“I knelt there for a while, still screaming and spitting at him, even though he wasn’t moving. Then I got off him and stood up. I realised that Sofia was still kicking me, again and again as if she was joining in too. That made me laugh. I actually stood there and laughed, holding my tummy as the pan floated away down the aisle.”
I looked at the others. Each face shadowed with a gawp of disbelief in the firelight.
“Fuck me,” said Bryce quietly. He tapped his head. “Now I don’t feel so bad about this.” He got up.
“Where are you going?” said Gloria.
“Taking a piss,” he grunted, making off for the cottage.
“Don’t go back behind the house,” said Gloria. “It’s not safe.”
Bryce stopped, grunted again and changed direction. We heard a zip and then a long stream of fluid hitting a tree.
“I realised two things then,” said Gloria. “The first was that I could survive. I could look after myself and look after Sofia, so long as we were together. The second was that I couldn’t stay in Glasgow. I had to find somewhere safe. I found two backpacks on one of the supermarket shelves and filled them with as much food as I could. Then I left. I don’t know how many days I walked, but one afternoon I found this place. There were some dead sheep in the field, just bones. The door was wide open and I called in but nobody answered, so I went inside. There was nobody about. One of the doors was off its hinges and the rest were wide open. There was stuff everywhere; clothes, objects all over the place. I found a bed at the back of the house with its covers all thrown back. I was tired and it smelled a bit like my mum, so I crawled in and fell asleep. I don’t know how long I slept for, might have been a day or two.
“When I woke up I was starving. I still had some food left from the supermarket, but I had a look in the kitchen and found a larder that had a few packets and tins. When I was full I looked outside. The barn door had fallen off. There were two bodies underneath it, a man and a woman I think. I guessed they were quite old, but I don’t really know, it had been too long. Their heads and shoulders were sticking out of the door and they were face down in the dirt, but they were looking at each other. The man had a shotgun in his hand.” She nodded over at Grimes. “That one,” she said. “I didn’t want to look at them too long because they reminded me of Mum and Dad, so I took the gun, found a spade and threw dirt over them until they were buried.”
She kissed the baby’s head and stroked it. Bryce returned with some wood, which he threw on the fire. He sat down and started smoking.
“I decided to stay,” said Gloria. “I knew that it would start to get cold soon and I was going to need a safe place to have Sofia. You can see quite a long way from up here, and there isn’t much else for miles. I had shelter, food, and I found a stream running through the woods. That’s where I get my water. I boil it up in case it’s dirty.”
“So what’s with the fire?” said Bryce.
Gloria looked up at him. There was a sudden darkness to her, not quite the child any more.
“Food ran out,” she said. “Nothing left from the supermarket, nothing left in the larder. I was five months pregnant and I had nothing to eat. I started to eat bark, wood, pine cones, mud...I got sick a lot, spent most of the time in bed. Then I was outside one afternoon dragging water back from the stream, feeling like I was going to die, when I saw something far away down on the road. I saw this man walking. I hadn’t seen anyone alive since the supermarket, I was all ready to start waving my arms and shouting, but something stopped me. It felt like something spoke to me, something inside me that wasn’t me. I sometimes think it was Sofia. I can’t really explain it, but it just said No, don’t wave. Start a fire.
“I didn’t know whether or not the man was friendly, or whether or not he had food. But I had nothing to lose. The voice in my head said light a fire. So that’s what I did. I lit a fire where he could see it and I waited, and he came.”
She looked up at each of us, that darkness in her face again.
“Just like you did,” she said.
“He wasn’t friendly,” she said after a pause. “But he did have food. I ate for two weeks on what he had. After that, I spent my days preparing fires and watching the road. Every so often, I’d get a visitor. Sometimes they were friendly and sometimes they weren’t, but they always had something useful.”
We sat in silence for a while. I didn’t want to ask any questions. I was just glad the gun was where it was.
“And Sofia,” said Grimes. “When was she born?”
“Three weeks ago,” said Gloria. She looked into the flames and little snarl of resentment curled her lip. “This was my first fire since.”
“How do you know about the boats?” said Richard.
“Some visitors told me,” said Gloria. She spoke as if her ‘visitors’ were friendly travellers looking for rest, which I imagine some of them probably had been.
She glanced up at us again, eyes still full of disdain.
“Must hurt,” she said. “Does it?”
“What do you mean?” said Richard.
“Them not being near you.” She spoke impatiently, nodding each word as if she was explaining something to a child. “It must hurt.”
Richard and I shared an uncomfortable look, not sure how far we should take this. Gloria was already agitated enough.
“Yes,” I said. “Of course. That’s why we’re trying to get to them.”
Gloria gave a purposeful sniff, as if at least that had satisfied her.
“Your daughter will be upset,” she said, looking right at me. “She’ll be crying, unhappy, wondering why her daddy’s not there.”
I winced. The words felt like needles.
“What did the…visitors say?” Grimes broke in.
“What?” said Gloria.
“The people who told you about the boat. What did they say? Who were they?”
“A couple. They were married I think. They said there were boats taking people away to another country where it wasn’t so bad. They told me that they were going to find civilisation and that I should go with them so I could have Sofia somewhere safe, where there was medicine.” She puffed through her nose. “What do I want with civilisation? We’ve got everything we need here, haven’t we, darling?”
She cooed into her daughter’s sleeping face.
“What else did they tell you?” said Richard, who had sat up and was leaning towards the fire.
Gloria shrugged. “Not much. Except that they leave on Christmas Day.”
“Christmas Day?” said Richard. He looked around at us. “That’s in less than three weeks.”
“Gloria?” said Grimes.
“Mm-hm?” sang Gloria, the darkness gone from her face once again.
“We need to get to those boats. We’re going to stay here tonight and then we’re leaving tomorrow morning. We need a vehicle. Is there one on the farm? Do you know anywhere around here that might have one?”
“A vehicle?” said Gloria. “You mean like a car?”
“Yes,” said Grimes. “A car, truck, anything with an engine.”
“Ummmm…” Gloria looked up at the sky as if thinking over a problem. “There might be one,” she said. “There’s another place near here, down the other side of the hill.”
“Does anyone live there?” said Grimes.
“Aye, a family. I’ve seen a truck down there. I don’t know if it works though, I’ve never seen them drive it.”
She yawned.
“I’m sleepy,” she said. “Think we’ll head to bed.”
“Gloria,” said Richard. “This is important. How do you know them?”
“The Hamiltons?” stifling another yawn. “The Hamiltons and I have an agreement. We stay out of each other’s way.”
“Well, we need to talk to them,” said Richard. “See if they’ll let us use their truck. Are they friendly?”
“Friendly?” said Gloria, getting up from the fire. She seemed to consider the word as if it had
some strange meaning.
“Do you think they would consider a trade?” said Richard.
“I don’t know,” said Gloria, turning for the cottage. “You’ll have to take your chances,” she said as she disappeared with her daughter into the darkness.
We kept watch that night, mostly in case Gloria came back out for her gun. We found some more logs in the wood to keep the fire going. I took the first turn. I stared into the flames and thought about Beth’s pregnancies with Alice and Arthur, then the births and the difficult months afterwards. Nothing came close to what Gloria had been through, so why had we found them so hard? Why was the process of bringing life into the world, even in a bubble of middle-class comfort, medicine and relative safety, so fraught? Why did it take so much emotion? Why did this process keep perpetuating itself, generation after generation going through the same thing, time after time? Why did life bother?
Gloria had talked about the thing inside of her, the cold voice of something that wasn’t her taking over and giving her strength and will when she had none of her own. I had read once that we were just vehicles for our genes to propagate, nothing more than hosts for a parasite with a much bigger plan than any of our own. Maybe that was true.
In the morning Richard shook me awake and put a cup of black tea on the ground next to me.
“We’re heading off soon,” he said, then knelt to pack his bag.
Harvey was cleaning dishes in the snow. He saw me and nodded, then went back to smearing a cloth around the corners of a blackened saucepan. I sat up and shook off my blanket, stretched my back. Bryce was towering above the embers of the fire in front of me, smoking. The bandage around his head was tattered and dark red.
“Sweet dreams?” he grinned.
“Where’s Grimes?” I said, rubbing my face.
“Inside with Goldilocks,” said Bryce. “Checking her over.”
“And the gun?” I said.
Richard held it up for me to see, then got back to packing his bag. I stood up, stretched some more and looked around. Gloria had been right: there was nothing for miles.
“Three weeks,” I said. “Five hundred miles in three weeks, and we don’t know what’s out there.”
Bryce squeezed his face into a wrinkled smile and nodded, bouncing on his toes and blowing smoke through his nostrils. I turned to Richard.
“How are we going to get that truck?” I said. “What can we possibly trade?”
“If they haven’t used it for six months, then they’re not likely to use it now, are they?” he said. “We have food. Perhaps they’ll take that. Otherwise…”
He glanced at Bryce.
“Otherwise what?” I said.
“We take it,” said Bryce. “Like Dick says, it doesn’t seem like they’re using it anyway.”
“Maybe they just don’t have any fuel,” I said. “What then?”
“Then we’re back to where we were,” shrugged Richard.
“Fucked again, you mean,” I said.
Richard stared at me silently as he stuffed the last of his belongings into his bag and pulled it shut.
“I need a piss,” I said. I threw my tea on the embers and walked off towards the cottage. I heard Grimes and Gloria talking inside and walked around the back to where the farm buildings were. In the yard I stopped and saw the burned-out barn and its fallen door next to a mound of dirt. I walked past it, around the back of another stone building that seemed to be suspended in a state of permanent semi-collapse. I followed its wall through the mud until I reached the end, where I stopped and unzipped my trousers.
As I relieved myself, I caught something out of the corner of my eye. The hill to my left ran down to another road parallel to the one we had been on the day before. The hill was steep and covered in snow, with the occasional patch of mud showing through, but a little way down I saw something else poking through. It looked like a stick or a branch. I zipped myself up and edged carefully down the slope towards it. As I got nearer, I saw more of the branches sticking up through the snow. Some seemed to be broken, their thin ends pointing at right angles.
Little thoughts arrived in my head as I made my way down the slope. My brain didn’t quite allow them to register, but they were there all the same.
What happened to Gloria’s visitors? What did she do?
I stumbled to a halt. I was close enough to see now. They weren’t branches; they were limbs. Human limbs sticking up from a pile of bodies buried beneath the snow and the dirt. For a few moments I was frozen to the spot, wanting to turn back but unable to move as those terrible thoughts made themselves clear in my head.
Here they are. Gloria’s visitors. This is what she did. This is what life made Gloria do.
Finally I turned and made my way up the hill. As I got to the top I rounded the corner and came face to face with Gloria in the yard. Sofia was awake and upright, strapped to her front and looking around with wide eyes. Gloria shook her head at me.
“I told you it wasn’t safe back there,” she said, her face dark and serious.
I faced her for a while, readying myself, convinced she had some weapon concealed in her jacket that she would use to cut me up and send me down into the pit behind me with the rest. But then her face softened and she looked at her feet. She took a step to her left and let me past.
“We need to go,” I said when I got back to the fire. I picked up my bag and strapped it on my back. “We need to go now.”
PIGS
We knew that Gloria’s gun would have been useful to us but, despite everything, it still felt wrong to take it. We might have felt otherwise had it not been for Sofia. She needed protection, and the only thing she had was her mother, and the only thing her mother had was a gun. It did no good to think too deeply about this, about what sort of world we were allowing Sofia to be raised in. This question is already the burden of every parent, no matter when or where they live.
Gloria showed us where the Hamiltons’ house was, but she wouldn’t walk there with us. Staying out of each other’s way was part of the ‘agreement’ she had with them. This should have concerned us, but with all the strangeness of the previous evening it didn’t seem out of place.
We made a deal with Gloria. We would take the gun with us on the way to the house. When we reached the road, we’d leave it next to the ditch for her to collect, along with some food for her in return for our safe passage. Again, it seemed wrong to leave Sofia with nothing.
We walked carefully down the hill, avoiding Gloria’s burial ground (I had explained what I had seen hastily to the others as we packed) and dropped the gun at the bottom, looking up at Gloria standing silhouetted against the bleak, burned farm. She raised an arm and dropped it. Then we walked for a mile or two in the direction she had pointed us in. The road followed sharp bends down a hill. The trees from the wood next to Gloria’s cottage ran down the hill beside us and another steep hill to the right made a natural, deep valley that seemed to have formed a protection from the fires. I could even see grass sprouting through the snow and a small stream ripened with meltwater ran alongside us. It was the first normal and natural thing I had seen in a while; it felt like we were somewhere that hadn’t been touched by the destruction.
Eventually the road flattened out and we came to an old white house set back into the trees. Smoke rose from a chimney and one window was lit up with a dim, flickering light. In front of it was a yard and some small, single-storey outhouses. Parked in the yard, facing the gate, was a well-used orange Jeep. Nothing - neither the buildings nor the truck - seemed to bear any marks of damage.
We stopped at the gate and Bryce leaned over.
“Be careful,” whispered Harvey. “We don’t know who they are.”
“Can’t be worse than Bo Peep, can they?” said Bryce, jabbing his thumb back along the road. “Ho!” he shouted. Richard pulled him back.
“Just let me do the talking,” he said.
Bryce stepped back. He raised his hands.
“Alrigh
t, Dick,” he said. “Go for your life.”
Richard stepped forward.
“Hello?” he called. “Anyone there?”
We heard a rattle and a wooden door slam shut in the yard. A man appeared from one of the outhouses and stopped, facing us, open-mouthed. He looked in his sixties, well fed with a round face and bald scalp. Thick tufts of white hair sprouted from the sides of his head. He was wearing wellington boots, beige work trousers and a heavy, plaid shirt underneath a tank top. The shirt was untucked and his sleeves were rolled up exposing strong, thick forearms. In one big hand he carried a bucket.
“Sorry to startle you,” said Richard.
“Huh,” he said, looking at each of us in turn. Then he suddenly shook his head and smiled, striding towards us.
“Not at all,” he laughed. His accent was full of Yorkshire warmth. “My apologies!”
He laid a hand on the gate and tapped his nose twice.
“Not that used to visitors,” he whispered, then grinned.
“Now, how can I help?”
It felt as if we were ramblers asking for directions. The white of the house behind even gave the impression of sunlight.
“We were wondering if we might talk to you?” said Richard. “We need some help.”
The man looked us over quietly with a quizzical half-smirk, taking in our bags and clothing. Then he looked at Richard and nodded.
The End of the World Running Club Page 19
