Early Riser

by Jasper Fforde

  ‘Jonesy exaggerates wildly like the outspoken fool I now realise she is,’ said Lucy, her voice rising, ‘but she has no cogent arguments, merely slander. It’s a bona fide career. How about it?’

  ‘There will always be the Gower.’

  It was Birgitta. She’d interrupted the conversation and was momentarily distracting – something that Hooke and Jonesy both exploited.

  Whu-whump

  They’d drawn and fired their weapons almost simultaneously. Concussive vortex rings do strange things in restricted spaces, but opposing thumps do even stranger things – and like weather systems, Arctic badgers and Sister Contractia, they are difficult to predict. The two pulses met with the sound of a log being split, then ran around each other before stabilising in a tight vertical dust devil that sucked up anything not nailed down – dust, paper, hats, gloves, books. We watched the vortex grow darker and heavier and had to hold onto furniture and each other to avoid being swept off our feet, until the maelstrom explosively lost cohesion and knocked us all off our feet. Hooke drew his second Bambi but Jonesy’s back-up weapon caught him on the chest and cannoned him backwards into a plaster wall, which buckled under the impact, and Hooke fell forwards in a cloud of dust.

  Jonesy dropped the spent thermalite from the Bambi and swiftly replaced it with another.

  ‘We’ll laugh about this later,’ she said to me, advancing upon Hooke, who was struggling to get up, still dazed, ‘in that cosy retirement we promised ourselves.’

  Whump

  There was another ear-popping concussion and Jonesy was lifted off her feet and thrown backwards through two chairs, a standard lamp and out through one of the front windows by way of the heavy drapes. The snow and wind swirled into the room, the cold air replacing the hot in an instant. I turned. Lucy Knapp was holding a Thumper and had a look of steely determination about her. Lucy had lied: she was HiberTech first, friend second. When you accept a corporate fast track, you have to leave a part of yourself behind.

  I pushed my way past the tattered curtains, which were flapping wildly in the gale, and waded through the snow to where Jonesy was lying. She wasn’t dead, but it wouldn’t be long. Her face was a fine mesh of broken capillaries. Her eyelids were sunken and closed and I knew that her sockets were empty underneath. She was breathing in short gasps, and a small amount of blood frothed from the side of her mouth. Her lips were moving and I leaned closer.

  ‘It’s Charlie,’ I said.

  Her cheek twitched into a half-smile.

  ‘We had a good life together, didn’t we?’ she whispered.

  ‘The best,’ I replied, ‘I have no regrets.’

  She smiled again and pressed something unseen into my palm which I knew was the Polaroid of Birgitta and Webster, and after that, she moved her hand in an uncertain manner up towards her chest. I didn’t see at first what she was trying to do, but then noticed her thumb was out, and guessing her intent, I hooked her thumb into the D-ring of the pulse mortar on her chest. She patted my hand and twitched me another smile.

  ‘Move away from her,’ said Lucy and I trudged back through the snow into the lobby. Already, Porter Lloyd was fetching emergency shutters of folded canvas on bamboo while the winsomniacs all made themselves scarce, just not very quickly.

  ‘I’m sorry if you liked her,’ said Lucy, ‘but Project Lazarus brings a whole new meaning to the word importance.’

  Hooke picked himself up, touched a finger to his bleeding nose, shook his head and then found his weapon. He reloaded it and looked at Lucy and me in turn, then outside at Jonesy, who was still moving weakly on her back in the snow.

  ‘Put her out of her misery,’ said Lucy. ‘We’d expect the same courtesy from her.’

  ‘It’s time you were blooded,’ said Hooke. ‘Do it yourself if you’ve the stomach.’

  She glared at him.

  ‘Oh, I’ve the stomach,’ said Lucy, and took Hooke’s Bambi from him.

  I started to say something. A warning, I think. Lucy noticed, stopped and stared at me.

  ‘What is it?’

  I stared back at her for a moment.

  ‘It’s nothing.’

  She strode across to where Jonesy’s form was lying in the snow outside, then leaned over and placed the Bambi to Jonesy’s head. I turned away as Jonesy detonated the pulse charge, a heavy concussion that blew the snow and tattered remnants of the curtains back into the lobby. When I looked back outside, there was only a refrozen circle of clear ice on the ground, about the size of an ornamental fountain.

  ‘Well, shit,’ said Hooke, following my gaze, ‘that’s a loss.’

  ‘I liked her,’ I said, referring to both of them, I think.

  ‘No,’ retorted Hooke, ‘I was talking about my staff protection bonus.’

  He then looked at me, and presumably misconstrued my lack of decisive action or intervention in any of this as tacit approval of his intentions to take me to HiberTech.

  ‘Well now, Worthing,’ he said, switching his attention to Birgitta, ‘wouldn’t have marked you as a harbourer. Porter, put this deadhead somewhere safe, and make sure she’s looked after.’

  I asked Hooke in something of a daze if we should wait until the blizzard had abated, but he told me that the sooner I was safe inside HiberTech, the better it would be for him. He walked away and I, in a confused and shocked daze, followed.

  H4S radar

  ‘ . . . Limited-vision navigation is more than simply being blind within a snowstorm. The wind, swirling snow and lack of visual cues all conspire to disorientate the unwary traveller. Even seasoned professionals became lost, and only the advent of modern navigational aids made going out in a blizzard anything other than for the morbidly foolhardy . . . ’

  – Basic Blind Driving Techniques for Overwinterers

  I followed Hooke behind the line he had strung from his Sno-Trac and we climbed aboard, all the while buffeted by the blizzard. The wind had risen, the snowfall was heavier, and the temperature was dropping by the minute. It was dark by now and in every other circumstance, we would not be venturing out.

  Hooke wound in the cable, shut the rear door then climbed past me and started up the engine. But instead of troubling with the high beams which would have been useless in the blizzard, he instead switched on the H4S and waited while the screen warmed up. The outside temperature gauge was now indicating minus twenty-four Celsius and still falling. Any porter worth his salt right now would be going Full Rods Out on the HotPots.

  ‘Lucy killed Jonesy,’ I said in a quiet voice.

  ‘Other way round, kiddo – Jonesy killed Knapp. But the good news is we lost one each, so at least Pinky and Perky will have less to squabble over.’

  ‘Where are you taking me?’

  ‘To safety,’ he said. ‘Recent events have proved that you’re not safe in Sector Twelve with Toccata kicking around. Once you’re with us, we can figure out what’s going on, and if you want, you can accept that job Aurora was talking about.’

  ‘So I’m not a prisoner?’

  ‘Goodness me, no,’ he replied with perhaps not quite the tone of veracity in his voice he’d hoped for, ‘you can leave whenever you want.’

  I looked outside at the cold and the snow. Somehow leaving wasn’t really an option right now.

  The circular H4S screen in the centre of the Trac’s panel was now glowing an unearthly shade of green; the radar returns from the surrounding topography displayed as green specks on the screen, refreshed every second by the sweep of the scanner. It would give us more than enough information to navigate, although at greatly reduced speed. Clearly visible was the Dormitorium exit road, part of the Siddons and, closest of all, Jonesy’s Sno-Trac. I could see the shape of the vehicle less than twenty feet away on the screen, but when I looked outside there was nothing but a wall of swirling snow.

  Hooke said somethi
ng vague about ‘returning to base with Worthing’ on the shortwave, then popped the Sno-Trac into gear and we moved off. I was annoyed with myself because Jonesy had been a far better friend than I realised. She’d had answers, and so had Toccata, whom I’d also underestimated. I briefly thought of opening the rear door of the Sno-Trac and making a run for it, but going out in blizzards was like consorting with drowsies, borrowing from bondsmen or poking an already-enraged mammoth with a sharpened stick: don’t. Just don’t. But despite everything, there was a plus point: HiberTech had placed some sort of value on me. As long as I had value, I was safe. And if I was safe, then so was Birgitta. Sort of.

  The odd thing was, I didn’t feel anything about Lucy at all. It wasn’t that our friendship meant nothing, nor did I feel that I had, by omission, led her to her death. There was just a certain numbness, as though I’d known all along that she really only looked after herself. Mother Fallopia and the Sisterhood would be distraught, but philosophical. People die in the Winter; it’s what it’s there for.

  Hooke concentrated on the journey, the route clear on the glowing H4S, while outside the storm buffeted the small vehicle. In this way we passed slowly back down the drive from the Siddons, took a left, then after what seemed like an age, the right turn at the billboard.

  ‘So,’ I said, thinking about Hooke’s reputed enthusiasm for invasive interrogation techniques, ‘I heard you used to be with military intelligence.’

  ‘Regretfully not,’ he said, ‘more’s the pity. I would have liked to have served my country in that manner, but no. We put it about that it was me, but it was actually Aurora.’

  I should have been more surprised than I was.

  ‘Until her retirement, she was the best they had. Just went into the dreaming subject’s mind and took what she wanted. I was her assistant for a time and had a go at dream incursions, but it’s hard to know what’s real and what isn’t. I left it up to her. We all did.’

  ‘What’s on this cylinder?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said, ‘but if I were to hazard a guess, about the most impor—’

  The Sno-Trac lurched to a halt. I looked up and could see nothing but blizzard through the windscreen. Hooke flicked the ranging knob on the H4S and adjusted the gain.

  ‘What is it?’ I whispered.

  ‘There,’ he said, pointing at the glowing dots on the screen. Not more than ten yards away in the middle of the road was a strong radar return. Something that shouldn’t be there. I’d driven this way with Jonesy an hour before, and the road had been clear.

  ‘Winsomniacs on the move . . . but now not moving?’ I suggested.

  Hooke shook his head.

  ‘They’re lazy, not stupid.’

  ‘Could be womads who got caught out.’

  This was unlikely, but possible. Winter Nomads had been known to move in clutches of twenty or more to conserve heat, usually covered by a yurt with caribou skirts to stop the outer walkers’ legs from freezing. If things got bad they just downed the yurt with them in it, lit the fire, wrapped themselves in skins and huddled.

  ‘Possibly. Still, can’t be helped.’

  He lowered the snow plough and moved forward. But as he did so, the trace moved away from us. Hooke stopped, and the trace shifted on for a few yards, stopped, paused, then approached us again. A squall of wind hit the Sno-Trac and the vehicle shook. The anemometer on the roof was reading gusts of sixty miles per hour, but the whatever-it-was on the H4S seemed unaffected.

  There was silence in the cab for a moment and then, with a slowness that denoted clear deliberation, the radar trace started moving towards us.

  ‘After a scrap, are you?’ said Hooke, and took the Cowpuncher off the rack behind him. He pushed four D-Cell thermalites into the magazine and racked the first into the battery chamber. The Cowpuncher was not the subtlest of weapons – it was actually intended for herding dairy mammoths rather than fighting – but was the close-quarter weapon of choice when you weren’t big on subtlety and hostility was getting right in your face.

  Hooke slid back the window and held the weapon outside while we both stared at the H4S screen, the trace moving ever closer. When it was at the ten-yard range, Hooke let fly.

  The pressure wave momentarily turned the snow to rain and should have revealed whatever it was in the blizzard, but there was nothing to be seen except the side of the road and one half of a horse trough. Within a second the blizzard had once more closed in and by the time we looked back at the H4S screen, the radar return had gone.

  ‘Must have been a glitch,’ said Hooke.

  ‘No,’ I said, pointing at the bottom of the screen, ‘I think it’s behind us.’

  The H4S scanner was mounted on the top of the Sno-Trac and gave a 360-degree view of the surroundings. It was now picking up a trace directly behind, and moving slowly left to right.

  ‘I’ve had enough of this,’ said Hooke, and drove backwards as fast as he could. I felt a thump and then a judder as we hit something, and he stopped.

  ‘We got it, whatever it was. Bear, I think.’

  ‘Why would a bear not hibernate? That never happens.’

  ‘First time for everything. I’m—’

  He’d stopped talking because the electrical power in the Sno-Trac had died, and with it the lights, H4S and engine. The only thing still working was the AM wireless, the dial a dull orange. It was tuned to the Winter Network, and now the engine was off we could hear the music – a crackly rendering of ‘Getting to Know You’. The implication of a Rodgers and Hammerstein track wasn’t lost on Hooke, and he went to switch the wireless off, but the knob broke off in his fingers.

  ‘The plastic must have been fatigued by the cold,’ I said, but if I thought this situation was in any way good, I was mistaken. The auxiliary heater had died with the power outtage and Sno-Tracs were not well insulated. Without heating they’d match the exterior temperature in less than ten minutes.

  ‘Bad time to have a breakdown,’ said Hooke, checking all the trips. After cracking a light-stick, he pressed the starter and the compressed air turned the engine but without a restart, and that’s when we felt the vehicle lurch violently to one side. We exchanged looks.

  ‘It’s dragging us backwards,’ I said. ‘You must have snagged her.’

  ‘Not for long,’ he replied, his temper up. He selected low reverse, let out the clutch and then pressed the air starter. The compressed air hissed into the engine, turned the motor over without a start but it moved the Sno-Trac regardless, jerkily, and in reverse; he was attempting to run over what was pulling us. There was another lurch, the vehicle lifted as it went over an obstruction, then fell to the ground again and stopped hard; we’d struck a wall or something. Hooke pushed the gear selector into first and pressed the starter again but there was only a faint hiss as the compressed air tank ran out – we were going nowhere.

  ‘Stay here,’ said Hooke, grabbing the Cowpuncher. ‘Me and it need to get some face time.’

  He opened the rear door and the cab was suddenly full of wind-borne snow.

  ‘Safety line,’ I reminded him, shivering with the sudden cold, and he nodded, grabbed the safety cable, clipped it to his belt and dropped out of the cab and into the blizzard.

  Once the door had shut, the snowflakes that had blown into the cab settled and turned to water in the warm interior. The ratchet on the steel safety reel began to pay out, matching Hooke’s cautious walking speed. After about a half-minute it stopped. And then, softened by the storm, there was a distant thud – Hooke had deployed the Cowpuncher. A second or two later and there was a howl of noise as the safety reel paid out at a furious rate. Within ten seconds the entire fifty-yard length had gone and the reel came to a juddering halt. The tensioned wire bit into the drum and door surround, bent the mounting spindle and jerked the entire Sno-Trac sideways. The cable stayed taut for a second, then went slack
.

  I sat there for a few minutes with the wind buffeting the Sno-Trac, the temperature falling. My breath was now showing white in the chill air, and the moisture in the cab was beginning to freeze on the inside of the windscreen and instrument panel. This was not good news: in the rush to leave the Siddons, I’d left my heavy coat, gloves, hat and overboots behind. If I didn’t do anything, in a couple of hours I’d be solid until the thaw.

  Just as I was trying to figure out my best option the lights flickered back on as electrical power returned. I jumped into the driver’s seat, checked the Trac was in neutral, turned on the ignition and then pushed the air starter. Nothing. The H4S had powered up again, and the creature was visible only as a whispering collection of greenish spots on the screen in front of me, reinforced by every sweep of the scanner. The trace moved, took a pace forward, then stopped, and by the time the scanner came around again, it had gone. There was just me, the blizzard and an immobile Sno-Trac.

  I shivered again and realised that notwithstanding the apparent safety of the vehicle, I needed to make a move now while I was still warm enough to do so. I rummaged in the back of the Sno-Trac and found a pair of socks, a flat cap and a spare woncho. I put the woncho over my head and pulled the hat down as far as I could, then slipped the woolly socks on my hands to use as gloves. I took the emergency lantern from its place on the bulkhead, pushed in a thermalite and switched it on. There was a soft fizz and the cabin was flooded by a warm orange glow. I looked at the temperature gauge and wind speed, and figured I had perhaps ten minutes to find shelter or I’d be next in line for a multiple finger transplant. Leave it twenty minutes and I could upgrade the loss to that of a foot, nose or hand. Half an hour and I’d probably be dead.