Matt’s only made it halfway home from the convent when he’s jumped in the street. They must have been waiting. They must have seen him leave the convent before today and clocked the fact that he usually goes out carrying more than he took in. He curses his own stupidity, because no one has routines anymore except him. Why didn’t he vary his route or do something else to be less predictable? The fuckers pin him down and rip his rucksack off his back before kicking him in the gut for good measure and leaving him lying in the stinking gutter in several inches of stagnant water. Bastards. He picks himself up and brushes himself down, more annoyed than hurt. He then checks the pockets of his trousers and the inside of his jacket where he’s stored most of his stash. Thank Christ he had some degree of forethought in anticipation of such an attack. His muggers won’t be best pleased when they realize his bag’s a decoy, filled with useless crap. That’s the problem with most people in this place, he reckons. They still don’t understand that they need to think before they act. He knows that’s true, because he can still see the little shits who did him over, and they’ve just been fleeced by a crowd of nasty-looking bastards who are even bigger and hungrier than them.
Jen’s frantic when he gets home with a black eye and blood down his shirt, but that’s the very least of Matt’s concerns. It takes him a couple of minutes to realize his minor injuries are the lesser of her concerns, too. There’s an awful atmosphere in the house, and it’s deathly quiet, too. Something’s very wrong here.
“What is it, love?”
She can’t bring herself to answer. Jason appears in the kitchen doorway. Unusually, the door to the lounge is shut.
“We didn’t know,” Jason says. “Honest, we didn’t hear a thing. Jen just went in to check everything was all right first thing and…”
Matt stops listening, because he thinks he already knows where this is going. As he moves closer to the lounge door, Jen backs farther away.
The smell inside the room is sweet and wrong. The temperature is lower than expected, the silence deafening. Mrs. Walker and her children are lying in bed together, one child either side of their mother, all three of them dead. There are empty medicine packets lying around. “Where the hell did she get all these pills from?” Matt asks, pointlessly shaking an empty plastic tub and equally pointlessly checking the label.
“We got it for her, remember?” Jason says. “She told us she needed it for the kid. All along she’d been planning a way out. Remember that Titanic movie when the mother puts the kids to bed while the ship’s filling up with water because she knows they’re all going to die and she decides she’ll—”
Matt yells at him. “Fuck sake, Jason, shut up. I get it. I know what she’s done and why she did it.”
“At least they’re free from all this now,” Jason says, and Matt can’t help but agree.
It might be a waste of time and of energy he doesn’t have, but he does it just the same. This small plot of land is as irrelevant as any other part of the camp to the displaced Walker family, but it feels like the right thing to do in the circumstances. He wraps the bodies in their bedding, then buries them together in a single shallow grave in the back garden. It takes hours to dig the hole and fill it in again, and by the time Matt’s finished he’s physically and emotionally drained. Just a shell. He practically crawls upstairs to bed but no matter how tired he is, he knows he’ll get little sleep tonight.