The Snow

by Adam Roberts

  A door squealed, and I looked round to see [Name deleted] emerging from a dark little hut. He was carrying keys, which he tinkled in his hand like a little bell. ‘Truck,’ he said. ‘That one, I think.’

  Opening the door I clambered up the little ladder and got myself inside the cab of the truck. The seats were sharply cold to the touch, and the chill seemed to have intensified the odour of the space: the smells of metal and creaky plastic and motor oil, to which was added a vaguely mentholated and frowsy essence. ‘Wrong one,’ said [Name deleted], having tried rattlingly to fit the key into the ignition. ‘Next one.’

  ‘[Name deleted],’ I said. ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘Come on,’ he said.

  He climbed down from his side of the truck and I, less eagerly, got out of my side. It occurred to me to run back across the pocketed white of the yard, to try and get help. But then, I thought to myself, what? Wouldn’t [Name deleted] just shoot me in the back as I ran? Then I thought, to rationalise my decision further, escape to what, anyway? Locked back in a room with no company?

  ‘This one,’ he called, and waited for me to come over to the cab of a second truck. ‘I think this one matches the tab on the keyring.’ He pulled open the passenger door. ‘Up you go,’ he said.

  I think I was still half asleep. It didn’t, quite, seem real, despite the glaze of frost on the inside of the truck. He tried the ignition and the engine farted noisily, barked, barked and died. ‘It’s the cold,’ he said. ‘The fuel gets a bit frozen. They put an additive in the diesel, you know.’

  ‘You don’t say,’ I said. ‘[Name deleted], where are we going in this truck? Is it back to Liberty?’ But my last word was drowned by the phlegmy rattle of the engine starting. I thought to myself: surely the guy at the front table, the one [Name deleted] threatened with his gun – surely he will have gone to get help now. Surely soldiers will rank and block our exit? Surely [Name deleted] is about to be recaptured.

  But no.

  He put the truck in gear and we lurched off. I could hear the crunch of the tires over the snow, and the clatter of the engine cylinders, and then we accelerated rapidly, driving straight for a stretch of fencing. We went straight through with a fantastic crash. That must wake the whole camp, I thought. But the next thing was that we were on the open snow, driving at full throttle, and by the dashboard lights I could see [Name deleted]’s face grinning, underlit in green like a Halloween mask.

  We drove for hours. I don’t know how long exactly. [Name deleted] put the headlights on almost as an afterthought after we had been driving for half an hour or so. ‘Where are we going?’ I asked him. ‘Do you even know which direction you’re driving?’

  I was very aware that he still had the pistol.

  You may find this hard to believe, given that I had been kidnapped at gunpoint and was certainly in danger for my life, but what I did next was fall asleep. The driving was monotonous, it was dark, and I was very tired. The stresses had overcome me, I suppose. The blow-heater on the dash was warming me cosily. I fell into a doze slumped in my seat.

  I woke abruptly when the whole truck shook and bounced. I yelled out, and tumbled forward, knocking my chest against the dashboard in front of me and banging my forehead against the windscreen. That hurt.

  I blinked, sat up. Light was coming in through the windows.

  The whole cabin had tilted forward thirty degrees from the horizontal. I looked over to [Name deleted]. He was cradling his face in his hands. A wriggle of blood came through his fingers and dripped onto the floor. ‘You OK?’ I asked.

  ‘My nose,’ he replied, with a flattened intonation that was almost comical.

  ‘Jesus,’ I said, my heart starting, belatedly, to hammer. ‘Did we crash? Did you crash the truck? You idiot.’

  ‘We must,’ he said, still cradling his nose, ‘have hit a pothole in the snow. Thin crust, small crevasse, I don’t know.’ He fumbled with the catch of his door, and more or less tumbled out into the dawn light. I stayed where I was. The air coming through the open door was very chilly. I could see [Name deleted] fussing about the buried snout of the truck, examining the wheels, rubbing his nose into the crook of his arm. Eventually he got back into the cab and, with some difficulty, pulled the door shut.

  ‘So?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh we’re stuck,’ he said, glumly. ‘It don’t signify.’

  ‘Where are we?’

  He didn’t say anything.

  ‘What, hey – [Name deleted] – what are we going to do?’

  ‘We’re going to wait here. They’ll come.’

  He tried the engine several times, but it just refused to start. Without the engine, the hot-air blower wouldn’t work. It got cold in the cab very quickly.

  There wasn’t anything else to do. We sat in silence for a long time.

  ‘You ever think about the Spirit?’ he asked, after a long time.

  All around us was blind, blank, whiteness. It was very cold. The horizon looked only a few hundred yards away; the world could have been a film set, white in every direction under a moon-coloured sky. It shrunk perception. ‘Spirit?’ I said. I was giving my hands an alternate squeeze and a chafe, but even my breath felt cool. My muscles trembled intermittently, like rabbits about to have their necks wrung. ‘Spirit?’ I said.

  ‘The Holy Spirit,’ he said. ‘You won’t believe it, maybe, but my whole life has been guided by the Holy Spirit. Kind of like a cloud, floating overhead. My own personal cloud.’

  His voice sounded a little less deranged than it had. I hazarded: ‘You’re religious? Jesus, you’re a Christian? I had no idea.’

  ‘No,’ he said sharply, ‘not like that, not conventional religion. Not sheep and children and all that. But the Spirit, yeah? Inspiration. Respiration, inspiration. It kept you alive, in that building, under the snow. I remember you told me about that. It was them, can’t you see? They gave you the air to respire, diffused the air out of the snow for to inspire you. Inspiration. The Holy Ghost. When I heard that phrase when I was a kid, I thought of a ghost, like Casper the ghost or something – you know. A sheet floating spectrally in the air, with holes for eyes and mouth, like that was the holy part, and Casper was the ghost part.’ He laughed at himself. ‘You know what it was like, in church when you were a kid and they’d say holy ghost?’

  ‘I wasn’t raised,’ I said, somewhat primly, ‘in a Christian environment.’

  But he wasn’t paying attention to what I said. ‘The Holy Spirit, that’s a better phrase. The Spirit. What does it look like? It’s particles in air. That’s what it looks like. Everything is particles in air, light is particles in air, matter is, spirit is the same thing. The universe is an endless snowfall of atoms. You know who said that? Heraclitus said that. He was an ancient Greek philosopher. They knew a thing or two. Those Greek philosophers. They knew a thing or two, that this is the way the world is, this is simply the way it is. Atoms falling through infinity like an endless, bottomless, fucking topless snowfall. That is what is.’ His teeth caught, clattered, on the last word. He said: ‘Man, it’s cold, it’s really cold. I got to stretch my legs, I have to stretch my legs to get warm.’

  He pulled open the truck door and hopped out. I leaned over and pulled the door shut. I sat back in my seat and tried to wrap myself around myself to keep warm. [Name deleted] was yelling at me through the windscreen, ‘Come out, hey, Tira, it’s warmer in the sunshine.’

  I watched him for a while, and eventually – more from boredom than anything else – I clambered out to join him.

  There was a minim of heat from the sun, but I still felt wretched with cold. I folded my arms, hands under armpits, and shuffled sluggishly round in a circle. [Name deleted] was flinging himself about with crazy energy, throwing his body into a starburst posture and then pulling his limbs in again. ‘This is the way to do it!’ he said. ‘This is the way to do it!’

  ‘What are we doing here?’ I asked.

  He was trying to run on the spot, but the s
now under him had been softened by his bouncing and his foot went through the crust. It looked as though he had gone down on one knee. ‘They’ll come,’ he said.

  ‘And then what?’ I asked.

  ‘They’ll come,’ he said, a third time. He was grinning. I don’t know if I’d ever seen him so happy.

  ‘It’s a kind of infection, you know?’ I said, shuffling round to try and keep myself warm. ‘They’re not worms, or anything like that. I think they’re more like bacteria.’

  His smile vanished. He struggled up. ‘That’s a lie. They tell you that? That’s a lie.’

  ‘They get inside us, in our brains,’ I said. ‘They’re like intelligent dust. Like bacteria. It’s an infection.’

  ‘Don’t goad me,’ he said, crossly. Then, suddenly, he bellowed. It was like a heifer. ‘Oh!’ he cried. ‘Oh!’ He fell backwards and sank a few inches, his arms moving, like a kid making a snow angel. I tutted. He was such a child, really: such a show-off. A spoilt child.

  ‘OK, [Name deleted],’ I said, becoming more bad-tempered. ‘You’re the centre of attention. Everybody look at you.’

  ‘God!’ he called out, lying on his back. He sounded wheezy. ‘I’ve torn something.’

  I assumed he meant a ligament. ‘Should have warmed up before your exercises,’ I said, sarcastically. ‘Or perhaps those jumpy-things were supposed to be your warm-ups? In which case you should have taken them easier.’

  ‘I can see clover,’ he said.

  This brought me up short. It seemed like a fantastically strange thing to say, in the circumstances, even for a lunatic like [Name deleted]. ‘What do you mean?’ I asked, starting over to him. ‘Did I hear you right?’

  ‘God, God, God,’ he said again, more faintly.

  ‘[Name deleted]?’ I asked. I began to think this was more than horseplay, that something was wrong. ‘Are you OK?’ I crunched over to him. My feet went into the snow to the ankles. He was lying on his back. His face was concrete-coloured. It looked awful. It was terrifying to see it: grey, scrunched up in pain. ‘Christ,’ I said, bending down over him. ‘What is it?’

  His pain rictus was exactly like a grin. He’d drawn his arms up tight at his chest. It occurred to me that he had had a heart attack. ‘Jesus,’ I said. ‘Is it your heart?’

  He drew a painful breath, and spoke rapidly and wheezily on the exhalation until his lungs were empty: ‘It’s a she, Tira, spectre made up of particles of snow where—’ He gasped.

  I felt a fear freeze solid inside me. ‘Don’t die, [Name deleted],’ I said. I had a vision of myself marooned on the snow, miles from anywhere. I had no idea which direction the camp was. I could certainly not extricate the truck from its snow-crater. There was no food. I thought to myself: he dies, what do I do? ‘Jesus, are you hurting?’

  His face told me he was hurting.

  ‘I have to hurry you to hospital,’ I said. But it was an empty thing to say. ‘Shall we try and get you in the cab? It’d be warmer in the cab.’

  ‘Cold,’ he gasped, as if in confirmation.

  But there was no way I could lift him. I pulled at his shoulders in a desultory fashion, couldn’t move him, and let him sag back into his indentation in the snow, and he puffed out a cloud of warm breath in the cold air. He exhaled, but he didn’t inhale. I think it was then he died. I couldn’t see any chest movements. Perhaps he just passed out, and was breathing too shallowly for me to see, but it amounted to the same thing. I put my hand on his face, and it was cold as any snow. I had a distressing flashback: I saw myself in a building trapped under the snow with the man called Jeffreys who’s dead now. He broke his leg badly in a fall and died. I remembered [Name deleted] telling me that he’d had a heart attack, in the pre-Snow. And now he’d had one again. ‘[Name deleted],’ I called. ‘[Name deleted].’ I chafed his face. I lifted his arms and pulled them around in the vague hope that it might move blood through his body. I thought of doing chest compressions. I wasn’t quite sure how to do them, but I’d seen them on TV, so it was surely possible. But then I thought, wasn’t a heart attack a sort of rip or tear in the heart itself? Wouldn’t pounding his chest make it worse?

  I did nothing. I went and sat in the cab for a long time, and thought about nothing, about nothing at all, about nothing.

  That was how [Name deleted] died.

  Now, it seems, he’s a hero, and we’re not to say bad things about him. But I’ll say this, I know for certain that his heroism was a wholly involuntary thing. Can a person act heroically after their death? No: a person cannot act at all after their death. But, they say that we need heroes in the new world.

  Now I discover that there are under-snow lakes, great oval stretches of water surrounded on all sides by snow. I’m a little hazy on these. As I understand it, these lakes may be the result of volcanic activity at the earth’s buried crust. The snow played havoc with tectonics, cooling and fracturing tectonic plates and producing a great deal of vulcanism, which in turn heated scattered pockets of water within the ice. But I was talking to somebody the other day, and they said that the lakes are heated by nuclear power stations, broken and malfunctioning under the snow, so they are one of the functions of human activity. This person said that the water was radioactive, and the fish we grow there and harvest are radioactive too. But better radioactive food, than no food, I suppose.

  Then there’s the plant growth. I don’t know anything about the plant growth, except what every schoolchild knows: that some of the funguses are crystalline, drawing up minerals dissolved in the snow into coral-like patterns, helped by fertilisation from all manner of human waste; but that some of them (I don’t know how) are organic, and can be prepared as food. Pretty tasteless food, but better than starving. I suppose. As to whether we owe these new growths to the Others, I have no opinion one way or another. I think, on reflection, I’d prefer to think not. If they destroyed our world, giving us back some mosses is pretty poor recompense. Besides, as I understand it, the Others don’t think in terms of cause-effect, of injury-recompense, or anything like that. So if they kept me and Jeffreys alive, under the snow, in that building, diffusing in oxygen and taking away our carbon dioxide – as, perhaps, they did – then it was not because they had a plan. What plan? It was an arbitrary thing. To allow us to live, and billions to die? That doesn’t suggest a plan. All I know is that the oxygen came from somewhere, after our pot plants had died. That’s all I know.

  The day wore on. I was achy in my stomach with hunger, and I drank very little, because it hurt my gums and teeth to suck on the snow. I knew I ought to ingest as much snow as I could for the water, but I was so cold and shivery and I could simply not bring myself to stuff snow in my face.

  I got out from time to time to have a look at [Name deleted], in the snow. But he was cold as the world now, and motionless, and I knew he was dead. I tried to formulate a plan, but didn’t get very far. Mostly I sat in the cab of the truck and wrapped myself about myself to try and keep warm. But what was the point? You can’t answer me that question. What was the point? Death everywhere.

  Finally the light started to thicken and the sky darken. I felt a terror come with the darkness, to think I was going to sit in the cab in my nightwear. I told myself I was going to die. So I galvanised myself by force of will. I stepped out into the dusk, and went over to [Name deleted]’s body. I wanted to get the clothes off the corpse, to wrap myself in them. It was not easy work. The sky darkened and darkened over me, as if the coming of night were an impending thunderstorm. The quality of the light became eerie, as it sometimes does at dusk. My fingers were numb with the cold and wouldn’t work properly. It took me long minutes to undo each jacket button, and when I had them all undone it was very hard to pull his arms free, to turn his dead weight over and wrench the jacket off. I almost stopped there, I was so tired; but I needed all the clothes, so I turned the body again and picked, picked at the shirt buttons, and then turned him again to pull the shirt off, and then yanked and jarred the vest off. I p
ulled the pants down. The legs were stiff, frozen straight, whether with rigor mortis or just sheer cold I couldn’t tell. It was hard to manoeuvre the pants down the legs, but finally I did it. I had an armful of freezing clothes, saturated with snow. I was shivering so hard I could barely hold them.

  I left [Name deleted] lying face down in the snow, naked except for his underpants and his socks. His flesh had a blue-veiny whiteness that reminded me of Stilton.

  I think I was hungry to the point of insanity. I had flashes of apprehension that the snow was all sugar, that the ice-crust on top was meringue, that [Name deleted]’s clothes were huge slabs of cold cooked pasta in my arms, that his flesh was soft cheese. My mouth watered. ‘Jesus,’ I muttered to myself, through banging teeth.

  I stood up to return to the cab. But the dusk appeared to have reversed itself all around me. There was a brightness all across the sky. I turned, and turned, and light swelled enormously, terrifyingly, from all the snow, like a colossal world-breaking and silent explosion all around me. The light shone upon the fabric of sky lightening it. Everything became extraordinarily white. Silent white and neon white.

  ‘It’s happening again,’ I said, turning. But the truck had gone, and [Name deleted]’s body had gone, and I dropped the cold clothes from my cold arms.

  I expected to see another of the worm-dragons rise up from the ice, but it didn’t happen. There was a long stretch of time, perfectly silent and perfectly white.

  The light pulsed brighter until it bulged inwards into my line of sight, squeezing all detail into a wash of whiteness. Then it pulled back again, the pulses reduced, and in the middle of my vision was a figure walking towards me, tall, skinny and dark.