by John Eider
The towns that Wareing and I were now meeting on our midnight marches were as weird as the fields we had left behind, just as empty but odd in their own way, primarily in the absence of people. Yet why would they still be here? How could you live, eat, work in such places now?
The last target of one particular night – and of that phase of the mission, it turned out – was on a factory estate long out of favour and now empty of humanity. Great doors stood open at the ends of warehouses. Televisions and washing machines were offered up neatly in stacked rows, had anyone the means to loot them; while other interiors were blackened by the sparks and fires of presses and forges now gone cold. My father had followed his brothers into places like this, before working up to foreman and then manager. (It was this line of self-improvement that had seen him push me so hard at school, and then be so disappointed at my ‘throwing it away’ to be a squaddie.)
‘These documents are old, the names have changed.’ Wareing spun a large-scale groundplan in his hands, his bearings lost for once.
‘Well, there’s a railway line,’ I pointed out behind him. ‘Can you work your way out from that?’
‘Thanks.’ He looked again. ‘Then it must be this one.’
As was often the case, we ignored the front door of our target building, this time in favour of a hatch in the side wall by some large round bins. Out with the jimmy, the padlocks were soon twisted off and we were heading down the now familiar secret thoroughfare of a narrow enclosed staircase of steep concrete steps. The only interest in what was becoming a turbid routine was seeing, on a wall in one of the dark rooms we entered, the self-same map that Wareing had in hand. (Where had the Major found this vintage stuff? Was the maison in Brittany packed with similar detritus?) In the underground rooms there was also an old radio receiver, that might have been got working again before we threw it on the floor, but no phone lines. Given the integrity of the huge building above us, we decided to leave the bunker unexploded. We took the code book though to burn up later (‘Industrial Civil Defence Service, Warden Section, Divisional Directory 1965’) but left the map that in Wareing’s confusion had already been proven redundant past the point of usefulness.
In the canteen of the open warehouse across the way from the factory, were teabags and sugar, and cushioned chairs that I could push three together to sleep on. I woke mid-day though, to voices outside the room. As the layers of sleep receded, I made one of the voices out to be Wareing’s, and the other to be something so bestial and near-human as to bring shivers down my spine and snap every sinew in me rigid.
Half-awake still, I crept up to listen at the nearest doorframe (for the voices were clearly coming from not very far away). I peeked around to see Wareing at an exterior door, his back to me and he having moved just a couple of feet outside of the building’s flat exterior. Here, in what looked like the carpark, and seen through the open door and windows either side of it, he was facing down what I hesitate to call anything human. We had left that glass door open to let in some air… our visitor could have killed me while I slept.
‘He’ could have been anywhere between twenty and sixty, so matted was the three month’s growth of hair and beard over his gaunt features. His neck and hands were thin and filthy, the rest of him covered by a coat not dissimilar to how ours must have looked at that point after days spent sleeping on bare earth. He spoke in a series of guttural outbursts; splenetic might be the word.
‘What do you want?’ asked Wareing, while gesturing for me to keep back – and then I remembered I had taken my stab-proof jacket off to sleep. Our new friend had something like a blood-spattered half-bottle jockeying in his nervous right hand.
I honestly couldn’t make out a single word in the sounds he was making, yet he was coming no closer to the building while Wareing spoke back to him, as though warded off by the power of speech itself.
‘Where do you want to go to? What do you want to find there? Who do you want to find there? What would you like to eat there?’ intoned my partner deeply and somewhat hypnotically, and in a way that I saw lulled and calmed the man to the point where his arm became less twitchy and the bottle began to droop at his side.
Knowing that this effect may last for only seconds, I crept back inside and out of view, before pulling my coat back on. Remembering the way back to the big main entrance, I sprinted through the building and out past the racks of unwatched televisions. Once outside, I moved more gingerly along the exterior wall, to the point where I guessed the scene was taking place around the corner of. Peeking by, I saw the man, half slumped now but desperate; and Wareing, not ten feet from him, asking the same questions, over and over – ‘What do you want? Who do you want?’ – as if the voicing of words, any words, were duping the man into a trance. Without turning to me or breaking from his mantra, he began nodding his head and I knew this was my signal. I pulled my coat around me tight, clenched my hands in my cuffs, and ran at the fellow.
He only had time to make one, still pretty vicious, swipe – thankfully at my chest – before I was over him and had him pinned to the ground. God, he stank.
‘Knock him out,’ shouted Wareing, not missing a beat. ‘Lord, didn’t you box at school?’ He stooped to offer a right hook to where he judged the fellow’s jaw to be. Unconscious, we dragged him inside to sleep it off, leaving him a package of cold rabbit and a bowl of tepid neat tea.
After moving far enough away from him – still in daylight, not good – we could again breathe and think.
‘I couldn’t sleep,’ began Wareing, ‘so I let you doze off. I was checking our place on the maps when I heard him jabbering outside.’
‘He could have killed us.’
‘He didn’t come anywhere near me.’
‘He seemed transfixed though,’ I remembered.
Wareing pondered, ‘He might not have heard speech in months; just my talking was like a lullaby to him.’
‘I’m sure I remember a story I read as a boy, about someone left on a desert island for years. When they found him, he’d forgotten how to speak.’
‘It could be true,’ he concurred. ‘It takes us years to learn it, and then we’re rarely given the chance to get out of practice. Or he might just have been half-mad: did you see the blood in his beard? He’s probably been living off stray dogs, or worse…’
I started, ‘You mean we’ve just fed a cannibal?’
‘He’s still the first person we’ve seen for days.’
Some of this apparent misanthropy was down to our nocturnal ways, but some also to there really not being many people around to meet. Perhaps you had to have gone feral to have survived back then?
‘And don’t worry that that was the last of the food,’ my partner continued. ‘As soon as we’ve found somewhere to stay, then we’re staying put tonight. There’s woods around here, so says the map, so I’ll be stocking up. Now, how about we find somewhere nearer the outskirts of town; and make a dash there now, get it out the way?’
I looked warily around me at the day-lit streets, and nodded my assent.
Chapter 13 – Solo Editions