Then a car pulled up in the road directly ahead – a canary yellow Astra that she didn’t recognise – and the driver leaned out of the window.
‘Hey, Lauren!’ he shouted. ‘Can I give you a lift?’
It was Matt.
‘Oi, mate! Fuck off, yeah?’ shouted one of the trolls.
‘Seriously, Lauren, get in.’
Lauren had no love lost for Matthew Hewitson; he’d been a dick of the first order and under any other circumstance she’d tell him to get knotted, but right now he was the lesser of two evils so she hurried around to the passenger door, which he had already opened, and got in.
* * *
‘Thanks, Matt,’ she said as he drove away.
‘Hey, no problem.’
He watched the figures grow smaller in his rear-view mirror. One of them waved. If Lauren was watching she’d probably just see it as sarcastic, but to Matt it was a wave that said ‘job well done’. That had been the best hundred quid he’d ever spent. When this was all over he’d probably even buy Jason and his mates a round at the Golden, sort of as a bonus. She really did look terrified: flushed, out of breath, and almost on the verge of bursting into tears.
‘Are you okay?’ he asked.
‘No, I’m not fucking okay!’ she snapped. ‘Those dickheads! Those absolute fucking dickheads!’
He drove in silence for a while, letting her compose herself. ‘How are you doing these days, anyway?’ he asked. ‘I mean, generally, like.’
‘Generally, like? When I’m not being harassed by kiddie perverts?’ She shrugged. ‘Okay, I suppose.’ She looked around properly for the first time. ‘You seem to be doing okay for yourself, car like this.’
He shrugged. ‘I’ve met some helpful people. But are you well? You know – health-wise?’
‘Why are you asking after my health? Why are you being weird?’
‘You used to have asthma, didn’t you?’
She gave him a strange look. ‘What do you mean “used to”?’
‘I mean that you don’t have it any more, do you?’
That strange look had turned into a stare of outright suspicion and fear. ‘How do you know that?’ she whispered. ‘I haven’t told anybody that.’
He shrugged again. ‘Lucky guess.’
She was paying more attention to what was outside the car now – the countryside that they were driving through. ‘And where are we, anyway? This isn’t the way to my place. Where are we going?’
‘To meet my new friends. I think they’ll really like you, especially Mother.’
‘Like fuck we are. Let me out of the car!’ She fumbled at the door handle even though they were still moving. ‘Let me out!’
‘I don’t think that would be a good idea,’ he said. The village roads had taken them onto the A38, which at this point was a dual carriageway following an old Roman Road called Rykneld Street. It ran straight as an arrow from Lichfield to Burton, a stretch infamous for joy-riding races, and he pushed the speed up to sixty.
Lauren left the door alone and took her phone out of her handbag. ‘You take me home right now!’ she demanded. ‘Or I am calling the police. I’ve fucking had enough of this.’
‘Okay, sure, no problem. Taking you home now. Next intersection, I swear.’
And he did – at the very next turning he pulled left off the dual carriageway and headed back for Dodbury along the narrow country lanes. He didn’t mind – it was the turning he had planned to take anyway, since it went by Farrow Farm. ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you. I just want to apologise for the way I treated you earlier this year,’ he said. ‘I was a dick. And also for, you know, beating up Daz. I should have been happy for you two, I know that now.’
‘Yeah, well,’ she muttered. ‘Me and Daz have split up, so there’s that.’
This was an interesting turn of events. ‘Sorry to hear that,’ he replied, feeling anything but.
‘But you were still a dick.’
‘I know. Believe me when I say that I want to make it up to you.’
She didn’t respond to this; just stared out of her window at the passing trees and hedges.
‘You’re not going to ask me how I know that your asthma has cleared up?’
‘I just want you to get me home,’ she said without looking at him. ‘This day has been weird enough already without adding to it.’
‘It was the pork you ate at that hog roast on the allotments back in March.’
‘Please. Stop talking.’
‘And you weren’t the only one. I’ve seen a man grow back a missing eye. I broke all these fingers and they healed in a week.’ He waved at her with his right hand to show her. ‘I was buried alive, and died, and then I dug myself out and was reborn. We’ve been blessed, Lauren. Miracles really do happen.’
She dug for her phone again. ‘That’s it,’ she said. ‘I warned you.’
He snatched the phone from her hand and threw it out of his window. ‘No. Can’t have that, sorry. Everett really will kill me.’
She stared, open-mouthed, then launched herself at him, screaming and scratching at his face. Her attack was so sudden and vicious that he nearly lost control of the car, ploughing up the grass verge and into the hedge on the driver’s side. Its stiff branches made a screeching noise like fingernails down a blackboard as they did to his paint job what Lauren was trying to do to his eyes, but he wrestled the car back onto the road and then back-handed her – not as hard as he could have done, just enough to quieten her down. Her head flopped back against the head-rest, blood spilling from her nose. It was all right, though. She was just stunned. She’d eaten the first flesh, like him, and she’d heal quickly enough. Luckily these lanes were
