The Rain (14 page)

I didn’t think; I just followed. I could do that because Simon was thinking for me.

At the smashed-in doors of the supermarket we stood and listened. You couldn’t hear anything with the alarms going. What you could see, though – that was terrible.

‘Wait here,’ shouted Simon.

‘You can’t leave me,’ I shouted.

You can’t leave me, you can’t leave me, you can’t leave me.

‘If anything happens,’ shouted Simon, ‘you run straight home. You just run.’

So we shopped. Normally, if I got forced to go shopping, I moaned like
. I kind of skulked around the supermarket
after Simon and Mum, sighing at all the stuff there was no point even picking up because you knew you wouldn’t be allowed it. Not even one thing as a treat – and definitely, under no
circumstances, any kind of cereal with chocolate in it. I picked up two boxes of chocolatey cereal; one the ordinary kind, one with teeny marshmallows. I got those jam-filled things you can shove
in a toaster too.

Simon wasn’t watching me . . . but I saw him. He was rummaging in dead people’s shopping trolleys.

‘Look for water, Ru! Look for stuff to drink!’ he shouted, waving a carton of long-life milk at me.

Yes, it was a shopping trip like no other. Stepping over bodies to get stuff kind of puts you off a bit.

In the freezer section, the pitbull lay quietly by its master’s body. Maybe that man had been shot . . . and those kids, with the bumper-bags of sweets, they looked like they must have run
out into the rain, then run back to him. Their mum looked the same.

The dog didn’t even lift its head, but let out a little sad growl when it saw me.

‘Come away,’ said Simon.

There was only the bakery section left to visit. The bread was as much use as bread from a toy set: rock hard. You could have killed someone with one of those French
sticks.

While I was loading up on chocolate flapjacks – hey, they’re practically healthy, aren’t they? All those oats – Simon made the discovery that ended our shopping trip.
Like all good customers we had kept to the parts of the shop that we were supposed to, but Simon pulled open the doors that led to the storage part.

It was all dark. He flicked on the lights:
flick
,
flick
,
flick
,
flick
. Enough lights to see it had been trashed, cleaned out. There was even a truck still
parked in there. Someone, somewhere inside that warehouse, groaned.

‘You
!’ snarled a man’s voice. He sounded done-in, though, weak and broken . . . then screechy: ‘You
!’

‘Let’s go, Ru,’ said Simon, flicking off the lights.
Flick
,
flick
,
flick
–

There was this clickety-slide-click sound that you only ever hear in films.

Just like I’d never heard a gun fired from a distance, but knew right away what it was, I double-knew what a gun sounded like getting ready to be fired.

And so, again, we ran.

On the way out, without even pausing, I snatched up the best bunch of flowers I could see. Simon, without even pausing, grabbed up our bucket with the measly bit of water left in it.

I wouldn’t want you to think this took any more than a trillionth of a second. There was no discussion. We grabbed and ran. We so ran.

Simon said later it had been a professional job. That’s what he kept saying, that the whole supermarket thing had been a professional job, how ordinary people like us
would have left something for other people. I didn’t say what my entire body, kicking up for water, water, water, something, anything, to drink wanted to say: NO I WOULDN’T . . . but he
might have been right. There was the truck in the entrance, the truck in the stores and, right where we ran out, weren’t the flowerbeds flattened, the mud churned up, cars biffed out of the
way? Before people trundled out with trolleys full of toilet rolls, before people had started hacking the ice out of the freezers, you kind of knew someone else had come and taken the good stuff .
. . because I never saw a single person leave that supermarket with even a single bottle of water. I never even saw anyone leave with a trolley full of beetroot and prunes, not even a plastic bag
full of them. I never saw anyone leave that supermarket with anything much you could drink. It had gone. It had all gone.

We ran along the whole of Jubilee Road, all of it rammed with cars, alarms bleating and honking, but there wasn’t a single person in sight. No one alive, anyway.

There’s a thing I want to say – once, and not say it again. I want to say it just in case you think I didn’t care or even that –
how?!
–
I didn’t notice. There were bodies – human bodies – everywhere. I don’t even want to talk about them again, how there’s nowhere you can go without seeing them. So they
get to be like lamp posts, or doors, or trees; they get to be THINGS that are just there, that you wouldn’t even bother mentioning (unless they get in your way or are especially important).
And that sounds dreadful, and I wouldn’t ever want anyone to think that about my mum, but also . . . that is how it is. There are bodies, everywhere, and they are just there. They’re
just there.

They’re the dead people. You breathe. You still breathe.

As we turned into the High Street – walking now, gasping – there was this young bloke standing outside The Sun and Moon with a pint of beer in his hand. The kind of
bloke me and Lee would have gone all giggly about (before I was in love with Caspar). There was music – some rock thing so loud you could hear it over the alarms – coming from the open
door of the pub behind him. He raised his glass at us: a toast.

Simon looked at me; a look that asked, ‘OK if I speak to him?’ I shrugged. I shrugged when really I wanted to say, What, are you
crazy?! You want to stop and talk to this guy?!
Are you really seriously crazy?!
LET’S JUST GO HOME!

But this bloke . . . we were close enough to see that he was crying.

‘All right, mate?’ called Simon in this blokey voice he used to talk to builders, etc., like he was one of them and not a chartered accountant who liked birdwatching.

‘Not really, mate,’ called the bloke.

There sort of wasn’t anything else to say.

‘Don’t bother with the supermarket, eh?’ said Simon. ‘It’s bad there.’

That bloke, he nodded.

‘We’d best be off, then,’ said Simon.

‘Come down for a pint later?’ said the bloke. ‘If you fancy it. I’ll still be here.’

‘Thanks, mate,’ said Simon.

The bloke raised his glass to me, and winked – not a lechy wink, like blokes like that normally did, but a sweet one, like Grandpa Hollis used to do.

‘Wait!’ he called as we walked away. He sat his pint glass down on the doorstep and disappeared into the pub.

I looked at Simon; he shrugged.
Uneasily
, that’s what I’d say – he shrugged uneasily.

Do you see what had happened already? Where you’d just say hello to another person, or maybe chat with them a bit, this fear thing came. Not even a specific ‘You’ve got a
gun’ or even a ‘What if this person is sick?’ fear – and anyway that bloke definitely wasn’t sick and probably, surely, couldn’t have been going to get a gun . .
. it’s a ‘What is this person going to do?’ fear.

That was the first time I felt it too: I felt
uneasy
.

The bloke came back out with a bunch of little bottles of cola.

‘For your girl,’ he said, loading them into Simon’s bag.

His mouth, it twisted up – but tight, so tight, like he was tying a knot in his lips to stop himself from crying.

‘I had a girl,’ the bloke managed to say. ‘Just . . . a little girl.’

Simon took my hand. He gave it a squeeze. We walked away.

‘Don’t forget that pint, then,’ the bloke called to Simon, his voice gone all sobby now. ‘Later. If you fancy it. Or another time.’

The High Street was a tad trashed – and it was completely deserted. We avoided it anyway, turning into South Street, going home the way we had meant to come.

A crow was pecking at the body we’d passed. At his belly, where some other creature – a fox, maybe? – must have stopped for a nibble. The crow flew off as we came close.

‘At least the birds are OK,’ said Simon.

I would have kicked off, like – how could he say such a thing? But it was true: we hadn’t seen a sick or dead animal anywhere. It was only people that had been destroyed.

‘Uh-huh,’ I said.

The sightless eye sockets of the man who was now bird food stared back at me.

And I remembered: he had officially been my fourth dead body. Less than twenty-four hours later, I had lost count.

My first dead body, Mrs Fitch, was waiting for us in the front garden. Flies buzzed.

‘
!’ said Simon, gagging as he pushed me past her and unlocked the front door.

The second he opened the door you noticed it. It wasn’t our wee buckets – they honked a bit but we’d put bleach in – it was another kind of smell altogether; the
beginning of a stench I know so very well now, but had never smelt until then. It is strangely sweet. Strangely . . . almost spicy. That makes it sound nice, but it’s not. It was like Mrs
Fitch, but stronger. Mrs Fitch and no fresh air.

We bustled into the kitchen, shutting the door behind us, dumped our haul down on the table, opened the garden door and all the windows.