The Trees

by Ali Shaw

  ‘But you just said that they’re not bright enough to smash it down.’

  ‘They’re not. I’m talking about the chickens.’

  Michelle frowned. ‘I don’t follow you . . .’

  ‘I can smell those chickens from here. There will be things with better noses than mine who come here at night, and they’ll be checking every fencepost for a way in. They know when something’s weak enough to take advantage, believe me.’

  Michelle looked exasperated. ‘Why does everything always have to want to eat something else? Okay, I’ll talk to Roland about it. But I doubt he’ll give it much thought. He’s sort of . . . stopped looking at the little details, of late. He’ll probably insist that we keep the cows in the field all day just to spite me.’

  Hannah held her tongue after that. She followed Michelle’s direction, and helped to gather leaves and shrubs the cows could eat. They had to go some way into the forest to find them, for where the trees met the valley their bark was hard as elephant hide, and what leaves they still possessed drooped dankly for the ground. Even the earth was ripped open there, the dead roots on show in the silt.

  ‘Earlier,’ began Michelle, once they had found some healthier growth, ‘when you were telling me all that stuff about your brother . . . I wanted to tell you that I know nothing’s ever simple. There’s been . . . killing here, too.’

  Hannah’s fingers paused, gripping tight the twigs she had been pulling.

  ‘You’ve met our friend Leonard,’ said Michelle.

  A branch cracked behind them and Hannah scanned the woods in its direction. There was nothing to see. Leonard and his dog had headed in the other direction that morning.

  ‘When the trees came,’ Michelle continued, ‘those of us who stayed here were in two minds about what to do. Roland wasn’t just put in charge instantly. There was another man, a big man called David, and he had his own ideas about how we should react. He’d been awake to see it happen, and I think it had unsettled him on some fundamental level. He said that what had happened was a sort of apocalypse, and that we were in a kind of hell now, and what we did would come back to bless or to haunt us. He was a very persuasive speaker. Lots of people believed him.’

  ‘Not you, by the sound of it.’

  ‘I threw my lot in with Roland, of course. David was making people hysterical, and Roland was the only one to challenge him. On that first morning, Roland found a fire axe in the hotel’s ruins and used it to cut a tree down. He told David that, if the forest was so godlike, it could come right now and punish him. Nothing happened, if you don’t count David’s subsequent tantrum, but it was an important marker. It gave people someone else to look up to. Anyway . . . like I said, I think David had become unhinged somehow. He started saying we needed to appease the forest. I remember . . . I remember coming out of the hotel ruins one day, after salvaging what we could from the kitchen, and David had caught a forest hog. He and his followers had rounded it up and they’d stabbed it horribly with knives and it was bleeding to death and could hardly stand. They weren’t even going to eat it, they just dragged it onto a tree stump and slit its throat and left it there as if it were on an altar. Roland told me right after that that we were going to have to deal with David.’

  ‘What happened?’ asked Hannah, noting that she had not encountered anyone called David in the valley.

  ‘Well, first of all, more people started showing up. Some hoped there might be supplies to be had, some just stumbled upon us. Both Roland and David invited them to stay, saying we could use their assistance here. Roland wanted everybody he could to help with building and organising. But David’s idea was to make us into a kind of congregation. When he started talking about building a church to the forest, that was the final straw for Roland. They had a blazing row in front of everyone.’

  ‘A row I presume Roland won?’

  ‘No. You’d think it, now, but back then people remained divided. David had a knack for touching a nerve. Things became unbearably tense, some people had actual fights, and there were countless heated arguments.’

  ‘So what resolved it? Everyone here seems behind Roland now.’

  ‘Leonard. He arrived on his own one day, along with his dog. He didn’t even introduce himself to any of us. We were asking each other, Does anyone know this guy? I’ve never seen him before. Anyway, he arrived, and at first didn’t really say anything. He just watched, and people were happy to stay out of his way. Then, when things reached a boiling point, we called a big meeting for everybody to attend. The idea was that we’d thrash out our differences, and choose to build either a community under Roland or a sort of crazy tree cult with David. Perhaps it was naive of us to expect consensus. When Roland suggested, after both he and David had said their piece, that we put the future to a ballot, David said there was no way he could agree to it. Probably he thought he’d lose, but he said something along the lines of voting being part of a system that had failed us. Voting had no authority, that’s what he said. Only the forest. And that was when Leonard stood up.’

  Hannah shuddered, and remembered the gunman. You will either decide that you are your own authority or imagine a new one.

  Michelle carried on with the story. ‘Leonard told David he was right. There were no authorities now, he said, and none of our old rules. He said the only law was survival and that therefore . . . therefore we would be doing things Roland’s way, since it gave us the best chance of riding out the winter. And he said that was the end of the argument, and when he’d finished speaking even David seemed at a loss for words. I’m not even sure he’d ever noticed Leonard before. Eventually he recovered himself and rebutted him in front of everyone, but you could tell he was frightened by the way Leonard had addressed him. Halfway through his response, Leonard just walked away, as if David had never even been speaking. And then, in the morning, David had gone.’

  ‘He’d just left?’

  ‘That’s what we were supposed to assume. I mean, I know Leonard well enough now to be sure that’s not what happened, but the official line is that David just packed his bags and vanished without telling anyone.’

  Hannah gripped tight the bundle of sticks she had gathered. ‘He said there are no policemen. That there are no judges now. But he’s made himself into a sort of policeman.’

  Michelle nodded thoughtfully. ‘Who said that? Leonard? That does sound just like the kind of thing he’d say.’

  ‘No . . . no, that was somebody else. But did nobody confront Leonard? Did nobody try to find David?’

  ‘No . . . You see, after that, Roland was in charge. Things started to get done. It was hard work, but it wasn’t long before people felt more secure, felt their chances were getting better. Those who’d followed David just sort of forgot about him. They began to see, I think, how Roland’s plan could work out for all of us.’

  ‘Someone should have confronted him,’ murmured Hannah. ‘He might do the same again.’

  ‘You’re right, of course,’ Michelle admitted. ‘But people are scared, and with good reason. There are children and old people here. Families. And Leonard has Roland’s ear. In fact, if I’m honest with you, Hannah . . . Roland’s always risen to the top, in everything he’s done, but this time it’s been different. Having Leonard at his side has made him . . . well, it’s difficult to place my finger on it.’ She swallowed. She looked very small, Hannah thought, beneath all those trees. ‘Put it this way, now sometimes I don’t trust him. Now sometimes I’m frightened. Now sometimes I wish I had somewhere else to be, other than in this damned valley.’

  7

  Fox

  At night, in the valley, several fires were always kept burning. Chief among these was a bonfire in the middle of the settlement, provided for warmth and for cooking over. Smaller fires burned at four points around the perimeter, both to lend light and to act as sentry posts against anything coming out of the forest. People took it in turns to staff them, and stacks of wooden torches were stored at each, in case the look
outs needed to venture away from the flames.

  One such sentry was just beginning to nod off, beside the eastern campfire, when Hiroko appeared out of the darkness. The firelight lit up her eyes like a cat’s. ‘I’m here for a torch,’ she announced, then gave the sentry her best hungry smile.

  ‘B-but,’ said the sentry, ‘they’re not to be wasted.’

  ‘Who says I’m going to waste it?’

  ‘They’re for emergencies only. In case we need to find our way.’

  ‘Not this one,’ she said, and skipped past to take it. She scooped its brand through the flames and it caught at once. The sentry didn’t oppose her, and she couldn’t stop giggling when she returned to Seb with the torch blazing in her hand.

  ‘Idiots wouldn’t be able to defend this place if they tried,’ she told him. ‘Now come with me.’

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘Anywhere,’ she shrugged. ‘I just can’t bear to sit around in the mud.’

  Soon they had found their way into the settlement’s scrap yard. The sputtering light of the torch played over the junk mounds as if searching them, illuminating the hob of a gas cooker, the hubcap of a car, a half of satellite dish, a useless extension cable. Everything it lit it shadowed away again quickly, and all the time it crackled and spat as if disgusted with what it showed.

  ‘What a lot of stuff we used to have,’ muttered Seb, looking around him. ‘And now it’s all landfill.’

  ‘There’s got to be something worth finding, in one of these piles.’

  A rumbling came from some way off in the darkness, and for a moment they both looked up. It was just a part of the hotel crumbling in, and when a second rumble came they ignored it. They had been getting used to that sound.

  ‘I think I see something,’ said Hiroko, looking back at the scrap. She thrust the torch towards him. ‘Hold this.’

  She danced up the side of the biggest scrapheap, lifted a broken chair and pulled something out from beneath. When she skidded back down, she was holding an intact laptop.

  Seb’s face altered as she gave it to him, and flickers of the boy he had been not so long ago came and went like the light of the flame. He had changed more than mere dirt and a broken nose accounted for. Handing her back the torch, he sat down cross-legged and opened the laptop on the ground before him. He touched the smooth plastic of the screen as if it were some priceless antiquity.

  Instead of pressing the power button at once, he reached beneath his collar. From there he retrieved his memory stick, on its string, and plugged it into the appropriate socket. Hiroko bit her lip, finding to her surprise that she was excited. She wanted to at last be introduced to this website into which he’d invested so much of his youth: his online scrapbook and his webpage letters to his loved ones.

  ‘Moment of truth,’ he said, and pressed the power button.

  Nothing happened. The laptop was dead.

  ‘Oh,’ said Hiroko, slouching. ‘Damn. It was worth a try, Seb. I’m sorry.’

  He shook his head. ‘Don’t be.’ He stood up holding the laptop, with the memory stick still attached to it. Then he flung it onto the scrapheap. Hiroko’s arm trailed after it on instinct, but it flew off like a discus and clattered against the other pieces of the demolished world.

  ‘Seb! Your memory stick . . .’

  ‘Don’t worry. I should have done that ages ago. I should have dropped it into the sea. It’s served its purpose, now.’

  Hiroko stepped closer to him. ‘That can’t have been easy.’

  ‘It’s got no future. Best to let it go and keep sight of what does.’

  She reached out and stroked a finger over the bridge of his nose. ‘Which is?’

  He grinned. ‘Us, I hope. And speaking of the future, I’ve been thinking about what to do next. Once we’re done in this valley, I mean. Actually, I’ve been thinking about it for some time, I just didn’t want to jump in and suggest it before I’d had a chance to mull it over.’ He licked his lips. ‘So . . . here goes . . . Hiroko, what would you say if I suggested—’

  ‘Wait,’ she snapped, turning away with her nose twitching.

  Seb deflated. ‘What is it?’

  Hiroko reached up and felt her empty hood. She patted her shoulder and found nothing there. ‘Where’s Yasuo?’ She turned on the spot and swept the torch after shadows. ‘Yasuo?’ she called, and the name was swallowed by the night air. ‘Where are you, Yasuo?’

  Seb, too, became concerned. ‘He was with us, wasn’t he, when we started looking through the scrapheap?’

  ‘I’m not sure. I think so. He’s normally right here.’

  There was no sign of him, so she tried to think when she’d last seen the little fox. She thought she’d heard him purring in her hood not a minute before, yet the harder she tried to remember the more blurred was the result. He was snuggled in her hood in so many of her memories that she couldn’t be sure whether any given one had happened a minute ago, a day or a week.

  She cupped a hand to her mouth. ‘Yasuo!’

  No answer.

  They hurried back along the route they had walked, flashing the flaming torch at the scrap mounds. The orange light found picture frames and wheels without tyres, lampstands and bookshelves and a pot of paint, but no fox.

  ‘Yasuo!’ they both yelled. Hiroko kept expecting him to streak out of the shadows, to materialise from the firelight as he had on that first night when he’d introduced himself to them. There was only the stillness of the dark.

  ‘Yasuo!’ she cried, as they came out of the scrapheap and back into the settlement proper. She could not believe she had lost him.

  From somewhere nearby, Leonard’s Alsatian barked.

  ‘Oh shit!’ cursed Hiroko, spurring towards it. Seb broke into a run behind her, shouting the fox’s name. Snakes of reflected fire shimmered through the mud, but all Hiroko could think of was the dog. It had cast hungry eyes at Yasuo ever since they’d met it, and Leonard didn’t bother to leash it at night. Had Yasuo slipped away alone, the Alsatian could easily have followed up on its instincts.

  ‘Yasuo?’ she screamed. ‘Please!’

  Somebody stepped irate out of their shelter and hissed at them to keep the noise down.

  ‘Yasuo?’ shouted Seb, at the top of his voice.

  On Hiroko rushed, almost tripping on a tree stump. She’d grown used to the way they covered the valley, but in the streaming light of her torch they were like mutilated remains.

  ‘Yasuo! Yasuo!’

  ‘What’s going on, kids?’ called Roland gruffly, coming out of his hut beside the big wooden hall. ‘People are trying to get some sleep.’

  ‘Yasuo!’ was all she could yell, hurtling onwards.

  ‘Hiroko?’ asked Adrien, appearing with Hannah alongside.

  She dashed on past them all. ‘Yasuo!’

  Then, up ahead, somebody shouted something else.

  It was not the name of the fox, but a voice raised in alarm. It came from the livestock enclosure, and something skittered through Hiroko’s heart when she heard it. She had a sudden vivid recollection of her grandmother standing outside her duck house, shaking in outrage.

  At once she broke into a final sprint, her torch guttering out as she ran. She cast it aside and hurdled the enclosure’s fence as soon as she reached it, heading for the chicken coop, around which five or six other people had already gathered with a torch of their own. Its light painted their shocked expressions red. They had lifted the roof of the coop and were looking in at its contents.

  Hiroko skidded to a halt a few yards from them, but Seb overtook her and saw what they were seeing.

  ‘Oh no,’ Hiroko whispered, drawing closer almost at a tiptoe. ‘No no no . . .’

  Seb tried to make her turn back. ‘You don’t want to see this.’

  She pushed him aside.

  All of the chickens’ heads were missing, and blood had sprayed the coop’s walls as if it were paint spun from a bucket. The proud cockerel’s neck of fine feat
hers was topped now by a festival of sticky red.

  Roland was the first of those who’d followed them to catch up. ‘What’s going on?’ he asked, and strode into the huddle around the coop. He stared for a long minute at the sight, then turned from it furious with dismay. ‘Who the hell did this?’

  ‘It had to be a fox,’ said one of those gathered. ‘This is what foxes do.’

  Hiroko took a step backwards, into the shadows. It wasn’t far enough for Roland’s searching eyes to miss her. When he came towards her, she thought for a moment he was going to punch her.

  ‘It wasn’t Yasuo,’ she said, before he had a chance to speak.

  ‘You can prove that, can you?’

  ‘It must have been some other fox.’

  Roland turned to Seb. ‘Can you vouch for that?’

  Seb nodded. ‘Yes. Yes, Yasuo was with us all night.’

  ‘And what about just now? Is that why you woke us all up by yelling like you’d lost him?’

  At first, neither Hiroko nor Seb could say a word. Adrien and Hannah had by now arrived, and Michelle and a half-dozen others, but they were all stricken spectators. Then Seb came up with something. ‘He’s not big enough.’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Hiroko, seizing upon it because it was all they had. ‘He’s too young to do something like this. Foxes don’t learn to kill until they’re older, and Yasuo is just a baby.’

  Roland opened his mouth to disagree, but at that moment a little yip cut the air. Hiroko’s heart froze, but it was already too late.

  Yasuo crept out from under the chicken coop. Some of those gathered nearby cried out and backed off, as if he had the power to behead them too. He trotted over to Hiroko and purred contentedly, just like he always did when he wanted picking up. Even in the flickering light, she could see that his snout was a brighter red than usual, and something as thin and rubbery as an elastic band was caught on his teeth.

  ‘Oh, Yasuo,’ she said, crouching to huddle him up. He licked her nose when she lifted him, and his tongue smelled of gore.

  She was aware that everyone was looking at her, but she refused to look back. She deliberately turned her back on them.