by Polly Ho-Yen
I watch as another car pulls out behind us. A man is driving, there is a woman in the passenger seat.
The man looks steely, his expression grim. The Greys that were following us spot them and as we accelerate on, they fall back to this new car, this car that they have more chance of reaching.
I look forward, we are almost at the split. I look back… and then I have to look away.
The car is no longer following us.
It is engulfed with Greys.
I can’t see the man and the woman any more.
HOW TO START A JOURNEY
We do not speak.
Julie drives, still sitting in the same hunched over position. Steve stares out at the road. Angharad leans forward, so she’s as close to her mum as she can be without climbing into the front.
My fists are clenched. It takes me a while to notice. I wonder how long they have been like that because when I try to unclench them, I find that I can’t.
We cross the bridge into Wales in silence. I realize I’m holding my breath until we cross it. It feels like something might stop us again but Julie keeps pushing down on the accelerator and we speed onwards, untroubled.
I look out of the window, at the trees and bushes that blur together in a green that races past me, at the sunlight hitting a field and illuminating every ridge of its earth. It looks so idyllic, so tranquil, that it does not seem possible that this place can exist in the same world as the one we just left.
No one speaks.
I hope that Anwar and his family got out of the city okay, that they are safe, wherever they are. For a moment, I imagine what it might have been like for them if they’d been attacked by the Greys as they left, like us. I can see Nadifa and Taifa’s scared faces so clearly and I can picture Anwar desperately trying to distract them even though he would be feeling terrified himself. I turn my phone over in my hands. Although I know there is no way he can receive a message, I type one out anyway, telling him what we’re doing, hoping that he is okay. It sits, unsent, on my phone.
As we drive on, I spot on the dashboard that the petrol gauge is steadily swinging to the left. It is moving closer and closer to the red line, showing that the tank is almost empty.
No one speaks.
There are cars that are driving like us. We all drive faster than the speed limit; we are driving as fast as our cars will go.
There are other cars too, ones that have been abandoned – often on the side of the road but sometimes left in the middle at an angle. Julie has to swing our car to the side to avoid them.
We don’t see any sign of the people that once drove them.
We’ve made really good progress, but then we spot a queue building up.
Cars are stopping ahead of us. We all sit up, really alert now, and look round.
Julie points to the sign that reads ‘Services’ and I realize that the people in the queue are stopping for petrol – they are probably running low, like us.
But Julie doesn’t slow as we reach the queue. She pulls around and carries on driving. It doesn’t feel safe to stop here. In these new times, seeing lots of other people means trouble. Today, seeing a queue of traffic means danger.
No one questions her when she does this.
No one speaks.
* * *
One moment the car is racing ahead, pushed on, almost, by Julie leaning into the wheel. Her need for it to go forward fuelling the car alone.
Then its power dies. The engine cuts out. Julie pushes uselessly against the accelerator.
The car rolls to a stop.
Julie turns the wheel hard to try to bring the car to the side of the road but we don’t quite make it – we come to a halt at an angle on the outside lane.
She turns the key in the ignition over and over but the car does not make a sound. After a few minutes of trying, she stops.
‘Right.’ Steve breaks the silence finally. He turns to look at Julie. ‘Are you okay, love?’
‘Yes,’ Julie says in a very small voice. She sounds weary. Her face is drained and white. Like the car, she’s empty, she has nothing more to give.
No one moves. Julie’s hands remain gripped on the steering wheel.
I look around us. The number of cars on the road has lessened as we’ve gone further and I can see no one else around us, at that moment. We’re surrounded by green here, now we’re even further into Wales.
‘How far are we from the farmhouse?’ I ask.
‘About an hour’s drive. Maybe a little less,’ Julie says.
‘How long would it take us to walk?’
‘I don’t know…’ Julie’s answer seems to wither away.
‘We should get off the road and start walking. Carry as much as we can,’ I say. ‘I’ll take the water.’ I unlock my door and push it open. It takes a few shoves before it will budge because of the damage done to it when we squeezed in between cars. Finally it swings open with a creak.
My feet land a little unsteadily on the warm tarmac of the road. For a moment I’m not sure if my legs will support me and I have to hold on to the side of the door until I feel calmer. Then I turn to the boot of the car to haul out the first of the water bottles and that’s when I notice that I’m the only one who’s made a move.
Julie is still staring at the patch of road in front of us, clenching the steering wheel. Steve’s eyes are glazed and he sits forward, frozen still. Angharad is still bent in between the space of the two front seats.
‘Angharad,’ I whisper and then I say it louder: ‘Angharad.’
She flinches, as though she’s just waking up.
‘We’ve got to get off the road,’ I tell her. ‘We’ve got to get moving.’
She nods but does not answer me. I cannot tell what she is thinking but I can see her mind ticking over, lingering over something, or someone. But then she pats Julie’s shoulder and tells her gently, ‘Mum, we’ve got to go.’
‘Yes,’ Julie says. It sounds like an exhale. She still makes no sign of moving.
Angharad looks over at me a little hopelessly and I jerk my head towards Steve. I haven’t spoken to him since our argument in the kitchen and I can still feel resentment ticking over inside of me. Angharad seems to understand that I can’t speak to him at the moment.
‘Come on, Steve,’ she tries. ‘We’ve got to go.’
But still neither adult makes a move.
‘We’ve got to get off the road – before anyone finds us,’ I repeat.
The words sink in. Steve opens the door on his side in a sudden movement; he winces as it rasps and scrapes open.
‘I think we should stay in the car,’ Julie suddenly says. She speaks almost with a shout, each word increasing in volume, and then almost pleading. ‘We can lock the doors.’
Angharad and Steve exchange a look.
‘Come on, Mum, we can’t stay here,’ Angharad says. She almost sounds like she’s the mother, the one who should be comforting and solid.
‘We’ve got to get to the farm, love,’ Steve adds.
‘I know,’ Julie says. ‘I think… I think I’m just… I don’t know. I can’t believe it.’
‘We’ll be okay,’ Steve says and then he repeats it, as though he really wants to believe it. ‘We’ll be okay.’
I put down the heavy bag of water bottles from the boot. I won’t be able to carry it that far, I think. Its handles are already cutting into my fingers. The bottles make a sort of thump as I drop them on to the tarmac. One of them falls on its side and out of the bag.
At first I think it’s just the movement of the bottle rolling away. I tell myself that that’s all I’m seeing because I so want it to be true. I want us to be the only people on the road.
But when I make myself look, there is no denying that we are no longer alone.
The figures look like shadows in the distance. There are two of them and from far away, they look like little more than small dots. They could just be normal people, people who are looking for help, people who are just
like us. But we can’t find out. We can’t take any risks.
‘We have to go,’ I tell the others. ‘Someone’s coming. We have to leave now.’ I speak like I want to move: rushing through the words, sprinting from sentence to sentence. There’s no time for fear any more.
We break into movement then, even Julie. We grab what we can. Some of the food. The bag with the bottles of water. We leave behind most of the things that we brought with us.
There’s a parting in the bushes that we run towards.
I can’t see anyone following us, although it’s too early to tell.
We run, we scramble, we don’t look back.
HOW TO WALK (AND START RUNNING)
We agree to keep quiet as we walk and though it makes sense to do this, I wish that we were able to talk. I wish that it was different.
I imagine that if we were walking together through the countryside in a different time, on a different day, that we would play games as we walked. Steve and I would be speaking to each other; we wouldn’t have fallen out. He’d be able to look me in the eye again. Maybe we would start with something like I Spy and then move to Twenty Questions, taking turns to guess. We would break off when someone spotted something that they wanted to share – an interesting snail shell or a view through the trees.
It’s funny that I can imagine us so easily doing this. I almost feel sick for it, as though it’s something that I am actually missing, although we have never spent time together like that before.
‘I think there’s a village coming up ahead,’ Julie says.
We’ve tried to look up a route on our phones but there’s still no signal. Julie thought that it would take about twelve hours if we didn’t stop at all.
‘Should we go round it?’ she asks.
No one answers and I wonder if everyone else is thinking the same thing as me: I’d like to go there, I have a need to see other people all of a sudden. It’s as though I want to know that we are not the only ones left. I know that we are not, but I want proof.
‘It’s probably best we avoid it,’ Steve says and Julie nods and makes a right turn where the path forks.
‘Look!’ Angharad hisses, suddenly. She points to the sky and we see a trail of smoke rising steadily in the air. ‘Is that where the village is, do you think, Mum?’
‘Yes, it looks like it,’ Julie says. Her face grows fixed and unreadable and then she looks down to the ground and walks on and I can’t see her expression any more. ‘Let’s stop for a break for a moment, shall we?’ She puts down her bags and gestures to Steve that she wants to talk to him. I can’t hear what they are saying, only their muttering from behind a tree.
‘They’re worried,’ Angharad says to me.
‘Steve’s always worried.’
‘Why do you do that?’
‘What?’
‘Call him Steve, why don’t you call him Dad?’
‘Sylvia called him Steve,’ I say back, although I know that doesn’t really make sense.
‘So why do you call your mum Sylvia?’
‘She wanted me to call her by her name,’ I say. ‘She said that if there was an emergency and people were calling out for their mums, she wouldn’t know if it was me. But if I said her name, then she would always hear me.’
Angharad considers this. ‘Wouldn’t she just know your voice?’
‘Of course – but in a real emergency, every small thing counts. You might not be able to hear someone’s voice clearly if everyone’s shouting.’ I hear my voice rising as I recount the explanation that Sylvia herself had given me. There’s something about it that makes me feel funny. It makes sense for me to call her by her name but as Angharad pointed out, wouldn’t she be able to tell my voice over everyone else’s? Isn’t that what a mum does?
‘Maybe I should ask Mum if I can call her Julie.’
‘I don’t think it would work – she knows that you call her Mum now – she wouldn’t think it was you if you said Julie.’
‘I guess so.’
* * *
We’ve headed on again, Julie still leading the way as we follow in a single line. Steve insists on going at the back. It’s slow going because we are carrying so much and because we stop to drink water fairly often, in the beating midday sun. After each of those stops, my bag is not quite as heavy to carry.
It feels as though it will take us much longer than twelve hours to get to the farm at the speed we’re walking and with the stops we’re taking.
There is little shelter from the sun on the path we’re on. Angharad raises a hand to try and shade her face. I can feel my skin burning too but I have to use both hands to carry the water bag. My mind races over the Rules and then it’s like I’m reading How to Survive, turning the pages and poring over every word and diagram. As the sun beats down, I remember a section about the different kinds of exposure to the weather you need to be wary of.
‘We need to stop,’ I say.
‘What is it?’ Angharad asks.
‘Has anyone got any T-shirts or shirts or anything like that? We’ve got to make sure that we don’t get heatstroke being out in the sun like this. We need some protection.’
I think I hear Steve make a scoffing sound but I don’t look over at him.
Julie throws off the rucksack that she is wearing. ‘Good idea, Billy. How about these?’
She pulls out some T-shirts from her bag.
I tie one of them around my head.
‘You look ridiculous,’ Angharad says.
‘I’d rather look ridiculous than get heatstroke.’
‘Quite right, Billy,’ Julie says. She starts to tie a T-shirt around Angharad’s head, although Angharad tries to bat her away.
‘Mu-um,’ she says, in that same tone she used when they first came round for lunch at our house.
‘Hold on,’ Julie says. ‘Almost done. You’ll feel cooler in a moment.’ When she’s finished, it looks like Angharad is wearing a lumpy-looking turban but it shades her face.
‘Steve? Do you want one?’ Julie asks.
‘Ah – I think I’m okay without…’
‘Come on, Steve!’ Angharad says and touches the T-shirt on her head gently. ‘Don’t you think it looks good?’
‘If you get heatstroke, you’ll slow us all down,’ I say quietly.
‘All right, all right,’ Steve says, holding his hands up in defeat. ‘The sun’s gone behind a cloud now anyway,’ he mutters but he lets Julie wrap a shirt around his head. It’s much bigger than the T-shirts so she has to coil it round and round him until it bulges out.
‘There,’ she says when she is finished. ‘That wasn’t so bad, was it? You look, you look – really good.’ She almost finishes the sentence without laughing, but not quite.
Angharad starts to laugh too, so much so that her shoulders begin shaking. I don’t want to look over but I sneak a peek. He looks ridiculous and I can’t help but smile for a moment.
Steve catches me looking and he begins to grin and strike a pose with his funny, lumpy turban that makes Angharad and Julie laugh even harder. I look resolutely away.
‘Stop it! Stop it!’ Julie is saying. At first, it seems like she is saying that because she is laughing so hard but then her voice changes. ‘Stop it. Stop it,’ she commands.
Steve whirls round.
We spot what Julie has seen. There is a blur of Greys moving together like a pack on the path ahead of us.
And they are coming straight for us.
HOW TO BE MUCH CLOSER TO GREYS THAN FEELS COMFORTABLE OR DESIRABLE
‘This way,’ Steve says. We dart off the path into the bushes.
They’ve all pulled the T-shirt turbans from their heads now and Angharad’s braids sweep out behind her in every direction.
‘Leave it!’ Julie shouts when she sees me struggle to run with the bag of water bottles. I hesitate for just a moment but then I let the handles go.
The bottles tumble from the bag and roll off down the path.
I almost fall as I
leap across the uneven ground. It feels as though we are making no progress at all as we scurry through the bushes; the landscape is impossible to sprint through. There are too many obstacles in the way, too many holes in the ground.
We run until we can go no further.
The vegetation grows so thickly we cannot pass through it.
‘Hide!’ Angharad cries. I duck next to her, behind a tree trunk, and Julie and Steve crouch behind some large bushes.
Now that we have stopped running, I can hear the sound of the Greys stumbling and tripping towards us.
I can hear the rustle of bushes as they pass them, the grass that is crushed under their feet, their stampeding legs whipping through the undergrowth. But more than anything else, I hear their terrible moaning; something like grinding, something like pain, all at once.
They are getting closer.
I am aware of every breath that I take. Each one seems too loud, sure to give away where we are.
I close my eyes. I try to slow my breath down and calm myself. I am sure that they were attracted to the sound of our laughter and only if we keep absolutely quiet will we be able to escape them.
I motion to the others, placing my fingers on my lips, and I think that they understand this. Angharad looks like she is holding her breath.
Then I see Steve beckoning us over. He points to a small gap he has spotted in the hedge beside them. Julie has started to edge towards it. I can hear every rustle, each leaf that she brushes past. The sound seems to grow louder as she moves through the gap and the Greys move closer still.
But before I can say that I think we should stay where we are, Angharad begins to crawl over to follow Julie. Steve waves at me frantically to follow.
He mouths at me desperately: Come on, come on!
Then, Angharad cries out.
Her cry slits through the air. It rises up above us like smoke streaming from a fire, a beacon of where we are.
We freeze.
Angharad is hunched over her leg, it looks like she’s hurt herself. When I turn back, I see the Greys amassing. They flock towards us.