"Hey, Will, you should see this."
"What's up?"
"Looks like someone broke in here before us," Chester replied nervously.
9
The small fire pirouetted on the scraps of timber, filling the earthen chamber with flickering light. Sarah was rotating a makeshift spit over the flames, on which two small carcasses were skewered. The sight and smell of the gently browning meat made her realize how hungry she was. The cat must have felt the same way, if the necklaces of milky drool dangling for its muzzle were anything to go by.
"Good work," she said with a sidelong glance at the animal, which hadn't needed any encouragement to go out and forage food for both of them. In fact, it had seemed relieved to do what it was trained for. In the Colony, its role as a Hunter would have been to trap vermin, particularly eyeless rat, which was considered a rare delicacy.
In the light of the fire, Sarah had an opportunity to inspect the cat more thoroughly. Its bald skin, like an old, partially deflated balloon, was crisscrossed with lacerations and, around its neck, a number of these were a livid purple and had clearly been recently inflicted.
Across one of its shoulders was a nasty-looking gouge, flecked with spots of sickly yellow. The injury was bothering the cat, since it kept trying to clean the wound with its forepaw. Sarah knew she'd have to attend to the injury before long — it was badly infected. That was, if she wanted the animal to live. But considering the possibility of some kind of link with her family, she felt she couldn't just desert it.
"So who did you belong to? Cal or my… my… husband? " she asked, finding it difficult to utter the word. She gently stroked the cat's cheek as it continued to stare fixedly at the roasting carcasses. It wasn't wearing a collar with any form of identification, but this didn't surprise her. It wasn't common practice in the Colony, as Hunters were expected to move through narrow passages and crawlways, and a collar might catch on rocks and hinder the animal in the chase.
Sarah coughed and rubbed her eyes. It wasn't an entirely satisfactory arrangement to have a fire burning underground; the kindling, which was too damp to begin with, had to be kept aloft from the pools of water on the chamber floor by a platform she'd fashioned from a pile of rocks. And, since there was nowhere for the smoke to go, it was filling the chamber so thickly that her eyes kept weeping.
Above all else, she hoped that they were far enough away from anybody that the smell of cooking wouldn't be detected. She consulted her watch. It was nearly twenty-four hours since the incident, and any searches, particularly using dogs, would be unlikely to extend as far as the wasteland above. The police would be concentrating their efforts of the immediate area of the crime scene and on the Common itself.
No, she didn't think it at all likely that she would be discovered here — in any case, none of the police would have the finely developed sense of smell that most Colonists possessed. It occurred to her how remarkably safe she felt down here in the excavation — and being underground again probably played no small part in this. The earthen hollow was a home away from home.
She took up her knife and dug the tip into each carcass.
"Right, dinner's ready," she announced to the cat at her side. It was rapidly switching its expectant gaze from her to the food and back again, with all the regularity of a metronome. She slipped the first carcass, the pigeon, from the spit and onto a folded newspaper in her lap.
"Careful. Hot," she warned, dangling the still-impaled squirrel in front of the cat. But she was wasting her breath: The cat lunged forward, snapping its jaws around the carcass and snatching it off. It immediately scurried away into a dark corner where she could hear it eating noisily, all the time purring furiously.
She juggled the pigeon from one hand to the other, blowing on it as if it were a hot potato. When it had cooled sufficiently, she quickly started on one of the wings, nipping at the meat with her teeth. As she moved on to the breast, tearing off slivers and devouring them appreciatively, she began to assess her situation.
Her cardinal rule for survival was never to stay put for any longer than she had to, particularly when the heat was on. Although her face was a mess from the fight with the policemen, she'd cleaned off the blood and done her best to mask the worst of the bruises. She'd used her makeup kit for this, something she carried with her wherever she went, since her lack of pigmentation, her albinism, forced her to use a blend of sunscreen and foundation cream to protect herself from the sun. So she felt confident that her appearance wouldn't attract attention if she decided to set foot outside the dugout.
Sucking thoughtfully on a tiny bone, she remembered the papers she'd taken from the doormat in the Burrowses' house. She wiped the grease from her hands with a handkerchief and pulled out the clutch of letters from her bag. These were the usual fliers for plumbing services and freelance house painters, which she examined one by one under the light from the dying fire before she fed them to the flames. Then she came across something that looked far more interesting, a manila envelope with a badly typed label. It was to the attention of Mrs. C. Burrows, and the return address was the local services agency.
Sarah wasted no time tearing it open. As she read it, somewhere in the shadows there was a sharp snapping noise: The cat cracked open the squirrel's skull between its jaws, then licked greedily at the animal's exposed brain with its rasping tongue.
Sarah looked up from the letter. Suddenly her path became clear.
10
Will and Cal waded back through the dust to the front door and directed their lights where Chester was pointing. He was right — the edge of the door had been broken off, and not so long ago, if the lighter-colored wood that had been exposed was anything to go by.
"Looks new to me," Chester noted.
"We didn’t do that, did we?" Will asked Cal, who shook his head. "Then we should give this place the once-over, just to make sure," he said.
Keeping together, they moved down the hallway until they reached a pair of large doors, which they flung open. The dust rose up in waves ahead of them, like a visual premonition of their every move. But even before it had begun to settle, they were taking in the size of the room and its impressive features. The depth of the skirting and the elaborate ceiling moldings — an intricate lattice of plasterwork interlacing above them — hinted at its former grandeur. It could have been a ballroom or a formal dining room, given its dimensions and position in the house. As they stood around in the middle of the room, they couldn't help but chuckle because the whole scenario was so unexpected and inexplicable.
Will sneezed several times, irritated by the dust. "I'll tell you something," he said, sniffing and wiping his nose.
"What?" Chester asked.
"This place is a disgrace. It's even worse than my bedroom back home."
"Yep, the maid definitely missed this room!" Chester laughed. As he made the motions of pushing a vacuum cleaner around the floor, he and Will completely cracked up, howling with laughter.
Shaking his head, Cal gave them a look as if they'd taken leave of their senses. The boys resumed their exploration, padding gently through the dust and checking the adjoining rooms. They were mostly small utility rooms, all similarly bare, so they retraced their steps to the hallway, where Will pushed open a door at the foot of one of the staircases.
"Hey! Books!" he said. "It's a library!"
Except for two large windows that had their shutters closed, the walls were covered with shelf upon shelf of books, all the way up to the high ceiling. The room was some one hundred feet square, and toward its farthest end was a table, around which a couple of chairs lay toppled over.