For a moment I stand there, unsure what to do. Bear leaps forward.
“You got it! You actually got it, Ju!”
There’s this grey pink white bird, floppy in his hands, its head lolling. I shudder, but Bear’s dancing round.
“Let’s make a fire!”
“OK, but we should move on first, in case the drones are still following.”
“I’ll carry it though,” Bear says importantly, swinging it as he walks.
A little further on, Ghost’s back, looking at the wood pigeon in Bear’s hand with interest. I point her out to him.
“Oi, Ghost!” he shouts. “Paws off our pigeon! We’re going to have the best lunch ever today!”
The pigeon is, literally, the best lunch we’ve ever tasted.
Bear makes the fire and I prepare the bird. I pluck the white feathers from its breast and cut open the skin. I break apart the ribcage to carve out two oval pieces of flesh – purple and surprisingly neat and unbloodied. The bullet must be somewhere in the head or neck, I reckon. The chunks of meat are unblemished.
We skewer them on sticks and sear them over Bear’s fire and the pigeon tastes of all of it. All the flavours of the forest – rich and earthy – and the burning wood. And of survival too. That’s what it tastes of most of all. It tastes like survival.
Everything is different after the pigeon. It’s not just the meat in our stomachs, it’s something else. I’m different. It’s like a lion has woken inside me, only it’s not a lion, it’s our lynx cat, Ghost. There was danger and she didn’t flee. She warned us. Stayed with us.
I used the gun too. I killed and Ghost still came back.
Even the way we move through the landscape feels different. At first we were on top of it, stumbling through it, fighting it to make our path. Now we’re part of it. We’ve gone to earth, moving through it, with Ghost following after.
We’re a pack, though I think it’s dogs that run in packs. There was probably some word once, some cat equivalent, some lost word. Every day she allows herself closer, brushing up against us, stretching out her nose to breathe in our scent.
It’s morning and the air we’re walking through is different, all white and opaque.
Bear makes this low eerie screech.
“Don’t do that!” I snap.
You got fog in the city too. They couldn’t keep it away, the air there’s so thick with pollution and even though I knew that’s what it was – clogged-up city air – I liked it anyway because it hid everything ugly. Fog’s a different matter out here.
“It’s just ground cloud. It’s water. Look, we can drink it.” Bear opens his mouth and gapes in towards me.
I pull a face. “That’s really not helping, OK?”
“You’re weird,” he says, running off, and in an instant he’s vanished.
“Bear! Bear!” For a moment everything’s silent, like the fog’s taken everything away, even the sounds. I listen for Bear’s footsteps, but there’s nothing. “Bear!”
A mass of fur appears beside me, brushing my fingertips. Ghost.
“Bear!” I yell.
“Boo!” he says, suddenly right in front of me. “Wooooah! Wooooah! I’m a ghost!” He stops when he sees my face.
I’m screaming at him now. “Never do that, OK! Don’t you ever disappear again!”
Bear’s face falls. “I was just playing. Hide-and-seek, like we’ve always done.”
“We’re not in the Palm House any more!”
He looks at me, puzzled.
“You have to stay right by me. All the time!”
“Why don’t you trust me?”
“I do, but you’re only—”
“Six!” he shouts in my face, before turning away. “I know! You tell me all the time.”
For a while we walk on in silence. We’re on a road, one of the big ones. A motorway. At least with the fog we don’t have to worry about being too visible and you can’t deny the road makes the journey easier. There aren’t so many trailing loops of bramble. You don’t keep having to duck down to miss tree branches.
We’re walking uphill, but for some reason I don’t cotton on that we’re on a bridge. A high one. We see the buildings suddenly, all at once, looming up to the side of us and underneath us too because we’re already at the highest point of the bridge. And it’s not water we’re crossing – it’s the city itself.
We’re on this overpass with great towers either side – soaring chimneys, vast metal warehouses.
“Juniper!” Bear cries. “What shall we do?” He’s rooted to the spot and it’s way too near the edge. Maybe there were barriers once, but there aren’t any now. The sides of the road drop away to nothing.
“Get away from the edge!” I yell.
“It’s a city!” Bear cries as the shapes start to make sense to him. “Ju, we walked into a city!”
It’s a city, but there was no Buffer. That means something.
I pull Bear to the centre of the road. “It’s not a city now.”
As the fog clears a little – maybe as we’ve risen above it – we can see more of the buildings around us. Green, not grey. All tangled up in climbers and creepers.
“Why didn’t it show up on the GPS?” Bear asks.
“Maybe none of those cities show up any more. Maybe the GPS was wiped after the ReWild.”
You aren’t meant to talk about the lost cities. The ones the authorities abandoned. They abandoned lots of places, but it’s the big ones they want you to shut up about. The seven largest cities that were forsaken. The ones that were too big, too sprawling to contain.
“Which city is it?” Bear asks.
“I don’t know. It’d be on Mum’s map. I should’ve been looking at that too.”
Beyond the chimneys for miles, for literally miles and miles, you can see buildings. Tower blocks. Houses. A huge great sprawl of them. It takes your breath away.
If you look closely there are trees too, in and among them.
“Were there really enough people to fill it?” Bear asks in astonishment.
“I suppose there must have been. Once.” I think of Silvan’s face, when he talked about the disease. And what I wrote in my essay – ‘the beauty of the disease’ – like I had any clue. Any clue what I was talking about.
Where are all the people who live here now? How many survived?
“It’s a ghost city,” Bear says.
“I’m not sure that’s very flattering to Ghost.” I turn to look at her. The one bit of gold in the tangled-up concrete and steel.
“She doesn’t mind,” Bear says. “She doesn’t understand what we’re saying. Anyway, don’t you like it, Ju? There are trees.”
“It’s not a matter of liking, it just makes me sad. It’s, you know –” I pause, trying to find the right word – “bleak.”
“You said our city was bleak too.”
“It was. Is. But in a different way.”
“You said the ReWild was a good thing.”
“It wasn’t a good thing exactly,” I say slowly. “Not everyone dying, but it was better than what we were heading to.”
“It was the Wild or people?” Bear asks.
“No. It was the Wild or nothing.”
“Because we need trees to breathe?”
“Yeah, but more than that.” Even the scientific arguments, the real tangible things – that trees give out oxygen, filter the air, help control the climate. Even after all that, there’s more. You just need it. The Wild. You need to know it’s there.
I shake my head. “Come on, let’s get off this thing, it’s making me dizzy.”
Bear’s so intent on staring out into the city that he’s crept forward again.
“Bear! Come back, you’re too close.”
He turns back, surprised. “I’m not.” Though he comes over anyway and takes my hand. Maybe he knows I can’t deal with another argument right now.
“You were,” I say softly.
“You just don’t like heights, Ju.”
Even once we’re off the overpass there are miles of city to trek through. We’re at the perimeter. The edge lands, where it was all factories. Now it’s a different kind of landscape entirely – tendrils of ivy and bindweed, blankets of moss and lichen. Some of it you wouldn’t guess was ever buildings. They’re just weird shapes of green, like the city’s been choked up and softened at the same time.
We come to a wide span of railway lines with rusting metal trains – engines and carriages side by side and one after another, like they were gathered up for something. Something that never happened since they’re all still waiting. The paint’s faded now, but you can still make out the letters on one of them.
“Intercity,” I read aloud.
“What does it mean, Ju?” Bear asks, staring at the word.
I shrug. “Inter means between. Between cities, I guess. They took people from one city to another.”
Most of the windows are smashed in, but the carriage interiors are less broken up than you might think. The seats are still there, some are still even padded. Not entirely – in most places the padding has been ripped out like some animal has got to it – but a few are still recognizably these big padded armchairs. And the roof’s still on and that’s the important bit.
“We could sleep here.” I think it first, then I say it out loud. It’s late in the day now and cold, really cold. The wind’s getting up and the carriage would protect us from it. Plus we’d be hidden from any drones.
Once we’ve made the decision, it’s sort of fun. Bear springs into action and starts clearing a space in the carriage, throwing out all the leaves that have gathered there. There are insects too – spiders, crane flies, beetles, woodlice. Bear carefully transports them all further up the carriage while I make the fire and start taking out our wet things. I drape them over some of the seats to dry. Bear’s shoes too, which are falling apart with mud and rain and too much walking. Every time he takes them off, I’m worried I’ll find actual rot on his feet.
Ghost isn’t impressed with our choice of accommodation. It’s too confined and she starts her agitated pacing, the toing and froing. She settles eventually though, outside, and Bear and I snuggle up in our sleeping bags, telling stories. We make them up, getting more and more fantastical.
We’re survivors of a train crash. Of Armageddon. Aliens have landed and bombed our city. It’s the War of the Worlds and we’re the only two people left on Earth. What do we do?
“We have to get to the sea,” Bear says, with some certainty. “Find a boat. Set sail. It’s bound to be better somewhere else. There are always some survivors. Or –” he says, really enthusiastic now – “this carriage could be a portal. It could take us wherever we want to go.”
I laugh. “What, at the push of a button?”
“Yes, or a magic word.”
“Say it then.”
“Ennerdale,” Bear says and we close our eyes, wishing.
Bear’s awake, playing in a different bit of carriage. It’s daylight already. I’ve slept later than usual, more protected from the cold than we’ve been for ages.
For a while I lie there, listening. Bear’s pretending to be all the birds and animals we’ve seen or haven’t seen. All the ones he’s still looking for – the badger, the otter, the beaver, and more lynx.
I look for lynx all the time. I look obsessively. It’s mean of me – everyone needs their own kind – but I’m relieved we haven’t seen any. If we find other lynx, maybe Ghost will leave us.
“Ju,” Bear says, sensing me watching him. “We could stay in our carriage today. Have a rest.”
“We have to keep moving, Bear,” I say automatically, already starting to fold up my sleeping bag.
Bear clasps my hand. “Please, Ju. Just one day.”
I pause. “We’re running out of water.”
“Check the GPS,” he pleads. “Maybe there’s a river. There must be.”
I look at Bear’s little fingers, tangled through mine. His fingernails are covered in mud. Mine too.
Next is going to be the hardest stretch of all, for from here the uplands really begin. It’s hills first, mountains later on. Plus it’s getting colder – day by day, you can feel it and see it in the glaze of frost that’s painted on everything.
There are still more than a hundred miles to go and we’re covering less distance each day. Not just because we’re tired – the days are running out quicker. The sun’s falling earlier and earlier.
We shouldn’t stop, not really, but we could do with a rest.
“OK,” I say, smiling at him. “Let’s stay here today, then tomorrow we’ll start afresh.”
We spend some time roaming through the rest of the carriages. The carriages are joined up with gangways and we can walk from one right into the next. We’re freed from the weight of our rucksacks and the grind of the journey.
“We’re not travellers today,” Bear says happily. “We’re explorers.”
“Archaeologists,” I add.
“What are we looking for, Ju?”
The metal has held back some of the plants and there are old things. It’s mostly just rubbish – old drinks cans and bottles, things we would recycle. I guess that’s something our city does right.
“Anything useful,” I reply. “Clothes or blankets. Maybe there’s an old suitcase somewhere with those kinds of things.” I’m checking all the glass bottles too because they’d hold water, especially if we find some with their screw tops left on.
I’m still cross with myself for leaving that big bottle on the riverbank. Even though there’s been no sign of drones since the fire, I’m nervous every time we have to go for water.
Bear’s scampering ahead. He’s more excited about the insects than the human things. He finds a nest of ladybirds.
“Ju, they’re hibernating! Look!”
They’re huddled together in a corner of a seat. Bright red bugs with black spots.
“Don’t wake them, Bear,” I say, already wandering on ahead as he counts the dots on each beetle.
At the end of the carriage we’re in is a bulging-out section of train. It’s closed off and I’m wondering if there’s a way to kick the door open as it’s not like the cottage door – this one’s thick solid plastic. Bear comes up behind me and turns the handle. The door swings right open.
“Jackpot!” I squeal.
“I can’t see a suitcase,” Bear says. “It’s just cleaning things.” He kicks an old mop and it clatters to the floor.
“Look at those, Bear.” I point to the corner, where there’s a teetering stack of metal buckets. “Just think how much water they’d carry.”
We clank down to the river with some of the buckets and bottles, and we clean them out, then make trips to and from the carriage. Soon we have all the water we can drink, and some left over too, to clean our teeth in and to heat so we can make an attempt at washing.
Bear’s sloshing behind me back to the carriage, a bucket in either hand, even though I said he should just carry one.
“We’ve probably got enough now. This is the last trip.” I turn back. Bear’s put the buckets down and is turning something over in his fingers.
I walk back to him. “What’s that?”
He shrugs. He’s holding a bundle of twigs, tied up with an old piece of blue cotton.
“I found it in that tree.”
Where he’s pointing, the lowest tree branch comes out from the trunk and there are three wavy lines carved into the bark. An arrow points in the direction we’ve come from.
We both speak at the same time.
“River,” Bear says.
“A signpost,” I say.
I have this tingly feeling on the back of my neck. It’s the helpfulness of it. The simplicity. It’s just showing where to get water.
“Maybe Ennerdale people come here!” Bear says.
“Ennerdale’s still a hundred miles away, Bear. Ennerdale’s got its own river. The Liza, remember?” I think of the blue line on
Mum’s map, flowing down from the mountains into Ennerdale Water.
“Other people then. Forest folk. Fairies?” Bear’s eyes light up.
“Maybe.”
“We found a magical kingdom, Juniper!”
I laugh. “Yeah, let’s not get carried away. We’ve still got to be careful.”
“We’ll see the lakes soon, Ju. And then Mum and Dad!” He’s pocketed the twigs and is bouncing on ahead with the buckets, swinging them, swinging them hard, so water sloshes right over the edges.
It feels like we should leave the twig bundle, but the marks are still there in the tree, if you know where to look, pointing to the river.
“Mum! Dad! We’re coming! We’re actually coming!” Bear sings and I only tell him once to quieten down.
I wish I could feel so happy. Sometimes it seems the closer we get, the more scared I am of what we’ll find.
But Ennerdale must still be there. It has to be.
Mum knows we’re coming back one day. That was always the plan. She’ll be waiting for us. And Dad. If anything had changed, someone would have got word to us. Mum promised.
Once we’ve made the fire, I heat a bucketful of water to wash in. It’s the nicest feeling – warm water against my face.
I loved bath night back home. There wasn’t enough water for separate baths, but Annie Rose always let me go first. She knew what it meant to me. That tub of hot water. There was always a lingering smell of disinfectant, some bleach-like stink in the water and in the steam that misted up the bathroom mirror, but Annie Rose had these drops that took the edge off it. Lavender oil. We’ve used the same bottle ever since I can remember, but because there was no hope of getting another, we made it last. Just two or three oily drops, like tiny pearls, from the old glass bottle. I swirled them in by hand and shut my eyes as I sank into the water.
We’ve never seen the sea, but that’s where I took myself in my head. Some bright clean ocean, back when the world was this big open place you could travel across, where it was green, or blue, or yellow. Anything but grey. Anything but the city outside our windows.
Where the World Turns Wild Page 16