Chapter 5 #3
This is the thing itself. Not the fear of it. It’s real, and now – at last – something can be done.
His eyes flick between us, but the gun stays on her. It doesn’t waver a bit. It’s as steady as the gun on the statue.
Mouse, says Cat, voice low and hoarse. When you can, just run.
I know the something that she’s going to do is bad and I don’t want her to because he’s bigger than both of us and the gun is pointing right at her.
And then the man changes his voice.
It softens. He takes his hand off the trigger and raises it, open-palmed, though he keeps the gun up.
He pushes back the hood, and he’s got long grey-black hair escaping from a tight woollen cap and he’s smiling, his teeth a crooked white slash in his beard.
He makes calming gestures with his hand as he crouches down very slowly – and then lowers the gun to the ground, placing it very carefully on the sodden moss at his feet.
He looks from Cat to me and back, and then he stands up again, still moving deliberately and unhurriedly, both hands palm-up now.
It’s OK, Cat, I say. He was scared. Just scared. Now he’s trusting us. He wants you to put your bow down.
She keeps the bow up as she thinks.
Cat, I say. He’s unarmed now.
He can still kill us, she says. If he starts coughing.
The wind is behind us. The rain is sloping towards him.
He’s downwind, I say. For now that’s OK isn’t it? He can’t breathe infections on us.
The man nods encouragingly, like he can understand what I’m saying to her, even though I don’t think he knows our words either.
Cat, I say. We can’t kill the first person we’ve ever seen.
I’ve seen people, she says. Despite the lashing rain her voice is like wind in dry leaves.
Cat, I say.
There’s just the rain spattering the leaves and bouncing off the tank, and the sound of us breathing.
Fine, she says. But we stay upwind, and we try to make him understand he has to keep away until we know he’s not sick.
She looks at him.
Not sick? she says.
He smiles and shrugs and says something calming.
Bollocks, she says.
Bollocks is a swear word she says her dad used when things were going wrong. She calls it her inheritance. She doesn’t use it often but mainly when she’s having to admit being wrong.
So I know it’s all going to be OK.
She lowers the bow and un-nocks the arrow. He looks at his gun on the moss. She snorts and bends to put her weapons on the ground too.
Good, I say, relaxing and lowering my bow.
I feel my heart blip as I exhale in relief, like it’s switching from scared to excited. Because this is, now the danger has gone, the most exciting thing I’ve ever seen.
Another person. Maybe one of lots of new people. Maybe this is a whole new life starting, a fuller life. I smile, trying to make him see we’re nice. Not a threat. That everything is good.
Hi, I say. I’m Mous—
It’s not good.
Somehow his hand has disappeared inside his cape and come out with a handgun in it which is pointing the little black hole at the end of the barrel right at my eye.
His smile has gone and the slash of his mouth curls into a snarl as he shouts something at me. His eyes are blanker and darker than the gun muzzle.
And I realise we’ve made a terrible mistake.
Hey! says Cat, stepping towards him.
He backhands her, hard with the other hand.
He’s twice as big as her and he has something metal like a pair of big rings gripped in his fist which makes it worse.
Time goes a bit slow somehow and I see her head snap sideways as the force of the blow spins her round and I can actually feel it, the jag of outrage is so immediate and strong as I hear the flat smack of the metal in his hand hitting Cat’s face and then there’s a thunking noise like an axe biting into a stump.
And then there’s a grunt of shock and a gurgling and then the day rips open with a sound like a thunderclap as the gun in his hand bucks high and flashes hot and only then do I feel the burn of the bowstring on my forearm and realise the arrow’s gone, of course it’s gone, because it’s sticking out of his throat as he falls backwards into the nettles.
I did it without meaning to, I did it faster than thought, faster than even Cat could have done it, so fast she didn’t see it because she stumbles out of her spin with blood on her teeth, hand scrabbling for the knife in her belt and then she stops dead and looks stupidly at the space in the air where he was standing just a moment ago.
Mouse, she says. What…?
She looks down and sees his heels, his dying heels, hacking at the ground, grinding through the moss and into the crumbling tarmac beneath, his legs spasming as if he’s trying to push himself deeper and deeper into the nettle clump, but they are getting weaker with each kick and then there’s a sudden ugly choking sound that stops the gurgling and the feet go still, apart from a twitch or two, like a dead rabbit.
Mouse, she says. Oh Mouse…
I hear a voice that’s so low it’s almost lost in the rain that’s now falling heavier than ever.
He shouldn’t have hit you, it says.
I’m suddenly so numb it takes a moment to realise it’s mine.