There was a lot of grumbling about the scratchiness of hay, but they eventually settled. Joni stayed on the bench, munching through a bag of trail mix. Lola and Jack propped themselves against the wall and whispered behind the barrier of their knees. I lay back in the hay between my boys and watched a cool sliver of blue-black sky framed in the long window.
A change in air pressure disturbed me. Or maybe even woke me. The light was different—it was so black, I couldn’t tell the windows from the walls. It must have clouded over. It must be much later. A soft click told me the outside door had been open and was now closed. I tried to reach silently for Charlie’s backpack, where I knew there was a torch, but the hay rustled beneath me, setting off ripples of sound as my noise prompted other bodies to rearrange themselves in their sleep. With stealth no longer an option, I rummaged in the bag and clicked on the Maglite, flickering the beam first over my own brood, who were all there, and then straight to Woody’s corner. He was gone. I checked behind the pickup, where we’d left a slop bucket for overnight emergencies, but there was no sign of him. I swore behind my teeth and stepped over sleeping bodies to the door.
Outside, the torch was pathetically inadequate against the bulk of the darkness. The door clicked behind me, and I heard a crunch of gravel to one side. The light barely made it the few feet between me and Woody, who was fastening his trousers. I dropped the beam so that it pooled between us, and we both stood in the dark outside the circle of light.
“What are you doing out here, Woody?”
“What do you think?”
“We brought a bucket inside for that.”
“Go back in then, if you’re scared.” The hard edge of his voice bounced my concern away.
“We shouldn’t be taking risks now, not when we’re so close to getting there.”
“Getting where?” His question faded into the dark.
“I don’t know until we find a map. But I feel sure we have to check it out.”
“As sure as you were when you thought my brother was involved in some plot to kidnap your son?”
The wind drew a long breath through the trees.
“That’s what I thought.” He walked toward the door, and my torchlight trailed after him. “You’re just winging it. For all you know, the Cleaners could be sending that Morse code so we go straight to them. Save them the bother of finding us.”
“That could well be the case, so we’ll have to be careful. But what else are we going to do? Do you really think if we hide, they’ll just leave us alone? If they find us, they will kill us.”
Woody’s feet turned back into the light, the white rubber caps of his trainers glaring.
“How many people have the Cleaners killed?” His voice was quiet.
“I saw them shoot the hermit, and they killed our dog. But who knows how many others—”
“And how many people have you killed, Mrs. Greene?”
I licked my thumb and used it to rub away the hard little scab behind my ear, then tasted the tingle of blood.
“I have killed one person. By accident. It was an appalling mistake, but—”
“And what about the other kid? Peter. Was he an accident?”
“Yes! He got burnt, he couldn’t survive those injuries, it was a mercy killing. And that wasn’t even me.” My whiny voice hung in the air like the steam rising off Woody’s piss. I sounded like Maggie: It wasn’t me, Mummy; it’s not fair, Mummy.
“And you wanted to leave Harry Berman behind at the mine.”
“Nobody wanted to leave him behind.”
“Well, I make it one for the Cleaners and two for you.” Woody stepped forward so that his eyes flared for a second and were doused by shadows. “So tell me, Mrs. Greene. Who should I be running away from?”
Back in the hay, I rolled over in my sleep and gasped aloud as something sharp pricked my cheekbone. I sat up, and found it had drawn blood. I sifted through the green strands of grass down to the hard-packed earth below. There I found a white tooth. I lifted my hand to my mouth, and when it came away, a second incisor came with it in a puddle of bloody drool. My tongue slid into the gaping hole left behind, and I whimpered as the pressure popped out my canine, which arced in a languid rotation down onto the soft hay, where it bounced once and slipped between the strands. I pulled my lips over my teeth, as though that would keep them in, but my mouth filled with blood, and I had to swallow it. I lay back down in the hay to tongue my wounds. But the movement set off a bloom of warmth beneath my legs, and I bolted up again to see blood dilating out from between my thighs, and I screamed exactly the way I had once when I was pregnant with Billy and thought I was losing the baby—which only the day before I had considered aborting because Julian didn’t want to know about another child, and I didn’t see how I could manage a third as well as the business, and it took a bloodletting, a moment of horror, for me to realize that I could never let that baby go. I pressed my thighs and my mouth together to keep my blood inside.
I sat up in the hay. My heart kicked me in the ribs just like Billy had later in the pregnancy. He was there, sleeping beside me. My teeth were there, safely in my mouth. The dawn was there. I got up and downed the dregs of the can of Tizer to wash away the taste of blood that came from picking at the scab behind my ear. It was bigger than ever with strands of hair dried into it like a fetid little nest. I needed scratch mitts, like a baby. I headed for the door, expecting to navigate past several boys. But the space was clear. Woody and his gang were gone.
Outside, as I followed the path toward the main shelter, Charlie’s warning about the wolves hunting at first light ran round my head like an earworm. When I glanced over my shoulder, the high fence of the wolf enclosure was already out of sight, shrouded in a mist that would make perfect cover for predators. Stones clattered to my right. I faced the misty wall again, expecting to see one of the boys. Instead, there was a clang of metal. The noise was smothered by the fog. Silence.
“Woody?”
Scuffling over hay bales. I was near the main shelter.
“Woody, are you there?”
My feet turned themselves back toward the wolf enclosure. But the gate to the lynx pen was closer—I should run there instead, get inside. Another metal clang from the shelter, and the mist ahead of me started to swirl. I backed away from whatever was stirring it up, and my heel caught on the lip of the grass verge so that I rattled back against the fence. I groped along in the direction of the propped-open gate. The footsteps crossing the gravel were light, stealthy. I found the gate and stumbled to get inside, grappling it shut.
“Mrs. Greene?”
A boy emerged from the mist. I was standing with my arms rigid to keep the gate closed. We stared at each other through the metal diamonds.
“Were you scared?” He made this sound like it defied the laws of physics.
I unfurled my fingers from the gate and came out from inside my pen.
“Unlike Red Riding Hood, I can comprehend the possibility of being gobbled up by a wolf. So, yes, I was scared.”
“Sorry.”
“Not your fault. What’s your name, anyway? Where’re the others?”
“Kofi. And they’ve gone.”
I pushed my hands into my hair and tipped my head to the sky. Make it stop.