‘We? Your family?’
‘Just me and my sister now. Callie, she’s called. We hooked up with a couple we met on the way. We just sort of latched onto them I guess. Seem all right. I’m the only one who drives so they send me out on the food runs.’
‘When you said you were a thief I assumed it wasn’t a career choice.’
‘Well, actually it was.’ Hector met Mia’s eyes and he saw she was smiling. ‘Haven’t had a proper job since I was sixteen.’
‘How old are you now?’
‘I’m twenty-three. Why, are you going to propose?’
‘Shouldn’t think so, Hector.’
‘Too old for you, am I?’
‘No. I’m too good for you.’
Hector laughed into his shirt and pulled the car off to the right before making a sharp left into a small avenue of houses. Mia gazed from the open window at the neat little homes, now standing idle and empty, some gutted by flames, the others by human hands. Furniture lay broken across gardens, fridges and freezers were upturned on driveways, and hedgerows were flattened and torn. As Hector moved around the road and then pulled out into another, almost identical looking street, Mia noticed a sprinkler still on in one garden, its gentle shower of water arching back and forth, left and right, across a beautiful patch of green grass. The house it stood in front of seemed to have been pulled inside out. A long tongue of rubbish snaked up to a shattered doorway, and punched through windows. The roof seemed to buckle in the middle, its greying slates spreading apart like a badly fitting toupee. Overseeing all, a bearded gnome stood at the end of the drive, its fishing line in the rubbish, watching the country fall apart with a stupid, dumb grin on its face.
‘Why are you going to City 17?’ Hector asked.
‘I have no idea. Really. I’ve been lost…I think it’s where I need to be. I don’t know, Hector. Really, I don’t know. Where are you staying?’
‘Pitched up in the city library. The apartments and tower blocks aren’t fit for much now. They’ve all been stripped clean. Most of the shops too. Anything worth anything has been stolen. Library’s hardly been touched.’
‘And The Party?’
‘We get the odd patrol. Seen a couple of wagons cart people off. It’s pretty safe. As safe goes, nowadays. You’ve seen the posters everywhere?’
‘Of course.’
‘What do you think they’ve got going on up there at Bleeker Hill?’
Mia fell silent and started fiddling with the buckle on her belt. Voices wanted to be heard, and memories wanted to be seen in her mind, but she closed them off as expertly as she always had done over the months. That name was a trigger and the images it created were bullets.
‘You know about The Wash?’ Hector asked. ‘I heard about The Wash. Had mates do time tell me about The Wash. Story goes they are trying to control minds. That’s what I heard.’ Hector whistled between his teeth and shook his head. ‘Crazy, damn country.’
Once more Mia’s mind seemed to tighten, and her hands started playing even more quickly at her belt. Behind her, Blarney jutted his head forward and licked her neck.
‘Bleeker Hill is a terrible place,’ Mia said to her lap.
‘I heard the stories. Read the books. All a load of hokum if you’re asking me.’
Mia laughed and felt a small tear sting her right eye. Blarney was at her face again, ready with his slobbering tongue, but she gently moved his head away.
‘What’s so funny? Why are you laughing, Mia?’
‘Hokum. Good word. Hokum…I like that.’
‘It’s a story. That’s all. Bleeker Hill is just a well-worn story that mothers and fathers tell their kids, and then those kids grow up and they then tell their own kids. Elaborating and embellishing throughout the years. Damn, give it a couple of generations and the story will probably involve floating apparitions and full body possession. Hard to believe in anything nowadays. But when I start again, it won’t be haunted houses.’
Mia pointedly turned away from Hector and gazed from the window again.
‘Mia?’ Hector reached out to touch Mia’s arm but was met with a tirade of barking and snarling from the back seat and quickly retracted his hand. ‘Mia? Are you all right?’
‘Hokum,’ Mia said absently and rubbed at her right arm.
‘Hokum,’ Hector said through another little laugh.
‘I’ve been there.’
‘Bleeker Hill?’
Mia nodded. ‘It’s just stories, Hector,’ she said slowly, purposefully, with a barely concealed trace of venom. ‘There’s nothing to be scared of in stories.’
Slowly Mia took her left hand to her right arm and pulled up the sleeve of her jacket, raising her bare skin to Hector’s face. A second later the car was coming to a screeching, skidding stop and Hector was mumbling incomprehensible gibberish into his shirt, as a big lump of ginger fur and flailing legs fell into the space between them.
The scarred letters on Mia’s arm had healed only slightly over the months. You could still read the word that had been scrawled on the skin easily enough. LEAVE it said, and Hector was now repeating the word over and over.
‘I got this at Bleeker Hill,’ Mia said matter-of-factly.
Hector was reaching for the handle of the driver’s door, and then he was stumbling out of the car, landing on his backside on the pavement.
‘Where are you going, Hector?’
‘Erm…it’s…yes…’
‘What’s that?’
‘We can walk from here,’ he replied with a hopeless attempt at a smile, and then he was rushing to gather his belongings from the boot.
‘I think we might have unnerved our lift, Blarney,’ Mia suggested to her dog. ‘We do tend to do that, don’t we?’ She looked down and saw her faithful friend had rested his head across her bare arm. At the catch of her gaze his tail began to bang against the steering wheel like the quick beats of a happy heart.
5
They walked the back alleys, the darkened arteries around the heart of City 17. They passed the rear of shops, the fenced in gardens of deserted houses, empty playgrounds and old parks. Hector led the way, weighed down with his loot and a fair few hundred heavy thoughts about his travelling companions. He looked back at Mia and Blarney a couple of times, the two of them strolling quietly along about twenty yards behind him, and on each occasion he started to quicken his pace.
Mia knew he was desperate to get away from them, this mad girl that had commandeered him and his car and her snarling, over-protective dog. She had seen the look on his face before. She hadn’t met many people since escaping Bleeker Hill – the dear old Barnes’ at the B&B were the only people she had spent any real time with – but those she had come across, no matter how fleeting, all ended up carrying the expression Hector was now wearing so well, and none of them stayed in her life very long. Maybe it was just the way the country is nowadays, she would think, after everything that had happened and after how far they had fallen, it was easy to see why no one trusted strangers any more. It was safer that way. But somehow Mia knew it was more than that. Where she was concerned it wasn’t just a mere mistrust of a stranger. It was more than a wilful detachment for the sake of self-protection, and it was something much more primal than the natural fear she felt of others. Mia scared people and she didn’t know why. What was she doing here, and why did it seem like the place she needed to be? Nothing made sense any more. Since leaving Bleeker Hill she had become little more than a balloon cut adrift, floating aimlessly around until she fell.
Time, someone had once said to her. It’s all about time.
The time to live.
They had been walking a good half an hour before it occurred to Mia how quiet the city was. She felt stupid for not noticing it before, and when she did she started to think back to her travels and tried to remember the time when the crazy, howling battle cry of the rioters and looters, those bloodthirsty gangs that not so long since had ruled the roads and the cities, had given way to this a
ltogether more frightening new sound – this deep, bottomless silence. She knew The Party had targeted the cities when they made their play for control of the country, but she couldn’t believe that they had strangled every last sound from City 17. Not yet. She looked into the open shops they passed, through the blasted walls and into the empty shells inside, and she wondered if perhaps there was finally nothing left in City 17. Had the stragglers stripped it bare and moved on? The city was a carcass and there was little left on the bones to pick off. That was why The Party was now fighting with food more often than the gun. Her father had told her what would happen; in fact it had been Lucas Hennessey himself who advised the tactic to his superiors – “In a free for all, with no rules and recourse, people will never think to steal food first. They will never think beyond their initial lustful greed. So while the TV’s and computers and cars are disappearing, The Party needs to start playing the long game. In a few weeks, months, maybe years, there will only be one true weapon and that will be food. Control food, control people.” At the memory of her father, Mia’s steps slowed and then stopped. She could feel herself falling back into another dream, but fought it. She shook her head to deny it, moved the thoughts away, and then pushed herself on, her faithful friend at her heels, his eyes gazing up at her with all the love in the world.
The quietness of the city was troubling enough at that moment, but somehow the silence between herself and Hector felt worse. Mia felt sorry for Hector and she felt guilty for the fear she had installed in him. Pulling herself back into the moment, she broke into a quick jog and then drew up alongside him. Blarney followed her lead and clumsily barged his way between them.
‘Let me take one of those bags,’ Mia said, grabbing at one of the bag straps on Hector’s shoulder.
‘It’s fine.’
‘They look heavy.’
‘It’s fine. Really, Mia.’
They walked on for a few more minutes without speaking. Hector wasn’t going to make it easy for her and Mia couldn’t help but admire him for that. It’s exactly the way she would be too. It was, in fact, just exactly how she had been with everyone she had met since…
Do you know what this place is?
Voices wanted to be heard. Old voices. Mia stumbled as she fought them away again, and then quickened her pace once more, drawing ahead of Hector, pushing on to the here and now and ignoring the what once was.
‘My name is Mia Hennessey. I’m eighteen, nearly nineteen. My father worked for The Party and took me out to Bleeker Hill. The Party had a safe house out there. He was working on a point team that was supposed to secure the area…’
‘You don’t have to tell me any of this, Mia.’
‘I do. I really do.’
‘I don’t want to hear ghost stories.’
‘Then what do you want to hear?’
‘I don’t want to hear anything.’
‘Sure you do.’
‘You’re not obliged, Mia.’
‘I know. Suppose I want to?’
‘Then I suppose you could tell me what you are doing here in City 17?’
‘I told you I don’t know.’
‘You could tell me why you wouldn’t kill those two Party Plod back on the road. You could tell me why you kidnapped me and made me bring you here. You could tell me that.’
Mia was momentarily taken aback. ‘Kidnapped?’ Her voice wavered somewhere between amusement and shock. ‘Is that what you think it was?’
‘What would you call it?’
Mia thought about it and knew she couldn’t call it anything different. ‘I’m sorry. Really, Hector.’
Hector merely shrugged and then hoisted the two bags higher onto his shoulders and started walking more quickly, pulling away from Mia and Blarney again.
‘As for City 17, I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m doing here. Where is the right place to be when the country has broken? Where do you go, what do you do? I’m making this up as I go along just like the rest of us. But something told me this was where I should be. Somehow I know it is right. Don’t ask me how, Hector, because I don’t know.’
Hector didn’t look back and didn’t respond. He walked on with those big bags slung over his shoulder, heading to the library and his sister and his new found friends that he hoped he was right to trust, and in that moment Mia’s guilt was overpowering. She knew she had to leave him. Let him be. Give him back his life. She brought trouble to people, isn’t that what that Party Plod on the road had said to Hector? People died around Mia and she knew he was right. Hector had helped Mia out and that marked him well above the average in this new world, so why not return the favour to him and walk away? He would never believe what had happened to her. Who in their right mind would? She didn’t need him and he certainly didn’t need her. Mia stood her ground and watched him walk off. At her knees, Blarney was looking up at his master, waiting for instruction. Mia took a hand to his head and ran a palm over his bony skull.
‘Come on, Blarney,’ she said and began to turn away. ‘Let’s…’
Mia swallowed the words she had wanted to say. Up ahead of her Hector had stopped, the bags slowly slipping from his shoulders as he carefully started to raise his hands either side of his ridiculous haircut. A man was stepping out of an old shop front, a rifle raised into the air before him. He had seen Mia and the rifle had too. Blarney was in attack stance next to her but she was moving in front of him, blocking him off, stopping him launching at the oncoming stranger.
‘Back up!’ The man was walking slowly towards Hector, angry little eyes darting over his shoulder to Mia. ‘You, stay where you are,’ he ordered before returning to Hector and prodding him in the chest with the rifle barrel. ‘Back up. Back up to her.’
Hector took a careful backward step and then stumbled over his bags and landed flat on his back. The man was on him in a flash and was yanking him up, turning him around and shoving him on with a carefully placed boot in the backside. Hector staggered back down the alley, his hands waving frantically above his head. As he got within a foot of Mia he fell again, tripping over a fallen shop sign for Brenda’s Best Buns, and then splayed out on the ground at her feet. Once more Blarney was standing over him, but this time the ominous and threatening growl was reserved for someone else.
‘Mia Hennessey, I knew it was you.’ The man had now drawn up in front of her, the rifle trained at her head. ‘Lot of people looking for you, Mia.’
‘So I hear,’ Mia replied. She remained still, no part of her moving expect her eyes, which roamed over the man, soaking him up. He was young for Party Plod, barely much older than she was, she guessed, and in his beady, angry eyes she could see beyond to a barely concealed fear, but it wasn’t just a fear of Mia but also of what she represented. They were greedy eyes, eyes that couldn’t seem to believe their luck. They had landed on a much-coveted prize and now he didn’t know the right thing to do.
‘Get your hands in the air,’ he shouted and took another step forward.
‘Why?’
‘What?’
It was that easy. In her simple question, and her refusal to bow to his demands instantly and completely he had betrayed himself and now Mia could see him for what he was; a lost boy. A soldier out of his depth.
‘Was that your plan?’ Mia asked. ‘You point a gun at me and I come quietly, compliantly?’
‘I won’t ask you again,’ he said.
‘Good, then don’t. How old are you?’
‘What’s that got to do with you?’
‘Just a question.’
‘You don’t get to ask questions,’ he snarled unconvincingly.
Hector was slowly getting to his feet, rubbing at an elbow. The gun was now on the move, swishing quickly through the air between Hector and Mia, and the fear that Mia had seen was there on the man’s face again. At each frantic sweep of his weapon the man’s tough façade fell apart.
‘Why don’t I get to ask questions?’
‘Shut up! Put your hands in the air!�
�
‘Is it because you’ve got a gun and I haven’t?’
‘Shut up!’
Mia reached out and snatched the gun upwards, pulling it clear of the man’s grip in one clean motion. Swinging the butt around she cracked him across his nose and then as the man crumpled to his knees and held hands of submission before him, Mia took the rifle into her hold and let the barrel find his face.
‘Please…please don’t hurt me. Don’t shoot me.’
Mia gazed around them, at the bombsite backyards and the broken down shops, before seemingly settling on one – an old florist’s. It stood empty but it seemed to stand strong, and that was all they needed.
‘Blarney!’ Mia called and then gave a quick whistle and nodded towards the back of the shop. Blarney was off at a scamper, bounding across the rubble pathway that led into the shop via a darkened, jagged doorway. A few seconds later came a small series of sharp barks, and then Blarney was there in the doorway again, wagging his tail.
6
He could feel her. Sense her. See her. He was looking at a wall and yet he could see that girl Mia, the girl that everyone was so frantic about, as clear as if she were next to him, and not in fact in the florist’s shop over the street. A florist? Yes. He was sure that was where she had led them. How strange. He could walk over to the window and check, but where was the fun in that? His mind was so clear. The vision of her so defined, that he had no reason to doubt himself. With his gift came arrogance. He fought it once, but age had made it less of a priority. Once the country fell, how others perceived him seemed of very little importance.
Jacob Silence shut his eyes tight and looked into his mind, peered in through the shifting faces and into the part that held what he was searching for. There she was, there the dog was, the young man with the stupid hair too. Hector? What an unsuitable name. Frost? They called him Frosty. He could touch the crumbling walls of the florist’s and smell the sweet decay in the air. Dead flowers like dust now, breaking under his feet and he could feel them, hear the delicate crunch. He knew how the skin of the girl felt on his hands and knew how it would be to kill her should the instruction ever come.
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