Maggot Moon Read Free Page A

houses. A supply path. It was the best way of collecting wood and stuff from the derelict buildings without being seen.
    I never liked it down there. It gave me the creeps. It was dark, smelled of damp. There were lots of things to bump into.
    We went up the steps that lead to the cellar door of what used to be my parents’ house. I could tell what was behind that door without it being opened. Red-flowered wallpaper with bulging baskets of fruit, red wooden paneling which ran round the lower part of the kitchen and was red only because that was the color of the paint that had fallen off the back of a lorry. Gramps had rescued the light from the old police station after it was bombed. All this and more was known to me about the house I was born in.
    Nevertheless, we knocked politely.

There was a loud silence, then the door opened a little.
    “Yes, what do you want?” said a man.
    He spoke our home language well, with only a slight accent, but you could tell it wasn’t what his tongue was used to. He was, by the sound of him, a paid-up member of the Motherland, the real McCoy. Tell you this for a pocketful of dirt, you don’t see many of them — civilians, that is — in Zone Seven. It was quite a shock to me. It struck me that maybe Gramps was right about this spy business after all.
    The man was coat-hanger thin, with a shock of gray hair. He had gray, bushy eyebrows, the only barricades against a large expanse of wrinkled forehead that threatened to tumble down in an avalanche of anxiety over the rest of his features.
    “We have no food, we have no valuables,” he said, his voice wavering. “We have nothing to give you, nothing.”
    I thought Gramps would harden when he realized this man was from the Motherland. But his voice was soft.
    “I am your neighbor, Harry Treadwell, and this is my grandson, Standish Treadwell,” he said, holding out a hand.
    The man slowly opened the door.
    Sitting at the table, just like my mother used to sit, was a thin, pretty woman and opposite her, where I used to sit, was a boy of my age. Handsome, straight-backed, dark-blond hair and green eyes.
    “I just thought,” said Gramps, “that I would see if you were settling in all right.”
    I took the flowers and the small bowl of raspberries to the woman. She accepted the flowers and buried her face in the blooms. When she turned to me again there was golden pollen on her nose and a tear rolling down her cheek. She touched the bowl of raspberries with trembling hands.
    I was aware all this time that the boy was staring at me, and I wanted to stare right back at him but I didn’t, not at first. I felt my cheeks to be red, felt awkward, unable to gauge the scene before me. Finally, in defiance, I turned to him, imagining that, like my classmates, he would find me strange, with my blemish of impurity.
    What odd eyes you have.
    What odd words you spell.
    But his face was serious. He stood up. He was taller than me. He was not nervous like the man and the woman. Self-assured, he walked up to me.
    “Thank you,” he said. “My name is Hector Lush, and these are my parents.”
    I knew him.
    But I knew I didn’t. I had never seen him before.
    Gramps hadn’t moved from the cellar door. He just stood there watching, taking in all he saw. Then suddenly he turned tail and went back the way he had come. He called to me when he was at the bottom of the cellar steps.

It didn’t take us long to gather what we needed from our house, which was basically my dad’s revolver. It had the luxury of a silencer, stolen from a dead Greenfly. We went back up again into what once had been my kitchen. This time Gramps didn’t knock. Mr. Lush saw the gun and rushed to his wife’s side.
    Hector smiled. “Are you going to kill us?” he asked calmly.
    Gramps was unused to being polite, and the rigmarole of manners didn’t really interest him much. He said nothing, and taking aim, shot the first rat as it ran along the skirting board, then the second