More Than This (12 page)

He nearly drops the can when he sees a pair of ducks sunning themselves on the rock in the center of it. There’s nothing special about them as ducks per se, just plain brown ones, squabbling quietly to each other.

But still. There they are.

“Hey!” Seth shouts down at them, without thinking. They fly off almost immediately, quacking in alarm. “Hey, come back!” he calls after them. “I brought you here.
I
did that!”

They disappear over some trees.

“Ah, well,” he says, taking another bite of spaghetti. “It’s not like I could shoot you for dinner.”

He looks up. Could he? Well, he’d need a gun first, and he thinks immediately of the outdoor store –

And then he remembers this is England, or at least his mind’s version of it. You couldn’t buy a gun here anything like how easy it was in the U.S., where he could actually have got one at the local shopping mall, going to McDonald’s before and seeing a movie after. His parents were appalled, and talked about it for years with joyous European indignation, while never allowing one in the house. The result being that Seth has barely seen a gun up close, much less shot one.

So that ruled out hunting, probably, at least in the short term. His can of spaghetti, though, is suddenly looking a lot less appetizing than a roast duck. Not that he’d know how to roast it. Or if you even could on a butane camp stove.

He sighs and takes another bite, using the spoon he remembered to bring this time. He’s tired but not as tired as he was the day before. He wonders if he’s finally catching up on the sleep you need when you first die, which, granted, must be an exhausting thing to happen. Probably the most exhausting thing that ever
could
happen.

He looks back down to the now-empty pond and notices something new. The tall grasses up and down the hill are swaying a bit in the breeze. More than a bit, actually. They’re being blown by a wind Seth can now feel against his face. He looks up.

For the first time, there’s something in the sky. Clouds. Great big puffy ones. Great big puffy
black
ones scurrying this way.

Seth can’t believe his eyes. “It rains in hell?”

He barely makes it back to the house before the skies open up. The storm is a summer one, and Seth can still see blue sky on the horizon, so it won’t last, but boy, does it pour. He watches it from the doorway of his house as it quickly soaks the dusty streets to mud and streaks dirt across the windows of the dead cars.

The smell is outrageously good. So clean and fresh, Seth can’t help but step out into it, letting it drench his upturned face, squinting as the drops hit his eyes. The rain is surprisingly warm, and he suddenly gasps, “Idiot!” He races back inside to grab the hardened bar of dishwashing liquid. How much nicer would this be than the freezing cold shower he had this morning –

He jumps back out the front door, but the rain is already tapering away, blowing out of the neighborhood as quickly as it came.

“Damn,” he says. The wind up high must be blowing something wicked because the rain clouds are leaving like they’re being chased by a mob, out past the back of Seth’s house and carrying on to –

Where?

Yeah, where
would
they be going?

How big
is
hell?

Big enough for weather, obviously. The sun is back out, the breeze dying down, and steam already rising as the mud dries back into dust on his street.

A street he’s been up and down several times but not much beyond.

Maybe it’s time to do some exploring,
he thinks.

He feels tired again after the morning’s exertions but resists taking a nap, dreading the vivid dreams even more after last night’s. Instead, he packs the backpack with a few supplies and a bottle of water and heads out for a walk.

He takes a moment to decide which direction. To the left is all the High Street stuff he’s seen several times already. Of course there are neighborhoods behind that, sprawling for miles before, if he remembers correctly, changing into farmland as they head east.

To the right is the train station.

I could walk all the way to London on that track,
he thinks, and that’s somehow vaguely cheering. What does it matter if he has no phone to show him maps and no Internet to look things up? If he follows the train tracks one way, he could walk all the way to London.

Not that he’s going to. It’s bloody miles.

He stops. Bloody. He actually thought “bloody miles.” His parents didn’t even say bloody anymore, American slang having almost thoroughly obliterated everything but his mum’s insistence that he call her “mum.”

“Bloody,” he says, testing it out. “Bloody, bloody, bloody.” He looks up. “Bloody sun.”

It’s shining down brightly again, even hotter than before, the mud almost already thoroughly dried. This certainly isn’t the cold, damp English weather his parents always complained about. Nor is it really what he remembers from living here, though the memories of an eight-year-old about weather might not be the most reliable. But still. It’s a lot hotter than he’s been led to believe. With the steam rising from the ground, it’s almost tropical. Which is a word no one ever used to describe England.

“Weird,” he says, then he resettles his backpack and heads to the right, toward the train station.

The roads he crosses are the same as everywhere else, dusty and empty. He thinks it’s going to be worth starting some kind of systematic look through the houses, a more thorough search through the ones whose windows he’s already smashed and then spreading out across the neighborhood. Who knows what useful stuff could be found? More cans of food, maybe, tools and better clothes. Maybe one or more of them has a vegetable garden –

He stops in his tracks.
The allotments,
he thinks.

Of
course.
A whole huge field of private little gardens, tucked away behind a . . . what was it? He tries to remember. A sports center? Yes, he thinks that’s what it was, a sports center on the other side of the train tracks, with a field of allotments behind it. Sure there’d be weeds, but there’d have to be edible things still growing there, right?

He quickens his step, remembering almost automatically to turn up the long concrete stairway that runs between two apartment buildings –
blocks of flats,
he remembers. The English terms keep coming, and he wonders if his accent will return as well. Gudmund was always trying to make him “talk British,” always wanting him to say –

He stops, the feelings of loss coming again, strong. Too strong.

Keep going,
he thinks.
As long as you can.

The stairway reaches a sidewalk that leads up to the train station, which rests on top of a little rise. He can see the station building now. To get to the allotments, he’ll have to walk through it, cross the bridge between platforms, and go out the far side. He’s almost feeling excited about it as he passes through the entrance, hopping over the ticket gates without a second thought, and up the short stairs to the first platform –

Where there’s a train waiting.

It’s a short one, just four cars, a commuter train meant to shunt people back and forth to the city up the tracks, and he half expects passengers to start emptying out the doors or for the train to start pulling slowly away from the platform.

It doesn’t, of course. It just sits there, silent as a rock from the earth, covered in the dust of this place. There are weeds growing up all along the cracks of the platform and even some in the gutters along the train’s roof. Like the cars on the streets outside, it hasn’t moved in a long time.

“Hello?” he calls. He walks across the platform to look in through a window, but it’s mostly dark, the windows so badly dusted over they block out most of the afternoon sun. He pushes the open button on the closest door, but there’s no power running through it and it stays firmly shut.

He looks down the length of the train. At the front, the door to the driver’s compartment has come open. He walks to it, takes the torch out of the backpack and sticks his head inside the driver’s compartment. There’s only one seat behind the controls, which surprises him. He’d have thought there’d be two, like in airplanes. The screens on the dash are all either cracked or dusted over, dark without power.

There’s a door inside to the rest of the train, and it’s open, too. Seth steps up into the compartment and shines the light through the inner doorway, down the central aisle of the first car.

It smells. Animals have clearly been in here. There’s a fug of urine and musk, and the dust on the linoleum floor of the aisle is disturbed and streaked in any number of unpleasant ways. He can imagine all kinds of foxes huddled under seats now, watching him with his torch, wondering what he’ll do.

What he does is look around, almost overwhelmed with memories. The sun is bright enough for a dim light through the filthy windows, many of which are scratched with unintelligible graffiti, but there’s enough to see the blue cross-hatch pattern on the cloth of the seats. He runs a hand down one, burring the fuzz with his fingertips.

The train. The
train.

He hasn’t been on a train since he left England. Not once. Americans on the west coast didn’t take trains. They drove. Everywhere. This is literally the first time he’s set foot on board a train since they crossed the ocean.

And everything the train had meant when he was young! Trips up to London and all the city had to offer a boy of six and seven and eight. The zoo, the Wheel, the wax museum, the other museums that were less interesting because they had no wax. Or down the other way, too, to the coast, with its castles on hills and the great big white cliffs that his mum wouldn’t let him or Owen anywhere near. And the pebbly beaches. And the ferries to France.

Trains
always
went somewhere amazing when you were eight years old. They were a way out of the same houses and the same faces and the same shops. It seems embarrassing now, to have been so excited by a simple train journey that millions of people took every day, but Seth can feel a little smile spread across his face as he steps farther down the car, shining the torch on the overhead racks and the assorted blocks of seats, two here, three there, and at the back of the car, the little boxed door to the horrible train toilet that Owen, without fail, would need to use within five minutes of the train leaving the station in whatever direction.

Seth shakes his head. He’d almost forgotten trains existed. Looking at it now, he can’t believe how exotic they seemed to him as a little boy.

Still, though,
he thinks.
A train.

Which is when the door to the bathroom crashes open and a monster comes roaring up the aisles straight for him.

Seth yells in terror and runs back down the aisle, risking a quick look back –

A huge, black
shape
hurtles toward him –

Screeching and roaring in what sounds like rage –

Two eyes staring back at him in unmistakable malevolence –

Seth flies into the train driver’s compartment, slamming into the control panels, crying out at a pain in his hip. He scrambles over the driver’s seat, and there’s a terrible moment when the strap of his backpack gets caught, but gets loose as the shape comes smashing inside.

Seth leaps out the door of the train and takes off, tearing down the platform, dropping the torch and leaving it behind. He looks back again, just as the shape comes rocketing out of the compartment, sending the door swinging back and forth violently. The thing turns and comes after him.

Running a lot faster than Seth is.

“Shit!” he yells, pumping his arms and trying to remember his cross-country form, though that was for long distances, not for sprinting, and he’s still not even remotely fully recovered from –

There’s a squeal behind him.

(a squeal?)

As he turns up the steps to the bridge over to the other platform, he takes another look back.

The shape is the biggest, ugliest, dirtiest wild boar he’s ever seen.

A wild boar?
he thinks, charging up the stairs.
A wild BOAR is chasing me?