The Last Wild

by Piers Torday

  *Am I the best in the world at recovering from a firestick wound?* he asks quietly.

  I want to laugh, but Polly’s serious expression stops me.

  I pick up a tray from the worktop, and they follow me down the steps and out into the garden, where the pigeons fly down from the tree to meet us, lining up on a low wall.

  I look at them, every single one in turn – grey and white, because I know this is possibly the last time I will ever see them. I place the tray carefully down on the ground, and with Polly kneeling next to me, we begin to unpack its contents. Bound bags of gel batons, each one packed with a slow-release version of Laura II.

  One by one, we take out the bags and fasten one to each bird, tying them on tightly with ribbons. I explain carefully to them how all they need to do is pull the ribbon to release and open the bag. The gel sticks can be chewed, licked, pecked or even swallowed whole – the effect will be the same. They all nod their understanding, apart from the white one, who says thoughtfully, *Stick the bag and chew the ribbon.*

  Loaded with their cargo, the pigeons turn to say goodbye, first to the General, who has appeared from nowhere – on Polly’s shoulder this time. And she doesn’t seem to mind at all.

  *If we should meet again one day, brave comrades,* he says, nervously feeling their sharp beaks with his antennae, *be so good as to remember that we once fought together on the same side.*

  *We shall try,* say the grey pigeons.

  *Remember, one day we shall fight together on the same side,* adds the white pigeon wisely, before joining the rest of his flock, who are already waddling down to where the stag lies on the lawn.

  *Goodbye, great Stag,* the pigeons say. They move to leave, before turning back awkwardly. *Will we see you again at the Ring of Trees?*

  He nods at them sleepily, through half-closed eyes.

  *You will see me again, I’m sure of it.*

  *Yes, we’re sure we won’t see you again,* says the white pigeon cheerily, before being nearly pecked to death by the others. They then shuffle down to the mouse, who performs a traditional Farewell Dance, that seems to involve flicking every one of their heads with her tail. But as soon as she’s finished she abruptly declares, *Well, I don’t much like goodbyes. I’ve said enough in my time,* and scurries away under a bush. So the birds flock up and land on the wolf-cub’s back, pecking busily at his fur, until he shakes them off with a growl.

  And finally, they come to me.

  I pick the white pigeon up in my hands, while Polly looks on.

  *Pigeons,* I say, *you’ve got a hard journey ahead. You might not all make it. And who knows how many animals you will still find living at the Ring.* And I stroke the bird’s beak and feathers for perhaps the last time. I don’t want to let them go, not on their own. But they will be faster than we could ever be. *Maybe there will be enough left for you to start again. You know my father’s magic is not perfect yet – but it’s better than no magic at all.*

  *Better than no magic at all,* repeats the white pigeon softly to himself, like he is understanding something for the very first time.

  I kiss him gently on the top of his head, before throwing my hands up, releasing him into the air. The others follow him, flying in formation up above the trees, off into the endless sky beyond. We wait until the last pigeon is nothing more than a distant dot over the horizon, until there is nothing to stare at but the clouds floating by, and then I feel Polly’s hand softly taking mine and leading me back up the garden, to where Dad is now knelt by the stag, stroking his flank.

  ‘Kester,’ she says, as we walk up towards them, ‘now that the pigeons have gone home with a cure, do you think we can go and find my –’

  She doesn’t finish her sentence, as I freeze, and drop her hand.

  Because I can hear voices. Talking.

  An animal voice. Talking to a human voice.

  Except it isn’t mine.

  I race up the garden towards Dad and the stag. They both turn to me, the stag still looking woozy from the drug, his eyelids drooping low, Dad looking startled, turning round – as he says – as my dad says to the stag –

  *Tell me, great Stag – is this in the dream?*

  The stag nods slowly, and weak as he is, he staggers to his feet. The wolf-cub comes to him, in his shadow. The mouse and the General on his horns. I have never seen them look so serious.

  My dad can talk to animals too –

  Is this what Mum meant when she said, ‘He has to tell you’?

  I’m looking at Dad. At the stag. Furious –

  *I’m sorry,* he says. *I know I should have … you know, chip off the old … but they took you away before I could …*

  *Yes,* interrupts the stag. *Yes, this was in the dream.* He turns to me, half his head dark in the shadow of the old apple tree, his horns sharp against the sky. *Wildness, the dream said the son of the man who talked would lead us over earth and rock, through water and fire, to save a wild. This you have done and we thank you for it.* He touches my hair with his nose. *But I am afraid the dream did not end there.*

  There are so many questions bouncing around my head that I don’t know which one to choose first, and then –

  A noise makes us all turn around.

  The noise coming from a distant dot in the sky, high above the glass towers. A dot that at first I think is one of the pigeons, perhaps the white one losing his way again – but if it is a bird, it’s a very big metal one. Making a whupwhup noise, with whirring rotor blades instead of wings. A metal bird with purple sides, a large F painted across the front.

  A metal bird heading straight for us.

  But Dad isn’t frightened. He puts his arm around my shoulder as we watch it, and grips me tight.

  *You didn’t think he’d, you know, let us get away with it … ?* he murmurs.

  The Factorium helicopter slices through the air, its windows dark and closed, the steel blades spinning circles of shadow across the river, as the sun disappears behind the horizon.

  *Soldier!* whispers a voice from my shoulder. I look down to see the General, the cockroach who first talked to me in the Yard. *The rest of the dream begins. Are you ready?* he hisses.

  I’m not sure. There’s so much that I don’t—

  But then I look again at the brave insect on my shoulder. I think of the pigeons flying on past the glass towers. I think of the wild we’re going to save. I turn round to look at the animals we already rescued. The Dad I found again. The new friends I made.

  The journey we took together. Everything we did.

  The roar of the helicopter engines grows deafening, the trees sway in the rush of air, the downdraught pulls at our faces—

  I reach out for Dad’s hand, and Polly’s. The stag stands behind me, the wolf-cub at my side.

  *Yes, General,* I whisper back. *We’re ready.*

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  I can’t sleep.

  Tossing and turning, I watch the next day arrive through the skylight above my bed, with grey and heavy clouds filling the sky. Everything looks and feels muggy. Gazing around my airless room, it hasn’t changed at all since the night they came and took me to Spectrum Hall.

  It was a rainy night. A strange noise from downstairs – and a man in dark standing in the doorway, wearing leather gloves. I will never forget that voice as long as I live, or the smell of those gloves.

  I was scared of the dark then. And scared of rain tapping the glass, creaks in the floor, windows rattling in a storm. Frightened even of the way my animal toys looked at night, as if they might come alive …but nothing like that scares me now.

  Not after what my wild and I have been through together – chased by the wolf guardians from the Ring of Trees, shot at by cullers, half drowned in a fish-road trying to escape, almost burnt alive at a farm full of starving outsiders
– to save the creatures dozing on the lawn below.

  But if you think not being scared of things makes you braver, you’d be wrong. Everything we did, that everyone calls being brave, didn’t feel like being brave at the time. It felt like the only thing to do, and at the same time I can’t imagine myself doing anything like that again. Not while lying here, in my room full of sagging toys and piles of faded comics spilling on to the floor.

  ‘Can’t or won’t?’ Mum used to say. I don’t know.

  I feel a knot in my stomach and turn over to stare at the wall. Haven’t we done enough – helping Dad make a cure for the virus in his lab, and sending pigeons laden with bags of it back to the Ring of Trees? As it is, we’re in massive trouble. We broke every law in the land bringing diseased animals into the city, which is meant to be an infection-free zone. Even though I’ve now learned that the virus can’t spread to humans, everyone else believes Facto’s lies.

  But what freaks me out the most is the fact that my dad can also talk to animals. He still won’t tell me how, or why he didn’t tell me before. It’s like he and the stag know something that they’re keeping from me.

  Suddenly there is a whole lot more to be scared of than creaks and bumps in the night. I pull the duvet over my head and sink down underneath it.

  Just as I finally start to drift off, there’s a hiss as my door slides open and the duvet is dragged off me on to the floor. Polly is standing there, arms folded and head cocked, her fierce eyes studying me. She doesn’t look scared or tired.

  In fact, she looks at the room like it said something to annoy her. She sweeps a sheaf of comics off my bedside table on to the floor and puts in their place a vase full of irises and fresh water.

  ‘Now,’ she says, rubbing her hands together, ‘what about some breakfast? A hot drink . . . something good and sweet to eat . . . a nicely laid table with everything on it?’

  Blinking in the light, I try to smile.

  ‘It wasn’t an invitation,’ she says, disappearing back out of the door with a flick of her hair. ‘It was an order. I’m your guest now, remember, Kidnapper.’

  Downstairs in the kitchen, I stumble around following Polly’s instructions and lay out breakfast. The bright red kitchen, which was like a bomb site when we first came back, has been swept, cleaned, tidied and polished, just like when Mum was around. Although Mum never made me do as much of the elbow work as Polly does.

  I first got to know Polly at her house, Wind’s Edge, the biggest house I’ve ever seen – right on the furthest edge of the Quarantine Zone. I broke in looking for help, because I thought I had the red-eye. And then she made me a cup of herbal-medicine tea for my fever in the dirtiest kitchen I’d ever seen.

  ‘But your kitchen is different,’ said Polly, spraying and polishing the gleaming metal and plastic surfaces in the days after we rescued Dad. ‘It’s designed to be clean. Ours looked better dirty, because it was old-fashioned and meant to be like that.’

  Looking around, I suppose I see what she means – Mum and Dad designed this when we moved in and made sure we had the very latest stuff. The work counters, clouds of white plastic that seem to hover above the floor, are called ‘living ovens’, which meant you could put meals down anywhere on them, and depending on whether you said ‘Heat!’ or ‘Cool!’ – they would do that to the food.

  (Sometimes. Most times they would do either nothing or the opposite of what you asked.)

  The fridge is the latest model. (Or was, six years ago.) If you swiped the door it went transparent, so you could see what was inside, and a list of recipes using the food you had popped up. Unfortunately it also had a voice feature, which we could never turn off. ‘More milk!’ it would beep, if we were running low, and mainly when we weren’t.

  It must have said that a lot over the last few years. There’s not much milk around since all the cows died.

  ‘Is it called a living fridge too?’ said Polly when she first saw it, running her hand over the glass door in amazement.

  ‘You are out of butter! Would you like me to order some more?’ the fridge snapped at her.

  No, not a living fridge, just an annoying one. (Or a comfridge, in actual fact.) I’ve got enough trouble with talking animals, I don’t need talking machines too. Both being scientists, Mum and Dad loved having the latest stuff, and I guess I did too once – except now it seems . . . not as important as it once did.

  With one exception.

  The mega-screen. Opposite the living oven and the talking fridge, filling a whole wall, with pictures you can touch and move, expand and shrink, talk to and interact with. I loved it six years ago and I love it again now.

  Polly couldn’t believe her eyes at first.

  ‘We never . . .’ She had to touch the mega-screen to make sure it was real. ‘In the countryside . . . after the quarantine came . . . we were cut off. Everything is so much further ahead in the city.’

  Perhaps – at least when it comes to screens and fridges.

  This morning – like every other morning – Polly and I are eating bowls of breakfast formula. If you close your eyes, sometimes you really can imagine the flavours of honey and cream and bananas in each mouthful. But as soon as you open your eyes, and see the bright pink – it tastes of prawn-cocktail crisps again.

  But Polly being Polly, we’re not just eating formula. Somehow, in the tangled jungle of rotten flowers and weeds our garden has become while Dad was locked up, she has found stuff to eat. Wizened berries that still just have flavour when blitzed in our blender, a handful of shrivelled mint leaves and of course some iris petals have created a natural topping for our meal that makes it taste not quite as chemical.

  Her adopted toad hops around the rest of the living oven croaking. We found the toad in the Forest of the Dead, where animals go to die – except he was alive. She thought he was gross at first, but now they are never apart. He never says a word to me, and I know Polly can’t talk to him, yet they seem to have . . . a connection. She had just better be careful not to say ‘Heat!’ while he’s on there.

  Watching him watch her with his blinking black eyes, she sits and spoons the formula into her mouth without looking at me once. I can guess what she’s thinking.

  I put my hand out, on top of hers – but she snatches it away.

  ‘When?’ she asks without looking up. ‘When?’

  I dig in my pocket and slide some of my words across the counter.

  JEEPERS! WAIT JUST A SECOND!

  Since I can’t talk, we communicate using written words. When I first met Polly by breaking into her house, we used letter tiles from a word game. But they got lost in the final battle against Skuldiss and his cullers outside here. So we spent two days cutting out words and phrases from the piles of comics in my bedroom.

  They cover most things. In a superhero kind of way.

  She looks at the words without reaction, and pushes her half-finished bowl of formula cereal away. ‘I helped you do everything,’ she says. ‘I helped you get better when you were sick, helped you find food on our way here – and now all I want to do is go back home and find out where my parents are.’

  As she says that I realize, with a jolt, that I don’t want her to leave.

  When we were first captured by Captain Skuldiss, he told us that Polly’s parents had been arrested for illegally trying to get formula in the northern city of Mons. You aren’t allowed formula if you ignored Facto’s orders and try to stay in the Quarantine Zone like they had.

  I know Polly is worried about them. I know she wants to find her mum and dad as badly as I did. But I also want her to stay. I want her to be part of the new normal.

  I don’t say any of that – can’t say any of that. I don’t give her any more words to look at, but turn to go and rinse my bowl out at the sink beneath the window. And as I look up out of the window, across our quiet and empty street – our Culdee Sack – I see the strangest thing.

  A dog. A white one.

  A dog where there shouldn�
�t be one, in an animal-free city. The only animals meant to be alive are the ones in the garden behind me, or awaiting our pigeons with the cure at the Ring of Trees. But there is a dog, as white as a ghost, standing across the road.

  I only have the faintest memory of dogs before the virus came. A neighbour had one as a pet, black and shaggy, who used to jump up at me and lick my face. But I don’t know all the names for the different kinds.

  This one is short and strong-looking, with a tiny tail, a big snouted face and pointed ears. I can’t see if his eyes are red or pink; from here they just look like black dots. As I’m straining to get a closer look through the window, the dog opens his mouth, slowly, and stares at me. But I don’t hear a thing. No animal voice that I can recognize.

  And the strangest thing – inside his mouth, nothing. No teeth, just ugly pink ridges. And where there should be a tongue, a raw little pink stump. His black eyes gaze at me with – what?

  I don’t know, and I don’t like it.

  I glance back at Polly, who is humming a tune to herself and teaching her toad to jump over formula bowls. She hasn’t noticed and nor has he. When I turn back to the window, the dog has gone. Completely vanished, as if it had never been there.

  For a moment, I catch sight of my face in the half reflection of the window. Ginger curls in need of a good cut, green eyes staring past like they are trying to tell me something I don’t want to know. Was that dog some kind of daydream? Perhaps I just didn’t sleep too well.

  I turn away – and Dad walks in. He has tried to brush his hair, is wearing a wonky tie and an iris flower stuck upside down in his buttonhole. A briefcase dangles between his hands, and he thumps it down on the living oven so hard it turns on. The bottom of the case starts to smoke and sizzle.

  Polly and I stare at him and the briefcase, but he doesn’t seem to notice.

  I,’ he says proudly, ‘have a plan.’

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