As planned, we had started the drive to the coast. Jack would meet us after dark at Whitby Abbey, from where we should be able to observe the harbor. If it seemed safe—based on what criteria, I wasn’t sure, but gut instinct and the absence of gunshots would be key—we would wait for Jack and the other boys before approaching.
“What if it is a trap?” Lola asked.
“Then I’ll kick and punch them in the willy,” threatened Billy, demonstrating his moves on his sister, who took him out with a single ninja elbow to the eye. His plan was as good as anything I could offer. Being realistic, if this wasn’t a rescue mission by friendly forces, then we had very little chance “going forward.”
“We’ll go hide in a cave,” said Joni.
“What will we eat?” asked Billy.
“Baked beans.”
“I hate baked beans!” Maggie reacted as though baked beans were a fate worse than death.
We sped across land that featured nothing higher than a telegraph pole. The route wound through nondescript villages whose whitewashed houses and garden walls flanked the road, leaving no room, even for a pavement. We raced from the corral of each settlement to the exposed flatlands beyond. There was nowhere to hide here, so we ran. I muttered apologies to the kids bouncing around under the tarpaulin in the back.
Lola reached over a hand and tapped my wrist on the steering wheel.
“You’re doing it again,” she said.
I gripped the wheel to prevent myself from drumming my thumbs to the rhythm of the tires. Instead, I counted the letters of the place names we passed to see which ones were prime numbers. Took a while to get a nineteen. Whitby was a perfect number.
“What’s that?” asked Charlie.
“What?”
“That.”
“Words, Charlie.”
“In the sky again. It’s bigger this time.”
I stopped outside a boarded-up pub and reached my hand back for the binoculars.
“There,” said Lola, pointing past my nose out the window.
I didn’t need the binoculars. Something small and black was hovering over the massive steeple of the village church.
“It’s a ginormous spider,” said Charlie.
“It does look like a spider,” Lola whispered. “Or a fly.”
I pushed the truck into gear and bumped down the curb into the street. A muted scream told me the boys in the bed had really felt that one. I accelerated away, watching the church spire and its strange hovering angel recede in my wing mirror.
“It’s a drone,” I said. “And so was the one before.”
The pickup pitched through the village, round some traffic cones, before a sharp bend outside the local school. We picked up speed again as the road swept past a long row of stone cottages.
“What’s a drone?”
“Can it see us?”
“Where is it now?”
I ignored them and drove. Joni scooted round on her seat to face backward on her knees. She took the binoculars and crouched to peer out of the rear window.
“Anything?”
“Nope.”
“Hold on.” A hump in the road. Her head hit the ceiling, but she righted herself and lifted the binoculars back to her face.
“I can’t see it anymore.”
The road bent round another sharp bend. A long wall ran alongside us as the street narrowed for several hundred yards to a single lane. The sign told me to give way to oncoming traffic. Instead, I drove straight ahead, right up to the rear bumper of a crashed car that forced me to stop just before the narrow section widened again.
“Fucking stupid place to crash your car,” I said.
I wound down the window and scanned the sky, but I could see nothing, not even the tip of the steeple that must be a mile or so behind us already. We were stuck between the houses to the left, the crashed hatchback in front, and the drystone wall to the right. The land beyond the wall was higher than the road, so that the stones strained to hold back the weight of an overgrown graveyard. Brittle crests of dried grass flooded over the wall in waves.
“I think I see it,” said Lola.
“Where?” Joni squinted into the binoculars.
“I’m not sure.”
“Can you see it or not?” I asked her.
“I’m not sure!”
“All right,” I said. “Let’s work on the assumption that you can.”
I let off the hand brake, and the pickup made contact with the back of the hatchback. It resisted for a second until I gave the engine more power, and then the car’s nose pulled away from the house with a teeth-grinding scrape and rolled toward the end of the narrowed section. It picked up speed and trotted obediently along. The kids gave a little cheer. But then its tires turned out into the road and it veered to the opposite side, and not even all my swearing could prevent it from embedding itself in the very end of the stone wall, just a few feet shy of a gateway that led into the graveyard. I rolled up behind the hatchback and gave it a shunt that budged it another foot out of the road. But a second bump creaked a metallic warning through my bonnet. I reversed a little to straighten up and then squeezed between the back end of the stricken car and the brickwork of the houses. Lola wound down her window to pull in the side mirror. The cab pulled clear of the car, and Charlie started celebrating again. But then we jerked to a halt as our wider back end wedged. I forced the pedal down and the pickup writhed like a fish, catapulting past the crashed car with a screaming wrench. As we drove away, the red brick wall of the house collapsed into the road behind us, blocking the narrow lane once and for all.
Chapter Twenty-Four
We crossed the river to reach the cliff top, driving into a purple sunset, the same bruised color as the clouds of heather drifting over the moorland that had brought us here. It seemed that the land ran seamlessly into sky. After our long days of confinement—forest, mine, wolf enclosure—I felt like I had stepped onto a parapet, an impression that was heightened by the buffeting wind on the exposed road. The wide view offered a vertiginous freedom, as though we could drive straight over the edge and just keep going.
As we approached the Gothic face of Whitby Abbey, the sun dropped behind one ruined window socket and split into an orange frangipani flower. The glow streamed across the surrounding pastureland so that the dry grass lit up, its windblown movement swilling like the yellow hair of a drowned girl. It shifted direction to beckon us toward the cliff tops. We rolled along in silence, tires rumbling like distant thunder.
“Is this real?” asked Maggie. I assured her it was. We rumbled on until I stopped the pickup beside a tall stone cross, so weathered its ornamental top was worn down to a nub.
“I see the sea, and the sea sees me,” said Charlie. As though in response, a wave drummed on the rocks below.
I got out and walked to the stone cross, up the little steps to its base to gain extra elevation and look out over the coastline. Mercury water pooled in the sheltered river inlet down in the town. But the wide swathe of beach running up to a distant headland was batted by shallow waves, slow blinking eyelids. Lola climbed up beside me, fighting to open the map in the wind.