Scott Andrews - School's Out Forever

“Well?” he asked.

“I got all the pellets out, sterilised the wounds, stitched the ones that needed it, dressed them, put her to bed. She should really have some antibiotics, but there’s nothing I can do about that. The vodka you found helped, thanks.”

“Any left?”

“No, sorry. I wish.”

“You lush,” he smiled.

“I couldn’t save her eye,” I said quietly, “and her face will be horribly scarred. Rowles refuses to leave her side. He’s just sitting there, holding her hand and stroking her hair. I never really thought he had a tender side. Funny how people can surprise you.”

“He’s not people,” said Sanders. “He’s an eleven-year-old boy. Who you took into combat.”

I laughed bitterly. “Like I could have stopped him! Trust me, Sanders, the boy’s a law unto himself. I’m just trying to keep him contained and alive.”

“And Caroline?”

“Goes where he goes. Always.”

“And which of them shot Patel?”

Shit, that took me by surprise.

“Sorry?”

“I found his body where you told me,” he said. “He wasn’t killed with a shotgun, he was shot with a sidearm, and you three had the only ones in play.”

“There was a fight upstairs at the bank,” I lied. “One of the cleaners got my gun off me. Patel burst in and got shot. Then Rowles hit the cleaner over the head with a chair and in the confusion I snatched back my gun and ran.”

Sanders shook his head slowly. “Nice try. If I thought you shot him trying to escape custody…” He left the threat unspoken. “But no, I think one of you shot him by accident. Caroline, at a guess.”

I stared intently at the swirling patterns on the surface of my tea.

“He was a good lad,” continued Sanders. “Would have made a good officer.”

“Look, she just panicked, that’s all.”

“And that’s why you don’t take children into combat.”

I looked up at him angrily. “What, like we seek it out? Are you joking? I just want to keep them alive and teach them to read. But people keep pointing guns at us. People like the cleaners and you.” I jabbed him in the chest with my index finger. “We have no fucking choice. Do you think I like seeing what it does to them? You know, Rowles used to be the sweetest kid in the world. I mean Disney sweet, saccharine, cutesy. Now look at him! He’s terrifying. But he’s alive, and one day, maybe, if I can keep him alive long enough, he can stop fighting and grow into a man. That’s all I want, to see him grow up safe, to see all my kids grow up safe. But as long as there are nutters with guns strolling around telling everyone what to do, that’s not going to be possible. And now Caroline. I was supposed to keep her safe.”

I stood up and threw my mug across the room, full of fury that had nowhere to go. It smashed against the wall and then, before I knew what I was doing, I was crying my eyes out and Sanders was holding me tightly as I pounded my fists against his chest and wept for the girl lying shattered in the bed upstairs.

Then there was kissing.

Then there was sex.

Then there was sleep.

WHEN MORNING CAME I woke refreshed, warm and mortified.

Not because I’d slept with a guy who was about as far from my type as it’s possible to get, but because as I lay there feeling him breathe, I replayed the night’s events in my mind and realised something awful.

I felt guilty.

Which was, of course, ridiculous. I wasn’t seeing anyone.

(Do people still ‘see’ each other after an apocalypse? ‘Seeing’ someone makes me think of flirty text messages, bottles of wine, dinner in fancy restaurants, making your date suffer through a romcom as a test of their forbearance. None of those things were possible any more. I found myself drowsily wondering what Sex and the City would say about the rules of dating in a post-viral warzone. Of course, with society entirely gone away, every woman who wanted Jimmy Choos could have them, as long as they were prepared to fight their way to a lootable store. And then I had a vision of Sarah Jessica Parker in a sequined dress, with an AK47, mowing down hoards of Blood Hunters, screaming “if you want the strappy sandals you’ll have to go through me, motherfuckers!” That was Kate thinking. Jane told her to shut up and focus.)

I had no ties. Since that thing with Mac and the sixth-formers last year I’d not been within arm’s length of a man I felt like getting to know better. Still, there was nothing to prevent me bedding the entire male population of the UK if the mood struck me.

But as I replayed the night’s exertions I realised that at a very particular moment I was thinking of a very particular person. It wasn’t as if I was thinking of Sanders at any point. It was a comfort fuck at the end of an awful day; it wasn’t about Sanders at all. Neither was I fantasising about anyone else. It was all about me, about being alive while people were dying around me, about wanting to feel something other than pain for a moment.

Yet at one moment, as I arched my back and dug in my fingernails, I had a crystal clear picture of Lee in my mind, just for a second. And I lay there in the morning with a sinking feeling. I knew what it meant, but I refused to accept it. I banished it from my mind. As Lee was so fond of saying: “No time, things to do.”

But, really, damn.

WHEN HE WOKE, Sanders was brisk, businesslike, unsentimental. He didn’t want to cuddle or talk or any of that, which suited me fine.

Kate had never had a one night stand, but Jane had had plenty. Of course, Jane had never bedded a guy who knew Kate and that collision did strange things to my head. He was detached come daylight, the kind of behaviour that would have thrown Kate into despair and angst but which was a blessed relief to Jane.

He wasn’t cold, though. He smiled and cracked a few lame jokes. Don’t worry, his behavior said, I don’t expect or require anything else. Ironically, that made me like him a whole lot more than I had the day before.

I checked on Caroline and Rowles. They were curled up on the double bed in the main room, spooning, fast asleep. They looked so peaceful and innocent lying there that I decided to let them sleep. Sanders found some tinned spaghetti and a calor stove, and we sat down to breakfast. We ate our food out of china bowls with old, dull forks and listened to the harsh wind battering the open doors and windows of this deserted little suburban cul-de-sac.

“You said you swept this town,” I asked as I wiped tomato sauce off my chin with my sleeve. “What does that mean? What is exactly is Operation Motherland?”

“Our orders are pretty simple,” he replied. “We’re emptying every armed forces base in the country, gathering all the weapons and ordnance in a series of huge depots on Salisbury plain. The idea is to disarm the population, take guns out of the equation. Then, when we’ve got all the hardware, we can start to re-impose law and order, raise a new army, take back London, put the king on the throne, get back to some sort of normality.”

I gaped. “You’re just collecting weapons? That’s it? That’s your masterplan?”

He nodded. “Yeah, for now. We’ve got more kit than we know what to do with, to be honest. Take this town, for instance. There was a TA base nearby and a gang of kids had broken in, got themselves all tooled up, and they were running this place. It was ugly, what they were doing. So we rolled in, executed the worst of them, took all their guns away so it couldn’t happen again. Job well done.”

“And where is everyone now?”

He shrugged. Not his problem.

“Jesus, Sanders,” I said. “Didn’t it occur to you that it would have been better to arm the people here? The sane ones, the adults?”