“What did she want?”
“She wanted to know if Edward had left any papers here. Any parcels, perhaps something in a college safe. Something academic.”
Hopper took a sharp breath. Warwick and Blake were still looking, then. And they were a day ahead. “And what did you tell her?”
“I told her the truth. That I was aware of no such object.”
So that was it. Whatever Thorne had discovered, he had destroyed. There was nowhere else: everything that had led her here had been for nothing. Her career and David’s, Harry’s and Fisher’s lives, all thrown away chasing the same phantom.
Then Heathcote spoke again. “I did not, of course, mention anywhere I suspected such an object might be found.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Everyone signs a declaration of assets when they arrive at the college. It details everything they own. And when they leave, they sign a similar document. When he arrived at the college, Edward signed a declaration, like any other; it included a small house in a village nearby.” Heathcote smiled, clearly enjoying the sense of an audience paying court.
Hopper leaned forward. “And?”
“When he left the college, he signed a similar document. The cottage had disappeared from the register. Out of curiosity, I dug out the original form and looked up the address.” Curiosity indeed, Hopper thought. Heathcote had been intrigued by her friend’s secret refuge and was too vain to admit it. “And then I ensured the original form was destroyed.”
“Why are you telling us this? Why us and not Warwick?”
Heathcote sighed. “Because I should never have betrayed my friend.” And there, miraculously, the shabby, attention-seeking role fell away from her. “Edward was a talented scientist. Very talented. His work shouldn’t be destroyed, whatever it says, and whatever its consequences. I would not want it falling into the hands of a woman like Ruth Warwick.”
“What makes you so confident we won’t destroy it ourselves?”
“I remember you were one of his students, Miss Hopper, and I remember how highly he spoke of you.” She shrugged. “Let’s just say I’m playing the balance of probabilities.” And with that, she crossed the room to her desk, pulled out a pad of paper, and wrote two words on it in a faltering hand.
THIRTY-NINE
The rain was coming down harder now, pooling in the gravel of the first quad, swirling above the half-blocked drains on the street outside.
They had left the warden in her residence. She had walked with them, slowly, to the door. On the threshold, she had offered neither a handshake nor encouragement. Hopper had said something about their gratitude, and Heathcote had simply said, “Don’t get caught.”
The last thing Hopper saw, as the door swung shut, was the warden’s daughter, standing on the stairs and staring at her, interest and disdain mingled on her face.
As they walked out of the college, David was silent. Back in the car, the thud of the Ford’s door shutting the world out, he said: “We can be there and back before curfew. Or stay out. They don’t really have curfew out in the sticks.”
“Do you want to go? I can go by myself if you prefer.”
It was raining harder on the windshield now, blattering on the long hood in front of them. He looked at her. “Ellie, you keep asking me if I want to stay with you. If I’m sure about driving you here, if I want to go home yet, if I wouldn’t rather curl up back in London, go back to Pamela, keep writing propaganda. So for the last time, I don’t want to go home. I don’t wish I was in London. I want to be here. With you.”
“Sorry. Force of habit, I think.” She felt abashed, realizing how much she’d been testing him. “I guess I’m just a bit surprised, that’s all.”
“That’s all right. I’m as surprised as you are.” He grinned and started the engine.
They pulled onto the main road, then turned again, onto Banbury Road, heading north, toward the village Heathcote had written on the paper.
There was a map book in the glove compartment, a crinkled and well-thumbed volume, pages browned by old spilled coffee. The village they were headed for was on the edge between two pages, hardly visible. Alnford. Hopper directed David through the outskirts of Oxford, the houses slowly getting larger and grander. They passed Summertown—she and her friends had come here to escape the university during revision for their finals, sitting in the same grimy café all evening, nursing a single drink before curfew.
Before long, they passed the edge of her memory. They turned north again after the ring road. After a few miles of double-lane road, the track fell into disrepair, until they were creeping along it at fifteen miles an hour, dodging potholes. They were leaving farming country, heading into one of the thick, unconquered belts of forest spreading across England’s middle.
As they drove, the trees approached the road on either side. At first they were twenty yards away, but the gap slowly closed until the tall roots above the ground started taking little bites out of the road, testing the strength of the tarmac, forcing their tendrils into the fissures. Overhead, the trees knitted their branches together, until the road stopped being a road, and became a chute of a hundred whispering greens along which they were funneled.
Hopper looked at her watch. It was just after four in the afternoon. Her brother wouldn’t have got home, but even if Mark had missed her absence in the morning, Laura must have notified him by now. Was there a chance it would not be reported? In the rearview mirror came no sign, no car carrying Warwick and her gaunt friend to arrest them.
The sky darkened. It was still raining, now even harder than at the college. Hopper remembered a perky radio broadcast predicting it when she was last on the rig. When had that been? God, it was only a few days ago. It felt like a month. She and Harv had listened together in his room, and she had—in an unguarded moment—let herself feel that life on the rig might not be so bad, that she might establish some kind of home there.
The woods had closed in completely now. The windshield wiper moved slowly, dragging across at half speed. The blotches of rain that fell on the window stayed for several seconds, fragmenting the road ahead.
“Can you see where we are on the page?”
She looked at the map. “There should be a church.”
And sure enough, there it was, on their left after a few more minutes of creeping.
“Do you want to shelter inside until the worst passes?”
“How much farther?”
“Perhaps four miles.”
“Let’s carry on.”
She looked at the church as they passed. Its decay was well advanced, its walls hidden by sheets of ivy running rampant up the shady side. The tower was only visible by its shape. A few more years and it would perhaps cease to be a church at all; it would simply be a sleeping leviathan by an abandoned path.
The cemetery outside was full of saplings. She pictured what must be happening beneath the ground—roots pushing urgently through the skulls of the dead, tombstones providing only holds for creeping shoots. She said, hardly listening to herself: “We’re not coming back, are we?”
But David did not hear her, and even if he had, she could not have said what she meant by the question.
London: the heaving city, so full of people, would grow empty. The world would die and not be replaced, and there was no indication of what would follow, if anything, on the tiny ring of the Earth remaining habitable.
“Look. There.” He was pointing. At the side of the road there was a large creature, picking at the foliage. They slowed to a halt twenty meters from it, and it looked briefly up before carrying on grazing. “What is that?”
She had never seen one before, but she recognized it from pictures. “I think it’s a wallaby.”
“What’s it doing here?”
“It must have escaped from the ARK Project. I think it was based somewhere around here.”
“That was over thirty years ago.”
“I know.”
After a minute, the creature half walked, half hopped away, through the undergrowth. David started the car, and they rolled gently onward. Some minutes later, she asked again: “Much farther?”
“Not too far.” He nodded abstractedly. It was so shady under the trees and in the clouds that he flicked the car’s headlights on, and they sputtered haltingly into life.
Just a few seconds after the lights went on—as though they had summoned him—a man stepped into the road. He was waving at them, gesturing frantically away and up the road ahead.
There was no time, they had to decide whether to stop now, and Hopper was alarmed to see David’s hand automatically go to the gear stick, feel the car slowing down. Afterward, she wondered how they would have reacted in London, and reasoned that maybe they’d stopped because they were in the countryside. You could trust people in the countryside.
The man could have been anywhere between thirty and fifty, his brown hair matted and streaked with gray. Hair sprouted on the upper reaches of his cheeks so only his eyes were left staring out from the no-man’s-land between his low brow and his beard. He wore a long gray coat that fell nearly to his knees and was covered in pockets with plastic bags sprouting from the edges. His shoes, once perhaps light brown, were now covered almost completely in mud.
“Please,” he was shouting. “Please. You must help us. My wife.” He gestured up the road, and as the car rolled to a stop, he ran around to David’s door, leaned down, was shouting and jabbering through it. David did not open the window. The man kept bellowing, not giving David time to reply.
“Ask him what’s wrong,” Hopper said. “Ask him what’s going on,” but her voice was half drowned by the shouting and the banging, and she knew as she said it that they should have kept driving.
David turned to her and looked first at, then past her, and as his eyes widened, she turned to see other men, two of them, just meters away, moving fast, carrying something between them. They were too close for David to pull away again, and she screamed at him to drive.
It was too late. The men were past the front of the car, dropping the heavy log they held between them, and as David shoved the car into reverse and looked over his shoulder, they felt a thump behind the wheels. They were boxed in, the wheels grinding uselessly against some second obstacle. And then a blow shattered the window and hands were dragging at her, disorienting her, making her feel she was being pulled in two. Something struck the side of her head and she saw nothing, only heard the noise of shouts and the grinding of the car’s engine and the smash of the window on David’s side.
She found one of the hands gripping her, dislodged it and grabbed, bit down on two of the fingers. She heard a scream and the hand withdrew sharply, giving her space to release her seat belt, and she managed to push out at the car door with a foot. It swung, shoving one of the men outside into the other. As she got out, David was wrestling with the man on his side, had grabbed him by the collar. The two of them were half in and half out of the car door.
The rain was falling in sheets around them. One of the men facing her was bleeding from the hand—she had done that, she thought—but the other was back on his feet, staring at her. And she had no weapon. Too late, she remembered the gun that had been right in front of her in the glove compartment. If she turned to try to get it out, they would be on her.
The second man rushed at her. Hopper tried to pull away to the side, remembering confused fragments of self-defense she hadn’t tried for fifteen years. But he was taller than her, stronger, avoided her parrying arms and simply shouldered her to the ground, slithering down with her into the mud as the rain fell around them. Her head struck the bottom of the car’s frame, just where Blake’s blow had knocked her into the wall, and it felt like a seam at the back of her skull had come open. The second man pulled back and scrambled to his feet, breathing hard, and turned to his colleague, grinning.
From her position on the ground, she turned, half falling into the car’s footwell. She had felt something metal in there as they drove. She groped for it and it came to her hand—long, heavy—and just as the second man started to pull at her legs, she closed her fist around it and swung backward, narrowly missing herself as she turned. It bit into something, making a horrible wet crunch, and the man’s grip slackened as he fell to the ground.
She wiped the rain from her eyes as she levered around and stood. The other man was waiting there, looking from her to his fallen friend and back again. She kept the long spanner in her hand, waiting for him to approach her. As soon as he did, she would swing for his head as hard as she could. The back of her scalp was sticky. There was a sound of ragged breathing coming from the prone man on the ground, and the hammering of rain on the windshield behind her.
The standing man inched forward, putting his hands out ahead of him, one still dripping flecks of blood onto the ground. She remembered what she wanted, how close to it she was, and she held the heavy spanner tighter and waited for him, ready to strike.
He stood, breathing hard, glancing at the car and yearning for whatever luxuries he imagined were inside. For a long moment, their eyes met. Then he turned and ran, stumbled away, still clutching his injured hand, lopsided and halting, until the green of his coat was lost among the trees.
She turned and moved around the front of the car, half falling, slipping on the hood. There was a man on the ground, not moving, and for a terrible second she thought it was David. But it was not. It was the man who had first approached them, the one—she reproached herself for thinking of his lie—the one with the wife.
David was sitting with his back to the car. He was bleeding above his eye, the left half of his face already puffy. He spoke in a voice barely audible above the rain. “I stabbed him. He had a knife and I got it off him.” Beneath the man, she saw a dark patch spread over the mulchy ground. She saw too that David had thrown up, and the tang of his vomit reached her nostrils.
“We have to get back in the car now, David. One of them ran off. He might come back.”
David looked up at her, then nodded and stood.
“We have to move these.” The two of them shifted the log at the front of the car out of the way, slowly and painfully. There were two long handmade wedges deposited behind the back wheels, heavy lumps of wood coated with pitch. She and David must have been distracted by the first man—the one now lying on his front—for longer than she had realized.
On the ground, he seemed shorter than he had at first. His head was to one side, and the visible side of his face had already relaxed in death, under its gray-streaked beard. He had goggles above his eyes, the double effect making him look insect-like. The first fly landed on him as she stared.
She moved back around. Her one—the one she had hit—was being washed clean by the rain. He could not have been more than about seventeen. The wound she had inflicted with the spanner must be at the back of his head. His coat had fallen open, exposing a wooden club inside. He reminded her of the children on the rig, or the fresh-faced police officers in London: interchangeable youths, their lives blighted from the beginning, not given the chance to become anything before they were seized into the service of this dying world.
And then the body at her feet groaned, and coughed.
Hopper made her way back to where David was dragging the second wedge out of the way.
“The one I hit. He’s alive. I didn’t realize.”
“So what?”
“So we should . . .”
“What?”
“I don’t know.”
“What do you want to do, take him with us?”
“No.”
“Want to take him back to his friends?”
“But just leaving him . . .” She felt the absurdity even as she said it. “Should we try to help him?”
“No. We have to keep going.”
She moved around to her door and gave the boy a long look. Then she and David slowly clambered back into the car and left the scene, accelerating through the heavy splotches of rain toward their final destination.
FORTY
Perhaps that would be how it ended, she thought. The cities would fall apart, everyone would make their way into the woods, and the towns would be left populated only by the police and the army, running out of bullets, raiding the countryside around them.
David’s face had swollen, and his eyelid was already being levered shut. He asked Hopper for a cigarette and she retrieved one from the glovebox, lit it for him, and passed it into his free hand.
There were still two miles to the village. He drove quickly, nervously, hugging the middle of the road so he could get an extra few miles an hour without the risk of hitting the frequent potholes, speeding up whenever he found twenty meters of clear tarmac. He checked the mirrors every few seconds. So did she.
But no obstacles detained them further and the trees gradually relented as they arrived in the village of Alnford.
It was abandoned. Doors hung open on hinges; the gardens grew wild. The only life that disturbed the street was a pair of crows, which flapped from one roof to another above them as they drove. The rain on the car’s roof was deafening.
“This must be one of the Protected Villages,” David shouted above the noise of the rain. These were trial areas, cleared soon after the end of the Slow in a vain effort to assist places with high numbers of vulnerable individuals. The populations had been sluiced toward larger cities. Only a couple hundred villages had been cleared that way before the idea had been abandoned. Fifteen years ago, Thorne could not have sold the home to anyone if he had tried—either that, or he had deliberately acquired a property in an abandoned hamlet.
The Last Day Page 29