Chapter 30
In battalions
I woke the next morning dreaming of a tree full of crows, all huddled together on the leafless branches against a winter sky.
And then something spooked them, something bad I could not see behind me and they all rose in the same moment, in a black explosion of oily feathers going in every direction at once, and I was filled with the kind of sticky dread you only really get in a dream, convinced that they really should have stayed on the tree because now they weren’t safe, but before I could turn to see what from, I woke with Cat shaking me back into consciousness.
And I never got to tell Storm about the leopard thing because the reason Cat was tugging me out of my unlucky-feeling dream was that they were gone.
Run off. In a pelting rainstorm. With the horses.
But not the babies. They left them, and a note that read SORRY.
THANK YOU. BABIES IN OTHER BUNKER. SAFER WITH YOU THAN US.
I was still half mired in my dream when we ran out into the rain, which was falling so thick and hard it felt like it was trying to hold us back so that we couldn’t interfere with the girls’ getaway.
Cat had the presence of mind to grab her rain cape from the hook on the door as she ran past but I careered into the downpour with no protection, pounding along behind her as she wrenched the oilskin over her shoulders while she ran for the other bunker.
And even though she was dressing as she ran, she got there ahead of me, so that by the time I slid into the library bunker wet as a fish just pulled from the river she was bent over the cot looking down at two happily sleeping babies.
They’re fine, she said. Untie Digger but keep her on the lead.
Digger was wagging her tail at us from where she’d been tethered in the corner of the room.
Maybe she can help us find them, she said.
Despite the speed at which we were moving, I was still thinking slowly, not because I’d just woken but from the shock of the message and the fact of their great betrayal. Which hit like a punch that came at us out of nowhere.
I could hardly breathe. I felt winded by it.
Now I can think back and see there were plenty of signs I missed or that I, maybe Cat too, just chose not to believe.
Now, far beyond the immediate shock of it all, I even understand why they did what they did.
But there is a part of me – maybe all of me – that won’t forget no matter how hard I try and which can’t forgive them.
Not just for the leaving, not for that in itself.
What I can’t forgive is how they did it.
If we’d known. If we’d all talked more about it.
Planned it even, they could have gone but everything else would not have happened.
Cat and I wouldn’t have been so surprised, so shocked, so hurried that we didn’t quite think straight when we really needed to.
We forgot that slow is smooth and smooth is fast, and went too quickly.
Where are they? I said.
They’ve taken the horses, but the goats are still here, she said.
Which way did they go? I said.
She ran back to the other bunker without answering. By the time I caught up she was coming back out with the binoculars.
Slow down, I said,
No time, she said, pushing past me. Need to see where they’ve gone. Top of the Tower is the best viewpoint.
I grabbed the binoculars as she passed, stopping her in her tracks. She didn’t let go. We looked at each other.
I’ll go, I said. My spaceship. Your ankle.
She didn’t smile. Just tugged at the binoculars.
I’ll be careful, I said.
I’ll be lighter, she said. And my ankle’s better…
And indeed there was no sign of a limp as she ran.
She looked like one of the crows from my dream as she sprinted towards the Tower, cape flapping untidily as she flew past the brambles and the tank and the broken-down building beside it, and it took all my speed to catch up with her and grab her arm.
I don’t know why I was trying to stop her.
I didn’t really think the Tower was that dangerous.
I was more worried about her ankle, and I could see it was better and she hadn’t been lying about that.
I think maybe somewhere in the back of my mind I just needed to slow everything down so my brain could catch up with my gut and settle it a bit.
Because at that moment the feeling in my gut was bad, as if the girls going like that had ripped an unexpectedly large hole in me, a hole that felt full of nothing but darkness, a darkness that had its own suck to it, like a whirlpool, like water spiralling down a drain pulling everything with it.
That hole in my gut had its own gravity that was threatening to pull me in on myself, like the outside of me would get sucked into the inside and then there’d be nothing left.
Maybe we should let them go, I said. Maybe they’ll come back…
No, she said. We don’t let them go off like this, unprepared, scared.
Why? I said.
Because they’re family, Mouse, she said, rain slicking her face as she stared up at me like I was being slow on purpose.
They’re family even if they don’t realise it yet. Even if they think they don’t want to be.
But this, Cat? I said. Isn’t this sneaking off them showing they don’t want to be a family. Our family?
No. This is a different thing. This is us not having solved it for Freya. We didn’t do a good job, Mouse. This is Storm trying to save her sister. Thinking this will make her better, said Cat. It won’t. But maybe we will… We don’t have time to argue, Mouse.
She tried to tug the binoculars out of my grip, I didn’t let go. I think I knew she was right but I wasn’t ready to admit it to myself. Maybe my head was still woozy from the dream.
Be careful, I said.
She grinned at me.
I’m always careful, she said.
In the distance the sound came to us of the babies wailing and hungry.
I’ll shout if I see them, she said. I won’t be gone long. Go. Look after the babies.
Digger wanted to follow her, but I pulled at the lead and dragged her back towards the library bunker. It slowed me a bit, so I was still outside when it happened.
That instant when everything changes, when your life turns suddenly and finds itself inescapably different from all the other moments in your life up till that point, is another thing that happens both slow and fast. Like when I killed the Russian, a fraction of time come and gone in a flash, but also painfully stretched out again and again as you go over it in your mind and try to see whether you might still be in that earlier, happier place if only you had had the sense to do something different.
So when it happens, when I hear the crack of doom above my head, I turn and see the thing that makes no sense, the tilt in my world made real as the horizontal platform that spreads in all directions from the supporting trunk of the Tower is no longer staying parallel with the ground, no longer static at all, but in motion and angling faster and faster towards vertical, turning turtle, presenting me with a nightmarish view I have never seen, that no one has ever seen from the ground, a dirty grey mottled and rain slick rooftop on which two things are moving, one slow, one furiously itchy-twitchy fast. My pilot’s chair is sliding down the tilted surface towards me, and a figure in a flapping oilskin is running uphill, past it, in the opposite direction, trying to beat the slope as it gets steeper and steeper, and I don’t understand what I’m seeing because it makes no sense and then I realise the roof’s toppling over and Cat is trying to get clear of the collapse.
She knows – she must know – she’s going to fall, but she’s trying to fall on her own terms, not the Tower’s or gravity’s because if she lets them have their way she will be landing in the debris, or the debris will be landing on her.
She’s going to try and jump clear in the other direction because it’s the only thing left to her, to risk the fall and take the broken bones so that she might survive, rather than end up in or under the tons of iron spiked concrete and glass now heading towards the ground behind her.
And I’m shouting her name as if that will help and she almost makes it to the top of the pitching incline when the roof snaps.
It breaks across its middle, like one of the oatcakes we make.
The half closest to me hinges sharply down, shedding the pilot’s chair as it slams into the supporting Tower beneath, and that impact hits as Cat scrambles upwards on the other half, on all fours now.
That half of the roof is momentarily stuck at a terrifyingly acute angle and I think as long as she can hold onto the rim of the top where she is now hanging, she’ll be OK, and then the impact of the other half slams the Tower beneath, and the impact turns the top half circle that Cat is clinging to into a giant bat that smacks her grip loose and punches her into the void where there’s nothing to grab hold of but an infinity of raindrops.
But she’s Cat. And for a moment she’s there, in the air, her oilskins spread around her, untidy as a crow’s wings, and she hangs just like a crow does – looking like flight is impossible.
And then like a crow she flaps her arms which must be a reflex like her legs that are trying to run in the air, and her arms snarl up in the cape and look even more wing-like and my treacherous heart leaps in hope.
And then gravity reaches up and grabs her and yanks her flailing body down into the ground below, hitting at the same time as the front half of the Tower roof, and the slam of all that concrete shakes the ground under my feet taking my breath away as finally as the sight of Cat plummeting has taken my hope, my heart, my life from me in one vicious and irretrievable moment.