by Piers Torday
I look back at the bridge, to see Dagger staring at me again, his heavy paws resting on the wall. He opens his mouth, almost like he’s smiling.
The twin suns begin rise up out of the tunnel, and with them a noise, as the formula train clanks and roars into view, rocking its way down the tracks towards me.
Sorry, Polly, this isn’t going to work. I’m getting out of here.
Except I’m stuck. I go to move, and get jerked back.
Shining my watch, I can see what by.
My scarf. Aida was right. It is stupid. Because somehow when I bent over the points switch, pressing down with all my weight, both dangling ends got trapped in between the lever and its rusted pivot. I try to pull them free, but they’re trapped tight.
The formula train is now thundering down the track, the headlamps glowing in my face as I scrabble to unravel the scarf from around my neck, fumbling –
Jerking the scarf free with a rip, I fall flat on my back –
The bullet head of the train, its black windscreen, the scream of the wheels bearing down on me –
And then they are there. Out of nowhere, scrambling and skittering along the rails.
Squirrels.
Grey squirrels, their fur turned silver by the moonlight. Hundreds of them, streaming out of the tunnel, bounding along the ground, ahead of the train. Swarming on to the lever, their pairs of tiny claws drag it down to the ground. With a scream that sounds like they were ripping open the rail itself, I can hear the points slide open.
Squirrels. But I didn’t call them. They just appeared.
Shuddering, the train veers on to the side track at full speed. This sends a wave right through its whole jointed body, which convulses, sending the cars tumbling over as if they were made of cardboard boxes rather than iron. As it does, the machine gives an angry moan, as rusting wheels skid off the tracks and containers scrape along the embankment.
The greatest noise you ever heard. It feels like every piece of metal on earth has rained down from the skies like hail, bouncing off the walls, tunnel and tracks.
I am flat on the ground, burying my head under my arms, as a rusting shard shoots straight over me, slicing open the embankment wall above and showering me with brick dust.
And then, after the banging has drawn to a close and the clouds of reddish black dust have risen and settled … a strange silence.
Then Aida and the others are scrambling down the slope on their bikes, the dog and wolf-cub careering behind them. As they see them approach, the squirrels chatter quickly to one another and melt back into the shadows, before the children even notice that they were there.
*Wait!* I yell after them, but they’re gone.
For a moment Dagger looks after their disappearing tails as if he is going to follow, but then he turns his back on them and picks his way over the wreckage towards the first car. It is lying completely at the wrong angle – the wheels facing in different directions. He sniffs at the upended corner, his tail wagging like crazy, almost jumping from side to side with excitement.
‘You found something, boy?’ Aida calls to the dog. ‘He got a real nose for formula,’ she says to me proudly.
No wonder, after being force-fed the fake stuff. And no sweat, by the way, I wish I could add. I’m fine. That was no bother at all.
Aida and Eric hurry after Dagger and haul one another up over the wheels, each of which is about their size, on to the sloping side of the car, and begin trying to slide open the massive doors. After pulling and grunting, they decide to take just one door between them as we watch.
‘OK, get ready,’ warns Aida. ‘If any of them formula kegs have bust, there’s gonna be a lot of pink dust. You hear me? A lot.’
Sleeves over mouths, they strain and pull, until the door judders open with a roar.
‘What the …?’ says Aida.
Because, as I can now see, there is no formula in this train. There is instead an unexpected, living cargo.
Wolves.
In the slanting light from the crashed train, I can see that their greyish brown fur now hangs loose over their bones like a coat that’s too big, and the teeth in their long snouts look more yellow and rotten than when I saw them last. The pads on their feet have shrunken in, exposing longer but blunter claws. Tongues swollen, eyes bloodshot – not infected, perhaps, but they are covered in too much dirt to tell – these six creatures have changed so much from when I first met them.
But there is no mistaking who, or what, they are.
Guardians. The beasts appointed by my wild to keep them safe in their sanctuary at the Ring of Trees. When we first met, they blamed humans for the virus and tried to kill me. The stag intervened and saved my life but killed Wolf-Cub’s father in the process.
The cub who then ran away from his pack to follow me and save the wild. The cub now desperate to rejoin them as a full-grown wolf.
For a moment we are all looking at one another. Wolves staring at children, a lone dog at a pack, and a mother at her cub. Mother Wolf is not the largest of them, but I will never forget those eyes, that stared after us as we left the Ring – her mate and leader lying bloodied at the bottom of a gully behind her.
At first no one says anything. There is only the hiss and steam of the buckled train engine, the steady panting of the wolves and the drip of leaking oil on to the tracks.
Then, with a snarl, the cub’s mother bounds out of the carriage. She lands with a wobble, but she stays upright and shakes her fur. Aida instantly raises her prod, as do the others, but the mother ignores them.
I touch Aida’s hand, and she whips round. ‘You think I scared of these things?’
I don’t, but I think I might be able to handle them better. She sighs. ‘You got a way with them too? Then ask them what happened to our food.’
I wish it was that simple. But she lowers her prod and signals to the others to do the same.
The new leader of the wolf pack doesn’t head for the children. Or the dog, who is watching everything with his blank stare. Or even me. The cub told me she is sworn to kill both me and the stag, as revenge for her mate’s death. I stand back, feeling her dirty fur brush past me, as she instead stalks round me towards her son.
Wolf-Cub snarls and cowers at the same time. He is nearly large enough to match her strength now, but he was shot a week ago, and she looks like she has not eaten for days.
Standing over her son, she looks down her nose at him. It’s only as the stray headlights of the derailed train catch her eyes that I see the sadness in them. Bending down, she licks and nuzzles him. She nudges his bandage softly, investigating it, pulling it off.
The cub begins to relax. *Mother …*
At this her eyes harden, and she straightens up. *It’s strange,* she says. *You look like my son. You smell like my son. And yet here you are running with humans, and a sworn enemy of your pack. So you can’t be my son. Not any more.*
And she opens her jaws and grabs him by the scruff of his neck, almost hauling him clean off the ground, shaking and shaking him, pulling at him till blood starts to spill down his coat –
*Stop!* I can’t take this any longer. *Leave him alone. It’s not him you want. If you want to avenge his father – take on someone your own size.*
The minute the words are out of my head, I wish I hadn’t said them. Mother drops the cub, who collapses in a whimpering heap on the ground. She stalks towards me, and now the other five tumble out of the carriage behind her, the children raising their prods but taking ten paces back. Only the dog refuses to move.
The fur on Mother’s face is two colours; black around her eyes, white around her muzzle. In the darkness it is almost like looking at a pair of amber eyes floating above a white cloud.
*Oh, I’m sorry, human. Is this wolf-cub your son now? There must be so much he can learn from you, that he never could from me,* she says in her husky voice. *Shall you teach him to walk on two legs and wear cloth?* She glances at the carnage of the train wreck behind her. *I
see you are already introducing him to the kind of destruction that only your kind can achieve.*
I don’t think now is a good time to try and explain that it was squirrels who stopped the train, not me.
From behind her there is a whimper from the crumpled heap of fur lying on the ground. *Please, Mother, I never meant to hurt you, I swear—*
*You know, Cub,* Mother says coolly, without even looking back at him, *the weaker you sound, the easier it is for me to despise you. A fatal flaw, just like your father. It was his pride that got him killed, and your downfall will be your cowardice.*
She takes another step towards me, and I can smell her breath, no longer rich and meaty as before, but dry and stale as dust.
‘You have this under control, yeah?’ says Aida next to me, not taking her eyes off Mother for a moment, or lowering her prod. ‘You’re telling them not to attack us? This is no time for life stories, understand? Facto will be sending a patrol right now.’
I turn back to Mother. *He is no coward. He got hit by a firestick trying to save my life.*
She curls her lip. *I’m not interested in your stories. All I know is he left his pack, betraying his oath to the Guardians.*
*Your cub helped us save your wild. He risked his own life. For the wild you were meant to protect.*
*Save?* Her voice echoes around the steep stone walls of the cutting with disbelief. *They could not be saved. The berry-eye had done its worst. There was no wild left to be saved.*
*So you decided to save yourselves.* I’m really hoping she’s wrong or lying. I think about the pigeons, flying north with the cure, through the middle of the Zone, under storm clouds and over cullers. With no way of telling if they even made it out of the city or not. But if Mother is lying, she doesn’t even blink.
*We left the wild and tried to find the human land you had gone to. We found a place of glass tall-homes, but it was too near to be the one you spoke of. Glass tall-homes hidden in a valley of rock.*
Mons, mountain city of the north. Where Polly’s parents were captured by Facto and where formula is made before being sent in all directions on trains like the one behind us.
*We found no wild though, and no wolf-cub. There was no food for us in your glass place, only this sand, the colour of salmon.* Formula is transported as a dry powder and mixed with water for eating – the only ‘cooking’ the grey dinner ladies at Spectrum Hall ever did. *It tasted of nothing good, but we ate it. And then the metal box it was in started to move.*
In the distance, a siren gives a solo whoop in a street, which could be for us, could be nothing. There’s another sound too, very quiet at first, but I know straightaway what it is. Whispering, from the drains and grates sunk into the rails around us.
The whispering I heard from the sink.
The whispering I heard when I first saw Dagger.
I shake my head as if to clear it, like the buzzing of a fly, but the noise stays steady in my head. And I can see that the wolves and the dog have heard it too. They look at one another.
Aida hisses under her breath to me. ‘Whatever you saying, there’s nothing for us here. Come.’ She points her prod at the upturned carriage, where Eric and 123 have found nothing but formula crates chewed apart, pouches clawed open and licked clean by the wolves. Barely a crumb left to fill up three huge empty rucksacks.
*So you came here looking for food?*
Mother’s tail lowers, but only by a fraction. *I think you know perfectly well why we came here.*
I look at Mother Wolf and her pack, their eyes full of hunger and hate. Wolf-Cub has pulled himself to his feet, his tail hanging so low behind him. *Wildness, please – if she will not listen to me, please tell my mother what I have done, how brave I was.*
His own mother still does not look at him even as he says this.
Aida turns back up the slope towards the bridge. ‘Come! This is a bust, we done. Leave these mangy beasts. The cullers will sort them out, you’ll see.’
Mother talks straight over her, to me. *We stayed on these metal boxes and let them carry us here because we heard a dark call come to us in the night.* She is not looking at me now though. *A dark call we intend to answer.*
And then she snarls, before running off down the track into the tunnel, followed by her pack – without even a second glance at her cub. To my amazement they are followed by Dagger, bounding after the six wolves as fast as he can.
The children stop wheeling their bikes for a moment, Aida turning and yelling. ‘Dagger! Come here now, boy, you hear?’
Wolf-Cub howls after them. *Mother, come back, don’t leave me …* But he doesn’t move, almost clinging to my side.
The whispering grows louder and louder in my head.
*Can you not hear it, Wolf-Cub?* I ask him.
*Don’t listen,* he says miserably. *No good will come of answering a dark call.*
I know. They all warned me. Yet I can’t help it. That white dog appeared immediately after Polly told me about the Iris. That was when the whispering started. Now these wolves have ruined the one chance we had of getting Polly and her secret back. And every time, the whispering.
Polly always told me not to be frightened. She was the first to follow a lead – following Ma to her farm, telling me to be brave in the Forest of the Dead.
I turn back to look at the Waste Mountain Gang, standing in a knot of bikes at the bottom of the slope. Aida puts her hands on her hips. ‘Don’t you even think about it, animal-boy,’ she starts. ‘Not even for a second.’
But I can’t help it.
The whispering in the tunnel draws me on.
I will never be allowed to forget that I have a gift. I can hear things others can’t.
I am a Wildness, and I hear the darkness calling me.
Ignoring their shouts of protest, the wailing of the wolf-cub, I charge at Eric and his bike, knocking them both over. Weighed down with his rucksack of kit, he is too slow to stop me grabbing the handlebars – and I set off along the tracks in pursuit of the wolves and the white dog.
I pedal as fast as I can up the track, my ripped scarf blowing around me as the bike swerves over the rails and bumps along the concrete sleepers in between. Eric’s bike needs charging and the engine keeps spluttering.
I keep twisting round, looking back, half expecting to see the rest of the gang in pursuit or my wolf chasing after me.
But they aren’t. I know they will be returning to Waste Town with a story about me running away. And somehow I don’t think the cub wants to go anywhere near his mother again for a while. I just have to hope he can look after himself until I return.
I have to find out the connection between this white dog and everything that has happened, the meaning of these whispers which brought a pack of wolves here from the Ring of Trees.
Our one plan to get Polly and the Iris failed because of them.
I have to know why.
As the tracks run on into this valley of stone-brick walls, the lights of the city fade away. The only sense of being outside at all comes from the strip of purple sky I can still see, hovering above the orange glow of the city at night, criss-crossed by pylons and overhead wires. The mouth of the black tunnel ahead looms up to swallow me, just as it has the dog and wolves.
Riding inside, the rasping bike echoes against the damp walls and the beam from the big silver lamp catches speed signs and giant air fans clogged with dust. Then just occasionally, far ahead – the glimpse of a bounding dark tail.
The overhead wires hum in the air, and my head is filled with the sound of wolves, calling out to one another, as they spread across the tracks in front. Talking seems to sap their energy though, and soon Mother’s short commands fade to heavy pants and snarls. I am following the skitters of their claws on the polished tracks.
I have to keep focused on the chase ahead.
I pedal on in silence. There is no cockroach in my pocket to point out how slowly I am cycling, no wolf running by my side to boast that we have nearly c
aught them. I begin to wonder if the stag would have let me just ride after the wolves like this, whether Polly would actually be cheering me on.
It doesn’t matter. None of them are here. I am completely alone, only the sound of my own breath and a spinning electric bike chain for company. But with every spin of the wheels, the strangest thing is, I start to worry less, about what I should be doing for my wild, and Polly.
It sounds weird, but the more alone I am, the more free I feel.
Only the dark call beckons me on.
*I am alone,* I say to myself. For the first time in a long time.
*Or are you just running away?* says a voice from the top of my head. *Running further and further away from your wild, it seems to me.*
Oh. It turns out there is a cockroach after all.
*General, everything has gone wrong since that dog appeared, and I’m determined to find out why. Isn’t that what a Wildness is meant to do?*
*Of course. You must do as you judge to be right,* he sighs, fluttering down on to the handlebars.
I don’t understand this weather – last night in the Garden of the Dead it was freezing cold, and now it is boiling hot inside a tunnel. It makes no sense at all. My neck is damp with sweat, and I can hear the engine starting to fade, my legs, arms and back aching as I try to catch up with the wolves.
Plus I’m starving.
The formula I had at home feels a very long time ago now … I can almost hear my own stomach grumbling with hunger in the silence.
Then it hits me – the silence.
I stop the bike for a moment, and with a groan the big eye of the headlamp and the green frame light power down completely. I hold my breath.
The wolves’ pants and clashes with the tracks have faded into nothing. Nothing, apart from –
Whispering. The voices I heard from the kitchen sink are all around. Chanting clearly, loudly, in this empty tunnel – the same dark call the mouse heard long ago.
I can’t turn back now. I jump straight on to the bike and press the button. The engine splutters for a second and then fades back into nothing. I press the button again and again, but nothing happens.
