Down Station by Simon Morden

whatever-his-name-was, the kid with the turban, seemed to have shut up about being dead.
    So she sat with her back to a tree, like she was in one of the local parks, and watched those around her. That was only good for a while, and she became bored. Little was happening: everyone seemed content just to stare into the fire and feel the warmth of it against their skin. It reminded her too much of the tunnels, and she got up to walk away.
    ‘Hey. Where are you going?’
    Stanislav had the top half of his boilersuit tied around his waist, baring a grey-looking vest spilling muscle and tufts of grey chest hair. To her, it looked grotesque. Old men were supposed to keep everything covered up.
    ‘You don’t get to tell me what to do,’ she said.
    The turbaned kid looked up. ‘I’ll go with her.’ He was still barefoot, but he reached for his socks.
    ‘Oh, fuck off.’
    Stanislav, his stubbly head glistening from work, put the end of the branch he carried on the floor, then pressed his foot against it a third of the way up. It bent, and snapped with a sharp crack. ‘We do not know what is out there. We have seen one monster already, there may be more.’
    ‘That was in the sea. And I was just going for a walk.’
    ‘No one will go and look for you when you do not return.’
    ‘I wouldn’t want them to.’
    Stanislav shrugged, reduced the branch further, and threw all three pieces on to the growing pile where they landed in a hollow clatter.
    ‘As you say, I do not tell you what to do. In return, you cannot expect us to do what you want.’
    ‘Whatever. Later.’ She walked between the trees, waving her hand over her shoulder.
    She’d barely got any distance before she heard footsteps hurrying after her. She didn’t turn around, just kept walking.
    ‘Haven’t you learned anything from films?’
    ‘Fuck. Off.’
    ‘Seriously. We don’t know where we are, we don’t know what’s out there. You can’t just wander off like this.’
    There was very little undergrowth: mostly small, thin plants and long looping briars. The leaf litter made every footfall release a deep, earthy scent. The overlapping branches above formed an almost complete canopy, throwing deep shade over everything below. Where a tree had fallen, there was a clearing, bright with sunlight and hazy with insects. They were like islands in a sea of gloom.
    She stopped and looked around. She could see tiny flashes of orange boilersuit coming from the tree line, but if she went only a little further, she’d be lost, unable to find her way back.
    It wasn’t like a local park at all, with paths and play areas, and a lake with scruffy-looking ducks. This was the wild wood, stretching beyond this point for as far as it pleased. There were no tower blocks on the borders, and the realisation struck her with all the force of a punch to the side of the head.
    The turbaned kid had a stout branch in his hands, his fingers digging into the rough bark. It was the best weapon and, unless his little blunt knife counted, the only weapon that they could muster.
    She didn’t want to lose face. Neither did she want to carry on any further. She could have gone down towards the river, but hadn’t. Instead, she was in the middle of a forest with a stick-wielding kid in a blue turban and a ridiculous beard.
    ‘Fuck.’
    ‘Look. Stanislav’s right: you can do what you want, but it’d be stupid to just wander off after all we’ve been through.’
    ‘What if there’s someone just over the hill who can help us, and we’ll never know unless we go there.’
    ‘And there might be someone – or something – just over the hill that might eat us. We don’t know that either. So being together is always going to be better, right?’
    Who was she going to be? Was she going to be the one who came through the fire and survived, or was she the one who was too fucking arsey to be with and eventually abandoned? Because that wasn’t a pattern that had repeated itself throughout