Will ducks then zigzags across the grass. The strips on his coat glint in the moonlight.
“Run, Will,” I say under my breath.
“I told you to get off my land in five seconds,” screams Dad. “You broke a Rule. Never break the Rules.” He raises the rifle to his shoulder and looks through the night-vision scope. A shot rings out.
Will drops to the ground.
Dad shot him. In the back. On a five-second warning.
I don’t make a sound. Both hands rush to cover my mouth, but no noise comes out.
Dad runs towards Will and I follow, stumbling my way behind him. Dad gets to Will, circling, with the rifle still pointed at him, and pushes at his body with his foot. He bends to take a pulse on his neck and lowers his ear to his face and chest, listening for breathing.
My legs are weak. I edge closer to them. To Will’s body, slumped a metre from the trees. I can’t tell if he’s still alive. I can’t see if his chest is rising and falling. I want to heave. I’ve never seen so much blood. It’s seeping across the back of his shirt, spilling into the ground. I gag, turning to throw up behind me.
“Is-is he OK?” I stutter, wiping my mouth on the back of my hand. My voice sounds thin, like a young child intruding on an adult scene. I’ve never seen a dead human being before. Not a real one. A piece of engineered metal and a tiny bullet have taken down Will, a living breathing person. I know the answer to my own foolish question. Will is far from OK. “Dad? Daddy?” I tug at his sleeve.
But he doesn’t answer at first. He takes a long moment staring down at Will before he turns to me, like he’s surprised to see me here. The blood on his hands is bright red: Will’s blood.
“We need to go,” he says.
You can’t just shoot people and leave them to die in the woods. And yet he is. We are. Dad doesn’t even seem that bothered. It’s like he’d fired at a deer on a hunting trip. He reloads.
“We need to get help for him, for Will,” I say quietly, but as firmly as I dare. “It’s serious, Dad. He’ll bleed to death. I’ll get the first-aid kit. But I can’t treat a gunshot wound on my own.”
Dad chews on his lip.
“If he dies, it’ll be worse. The police will come,” I say. “The state will be here, asking questions, crawling over the house, the land. They’ll stop the Ark.”
“You’re wrong,” he says. “No one’s going to miss that piece of nothing. He wasn’t following the Rules, Amber. Don’t break the Rules.”
“Do you have an emergency phone hidden somewhere? A satellite phone? A CB radio.” They’re not in the basement store – I looked thoroughly.
“We’re not calling anyone.”
“Dad, we can’t just leave him. Look at him. How will you live with yourself?”
“I think we’ll manage, don’t you?”
What kind of a person leaves someone like that? I swallow hard. I already know.
He’s thinking something through. I recognize the furrowed brows and the distant stare. I wait for him to do the right thing. To think it’s his own idea to call an ambulance, not mine. But the relief is short-lived. He bends down again and checks Will’s neck for a pulse. I force myself to look at his lifeless face in the moonlight. The eyes are half-closed, staring up at the starry sky but seeing nothing.
“There’s no point calling anyone. He’s gone. We’ll have to bring it forwards, thanks to Will. He’s ruined everything.”
Not the Ark… “What? Now?”
“We’ll have to start earlier, not wait until Christmas Eve.”
No, no, no. “What about the others? Do we need to contact them, call someone?”
He turns and pushes me back towards the house.
“Wait. Should we cover him up? It’s Will, Dad. Will!”
Dad grabs at my arm and pulls me along.
We’re in the terrible finale to all this. Shooting Will dead has changed everything. What’s the best I can hope for? Throwing myself out of the car? Wherever the Ark is – Scotland. Maybe back in Wales. The US? Wherever it is, he can’t possibly plan an entire route where we see no one, never stop for fuel, never slow down. I’m breathing easier now I have a plan. Stay one step ahead, that’s the Rule.
Dad twitches, wiping his sweaty forehead. And then he smiles at me. “No. That’s the beauty of the Ark.” He looks over his shoulder and pulls me closer towards him, leaving a bloody handprint on my sleeve. He lowers his voice until it’s just a whisper. “It’s right here. The Ark’s right here, Amber.” He places a slightly shaking finger on his lips.
“It can’t be.”
“Fooled you, didn’t I?” He laughs as my car plan shatters into pieces and falls away into the darkness. He’s leaving me no choices.
The Ark can’t be here at Centurion House. It’s not possible. I’m trying to get the logical part of my brain ticking through the options. He’s shown me plans. Photographs. The surroundings were not like here. How could something of that size even fit on this land – the house, a couple of outbuildings and maybe five acres of boggy grass and some woods?
I saw the picture with the Joshua tree, the shrubland that was more like desert than here. I thought it was somewhere like Utah or Arizona.
What about the cooling stacks, the ventilation shafts? He’s talked about a biodome, growing food on a hydroponic farm. He said a hundred people would be living there eventually.
Dad sighs and adjusts the gun. He’ll have to put it down at some point but he’s keeping it charged and ready.
Stay one step ahead. I’m a prepper. And the shit has hit the fan. Dad’s armed.
“I need my Grab-and-Go Bag,” I say.
He hesitates. “The Ark is fully equipped.”
“Always have your Grab-and-Go Bag, right? It’s a Rule.” My boots crunch on the twigs while I wait for his answer, willing him to agree.
“Never break the Rules.” He sounds like a computer, an automaton.
He just shot Will. A living, breathing person.
As we go back into the house, my mind’s whirring. The car plan is dead in the water so what’s next? I need to tell Josh where Dad’s taking me – ready for Neville’s cavalry in the morning. Where is Dad taking me? Will he wait for other preppers to join us in the Ark?
My eyes flick to the advent calendar on the shelf. It’s the twenty-first of December. If others are coming here for lockdown on Christmas Eve, they should be arriving soon, getting ready. They might arrive in the next few hours – they’ll see Will’s body. Except, as I pick up the advent calendar and look at all the doors that are open already, I can’t stop myself wondering why no one else is here already. Where are all the other people?
“I’m getting a fresh battery,” says Dad, heading for the kitchen. “Make sure you put your head torch on. Hurry up.”
I take a pen and write quickly on the back of the advent calendar that Dad shot Will dead by the trees and to stay in the basement quietly or Dad will shoot him too. I write in clear capitals that he’s taking me against my will to the Ark nearby but I don’t know where. I want to say more, to tell Josh more, but I can hear Dad coming back.
I post the advent calendar quickly under the basement door, pushing it as far as I can and hoping that Josh will see it and drag himself to reach it. With my ear to the door, I hear nothing. I toy with unlocking it. But it’s best if Josh stays down there, sleeping off his painkillers and the alcohol. Unseen, unheard. Alive.
Today’s advent window revealed a star, shining bright. Illuminating the way for those who seek an answer. Showing the way.
Dad comes back into the hall with the batteries. And the gun. “Amber? What’s keeping you?”
“It’s nearly midnight,” I say. “Maybe it’d be best to wait until the morning.”
He pulls repeatedly at his ear and mutters, “No, no, no.” Why can’t he wash his hands at least, change his clothes? Will’s blood is slowly drying from fresh red to rust-colour. “We have to go now,” he says agitated. “Will ruined everything. It’s his fault that w
e need to bring it forwards. We need to go now.”
I pick up my Grab-and-Go Bag and take a last glance at the hall and the door to the basement. There are no sounds. Dad switches on his head torch and I do the same.
He leads me round the back of the house, takes the gate behind the oil tank that leads down towards the paddock and the old barn. It’s beginning to snow. Gentle flakes stick to my lashes and melt on my cheeks. He’s muttering to himself but nothing that makes any sense. There’s nothing here. Is he just going to shoot me in the woods, like Will?
“You’ll see, Amber. You’ll see the future. Hiding in plain sight,” he whispers. “Always the best way. Because they are always watching us, always looking. Never forget you are being watched.”
“It’s dark, Dad.”
He pulls me down into a crouching position while he scans the area with the rifle scope. “What if they are watching us now? What if there’s a drone? They have thermal imaging. They can pick up your body heat. Crawl.”
Everything he says is stupid, illogical, irrational. But Will had twice my strength and couldn’t stop Dad shooting him so I bide my time. Dad always said that a bullet doesn’t distinguish between the types of flesh it slices through. I play along with his commando game.
There are no drones. The sky is heavy with stars. The most I’ve ever seen. Completely and utterly beautiful.
We crawl through the damp grass in the paddock until we reach the barn and he pulls me to my feet. He draws a keyring from his pocket and selects a normal key. I was expecting a big entrance – like in his pictures – a concrete ramp leading to an underground silo. A blast door, a keypad, cameras – where is it all?
He fumbles with the lock on the old barn.
Is there a passageway inside? A concealed set of steps? I’m impressed.
“You’re the first to see it, Amber. Only you. You’re my flesh and blood. Blood’s thicker than water. It was only ever for you.” He catches sight of the blood on his hands and looks puzzled. He wipes them on his trousers than holds out his hand to me.
“At last we can live by the Rules. I was right all along, Amber. It’s me who’s right, isn’t it? Not them. Not your mom. Not people like Will. No one knows better than me. I am the Rules and the Rules are me.”
“Sure, Dad. Living by the Rules. You and me. For ever and ever.”
I keep my hands by my sides. I don’t take his. Will’s blood is crusted on his fingernails in the torchlight. He points the rifle in my direction and I shuffle forwards.
The door shudders open.
Dad says, “Welcome to the Ark.”
The door catches on the ground where one of the slats protrudes. The floor is just dirt. I jolt to one side as a pigeon flies out of the door in a flap of wings. My eyes adjust as Dad pushes me in and locks the door behind us. I turn my head torch from one side to another.
White lines mark out a strange set of squares on the floor. A ladder stands by the back wall, next to open cans of paint and creosote. He’s been busy. It’s like the wall back at Eden Farm, but bigger. Painted in giant letters, drips running down the wall, blending one line into another. Words misspelt, repeated. Random capital letters thrown in.
The Rules.
I look again at the lines on the floor and I realize what it is. A floor plan, badly measured out in the dirt, roughly like the plan he showed me the other day. The plan of the Ark.
Dad’s practically bouncing with excitement while I’m rooted to the spot with shock. My brain’s struggling to find an explanation, to join the dots in some way other than the obvious.
There is no Ark.
There never will be.
It’s all in his head.
No one else is coming.
There is no one else.
“What do you think?” he asks, his eyes wide. He’s like a child. A child showing me the castle he’s made from sticks and an old blanket. “Here’s the plant room I told you about. We can produce so much electricity from the solar panels and the heat-exchange pump and the windmills. We’ll never want for anything.”
I swallow. I close my eyes for a moment then reopen them. Nothing has changed. A load of farm junk. Dented gas canisters.
“Where are the windmills, Dad? The wind turbines?”
He laughs. “Not in here, silly. Out there. In rows on the hillside. Hundreds and hundreds of them. We can survive here for years and years. Just you and me. We don’t need anyone else.”
He leads me down the corridor marked on the floor in tiny steps. “And this is our apartment. I reserved us the best spot.”
We stand in a marked-out white box about four metres square. The only contents are bird poo and debris from the nesting pigeons cooing above us. A small hole in the wall that they must use as an entrance lets in a circle of weak moonlight to pool on the floor of ‘my room’.
Dad points out the features – the features in the rooms in the glossy pictures and plans back on the table at Centurion House. Our private kitchen area is marked by a long-dead baby bird, right next to an old can which he calls a control panel to operate the daylight pipes and the ventilation system.
“Where’s the food store, Dad?” You know, the refrigerated room, the freezers run by generators, the dried-goods store? The hydroponic containers? Where’s all the food, the crops already growing for the future? The seed store?
All the lies you told me. That I believed. That Will believed. That he died for.
Dad leads me to the far corner of the building. A few cans and jars sit on an old oil stain on a ripped tarpaulin. “Unpack your supplies,” he says. “We’ve got provisions to last for years. Just you and me now.”
I arrange the food, following the Rule: Everything has its place. Cans and jars should face forwards and be exactly one centimetre apart.
Sets of clothes should be laid out in order, ready to put on in an emergency. I lay my clothes in the correct piles in my ‘bedroom’, ready to wear, trying to calm myself with the routine.
Dad seems happier than he has in days, humming to himself as he watches my preparations.
There’s an empty mixing bucket in the pile of junk by the ladder. I take it to the chalk-drawn ‘bathroom’. He seems pleased. Is it a bath, sink, toilet, bucket? Deluxe hot tub? I don’t know what the hell he’s seeing. I find the antibacterial gel and the toilet roll in my bag. Are we staying here? Am I making myself an actual prison toilet?
He takes me round the rest of the Ark – pointing out the giant biodome in the corner. He genuinely sees it. He steps gingerly past the rows of vegetables, tells me not to squash any. I find myself looking at the ground, picking my way carefully over the dirt and loose stones in case I ruin his imaginary pumpkins. “We’ll save the rest of the tour for tomorrow and the daylight. Wait till you see the water filtration system.”
His enthusiasm makes me doubt my own eyes. Do I not believe in it enough to see it?
Then it’s like he’s reached into my head and read what I’m thinking. “You just had to believe in me, Amber. You just had to believe.”
“Poor Will…” I start to say. He wanted something better out of life and this is what he’d have got. What a waste.
“He didn’t follow the Rules,” says Dad. He taps his finger on his nose and says in a sing-song voice, “Don’t break the Rules!”
He drags over a couple of ancient heaters, stinking of dust and fumes as he sets them working. He sits down cross-legged in the ‘atrium’ area amongst the pigeon poo and surveys the wall, muttering a disjointed set of Rules. He checks the catch on the gun and lays it across his knees like a banjo.
I’m floating above the scene, struggling to grasp some reality. “Shall I start a fire? Make food?” someone in my body says.
“It’s his own fault, Amber,” he says. He repeats it like he’s trying to convince himself he hasn’t just murdered a teenage boy. “I made a new Rule today,” he says. “I told Will, but he didn’t want to follow it.” He shakes his head sadly.
I’m
holding my breath. My whole body is straining to see the words he’s scratching in the dirt with the end of the rifle.
I hated those caves at Eden Farm. Hated the so-called bunker. Hated him.
Dark.
So dark.
The lights flickered on and off,
on and off.
Off.
Scratching rats lived in the caves. A tail flicked across my flesh in the darkness and I screamed and lashed out.
I held a candle, shaking, watching it burn slowly down as I ate from a can of peaches.
The toilet smelled foul. The chemicals merged with the stench of wee and poo and vomit.
Was it a day – or a week – a month – or an hour? Time both stood still and raced up and down, until I had no concept of it at all.
With no day and night, no watch, no calendar.
I just wanted to know what day it was.
The date.
Never-ending.
I read my notes with the last blast of candlelight.
My captain’s log.
My prison diary.
Written on page after page.
The candle died.
Part of me died.
A key in the lock, the squeak of iron gates, a handle turning.
A flicker of lights, of a video camera clicking into action.
A rock lifted high above my head in shaking hands.
Gravity brought it down. Not me. Not my hands. No.
The rock came down with a sickening crack of bone and tissue.
He slumped.
All reflected in an unblinking camera’s eye.
I ran.
I left him like that.
I ran away.
I ran to Mum.
Mum made me swear to keep the secret.
Secrets are heavy.
Even if you try to keep moving on.
The secrets of what I’d done. Of what I was.
I feared I’d killed the monster in the cave.
I hoped I’d killed the monster in the cave.
Who was the monster? Me or him?
Dad sits hunched by the fire we’ve made in the centre of the Ark, shivering even though he’s sitting way too close to the flames. The gun is still in his hands – his finger trembles on the trigger. The combination of burning wood and fumes from the extra heaters is choking.
The Rules Page 18