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"Aren’t you glad we came here on vacation?"

The boy grinned at the woman over his shoulder, and pretended to consider her question. "Well..." he began, "I could have been playing pool down at the mall, or maybe been out at the football game. Worthy pursuits, don’t you think?"

The woman laughed. Away from the town, she felt free, and much happier, and once again wished she’d lived in a simpler time, when one could live on one’s own in nature without the pressures of earning a living, or dealing with the boy’s schooling and both their special needs...let alone keeping those special needs hidden.

They had been hiking up the narrow, stony trail since shortly after dawn, and now were high enough up that when the woman looked over her shoulder she could see the other hills spread out like a stormy sea. Patches of cloud drifted in the valleys, and high feathery bands of cirrus failed to blot out the sun. It was comfortably warm for this time of year.

"There’s going to be a frost tonight," the woman said. "Unless it clouds up, of course."

The boy, ahead of her on the trail, pointed at something off-white further up the hill. "Is that where we’re going?"

"It could be," the woman said. "If it is, we’ll be there in a couple of hours. I haven’t been up here in years, and I don’t remember the way all that well."

They paused a few moments to watch a large, multicoloured spider spin a web between two bushes by the side of the trail. From this vantage point they could see a small village down in the valley beneath them, a network of streets and the roofs of houses reduced to red and green specks. It was like looking down from the window of an aeroplane. They could even see the tiny speck of a truck crawling down a red earth road cut into the side of a hill.

The boy looked at the woman, an unspoken question in his eyes.

"It’s a possibility," the woman said. "We’ll have to be careful, though. It’s not territory we know."

They reached the old cabin shortly afterwards. It had been shut up and abandoned for some years, but had not deteriorated too badly yet. The grey-green of the roof wasn’t badly dulled, and though the unpainted plaster of the walls was rough and uneven, it still seemed good enough to keep out the elements. The one window was a block of wood, without windowpanes to interrupt its tarred blackness. The door was shut, but opened at the woman’s push.

"Who built this place?" the boy asked.

The woman shrugged. "It’s old. Nobody knows for sure. Maybe one of the nobility wanted to make this a hunting base or something, a hundred years ago." She opened the window with a hard shove of arm and shoulder, the afternoon light streaming in. Dust motes danced in the air, in such quantities that she sneezed.

"It’s not too bad, considering," the boy said, surveying the one large room with the blown litter in the corner and the cupboard inset into the opposite wall.

The woman nodded. "We’ll make out well enough for a one day, with sleeping bags and all. Still, I wish it were less dusty."

"Perhaps it’s better that it’s not too clean," the boy said, with a wisdom beyond his years. "Things that are too easy to start with seldom work out well."

"You’re probably right," the woman said, unbuckling her haversack. "We’d better have something to eat."

"Yes," said the boy, biting into a sandwich. "Long night ahead."

He’d parked the new car near a curve of the road made, where a patch of gravel had probably once housed graders and bulldozers. To his right the hillside had been cut away and now formed a cliff, the lines of the black stone already blurred by green. He had seen no other traffic on the road, and with the night coming, he did not think there would be any more. Still, he was cautious enough to wait.

He had coffee in a Thermos flask, strong and bitter the way he liked it, and he sipped it as he considered his options. Long ago, he had become intensely wary of hunting the meat in their own environs. It was simply too dangerous and warned the survivors to be on better guard next time around. He had been forced to pick off stray dogs and cats for the most part, refusing better pickings even when the opportunity presented itself.

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