The Last of Us

Ten days ago

Next morning, for the first time, Alex misses his insulin. We watch as he eats his favourite breakfast – wafer biscuits with jam, dried apricots with juice – to see if he’ll start to become unwell or act strange.

All that happens is he gets fed up of all our staring, and takes his food off to a different room.

Nobody talks about what Calum Ian did with the dart. When it’s time to go he packs quiet and separate from the rest of us, talking only to Duncan and Alex.

His rucksack looks as heavy as it did before; and the smell on it is still strong with petrol.

When we start off on the road again he’s exactly the same as yesterday: holding back, always being last, watching. But now Elizabeth has slowed, too: though for why, to annoy him or to outdo him, I can’t tell.

Alex’s house is a mile up the road. It has a red roof, a garden around. There’s a trampoline blown on its side, jammed under a fence. His old bike is there, but rusted so much that we can’t turn the wheels or the steering.

We spray our perfume-hankies. Alex stays at the gate, nervously chewing his sleeve.

‘Please don’t be spraying petrol,’ he says, putting his hands together in prayer in front of Calum Ian.

Calum Ian just waves him away.

The house – has no smell. Calum Ian goes right in, takes off his hanky. He breathes deep. Then he comes back and claps Alex on the back like he’s a competition winner.

‘It’s all right.’

After this, ahead of schedule, Duncan takes out his spray-paint and sprays a gold G on the door.

‘I’m the luckiest kid,’ Alex says.

In the hallway it only smells of coldness. His house reminds me of my old home, with its stairs, shoe rack, curtains. There’s a pair of Highland dancing shoes with red laces on the floor, which Alex says belonged to his big sister, Clare. I forgot or never knew in the first place he had a big sister. He was only ever Alex to me.

The living room has black leather chairs. There’s a scrunched yellow duvet on the longest sofa. On the floor, a mess of plastic aprons, masks, towels. Some of the towels have dirty bits on them, which seems to get Alex ashamed, because he kicks them into a corner.

We get on guard for finding something bad, but Alex says it was like this before: the same mess.

‘The masks were dumb,’ he says. ‘They made my face go hot and my nose itchy.’

‘What – you prefer being dead?’ Duncan asks.

‘Lots of dead people are still wearing them,’ Alex answers.

There’s a pile of Alex’s old DVDs on the floor. He looks through them, though we’ve found most of his favourites in other people’s homes. Elizabeth, meanwhile, looks in the kitchen for injection things. She opens the drawers as softly and as kindly as she can, for respect.

In one drawer, in a plastic box, she finds bandages, antiseptic creams. In another: tissues, candles, kids’ plasters with brave faces on them.

No insulin.

I stay in the living room beside Alex. He stares at the sofa, at the scrunched duvet. Then says, ‘This was where Mum was sick.’ He pulls back the duvet and calls out in surprise. ‘See I just found it, look! There’s her plate with the jam sandwich I made her!’

Duncan goes ahead to look. The sandwich isn’t a sandwich. It’s a shrivelled crisp of green-grey mould.

‘She never ate it,’ Alex says.

‘No wonder,’ Duncan laughs, trying a joke, then seeing that the not-eating is a subject Alex is sad about.

‘If only I’d made a better job,’ he says. ‘She might’ve had it and got her strength. She might’ve got better.’

Duncan forgets his joke. He puts an arm over Alex’s back instead. Alex says, ‘Auntie Jane was crying about us being in here, but she was too strict, wasn’t she?’

‘Strict? For what?’

‘For going away. When the men came they wouldn’t let me go with Mum. I told them I wouldn’t get sick, that I didn’t have a cold all summer. I said “Cross my heart, hope to die; stick a needle in my eye.” I even kicked the edge of the rug, but it was no use.’

‘They took your mum…’

‘So I stayed with Auntie Jane. Only she was too scared to inject me. After that I don’t remember.’

We cover the sandwich up. Alex pats the duvet like it’s a favourite friend, then frowns, calls himself eejit.

His sister Clare’s room is the first one upstairs. She has a sign Sellotaped to her door: PLEASE KNOCK BEFORE ENTERING and if I am not here GO AND LO.O.K FOR ME. The OOs of LO.O.K have dots to turn them into accusing eyes.

There’s a bookcase, striped carpet, bed, wardrobe. She has a silver CD player. The CD inside is by Lady Gaga. Her bedsheets are pink. So’s the carpet.

We wait for Alex to decide what to do. For once he’s the boss; even Calum Ian waits.

After thinking about it, Alex goes to Clare’s bookcase to look through her books. He spends a long time there, then picks up something from the floor.

It’s a girl’s shoe: shiny black. Alex puts it back on the floor next to his own foot for measurement.

‘Her feet went less of a size,’ he says. ‘I never realised my big sister would go that way.’

Next along is his mum and dad’s bedroom. The duvet’s missing – it’s downstairs. The wardrobes emptied, with a lot of plastic bags of clothes on the floor. The bedside lamp, broken. Perfumes on a dressing table.

We follow him to his old room. There’s a sign on the door made of red card and gold tinsel which says Santa Stop Here. He has a small bed, and the wardrobe’s small too. There’s a teddy bear temperature-reader on a chest of drawers, which right now says COLD.

He opens his toybox. There are a lot of things inside for a boy. I want him to have a party of it, but he just stares at the contents. Then closes the box.

‘So this is my house,’ he says, circling his hands. ‘I hope you like it. It’s quite dark. Also, it feels lonelier than it did. But it’s a good house, and I’m proud of it.’

He sits on the toybox. All of a sudden the fun seems to melt away from his face, and he says, ‘What if they won’t understand? What if we’ve changed how we speak so much that when adults come to find us we’ll be talking a different language?’

Everybody goes quiet – maybe because there isn’t any way of proving that it couldn’t happen, other than it not being long enough for time.

‘We’d know,’ Calum Ian says. ‘I’d tell you straight if you started talking rubbish. We’d give you a clap on the head to get you normal again.’

Alex doesn’t answer back. He gets up from the toybox and goes out to the hall.

We follow, and he stops on the stairs.

Still being in charge he points at Duncan like he’s the smaller kid then says: ‘You can be the one to put on my DVD.’

Duncan says, ‘You want a film?’

‘Not a film. Something else. It’s part of the worst. I’m not scared if you’re here. It’s downstairs.’

‘What worst—’

‘Downstairs.’

We follow him to the living room. After a time of chewing his sleeve Alex points to the DVD player then says, ‘Inside that.’

Duncan takes a metal ruler out of his rucksack. He uses it to break the lid of the DVD player.

There’s a disc inside: just silver, no film name. He hands it to Alex. Alex doesn’t want to touch it.

Duncan looks at us, puzzled, then goes back into his rucksack and takes out his portable DVD player. He connects the battery-pack, puts in the disc.

We try to bunch together by sitting on the floor and on the chair behind.

When the screen gets broken into choices we press PLAY.

The first is an advert! Everyone cheers, it’s amazing! There’s a bathroom being cleaned with blue stuff. A lady with shining blonde hair smiling at her clean toilet. Adverts only happen when the world is going OK!

Then it’s the news. Alex hides his eyes.

It’s an early news. They didn’t know yet. There’s a foggy picture of a night-time street. Then a lady reporter, wearing a mask and lifting it up to talk to the man in a blue suit beside her.

We press return for MAIN MENU. Elizabeth reads the dates of the clips with her finger. Her shoulders drop and she makes a sad groan in her throat.

November, December.

‘Who did these? All these recordings?’

‘Dad.’

Next: a newsman beside a fence. Behind him is a plane. This one and lots of other planes have been told not to leave. But the people can’t get off either.

They’re waiting for days. The steps to get people down are forbidden. Some of them jumped.

Food gets passed up, after dead people start to land on the runways. Flat trucks come and take them away.

Elizabeth goes to MAIN MENU. More adverts. More news. She doesn’t want to press the button to start – but then Calum Ian presses it for her.

It’s cold in the news, because the people talking have smoke on their breaths, plus they’re wearing scarves.

‘He’s the one that frightens me,’ Alex says.

‘Him?’

‘No, the next one. He’s the one that made me scared of seeing zombies.’

It’s a film we’ve seen before. Someone being chased by police. The picture freezing into dots, like when storms used to shake the satellite dish. Then, when the picture comes back, the running man has fallen asleep beside some stairs. Black paint is coming out of his shoulder.

‘Shot,’ Duncan says.

Elizabeth holds her head like it’s sore. Calum Ian covers his ears from the film’s shouting, though it’s crackly and it isn’t even that loud.

‘He was only ill,’ Elizabeth says.

Calum Ian chooses another one. It’s a film of someone talking: a man with a sweaty face. He looks at the camera and smiles and talks patiently, so you’d think he’d be a good teacher. There are two people sitting beside him. They both look strict, or bored. Or fed up. These two don’t look like nice teachers, and they don’t look at the camera.

The man talks about growth. He uses words we don’t understand. He mumbles, then talks too fast, calls growth a cancer that has to be stopped. There’s a light that’s too bright for his face. He might be patient, but still, he looks like he’s in a hurry. We all agree that even though he’s smiling it’s probably not a true smile.

‘Can’t understand him,’ Alex says. ‘It’s like he’s talking in sore tooth language.’ On other days this might make us laugh, but right now, here, it doesn’t.

The man goes on and on. I get bored with him, which is fine because then the clip changes. And then I want to be bored again, because it’s a man Elizabeth recognises as the Prime Minister.

‘I am appealing for calm,’ he says. ‘I want you all to know we are doing the best we can. Please put your trust in the efforts of our emergency services—’

The clip cuts off – then there’s a film of people camping or working inside a sports stadium.

Elizabeth rubs her eyes with her sleeve. She’s shaking like she’s been outside for too long and got cold.

We watch the rest. I don’t even remember the one about the man running from the shopping place. I feel sorry for him, because he’s left behind his box of stuff. It’s all tipped onto the shiny floor beside a Christmas tree.

The DVD stops. It goes to blue screen, and we know we’ve come to where the electricity stopped.

The big kids should be in the lead, but they’re not.

Alex: ‘What was that man doing?’

Elizabeth puts on a smile. ‘In the very last clip? I know, actually. Mum and Dad used the same thing to help people.’

‘What?’

‘He had a mask. Called a nebuliser. Doctors and nurses use them to help people: maybe if they have asthma or lung problems, for their breathing.’

‘But the mask didn’t help the people who died.’

‘No. The bad man used it to hurt them.’

‘How?’

‘He used it to send bits of sickness in the air.’

‘Is the sickness still in the air?’

‘I don’t know.’

Alex goes quiet for a bit. After this he frowns and says, ‘If the people didn’t have asthma, or lung things, why did they want to put the masks on?’

‘Because he told them a shitty lie. He said it was oxygen. To give them energy, for shopping. He told them it was extra healthy, that it would give them extra strength for their Christmas shopping.’

As we leave the house the last person still sitting is Calum Ian: staring and staring at the blue screen of the player until Duncan has to wake him up, ask for the player back, tell him to get going.

Calum Ian clicks out the DVD – then he takes it outside and sprays it with petrol.

He throws a match, and we all watch as the silver top of the DVD bubbles and melts and goes black.

Alex keeps turning to have one last look at his house: watching to see if there will be any change, maybe hoping for some sign of life at the windows or door.

Then we’re back, walking the road.

Up in the north, where the wind blows hardest, some of the telephone wires got knocked down. Rubbish, plastic bags and fishing nets all snagged in a line along the fences. Tin cans, plastic tubs buried down in the sand drifts that the wind has built at the corners of the road.

It’s when we come to an abandoned car that Calum Ian, still walking behind, whistles for us to stop.

The car has been spray-painted.

There are red and blue swirls on the doors. Also on the front window.

No names, no letters or messages, no drawings: just swirls of spray.

We look inside. Calum Ian stays by the grass verge. There’s empty crisp packets and juice cartons and tins bashed but not opened on the front not-driver’s seat.

We look around, but there’s nothing: just some blank houses, the rubbish-snagged fences, the empty hill.

Duncan whistles on his brother, who doesn’t come but instead hunkers deeper in the grass.

We open the car door. It creaks bad, plus the inside smells old: old like the sun dried the air in it for weeks.

‘Nobody recent,’ Duncan says.

Still though: he looks at the hill and the nearest house in case there’s a trap we didn’t see.

When nothing bad happens Calum Ian comes over to us. I notice he’s got one of the knives out: tucked in the side of his belt so the end of it points backwards.

He takes out his tarpaulin and rolls it out on the road: offering us weapons, if we want. Then says, ‘Duncan saw smoke. Three month back. It was coming from the other side of the big hill. From the side we’re on now.’

Nobody speaks.

He must see something in how we’re all looking because he adds in a hurry, ‘Listen: it was hard to know if it was really smoke or just more clouds.’

Elizabeth gets him to slowly repeat what he said, and to give more details: about the exact date, about how long since, about whether the smoke was black or white.

‘Why didn’t you tell?’

Even though the question is aimed direct at Calum Ian it’s Duncan who finally answers: ‘He ordered me not to.’

Calum Ian looks caught. But then he gets his confidence back and says, ‘Tell me then: why didn’t they come and help? If it was truly friendly adults, they would’ve come. If it was my dad, he would’ve come. But nobody did. So you work out if a person doesn’t come – maybe that means they’re watching and not wanting to be found.’ Pointing to the rubbish inside of the car he says: ‘An enemy.’

Elizabeth looks at him like she can’t believe.

She stares at the weapons, back at him.

Then she nods, only not for agreement, but more for realising the worst in somebody.

She goes to fold the tarpaulin roll, then seems too disgusted to let her hands even touch it.

‘You and your stupid weapons.’ Then: ‘What if there was a search party? What if that was our only chance and we missed it? What if we missed our last ever chance of being saved? Did you think about that?’

‘What if they were bad bastards. Did you think about that?’

She hitches her bag up, then starts on the path, going quick like we’re in an even bigger hurry.

‘You don’t know what you’re walking into,’ shouts Calum Ian after her. ‘I was just trying to defend us. To keep the team safe. You’re the one that’s always going on about teamwork. That’s what it was.’

‘Protect us: from who? It’s you who wants to poison people. Maybe it’s you we’ve to worry about.’

Now he’s made Elizabeth nervous. I see her move from the middle of the road to the side – trailing the fence, then kneeling, like his words had some effect after all.

It gets us all nervous – so when we see the wind turbine moving – just before the houses of Bagh a Tuath – there might as well be a hundred folk on it, waving.

Calum Ian orders us to wait in the grass, where we hide and watch for a bit: listening for strangeness in the sound it makes as it chops air.

Alex thinks it’s a sign that adults are still alive. Elizabeth doesn’t agree. She says it turns all by itself until the day it gets rusted and stops.

Our third house has a ramp going around and up to its front door. There are two gates, both with stiff bolts. We take it in turns to climb over. There’s a door-knocker with a nameplate which says: E. R. KERR.

As soon as we open the door there’s a smell. Not the worst smell, but a definite one.

The hallway’s narrow, middle-bright. There’s a tipped-over walking frame on the floor. It’s got an empty string bag tied to the front of it, plus a long stick with pincers for picking stuff up. Old person things.

Because of the smell Alex won’t come in.

He waits on the step outside, and begins to count aloud to tell us how long we’ve taken—

‘Stopping at two hundred. One, two, three—’

We tie on our perfume-hankies, which is the best thing to have done, because when we go into the kitchen we discover that there’s an old woman dead in a chair.

She’s not alive. It’s easy to see. She’s fallen to her side, all twisted up like the trees by the north shore.

Her skin went black.

We search the rest of the kitchen, trying not to look at her. In the end Calum Ian puts a towel over her head.

I worry that it’s disrespectful, but truthfully, it’s better not to see.

We open the kitchen drawers. The fridge stinks, plus it’s empty. We look in the bathroom cabinets, the bedroom, then every cupboard in the kitchen again.

At the end of this Elizabeth just sits on the hall floor.

‘Nothing.’

Calum Ian bangs his hand on the doorframe.

‘Who tells Alex?’

It’s just then, when we’re trying to pluck up the courage to go out and tell him, that Alex begins to shout.

Something scared him proper: because now he comes into the house to get us.

He’s shaking, won’t stop.

Calum Ian gets to him first. He puts Alex’s hands at his sides for attention then asks him what he’s playing at.

‘Was no—not—’

I remember now how his words got broken up, after it happened. So does Elizabeth: she kneels down and speaks to Alex quietly, trying to unmess his thoughts.

‘Remember, one at a time. Slowly.’

‘N—n—’

‘Think of all your words. Separately, like you did before. Go on. A big breath, it’s easy.’

‘Th—there. Was.’

‘OK… there was what?’

‘A thing.’

Calum Ian straightens up right away: and looks at all of us, making a told-you-so noise. He asks: ‘What kind? A man, right? He must’ve been hiding, I bloody knew it! Did he look bad? Was he like the bad man in the DVD?’

Alex presses his hands to his cheeks.

‘I can’t believe it was real! It wasn’t a dream!’

Elizabeth gets his attention by clicking her fingers in front of his face. She speaks sharper now.

‘Describe for us.’

‘Ran away… it had eyes and a face.’

‘So it was a dog, or a cat.’

‘No. It was running up on its two legs like a person.’

‘Alex. You can’t be making stuff up.’

‘Cross my heart, hope to die.’

Now when Calum Ian takes his roll of knives out of his rucksack we don’t say a thing.

He chooses the all-silver one: checking the sharpness of it by jabbing it into the wood of the floor.

For now we let him be in charge. He tries to look angry, like a man could be, but still, I can see he’s scared.

I wait for Elizabeth to tell him to put down the knife; this time she doesn’t. Nor does she tell him to stop when he hands out darts and knives to the rest of us.

I don’t know how to hold a knife for proper defence. Neither does Duncan, who drops his.

‘You grab – always – with two hands,’ Calum Ian whispers fiercely. ‘So go for the guts. Or the throat, and you attack first. Always first. We come in from three or four sides, that puts up our strength, right?’

He forces us down in the grass.

‘Listen.’

For ages there’s only birdsong, and the whurry-whurry of the wind turbine.

Then there’s barking – we see three dogs.

They see us as well, and they come close, tails wagging and their ears backwards for friendship.

One tries to get close to Duncan who holds up the shaking end of his knife.

‘And we were afraid!’ laughs Calum Ian, with a rise in his voice for relief, that it was maybe only dogs, after all.

But these dogs are strange.

It gets in me that they’ve been painted. They have blue stripes along their sides.

One of them has a blue face. Blue-tipped whiskers.

‘So they tried to drink paint,’ Calum Ian says, though he doesn’t sound convinced by himself.

It’s when I look at Elizabeth to see what she thinks about the dogs that I notice she’s looking in a different direction: with her eyes fixed, just staring.

When I follow where her eyes are going, I see.

A little girl.

We stand to show ourselves and the girl runs away.

Seeing an animal that isn’t a dog or cat looks so strange that nobody can even react.

But then Elizabeth does – ‘Wait!’ she shouts, but the girl nips between two hedges and is gone.

We close in around on both sides – and she jumps out again, running fast.

It’s hard to follow her, she’s so quick: running around the back of the circle of houses, crawling behind and between bins, rubbish-piles, gas canisters.

‘She went in at the end!’

The end-house has a load of rubbish in its front garden. Black bags, tarpaulin, held with fishing rope, lines all twisted in an untidy heap. The garden smells. I see lots of shit on the grass, which I hope is from dogs.

Alex and Duncan are posted to the back door. Me and Elizabeth and Calum Ian stay around the front.

By the doorstep there’s a shivery cat, with five rag-doll kittens taking milk. It’s lying on a pair of jeans inside an old tyre. The cat meows, hisses at us.

We ring the doorbell. It’s not working.

There’s a strong smell when we open the door. The smell is of many things: rotten food, damp, shit, pee, dogs. It’s hard to tell if there’s a dead person’s smell there too. Calum Ian says there is. Elizabeth says there isn’t.

It’s cold. Straight ahead: a kitchen with one fluttering torn curtain. We see Alex and Duncan out the back, through the window. They don’t see us inside.

All the shelves are pulled out. The kitchen floor has a broken centre. Mostly it’s a mess: dried-dirty plates, tins, crisp packets. There are hundreds of small empty cans of something called Indian Tonic Water. Then up on the kitchen table, lots and lots of tins of dog food.

There’s teddies, sitting on the seats around the table. Then at the middle of the table there’s a framed picture – of a man, a lady, a boy, with plastic flowers beside it.

Calum Ian points at the boy in the picture with the sharp edge of his knife.

‘Knew him,’ he says. ‘His name was Rory.’

There’s a camping stove on the floor. It’s gone black. Maybe it went on fire? The wall beside is also black, but that’s different, the black is from spots of mould.

We go through the kitchen. In the hallway Calum Ian shushes us – then Elizabeth calls, ‘Hullo? We want to help. To become friends.’ Then: ‘Are you very hungry?’

There’s the smallest sound.

‘Door – there.’

We open the door. It creaks loud.

The room’s dark. The curtains are hanging off their rails. The mess here is worse than in the kitchen: hills and forests of rubbish. A part of the corner of the ceiling has the paper peeling.

Our eyes get used to the dark. There’s a stick-tree in one corner. As my eyes get stronger I see that it’s a Christmas tree gone down to bare branches.

In another corner there’s a nest. Only it’s not for a bird, it’s for a person. The nest is made of duvets, dressing gowns, sleeping bags, clothes, and even, I think, a big blue flag. It all looks filthy. On the floor around are thousands of sweet wrappers and bits of silver foil.

There’s a face: very dirty, with white eyes. Watching us, from a hole in the side of the nest.

Calum Ian doesn’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do. Elizabeth gets us to kneel down, to get ourselves small. Then she holds out her hand. The dirty face goes further into the nest. Then reappears.

‘You’re all right,’ Elizabeth says. ‘You’re all right to be feeling curious. What’s your name?’

The dirty face just stares.

‘Mine’s Elizabeth,’ says Elizabeth, and she gives the rest of our names. ‘Is anybody with you? Maybe your mum or dad? It would be a very big help if you could tell us if there’s adults. We definitely need to find adults.’

The dirty face just looks.

‘You on our side?’ Calum Ian demands. ‘You should be, and now you’ve got to talk, so give us your name.’

The dirty face disappears. Elizabeth puts her hand up to Calum Ian’s mouth. Slowly the face comes back.

From deep in the nest she’s found something.

She throws it. Calum Ian falls away, annoyed, or scared.

But it’s nothing. It’s only small: a key fob.

Elizabeth picks it up. The key fob is pink, blue, with a smiling cartoon girl’s face. Mairi, it says underneath.

Now we remember her. She did have a big brother called Rory. Both of them had dark hair, dark eyes. She liked to show off, I remember, by dancing in the playground.

‘Come on to hell,’ Calum Ian says. ‘Rory’s little sister never looked like that.’

We look at Mairi. She’s more of a dirty broken toy than a girl, thinner than the thinnest of us, which is Alex or Duncan. I think I remember her being in P2. If it isn’t Mairi, then it’s hard to imagine who else she could be.

‘Where’s your brother?’ Calum Ian asks, then he spells out the letters, first in words then using his fingers to write in the air. ‘BROTHER? Tha? Yes? Did he get sent AWAY? Did he get put in the Community Centre?’

Mairi stares at us like we’ve come from space.

‘Where is he? A bheil Gàidhlig agaibh? Or English? A bheil an t-acras ort?’

After a bit she points at the door we’ve come through.

‘Outside?’

She shakes her head.

‘A-staigh? In the house?’

She nods.

‘Up the stair?’

She shakes her head.

‘Downstairs? That other room next door?’

She nods.

Next door is also dark. It has the worst smell. It’s another living room: only instead of a coffee table in the middle there’s a mound. Elizabeth opens the curtains. We see that the mound is a pile of clothes and cushions. The mound is topped with fairylights all in a spiral.

At the very top, on a pink pillow, there’s a face drawn on paper. It has shells for eyes, tinsel for hair.

‘Like our Last Adult,’ says Elizabeth, of the mound.

Around the edges are things which Elizabeth calls mementos, though they’re really only toys. There’s an Action Man and a green teddy-snake. There’s some food: cornflakes on a plate. The flakes look mouldy.

Mairi has now come out of her nest. She’s in the hall, still too timid to come close to us. Calum Ian stands the same distance apart from her, nervous as well.

‘Your brother under there?’ he asks. ‘You bury him?’

Mairi doesn’t seem to hear. But then she nods.

‘When did he die?’

Mairi doesn’t nod or shake her head.

‘Same time as everybody else? Later, then? You lived together for a while? He survived beside you?’

Mairi nods – a tiny nod, but definite.

‘He died after. What happened?’

At first I think she doesn’t understand. Then she points to her mouth.

‘He was hungry. No, he was sick. OK. What got him to be sick? Did he get toothache? His mouth? Did he eat something that made him sick?’

Mairi doesn’t look sure. Instead she points to the mound, and keeps pointing until we get to the bit that’s warm in the warmer-colder game.

‘The box?’

She nods very strongly.

The thing she means is a shoebox.

We open it, and inside there’s purple silk material and Christmas decorations. Also, a drawing – of Mairi, in a dress, with individual fingers drawn like flowers.

Her brother is in the drawing as well. He’s standing alongside, but with his eyes closed.

Also in the box is a mountain-picture calendar. The days gone past are marked with crosses. Except that the last day crossed goes all the way back to March 5th.

‘Can’t have died then. That’s not possible.’

Mairi moves her lips without talking. The hushed word she’s saying is: Yes.

‘That was three months ago… that’s too long. You can’t have survived on your own for that long.’

Mairi looks like she doesn’t care if we believe or not.

It’s strange to see another home owned by kids. Mairi’s home is far, far messier than ours. And also darker – they didn’t collect batteries for light-ups. Also, there’s no radios, no room full of clocks. It looks like they didn’t have as good routines.

It looks like they didn’t have so many good ideas.

Duncan comes in, and looks shocked by Mairi, in fact he can’t stop looking. Alex must still be outside.

‘She doesn’t talk English, or Gaelic,’ says Calum Ian.

Mairi has finished three packets of our crisps. She goes out of the room then comes back with something from her nest. It’s a naked doll.

She creeps in behind Elizabeth’s feet on the floor and curls up to stroke the doll.

‘She stinks,’ Duncan says.

She doesn’t hear the rudeness of it: but instead, still lying on the floor, she puts a hand forward and begins to play with the lace of Elizabeth’s shoe.

Elizabeth tries to lift her up, but Mairi won’t allow it. She fast-crawls back to the door and watches us from there. Her eyes dart to see us all.

With her patient voice Elizabeth says, ‘You have to come home with us Mairi, because we’ve got a better place. You’ll be safe and sound there. We’ve got toys. We’ve got films. Have you a favourite?’

Outside, Alex is noisily counting. Mairi stares and stares until we get uneasy about her.

‘This could be a trap,’ Calum Ian says.

Elizabeth gives him a look which means Shut up.

‘Listen,’ she says, ‘We’re in a bit of a hurry. It can be a big help, in a group. You’ll get teamwork. It’s crucial to be helping together. It’ll be your best ever decision.’

Mairi starts to creep back. She’s keen to play with Elizabeth’s school badges. She points at the one that says BANKER, then points like she wants it.

Elizabeth gives her both badges.

‘You haven’t seen Alex yet,’ she says, with a hurry to her voice. ‘I’ll tell you one big issue, Mairi. He needs medicine. If he doesn’t get any he’ll become sick. So for that reason we’ve got to go back. It’s our mission.’

Elizabeth pins the badges to Mairi’s T-shirt. All the smudged dirt makes the gold and green shine.

Elizabeth takes out a wet wipe from her rucksack and begins to wipe clean Mairi’s cheeks.

‘So we start to see you.’

Mairi looks very solemn. Her face comes in like a window being cleaned. Her skin’s the colour of clouds. Or even whiter – it’s the colour of snow.

Elizabeth’s hand stops moving. Then Calum Ian makes a mad sound I never wanted to hear.

Elizabeth quickly cleans all the way down to Mairi’s neck and ears.

With her mouth sagging she says – ’Show me your stomach.’

Mairi shakes her head, so Calum Ian gets behind her and grabs her arms. She kicks, but she’s too small.

He pulls up her jumper. After this he turns her around to look at her back.

‘She’s got none. None at all.’

I don’t know why, but Calum Ian pushes us away from Mairi. And for once Elizabeth doesn’t disagree.

When we get back outside Alex is writing with dirt on the path. His face goes amazed like Duncan’s did when Mairi appears. She keeps hiding at the door, as if Alex was the bad person we were hiding from her.

It’s Elizabeth’s face I don’t understand. She looks like something awful happened – which can’t be true.

Alex holds out his hand, to shake. Mairi doesn’t reach for it. ‘You want water?’ he asks. When he holds up our bottle of red sterilised Calum Ian stops him from getting too close.

‘Don’t think about touching her,’ he says.

I ask what’s wrong. I ask it ten times or more and then I get angry because they don’t want to tell and it makes me feel like a dumb kid who doesn’t understand.

In the end Calum Ian says, ‘It should be obvious. Just look at her face.’

I look at Mairi’s face. It’s mostly hopeful, like she wants to be friendly. Plus it’s more clean. I mention both.

‘And she doesn’t have scars.’

I see that he’s right: she has true skin like from an old photo or DVD: not broken around her nose and cheeks like all of us.

‘So she got lucky,’ Duncan says.

‘But none of us got lucky. We all got ill.’

‘Then she’s still lucky.’

‘Not if we give it to her. Then we make her sick. Then she might die.’

Everybody now looks at Elizabeth: all at once, as if we need her to tell that it couldn’t happen.

She just looks away to the big hill, the turbine.

Mairi begins to touch her own face: a sign that she understands what’s being said. Maybe she’s only waiting for her best chance to speak?

‘But none of us are ill now,’ Alex points out. ‘Apart from Duncan’s face, but that got better. Apart from the insulin with me. Maybe that makes it OK to be friendly?’

‘How do you know we’re not still infected? How do you know we can’t make her sick? All the adults who got sick died. All the other kids as well.’

I try to think of another person with no scars. I can’t think of even one. All of the babies we saw, all of the dead adults. Every person in every house.

It doesn’t feel right. I hate to think I still have some sickness in me. I want it gone. I want us to be healthy.

We end up standing in two groups: her and us. We throw food, we throw water. Duncan makes a line of stones on the road for not crossing.

Yet the longer we wait, the more it gives us of worry: even more when Calum Ian takes out his petrolgun and begins to talk about hiding again.

‘Something’s not right here.’ He curls his finger on the trigger of the gun. ‘How can she be the only lucky kid? I think she’s not talking because she’s not telling.’ He sprays one spot of petrol on the road, looking deliberately at Elizabeth, as if challenging her to stop him.

‘I vote we leave her,’ he says.

Elizabeth rubs and rubs at the sides of her head.

‘Can’t do that.’

‘We could feed her, put down some food. Aye? Then we come back later and check she didn’t get ill.’

‘No!’

‘So you bloody take her. But make sure she keeps herself apart. Maybe fifty feet? Till we know it’s safe. I’m taking Duncan back with me.’

‘When will we know? When can any of us know for sure that it’s safe?’

‘I don’t know – you’re the expert! You’re the expert-girl, doctor’s girl! An e dotair a th’annad? You’re the one who knows it all! The one whose mam and dad knew so much they couldn’t even save themselves!’

When he shouts this Mairi sags her head. I want to put the dirt back on her cheeks so no one knows the truth.

He goes to the edge of the stones, stares at Mairi, then begins to rearrange his rucksack, for going.

When a paint-swirled dog comes to make friends with him he kicks it.

We watch him stuff Duncan’s rucksack with the blankets we carried. Then he throws clothes belonging to me and Alex onto the ground between us.

I pick up my clothes, pack them safe beside Mum’s letter.

And we watch the MacNeil brothers walk away.

Mairi comes nearer. She looks worried, as if we’ll kick her like Calum Ian already kicked the dog.

Elizabeth puts a hand up to say Stop; but the hand trembles like it got too heavy to hold.

‘Don’t come past there,’ she says. ‘We need to think about you, all right? Decide if you’re safe.’

Mairi stares and stares at the stones, like the only thing she wants now is to be part of the team.