Max was finding it hard to forget the pretty but strange girl who had caused so much commotion that day. She would probably have stuck in his mind anyway, she was so intense. It was the way she listened to everything as if it were important. Most customers barely looked him in the face and certainly didn’t think he had anything important to say. She was different. And then there was the matter of a hall full of sick and dying kids. It had seemed that she was the only one to walk out of that unscathed. He shuddered at what might have happened to him if he’d investigated himself and not run away.
Running away was his speciality.
However much he tried not to think about his family, they crept back into his mind. He’d run from them three years ago, and it didn’t get any less painful. He’d come to the city to get away from the isolation, but he was just as alone surrounded by people.
Was it worse to be lonely in a city of people or in a farmhouse in the country?
When they’d questioned him about the girl, they’d told him she was very dangerous, but would not explain in what way. She had looked harmless enough, but they wouldn’t have a huge cordon around the centre and a stream of people in hazmat suits swarming all over the place way into the night in that case. Perhaps she’d been making a bio bomb, and it had gone wrong.
Anyway, his worst problem was that he’d been ordered off work for two weeks, had been told to remain isolated and report in if he had a fever. It was as bad as being back in the farmlands, and he would have no money and therefore no food in the meantime.
His stomach rumbled just to highlight the point.
Ironically, it seemed this girl had headed out towards his family home, where they had barricaded themselves all these years to stay safe. He wondered if they were still all right and, more importantly, if they were still vigilant against strangers and the dangers they posed. The hunger pains were nothing to the pangs of guilt he felt dragging at his conscience as he remembered that he had been the one to send her in their direction.
It couldn’t be plague, could it? He’d been too young to remember the last outbreak – it had barely been during his lifetime. His parents had said it would never really go away, but then they had said a lot of crazy things, and he’d spent his childhood picking and choosing which ones were likely and which ones he wanted to believe.
He listened to his stomach rumble again and knew he couldn’t stay cooped up in the flat, getting increasingly hungry.
It was unusual for Max to be free to wander the streets in the middle of the day, and by night he was generally too tired for a ramble. But without work, he decided to explore some new areas.
As he walked past the park, he took a detour further into it and enjoyed the greenery. He would never do this at the end of a night shift – too many strange people lurking in the wild undergrowth. The parks had become little forests with no one to tend them. They were more unkempt than his farm, where it was all cared for to produce the highest yield of crops. A few park areas had been ploughed up and used to grow vegetables, but the rest had returned to nature.
Feeling nostalgic for home, he climbed a tree high enough to get some sun on his face, and he wedged himself into a fork in the branches.
As he sat half-asleep in the warm nook, it was as if he were nine years old again. On a day like today, he had met his first outsider.
No one came to the farm, or left the farm. The boundary wire was so effective it could have been a brick wall six metres high. At the end of the growing season, his father bundled up a portion of the produce and took it just beyond the boundary. The next day, it would be gone. Very little came back in, and what did went through a thorough and relentless cleaning process. When Max asked where it went, he was told ‘the people’ came to get it.
‘You’re better off not thinking about the people outside,’ his father told him. ‘They are full of disease. Dangerous. We send out food so they leave us alone; they stay clear so we can keep feeding them. They need us more than we need them.’
Often during these talks, his mother turned away or left the room. Once, Max had stormed out of the rant, bored with the standard lines, and had found her clutching a book of photos and crying. She’d put her finger to her lips and pointed to his father, and Max had understood this was not to be talked about.
His younger sister would roll her eyes at the talk of disease and pretend to suffocate and die on the floor, out of sight of their father, of course.
The day that Max met his first stranger, he’d been hiding up in an apple tree.
He was tired and had had enough of back-breaking fruit picking. So what if they got a bit mushy? Perhaps that was how he liked them. He’d picked about ten baskets of raspberries that morning, and eaten about one basketful.
In the distance, he could hear shouting; it must be his father calling him to do a job.
As he sank his teeth into an apple, he heard a cough. Beneath him, at the base of the trunk, there was a bundle of clothes. The clothes coughed again.
‘Who’s there?’ he called down, sure it had to be his sister, Cissy, hiding too.
But the clothes slowly unfolded themselves and revealed a girl. About the same size as himself, but thinner. So thin he could see her bones pushing up through her skin. Her eyes looked enormous, and her hair was thin and balding in patches. She coughed again, into a cloth, and held herself tight as if in a freezing wind, although the sun still shone hot and fierce.
‘Who are you?’
‘I’m Sarah. Can I have an apple?’
Max was so shocked at seeing this girl that he dropped the bitten apple down to her. It fell to the ground, but she quickly scooped it up, and with a cursory rub on her coat, she bit into it hungrily. She swallowed chunks so fast that she was nearly choking on them, but she seemed unable to stop stuffing it into her mouth. Max was on the verge of jumping down to pat her back and stop her asphyxiating herself with apple pieces, but he hesitated as she pushed the core into her mouth and finally chewed.
‘My dad’s gone to ask for some food from the farmhouse,’ she said, indicating Max’s home.
And then they heard it. The shouting. And then a single gunshot.
Sarah froze in terror. There was more shouting and two more shots, followed by a man’s scream. She bent over and vomited up the apple in a neat little pile and then, seeming to recover herself, circled to the far side of the trunk, making herself as small and inconspicuous as possible.
Looking up, she put her finger to her lips in exactly the same way his mother did when she needed his collusion, and without thinking, he nodded.
The shouting was getting louder and nearer.
Max peered between the branches to see what was going on. He could see his father advancing across the orchard with his gun swinging around, looking for his target.
For a moment, Max thought his father might be looking for him in a fit of madness. There were tales of farmers stricken with a fever turning on their families rather than risking them falling sick with the plague, killing them all rather than suffering the illness. He clung onto the branch with both arms, scared of showing himself, sure that his father’s paranoia had tipped him over the edge of sanity.
But then he shouted, ‘I know you’re there. Your father said you were out here. Come in and we’ll talk.’
He was getting closer, still with his gun raised and ready to shoot.
‘We have food in the house. Come out, and you can join your father for a proper meal.’
It was at that moment that Max knew that his father would not let this girl go.
His tone was gentle and his voice soft – exactly as it was before he slaughtered an animal for their meat. ‘Come on, lass. I won’t hurt you.’
Max wanted to warn Sarah. He wanted to jump down and protect her, or shout for her to run. But he didn’t. He looked down as, lulled by his father’s words, she stepped out.
He shot her.
Max clung to the branch, barely able to breathe. He was sure that if he made a sound, his father would shoot him too. Ringing in his head was a terrible question. Would it be worse to be shot by accident, with his father thinking that he was a stranger, or be shot on purpose to cover up what he’d witnessed? Death by paranoia or by malice?
His father had spent some time searching the orchard for anyone with the girl but, luckily, did not have the imagination to look up. Then he went to the outhouse where he kept a hazmat suit and returned dressed in it, carrying the body of a malnourished man. He dragged the man and Sarah to the edge of the orchard, just beyond the magical boundary, and then spent time bringing wood up from the back of the house. Sparing a little of his precious petrol, he poured some on top and then stepped back and lit the fire.
His father stood and watched the fire consume his victims. Max watched him.
Once it was clear that the fire was burning thoroughly and it wasn’t threatening the nearest trees, his father turned to take the hazmat suit back. Max could hear him shouting for his mother to come and hose him down.
Max stayed in the tree until the fire had almost burnt out and he was sure that his father would be safely inside and wouldn’t see him coming back from the orchard.
Finally, he went home, because he had nowhere else to go.
‘Where have you been, then?’ his father fired at him as he came in the door.
‘I was up at the pasture,’ he replied. ‘I heard some bangs. They sounded like shots.’ He looked at his father’s face to see his reaction.
‘Vermin,’ he said, getting up to leave the room. ‘Vermin after our food.’ And he walked out.
Max hadn’t done much climbing after that, and went off apples too, much to his father’s annoyance.
Eight years later, as he left the farm, his father’s parting comment had been, ‘Don’t come back.’
‘I won’t,’ he replied.
And three years on, he hadn’t.