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.
Everything between the train station and that distant hill is a blackened ruin.
Some blocks are nothing more than ash and rubble, others still have husks of brick, their roofs and doors gone. Even the roads have buckled and bent, in some places indistinguishable from the buildings they separated. There’s a stretch of ground where Seth is pretty sure the sports center was, and he can see what looks like the remnants of a large square hole that could have been its swimming pool, now filled with charcoal and weeds.
Though not as many weeds as the streets behind him, he notices. And not as tall. There are weeds and grasses scattered through the rest of the burn, now that he thinks to look for them, but they’re far scraggier than the ones on his own street, and some of them are just plain dead.
There’s no sign at all of the field where the allotments were. He thinks he can see where his memory tells him it should be, but amongst all the ash and burnt timber and blasted concrete, it could also just be his imagination trying to make it be there.
The destruction stretches on for what must be miles, as far both to the left and right as he can see in the hazy sunshine. The fire – or whatever it was; destruction this big may have even been some kind of bomb – stretches all the way back to Masons Hill, stopping around its base much like it stops at the rise where the train station sits. Too much bare concrete to cross to actually burn down the station.
He’s looking at a wasteland. One that seems as if it might as well go on forever.
It explains all the dust, is the first thing Seth really thinks. The layers upon layers of it, covering nearly everything in the streets behind him. It’s not just dust – it’s ash, dropped from whatever this huge fire was and never cleaned away.
It’s also, in a way that troubles him more than he can really say, a past event. Something caught fire, or was blown up, or whatever happened, and then that fire raged out of control before burning itself out some time later, taking most of this neighborhood with it.
Which means that there was a time before the fire, a time of the fire, and a time after the fire.
He thinks he’s being foolish feeling troubled about this – there are weeds growing everywhere, obviously, and the food didn’t rot in an instant – but those things were just time, time passing in stillness.
But a fire is an event. A fire happens.
And if there was an event, then there was also a was for it to happen in.
“When, though?” Seth says to himself, shielding his eyes from the sun and scanning up and down the ruins.
Then he turns back to his own neighborhood on the other side of the tracks.
What if the fire had happened over there rather than here? What if his own house had burnt down, not all these empty ones of strangers?
Would he have woken up at all?
On the other hand, he thinks, is this my mind trying to tell me something?
Because the blackened ground feels like a barrier, doesn’t it? Feels like a place where hell stops. He’s gone out exploring and reached an area that might as well have a sign on it saying, DO NOT PASS.
The world, this world, suddenly feels a whole lot smaller.
He suddenly doesn’t feel much like exploring anymore today. Silently, he drops his backpack through the window of the bridge and climbs down after it. He heads back down the stairs, taking care to tread quietly when he retrieves the torch so as not to disturb that huge, alien boar from the train.
Then he shoves his hands in his pockets, hunches his shoulders down, and trudges on home.
23
“What do you expect us to say?” his mother asked, angrily. “How do you expect us to react?”
His father sighed and crossed his legs in the other chair facing Seth. They were in the kitchen, which – and Seth wondered if they even knew they did this – was where they always had their serious talks with him, especially when he got in trouble.
He was in here way more often than Owen ever was.
“It’s not that we,” – his father looked up in the air, trying to find the right word –“mind, Seth –”
“What are you talking about?” his mother snapped. “Of course we goddamn well mind.”