“Huh!” The man gave a snort, then muttered half to himself: “A lesson learned, Ned lad: ask a pup for his opinion, expect a hesitant, wishy-washy answer…”
“Pup?” Garth bristled, but mainly from the tense atmosphere in the huge cavern, which was getting to him. “I’m sixteen pushing seventeen—which is old enough to go out with your scavs!”
“True,” Singer nodded, elbowing Garth again but harder this time. “You’re old enough to go out with us, but only as my apprentice—so watch your lip ‘pup!’ Damn me, but every time you open your mouth, it’s like I’m listening to your gimpy father!”
Garth drew a breath that swelled his broad chest…but on the far side of Ned Singer Layla Morgan had once again moved to the fore, from where she stared at Garth and shaped her expressive mouth into a silent warning unseen by Singer: “No!”
Good and timely advice, Garth supposed. And saying nothing, relaxing as best he was able, he kept the peace.
Meanwhile Andrew Fielding had been speaking for some little while, much of which had now been lost to Garth. Still angry at Singer’s insults—more especially the reference to his father—he nevertheless succeeded in ignoring his bruised feelings in order to concentrate on the head tech’s comments. By which time Fielding was midway into a sentence:
“…background radiation has ever fluctuated; by day it increases naturally, most likely due to the influence of the sun. However, in the event of any unacceptable increase in levels in the water—an event outside every previous experience, but one governed by an ancient SOP—we are tasked with releasing anti-radiation compounds into the tanks and reservoirs, hopefully to absorb any dangerous excess. Alas, it should be noted that down the decades the potency of these infusions has suffered considerably…but of course we still treat our drinking water with what few chemicals remain—for what good they do—and in addition the water is always filtered before use…
“Many years ago, before my time—indeed in the time of my great-grandfather, also a tech—in order to conserve compounds that were even then scarce, the techs stopped treating and even monitoring water from the animal well. In those days such measures were deemed wasteful; the water, with a source deep in the earth, was always so very pure. Well, that was then. But—
“Twelve days ago the farmers notified us of a slight deterioration in the health of certain of the beasts. Without delay, we techs examined these animals, discovering that they suffered the first symptoms of radiation poisoning! We immediately separated out every affected animal and bird, seeing to it that they were destroyed, and at once isolated the tank of initial influx from the overflow system, thus preventing any further spread of the contamination. Moreover, we cut back on the already limited supply of water to the lake; as Big Jon has mentioned, the fish are barely edible and continuing to maintain their habitat only depletes our human needs…” Here Fielding had paused and drawn a rasping breath, then very quickly continued:
“Obviously affairs were now most serious. But, so as not to cause alarm, only Big Jon and the heads of the various affected crafts were initially informed. Now: from the beginning we kept a close watch on the second tank of influx from the wells, regularly monitoring the radiation level. On the fourth day we discovered a taint, but so slight it was scarcely worse than normal background radiation levels. Nevertheless we isolated this tank also; which was just as well, for in four more days the radiation levels had increased to lethal degrees!
“All of which events were reported to Big Jon Lamon even as they occurred. Which brings us up to date. We techs continue to be vigilant, of course, but as for now…there you have it.”
In the crowd Ned Singer had grunted: “There we have it, eh? None of which addresses the so-called problem!” A number of the people close by had turned to stare at him, nodded their agreement, a few of the men muttering low and even cursing.
From his elevated position on the loading bay platform, Big Jon had been aware of this disturbance in the otherwise stunned assembly, and so was quick to intervene before full-scale panic set in. “Now hold!” he called out, “Listen to me! Andrew Fielding’s techs are not the only ones who have been working on this. Since first learning of the situation, I’ve debated a course of action with the elders and brought into play a contingency plan of sorts—as I shall explain in just a moment.
“But first…I would like to remind you of something that happened eleven months ago, when we received a radio message—our first human contact in a great many years—from the people of a refuge far to the north: an event that caused much excitement in the clan at that time.
“Reception was poor; we couldn’t be certain of the precise contents of the message, which seemed to be a request—even an entreaty—for people! By which I mean human reinforcements for a refuge decimated by fly-by-night depredation! Though the message was weak and fragmented, we learned this much at least: that the folk of this distant community had been attacked, suffering enormous losses before finally destroying the local swarm; also that they now offered safe harbour to anyone who could find his way to their co-ordinates. Moreover, head tech Fielding believes these co-ordinates are known to us, from marks made by our forebears on what few pre-war maps have been preserved!”
Here pausing to let all of that sink in, Big Jon Lamon had relaxed just a little, relieved to note that the various family and craft groups had now begun to talk excitedly among themselves. For finally they had recognized at least something of how certain of his previous statements now made sense. And so for a quarter-minute Big Jon had stayed silent, letting the buzz gain momentum as it rippled through the crowd…
II
Garth Slattery’s thoughts, memories from a comparatively recent life which now seemed a thousand years in the past, were abruptly interrupted when the trundle swayed, lurching over an uneven mound of stony debris. Garth’s father, Zach, grasped his shoulder to hold him steady.
“Asleep, were you?” Zach inquired.
The trundle had steadied up and Garth shook his head. “Day-dreaming,” he answered. “Thinking back in time, to the Southern Refuge. Compared to this journey, it no longer seems such a bad place!”
His father nodded. “Then I’d advise you to think of what we might have at journey’s end. It’s no good dwelling in the past, Garth. Especially one that’s burning in a cold, invisible fire, or perhaps beginning to shine a little, back in that great dead hole in the ground!”
“As you say,” Garth had to agree. “But I know you too well, Father, and that your occasional talk of a future Eden is meant only to buoy me up. And really there’s no need; I’m only young, but as I’ve often heard you say, hope springs eternal. Well, it does in me anyway; and I want you to know I neither despair nor fear for whatever lies ahead—though I suspect that you do, if only for my sake…” He paused to offer a frustrated shrug, and then went on: “I think what I’m trying to say is that I’m hopeful, and that I do have plans for the future.”
With which he almost unconsciously glanced across the weapons rack in the trundle’s central aisle, to the row of seats on the far side where Layla Morgan sat beside Ned Singer, just out of earshot by reason of the trundle’s banging and rattling.
Garth’s father noticed, smiling as he correctly interpreted his son’s glance and something of his “plans for the future.”
“Perhaps you’d be more comfortable over on that side, eh?”
It was no good pretending; Garth had given himself away on too many occasions recently; and as he knew his father, so Zach knew him just as well, if not better. And sighing, he answered, “Layla can’t seem to decide who she likes best, me or Ned Singer. Older and more experienced—the important leader of a scav team, at least as was—Ned may be more to her taste.”
“Maybe so,” said Zach, “but I noticed it was Ned who seated himself beside Layla—not the other way around. As to who she likes best: you’ll never know unless you ask her. And remember, we mate young in the clan, for children are our future—assuming w
e’re to have one! As for Ned Singer: you should watch out for him. Ned’s too excitable and has a bad temper; doesn’t like to be beaten, not at anything. He had a wife, taken by disease. She was a frail thing and I didn’t know her well. There were no children, and…I don’t know, perhaps I shouldn’t mention it, but from what I saw of her she seemed to bruise too easily…”
With that said, and as he looked here and there around the swaying trundle, Zach’s thoughts and his mood turned dark once more. Garth was right: it was only for him that Zach lightened up from time to time. But inside he had felt empty—angry and frustrated, sad and despondent—ever since his wife, Garth’s mother, had died in childbirth. While no blame attached to the boy, still the father had never stopped grieving.
Now like Garth he let his memories drift back in time, but a great deal farther back…
One night all those years ago, not long after Angela died, Zach had taken his team out into the dark; not so much to scavenge as to hunt fly-by-nights! For in his embittered mind they were to blame that the refuge’s so-called “hospital,” like all of its facilities, was so poorly equipped. And oh, they’d done some cleansing, some killing, that night! Zach, like a cursing, berserk warrior out of olden times, riding the devils down and blowing them to hell one after the other—at least until he’d lost control of his machine, his powerful motorized mountain bike, crashing it and breaking his right leg sideways at the knee, resulting in the painful, awkward limp that he’d suffered ever since. It had put an end to Zach’s scavenging, but never his grieving or his anger…
And now his mind returned to the present.
Several of the men in the trundle were cleaning and oiling their personal weapons: antique rifles and shotguns from as far back as the 21st century—museum pieces scavenged from a shattered city close to the Southern Refuge—as well as many and various sidearms, and a few far heavier pieces; even a grenade-launcher, and a vicious-looking short-barreled machine gun.
Watching the men at work and nodding, if mainly to himself, Zach told Garth, “Aye, look at them. All of them hardened warriors now, though more properly survivors. Oh, we fight when we must and with all we’ve got, just to survive, to avoid extinction! For our hideous enemy rarely takes captives, and when he does…well, they don’t keep too long! Ever hungry, he fights recklessly, even insanely; puts himself in harm’s way in order to gorge; that and only that! And never a thought—if indeed he’s capable of thought—for his own survival, not that we’ve ever been able to tell. And definitely not for ours!”
As a former apprentice scavenger Garth had been very fortunate; he’d experienced only a few rare fly-by-night encounters. By contrast, here with the convoy he had already made his first kill. And he still felt strange, even a little sick about that: that he’d destroyed a creature once human, or which should have been, and that he’d shot the weird wafting thing in the eye…and seen its spongy head explode like a rotten puffball!
That had come about because the convoy had no use for scavengers in the old sense. No longer a stable, settled community, the two-hundred-odd folk of the once-clan had been allowed only a minimum of personal belongings, and then only items of absolute necessity. There was simply no room in the powered vehicles and battered trundles for materials scavenged en route, and so no need for scavs. Thus Garth Slattery was no longer a scav but a pointsman—an outrider on his father’s rebuilt machine—yet still an apprentice of sorts: the junior member of Ned Singer’s six-man team, sharing its nightly duties with two similar teams as tasked on Big Jon Lamon’s work rosters.
For when a fortnight ago Singer had lost an outrider to fly-by-nights—the rider, by pure coincidence, of Zach Slattery’s old bike: a machine Ned’s crew had recovered, but alas, without its rider—he had requested Garth as a replacement; which had left Zach feeling uneasy. It was why he now and then saw fit to warn his son against Singer: a man who had very little time for rivals. For it didn’t seem unreasonable that where Layla Morgan was concerned, Singer might see Garth as just such a rival. And out there in the velvet darkness—the badlands surrounding the near-blind, often painfully slow convoy…well, surely it were best to be cautious. For who could say what cruel fate might or might not be lying in wait for another young outrider during an encounter with fly-by-nights? Or even as the result of a simple accident, for that matter?
Garth remembered Singer’s wife. He hadn’t seen much of her, but recalled that as his father had remarked she’d never seemed too well. A small, sad, dark-eyed creature really, and not that much older than Layla when she’d died…
Death: it had come along all too frequently in the Southern Refuge. It seemed that men hadn’t evolved to live down in holes in the ground; nor yet in vast, man-made caverns.
Death: it came for men and monsters alike…
Now, as the memory of Garth’s kill flashed once more across his mind’s eye, he shivered; in fact it was more a shudder. His father felt the tremor and asked: “Cold are you? That’s strange because it’s summer and a fairly mild night, not that the seasons have ever meant much to us refuge folk.”
“Not cold,” Garth shook his head, “but I keep thinking back on my kill.”
“Again with the memories, eh? But this one far more recent. Well, that happens, but the more you kill—and you will—the less your conscience will trouble you. We’ve been lucky so far: no large groups of the awful things to contend with. Just small parties, and mindless as always. Lord, I only wish I could come out with you…but this damned leg.”
“According to Big Jon Lamon,” Garth answered, “when you and he were scavs together, you did more than your fair share. Anyway, working in the sorting bays with scav salvage, that hasn’t been easy work. I saw you come limping home after many a shift, with the pain screwing up your face. Hounding the fly-by-nights that time has cost you dear, Father.”
“Fly-by-nights!” Zach twisted in his seat, turning his head and spitting his disgust over the side of the lead-roofed, six-wheeled trailer—the so-called trundle—where it bumped and swayed across rough country. And wiping his mouth he continued: “Aye, you’re right, Garth, it cost me dear. But, by God, I’d do it all again, and gladly! But as for now—
“Well, what the hell! For what it’s worth, the Earth is all theirs now—or will be when we’re all done for…” A statement he at once regretted, following it up with a sidelong glance at Garth. And biting his lip, shuffling uncomfortably in his seat, he quickly made amends: “But that’s to look on the downside, of course.”
Forcing a grin, Garth attempted a joke, tried to divert his father’s dark mood. “Oh? So there’s an upside, is there?”
But no. Again nodding to himself, in a way that had become a habit, Zach once more turned in his seat to gaze out into the gloom, across a plain that was little more than a desert dotted with the crumbling stumps of ruins, beyond which a near-distant horizon of low hills glowed with an eerie luminosity. And glancing again at his son, and pausing to think whatever he thought—though nothing too profound, Garth felt sure—finally, with a grunt of sour amusement, Zach spoke again:
“Huh! No fool you, eh, son?”
Son. Garth smiled to himself, but genuinely this time. Son: and here he sat, sixteen going on seventeen, and a killer of fly-by-nights at that! But to the Old Man, his father, he was still a young boy, his only son.
And meanwhile Zach had continued: “No, there’s no upside—not recently, anyway—or if there was I’ve somehow missed it! But listen: just because I’m sometimes a bit down, that doesn’t mean that you—”
“It’s okay,” Garth cut in. “I know, I really do! It’s just that things never seem to get any better, right? “
Zach nodded and turned yet again, his eyes focusing, narrowing, trying to penetrate the night. “Something like that,” he said. “It’s like life doesn’t hold much meaning for me, not any longer. I sometimes feel…oh, I don’t know…but it’s like that old saw you mentioned—‘hope springs eternal’—except I know it doesn’t.
I suppose I’m just a bit weary of it all. Perhaps it’s simply that I wish I was doing more—wish I could do more—like I used to.”
With which Garth knew where the conversation would be turning now…
They were seated in a rear corner of the trundle, a rusting old bus long since stripped of a worthless engine, whose wheels and chassis were still in decent order. With its sides cut away except at the corners, and a roof layered with patches of hammered lead, the wagon now “trundled” along behind a tractor. Reconverted from a scav salvage skip, and refurnished with inward-facing bucket seats, it accommodated twenty-eight persons: men, women, and children alike. Some dozen or so trundles of similar design were in tow, while an equal number of vehicles proceeded under their own power; and all of them patrolled, watched over, shielded by outriders on mountain bikes, flanking the column at all times.
More or less separate from most of their fellow passengers, Garth and Zach knew that if they talked quietly they would not be overheard; that Zach’s frequently bitter, even disheartening-seeming remarks wouldn’t offend the men or frighten the women. For Big Jon Lamon had been known to come down hard on that sort of thing; though it was unlikely that the clan’s leader, Zach’s old friend, would find much fault with him.
Anyway Garth was sure that his father had long since earned the right to speak his mind, to think and comment out loud upon whatever was concerning him; but still he hoped Zach would keep it down when finally his frustration got the better of him. And sure enough, after another short spell of uneasy silence and just as Garth had anticipated—so it began:
“I’m reminded of my Old Man,” Zach said, “meaning my father, your grandfather, telling me things he’d heard from his father, including lots of immemorial slogans—or ‘home truths,’ as he called them—words that sometimes made good sense but all too often didn’t. I got that ‘hope springs eternal’ thing from him, just as you got it from me. Huh! Him and those old hand-me-down bywords that rarely rang true and never seemed to work in practice. In fact mostly they were dead wrong! Words from moldy old books is what they were. Words like—oh, let me think a minute—ah, yes, a favourite: ‘the meek shall inherit the Earth!’