“What’s a standard?” asked Lola.
“A flag,” Jack and I both said at the same time. The boy shrugged. “My father was in Afghanistan and Iraq. He was offered a job with one of those private military companies once. Good money, but he didn’t want to be called a mercenary.” Jack had excellent manners, straight back, neat clothes amid the dishevelment around him. I recognized the type from my time at boarding school. Jack had all the military bearing of a forces kid.
I explained how the biohazard-suited mercenaries—as he had no doubt correctly identified them—hunted down each person they detected with the heat camera for extermination.
“The flyover must have been a recce,” he said. “Then they came back to carry out the op. Clean up.”
As I saw the scene play out again in my head, I noticed for the first time the accents of the voices saying, “Clean?” and “All clean.” Two different accents I couldn’t precisely place, though one I recognized as a twangy white African. Maybe Rhodesian? The other, Eastern European? Hired guns, most likely, covertly paid by some foreign government that was too impatient to wait for the official wheels to turn because by then it would be too late; the epidemic would be a pandemic. William Moton’s phrase came back to me: they don’t see us as survivors, only carriers.
“Well, the Cleaners won’t find us in here,” Jack concluded, though his voice pulled up the end of the sentence to leave it hanging from a string between us. A tiny chink in his confident armor.
I offered Lola some cream for the injured kid’s fingers, but Joni intercepted it and ducked off into the dark to see to him herself. Lola and I exchanged significant looks about this new burst of activity, while Jack gave us a roll call. I lost track after the second Harry and third George. It didn’t help that their faces all looked the same, monochromed by the torchlight, all round eyes and upside-down mouths, as though they’d sketched unhappy faces and stuck them on. The appearance of an adult had popped the balloon of their bravado, and only one of them had any puff left in him: the ferret, who produced a school tie and fixed it around his head to cover one eye. I lifted the dangling end to inspect the insignia.
“St. Govan’s College,” said Jack.
Posh boys. And I’d taken them for a bunch of hoodie hoodlums. Jack had the same emblem on his polo shirt.
“I’m head of house.” He tapped his chest. “We were on this orienteering course when Mr. Holden got a call, and he went down to the village, but then he never came back, so Mr. Thomas left me in charge and went to check what was happening, and that was the last we saw of him, too.”
“And you’ve been here ever since?”
“Just the last couple of days, after we saw the helicopter. Some of them ran out and tried to flag it down.” He indicated the smaller boys with his chin, and they lowered their own in shame. I remembered standing in the field beside the Bury Ditches, screaming and laughing that we were being rescued, while all the time the Cleaners were totting us up into a head count: collateral damage. “So we decided to leave the Hoar Wood,” Jack went on, “but then we had to get everyone back together after the schism—”
“Schism?”
“It’s like a splinter group.”
“I know what a schism is.”
“Of course. So this one fifth-former who’s a total—” He pulled up short, seeking a replacement for a rude word.
“Botheration?” I offered.
“Right. He went off with some of the younger ones for a couple of nights, said they were going back to school, but ended up sleeping in some hay barn—”
He broke off, and we both spun round in response to the honking din of a car alarm. Jack ducked down the tunnel, and I crabbed along after him, through the iron gate, back out into the white glare of the day. He was racing across the clearing toward my poorly concealed car, where the sun streaming through the broken roof revealed a lanky boy bent into the effort of breaking the door open with a crowbar. His hair flashed in the beams of sunlight, glowing white like an electric filament.
It was the same feral little shit who’d slashed my tire at the supermarket.
Jack tackled the boy from the side, grabbing the crowbar with both hands, forcing the younger one to stagger back. They squared up to each other, the lanky kid shouting and gesticulating at my car, but his words were carried away by the whooping alarm. Jack threw the crowbar out of harm’s way. I dragged the key fob out of my pocket and popped the car doors to silence it.
“—the heat from the engine!” The kid was yelling and jabbing Jack in the chest with a pointed finger. “Just think about it!”
Jack glanced over his shoulder toward us with the drowning look of someone who’d gotten into a debate and only then realized they’re wrong. He took us all in—me standing next to Lola, surrounded by the other amassed children—and snapped his head back.
“Agreed. We have to hide the car better than this. Can you deal with that, Woody? Get it covered over?” He said the last part for my benefit: “But don’t wreck it, yeah? We might need it.”
Jack held the boy’s eye for another couple of seconds before walking back toward us.
The younger kid swaggered along behind him, followed by a gang of smaller boys who cruised in his slipstream. “All right, Boy Scout. Don’t get your woggle in a knot.” The gang sniggered at this witticism.
Jack didn’t react, but his shoulders sagged under the tension, and even his hair slumped a bit. Lola held out one hand as he passed, and her fingers trailed the length of his arm. Several boys wolf-whistled.
“Oo-oo, let’s hope the Boy Scout came prepared,” the lanky boy brayed, to the mirth of his minions.
“Your name is very appropriate, Woody,” Lola scolded him. “Peck, peck, peck with your little pecker.” And she turned to follow Jack.
Woody forced himself to laugh, looking round the group until his eyes rested on mine. He glanced back to the car and returned to me, visibly working to put it all together until his face crumpled into a frown and his lips wrenched down further into a furious snarl.
“That’s that witch!” he yelled, shooting his pointed finger toward my throat. “She’s that witch who took my brother.”
Chapter Eighteen
I sincerely hoped the lead mine was a long way off the helicopter’s radar, because the heat was rising. We stood outside in the clearing, a massed group of sitting ducks, flapping and honking to draw attention to ourselves. I glanced at the sky and saw a pop of light in the gray depths. A storm could work in our favor, assuming the helicopter couldn’t fly in a storm. Or maybe it could, one of those big rescue helicopters. We needed to get back under cover, but Woody was still railing against me.