21
Seth yells in terror and runs back down the aisle, risking a quick look back –
A huge, black shape hurtles toward him –
Screeching and roaring in what sounds like rage –
Two eyes staring back at him in unmistakable malevolence –
Seth flies into the train driver’s compartment, slamming into the control panels, crying out at a pain in his hip. He scrambles over the driver’s seat, and there’s a terrible moment when the strap of his backpack gets caught, but gets loose as the shape comes smashing inside.
Seth leaps out the door of the train and takes off, tearing down the platform, dropping the torch and leaving it behind. He looks back again, just as the shape comes rocketing out of the compartment, sending the door swinging back and forth violently. The thing turns and comes after him.
Running a lot faster than Seth is.
“Shit!” he yells, pumping his arms and trying to remember his cross-country form, though that was for long distances, not for sprinting, and he’s still not even remotely fully recovered from –
There’s a squeal behind him.
(a squeal?)
As he turns up the steps to the bridge over to the other platform, he takes another look back.
The shape is the biggest, ugliest, dirtiest wild boar he’s ever seen.
A wild boar? he thinks, charging up the stairs. A wild BOAR is chasing me?
The boar rages down the platform and up the steps behind him, and Seth can see it’s got a pair of filthy, splintered-looking tusks that would happily tear the stomach right out of him.
“SHIT!” he screams again, running across the flat part of the bridge, but he’s so tired, so weak still, that he’s not going to outrun the boar. It’s going to catch him before he reaches the stairs that go down the other side.
I’m going to be killed, he thinks, by a PIG. In HELL.
And the thought is so stupidly outrageous, so insanely angry-making, that he almost misses the chance to save himself.
The bridge is a corridor above the tracks, covered on both sides by square panels of frosted glass, broken by a metal guardrail at waist height. Right near the stairs at the other end of the bridge, two of the upper panels have fallen out in succession.
Leaving a space just big enough for someone his size to climb through.
The boar squeals again, barely five feet behind him, and he’s not going to reach the windows, he’s not going to reach them, he’s not –
He leaps for them and can actually feel the boar slamming its head into the bottom of his feet as he jumps. The momentum nearly carries him all the way out, and there’s an impossible few seconds where it seems like he’s going to fall straight back down to tracks twenty feet below, but he catches the upright support between the windows, manages to get one foot on the metal strip, and – swinging his free arm and leg wildly into the air – keeps his balance by a whisker.
Just before he’s nearly knocked off it again by the boar slamming into the wall at his feet.
“ALL RIGHT! ALL RIGHT!” he shouts, and there’s nowhere to go but up. He grabs a gutter above him and pulls himself up to the roof of the bridge. The boar keeps slamming against the railing as Seth hooks a leg up and rolls himself, panting heavily, onto the roof, his backpack lurched uncomfortably beneath him.
He just lies there for a moment, desperately trying to catch his breath. The boar is still going at it, grunting and squealing and ramming its weight against the inside wall of the bridge, knocking out another glass panel, which tumbles to the tracks, smashing into a thousand pieces.
Seth leans back over the side and looks down at the boar, who snuffles angrily up to him. It’s enormous, so much bigger and taller and wider than any normal pig, it almost seems like a cartoon. It’s hairy, too, and blackened by a thick layer of dirt. It squeals loudly at him.
“What did I ever do to you?” Seth asks.
The boar squeals once more and starts re-attacking the bridge.
Seth rolls onto his back again, looking up into the sky above.
He thinks he can remember stories about them breaking free from boar farms and going feral, but he’d never thought they were actually real. Or even if he was remembering it right.
But, you know, once again, hell, he supposes.
He keeps lying there, waiting for his breath to return to normal and his heart to slow down. He scoots the backpack out from under himself and gets the bottle of water. Down below, he can at last hear the boar giving up. It snuffles and snorts, making a defiant last grunt, and he hears its amazingly heavy tread back across the bridge beneath him. He can see it come down the bottom of the stairs to the platform before it disappears behind the train, no doubt returning to whatever den it’s made for itself in the train’s toilet.
Seth laughs. And then louder.
“A boar,” he says. “A bloody boar.”
He drinks the water. He’s looking out the way he came, and the view isn’t bad. He stands, balancing on the slightly curved roof of the footbridge, and he can even see the top floors of the stores on the High Street. His own house is too low to see, but he can see the neighborhood leading down to it.
To the left, behind where his house is, is the start of the cleared areas that lead farther down to the prison.
He stares at them for a moment. The fences and walls are all still there, with some of the empty spaces between them actually free of all but the sparsest of weeds. He can’t see the prison itself. It’s down in a small valley and behind a row of thick trees and more barbed wire and brick.
But he knows it’s there.
Just the presence of it strikes a weird chord through his stomach. Like it’s watching him back. Watching to see what he’ll do.
Waiting for him to come to it.
He turns away, thinking he’ll see if he can find the allotments from here, find an easy way to get to them. He raises his hand to shield his view from the sun –
And sees that everything on the other side of the tracks – the sports center, the allotment fields, dozens upon dozens of streets and houses stretching to the horizon – has burnt to the ground.
22
The land slopes down on the other side of the train station, spreading out into the shallowest of valleys with barely perceptible rises several miles to either side. It stretches back and back, street upon street, toward Masons Hill – whose name Seth remembers now – the only real rise for miles around, a wooded lump on the landscape, with one sheer side that falls fifty feet to the road below, a place where youths were routinely rousted for dropping rocks on passing cars.