Claire Jones awoke to the predawn chirp of nearby birds in the forest. Though it was not yet light, her body told her it was time to get up. She had always been a light sleeper, even in the old world, only now it was birdsong that awakened her each morning, instead of the technology she had relied on almost two decades ago. She gazed up at the tree branches and logs that served as the walls of her forest home and noticed that some of the clay which had been placed between the odd-shaped branches to block the wind and rain had begun to crack. Time for a new coat. But not today.
Maxime murmured in his sleep beside her as he lay facing away. She rolled over and hugged him for warmth, barely able to get her arm up and over his large frame. Her hand wrapped around his hard shoulder as she pressed her face into the back of his neck and breathed his scent in. It brought a calm to her like nothing else could. She placed a gentle kiss on the nape of his ebony neck.
Her touch woke him and he turned to face her. She felt him harden against her. A grin broke out on his face. She couldn’t see it in the dark but she knew: the same way she knew the sounds of the forest and the feeling of the earth under her feet, she knew Maxime’s every idiosyncrasy and every touch. In twenty years they had grown together like two vines, wrapping themselves tighter around one another and becoming something new. One entity strengthened by the pairing of two separate beings. She ran her hands down over his torso, her nails gently tracing his rigid abs until she found her target. Her hand closed around it. Maxime groaned appreciatively under his breath. Her heart beat a little faster. She almost allowed herself to succumb. ‘Not now,’ she said. ‘I need to check the perimeter.’
‘Tease,’ he said.
‘Besides, the boys.’
‘I’ll send them away. We should make them build their own huts nearby. Then we could get a little privacy.’
‘Mmm, you’d like that?’ She kept her grip on him as she whispered into his ear.
‘We could wake every morning like this.’
‘I could think of no better way to start the day.’
‘Consider it done,’ he said.
She allowed herself a chuckle at his earnestness. ‘Sometimes I think your mind has only one track, sir.’
‘It is impossible not to when you wake next to one so divine.’
She blushed and slapped him playfully on the chest. ‘I’ll make it up to you later, promise.’ She rolled on top of him and kissed him. ‘Go back to sleep and dream of me.’
‘I always do.’
She slipped out of the covers and stood up from the double mattress on the floor of the log cabin. Maxime rolled back over, his breathing already regular again. Claire pulled a pair of trousers from the suitcase that served as a cupboard and stepped into them. She took her thick sherpa-lined denim jacket off its hook and did the buttons up. On the other side of the wooden wall she heard one of the boys stir. At nineteen and seventeen they could hardly be considered boys, but they were her boys, and therefore boys they would forever be. She had raised them both in this cruel, unforgiving world. In a previous life her finest achievement had been designing an airborne internet for the world’s largest technology company which had connected the entire globe in one fell swoop. Its destruction, at her hands, and the hands of a group she had been momentarily a part of called the Disconnected, had been the cause of the Blackout.
Now she considered her crowning achievement the survival of her family. It was her first and only priority. Nature had once again reclaimed the world as its own and Claire had no objections, save for the primitive brutality the human species had imposed upon itself. Perhaps it had always been that way.
Ignoring the stirring, she picked up her bow and quiver and slung both over her back. She unsheathed her khukuri knife from its leather scabbard and ran her thumb along the recurved blade. She’d raided the Ghurka knife from an old military base somewhere along the journey her family had taken west from London over the years, at her insistence, in a push for solitude, away from densely populated cities and their untrustworthy inhabitants. The blade felt at home in her right hand, like an extension of her arm, and had saved her bacon on more than one occasion. She sheathed it once more and clipped it to her belt.
The dawn light was just breaking through the treetops as Claire headed out alone. Golden rays of light filtered through the gaps and kissed the foliage below, bringing life to the forest floor. She loved doing patrols on her own early in the morning. The Quantock Hills of Somerset were best seen at first light, in her opinion, and being alone meant she was more likely to get close to one of the red deer that populated the hillsides. It had been a week since they had eaten the last of the previous kill. The boys had caught some bream a few days back and of course they had the chickens, which laid eggs daily, but a deer would certainly go down well, if she could track one down in the dense forest. Besides, we need more skins before winter.
Claire made her way quietly to the edges of their unmarked territory, careful to avoid the traps Maxime and the boys had laid strategically around on the forest bed, in the trees, near thickets of scrub. It took a constant vigilance to spot the telltale signs of each trap, which were often moved or rebuilt. Nearby the stream wound its way through the forest down into the valley below, providing a constant burble as the backdrop to her life.
Something rustled in a bush in front of her.
She ducked down onto her haunches and eased the bow off her shoulder, before reaching back and lifting an arrow from her quiver. Her eyes scanned the greenery, looking for any sign of movement. Birds chirped above her. Not a deer. They never chirped over deer. This was something else, some kind of predator. The birds’ cries were warning the rest of the woodland creatures of something hostile in their midst. Claire fitted an arrow to the bow and drew it taut.
She waited.
Whatever it was must have seen or heard her, for it lay absolutely still. The forest had become deathly silent, save for the stream and the chirping birds overhead.
Lowering the bow, Claire picked up a small stone and threw it into the undergrowth, then snatched up the weapon.
A man’s head popped out from the bush, looking to where it had landed.
‘Don’t move,’ she said. ‘Stand up.’
The man stood up slowly. He looked old, near death. His hair would have been white, were it not so dirty, and his back was hunched over as his spine succumbed to decades-old bad posture. He had a shaggy beard, littered with leaves and twigs. ‘Please,’ he said. ‘I mean you no harm.’
So the traps carefully laid by Maxime and the boys hadn’t caught him. If they had, it would be his corpse she’d be looking down upon now. Claire pulled the bowstring back gently so that her finger holding the arrow notch sat under her chin, whilst the string touched her nose and lips. ‘Why are you here?’
‘Where is here?’ the man asked. ‘I was simply heading as far as I could from the others.’
‘Which others?’
‘New Britain.’
‘Did they follow you?’ she asked.
‘No,’ he croaked. ‘They ransacked our village, took our kids. Then they told us to run. My wife refused. She’s … she’s—’
‘Your wife is not my concern. You are my concern.’
‘Please,’ he pleaded. ‘I didn’t mean to stumble into your land. I’ll go. You’ll never hear from me again. I only meant to get as far from them as possible.’
‘You know where I live now.’
‘I don’t … I only see you standing before me. Please, just point me in a direction and I’ll go. I’ll be out of your way and I’ll never return. I promise you.’
Claire eyed the old man for a moment. She doubted he would last another day in this wilderness. Wherever he had been, he was not well equipped for his current predicament. She toyed with the idea of letting him go. He might even survive. But he was weak, and that made him vulnerable to other hostile forces, stronger ones: he might easily be persuaded to talk about her in exchange for goods and protection. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘That’s a risk I cannot take.’
She loosed the arrow.
With no more than ten feet between them, the arrow struck its mark, dead in the centre of the old man’s forehead. It pinned him to the tree he had been standing in front of. His eyes curled up into his forehead, almost looking at the arrow shaft embedded in his skull, whilst his mouth drooped open and his body sagged, held in place only by the arrow itself.
Claire left the old man’s corpse where it was: a warning to any others that these hills were off limits, unsafe for exploration.
This was the way of her world now.
Trust nothing.
Trust nobody.
