North

by Frank Owen

  ‘But the scientists aren’t satisfied. Why would the pronghorn have evolved to run twice as fast as the predators they’re trying to escape from? They don’t need that kind of speed to survive. But the scientists, they’re thinking about the present. They think that right now is what counts.

  ‘Then one guy has an idea: maybe they’re running from something that used to exist, long ago. So they look in the fossil records, and sure as shit, there’s an American cheetah – used to be, anyways. Bigger than the African kind, and fuckin’ faster than greased lightning. How about that? Turns out the pronghorn’s been outrunning a ghost for thousands of years.’

  ‘Neat,’ Kurt offered. The wind was blowing in off the water, and he reached out for Linus to hold the cat against his body.

  ‘Son, what I’m saying is that sometimes things take the wrong path and we all just go on along with it. Instead of standing up, we say, “This is how it is, so this is how it was meant to be.” All the while we’re exactly like the pronghorns. You get what I’m saying?’

  Again the shrug.

  ‘What if Columbus arriving was that point, the place where we left our proper path?’ Felix waved his hand through the air, at the invisible pathogens that rode the currents. ‘You know what that means? We’re doing all of this to ourselves. We’re running from the ghosts of things that stopped existing a long time ago. Know what I think? Maybe it’s time to stop running and to start acting again.’

  With his free hand Kurt peeled back a finger of moss that had grown in a crack. There were small, grayish beetles underneath. He flicked one out into the water.

  Felix was done. He lay back and looked up at the sky, taking the air deep into his lungs. He was still not used to it.

  ‘Okay, but what are you saying exactly?’

  ‘I’m saying that seeing you today has cleared up some things. It was meant to be. Maybe it’s time for us to put things right. Get back on track.’ Felix paused. ‘In that building back there, the one with the fancy domes’ – he thumbed over his shoulder and Kurt craned his neck to get a look – ‘there’s a group of Northerners who’re going to attack Renard and get rid of the viruses, once and for all. You’d be a good addition. What do you say?’

  ‘Old man, I say what I always say: Fuck Renard!’

  ‘That’s what I figured. Now, I got something to show you.’

  36

  Dyce flinched. Supply and demand. Where had he heard that before? The fat guy. Ed. Down under the Mouth, in the tunnels where they farmed the mushrooms, forcing them back from death into life. Look how that had turned out.

  Adams pressed on. ‘There’s no more time for trial-and-error with the mushroom production. We do it like you saw it in your caverns. Just like that. Seed the spores in someone while they’re still alive, then harvest from the body.’

  Ruth shook her head. ‘I think you need some more time in the shackles.’

  ‘But who’s going to volunteer?’ Dyce spoke up.

  ‘We got us a compulsory volunteer yesterday. Northern patrolman who learnt our location. Hank Someone. There’s no way we can let him go and there’s no point in keeping him. Manna from heaven.’

  They took a moment to digest the news.

  ‘All’s fair in love and war, right?’ Adams wasn’t really asking: he was explaining what he was going to do, and there was no avoiding it. They were technical consultants, and that was all. ‘Now, I just need you to tell me again, without missing a single detail, about what you saw down in those mines so we can do this. We get one good shot. One batch should do it. We can end this now.’

  Dyce looked over at Vida. She was touching her flaking lips with the tips of her fingers, the way people did when they were about to tell a lie.

  ‘I can’t be part of that,’ he said, and she looked at him in surprise. Two days ago he’d have given anything for a shot at Renard.

  Fuck. Was it the baby? Was this shit happening already? For Vida it was working the other way around. The idea of her child made her more willing than before to do whatever had to be done. One Northern death, when so many Southerners had already given up their lives, seemed like a good deal. Sacrifices. They all had to make them, right? And with a new generation to think about, she was doubly prepared to make them.

  She tried to speak softly, but she knew Adams would hear everything anyway. It was like he was part of the building: nothing happened within its walls without his knowledge.

  ‘Dyce? Can we just talk about this?’

  He looked her straight in the eyes, fierce. ‘You didn’t see them, down there in the mines. The way they were lying. They’d been slaughtered. They died screaming, Vida. The kids too. That’s on me, burnt in here.’ He put a finger to his head and twisted it against his temple, as though he was trying to bore his own hole. ‘And I can’t let that happen again – to anyone.’

  She shook her head, but she also felt herself softening.

  Ah, fuck.

  ‘But, Dyce, what else is there?’

  ‘We’ll think of something,’ Ruth said. ‘Don’t we always?’

  Adams cleared his throat. ‘I appreciate the, ah, sentiment, but we don’t have time for pussyfooting. This is the only way. Believe me – I’ve given it a lot of thought.’

  Vida tried to intervene. ‘Look. Isn’t this patrolman good for information, at least? In the meantime, you could try growing the mushrooms from a . . . a corpse. That’s their natural state, right? There must be cemeteries everywhere in Des Moines. If you’re that desperate, you could dig up a body.’

  ‘I look like a resurrection man to you? You’re going to need to do some heavy persuading before ole Grizzly Adams reaches for the torch and the spade.’

  Vida and Ruth exchanged a long look. Vida took a deep breath. ‘Okay. Well, how about this? I have something that Renard would be very interested in getting his hands on. We could lure him out. And then, blammo. The end of Mister Fox.’

  Ruth was nodding. ‘We’d need a way of sending him the message, letting him know what it is. Like a carrier pigeon.’

  It was Dyce’s turn to be shocked. ‘What the fuck? Lure Renard out? Are you serious? What do we have that he would possibly want?’

  Adams’s eyes shot from one to the other, traveled down Vida’s body to her stomach, and then back up again. He smiled slowly.

  ‘I see you have something to discuss among yourselves,’ he said. His eyes were narrowed, but that permanent grin was in place. ‘I’ll give you five minutes, and then I’m coming back inside.’ He got up and left the room, his shirt tucked neatly back into his pants, as if the revelation of his tattooed belly had never happened.

  ‘You need to sit down,’ said Dyce to Vida. ‘You need to sit down right now and tell me what the fuck is going on with the two of you.’

  ‘Vida, you want me to stay?’ asked Ruth.

  ‘Of course I want you to stay. It’s your fault we’re in this almighty fuck-up in the first place! In fact, how about you start, and I’ll jump in?’

  Ruth pursed her lips and turned to face Dyce full on. ‘Maybe it’s you who’s going to need that chair, Allerdyce.’

  ‘We’re wasting time. Just tell me.’

  37

  Ruth lifted her chin. ‘All right. You asked for it. Dyce, you know I used to work up North before the War. In the labs.’

  ‘Vida told me all that stuff when we met. I don’t hold it against you.’

  ‘I’m not asking for your forgiveness. I’ve had a long life. When you have the same, you’ll find out how it is.’

  ‘Get on with it.’ Dyce couldn’t help himself. He knew this wasn’t the way he ought to be speaking to Ruth. The worm turns, he kept thinking. The worm fucking turns, lady!

  ‘I had an affair with Renard.’

  ‘You what?’

  ‘You heard me. We were lovers. He was married. That woman who got blown up in the toilets by one of the Callahans. Queenie.’

  ‘Fuck. Me.’

  She went smoothly on, and Dyc
e let her. ‘I got pregnant, Dyce. I got pregnant by Renard and I stole some of the antidote he was working on: the panacea, he called it, like he hadn’t been responsible for the viruses in the first place. I ran down South and I had the baby. Then I met Everett. The rest you know. I have spent my life waiting for Renard to track me down, but I’m not sorry I went.’

  ‘Wait, wait, wait. Just wait one cotton-picking minute. What happened to the baby? Does Vida have a brother or a sister?’

  Ruth shook her head slowly, watching Dyce in case he did something he couldn’t come back from.

  ‘Dyce.’ Vida’s voice was a whisper. She cleared her throat.

  And then he did have to sit down. The seat was still warm where Adams had left it.

  ‘My Christ. My sweet motherfucking Savior.’

  ‘Dyce!’

  ‘It’s you, isn’t it? It’s you. You’re Renard’s daughter. Oh, my sweet, sweet jumped-up Jesus!’

  Vida got over to him quite quickly in spite of the crutches. She set them aside and tried to take his face in her hands. Dyce kept turning away from her, but she wouldn’t let him.

  ‘Dyce. It’s me. It’s still me. Don’t you think it was a terrible thing for me to find out too?’

  ‘How long have you known? When did she tell you?’

  ‘I’m standing right here,’ Ruth snapped. ‘I told her when she first arrived. When she was under. I couldn’t let her go without her knowing. She could have died.’

  ‘You think this is news to me? I fucking know she could have died! I was there!’

  ‘Enough,’ said Vida. ‘It is what it is, Dyce, and we can’t change it. But you know what? We can use it. We can use it to lure Renard into a meeting. It might be the only thing in the world that he still wants.’

  ‘Lure? Lure? You have any idea what we’re putting on that hook?’

  Vida nodded, exasperated. ‘Dyce. This is what we’ve been talking about since the beginning. What do you think “Fuck Renard” really means?’ She held his arms. ‘You’ve got your mushroom nightmares, and I’ve got mine. Well, I’m tired of being scared to fall asleep. And I’m tired of waking up to this shit too. What’ll life be like with Renard still in charge? Just think about it. No reward without risk, right? This is the risk. He can’t refuse!’

  Adams had stuck his head around the door.

  ‘All clear?’ His eyes darted among them, calculating, and they all heard his breath hissing in and out through the hole in his cheek. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘What’s the buzz? What have you got that Renard can’t refuse?’

  Vida let Dyce’s arm go and pointed at her belly. Dyce felt the blood rushing away from his face.

  38

  Hank lay on his side on the floor in the dark. After the beating, they hadn’t bothered to shackle him, though he saw there were rings attached to the wall, like old-time slavers’. There’d been screaming in the night – shrill, so that he couldn’t decide whether it was a man’s voice or a woman’s. ‘I’ll kill you!’ it kept saying, over and over. And then there was the thumping – a body slamming against a door, he guessed. It seemed to him as though it was just a matter of time before the wood of that barrier broke and the monster would be at his door – and then on him: a worse monster than the ones who had beaten him.

  But patrolmen were chosen for their grit. And also, the screaming had stopped. In the blessed, quiet dark, Hank had given in to his concussion. You sent your mind away, he knew that, when it was in danger of being broken or lost forever. It wasn’t weakness.

  ‘Live to fight another day,’ he murmured.

  And Hank knew it was another day when he was woken by the sounds of industry that carried through the building – the metered vibrations of footfalls, the mutter of distant voices. The normality of it reminded him of the patrol station, and he was buffeted by homesickness. He even missed that bitch who was always screaming at them to close the door. By God, his head hurt!

  Now the latches clunked open one by one, and Hank felt his heartbeat speed up in protest. When the door opened, four people came in. The one in front carried a hurricane lamp that made their shadows dance on the walls like demons until they closed the door behind them.

  Hank knew what happened behind closed doors.

  He sat up fast, his head ringing.

  The little group that was inspecting him wasn’t in much better shape than their shadows. The leader was a grisly white man with a hole clean through his cheek. Behind him was a dark-skinned girl on crutches, her leg bandaged and outsized, like someone had stuffed the thing to make it look normal again but had failed. Now and again she leant against a guy, young and pale and so tired he was rocking on his feet. The smudged growth of stubble gave his age away. He was the kind one, Hank marked. The weak link. The last one was a tiny woman with fierce lines around her mouth. Hank had seen enough in his years as a patrolman to know not to fuck with someone who looked that way, woman or man, old or young. You earned those lines; they didn’t come free.

  The leader began, his voice hollow. ‘Hank Simmons? That you?’

  There was no sense in lying. They’d find out, and then they’d lay into him again. Shatter something this time. And who was he being loyal to anyway? Hank sniffed.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said, and Vida saw how bad the recent hammering had been. Blood from Hank’s nose had turned to scabs, and they clung to his moustache like ticks.

  ‘Let me fill you in, then. When you escaped, you got our guy real good. Because of you, one of my best men, my best marksman too, Otis, got eight stitches in his tongue – and enough alcohol to float the Titanic. He’s bandaged up like a mummy. He worked with you at your precinct, undercover Resistance, and you didn’t even know. He’s still out now, otherwise he’d have been here too. And you’re lucky he’s not.

  ‘But it’s not Otis I’m interested in right now. It’s you, my fine friend. Sit up and take note of these good people. On the crutches here is Vida, and over there is Dyce.’ The leader gestured theatrically, and the others nodded, silent. ‘But most important for our purposes is this lady here: Ruth. Say hello to Ruth, Hank Simmons.’

  Hank edged his back against the wall properly, so he could sit up straight to face whatever was coming. He hadn’t known that he’d pissed himself at some point in the night, and now his trousers clung cold and heavy on the backs of his legs.

  ‘Now, I ’spect you’re wondering why I dragged them all down here when we got so much to do. Well, these kind folks just had an idea that might save your sorry life. How does that sound? Am I selling it right?’

  ‘Depends,’ Hank said. His voice was a nasal snuffle through the damage.

  ‘Well, keep an open mind and don’t go anywhere. That’s all we’re asking.’

  Ruth came closer, impatient with Adams’s grandstanding. Men. They loved the sound of their own voices.

  ‘Actually, Mister Simmons – that’s not all we’re asking. We have something that Renard would be very interested in. And we need to set up a meeting with him – in person. You reckon you can do that?’

  Hank snorted, then winced. It hurt like hell.

  ‘A face-to-face with Renard? No way. That never happens. Doesn’t matter who you talk to. He knows better than that.’

  ‘Look.’ She was trying to make her voice kind, but Hank heard the iron in it. ‘We’re a hundred per cent sure that what we have is something he wants. He’ll meet us – that part is none of your business – but we need to know whether you can pass the message along to him. Put us in touch.’

  Hank coughed into his fist and cleared his throat of the blood and phlegm. ‘What is it? What have you got?’

  ‘It’s none of your concern right now,’ Dyce echoed. Though his vision was still blurry and the lantern swung, Hank saw that he didn’t have the same fire as the others. The boy sounded like he was just going through the motions. A coward. If Hank had been planning his second escape, that was the guy he would have gone through first.

  ‘You’ll have to tell me what it
is if you really want me to do this. How am I supposed to pass on a message if you won’t tell me?’

  ‘Whiny motherfucker,’ commented Adams mildly to Ruth. Bad cop.

  ‘Give him a chance,’ she said. Good cop.

  Adams shrugged and sighed. ‘Okay, then. How about this? We have his daughter. And his grandchild.’

  Hank snorted a laugh, then coughed again and held his ribs. They had probably been cracked, but there was nothing a person could do about that except strap them up and pray.

  ‘Grandchild? Now you’re shitting me. Old man doesn’t have kids. It’s kind of his thing – you know, like that song?’ Hank hummed through his nose. ‘Hitler only had one ball. The War was the only time Renard didn’t shoot blanks – you never heard that one?’

  ‘Well, he got one shot off. So tell me: what do you need to set this up?’

  ‘Renard didn’t get where he is by being stupid. I’m not sure he’ll bite.’

  ‘It’s not a trick,’ said Vida, quick and intense. ‘It’s real.’

  ‘As I mentioned,’ said Adams, looking at her until she was quiet, and then turning back to focus on Hank, ‘you can set it up, or you can find out what being buried alive feels like. I know which I’d prefer. You going to do it or not?’

  Hank thought. Live to fight another day, he said to himself.

  ‘I’ll need a phone.’

  ‘Good,’ said Adams. ‘It’s settled, then.’ Hank watched in fascination as the lantern light glinted off his exposed molars. ‘Be ready. And now we will leave you to your beauty sleep.’

  He led the others out and the bolts were shot again, leaving Hank alone with the perennial darkness.