Preface

A yellow-black streak lies across the eastern horizon as I look out over the valley. A repulsive slick of poison oil warding away anyone who may dare to tread upon its scorched earth.

The black clouds are looking heavier by the second and the crows warn of rain. Wailing devil sirens circling overhead. Each caw, a cry for help, longing for shelter from the looming storm. I think about turning back, but I have nowhere to turn back to.

As I gaze into the basin, a thick deathly plume of smoke makes its way through my field of vision. Quickly creeping from right to left through the centre of the valley. I strain my sight to suddenly realise that the black fog is coming from a fiery train dragging itself alongside the river, exploding balls of fire as it goes. I continue to watch as the burning snake propels itself from view, behind another hill littered with burnt trees and what used to be a cluster of farm buildings.

I sit on the brow of the hill and ponder as to what the fuck is going on. I haven’t seen anything resembling human presence for days.

I decide against altering my route west and pick up my meagre pack. I slowly descend into the valley with hawk eyes. Broken trees, split in two line most of my troubled walk to the bottom. As I reach the bottom of the hill, I scramble through a thicket into a small field. In the centre lay half a dozen overturned caravans and burned-out cars.

I stick to the hedgerow and make my way along the perimeter of the field. Hawk eyes on the steel carcasses strewn askew to my right.

‘That noise’, I think. The sound of a tin can being dropped accompanied by the sudden fluster and disbanding of twenty or so starlings erupting from one of the caravans.

At once I see it. A king hell motherfucker of a hound with eyes meaner than Goliath hurls itself through the grass towards me. Silent as a mute, jaws from here to damnation, with the smell of my sweat heavy-set in it’s nostrils. Bounding closer, bounding closer…

I think about the pictures I’ve seen of a green world. Gentle streams lapping at pebble shores in quiet secluded corners. Oh the things I’d wished to see!

To gaze over valley’s and fields brimming with life. Birdsong. The smell of flowers on a soft summer breeze. These things so close yet so far, just west of the moor, and I can’t even make it that far. Ripped apart by a slavering hound in a filthy field somewhere in Devon.

I breathe through my mouth and hold it.

…Bounding closer, bounding closer…POP!

The hound explodes in a mess of sinew and matted fur, covering the mud in front of me. A section of it’s jaw tumbles towards me and breaks pace on my knee.

I’m rooted to the spot. Only my eyes dart from corner to corner, to every possible vantage point I could have been spared from. Anything? Smoke? A shout? Fucking anything?!

I coil myself and like a whippet, bolt to the other side of the field and dive over the barbed fence.

I snag my right thigh and tumble in a heap into a muddy trickle of water in a ditch between the last field and the next. The clouds finally break and piss down upon me.

 And there I lay. And there I lay.