Page 97 of The Two of Us at the End of the World

And as she turned to defend us against whatever she thought was behind her, I saw the wet slash of red along her flank. Something had hurt her.

Cold fear hit me like ice water flushing the blood from my veins, jerking me out of the hot and sweaty fog I’d been stumbling through the day in, muffled and numb and not thinking any more than I had to because even thinking was using energy I didn’t have. The shock woke me brutally fast, and the feeling of all my blunted senses coming back to life, honed and alert in an instant made me feel nauseous and off balance. Suddenly everything was hard-edged and in focus. My hearing seemed to reach out and notice noises in the distant undergrowth that I would not normally be aware of. Even my sense of smell seemed to have jolted into action at a higher level: I could smell Digger’s breath as she huffed the strangely wet and meaty smell of her own fear into the afternoon air.

And more than my abruptly sharpened physical senses, my mind was kicking into action on several levels at once which added to the feeling of sickening disorientation: I could see nothing coming after Digger and I couldn’t hear anything crashing through the undergrowth towards us, but I didn’t want to stop focusing on the direction from which she’d come in case I missed it. At the same time, if it was wolves, I felt I needed to get the goats inside as well as us. And the horse. And then there was the real, immediate problem: What had felt like a clever practical solution to carrying the babies in my specially designed harness – one in front one behind – now seemed the stupidest idea in the whole empty world. Because although I found I had instinctively picked up my bow as soon as Digger came in sight, running towards us, I obviously hadn’t thought any of this through fully enough, because using a bow with a baby strapped to your chest was not practical and would injure the baby the moment I let go of the bowstring. Worse than that was the horrible realisation that the babies were not only hampering any movements I might have to make at speed in order to save us, but that strapping them onto me was doubly dangerous for them. In fact I couldn’t have done anything worse. I had basically put on a suit of armour made of babies. I was also painfully aware that I had left Cat unprotected in the Bunker with the doors left wide open to get some cooling air in, and that if the wolves, or whatever had hurt Digger had circled round us in a wide loop, she would not be able to get up and defend herself if they got inside.

Thinking of Cat kicked me out of the frozen state I had fallen into and started me moving, automatically doing one thing at a time. I could hear her voice reminding me: Slow is smooth, smooth is fast. So I did one thing at a time. Smoothly as I could. I unhobbled the goats, and led them back to the Bunker, dragging them as they resisted – not so smooth – looking over my shoulder all the time to make sure that nothing was coming at us. Digger brought up the rear, criss-crossing back and forth, making her low warning noise as she did so. The babies must have picked up the fear coming off me and the dog because they started crying, so that we made an awkward and noisy procession as I stumbled us towards the safety of the Bunker. Luckily the only wolves in the Bunker were in my imagination, and after I had dragged the goats through the door and closed it, I realised that Digger had remained outside and was looking at me and then away towards the direction where we had left Red to graze earlier in the morning. I put the crying babies on the floor in the pen and decided they would have to calm themselves for the short time it would take me to get the horse into safety as well.

When I got to Red she’d been spooked by Digger, and was even harder to lead back into the Bunker than the goats had been. None of that was a bit smooth, but I stuck with it. As we neared the door I could hear the babies crying even louder through the glass, and somehow that made me angry. It didn’t seem fair that they should be so upset when they didn’t understand anything, not least the danger that might now be stalking us. In the end I got the horse inside and closed the door again, dropping the bolt across it, this time with Digger beside me on the right side of the door. She remained staring out across the Tanglewood to the landscape beyond while I extracted the babies from the harness that I had left them in, and tried to calm and feed them. I kept up a running commentary of what I was doing and why I was doing it so that Cat could know what was going on as I did so. And then, when the babies were finally quiet, I went and stood by Digger in the open doorway, staring over the dry bramble thicket to see if whatever had hurt her was about to appear out of the dusk now falling over the familiar landscape.

I didn’t know what to do about the cut on her side. I thought about stitching it up, but knew she would never sit for me to do that, and Cat was too weak to hold her still. For me I sat with my feet on either side of the bucket of cold dripping and cooking fat we collected through the year to soak the strips of rag we wound round sticks to make our torches, thinking I might as well keep my hands busy doing something useful, but my mind wandered and I only wound a couple of torches, and then lost myself wondering if I could soak some of these rags in our antiseptic salve instead of rancid cooking grease, and somehow attach them to her wound, but she turned and snapped at me as I reached for her to try dabbing some on to start with. The nip was not hard. She wasn’t trying to hurt me. But it was just enough to tell me to stop fiddling at her. I think even if I had managed to put some salve on the slash she would just have torn the bandages away and licked it off, and that would probably have made her sick, so maybe leaving it alone was the right thing to have done. Animals are pretty good at healing themselves if you let them. As I sat with her watching the shadows lengthen I felt twice as exhausted as normal, and one hundred per cent convinced that the coming night would be a sleepless one.

But then this was the time when I seemed to get almost everything wrong that I should have got right.

Chapter 33

Deadlier than a unicorn

Mouse – Year 201 AG

I woke in the dark to the sound of a rumbling almost too deep to hear. First instinct was that it was the thunderstorm arriving to clear the air at last. Second, correct and much less welcome thought was that it was the noise of Digger growling at something. It was a growl pitched so low that I felt rather than heard it. I rolled slowly to my feet, cursing myself for having gone to sleep without having laid out the weapons I had meant to put close to hand. I had meant to have the boar spear and my bow and arrow and even the guns with me as I stood watch through the night. I’d also meant to have some of the fat torches ready to light so that we could see what was out there if anything actually came looking for us in the dark. Not only that but I knew that wild animals didn’t like fire and could well be frightened off by the flames alone. But I had done none of that. I had let exhaustion take me and put us all in harm’s way.

And now the harm had arrived

That wasn’t my imagination any more. There were undoubtedly things or a thing out there in the dark. They were very close and though I could not see them I knew they were there with absolute certainty: I can’t explain what it was, whether it was a smell, a noise or something I caught with the tail of my eye but I knew without the tiniest piece of doubt that I was being watched, and that the watcher did not have my best interests at heart. Digger sensed exactly what I did. I felt her growling deepen as she got to her feet and stared out into the full dark of night beyond the patchwork wall of windows. We watched for a long time. Nothing happened. Nothing moved or howled or attacked. And eventually tiredness trumped fear again, and my head began to drop. I jerked myself awake a couple of times, and I remember praying the babies would sleep until daylight and thinking I should go and talk to Cat about all of this, but before I did, I must have fallen into a deep sleep.

It’s unnerving when you’re jolted out of a deep dream in the dark by your dog barking at something out there that you can’t see. It’s much, much worse when the dog just growls. That’s what Digger was doing again, deeper than before, if that were possible. The bass note of it was now so fathomless that I knew things were deadly serious.

Barking is a warning shouted into the dead of night. It says: Whatever you are, go away because I know you’re out there. A growl on the other hand is a whispered promise. It doesn’t have to be loud, because the unseen enemy is now close enough to hear it. And it says: Whatever you are, you’ve come too close, and I will fight you and I will not stop until you’re gone.

Digger was stiff and quivering and making that growl.

I stayed still, hardly breathing, aware that just as I was peering into the blank mosaic of windows trying to see what was out there, so whatever that was was also looking in. The hairs on the back of my neck were standing up just like the hackles on Digger’s back. I was reacting with my animal brain, knowing not thinking. And then I heard the smallest softest crunch of sun-baked grass as something moved off to my left beyond the windows where I hadn’t been looking, and suddenly I knew too, and my mouth was dryer than any of that grass and my heart was stuttering as if it couldn’t decide whether to speed up or just stop dead.

And then the whole patchwork wall of windows creaked alarmingly and there was a sound like branches cracking and I was simultaneously aware of how cobbled-together the hotch-potched wall actually was, and that something was rubbing itself along it, bringing the creaking of old wood and rusting nails closer and closer to us with each step.

I had a very clear vision of the whole thing being pushed in and all the glass sharding, and wood splintering and I knew I had to move, I had to get a light and a weapon and stop being stuck waiting for something I couldn’t see. I tore myself away from Digger and ran into the kitchen area: I didn’t need to look to see where the fat-soaked torches were, and my hands found the flint and steel on their own. I didn’t have time to hesitate, knowing deep in my animal mind that as soon as the sound of metal on stone cut through the furtive noises on the other side of what I now thought of as a dangerously thin and breakable glass barrier, then whatever was out there would stop having to be stealthy, and things were likely to get extremely noisy and serious very quickly.

There was a part of me that wanted to grab the gun and trust that it would fire because the sound of that thunderclap ripping the world apart was sure to send anything out there running off in terror, but then the other part of me remembered that if it didn’t go bang, if the bullet misfired, all I had to defend us then was a handful of metal that was less use than a hammer. So I put the gun down, grabbed my bow and arrows and the boar spear and went back to the kitchen bench, striking the flint before I could think of more reasons not to do so.

It took two fast hits of metal on flint before the spark lit the tinder on the torch and then I grabbed it, not bothering to blow on it but sawing it through the air instead, waving it alight as I ran forwards towards the dark wall that now burst into mismatched shards of flame as the glass windows reflected the torch back at me—

—and then a lot happened, too fast.

Digger barked. The first proper bark she ever managed.

The babies started crying in the back of the Bunker.

And whatever the wolves were doing beyond the glass was not quite invisible any more because I could definitely see something moving, fur of some kind on the other side of the glass, pressed hard against it, making it move like wind through the barley as the animal lazily rubbed along the other side.

And then, before I could take in any more thought other than the one telling me it wasn’t a wolf because wolves just didn’t get anywhere near that big – it was gone.

It all happened too fast for me to believe that it was over. I looked at Digger.

What was that? I said.

Digger just kept staring out of the window, quivering. Like every muscle fibre in her body was stretched to breaking point.

And then I said: