by Sarah Govett
‘Hello!’ Our shouts sounded strange against the stillness of the landscape, as out of place as someone shouting in Assembly. We heard movement, the creak of a metal shelter, but no one came out.
‘Hello!’ we tried again, desperation now seeping in. ‘HELLO!’ We approached the fence and tried to push one section open.
‘Stop there!’ shouted a young guy’s voice. Hostile, warning. A guard.
I don’t know exactly what I’d imagined, but it wasn’t this. Actually, who am I kidding? I know exactly what I’d imagined. I’d imagined knocking at some sort of door and it being opened. I’d imagined being welcomed with open arms and an offer of food and shelter. I’d imagined thanking our new hosts, who for some reason were all wearing long velvet cloaks, but explaining that we were here for Jack. And, then, before I’d even finished my explanation, I’d imagined Jack appearing and running towards me – huge, reassuringly ginger – and picking me up and spinning me round and round and saying something like, ‘Noa Blake, I presume.’ And then I’d imagined us laughing and laughing and me feeling whole again.
None of that happened.
A group of four guys, probably in their twenties and armed with huge sticks and metal bars, appeared at the fence and peeled back a section of metal to speak to or rather confront us. They told us to leave. Said, ‘we don’t deal with traders here.’
We tried to explain. We weren’t traders, whatever they were. I mentioned Jack and said he was on the last shipment of kids out. But they said they hadn’t taken anyone from that in. They weren’t taking anyone else in. They couldn’t support any more people. Round the ankles of one of the men appeared this little girl, thin but with a belly swollen from lack of protein. Kwashiorkor. We’d done it in Biology. Nature’s sick joke. The man shook his leg and told her to leave. To, ‘Go back to Mum.’ Stern but soft. And then I started noticing that the guys weren’t that big either. Their anger, their attitude inflated their otherwise thin chests and weak arms.
Raf tugged at my arm. ‘Come on, let’s go.’
But I couldn’t accept it.
‘Jack!’ I started shouting. It rose to a scream, ‘JACK!’
‘He’s not here,’ one of the men shouted back. ‘You’ve got to leave. We need to look after our own.’
And I looked deep into his eyes and saw there was no cruelty there, no deception. Just desperation.
So we left.
Thirst. Horrific, unquenchable thirst. The sort that swells your tongue and sinks your eyes and shrivels your skin. A feral animal that crawls out of your mouth and demands to be fed.
Our bottled water is gone. As are the fresh water streams. Before it hadn’t seemed like water’d be an issue. We’d just kept on filling our bottles from the fast flowing streams and small rivers that cut through the drier land. It was just a question of dunking in our water bottles and popping in a water purification tablet or two. OK, the water hadn’t always looked the nicest – once I had an actual snail in my bottle – but it was water and it kept us going. Now that we were deeper into the Wetlands everything had changed. The streams had mixed too much with the saltwater pools so there was nothing fresh left. Water, water everywhere but not a drop to drink. It’s so hard resisting the temptation to cup your hands and sip just a little. The devil’s voice in your ear murmurs, ‘A little bit of salt can’t hurt you,’ and you know it’s poison but his whispering gets louder and louder.
Raf is pretending everything’s fine. Fine seems to be the only word he knows at the moment. Hope Hill shuts its doors on us. We’ll be fine. We don’t have a clue where we’re going now and are basically out of food. It’s fine. There’s no water. FINE FINE FINE. It’s like he doesn’t trust himself to show doubt in front of me. To be vulnerable. To be human.
He said there’re loads of sources of water other than actual water. You can suck the stems of fleshy plants, drink the blood of animals and fish. But we haven’t found any fleshy plants and we haven’t caught any animals or fish. We chased a rabbit for about ten minutes but it managed to disappear into long grass and we couldn’t flush it out again.
‘If a rabbit can live, we can,’ Raf declared, as logical as ever. ‘They need water too.’ But maybe the rabbit was scampering back to the drier land to drink. Going back isn’t an option for us. Or maybe it can last longer. It didn’t have weird bloodshot eyes. And I’m pretty sure it doesn’t keep on seeing Daisy just up ahead calling to it. Daisy’s smile. I think if I could just stop and rest for a while, Daisy would come to me. Hug me. And we could talk like old times. And she could tease me and we could laugh about how I’d thought she’d died.
I must have sat down as the next thing I knew, Raf was pulling me up and shaking me violently. He wouldn’t let me stop. He wouldn’t let me rest. Every time I tried to sit down, he’d tug me up again under my arms and order me to keep walking. And the time I said I was going to sip from a pool, just a little, he slapped my face and told me to get with it.
We’ve picked another hill now. Scientifically. We did eeney meeny miny mo. So that’s where we’re heading. We haven’t named it this time. I read somewhere ages ago that ancient cultures didn’t name their babies till they were one and a half or two or something. They thought that giving them names showed an arrogant belief that the baby would survive infancy and such arrogance angered the Gods.
When we were nine, me and Daisy found an injured pigeon in People’s Park. I think a Police dog must have got it, or maybe it’d been run over by a car. Anyway, one of its wings was broken and mangled so it couldn’t fly and couldn’t even hop straight. It kept on going round in a circle like a clockwork mouse gone wrong. Daisy was sure we could heal the bird and so she picked it up gently and carried it home wrapped in her jumper, blood seeping into the sleeves. Daisy is … was, a really kind person so would definitely want to help a creature in pain whatever, but I think this time she was actually thinking about the fact that she’d never had a pet, her mum claiming to be allergic to anything with a heartbeat, and now, since Dead Dog day, this was probably the only chance she’d get. We made the bird a ‘nest’ out of a shoebox filled with shredded cardboard and hid it strategically behind Daisy’s coats in her wardrobe. We fed it on worms, grim sounding I know. Yes, we actually dug up worms, mashed them up and served them to Fred the pigeon on a teaspoon. Daisy’s mum would have had an epi-fit if she’d found out. Every time she stirred her tea after that I’d get the giggles, thinking that maybe she was using the worm spoon!
The bird didn’t make it – two days later Daisy found it dead. But ever since that moment I’ve felt a sort of affinity to birds. Like I’m their friend and somehow they know it.
It seemed kind of right then that salvation for me and Raf came in the form of a seagull. I realise it might sound from that like it carried us a message like birds did in the olden days (‘fresh water, 200m to the west’) or was a sign like a biblical dove, bringing us an olive branch from an irrigated oasis. It didn’t and it wasn’t. We ate it.
We’d stumbled across it that morning. Literally just outside where we’d made camp. It had been injured – its left wing hung limply at a weird angle – and some of its feathers were blood stained. I had to fight back the memories of me and Daisy. Of happier, easier times.
I don’t know if seagulls are supposed to be edible but when you can hardly focus because you’re so thirsty and you have one mucor bar left between you, you get pretty experimental. I picked it up and tried to quieten it as it squarked and shrieked and flapped its good wing wildly. I murmured softly to it, trying to calm it, nodding at Raf at the same time. Raf understood. He brought a rock down on its head. He then took a knife from his pack and cut the seagull’s neck. He brought it to his lips and sucked, then pulled away disgusted and it was my turn. The blood was warm, thick and metallic and my body made me drink.
After we’d sucked out every drop we could, we plucked the bird and cut up the meagre amount of meat, forcing it down, trying to see it as cubes of energy.
It didn’t quench our thirst. There was no miraculous recovery. But we were still alive. We could keep walking.
I have no memory of arriving at the next hill settlement.
I’d felt faint all day. It was hot, really unbearably hot and the heat seemed to be hitting us from two directions – from above obviously, ’cos durrr the sun’s in the sky, but also weirdly from below – bouncing back at us, reflected by the pools of water everywhere. We were sunburnt, starving and ridiculously dehydrated. We opened the last mucor bar at breakfast and then this enormous gull swooped down out of nowhere, all hooked yellow beak and dead snake eyes, grabbed the bar in its claws and shot back into the sky. We screamed after it, aware as we did it how totally pointless this was, but anger needs some form of escape valve. Like a boiling kettle.
Part of me accepted it though. Saw it as a kind of seagull justice for what we’d done. But while acceptance might be good for the soul, it does nothing for blood sugar levels. I’ve always needed regular meals. Mum says I have a ‘high metabolism’ which supposedly used to be good as it meant you never got fat, but for life in the Territory even let alone out here it’s massively annoying as with rationing there’s no chance of anyone getting fat and it just means I’m often just really hungry or am the dizzy special kid who needs to sit down suddenly. I needed to sit down suddenly all morning.
I could see Raf was getting properly worried about me. He wouldn’t let me take turns carrying the backpack like normal even though he wasn’t doing so well either and clearly needed a break. Near midday the sun was so hot we desperately needed shelter but there wasn’t a tree in sight. What there was instead was a crumbling house, an old farm house presumably, with half the roof tiles missing, exposing bare timbers and water up to the level of the first few bricks.
We’d been avoiding buildings, well the ones we’d seen on the way. The ones closer to the Fence had all been flattened. And then other ones had been too flooded or isolated. I’m pretty sure Jack would have headed to a bigger settlement rather than hidden out alone and the single buildings always looked so empty, so lonely that they scared me.
We’d peeped in a few before but there was never any food or bottles of water left in them – the insides always being stripped bare – and I was terrified that we might stumble across the psycho from the bus as he was exactly the sort of freak who would camp out alone and, I don’t know, eat people who came past.
We sidled up to the house and peered through the open doorway. Listened. No sight or sound of anyone. There were rusty hinges where the front door had once been – this place had been looted long ago. Splashing through the hall and into the living room I was suddenly filled with terrible sadness. There was a sodden sofa with stuffing ripped out, a painting on the wall of lots of sheep on grass next to a river and a sign over the fireplace – ‘welcome to our happy home’. It was the sort of thing that would have made Daisy mime puking but it just really choked me up. It spoke of a different type of people and a different time. A time when people had gardens, sheep walked around eating grass and people put up innocent, sweet, really tacky signs.
The afternoon brought with it a bunch of clouds which calmed the heat a bit so we could set off again. Marching, trying not to lose pace, trying not to think about our thick tongues and throbbing heads.
Just as the hill seemed within reach at last my vision went weird, I have a vague embarrassing memory of calling for Mum and then there was blackness.
‘A bone to the dog is not charity. Charity is the bone shared with the dog, when you are just as hungry as the dog.’
Jack London said this. He’s one of Dad’s favourite writers. I’ve only read White Fang, but that was brilliant. And I think he’s totally right on this, charity, not dogs that is. When Amanda’s mum used to try to give me Amanda’s old clothes she was obviously being really kind and everything, but the guys at this settlement – they’re on a different level.
Raf said he’d been terrified that we’d be turned away again. He was carrying me, passed out, as he walked up to the settlement’s fence – the same sort of makeshift job as the last one. A sentry appeared again and Raf had a horrific sense of déjà vu. What if we’d been rejected again? That would have been it for us. Dying alone in the Wetlands, not having even found Jack. A stupid, pointless death. But the sentry had fetched a group who walked as if they were in charge, all hips and shoulders, and Raf had explained our situation and begged, literally got on his knees and begged, and they’d let us in. They’d agreed to share their limited supplies with us, complete strangers. One of the group had taken us to a structure at the far end of the settlement and a woman in her twenties had checked us for fever and mosquito bites and then given us water and strips of dried meat. Then we’d been left to sleep. And we must have slept for AGES as when we woke up it was properly day time. A woman, Mary, Raf said it was the one from last night, came to check on us, and give us some weird-smelling mosquito oil. Thank God as we only had enough of ours left to coat one of our hands! Out the window, or rather hole in the wall, we saw loads of people walking in one direction, up the hill. When I asked her where everyone was going she said, ‘to eat’. I asked if we could join in breakfast as I was still absolutely starving and she laughed and said. ‘Lunch. Sure – you can join in lunch.’
Jack’s not here.
Everything had seemed so right, like we were destined to come to this settlement. They’d let us in after all, were caring for us, so I just assumed, why now I have no idea, that Jack would be here. That we’d come to the end of our quest. But he’s not. And my heart feels a hundred times heavier. It’s now weeks since I watched him being dragged into the cage. Weeks since I promised to come after him. He’s going to think I’ve forgotten him. That my promise was empty, counted for nothing.
I scanned the entire food hall – well barn, ‘The Barn’ they call it – and not a red head in sight. I started walking round asking everyone, ‘Have you seen Jack? Jack Munro? He’s really tall with bright orange hair?’ I think I must have started acting a bit like a crazy lady as one of the girls, just a few years older than us, pulled me aside and told me to talk to Annie, who I guess must be the group’s leader.
I found her in a shed on the other side of the settlement. Milking a cow! I had no idea there were still cows around but Annie, laughing at my stunned denser face, told me there were still a few roaming wild over drier sections of the Wetlands. They were like the most valuable things ever – for their milk and everything – so they had to be kept inside the settlement to protect them from Raiders. This cow’s name was Brian. The kids who found her had never seen a cow before, Annie laughed, so they didn’t know the udders meant it was a girl. You can tell from Annie’s face that she laughs a lot. I liked her immediately.
I did a mental rewind of what had just been said. Raiders? There was so much new stuff being thrown at me that I must have looked like a living, breathing question mark.
I don’t think I really wanted the answers though. Annie confirmed my worst fears.
Jack wasn’t here. They’d let in four students this time, with the six parents that had come with them. Ten’s their maximum intake at any one time, there’s no way they could fit and feed anymore. But there was no one called Jack. No one with red hair. ‘It doesn’t mean he’s not safe,’ Annie reassured me. ‘It just means he’s not here.’
The Raiders explain the fences and the lookouts. Apparently there’s no pattern to their coming. They might come two nights in a row or months might go by without an attack. Annie said they came for supplies, animals and she seemed to be about to say something else but then she drew her mouth into a tight line instead.
‘But who would do that?’ I asked, furious that someone would steal from these amazing, kind people. Surely if everyone in the Wetlands had been kicked out the territory they’d be a sense of shared destiny. My enemy’s enemy and so on.
‘For some civilisation is just a mask,’ Annie replied sadly, sounding like this English teac
her I used to have in year 8 when we did Lord of the Flies. The Ministry seems to like books where bad stuff happens to kids. ‘Take it away and there is nothing but darkness.’ I remember Dad talking about the Dark Days and Uncle Max and shuddered. They’d seen the darkness.
‘That’s why what we’re doing here is so important,’ Annie continued. ‘Just continuing to live, to survive is not enough. Some settlements out here have turned insular. They live in fear of Raiders, of outsiders, so they don’t trade, they don’t educate, they don’t interact in anyway with the outside world.’ I thought of the first settlement we’d been to. The lean, desperate faces. ‘We need to think about the sort of society we want to build and the sort of values we want it to have. We can see this exile, the Wetlands themselves, as an opportunity to build a better world than that of the Territory. A world of humanity not just humans.’
This silence lay between us, but it wasn’t one of those empty, awkward sort of silences. It was a pregnant silence, full of quiet optimism.
‘I know it takes some adjusting at first,’ Annie continued, her voice soft. ‘But you can learn to live out here. And the more people who embrace our ways, the fewer recruits the Raiders will get. We will overcome them.’
Annie glanced up at the sun. ‘Now, the afternoon’s running away from us. You and the boy you came with are on water duty.’