Chapter 33 #3
Easy to say, harder to do. But though I don’t remember planning it at all what I did was move fast and keep it simple: The tank was lion-proof and close enough to get to fast. But there was no point saving the babies only to have them starve.
So somehow I got the babies and two of the goats inside that tank.
Babies in the turret, goats very unhappy at being trussed and stuffed into the driver’s hatch.
And then I carried Cat and left her on top of the turret with Digger standing guard while I went back for Red.
I got her along the narrow passage which was now funnelling black smoke along the ceiling that raced me to get out in the open air, and I led her out of the even narrower back door.
And I remember little of that except how hard I had to pull and that she kicked me in the right thigh and bit my upper arm for old time’s sake before we emerged into the angry glow of a night fully on fire behind us.
I tied her to the tank and must have gone back into the Bunker many times, because the next clear memory is flames licking out of the back door facing us, and sitting on top of the tank, oilskin round my shoulders like a cape, weapons ready, on guard, watching the flames until I must have dropped my head.
In the night, something exploded. Maybe it was one of the old fuel tanks underground, the ones we thought were all used up centuries ago, or maybe just dried out by the passing of time.
Maybe they’d cracked and soaked the surrounding earth, maybe it was that earth that had become volatile and burnable or had leached gases back into those empty concrete voids, turning them into bombs just waiting for ignition.
Maybe that was what detonated when the wildfire became hot enough to trigger it.
The boom hit like the world splitting apart, and then a wave of hot air punched outwards and blew the oilskin off me so that the first thing I saw on waking was a huge ball of orange and yellow fire rolling up into the night sky, its glow reflecting downwards from the low cloud overhead until the fireball hit the cloud-base and was muffled into a threatening pink glow within the cloud itself, a blush which spread and lessened and then disappeared completely, swallowed by the murk.
I must have slept again, because dawn came with a chill wind and the weather breaking into a short but violent thunderstorm, which led to me waking under a sodden oilskin on the top of the tank to find the babies howling in outrage inside the turret and looking around to see Red looking drenched but alive, and then Digger emerging from beneath the tank which was, when I slid off and looked beneath it, jammed with everything I must have thought necessary and worth salvaging from the fire that had, now I looked at it, gutted our home.
I’d saved knives and bows and our supplies – oatmeal and biscuits and dried apples – and the first aid kits and the herbs, and though there was much else, those are the things that were in the first instance going to keep us alive. At least until the next bit of bad luck came for us.
When the rain stopped, everything was different. It looked different, and it smelled different from a normal wood fire. Not everything that burned had been wood.
Our home was gutted. I didn’t know what to do.
Time to leave, Cat said.
Leave? I said.
The calmness with which she said it cut through like a knife. I was shocked, tired, befuddled. She saw it clear. But at that moment I thought she was nuts.
Leave how? I said. Leave? Why?
Find another home, she said.
I found it hard to breathe as the shock of what she was saying caught up and knocked the wind out of me.
It wasn’t that we would have to find another home that shook me, because we’d done that a lot before we ended up happily here in the bunkers on the airstrip.
It was that Cat never lied, and she’d always said this would be our last home, and now, instead of saying we should rebuild, she was saying we should abandon it.
She’d made me believe that this was our last home, our hidden fortress protected from the world, safe from the sea and the death that accompanied the strangers that came from it.
It was where we would live together for ever.
That was what she had always said, that was what we had worked so hard to make here: the orchard, the goat field, the vegetable plots, the library bunker, our home bunker. And now she was saying the opposite.
We can repair it, I said.
Time to go, she said, her lungs still too weak to muster more than three words worth of breath at a time.
But… But you can’t travel, I said. And where should we go?
You know where, she said.
I don’t, I said. Really Cat. I’m sure we can repair one of the bunkers and the smell will go and…
I was wrong, she said.
Cat admitting she was wrong was unusual enough to stop me in my tracks again.
About what? I said.
You know what, she said.
I still don’t know why, but a lump had appeared in my throat and my eyes were wet.
Maybe it was fumes from the fire. I also don’t know how she knew what was in my head when I hadn’t really acknowledged it to myself before that very moment.
Maybe because my thoughts about the travellers had seemed like a kind of betrayal.
But if they’re Russians, I began. Like Storm said they were, like Freya said—
Trust your gut, she said.
But maybe my gut just wanted them to be nice, I said. Cat, maybe I was too excited by listening to them. I don’t think we should—
Find Bear Shirt, she said.