“We have to find a way to get food,” said Finn. He was half-lying in the window seat, looking out at the bay. He had never seen the air so clear, it gave a glistening freshness to everything. And the birdsong! Were the birds always so loud and joyous?

“We need adults.” There was a bit of a break in Optima’s voice.

“Yeah. Bloody Uncle Desmond.”

She laughed weakly. “Nobody ever called Des ‘Desmond’, though.”

Into the silence that followed, Finn slowly said, “Maybe she didn’t mean Des?”

Optima walked to the window seat and put her hand on Finn’s shoulder and leaned out. They looked out together. Then Finn scrambled up and they both ran to the back of the house and looked up the hill to where the Desmond Castle stood looking over the town.

“I don’t know if I told you,” Finn said. “I told Mam, but I don’t think I told anyone else – when I was working there last summer helping the tour guides, there was a historian came in one day, and he told me he wanted to show me something. I think he thought I worked harder than the others, or I was more interested than the others or something. And he brought me through the town and showed me a hidden entrance to the castle. He said nobody knew about it. He was going to write about it, but he hadn’t got around to it yet.”

“I don’t know,” said Optima. “It’s not as if there’s any food in the castle, it’s a tourist trap. People just go in there and get the tour and hear about the 15th century.”

“Still. If Mam said that, I’d trust Mam.”

They were rationing the little food they had left. Optima went down and got the jar with the tomatoes she had ladled out from the tin. Two cherry tomatoes each for now. They sat in the window seat, their feet interlaced, and watched the empty town, keeping each tomato in the mouth as long as possible without swallowing.

“I’ll go and scope it out tonight, see if I can still find the place,” Finn said. But you’re right, I’m sure there’s no food there.”

“Why would she tell us to go there then?”

That was when they heard the singing. It was like football fans, a rowdy chorus with a catch of violence underneath. They ran up the road, kicking the door of every house in, coming out with whatever they had found.

“Get back!” Optima dragged him off the seat. They crept to the other window, which they knew caught the sun so you couldn’t be seen from it. The crowd – young men, filthy-looking – had come to the house next door. “They’re very well-fed-looking,” she said. “Where are they finding the food?” The men came out with something and all cheered, and they turned and disappeared down the road.

Without a word, Finn and Optima swallowed what they were holding in their mouths, and crept down the stairs and out the side door to the garage. Their mother’s and father’s cargo bikes and Finn and Optima’s two bikes were there, looking pristine.

Finn stared at them. “I’ve seen a load of bikes and their tyres were mostly all down.”

“I never thought about it before, but our bicycles are kind of weird.” Optima crouched down and ran her fingers down the rod brakes. “They’re like old Dutch bikes, but they’re really light.”

This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

The cargo bikes had light aluminium boxes rather than the usual wood-and-plastic. All of the bicycles had rod brakes with thick rubber brake pads. They had no gears.

“Don’t worry about it. Come here, what do we bring?”

“Everything. Not all at once but – clothes for a start, everything here is linen or wool, the odd bit of silk; we can probably swap them for stuff. Cooking pots. Knives. All that stuff.”

“You start. I’ll go and scope out that entrance, see if it’s still… intact,” said Finn.

“Wait.” Optima took the two whistles that hung on the wall. She looped the leather cord of the bit around his neck, tucking the deep-noted buffalo-horn whistle into his shirt, and she looped the metal whistle on her own neck. They’d always laughed at their mother for saying you should always carry a whistle in case you needed to call for help. “Look at those refugees from the Syrian boat,” Mam had said, “If they didn’t have whistles that huge big superyacht with all its music playing would never have stopped and found them in the sea.”

He went out the back, listening hard. The voices of the looters were faint in the distance. He went along the backs of the houses by the lane. Most of the doors had been kicked in. The place was eerily silent. He crossed the stream and went on.

Then he heard a kind of thumping. He stopped. The house he was passing had a big plate-glass door at the back. Something grey was crashing against it, disappearing, then crashing again. Trying to get out. Inside something black – a cloud of something – was wavering through the air of the rooms.

He sidled up the garden, keeping flat to the wall. He saw it. It was a dog. Trapped. Probably starving. It would probably attack him…

He kept watching. It stopped. He heard it crying inside the house.

He tiptoed over to the door and tried it. Locked. The dog crawled to the door and looked at him. It got shakily to its feet and scratched the inside of the door, leaving a bloody streak.

He remembered that there had been news stories a while ago about burglars lifting sliding doors to open them. He shook the door, tried to lift it. Nothing. He looked around, chose a garden chair and smashed it. The effort left him panting, but after he rested, he twisted off a chair leg, and wedged it under the door. It lifted more, but still would not open.

“Ah, feckit,” he said. The garden was decked with marble slabs, and a pile of them had been left – he picked one up and slammed it into the glass, edge-on.

The glass exploded in, and the dog exploded out and raced past him. A massive cloud of flies pursued it. Finn staggered back, covering his nose and mouth and squinting his eyes shut.

The dog ran back to him, rose and touched its nose against his arm, and ran away.

Finn stepped through and into the hall. A pile of… something… was on the floor, something mushy. Even through his hands the incredible, horrible stench flooded into him. He held back vomit. He could not afford to vomit. He looked up. Two swollen bodies hung from the banisters, what had been a man and a woman. A caked rope swung beside them, above the pile of— he saw a baby’s jacket with stained yellow teddybears on the—

He staggered out. He could not stop himself, he brought up the whole precious contents of his stomach. He ran without thinking where he was going.

The dark was already coming in when he stopped running. He must have run all over the town without stopping. He was not conscious of where he was. Stop, he said to himself. Stop and think. Orient. Where is north? He could see a new moon, but he did not know what time of the month it is – where should the moon be? He went uphill, along a quiet road, and found a place to crouch and wait. When the North Star came out he could work out where he was.

He fell asleep before that happened. At last, he woke, and the star was beaming down on him from the foot of the moon. He went north, and after an hour or so he came to the old city walls. He kept walking, keeping his steps as silent as possible, stopping to listen and make sure he was not overheard.

He followed the walls till he came to the mass of brambles covering them for a kilometre. Part of the way along, he found the oak tree, and felt around under the roots for the key. It was there!

Where the brambles ended, ivy began. He squirmed in behind it and followed it back behind the brambles a long way, to find a place where the walls became double. He squeezed in between them, then crouched down, felt his way along to find the seam, then the hole at the foot of the stone, inserted the key and turned it – it turned with a silky click, the historian’s olive-oil treatment was still working – then he slowly straightened up and found its match at the top and turned that, and the stone wall hinged and swing. He slid through and shut it behind him.