Not long after we bedded down, Billy sought me out and rolled over to lie with his back pressed into my stomach, head tucked under my chin. We lay there, in a human Zz. I found myself shushing under my breath like I did when he was a baby, and his hand found mine in the dark and gripped one finger. I don’t know how long I slept, but I woke with twitchy legs and brain.
I extricated myself from Billy, rolled over, and pulled my phone from my bag. Facing away from the others to shield them from the light, I opened up a new page in Notes, a to-do list: self-soothing for insomniacs. Pack up camp, find police station, contact Peter’s mother, find Horatio’s owner. I hit done, but knew I wasn’t. My legs still fizzled. Contact Julian. That should be top of my list, even if I wasn’t top of his. In the darkness, Joni smacked her lips. I reopened Notes, added Contact David and Check on intl flights. Then a second wave came, and I let practicalities distract me: shelter, food, fuel. On and on, I emptied my brain until the red battery told me the phone was going to die. I wasn’t about to creep into the night to put the phone on charge in the car, so just after 3:00 a.m. it shut down. I lay back. Still couldn’t close my eyes. Deep inside my bag I found a notepad and a stub of pencil. I scribbled until I punched a hole through the thin paper. I screwed up the sheet and stabbed it again and again onto the floor with the pencil, punching a hole right through the ground sheet and pounding the scrap into the soft earth, covering it over with a blanket, and dropping back onto the pillow.
My head was leaden, aching like my thighs after an especially masochistic run. I rested my eyes, and sleep wafted in and out on the breeze. I woke once to footsteps outside the yurt. A cold rush of air told me the flap was open. I laid a heavy hand on Billy’s leg in the sleeping bag next to me. He was fine. My body was mattress thick with fatigue. Another stumble in the leaves outside and the sound of liquid splashing. A whimper, distinctly in fear and recognizable as Peter. He shouldn’t be out there alone in the night, I thought, as my eyes closed again.
Gray light and bird calls, and Billy’s face against mine woke me again. “Awake, Mum-may,” he told me and rapped his knuckles on my forehead. I tried to pull him back down for a cuddle, but he was having none of it, and when I realized that Joni was already up and brewing tea, I let him go. I tried to sit up, but dizziness forced me back down. A cough dredged up something from my lungs that had to be swallowed. I held out a hand and saw it tremble. Then I was fully awake, scrabbling around in the bedding for socks, jeans. I was a bloody idiot to get as close as I had to those bodies—whatever killed them had to be contagious. And I’d spent the whole night pressed against Billy, breathing it over him. Over everyone in the yurt. I should get away from them.
I bolted out of the tent straight into Joni, who was coming my way with a cup of livid-green tea.
“So you are living and breathing,” she said.
“Why, what’s wrong with me?”
“You look like shit.” She thrust the cup into my hand, stumped off. “Not surprising, after finishing all the gin and pissing around in the dark all night.”
I didn’t feel so dizzy now that I was up. The weird tea seemed to settle my stomach. And I was ravenous. It could just be a hangover.
“I was making a list,” I said.
I heard her mutter “fricking brainstorming” as she carried the cooler down the slope to the car. I went back into the yurt to pack, but ended up sitting down again, watching the trees play shadow puppets through the canvas. Maggie scurried across to lie beside me.
“Are you scared, Mummy?”
“No, love.”
She put her arm around my shoulders, pulling me awkwardly down to her level. “It’s okay, Mummy. You can be scared.”
I lay there with my head on my seven-year-old’s chest. No, I thought. I can’t be scared.
Joni was bandaging Peter’s latest injury. I was wrestling the inflatable mattress into its bag. Charlie was supposed to be holding it open for me, but kept wilting. I snarled at him to concentrate. Maggie eyed the cooler in the back of the Beast.
“There’s nothing in it, Maggie,” I called out to her. “I’ll get you a drink in a minute.” She pulled out a bag of dirty clothes, emptied them all into the mud, and abandoned everything when she found no drinks.
“Maggie! Leave things alone. Hold up the bag, Charlie, for God’s sake.”
The mattress was mostly in. I heard a scraping thump and a scream. Maggie was prostrate, pinned down by the cooler she’d pulled on top of herself. I pressed my fingertips into my eye sockets until I saw stars, dragging in a long breath that whistled through my hands. They were pressed together in a prayer gesture. “Give me strength,” I whispered. Next to me, Joni tossed the grill into the remains of the fire.
“Let’s just leave the fricking camp.” She held her arms out like a cormorant, cooling herself.
Lola stopped untying the yurt cover and watched us both for confirmation. My niece gave a little cough and said, “It might be wise to have a place of refuge.”
I shrugged in agreement and watched her retie the canvas with prim double bows. I picked up the biggest torch—hefty enough to function as a makeshift weapon if necessary—as I walked to the car and bundled everyone in.
“Bye-bye, camp,” we singsonged as we powered up the dirt path across the field. “Bye-bye, wabbits,” I encouraged them to silliness. Bye-bye, (massive, flesh-eating) birdies. Bye-bye, (mastitis-doomed) moo cows.
“Bye-bye, Bury Ditches,” said Maggie as we passed the hill fort.
“Buh-bye, buried witches,” echoed Billy.
Joni and Lola managed to keep up in their car all the way to Wodebury, where I cruised past the now-familiar church, houses, and school, confirming that nothing was changed by the arrival of Monday morning, the day we should get back to normal: there were no children raging around the playground, no mothers one-upping each other at the gate. I didn’t need to see the pub to know that the bodies were still in the street, and there were no police making notes and scratching their heads and taking statements. In fact, judging by the long expanse of empty road that streamed over the hill before us, we might have been the only remaining statements.
After a few miles, we approached the motorway roundabout. Although the road was still clear, we stopped. Perched on the vantage point of a grassy mound was an armored vehicle, the kind you see on the news, its desert camouflage conspicuous against a sky washed out by rain clouds. Unease circled the inside of our car like a chill breeze that made us draw closer together.
“Mummy?” Charlie said. The windows of the armored vehicle were too dark to see if there was any movement inside, any response to our approach.