Chapter 3 #2
I heard Cat shout something, but I don’t know what because all my attention was on those hate-filled eyes and those stubby dagger teeth sprinting at me.
I was too far from the silver birches to get up one before it ran me down, and on the other side the railing of the ramp was between me and the hospital wall.
I don’t believe I thought at all, because the boar was too close to do anything but react.
I stood my ground for a second and then dodged at the very last moment, launching sideways as the boar careered past me, and I swear I felt the rough bristle on its side scrape my leg and for a flash my brain kicked in and I did have time to think I should start running in the opposite direction before it turned and had another go, but then my torso slammed into the railing that I’d forgotten and all the air in my lungs punched out of me and I dropped to my knee in time to see how very terrifyingly fast an angry boar can spin around and charge back at you.
This time I only had an instant to launch myself under the bar while instinctively putting out my hand to fend off the animal.
I was twelve. Still skinny. My strength and my muscle had only just begun to think about coming in.
I weighed no more than a bag of dry sticks.
I had no chance of deflecting that boar a millimetre.
I just felt a dull but immediately serious blow as it hooked sideways at me and smacked the side of its head against my outflung palm, a blunt hammering impact that actually helped me tumble out of its path and go sprawling across the bumpy concrete of the ramp.
It was such a numbingly hard knock that I saw but didn’t feel the sharp cut as the yellow tusk went straight in and then out of my outflung hand, right between my thumb and finger.
My head hit the base of the hospital wall, and I just lay there, looking in surprise at the hole in my hand, so fresh I could clearly see white bone and pinky-blue muscle and the yellow line of fat beneath the split skin before the heart caught up with things and flooded everything with pumping red.
The scrape of the hog’s hooves as it turned for me again pulled me back into the moment though my legs were smarter than I was and were working on their own plan already, pushing me up the wall to a standing position.
The hog huffed and then lowered its head to come at me again.
And as it did so, something streaked through the empty air where its head had been an instant before and shattered against the stone hospital wall.
Cat’s arrow was one of the old ones we had found, made in the long ago in a factory.
I think that’s what saved us because the wood was so old and dry that it sharded into splinters, like a sort of mini wood explosion, and that got the hog’s attention.
Maybe it got some splinters too. But it turned and huffed in surprise as it saw what was hurtling towards it.
Cat came running, roaring and shouting, doing everything she could to take the boar’s attention away from me as she snatched another arrow from her quiver.
If the mistake I had made was getting between a full-grown wild boar and its family, the bigger mistake the boar had made was getting between Cat and hers.
I didn’t have time to shout at her and tell her to stop because although everything seemed to be happening in painful slow motion for me, what was happening to them went at sickening speed.
The hog bucked against the ground and launched itself at Cat who didn’t break pace one bit, just nocked her arrow and fired on the run.
Given the speed at which they were closing, it’s a miracle she hit anything close to what she was aiming at, but the arrow did make contact, before glancing off the boar’s right-hand tusk and clattering into the wall beyond, this time with enough momentum taken off it by the ricochet that it didn’t shatter like the other one.
In fact, it looked like the boar had amazingly fast reflexes and had actually blocked the arrow and batted it away, but of course it was just an unlucky accident.
The animal just kept coming, hurled itself at Cat who sort of stutter-stepped at the last moment, jinking sideways out of the path of the murderous charge, almost clear but just unlucky enough to be caught by the left-hand tusk which hooked at her in passing.
That the boar definitely did on purpose.
The impact spun her and made her grunt as her coat ripped open and the torn portion ballooned in a swirl, dropping around her as she fell.
Her quiver spilled arrows as she tried to brace her fall with the other hand still holding her bow.
The bow snapped as she hit the ground and rolled.
Beyond her, the boar skidded to a halt and twisted into a fast turn.
Cat was as fast and was on her feet before it could kick into its next attack, and in my memory they both stand glaring at each other, and Cat is in the open with no chance of outrunning the angry-eyed boar, all she has is one length of broken bow in her left hand and her knife has found its way into the other one and she is standing her ground, blocking the boar, protecting me.
Now I’m older and bigger and have carried her so many times I know she’s wiry but light as a bird really, but she took up the space between us like she’s a rock, like she’s a great wall, like she’s a mountain, this small sixteen, maybe seventeen-year-old girl facing down what must be three hundred pounds of angry bunched muscle and tusk, and the blood sheeting down her side is nothing to her, nor is the pain, nor is the fear.
She doesn’t shake, she doesn’t tremble, she doesn’t step back from this face-off.
Instead, she steps forwards, towards the boar and roars at it.
Come on! she shouts, her voice deeper and more ragged than I have ever heard it. Come on! I’ll cut your fucking heart out!
The boar stares at her, narrow set eyes unblinking behind the wicked tusks, one of which is pinked with Cat’s blood.
COME ON! Cat screams and takes another step forward.
The boar huffs, shakes its tusks left and right, like it’s loosening up for what is to come.
Then it digs its hooves in and kicks into a run, But not towards Cat.
It runs off at an angle, towards the donkey rhubarb.
Towards its piglets, into the green, and out of our lives.
Cat drops to one knee and turns and looks at me.
You OK? she says.
I can’t breathe properly. I’m still too scared of what I thought was going to happen to Cat. I just hold up my hands, the one trying to stop the bleeding in the other.
Cal looks down at her side which is now a sheet of blood from just below her armpit to hip.
We’re OK, she says. But you’re going to have to sew me up.
Somehow, despite everything we’re both grinning. Maybe shock is like that.
How? I say.
I’ll show you, she says. We’ll do your hand first. It’ll hurt.
It already hurts, I say. But I don’t mind.
And that was the truth. Hurting meant we were both still alive.
And that’s how we learned to clean wounds and sew them up tight so blood wouldn’t leak out or germs get in, and that’s how come down there is always known as Stitch Country and also why we don’t go down there any more.
Because that boar let us go, maybe because it recognised a similar force of nature to itself in Cat, but also maybe we might just have been lucky – and we never like to push our luck.
Because even though we don’t believe in it, that’s how it runs out, Cat always said.
Correctly, as it turns out.
So I lie in the shadowless dark remembering all this, feeling the raised line of scar tissue on my hand and just listen to Cat breathe, which is how I soothe myself back to sleep when I wake like this.
The only other sound from inside the Bunker is the drip of the overflow pipe on the water-catcher in the kitchen.
It must be raining outside. I decide the dream can’t have been a really bad one because it hasn’t left the usual unsettling aftertaste in my brain.
Normally, a jolting nightmare makes me worry about the day ahead, like it’s a warning of something nasty that’s going to happen.
Cat says that’s stupid magical thinking and that’s not how the real world works at all – which is usually by accident, sometimes by planning but never, ever because a spooky dream foretold it.
Cat always sounds so sure of what she’s saying when she speaks that I stopped telling her about my forebodings a long time ago.
It wouldn’t make her any less twitchy to know how often I’m right, even if the bad thing is a small one like hitting your thumb with a hammer or a big one like losing your favourite knife.
Cat thinks that sort of stuff is just coincidence.
Sometimes I agree with her, but those times are usually in the daylight.
At night? I’m not so sure. At night, in the dark, it’s easier to believe in things that aren’t quite so rational.
As I lie there and let my thoughts get less jangled from waking up with such a start, I decide the shriek I heard wasn’t in my dream. As I replay it in my memory it’s more like the scream a rabbit makes when it’s in pain or distress. Maybe there are foxes hunting out there, I think.
Maybe it’s just foxes in the rain.
And then I must have fallen asleep.