Next morning, Jack and his sister Emily headed for Camp Truth. Rucksacks over their shoulders, they were walking into the sunrise and beginning a journey leading somewhere Jack had dreamed of for two years.
He felt that rush of youthful anticipation—part wonder, part fear—that had been absent for so long. But above that even now hung the crushing weight of his responsibility. He had Emily to look after and look out for, a young girl who sometimes had trouble remembering her parents’ faces when she was tired, crying and needing them most. Jack was always there for her, offering a hug and trying to hold back his own tears because he was the grown-up now. He was the one who played with Emily and told her off, washed her clothes and helped with her school work, prepared her meals and looked after the house. He sobbed with her sometimes, but other times he had to scold her if she misbehaved. He'd tried to tell himself that not tidying her room when he asked was too insignificant to worry about, but the gravity of Doomsday sometimes seemed to exaggerate the smallest of things.
Emily skipped on ahead, her rucksack bouncing on her back. She held her digital camera in one hand, fully charged the previous evening, strap wrapped around her wrist three times. Mum had bought it for her, and she'd treasured it ever since. Jack had lost count of the number of DVDs Emily had filled with random still and moving images, all of them seemingly meaningless but meaning the world to her.
They reached the edge of the village, and as they passed by the dilapidated old scout hut Jack felt nothing. He'd grown up in Tall Stennington, had many good times there—making mud pies at the village pond with his cousin when he was six; playing baseball on the green as his parents sat outside the pub; seen his first naked breast at twelve when Billy White smuggled him into his older sister's bedroom closet—but the bad far outweighed the good. Crossing the field towards the woods, he felt as if he was truly leaving his childhood behind.
“Don't run, you'll trip!” he called to Emily, and he laughed at the foolishness of his statement. They were heading for London, the Toxic City, where millions had died and the government claimed that monsters now lived. And he was worried about a grazed knee.
“What's wrong?” Emily called back.
Jack could only laugh and splutter some more.
“You sound like a hyena.”
He ran after his sister, yapping and barking. She squealed and hurried on, and they were both sprinting as they entered the shadow of the woods, keen to leave the past in the cleansing sunlight.
They took a circuitous route around the edge of the woods, following a path popular with dog walkers and strolling lovers. Jack sometimes walked this way with Lucy-Anne, and a few times they'd gone deeper into the woods, spread a blanket and messed around. But recently there had always been a reason for their messing to end; wood ants on her naked legs, a noise from the bushes, a feeling that they were being watched. And not all the reasons had come from her. Jack tried to put it down to being scared, but it wasn't that, not really. He felt as if he had turned from Lucy-Anne's lover into her best friend, but he was not certain she thought that way. One day they'd have to talk about things, but she was such a strange girl; sometimes she scared him.
And sometimes, he knew, he just thought about things too damn much.
Clothes, water, food. He mentally flipped through the contents of his backpack. Washing stuff, money, knife. The beginning of the Exclusion Zone was thirty miles away, but they'd be able to get public transport for more than half that distance. Medicine, bandages, antibiotics. Beyond that, they'd walk. Rosemary said she knew where they were going. They'd have to trust her.