She nods once. She knew the answer to the question before she asked it.
'He saved us all,' I add. 'Little madman took out the entire US army, if you can believe that.'
She looks up, amazed. 'What?'
I nod, smiling. 'Nuked them.'
Her mouth falls open in astonishment then she begins to laugh.
'He asked about you,' I continue, smiling in spite of myself. 'Wanted us to find you, tell you he loved you.'
Gradually her laughter subsides and she wipes away a tear that could equally have been caused by hilarity as grief.
'He stayed behind so I could escape,' she says eventually. 'The surgeon who operated on me came to get me during the attack. Spirited me away from right under their noses.'
'Where did he take you?'
'We spent a while in a house somewhere in Bristol, while I recovered. Just the two of us.'
'Did he…?'
'Oh yes,' she says matter of factly. 'But, you know, could have been worse.' She registers my look of horror and dismisses it with a scowl. 'I'm still alive,' she snaps, irritably.
'Okay,' I say, eager to move on. 'And then?'
'He traded me to a trafficker for a pallet of Pot Noodles and a bag of firelighters.'
I stare intently at the floor, unable to meet her gaze. 'I should have looked after you better,' I say. 'I'm so sorry. This is all on me.'
I feel her hand on mine and I look up. She's not smiling, but she's not scowling either. 'Not your fault. Move on,' is all she says. But I'm worried for her. Caroline and Rowles were inseparable for a while. Kindred spirits. Bonnie and Clyde. But while she was brave, strong and ruthless to a fault, she didn't have the emotional detachment of her younger partner in crime. I remember the look on her face, the utter horror, when she accidentally shot a soldier who was trying to help us. Rowles would have shrugged and made some comment about tough luck; Caroline was devastated.
Yet here she is leading an army, battle scarred and hardened and not yet sixteen. I wonder if that vulnerable core has been entirely burnt away.
'I thought you'd died in the nuke,' I explain. 'It wasn't 'til much later that we discovered you weren't there. We searched high and low for you, I swear.'
'I believe you. But once the traffickers had me, I was shipped straight to London.'
'You escaped, though. I mean, look at this place. Why not come find me?'
'I was… busy for a year or so. And when I did manage to get away, I didn't escape alone. I had this lot to look after. And a war to fight.'
'Against who? Who are these bastards?'
She regards me coolly for a moment then says: 'Come with me.'
As we walk out into the main street and down to the centre of town, we talk more, filling in the blanks. I tell her how I ended up in the van, about the snatchers and how they killed Lee, John and Tariq; she relates stories of all the times the church have tried to track them down or infiltrate them. There's a streak of ruthlessness to Caroline's tale — moles identified and shot no matter how young they may have been, lethal traps laid at freshly abandoned living spaces. She's been fighting a guerrilla war and she's been fighting dirty. I don't have the right to disapprove — she's kept these kids safe in the face of overwhelming odds — but there's a disquieting element to her stories. I can't decide whether her precautions and her summary justice were always justified or whether she's succumbed to paranoia. I remember how Lee was after the siege of St Mark's; reckless, too quick to fight when a calmer head could have avoided the need. I see a lot of that in Caroline. The sooner I get her back to the school, the better.
It's so long since I've been in a city that I've almost forgotten what it's like to be surrounded by concrete. Everywhere I look is evidence of The Culling Year. Burnt out cars and buildings, skeletons in the street, a wrecked van, turned on its side. Someone's gone mad with an aerosol too — up and down the high street, in big red letters it reads 'whoops apocalypse J' over and over again.
With no council maintenance teams to trim them, the trees are taking over. Tough grass is starting to force its way through the moss-covered tarmac, and foxes stroll blithely down the road eyeing us more with hunger than fear, as if calculating the odds of successfully bring us down and making us their next meal.
As we walk and talk, Caroline notices me watching the foxes. 'Keep clear of them and they'll keep clear of you. Otherwise they tend to go for the throat. And if you hear a dog barking, go the other way. Don't let them get your scent. We've managed to trap and eat most of the local packs, but there are still a couple of nasty ones left. We lost a girl to one of them only last week. Seven, she was. Poor love wandered off and tried to play fetch with a Rottweiller.'
We cross what would once have been a busy traffic junction and suddenly I realise that we're not alone. I become aware of shadows flitting underneath the overpass, and catch a snatch of raucous laughter somewhere up ahead, echoing through a deserted shopping mall. There are people here, all moving in the same direction as we are. Then we turn a corner and I see our destination: The Hammersmith Apollo. The sign above the entrance still reads 'Oct 24/5 Britain's Got Talent Roadshow!'
There's a small market outside, a pathetic collection of scavengers trying to barter remnants and relics for food. But there's precious little of that, just an improvised spit on which rotate a couple of thin looking pigeons. The smell isn't exactly appetising.
Caroline notices my disgust. 'I know. You've probably got a big old vegetable garden and a field of sheep, huh?'
I nod.
'I dream about mashed potato,' she says wistfully.
'Then why are you still here?'
'Because of him,' she says, pointing.
I look up and see a huge mural painted onto the theatre wall. It stretches the entire height of the building and depicts a withered old man in glowing white robes. His balding head is ringed by a red circular halo and his hands are stretched out towards us in a gesture of welcome. Blood drips from his fingers. I suppose it's intended to be beatific, religious, holy. But to me it just looks fucking creepy, because standing around him, gazing up at him in awe and wonder, are a gaggle of children.
'The Abbot,' says Caroline. 'Come on, it's nearly time for the miracle' She leads me through the market and into the theatre.
Inside is a small wiry man with a little stall selling bags of KP peanuts. I gawp. 'I know,' says Caroline, registering my amazement. 'He's here every time, and no-one knows where he gets them. People have tried following him back to wherever he's got his stockpile, but he's too slippery.'
'Hey, thin man,' she says cheerily. 'Can I get a freebie for my guest here?'
The peanut seller smiles broadly and tosses a packet to me. 'Anything for you, sweetheart,' he says. Caroline blows him a kiss and we walk through the doors into the auditorium as I pull open the packet and inhale the salty aroma. Yum.
'We rescued his daughter — well, he says she's his daughter — from the snatchers six months back,' she offers as explanation.
There's a big screen on the stage and a projector in front of it. A relatively large crowd — fifty or so people — has gathered in front of the stage. I hear the cough and splutter of a generator starting up and settling into its rhythm before the projector comes alive and beams snowstorm static for our amusement.
'So what are we going to see?' I ask through a mouthful of honey roasted heaven.
'Wait and see. It happens at the same time every fortnight,' she says, as we take our positions at the edge of the crowd.
The television signal kicks in and we see a graphic of a red circle against a light blue background, and then the show begins. The miracle.
The broadcast is by a group who call themselves the Apostolic Church of the Rediscovered Dawn and they're — wouldn't you know it — American. Their leader is the creepy guy from the mural. An ancient, wizened old vampire who's survived the plague despite being — he claims — AB Positive. He provides a demonstration, mixing
