no longer darting to hide every time one of them turned round to check where they were.
‘Why do you think they’re following us?’ asked Bushey.
‘They see your uniforms.’ She nodded at the faded and patched khakis Adam and the other men were wearing. ‘Maybe they think you’re, like, representatives of the government or something.’
They see hope.
‘They want us to help them,’ she said.
Walfield shrugged. ‘We can’t.’
‘Not saying we should,’ replied Leona. ‘But that’s why they’re following us.’
It was an hour later that Leona and the others finally stopped. It was a beautiful moment that stopped them; in a way a reassuring thing, that life goes on quite happily without mankind’s help. Just as the last pale stain of day was being chased by long shadows across the motorway, they watched in stunned silence as a small herd of deer ambled across the four lanes of the motorway passing within feet of them, their dark eyes expressing only a casual curiosity and not fear as they trotted by.
Here were several generations that had never known roads filled with moving vehicles, roads that could kill them. Or people that could shoot them.
Leona stretched a hand towards the nearest of the animals, a large doe bringing up the rear. She felt its hot breath coming in gentle puffs as it paused to sniff her outstretched fingers curiously.
‘Hello,’ she said softly.
It snorted wetly then broke into a trot to catch up with the others as they began to weave their way through a logjam of vehicles and down an off ramp leading into a cluster of low office blocks.
Adam shouldered his gun without a word of warning and fired a solitary round. An old stag, one of the largest animals in the group, dropped heavily to the ground with a clattering of its horns against the boot of a rusting Renault estate. The rest of the herd scattered, their pale rears bobbing like ghosts amidst the gathering gloom.
‘Meat,’ said Adam. ‘Jesus, I haven’t eaten fresh meat in . . .’ he looked slowly round at them, a widening smile spreading beneath his beard. ‘Shit, I can’t even remember.’
‘Come on, lads,’ said Walfield to the other two men, ‘let’s get something for a fire.’
Leona nodded, glad at least that he’d not shot the doe that had sniffed at her hand.
‘But they all seemed so young.’ Leona chewed on the hot gristle in her greasy hands. ‘I mean, those three smaller boys at the gate, they must have been eleven . . . twelve?’
Walfield shrugged and tossed another slat of fence wood onto the fire, sending a shower of sparks up into the sky. The deer’s skinned and cleaned carcass hung from an improvised spit, dripping fat into the fire as it cooked; one hind leg already pared to the bone in places where cuts of meat had been removed.
‘The younger the better,’ he replied after a while.
Adam nodded, finishing a mouthful. ‘Child warriors. They’re often the most fearless. Certainly the most ruthless.’ He swigged warm water from one of their plastic bottles. ‘Maxwell was no fool. He set up his boys’ army as “auxiliary staff”, initially to help out the emergency workers. That’s how it was for a couple of years until he staged that coup and had them turn our own guns on us and kick out the rest of the lads in our platoon.’
He picked meat from his teeth. ‘There’s a long history of dictators using child soldiers as a psychological weapon on their own people.’
‘East Africa,’ added Walfield. ‘Somalia, Ethiopia, Eritrea . . . I remember reading about some warlord who ruled over something like a quarter of a million people with just a couple of hundred boys with guns. It was their totally psychotic reputation that did it. Kept all them people in line.’
‘Boy soldiers,’ added Adam, ‘because they haven’t lived long enough to understand right from wrong, to “grow” a morality. Older soldiers - men - have lived long enough to have wives, girlfriends, younger sisters, younger brothers, perhaps even sons or daughters of their own. It makes them pause for thought. At the moment of committing an act of atrocity, it gives them a reason to hesitate. And that moment . . . that second of hesitation can mean the difference between killing an innocent civilian or not.’
He sighed. ‘If you want your people to be totally immobilised by absolute fear, you need a militia that can kill and r—’ He was going to say ‘rape’, but casting a