Wabbity.
“I can’t get Rabbity, Billy. We don’t have time.” I wrestled him into his seat belt, pressing my head into his stomach to hold him down.
“Effie Elephant!” Now Maggie joined in, taking her belt off and scrambling back out. I held up my palms like two white flags: I would have to surrender this battle to win the war.
“Stay in the car!”
I ran back into our tent. Scrambling among the bedding, I found the various soft toys, their beady eyes looking alarmed by the turn of events. Outside, Joni moved toward the car in slow motion, as though getting accustomed to sea legs. I pushed her into the boot on top of whatever belongings and food we’d grabbed in the rush, and ran to the front seat. Lola climbed up next to me.
“What are we running from?”
“Guys in a helicopter. Tracking us with a heat camera, I think. They killed the hermit.” I hissed: “And Horatio.”
“The boys heard that helicopter a couple of times. No one could agree whether to trust it or not. Jack thought it might be mercenaries.”
“We can’t trust it, believe me.” I pulled the car round so that we faced the dirt track, but stayed under cover of the trees. “It landed at Moton Hall, which is beyond that woodland.” I pointed up the path to the left. “The main road goes past it. So we need to go the other way and hope they don’t fly overhead. But that lane is narrower, slower, and I don’t know where—”
“I know a place to hide,” said Lola. “We won’t be on the road for long.”
“Where are we going?”
“To the railway. To find the boys.”
The Wild Things. I closed my eyes for a moment. Maybe Lola didn’t know about the first boy, the one I’d run over. Maybe Joni hadn’t had time to tell her. Would these boys know it was me? Would they give us shelter if they did?
“What are we waiting for?” Lola shouted. I grappled with the unfamiliar gear stick, and the car lurched down the dirt track toward the railway.
Chapter Seventeen
“The younger boys are hopeless, though. They keep touching things they shouldn’t—like fire!—and they’re always fighting and stealing each other’s stuff. It’s like”—Lola searched for the right phrase—“it’s like Lord of the Flies. Jack said he half expects to find a pig’s head on a stick.”
“Sounds like every Saturday morning in my house.” The hedgerows blurred past my window.
“You have to tell Mom they needed me.” She glanced toward the boot, where Joni was wrapped up amid the sleeping bags. “I thought she’d understand.”
“Where’s this turn, Lola?” In the wing mirror, I scanned the sky, but there was no movement, nothing to stir up the dense clouds that hung above us like the thick globs of ash we’d dropped on the path to Peter’s grave.
“We’re going so fast, it’s hard to—no, it’s further down. I’ve never seen Mom this bad before. Oh, it’s here—right, right!”
Lola gripped the dashboard as I swerved into a narrow lane, where a line of grass down the middle had grown so high I could feel it scraping the underside of the car. The hedgerows had shot up, too, and provided a degree of cover. Still, I kept up the pace. Better to get off the road. “Your mum’s had a rough few days,” I said. Inadequate words, as though she’d had a run-in with her boss or a marital dispute. Some first-world problem. I took a bend too fast, heavy braking, someone’s head bopping against the glass behind me. I dropped two gears to get back up to speed. Rev counter fingering the red.
“We need to go all the way to the far side.” Lola pointed to a gateway into a field, and we turned in and rattled onto the pitted ground. Her juddery robot voice would normally have caused hilarity among the kids, but our sudden departure had muted them. They held themselves steady on the back seat as though good behavior might help them. I followed the lay of the land until the field ended in a scrubby open space. The car was well hidden from the road, but I pulled up close to the tree line to shield it from the air and then scrabbled the hermit’s silver heat blanket over the bonnet. No idea if it would make much difference.
“Where are we?” I asked Lola. We stood on shattered concrete that was covered with a cargo net of brambles.
“This is the old railway line. It was decommissioned in the nineteen sixties by a man called Beeching, who closed over two thousand train stations across the country.”
Lola was shiny-eyed with her new knowledge, and I knew right away that Jack must have taught her this fact. Along with goodness knows what else.
“Look, this is the old train station,” she said, high-stepping to the far side of a boggy pond, where a stone arch rose in a sea-monster hump from the ground. Lola scrambled onto the hard-packed earth of the platform, where passengers holding parcels must once have stood and peered down the line waiting for loved ones, or for escape. Any buildings or signals or rails were long gone. But the wind flailed across the scarred landscape, as though it were being dragged along invisible tracks.
The kids opened their doors and climbed down from the car. Billy came over to be picked up. I grappled him onto my back to leave my hands free to carry bags.
“So where is it?” I called to Lola, who was beckoning us onto the railway platform.
“We have to walk about two miles north.”
“Two miles?” I could run it in less than twenty minutes, but at toddler pace it was too far to walk.
“The railway leads us to an old lead mine. That’s where the boys have their camp.”
Very secure hideout. Good plan. But I hadn’t forgotten them raiding and hacking my car outside the supermarket. And what if they recognized me? We needed to keep mobile, just in case.
“We’re too vulnerable on foot,” I said. “We’ll drive.”
Lola held out one palm like a traffic policeman.
“Jack wants the site to look unused from the air. Because of the helicopters. We leave nothing outside that suggests habitation. No bikes, no rubbish, nothing.”
“We’ll hide the car when we get there.”
“We can come back for it if we need it,” she said.
“Do you have any idea how long it will take four children to walk two miles?” I started ushering the kids back toward the car. “We have to drive.” I turned around to see if Lola was coming, but she was on the far side of the platform, pulling a bike out of the trees. She ran a few steps and hopped on, her black top billowing out behind her straight back like Mary Poppins’s umbrella.