Black Feathers

56

When the light began to leave the sky Gordon knew he wouldn’t make it across the river before dark unless he swam. That wasn’t an option: his equipment would sink and probably take him with it. There had been places where the river had broadened and the water had become shallower, but not shallow enough for him to wade across. There was still too much rainwater coming down from the hills.

He’d have to try again in the morning. He ground his teeth. It was only twenty or thirty yards across the water, but it was twenty or thirty yards of impossibility. He set his mind to finding somewhere secluded to pitch his tent.

To his left, one field after another sloped upwards towards hedges and lines of small trees. When he saw a thicker stand of hawthorn and a few small birches, he turned up the hill following a hedgerow until he was among them. He wouldn’t be able to see out from where he planned to put the tent, but it seemed safe enough.

He decided not to light a fire. He had water and dried meat. There was no real need for any of it to be hot. He sat watching the river as he chewed deer strips and drank a few sips of water. The moment he finished, he pulled everything inside the tent and zipped himself in.

Darkness came sluggishly, and every few minutes he inspected his hand in front of his face to check if he could still see. Not wanting to make himself visible writing by torchlight, he got into his sleeping bag, made a pillow of some of his clothes and lay back. When sleep did come it was light and restless, ushered in by dream wraiths. As the night progressed the wraiths became more substantial, taking the faces of his enemies and his fears.

Angela came up from the river bottom, her clothes torn and dripping, weeds wrapped around her ankles. They trailed back into the water as she walked up the slope to his tent, a slew of green entrails in her wake. He heard the squelching of her waterlogged shoes and the splash and squirt of fluid leaking from her pores as she walked.

She stopped outside his tent, seeming embarrassed about her condition – most unlike her.

Perhaps it isn’t Angela at all, he thought.

Despite the tent being zipped up and the darkness of the night being complete, he could see very clearly how she looked: bedraggled, hesitant, distracted.

She tried to speak but no sound came at first. Eels as black and oily as tar slithered up from her throat and out of her stretched-open jaws. They passed from her lips in skin-wrenching spasms, dropping to the grass to slither away, silver reflections gleaming off their backs from a moon Gordon couldn’t see.

Finally, the eels were gone from Angela’s stomach and she was able to whisper to him. He didn’t recognise her voice.

“I come with a message of hope for the future. A Bright Day is nigh.”

Even in his sleep, Gordon giggled at her solemnity and the triteness of her speech.

“I wish I could believe you,” he said. “And that’s the truth.”

The old Angela, sarcastic and dismissive, returned.

“OK, you got me. What I came here to say is the end of the world is just around the next bend and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

The end of the world.

No one had ever said it to him like that before. Not even he and Jude had ever spoken of it in quite that way. But wasn’t that what they’d been thinking all along? Wasn’t that what his parents had been preparing for? And wasn’t this the same fear that motivated the Ward?

The end of the world. That was the end of everything, wasn’t it? The end of history, the destruction of every human memory ever made. Not only the end of the Earth but the end of its story, its erasing from the memory of time itself. He imagined this end then as an explosion on a galactic scale, an event that blew the world apart and left nothing but dust to drift in the space the planet had once occupied. But he knew it wasn’t really like that. Really, it was a sickness. If the world were a person, the sickness would resemble leprosy. Superficial initially, now the rot was deepening. Areas on the surface were dying but as the sickness burrowed deeper into the flesh, huge areas of the world’s body would become necrotic.

The end of his life. The end of his family’s lives. The end of everything. He couldn’t make sense of it, couldn’t fit the idea in.

He saw the amused leer on Angela’s water-ruined face.

“You’re lying,” he said.

“I might be. But you’ll never know if I am or not. What would you rather do: spend your last days on the run, or see Mum, Dad and Judith one last time before the end comes? You’re going to die, Gordon. Just because you’re only a boy isn’t going to stop it from happening. Do you want to die alone, or surrounded by the people you love?”

Lies or not, her words were powerful. The one thing he didn’t allow himself to consider in the daytime was never seeing his family again. Separation forever. But here in the privacy of sleep there was no way to escape his feelings. He didn’t want to cry in front of his merciless sister but he couldn’t stop himself.

“Well,” she said. “I guess there’s your answer.”

Gordon snivelled, on the edge of wakefulness now. As Angela retreated back to the river she had one more thing to say:

“Turn yourself in, Gordon. The Ward are everywhere anyway, so you won’t have far to travel when you give yourself up. Or you could just stay here. They’ll catch up with you soon enough.”

Her footsteps on the grass were stealthy and soft. Not the sloshing gait she’d arrived with. They got louder as she backed away. The noise of her re-entering the river was wrong too. It sounded like the opening of a zip. By the time Gordon realised why, he was pinned to the floor of the tent by the weight of a tense body. A hard, sharp point dug into his throat. Hot breath, scented with whisky and cigarette smoke, blew across his face. Tense, excited, aggressive breaths. Laughter, terribly loud in the silence of the night even though the intruder tried to keep it hushed.

Gordon thought of his own knife, only a few inches from his fingers and left locked open for exactly this reason. There was no way he could reach it, though. Not before his own throat was cut. For the moment all he could do was lie still. The body on top of him shifted, tense and edgy. Gordon felt an intimacy to the weight. It made him nauseous but the knife at his neck kept him still.

“Unzip the sleeping bag.”

The whisper was a wheezy rasp. Gordon didn’t recognise the voice. Nor did he move.

“Do it.”

This was a chance.

Given leave to move his hands, he could try for the knife. He might even be able to grab it in one swift move, but would he then be able to turn and use it? He didn’t think so. All the intruder had to do was push his blade upwards and Gordon was finished. The longer he thought about it, the harder his heart beat. Soon it was all he could hear.

Slow enough not to create alarm, Gordon began to unzip the sleeping bag as he’d been asked. The breath of the knife wielder quickened. The knife trembled at his neck.

“All the way down.”

The accent. That was familiar.

Gordon did as he was asked.

The man rolled further onto him and used his free hand to peel away the sleeping bag from his body. Gordon found his voice, not much above a whisper.

“What do you want?”

“Shut up.”

“I’ve got food. Money too. You can have it.”

The harsh breathing became a spasm of giggles. The whisper became speech.

“What I want, I’m going to take.”

A rattle in the throat like pebbles shaken in a glass. The intruder forced his free arm under Gordon’s throat, locking his neck into the crook of the elbow. The force was enough to squeeze his windpipe. Gordon’s voice became a strained wheeze.

“You’re strangling me,” he said, his voice a pressurised gurgle in the darkness.

“No,” said the voice, more confident now and rattling like stones. “No, no, no. If I was strangling you, you’d be dying. It’ll be a while before we get to that.”