rolls onto his back again, looking up into the sky above.
He thinks he can remember stories about them breaking free from boar farms and going feral, but he’d never thought they were actually
real.
Or even if he was remembering it right.
But, you know, once again,
hell,
he supposes.
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.
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
He thinks he can remember stories about them breaking free from boar farms and going feral, but he’d never thought they were actually
real.
Or even if he was remembering it right.
But, you know, once again,
hell,
he supposes.
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.
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
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