by Sarah Govett
I thought we’d wake at dawn with the sunrise, possibly accompanied by birdsong. It didn’t exactly work out like that. It was still dark when we were wrenched from sleep. We looked around, bleary eyed and there it came again – BANG and WHIRRRR and then BANG again. A plane’s engine. A bomber. No, two. The earth was lit up by the criss-cross of the plane’s lights and it shook beneath us as if it were alive and injured. We burrowed deeper into the shrubs. There was nowhere else to go. We were sitting targets. Waiting. Baited breath.
Then the planes’ lights grew dimmer and the engine whirr faded.
‘They missed us,’ I whispered at Raf. There was no one to overhear us, but it fitted the mood.
‘I don’t think they were aiming for us,’ he whispered back.
I looked confused, then realising it was too dark for him to see my expression, I murmured a ‘What?’ instead.
‘Think about it,’ Raf replied. ‘The craters we saw earlier. The fact that no Fish are camping out here. Bombing must be a regular thing, maybe after each shipment of kids or prisoners or whatever. To stop people settling here, right next to the Fence.’
‘So they frighten new Fish away? And flatten the buildings so there’s nowhere for them to live?’
‘Exactly, the last thing the Ministry wants is for a lot of hungry, angry, dispossessed people to mass at the border. It’s one thing for people to support shipping kids and prisoners off in the abstract. It’s another to have to see the suffering.’
‘Maybe it’s more than that,’ I added. ‘I mean, if you have a lot of desperate people in one place, how long before they turn into an army?’
We settled back down under our mosquito net. The bombers had served their purpose, they didn’t return. But neither did sleep.
Pick a hill, any hill.
We chose the closest one. With nothing to go on, this seemed like as good an option as any. The sort of option Jack might well have taken. We ate at first light, feeling almost crazily alert – one good thing about not resting much is there’s no fog of sleep to wait to clear. Breakfast was another mucor bar followed by a shower of mosquito repellent. It stank. We stank. Like some comical advert for a terrible aftershave … introducing ‘Repel’ by Noa and Raf. We’d better start catching some fresh food soon though. We’ve got enough dried rations for 10 days, but it might take us all of the 29 days we have left to find Jack and get back. That’s 19 days of foraging. Raf’s complete inability to catch a pigeon in People’s Park no longer seemed quite as funny.
The new craters seemed to jump out at us in the light. One must have only been a hundred metres away. A hundred metres near.
We started to pack up our things when my hand hit the smooth surface of the marker pen lurking at the bottom of my backpack. I took it out and drew a short line on the right arm of my bag. Raf did the same. It seemed both unnecessary – we were hardly going to lose track of days when we had a strict deadline of 31 – yet essential at the same time. Like a solemn ritual marking the beginning of something. Entering the unknown.
In the morning light we got a better idea of the lie of the land. Most of the hills weren’t smooth or a uniform green, grey or brown. They were jagged, with stuff tumbling up or down the sides. Too irregular and crooked to be a geological phenomenon which meant man-made stuff. Shelters. People.
Energised, we set off, scurrying down the mound and hopping over rabbit holes and tiny streams. I was actually sort of enjoying myself, the bombers almost forgotten. That’s the thing when terrible stuff happens at night – it sort of feels like a bad dream so fades from memory as a nightmare might. And Raf was too, enjoying himself that is. We didn’t talk about it ’cos it seemed pretty inappropriate. Like tapping your foot to a song at a funeral. But I could tell by the glint in his eye and the toothy grins. And I started imagining us living here, ‘at one with nature’.
The most direct route to our hill wasn’t along one of the old crumbling roads but instead followed a deep stream, which I was pleased about. Seeing the remains of what had been – decaying buildings, roofless barns, signs that led to nowhere and pylons that had long since stopped humming with electricity – gave me the creeps.
We were already running low on water so now seemed like a good time to test out the water purification tablets. With Raf next to me in case I malced up and drowned, I took off my socks and shoes, rolled up my jeans and waded in. Unlike the festering pond in People’s Park the water here was totally clear so you could see straight down to the bed of pebbles fringed by long reeds or weeds, like mermaid’s hair. There were pond skaters and even tiny fish. It must have been coming from the Arable Lands or the Woods instead of a city. I put my finger in and tentatively sucked. Sweetness. No salt. No weird deadly chemicals – none that I could taste anyway. Gleefully, I filled up the empty bottles we had, stuck a purification tablet in each and waited for it to fully dissolve. Look at us go!
I clambered out of the water again, only to find Raf starting to take his clothes off. Shoes, socks, jeans, jumper, top – one by one they were unceremoniously thrown down on a flat stone on the river bank. Just his boxers remained. His white body stood out against the green and blue scenery and even though he’s not built like, say, Jack is, the ease with which he stood there, totally unembarrassed, made him hotter than ever. It was like watching a weirdly speeded up, non-prancing about strip show. I imagine.
‘What?’ I tried to keep my voice neutral but it came out as a strangled and squeaky half question.
‘Come on. Haven’t you always wondered what it’d feel like to jump in a stream? To bathe in fresh water?’
‘We haven’t got time…’ I looked longingly at the water. I’d like to say that all my reservations were due to my fear of falling behind schedule and that the only draw was the freshness of the water. These were definitely my main considerations but I guess ten per cent of my brain was also thinking about the pull of Raf’s body versus the not -so-choice underwear I had on. OK maybe twenty per cent. My underwear was all washed-out, ‘practical’. Improvisations on the theme of grey. That’s all that’s available. Maybe it’s another Ministry tactic to lower birth rates.
‘You’re going in, Noa Blake. The only question is whether you want to get your clothes wet.’
By now, Raf had jumped into the river with a yell and I decided to go for it. I undressed, awkwardly at first and then with less and less care before choosing dive bomb as my graceful method of entry. The coldness and the freshness of the water sent shivers through my body and an involuntary ‘whoop’ came charging out my mouth.
We dried ourselves in the sun, quickly reapplying mosquito repellent, and then kept moving, Raf every now and then whispering a mocking, high-pitched, ‘whoop’ into my ear.
Just as we were starting to get hungry again, we practically walked into a duck’s nest, just sitting there in the long grass. The duck, outraged, took off in a frenzy of quacking and we uncovered four duck eggs. Duck eggs! That’s like 20 points in Foraging 101.
‘Cool. So let’s make a fire.’ I couldn’t contain my excitement.
‘A fire?’
‘Scrambled eggs!’
‘We don’t have time for scrambled eggs, Noa.’
I opened my mouth to protest at the double standards but then bit my tongue. Raf was right now. I’d be right before. We couldn’t keep stopping. This wasn’t some holiday.
I watched as Raf tapped an egg gently on a stone to crack it and then sucked the raw egg directly into his mouth. Grim. He looked so pleased with himself though. Like he was the chief hunter in the tribe and had brought home a massive buffalo to feed the village. I copied him and managed to control my gag reflex. It was actually less grim than I thought. Slippery and somehow tasteless yet rich at the same time. I had a second and Raf cracked open a second too but then started heaving. There was a baby duckling in it. Not the sweet, yellow, fluffy kind. The grey-weird-embryo-baby-reptile kind. Life and death separated by an eggshell.
Silent now we continued towa
rds the hill. ‘Hope Hill’ we’d named it, kind of ironically. We’d guessed we’d be there by mid-afternoon. There was a much smaller mound first that looked uninhabited and then Hope Hill probably another couple of hours’ walk further. It was difficult to tell exactly though as mist had been building since noon. We didn’t get mist in the Territory. Some occasional lowish clouds or the very occasional freakish fog in the winter, but not mist like this. It rolled towards us, coming from the sea I guess, creating this weird muffled landscape. Like when Jack didn’t like a painting he’d done, but didn’t want to waste the canvas so just whitewashed it.
The sky didn’t stay white though. There was a huge but weirdly solitary cloud embedded in it that was moving our way. I looked at Raf who looked back, clearly as confused as I was. We decided to take shelter under one of the few surviving trees and wait the storm out. But it wasn’t that sort of storm.
We heard them before we saw them. A high-pitched ‘eeeeehhhhhhhhhhhh’.
Mosquitoes.
A swarm of mosquitoes. It’s weird when something happens simultaneously to two people that you both have no training for but that you both just instinctively react to in the same way. Raf and I hit the ground and curled into foetal position. Earth mother protect us now. Burying faces, hands, ears, anything exposed and vulnerable under clothed arms to minimise the chance of being bitten. It was four hours since we’d put on the spray. The spray was supposed to be effective for twelve. 99 per cent effective. I felt them brush over me. Felt the wind created by their horrible beating little wings and although my eyes were tightly shut, nothing could shut out the image playing on virtual retinas of them landing on me, piercing me, injecting me with the death they were carrying. I felt like I didn’t breathe for the whole time the swarm was over us. I must have, or I’d be dead. But they would have been really shallow breaths, the kind that supply virtually no oxygen to your body. I was light-headed when I finally stood up.
‘Take your clothes off,’ Raf ordered. ‘All of them.’ His voice was serious. This wasn’t a game. He’d already started stripping himself. He checked me all over, legs, arms, behind my ears, as emotionless as a surgeon and then I checked him.
We hadn’t been bitten.
We were safe.
Both shaking, we redressed in silence and then clung to each other.
‘I can’t ever lose you,’ Raf murmured into my ear, his voice not soft but angry. Angry at what he couldn’t control.
We are not at one with nature. I hate nature and I think it’s going to kill us.
The mosquitoes moved on but the mist stayed, as thick as school custard. We’d stupidly not thought to check the direction of the hill before the mist thickened so we were navigating using an ancient compass and basing everything on guesswork from where we’d sort of remembered things were in relation to the sun back when we were sucking eggs.
What happened next was completely my fault – I just didn’t see the ditch in time. One minute my foot was on a firm bit of long sandy grass, the next it (and the rest of me) was at the bottom of a five-foot drop into a deep salty pool. The weight of my backpack must have flipped me over as I landed heavily on my back and groaned as the muscles around my lower spine and right ankle spasmed. Raf, seconds behind, scrambled down to help me up and I knew from the darkening of his eyes that something was wrong.
‘Have I broken something?’ I asked in a small voice. I didn’t want to look down in case there was a super grim bit of bone poking out from my leg or something and the adrenalin was the only thing stopping the pain from kicking in.
‘I don’t think so.’ Raf scanned my body. ‘But your backpack’s split.’ I gingerly eased it off and saw that it had totally ripped open down one side, the contents having tumbled into the pool below. And that wasn’t the worst of it. The pressure of the fall had burst open ten of the remaining mucor bars so they were now floating around me – brown slush pumped up with saltwater. Inedible. And my mosquito repellent – the can must have hit a rock as it fell out the pack; there was this big indent on one side and what must have been a minute hole as a shoal of tiny silver bubbles rose from it through the water. Exhaling safety.
I looked at Raf and tried to fight back the tears but they flooded down my face anyway, blurring my vision and turning him into a blue/green-eyed Cyclops. He hugged me close and stroked my hair, telling me we’d transfer everything else to his backpack, that we had enough repellent to share as long as we found Jack quickly, that we could go to half rations and forage more, that he’d get us home.
My ankle was a bit swollen from the fall so Raf wouldn’t let me go any further. We found a dry patch of land and made an A frame from long sticks to hang the mosquito net from (or rather Raf did while I sat lamely with my sore leg elevated on a rock). Raf also insisted we had a fire. To dry me out – so I didn’t catch some malc cold and slow us down even more. He spent ages collecting all the driest sticks and reeds he could find and then piled them up in a careful pyramid structure. He was sweaty from the effort and his forehead creased from concentration and I fancied him so much just then. He seemed so strong. So primal. But then he opened his backpack and just started swearing and then went and kicked the pile of sticks. Kicked them again and again and again until they were flat and scattered.
The matches had been in my bag.
How do you know when you’ve reached rock bottom if whenever you think things can’t get any worse the world just keeps on pushing you further down?
We felt more hopeful this morning. I was wearing Raf’s spare clothes and my damp ones were drying on a gorse bush. The mist had lifted and we could see Hope Hill was pretty close now and the first, smaller mound was just the other side of what looked like a reed bed. The ground was getting wetter and we took off our shoes and rolled our trousers up to switch to wading mode. There was a half submerged, skeletal hedgerow to our right – a sad reminder that this used to be ultimate farming land. The bread basket of Britain. Before the Flood.
Wading is a weird sensation. Your foot lands on a rock (fine), damp earth (fine), wet slimy reed (grim) and then it occasionally brushes again something that moves or slithers (totally freaky). I’ve also discovered that my automatic reflex response to this is to freeze. Brilliant. Not to move my foot, run or call for help. No, just to freeze in fear like a denser prey animal right at the bottom of the food chain. I am clearly not cut out for this.
The wind had changed direction overnight and now it was coming from in front of us, heavy with salt and this other smell. Or rather stench. My first thought was, ‘Oh, Raf!’ but then I saw that he thought it was me and I was immediately all over that with a big fat NO WAY.
The true source of the smell lay twenty metres in front of us. We were right – the first mound wasn’t any sort of settlement. It wasn’t even a proper hill or earth structure. It was a pile of dead bodies. Young and old, but not old old, no one much older than my parents say, in various stages of decay. Some just seemed frozen stiff, others were covered with terrible sores. As much as we wanted to, we couldn’t turn away. Raf bowed his head out of respect and I saw his mouth move in silent prayer. I forced myself to confront the horror and look at the faces, to check Jack wasn’t among them. I didn’t go rummaging through the corpses or anything sick like that, but I figured his body would be near the top if he was there. A recent addition. As far as I could tell he wasn’t and my legs turned to jelly with relief.
Although it was obviously a mass grave these bodies hadn’t just been dumped. The pile seemed to have been made with respect. There were flowers on the top, some woven reeds, white stones that had clearly been specially selected and laid in concentric circles round the base and then pile upon pile of sea lavender and flowering yellow gorse. These were people’s loved ones. Victims of the Wetlands. Victims of the Ministry. Anger fought sadness. Anger won.
We backed away, heads bowed from respect, determined to get to the Hill as soon as possible, to rescue Jack and plan our next move.
Ho
pe Hill – what a frickin joke.
We reached it well before sunset. The ground was getting properly wet now with saltwater pools everywhere, but we still skip/splashed the last few hundred metres, our bounds increasing as the settlement buildings grew bigger with our approach. My skips were slightly malc as my ankle was still hurting a bit and Raf definitely wouldn’t accept that he skipped, ‘guys don’t skip’, but he did, like a little girl. I think it’s probably the most joyful movement you can make and we were fairly high on finally getting to our destination. Each splash sounded like a ‘Jack’ and I pictured myself like some fairy-tale knight coming to rescue him.
By now we could clearly make out the set up. There was a cluster of what looked like teepees made from reeds. Then there was a fence ringing the hill that had been cobbled together from pieces of corrugated steel and wire, wooden fence slats and what might once have been car doors and road signs. This level of defence seemed odd. Maybe there were some particularly hungry foxes or something round here or maybe it kept the water out if it was tidal. Presumably it could be tidal if we were getting closer and closer to the sea proper? Then above the fence was I guess what they used to call a village or maybe a slum. There were a few old buildings, probably a pre-Flood farm, surrounded by lots of makeshift additional shelters made from the same stuff as the base fence. It looked a bit like the images they used to show us at Hollets of refugees living in crowded squalor as they tried to escape the countries whose climates were totally burning up. They used them tell us how lucky we were that we lived in the Territory. How civilised we were. Ha.