‘You want to search in the dark?’
‘That’s right.’
Daniel shrugs. ‘We’ve got nothing to hide here, but these are our homes. There are babies asleep. It’s getting late now. Why not wait until morning?’
Saul pauses. ‘We could – I suppose. After all, no one will go far in this darkness, will they?’
Daniel don’t answer the question. He says, ‘Do you have a tent?’
‘We do, but you’re right, brother, it’s getting late. We’ll just bed down in our sleeping bags near the fire.’
Daniel nods, but Saul wasn’t asking permission.
The evening’s over. People start making their way back to their shelters. The three strangers walk away into the darkness to fetch their things.
‘What do we do now?’ Sarah whispers.
‘We get our stuff and go,’ I say.
‘But it’s pitch black out here. How far do you think we’ll get?’
‘I don’t know. We just need somewhere to hide.’
‘In the dark?’
Why doesn’t she understand? Why isn’t she scared of these men? Why can’t she just agree with me for once? Mia starts coughing again.
‘Stop coughing, Mia. I need to think.’
‘It’s not her fault. Look, they’re coming back. Sh, Mia, shh.’ Sarah unbuttons her coat and wraps it round Mia, rocking her back and forth.
‘Away,’ says Mia softly. ‘Man go away.’
We watch as the three men put their sleeping bags on the ground near the fire. They have a bottle, too. The gold liquid catches the light of the fire as they pass it between them. Everyone else has gone now.
They talk quietly amongst themselves, matey, jokey, like men used to spending time together. My body jerks as a shiver runs down my spine. The cold’s starting to bite. How long before they go to sleep and we can tiptoe away? The bottle’s nearly empty, the fire’s starting to die down.
Then, without turning around, the man with the grey hair, Saul, raises his voice and calls out into the night air, ‘Why don’t you come nearer to the fire, Adam? You must be freezing out there.’
Chapter 5: Sarah
It feels like we’re cornered, though there aren’t any walls behind us, just miles and miles of dark, empty forest. He must have heard Mia coughing. At least I don’t need to argue with Adam any more.
‘Help me up,’ I say to Adam, and we all shuffle forward.
Marty and Luke are hiding behind me.
The three men turn to watch us. I’m not scared at first, but as we get closer to the fire, and to the men looking at us, I get the creeps. I can feel the leader’s dark eyes on me. It’s as if he’s touching me, and I want to slap him away.
Mia starts to cry. I wrap my coat further round her, but she’s cowering inside, burrowing her head under my armpit, and her thin little body is racked with tears and coughs. ‘Away,’ she keeps saying through her tears. ‘Man go away.’
‘How did you know we were there?’ Adam asks.
Saul switches his attention away from me, and I realise I’ve been holding my breath.
‘I could sense you.’
And just for a moment I believe him – he’s a devil, a vampire, a werewolf. Someone, something, with superhuman powers.
Then he laughs. ‘I picked up your chip in my beam.’ He pats the torch hanging off his belt. ‘It’s a clever little thing, this. And I heard the child coughing,’ he adds. ‘She sounds bad.’
‘She’s fine,’ I say, ‘but I need to get her into bed now.’
‘Is this your daughter?’ Saul says. He’s not talking to me but to Adam, who neither agrees nor puts him straight. ‘Let me look at her.’
‘No,’ I say, holding Mia closer, shielding her, but Saul’s on his feet and reaching towards me before I know it. He grabs my lapel and peels the front of my coat back. And now his fingers are touching her face, turning her head towards him, his thumb prising open her eyelid.
‘What are you—? Stop it!’
‘Mum-my!’ Mia sobs.
Her frightened blue eye stares up at him, then her chest heaves, her arms and legs shoot out, and she starts to kick and yell. I’ve never seen her react like this to anyone.
‘Get off her!’ Adam and I are both shouting now.
Saul doesn’t apologise, just steps away. But he carries on staring at her, and then he laughs again, that harsh, unnatural sound.
‘The girl in the woods,’ he says. ‘She’s a noisy one. Looks like an angel but screams like a devil.’
I hate him. I hate this man, who thinks nothing of waking a child up and laughs when she cries. I can’t believe he touched her. It makes me feel sick.
‘She’s frightened. You frightened her,’ I say, trying to shush Mia. ‘Come on, Adam, let’s go.’
But Adam’s not moving.
‘I’ll be there in a minute,’ he says. His voice sounds strange, forced.
‘Adam?’
But he’s looking at Saul like the rest of the world doesn’t exist. Like I don’t exist.
I leave him there.
Marty and Luke fall asleep instantly but it takes me ages to settle Mia down again.
‘No like man,’ she hiccups between sobs.
‘I don’t either,’ I say, stroking her hair. ‘Don’t worry about him now. It’s sleep time.’
‘Mummy sing “Twinkle”?’
‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’. It’s her favourite. Mia loves stars. That’s one thing we gained from the Chaos – deep, black night skies, studded with stars, planets and constellations, shooting stars, and a moon that’s as familiar to us as the sun.
I start to sing softly, trying not to wake my brothers.
Mia stretches her arms above her. She opens and closes her hands, making them twinkle.
After a while she puts her thumb in her mouth and turns onto her side. I tuck a blanket round her, then I slip out of the tent and sit outside to wait for Adam.
Chapter 6: Adam
We stand two metres apart, looking at each other. There’s a white scar above his left eye.
I’m nearly shitting myself, but I don’t want him to know how scared I am. I make myself stand square, look him right in the eyes. And when I do, his number blows me away. It’s something else.
1622029.
But it’s not the date that’s getting to me.
It’s the death itself.
It’s extraordinary, a split second of pain and despair and rage and panic. I’ve never felt anything like it. I can’t explain, except it feels like death from the outside in, every surface screaming, with scraping, gnawing, piercing pain all over his body, and death from the inside out, every cell collapsing, all coming together in a white point of agony.
I want to look away, to break away from his pain, but there’s something else. His number shimmers in my head. The more I try and get a fix on it, the more it dances in and out of focus, light and dark all mixed up. There one minute, gone the next.
The whole thing – the death, the shimmering – makes me feel giddy. The ground’s shifting underneath my feet.
‘Adam,’ Saul says. ‘Sit down. Have a drink.’
‘Thanks,’ I say, ‘but I don’t. Drink. That stuff.’
I do sit down, though. Ain’t got much choice – my legs have turned to jelly.
Saul nods at the other two men, and they melt away into the darkness.
‘You took some finding,’ Saul says. He sits down next to me, reaches out for the whisky bottle and swigs the dregs.
I’m concentrating on my breathing, trying to control the panic that’s washing through me.
Who is this man? What sort of death could feel like that?
‘Why were you looking?’ I say, my voice higher than I want it to be. ‘What do you want me for?’
‘I’ve come to take you away from all this.’
It’s like there’s a hand clutching at my throat. I told Sarah. I told her. They’re after me and they want to take me away.
r /> ‘Take me? Where? Why?’
‘We work for the government. We’re putting this country back on track. We need people like you, Adam. Strong people. People who can lead. Gifted people.’
That throws me.
‘Gifted,’ I say, trying out the word for size. Nobody’s ever called me gifted before. ‘But the government don’t want to know,’ I say. ‘I tried to tell them two years ago and they tried to shut me up, to silence me.’
‘They arrested you.’
‘Yeah.’
‘For murder.’
‘But I didn’t do it! I was being framed. I didn’t kill nobody.’
I’m properly scared now. Whoever this guy is, whatever he is, he knows a lot about me. Too much.
‘That was then. Things are different now. We want your help.’
‘What help could I be now? I already told everyone the end was coming – and it came.’
‘But it’s not the end, Adam,’ he explains. ‘It’s the start, the start of a new world where people like you are listened to, respected, valued. You can make a difference.’
I don’t know what to say. ‘What do you mean?’
‘People listened to you before. They started getting out of London. They’ll listen to you again. You can be a figurehead. Where you see danger, you can warn people – get them away from areas that are going to flood, out of buildings that are going to collapse. You can get children to feeding stations. You can help, Adam. You can help us rebuild this country.’
I don’t believe him. Why would the people that tried to silence me before want my help now?
‘It took you long enough to find me. I’m chipped. You could’ve picked me up any time you liked.’
‘We’ve been putting the information infrastructure back together. The software, the systems. We had the drones but we couldn’t communicate with them. We can now. We’ve got phones, too – a basic network up and running again. We’re piecing things back together, back how they used to be, but we need people like you.’
‘I want to help people, of course I do, but—’
‘You don’t have to live like this,’ he carries on as if I hadn’t said anything. ‘You don’t have to live the way this lot do, sitting in the dirt like savages. Your kids don’t have to go hungry or cold. They don’t have to be ill.’
‘What d’you mean?’
‘There are places with electricity, heat, food, medicine.’
‘In England?’
‘England, Scotland, Wales. There are pockets of civilisation left. Enclaves. For the ones who can contribute.’
‘Cities?’
He shrugs. ‘Parts of cities, some buildings, country estates, farms. Places that thought ahead. Planned. Wind turbines, solid fuel burners, solar panels. Some of them survived intact. Others have been repaired.’
He smiles and throws his empty bottle into the fire.
‘It’s going to be a hard winter, Adam. Hardest since 2010.’
I know he’s right. There are at least three people in the camp who won’t make it to the spring. I think of Marty and Luke and Mia and Sarah, of the last two years just getting by.
Pockets of civilisation.
The thought of being indoors, warm and dry, is almost painful.
‘What would I have to do?’
Saul claps me on the back like it’s a done deal.
‘Play your part, my friend. Play your part. We’re laying the foundations for a different society, where intuition and science work hand in hand. The old ways and the new. People who are special, people like you, who’ve been misunderstood, we want to understand you.’
Gifted. Misunderstood. Understand.
I know he’s choosing his words carefully, spinning them. I can feel he’s pulling my strings and I don’t like it. But they’re warm words. They make me feel warm.
‘Talk to Sarah about it,’ he says, all calm. ‘Talk to her now. Come back and tell me what she says.’
‘She’s probably asleep by now. I don’t want to wake her.’
‘So talk to her first thing. I’ll still be here.’
I picture him sitting there all night. Waiting for my answer.
And only one answer will do.
Chapter 7: Sarah
I hear him before I see him, the twigs snapping under his boots.
‘What did they want?’
There’s a knot of fear in the pit of my stomach.
‘They want me to help them, help the government.’
‘Why you?’
‘Because of my … gift. I can see where trouble’s coming and get people away from it. Like I did in the Chaos.’
‘Adam, these are the same people that tried to stop you then. What’s changed?’
‘I think they just understand now that I can be useful. They see me as a leader.’
This sounds like bullshit to me.
‘I don’t trust them,’ I say.
‘Neither do I,’ he says, ‘but they’re saying we can go with them, go to somewhere warm and dry, where they’ve got doctors, electricity, everything we haven’t had for two years. You want to settle somewhere, Sarah. You want somewhere safe for Marty and Luke, and Mia and the baby. This could be it.’
‘I thought we’d found it here.’
‘Here’s still living in a tent in a wood, isn’t it? What Saul’s talking about is different. Back to civilisation. You can tell they’ve all had enough food. They’re well kitted out. They’ve come from somewhere that’s okay.’
Somewhere that’s okay. In my head I’m back at my parents’ house, before the quake, before I ran away. There’s deep soft carpet under my bare toes; I’m sinking into a claw-foot bath full of bubbles; watching Hollywood blockbusters on a wall-sized screen. I’ve got everything … the sort of life people dream about. But it’s rotten to the core.
My family was poisoned and the house was a beautiful cage in which my dad could do whatever he wanted. And he did – night after night after night.
‘People make a home, Adam. You said that. And that man’s a thug. You saw what he did to Mia.’
‘But we can save Mia and your brothers from living like animals. Think about it. Regular food, a roof over our heads.’
‘I don’t know. I don’t trust him.’
‘You haven’t heard what he’s offering. You talk to him in the morning. You’ll see.’
I look at him closely. There’s something about him. His eyes are flicking all over the place.
He’s not being straight with me.
Chapter 8: Adam
At first light, we leave the boys and Mia sleeping, and make our way to where I left Saul. He’s still sitting next to the fire, waiting, just the way he said he would. The other two aren’t there. The sleeping bags and the rifles have gone.
Sarah fires questions at him. She’s like a Rottweiler, more like she used to be when we first got together. It’s pretty impressive. But I can tell Saul’s impatient.
He don’t want to answer her, don’t want to tell us exactly where we’d be going. All we get is ‘south’, and then, eventually, ‘The Cotswolds’. I don’t even know what The Cotswolds is, or are.
‘That must be fifty miles from here,’ Sarah says. She obviously knows more than me. ‘How would we get there?’
‘Got some big bikes here. Take an hour or so, that’s all.’
‘There are five of us and three of you. Anyway, Mia can’t go on a bike and I don’t think the boys should either, and I can’t—’
She stops mid-sentence and I realise she doesn’t want Saul to know about the baby. But she’s pulling her coat further round her and instead of hiding her stomach, it just draws attention to it.
Saul looks her up and down, and I know the penny’s dropped.
‘You’re right, Sarah,’ he says. ‘Eight into three doesn’t go. So it’s one rider, one pillion per bike. Up to three passengers – Adam, you, and Mia, if you like.’
Just for a moment her jaw drops. ‘No,’ she says. ‘Never. We wo
n’t leave my brothers. Adam, tell him. Tell him!’
‘This isn’t a time for selfishness – it’s a time to think about what we can do for others,’ Saul says smoothly.
‘Are you saying I’m selfish to care about my family?’ She’s really riled now.
‘No, but there’s a bigger picture here. I know Adam is important to you but he’s also important to all of us.’
They both turn to look at me.
I’m thinking warm beds. I’m thinking hot food. I’m thinking helping people, using the numbers like I did before. But I know Sarah’s right. I have to be with her now and she ain’t going nowhere without the boys.
‘Not now, Saul,’ I say. ‘We’ll stay here for the winter.’
I put my hands on Sarah’s shoulders, and I feel the tension go out of them.
‘Is that it?’ he says. ‘Your final word?’ There’s a warning note in his voice, but it don’t matter what he says now. I’ve made my mind up and I know it’s the right thing to do.
‘Yeah,’ I say, firmly. ‘That’s it.’
He clenches his jaw and there’s a flash of temper in his eyes. He looks around quickly, like he’s scoping out who’s where. Then he turns back to me.
‘In that case you don’t give me any option.’ He lunges towards me, grabs my wrist, shoves me round and twists my arm up behind my back. ‘I’m arresting you, Adam Dawson. You’ve got a murder charge to answer, or had you forgotten?’
Sarah’s barged out of the way and she staggers sideways. It’s all so quick, I don’t have time to react. He’s yanking my arm up so hard it feels like it’s going to come out of its socket.
‘Bastard!’ I gasp. He pulls harder.
‘Let him go.’
I look up and I’m staring at the barrel of a gun, but it’s not aimed at me.
Daniel’s got Saul in his sights.
‘Let him go,’ he says again. He’s calm, his eyes fixed on Saul.
‘I’m acting for the government,’ Saul spits. ‘You can’t pull a gun on me.’
‘I don’t give a stuff about your government. This is my camp. You’re not welcome here any more. Let Adam go and get out.’
For a few seconds there’s silence. Daniel and Saul stare each other out. I can’t tell who’s going to crack. All I can hear is the blood pounding in my ears as Saul tightens his grip on my wrist. Then he drops it. My arm flops to my side. I stumble a couple of paces away from Saul then turn and face him. I want to slam my fist in his face.