Chapter 2
Mouse
Rule Two
It’s spring and Cat has ants in her pants.
Not real ones. Just something in her brain that makes her twitchy and impatient.
I know that her world happens faster than mine because when she gets angry her face gets red and she says I’m slow, so slow.
If she’s really cross then her lips get tight and white and she sort of spits the words out like she’s making them into a thing that stings, like throwing a sharp little stone.
But I’m not slow. I’m just me.
Mouse.
It’s a little name that she gave me that doesn’t really fit me any more, because I’m big, and I’ve been bigger than her for a long time now, and what I know about going slow – and what she always forgets – is that if you go fast, you miss things happening.
And I don’t like missing things.
I like knowing them.
And the best way to know things is to stay still and watch them happen without them knowing you’re watching. Cat, when she’s twitchy Cat, always gets noticed – and then the interesting things go away.
Like right now. The rabbits that have been eating their way closer and closer to my trap hear the scuff of her boots as she hurries down the slope from the old mushroom-shaped tower and skitter off in all directions, white tails bobbing as they disappear into the brambles and long grass.
I see one big buck rabbit run right for where I’m hiding in the turret of the old tank, and I think he’s going to jink but he keeps right on running straight until he disappears from my field of view beneath the tank’s front plate.
I can still hear him as he runs right under my feet in the gap between the tracks and the bottom of the armoured hull.
Cat doesn’t notice. She just stomps towards me, longbow over one shoulder, head cocked the other way as she re-plaits one of her pigtails, cinching it tight behind her ear, fingers working in a series of angry tugs.
Mouse, she hisses. Hey Mouse!
I don’t know why she’s hissing. I don’t know why she’s got ants in her pants.
She knows where I am. Ever since I got accidentally stuck in the tank we’ve had a sign.
We put a plastic doll’s head in the muzzle of the gun and now – when I turn it so it’s facing outwards – it means I’m inside.
She says it’s important for safety, so I do it because safety is always the most important thing to her, and she’s Cat, my only-one.
But really for a long time I’ve stopped seeing what difference it makes.
I could hear her, and she could easily hear me through the viewing slit.
Even though it must have been parked here for a century, more or less, the rust hasn’t penetrated the metal body of the tank, not like on the skeleton cars lying out in the trees and bramble patches on the old motorway.
Not like the orange flakes on the metal rods that show through where the concrete has fallen away on the corner of the Tower looming behind me.
Cars and lorries had much thinner metal skins than the armour, but the seals on the tank hatches have been eaten by rats or field-mice or maybe just time, so it’s not airtight now, even if it ever was.
I’m not going to suffocate even if I do get trapped again, like I did all those years back when I was smaller.
I still enjoy sitting here in the seat in the turret reading books and watching the world go by, even when it doesn’t much.
Although there’s almost always something to see – foxes, badgers, plenty of rabbits, sometimes a wolf.
Once I saw something that I thought for a moment might have been a lion.
Or a wildcat. Maybe it was just a big wildcat.
There is definitely something out there in the tangled country beyond the quarry, something big enough to kill deer, because we’ve seen the leftovers a couple of times, spread around the floor of the woods.
I see mice too, and rats. And all kinds of birds, of course.
There’s a robin that knows I like being in the turret and he comes and jumps around the outside when I’m there, like he’s keeping me company, the way robins do when you’re working near them.
He flits from the gun barrel to the deck-plates to the thistles and willowherb on the edge of the old service-station canopy that came down and bellyflopped across the side of the tank a long, long time ago, and the way he keeps an eye on me while never quite being still reminds me of Cat and her twitchiness.
Neither of them is ever stationary for long enough to relax.
Her feet scuff on the grit where the clumps of scutch grass have burst through the crumbling tarmac and keep themselves slowly busy breaking it back down to chunks of grey gravel.
Mouse! she says, urgent now. Mouse! We got to go.
I stick my head out of the hatch and grin down at the sight of her hopping from foot to foot as she scowls back up at me, and then I look away, along the curving sweep of bramble track that used to be the big north-south road.
What happened? I say.
Someone’s coming, she says.
That’s Cat. There’s always someone coming even though there never is, even though there likely aren’t any other people left to come, because the world’s empty now.
Nobody’s coming, I say.
They are, she says, stamping her foot. This time they are! We’ve got to go to the Bunker. Till they’re gone. Come on, Mouse. I’m serious.
I’m catching rabbits, I say. She can probably hear the sigh in my voice, though I try to sound normal.
Catch them tomorrow, she says. Come on, Mouse. Now. Today’s closed.
I’m hungry. I’d like to have rabbit tonight.
It’s wild garlic time and that makes a nice stew.
But if Cat says today’s closed, then it’s closed, and that means no fire in the Bunker because fire means smoke and smoke gets noticed because it writes in the sky, and getting noticed is how we went from nearly fourteen people to just us, me and Cat, each other’s only ones.
Nearly fourteen because my mother was pregnant, but she hadn’t had the baby yet, so we were just unlucky thirteen when we did get noticed, which might be why it went so badly although Cat said it started with smiles, and that lucky or unlucky numbers are not real, same as magic.
Magic doesn’t save you, she always says, not the abracadabra or the prayer kind: being clever, being cautious and thinking fast is what saves you.
And she probably knows what she’s talking about, since in the end, at the very beginning of us being just two, she was the one who picked me up and saved me.
She had to, because I was a baby back then and couldn’t walk for myself.
OK, I say hauling up and out of the tank. The seat bottom crunches and squeals in protest as I step on it. It’s going to rust out and break soon. I’ll have to repair it again.
OK, she says. Hurry up.
I pick up my bow and axe off the roof of the turret and jump down, jogging after her as she heads back across the dead nettles and knotweed that cover the shallow rise leading to the Tower.
How do you know someone’s coming? I say. Cat. How do you know?
I was climbing the Tower, she says.
That made me stop and give her a good hard look.
You’ve been telling me you think the top of the Tower’s not safe any more, I said. But now it’s OK for you to climb it and not me?
The Tower is mushroom shaped because when it was built they put a big restaurant on top of it, like the head of a mushroom on a thinner stalk.
It’s become a recent thing we argue about.
Cat says when she was up there in the wind a while back, she felt it shift a bit and thinks she felt a kind of gravelly crunch under her feet as it did so.
She thinks that’s a sign the concrete’s going to crumble away.
I think she’s being overcautious. It’s a solid structure and it’s been standing there for ever.
What are the chances it’s going to fall while we’re here?
We don’t weigh much and it’s big and was built to last. Plus, I like going up there at night to sit under the stars just as much as I enjoy sitting in the tank.
They’re both good spots to look at interesting stuff.
My hard look bounces right off Cat, the way it always does. Once she’s got an idea in her head it’s like it comes with invisible armour that makes her change-proof, no matter what you say.
I saw something flashing from down the M-way, she said. Like sun catching glass. Or shiny metal. Maybe someone looking back at me with binoculars. Looking for us.
Like I said. Cat can be twitchy in all kinds of ways. And nobody ever, ever comes.
The M-way’s got nothing but dead cars and brambles on it, I say. It was probably off a mirror or a windscreen. You know how they flash in the sun sometimes.
It was moving, she says, her jaw coming forwards like it does when she digs in and gets stubborn behind the invisible armour. Dead cars don’t move, Mouse.
And of course she was right about that. The cars and trucks abandoned on the M-way when they ran out of power haven’t moved in a century. More than a century. In fact, most of them are so rusted out that the windscreens fell in years ago. But still. Most isn’t all.
I saw it moving, she says. I’m sure it moved. You know the rule.