Page 5 of The Two of Us at the End of the World

Chapter 3

Stitch Country

Mouse – Year 201 AG

I wake with the sound of something shrieking.

When I open my eyes I realise the noise is only an echo, left by the deep dark of a dream that has just thrown me back up into consciousness, but not the light. The night is so black I might as well be blindfolded, and it’s as still as a grave. “Still as the grave” is something they say in books: I’m not actually sure how still graves really are. Seems like they might be writhing, squirmy places once the worms get in, but that’s the kind of grisly thought that surfaces when you wake like this. The only real human sound that is in here with me is Cat breathing through her nose on the other side of the room.

In the hours of darkness, when she is most buried in sleep, her breaths are measured and slow, the opposite of the twitchy Cat who pushes her way impatiently through the daylight hours. It’s also my favourite sound. It calms me and makes me feel safe even if – like now – I have been spat out into the lowest part of the night by a nightmare. I suppose it’s just because I have slept alongside that comforting noise on every night I can remember. Even though we’ve moved where we live a lot, it always sounds like home. Maybe that’s what other people are if they’re the right person. Home. Not hell, like it said on a bridge we walked under one day. Someone had sprayed words on it. “Don—orry – If hell is other people, this is going to be heaven!” A bit of the bridge had cracked off after the “Don” where some knotweed roots had split the concrete, but I know they wrote “Don’t worry”. We only walked past it the one time, when I was about twelve or thirteen, because it’s down in Stitch Country, and that’s a place we’ve avoided ever since, because of the boars and their bad tempers and sharp tusks. It’s dangerous and it’s also a good story, because though bad things happened to both of us there, we also discovered our plan for dealing with those kinds of things actually worked. I lie and try to make out the silhouette of my hand, trying to see the scar shaped like a crooked smile that I know is there but can’t yet see in the darkness. Cat has a longer white slash which is puckered with stitch pulls and has stayed red at one end, running two hands-width along her ribcage, front to back. Just above her kidneys. The sewing on her scar isn’t as good as on my hand but that’s because she did mine and she’s nimble-fingered and I had to do hers sort of one-handed, and back then I was smaller and more clumsy anyway. The bad luck is we both got hurt: the good luck is that First Aid and Safety for Dummies had taught us to be prepared, so we knew what to do, and did it as well as we could. Which turned out to be just enough, which is all that matters in the end.

We started by going down into Stitch Country looking for a hospital we’d seen on an old map, hoping to find medicine or useful things, but instead we found wild boars and violence, and stitches. Cat had found the map on a wall in the Tower, and figured out that a white H on a blue square meant hospital. Back then we thought that hospitals might just, even after all this time, still have things we could find useful. So we went foraging, following the M-way with our feet as we traced it with our fingers on the copy of the wall map we had made, until we found the town.

The hospital was a sprawly building with a big entrance that was surrounded by an open flat area that had once been a place for parking cars but was now an expanse of low scrubby heath criss-crossed by broken lines of silver birch trees that must – from how regularly they were spaced – have been planted along the ranks of parked cars to give them shade. There were no cars there now, just bracken and dock and bent-grass and – as we approached the entrance – hospital beds. I don’t know why they were there, out of the building as if they’d been banished from the shelter of the wards that were their normal home, but there they were, ranks of them, rusted out frames and indestructible plastic headboards poking above the brambles and greenery that were slowly pulling them back into the earth below. A huge drift of donkey rhubarb had grown round one side of the hospital and had begun to reach sprays of heart-shaped leaves over one end of the bed-park, so it looked like a giant green monster had begun to devour them. We used to eat tender young stems of donkey rhubarb in the spring, stewed up and mixed with honey, but I’ve always found the red stemmed branches somehow sinister, the way they hide under the green cloak of leaves and look more flesh than plant. But we did enjoy the young shoots for their tart and slightly sweet flavour. And it turned out we weren’t the only ones who liked them.

Why are all the beds outside? I asked Cat.

She shrugged as she took off her pack, and took a swig from her water bottle.

Why did crazy people do crazy things? she said. Because their world was ending, and it made them nuts.

The hospital had been gutted. There wasn’t anything useful inside it for us to scavenge, no medicines, no tools, no supplies. The whole place smelled damp and earthy. And even though it was beginning to seriously fall apart, the whole building had a stripped and lean feel to it as we moved from floor to floor and wing to wing. All the wards and offices were empty, no chairs, no beds and very few tables or desks. We were hoping for forgotten medicines or other treasures, and instead we found nothing but mould and decay. In the basement we did find a room with long, still almost-shiny steel tables that Cat said were probably for doing the operations on, but they were bolted to the floor, and we didn’t need them anyway. There was a wall of drawers that we tried to open but couldn’t, and she said that was just as well as they probably stored the bodies there.

Finding dead people was a thing that had happened a few times as we scavenged houses. I was never scared of them. They were usually just bones, sometimes with leathery skin stretched tight and mottled over them as they lay in their beds or sat in their chairs, patiently waiting to fall to bits and to then begin the long process of becoming part of whatever floor they were on – moss, soil, rotted wood or whatever. Everything broke down to soil in the end. We were young but we knew that much. Earth to earth was something they used to say at burying ceremonies, Cat said, but you didn’t have to be buried to go to earth. You just had to die. The earth got you in the end. All you needed was time and then with a little help from the rain, roofs would fall, floors would collapse, beds or chairs quietly cave in and there you’d be, on the ground, a bag of bones ready to be recycled into earth that would grow moss or trees or brambles. And because the few dead we had seen were so old they didn’t look much like people, we never got scared by them. Cat would just say hi as we passed or thank you if we took something from their house. Their bones couldn’t hear, but Cat always said it cost us nothing to be polite, and it was a habit she’d got from her mother, so we both did it. I haven’t ever escaped the habit.

Anyway, we found no bodies in the hospital, and nothing much of anything useful at all either. We picked up a couple of bean-shaped steel bowls which we never used and some stainless scissory looking things that locked closed on little ratchets on the handles. Cat said they were for clamping things and we should take them for our first aid kits. We never used them either, until we did suddenly need them one day in a way we couldn’t have possibly foreseen. We were feeling sad we’d come all this way and wasted our time and were taking a walk around the outside of the building just in case there was a part we’d missed from the inside when I saw them.

They were rooting in the shadows beneath the leaf canopy on the edge of the donkey rhubarb clump. Seven or eight little pairs of eyes paused snuffling and snorting and looked up at me. I stopped and looked back at them, one hand on the rail that ran up the shallow ramp I was walking up. I remember it felt unexpectedly smooth and was rust-free, and I was thinking it must be a different kind of metal to steel or iron, maybe aluminium or something, and then I saw the faces turn and look up at me. They weren’t scared, maybe because they’d never seen a person. I’d never seen a piglet, though that’s what I could see they were. I’d seen a boar at a distance once, and I’d seen pigs and piglets in lots of picture books.

Piglets, I said, looking round for Cat.

Don’t move she said.

They’re not scared, I said.

Not them I’m worried about, she said. Mouse. Seriously. Just don’t move.

She was slowly reaching her bow off her shoulder, the movement made uncharacteristically awkward by the position she’d frozen in.

I didn’t know what she was talking about. But then I hadn’t seen it yet. All I’d heard was the very serious edge in her voice.

It was behind and to my left. I heard it huff once before I turned my head and saw it move, and then it was too late to do anything right.

The mistake I’d made was getting between a full-grown wild boar and its family and not noticing what I’d done until it noticed me.

A wild boar might look like a chunky little barrel of muscle on legs, but it can get moving really, really fast. And there are sharp and wickedly curved tusks coming at you on the front of it.

I heard Cat shout something, but I don’t know what because all my attention was on those hate-filled eyes and those stubby dagger teeth sprinting at me. I was too far from the silver birches to get up one before it ran me down, and on the other side the railing of the ramp was between me and the hospital wall. I don’t believe I thought at all, because the boar was too close to do anything but react. I stood my ground for a second and then dodged at the very last moment, launching sideways as the boar careered past me, and I swear I felt the rough bristle on its side scrape my leg and for a flash my brain kicked in and I did have time to think I should start running in the opposite direction before it turned and had another go, but then my torso slammed into the railing that I’d forgotten and all the air in my lungs punched out of me and I dropped to my knee in time to see how very terrifyingly fast an angry boar can spin around and charge back at you. This time I only had an instant to launch myself under the bar while instinctively putting out my hand to fend off the animal. I was twelve. Still skinny. My strength and my muscle had only just begun to think about coming in. I weighed no more than a bag of dry sticks. I had no chance of deflecting that boar a millimetre. I just felt a dull but immediately serious blow as it hooked sideways at me and smacked the side of its head against my outflung palm, a blunt hammering impact that actually helped me tumble out of its path and go sprawling across the bumpy concrete of the ramp. It was such a numbingly hard knock that I saw but didn’t feel the sharp cut as the yellow tusk went straight in and then out of my outflung hand, right between my thumb and finger. My head hit the base of the hospital wall, and I just lay there, looking in surprise at the hole in my hand, so fresh I could clearly see white bone and pinky-blue muscle and the yellow line of fat beneath the split skin before the heart caught up with things and flooded everything with pumping red.

The scrape of the hog’s hooves as it turned for me again pulled me back into the moment though my legs were smarter than I was and were working on their own plan already, pushing me up the wall to a standing position. The hog huffed and then lowered its head to come at me again. And as it did so, something streaked through the empty air where its head had been an instant before and shattered against the stone hospital wall. Cat’s arrow was one of the old ones we had found, made in the long ago in a factory. I think that’s what saved us because the wood was so old and dry that it sharded into splinters, like a sort of mini wood explosion, and that got the hog’s attention. Maybe it got some splinters too. But it turned and huffed in surprise as it saw what was hurtling towards it. Cat came running, roaring and shouting, doing everything she could to take the boar’s attention away from me as she snatched another arrow from her quiver.

If the mistake I had made was getting between a full-grown wild boar and its family, the bigger mistake the boar had made was getting between Cat and hers.

I didn’t have time to shout at her and tell her to stop because although everything seemed to be happening in painful slow motion for me, what was happening to them went at sickening speed. The hog bucked against the ground and launched itself at Cat who didn’t break pace one bit, just nocked her arrow and fired on the run.

Given the speed at which they were closing, it’s a miracle she hit anything close to what she was aiming at, but the arrow did make contact, before glancing off the boar’s right-hand tusk and clattering into the wall beyond, this time with enough momentum taken off it by the ricochet that it didn’t shatter like the other one. In fact, it looked like the boar had amazingly fast reflexes and had actually blocked the arrow and batted it away, but of course it was just an unlucky accident. The animal just kept coming, hurled itself at Cat who sort of stutter-stepped at the last moment, jinking sideways out of the path of the murderous charge, almost clear but just unlucky enough to be caught by the left-hand tusk which hooked at her in passing. That the boar definitely did on purpose. The impact spun her and made her grunt as her coat ripped open and the torn portion ballooned in a swirl, dropping around her as she fell. Her quiver spilled arrows as she tried to brace her fall with the other hand still holding her bow. The bow snapped as she hit the ground and rolled. Beyond her, the boar skidded to a halt and twisted into a fast turn. Cat was as fast and was on her feet before it could kick into its next attack, and in my memory they both stand glaring at each other, and Cat is in the open with no chance of outrunning the angry-eyed boar, all she has is one length of broken bow in her left hand and her knife has found its way into the other one and she is standing her ground, blocking the boar, protecting me. Now I’m older and bigger and have carried her so many times I know she’s wiry but light as a bird really, but she took up the space between us like she’s a rock, like she’s a great wall, like she’s a mountain, this small sixteen, maybe seventeen-year-old girl facing down what must be three hundred pounds of angry bunched muscle and tusk, and the blood sheeting down her side is nothing to her, nor is the pain, nor is the fear. She doesn’t shake, she doesn’t tremble, she doesn’t step back from this face-off. Instead, she steps forwards, towards the boar and roars at it.

Come on! she shouts, her voice deeper and more ragged than I have ever heard it. Come on! I’ll cut your fucking heart out!