Page 10 of The Two of Us at the End of the World

This is the thing itself. Not the fear of it. It’s real, and now – at last – something can be done.

His eyes flick between us, but the gun stays on her. It doesn’t waver a bit. It’s as steady as the gun on the statue.

Mouse, says Cat, voice low and hoarse. When you can, just run.

I know the something that she’s going to do is bad and I don’t want her to because he’s bigger than both of us and the gun is pointing right at her.

And then the man changes his voice.

It softens. He takes his hand off the trigger and raises it, open-palmed, though he keeps the gun up. He pushes back the hood, and he’s got long grey-black hair escaping from a tight woollen cap and he’s smiling, his teeth a crooked white slash in his beard. He makes calming gestures with his hand as he crouches down very slowly – and then lowers the gun to the ground, placing it very carefully on the sodden moss at his feet. He looks from Cat to me and back, and then he stands up again, still moving deliberately and unhurriedly, both hands palm-up now.

It’s OK, Cat, I say. He was scared. Just scared. Now he’s trusting us. He wants you to put your bow down.

She keeps the bow up as she thinks.

Cat, I say. He’s unarmed now.

He can still kill us, she says. If he starts coughing.

The wind is behind us. The rain is sloping towards him.

He’s downwind, I say. For now that’s OK isn’t it? He can’t breathe infections on us.

The man nods encouragingly, like he can understand what I’m saying to her, even though I don’t think he knows our words either.

Cat, I say. We can’t kill the first person we’ve ever seen.

I’ve seen people, she says. Despite the lashing rain her voice is like wind in dry leaves.

Cat, I say.

There’s just the rain spattering the leaves and bouncing off the tank, and the sound of us breathing.

Fine, she says. But we stay upwind, and we try to make him understand he has to keep away until we know he’s not sick.

She looks at him.

Not sick? she says.

He smiles and shrugs and says something calming.

Bollocks, she says.

Bollocks is a swear word she says her dad used when things were going wrong. She calls it her inheritance. She doesn’t use it often but mainly when she’s having to admit being wrong.

So I know it’s all going to be OK.

She lowers the bow and un-nocks the arrow. He looks at his gun on the moss. She snorts and bends to put her weapons on the ground too.

Good, I say, relaxing and lowering my bow.

I feel my heart blip as I exhale in relief, like it’s switching from scared to excited. Because this is, now the danger has gone, the most exciting thing I’ve ever seen.

Another person. Maybe one of lots of new people. Maybe this is a whole new life starting, a fuller life. I smile, trying to make him see we’re nice. Not a threat. That everything is good.

Hi, I say. I’m Mous—

It’s not good.