Chapter 6
Bigger than a fox, smaller than a wolf
It’s Cat who goes into the nettles to see if he’s alive.
My ears are still ringing with the sound of the gun’s thunderclap.
I keep checking myself for the hole that miraculously still isn’t there.
I can’t believe the gun missed me from so close.
I can’t believe anything that small could be that loud.
There’s quite a lot of blood, she says after a bit with her voice sounding scratchy and low.
I can’t string a long sentence like that together in my head, let alone get it out of my mouth.
I’m, I say. I don’t. I just. I didn’t. I…
I know, she says.
The rain doesn’t care what happened just now, just then, just a minute, just a whole lifetime ago.
It just keeps on falling. It’s the only thing that seems to be able to penetrate the unending moment I seem to be stuck in, the one where every movement seems pointless and there’s nothing to say even if I could.
I watch Cat in the nettles. She seems sluggish too. She doesn’t look at me.
I always thought it would be me protecting you, she says. If something happened.
Yes, I say. It’s. Um.
I have my head tilted back so I can feel the rain on my face.
I try not to mind the drops falling in my eyes.
It’s OK if I blink a lot. I could close them, but I know I’m not meant to.
I know the stinging of the rain is meant for me.
It stops me from feeling I am going to throw up the big hard bubble that has suddenly appeared in my chest, the one that feels like it’s going to choke me if I let it move.
It almost stops me listening to the sound of blood beating in my ears. Almost. Thump thump thump thu—
Mouse, Cat says. Mouse.
I’m finding it difficult to hear anything apart from the drumming of my pulse. Or rather, I’m finding it hard to concentrate on what she is saying. It seems more important to look up at the leaves and the rain coming through them.
Mouse! she hisses. You’ve got to pay attention. We can be upset later.
OK, I say, but I don’t mean it.
Keep an eye open, she said. There may be more.
I look down at her, now bent over the body tugging at something.
What are you doing? I say. My tongue is still thick and sluggish in my mouth. I can hear how stupid and slow I sound.
Getting this, she says, giving a final yank and showing me my arrow. It’s black with blood from head to feathers. She must have pulled it all the way through his neck.
Cat, I say.
If there are more of them, we might need it, she says. And if there are more, it’s not good they know it was us who did this.
More? I say.
We don’t know if he was alone, she says.
That’s when we hear the strangled half-howling noise from the trees on the other side of the motorway, in the direction of the old farm by the quarry, across from the fallen pylons. We both go still and listen.
That’s not people, Cat says. It’s an animal.
It’s hurt, I say.
It’s something, she says. She’s biting her lip. Which means she’s thinking.
It might be people too, I say.
She nods.
Should we run? I say.
I don’t say I suddenly really want to run, more than anything, just get far away from the thing in the nettles, run to Plan B, which is our other place deep in the hills where we have to go if we ever get separated and the Bunker isn’t safe any more.
Cat bends and picks up the long gun.
Cat, I say.
She just looks at me and then puts it under the belly of the tank.
Out of the wet. Hidden, she says, in case there are others. I don’t know how to use it. We’ll try and find out later.
Later? I say.
We’re going over there, she says. We don’t have to run away if there’s just him and no others. But we won’t know that unless we look for his camp and see if there’s anyone else there.
How do you know he has a camp? I say.
Because he isn’t carrying enough stuff to travel with, she says with a sigh. There’ll be a camp and so we’ll go see if we have to run before we panic and do it without a good reason. We’ll just have a very careful look-see.
She looks at me, as if she can read my thoughts, which mostly she can except I haven’t ever had thoughts like this, about running and the darkness closing in on us.
We’ll be fine, she says. Mouse. We know this woodland, every track and tree-fall. If there are others this is all just a jumble to them. Like a maze. They won’t see us.
She can see I’m not happy about anything that’s happening.
Take it, she says, holding out the arrow. Her voice trips slightly. Look, it’s fine. Rain’s almost washed it clean already.
I can’t tell if she’s crying like I am, because the rain is streaming down her face, thinning and pinking the red blood welling from her cut lip, the skin on her cheekbone flushed with the nasty bruise that’s beginning to blossom round her eye socket.
And though I really want us to run in the opposite direction and never, ever stop, I follow her into the undergrowth because she’s Cat, and because she doesn’t need to explain why. I know why we have to do this just as well as she does:
If we don’t face it now, if we don’t go see what’s really down there, we could spend the rest of our lives running from something that wasn’t even there at all.
Nettles need to be grasped, same as opportunities.
We move fast and quietly, bows low at our sides, arrows nocked and ready.
We don’t go down the exit road to cross the old motorway but instead double back and pass underneath, through a water culvert, keeping out of sight and running at a crouch so as not to bang our heads.
The rain has turned the bottom of the old concrete pipe into a stream, and we splash through it towards the light at the other end.
My feet are soaking by the time we come out, but I’m just happy now to be getting further away from the nettle-bed and what’s lying in it.
We pause once we emerge into the rain and listen again. The howling is still coming from the miserable woods below us.
Cat calls them the miserable woods because they’re a strip of close-packed fir trees that don’t let anything else in among them to grow.
Nothing interesting lives in the nearly impenetrable floor of that kind of wood: there’s just a thick carpet of rust-coloured needles and enough shadow to make it gloomy at any time of day, even in the brightest sunshine.
Luckily, it’s just a thin band of conifers, and beyond them the friendlier broad-leafed trees take over and the light gets back in, all the way to the quarry.
Which is where things get dark again, not just because it’s fringed with more pine trees, but because the edge gives way all the time.
It’s as if the quarry is constantly eating itself, pulling more and more of the sheer cliff face into the empty and unfillable chasm at its centre.
We don’t like it there. It has a bad atmosphere.
We were once out hunting and heard the most terrible screaming coming through the trees.
It was so shocking and frightening, ripping abruptly through the sleepy calm of a peaceful summer afternoon with the sun still high in the sky.
At first, we thought it was a person, which was both exciting and horrifying.
It sounded so human and in such distress, but when we got there, we saw that it was just a big hog that had fallen over the edge and was lying 150 feet below, its back horribly broken by the rocks but not dead, because it kept trying to get up, only its back legs wouldn’t work and so it just dragged itself round and round in a circle.
It was one of the worst things I’ve ever seen, and definitely the most dreadful sound I’ve ever heard.
Sometimes I still hear it in my nightmares, though by now I have lots of other dark memories to populate them with.
Cat put it out of its misery with one arrow straight through the eye.
People must have known how dangerous the quarry was even before the Gelding happened, because you can still see the broken lines of fencing round it, one row laced with creepers that hang on concrete poles, and then another taller line of metal fencing that’s mainly corroded out and fallen down now, or – where the ground beneath it has been eaten by the quarry – fallen in.
Where that has happened it hangs in swags on the cliff face in a sharp festoon of jagged rust. Another time we saw a deer fall in and get all hooked up in it.
It just stared up at us, blood pumping from a severed artery in its haunch, too far down to get to, still suspended more than a hundred feet in the air.
Cat wasted an arrow that she wouldn’t be able to retrieve just to put it out of its misery, same as she did for that hog.
The edge was too unstable to climb down and retrieve it for the meat, so we just left it for the crows that circled over it for three days as they picked it clean.
And that was just what Cat was like – always grumbling and complaining about wasting or losing arrows, but then doing exactly that because she saw something that just wasn’t right with her.
We follow a line of old electrical pylons that crosses the M-way, marching drunkenly across the landscape, leaning this way and that as time and decay have eaten away at them, toppling some and eroding the solid ground on which the remnant once used to stand so straight.
One of the fallen pylons lies on its side straddling the divide between the dark conifers and the broadleaf woodland, and it’s there we find the camp, coming on it quietly from either side, communicating by hand signals.
The old pylons were made from metal girders joined together to make tall tapering boxes.
The fallen pylon is a bit crumpled at the narrow end, but it lies on its side, like a tipped-over chair.
There is a vaulted square space between its legs which have been overgrown by creepers and ivy, and it’s in this strange sort of outside room that we see the horses.