Where the World Turns Wild

by Nicola Penfold

  I don’t though. I stare at the thin rectangle in Bear’s hand as it moistens, darkens. It takes a few seconds for any colour at all to show. I don’t know where on the scale it would be, what the name would be on my paint palette, but it’s a blue turning into green. Some kind of turquoise. It’s what I always think the sea would look like.

  “That’s good, Bear, that’s really good.”

  “We can drink it?”

  “We can drink it.”

  Bear makes space for me beside him and we cup the water in our hands and pour it into our mouths. Long wet gulps of it.

  It’s icy and makes us shiver, but there’s something else too that isn’t just cold. It’s fresh. Deliciously, beautifully fresh. So different to the stale city water that cycled around forever. There was some horrible statistic you had to try and forget, about how many bodies it had passed through already and how much of it was actually plastic.

  The sun’s a low blaze in the sky and we probably shouldn’t linger, but I’ve got the triumph of finding water playing in my head, one of our first and most important goals. If only there was a way to send word to Annie Rose.

  “There must be fish here!” Bear says, bending low over the water.

  “Maybe.”

  “We could eat them!”

  “Maybe,” I say again. “If we can catch them.”

  “I could, Ju. And there will be some. There’ll be loads!”

  I smile at Bear’s certainty. I hope he’s right. It would mean the rivers are better now. When the ReWild happened, any fish were long gone. Annie Rose said first the rivers were full of dead, bloated fish bodies, then the bodies rotted away and you were just left with the decay. The algae that took the place of the fish, clogging up the water like a big old net.

  Maybe all that made it easier to leave behind – the rivers and trees and whatever else was left by then. It wasn’t beautiful any more. Then when people started getting sick and everyone saw how deadly the disease was, you can kind of see why they went along with everything. They walked into a cage and they locked the door behind them.

  We haven’t seen fish yet, but there are insects – long black bodies with four legs outstretched like a cross. They’re balancing precariously on the surface.

  “Pond skaters,” Bear declares.

  There’s better than that too. Bear sees it first.

  It’s another insect, perched on a reed. It’s long and thin and bright electric-blue, with four separate wings that are shiny and clear and partitioned, like that glass from our old apartment-block door.

  “Dragonfly!” I say exultantly, because this one I know.

  “Or damselfly, I’m not sure,” Bear says.

  “Dragonfly sounds better!”

  The creature takes to the air, into the swirls of flies clustered over the river. Its prey. It’s like a relic of a time when there really could be dragons. I think I hear its wings, beating.

  I wish I didn’t have to say we should move on, but what if those flies the dragonfly’s catching are mosquitoes and what if the disease did transfer to them?

  It’s getting dark too. We have to move on so we can make camp while we can still see. I start filling our bottles, from as far out in the river as I can reach so it’s as pure as you get. I’m doing it slowly, not wanting to lose this feeling, swirling my fingers through the water, when Bear screams.

  “Ju! What’s that?”

  He knows already. I hear the fear in the pitch of his voice. And we know that sound like we know our own heartbeats. The buzzing and whirring Annie Rose said was like a fly in your ear. Only the glyphosate killed most of the flies, so an annoying buzz has only ever meant one thing to Bear and me. A surveillance drone.

  It’s just a couple of metres above water level. The river provides the perfect path. Bear’s fumbling with his rucksack. I want to say leave it, just run, but we need everything in that bag. I hoist it on to his shoulders and grab my bag, and we tear through the brambles. Back into the trees, deeper into the forest.

  I was stupid to let us dawdle by the river. Of course Border Patrol would look for us. Of course they would. Abbott will have sent word first thing. The moment he realized we weren’t in school.

  The river’s the obvious place for them to look. They know we need water to survive. They’ll have sent drones out in both directions.

  I hear it behind us. The drone of it, just like its name, mirroring every move we make. Chasing us. This silver-grey orb with metallic legs. Loud. Louder. The churned-up air touches the back of my neck like fingers.

  “Faster, Bear!”

  It’s just a machine. But you don’t think about that when you’re running, you just run. Fast, faster, and then some. Even if a drone can’t actually hurt us, someone, somewhere, back in the city, in one of their control towers or their bunkers, is seeing everything that drone sees. They know where we are. They know we’re alive and that our bags are big enough to contain supplies. Which means someone helped us. This totally contradicts what Annie Rose had been going to say. Her surprise when she found the broken glass. Her despair that she’d lost her grandchildren, because there’s no way we’d survive out here with just the clothes on our backs.

  “Bear, take my hand!” We have to change direction.

  We swerve right and then left. This zigzag pattern through the trees. My head’s swirling, dizzy, but we keep going. Right, then left, then right again.

  The drone keeps after us for ages. Someone’s got good reflexes – the controller, the pilot, has practised this – and the machine flies like the dragonfly does. Fast. Precise.

  But eventually I realize the sound is only in my head and when I look back I can’t see it. “Stop! Let’s stop a minute.”

  Bear collapses to the ground, his lungs heaving. I’ve never seen him so out of energy. “Did we lose it?”

  “I think so.” I have to catch my breath too. We’ve been running for ages – ducking under branches, jumping over roots – through the trees and the thorny scrub.

  “You think it hit a tree?”

  “Maybe.” They’ll send another though. They’ll send whatever they can spare if Abbott has anything to do with it.

  “Have you got the water, Ju?” Bear asks.

  I pass it over, sick inside suddenly. This is the bottle I’d been refilling, the one still in my hands when we saw the drone. I left the other one on the bank.

  “Where’s the other?” Bear asks, seeing my face freeze up.

  “We’ll have to make do with this one.”

  “We can go back.” He gets up and starts walking back the way we came.

  “No! No, Bear,” I say. “They’ll find us. We just have to keep refilling this one. But more carefully now, and quickly, and maybe when it’s dark.”

  “Will it be OK?”

  There’s only one answer I can give. “It’ll rain soon. We’ll catch rainwater. We’ll drink that.”

  “I wish Etienne was here,” Bear says.

  “Well, he isn’t, is he?” I snap. “You have to make do with me.” Bear flinches. I don’t know why I’m so angry all of a sudden. Maybe because I wish it too. Not that Etienne could do any of this any better. Maybe help cajole Bear, he could do that, and share the load on our backs. And be our friend, someone to talk to, help make the decisions. Etienne would have the whole route planned out. We’d know exactly where we’re going and how long it should take.

  Bear’s eyes are shiny. I shouldn’t have yelled at him – we’re out here alone with no Annie Rose to console him. My stomach clenches with guilt. “Come on, Bear cub. We’ll get back on track and then find somewhere to make camp.”

  “Can I collect sticks tonight, Ju? We can make the fire.” Despite everything, he’s still excited.

  “I don’t know, Bear,” I say slowly. “I want to as well, I do, it’s just with the drone nearby it’d be like sending out a signal.”

  “We need the fire to keep the wolves away.”

  The wolves came from the zoos. T
hey escaped, or maybe their keepers let them go, because it was better than the alternative, better than what happened to all the pets, back in the city. Rufus, Jamie and Leo. Smoky, Poppy and Bo.

  “We’d have heard them, Bear. We were OK last night. Nothing came.” And wolves know to stay away from people, don’t they? Surely people have shown them that enough times in our long bloody hunting history? Can a species remember that? The rabbits obviously not, but wolves… Wolves are so much cleverer. That’s why they’re in so many of the old stories.

  “You promised we’d make a fire and I’m cold, Ju.”

  “I know, Bear, and we will. Just not tonight.”

  Bear puts his face into a sulk. A scared, sad sulk.

  “You can make the tent. We’ll need stones to weigh it down at the edges. Let’s go and find the right spot.”

  “It’s too dark,” he says flatly.

  He’s right, but we can’t use our torches in case more drones come. We just have Etienne’s GPS, which I hold out before us, a soft globe of light.

  “We’ll go by moonlight,” I say, “like real explorers do.”

  “And starlight?”

  “Yeah, exactly, so we have a million lights to see by. We’re actually quite lucky. Let’s just do a couple more miles and then we’ll make camp, I promise.”

  We pick up our legs and keep walking. There are no drones, we’d hear them, but I look back anyway. I can’t shake the feeling we’re being followed.

  The moon hangs above us, a white impossible kite on a string of stars. These tiny twinkling lights, trillions of miles away.

  We’re about to stop and make camp when Bear says it. Or screams it.

  “Tick, Juniper! Tick!”

  “Where?” I shout, brandishing a stick in my hand ridiculously, like it would do any good against an insect.

  “On my neck!” He’s crying. This is the one animal he knows to be scared of.

  I scramble for the torch and turn it on, directing it to where Bear’s little fingers point, on the side of his neck, up near his ear. It’s brown or black maybe. One round body, eight legs, its face buried deep inside his skin.

  “Stay still. Don’t touch it.”

  I’ve gone through this scenario so many times. Even at school they taught us how, just in case one got through. Never squeeze a tick. You take hold of it with tweezers, close to the skin, and you pull. Slow, steady, straight up.

  Time matters. The longer the tick feeds, the more time there is for the disease to pass through the skin barrier. To leach through into your fluids. The microbes. The pathogens.

  Only you have to do it right. If you’re heavy-handed, you could crush it and then it releases even more microbes, all at once. Or the tick breaks away, but the mouthparts get left inside your skin and you’ve got a prime site for infection.

  Even if we are resistant, we could do without having to fight off infections. And what if we’re not? What if Silvan was right and the disease has mutated on past the resistance we have? Bear’s only six. The youngest kids got it worst, their immune systems weren’t developed enough.

  “Ticks are harmless to us, aren’t they, Ju? Benign? Safe?” Bear says, still playing our game, even though his voice is breaking with fear.

  “Yes, but we still need to get it off.”

  My fingers are fat and numb as I wield the metal tweezers, trying to get the right angle as close as I can to Bear’s skin, under the body of the tick and its floundering legs. Then I squeeze and pull. Slow, steady, straight up. I can feel the insect resisting, clinging on, its pincer mouth buried inside him.

  You pull, but the tick has to release itself. I think it’s not going to happen, that I’m going to rip a piece of Bear’s skin off instead, but suddenly the tick comes away and the engorged black mite flails helplessly between the metal fingers of the tweezers. I throw the tick down and grind it into the forest floor with my boot heel.

  I get the antiseptic wipes from our first-aid kit and dab gently at the red bead on Bear’s neck. “It’s OK, Bear cub. It’s OK. It’s gone now.”

  He looks up at me, big-eyed and grateful. “I won’t get sick will I, Ju?”

  I shake my head. “We just have to keep an eye on the wound. Keep it clean. Come here. I need to check the rest of you.” I trace my hand along his neck and down his top, on to his shoulders, feeling for bumps on his smooth skin. We should have done this first thing this morning, although I bet that tick was from today. It was probably from the river. Anyway, there’s no point spending much time looking now. It’s too dark to see.

  “Come on. Let’s find somewhere to make camp. We’ve gone far enough for one day.”

  We lay our groundsheet under a tree, but don’t put the top layer on, not yet. We want to look up.

  Bear’s imagining creatures in the sky, drawn out in the stars. He’s got my sketchbook, the one unessential item I allowed myself, and has his torch directed at the page.

  You never saw stars in the city. Not really. There was way too much light pollution. So many people, so tightly packed. Someone, somewhere was always awake.

  There were three more ticks – two on Bear’s right ankle, one on my shin. We found them after we made camp. We took off clothing, one bit at a time so we didn’t get cold, and ran our fingers along our goose-pimpled skin. You don’t feel them at first, not when they bite. All the time the tick was on my leg, for however long it was there feeding, I didn’t notice anything. As they’re sucking out your blood, they’re sending painkillers into you, to deaden you to any sensation that they’re there.

  That first bite, on Bear’s neck, is red and sore, but it doesn’t seem to be spreading, not yet. That’s what you’ve got to watch out for – red angry weals, radiating outwards.

  We’ve eaten the last of the sandwiches and Bear’s had a snack bar too, and a few metres away, under a tree, we’ve laid the trap.

  I can feel my energy waning. We need protein. Maybe we’ll go a few miles first, in the morning, before we cook it, whatever ‘it’ is. Then we can make a fire and we can eat something warm that will actually fill us up.

  We need to go back to the river too. I’ve no idea when it’s going to rain, despite what I said to Bear. The sky was red tonight – bleeding across the sky, haemorrhaging – and I think that means something about the weather, only I can’t remember what. I think it was some extreme, though it’s just an old rhyme. Sailors or shepherds or something.

  “Ju, it’s the cat again,” Bear whispers, but casual, so casual that I look down at the sketchbook on his lap, thinking that’s what he means, that he’s added the lynx to his constellations. But Bear’s hand is pointing out into the darkness and when I look, I see the dim shape under the trees.

  It takes a while for my eyes to make out the full picture. It’s a cat, just like we saw before. It’s lying down, head on its paws, watching.

  “You think it followed us?” Bear asks.

  “I don’t know.”

  “But we don’t have to move our camp, do we? I don’t want to walk any more today. I can’t!” There’s a moan forming in his voice.

  I don’t want to walk further either. My legs and body ache, and my head aches too. It’s just a cat. It’s big, but not big like a lion or tiger would be big, and we’ve been sitting prey for ages. The cat could have got us already, if that’s what it wanted.

  “Let’s just watch it for a while. See what it does.”

  “I miss the Sticks,” Bear says.

  “Do you, Bear?” I ask, giving him a squeeze. “They’ll be OK, you know. They have a good keeper.”

  Bear smiles. He gave his vivarium to Etienne the night we left. “I hope Etienne takes them to the Palm House, for adventures. They like it there.”

  I nod. I want to say something more, that Etienne will do everything he can for the Sticks, and for Annie Rose, that we don’t need to worry, but I can’t. Thinking about Etienne and Annie Rose makes this lump in my throat. Plus it might not be true about Annie Rose, that we don’
t need to worry.

  Will Steel’s Border Patrol officers really accept her story – that we broke the glass on our own, that we were running from Annie Rose too? They’re not stupid.

  “We could give the lynx a name,” Bear says hopefully. “He could be our new pet.”

  “There you go again, Bear,” I say, raising my eyebrows. “How do you know it’s a boy?”

  “It’s a girl?”

  “I don’t know, I sort of think she is.” I can’t explain why. It’s something to do with the way she watches us.

  “Shall we call her Lady Jane Grey then? She’s got that collar round her neck, like kings and queens did.”

  “Yeah, but that name’s taken. Lady Jane Grey’s with Etienne. What else?”

  “I don’t know. Goldie? Spot? Like the pet tags in the Emporium?”

  “Nah, they’re too obvious.” And she’s better than that. She’d never be a pet, with a shiny gold medallion round her neck.

  “She’s a bit like a shadow,” Bear says, his nose crinkling up. “Cause she follows us.”

  “That’s good.”

  “Or like a ghost of the forest.”

  “I like that. Ghost.”

  “Like the Sticks,” Bear says, pleased with himself.

  “That’s it then. I name her Ghost, in honour of our left-behind stick insects.” I put on this pompous voice and Bear repeats her name after me solemnly.

  “Now come on,” I say, “help me with the tarpaulin. The lynx might have a name, but she’s not exactly our friend yet. I think while we’re sleeping we’re safer under a layer of canvas.”

  “Maybe Ghost will keep the wolves away.”

  “Maybe. That would be good.”

  “Our watch cat.”

  I look out at her – eyes still awake, still watching. That would be nice. And if she could listen for drones too – meow or something if she heard one. Warn us.

  The tarpaulin keeps out the moonlight, but it doesn’t keep out the cold. Nor does the groundsheet stop the damp seeping upwards into our sleeping bags.

  Although the forest looks dry, when you touch it, when you sink down into it, it’s not dry at all. I don’t know whether it’s rainwater from days ago or the leaves themselves. All the water they’ve ever taken in leaking out as they break down to become part of the forest floor. Their journey back to the beginning.