Empty World by John Christopher Read Free Book Online Page A

Neil remembered his mother teaching him. She could never have imagined him being lost like this.
    He told his story haltingly but clearly. Mummy and Daddy had got sick, and then died. They were upstairs. They had told him not to go out without them. He had been eating biscuits, but they were all gone. He was hungry.
    Neil said: “That’s all right, Tommy. I have some food. You come with me.”
    He hung back, standing in the doorway. Neil put his hand out.
    â€œIt’s all right for you to come out now. Your mummy wouldn’t mind.”
    The boy whispered something Neil failed to catch. He asked him to speak up, and bent towards him. The boy whispered:
    â€œSusie.”
    â€œSusie?”
    Tommy turned and went back into the house, and Neil followed him. The room was very untidy, with toys and clothes and biscuit wrappings scattered everywhere. In front of the empty fireplace wasa rug, cherry red, with a yellow half moon on it and a couple of big silver stars. On the half-moon a very grubby two-year-old girl, partly dressed by her brother’s fumbling fingers, lay sprawled asleep.
    Tommy looked at him, expectant but doubtful. Neil said:
    â€œThat’s all right. We’ll take Susie with us.”
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    Neil carried her back, with Tommy trotting beside him. She was half asleep and mumbled words he did not catch, but seemed quite happy. In the house he ran water into the bath, and put them both in. They accepted this contentedly, not minding the water being cold because the day was so hot. That solved the question of clothes, too, for the time being; after he had dried them on a bath towel he let them run about naked. The clothes they had been wearing were too filthy to be put back on.
    He set about opening tins to make a meal for them and they were soon eating hungrily. While they got on with that—the little girl was more deft with a spoon than he had expected—he washed their clothes through and hung them out to dry.
    Later, while they played with china figurinesfrom his grandmother’s china cabinet, he watched and thought about them. The Plague had struck first at the old, later at the middle-aged, finally at young people. Youth had offered a greater resistance to its onslaught, which seemed to suggest there might be something, some innate defence, which weakened as people grew older. And might that not mean that in the very young the defence would be strong enough to defy the Plague completely?
    Susie, playing with a shepherdess with a crook and a lamb, dropped it and it smashed on the floor. Neil remembered his grandmother letting him hold that piece, very carefully, telling him it was a special piece of Dresden and extremely valuable. Susie looked alarmed, and he thought she might be about to cry. He quickly found her something else, a Limoges jug with snails crawling up the outside, to amuse her.
    These two, he thought with a growing excitement, really might survive. But could they cope, small and unskilled as they were, with the day-to-day problems of living?
    He went to a mirror and looked at his reflection. There was no sign of ageing yet: the lines in his facewere only lines of nervousness and disappeared when he relaxed. But he could not have long. Three days? Four, at most. Not long to prepare a boy of six for the task of looking after himself and a helpless younger sister. But one must do the best with what one had. He called:
    â€œTommy?”
    â€œYes, Neil?”
    â€œThere are some things I want to show you. How to use a tin-opener, to begin with.”
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    Neil got them to bed early. Tommy asked to be told a story, and he did what he could in the way of remembering one his father had been in the habit of telling them at bedtime, about a big steam puffer train and a little electric train. It sounded more and more ridiculous as he went on with it, but Tommy seemed to enjoy it, laughing at places where he remembered