The last chicken dies in the night.
I leave its straggly little body, like the others, at the side of the road. Maeve’s voice, in an unlikely singsong: If you kill it, you can eat it; if it dies, say goodbye. I couldn’t have ate it anyway. My stomach feels like a knot of scar tissue drawn tight into itself. I can hardly look at the little feathered body. Our wasted wealth. Danger paws it, takes it gingerly in his mouth.
Don’t think about what you don’t have, work with what you do.
I must have heard Maeve say that a million times, and remembering it now is painful. I miss her, so I do, and I’m scared shitless of her now. Though Maeve’s hands and feet are tied fast, still and all, I’d pose no problems for her. If she takes a notion to kill me, she’ll do it all right.
We move. It is difficult now, being so tired and frayed, to take pleasure in the landscape changing around me, but I try to notice the trees, the vines. I hear a whistling and chattering from far away—songbirds chirping. This might be the last bit of life I get.
We’ve only one plastic container half full of water left, but we can store up more when it rains so I feel okay about pouring some into a cupped hand for Danger. He sniffs and laps. When he’s finished, I take more and throw it on my face, hoping it’ll wake me up a little, or help scrub the dirty film that has come between me and the world.
It’s not too late, I tell myself. Maeve’ll tell me in the end. She’ll see how far I’ve come, and she’ll have to tell me. Then I try good and hard to stop my mind chattering.
I half walk, half jog on the road, not thinking about things. I don’t think about how the dog is only skin and bones. I don’t think about the chickens, maybe the only and last chickens in the world, dead now, and I’ve nothing to offer anyone. If I was ever to meet anyone.
I don’t think about how Maeve smells like innards left to rot.
The buildings around us are big, and I’m bewaring them, but I can’t avoid them. We’re in one of the towns near the city, and though I’m moving faster and the barrow is lighter, the going is slow for all the cars and rubbish on the road we’ve to work around.
The wind picks up, and the rain comes early and hard, and we’re back into fields and woods. We won’t get as far as the outskirts of Dublin today, which I’d say is the direction I’m going if I was pushed to give an answer. It was the biggest city before all this happened; maybe I can camp out not too far in and see what’s left of it. There’d be things to read at least.
I push the barrow down an alley and underneath a huge, cavernous space. I’m too tired to even make sure the building is clear, but we find a small room with a door that closes, and we lie down and go to sleep while the storm rages. I sleep for a long time, warm beside Danger.
The silence that comes when the wind and rain are finished is maybe what wakes me up. The night is coming on bright with a nearly full moon, so I take up the barrow again and head back out to the road. I can’t sleep more, and I won’t be any less faint with hunger when the sun comes up. At least if I’m moving, I’ll get warm.
In the half-light I see more signs: a large red circle with an X in it, drawn messily on a whitish metal background. Another reads DUBLIN: 50 KM. The east is farther than I thought, but so close now, already there are more buildings around us, and bigger. I think of the signs I left near the beach to Slanbeg; an age away, a country between us, and from one end of this country to the other, I’ve seen nobody living.
Who were these signs for, the Xs and the warnings? Can they be so old? I run my finger carefully over the jagged metal, trying to imagine the hands that were here before mine.
We’re surrounded now by the remains of buildings, slouching and fallen on top of each other, utterly ending whatever was underneath them. I work our way forward slowly, eyeing toppling spires and leaning walls. The buildings are so tall, I have to let my head roll all the way back to look up, and when I do, something pops gently in my neck. There’s nothing like this on the island. Whoever lived here built higher and maybe fell farther.
We might be watched from a thousand different places, something might jump out at us from a hundred. Up now, in front of us, in the middle of the road come barriers made of old rock, metal beams, window frames, and glass. I put Maeve down and straighten up, guarding my eyes against the sun, trying to work it out. Beside me, Danger whines, thumps his tail in the dust.
I think I can see a way.
Moving slow, I lift up the barrow again and veer back and to the right, through a smashed door. Inside the building, the air is colder and the quiet so loud my ears buzz with it. There’s a doorway through to the next building up and over. The wheel of the barrow crunches on broken squared bits of glass and on crumbled bricks and old yellow paper. I want to stop, to investigate, but mostly I want to run, to spend all my small energy on leaving this silence, these stale enclosed spaces, behind us.
A hole in the floor ahead of us divides one side of the room from the other. I find a long strip of wood, thick and only just long enough, and I put it down and, heart leaping from me, I squeeze us on and put one foot in front of the other. I will not look down. We come down the other side, the wood lifting behind us as we go. Through a window to my left, I can see we’re nearly past the barricade.
It’s coming off the other side that my foot slips. Behind us the plank falls, dropping one story or two or three or the whole way to the center of the earth; it takes a long time to land and when it does, it makes the loudest sound I’ve ever heard. I feel my feet vibrate with it. There’s a rumbling, and I am frozen with fear, standing stock-still, terrified.
Move.
My heart in my mouth—
MOVE.
Gasping, pushing furiously, feet skidding in the dust, we move while behind us the ground gives way. Ahead of us, a corner of the building has opened up to the street, and I run hard, crouched down, Danger a blur behind me.
I don’t stop till we’re away, and when we are, I lie down, panting, in the dirt. I watch the building as if it’s an animal waiting to make its next move. It seems to slouch, but it doesn’t fall all the way down. After a little while I get up again, coughing out dirt and dust, knowing I need to move. The noise of that little collapse could bring anything on top of me.
It’s a long time till we slow, and longer still before we come to a stop on a slope, when I’ve no more left to give to the day.
I’m getting fairly close to an edge. I know I am not thinking properly. I’m tired enough to sleep, and unless I go back, there’ll keep on being buildings everywhere. At last I climb in under the nearest roof, shaking with tiredness. Danger’s warmth and doggie smell lulls me into dreams of home, of Mam and a soft sun and the scent of lavender.
I am awake, sitting up, my heart jammering. I dreamed something confused about being chased on the beach by bone fingers, but before I can think one proper, whole thought, I’m on my feet.
What remains of the night is quiet. The road behind me seems almost to shine in the moonlight, and I watch it for a moment, standing up straight, rubbing the small of my back, blinking blearily in the cold. It’s beautiful, I think, in my fog of exhaustion. The countryside, Ireland, is laid out before me: forest pushing in against the hills, tracks of small roads, now paths, weaving between it like rivulets of water on the beach at home. Little towns are nearly consumed back into earth with trees and vines delicately dismantling the stoneworks of the buildings. To the east the sky is beginning to lighten, and I can make out the city proper beginning.
The moon is so bright that the clouds cast shadows on the ground, and I watch them slide forward lazily. On the road ahead of us are more signs. I wonder who put them there, and what they used to make them. I imagine the hands of men and women and children, helping each other. My heartbeat has slowed. I could sleep again. I let my eyes take one more long look over the country at my feet, and that’s when my eyes catch it, on the road behind us.
A figure.
And then another.
Of all the times I have been afraid since I left the island, this is the biggest and the worst. I cannot distinguish my panic from my deep longing.
“Maeve,” I say quietly, in case she’s with me.
Beware people.
I can’t stay on my own, though, I can’t.
If they’re men, I will run.
I crouch and watch, my shaking hands hugging my knees. I cannot say from looking at them; they’re too far. I wish there was just one.
They are moving slowly away from me.
If they are men, I will run; they’ll never catch me.
Nearly crying with the fright, I stand.
“Hello!” I shout, my voice like a knife in the night.
They slow, stop. Silence.
“Hello!” I go again.
Nothing for a long time, and then a shout back, and it’s a sound I have not heard before, but I know immediately what it is.
“Hello!”
It’s a man’s voice.
I turn and run.
The barrow is where I left it, full of Maeve and not much else. My hands go to grip the handles like they know what they’re doing, and my feet won’t be outdone. I stop short at the entrance to our shelter and listen for a moment and listen hard, and then I move.
I run noisy and slow, my breath coming in grunts and snatches, the barrow jumping and swaying dangerously under my hands. I get moving and I keep moving, and I resist the temptation to look over my shoulder for a long time, and I don’t think at all.
In my mind’s eye, unwillingly, I see the figures again. One small shadow, one large. Were there more, in the shadows, walking ahead or behind? I concentrate on moving, on running, until we are on a rise, and it’s easier for me to pause and look back over the road beneath me.
I don’t know where Danger is.
The hill has been long, and I am badly out of breath. The pain I have in my back, all along the curve of my spine, cuts through the panic of the moment, and I try to use that. I still my breath and listen for the dog’s paws on the cracked hardness of the road over the sound of my own feet and the whumph of where the barrow wheel meets the road. I hiss his name, hoping for his stupid lollop, a rustle in the bushes, but there is nothing.
Am I leaving him behind? Am I leaving him to the men?
I snatch a look over my shoulder and see them, running hard on the long road behind me. They’re moving quickly, faster than I can with the barrow. At last I see Danger, slogging to catch up with me, tail held low.
I need a way to hide if I cannot outrun, a place to ambush, maybe, away from the glare of moonlight on the road. There’s a sign saying ALL ROADS DUBLIN and a left arrow, and I take the left. They’ll have seen I came this way. I need to find more cover, but the ground all around me now is high and flat and clear of buildings. It’s going to be hard to hide.
They’re going to catch me.
I can hide Maeve, maybe, put her out of the way. The road forks and I take another left, and maybe it’ll be okay, if I can get out of sight. I push harder.
Some foliage has broken through the concrete up ahead on the left before a corner: if they take the wrong turn, we might be all right for a while, and either way, I’ll get Maeve into those shrubs and then get them away from there.
I hear them calling.
Their voices are so close, I can almost hear words—the first words I’ll have ever heard, other than Maeve’s and my mother’s and my own stupid ones in my own stupid head and the man calling “Hello.”
The bushes scratch my arms, but I’m listening so hard for the voices, for footsteps behind me, I don’t feel it. I shove the barrow into the cover as far as I can get it, and it turns on its side. Maeve falls out—I think of the limp chicken I threw to the side of the road this morning—and I pause to thrust myself farther into the bushes after her. Scrabbling, panting, I grab the handles of the barrow and force it around and over so it covers Maeve’s head and torso to hide her, to protect her a little. It’s the best I can do; it’s all I can do. I shuffle back out on my hands and knees, and when I go to straighten, the spasm in my back is like a whip.
Still and all, I keep going. I move just like I’ve been trained.