They left town in the early hours and never looked back. They followed the road through fog and emerged the other side to more fog still and it was everywhere and they could not escape it and now the wolves were close and they were exhausted. Yeri was crying again. The blood would not wipe away and Seulgi led their pack out beyond cold morning ash like some feverish painted harlequin or perhaps crimson warrior from depths unplumbed by human hand. What lunacy to have taken place for her to appear this way. What moral degeneracy. They passed the ruined hulks of a few cars here and there and walked all through the morning and not once did they even turn back and when they stopped by the roadside and rested Yeri was still crying. Her tender face ravaged by fat tears.

Seulgi turned to her. ‘Stop,’ she said. ‘Please, stop. It won’t do you any good.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Yeri.

‘I know.’

‘I didn’t mean to.’

‘I know.’

‘He was – he could’ve killed you.’

‘He would have.’

‘I had to do it.’

‘Yeri.’

‘Oh god. I killed him, didn’t I? I killed him.’

‘Yeri.’

‘What did I do?’

‘Yeri, listen to me.’

She turned her eyes up and there was no hope in them and these painful hearts never stopped their trembling. ‘Listen to me. You saved my life. He would’ve killed me. You saved me, okay?’

‘But –‘

‘You saved my life, Yeri. Okay?’

‘Okay.’

‘Good. Come on.’

‘Where are we going?’

‘We have to keep moving.’

‘Why?’

‘Because they’ll be following us by now.’

‘Who?’

‘Whoever we stole from.’

They kept moving. In the afternoon they passed the smouldering wreckage of a tractor by the side of the road and pushed on past it. It was still burning and in the delicate embers they knew that somebody had been here and not long ago and they carried on knowing in their hearts that there had never been such danger biting at their heels and they were the hunted now, the hunted always. Yeri was crying again and she would not stop nor did Seulgi make her. Let it out. If you need to cry you cry but don’t you stop. If you stop I cannot save you. My warrant, my very own. An hour later they came to an impasse in the road. A half-dozen cars stacked endways like ancient rustworn building blocks dead in their path and so they took the unploughed ashfields and went around and came back up the other side and when they did there was faint light in the black sky.

‘Maybe there’s going to be a proper sunset,’ Wendy said. Seulgi smiled.

‘Maybe you’re right.’

But in the waning hours there was no red sunset or scarlet eve and they were soon in darkness and cold. Stinking halfdone phantoms lumbering on. By nightfall they came across a great clothed dome in the distance and Seulgi held them back and made them wait while she took out the binoculars and glassed the dismal horizon. It was a sheet of dark tarpaulin some fifteen or twenty metres long and the same wide but no sign of what laid under it save the faint outline of black waterbarrels. She watched that quiet place for a while longer. Nothing moved. She watched some more and it was silent and then she put back the binoculars and closed the satchel and Wendy came up to her with her arms tucked into her jacket.

‘What is it?’ she said.

Seulgi made a strange click with her tongue. ‘I don’t know.’

‘What does it look like?’

‘Barrels under a sheet.’

‘Is that it?’

‘That’s what it looks like.’

‘Then what do we do?’

‘What do you think we should do?’

‘Well we could just go on. It’s not on the road or anything. We could just go right on past it and not stop.’

‘But what do you think we should do?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘There’s nobody there.’

‘How do you know?’

‘It’s quiet,’ Seulgi said. ‘If there was someone there they would’ve moved.’

‘Maybe we should go then.’

‘Maybe we should.’

They took their bags and kept on moving. The fog so thick around them they could barely see. Under the gibbous pallor of the moon they looked like fractal homunculi stuck to that deathridden terrain and they pushed on and soon they were upon the tarpfield and they stood in front of it and Seulgi took out the bloodstained hatchet and waited with bated breath. Nothing moved. Somewhere far beyond the world through their eyes the wolves had begun to cry in sickness or in desperation or perhaps in anticipation. They waited there and still nothing moved. Seulgi let the hatchet hang loose in her hand and she took the tarp and dusted away the ash and threw it back as far as she could. Underneath there were barrels. A field of barrels. And hidden amongst them an old man and a woman also of considerable years and two younger women and a man not much older than Seulgi. All pale and gaunt wraiths sickly and stinking. They smelled of death.

The young man rose from between the barrels and held onto the tarpaulin with one frail skeleton hand as if to balance himself lest he collapse again. In the other hand he held up a small ice axe and his eyes went from Yeri to Wendy to Seulgi and back like some bewildered simpleton. His mouth trembled with a sort of dopeaddled anxiety and he swallowed and they could see the sweat slick on his throat and his chest. He held the axe out as if to ward them away and nodded towards the road.

‘Go on,’ he said. ‘Get going.’

‘Sorry,’ said Seulgi.

‘What do you want? We don’t have any food or water. So just get going.’

‘We don’t want anything. We were just curious.’

‘Well now you’re not so get going. Please.’

‘Okay.’

She set the satchel down in a slow gesture of peace and put away the hatchet and he nodded towards the road again.

‘I told you we don’t have any food,’ he said again, ‘and we don’t do that.’

‘Do what?’

‘Eat them. Eat our own. We’re not monsters. We don’t. So go on.’

‘Alright.’

She took up the satchel and slung it across her back and set off down the road and not once did she look. Yeri watched the tarp fall back again and she watched them disappear like drowned fieldmice under that blackened ashfallen cover. Then she tapped Seulgi on the shoulder and when the older girl turned she said: ‘Will they be alright?’

‘I don’t know,’ Seulgi said. ‘I really don’t.’ But in her mind and in her heart all that she could say to herself was: If they manage to survive another winter then there is still some justice in the world and I know that it is still good.

They walked all through the night and in the early predawn light they came upon a forest set to the south and stopped. Seulgi took out the binoculars and scanned the eastern horizon and then the forest. Its ancient wilted branches. Dead trees for a dead earth. She turned to the others. Yeri was wiping tears from her eyes again and Seulgi put a hand on her shoulder and rubbed her cold cheek and smiled thinly and turned to Wendy.

‘What now?’ Wendy said.

‘I don’t know.’

‘What do you think we should do?’

Seulgi pointed west. ‘If we’re still being followed, they’ll find us on the road. They’ll catch us before dark. In there, I don’t know. Maybe they still catch us. Maybe they’re not even following us, whoever they are. But if they are we stand more of a chance in there.’

‘We should go through the forest then.’

‘If that’s what you want to do.’

‘I want to do whatever you think is best.’

‘The forest.’

‘Okay.’

They took up their things and set off down the beaten forest tracks. The mud and ash thick around their ankles. Weatherstricken faces turned down against the cold of the early morning and in that grey antidusk they looked terribly ill and none of them spoke even a word to one another and all around it was silent. Skeleton oaks and in them untold secrets for millennia to be kept forever as such and they felt one and all a sort of awesome presence upon them in that place. Haunted fireblack tabernacle beyond where man’s limits approached and now they were witness to it. An hour or so later they camped by the side of a thin track and sat around an upturn of rock and Seulgi took out a can of the chicken and the zippo lighter and motioned towards Wendy.

‘Give me the saucepan,’ she said. She took the pan and gathered around a small bundle of wet sticks and poured out the last of their gasoline and set a small fire and pried open the can with the pocket knife. When it was done and cooked they ate quietly. Starving mouths and aching stomachs and tender souls and Yeri the lost amongst them. Her downcast penitent eyes and her unholy paradoxical visage. This unfortunate outcast and now her heart in darkness. They finished the chicken and Seulgi dug up a small hole in the dirt with her knife and put down the can and began covering it with black ash. Wendy turned to her. ‘What are you doing?’ she said.

‘If they come by, they’ll know we were here. Help me with this.’

She began piling ash onto the fire and it smouldered and faded and she took the burntblack sticks and dispersed them and set the grey snow so that it appeared from at least a distance to be the workings of a natural day’s progression. Then she took one of the bottles of water and drank and gave it to the others but Yeri would not take it nor would she look up.

‘Drink,’ Seulgi sai