The Pack (17 page)

Bradley had been turning and muttering in his sleep for two days now. “Whatever's troubling him—that's it coming out,” said the farmer's wife. “Don't fret, Martha. He's mending. Suffering, but mending.”

Then Bradley's eyes opened and fixed on Martha's face. The words were strange, but he said them to Martha as if they would make perfect sense to her. Twice.

“Chloe. Chloe is my princess.”

15

THE LAKE

Sundep McLachlan had been right. It didn't snow again after that last flurry. And the snow that had fallen formed a crust over itself that grew more and more fragile and crystalline. Below it, the seeds split and their shoots began to push towards air and light.

The old farmer was as good as his word. After they had shown him the entombed calf, there had been no argument about them staying there. He and his wife even encouraged them to wash and to patch their clothes. With more persuasion, they allowed Mrs. McLachlan to cut their matted hair. Floris and Victor rarely left the barn—“That cough'll never clear up with winter here,” said Mrs. McLachlan. “Best stay inside as long as you can.”

Somehow, in his captivity, Victor had managed to hide Floris's blue glass and now it was returned to her, she lay content for hours, turning it against the light; through its tiny portal entering her magic world.

Martha and Bradley helped around the farm as much as they could—repairing fences and broken gates. But it was dangerous for them to be seen, so they found themselves living a life much as they had in their Zone. The barn became for them, as their basement had been, part refuge, part prison. Helping was for them a release and the McLachlans were good teachers.

“Hold it this way,” Sundep McLachlan instructed Martha on how to wield a hammer. “Now, nice and steady … That's the stuff, you've got the hang of it now.”

“Come on,” said his wife to Bradley, “and I'll show you how to make that soup that's so good for you.”

In the kitchen she took two shrivelled onions from the back of a cupboard and began to slice them. She stopped after the first one and stroked her cheek with the back of her hand.

“What do I do?” Bradley asked.

“Oh, nothing. Just watch. It's good to have a boy beside me when I cook…” She tucked a strand of grey hair behind an ear and smiled at him.

“We used to have a boy, you see—a fine boy. He'd work all day for his father, then stand and tell me all about it while I was cooking. Thought he was helping me, he did. And he was. He was.”

“What was his name?”

“Sundep, like his father. Young Sundep. And we had a good farm for him to take over—and he wanted nothing different.”

“What happened to him?”

“Oh, for a long time nothing but good things. He grew up, tall like his father, but with more sense of fun. He was always making people laugh—me most of all! But not only me—the men who worked on the farm too, and the neighbours. And most of all the girls.”

Bradley frowned.

“You should laugh more, you know. Something about you around the eyes reminds—”

“Laugh at what?”

“Yes, you're right and, huh, here's me talking…”

“So what happened?”

“Simple. He fell for one of the local girls—someone he'd grown up with from the nearest farm. But you know how girls can change.”

“Yes. That is, no … not really.” Bradley thought Mrs. McLachlan wouldn't be thinking of girls like Martha.

“Well, take it from me. One minute some of them can't bear to be beside a boy and the next…”

“What?”

“It's very different. Anyway, young Sundep married her and they both came and lived here. For a while it was the happiest time. She was like the daughter we'd never had and young Sundep—oh, to see a son so happy!”

“And?”

“And then what should have been the happiest time became the saddest. She became pregnant—a grandchild for us—then the Dead Time hit us. But we got through it somehow. It was the aftermath that did for us. We lost most of our land and all our animals to the Compounds. That first year, before we learned what you could do with roots and berries, before we learned to plan and to preserve, we survived on scraps. Everything was rationed. We watched each other getting thinner and thinner … and though we all made sacrifices, gave up our own food for the baby, he got weaker and weaker. When he should have been toddling, he sat on the floor and stared up at his mother with huge, empty eyes. When winter came, nothing could save him. His mother, who'd been a girl just two winters before, looked middle-aged now. Young Sundep cursed the land. They told us they could not stay here, there was nothing for them but painful memories. So they left for the city to try their luck there.”

Bradley had heard the stories of starvation in the north that kept everyone in the Zones. “Nothing for anybody out there,” people said. “If you think this is bad … At least there's shelter and the chance of a meal now and again, if you're clever enough, eh?”

“Of course, we've never heard from them again. But being followers of the Faith keeps us going.”

“The Faith? What's that?”

“It's what we believe.
What has been lost will be found. Those who give will have their gifts passed on.
”

“I don't understand.”

“Well, many of us in the Faith have lost children—to the Compounds, to the Zones; some have even gone to the forests of the north. We believe that if we take in whoever knocks on our doors, that hospitality will be passed on to our children wherever they are.”

“Are there many of you?”

“No, very few. All of us live in farms starved by the Compounds. But you're lucky that you came to a farm of the Faith. Any other, you would have had a far harsher welcome. You could have been shot or handed over to the Compounds to be taken back to the Zones—or worse. You see, whether he wanted to or not, Sundep had to take you in. For young Sundep's sake. For his sake, if for no other.”

Mrs. McLachlan's hands lay inert on the chopping board. She stared out of the window a long time before Bradley left the room.

*   *   *

The closer they got to spring, the hungrier they got. The snow was lying in patches now around the countryside—like a giant half-finished jigsaw.

“Give it two weeks,” Sundep McLachlan said. “I don't know what the road north will be like—no one dares go there now—but the thaw could flood it or mud could make it impassable.” And it was true that they could hear the food trucks revving their engines as the mud held them on the road into the city.

But they couldn't stay inside forever—their hunger wouldn't let them. Martha and Bradley began to explore the land that lay behind the farm, far from the road. The farmer had told them of a small lake that was surrounded by hazel trees, hidden by a small rise.

“There used to be fish in it,” he said. “But these days I'd not like to say. I'd get up to it myself if I could. Still, if you could catch us one, that would be a fine thing.”

*   *   *

Hunger ran on ahead or made large looping explorations around them. It was good to see him stretch his legs in an open space and flow over the fields. But this was a new Hunger for Bradley. And he was still missing the old one. Since Bradley's fever, Hunger was as likely to follow Martha as he was Bradley.

He would respond to Bradley's commands as readily as ever, but he talked only in the dog's way—with barks or whines or with the angle of his head. The deep, equal understanding between them seemed to have gone. Bradley missed it. As he watched Hunger run so magnificently, he felt again jealous of what he had lost; for he had his suspicions.

“Martha?”

“What?”

“Does Hunger ever…”

“Ever what?”

“You know…?”

“Not unless you tell me, I don't.”

“Ever, well, like…”

“Like what, Bradley? Ask the question!”

“Does Hunger ever
talk
to you?”

“
Talk
to me…?” Martha's tone and her face spoke equally of her astonishment. “As in, ‘How are you today, Martha?'”

“No, not quite—you know what I mean.”

“I haven't a clue what you mean! Though just this morning he did ask if I didn't think you were getting a little odd.”

She looked at Bradley and the wildness of his question finally struck him.

“And how did you answer?” he said.

“I said, ‘Yes, Hunger, he thinks you're talking to him.'”

Martha laughed and Bradley just caught her laughter—her face uplifted to the light, her eyes dancing—before he joined in, laughing as much out of relief as anything. Laughter—he felt it tugging at his chest. Then Hunger was there, snaking between them, and they both crouched down and hugged him so closely they were also hugging each other's arms, so closely their cheeks touched.

They drew apart and Martha looked at Bradley, cocking her head slightly like a dog. Her eyes flicked in tiny movements around his face, never leaving it, taking in each part of it, as you would wish to know the face of someone who had just saved you from a burning building or a prison cell.

“Bradley Prince,” she said. “Bradley Prince.”

“That's my name.”

And the last splinter of ice in his chest finally thawed.

*   *   *

They followed the track through the stunted hazel trees and came to the lake's shore. It was a small lake, yet the water was as blue as the sky. Bradley felt warmth on his face for the first time that year.

But Hunger had frozen, his ears alert, his nose pointing.

Along the shore there was a wisp of smoke. Close by it, out in the lake, the water's surface was ruffled.

Bradley touched Martha's arm and they crouched down behind the last line of hazels. They crept along behind the trees, till they could see a pile of clothes and the glint of a fish lying beside the fire.

The surface of the lake exploded.

A huge figure rose from it—pulling the water with it—holding a fish like a wriggling bar of light in its hands. The figure appeared to kiss the fish, then to dance out of the water with it. He tapped its head twice against one of the stones around the fire and laid it beside the other one.

They had come across the occasional vagrant before, though after the ambush of the food truck the gangs had migrated elsewhere. In this live-and-let-live world they had given each other a wide berth.

But this was no ordinary vagrant. Bradley recognized immediately the broad naked torso, the perfectly bald head and hairless face. And so did Martha.
Once met, never forgotten.
Turning to her, Bradley saw her face bulk and harden round the edges, as briefly she put on Skreech again.

They watched as Red Dog stamped his feet, swung his arms, then turned back into the water. As he dipped below the surface, Martha and Bradley nodded grimly to each other. Was it safe to pretend they had not seen him, so close to the McLachlans as he was? They looked around—the biggest sticks of wood they saw would be as twigs to Red Dog.

Bradley felt a cage forming in the air around him. He reached out a hand and touched Martha's arm to prove to himself that he still could. He was aware her breathing had quickened. With their eyes fixed on Red Dog, neither Bradley, Martha nor Hunger noticed the movement of branches at the fringe of the wood, where it was closest to Red Dog's fire.

*   *   *

Claw stooped beneath a hazel branch and stepped down the banking onto the stony lakeshore. His left knee clicked yet again, like two stones knocking into each other. Still, at least this time it had not locked. He wondered whether he had another winter left in him. His joints seemed to take it in turns to give him pain.

He rubbed the stiffness from his neck and craned his head from side to side. He took in what he saw with his own narrowed eyes and looked for what they missed with the blind hollows of the wolf's head he wore above his own.

No one but the fisherman.

He took another few steps towards Red Dog's fire, turning his head this way and that, sifting through the smoky air. He was broad-backed, bow-legged, and his grey hair flowed over the wolf-skin he wore round his shoulders.

He gave a low whistle and the others came out, blinking in the sunlight. Bradley, wide-eyed, counted two more men, two women and three children. One was a baby tied to its mother's back. They were all partly dressed in animal skins. The first man was the only one with a headdress, though the two younger men carried clubs—stones the size of fists, tied into split wooden shafts.

Empty bellies had drawn them once more far from the depths of the forest. Claw had smelled the fire and led them to this spot. How long they would survive without him, he could not guess. The younger men could be ferocious, no denying that, but to be wolf was also to listen to the forest; to smell the forest; to fill your eyes with the forest. To use whatever wisdom a brutish life allowed. The mothers at least knew that.

Claw signalled to them that they should stay by the fire. To the two children he spoke firmly, raising his fist as if he might strike them. They needed to be bold to survive in the forest; but more, they needed to learn. Perhaps this giant would be prepared to share with them, yet he was a new and unpredictable challenge. Whatever happened, the children, tucked in behind the wolf men, would be safe.

*   *   *

Red Dog was gone a long time—or so it seemed to those who watched and waited in the silence—before, his cavernous chest almost airless, he leaped up from the water. His arms were raised over his head, a trout was in his fist—and there was only a narrow strip of water between him and the wolf men. They appeared to laugh at him—or to grimace—as Red Dog lost control of the trout and juggled with it, before the fish fell back into the water and skimmed away below its surface. Momentarily, his forehead had lifted in the openness of shock. Now it came down into the helmet Bradley and Martha had known so well.