‘Not once?’
‘No.’
‘What, never?’
‘No.’
‘Like, literally . . . never?’
‘Argghh.’ Leon turned to look at Freya, exasperated. ‘Like I said . . . no.’
She giggled at his mock anger and absently tapped the steering wheel with her knuckles. They were sharing the driving. It tended to be a more comfortable and less jerky ride with Leon in the passenger seat.
‘OK, so what about you, then?’ asked Leon.
‘Boys have never featured heavily in my personal life. At primary school I used to hang out with them more, because I . . . I suppose I preferred playing the boy games, rather than pretending to push a pram around. Then, in secondary school . . . Well . . . the secondary-school years weren’t a great success for me romance-wise.’
He glanced at her walking stick, leaning against the seat behind him. ‘The MS?’
‘No, that started in my last year. No, I was always just a bit of an outsider. Not one of the cool kids. You know how it is – you are or you’re definitely not. It was very binary, wasn’t it? Playground politics.’
Leon nodded. He knew what she meant. High school in New York had been the same. A caste system of jocks and WAGS, the rest of the student body . . . and then at the bottom, the outcasts. He’d constantly hovered on the borderline between ‘the rest’ and ‘the outcasts’.
After Mum and Dad had split and she’d taken them ‘back home’ to England, he’d definitely been one of the outcasts in his sixth-form college. Mum had assured him that his acquired American accent would make him an exotic curiosity. Instead it had made him a target. He shook his head at the hypocrisy and flawed logic of teenage doctrine. They all parroted the same mantra – I’m an individual . . . I’m unique . . . There’s only one of ME. I’m special – and then did anything they could to look and sound identical to all their friends. Worse than that, they punished those who didn’t tow the line and follow suit.
Who do you think YOU are? You think you’re so special, huh?
He’d once tried to clarify that very point with one of the popular girls at college. She and her gang had been picking on him because he sounded different, and yet all they banged on about all day, every day, was how wonderfully different they were to everyone else. The fact that some days it was almost impossible to tell them apart from each other was completely lost on her.
‘I used to think that—’
They heard a loud bang.
‘Shit! What was that?’
The van suddenly started to judder violently, then it swerved sharply towards the central reservation. Freya grasped the steering wheel with both hands and began to push on the brake. There hadn’t been many potholes or cracks from the cold weather, nor any weed tufts to steer around. The road must have been freshly surfaced just before the virus hit.
Reassured by the smooth surface and clear for the last hour of any car graveyards, Freya had slowly allowed her speed to climb to nearly one hundred kilometres an hour.
She wrestled the wheel left, then right, then left – short controlled jerks that prevented the van spinning on the wet surface – finally coming to a rest a hundred metres down the road.
Freya sat back in her seat and puffed out a breath. ‘That was a blow-out, wasn’t it?’
‘I don’t know. Never had one.’ Leon looked at her. ‘Jeez, you were pretty cool, though. You had one of those before?’
She shook her head. ‘Oh well, after six hours of your riveting company . . . I could do with some excitement.’
‘Thanks.’ Leon opened his door, got out and went round to the front. ‘Front-right tyre’s gone,’ he called out. He was looking at shreds of rubber and wire coiling. The wheel rim was resting on the ground. Behind the van was a snaking, still-smoking black trail of smeared tyre rubber.
Freya got out and looked at it. ‘Ever changed a tyre?’
Leon shook his head. ‘It’s pretty simple I’m guessing.’ He headed to the back of the van and opened the rear doors. ‘There must be a spare, and one of those lifting things.’
‘A jack?’
‘Yeah, that.’
He pulled several boxes of their tinned supplies out on to the road, lifted the plastic matting and found an empty space where a spare had once been. ‘Great.’
Freya sucked air through her teeth. ‘So we borrowed a van from a careless idiot. Bloody marvellous.’
They both looked around. There were no other vehicles in sight. Just empty road as far as they could see. Ahead of them, though, rose the outskirts of a town, a low carpet of rooftops, and in the distance the faint grey outlines of several high-rise buildings.
Leon could see an overpass and a slip road about half a kilometre ahead. He noted a sign informing them to take the next slip for the city centre.
‘So that must be Oxford over there, then?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Looks pretty close by. We could go see if we can find a spare . . . or borrow another van.’
Freya sighed and rubbed her hip absently. ‘Wonderful. More walking.’
Leon reached into the back of the van, pulled out their backpacks, the two army rifles they had and Freya’s walking stick. ‘I can go alone, if you want to stay—’
‘No,’ she replied quickly. ‘You’re not leaving me here all alone!’
‘Well, at least let me carry your back—’
‘And don’t patronize me!’
He looked up at her. She was grinning at him. ‘Joking.’
They made their way down the slip road, as empty as the A road, and turned right at a small overgrown roundabout. Ten minutes of walking later, they found themselves staring at the tail end of a logjam of vehicles.
As they drew closer, they could see it was actually the very front of a traffic jam, a solid convoy of cars and vans prevented from proceeding any further by a barricade of dumped concrete blocks and barbed wire.
‘My God,’ whispered Leon.
It was also solid in the sense that a number of the vehicles, all a uniform charcoal black, had been welded together by some kind of intense heat. Leon stepped carefully between the concrete blocks, round some coils of rusting razor wire, and inspected the nearest vehicles. Their tightly packed metal carcasses seemed to be merged together in places. The road was black with soot, and crusty cowpats of melted rubber and plastic around their wheel rims.
Freya joined him. ‘God . . .’
‘It looks like it was napalmed or something.’
Freya nodded. ‘Firebombed.’ She winced at something and looked quickly away.
Leon saw what she’d spotted. In the car to their right, a four-door hatchback that might once have been a Volvo, were the carbonized silhouettes of bodies. He counted five. Two in the front, three smaller ones in the back. The fingerless blackened nub of two small hands and thin arms protruded through the empty frame of the rear left window.
One of the kids . . . trying to climb out of the back.
He caught a glimpse of the corpse’s face: a dark speckled mannequin’s head, featureless, without a nose and only fused dents where eyes had been. A tidy row of small white upper teeth framed a dark hole where the mouth had frozen open in a perpetual fossilized scream.
He snapped his eyes shut and turned his head away, not wanting to pick out any more details, not wanting to give this image a chance to take permanent root in his head.
‘No one got to leave Oxford, then,’ said Freya matter-of-factly. Leon could tell she was trying to sound dismissive and business-like, but he could hear the slightest tremble in her voice.
‘Come on.’ He reached for her hand and tugged her gently. ‘We need to go find another ride.’
They walked along the hard shoulder, staring resolutely ahead as they passed beside the blackened convoy, not wanting or needing to look closely at any of the other frozen shapes, some still belted in their seats, others half in, half out of their cars, nearly but not quite escaping the fireball.
The road began to slope down into an underpass. They came to a halt just outside its gaping gloomy mouth and looked at each other.
‘We could backtrack and go up and round,’ said Leon.
Freya looked behind them up the blackened road, flanked on either side by concrete banks, then back into the tunnel ahead of them. It wasn’t long. Fifty metres of gloom – she could see the glint of unburnt vehicles edging out into daylight at the far end.
‘Unless there’s such a thing as underpass trolls, I think we’ll be OK.’
They made their way along a service walkway at the side with a safety rail. After taking several steps, they found themselves a metre or so above the road, looking down on the roofs and bonnets of the jammed vehicles. Their boots echoed in the cavernous interior, and somewhere nearby they could hear the steady drip, drip, drip of water.
Round about the middle where the road began to flatten out, ready for the rise up and out, Freya chose to lighten the mood by whistling a tuneless version of an Olly Murs song.
A few minutes later they emerged, relieved, into daylight at the far end.
‘You can’t carry a tune, Freya,’ said Leon.
‘Could have been worse. I could’ve been singing.’
At the top of the sloping road, the jam of vehicles began to thin out, and they started looking for a suitable candidate that could be reversed clear of the tangle.
‘There’s a similar van.’
Leon looked. A dark blue one, about the same size as theirs. Leon crossed the road and peered through the driver-side window – no rags, no bones to be seen. He suspected the vehicles at this end of the jam must have been hastily abandoned by their owners, not wanting to face the same fate as those poor souls ahead.
He tried the driver-side door. It opened easily and he pulled himself up inside. The key was still in the ignition and he gave it a hopeful twist.
Nothing.
‘The battery’s probably flat.’
Freya looked around. ‘They’re all going to be flat, aren’t they?’
Leon climbed out. ‘Why don’t we just grab a tyre off this one?’
‘Are the tyres the same size?’
Leon shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Did you check on the tyre type for our van?’
‘No. Did you?’
She rolled her eyes. ‘Duh . . .’
He shrugged. ‘Same kind of van. I guess the tyres’ll be the same.’
They both went round to the back, pulled the rear doors open to reveal a drum kit, guitar cases and amplifiers. ‘A band,’ said Freya. ‘You reckon they were on their way to a gig?’
He wondered. The whole thing had happened so suddenly that he could actually imagine a bunch of dozy, self-obsessed rockers so singularly focused on Making It Big that they hadn’t actually noticed the end of the world going on around them.
He lifted the mat up at the back and found a tyre and a jack. At least they had a spare. He lifted them. Freya stored the jack in her backpack and Leon held the heavy tyre in his arms. He tried to heft it on to his shoulder.
‘Might as well just roll it.’
‘Oh yeah, that’s true.’
They headed back down the sloping road to the dark mouth of the overpass.
‘If it’s the wrong size, you know we’re going to have to do this all over again,’ said Leon.
Freya laughed. ‘We’re not exactly the survival A-team, are we?’
‘Screw that. We’re still alive. That’s got to count for something.’
She paused and leaned on her walking stick. ‘Leon Friedmann.’
‘What?’
She smiled at him with a hint of something like maternal pride. ‘Spoken like a true dude.’
They entered the gloom of the tunnel once more, climbed up the steps on the right on to the service walkway and began to make their way slowly along it. As they approached the middle, Leon was waiting for Freya to start whistling tunelessly again (or, worse, start singing) when she suddenly stopped ahead of him. The tyre rolled heavily into the back of her legs.
‘Hey!’ Her yelp carried down the tunnel.
‘Why did you just stop then?’
‘I heard something.’
‘What?’
In the gloom, Leon could dimly see that she was holding a finger up.
‘Shhh . . .’
They both strained to hear, waiting for the echo of her voice to finally recede. There was the dripping sound, of course, but Leon couldn’t hear anything else.
Freya shook her head. ‘Huh . . . thought I heard . . .’
‘Heard what?’
‘I dunno . . . like someone tearing a sheet of paper. Like a sort of fwhiiiit sound.’
Leon reached into his backpack and pulled out the torch. Not that they needed it to make their way out of here. There was enough ambient light spilling in from both ends of the underpass to see to the far end. But there were also enough pools of darkness between the stationary cars to make him feel uneasy.
He snapped the torch on and instantly shadows danced across the tiles on the far wall. Glass windscreens and headlight and tail-light reflectors glinted back at him like cats’ eyes as he carefully panned the beam up and down the line of vehicles. The cars and vans down here had escaped the firebomb at the front and, protected from the weather these last two years, some of them even looked showroom-clean.
This time they both heard it. A creaking, tearing sound above them.
‘I’m not going to lie, that sounds decidedly not good,’ whispered Freya.
Leon panned his torch beam up to the low ceiling of the overpass.
‘What . . . the . . .’