The Outlaws Scarlett and Browne

by Jonathan Stroud

  “Hello?”

  It was strange to hear her voice at all in that wrecked and ruined place. It sounded false and heavy. No response came from behind the door.

  “Is someone there?”

  She waited. Not a movement, not a rustle.

  Scarlett leaned back against the roof of the bus, scratched her nose, blew out her cheeks. This time she did reach up and tap gently on the side of the cubicle. “It’s almost four,” she said. “Soon the sun will move behind the trees and the glade will be in shadow. The creatures will return. They will smell you and attack the door. Eventually they will tear it down. I am a traveler, a simple pilgrim and a girl of God. I am here now, but soon I will leave. No other aid will come to you. If you are injured, I have medicines. I can help you up onto the road. But you have to come out,” Scarlett said, “in twenty seconds. That’s the deal. Otherwise I go.”

  Her ears caught the trace of a whispered conversation. It was not a big space for two people to be trapped in. She imagined the stifling heat and dark. She imagined being inside there while the bus was rolling down the slope. She imagined being inside while the beasts ate the other passengers; while wolves howled and slavered and scratched at the plywood door. Scarlett McCain had plenty of imagination. Too much, in fact: it was something she could not eat, nor fight with, nor sell to give her tangible benefit, and she regretted having it.

  “Ten seconds,” she said.

  Someone said something inside the cubicle; almost at the same moment, a flurry of rapid impacts struck the wood close above Scarlett’s head. She stepped away—but not fast enough. The door swung open, slamming her hard on the side of the skull. As she reeled back, stars sparking behind her eyes, the cubicle disgorged its occupant. It fell at her feet, rolled across the debris in a blur of flailing legs and arms.

  Scarlett McCain, clutching at the nearest seats, teeth ringing in her jaw, levered herself upright.

  She gazed wordlessly down at a single sprawled person.

  It was a youth, wiry, pale, and angular, possessed of enormous staring eyes and a mane of wild black hair that spiked outward like a fountain of water caught by sudden frost. Just one curl of it flopped forward over his face, as if someone had slapped him from behind. He raised a slender hand and pushed the strands away from his eyes, then resumed his original position.

  A boy, staring up at her.

  “Holy crap,” Scarlett said.

  With fumbling fingers, she took a coin from her pocket and transferred it to her cuss-box.

  In all her travels across the broken lands of Britain, Scarlett had seldom been so uncertain about what to do. Bearded outlaws she could deal with, beasts and bank managers too. These were things she could outmaneuver, flee from, or, as a last resort, shoot. She could rely on her speed, her endurance, and a wide range of antisocial talents to dispose of them.

  But she’d had little experience of helpless-looking boys.

  He just sat on the floor, staring up at her like a puppy. Scarlett McCain gazed back at him.

  “Who are you?” she asked.

  She couldn’t tell how old he was. His shock of hair had been very roughly cut, perhaps with a knife. It emphasized his bony features. His eyes were wide and unnaturally bright. He looked a little younger than Scarlett—midteens, perhaps?—but he also looked malnourished, which meant he might be anything. He wore a white T-shirt, a green coarse-knit jumper, shapeless and very dirty, and loose-fitting flannel trousers. An enormous pair of grubby trainers encased his outflung feet.

  “Who are you?” Scarlett repeated. “Come on—talk.”

  The boy shifted his position, murmured something that Scarlett couldn’t hear.

  She frowned at him. “What?”

  This time his voice was surprisingly loud. “I said: Are you one of the Tainted?”

  Scarlett grunted. “If I was, you would already be dead.” She glanced back along the bus at the tilted planes of sunlight streaming down through the upturned windows. No time to waste. Even while she’d been inside, the angle had changed. With a finger, she nudged the swinging cubicle door. “You been on your own in that thing?”

  The boy looked up. Little droplets of water were falling from inside the cubicle. There was a faint smell of disinfectant and other scents. “Yes,” he said slowly, “I was alone.”

  “Thought I heard you talking to someone.”

  “No.”

  “I definitely heard you talking.”

  He considered this, his head held slightly on one side. “Perhaps I was talking to myself.”

  “Uh-huh….” Scarlett rubbed her chin. “Well, that’s not great, but we’ll let it slide. You been in there for how long now? Hours? Days?”

  “I really couldn’t tell you,” the boy said. “I’ve been in there since the crash. Since before the screaming started, before the things came.” His gaze changed, became momentarily remote. Then he smiled up at her, smiled broadly, his hands clasped across his bony knees.

  Gods, his eyes were too bright. He was sick or something. Scarlett could see right off she should leave him and get out. Looking like that and talking to himself…Whether it was fever or he was just plain mad, he wouldn’t bring her luck.

  Her jaw clenched. She glanced back at the steepled rays of sunlight, aching to be gone.

  “It’s getting late,” she said. “You need to come out of here now.”

  The boy shrugged. “I guess. Are you from Stonemoor?”

  “I don’t know what that is. Can you walk?”

  “Well,” he said, “I expect I’m a bit stiff. It was cramped in there, you see, and also dark, and I was kind of wedged beside the toilet. I couldn’t sit on it on account of the slant, and all the water and stuff had fallen out on me earlier when we were rolling down the hill, so it was very uncomfortable. Plus I didn’t like to put my weight on the door in case it opened, or the things outside heard me. Of course, when all the screaming had finished, they did hear me—or smelled me, more like. Then there was trouble. They were biting at the door and scratching, and howling, howling, for the longest time….” His eyes drifted again, focusing on something Scarlett couldn’t see. Then he blinked. “Sorry, what was your question again?”

  Scarlett glared at him. “I’ve forgotten myself, it was so long ago. I asked whether you could walk. At least we know your jaw’s operating fine. Get up.”

  The boy did so, awkwardly, silently but in evident pain, supporting himself against the upturned roof. He was taller than Scarlett had thought, almost the same height as her—but all bones and gristle, no muscle to him, and shaking badly too. He radiated weakness. She felt a wave of irritation.

  “I’ve got pins and needles in some pretty strange areas,” the boy said.

  Scarlett had already turned and was marching away along the bus. When she got below the gap in the metal, she looked back and saw with annoyance that the boy had not followed her. He was still leaning against the roof in a state of limp exhaustion.

  “Hurry it up!” she called. “You can climb out through here.”

  The boy didn’t respond at first. Then he said: “Is there anybody else outside?”

  “No. They’re all dead.”

  “Is there a limping man? A woman with black eyes?”

  “No. Neither of them. Of course not. On account of everyone being dead, like I just said.”

  “I don’t want to meet that woman.”

  Scarlett stared at him. “That’s fine. You won’t. What you will meet soon, if you stand there like a fool, is a wolf, a bear, or a dire-fox, because that’s what’s likely to show up in this bus after dark. Or the Tainted, which is even worse. There’s no natural man or woman within six miles, apart from me,” Scarlett added, “and I’m buggering off. I can help you before I go, or I can leave you to be eaten. Choose now, chum. It’s all one to me.” She lifted an arm toward the ho
le, squinting upward into the light. One flex, one jump, and she’d be gone. She felt a powerful temptation to do just that. Maybe that was what the boy wanted. Maybe he wanted her to leave him. Please gods, let that be the way of it. He’d just ask her to go.

  “Don’t go,” the boy said in a feeble voice. “Wait up. I’m coming….” He lurched fully upright, began shuffling toward her.

  Scarlett let out a long and narrow breath. Fine. She could help him up onto the road and leave him there. Someone would be along eventually. A supply lorry, another long-distance bus. She gazed up at the sky’s deepening blue. Only likely not this evening…but that wouldn’t be her problem.

  She glanced across. The boy was still tottering listlessly through the debris.

  “Can’t you go a bit faster than that?” she said. “A corpse would have made it by now.”

  The boy looked pained. “I’m trying. My bottom’s numb.”

  “What’s that got to do with it?”

  “Makes my legs stiff. Right up here, see, at the back of my thighs. Ooh, my buttocks are like concrete. If you prodded them, I wouldn’t feel a thing.”

  “Well, we’ll never know.” Scarlett waited, tapping her fingernails pointedly against the roof. The boy reached her. She indicated the hole. “Right. This is the way out.”

  The boy pushed his shock of black hair away from his face and considered the gap. His skin was smooth and unlined, his expression one of calm contemplation. He seemed to have no interest in the bloodstained clothing they were standing on, nor any true understanding of the dangers of their situation. It was almost like he wasn’t really there.

  “Well?” Scarlett demanded. “Can you climb to the hole?”

  “No.”

  She snorted. “Predictable. All right, stand there. I’ll give you a leg up.”

  She did so, taking his weight on her hands while he scrambled up into the light. His trainers were big, his movements flapping and clumsy, but he hardly weighed anything. Scarlett had a brief fantasy of propelling him upward with a mighty flex of the arms so that he disappeared over the treetops and was never seen again. Somehow, she resisted the urge. With much gasping and flailing, he clambered over the rim of the hole and onto the side of the bus. In a single rapid movement, she pulled herself up next to him.

  * * *

  —

  They crouched together on the expanse of warm metal, above the rocks and stream. The air was good and fresh after the bloody confinement of the interior, but the boy’s face was scrunched up in pain against the daylight. He folded an arm over his eyes. Scarlett ignored him and jumped to the ground, to a dry place beside the water. All around her the trunks of elms and silver birches hung in black shadow. She listened to the flies buzzing on dried blood, and to a silence that lay upon the forest beyond. It was a deep silence.

  Possibly too deep. She couldn’t hear the calling of the birds.

  She rotated slowly, her hand making an unconscious movement to the knife hilt at her belt.

  Not the Tainted, surely. They were mostly out beyond the borderlands.

  Not the Cheltenham search parties. They’d have turned back long ago.

  Something else?

  Nothing moved in the bracken. Heat haze swam on the lip of the road embankment high above, where the bus had come down.

  Maybe not…. Her hand relaxed. Even so, it was best to remain watchful, quick and quiet.

  “THANK YOU!”

  The joyous cry came from atop the bus, where the boy had got to his feet. He was making tentative motions toward climbing down, standing at the edge, peering over, but also waving and grinning at her. His arms jutted out at angles, the sleeves of his enormous jumper flapped as he waved; he looked like a great green fledgling about to take flight.

  “Thank you!” he called again. “It feels so good to be out!” Moving stiffly, he sought to negotiate his descent, lost his balance, toppled back, and fell against the metal with a thud that echoed around the glade. He lay there a moment, with his feet and legs sticking over the edge, then sort of flowed bonelessly forward and dropped in a heap to the ground.

  Scarlett rolled her eyes. Turning away, she unclipped a bottle and took a swig of water. By her watch, it was well past four. In a couple of hours it would be getting dark, and she’d need to have found shelter. She shrugged her pack off her back, tightened the cords securing the tube and the little metal briefcase. She’d get that opened in Stow. For sure, it contained something of value. Money? Weapons? Maybe.

  The boy had picked himself up. The reverberations of his impact against the bus were still echoing faintly among the trees.

  “Shouldn’t prat about like that,” Scarlett remarked. “Noise is not good here.”

  “Sorry,” the boy said. “It’s just I’m so—”

  “And if you mention your stiff bum again, I’ll punch you.”

  He stopped talking.

  “Just a little tip there,” Scarlett said.

  He blinked at her. The sun caught his black hair, made it shine like a dark flame. For the first time, she noticed a purplish bruise on his forehead, a thin red weal across the side of his neck. His body was shaking slightly; he dropped his gaze and looked off in a distracted way at the trees and stream.

  Scarlett nodded. “So, if you’re ready,” she said, “I’ll take you up to the road, where you can wait for help. Then I’ll be off.”

  She stepped out into the stream, moving lightly from rock to rock in the direction of the embankment. Halfway across, she glanced back. The boy hadn’t stirred.

  “This is such a beautiful place,” he said.

  “Aside from all the flies and bloodstains, you mean? It really isn’t. Come on.”

  “I guess you’re right. I’ve never been somewhere like this.” He set off after her, slowly, diffidently, stumbling on the stones. “Thank you for rescuing me. You are a kind person.”

  It was an absurd comment, and Scarlett did not respond to it. “You do realize you didn’t actually need me,” she said. “You could have come out of that cubicle at any time.”

  “I was too frightened. And too weak. Do you have any food?”

  “No.”

  “I haven’t eaten for a while.”

  She walked on a couple of steps, then stopped. “I suppose I do have water. Take a drink from one of these bottles. Or use the stream.”

  “Ah, no, I’m OK for water, thanks. There was a tap in the cubicle. I drank from that.”

  “Yeah? So you’re fine.” Impatience swirled inside her. She went on, slipped round the carcass of the bus, began clambering up the embankment.

  “There wasn’t much to do apart from drink,” the boy added in a small voice. “I just sat there, listening to what was going on outside….”

  He meant the beasts eating the passengers, of course. Scarlett wasn’t interested in that. It was something that had already happened, and happened to someone other than herself, which made it doubly irrelevant. Her only concern was with what lay ahead for her in the forest—and getting safely to Stow. Still, the boy’s presence was distracting, and the fate of the bus was strange. She might have asked him about it, and he might have answered. But her impatience and irritation were too great, and all she wanted was to be rid of him. And thirty seconds later it was too late.

  The sun hung at the top of the embankment; it danced behind the broken barrier fence, casting forth shadows like cage bars that striped the slope before them. The ground was steep, its long grass spattered with black clumps of earth ripped up by the bus’s slide. It was not easy going, even for Scarlett. She could hear the boy wheezing and puffing behind her. Get to the top, dump him, and move on. She turned to hurry him, saw him lit clear and golden, a scarecrow in a bright green jumper, struggling but smiling, his eyes fixed on her with a look of stupid gratitude; and beyond, rising up beside the bus,
where it had lain concealed as they passed it, a shape, large as a standing stone but brindled with red-brown fur: a black-throated, black-pawed monolith that lowered itself upon its forelegs and hastened up the slope toward them with a romping stride.

  Scarlett knew in that instant that she didn’t have enough time. The bear was too fast; the boy too near, too unaware, too downright hopeless in a dozen ways. He was talking again—probably offering up more pointless thanks—completely insensible of the onrushing, swing-bellied death that shook the ground behind him. She had no time. She knew that this was so even as she took three strides down the slope—and jumped. She knew it as she collided with the boy, one arm thrusting him sideways, the other reaching for her belt…. She knew it as she scrambled for her knife. Then the bear slammed into her, and the impact and the pain and the onset of the teeth and claws and hot, foul breath only proved that she’d been right.

  The boy, tumbling backward in the grass, came to a halt, raised his head, and saw the bear rearing and thrashing a few feet away. What a hideous snarling it made! The noise crescendoed, and its back bucked and reared in weightless frenzy, until—all at once, as if belatedly conscious of the proprieties of its bulk—it subsided in a single shuddering movement. The growling ebbed into nothing. The hairy sides relaxed; the bear lay still and sprawling on the sunlit ground.

  For a few moments, the boy blinked at it. His own hair was over his face. He blew it away from his forehead and got carefully to his feet, his limbs quivering, light as water, and stood looking at the vast shape that lay there like a red-brown outcrop of the earth. Black paw pads with dirtily translucent claws were splayed out at the corners, like the carved leg supports on Dr. Calloway’s desk in her office at Stonemoor. The boy thought about that desk, about standing before it on the half-moon rug, waiting for whatever trouble would inevitably come to him; and for a few moments he was no longer on the slope in the forest. Then he snapped back into the present and remembered the existence of the girl.

  She was nowhere to be seen.