a potato peeler. He would gut her like a pig before she could break his skin.
“You’re right about that, squirt. Bad man.” He dragged out the latter words into a tuneless song, Baaad man. He stopped in front of her and lowered down on his haunches so that they were looking each other in the eye. “You talk funny. Where you from?”
She blinked, lowered her face behind her hands so his glaring blue eyes couldn’t burn her skin, and bit back a whimper. She sensed the anger building inside him; the air was charged with it, but she kept still and kept her eyes off the knife.
I want to go home. I wanna go home, go home! I want Ma and Daddy and Grandpa, I want to go home!
The monster was quiet a moment, then shrugged like it didn’t matter. “Fine. You’re not a talker. I don’t need that. I can get all the fun I need elseways.” And Billy’s heart almost exploded in her chest as the knife began a slow arc up from his side toward her.
She told herself to reach for her dagger, commanding her fingers to reach under her tunic and grasp the handle. But her arms were frozen with fear, her body stupid and unresponsive.
She couldn’t do anything. She was just going to sit here and let him come.
Oh no. No. It can’t happen to me, not me—why am I here? Why? I should be at home, I should never have come—help!
She groaned like a whipped animal and sunk toward the ground, waves of nausea and terror running through her body. She was shaking all over, and it all seemed silly and fake, but she knew she was definitely here in this stinking tent with a man who was about to kill her.
The monster whispered, “Beautiful skin. Hold still, I’m going to carve a pretty picture …”
“No, wait! Help!”
Nononononono, please. DADDY!
With a jerk, she knew she had left her body behind. Despite the knife being only inches away from her face the whole world fell away and darkness took its place. For a moment she was spinning and floating just as she had when she had stepped through the Arch from the Henge, and then she thumped down on familiar floorboards beside a familiar bedframe. When she opened her eyes, she was looking down at Daddy, gaunt and wilted like a summer flower visited by Jack Frost.
“You’re just like your mother,” he wheezed.
*
Alexander dunked the sponge in the basin of stagnant warm water and rinsed it out with one eye on the quivering Irishman. They had just got to talking and Alexander had been settling into a story like so many others he’d heard over the last year about going hungry and watching the world wilt and the crops die. Don and his family had come across the sea.
He was captivated. They had brought in the old man back at New Canterbury, but there had always been the chance that he had been an expat living in England when the End hit. But this … this man was too young to have known the End, barely out of his thirties. He was a native of Ireland itself.
So others really were out there. After all these years, he finally had solid proof of it.
And if Ireland was still dotted with survivors like Don claimed, what did that mean for the rest of the world? The End had left perhaps only one in a thousand behind, but the world’s population had been in the billions. If that was so then maybe the small circle of ten thousand souls left on Earth he had estimated all this time was far larger. Perhaps their true numbers lay in the millions.
He was so enamoured with a snowballing flight of imagination—the kind he hadn’t felt in years, like those that used to drive the fits of passion in his youth that had forged the mission’s heart—that he didn’t notice Don’s eyes glaze over.
By the time Alexander stooped forth from the stool, the Irishman was in the grips of muttering delirium, speaking incomprehensible tongues. Even in the short time Alexander had been with him, though his spirits seemed buoyed more by the moment, his body was fading. His lips were now a stark blue and his skin had the rubbery lacklustre appearance of a corpse.
The man with the sickle was on his way, there was no doubting it. Alexander couldn’t guess how long he had, but it wasn’t long. A day, maybe.