The Wilderness

by C. J. Harper

  In the afternoon we start up a steep hill. It’s hard going, even for super-fit Kay. We’ve barely had anything to eat for the last few days and our water is running low.

  Finally we reach the top of the hill.

  What we see beneath us takes my breath away.

  We’ve found the city.

  And unlike everywhere else we’ve seen, it appears untouched by the bombs. In fact, at first glance it looks as if an entire district from the other side of the fence has been picked up and dumped in the middle of the Wilderness. Then I see what is missing. Colour, lights, movement. There are no fresh green parks, no lit-up signs and no cars or buses winding along the many roads beneath us.

  This is a city of absence.

  As we make our way down the hill I can see that many of the buildings have fallen into disrepair; even so, this is the first place that we have seen that is still recognisable as what it once was. I don’t see any of the super-sized craters here. This place seems to have got off lightly. The inhabitants were lucky. Although, that’s not how I would describe anyone still living in this lost city.

  Walking the empty streets makes my skin prickle. The whole place is awash with whispering ghosts. I can almost see them coming out of their houses, walking down the street, stepping into a shop.

  But it’s the living inhabitants who scare me most. I’m more frightened here than I have been the whole time we’ve been in the Wilderness. There are hundreds of hiding places. I imagine eyes at every window and predators around every corner.

  ‘Do you think there are a lot of Wilderness people here?’ I ask, looking over my shoulder.

  Kay nods. ‘If I was in the Wilderness I would live here. This is the place you would look for things.’

  I can only hope that no one is looking for us.

  At the end of the second street there’s a corner shop. A blue-and-white striped canopy over its window has blistered and torn. The wind whips the tatters back and forth.

  ‘Let’s look in here for food,’ I say to Kay.

  She nods.

  Inside the shop, the racks of newspapers and magazines from two decades ago are untouched. Unfortunately, the rest of the shop is not. Every item of food has been removed. Looking at the stock labels on the empty shelves, it’s clear that even items like tissues and bleach have been taken.

  ‘Someone has been here,’ Kay says.

  It’s the same in every shop we find.

  ‘It’s good,’ Kay insists. ‘It means the Resistance people are here. And they will have food for us.’

  We walk right across the district. In the countryside the silence and emptiness wasn’t so bad, but here where I expect to see people walking and chatting and eating outside restaurants and waiting for the bus, the stillness sends a chill through me.

  And yet, despite the quiet, I know there must be Wilderness people here somewhere. Occasionally, I think I see someone moving out of the corner of my eye, but every time I spin round there’s nobody there. Once, I think I hear the engine of a car in the distance, but the noise fades away before I can be certain.

  There’s been no rain all day and I start to seriously worry about where we can find water. Also, it’s clear that someone – probably a lot of someones – has been using up all the resources this place has to offer. It can only be a matter of time before we bump into them. Who will we meet first – the Resistance or a pack of violent Wilderness people?

  The sun is descending. I try to decide whether it’s safe to shelter in one of the buildings for the night. It would be so easy for someone to creep up and ambush us.

  ‘Let’s get up high and look,’ Kay says.

  We climb the stairs in a block of flats.

  Every door we pass has been forced open.

  ‘Someone has been here too,’ Kay says.

  It gives me the shivers. I feel as if we’re just seconds behind someone. I press my face to a window on the third floor; laid out beneath me the city is divided up by crisscrossing roads. The rows of grey houses blend into the dusk. Nothing moves.

  ‘Do you think we should stay in one of these places?’ I ask.

  Kay casts a fighter’s eye over the layout of the flat we’re stood in. ‘If we do we can hear if someone comes and get ready to fight.’

  ‘Or hide,’ I suggest.

  Kay rolls her eyes at my entirely reasonable desire to avoid getting hurt and walks into the kitchen. She growls. ‘All the food is gone in this one too! People have taken all the good things in every one.’

  I bite my lip. Maybe we’d be safer trying to get back to the other side of the fence.

  Then, I finally see something that gives me hope. I jolt with surprise.

  ‘What is it?’ Kay asks.

  I point out the window at a tall building in the distance.

  Someone has just switched on a light.

  We rush back down the stairs, but by the time we reach the street my feet have slowed. What if the light isn’t a good sign? ‘What if it’s Wilderness people?’ I ask Kay.

  ‘Do Wilderness people know how to get lights on?’

  That’s a good question. I don’t know a lot about Wilderness people and even less about their understanding of electricity. I’m surprised to find that there’s any electricity here at all. Where do they get their power from?

  ‘Maybe we should keep away,’ I say.

  ‘Light is where people are and where people are is food and water,’ Kay says.

  I nod. We’ve got to find water whether it’s dangerous or not.

  As we move into an area that reminds me of a business sector, the number of tall buildings increases. It makes it harder to keep a fix on the light and at one point we lose it all together. When we find it again we’re close enough to see the outline of the huge building it’s shining out of. In front of the building the road curves in a U-shape. Kay spots something on the ground. ‘Look,’ she says, bending down and lifting a stainless steel kidney dish. ‘Shiny. What is it?’

  ‘It’s . . .’ I notice the markings on the ground. A hatched-out space marked Ambulance only. ‘I think this place used to be a hospital,’ I say.

  ‘A what?’

  ‘It’s a place where they send sick people so that they can be made better.’

  In the gloom I watch Kay’s face as she struggles to comprehend a world in which ill people are met with kindness. When I think about how Kay has been treated I get so angry. Even with myself. I feel like somehow I should have been there with her through all the bad stuff.

  ‘Blake,’ Kay says in a low voice. I can tell by her tone that it’s not good news. I follow her gaze and there, on the other side of the road, is a man. Even in the moonlight his hunched figure radiates illwill.

  ‘Keep moving,’ I say. ‘Head for the light.’ I feel for Kay’s hand, but before we even take a step I realise that we have nowhere to aim for.

  The light is gone.

  The Wilderness man makes a snarling sound in his throat. Is he a cannibal like those boys who attacked me out the back of the Academy? I spin round, hoping that the light will reappear – but it doesn’t.

  ‘It was this way,’ Kay says, pointing to the right of the hospital.

  I can’t believe that we took our eyes off it.

  There’s a metallic clang as the Wilderness man kicks something across the tarmac. He’s heading straight for us.

  ‘Run,’ Kay says, and she sprints in the direction she pointed. I follow her. We have to find somewhere to hide. When I turn back, the Wilderness man is lumbering towards us. A small part of my brain wonders why they all seem to have difficulty moving, the rest of me just hopes it will slow him down a bit.

  The front of the hospital looms up. The ground-floor windows are all boarded. Kay runs down an alley between the main hospital and a lower building next door. There’s a dull thump as the Wilderness man hits something else. I follow Kay down the gap between buildings. She’s much faster than me. She’ll get away and I’ll have to take him on. He makes
a noise somewhere between a scream and a roar.

  I’m so tired from cycling, I’m panting already. He’s going to catch me. My ribs seem to be contracting, crushing my lungs. Must keep running.

  I’m wrenched to a halt by a hand on my shoulder. Efwurd, it’s another one.

  ‘Kay!’ I call out. I jab backwards with my elbow and try to twist out of his grip. Kay comes sprinting back towards me. I struggle violently, but I can’t break free.

  ‘In here,’ a voice near my ear hisses.

  I look over my shoulder in surprise. It’s not a man that’s got hold of me. It’s a teenage boy.

  Kay’s long strides stutter to a halt by my side. She pulls back her arm to punch the boy, but he’s too fast for her and grabs her wrist. ‘Quick,’ he says.

  Footsteps smack down the alleyway. The Wilderness man is coming. He spits out a guttural sound like a curse. I let the boy pull me and Kay through a metal door. He slams it behind us and pulls a bolt across. I’m shaking. The footsteps stop outside the door. The man scratches at it. There’s a thump. I suck in my breath.

  Then nothing.

  ‘Is he gone?’ I whisper.

  ‘Probably,’ the boy says.

  ‘Are there other entrances?’ We’re at the end of a long corridor. There’s a solar lantern stood at the bottom of a flight of stairs and by its feeble light I can see the paint on the walls has peeled off in strips, so it looks like the passageway is covered in tattered fabric. The nearest window is boarded up, but a vine has crept through a crack and is snaking down the corridor.

  ‘It’s possible he could get in,’ the boy says. ‘But he doesn’t really want to. He knows I have this.’ There’s a gun in his hand.

  I stare at the boy. He’s wearing a shirt and jeans and he’s well spoken. He looks like any number of boys I knew at the Learning Community. What the hell is a boy like this doing in the Wilderness with a gun?

  ‘They’re not even that dangerous,’ a little girl says, appearing from under the stairs.

  I jump. Kay doesn’t.

  ‘Robin, I told you to go upstairs,’ the boy says.

  The girl scowls and turns to Kay as if the boy hadn’t said anything. ‘I’m not scared of the Wilderness people at all,’ she says. ‘You just have to know how to handle them.’

  ‘Really?’ I say. She looks about eight years old. Have I completely overestimated the threat the Wilderness people pose?

  The girl nods. ‘Yeah, in the last couple of months they’ve hardly killed anyone.’

  Kay and I exchange a look. ‘Well, that’s a relief,’ I say.

  The girl sizes us up, taking in our filthy Academy uniforms. ‘You’re not from one of the cells are you?’ she says.

  Kay shakes her head.

  ‘Robin,’ the boy says in a warning tone.

  ‘Paulo,’ Robin mimics back at him. Her forehead is scrunched again. She seems to be a very cross child.

  Paulo shakes his head. ‘I’m going to check the other door and then we’re all going upstairs.’ He walks away without waiting for Robin’s response. The light from his torch spotlights an abandoned stretcher halfway down the corridor. I suppress a shudder.

  ‘Hey,’ says Robin in a low voice so that Paulo won’t hear. ‘You’re not Wilderness, are you?’

  ‘Do we look like hairy-faced cannibals?’ I ask.

  ‘They’re not all like that one.’ She gestures with her head towards the door. ‘Some of them are nice.’ She pouts. ‘I made friends with a boy, but our captain said I wasn’t allowed to talk to him any more.’ She rubs her nose with her fist. ‘He’s called Jed – my friend, not the captain. I like playing with Jed, but they said we’re only allowed out to go on missions and if I’m going to be a useful member of the Resistance then—’

  ‘The Resistance?’ I say. ‘You’re the Resistance?’ I can’t believe it. ‘I mean, is this the Resistance? Here?’ My vague fears subside. They can’t be bad people if they save desperate people like me and Kay, and look after little girls.

  ‘I don’t want to stop playing with Jed,’ the girl says, ignoring me. ‘Do you know . . .’ She lowers her voice and brings down her eyebrows as if she is about to tell a secret. ‘I hate our captain.’

  ‘What about—’ I start, but Kay cuts me off by elbowing me in the ribs.

  ‘It’s hard when you can’t see your friend, isn’t it?’ she says to the girl and gives her a sympathetic smile. ‘My friend went away too.’

  I think of Ali closing her eyes for the last time and I bite the inside of my cheek.

  The girl looks Kay up and down. ‘I can be your friend if you want,’ she says grudgingly, as if she is bestowing a great favour. ‘But don’t tell anyone. They told me not to talk to anyone from outside.’

  ‘I won’t tell it,’ Kay says.

  Robin looks up. Paulo’s torch is coming back down the corridor. Soon his face is visible again.

  ‘Do you need medicine?’ Robin asks me, switching to a businesslike tone.

  ‘No, we need to find the Resistance,’ I say.

  Paulo considers me. ‘You’ve found them,’ he says.

  Kay beams at me, but my doubts are gathering again. I never imagined the Resistance would be living in a derelict hospital.

  ‘Are you going to let them stay?’ Robin asks.

  Paulo looks at us and then back to the girl. It’s clear that she’s asked an awkward question. I want to explain to him that we’re here to help, but Robin doesn’t stop talking.

  ‘It’s not really up to you is it?’ she says to Paulo.

  Even I can see that this remark hurts Paulo’s pride, but Robin is either oblivious or tactless.

  ‘You have to—’

  ‘I know what I need to do, Robin.’ He gestures to the stairs. ‘This way,’ he says to us. We climb the stairs, our feet crunching on the gritty surface of the steps. Robin hops ahead of us. She reaches the top first and swings recklessly on the rail.

  ‘What’s your name?’ she asks me. Without waiting for an answer she says, ‘I think that you sh—’

  ‘Go to bed,’ Paulo says.

  ‘You go!’

  Kay’s eyes widen. No little Special would get away with talking to a senior like that, but Paulo seems unflappable. ‘I don’t want to report you, Robin,’ he says quietly.

  ‘All right, all right, I was going to anyway,’ she says and flounces off down the corridor. ‘Hope you like being bossed about if you’re staying,’ she calls over her shoulder.

  I try to relax. If our biggest fear is being bossed about maybe things will be okay.

  Paulo is unmoved by Robin’s dramatics. ‘This way,’ he says, turning in the opposite direction to her.

  On the damp-stained wall in front of us something painted in white shows up in the gloom. I move closer. I’ve seen it before. When we got out of the pipe into that shack, this is the wonky figure four that was painted on the back of the door.

  ‘What’s that?’ Kay asks.

  ‘That’s our symbol. It shows we’re against the Leadership.’

  Now I get it. It’s not a number four; it’s a capital ‘L’ with a line struck through it.

  ‘We’re against the Leadership too,’ Kay says. ‘I’m Kay.’

  ‘And I’m Blake. We’ve come—’

  ‘It’s better if you save it till . . .’ He trails off and we follow him in silence down the murky corridor. I assume that he is taking us to the leader of the Resistance, the captain that Robin mentioned, but before we can get there a door opens ahead of us, letting out the pale glow of another solar lantern.

  A young man leans out into our path. ‘Paulo,’ he says, like an accusation. ‘I appreciate that for you the passing of time is merely a dull interlude between your unremarkable childhood and your unremarked upon death, but some of us have many splendid and important things to get done—’ He suddenly notices me and Kay. ‘Who the hell is this?’

  Paulo seems paralysed by the other boy. ‘I found them,’ he says eventually.
<
br />   I know how people like this work. We haven’t got time to stand about while he makes fun of us. ‘If you don’t mind,’ I break in. ‘We were just on our way somewhere.’

  He turns on me in a way that almost makes me shrink back. ‘If only I’d got that idiot detector fixed,’ he says. ‘Then I wouldn’t have to listen to you telling me that you think you’re too important to speak to me. In fact, you’d never have made it into the building. How did you make it into the building? I was hoping that those guys with the guns might put people off, unless of course, one of the guys with the guns let you in. Paulo?’ He talks really fast. Kay is staring hard, trying to follow the rapid flow of words.

  A number of faces have gathered in the dark doorway behind the boy to listen to this exchange.

  ‘A Wilderness man was chasing them,’ Paulo says. ‘They needed help.’

  ‘Actually,’ I say stepping towards the boy and opening my palms so that he knows I mean him no harm, ‘I think that we could help you.’

  All the eyes are on me. My smile falters. Some of my fear of the Resistance rises again. They don’t seem too pleased with my offer of help. In fact the atmosphere is decidedly tense. I look at Kay.

  She gives me a questioning look. ‘You are the people who hate The Leader, aren’t you?’ she asks the bully.

  Paulo nods his head, but the young man says, ‘Who wants to know?’

  ‘We’ve come from the other side of the fence,’ I say. ‘We were in an Academy and, well, actually we managed to lead a rebellion and many of us escaped.’ I try to sound modest.

  ‘You’re saying that you’re the one that started the trouble in that Academy?’

  ‘Yes, that was me.’ I’m surprised that they seem to have heard about it. Perhaps the story of our success is being passed around the underground.

  ‘The one that burnt down?’

  ‘Yes.’

  There’s a silence and a prickle runs up my spine. Maybe everything I heard about the Resistance is true. These people aren’t reacting at all the way I expected them to. I take a step closer to Kay.