Page 12 of The Two of Us at the End of the World

I look down at her, now bent over the body tugging at something.

What are you doing? I say. My tongue is still thick and sluggish in my mouth. I can hear how stupid and slow I sound.

Getting this, she says, giving a final yank and showing me my arrow. It’s black with blood from head to feathers. She must have pulled it all the way through his neck.

Cat, I say.

If there are more of them, we might need it, she says. And if there are more, it’s not good they know it was us who did this.

More? I say.

We don’t know if he was alone, she says.

That’s when we hear the strangled half-howling noise from the trees on the other side of the motorway, in the direction of the old farm by the quarry, across from the fallen pylons. We both go still and listen.

That’s not people, Cat says. It’s an animal.

It’s hurt, I say.

It’s something, she says. She’s biting her lip. Which means she’s thinking.

It might be people too, I say.

She nods.

Should we run? I say.

I don’t say I suddenly really want to run, more than anything, just get far away from the thing in the nettles, run to Plan B, which is our other place deep in the hills where we have to go if we ever get separated and the Bunker isn’t safe any more.

Cat bends and picks up the long gun.

Cat, I say.

She just looks at me and then puts it under the belly of the tank.

Out of the wet. Hidden, she says, in case there are others. I don’t know how to use it. We’ll try and find out later.

Later? I say.

We’re going over there, she says. We don’t have to run away if there’s just him and no others. But we won’t know that unless we look for his camp and see if there’s anyone else there.

How do you know he has a camp? I say.

Because he isn’t carrying enough stuff to travel with, she says with a sigh. There’ll be a camp and so we’ll go see if we have to run before we panic and do it without a good reason. We’ll just have a very careful look-see.

She looks at me, as if she can read my thoughts, which mostly she can except I haven’t ever had thoughts like this, about running and the darkness closing in on us.

We’ll be fine, she says. Mouse. We know this woodland, every track and tree-fall. If there are others this is all just a jumble to them. Like a maze. They won’t see us.

She can see I’m not happy about anything that’s happening.

Take it, she says, holding out the arrow. Her voice trips slightly. Look, it’s fine. Rain’s almost washed it clean already.

I can’t tell if she’s crying like I am, because the rain is streaming down her face, thinning and pinking the red blood welling from her cut lip, the skin on her cheekbone flushed with the nasty bruise that’s beginning to blossom round her eye socket.

And though I really want us to run in the opposite direction and never, ever stop, I follow her into the undergrowth because she’s Cat, and because she doesn’t need to explain why. I know why we have to do this just as well as she does:

If we don’t face it now, if we don’t go see what’s really down there, we could spend the rest of our lives running from something that wasn’t even there at all.