More Than This (7 page)

He looks around furtively as he walks, turning often to make sure nothing’s following him. He reaches the street leading up into town. Aside from the huge sinkhole across the middle of it – ablaze with a weed forest of its own – it’s the same as everywhere else. Cars on deflated tires, covered in dust, houses with paint peeling off, and no signs of life anywhere.

He stops at the edge of the sinkhole. It looks like a water pipe ruptured somewhere and the ground opened up like you saw sometimes on the news, usually with journalists in helicopters hovering over, saying nothing much for very long spaces of time.

There are no cars down in it and none stopped along the edge either, so it must have happened long after the traffic ceased.

Unless the traffic never started,
he thinks.
Unless this place didn’t exist until I
–

“Stop it,” he says. “Just stop it.”

He has a fleeting, almost casual thought, about how there is so much plant life in this place, all these weeds and ridiculous grasses, all growing completely out of control and unchecked, like down here in this really quite huge hole.

So you’d think there’d be –

And before he can even think the word
animals,
he sees the fox.

It’s frozen there, down at the bottom, tucked in amongst the weeds, its eyes bright and surprised in the morning sun.

A fox.

A real, live,
living
fox.

It blinks at him, alert, but not quite afraid, not yet.

“What the hell?” Seth whispers.

There’s a small bark, and three baby foxes – pups? No,
kits,
he remembers – climb playfully over their mother, before freezing, too, when they see Seth standing there above them.

They wait and watch, looking ready to run, ready to respond to whatever Seth does next. Seth wonders what he’ll do next, too. Wonders also at the reddish brown faces and the bright staring eyes of the creatures. Wonders what they mean.

It’s a long time before he moves away from the sinkhole, but the fox and her kits never stop staring at him, even as he heads back up the street.

Foxes,
he thinks.
Actual foxes.

At the very moment he thought about them.

Almost as if he’d called them into being himself.

He hurries up toward the High Street now, his head still down, eyes glancing around even more suspiciously. Every moment, he expects something to come jumping out of the bushes, out of the unkempt lawns or weedy cracks in the pavement.

But nothing does.

He feels himself tiring again, quickly, too quickly, and when he reaches the High Street, he almost collapses on a nearby bench, panting from the effort of walking up a short hill.

It makes him angry. He spent three years on the cross-country team at Boswell High, the hobby and habit of running having been picked up from his mother, something that should have brought them closer together but had somehow not. Granted, he wasn’t a particularly serious competitor, Boswell regularly got beaten quite badly, but still. There’s no way he should be out of breath walking up one stupid road.

He looks around. The High Street is really just a long, skinny town square, blocked off at each end by metal posts. His mother would shop here with him and Owen when every square inch was covered in stalls selling sugared almonds and popcorn; homemade candles and bracelets that were meant to cure arthritis; ethnic clocks and paintings even toddler Owen thought were ugly.

There’s nothing here now. It’s a vast, empty space, with the now-familiar proliferation of weeds and abandoned-looking buildings lining either side, just like any other street.

Seth waits a moment before getting up from the bench.

He didn’t create the fox. He
didn’t.
It was just hidden there in the weeds, and he saw it, that was all. He’s thought of plenty of things since he’s been here, his parents and Owen, Gudmund and H and Monica, even his uncle when he saw the painting over the hearth, and none of
them
had suddenly appeared.

There were wild plants, and this seemed for all intents and purposes to be England, so why wouldn’t there be foxes? Foxes were English. He remembers seeing them when he lived here, sloping across the street with their oddly adult air of detachment. So of course, there’d be foxes. Why not?

But foxes had to eat. Seth’s eyes pore over the trees that grow from brick boxes up the High Street, looking for birds, maybe, or squirrels or rats. They must be there. If one fox was here, there had to be more animals, more
something.

Didn’t there? If he just didn’t actually
create
–

“Hey,” he says, stopping this line of thought but feeling unsatisfied.

“Hey,” he says again, not sure why he’s saying it, wanting to say it once more.

And louder this time.

“Hey!” he says, standing up.

“HEY!”

He shouts it again and again, his fists clenched, his throat raking from the effort. He keeps screaming until he’s hoarse, until his voice actually breaks.

It’s only then that he realizes his face is wet from more crying.

“Hey,” he says, whispering it now.

No one answers.

Not a bird or a squirrel or the fox or her kits.

No one answers from any quarter.

He’s alone.

He swallows against the pain in his throat and goes to see what he can find.

The stores along the High Street are all locked. The sun is brighter now, and Seth has to shield his eyes against the windows to see inside. Some – the doughnut shop, the Subway Sandwich, something called Topshop – seem to have been cleared out, just empty racks and barren shelves, packaging strewn across the floor, naked mannequins lined up against the wall.

But they’re not all empty. The thrift store looks full, should he ever need a tea set and a bunch of moldy paperbacks, as does a place that seems to sell only wedding dresses, but he can’t really see that as a practical option for an outfit, even in hell.

And then his heart quickens as he looks through the glass of the outdoor supply store next to it.

“No way,” he says. “No
way.
”

He can see backpacks inside and camping gear and who knows what else that might be insanely useful.

Suspiciously
useful, he has a moment to think, but he pushes that thought away, too. There were outdoor stores all over the world. There just were, so why not here?

The glass door is locked, and he looks around for something to break it with, finding some loose bricks in one of the tree stands. He picks one up, but even in this empty, empty place, the prohibition against what he’s about to do is so strong, all he does is toss the brick up and down in his hand a few times. He’s played baseball and basketball in gym class, the first boring him nearly to death, the second being almost kind of fun in a run-around-and-shout kind of way that other people took seriously enough that it meant he didn’t have to get too involved. But he knows he can at least
throw
something, even if not particularly skillfully or especially far.

But still. A brick through a store door.

He looks around again, and once again, he’s alone.

“Here goes nothing,” he whispers.

He rears back and throws it as hard as he can.

The shattering sound is loud enough to end the world. Seth instinctively ducks down, ready to make excuses that it wasn’t him, that it was an accident –

But of course there’s no one.

“Idiot,” he says, smiling, embarrassed now. He stands again, the feeling of having
done
something, anything, making him actually swagger a little up to the now gaping door.

Where a flock of screeching darkness comes hurtling out past his head at blindingly fast speed. He falls to the ground, protecting his head with his hands, shouting in wordless terror –

And as quick as it came, it’s passed, the world silent again except for his racing breath.

He looks up and sees the flock gathering itself into a panicked ball as it disappears over the roof of the shuttered-up bookstore.

Bats.

Bats.

He laughs to himself before getting up, kicking away the broken glass that still stands in the door, and crouching his way inside.

It’s a cave of treasures.

He grabs a backpack off a display. Next to it, he finds a whole wall of flashlights, which excites him at first, but there are no batteries to be found anywhere. He takes a large one anyway, long and heavy enough to feel like a weapon even if it never produces light. He finds a bunch of dried-up food rations nearby, too; terrible-looking stuff, freeze-dried pot roast, soup with inflatable dried vegetables, that sort of thing, but it’s better than nothing, and he also finds a little stack of butane camp stoves to cook it all on, hoping they won’t blow up in his hands the first time he tries to use one.

The store seems more tightly sealed than his house, and there’s less dust covering everything. A row of first-aid kits is practically clean, and he stuffs one in the backpack, then pauses. He takes another kit and opens it. It’s got the usual: bandages, alcohol swabs, but there, right at the back, he finds a packet labeled CONDUCTIVE TAPE. He tears it open with his teeth. A bundle of bandages falls to the ground.

He doesn’t even need to pick it up to see that the underside is covered in metallic foil.

He reads the empty packet again, but
CONDUCTIVE TAPE
is all it says, along with some pictorial instructions for how to stick it to your skin. Nothing to say what it’s for or why you’d use it or why the hell you’d ever wrap so much of it around your body.

“Conductive tape,” he says.

Like it’s so obvious it doesn’t
need
an explanation.

He leaves it there on the floor, not wanting to pick it up again, and heads for the clothes racks at the back of the store.

They’re so full he laughs out loud. They’ve even got
underwear.
Granted, it’s thermal-insulated so probably a little hot for summer, but he’s out of the baggy sweatpants and pulling on a pair before he thinks to mind. The cool cleanness of them feels so good he almost has to sit down.

The rest of the clothes seem to be mainly for mountaineering and hiking, but there are T-shirts and shorts and an expensive all-weather jacket that he takes. He exchanges the old sweatpants for what are essentially just more expensive sweatpants, but at least these ones don’t make him look like a transient. There are also more kinds of socks than he can count.

It takes him a while to find shoes that fit, having to wade through an ammonia-smelling pile of bat guano to get into the stockroom and find a pair his size. But soon enough, he’s fully equipped. He grabs up everything and heads out into the sunshine.

Where he’s immediately drenched in sweat because it’s far too hot to be wearing such heavy clothing.

For a moment, though, he doesn’t mind. He just closes his eyes against the sun and takes it all in. He’s not naked, he’s not in dirty bandages, and he’s not completely filthy with dust. He’s wearing clean clothes and new shoes and for the first time since he died, he feels almost human.

The supermarket at the end of the High Street is deeper and darker than the rest of the stores, but through the glass frontage, Seth thinks he can still see shelves filled with
something.
He shifts the pack on his back and realizes, stupidly, that he’s overloaded it with clothes and other supplies. No place to put any groceries. He sets it down and starts to take stuff out that he can come back for, but then something against a wall catches his eye.

That
’ll do.

It takes him nearly fifteen minutes to get a rusty shopping cart separated from the petrified row of them, but eventually it comes, its wheels even mostly turning if he forces them hard enough.

It’s easier to throw a brick the second time, though once inside, the store is much darker than he thought. The ceiling is low, and the aisles block any view of what they might be hiding in their depths. He thinks of the bats again. And what if there was something larger in there than a fox? Did England have big predators? There were mountain lions and bears in the forests back home, but he couldn’t remember a single dangerous thing anyone ever mentioned as living in England.