Unfed (14 page)

A trip taken just before we went to live in the States. My mother and me in a tent — a camping weekend. It was the kind of thing I usually would have done with Dad — mainly because my mother was always far
too busy to spend whole weekends with me — but she managed to surprise me with a last-minute adventure.

We went somewhere by a lake; it was summer, and the sun burnt my skin red as I played in the icy waters on the first day. Then there was a campfire, and insects — midges and wasps and a big beetle with antlers — in my sleeping bag. Mum told me not to be silly, not to be scared by the little things.

And the next day, we went orienteering. There was an important pile of rocks that marked something, called some ridiculous thing like Folly’s Cairn or Bluff’s Outcrop, and we had a map and a compass and we took bearings. We traversed hillsides, marched determinedly through woods so thick and pine-scented it brought on Mum’s asthma.

I didn’t really get it; she tried to teach me how to use the compass with the map so we could find our way, but I couldn’t make it happen. I was
nine
, people. I was still checking out the shadows of the woods for fairies and Bigfoot.

But life with Mum had taught me, if you don’t know what you’re doing, blag it. So I blagged it, big-time, pretending like I totally understood where we were going, and getting it right by pure chance more often than I got it wrong. I was pretty amazed at how lucky I was. I blagged it so damn well that toward the end of the walk, just as my stomach was beginning to rumble and I was beginning to look forward to going back to school after this epic journey, we walked out into a clearing, and Mum handed me the map and the compass, and told me I was on my own.

“I know the way from here.” She pushed the hair out of my eyes. “But I want you to make it there by yourself. Use the coordinates, and I’ll see you at Dead Man’s Pileup.” (OK, so I clearly can’t remember the name of the rocks, but you’ll forgive artistic license at a time like this.)

With that, she strode off into the woods.

As I looked along the narrow pathway, the map heavy and floppy in my hand, I knew my mother wasn’t coming back. This was one of her tests: If I passed, the weekend would have been a success. If I failed, I obviously wasn’t her daughter after all.

Gripping map and compass tightly, I stepped onto the path. Maybe I’d walk for a few minutes, the trees would disappear, and I’d find a field with a big ol’ pile of rocks and Mum sitting on top of them like a leprechaun at the end of the rainbow? Easy peasy.

But, of course, it wasn’t like that. And this is where my memory gets a little fuzzy. I know that I walked and walked, the woods getting darker, and I remember that sinking feeling that this was going on far too long to be the right way. I remember finding a stream and following it because streams always lead
somewhere
. And then came night. After that I don’t remember much, because I think I blanked it out. Just waking in the parking lot, and the police car’s flashing lights, and Dad shouting at my mother.

Turns out, I had wandered way off track. I’d actually ended up going in a huge circle and almost retracing our steps back to where we had left the car the day before. I had no clue how to use the tools my mother had given me to find some arbitrary pile of rocks, but I had followed my nose and found my way out of the woods on my own terms. They found me asleep, curled up on the ground outside the locked passenger door of my mother’s car. She was embarrassed, Dad was furious, and I had learned never to expect my mother to come for me, but to help myself out, to find my own way home.

We never spoke about that weekend again, ever. But she must have figured that I’d never forget about coordinates. I know that by leaving
me this clue, she’s kind of giving me another shot at finding my way again. I should have known what the numbers were, but again, I wasn’t paying close enough attention.

“Give me that map.” I hold out my hand. “And make some room in this Jeep. I’m finding this place, and we’re rescuing Smitty.”

We are standing on a sodden hill overlooking a field lined with a forest. The field is featureless apart from four low stone walls, which make up an empty sheep pen.

“Ooh,” Alice murmurs. “Give Bobby a Girl Scout badge.”

I worked it out, and we drove here, only a few miles from where they picked me up. This is the point on the map where the coordinates meet. The fog has mostly cleared on the higher ground, it’s raining lightly, and the Jeep beside us is threatening to slowly sink into the mud.

“So now what?” Pete looks grim.

“This is the spot,” I say, as if that will make Smitty materialize. Why am I feeling so frightened? I should be yelping in excitement. My mind is all Smitty — but he’s fled from me. No voice in my head now. I could be too close to the real thing.

“There’s got to be something else here.” Russ shakes his head. “Let’s check out that sheep pen at least.”

We begin to slide down the muddy bank. My mind races. What if Smitty’s lost it? Who knows what can happen to a person in six weeks if he’s on his own and living off the land? Especially one who is full of zombie bite and zombie antidote, fighting it out. Maybe he’ll be crazy —
have no memory of me, or be running round the field in his underwear and bits of leather fashioned from the hide of one of the dead cows.

And not only that; how will he greet me? What will we say to each other? It’s been forty days and forty nights. In Teen Time that’s like a year. Granted, I have been unconscious for nearly all of that, so to me it’s a bit like I saw him yesterday. But presuming he’s lived every minute of that time, he’s had an opportunity to … well, get over things. Get over me.

Maybe he won’t like me anymore.

I’m so stupid
. Like any of that matters. This is about Xanthro and Osiris and zombie epidemics and saving the world. Or it’s about Mum and me, and about getting these kids in this car home. It’s
not
about my burgeoning love life or lack thereof. It’s not about a kiss or a warm hand to hold or the quite mortifying way my body tingles and churns when he’s near. It’s not about missing him; it’s not about feeling — for the first time in ages — that I’d finally got someone who gets me.

Leapin’ lizards
. It took going into a coma to even admit all that stuff to myself.

Oh god. The coma. The bald head. I look like an
ugly baby
.

No!
This will never do! I can’t have this huge, full-on reunion as Bald Bobby. I look appalling. I have waterproofs on, for goodness’ sake — I go
swish-swish
when I walk. I smell of rotted cow and formaldehyde and river mud and dead soldier juice. And nobody else looks as bad as me in comparison. Alice — I swear it — has glossy,
brushed
hair. There’s no hope for me. I might as well knock out a couple of my front teeth and have done with it.

It’s hard going down the bank. We pause halfway to catch our breath and dislodge some of the caked mud from our feet.

“If he’s here, he’s well hidden.” Pete shivers beside me.

There’s nothing unusual about the pen. It’s one of one of those old-fashioned ones they make out of big lumps of stone that all miraculously fit together without any cement. There’s no roof. Nowhere to hide.

“We’re here. Let’s look.” Russ tries to sound enthused. We continue to make our way down, mud still thick around our ankles, sliding diagonally in a way that reminds me of my crappy boarding efforts in the snow of a few weeks ago.

There’s a gap in the wall right at the other end. We clomp along there and enter.

Once inside, there’s quite a lot of shelter; I’m amazed how the wall keeps some of the rain off. The ground is sprinkled with hay (or straw, still unclear on the hay-straw diff), and there are a couple of large metal feeders that presumably dispensed food to hungry sheep. No hungry sheep, though. And definitely no Smitty. Well, what did I expect? To see him crouched in a corner, chewing on a turnip? Maybe I did. I walk around the wall, past the first food trough, toward the second.

“There’s nothing here.” My voice sounds awful. Croaky, rough, raw. It’s tired. I’m tired. I’m almost ready to crash out in the back of the Jeep and let Pete take us wherever he can. I’m almost done with the whole damn thing.

“So we keep going,” Russ shouts. “In the same direction. It’s got to be close.”

The hay or straw looks soft in this corner by the trough. I think I’ll just hunker down here. I’m already wet through, and this way I don’t have to put up with Alice’s in-Jeep entertainment. Yep, that’s decided. I’m staying. I halfheartedly rake a boot across the hay-straw, like a dog scraping at the ground, preparing to lie down.

Jackpot
.

I clear some more, holding in my yelp before I’ve made certain. And then I’m on hands and knees, and I am certain, but still I don’t share.

There’s a small wooden trapdoor. There in the earth.

I take a moment, just for me, to steady myself, because once they know, we’re going in and we’ll have found him and I’ll have to deal. A rush of hope and wonderfulness runs through me. I feel incredible. This is it.
I found him, Mum
. I found him.

I stand slowly on wibbly-wobbly legs, and turn around to let the others know, but they’re already there. They must have seen me scrabbling and they’ve come up behind. Silently I point at the steel ring that acts as a handle.

Russ nods.

I bend to lift the door. It’s heavier than I thought it would be, but it moves on well-oiled hinges, and I can manage.

A few steps down. To a squat tunnel that disappears under the wall.

“A shelter?” Pete whispers.

I head down the steps, ducking my head to fit in the tunnel. Russ hands me the flashlight from the Jeep.

I shine the flashlight, but there’s not too much ahead of me. Barely a few feet away is an opening into a larger space. I scuttle along, squeeze through, and find I can stand up and pan the flashlight around me.

A small room. Corrugated tin walls, a stone floor. A camp bed on the far wall. Some stuff in the middle of the room — a cardboard box, some kind of lantern. Candy wrappers. To the right is an alcove with a curtain across. I pull at it; behind is a dirty sink with a faucet, and something that looks and smells suspiciously like an adult-sized potty.

The others follow me in, and suddenly the room is crowded. Russ has found the lantern and has turned it on with a flick of a switch. The room is bathed with watery white light.

“He’s not here.” Alice sounds irritated, like her dad didn’t turn up on time to collect her from the mall.

I sit on the camp bed. I’m tempted to lie down, smell the bed, see if I can tell if he slept here. But that would be slightly loony.

“Someone was.” Pete holds up a box of empty food cans. “Maybe your mother took him. She could have moved him to a safer place. She might have left a message here for us.”

It’s true, but I can hardly summon the energy to look. The disappointment is stinging me from the inside, pushing its spikes through my gut and up, out of my chest and my throat, threatening to choke me in tears. I look under the pillow on the bed, under the bed, on the walls and floor. I don’t see anything.

“This could be nothing,” I hear myself say, getting up slowly. “For all we know, he was never here. Maybe this is the wrong place after all. Who knows? Dammit!” I reach down and toss the bed up, and the metal frame springs up and clatters against the wall.

“OK,” Russ says. “So we gather anything that’s useful to us, and we go on.”

“Where to?” Alice shouts.

“Farther.” He sounds sure. “It must be the wrong place.”

“No,” Pete says. “This is the spot, I’m sure Bobby got it right.”

“Who cares,” I say. “He’s not here, and we’re wasting our time.”

I’m about to flounce off, sucking in my tears until I’m outside and the rain will cover them anyway, when I notice a shiny red thing down by
my feet. It must have been dislodged from somewhere when I kicked the bed, perhaps between the mattress and the frame. I crouch low and pick it up, feeling the smoothness of the material in my hands. It’s a small Chinese silk purse. I unzip it. There are four silver coins inside. Quarters. The ones I put there back in the States, in case there was ever an emergency. I gasp.

“What is that?” Russ said.

“This is mine.” I grip it in my hand. “Smitty must have gone through my pockets at the crash and stolen it from me.” I smile. “That’s so him.”

“He could be nearby,” Pete says, heading for the door. “Maybe he heard us coming in the Jeep and ducked out, thinking we were the enemy.”

I cling to the purse and follow him out the door, but as he gets to the end of the short passage to the surface, he stops and turns round.

“Helicopter,” he whispers.

I tune in my ears. Yes, it’s there. The juddering sound of the air being sliced through, the copter hovering very close by.

“Stay here, or make a run for it?” Pete’s green eyes are strained and bloodshot.

“The Jeep.” Russ pushes from behind. “Have to get to it.”

“Up that bank?” Alice squeaks. “I can’t run up it.”

I don’t think any of us can.

“We’re hidden here,” says Pete.

“The Jeep isn’t. And maybe they saw us heading in this direction,” I say. “Presumably they know about this place? If we’ve disappeared it’s pretty much the only place we could have hidden.”

Russ nods, pushes past. “Wait here.” He disappears through the hatch for a minute, then emerges, red-faced.

“They’ve found the Jeep. The helicopter is at the top of the hill. We’ve no choice but to make a run to the woods.”

“Are you serious?” I say. “Leave the car?”

“Bobby, they’re on foot, heading this way. We go now, or we get caught. When we get the chance, we double back. Come on!”

He pushes us up through the exit, like we’re going over the front. The light is blinding after the dim of the shelter; at first I can’t see the men, but then I spot them, about a third of the way down the slippery bank behind us. Three men, like before, all in black. I duck down behind the wall and make my way toward the gap in the pen. There, over an expanse of rough clumps of grass, is our only hope. A dense forest, green trees peeling away into the horizon, seemingly endless. A great place to get lost in. But getting lost is our only hope.

Russ is at my side.

“We run. It’s the only way.” He takes off and, with a quick glance to check that Pete and Alice are with us, I do the same. We only have a few seconds’ head start; they’ll see us, and then the rifles will be trained on our backs. Even if they’re under orders not to shoot to kill, that doesn’t stop them from shooting us to bring us down.

“Stop!”

Sure enough, the now-familiar rasping voice rings out.

“Stop, or we’ll shoot!”

“Keep running!” I yell at the others.

The trees are achingly close now. But a single shot and I’ll be far, far away.

But it doesn’t come, and as I reach the forest first, I fling myself into the undergrowth. Alice is next, thundering past where I’m lying.

“Bobby?” she cries. “Where are you?”

Then Russ, almost dragging Pete, who is purple, gasping for air.

“Get up!” Russ shouts at me. “They won’t stop!”

I know it. But they want to catch us alive, of that I’m sure. I scramble up and follow where Russ leads, branches pinging back and whacking me in the face, roots tripping me, moss-covered rocks threatening to make me land on my back again.

“Keep together!” Russ gasps. “When they hit the trees they’ll spread out, try to corner us.”

He seems to know what he’s doing, and we follow. He takes us into thicker undergrowth still, and to the foot of a steep bank. We keep on keeping on, leaning into it, pulling ourselves up by saplings and rocks and clumps of grass. Reaching the top first, I collapse and lie for a minute, lungs pumping painfully. The others thump down beside me, Russ wriggling on his stomach for a better view.

“Hostile at twelve o’clock!” he whispers. One of the soldiers is some way below us, but on course for a rendezvous if we stay where we are. “The others will have gone round, either side.” He indicates left and right. “Damn! We need to keep going, or they’ll have us.” He springs to his feet. “Wait here a second.” He dashes off, and we lie there panting, barely able to do anything else. I keep a beady eye on the soldier, who is sizing up the bank. If he decides we’ve come this way, he’ll be joining us in a minute or two.

Russ comes back. “This way.” He beckons and we rise, keeping low, following him through the trees until he crouches down, hand flattening for us to do the same. “The way is clear — we go down the bank and out of the tree line in the open. Then we can double back and up the hill to the Jeep — it’s our only chance.”

This bank is steeper than the first — almost a cliff in parts — and it has less cover, and fewer trees to grab. It is slick mud from top to bottom, and to our right is a ravine with a fast-flowing stream tumbling down jagged rocks.

Pete shakes his head. “I’m not sure …”

“Slide from trunk to trunk,” Russ says, demo-ing on his backside, sliding to the first tree and catching himself on it. “Just follow my lead and you’ll be fine.”