by Ali Shaw
He took off his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose. ‘This is a nightmare.’
‘No,’ said Hannah, ‘it isn’t.’
Adrien stared down at the forest floor made blurry by his short-sightedness. For once he was glad of his weak eyes, for they blotted the woods into a smudge of brown and pink.
‘Come on, Adrien,’ said Seb, gentler than Hannah. ‘It isn’t so bad.’
Adrien took a deep breath. ‘Isn’t it? Because when I look around me, it bloody well looks like it is. What about all those corpses along the road, were they not so bad? What about my house destroyed by the trees, and everything I ever owned gone with it, and Michelle in another country with the bloody sea between her and me? Is none of that so bad? And what do you think about Diane, and a pack of fucking wolves on the loose? Are you insane? This is the end of the world.’
Hannah shook her head. ‘If the world had ended, we wouldn’t be standing in it. Like I’ve told you, this is a fresh start. I’m determined to prove that.’
Adrien thumbed his glasses back on. ‘Are you really? Well, it will never work. I’ll never see things that way because it’s . . . it’s . . . wilfully optimistic. People like you think that just because something’s pretty and green, it’s not going to do its level best to kill you.’
‘People like me? What’s that supposed to mean?’
Adrien flung his hands in the air. ‘Hippies! And do you know what? I liked things the way they were before! I bloody well preferred a suburb to the countryside. All you want is for things to be wild and natural, but I want them to be safe! The only wolf I want to see is a wolf on television, a million miles away. God damn, I miss my television. I miss westerns! I miss the takeaway at the end of my street! I liked eating crappy chicken in a crappy sauce that was probably made out of plastic! I’d have plastic everything back in an instant, and tarmac and petrol, and anything else that would get me away from all these fucking trees. But you . . .’ He took a deep breath. ‘It’s like you’re pleased that this has happened. It’s as if you wanted all those people to die.’
Hannah’s expression was icy. ‘How on earth could you think that, Adrien? When all I’ve done is help you.’
But Adrien was angry now, and the blossoms danced around him and he was terrified too. He’d been so damned terrified ever since the forest arrived. Ever since long before that, in fact. Ever since years ago. Work out what you really want from life, but he was too damned terrified to even begin. ‘You shouldn’t have!’ he spat. ‘The only way to help me is with a chainsaw and a demolition truck. If you don’t have those I’m fucked, don’t you see? You should have just left me alone to be eaten like Diane!’
‘I don’t appreciate this, Adrien,’ said Hannah, in a voice trembling to control itself. ‘Why don’t you apologise so we can try to move on?’
He stared at her, and as he stared he heard a kind of echo in his mind of all the things he’d just said. He shrank. A part of him immediately wanted to do as she’d asked, to apologise and accept her help and perhaps sort out the mess that was himself, but the other part of him was still in control. That part was the side that had roused itself for every clash with Michelle, the side that always wanted something more perverse. It was the part of him that whipped itself into a bitter fury at the end of every evening spent watching westerns drunk and alone, and it seethed inside of him just as it despaired.
‘I never asked for your help,’ he said.
‘And I never forced you to take it,’ said Hannah.
‘There isn’t any helping someone like me. I’m a loser, Hannah. A lost cause. Go on and find your precious brother. Be happy with your plants and your murderous animals. I’m going home.’
‘You haven’t got a home to go back to,’ said Seb, with concern.
‘That’s not what Adrien thinks,’ said Hannah, every word shaking with anger. ‘Adrien thinks he’s better off digging around for tinned food in the rubbish than being in the woods with people like me.’
Adrien set his teeth, his heart hot with despair. ‘Just fucking leave me to it, alright? Go and be with Zach and leave me here to take care of myself.’
‘We’re not going to—’ began Seb.
‘If that’s what he wants,’ interrupted Hannah, ‘then I’m not going to stop him. Far be it from me to stand in the way of a man taking care of himself.’
Seb looked from Adrien to his mother. ‘Mum, he doesn’t . . .’
‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Maybe Adrien can barter his bottle of petrol for a tent and a compass, or maybe just a road atlas. Maybe he can use it to pay for foraging lessons.’ And with that she marched off westward.
Adrien had begun to tremble, both with residual fury and the fear of what might happen next. Seb lingered, troubled. ‘I’ve got to go with Mum,’ he said, after a moment.
Adrien tried his best to give an indifferent shrug. Instead it was a flinch and a desperate grimace.
For a moment Seb looked the angriest of all three of them. ‘What about Michelle?’
He thought of his wife in Ireland, and in his picture of her the sun was shining and Roland was at her side, and their hands were joined in happiness. ‘She’ll be just fine without me,’ he said.
Seb shook his head. ‘Why are you doing this?’
‘Fuck off,’ said Adrien, half-heartedly. ‘Fuck off with your mother and forget you ever met me.’
‘This isn’t what you want.’
‘How the hell would you know what I want?’
‘I’m going to bring Mum back,’ resolved Seb. ‘Don’t you move from this spot.’
Again Adrien tried to shrug. Seb watched him for a moment, then pressed his own bottle of fuel into Adrien’s free hand. ‘And in case I don’t manage to convince her, take this. I still think it might be worth something.’
Then he went after Hannah.
10
Wolves
Adrien stayed put in the petrol forecourt, wondering if Seb would come good on his promise and return with Hannah in tow. After ten or fifteen minutes, neither the boy nor his mother had come back, and Adrien began to feel loneliness gnawing away at him. He tried to square his shoulders and stand up straight, but it was as if his skeleton would not allow him to do so.
He could remember Michelle comforting him in the rain, in their front garden, after one of the first almighty rows of their marriage. That one had started because of dirty dishes. Michelle had found him knelt on the kitchen floor one rainy November evening, with the washing-up sponge clenched so tightly in his fist that a puddle of soapy water had formed on the lino beneath it. ‘Adrien,’ she’d asked, ‘what on earth?’ and he’d stabbed a finger in the direction of the grimy cups and plates in the sink and tried to explain that the constant wiping clean and resoiling of the crockery had come to seem to him, on that terrible evening, like the embodiment of life’s futile struggle.
‘That’s really silly,’ Michelle had said, and although he’d known she meant it kindly he’d received it as mockery. He’d said something spiteful and she’d defended herself, then before he knew it he was storming out of the house and deciding to leave her for her own sake, to save her from him. The rain, however, had been pelting, and Adrien had been wearing only the shirt he’d left in. He’d stood in the garden getting soaked, agonising over the indignity of returning for a waterproof.
‘Why do you do this?’ Michelle had asked when, ten minutes later, she’d come out under an umbrella to find him. ‘It can’t really be because of dirty dishes.’
‘I don’t know,’ he’d said. ‘I can’t stand myself for it.’
‘Little things overwhelm you. Sometimes it’s as if everything overwhelms you.’
‘You’re right,’ he’d said, wiping tears and rainwater alike from his cheeks. ‘But in those times the world just seems so damned formidable.’
With one arm she’d held the umbrella over his head. With the other she’d reached around his waist and held on to him tight. ‘I want to help you, Adrie
n. But you mustn’t give up. You can’t wait for the world to be perfect before you start living in it.’
Adrien began to walk through the woods again. He reckoned Michelle had been far too charitable, but he sighed with gratitude all the same. He headed back the way they had come, back through the blossoms flowing against him, one arm held high like someone walking out in a blizzard. At least, he was certain, Hannah and Seb would make swifter progress without him. He could picture Hannah embracing her brother, just a short week or so from now, and he managed to smile.
He did not know how he’d find his way home, but he plodded on with his arms kept aloft against both the blossoms and the weight of his own self-loathing. The forest air was heavy, weighed down by pollen and that smell he still could not name. Petals danced on every puff of the wind, and Adrien felt the distance between himself and Hannah stretching like a band of elastic about to finally snap.
Then he saw a tree trunk with a stain up its bark. It did not glisten like the petrol, but it certainly stank. Its tang seared the air like venom.
‘Oh,’ he said, sniffing it again. ‘That’s what it is . . .’
It was the smell that had been nagging at him since arriving in the town. Piss. It was an animal’s piss, a canine’s territorial marking, all acid and ammonia. No petal’s sugar could pamper it out. Adrien hoped that only a dog had made it.
A moment later, from somewhere very nearby, a wolf howled.
At once Adrien turned and ran for Hannah. Back past the petrol pumps he raced, back past the spot where Seb had left him. The blossoms spurred close all around. Did he dare to hope they might shield him? No sooner had he done so than they swirled apart before him and he dug in his heels. Up ahead, standing on the roof of a car like a lookout, was a brown wolf with pale eyes. For a half-second that felt like an eternity, Adrien could only stare. Then, with a squeal, he shed his backpack and veered the other way, forcing the stiff muscles of his legs to run their fastest. He pelted over root and tarmac, at any moment expecting to be brought down, to feel the weight of the animal landing claws-first on his back. Cars blocked his way as often as tree trunks, and he zigzagged between both, through what had been a motor showroom now full of punctured wheels and smashed chassis. For a moment he saw the wolf to his right, and hurled himself left with glass crunching under his feet. When he glanced back over his shoulder there was no sign of it, but the petals conspired and he could see only a few metres. On he rushed, colliding with the side of an estate car then hurtling away, ignoring the bruises of the impact to charge headlong as fast as he could.
Coming out of the showroom and into a street, he was amazed that he was still alive. He raced along the road, dodging tree after tree, and was just thinking he might have escaped when the wolf sprang out in front of him. Adrien skidded to a stop, but the wolf did not attack. It watched him with yellow eyes and its snout lowered, except when it twisted its head sideways and sent a bark into the distance. From somewhere in that direction, a gruffer bark answered it.
At once Adrien realised what was happening. The wolf wasn’t even panting, for it had been no great effort to chase an unfit man over a short distance. A yowl cut back through the woods from nearby, and then another, and Adrien knew that he had been momentarily spared. This was a kind of generosity shown between the wolf and its pack. When the rest of the animals arrived, then they would eat him alive.
Something crashed into Adrien from the side, and he fell under its momentum wailing with what he supposed was his death cry. Then he was being pulled back up not by teeth but by hands, and it was Seb. The wolf sprang forward to put a stop to the escape, but then it squealed and yapped the air and fell back. A stone had struck its flank, and there was Hannah flinging another.
‘Run!’ yelled Seb. ‘Run, Adrien, run!’
Adrien did as he was told, and Seb and Hannah raced after him. Moments later, Seb grabbed him again and yanked him into a nearby building. Hannah piled in too, and at once she and Seb were dragging something heavy across the door. It was a shelving unit, and they were in the ruins of a shoe shop. Boots and loafers and plimsolls lay scattered everywhere, and Hannah grabbed a high heel and flung it with all her might through the smashed shop window. A yelp and a snarl met it, then Seb yelled, ‘This one too!’ and Hannah helped him heave another block of shelves across the window.
Adrien could only stand in the middle of the shop, chewing on his knuckles and trying to calm his racing heart. Seb and Hannah added chairs and part of a counter to their barricade, then all of a sudden sprang back. A flash of fur had passed close to the other side.
‘Grey,’ murmured Adrien. ‘That one was grey.’
Neither Seb nor Hannah heard. They resumed the building of their barricade.
‘The first one was brown,’ said Adrien.
‘There are five,’ said Hannah over her shoulder.
Seb tipped vertical a block of seats, and shunted them across the last hole in the window. The shop was temporarily secured, slices of sunlight shining through the gaps in the furniture blockade.
Some of the sunny gaps winked out. Then some more. Then the first lit up again. The wolf pack prowled the length of the barricade with hunger grinding in their throats. When Adrien held his breath, he could even hear their nostrils sniffing.
One of the beasts howled, and the noise sucked all the warmth out of the air. The return howl was even more awful, since it answered from further away. ‘Even more are coming?’ whimpered Adrien, pressing his hands to his head. Now he understood why they hadn’t seen another soul in the town.
‘This isn’t good,’ said Seb, who had turned pale. Hannah was thumping the barricade to test it, and it didn’t seem anything like as secure as Adrien would have hoped. He looked around for an escape. Much of the shop had caved in, and blossoms scudded in the gloom. Shoes were worn on the ends of bent branches like feet at the end of chewed-up limbs. Whatever fire exits and storerooms the place had once had were buried now under rubble, and there was no way out.
‘We’re trapped!’ said Adrien.
‘He’s right,’ agreed Seb.
‘We’ll think of something,’ said Hannah, although she didn’t sound like she believed herself.
A wolf thumped against the barricade. Then there was a snarl and another thump, and the shelves shook and budged an inch. Claws scrabbled against the wood, and Hannah and Seb threw their backs against the furniture to stop it from falling away. Meanwhile Adrien willed some tunnel or secret hiding hole to open itself in the rubbled back half of the shop. What he saw instead was a mound. It was tucked into the furthest recess, four feet high and made from rags and squares of carpet dragged into place. Bones surrounded it, as did bird carcasses picked of their meat. Adrien sniffed the air and knew what the smell was.
‘Oh my God,’ he said in a tiny voice. ‘Oh sweet Jesus.’
‘What is it?’ grunted Seb, forcing his shoulders against the barricade.
‘This is their den!’ He pointed to the mound, which began to stir even as he did so. ‘There’s one in there right now! We’re dead! We’re dead!’
In that moment the other wolves threw themselves at the barrier with coordinated force. Hannah and Seb both gasped at the animals’ strength, and were knocked back from their posts. That bought enough time for the alpha wolf to shove its head through a resulting gap, then barge it wider with the muscles of its shoulders. It slipped inside and six more followed, slinking into the shoe shop with the leisurely airs of conquerors. At the same time, the mound of rags lifted and slid apart, and the sleeper within stepped out.
It was a teenage girl.
She was Japanese, and her jeans and T-shirt were covered in damp earth, as if she had swum through a bog. Mud was in her hair as well, cloyed lumps of it like braided beads, and blossoms unintentionally stuck there too. She wore a hunter’s belt, with a knife and a slingshot attached to it, and tall boots strapped up like a soldier’s. She was perhaps a year older than Seb, drawing herself upright and glancing ur
gently from the three travellers to the failed barricade and the wolf pack.
Adrien backed towards her, since there was nowhere else to back. The alpha wolf watched him do so with its ears erect and its mouth hanging parted, as if amused by the sight of him. Grey-furred and paler at the belly, it had a white arc across its forehead like a crescent moon. Adrien could not help but stare into its eyes. Eyes that were cracked like lovers’ lockets, the halves of the irises pale gold compressing a black slit.
In unison, the beta wolves peeled back their lips and extended their teeth diagonally into growls. They were taking their time, Adrien supposed. They had their kills cornered and he realised that, even though it was appetite that drove them and not malice, they were still going to enjoy the coming meal.
Twung. A noise like a plucked guitar string, and something whistled through the air. The alpha wolf squealed and flinched its head to the side, a spray of blood squirting from its nose. The other wolves hesitated and looked to their leader. Twung. The alpha yelped again as something struck its nostrils, ripping bare the raw pink flesh beneath the leather of them. It gnashed the air, as if fighting an invisible hornet, then (twung) its eye imploded. Something pulped the eyeball into jelly. Twung. One of the betas wailed as its nose in turn split open. Twung. Another beta flinched and was bleeding from the lips. With a guttural cry, the alpha turned tail and dashed out of the shop, and the betas followed swiftly behind, howling their curses as they fled into the woods.