Doctor Who_ Cat's Cradle_ Warhead - Andrew Cartmel [63]
Now despite herself Justine found her thoughts focusing on the house, imagining exactly what she might find in it. She forced herself to concentrate on the shopping. It would have to wait until nightfall and it would have to be a long walk. It was tempting to go to the nearest village to buy water, but she didn’t want the presence of a stranger to register with the locals. Word might somehow get back to the house.
Justine chewed the strips of spiced dry meat and carefully planned her walk that night. She would find an off‐licence or late‐night video and grocery store. She’d buy some food for Sammy in addition to the water. She wasn’t cruel. This morning when she’d left their tent she’d weighed her canteen and poured most of the contents into the old battered tin bowl that Sammy drank from. Now there was only a sip left in the canteen for her and the charqui was dry in her mouth. The muscles in her jaws ached but she didn’t mind. She didn’t begrudge the water left in the tin bowl. Sammy was tied to a tree by the tents and he’d need it. Lapping it up with his big pink tongue in the noon heat.
Justine swallowed the charqui. It went down a little painfully, but it did go down. Before she unwrapped the next piece she opened her leather ammunition bag and took out the magazines. When she had bought the bag in London the man had told her it was a relic of the Spanish Civil War. But that wasn’t why Justine bought it. She bought it for the silver skull and crossbones and the silver lettering that said Clean Up Or Die. Inside the bag were the covers for the CDs, the rest of her dry rations and the magazines. She told herself she wouldn’t read the magazines yet, but she found herself looking at the covers.
The magazines were thin, forty or fifty pages each. Printed on cheap paper which had begun to swell with damp after a couple of nights in the woods. The pictures in the magazines were all black and white. Some of the covers were in colour, but not the one Justine was interested in. On the cover was a grainy monochrome photograph of an old house set in wide overgrown grounds. Justine looked up from the magazine and through the trees. The photograph had been taken with a long lens, from a position very close to where she was sitting right now. Did the thought frighten her? No. It was exciting.
She leafed through the magazine, glancing at the article that went with the cover photograph. She didn’t read the article. She knew it word for word.
Justine unwrapped the second strip of dried meat and put it in her mouth. Her mouth was dry meat too, she reflected as she began to chew. She’d allow herself a sip of water with this one. As she reached for the canteen she became aware of a faint background buzzing. The sound was so constant it was like silence. She couldn’t say when it had started or how long it had been going on. It was a fierce buzzing and Justine instantly thought of a machine of some kind. She drew the knife from her boot.
The line of fracture between two halves of the stone slab was filled with vegetation. Weeds, grass and thin bushes had found their way up to the sunlight through the dividing crack and over time had widened it, the massed tiny strength of roots and stems shifting the thousand kilos of stone. Justine moved silently up her half of the slab, crawling over sun‐warmed stone mottled with fungus. She couldn’t see through the growth at the broken edge of the stone. Justine extended the knife and carefully divided the foliage, taking five minutes to create a gap she could see through. She spent another ten minutes looking through. The sound continued all the time, but as she watched it grew steadily weaker. Finally Justine stood upright and stepped over the bushes to the other side of the slab.
There by her foot was a bee. Its black and yellow stripes reminded Justine of the black and yellow capsule she carried