For the first time, there’s something in the sky. Clouds. Great big puffy ones. Great big puffy black ones scurrying this way.
Seth can’t believe his eyes. “It rains in hell?”
He barely makes it back to the house before the skies open up. The storm is a summer one, and Seth can still see blue sky on the horizon, so it won’t last, but boy, does it pour. He watches it from the doorway of his house as it quickly soaks the dusty streets to mud and streaks dirt across the windows of the dead cars.
The smell is outrageously good. So clean and fresh, Seth can’t help but step out into it, letting it drench his upturned face, squinting as the drops hit his eyes. The rain is surprisingly warm, and he suddenly gasps, “Idiot!” He races back inside to grab the hardened bar of dishwashing liquid. How much nicer would this be than the freezing cold shower he had this morning –
He jumps back out the front door, but the rain is already tapering away, blowing out of the neighborhood as quickly as it came.
“Damn,” he says. The wind up high must be blowing something wicked because the rain clouds are leaving like they’re being chased by a mob, out past the back of Seth’s house and carrying on to –
Where?
Yeah, where would they be going?
How big is hell?
Big enough for weather, obviously. The sun is back out, the breeze dying down, and steam already rising as the mud dries back into dust on his street.
A street he’s been up and down several times but not much beyond.
Maybe it’s time to do some exploring, he thinks.
20
He feels tired again after the morning’s exertions but resists taking a nap, dreading the vivid dreams even more after last night’s. Instead, he packs the backpack with a few supplies and a bottle of water and heads out for a walk.
He takes a moment to decide which direction. To the left is all the High Street stuff he’s seen several times already. Of course there are neighborhoods behind that, sprawling for miles before, if he remembers correctly, changing into farmland as they head east.
To the right is the train station.
I could walk all the way to London on that track, he thinks, and that’s somehow vaguely cheering. What does it matter if he has no phone to show him maps and no Internet to look things up? If he follows the train tracks one way, he could walk all the way to London.
Not that he’s going to. It’s bloody miles.
He stops. Bloody. He actually thought “bloody miles.” His parents didn’t even say bloody anymore, American slang having almost thoroughly obliterated everything but his mum’s insistence that he call her “mum.”
“Bloody,” he says, testing it out. “Bloody, bloody, bloody.” He looks up. “Bloody sun.”
It’s shining down brightly again, even hotter than before, the mud almost already thoroughly dried. This certainly isn’t the cold, damp English weather his parents always complained about. Nor is it really what he remembers from living here, though the memories of an eight-year-old about weather might not be the most reliable. But still. It’s a lot hotter than he’s been led to believe. With the steam rising from the ground, it’s almost tropical. Which is a word no one ever used to describe England.
“Weird,” he says, then he resettles his backpack and heads to the right, toward the train station.
The roads he crosses are the same as everywhere else, dusty and empty. He thinks it’s going to be worth starting some kind of systematic look through the houses, a more thorough search through the ones whose windows he’s already smashed and then spreading out across the neighborhood. Who knows what useful stuff could be found? More cans of food, maybe, tools and better clothes. Maybe one or more of them has a vegetable garden –
He stops in his tracks. The allotments, he thinks.
Of course. A whole huge field of private little gardens, tucked away behind a . . . what was it? He tries to remember. A sports center? Yes, he thinks that’s what it was, a sports center on the other side of the train tracks, with a field of allotments behind it. Sure there’d be weeds, but there’d have to be edible things still growing there, right?
He quickens his step, remembering almost automatically to turn up the long concrete stairway that runs between two apartment buildings – blocks of flats, he remembers. The English terms keep coming, and he wonders if his accent will return as well. Gudmund was always trying to make him “talk British,” always wanting him to say –
He stops, the feelings of loss coming again, strong. Too strong.
Keep going, he thinks. As long as you can.
The stairway reaches a sidewalk that leads up to the train station, which rests on top of a little rise. He can see the station building now. To get to the allotments, he’ll have to walk through it, cross the bridge between platforms, and go out the far side. He’s almost feeling excited about it as he passes through the entrance, hopping over the ticket gates without a second thought, and up the short stairs to the first platform –
Where there’s a train waiting.
It’s a short one, just four cars, a commuter train meant to shunt people back and forth to the city up the tracks, and he half expects passengers to start emptying out the doors or for the train to start pulling slowly away from the platform.
It doesn’t, of course. It just sits there, silent as a rock from the earth, covered in the dust of this place. There are weeds growing up all along the cracks of the platform and even some in the gutters along the train’s roof. Like the cars on the streets outside, it hasn’t moved in a long time.
“Hello?” he calls. He walks across the platform to look in through a window, but it’s mostly dark, the windows so badly dusted over they block out most of the afternoon sun. He pushes the open button on the closest door, but there’s no power running through it and it stays firmly shut.
He looks down the length of the train. At the front, the door to the driver’s compartment has come open. He walks to it, takes the torch out of the backpack and sticks his head inside the driver’s compartment. There’s only one seat behind the controls, which surprises him. He’d have thought there’d be two, like in airplanes. The screens on the dash are all either cracked or dusted over, dark without power.
There’s a door inside to the rest of the train, and it’s open, too. Seth steps up into the compartment and shines the light through the inner doorway, down the central aisle of the first car.