Piggies (4 page)

5 The Woods

It was quite clear to Ben that Doctor Macreedie was not a man of action.

Until the previous day the doctor had found it hard to believe in ferals. He was quite unprepared for keeping one captive.

The sheet from the bed made a handy rope. Ben tied it to the radiator, and then swung his legs out of the window.

The sheet wasn’t long enough for him to reach the flat roof, but he used it to get down part of the way, to a height where it was safe to jump.

He landed with his knees bent and immediately dropped into a low squatting position, suddenly fearful that the roof would collapse under his weight.

It was okay. With his back to the house wall, he edged along the flat roof to the back of the building. At the far end of the garden there was a wooden fence and then another garden.

He moved back towards the front, but then he heard the crunch of tyres on the gravel at the front of the house. Jillian and baby Adam must have returned from wherever they had gone so early this morning.

Voices came from the front of the house: the doctor must have gone to let his wife and child into the house, maybe to tell them the good news that they had their own supply of feral blood locked in the spare bedroom.

Ben took his chance.

He went to the back of the house again and lowered himself from the flat roof. He landed in a flower bed and looked around. All clear.

Cautiously, he moved away from the house. He would head for the back fence, stay out of sight. If he climbed it, he would be in the far garden. From there he could cut through to the street and slip away.

The garden path cut diagonally between flower borders before reaching the lawn and then the kitchen garden.

Ben paused, looked back.

Doctor Macreedie had emerged from the back door.

The doctor stood there, eyes wide, mouth hanging open, hand half-raised, pointing. It was as if that instant was frozen in time.

Then the doctor took a big step out of the house. “Hey!” he said. He stopped and looked up at the open window, the sheet flapping idly in the breeze.

Ben ducked his head and ran.

He didn’t see the trike until it was too late. His shin rapped painfully against the metal crossbar and he plunged forward.

Flat on his face on the lawn, he looked back, saw the doctor advancing between the borders, a mad, triumphant smile plastered across his face. The man’s mouth was still open, teeth showing. Anticipation? Blood lust?

Ben reached for the trike, turned it, pushed. It didn’t go in a straight line, but his aim was good enough. The trike trundled haphazardly across the grass, right into Doctor Macreedie’s path. His legs went from under him, his arms flailed and he went down heavily.

Ben scrambled to his feet and sprinted across the lawn, through the kitchen garden to the wooden fence. He jumped at it and managed to swing a leg on top before the flimsy wooden structure collapsed beneath him.

There was an old man tying flowers to supporting wire frames in the neighbouring garden. He looked up at Ben, and cried out, startled at the sudden intrusion.

Ben straightened and then sprinted across the garden, to the side of the house and then out into the street.

Once he was clear of the garden, he had to force himself to slow down. He didn’t want to draw attention to himself.

He wondered how much time he might have before Doctor Macreedie sorted himself out. Would he chase him, or would he accept that he had lost him? He remembered the look on the doctor’s face, the desperation. He didn’t doubt that Doctor Macreedie would be after him.

He hurried, without running. He kept his head down, staring at the ground, as if that would stop people noticing him.

He reached Regency Road.

A small green hatchback turned the corner. Doctor Macreedie’s car!

Ben stopped in his tracks, looked all around.

There was nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.

He relaxed. It wasn’t the doctor’s car at all. Just another green hatchback. The driver was an elderly woman, sitting hunched forward so that her nose was almost touching the top of the steering wheel.

At the top of Regency Road, Ben crossed over.

He felt much safer once he was heading through the scrubby wasteland he had always known as Barlow’s Patch. He wondered what they called it here.

As he walked, the sounds of the road fell away behind him. Soon the town was out of sight.

This path was pretty much like the one he normally took to get to Andy’s house. A single track, worn through the grassland by walkers, bicycles and the occasional horse. In the winter stretches of the path could be ankle-deep in mud, but now it was dry.

The path cut through a blackthorn thicket, just as normal.

It would be easy to think that everything that had happened to him was some kind of illusion. A dream, perhaps. Maybe, if he kept on along this path all the way to the village of Weeley, he would get to Andy’s house and everything would be back to normal.

But no, he knew it was foolish to think like that.

He wondered what his parents and friends must be thinking, what sort of fears they must have for his safety. He felt helpless, and very much alone in the world, whichever world this was. But he had to keep going. His best chance of finding company and maybe beginning to understand what had happened was to find the ferals in Weeley Woods.

After about ten minutes, he turned off onto another path, smaller than the first, not so well used.

Soon, he could see the dark fringe of the woodland’s edge.

He quickened his pace.

Darkness. Cool, refreshing shade. He was in the woods. He’d made it. A sudden fit of shuddering overtook him, and he had to lean against a tree for support. It was only now that he realised just how scared he had been: he’d been blocking it out, concentrating only on walking, on not being noticed.

He straightened. He had to pull himself together.

It was not over yet.

He’d reached the woods, but what now? Doctor Macreedie had only said there had been
sightings
of ferals in Weeley Woods, amongst other places. Rumours. Gossip. What if he found nothing?

He stopped himself. He would gain nothing by thinking too far into the future. He was here now, in the woods. His immediate priority was to avoid being found.

And, of course, that was exactly what any feral humans would be trying to do, too...

~

He knew he should try to be methodical: start from one side of the woods and work steadily across to the other.

But that wasn’t possible.

The woods covered a vast area, spreading out in a squashed horseshoe shape that wrapped part way around the village of Weeley, with a railway line cutting across one corner.

There were countless paths threading their way through the woods, but they twisted and turned, making it impossible to explore the area in any logical and methodical way. Some parts of the woods were blocked off by thick patches of thorny undergrowth. Others were fenced off to keep people away from the old quarry workings.

It was an ideal place to hide.

Ben followed a path into the heart of the woods. Every few minutes he stopped and stood quietly, listening. He reasoned that he couldn’t see very far in the woods, but human sounds like voices might carry for some distance.

Other than the occasional sound of a train, and a dog barking in the distance, he heard nothing.

There were plenty of signs that people had followed this path recently, but all the footprints in the mud could easily just be locals passing through. Did vampires go for strolls in the woods? Some of them had dogs to walk, so he supposed they probably did.

He realised that he didn’t even know what he was looking for. Would feral humans have shoes, even? Maybe he should be looking for the imprints of bare feet. Shut off from civilisation, these feral humans might be savages. Perhaps that was why the doctor had been so fascinated by Ben...

By late in the afternoon, Ben was hungry and dispirited.

He remembered watching television programmes about how you could survive in the wilderness, living off nature. They showed people scraping about for roots, finding leaves that could be boiled into tea or soup, finding berries and mushrooms. It looked easy on the TV.

But in reality Ben had seen no mushrooms. The only berries he had found were a few hard green blackberries that were nowhere near ripe. He didn’t know which plants were safe to eat and which would poison him.

Hungry or not, he would have to find somewhere to sleep.

Remembering the programmes, he found a fallen branch and dragged it so that it leaned against a tree. He should be able to balance smaller branches against it, and smaller ones against those and so on until he had a shelter.

It didn’t work like that, though. The thing kept collapsing.

He decided that it wasn’t worth it. It looked like being a dry night in any case. He would just have to take his chances with the weather.

~

He found an open area where he could see the stars through a gap in the trees. The undergrowth was thicker here, and he was able to pull loose grass together with fronds of bracken to make a kind of nest for himself.

The vegetation broke the hardness of the woodland floor for a while, but soon Ben was uncomfortable. The ground felt hard and cold. His jacket would have helped him stay warm but he’d lost that in Kirby. He was exhausted, but sleep remained a long way off. He couldn’t shake the images of the last two days from his mind. The bright red smears across Lenny’s face. Rachel smiling at him, laughing. The man with PURE OF BLOOD where his eyebrows should have been and the stink of beer and smoke on his breath. Most disturbing of all was the eagerness in Doctor Macreedie’s expression, the anticipation.

If Ben hadn’t taken his chance to escape he knew it would be all over by now: the doctor and the policeman would have bled him dry.

Or perhaps not. Perhaps they would have held back, keeping him alive so that they could come back for more of his blood another time, and another... another...

Woodland sounds broke through his dark thoughts. Scuffling and creaking sounds came from all around. The movement of the trees? The sounds of animals?

At one point, a sudden yelping sound startled him out of not-quite-sleep. A fox, he decided. A badger, maybe.

He wondered if the animals here drank each other’s blood, too, or if it was purely a human thing.

~

Later, he woke to cool drops of rain on his face. He opened his eyes and stared up at the night sky. Clouds were hiding the stars and everything was pitch dark. He raised an arm and there was a sudden stabbing pain across his shoulders and back.

Cautiously, he rolled onto his side, his body aching from sleeping awkwardly on the woodland floor.

He wiped the moisture on his face with the back of a hand, and paused to gather his senses.

He rose and moved across into the shelter of the trees, stumbling on the uneven ground and the tangle of bracken and long grass. He leaned against a tree, then sat, but the ground was muddy and the wetness instantly soaked through the seat of his trousers.

He went deeper into the trees. He found another place to settle against a tree, testing the ground with a hand before lowering himself.

He had no idea what time it was, but he sensed that there were still many hours until morning, and he had a long, uncomfortable night ahead.

~

He hurt.

He hurt in his muscles and in every movement of his stiff, aching body. He hurt in his dry throat, with every breath, with every attempt to swallow. He hurt in the depths of his empty stomach.

He hurt.

Dawn’s light had only recently stolen through the woods, and Ben had watched the steady emergence of shapes from darkness, of details etched into those shapes, and finally, of colour. Birds sang and he cursed their joyfulness. What right had they to be so comfortable in this awful wood, when he was sore and damp and still so very tired?

Ben thought again of those survival programmes he had seen on the television, and he wished he had paid more attention. He was hungry, but he knew that his most pressing need was something to drink. Without water he would not last long.

He stretched his arms and legs, trying to free some of the night’s stiffness from his body.

Back in the clearing there were puddles from the night’s rain and he squatted by one and looked into its muddy depths. He scooped some of the water out in a cupped hand and eyed the brown liquid.

He stood, shook his hand dry and looked around.

The trees’ leaves were shiny with moisture. He took one, pulled it over his open mouth and shook it, but only a drop or two of water fell. He licked the leaf, finding more of the moisture that way. He licked others, and then felt suddenly self-conscious and stopped. This clearing had formed where a tree had fallen, and now Ben found a puddle in a cleft in the horizontal trunk. The water was clearer and he scooped handfuls up to his mouth and drank gratefully.

When he had finished, he leaned against the trunk and gathered his thoughts. Would he be ill from drinking this water, he wondered? He had no choice, though.

He looked around to find his bearings, then headed deeper into the woods.

~

Soon, he came to the railway. Its steep, rocky embankment was ahead of him, cutting a straight line through the woods.

There was a fence at the foot of the embankment: two strands of wire to mark the boundary between woods and railway property. The path followed the fence for a distance here, and suddenly Ben remembered something his older cousin Sophie had once pointed out to him on a train journey to London. All along the track there were rambling apple trees, grown from the seeds in apple cores passengers had thrown out of train windows.

He swung his legs over the fence and scrambled up the embankment.

Sure enough, a short distance along and part way up the slope, he came to an apple tree. The fruit were hard and green and he had to pull hard to snap them from their stalks. It was too early in the summer for them to be ripe, but even so he bit into one. It was hard and he found it difficult to break a piece off. It was dry and bitter, too, but he managed to chew it, and to swallow, and he found that he wanted more.