“HOW DO I LOOK?” FREJA ASKS, and pirouettes, wearing a truly appalling sun hat. It’s wide-brimmed and covered in bright-pink flowers. Yesterday Maureen had insisted she wear it while working in the garden. Freja is too pale to handle the sun and so had a ready excuse for needing to take it along with us today.
“Awesome, oh yes,” I say. “It suits you perfectly.”
She punches me, hard, in the arm.
“Ouch!” I rub my arm.
I’ve got a more respectable baseball cap on, found near Angus’s back door when no one was looking. It’s not as big and floppy as Freja’s but should do the job if I’m careful not to turn toward the cameras. It would have been hard to explain just why we needed hats to hide from CCTV—assuming anyone is monitoring it, that is. We’re both wanted by the authorities, and somehow I get the sense this is the sort of thing it’d be best not to mention to Angus.
Not that he thinks anything of getting us to steal fuel from any available source. I don’t imagine that dead people much care if you siphon their tank dry, but to be fair, an air force base might be different: the government isn’t always that willing to share, whether they need it themselves or not.
“Okay, now let me do my thing and see if I can sense if anyone is around the place,” Freja says. This time she closes her eyes. Did she do that so I couldn’t see them go weird like the last time? I feel a twinge of guilt. It did bother me a little, and it’s hard to hide things from her.
A few minutes pass, and then a few more. Just as I’m wondering what is taking so long, she opens her eyes and frowns. “I’m unsure what is going on. I thought at first that I might have sensed a few auras—or one at least, anyway—that could have meant one or more people were there. But when I looked closer, I couldn’t find anyone. Then I had a good check around the place using insects, a bird, even a mouse. I didn’t see any people. The grass is overgrown, and the whole place looks deserted.”
“Why do you say it could have meant people? What else could an aura be, apart from human?”
“It could also have been a cat; sometimes I sense them like that—but I couldn’t find a cat anywhere. It might have run off, though. There is also one other possibility.”
“What’s that?”
“It could be a survivor, one who sensed me and is blocking so I can’t find them. Or someone like you, who isn’t a survivor but knows how to block—but that’s not very likely, since it isn’t easy to learn and they’d need a survivor to teach them.”
“What do you think we should do?”
“Check it out. From what I’ve sensed and seen, I don’t think there is any sort of military presence.”
“You could be wrong.”
“Yes.” She shrugs. “But it might have just been a cat. And if there is a survivor there, or someone taught by a survivor, even if they are military, I don’t think they’d be against us.”
“Okay then.” I adjust the angle of my baseball cap to cover my face more. “Onward.”
We walk up to the entrance; we left the truck parked down the road a little. There’s one of those bars that lifts up to allow cars through when someone in a guard booth pushes a button.
“Don’t look up,” Freja says, “but Angus was right: there is a camera on the side of the building next to the fence that is swiveling to follow us. Someone must be in there watching.”
“Unless it works automatically with motion sensors?”
“Maybe.”
“There doesn’t seem to be a bell to ring. Should we knock?”
“It’s probably best to appear nonthreatening,” Freja says. “Or at least as nonthreatening as we can look with hats carefully shielding our faces from the cameras.”
“Hello?” I call out. We wait a few moments; nothing happens. “Shall we?”
I tug at the bar that blocks the road to see if it is one we can move out of the way manually, but it won’t budge.
We bend down to go underneath it.
The place has an abandoned feeling. Grass that is probably usually kept at a precision length is overgrown; weeds are taking over flower beds. There are a few empty vehicles behind the building by the entrance—they might have some gas we can siphon, but we’re hoping for bigger stores than that. A road leads to a hangar and airfields beyond. Some other buildings are in a clump the other way.
“I wonder if jet fuel would do the trick?” Freja says. “They must have supplies for the airfield.”
“Maybe, but I’m not sure what that’d do to Angus’s generator!”
“Let’s look through the place and make sure no one is here.”
We knock on the door of the building by the fence first. I call out hello again, try the handle. Locked. I’m looking for a rock to break in when Freja nudges me and points. There’s a small open window. “I should be able to get through that,” she says.
I give her a lift up, and she squeezes through, opens the door a moment later. She flicks a switch. No power.
We go in, check offices, a boardroom, a small kitchen, bathrooms. All appear dusty and deserted.
We step out the door and start down the road to the clump of buildings opposite the airfield.
Then there’s a vague pressure in my mind.
A prickling feeling on the back of my neck.
I push back and feel whatever it is retreat—but not before I sense a feeling of puzzlement before it is completely withdrawn.
“Freja? I think someone just tried to jump into my head. I pushed them out.”
She stops walking for a moment, closes her eyes. Opens them again a moment later. “I can’t sense anyone. I’m guessing it is a survivor who has worked out I’m a survivor too and you aren’t, and so tried to find out who we are through you. They wouldn’t know you can detect and block them. I’ll see if anyone answers a hail.”
She’s quiet again for a moment.
“I still can’t sense anyone, and whoever it is won’t answer.”
“Why do you think they are hiding from us?”
“I don’t know. Maybe they’re scared? Survivors get hunted. They’re being cautious.”
“Or maybe they want to check us out before they attack.”
“I can’t believe that. Let’s see if we can find them.”
We start to walk toward one building, but then I stop. “No. This isn’t where they are,” I say.
She looks at me oddly. “Okay then, Einstein, how do you know that?”
“There was a weird sort of sense of relief I could feel when we started walking toward it.”
“Shall we try the next one, then?” We continue on to the next building, a larger one. “Don’t look up. There are more cameras on this one,” she says.
There’s a sudden increase of pressure on my mind, and I flinch and push the stranger out. “Someone tried again,” I say. “Harder this time. I think we should check this building—I get the feeling they don’t want us to go there.”
“It’s weird that you are catching a sense of what they think. Maybe whoever it is doesn’t quite know what they are doing—either they’re new at being a survivor, or they haven’t been around many people to have had much practice. You could let them into your mind, introduce yourself?” She looks annoyed that her attempts to contact whoever it is are coming up with nothing.
“Not likely. What if they’re not friendly?”
She looks contrite. “Sorry, you’re right. If you let them in, you have no defense.”
Her words float around in my mind as we’re walking up the path to the door. No defense?
Shay and Freja are the only ones I’ve ever let into my mind by choice, and that was with trust. Does that mean that if I let somebody into my mind, they can control me or do whatever damage they want? Like the time Shay sent me to sleep: I couldn’t stop that from happening.
I knock on the door, call out, “Hello?”
We wait a moment, then try the handle. It’s not locked, and I’m surprised.
“Maybe whoever it is wants us to go through this door, but I was sure they didn’t want us to come this way,” I say. “Let’s have a look around outside instead?”
We walk around the building. Something moves to the side, and I turn quickly—oh. “Look,” I say to Freja.
A black cat with a white nose and socks stares at us intently from under a tree.
“Could that be all it was all along? A cat?” I ask her.
She shakes her head, then walks up to the cat slowly, bending down, hand outstretched. It looks at her, then runs away.
“It couldn’t have just been that cat,” she says. “For a start that was a well-fed cat with a shiny coat, so either it is a hell of a mouser, or someone is looking after it. And I’ve never heard of anyone being reached out to by a cat. Reaching to a cat is one thing, but the other way would be something else entirely.” She frowns. “Yet I can’t seem to reach that cat, which is odd: perhaps someone is blocking me.”
“What next?”
We look around us. The overgrown lawn behind the building slopes down; there’s a low concrete structure below us.
“What’s that?” Freja says, pointing to it.
“Looks like an outbuilding or something?”
We walk down to it and around, and on the other side of the concrete, there are stairs. They go down, cut deep into the earth. The concrete juts out from the ground around the stairs.
“It could be some sort of bunker, maybe?” I say.
We hesitate at the top of the stairs, then start down them. The air temperature drops with every step, and a shiver goes up my back.
There is a serious door at the bottom.
“I’m guessing we’ll never be able to break into this one,” Freja says.
Just as we’re wondering what to do next, the door opens.