t worry. She said she was going to do things and buy a book.’
‘By the book,’ Jane corrected. ‘So much for democracy.’
‘What?’
‘Never mind.’
Aidan helped him take down the tent and pack it in the rucksacks. They sat together on the rucksacks, feeling the temperature climb, waiting. They talked about books. Aidan liked Where the Wild Things Are.
‘Do you still like it?’ Jane asked, but Aidan didn’t understand what he meant.
The thought of books had stayed with him. He supposed there would be no more. Not for a long time, at least. He thought of all the books he had read over his lifetime, a great deal of them in those prison cells of hyperbaric chambers where there’d been little else to do. Were they still important? Maybe yes. Maybe more so than ever. Aidan had not been read a bedtime story since they’d found him. That wasn’t good enough. It was time to remember the stories Jane had been told as a child, or make up some new ones. It had been a while – he remembered singing silly, off-the-cuff songs to lull Stanley to sleep – but it was in him; it was in everyone, like the skill to make fire, or love.
Becky came back empty-handed. He was harder on her than he should have been, perhaps because of that.
‘I just looked in a corner shop,’ she said. ‘I waited a long time to make sure there was nobody inside.’
‘But that’s not the problem, is it?’ he asked. ‘It’s people on the outside, watching you, waiting for you to make your move.’
‘Well, I’m here aren’t I?’ she snapped.
‘Have a dried apricot.’
They walked most of the day in silence.
‘How many minutes until we get to London?’ Aidan asked.
‘I don’t know,’ Jane said.
‘Ten?’
‘A bit more than that.’ But he wasn’t really listening any more. Up ahead, maybe a mile away, there was a strange glinting on the road, as if someone were sending messages by reflecting light off glass.
‘What’s that?’ Becky asked. They had all stopped.
‘I don’t know,’ Jane said.
‘Code?’ As if she had read his mind.
‘Maybe. I don’t like it. Let’s get under cover somewhere for a while.’
They scampered down the embankment to a ploughed field. They had to leave the wheelbarrow. Jane dumped it in a ditch and they hurried across the field, dust pluming up from every footstep and lifting from their clothes, their hair, as if they were made from the stuff. At the far end of the field they climbed over a charred fence. There was a lake beyond it, dark and flat as a lithograph.
They lay down by the fence and watched the road. Their dust ghosts rose too slowly, but were then whipped away by the currents of wind. They had barely dissipated when the first of the figures appeared.
It was like looking at a mirror image of themselves. A man led the way for a woman pushing a young child in an old-fashioned pram. The child was too big for it, legs hanging over the side, jouncing at every bump and crater. He seemed to be wrapped from head to toe in shiny material, similar, perhaps, to the reflective insulating blankets that marathon runners wrapped around themselves at the end of a race. Was that what he had seen glinting earlier? Jane thought the child must be injured, or sick. He wanted to go to them, to ask them if they had come from London and why they were heading north, but there was something he didn’t like about the senseless motion of the child’s limbs.
‘Is that a little boy?’ Aidan asked. ‘Like me?’
‘I think so,’ Jane said.
‘Can we play? He can have my boat. I’ve played with that enough now.’
‘Let’s just watch them. I’m not sure if they’re friendly.’
Jane could sense Aidan’s scrutiny of him. He hated having to seed his mind with doubt. Boys of five shouldn’t have to be saddled with issues of trust when it came to other children. He didn’t want him growing into a suspicious, lonely man. But he didn’t know what else he could do.
The pram – not the best mode of transport for such an unpredictable road – hit one pockmark too many and the woman struggled to right it. The child slid out on to the surface; they heard the dull crack of its head, or Jane imagined he did. The man turned and started haranguing the woman. Two more figures appeared, as though rising out of the road itself. Men. They picked up the child – one of them grasping it by the hair – and dumped him back in the pram. There was no cry of objection, from the child or the woman.
‘Becky, I think maybe you should take Aidan down to the lake for a while,’ Jane said. ‘We don’t need to see any more.’
Becky tugged at Aidan’s sleeve. The boy resisted. ‘But I want to play.’
‘Aidan, it doesn’t look good. I think—’
‘NO!’ Aidan said, his chin thrust out in determination.
Jane glanced back at the travellers and saw how they had turned towards them. He saw the first man’s stance alter. He saw his knees bend slightly. He saw his shoulder recoil.
‘What—’ began Becky. And then the fence to her left disintegrated, the bolt the man had fired from his crossbow burying itself in the dead bark of a tree with a dull phut!
‘Let’s go,’ said Jane.
Aidan was pulling toys from his pocket. ‘He can have this if he wants. He can—’
‘Now,’ said Jane, and grabbed Aidan’s hand.
His back to the road, he felt the air move. Something punched past his ear, missing by a matter of inches. There had been some practising going on. He slipped the rifle off his shoulder and headed for the lake. Jane rued the lack of shots he had taken himself. He hadn’t even tried the gun out yet, thinking it better that he conserve his supplies of ammunition. He thumbed the safety off as they ran. Before the shape of the land took them lower than the level of the road, he glanced back. The three men were coming across the field. He felt his throat turn cold and swollen; he couldn’t swallow and for a moment he thought he’d been shot through it.
The lake stretched out, grey and uninviting, gnawing against pebbles so cold they might crack if you held them for a while. No boats to launch from the jetty, which was half collapsed, bending into the water. The trees thinned out as they approached the edge. Their breathing was fast and shallow; the breath of fear. The men would soon breach that fence, the last line of trees, and they would be targets easily picked off.
To the left, maybe two hundred yards away, Jane glimpsed the exposed spine of a drystone wall. They had to get beyond that, and quick, but there was no way they could make it before the men reached clear ground. He urged Becky and Aidan on ahead of him. Someone shouted out. They were splitting up: two men were following the route they had taken; the third – the man with the crossbow – had broken left and was taking a long, curving route to cut them off.