Acting completely normal, Preston dismounts his bike and leans it against the paddock fence, and then fishes in his pocket for his cigarettes, which are slightly squashed. Gabriel bites his lip.
‘What’s the matter?’ says Beth, looking between them. ‘What happened?’
Kerry wanders over, a notable skip in her step, when Preston explains, ‘I got shot.’
‘What?’ the girls screech in unison, and Beth immediately starts frisking Gabriel for injuries.
‘I’m fine, Mum,’ mumbles Gabriel as Preston sheds his jacket.
Cigarette dangling from his lips, Preston winces as he strips his jacket away from the wound. His grey t shirt is soaked with blood on his left side, and his arm is patchy with it. He examines himself with an expression akin to amusement as Kerry visibly blanches and Beth grimaces. Preston inhales deeply on his cigarette before tugging thoughtfully on his shirt.
‘So,’ he says, ‘who wants to dig the bullet out?’
‘Um,’ says Kerry weakly, ‘perhaps you ought to lie down...’
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ he snaps, waving his cigarette at her, ‘I feel fine. Did anyone even think to pack the first aid kit, by the way, or will the lucky winner be extracting the bugger with their hands?’
‘Excuse me,’ says Beth quietly, and she walks briskly to the door, which she just manages to heave open before she’s sick on the ground. Gabriel hurries over to her, muttering gently and patting her back.
Preston turns to Kerry and grins. ‘The honour is yours, Ginger!’
‘Oh hooray,’ mutters Kerry, shooting a filthy look at Gabriel. ‘Perhaps you should take your shirt off, then, let me look at it...’
‘It’s probably just embedded in there,’ says Preston cheerily. ‘You might be able to pluck it right out. I can’t feel a thing, it was lucky really...’
Gabriel glances over as Preston lifts his shirt over his head and then, after moving too much and too fast, collapses. Kerry leaps out of the way and he lands on the concrete floor, groaning. His half-smoked cigarette rolls out from between his fingers, smouldering, and Ratbag saunters over to investigate, sniffing nosily at the wound. Kerry pushes the cat away with her toes.
‘Perhaps I ought to lie down,’ murmurs Preston, chuckling softly.
In the doorway, Beth continues to heave.
Sanctuary 2
Over the next few days Preston takes great pleasure in watching the others work around him from the comfort of his sleeping bag, smoking lazily and stroking the cat, who has by now amassed a vast collection of dead mice that he’s gifted Preston with.
Despite Gabriel’s idea to use the hay piles as shelving for the tins, they’ve had to remove the straw from the barn, owing to the fact that a large family of mice has been living within it. Ratbag had such fun while they did this, chasing mice as they leapt free from their moving homes and fled for their lives. Kerry and Beth have spent afternoons on the motorway, halting passing cars and gently asking terrified Inlanders for donations. From this they’ve gathered a tatty travel pillow, a small torch, wet wipes, half a loaf of bread, a tin of dry shampoo, and a large bottle of cola, the latter of which they’ve been rationing to savour.
Two lists they’ve compiled have been scribbled on past months in the calendar: one a list of things they need to obtain (including but not limited to something they can use as a bath, plates, cups, mattresses and winter coats) and the other a list of tasks they need to carry out (reinforcing and repairing the walls, setting up a perimeter, clearing out mouse droppings). But today they’ve agreed to take a day off, much to Preston’s disappointment.
‘Read to me,’ he commands Gabriel in an attempt to remain important.
Kerry is beginning to feel positively filthy. They haven’t been able to bathe in over two weeks, and she knows she probably looks horrendous. She feels ashamed every time she catches a whiff of herself or someone else, and the others seem to feel the same, as they’ve all been keeping their distances from each other as they work. They’ve come to the conclusion that they’ll wait for rain, but as their luck would have it, they’ve been treated to blue skies ever since they’ve arrived at the barn. Preston, however, finds the situation hilarious.
‘We smell so bloody bad!’ he says, roaring with laughter as they settle down in close quarters to sleep every night.
It’s a situation in which they can’t win, for the weather is growing colder by the day and they have not yet managed to acquire winter coats. No one can decide if they’d rather huddle for warmth or avoid the terrible smell of their peers.
Beth, Kerry has noticed, is still being sick. ‘It’s the smell,’ she tells her when she returns inside from throwing up in the grass.
While Gabriel reads to Preston, Kerry doodles in her sketchbook and Beth braids her hair for her, parting it in the middle and attempting two French plaits. They sit in the doorway, away from the boys, occasionally keeping a lookout for any signs of movement. Despite Preston and Gabriel having provoked a community of Outlanders, the road remains blissfully empty in the distance.
‘You have such beautiful hair,’ sighs Beth longingly. ‘I wish I still had hair sometimes.’
‘Baldness suits you,’ says Kerry serenely. ‘If I shaved my head I’d look ill.’
‘Honestly, Kerr, you don’t know how pretty you are,’ Beth objects.
‘Nah, I bet if you cut all my hair off my head is all lumpy and disfigured underneath.’
‘You’re mental,’ Beth laughs.
After tailing off Kerry’s braids Beth sits back against the barn, and Kerry sits beside her, sketchbook open in her lap. For a while Beth watches her sketch. It takes her a moment to realise the image taking shape on the page is a tree house.
‘I never thought I’d miss it,’ says Beth softly.
‘It felt a lot safer than this, didn’t it?’
‘It did.’ Beth glances around her. ‘I suppose it’s a good thing that we found a new place so fast. And we’ll get used to this, I’m sure.’
Kerry pauses to add a little rifle, leaning against the doorframe of the Sanctuary. There are parts she’s got wrong, she’s sure. It’s sad to think that one day her memory of the place will be reduced to this greyscale drawing. She shuts the book and sighs.
‘I just wish we’d brought that bloody jigsaw with us,’ she says, leaning her head back against the wall. ‘It’s all well and good to have a day off, but it’s boring, isn’t it?’
‘I’ll take boring over Preston getting shot,’ mutters Beth.
‘Yes,’ agrees Kerry, ‘having someone who isn’t us shooting him takes the fun out of the idea, doesn’t it?’
‘I was so scared when he collapsed,’ Beth confesses. ‘All that blood... I thought he was... For a moment...’
Kerry nods, her gaze following Ratbag as he appears from inside the barn and prowls about the grass, his tail swishing angrily. Even though she spends half her time hating Preston, she too felt a rush of terror as he toppled drunkenly to the floor that day, terror that they would have to live without him. Not only was he their best means of protection, but over time, despite her suspicion that maybe he’d killed her sister, Kerry has come to see Preston as her family. All of them, in fact, hold a very solid and substantial place in her heart.
The first time she’d seen him, she recalls, he’d answered David’s door to her and she’d wondered who this strange seventeen year old boy was, and just as quickly as this occurred to her he’d slammed the door in her face. She’d waited then, stunned, with tears in her eyes, as voices penetrated the door. ‘There’s a ginger brat at the door...’ ‘I told you my sister was coming over...’ ‘I thought you meant the fit one...’
Back then she’d been wary of him, but in the loving nature of seven-year-old Kerry, she bestowed upon him the benefit of the doubt and always turned a deaf ear to his insults. But as she grew older, with Preston as a surrogate brother in replacement of David, Kerry occasionally went through very long phases of loathing him. He
was, after all, evil, and his mood swings were terrible. Who’d have known she’d feel so much horror at the prospect of her second-rate replacement brother being gone forever?
‘I’ve always found it frightening,’ says Beth, drawing Kerry back into the present, ‘how much we rely on Preston to keep us going.’
‘But also oddly reassuring,’ Kerry concurs. ‘It always boggles me that none of us are particularly smart or adept – at least, we weren’t to begin with – but somehow we’ve always managed to pull through. I think it wouldn’t have happened without Preston.’
‘Yes, he’s far more resourceful than we give him credit for.’
‘We ought to keep our voices down,’ says Kerry with a small smile. ‘We don’t want his head growing any larger.’
‘Too late!’ called a voice from inside the barn.
As they chuckle softly, Ratbag streaks past them, pursuing a white butterfly. They watch it float out of the cat’s reach, and Kerry imagines it laughing at him, taunting him. As the butterfly glides away Kerry’s stomach rumbles.
‘Is it lunch time yet?’ she asks, stretching.
‘Probably,’ says Beth. ‘In any case, I think they’ve stopped reading in there.’
‘Are you feeling any better?’ whispers Kerry.
Beth shrugs. ‘I’ll try to force something down but my stomach isn’t completely settled. It just feels like such a waste to be throwing all this precious food up.’
‘Maybe we should go about finding some medicine tomorrow.’
‘No, it’ll pass. I think it’s just... The circumstances, you know...’
Kerry eyes her uneasily. ‘If you’re sure...’
Lunch consists of soup and the rest of the bread. Beth eats half-heartedly, watched by Kerry, and she refuses the offer of the last slice of bread, which Preston snatches before she’s even finished saying no. They wash it all down with water, which is served in old tins because they didn’t pack any cups. Several times Kerry has sliced her lip on a treacherous bit of aluminium, which does nothing for the water’s already rusty flavour.
When they’re finished Kerry stands a four-litre plastic bottle outside with its two other empty friends, their tops gaping like thirsty mouths. She looks up at the clear sky, worried that if rain doesn’t come soon, not only will they smell, but they may just die of dehydration. They only have two bottles left, and the dregs of the cola, which will probably be gone by the end of the day.
Kerry spends much of her afternoon sparring outside with Gabriel, whose usual partner insists that he’s still far too injured to be leaving the paddock. Having changed his bandages (bandages being a loose term for a ripped up t shirt), Kerry knows that he’s very much on the mend, the wound having been shallow in the first place. The truth of his claims may be so, but Kerry knows that restless Preston will be up and about in no time.
Not being one for violence herself, Kerry finds herself struggling against Gabriel as they spar. Despite his scrawny, malnourished physique, Gabriel is well-learned and practised in proper leverage and techniques, so he floors her several times with ease. The exercise is welcome, however, as it keeps the biting November cold at bay. Kerry tries not to think about the fact that it’s probably not helping the body odour problem, though.
Dinner sees them already missing the absence of the bread. Despite conversation flowing as thick and easily as ever, a definite sense of gloom looms over them as they eat cold beans, though it eases with the dessert that follows and Kerry takes great comfort in listening to Beth and Preston reminiscing. She notices Gabriel disconnecting, as he usually does, from the conversation, having no idea what Beth means when she refers to iPhones or Google. Sympathetic as ever, Kerry draws out a noughts and crosses table in the back of her sketchbook, takes the first turn and passes it to Gabriel as she listens. She smiles in response to the grateful look he shoots her.
The rest of the evening is spent wrapped in their sleeping bags, playing a word association game in which Gabriel and Kerry shoot random words at Preston and Beth and whoever comes up with a lyric containing said word first earns a point. Kerry awards extra points if she ever recognises the song, but Beth’s and Preston’s musical knowledge has always been vast and this rarely happens. Often, despite coming up with words they deem impossible to match a lyric to, Gabriel and Kerry find themselves surprised when someone begins to sing before they’ve even finished speaking.
‘I think you’re making that one up,’ Kerry accuses Preston as he tails off a bizarre-sounding verse.
‘You’re telling me that David never inflicted “Heroes” on you?’ says Preston incredulously. ‘He loved that song.’
‘I don’t remember that song having the word “dolphins” in it!’
‘I’m sorry to say Preston’s right,’ laughs Beth, and Gabriel adds a point to the tally.
‘Humph,’ says Kerry, sticking her tongue out playfully.
‘Gabriel’s turn,’ announces Beth.
Gabriel considers, and then declares, ‘Tractor!’
The game continues late into the night, until Gabriel’s eyelids are drooping dangerously. They hastily clean their teeth just outside the barn, spitting into the grass and neglecting to rinse for the water shortage, and then they hurry back to their sleeping bags.
As Beth and Gabriel huddle close together in sleep, Kerry and Preston sit against the wall in silence, the end of Preston’s cigarette occasionally lighting up their faces. This has been known to happen on occasion, some sort of silent agreement to sit and think about the past if someone has mentioned their mutual loss that day. They stare ahead, as if they’re sitting on David’s sofa, with him between them, watching cartoons on the television. Sometimes Kerry wonders if this will evolve into actual conversations about him, but it never does, and she doesn’t mind. His ghost seems happy enough bathed in silence.
Finally Kerry falls asleep, sliding down the wall, her head landing comfortably in Preston’s lap. She pictures him rolling his eyes, and it’s the last thing she sees in her mind’s eye before consciousness slips from her grasp.
It seems like no time at all before she is woken by someone yelling, ‘RAIN!’
Blinking sleep out of her eyes, Kerry sits up. Gabriel is already on his feet and throwing his shirt off as rain pelts noisily on the roof. Groggy, Kerry sits there for a moment, wondering why Gabriel is stripping in front of her and how on earth she’s been managing to sleep through such a racket, until the message finally sinks in: rain.
Gasping, now fully awake, Kerry leaps to her feet and follows Gabriel’s lead, eager to get outside and wash weeks’ worth of grime from her body, uncaring of how cold it’s going to be out there. Gabriel’s already running outside, naked and clutching the shampoo bottle, when Beth finally gets up and disappears behind the car to change privately. The thought occurs to Kerry that Preston is still sitting behind her.
Free of jeans, socks and her jacket, Kerry turns to him, her legs already prickling with cold. ‘Do you, uh, need help with your shirt?’ she asks reluctantly.
He glowers up at her, his eyes glinting in the dimness, and growls, ‘No.’
Shrugging, Kerry makes for the door in t shirt and underwear, only stripping completely when she’s sure no one can see her. She only feels a little bad that Gabriel’s announcement clearly woke Preston as she frees her hair from its braids and squirts a generous amount of shampoo into her hands. She deposits it just inside the door, where Gabriel left it, before hurrying around the corner, the rain welcoming her like an icy hug.
Already shivering, Kerry lathers shampoo in her hair and scrubs vigorously, using excess suds to wash her body as quickly as she can. The rain is so thick and heavy that the moon looks blurry and misshapen in the sky, and Kerry can only just hear the manic giggling of her peers, who are beyond amused at the lengths they’ve gone to in order to wash. She finds herself smiling too, despite the fact that she’s now so cold her fingers are numb.
Suds slip quickly from her hair under the rain’s
heavy pressure and her feet begin to squelch in the sodden grass, and blissfully quickly Kerry is clean and ready to return to bed. She moves to stand in the barn’s doorway for a moment, letting the rain rinse her muddy feet, before hurrying inside and grabbing her clothes. Gabriel is already clean and wrapped shivering in his sleeping bag, illuminated by a lantern, his nose buried in a book.
Kerry is half dressed when Beth and Preston stumble inside, giggling and still naked. Kerry averts her gaze, a strange feeling surfacing inside her at the unusual new bond between them, and finishes dressing quickly, joining Gabriel in the paddock without a word. Gabriel doesn’t seem to have noticed any odd behaviour; he continues to devour his book, his limbs locked together for warmth.
Quickly and deftly Kerry ties her hair in a single braid before lying down in her sleeping bag, frowning slightly. It isn’t as though the four of them tell each other everything while they huddle in blankets at night, but given that privacy comes in short supply there aren’t usually secrets between them. But something is going on, Kerry is sure of it. And she will find out what.
After another day spent working under Preston’s lazy and watchful gaze, cleaning out mouse droppings and hauling in the now-full water bottles, Preston finally decides he’s ready to leave the barn. Over breakfast the group argues over what to prioritise before winter arrives, and they settle on tins, winter coats and blankets.
As Beth and Gabriel dispose of empty tins in a large dumpster around the back of the barn, Kerry redresses Preston’s wound for him, which she finds especially difficult today, as Preston won’t keep still.
‘This winter is going to suck,’ he says ominously.
After The End (Book 1): The Furious Four Page 23
