It got so warm as I rested in the tower that I took my coat off – I was filthy underneath, my clothes every shade of brown through to black from sleeping in woods. These shades were intermingled with different reds from innumerable minor injuries that I could no longer recall individually – I just imagined my whole body hurting. Another layer down I didn’t investigate, only noting the dryness of my skin, and how my joints cracked with caked-in dirt and sweat as I moved. My boots though had been in the water, and so were placed out in the sun to dry; exposing my feet, that looked like a poster in a doctor’s waiting room.
Throughout the day I slept, long deep gulps of sleep, with food and drink enough to sate me in-between. In my bag were what food we’d had left – bits of rations, a forgotten piece of rabbit at least three days old – and the fresh, gifted sandwiches; and these I ate without worry, for I’d have scraps left for the journey, and could do without them anyways. As for water, I had iodine pills to treat all I could carry off from the first fresh stream I came across.
That evening I gathered up my things, bid farewell to the foxes, and began the last walk. Knowing my general direction, and having Wareing’s marked map, I made as much progress as the pair of us had in the opposite direction. I couldn’t tell if I was walking the precise same paths, not least for it soon being the dead of night, but with each remembered landmark came reassurance. Recalling that we had seen hardly anyone along the route’s rural byways the first time around, after starting that evening I walked for all of those two nights and the day in-between. I was beyond tiredness, my body beyond aching; I had no thought but to continue, enjoying the sense of focus. Unlike before I had no task to complete when reaching journey’s end, the aim this time being simply to get there, hope for the best, and if I didn’t die that moment then hope I’d be allowed to sleep.
Of course, hunger struck around two days in. I had none of Wareing’s nous for hunting. Like a hobo finding roadkill, I chased a cawing blackbird away from the body of a freshly dead woodpigeon and was thrilled at my find, getting a fire going later and cooking it till it looked the right colour. After resting that second day, I walked all of the final night. Without another tramping along beside me, no idle chatter, no thoughts of military missions or personal dilemmas, my mind was clear. I was spooked by the sounds of the crops swaying in the fields, of the animals scuttling or calling or cooing in the trees I passed under. One time I even thought I heard an owl to-wit-to-wooing nearby, the sound confirmed an hour later by the noble silhouette of the hunter gliding down with wings outstretched to pick a mouse up from the path ahead of me.
The clarity of mind with which I pursued my objective – rarely equalled since – saw me reach my goal much quicker than anticipated. The realisation came at some point that, for all our epic hiking, Wareing had been pacing us, had kept us relatively un-exhausted. The tiredness he’d kept from me found me though as I knelt to tie a bootlace; I waking, knelt at the roadside, hours later.
By then I knew though that I must have been within a few miles of the lands under the control of Jack Berne’s commune, and policed by the necessarily paranoiac Zak. As I thought of stopping by some trees to think how to handle this, for it was daylight by then, I heard a noise that had my nerves alerted before my brain could form a picture of what I was hearing: dogs, though very distant, growling and threatening. Wishing I had a bat’s ears, I looked around to place the sound, and breaking cover walked up a ridge that flanked my path. Following the sound, I could see a couple of hundred yards away a small farmstead, just a few stone buildings. There were no people visible, but there was a cow held in an improvised half-brick, half-fence enclosure. That this noble creature had been kept alive by somebody this long, only to now find itself turning and ramming with its small, lowered horns as five dogs surrounded it, was a minor tragedy. The biggest curs must have bitten and battered at the protective structure, pulling parts of it away; to allow them now, like jackals on the savannah, to threaten and tire the larger animal. The cow was falling on its ankles as it spun, butting its head at one dog as another bit its side. The fight would not go on for long.
It must have been one of the commune’s farms, I realised, there being no way the animal would have been alive up to now otherwise. There was nothing I could have done to save the cow, bar making myself the dogs’ target. I was too far away for them to spot me, and so I kept walking.
For all that drama, I still had the commune community to deal with. I was under no illusion that if it was Zak who found me first that I would be killed as promised. My best chance then was to have Mill be the one who discovered me, or at least have her present there when found, if only to call out to Zak as he went to shoot – for though his hate for me was partly envy (that was obvious, wasn’t it?) it meant he would do anything for her. Even her reaction though I couldn’t be sure of; nor that of Jack Berne, who’d looked so disappointed as we’d left them the previous time. Otherwise, my only hope was to throw myself down on the ground face-down, as I wagered that even Zak wouldn’t want to have to show Jack or Mill a corpse with a bullet in the back.
As I walked that short walk, scared to death, my mind not shutting up, I tried instead to think about the different places I had been on that journey, the habitations and the people that Wareing and I had encountered; and though the seaside town I had just left had been the most like the old life, with its houses, cars and beer, it was the commune where the people were half-sensible, where life was lived with dignity, even if by necessity in a new way. The London motorway base would have been liveable I suppose; perhaps so amongst the farmers’ groups we had seen guarding their fields; who knew, even the seaside town too if Patrick’s reign succeeded… yet the commune had been the only place where I remembered thinking that a person could be happy.
And had it really been from this happiest place that Wareing and I had somehow conspired to be sent away with a death threat?
‘What is wrong with us?’ I asked myself, panic rising, the moment of re-engagement nearing with every footstep. ‘What is wrong with our mission? In our secrecy, our actions, are we anti-life, anti-humane, cast out of every corner of the earth leaving only a lingering odour in the air? Haven’t we only wanted to make places safe, places no one may have had a chance to check again for years?’ I felt repellent, but I wanted to do good, to repent, to beg forgiveness, to be readmitted into humanity, to do for these good people simple, healthy things like dig and grow and live off the product of my labours.
I was still on lanes, in copses, outside the town proper; when beyond a fringe of trees I saw two boiler-suited agriculturists, and knew I needed some of my training back. My clothes the colour of the earth I had been traipsing, I threw myself down on the ground until the pair had moved away. They chatted, another behind them whistled; they were so comfortable so far out from their base! Once they had gone, I scurried along the other side of a field-dividing hedgerow, and made it another half a mile into town. When I saw the houses on the outskirts, I made for back gardens, chanced a couple of minor roads at full pelt… and was almost in view of the town centre when I heard the engine.
To be honest, I was amazed I’d gotten that far. I’d had no plan to broach their security, no way of securing my return, not really. I stepped out from between two houses I was passing behind with hands up, bag thrown out in front of me in the road.
‘You remember what I said I’d do if I ever saw you again?’
The scene was just the same: the four-by-four, the pointed gun. I spoke,
‘You have a farm about three miles that-a-way?’ I risked moving an arm to point. ‘There was a cow there. Dogs were attacking it, I guess it’s dead now.’
‘Dogs?’
‘I’ve seen them in other towns, in packs, picking off the corpses. You might not have had them here yet, not enough bodies to feed on. But they’re coming your way.’
‘Why?’
‘No one left to eat where they came from? Needing fresh flesh?’
‘You’ve come a
ll the way back to tell us this? And where’s the other one, your mate?’
‘Dead, shot by a gang on the coast.’
‘I’m sorry to hear it.’ And to be fair, he did sound it. His gun though, still pointed at me, didn’t waver. ‘And you’ve been to the coast, and back?’
‘We’re Army, it’s what we do.’
‘You stay there,’ he then instructed me. ‘Don’t you bloody move.’ He had heard the footsteps before me, of someone running to pause by the vehicle,
‘Crofts, you’re back.’ It was Mill.
‘Don’t you start getting all gooey-eyed.’ Zak’s gaze, having flickered in her direction, turned back my way, ‘Tell her what you told me.’
‘There’s dogs, attacking one of your farms, over by the ridge about three miles back.’
‘I reckon it’s Hawker’s place he means.’ Zak didn’t take the gun off me for one moment. ‘Do we believe him?’
Mill pondered, then asked me, ‘You wouldn’t lie to us again?’
‘Tie me, hands and feet, put me in a sack if you have to. Let’s all go there and find out.’
The sack proved unnecessary, but trussed up like a turkey I was soon with them in the back of the tree surgeon’s utility vehicle, bombing back the way I had just came. Sure enough I heard the dogs again, even if I couldn’t see from my position; Zak popping off three crank-cartridge rounds before we had stopped.
‘I think I clipped a couple of the curs. You stay here,’ he offered needlessly, my bound legs going numb.
‘I think I might.’
The pair, leaving me with the driver, got down and went out of my vision.
‘The cow’s almost dead,’ I heard Mill say, before another gun crack.
‘Can we still eat it,’ asked Zak, ‘after dog’s have bitten into it?’
‘You know, I’ve no idea,’ she answered, as if shocked at finding a gap in her knowledge.
‘So that’s the cow, Mill. But what about Hawker?’
The voices moved out of earshot.
The journey back to the Council House was slower and sombre,
‘I’m going to untie his feet,’ said Mill spotting my discomfort, not waiting for Zak’s thoughts on the matter. Anyway, the guard’s mind was elsewhere, he asking,
‘So, do we keep the place on with no animals left there?’
‘There’s still his land that needs keeping an eye on,’ she answered as she undid my binds. ‘Don’t you try and run now,’ she instructed me, more with sadness than authority. She continued, after sitting back on the wooden slats,
‘I suppose you’ve a right to know, being the one who brought us here: the farmer who kept those animals was Grant Hawker, one of our group, though he stayed on his own land. His wife was visiting her sister in Manchester on E-Day, and never made it back. I think being out here alone must have been too sad for him, and he…’
‘Took his own life?’
‘He was in the house when we looked.’
‘We’ll come back with some men to collect him,’ said Zak, as if to ease any doubts I had of his being properly attended to.
‘We’ve a man who was a teacher of Religious Education,’ added Mill in that respect. ‘He’ll give him the right service.’
‘I only spoke to him three days ago,’ said the van’s driver then, through an open hatch behind him in the cabin. ‘I’d dropped off his grain ration.’
Mill looked so sad, ‘He’d left his animals well fed, but wasn’t there to shoo the dogs off when they came.’
‘There were pigs and chickens behind the farmhouse,’ added Zak. ‘The dogs had been feeding there a while.’
I noticed that in her hand Mill twirled a chicken feather, before throwing it like a dart into the air, to be swept up by the turbulence around the vehicle.
‘I think he felt useless,’ she lamented. ‘He stuck here, and she only sixty miles away, an hour and a half in the car before.’
‘A lot of people feel like that now,’ I empathised.
‘We could have done with a couple of guards to leave there,’ mused Zak. ‘The dogs will be back before we are. We’re going to have to watch for them: put up netting, watch the animals more. We’ll talk about it at Council.’
His mind was moving back to priorities, allowing Mill’s to linger yet,
‘The world has gotten larger, don’t you think? Grant told me once that if he were younger he’d have gone looking for her anyway, like you, walking overland; that he would have just left his farm and everything.’
I closed my eyes and thought of Mrs Hawker: lost in the murmuring crowds waiting for Captain Linkater’s delivery at Manchester’s food distribution point; or three-months dead in a burnt out house; or killed in a looting dispute; or fleeing for the countryside and land like that which she knew, and getting shot by someone protecting their crop against half-wild raiders.
There was a reason we after E-Day hardly asked about another’s family, and it was because if they weren’t there then they weren’t anywhere. We all felt it in a way that was almost collective: for our own family or for others’ it was the same pity.
Chapter 33 – Communal Eating