Numbers

  “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.

  “Pigs.”

  “You seen some?” He craned behind quickly, throwing the car into a steep swerve.

  “No. Keep your eyes on the road! You’ll kill us both. Anyway, not that sort of pig — real ones, well, storybook ones, oh, never mind….”

  There was a signpost with a picnic table on it. We turned off the road and found a big rest stop, well hidden. There was a tractor trailer parked there, and we pulled up behind it and both had a swig of Coke and some chocolate biscuits. A bloke appeared from the side and walked ’round the back of the truck. He stopped to light a cigarette, then checked that the fastenings on his rig were done up. All the while, I could see he was looking at us. He was pretending he wasn’t, but you know, don’t you, when someone’s staring at one thing but looking out of the corner of their eye at something else? Instinctively, I slouched down in my seat as I watched him walk ’round to the cab door and haul himself up.

  “Can you see him?”

  Spider picked a bit of biscuit out of his teeth. “What, that driver?”

  “Yeah, can you see him in his cab?”

  “Just in his sideview mirror. Why?”

  “What’s he doing?”

  “He’s smoking a cigarette and he’s talking into a little radio thing.”

  My skin was pricking all over. “He’s spotted us, Spider. He’s calling the police.”

  “Nah, don’t be daft. These truck drivers talk to each other all the time.”

  “But what if he is? What do we do?”

  “We need to dump this car, get another one. Let’s get out of here, anyway.” He started
the engine and shifted easily through the gears as he accelerated away and back onto the main road — he was getting the hang of driving.

  I looked behind. Way back, the tractor trailer was lumbering along, following us.

  When you looked, there were trucks everywhere — one a couple of vehicles ahead of us, and, every minute or so, one coming the other way. If the first driver had spotted us and had told all his mates, we were completely stuffed. They’d be able to trace our every movement. A truck was heading toward us, and as I looked into the cab, the driver met my eyes — just for a moment — then looked away. He had a headset on, and was talking as he passed us.

  “Spider, we’ve gotta get out. They’re on to us. That truck just now, he looked at me. Did you see?”

  “Nah, man, I’m keeping my eyes on the road, like you said.”

  “Watch the next one.”

  Another couple of minutes and another truck approached. The driver definitely clocked us. Spider saw it, too.

  He cursed and swung into the next side road, steaming along a narrow lane. I was holding on to the door with one hand and the dashboard with the other, praying we wouldn’t meet something coming the other way. He slowed down and eventually pulled up at a place where a little lane, not wide enough for a car, met our road.

  There was a signpost, a green one, saying FOOTPATH. My heart sank.

  “Gather up the stuff, we’re going to have to leg it.”

  “No way. Where to? How…?”

  “We’ll just take our stuff, go up this track, walk a few miles, find somewhere to kip down, and I’ll get some more wheels as soon as I can. Nick something from a farm. Come on, get the stuff together.”

  We bundled everything we could into some plastic bags. I frantically flicked through the map book, and tore out the pages showing where we were now and all the places between us and Weston.

  “Yeah, good thinking, thatta girl.” Again, you could tell Spider was buzzing with adrenaline. I guess I was, too, but it was like two sides of the same coin. He was excited, enjoying the adventure; I was eaten up with fear — they were closing in on us.

  We couldn’t get everything in the bags. I put the coat on, easier than carrying it, and Spider draped a blanket ’round his shoulders; then, with a backward glance to the car, we started up the lane. God knows what we looked like — a pair of dossers, I suppose. We weren’t like hikers with backpacks and walking boots, just ordinary kids with plastic bags, and a touch of the charity shop about us.

  The bags were a bloody nuisance. One of them kept bumping my leg, no matter what I did. I tried turning it ’round, swapping hands, nothing worked. Bump, bump, bump. The plastic cut into my hands, a cruel, nagging pain. And my feet and legs were all over the place. The track was so uneven; there were two deep ruts made up of stones, big ones and small ones, and a hump of grass in the middle, but all different levels. I started off walking in one of the dips, but my ankle kept turning over on the stones, so I switched to the grassy strip. That was OK, until it suddenly decided to slope or there was a hole or whatever, and then my ankle would go again. And all the time, bump, bump, bump, the bloody shopping bag. I got so sensitive to it, it felt like a sledgehammer hitting the side of my knee.

  After going on like this for half the morning, I stopped and dropped both bags. I turned my hands over to look at the palms: They were bright red, crisscrossed with fat white lines where the bags had cut in. Spider carried on, oblivious. It was like he was listening to music; he was walking along to his own rhythm, nodding his head, his legs kind of springy — but, of course, it was just in his own head. After a few seconds, he realized I wasn’t following and turned ’round.

  “What’s up?”

  “I can’t go on any farther. I’ve had it. Can we stop for a rest?”

  He looked at his watch. “We’ve been walking for six minutes. If you went back to that bend, you’d still be able to see the car.”

  I kicked one of the bags. “I can’t do it! I don’t like walking!”

  “We walk miles in London, along the canal and the streets. Miles, man. You can do this.”

  “Yeah, but that’s London, civilization. They’ve got pavement and tarmac there. This is crap! My ankles hurt. And these stupid bags keep banging against my leg, and look at my hands!” I held them up toward him.

  “Look,” he said patiently, “we need to get as far away from that car as we can, find somewhere to hide out. Why don’t we follow this path for an hour and see where we get to?”

  “You’re not listening to me! I CAN’T DO IT!” I let out a scream of frustration; I may even have stamped my feet. Then I picked up one of the bags with both hands and flung it. It sailed gracefully through the air and lodged in the top of a hedge, about six feet up.

  Spider lurched over to me and put his hand over my mouth. “Shh! You’ll have them all running here, you divvy.” There was light dancing in his eyes, a broad grin on his face. He was laughing at me.

  He was laughing.

  At.

  Me.

  I went ballistic, lashing out with fists and feet, screeching and grunting. “Don’t you ever laugh at me! Don’t you ever…!”

  Instead of backing away or hitting back, he got his arms and legs ’round me, and kind of wrapped me up, and squeezed. My arms were held down by my side, my legs had nowhere to go. I was held in close, my face pressed into the smelly place under his arms, and he sort of sapped the fury out of me. I could feel it going, feel my body relaxing. His chin was resting on the top of my head, and we stood there for a bit, just breathing.

  “You alright now?” he said after a while.

  “No.” But I was, or at least I was better.

  Spider released me and went to fish the bag out of the hedge. “Let’s have a bit of chocolate and press on. I’ll carry your bags.”

  I couldn’t let him do that — I mean, I have got some pride. “Piss off, I can carry my own bags.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  In the end we compromised and he carried the awkward one, and we set off again, up the track, as a soft yellow light filtered through the branches and leaves above us, and the sound of sirens drifted over from the main road.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The lane ended with a gate and a stile. We put our bags down, leaned on the gate, and peered over. The path seemed to go straight on, through the middle of a field. It dipped down, so you couldn’t see the other side, but rising up beyond it were more and more fields, as far as you could see. I had never seen such a godforsaken picture of nothingness.

  “Where the hell are we going?” I asked.

  Spider shrugged. “Away from the car we just dumped. Anywhere.”

  “We can’t go across there.” I nodded my head toward the rural wasteland.

  “Why not?”

  “Look at it, soft git! There’s no trees, no hedges. Everyone for fifty miles around will be able to see us.”

  “D’you wanna go back? Sit in the car ‘til they find us, haul us out, and spread-eagle us on the floor with a gun in the back of our necks?”

  “What do you mean, a gun…?”

  “They think we’re terrorists.”

  I leaned my head on my arms and shut my eyes. I didn’t know what I’d imagined being a runaway would be like, but this wasn’t it. I felt so tired, an aching tiredness creeping through my arms and legs.

  “Can’t we just stay here for a while?” I said, my head still down, my voice muffled by my sleeves.

  Spider shook his head. “It’s too close to the car. We’ve got to get farther away.” He paused. “Look, there’s a clump of trees at the top there. We could get over to that, and then hide out until it starts to get dark.”

  I looked up. There was a dark smudge hugging the curve of a hill that must have been about twenty miles away.

  “What, that? Way over there?”

  He nodded. “Yeah, take us an hour, tops. We can do it.” He got hold of all the bags and lifted them over the stile, then stepped ove
r himself, his long legs making short work of it.

  I sighed and followed. The wooden step wobbled when I put my weight on it, and I let out a squeal. Spider laughed and put his hand out to steady me. I grabbed hold and swung my leg over, then let go, swiveled ’round, and gripped the top of a wooden fence post as I brought my other leg over. With my butt in the air, the bloody step felt like it was going to give way, and there was something squishy on my hand. I let go of the post and realized I’d put my hand on some bird shit.

  “Bloody hell!” I could hear Spider laughing out loud behind me. “It’s not funny, I’ve got shit on me now!” I reached down with one leg, feeling for the ground with my foot. When I was finally on solid ground, I turned ’round to see Spider doubled over, laughing his guts out. “What?”