Perhaps this book was the one. His heart juddered in his chest as he heard a faint sound behind him.
‘Be careful . . .’ His mouth shaped the Gordy warning.
Anna stared down from her vantage point at the lone boy crouched over the ruins of a fallen building.
She guessed it was the skyscraper she had heard fall in the night, and her stomach rumbled at the thought that the boy had found food packets. She was bone-weary of the bitter taste of cockroaches and wondered what kept her from leaving the woman and the dead city. In her heart she believed there was no end to the city, but sometimes she dreamed of a place where there were endless trees and great expanses of grass, and even a great pool of water called Sea. Sometimes she thought of searching for the dream place.
It was cold outside the cellar.
The woman called this cold Wintertime. The boy below was clad in ragged shorts and did not seem to notice the chill in the air. She had seen him before since she had begun to roam more widely in search of food packets.
She had told the woman about him, but the woman said he was a Carnie or some sort of trap to catch them.
‘You want them to come here and eat me,’ she had accused.
Anna had not answered, but she did not think the boy was a Carnie. For one thing, he was too skinny. The Carnies were well-fleshed, though she sometimes wondered what they would do when they ran out of people to eat. The boy was even thinner than she was. The sun showed the knobs along his spine where the scant flesh stretched tight. And he was always on his own. The Carnies travelled in packs.
But most of all, Anna knew he was no Carnie because of the silence. That was one thing about the Carnies – they were always gibbering and screaming at one another. You could hear them long before they appeared. They were stupid and loud and clumsy.
She could see the boy was straining to reach into a crevice and again the thought of food stirred in her.
The woman hated being alone and had not wanted her to come out. She was deaf – easy game for the Carnies. If Anna had not stumbled onto the cellar where the woman hid, she would probably be dead. Even though there were fewer Carnies than there used to be, the woman would not leave the cellar, and each time Anna went to search for food, the woman seemed more reluctant to open the bars to let her back in.
The woman had not always been so. In the beginning she had taught Anna a way of making words with her fingers, and they had spoken for many hours in the darkness of the cellar.
But now the woman lamented her own survival endlessly, talking of the past with longing and despair until Anna was tempted to hit her on the head with a brick. What was the sense in talking about ‘before’? Now was now, and that was all there was to it.
Anna checked the knife in her holster. She had killed three Carnies with that knife and two with the one before. She always hid the bodies and left them for the cockroaches to finish off, though she doubted the Carnies even noticed the disappearance of their companions.
Hiding the bodies, she had sometimes wondered if it would be such a terrible thing to eat manflesh. Before she had found the woman and the cellar, she had begun seriously to consider it. The only thing that stopped her was a fear that the madness in the Carnie flesh would somehow get into her.
The woman had been captured by the Carnies and had managed to escape, but her daughter and man had been eaten, so Anna had never brought up the idea of eating manflesh. The woman’s daughter had been called Anna and this was the name the woman called her, pressing wet lips on her face.
Anna rubbed her cheek unconsciously at the memory. Somehow the name had stuck though she could not see the use of names with only the two of them left in the world.
‘And we won’t be here much longer if I don’t find some food,’ Anna murmured to herself. Food had been difficult until the woman had told her which packets were all right. She was grateful for that knowledge. But now the packets were getting scarce. There were always plenty of cockroaches, but you got sick if they were all you ate.
If only the woman would agree to come out of the cellar, they might find a better place. For the hundredth time, Anna wondered why she did not leave. Twice the woman had almost got them killed blasting away at shadows with her gun-weapon.
Absently, Anna ate two dried cockroaches and let her hand rest on the ridged hilt of her knife. She decided to go down, telling herself food was worth the risk. She could kill the boy and take the food packets if she had to.
She moved through the disintegrating building to street level, relieved and disdainful to find the boy had not moved. How stupid to sit out in the open like that for so long! Surveying the street with narrowed eyes, Anna left the shelter of the building and felt the sun on her bare head like a warning finger.
She resisted the temptation to look behind her. There was a kind of madness in too much looking behind.
She was little more than three steps from the boy when he swung round without warning. The shock in his eyes told her he had not heard her. She saw that the thing he had in his hands was not a packet of food, but a book.
The immediate fright faded from the boy’s narrow face, and Anna saw that he read in her the same qualities that distinguished him from the Carnies. Close up she could see he was not as young as she had thought.
‘Are you going to kill me?’ he asked, his voice unexpectedly deep and rusty, as if it were not often used. That voice told her he was a loner. That was how her voice had sounded once.
She was startled to realise her knife had leapt into her hand. She let the point drop but did not put it away. ‘Why do you gather books?’ she asked, her own voice pitched low.
‘You’re not a Carnie,’ the boy said.
‘I’m called Anna,’ she said, deciding there might be some point in having a name after all.
‘Where do you come from? Do you come from Country?’ His eyes were fever-bright, though he did not have the hectic red cheeks that went with that sickness. Anna noticed the way his ribs defined themselves through his skin and the bones of his knee joints stuck out. When she did not answer, he began to sidle away.
Anna felt baffled. ‘Why do you collect books?’ she demanded.
The boy flinched at her tone and his eyes scanned the street around them, reminding her of the risk they took standing in the open. He carried nothing to defend himself. She wondered how he had survived even this long.
‘I know where there are lots of books, if you want me to show you,’ she said, sensing the boy would run any second without some bait to keep him. She could not say why she wanted to bind him to her. Perhaps it was that he was another survivor – who knew what that might mean. And it was true that she knew of a building where a giant room was filled with books.
‘Books?’ His voice was intense. ‘Show me,’ he whispered.
Anna looked around and shook her head firmly. ‘I will come back another day and show you. It’s going to rain.’
The boy stepped closer to her. ‘Take me to the books.’
Anna lifted her knife warningly. ‘No. I told you I’ll come back.’
The boy seemed not to hear her, and the sky was heavy with rain clouds. Any minute it would pour. Anna backed away. ‘You’d better get in before the Carnies come.’
This seemed to penetrate the boy’s trance and he looked around him convulsively. Anna took this moment of inattention to slip into a doorway and disappear.
She made her way straight back to the cellar, knowing the woman would not let her in if it began to rain. She could not distinguish between the rain vibration and the vibration Anna made hammering on the cellar door.
Picking her way over the partly crumbled building that rose above the cellar, Anna passed the lettering which told the building’s name: IBRARY. Entering the section of the building which was still intact, Anna gagged slightly at the rotting musty smell of the shelves filled with books. Once, she had hidden between the shelves because the woman had locked her out when the Carnies came hunting. The smell of the
books made her feel sick and she wondered again why the boy collected them.
Belatedly, Anna realised she had not found anything to eat. She hammered a long time before the woman responded.
The cellar bar slid open with a wooden rasping sound, and she waited a moment before descending the metal steps. As usual, the woman had retreated into the darkest corner of the cellar in case it was not Anna who knocked.
‘Food?’ the woman asked in a guttural half-grunt.
Anna shook her head and tilted her face so the light showed her lips. ‘I’ll find some. Tomorrow. I saw that boy again.’
‘Carnie,’ the woman snarled, coming slightly forward.
‘No. I spoke to him . . .’ Anna began, then lifted her fingers to make the finger-talk. She told the woman about the boy and the picture in her mind of bringing the boy to live with them, of talking in low voices and hunting together. He was small and skinny but she would teach him the way of killing silently to protect himself. And maybe they would try to find a way out of the city.
‘Carnie,’ the woman repeated.
Anna opened her mouth, but before she could utter a word she heard the sound of a footfall, and whirled to see a bare foot touch the first step.
The woman made a long keening sound that made Anna’s hair stand on end, and time seemed to slow as the boy jumped into the cellar. In the grey light falling from above he seemed bigger, his face an inhuman plane of angles and hollows.
The girl heard a distinct clicking sound that told her the woman had her terrible gun-weapon. She waited for the sneezing cough that meant it had spat out death at the boy.
The boy’s head tilted and then was still as he spotted the woman in the shadows. His lips moved.
The woman stepped hesitantly into the light, her bone-white face strangely still. She lifted one hand and the fingers flicked out a question.
Anna pressed her fingers into the woman’s palm. ‘He says, “Are you Mother?”’
Though her legs were numb the woman did not move for fear of waking the children whose heads lay in her lap.
The girl had often slept that way when she had first come to the cellar, but in recent times she had seemed to withdraw into herself.
No, the woman thought with wry honesty. She drew away because I pushed her away.
She shook her head, wondering that her mind was so clear.
Very gently, she laid her hand on the girl’s head, and spoke the name of her dead daughter. The one who wore her name now was tough and violent, yet still a child for all that.
She looked at the boy and shook her head. He looked about eight or nine, but he might be older. He was nothing but skin and bone and that made it hard to tell.
The woman remembered her own childhood, long before the red dust came, in the lost world of yesterday. She had been frightened to sleep with the wardrobe door open for fear of what might come out of that dark space. Queer that she could recall so easily the terror of lying rigid on her back, waiting for morning to come and drive away the night terrors. She stroked the boy’s matted hair and wondered that he slept so trustingly. His trust made a calmness in her, so that the long terrible years since the dust came seemed like shadow years.
It occurred to her that she had made the cellar into a kind of wardrobe all these dark years of hiding – both a place of refuge and of writhing terror.
I climbed into the wardrobe with my nightmares, she thought.
The cellar door was unbarred and moonlight shone obliquely through the opening. The air was cold on her arms where the blanket had slid from her shoulders, but still she did not move.
She looked at the boy again. He had spoken of Gordy. How queer that their paths had knitted together again. She had thought him eaten, but he must have escaped at the same time she did, and found the boy as she had found her cellar and the girl.
Her fingers closed around the boy’s wrist easily. He must have been little more than a baby when his mother hid him in the wardrobe.
He called himself Roach and she had almost laughed aloud at that, knowing who had given the name. Trust his ironic sense of humour. Roach. Survivor.
She breathed in deeply, swallowing great mouthfuls of the clean cold air.
‘I am Mother,’ she whispered to the night. ‘Tomorrow we will go to the Country.’
THE BEAST
As he emerges from the black taxi with its tinted windows and sleek carcass, I can see at once that he is one of those grave, serious children whom one would not notice in a crowd. He stands quietly waiting as if he has done it often, clad in spotless black shorts and a jacket that has obviously been tailored for him. These are clothes of a politician’s son or some high official, perhaps a blackmarketeer’s boy. boy.
Centuries ago in another land, I wore similar garments to be confirmed. I cannot imagine why a boy dressed in such clothing has come here. This is an Industrial Zone, to begin with, not Residential, though there is little enough industry going on in it. The rows of factories are silent, inhabited by the mysterious, rusting machinery of another age, cogs still joined intimately in some unknowable rite from the Dark Age of Technology. Some furtive use of machinery still takes place in corners of these enormous places, but for the most part they are poor chop houses with almost everything being done by hand.
Glancing into them at night when they brought me home after my last Renewal, I caught sight of the fitful orange glow of forge fires being stoked in the cavernous darkness, and the gleam of a sweaty muscled arm. I felt I was looking into the Age of Stone said by many to be the first age of humankind.
It is not all factories, of course. Here and there are vacant lots studded with the inimical glint of dusty broken glass. Once this was prime land but no one builds factories any more so land has no value. In fact, no one builds anything any more because there is no need. There are far more dwellings than people to fill them, and even the wealthiest live like those crabs that once existed, scuttling from shell to shell.
It is almost funny now to think how people feared that the Renewal Vaccine would end up destroying the earth by overpopulation. Instead, people just stopped having children almost overnight. There was no need for them to inherit or provide a dynastic immortality when you could just stay around yourself. Then, instead of everyone choosing to go on and on forever as experts predicted, they still died at pretty much the same rate after a hiatus of a century or so. During that time the population growth was virtually at a standstill, but various wars and pogroms killed off thousands either immediately with bombs and bullets and poisonous gases, or eventually because of the destruction of food supplies and the onset of disease.
A lot more died when they stopped taking the Renewal Vaccine. People could go on and on, but what would be the point with the world the way it was? Better to see if there was any afterlife after all.
Of course, just because it is zoned Industrial does not mean people did not live here. Nor were they poor scrabbling workers. There were a few streets with grand houses on the edge of this sector. You can see the places where trees grew in their yards and even – the extravagance of it – in the streets as well, to shade and perfume the paths perhaps. These dwellings would have been inhabited by the factory bosses who ruled the world for a time. The trees have long been lopped down and even their stumps have been hacked from the ground by the Anti-Green lobby which was established after the dismantling of any industry deemed to harm the environment. When the Rainbow Ban was announced, people wept for joy in the streets in just the same way as they had once wept when the wall keeping the old Germany in two halves came down. It was a great moment. It was a Happily Ever After. But nobody ever wonders what happens After That.
No one thought about all the people who lost their jobs, because the poor have always been powerless. They didn’t reckon on the fact that for people with no life tomorrow was irrelevant; they need not trouble themselves about the consequences of their fury. The first great uprising was of the poor and nobody guessed how many of them t
here were until they rose in a great crashing churning tidal wave.
I remember the feeling of power that surged through me like molten gold as I marched with the rest, holes in my boots and my lice-ridden clothes in tatters. The sun shone that day because I felt we were doing something. A girl with red hair kissed me with a mouth that tasted of honey. Back then, in the beginning, I was capable of all kinds of love. I could be surprised and shocked.
The grand old houses used by the factory bosses in their days of glory were destroyed by the Anti-Greens because of their gardens and the trees, of all things. Or they might have been razed during one of the uprisings of the poor. Sometimes it’s hard to remember who killed what and why. Or perhaps the police troops burned them under the command of the Elite who resented the union power of the labour bosses. Or maybe they were destroyed in the Neighbourhood Wars that followed the breakdown of countries and other such territorial boundaries. All of this happened before anarchy settled the world comfortably into a sort of general apathetic peace, so it could be left to meander to its demise.
There is no way of knowing what happened except by personal remembering since the scribes mark time no more. Most historians were killed in the Riots against Elitist Intellectuals half a century ago. Myself, I think of that as being the end of my world, and the Neanderthals now toiling away at their rough forges are the inheritors of the future. Time is circling back, devouring its own tail. Soon we will be slime and dust and then a whimper.
Of course things still exist. We humans are good at blindness. How else could we have failed to know the beast in our midst, except by wilfully not seeing it? There are schools run by the few Intellectuals who escaped the Riots, and who are trying to preserve and collect the lost knowledge of all the ages. And there are the New Intellectuals who teach whatever crystal and ley-line gibberish occurs to them, and who dream of the new world which they will ruin as fast as the old. There are the barter markets where you can exchange anything with the help of the Facilitators. There are men who call themselves Politicians who rule districts with brute squads, and blackmarketeers who sell their services and mercenary squads for hire to any Politician wanting to move in on another, or to Facilitators needing to deal with reluctant suppliers. There is even the odd car that escaped the Carbon Monoxide Ban that was set in force once the connection between automobile gases and mentally defective children was finally published.