by Patrick Ness
Yes. That’s what he’ll do.
Keep moving, he tells himself again. Don’t stop. Don’t stop to think.
But he stands there for a minute, over the backpack of clothes, feeling the empty house around him, feeling the doorway to the kitchen and the farther door that leads outside onto the deck.
The same door that he’d opened for the man in the jumpsuit.
And the attic upstairs where he’d waited, by himself, on all those terrible, terrible evenings while the hunt for the man and Owen was on, all those evenings when his parents could barely bring themselves to look at him or each other, when his dad started taking the go-away pills he never quite gave up.
Seth hadn’t told Gudmund everything, even when he could have, even when the chance was there for –
For what? Forgiveness? Absolution?
If he could have taken forgiveness from anyone, he could have taken it from Gudmund. He could have done it right then, and even now he isn’t sure why he didn’t.
He remembers being there, lying in bed with Gudmund, being held as close as it was possible to be, having shared a story he’d never told anyone besides his parents and the police.
His chest begins to ache again, dangerously so, and he says, “Right. Right.”
He heads outside to start bringing food in from the cart, trying as hard as he can not to cry again.
He makes three trips to the supermarket before the morning is through. It’s mostly cans and the few bottles of water that look tolerable, but he’s also found some sugar that’s not too hard to chip chunks out of and some dried meats vacuum-packed in plastic that may not be too petrified to eat. He’s found a couple bags of flour, too, though he doesn’t really know what he might do with them.
He gathers a few camping lanterns from the outdoor store and finds some more clothes at a small Marks & Spencer around the corner from it. The shirts and shorts are boring enough to make him look like his father, but at least he’s not having to wear snow gear in midsummer, which makes him wonder what will happen if he’s still here for whatever passes for winter in hell.
When the sun’s in the middle of the sky, he uses the camp stove to heat up more spaghetti. He does it at the same spot in the park where he ate yesterday, looking down the hill again at the grass and the crystal clear pond beyond.
He nearly drops the can when he sees a pair of ducks sunning themselves on the rock in the center of it. There’s nothing special about them as ducks per se, just plain brown ones, squabbling quietly to each other.
But still. There they are.
“Hey!” Seth shouts down at them, without thinking. They fly off almost immediately, quacking in alarm. “Hey, come back!” he calls after them. “I brought you here. I did that!”
They disappear over some trees.
“Ah, well,” he says, taking another bite of spaghetti. “It’s not like I could shoot you for dinner.”
He looks up. Could he? Well, he’d need a gun first, and he thinks immediately of the outdoor store –
And then he remembers this is England, or at least his mind’s version of it. You couldn’t buy a gun here anything like how easy it was in the U.S., where he could actually have got one at the local shopping mall, going to McDonald’s before and seeing a movie after. His parents were appalled, and talked about it for years with joyous European indignation, while never allowing one in the house. The result being that Seth has barely seen a gun up close, much less shot one.
So that ruled out hunting, probably, at least in the short term. His can of spaghetti, though, is suddenly looking a lot less appetizing than a roast duck. Not that he’d know how to roast it. Or if you even could on a butane camp stove.
He sighs and takes another bite, using the spoon he remembered to bring this time. He’s tired but not as tired as he was the day before. He wonders if he’s finally catching up on the sleep you need when you first die, which, granted, must be an exhausting thing to happen. Probably the most exhausting thing that ever could happen.
He looks back down to the now-empty pond and notices something new. The tall grasses up and down the hill are swaying a bit in the breeze. More than a bit, actually. They’re being blown by a wind Seth can now feel against his face. He looks up.
For the first time, there’s something in the sky. Clouds. Great big puffy ones. Great big puffy black ones scurrying this way.
Seth can’t believe his eyes. “It rains in hell?”
He barely makes it back to the house before the skies open up. The storm is a summer one, and Seth can still see blue sky on the horizon, so it won’t last, but boy, does it pour. He watches it from the doorway of his house as it quickly soaks the dusty streets to mud and streaks dirt across the windows of the dead cars.
The smell is outrageously good. So clean and fresh, Seth can’t help but step out into it, letting it drench his upturned face, squinting as the drops hit his eyes. The rain is surprisingly warm, and he suddenly gasps, “Idiot!” He races back inside to grab the hardened bar of dishwashing liquid. How much nicer would this be than the freezing cold shower he had this morning –
He jumps back out the front door, but the rain is already tapering away, blowing out of the neighborhood as quickly as it came.
“Damn,” he says. The wind up high must be blowing something wicked because the rain clouds are leaving like they’re being chased by a mob, out past the back of Seth’s house and carrying on to –
Where?
Yeah, where would they be going?
How big is hell?
Big enough for weather, obviously. The sun is back out, the breeze dying down, and steam already rising as the mud dries back into dust on his street.
A street he’s been up and down several times but not much beyond.
Maybe it’s time to do some exploring, he thinks.
He feels tired again after the morning’s exertions but resists taking a nap, dreading the vivid dreams even more after last night’s. Instead, he packs the backpack with a few supplies and a bottle of water and heads out for a walk.
He takes a moment to decide which direction. To the left is all the High Street stuff he’s seen several times already. Of course there are neighborhoods behind that, sprawling for miles before, if he remembers correctly, changing into farmland as they head east.
To the right is the train station.
I could walk all the way to London on that track, he thinks, and that’s somehow vaguely cheering. What does it matter if he has no phone to show him maps and no Internet to look things up? If he follows the train tracks one way, he could walk all the way to London.
Not that he’s going to. It’s bloody miles.
He stops. Bloody. He actually thought “bloody miles.” His parents didn’t even say bloody anymore, American slang having almost thoroughly obliterated everything but his mum’s insistence that he call her “mum.”
“Bloody,” he says, testing it out. “Bloody, bloody, bloody.” He looks up. “Bloody sun.”
It’s shining down brightly again, even hotter than before, the mud almost already thoroughly dried. This certainly isn’t the cold, damp English weather his parents always complained about. Nor is it really what he remembers from living here, though the memories of an eight-year-old about weather might not be the most reliable. But still. It’s a lot hotter than he’s been led to believe. With the steam rising from the ground, it’s almost tropical. Which is a word no one ever used to describe England.
“Weird,” he says, then he resettles his backpack and heads to the right, toward the train station.
The roads he crosses are the same as everywhere else, dusty and empty. He thinks it’s going to be worth starting some kind of systematic look through the houses, a more thorough search through the ones whose windows he’s already smashed and then spreading out across the neighborhood. Who knows what useful stuff could be found? More cans of food, maybe, tools and better clothes. Maybe one or more of them has a vegetable garden –
He stops in his tracks. The allotments, he thinks.
Of course. A whole huge field of private little gardens, tucked away behind a . . . what was it? He tries to remember. A sports center? Yes, he thinks that’s what it was, a sports center on the other side of the train tracks, with a field of allotments behind it. Sure there’d be weeds, but there’d have to be edible things still growing there, right?
He quickens his step, remembering almost automatically to turn up the long concrete stairway that runs between two apartment buildings – blocks of flats, he remembers. The English terms keep coming, and he wonders if his accent will return as well. Gudmund was always trying to make him “talk British,” always wanting him to say –
He stops, the feelings of loss coming again, strong. Too strong.
Keep going, he thinks. As long as you can.
The stairway reaches a sidewalk that leads up to the train station, which rests on top of a little rise. He can see the station building now. To get to the allotments, he’ll have to walk through it, cross the bridge between platforms, and go out the far side. He’s almost feeling excited about it as he passes through the entrance, hopping over the ticket gates without a second thought, and up the short stairs to the first platform –
Where there’s a train waiting.
It’s a short one, just four cars, a commuter train meant to shunt people back and forth to the city up the tracks, and he half expects passengers to start emptying out the doors or for the train to start pulling slowly away from the platform.
It doesn’t, of course. It just sits there, silent as a rock from the earth, covered in the dust of this place. There are weeds growing up all along the cracks of the platform and even some in the gutters along the train’s roof. Like the cars on the streets outside, it hasn’t moved in a long time.
“Hello?” he calls. He walks across the platform to look in through a window, but it’s mostly dark, the windows so badly dusted over they block out most of the afternoon sun. He pushes the open button on the closest door, but there’s no power running through it and it stays firmly shut.
He looks down the length of the train. At the front, the door to the driver’s compartment has come open. He walks to it, takes the torch out of the backpack and sticks his head inside the driver’s compartment. There’s only one seat behind the controls, which surprises him. He’d have thought there’d be two, like in airplanes. The screens on the dash are all either cracked or dusted over, dark without power.
There’s a door inside to the rest of the train, and it’s open, too. Seth steps up into the compartment and shines the light through the inner doorway, down the central aisle of the first car.
It smells. Animals have clearly been in here. There’s a fug of urine and musk, and the dust on the linoleum floor of the aisle is disturbed and streaked in any number of unpleasant ways. He can imagine all kinds of foxes huddled under seats now, watching him with his torch, wondering what he’ll do.
What he does is look around, almost overwhelmed with memories. The sun is bright enough for a dim light through the filthy windows, many of which are scratched with unintelligible graffiti, but there’s enough to see the blue cross-hatch pattern on the cloth of the seats. He runs a hand down one, burring the fuzz with his fingertips.
The train. The train.
He hasn’t been on a train since he left England. Not once. Americans on the west coast didn’t take trains. They drove. Everywhere. This is literally the first time he’s set foot on board a train since they crossed the ocean.
And everything the train had meant when he was young! Trips up to London and all the city had to offer a boy of six and seven and eight. The zoo, the Wheel, the wax museum, the other museums that were less interesting because they had no wax. Or down the other way, too, to the coast, with its castles on hills and the great big white cliffs that his mum wouldn’t let him or Owen anywhere near. And the pebbly beaches. And the ferries to France.
Trains always went somewhere amazing when you were eight years old. They were a way out of the same houses and the same faces and the same shops. It seems embarrassing now, to have been so excited by a simple train journey that millions of people took every day, but Seth can feel a little smile spread across his face as he steps farther down the car, shining the torch on the overhead racks and the assorted blocks of seats, two here, three there, and at the back of the car, the little boxed door to the horrible train toilet that Owen, without fail, would need to use within five minutes of the train leaving the station in whatever direction.
Seth shakes his head. He’d almost forgotten trains existed. Looking at it now, he can’t believe how exotic they seemed to him as a little boy.
Still, though, he thinks. A train.
Which is when the door to the bathroom crashes open and a monster comes roaring up the aisles straight for him.
Seth yells in terror and runs back down the aisle, risking a quick look back –
A huge, black shape hurtles toward him –
Screeching and roaring in what sounds like rage –
Two eyes staring back at him in unmistakable malevolence –
Seth flies into the train driver’s compartment, slamming into the control panels, crying out at a pain in his hip. He scrambles over the driver’s seat, and there’s a terrible moment when the strap of his backpack gets caught, but gets loose as the shape comes smashing inside.
Seth leaps out the door of the train and takes off, tearing down the platform, dropping the torch and leaving it behind. He looks back again, just as the shape comes rocketing out of the compartment, sending the door swinging back and forth violently. The thing turns and comes after him.
Running a lot faster than Seth is.
“Shit!” he yells, pumping his arms and trying to remember his cross-country form, though that was for long distances, not for sprinting, and he’s still not even remotely fully recovered from –
There’s a squeal behind him.
(a squeal?)
As he turns up the steps to the bridge over to the other platform, he takes another look back.
The shape is the biggest, ugliest, dirtiest wild boar he’s ever seen.
A wild boar? he thinks, charging up the stairs. A wild BOAR is chasing me?
The boar rages down the platform and up the steps behind him, and Seth can see it’s got a pair of filthy, splintered-looking tusks that would happily tear the stomach right out of him.
“SHIT!” he screams again, running across the flat part of the bridge, but he’s so tired, so weak still, that he’s not going to outrun the boar. It’s going to catch him before he reaches the stairs that go down the other side.
I’m going to be killed, he thinks, by a PIG. In HELL.
And the thought is so stupidly outrageous, so insanely angry-making, that he almost misses the chance to save himself.
The bridge is a corridor above the tracks, covered on both sides by square panels of frosted glass, broken by a metal guardrail at waist height. Right near the stairs at the other end of the bridge, two of the upper panels have fallen out in succession.
Leaving a space just big enough for someone his size to climb through.
The boar squeals again, barely five feet behind him, and he’s not going to reach the windows, he’s not going to reach them, he’s not –
He leaps for them and can actually feel the boar slamming its head into the bottom of his feet as he jumps. The momentum nearly carries him all the way out, and there’s an impossible few seconds where it seems like he’s going to fall straight back down to tracks twenty feet below, but he catches the upright support between the windows, manages to get one foot on the metal strip, and – swinging his free arm and leg wildly into the air – keeps his balance by a whisker.
Just before he’s nearly knocked off it again by the boar slamming into the wall at his feet.
“ALL RIGHT! ALL RIGHT!” he shouts, and there’s nowhere to go but up. He grabs a gutter above him and pulls himself up to the roof o
f the bridge. The boar keeps slamming against the railing as Seth hooks a leg up and rolls himself, panting heavily, onto the roof, his backpack lurched uncomfortably beneath him.
He just lies there for a moment, desperately trying to catch his breath. The boar is still going at it, grunting and squealing and ramming its weight against the inside wall of the bridge, knocking out another glass panel, which tumbles to the tracks, smashing into a thousand pieces.
Seth leans back over the side and looks down at the boar, who snuffles angrily up to him. It’s enormous, so much bigger and taller and wider than any normal pig, it almost seems like a cartoon. It’s hairy, too, and blackened by a thick layer of dirt. It squeals loudly at him.
“What did I ever do to you?” Seth asks.
The boar squeals once more and starts re-attacking the bridge.
Seth rolls onto his back again, looking up into the sky above.
He thinks he can remember stories about them breaking free from boar farms and going feral, but he’d never thought they were actually real. Or even if he was remembering it right.
But, you know, once again, hell, he supposes.
He keeps lying there, waiting for his breath to return to normal and his heart to slow down. He scoots the backpack out from under himself and gets the bottle of water. Down below, he can at last hear the boar giving up. It snuffles and snorts, making a defiant last grunt, and he hears its amazingly heavy tread back across the bridge beneath him. He can see it come down the bottom of the stairs to the platform before it disappears behind the train, no doubt returning to whatever den it’s made for itself in the train’s toilet.
Seth laughs. And then louder.
“A boar,” he says. “A bloody boar.”
He drinks the water. He’s looking out the way he came, and the view isn’t bad. He stands, balancing on the slightly curved roof of the footbridge, and he can even see the top floors of the stores on the High Street. His own house is too low to see, but he can see the neighborhood leading down to it.
To the left, behind where his house is, is the start of the cleared areas that lead farther down to the prison.