because I was Piper's guardian now and I thought I'd better act like it and make it clear to her that she was safe with me no matter what. And the thought made me fierce and strong like a mother wildebeest and all of a sudden I knew where people got the strength to pick up cars with babies lying under them which I always thought was made up.
I took her by the hand and smiled the bravest smile I ever smiled and it was real, even though it might not have been one hundred percent sane, and it worked a little because she smiled back at me and hugged Jet and started to sing her angel song quietly under her breath.
We drove and drove and I tried to look at the road signs and follow where we were going but it was pretty confusing and the best I could do was notice the names of villages we went through and hope somehow I would remember.
I started making up a mnemonic the way I used to do in school but it was hard to keep it straight since I had to keep adding words on as we went along, and whoever named these places wasn't doing it with any particular pattern in mind.
We went through Upper Ellaston and Deddon and Wincaster and New Northfield, and Broom Hill and Norton Walton and then I gave up trying to remember and just noticed each one and hoped if I needed them to come back into my head someday they would.
I felt a little pissed off at all those spy shows where the guy gets blindfolded and thrown onto the floor of the backseat and finds his way home by the noise of a chicken here and two bumps in the road there and a dog barking in the key of D which I can tell you now from experience is a load of crap, well who'd have guessed it.
Some of the things that made the biggest impression were the things that were almost normal but not quite.
Like the fact that no one seemed to be outside even though it was a beautiful sunny day, and there were no kids in the playgrounds or riding their bikes along the streets or anything. Also there were no other cars driving and lots abandoned by the side of the road where they ran out of gas, which took me a while to figure out like What's Wrong With This Picture.
Other things, I recognized from our village, like most of the shops either had broken windows or were all boarded up and lots of houses had boarded-up windows too, presumably for when the marauding hordes swept through the Back of Beyond and wanted to rape all the housewives and pillage their dining room sets.
And then sometimes there were tanks. Mostly just sitting by the side of the road with someone's head and arms sticking out the top, smoking, and holding on to a gun. In some villages there were lots of them and then for a while you'd see none at all.
About every two or three miles we passed through checkpoints where our driver had to stop and show papers to a bunch of guys with machine guns who didn't speak fabulous English and I thought Oh my god, so there is an enemy after all. They all seemed bored rather than scary and Our Army Guy was very polite to Their Army Guy and I thought it's just as well I don't waste a lot of my spare time trying to figure out this war stuff because if you ask me they're not in the spirit of the thing at all.
We drove for nearly an hour along tiny winding country roads and though judging distances isn't exactly my forte unless we're talking Manhattan city blocks, I figured we'd gone about fifteen or twenty miles by the time we got where we were going, what with speed divided by time equaling four birds in a tree singing Melancholy Baby.
The place we arrived at was a little better than my worst fears which is the sort of thing you have to be thankful for under these conditions and after piling out of the van we were introduced to Mrs. McEvoy who lived with her army husband in a newish brick house just outside a village called Reston Bridge and first impressions, while not always right, suggested she wasn't the type to carve us into tiny pieces and feed us to her dogs when the going got tough.
I took her by the hand and smiled the bravest smile I ever smiled and it was real, even though it might not have been one hundred percent sane, and it worked a little because she smiled back at me and hugged Jet and started to sing her angel song quietly under her breath.
We drove and drove and I tried to look at the road signs and follow where we were going but it was pretty confusing and the best I could do was notice the names of villages we went through and hope somehow I would remember.
I started making up a mnemonic the way I used to do in school but it was hard to keep it straight since I had to keep adding words on as we went along, and whoever named these places wasn't doing it with any particular pattern in mind.
We went through Upper Ellaston and Deddon and Wincaster and New Northfield, and Broom Hill and Norton Walton and then I gave up trying to remember and just noticed each one and hoped if I needed them to come back into my head someday they would.
I felt a little pissed off at all those spy shows where the guy gets blindfolded and thrown onto the floor of the backseat and finds his way home by the noise of a chicken here and two bumps in the road there and a dog barking in the key of D which I can tell you now from experience is a load of crap, well who'd have guessed it.
Some of the things that made the biggest impression were the things that were almost normal but not quite.
Like the fact that no one seemed to be outside even though it was a beautiful sunny day, and there were no kids in the playgrounds or riding their bikes along the streets or anything. Also there were no other cars driving and lots abandoned by the side of the road where they ran out of gas, which took me a while to figure out like What's Wrong With This Picture.
Other things, I recognized from our village, like most of the shops either had broken windows or were all boarded up and lots of houses had boarded-up windows too, presumably for when the marauding hordes swept through the Back of Beyond and wanted to rape all the housewives and pillage their dining room sets.
And then sometimes there were tanks. Mostly just sitting by the side of the road with someone's head and arms sticking out the top, smoking, and holding on to a gun. In some villages there were lots of them and then for a while you'd see none at all.
About every two or three miles we passed through checkpoints where our driver had to stop and show papers to a bunch of guys with machine guns who didn't speak fabulous English and I thought Oh my god, so there is an enemy after all. They all seemed bored rather than scary and Our Army Guy was very polite to Their Army Guy and I thought it's just as well I don't waste a lot of my spare time trying to figure out this war stuff because if you ask me they're not in the spirit of the thing at all.
We drove for nearly an hour along tiny winding country roads and though judging distances isn't exactly my forte unless we're talking Manhattan city blocks, I figured we'd gone about fifteen or twenty miles by the time we got where we were going, what with speed divided by time equaling four birds in a tree singing Melancholy Baby.
The place we arrived at was a little better than my worst fears which is the sort of thing you have to be thankful for under these conditions and after piling out of the van we were introduced to Mrs. McEvoy who lived with her army husband in a newish brick house just outside a village called Reston Bridge and first impressions, while not always right, suggested she wasn't the type to carve us into tiny pieces and feed us to her dogs when the going got tough.
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