The Wilderness

by C. J. Harper

  ‘Blake, get out now.’ Kay sounds stern, but her face peering down at me is puckered with worry.

  I’ve come too far to die in a pipe. I’ve lost my mother and poor little Ali. I promised the Specials that I would take down The Leader, so that no one would ever suffer in an Academy like they did again. I have got to get out.

  I take a deep breath and squeeze all of my energy into my arms and pull and pull . . . and when they start to shake and burn I pull some more . . . and finally I reach the tipping point and I’ve got my head out of the pipe and I know I’m going to do it. Kay grips me under the arms and helps yank me out. I flail like a caught fish. When I’m out as far as my waist, I have to lie gasping for a while before I get my legs out.

  After being in the tunnel, the light is so bright it burns. I keep my eyes half scrunched to look around me.

  We’re in a very small concrete building. Wires snake all around us: running in and out of holes and sockets. One wall is covered with meters. A symbol like a crooked figure four is scrawled several times on the back of the broken door with spray paint. Rain is pouring in through the disintegrating roof and the protective sleeves on a number of the wires has been torn or even chewed away. I don’t think this place has been used for a long time.

  For a moment all I can do is take great shuddering breaths and press my head to the concrete floor in silent thanks that we’re out of that terrible pipe. I never want to be closed in again. I look over to Kay. She’s hugging her knees.

  This feels like the first moment of stillness since we escaped.

  Everything we need to talk about collides in my mind and all the horrors clog in my throat. Out of my mouth comes just one word: ‘Ali,’ I say.

  Kay understands. She crawls across the floor and we wrap our arms around each other.

  The thought of brave Ali fading away on the steps outside the Academy burns through me. I should never have included her in my plans to expose The Leader. I shouldn’t have let her get in that lift – and when it broke down and she squeezed through that tiny gap in the doors, I should have told her to run like hell. Instead, she brought us back the override key and, on the way, The Leader’s aide shot her. He was trying to get her to tell him where I was. It’s my fault. I feel the weight of responsibility for another death lodge above my heart, pressing painfully down. I know it will be there always.

  Ali didn’t even get to see her brother, Ilex, before she died.

  ‘What do you think happened to Ilex?’ I ask Kay.

  ‘I think some good people found him and he is in their house and they’re giving him big lots of food.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Really yes,’ she says firmly. She’s trying to make me feel better.

  The sound of rain on the roof is lighter now.

  Everything is a terrible mess. I am so exhausted that I could just sit here and wait for it all to go away, but Kay climbs to her feet and pushes open the door of the building. I hear her sharp intake of breath.

  ‘What is it?’ I ask, getting up to join her at the door.

  I see a vast expanse of bare earth broken up only by the rubble of demolished buildings. The back of my neck prickles.

  ‘We’re in a nowhere place,’ Kay says.

  ‘It’s worse than that,’ I say. ‘I think we’re in the Wilderness.’

  All the childhood stories about Wilderness bogeymen come back to me. Even worse than that, I remember the cannibal boys that I encountered in the Wilderness behind the Academy.

  Kay’s face is pale. The Wilderness is where they send the worst-behaved Specials. She’s got her own horror stories to remember. I hate seeing her worried.

  ‘We must have crawled right under the fence,’ I say.

  Kay isn’t listening. ‘I didn’t know the pipe came to the Wilderness,’ she says. ‘Ty didn’t tell me.’ She stares out at the barren landscape. ‘If you’re not good, the Enforcers make you go here,’ she says. ‘They say to you about the Wilderness to scare you. They tell you things.’ She sweeps her gaze across the horizon. ‘This is the place they send all the bad ones, isn’t it? Not just the Academy Specials. It’s all-danger here.’

  She doesn’t have to tell me. The hairs on the back of my neck are already standing up. I try to focus my mind. ‘Are you sure that Ty said this is where the anti-Leadership people are?’

  ‘Yes, big sure. Do you think we should go back?’

  I’m not sure there is a way back. The pipe is useless now that it’s flooded. Even when the water drains away, there is no way I am getting back in there. And I’ve tried the fence that surrounds the Wilderness before; it’s electrified. Besides, sometimes guards patrol along its length and I’m pretty sure if they saw anyone coming in from the Wilderness they would shoot first and ask questions later.

  We’re stuck here.

  ‘What exactly did Ty say about where we could find the people who would help us?’

  ‘He didn’t say big lots. He said there is the pipe. The pipe is an escape for the Leader-haters – he called them . . . the Resistance.’

  ‘Really?’ Resistance sounds a lot less scary than terrorists.

  ‘Yes. He said he can talk to his friend and ask if the Resistance want us to come, then we can go in the pipe because the pipe is a way to get to their . . . hecwaters?’

  ‘Headquarters. But where exactly?’ I look around at the desolate stretch of muddy fields and ruins in front of us. ‘There’s nothing here.’

  ‘No, it’s not here,’ Kay agrees. ‘But I’m thinking it’s near. I asked Ty what place it’s in and he said Anuldsity.’ She says it with a flourish. As if this clears matters up. ‘Do you know where that place is?’ she asks, as if I’m some kind of Wilderness expert.

  ‘I’ve got no idea. Did he say anything else?’

  ‘No.’ She frowns in concentration. ‘Yes! He said Anuldsity is in the south-east! Does that mean Wilderness?’

  ‘South-east is a direction.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s a way to go.’ I rub my hand over my face. I wanted to make things better so badly, but it’s all gone horribly wrong. I don’t even know where we’re going to get our next meal from. ‘What should we do?’ I ask Kay. ‘Should we try to find the Resistance?’ I don’t tell her that I’m still a little afraid of them.

  Kay eyes the thinning clouds. ‘I think maybe it’s better to get on a way to go than to stay here not getting any place.’ She touches my hand. ‘Ty said they would help us and I think it’s true.’

  ‘Why? We don’t really know anything about Ty. He was just a friend of Janna’s.’

  ‘When he talks about The Leader he has the look like you. I can see that he wants to stop him.’

  And that’s how we decide to search for the Resistance. I put my trust in Kay’s ability to read someone’s feelings in their face.

  The rain has completely stopped so we step outside the hut and take a look around.

  We’re in the middle of what must have once been countryside. Roads snake through hills, but instead of fresh green, the fields are bare grey mud. To the right a large building has been reduced to a pile of bricks.

  ‘Which way is south-east?’ Kay asks.

  I look up at the sky; a pale sun has broken through the clouds. ‘I can work it out,’ I say. ‘I just need something . . .’ I turn back into the hut and poke about until I find a strip of metal that holds a bundle of wires flat against the wall. I wrench it from its pins.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Kay asks.

  I go back outside and stick the long thin piece of metal in the ground. The sun casts a weak shadow. Using my finger I mark the end of the shadow in the dirt.

  ‘Now we have to wait a while,’ I say. ‘The sun moves from east to west, so when the shadow moves we’ll be able to work out which way is south-east.’

  While we’re waiting I teach Kay about the points of the compass, but neither of us are completely focused. It feels stupid to be standing still. I expect a pack of vicious W
ilderness people to attack at any second. I’m constantly scanning the land around us.

  I probably don’t wait long enough, but when the shadow has moved some way round, I make a second mark, then draw a line between the two dents in the earth.

  ‘Okay,’ I say. ‘The first mark is east and the second is west, so if we stand with east on our right, we’re facing north, which means . . .’ I turn one hundred and thirty-five degrees to my right. ‘This is south-east.’

  ‘That’s good,’ Kay says.

  ‘It’s not horribly accurate,’ I admit. ‘But we can always do it more precisely later when we’ve found a better stick.’

  We set off in the direction I pointed. Fortunately, one of the few marks on the landscape, something low and black, is just to the left of my calculated trajectory. As long as we keep that on our left, we should be fine.

  I hope.

  The muddy ground sucks at our boots as we walk. There isn’t much to see. What little vegetation there is doesn’t add much colour; the grass is yellow, the trees are grey and withered. After a while we end up on a road that’s leading in the right direction.

  I hope we don’t have to go far, but deep down I’ve already assumed that a group of rebels wouldn’t choose to live near the boundary fence. I prepare myself for a long walk.

  For a moment the wind drops and everything is completely still and quiet. I don’t know whether I’m more afraid of us being totally alone, or of what might happen when we do find someone. Either way I keep looking over my shoulder.

  ‘Tell me how there is this Wilderness,’ Kay says. ‘Tell to me about the war thing again.’

  ‘We went to war to try to defend another country that the Greater Power had invaded.’

  ‘What’s invaded?’

  ‘They brought loads of soldiers – fighters – into a country and started telling them what to do. Of course the Greater Power didn’t like us interfering when we tried to help, so they attacked us too. Using new weapons. Lots of bombs.’

  ‘What’s bombs?’

  ‘They drop them out of the sky and they explode.’ I mime an explosion by scrunching my fingers and flicking them out. ‘They break things, even big things, they make buildings fall down.’

  ‘Like at the Academy when there was the fire and then there was that boom! and it made everyone fall down?’

  ‘I don’t think that was caused by a bomb, but similar to that. Where we are now was the worst hit because the capital used to be around here somewhere.’

  ‘How did the war stop?’ she asks.

  ‘The Leadership stopped it.’ I frown. ‘Or so they claim.’ Come to think of it, what do I really know about the Long War at all? ‘That’s what I was taught in school anyway.’

  Kay nods. We both know that neither her school nor mine was a place for reliable information.

  The black shape in the distance gradually resolves itself into the remains of a group of houses. They must have been hit by a bomb. Only one front wall stands alone, with its windows smashed and its wooden veranda in splinters. It looks like a mouth full of broken teeth.

  The rest is not much more than a pile of bricks and timber. When we reach it I pull a plank from the wreckage and Kay and I manage to hack at it with flat stones until the wood splinters into a reasonable point, then I stick it in the ground, so that we can make another shadow compass and check we’re heading in the right direction. While we’re waiting for the shadow to move, Kay starts shifting bricks and hunks of plaster.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I ask. ‘Some of that stuff is sharp.’

  Kay rolls her eyes. ‘It’s not sharp things I’m worrying about.’ She looks behind her. ‘I want to find a weapon.’

  I would like a weapon too. If only I had a gun, then all that weapons training in the Future Leaders sessions at the Learning Community might actually be some use to me. But there’s nothing useful in the heap of rubble. Kay has to settle for half a brick, which she keeps in her hand at all times.

  Looking at the shadow compass I adjust our course a little and head towards a group of buildings in the distance. We cross several fields of mud sprouting nothing but a few sickly weeds and surrounded by hedges that are not much more than desiccated clumps of twisted twigs. Then we find another undulating road to follow. It must have been pretty once, looking down the hill at the fields. But now everything is grey and withered. I don’t understand why the weeds aren’t thriving. Surely, left untended, this place should be a riot of greenery? There’s something very wrong here.

  When we reach the buildings we find the remains of a village. The wind whips brick dust in my eyes. I squint to take in the devastation. Where we stand is barely even recognisable as a street. You can’t pick out individual structures. It’s just piles and piles of bricks with lengths of wood sticking out. I have to remind myself that these bricks once made someone’s home and these shards of wood came from the furniture they used every day.

  Behind these mounds is half a house, its side ripped open and its insides spilling out. Twisted between the bricks there’s a jumble of sun-bleached clothes tangled like intestines. Beyond that is more rubble, but on the far side of the village is a group of houses still standing, although they slump against each other like wounded soldiers. What happened to the people who lived here?

  Kay is picking her way through the mess.

  ‘Can we drink this?’ she asks, pointing to a pool of rainwater that has gathered in a dented plastic roof of some kind.

  I take a look at the water. It looks all right, but it’s bound to be full of bacteria. We haven’t got anything to filter it with. My tongue feels coated in grit.

  I shrug. ‘We may as well. This is probably as good as we’re going to find anywhere.’

  The puddle is quite deep and we manage a few mouthfuls each. The water tastes bitter, but it feels really good slipping down my throat.

  I hunch my shoulders against the wind as we make our unsteady way between the remains of houses. I can’t shake the feeling that we’re being watched.

  At the centre of the village is a crater the size of a football field.

  Kay’s eyes widen. ‘Is that where they bombed the bomb?’

  Dropped the bomb, I think – but I don’t say it because my jaw has seized up. It’s like the middle of the village has just disappeared.

  Kay stares into the crater. ‘Were there houses there?’

  I nod.

  ‘But there’s no things left. No bricks and things.’

  I don’t know what happened to the remains. It’s like they were vaporised. What kind of bomb does that? Causing buildings to collapse is one thing, making them disappear is something else.

  Kay has already turned away. ‘There’s some standing-up houses. Let’s look for food.’

  I tear my eyes away from the crater.

  Kay makes her way over, between bricks and roof tiles, into one of the few upright houses. I eye its walls with apprehension, but I climb in after her anyway.

  Inside, the ceiling has partially collapsed. The front door has been blown onto the stairs. The furniture and carpets are covered in a thick layer of plaster and broken glass. It’s hard to tell what’s what.

  The next house we try seems less likely to fall down on us at any moment. When we walk into the sitting room a shiver goes through me. Nothing has been touched. The green armchairs are pointed towards the old-fashioned TV. There’s a book about gardening splayed face-down on the coffee table. A piano in the corner has a jumble of music stacked on top. It’s like we’ve stumbled into someone’s home. Except there’s a chill wind blowing through a broken window.

  One room that isn’t untouched is the kitchen. All of the cupboards are bare. It looks like someone has cleared them out a long time ago. Even the cutlery drawer has been emptied. It’s the same in the next two intact houses we find.

  In the third house, Kay pulls open a cupboard under the stairs. Behind the coats and wellies and a pair of tennis rackets she finds a shelf holding f
our pots of homemade jam. The jars have rubber seals and they haven’t spoiled in all the years that they must have been sitting there gathering dust.

  ‘This is big good,’ Kay smiles, when we crack open a jar to share.

  I know it’s rash to finish a whole jar, but I’m so hungry and it’s great to see Kay enjoying the sweet taste. I find a bag on the row of pegs on the back of the cupboard door and put the empty pot and the remaining three jars in it to take along with us.

  Whoever made this jam had no idea that we would be eating it. What happened to them? Did they die in the war? Are they still alive on the other side of the fence? Either way, I’m grateful for the jam in my stomach.

  Out in the rubble-filled garden, Kay points at a small wooden hut.

  ‘What’s this?’ she asks.

  ‘It’s a shed.’

  Kay is already wrenching open the door. The wood is so weathered that it’s crumbling away at the corners like biscuit.

  Inside, the tiny space is crammed full of junk. Plastic sacks, spades, rakes, boxes, buckets and a giant fabric umbrella.

  ‘It’s rubbish,’ Kay says.

  ‘Wait a second.’ I pull a folding chair out of the way.

  ‘What is it?’ Kay asks.

  ‘It’s a bike. In fact,’ I say pulling back a rustling tarpaulin, ‘there are two – which is good.’

  ‘Why? What do they do?’

  ‘They move.’

  We had a number of bikes at the Learning Community. They didn’t make much of a fuss about Physical Education there, but once a week we were supposed to get some fresh air. Wilson and I usually opted for cycling around the grounds since it seemed like less effort than anything else on offer. The Specials at the Academy were required to exercise every day, but I never saw anything that might be described as equipment there and going outdoors for a ride would never have happened.

  ‘Show me,’ Kay says.

  ‘Okay. Grab that one.’

  We manage to yank the bikes out of the clutter and drag them outside. We have to haul them over and between the mounds of bricks until we reach a clear stretch of road leading out of the village. I swing my leg over the saddle and wobble forwards. My legs are still weak from that dreadful crawl through the pipe, but soon I’m gliding along.