“It's becoming a wilder place to live.” The woman smiled at Emily's camera and then nodded along a narrow alley between two houses. “That way. There's a body down here, but you won't see much of it.”
The skeleton was almost completely subsumed by nettles and ferns, the stalks and leaves sprouting up between ribs and through eye sockets. Jack wanted to walk straight by, but Emily paused and moved some of the plants aside with her foot. She started a quiet commentary into her camera's microphone.
“Who was this sad person, dead in an alley, killed by the lies told to everyone? They had long hair that might have been blonde, like mine. A leather jacket. A badge on the jacket, saying how much they liked the Dropkick Murphys, and a T-shirt, but it's too faded to see what was written on it. Did they fall here and die quickly, or crawl from a long way away? Were they coming from somewhere, or trying to get somewhere else?” She trained the camera along the body, then stepped away and let the ferns spring back up. “Another grim statistic of the Toxic City.”
“Come on, Emily,” Jack said. She looked at him, scared.
“This could have been us, if we'd come with Mum and Dad. This could have been anyone. We might have been friends.”
“Come on.”
Within twenty minutes of leaving the house, Jack craved the sight of another human being. Rosemary led them along sidestreets, through alleys, and, at one point, over several garden walls and through the small enclosed places that had once been so private and contained. He felt like an intruder, passing across family spaces once used as play areas for children, or barbeque areas for their parents. He saw children's garden toys hidden amongst the long grass and shrubs gone wild, and in one garden he noticed that the French doors leading into the house were open a few inches. He tried to see inside, but a slick green moss covered the inner surface of the glass, turning everything into shadow. He did not feel watched.
“Where are the other Irregulars?” he asked Rosemary as they paused beside an overturned lorry. It had been carrying boxes and boxes of books, the last bestseller now swollen into unreadable humps all across the road.
“We've been seen,” Rosemary said. “There was one in a house just back there, watching from an upstairs window.”
“Did you know them?”
“Don't think so. They'd have probably said hello if I did.”
“So is everyone alone, now?” he asked. “Is this how it always is?”
“Oh, no, Jack,” she said, apparently surprised at how he felt. “I do have some friends. There are people I see regularly, people I mix with. Many of us live on our own most of the time, of course, because it's far safer that way. But we have…not really a community, but an existence. There's plenty of hide and seek, but the Choppers don't bother us constantly. We just have to keep watch for them. And there are Irregulars with gifts that can do that for us.”
“So when do we meet Gordon?” he asked, feeling his friends’ eyes upon him as well as the lens of Emily's camera. “It's not just Lucy-Anne who wants to know about her family.”
“It's not far now. We have to cross a couple of main streets, but we'll be fine.”
“No dogs?” Lucy-Anne asked. “Wolves, lions, bears?”
“I've never heard of a bear being seen south of the river,” Rosemary said, and Jack was not sure whether she was joking.
They crossed the main roads carefully, running in pairs, and very little changed. Jack saw a dozen cats sitting together in front of one smashed-up shop, licking their paws, lazing in the sun and watching the humans rush across the street. It was an unsettling sight, because he'd never seen more than two cats sitting together before. It was as if the loss of their erstwhile owners had given them free reign to exist and adapt as they wished.