*
They made ice packs for Emma and Kingsley and bandaged Emma’s knee. Then Brian showed the three of them to a clean, spacious guest bedroom where they could put their bags down and Eric could get some sleep in an actual bed.
That was when Kingsley realised just how tired he was. His eyes wanted to shut almost more than his stomach wanted food. But dinner was close to ready, so he went back downstairs to join the others at the dining table.
His sense of smell was almost completely gone, along with his ability to breathe through his nose, but he could still taste how rich the beef and red wine stew was.
He was so absorbed in the tastes dancing around on his tongue that he didn’t pay much attention to the conversation Leena and Emma were having next to him. All he heard was the end of it, Leena telling her sister, “You’re home now.” He looked over and saw them hugging. But when he caught Emma’s eye, what he saw on her face was the shadow of uncertainty and fear, not the relief and happiness of homecoming.
Having lived with her for over a year and having got to know her very well, Kingsley knew right away what it was.
Home was the one place where Emma allowed herself to feel safe, but with that safe space came the anxiety associated with the possibility of losing it. The knowledge that at any moment that safety could be pulled out from under her feet.
It had already happened once.
7.
On the second day of them staying at the house, Eric’s stab wound began to look infected, the skin around it turning puffy and red with pus leaking from the wound itself. He had hardly left the bed at all since arriving, Kingsley bringing food up to the room for him. And now he also had a fever.
Brian had some spare co-amoxiclav prescription antibiotics from a harsh bout of pneumonia last winter, so he gave them to Eric; the leaflet inside the box said they could be used to treat skin and soft tissue infections. But his wound had been clogged with dirt before Kingsley had cleaned it out, which meant a lot of bacteria had gotten in there. They weren’t sure if the co-amoxiclav would suffice.
They could only hope.
*
It was quiet here. They saw quite a few snappers, but they were all lone ones or only in pairs, never in groups large enough to pose a threat. The curtains were kept shut and the lights switched off as much as possible, but as the house was set quite far back from the road, the survivors didn’t need to worry too much about noise.
Most of the snappers ambled up to the gate and seemed to inspect the driveway and the hedges – some of them grabbing and pushing against the iron bars of the gate as if they knew there were survivors beyond it – before meandering back to the road.
The ones that stayed at the gate for several minutes, usually because they had sensed activity in the grounds of the house, were safely dispatched with a knife between the bars. The bodies were then moved to a ditch not far down the road so they wouldn't fester in the driveway.
Occasionally the survivors would hear the faint rustle of a snapper moving through the grass on the other side of the hedges that surrounded the property.
Kingsley had taken to walking laps of the circumference of the property along the inside of the hedges; Brian had near enough an acre of land and it gave Kingsley the chance to stretch his legs and get some fresh air.
It was during one of these walks on a calm, pink-skied evening that, as he was coming along the back hedge near the empty stables, Kingsley heard a startling splash and spun to face the rear of the house where he saw that Archie had just jumped into the pool. The dog paddled to the middle of the pool and then came back to the edge and hopped out of the water with something in his mouth.
Hearing Emma swear in frustration from beside the pool, he realised what had happened; she’d been playing fetch with the dog and had accidentally lobbed the stick she was using into the pool.
Emma knew that she would now have to dry him off with a towel before he went back into the house, and she was probably also wondering how long it had been since the pool had last been cleaned.
Archie trotted up to Emma and dropped the stick at her feet.
She didn’t pick it up though. Instead she moved away from him as quick as her sprained knee would allow – too slow to avoid the catapult of water droplets as Archie jiggled himself dry.
“Shit. Bollocks – oh for god’s—” Emma began. But then she burst out laughing.
It was a pleasant sound. One that Kingsley hadn’t heard in months. One that he’d missed, a lot.
He only realised that he had chuckled out loud himself when Emma went quiet and turned around to look at him. Suddenly he felt awkward.
Kingsley had always found her laugh contagious – loud and somewhat maniacal, the complete opposite of how you would expect it to sound; his own laughter just now had been more a response to hers than a reaction to the comical sight of the dog flinging water all over her. And when Emma looked at him he felt like she saw right through him. That she knew he was enjoying the sound of her laugh. That she knew her smile still flooded his
