She looks for the sun, though it’s out of view behind the trees. The shadows are substantial and artificial-looking, like painted stripes of darkness. Aaronovich wears no watch. She can’t say with certainty when the shot was fired, or how long has elapsed since. She picks out one particular shadow and follows its crawl across the ground, over black earth jagged with discarded pine needles.
When it touches that root, I’ll make a decision. Twenty minutes, thirty at most. When the shadow touches the root, I’ll decide. And it will be my responsibility, whatever comes.
Then she hears it. This time she’s positive: an engine. And it’s drawing nearer.
Aaronovich listens, as though in a trance. She doesn’t look at Contreras or Carlita, but she has no doubt that they’re staring toward the noise, unmoving, hardly breathing, just as she is.
At last she snaps herself free. She’s sure. An engine. The jeep. They’re coming back.
“Come on,” Aaronovich says, hoisting her pack onto her shoulder and already moving. “We need to get to the road.”
* * *
Kyle has parked some distance from them. Aaronovich was surprised, in the first moment, to see him there behind the wheel. Yet, as she looks closely, he seems older to her than when he left. Little remains of the child she knew even a few months ago.
He appears, too, utterly exhausted. However, while she feels for him, Kyle only commands Aaronovich’s attention for an instant. Her eyes are drawn past him, to the figure hunched in the back seat. Then she’s hurrying, abruptly desperate to cover the intervening distance, and then she’s scrabbling at the door handle.
Abigail half falls, half leaps into her arms. A distant part of Aaronovich’s mind warns her of the danger from teeth, nails, saliva, but she can’t attend to it, or else finds she can ignore it. She grips Abigail and the child gurgles and laughs, and Aaronovich laughs as well, for all that she’s every bit as near to crying.
She appreciates now how it’s wounded her to let this small and fragile human being out of her sight. She recognizes the hole it’s torn, to do what she thought was necessary – what had been necessary.
Yet this, too, is necessary. This moment is as vital as any she’s known.
But it can’t last. Barely has she caught up Abigail when Aaronovich hears the scream. She thinks at first that Carlita must have seen the men from Funland, finally hunting them, or Sickers perhaps. But this isn’t that sound, not a howl of fear. It’s an outpouring of raw, torn grief.
Only as she lowers Abigail to the ground does Aaronovich register Doyle Johnson’s absence.
“Kyle,” she says, forcing calm into her voice because it’s apparent that once more she’s the one who will have to be calm, “where’s Johnson?”
Kyle is out of the jeep, hovering at the verge of the road as though he might decide at any second to flee. “He…he went into the woods,” he says, not looking at her or at Carlita. “He took the gun. He said there was something he needed to do. I tried to go with him—”
Carlita takes three rapid steps, halving the distance between her and Kyle. “Liar!”
“No.” But he seems uncertain. “He said to wait. He didn’t come back.”
“How could you let him, Kyle? How could you let him do it?”
“I tried to tell him—”
Even as he speaks, Carlita has taken three more steps, and before he can finish, she strikes him, open-handed, across his cheek, hard enough that Kyle rocks on his heels.
“My god,” Carlita spits, the words garbled with horror or disgust, “did you hate him so much?”
Aaronovich hastens to grasp Carlita’s hand, where it hovers ready for another blow. “Don’t.”
Carlita doesn’t look at her. “You talked him into this,” she says. “This stupid, whatever this was, this bullshit. This useless bullshit. When we were safe. You dragged him out here, just to die. And it was all for nothing!”
Aaronovich places herself between them. “This isn’t helping.”
Carlita turns away, though not, Aaronovich thinks, because of anything she herself has said. She stumbles across the road to the far verge. Contreras, who has been hanging back, appears as if he might try to comfort her, but when he glances to Aaronovich for confirmation, she mouths, Leave her. She’s seen enough of grief to know that Carlita is beyond consolation.
Aaronovich returns her attention to Kyle. He’s shaking his head spasmodically, and repeating something over and over, a brief phrase, but one she can’t make out. Sensing her attention, Kyle looks directly at her, and this time she can separate out his words.
“It wasn’t for nothing,” he says.
She doesn’t understand. All that’s happened in the last few minutes is a jumble that her mind is only now attempting to piece together.
“It wasn’t for nothing!” Furiously, Kyle hunts in his pocket, yanks out a scrap of paper, and holds it up. “Look…look! We found this. Johnson found it. It’s somewhere safe, maybe, if we can get there.”
Aaronovich considers the paper in the dying daylight, striving to deduce its significance. There are two numbers, punctuated, written in large scrawl. Coordinates perhaps? But she doesn’t know how to read them.
“It’s where they went,” Kyle says. “Somewhere better.”
So yes, coordinates. A destination, if they can interpret and follow them, and if they can remain safe in the meantime. That thought brings home the fact that they’re standing talking in the road, with night coming on fast. Aaronovich turns back to Carlita and Contreras. “We can’t stay here,” she says.
To Aaronovich’s surprise, that’s enough to snap Carlita out of her grief. She nods, the motion mechanical and not entirely human-seeming. “Yes. We can still find him.”
And Aaronovich doesn’t have the heart to say that isn’t at all what she’d meant.
* * *
Ten minutes later and Kyle is pointing out the spot where he last saw Doyle Johnson. It’s easy to identify from the SUV crashed there, a mystery Aaronovich has no desire to decipher.
The sky is almost fully dark by then. Carlita insists on getting out, and walks past the edge of the forest, in the direction Kyle has indicated. Aaronovich is ready to go after her, is trying to judge whether she and Contreras together will have the strength to force her to come back if she should resist, when Carlita turns and hurriedly retraces her steps.
“I know what this is,” she says. “I know why he did this.” She speaks the words without anger, but with a note in her voice that Aaronovich thinks may be despair. There’s nothing there, however, to suggest she believes Johnson is going to return – or that he’s still alive.
Aaronovich opens her door but, wary of unsettling Abigail, doesn’t get out. “We can wait a little longer,” she proposes. “It’s not quite night.”
Carlita looks down at her. Her eyes are expressionless. “He was dying,” she says.
“Yes, I know.”
“Oh. Of course.” Carlita nods thoughtfully. “That was why I couldn’t tell him.” She touches the fingers of one hand to her belly, perhaps unconsciously. “Because it wouldn’t have been fair.”
“No,” Aaronovich agrees. She had wondered if Johnson had shared her diagnosis with Carlita. Here’s her answer.
“But,” Carlita says, “he didn’t have to die alone.”
“We can wait,” Aaronovich repeats, not knowing how else she can possibly respond.
Carlita only shakes her head and climbs back inside.
Kyle doesn’t start the engine immediately. He’s staring into the fathomless rectangles of gloom between the trees. A minute passes, and another. Then, unprompted, he rouses the jeep to life and pulls away.
Aaronovich watches the SUV until a turn in the road steals it from view. She feels no pain, no sadness for Johnson’s loss. Perhaps that will come later. Or maybe it won’t. She kno
ws now that she has always respected him more than she’s liked him, and that on some level she feared the man more than either.
The jeep is ample for the five of them. It was designed, after all, for people of a different age, one recent and unimaginable, beyond her ability to recall in any detail. They aren’t those people. They need less space. Even with five of them, the vehicle seems roomy.
After a few minutes, Contreras offers to take over the driving, and Kyle grudgingly accedes. Within seconds, he’s fast asleep, and for the first time Aaronovich can see some trace of the boy she met all those months ago. In the back, Carlita presses herself to the very edge of the seat, as though with effort she might squeeze her body out into the night. For a short spell she cries softly, and then she’s quiet. Aaronovich takes the farther side and holds Abigail near, the child drowsing on her knee.
Aaronovich realizes she’s no longer afraid to be this close to Abigail. There’s no more that the sickness could do to her. Whatever she can be turned into, she’s been turned already. She’s become some entity that grew inside the desiccated shell of her old self, a being she doesn’t recognize, or even feel the need to examine.
None of them talk. Except that once, a couple of hours after they’ve left the crashed SUV behind, and apparently speaking to no one but himself, Kyle says, “What if it’s something worse?”
She’d thought he was still sleeping. Maybe he is. The question sounds like part of an internal conversation revealed by accident, and Aaronovich doesn’t suppose for a moment that it was aimed at her. Nevertheless, she tells him, “It won’t be.”
She’s not trying to reassure him. She doubts he would even understand her meaning; she barely understands herself. Only that, whatever’s ahead of them, it’s something new, and for them at least, something unprecedented.
What’s out here?
Freedom, for a while anyway. A world without walls. Danger, certainly, and death. The sick – since it’s their land now, their time. Perhaps other survivors, people better and worse than those they’ve known. Change. And therefore hope.
Aaronovich shuts her eyes, runs her fingers through Abigail’s tangled hair, and lets the sense of being in motion lull her into peace.
About this book
This is a FLAME TREE PRESS BOOK
Text copyright © 2019 David Tallerman
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
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Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.
Thanks to the Flame Tree Press team, including: Taylor Bentley, Frances Bodiam, Federica Ciaravella, Don D’Auria, Chris Herbert, Josie Karani, Molly Rosevear, Will Rough, Mike Spender, Cat Taylor, Maria Tissot, Nick Wells, Gillian Whitaker. The cover is created by Flame Tree Studio with thanks to Nik Keevil and Shutterstock.com.
FLAME TREE PRESS is an imprint of Flame Tree Publishing Ltd. flametreepublishing.com. A copy of the CIP data for this book is available from the British Library and the Library of Congress.
HB ISBN: 978-1-78758-243-9, PB ISBN: 978-1-78758-241-5, ebook ISBN: 978-1-78758-244-6 | Also available in FLAME TREE AUDIO | Created in London and New York
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