‘What’s that?’ Mia said, pointing to something off in the distance as they walked along the road.
Returning from the daydream he’d been indulging in while plodding ever onwards in the midday heat, Dylan turned to see what Mia was looking at. It was indeed quite odd. Some kind of rock formation, by the looks of it. A strange one. It could almost be man-made.
For once she had genuinely stumped him. He was used to coming across the destroyed remnants of the world from before the Blackout, the world he had never known. But those buildings had a certain style to them. Mostly they were made of brick and glass, although finding one with glass intact was almost impossible now. He’d never seen anything made purely out of rock. It seemed to him a completely mundane structure. His curiosity was piqued.
Usually, Mia’s constant barrage of questions over the last few weeks had been about simpler things; a tool she’d never seen before, or some kind of remnant of the old world that she’d never come across in her sheltered life, having been cooped up in one enclosed settlement since childhood. Like cars. She’d never seen the rusted steel carcasses sitting out on roads before. Her settlement had cleared them out long before she’d been born. Dylan had had a hard time explaining them to her, since he had no understanding of what they were beyond the steel shells that sat there doing nothing. His mother had once explained to him that they used to carry people from place to place, like mechanical animals, at speeds no animal could match. Lacking his own first-hand experience, he’d tried his best to communicate her explanation from memory.
Mia had never ventured out into the ‘real world’. Not like Dylan had. She was ignorant of its ways. She hadn’t grown up in a forest dwelling like he had. Hadn’t moved around parts of the country like his family had. She’d never needed to. Oh, to be so lucky. She had been part of something bigger: a community large enough that people were assigned roles and responsibilities, some being scouts, others medics, cooks, fighters and so forth. Her job had been to look after some of the settlement’s internal responsibilities. She’d learned skills such as stock control and sewing wounds.
Dylan’s childhood could not have been more different. As part of a small family, he and his brother had grown up sharing all the same tasks as their parents. Every responsibility was owned equally by each family member. As such, he’d spent time venturing out before they’d been captured and taken to Mia’s settlement.
But this was what their adventure was all about. And besides, he found that he quite enjoyed explaining these new discoveries to her. It made him seem knowledgeable. Worldly, even, if that were possible. Having recently survived a battle in which he had been shot by his own brother, he felt ready to go out and confront the unknown; to have experiences beyond simple everyday survival. To try and live like people had back then. Not like he and everyone he knew did now, with their whole lives about making it from one day to the next.
Dylan had always been fascinated by stories of the pre-Blackout world. He found the evidence of it intriguing. It was all there, right in front of him. Plain as day, yet a mystery all the same. Something to be uncovered. It was there in the crumbling buildings losing their battle with nature, the machines and devices that no longer worked, and in the weapons that still did, however scarce they were these days.
For three weeks he and Mia had been heading east from the settlement known as Taunton, onwards towards London, the fabled big city, and hopefully even beyond that to the continent across the sea, where the books he’d collected from time to time told of white sandy beaches, something neither Dylan nor Mia had ever seen. It seemed to him a whole other world.
Progress had been slow as they tried to keep themselves out of danger, or stopped to discover something new. The trip was, after all, about new experiences. And this was definitely something new. ‘Let’s go have a look,’ he said, wondering what this rock formation could be.
It was laid out in a circle: a ring of tall standing stones, each one easily more than twice his height.
‘Stonehenge,’ Mia said, reading from a barely legible rusted sign as they approached.
The name meant nothing to Dylan.
‘Do you know it?’ she said.
‘Afraid not.’
‘It’s so different to everything else we’ve come across.’
‘That it is. It seems older, much older.’
‘What do you think its purpose was?’
Dylan looked around the structure as he lifted his heavy rucksack off his back and dropped it to the ground, along with his rifle, bow and quiver, grateful to allow his sweating shoulders a chance to breathe. Some stones seemed to be missing. The pattern of the circle was obvious, with pillars spaced fairly evenly apart and other stones laid across on top like beams, but there were many gaps. Like everything in the world he had grown up in, this too was something destroyed before his time. His was a world of leftovers; a world in tatters. ‘Not a clue,’ he said.
‘It’s pretty,’ Mia said. ‘At least, compared to the buildings we usually come across.’
‘No arguments there.’
‘Do you think they built things just to be pretty?’
‘No idea. Mum always said they did everything they thought possible except do a single thing they actually needed to.’
‘I hope they did.’
‘You hope they what?’ Dylan said.
‘Build things just to be pretty. I like the idea of building something just to be appreciated, you know? Not a fence to keep others out, or a den to store weapons.’
‘Or traps to kill intruders,’ Dylan said, remembering some that he and his family used to lay around the perimeter of their forest dwelling back before he and his brother were captured.
‘Charming,’ Mia said. ‘Speaking of traps, shall we eat?’
‘Good idea.’ Dylan removed the leftover strips of hare he’d saved from the capture earlier that morning. In the last few weeks he’d been getting back to his old ways of setting traps at night before they went to sleep. He wasn’t as good as his younger brother Jake had been, but still, every other day or so he found one of the traps full as they journeyed east. The success rate was pretty good, as far as he was concerned.
They sat in the centre of the stone circle, enjoying the slight shade offered by a couple of pillars. The shadows weren’t much at this time of day, with the sun almost at its zenith, but any shade was good shade in this heat. Dylan found himself looking forward to the coming winter. If the changing colour of the foliage was anything to go by, these hot days were numbered.
‘How long do you think until we reach the coast?’ Mia said.
‘I don’t know,’ Dylan said, recalling what his mother had said. She’d suggested following all the signs to London, after which they could apparently follow the roads to a place called Dover. From there, assuming they were still alive and hadn’t given up on their adventure to turn back, she reckoned they could commandeer a boat, if they were lucky, and head to the continent. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said. ‘I’m just enjoying our adventure.’
‘Me too,’ she said, her face lighting up from behind the flask of water she was draining. ‘And thank you.’
‘For what?’
‘For keeping your promise.’
‘I said we’d see the world, didn’t I?’
‘You did. It’s just … after everything that happened back home, I thought maybe you’d want to stay.’
‘It made me want to get out of there even more.’
‘You don’t think we made a mistake leaving town?’
‘The way I see it,’ he said, ‘any place is as dangerous as the next. What we survived, taking on Frank’s crew, it almost cost us our lives. But it’s only worth it if we then get to enjoy the freedom we fought for. Staying back home just because the town was liberated wouldn’t be a life well lived. I want to see what’s out there.’
‘Okay,’ she said.
Trying to gauge her response, Dylan sipped from his own flask. When he’d proposed the idea of breaking out of town to her, she’d been tentative at first, then thrilled. She’d wanted to go see the world beyond the only walls she’d ever known. He tried to put himself in her shoes. To understand what it must feel like to be farther from home than she’d ever been, with a guy she hadn’t known particularly long. Now that he thought about it, it must be terrifying. But she had wanted it. And he was glad to have her with him. There was no way he could have stayed. The town only brought back the nightmares of his family’s capture. Of watching his brother fall for Mia first. Of watching his brother’s allegiance shift to Frank, that evil sonofabitch who lorded it over the townsfolk and had once whipped Dylan to within an inch of his life as punishment for trying to escape. No, there was nothing back there he wanted to stay for. He wanted to move on, not look back. Hopefully, somewhere out towards the horizon, he’d finally be able to get his brother out of his mind.
‘Do you think your brother is still alive?’ Mia said.
Admiring her ability to read his every thought, Dylan nodded. ‘Jake survived the fall, didn’t he?’
‘Yes, but we waited weeks before we left town. He never showed. Do you think he might have succumbed to his injuries?’
‘It’s possible. I don’t think so, though. Something tells me he’s out there. I can feel it.’
‘Do you want to see him again?’
‘Well, last time he shot me and accused me of stealing you, so I’m in no rush, if that's what you’re asking.’
‘I’m nobody’s to steal,’ she said, her tone defiant.
‘Couldn’t agree more, but Jake was angry. He was confused. Frank got in his head. We can’t be held accountable for nature taking its course. Jake needs to find his own way now, whatever that is. It’s his life. We, on the other hand, need to get a move on.’
‘In a rush to take me somewhere, mister?’
Playing it off as best he could, Dylan shook his head. ‘Nah, no rush,’ he said. The last thing he wanted was to seed the beginnings of panic, but he had a sneaking suspicion they were being watched. What was worse, he’d felt it for over a week now. Like someone was out there trailing them, waiting for the moment to strike. There was no way he could explain it without sounding like he’d lost the plot entirely, but the feeling had been nagging at him all the while. Sometimes he thought he’d caught the blur of a silhouette in the distance, peering out momentarily from behind a tree or rock formation. Other times it was a rustle in the long grass or the snap of a dry twig in the night. Every night, before they’d found a place to sleep, Dylan had created some kind of warning system around their perimeter, laying out rows of twigs that, if stepped on, would make a noise. Sometimes he ran string from tree to tree, with empty tin cans attached that clanged together when disturbed. Problem with those was how easy it was for a windy night to drive his paranoia to unbearable levels. When Mia had asked why he’d become so serious about this ritual every evening, he’d just explained that it was better to be safe than sorry. He’d told her about the various traps they used to lay out when he’d grown up in the forest with his family, how trespassers might come through their territory unaware. In this world, outside of safe settlements like the one she’d grown up in, surprises like that were unwelcome, and often led to bloodshed. Mia didn’t argue. She was used to scouts and security teams running to schedules in her town, Dylan figured. The systems he created made her feel safer, she’d said. He only wished they had the same effect on him.
They finished up their meal and washed their hands with the water from their flasks. As he slipped his rucksack back on, with the bow and quiver, and went to pick up his rifle, Dylan saw the figures step out from behind the stone pillars surrounding them.
‘I wouldn’t touch that if I were you,’ the man in front said.
