Finders Keepers

The first fat drops of rain fell on to the concrete, releasing the hot smell of dust. More rang slowly off the corrugated plastic roofs.

Bob Coffin padlocked one end of a coupling chain to Steven’s collar and handed him the other end. He unlocked the gate next door, and pointed at Jonas.

‘Put it on him, bay,’ he said.

Steven walked slowly into Jonas’s cage. It was strange to be so close to him after all the time they’d spent in separate spaces. It made everything seem brighter, more real. Jonas lay twisted on one side, like a dead fox in a ditch. His stretched skin was split in a dozen swollen yellow-purple places, the way a loaf cracks open as it rises. As Steven approached, Jonas stopped scraping the chain on the cement and watched him through one eye, the shallow rise of his ribs now the only thing that showed he was alive.

‘Can you sit up?’

Slowly, Jonas put a flat hand on the cement, and Steven helped him to sit against the mesh.

Steven knelt and attached the other end of the coupling chain to his collar. Now they were harnessed to each other.

‘Here.’

Steven looked round. The huntsman was leaning towards him with the key. He nodded at the padlock that held Jonas to the fence. Steven noticed that as soon as he took the key, the huntsman stepped quickly away, afraid of getting too close to Jonas.

Steven unlocked Jonas from the fence and helped him to his unsteady feet.

‘Where are we going?’ said Jonas.

‘Exercise. Put your arm on my shoulder,’ said Steven, and Jonas did, and together they left the stinking kennel. As they passed the huntsman, he held out his hand for the key and then slipped it into his pocket.

The others were already on the walkway, waiting for them: Pete and Jess linked together, and Kylie with Maisie.

Jonas was all bones. Steven guessed they all were, but to feel another man’s bones against his own was strangely sad.

The rain got louder on the roofs, and the children turned their faces to it and opened their mouths.

‘Hup!’ said the huntsman.

They were facing the meadow, as usual, but the huntsman spread his arms and encouraged them to turn the other way – towards the big shed.

‘Hup! Hup!’

Pete and the girls started to shuffle slowly round, but Steven stood his ground.

‘Where are we going?’

‘Hup!’ said the huntsman.

Steven didn’t move. This didn’t feel right. Routine had kept them alive for so long and this was not routine. First Jonas had been let out, and now they were being herded towards the big shed instead of the meadow. Steven started to feel bad. He didn’t exactly feel sick, but he thought he might quite soon.

‘Why aren’t we going to the meadow?’

‘Hup!’

‘Where are we going?’ said Steven stubbornly.

The huntsman paused and then gestured vaguely at the sky. ‘Helicopter.’

They all looked up, but saw nothing, heard nothing. Even so, Maisie began to sob loudly, which set Kylie off like a twin.

The younger children continued to move, searching the sky. Even Jonas moved his weight as if he expected Steven to start walking.

But Steven didn’t.

Instinct had served Steven well in his short life, and every instinct he possessed now told him something was wrong.

‘Hup!’ said Bob Coffin, poking and pushing at Jonas and Steven to try to get them started. ‘Get on now!’

‘We’re not cows,’ said Steven, shaking him off angrily. ‘We’re not bloody cows.’

Bob Coffin calmly pulled the gun out of his pocket and pointed it at Steven’s face. Steven ducked and Jess shrieked.

‘Helicopter,’ said the huntsman flatly.

There was no helicopter, but, galvanized by the gun, they all moved up the walkway made slippery by the rain.

Jonas wasn’t leaning too heavily on Steven, but it was still awkward to walk without stumbling. They were bumpingly close – all sharp elbows and hips. The loose end of the yard-long chain that had tethered Jonas to the fence for so long swung between them, the padlock bouncing off their thighs. Steven thought he should have unlocked it at the collar end, but whatever – it didn’t seem like a big problem after the gun.

They walked down the rutted concrete ramp into the big shed.

Steven looked around him at the room he’d only ever seen half of when fully conscious – and through a crack in a wall. It was bigger than he’d thought – big enough for a couple of tractors, at least – and almost empty. There was an old wooden bench on one side of the room, where he could see three knives laid out as if for supper at a grand house: neatly, and in order of length. There was a whetstone gripped in a shiny blue metal vice, a couple of lengths of heavy chain, some shackles and spring clips and a few rusting cans; Steven recognized 3-in-1 oil and Castrol grease from Ronnie’s garage.

Em’s arms around him, her warm breath on his neck … ‘I don’t care’ …

His heart ached to think of it.

On one wall was the electric winch, its steel cable the only thing in the shed that glinted with newness. Bolted low on the wall directly opposite was a heavy curled hook. Directly between the two was a drain and a small dark patch – the only evidence, Stephen realized, of countless animals that had been butchered on the spot – the place where the head was severed from the neck and the blood leaked out.

Beside the hook was the half-open door to the flesh room, and Steven’s stomach rolled at what was to come. The memory of being enclosed in the cold, fetid flesh was shockingly clear.

‘I don’t want to! I don’t want to!’ Maisie’s continuing sobs echoed loudly in his head, joining forces with the rain beating on the iron roof.

Even if the helicopter were directly overhead, Steven doubted that any of them would hear it now. He wondered what they might look like through a thermal-imaging camera: an odd party of white blobs shuffling together across the shed, becoming greyer in the cold of the flesh room, and then disappearing altogether once they were inside the meat. Maybe a grey foot would protrude, or a charcoal elbow – but the crew overhead would have to know what they were looking for. What they were looking at.

Bob Coffin turned on a flickering fluorescent strip light and squealed the shed door shut on its un-oiled runners. As the yard and the kennels and the darkening sky disappeared behind them, Steven’s instincts gifted him a powerful mental image of the stone lid of an ancient tomb closing over his head.

Jonas saw the same things they all did: the bench, the vice, the winch, the chains. But he truly looked at only one thing – the half-open door to the flesh room, where Bob Coffin would soon stuff the weeping, terrified children into the stinking carcasses like pimentos in olives. Already the huntsman had a hold of the chain between Jess and Pete. Already he was tugging them away from the others, the gun in his hand making things easy.

But there was something wrong …

Jonas frowned and strained his eyes, and leaned away from Steven to see as much of the small room as possible. It was dark but his eyes were adjusting, and it shouldn’t be that hard to see …

When he realized what he was seeing – or what he wasn’t seeing – Jonas felt the world tilt under him. He stumbled and Steven grabbed him before he could fall.

‘You OK?’

Jonas shook his head.

He wasn’t OK.