You cant take my name, p.1
You Can’t Take My Name, page 1
First published in Great Britain in 2025 by
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Copyright © 2025 Willow White
The right of Willow White to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in a retrieval system, in any form or by any means, without permission in writing from the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
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This work is entirely fictitious and bears no resemblance to any persons living or dead.
ISBN 9781835743874
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Thank you to everyone who helped fund this book so that my dream could become true – every one of you.
A huge thank you to Mum, Dad, Uncle Dan, Janny, Pam, Becky, Grandad Mike, and my sister, Shanice, and her partner, Matt.
Your help made this possible, and this book wouldn’t have been printed without you.
Contents
Part 1
1
2
3
4
5
6
Part 2
7
8
9
10
11
12
Part 3
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
Part 4
20
21
22
23
A child raised in a place impossible for insects to survive is not a world for anyone to live in.
But that’s where this young boy has been living for the past ten years. Alone. And he’s survived.
So far.
In a post-apocalyptic environment, this twelve-year-old has struggled his way through everything that’s come at him, and upon stumbling across a man much older than him, he has to decide whether companionship is worth the risk.
His brother once taught him so many rules, and so many strategies; what if he left them all now to live a life of his choice?
Over the next ten years, what challenges will he face in an abandoned country? Who will he meet along the way?
And who will he become?
Postapocalyptic:
“Where nature has become just as violent as humanity.”
Gretchen Crowley
Part 1
1
A Young Boy
A child raised in a place impossible for insects to survive is not a world for anyone to live in. You can’t expect anyone to hum a tune and run freely barefoot across sodden fields when they are a product of loss, desperation, and emotions so distasteful they are foreign to your tongue. Where, for the first years of his life, the views from abandoned skyscrapers in the thick of London to the farthest rock in rural Scotland were covered in this fine, nuclear ash, turning the world into a winter wonderland on the hottest day of the year.
It suffocated almost everything. Plants and bugs were fossilised beneath it, and whatever was beneath the toxic soot that didn’t find itself trapped and blinded was soon poisoned. Bugs died off completely, either starved or smothered. Birds’ homes became bitterly hostile and leaving their place of comfort offered no chance of finding nutrients to consume. Animals were poisoned by the ground, and agricultural land that wasn’t confined in the safety of a greenhouse was destroyed. Anything exposed to the air or relying on natural vegetation died within a month of the nuclear devastation.
The young boy didn’t know any better though, as he tiptoed across wet rocks to fields devoid of grass, swinging on the cracked branches of dead trees, being careful not to cry out when he fell. He was raised looking out at hillsides, where the familiar view to anyone a decade ago would have been trees covering green landscapes and birds flying in the sky. Instead, what he saw was a horizon of thousands of cold, crumbling tree trunks, some standing, some involuntarily sleeping, but not a leaf on any of them for years. There was the occasional splotch of green, possibly a sapling, determined weeds, or ivy that never entirely died. He didn’t know leaves to blow in the wind, although sometimes the force of the weather caused a scratching whistle among the dead bark. He’d never tasted fresh vegetation or breathed an abundance of oxygen while he stood in a forest; instead he became a connoisseur of stale ash from a decade ago and dust from decaying wildlife. It was always worse in the summer because things decompose quicker and layers of snow didn’t exist to drown out the smell.
He was used to listening out and taking in the deathly silence of the view. Even with all the time in the world, he’d never see a bird or the scutter of a squirrel, not unless it was the dead carcass of one from a lifetime ago.
Yet, there he was, humming a self-interpreted version of “Danny Boy”, while the sun burrowed beneath the hill, pretending grass still existed and his feet weren’t surrounded by ash. The young boy was incredibly alone, but how could he understand this when he hadn’t uttered a word to another human in five years? He simply hopped along the old country road in central England, closing his eyes and letting the rhythm skip along with him, as though it couldn’t be interrupted at any moment with bullets ringing past his ears. Sometimes the silence became too much, and his ears would pick up the thumping swoosh of the blood around his skull. He didn’t like the sound, which is how he came to learn to mutter gently to himself.
He knelt. His tune stopped. His eyes were incredibly adept at picking up bizarre details in the ground around his feet. Whether this was learnt from his lifetime of scavenging or a matter of inevitability when there was nothing else around, it’s hard to say. He stayed crouched over his feet, his chin turning to his chest to analyse the piece of material on the floor, but the movement sent a long fistful of hair brushing across his shoulder. It was too long, it always was, but last time he tried to cut it, he had equipped himself with a piece of glass that sliced his hand, and he still had the scar to prove it. He simply tucked his hair back up into his hat and returned his attention to where it belonged.
It was a tattered T-shirt for a newborn. He prodded it at first, moving it against the dry mud as he briefly wondered how young he’d have to have been to fit in an item of clothing this small. Maybe it was a jumper, but matter aside, it felt rough and itchy, the material finely woven despite the occasional pulled loop. He proceeded to pull a small backpack from his shoulder and cradled a stuffed bear in his lap, manoeuvring the woollen piece over its shoulders and replacing his bag on his back, with his teddy still in his grasp. It was a quick process performed delicately and necessarily, like someone brushing their teeth in the morning or kicking their shoes off after work. Then, he stood up and continued singing to himself.
He was walking along an old tar road that wound between fields in rather hilly countryside. The borders of the fields were marked by fences that were now mostly rotten and breaking apart. It was hard to decide whether the road was in ruin before the war, or whether it was another product of its destruction, but either way, the young boy had to mind his step as he travelled along the yellow lines at the side.
“There used to be cows, y’know?”
“Cows?”
“Yeah, and sheep. Ch’ckens, too, we had those. Sometimes we’d get these, like, foxes, a bit like dogs mixed with cats. Y’remember, I told you ’bout those?”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah, they’d fill these fields. Loads of ’em, all over the country.”
He thought the jumper on his bear would keep it warm. He knew it wasn’t alive, but he didn’t exactly understand what that meant. It couldn’t die, sure, but what did death mean to the young boy? He understood it stopped someone from moving, from thinking, from eating, but wasn’t that what sleeping was? His bear had eyes, a nose and a mouth, but it hadn’t ever talked and still couldn’t. Maybe it was always sleeping; maybe it was always dead. It didn’t rot like other dead things. It didn’t need to be buried like other dead things.
Sighing, he let his breath hiss into the air around him and his eyes search the nearby area. His legs were growing tired, and the sun was almost saying goodbye. He chuckled to himself, pulling his teddy to the side of his head, and glaring into the distance. “Look, there!” he snarled, bringing his voice above a whisper. His expression naturally turned into a grin and he lowered his head so he could peek between two chunks of wood. He brought his teddy to the same level, forcing its head into the gap so it too could get a glimpse. For a moment, he waited there, watching the lamb in the distance with his back rounded and hands drumming against his toy.
Snickering, he peeled
When he threw himself to the floor, his knees caught his landing, and he positioned his teddy on his lap. His eyes scanned the creature, dedicated to inspecting every bit of it; it wasn’t common to come across an animal in this world. He let an exaggerated huff escape from his nose, tilting his head to the side as he whispered, “We’re gonna need t’stitch it.” He crossed his arms to further analyse the lamb’s condition. “Here we go, Bear. Take the needle, take the thread, push it into the skin. But not too close t’the cut, don’t wanna rip it. Pull it through…” He grinned, tying an imaginary knot with his fingers, not bothering to cut the end of the invisible thread.
This was rather unusual. Firstly, a child so young would be unlikely to know how to thread a needle, let alone accurately sew stitches. But his knowledge was irrelevant, because although he owned the equipment needed, he knew there was no point. You can’t sew up a carcass. At least not this one, with its eyes pushed back into its skull, its skin mostly decayed from its bones, and its internal organs pushed out onto the floor in front of its stomach. Secondly, it was strange to him because this was the most alive animal he’d seen in a very long time; normally they were skeletons by now.
He giggled to himself, rolling onto his back so he could lie with the lamb, staring at the sky above him and wondering how it all once would have been. How it would feel to see straight into the sky without the looming remains of dust, or gaze past the tops of leaf-filled trees. He thought about it quite a bit; it was hard not to when the area constantly around you is dead but was once alive. It must have looked so, so different. He barely remembered a before, and felt that what he did know he had been told as part of a story, or simply imagined from the occasional photograph he’d found. Those were harder to find now; they had disappeared a few years ago and he dared not risk wandering into a city to find more.
He heard footsteps behind him at first, and before he could react there was a click and boom that shattered the space around him. He didn’t need to hear a second bullet to know he desperately needed to get to his feet and run. A few kicks and he was sprinting with every muscle in his body, letting his heart breathe for him and his lungs carry him away. It was natural to him, yet, just this once, a natural urge crept upon him to disobey what he’d been told years ago and take a peek at the shooter. There hadn’t been a second shot, either, making him believe it wasn’t one of them. He’d already decided it was worth the risk and snapped his head to one side, throwing his balance off slightly as he caught sight of a reasonably tall person less than halfway across the field, lacking hair on top and wearing a uniform he recognised. It was when he saw the greying beard, he realised he didn’t have to run as fast, but he kept drumming the ground beneath him just to be sure.
The old man was standing still, but then he limped forwards, holding his palm over his eyes to shield them from the sun as he squinted at the tiny figure ahead of him. It kept turning its head to check up on him, seeing if he’d shoot again. He decided not to; instead he struggled forwards, naturally putting his weight onto his one good leg as he quickly moved towards it. It was a kid.
“Shit,” he cursed, buckling the gun back against his waist and heading faster still. He growled at his limb that had been injured in a life before this one, cursing at it as he continued to struggle to run towards the child. The child was a whole stride faster than him at least, but he didn’t seem to care or let it stop him chasing after him.
Then, he clipped his good leg on a hole in the ground and found himself chewing a mouthful of skin. He let out a loud groan, increasingly frightening the young boy who was now standing still way ahead of him, eagerly watching. He tried to lift himself up, but his bad leg now ran with a bellowing pain striking through his thigh. He cried out once more, panting to regain control.
“Kid!” he growled. “Shit… Come back, alright?! I didn’t mean to shoot!”
But of course he meant to shoot, and the young boy was very much aware of that. He turned his eyes upwards, pleading with the small figure that had retreated and was hopping over another fence with more elegance than a cat – when they were still around.
The boy landed on the rubble of a destroyed shed, kicking around the remains and ignoring the soon-to-be-dying man.
“I’m sorry!” The man swore under his breath and piled his weight onto his elbows. His limbs gave out and he was hurled against the ground once again, biting the edge of his tongue and screeching through the pain.
This time, the boy’s head snapped up. He slowly made his way towards him with his eyes trained downwards onto him. The old man didn’t try calling him again; he simply stayed there, staring at the child, his eyes brimming with tears, fresh and old cuts on his cheeks, and his lips pleading.
*
“Keep your eyes open and breathe, alright?”
The boy was only a few years old, sitting on a chair with his nails biting into the base of it and his face wincing in fear. His bottom lip curled downwards, and his eyebrows were so tightened together he was going to give himself a headache. His eyes naturally clasped themselves shut again.
“I need you to watch. I need to teach you this so pay attention, alright?” The older boy was looking up at him, a pitiful smile on his face. In one hand he held a needle and thread, in the other the small boy’s knee as he comfortingly stroked him. He waited a moment before pressing the needle to his skin, piercing the top layers, and causing the poor boy to screech.
“It hurts, Jack!” he yelled.
“I know, I know, alright? I need you to watch, you’ll need to do it someday.”
They found each other’s eyes and held themselves there, both breathing in the same rhythm and letting themselves calm down. The older boy continued, calmly whispering to force him to concentrate, “Take the needle, take the thread, push it into the skin. But not too close to the cut, you don’t wanna rip it.”
“Okay…” the boy agreed. The sterilised wound being stitched into was significantly cleaner than the rest of his skin. They both cautiously stared at it as a knot was tightened around it.
“Just one more, alright?”
*
He hopped back over the fence and sprinted over to the limp body. What the young boy found bizarre was that the old man wasn’t dead, yet he didn’t bother to move.
It took the man a few moments to hear the pounding of steps towards him, turning his chin upwards and muttering, “Fucking hell, kid… just leave me, I’m as good as dead as the lamb you were lying by.”
The boy wasn’t listening, though. Now he was kneeling beside him, taking his backpack off his back and swapping his bear for a container.
“Don’t waste that on me. You shouldn’t see wounds like this, you’re too young.” Although, he wasn’t bothering to hide his leg.
The boy lost the smile he was wearing and muttered, “I’ve seen worse.”
They both paused for a moment, letting the silence of the fields around them fill in the emptiness in their speech. The young boy took a small bottle and a piece of cloth, and proceeded to ignore the man as he winced through the pain of him cleaning it. He opened his mouth to speak, but no words came out; instead he watched the child meticulously tend to his injury.
Eventually, the boy stood up again, slinging his backpack onto his back and shuffling around the old man’s body, assessing it as cautiously as a deer. His leg was wounded, obviously. A gash in his thigh couldn’t have any pressure against it and it needed wrapping quickly. The old man noticed his assessment and began trying to get up with both legs screaming in agony. “My home’s not far.”
