WHEN THE day came it was a beauty. Warm as toast, a bright blue sky, everything bathed in golden September light. Mags was waiting for him, and they walked down to the bus stop together.
‘Are you going to watch that field all day?’
‘Yeah.’
‘How will they know when to burn it?’
‘I don’t know. None of this makes sense, not the sense you want it to make.’
There was tiredness in her voice, as if she was stretched and emptied at the same time. Maybe she was just exhausted, but Robbie thought there was more to it.
‘Still quiet?’
‘Oh, no,’ she said, which he hadn’t expected. ‘They’re out again. There’ve been sightings, just the last two days.’
‘So it’s happening, this time?’
‘I suppose it must be.’
‘You okay, Mags?’
‘I think so. Not sure.’ She looked at him with her big blue eyes in her little pale face. ‘I feel so weak, I don’t know why.’
‘She needs you to help her now.’
‘I can’t help her like this.’
‘I don’t mean like that. I think she’s using your strength.’
‘Maybe. I don’t know. Why should that be? And why me? I suppose that’s obvious.’ She looked at him as if she was searching for something, but she might just have been looking through him, thinking it all over. Then she said, ‘We’ll have to follow her.’
‘Sorry?’
‘We’ll have to follow her. Afterwards. If there is an afterwards. If she escapes, she’ll run.’
‘We can’t keep pace with a running hare.’
‘You can. I think you can.’
‘Dogs, maybe. Not a hare.’
‘Someone has to.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know.’ The tension was back in her voice. She sounded as if she was about to snap. Robbie put his arms round her and she folded into them.
*
When he came home from school he’d been texting Mags all day. She had seen no one, nothing. He gave his dad the slip, and when he found her, lying by the side of the field in the same place they’d been before, she was asleep. She looked so peaceful it seemed a shame to wake her, and when he did she started, as if from shock, and looked at him blankly for a moment.
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Robbie. It’s you.’
He looked out over the field. Since the last full moon the corn had been cut and it was covered in stubble. The sun was sinking steadily.
Somewhere out there …
‘So – nothing?’
‘No. But that’s interesting.’ She pointed to a pile of hay in the far corner of the field.
‘Why?’
‘People don’t leave stuff lying around like that. Not unless it’s for something special.’
‘You sure?’
‘Kind of. I might be wrong.’
‘I bet you’re not.’
As the sun sank the sky was flooded with crimson and the edges of the white clouds above them shone.
‘Awesome,’ said Robbie to no one in particular.
Night came on. A wind sprang up.
In a gap between the trees hung the harvest moon.
‘Something’s stirring. Look,’ said Mags.
A light leaped up on the other side of the field. A man was holding a flame and another was standing watching.
‘It’s them,’ said Mags. ‘That’s Tommy with the burning rag, I think that’s what it is, on the end of a stick. Must be soaked in petrol.’
Tommy plunged the stick into the little hayrick and they both watched as it caught fire. The rick began to burn, and the moon climbed higher.
‘It’s hard to see.’
‘It’ll get better.’
As the rick blazed the men took forkfuls of it and began laying them in the stubble, and the breeze swept the flames forward so they took hold. Soon almost half of the field was on fire, spreading slowly towards the other side. Robbie’s heart beat hard with the fierceness of it. The air was full of drifting clouds of bitter smoke. Animals started to run – rabbits, hares, those were the ones he could see, there must have been hundreds of others, mice and rats and snakes and voles. The field rippled with movement. One of the Stricklands disappeared through a gate for a moment, then drove a flatbed truck down the edge of the field to face the incoming flames. There was a searchlight in the back.
Billy Strickland had his shotgun poised and ready at his shoulder.
Brightness flooded the field from the top of the truck. Tommy was working it, standing behind the cab. He had a gun too. A hare hesitated in the glare and bounded back towards the fires. Without stopping it hurled itself through the smoke and flames, looking for the patches left unburned, leaping through the smouldering wreckage of the field.
The beam swept the field.
‘Let’s go,’ whispered Mags. They slid on their fronts along the ditch. It was made easy for them by the noise of the fire, but it took time to crawl half a field’s length, and when they surfaced they’d come further than they thought, ten or twenty metres behind the Stricklands.
Billy was striding up and down, his gun now low and horizontal, as if he meant to shoot from the hip. The searchlight was swaying from side to side.
‘She’s not coming,’ said Robbie.
‘She’s here,’ said Mags.
He looked at her sharply. Her voice sounded slurred, as if she could hardly drag the words out, and she was white, dead white, under the blaze of the moon. She was struggling to keep her eyes open.
‘I can’t see her.’
Mags didn’t say anything.
Then the searchlight stopped.
And there she was.
Robbie didn’t know if it was a trick of the light or whatever, the way eyes can be in bright light, in camera flashes, for instance, but Fleet’s eyes were shining red. And she was sitting there bristling with fury, her ears tall and terrible.
The brothers started shooting. The noise was deafening. For a moment Fleet stayed where she was, then started to lope backwards and forwards across the searchlight beam.
Don’t. Don’t do that, Robbie thought.
Run.
Do something.
Run.
There was a shout from Tommy. Fleet had been spun round by his shot, and as she turned to face the light a wound on her back leg glistened with blood. She limped sideways, and the beam followed, but couldn’t find her. This time the shout was angry, and there was fear in it too.
Because she had disappeared.
The searchlight swung madly.
Suddenly she was there again, running in from somewhere, under Billy, between his legs. And he was falling, so fast Robbie could only see it when he thought about it afterwards, twisting, throwing out his left hand, his right holding the gun whirling fast, out of control, towards Tommy.
One barrel of shot was all it needed, spraying wide.
Then it was quiet. Long, lingering quiet that settled in as the crackle of the burning stubble subsided.
Until a sound bubbled up, and after a while Robbie realized what it was.
It was Billy, sobbing.