‘But what happened?’
‘Drones, helicopter. They shot you with tranquillisers.’
Ash is sitting up, but her head is resting on her knees, and she keeps keeling over.
‘Ash, you have to get up.’
Jessie tugs her arm. ‘Sis.’
Ash lies back down.
‘Sis. Remember we were in a bit of a fix? Well, guess what.’
He turns Ash around, shows her the black horizon. ‘Look, look. We have to get out of here.’
Jessie is standing up. She keeps shaking her head, trying to clear it.
‘Isn’t there anything in your medicine bag?’ he asks.
She goes over to the car, stops for a moment in front of the three bags.
‘I packed,’ he says. ‘We have to go.’
‘Where’s the coffee?’
They open one of the backpacks. Jessie takes a pinch of coffee, maybe half a teaspoon, and puts it in her mouth. She gives Ash some, makes her swallow it despite her grimacing. They give her water.
Ash stands up. Shakily, but she’s up.
He realises that the packing is still wrong; Ash will be barely able to walk. He shifts stuff from her backpack to his IKEA bag, and takes some things from Jessie as well.
To the west, the sky is black, and they can see the tips of flames now. Jessie spills water on some towels, hands them to him and Ash. ‘Cover your face,’ she says. Everything is incredibly slow. He feels like crying again. ‘If we don’t leave this second, we’ll burn. For sure.’
They start, him leading the way and Jessie more or less dragging Ash along.
‘We need a car,’ he says. ‘We really need a car.’
They have walked for maybe half an hour, Ash is properly awake now and they can go faster, but the distance between them and the fire is shrinking. It is much hotter. He didn’t think it could get any hotter.
‘I think it’s at the car by now,’ Jessie says.
He’s lost them the Lioness.
He sets off at the fastest pace he’s capable of without running, and the girls are keeping up. Still the fire is closing in on them. There’s hardly any wind, but what wind there is must be faster than them.
He dreads being overtaken by smoke; he knows that people become disoriented, end up walking into the flames.
‘This is the way we came?’ Ash comes up next to him. ‘The way we drove?’
‘Yes.’
‘There was a fire to our left, no? Wasn’t all that far.’
She points eastwards, and yes, in the distance the landscape is blackened, and there’s some smoke, but they can’t see any flames.
‘We should be going that way.’
They leave the road and head through the fields towards the blackened area. It goes against his instincts, to walk parallel to the fire instead of trying to outrun it, but Ash is right. Unless they find a usable car within the next hour, the fire will catch up with them. An already burnt-out area is their best hope.
The field they’re in slowly turns ashen, the grass covered in thin dust. They’re on a slight uphill slope and he feels the weight of the bag; a flutter of weakness in his chest. Charred, matchstick trees loom in the distance, and to their right billowing black smoke and flames.
He has to drink more water.
‘I’m sorry,’ he says to the girls. ‘For not believing you.’
‘It’s OK,’ Ash says. ‘It’s all beyond belief.’
The heat becomes searing. The field is now soot-black, burnt vegetation crunching underfoot, and still, it is towards more of this blackness they’re heading. The air seems to be boiling. His eyes are running.
They reach the edge of the burnt area in the nick of time, the flames only a couple of hundred feet from them. The ground is still hot. Under some fallen trees they see the glow of embers. Jessie empties a bottle of water on her feet – she is wearing flimsy fabric trainers. The water sizzles as it hits the ground.
‘We can’t keep wasting water like this,’ he says.
They have to keep going. He hurries them along. With all the ground vegetation gone the distance between trees seems huge. The trees themselves are just charred splinters, their branches gone or left as stumps.
The girls, with towels covering their mouths and noses, and their glistening eyes, look mad.
They are covered in soot. He can feel it in his mouth, in his eyes, in his ears. Breathing is an act of faith. The air is repulsive; it’s so thick with ash and soot that taking a breath is like biting into coal. At the same time, he is compelled to take deeper and deeper breaths, trying to get some oxygen in with the smoke. There’s a throbbing pain on the right side of his forehead, and when he touches it there’s a bump, and dirty, sooty blood. He must have hit his head against the top of the car.
And then, a roar, as the fire passes the place where they entered the burnt-out area. Ash grabs his arm and pulls at him, a look of panic in her eyes. He hadn’t realised he had fallen behind.
I may be too old for this.
As much as the heat hurries them along, he can’t help but turn to see what is going on. Several times, the wall of flames makes inroads towards them, little devil flamelets skipping from one half-burnt log to another, and then he starts running, urging the girls to go faster.
What nightmare is this? This hellish summer, and then this actual hell.
His eyes are sore, and he sees flames everywhere. He wonders if this is it, this is the smoke wreaking havoc with his sense of orientation. He blinks to clear his eyes.
He wants to splash some water on his face, but the girls shake their heads. They’ve run out.
At the top of a hill, they find they’re surrounded by charred land as far as they can see. How far can they walk in these conditions? Without water? And why, why should he keep walking? He’s tired. The only survivors they’ve met have just tried to kill them. He stops, lets his backpack fall to the ground. He can’t sit down for the heat, so he remains standing and closes his eyes, tries to will himself out of existence.
When he opens his eyes, Jessie and Ash have come back and are shouting at him. He shakes his head; he can’t hear them anyway. But the girls pull at his arms and his backpack, and in the end he gives in.
They start downhill, slowly leaving the roar of the fire behind. After a while they can only hear their own coughing and a sort of hollow raspy whistling; the wind in a dead forest.
12
He doesn’t notice it straight away, but Ash is not eating. She still prepares or cooks the food and hands them their portions, but one day he sees that her plate is almost empty from the start, and for the whole duration of the lunch she’s just been pushing a mouthful of greying canned meat around. He realises he hasn’t seen her eat in a couple of days, and when he studies her face it hits him that it’s drawn and sallow. But she would look drawn after what they’ve been through. He doesn’t say anything then, waits until the next meal. When she again fails to eat he takes her plate and forks over half his food.
‘I don’t want it,’ she says. ‘Who wants to eat in this heat?’
‘You. You’ve eaten in this heat.’
‘I’m not hungry.’
Jessie is watching them. He turns to her, hopes that she’ll back him up, but she just shrugs.
‘I can’t.’ Ash puts the plate down. ‘I’d gag if I try.’
They survived the ambush, the fire, walked through scorched land until they reached a town where they found this dusty hatchback with a nearly full petrol tank. The girls suffered no more ill effects from the tranquillisers. All in all, their losses turned out to be manageable, yet the mood is despondent.
The fear they felt during the ambush and the chase is still there, palpable, like a fourth passenger in the car. Instead of slouching in her seat with her feet up on the dashboard, taking interminable naps, now Jessie sits straight-backed with the rifle propped between her knees, her eyes on the road ahead. A sullen anger in her. She never lets go of the rifle, and what can he say?
She’s right; they have to be on their guard. They’ll scrutinise the side of the road for potential hiding places, and if they can’t rule out an ambush they just turn around and try another way.
But it’s not just the fear. The girls seem to have suddenly grown tired and hopeless in some fundamental way. Jessie used to monitor their diet to make sure they got all the necessary nutrients. Now she can stuff herself with gooey melted chocolate, and doesn’t even notice what Harry and Ash eat. It’s days since they asked him to find some stream or lake where they can have a wash. There’s a dimming of light in their eyes.
‘They won’t chase us,’ he tries to encourage the girls. ‘They were just waiting there, hoping to get lucky.’
‘Something will get us,’ Jessie says.
He’s not found the right moment to confess: I led them to us. I left you defenceless.
At night he tries to stay awake and keep watch. He feels less safe in this car. It’s far smaller than the Lioness, and drives like something put together in haste; more rickety cart than mother-ship. He doesn’t want to keep thinking about the ambush, but he can’t help it. Who are these people? What do they want? What additional nightmare is waiting for them? He remembers an article he read a year or so ago – a lifetime ago – about billionaires building luxury shelters; preparing in style for the end of the world. Would they be trying to find a cure, from the safety of their bunkers? Would they sacrifice other survivors for experiments? Or maybe the girls are right, and they’re just hunting women.
And then this thing with Ash. The following morning he and Jessie are eating, but Ash is still in the car, sitting sideways on the back seat with her legs dangling out. The closest she will approach breakfast.
‘Next stop,’ she says when he offers her a cereal bar.
Her skin is sallow, the hair limp, her lips are chapped and bleeding at the corners, little glistening red dots that she absent-mindedly wipes off.
It keeps being ‘Next stop’ with Ash and food.
The map promises water – a lake – to their left, but the truth is he doesn’t know where on the map they are. He lost track somewhere in the highlands, among white stony hills that reflected the harsh light and made him drive squinting, even with the sunglasses. Since then they’ve been following a hunch, a wish, the lie he’s been telling the girls about being on the M10, southwards. And they’d have been all right, he’d have found his way, but the road signs seemed to all vanish at once: it’s been a day since they last came across one. He wonders vaguely if they’ve strayed into a war-zone, the signs all intentionally removed.
They’re in a rocky desert, everything a monotonous dun-grey, with villages here and there, squat small-windowed houses, some of them built of clay, wisps of straw sticking out from the walls. He is still nervous, his fingers clasping the wheel harder than he needs to, but mostly the land is open. There isn’t anywhere for a helicopter to hide.
They drive past human remains now and then, far more frequently than before, sometimes just an arced ribcage picked clean by the sun and animals.
Ash wants to sleep, all the time.
In the last couple of days, the most she has eaten is a few spoons of a clear vegetable soup, that she seemed to enjoy until she saw something floating in it, a herb or something, and pushed the cup away. While he and Jessie eat she lies on the back seat, in a half-awake state. She barely drags herself out of the car to go to the toilet.
What he should have done is to have stayed close to the sea, he thinks. They could have caught fish every morning that even Ash would eat, and scavenged in the kitchens of all-inclusive hotels. Pretended that the clock has stopped.
He parks the car in the sun, intentionally, to force her out; he thinks it will make a difference if at least she sees them eat. But Ash doesn’t even notice she’s in the sun. She curls up against the back seat, closes her eyes.
‘You can’t stay here, you’ll cook,’ he says.
‘Leave the doors open.’
To Jessie he says, ‘Why can’t you do something?’
Jessie ambles over. ‘Come on, have some food,’ she says to Ash.
She looks at everything he offers with suspicion, right now a Green Giant corn tin.
‘Urgh, it’s warm,’ Ash says.
‘You know what,’ Jessie says, ‘you’ll want to eat at some point, and then you’ll have a whole lot of problems and pain because you’ve gone and starved yourself.’ Then, alarmingly, ‘There are easier ways.’
He no longer trusts them to drive. The girls don’t seem to mind.
In the car he asks Ash to think of stuff she might want to eat. ‘There must be something that doesn’t make you gag,’ he says. Fruit appears to be fine, but they haven’t found any fruit in this desert. ‘Ice cream,’ she says. ‘A green salad with tomatoes. A gazpacho.’ He wonders if she doesn’t do it on purpose: mentions things that she knows they’ll never come across.
At the next stop, Ash walks over to the side of the road, has a dizzy spell and falls over. Her head hits the dirt inches from a boulder. She could have died on the spot.
Once back out on the road he presses the horn, lets out a long, trumpet-like howl.
Jessie turns to him, alarm on her face. He looks in the rear-view mirror at Ash who has raised herself on one elbow.
‘That’s right, get up. I want to talk to you.’
‘Or else?’ Jessie snorts.
‘Listen to me.’
‘There’s only more awfulness to look forward to,’ Jessie says. ‘Sis here has the right idea.’
‘You have a future. You’re young.’
‘The future starts in about five hundred years,’ Jessie says. ‘After the radiation is gone.’
‘I want to forget everything,’ Ash says.
He presses the horn again.
‘Do you think more death is what this world needs? Look at me – in the best-case scenario, I’m facing old age without any of the medical benefits of the last century. There’ll be no pain relief for my arthritis, no cure for my cataract …’
‘I actually think I can do that operation myself,’ Jessie says. ‘In very rudimentary conditions.’
‘I don’t have a damn cataract, I’m just giving an example. My point is, we can’t give up.’
He knows what’s getting to them. The exhaustion of always thinking, What’s the point? Everything they do – what’s the point? He imagines himself in a museum, all the little explanatory notes under the artworks saying, ‘What’s the point?’ Not an easy question at the best of times.
That evening, they’ve just stopped for the night, when Ash suddenly wants to go and look out over a barren field at the remains of the sunset, coral tendrils in the sky. He doesn’t like walking so far from the car, and in the near-dark, but he’s so glad she wants to do anything at all that he doesn’t protest.
They advance slowly. She can no longer stand without support.
‘You’ve lost your drawing stuff, haven’t you? Again.’
It’s true, it was among the things they abandoned by the Lioness.
‘Don’t worry about it. We’ll come across some soon enough.’
She nods. ‘They’re making a fire over there. A big fire.’
He’s glad that she’s talking, that she’s showing some interest.
‘We’re aliens,’ she says. ‘We don’t mind the fire.’
He tries to understand her, he really does. It takes him a while to realise she’s hallucinating.
‘It’ll be a lot cooler there, for one,’ he says. He’s talking about their destination, the sheltered area behind the Ethiopian highlands. ‘Mountains, forest. Rain. Jesus, I miss the rain. We can establish a new society, be better, be kinder to each other and to the world. We can turn this into something good. If we actually get there.’
He goes on like that, a monologue that he hopes will stir something in the girls. Get Ash to at least open her eyes.
‘We wouldn’t have religion. We’d forget religion, just like tha
t. And ideas about countries, races! Everything bad, we can just forget it and it’s gone.’ He actually gets excited talking about it, he believes in what he says. He hopes he’s not the only one.
‘We did think,’ Jessie finally says, ‘that we could maybe help the wildlife once we get there. Animals don’t get the virus but they will be affected by radiation. This drought’ – she waves a hand – ‘we could help with water. We can dig.’
‘Exactly! You’ll see, it won’t be just us to care about.’
‘It’s not like we were left in charge, you know,’ Jessie says. She has turned despondent again. ‘It just happened.’
He glances in the mirror at Ash; she’s still dozing.
‘Think about your mother,’ he says. ‘I know the odds are small, but she might have made it.’
‘She’s dead, Harry.’
‘You know for a fact?’
‘She was murdered fifteen years ago.’
‘Jesus. I’m sorry.’
‘It was probably not your fault.’
‘This may be the first time you’re cutting me some slack.’
Jessie shrugs.
‘Do you want to talk about it?’ He says this, but really he expects her to close back up, braces himself against whatever sarcasm will come at him.
‘We were told to grieve. It was like we were given a prescription. Grieve, and you’ll be fine.’
‘I don’t know what to say.’
He remembers when the police called to inform him about Tim’s death – even then, his knee-jerk reaction, the split-second thought that went through his head before shock and sadness was, Why are they calling me? As though years of pretending that he wasn’t the boy’s closest relative had actually made it so. He had been so taken aback that he barely took in the rest of what the policewoman said – ‘two-vehicle collision’, ‘driving under the influence’. It only registered later that Tim had been given a lift home from a work bash by a drunk colleague.
‘I think so, anyway. Sis says I misremember things.’
‘Was it …? Did it happen in London?’
She shakes her head.
‘Uganda. Poachers.’
‘God. Were they caught?’
Under the Blue Page 22
