Scott Andrews - School's Out Forever

The girl steps forward and suddenly I can make out her face. It takes me a second, but then I gasp in shock.

“Well you took your fucking time,” says Caroline.

THE SCARS ON the right side of her face look like the worst case of acne I’ve ever seen. I remember the cleaner’s shotgun blast peppering her with shot, seeing her fall, working all evening to sterilise and dress her wounds. Failing to save her right eye.

I don’t know what it looks like under the eye patch she’s fashioned from elastic and felt, and I don’t ask permission to look.

She’s taller but still very solid. She’d be pretty if it weren’t for her injuries, and her hair is stunning. I spent so long looking for her; it’s hard to believe she’s actually standing in front of me.

The last time I saw her she was being taken into the hospital at the Operation Motherland base, Rowles at her side. I had assumed that was where she remained until the nuclear blast. But when Lee had recovered from his injuries enough to be able to communicate again, he told me that she wasn’t there. The Americans knew nothing about her. She had vanished from under their noses even as Sanders and I were escaping in the opposite direction.

I spread the word that I was looking for her to all our contacts, but I never heard so much as a whisper. Her trail had gone cold by the time I knew to start looking.

I look at the short, square, scarred pirate Jenny in front of me, gun in hand, defiant, leading an army of children, and I feel a strange sort of pride.

“That’s my girl,” I whisper.

She hands me a mug of hot milk, which I take thankfully, warming my frozen fingers.

“Fresh water’s hard to get here,” she explain. “But there’s a guy who comes to market with milk once a week, so…”

We’re awkward with each other. Not quite sure what to say. We slip into survivalist small talk — where do you get medicine, what do you use for fuel, do you have a generator?

We’re sitting on a ragged old sofa in the middle of a huge open plan office. Third floor, centre of the high street. The desks and chairs have been cleared away and the floor is a mad maze of old beds and sofas, with long clear runs where the younger kids race around, burning off the little energy they have.

It’s a headquarters, of sorts. There must be thirty or so kids living here; closer to a hundred now we’ve rounded up most of the escapees from the convoy. My hands ache from all the stitching and splinting I’ve been performing on the injured from the attack. Medical supplies are non-existent, so I’ve been using all sorts of dodgy unsterilised kit. The sooner I can get these kids out of here and back to the safety of St Mark’s, the better. We have enough supplies there to deal with the imminent avalanche of secondary infections. But for now, the last child has been mended and the majority of them are sleeping it off.

Caroline is the leader here, even though there are older, stronger kids in the mix. There are hulking great teenage boys who take orders from her without question.

It takes a while for me to ask the obvious question. “Where are we?”

“Hammersmith.”

“Jesus, that far in? I thought this was Bromley. What’s it like in the centre?”

“Church land. We don’t go there.”

“Church…? Never mind. Tell me later.” Small talk exhausted, I lean forward and ask the big question. “What happened, Caroline? Where did you go?”

She looks down for moment then, talking to her shoes, whispers: “Rowles?”

“He died, Caroline. I’m sorry.”

She nods once. She knew the answer to the question before she asked it.

“He saved us all,” I add. “Little madman took out the entire US army, if you can believe that.”

She looks up, amazed. “What?”

I nod, smiling. “Nuked them.”

Her mouth falls open in astonishment then she begins to laugh.

“He asked about you,” I continue, smiling in spite of myself. “Wanted us to find you, tell you he loved you.”

Gradually her laughter subsides and she wipes away a tear that could equally have been caused by hilarity as grief.

“He stayed behind so I could escape,” she says eventually. “The surgeon who operated on me came to get me during the attack. Spirited me away from right under their noses.”

“Where did he take you?”

“We spent a while in a house somewhere in Bristol, while I recovered. Just the two of us.”

“Did he…?”

“Oh yes,” she says matter of factly. “But, you know, could have been worse.” She registers my look of horror and dismisses it with a scowl. “I’m still alive,” she snaps, irritably.

“Okay,” I say, eager to move on. “And then?”

“He traded me to a trafficker for a pallet of Pot Noodles and a bag of firelighters.”

I stare intently at the floor, unable to meet her gaze. “I should have looked after you better,” I say. “I’m so sorry. This is all on me.”

I feel her hand on mine and I look up. She’s not smiling, but she’s not scowling either. “Not your fault. Move on,” is all she says. But I’m worried for her. Caroline and Rowles were inseparable for a while. Kindred spirits. Bonnie and Clyde. But while she was brave, strong and ruthless to a fault, she didn’t have the emotional detachment of her younger partner in crime. I remember the look on her face, the utter horror, when she accidentally shot a soldier who was trying to help us. Rowles would have shrugged and made some comment about tough luck; Caroline was devastated.

Yet here she is leading an army, battle scarred and hardened and not yet sixteen. I wonder if that vulnerable core has been entirely burnt away.

“I thought you’d died in the nuke,” I explain. “It wasn’t ’til much later that we discovered you weren’t there. We searched high and low for you, I swear.”

“I believe you. But once the traffickers had me, I was shipped straight to London.”

“You escaped, though. I mean, look at this place. Why not come find me?”

“I was… busy for a year or so. And when I did manage to get away, I didn’t escape alone. I had this lot to look after. And a war to fight.”

“Against who? Who are these bastards?”

She regards me coolly for a moment then says: “Come with me.”

As we walk out into the main street and down to the centre of town, we talk more, filling in the blanks. I tell her how I ended up in the van, about the snatchers and how they killed Lee, John and Tariq; she relates stories of all the times the church have tried to track them down or infiltrate them. There’s a streak of ruthlessness to Caroline’s tale — moles identified and shot no matter how young they may have been, lethal traps laid at freshly abandoned living spaces. She’s been fighting a guerrilla war and she’s been fighting dirty. I don’t have the right to disapprove — she’s kept these kids safe in the face of overwhelming odds — but there’s a disquieting element to her stories. I can’t decide whether her precautions and her summary justice were always justified or whether she’s succumbed to paranoia. I remember how Lee was after the siege of St Mark’s; reckless, too quick to fight when a calmer head could have avoided the need. I see a lot of that in Caroline. The sooner I get her back to the school, the better.

It’s so long since I’ve been in a city that I’ve almost forgotten what it’s like to be surrounded by concrete. Everywhere I look is evidence of The Culling Year. Burnt-out cars and buildings, skeletons in the street, a wrecked van, turned on its side. Someone’s gone mad with an aerosol too — up and down the high street, in big red letters it reads “whoops apocalypse J” over and over again.

With no council maintenance teams to trim them, the trees are taking over. Tough grass is starting to force its way through the moss-covered tarmac, and foxes stroll blithely down the road eyeing us more with hunger than fear, as if calculating the odds of successfully bring us down and making us their next meal.