Heaven's Edge

by Romesh Gunesekera

‘What happens with this alarm?’ I asked Jaz.

  ‘I don’t know. It hasn’t happened before.’ The mascara around his eye had spread like a bruise.

  I saw the two soldiers stumbling out of the hut and further down another bunch of soldiers descending a stairway. ‘More.’ Jaz crouched low. The numbers of civilians on the promenade began to swell as the rattle of boots grew. ‘What can we do?’

  I was trying to get my bearings when I saw a woman break away from the crowd and nip into the alleyway opposite us. She had one of Jaz’s bar bottles in her hand and was stuffing it with a piece of cloth. Jaz saw her too. ‘She’s crazy. We must stop her.’ I held him back; the soldiers would have seen him if he tried to cross over. I watched in a sort of paralysis as she set fire to the cloth and then, darting out, hurled it at the squad of soldiers in the centre. The bottle burst into flames. The soldiers scattered, firing in the direction from which the missile had been launched. ‘Fire, fire, fire,’ the woman chanted. Another volley of shots echoed in the mall. People screamed; several in the crowd fell, writhing as if skewered. One man, clutching his head, lurched towards the soldiers pleading; others scrambled to the upper floors and flung more bottles and stools, pipes and glass, from the galleries and stairways. Within moments the whole area was in mayhem.

  Was that woman, like Uva, another subversive? ‘She a friend?’ I asked Jaz.

  He shook his head. ‘She’s a nutter. She’s had too much. We have got to get out.’ His whole body sagged; his eyes were squeezed small in his face as if he didn’t want to see what was happening.

  ‘But is Uva with her?’ I grabbed him and forced him to listen to me.

  ‘No, I tell you. She is not in here. I am sure of it.’

  ‘Come with me, then. This way.’ I pulled him towards the stairs I had come down earlier. ‘You’ll have to run.’

  Jaz clutched hold of me with both hands, ‘Where?’

  We climbed up to the top floor where I had first emerged from the tunnel. From there I looked back and saw smoke pour out of one of the cafés. There was another blaze further down, near the Juice Bar. I couldn’t work out whether this was a spontaneous uprising, or something planned. ‘How is it possible?’ I asked Jaz. ‘I thought the people down here were all zombies.’

  Jaz stopped. ‘Did you?’ His eyes hardened, briefly.

  I didn’t understand then how close we all live to the brink. ‘Look, we better get out this way.’ I pushed ahead into the tunnel.

  When I reached the exit machine, I rammed Zeng’s card in. It disappeared but nothing happened.

  Jaz hobbled up behind me.

  I asked him for his pass.

  ‘They would have blocked all of them by now.’

  I tried it anyway. Still nothing happened. Jaz squatted down and hugged his knees. ‘What are we gonna do?’

  The door was made of steel.

  I ran my fingers quickly along the edges of the exit machine. ‘There must be an emergency bypass.’

  ‘What bypass? Why should there be any bypass?’ Jaz buried his head in his arms.

  ‘Because that is the way things are made. Everything has an emergency bypass.’ Right at the bottom I located a small screw. ‘There. See?’ I used the rolled edge of a token to unscrew it. It turned easily, but when it came out there was nothing but an empty hole there.

  ‘Now what?’

  I stood up. There was only one thing to do. Cocking the gun, I put the muzzle into the metal slit and fired. This I could do then. I could pull the trigger if the target didn’t breathe. There was a terrific squawk of surprised electronics and the steel door opened.

  * * *

  Outside, the sentry-box was empty. Jaz touched my arm. ‘Where are they?’ he asked half-covering his mouth with his other hand.

  ‘They must have all gone down.’

  ‘What do we do?’

  I found it impossible to think clearly. ‘You are sure she couldn’t be down there too.’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘What about up here? Could she be hiding somewhere else in the city?’

  Jaz put both his hands on me and drew in his breath. ‘I don’t know how I can say this, but you are the one who must calm down now.’ He waited a moment. ‘You spoke to a friend of hers up here? Was it Zeng? What did he say?’

  ‘He didn’t even know they were after her.’

  Jaz released my arm. ‘Then she’s way out somewhere. He would know if she was anywhere in the city.’

  I thought we should be running. The soldiers would be coming after us. But I couldn’t move. I felt something was settling into place between us. Trust? Something more? ‘We better get out of this town too. I know where she will be heading. Across the cordon, over the hills … to Samandia.’ I looked at Jaz: he seemed small and delicate in the open air. ‘You’d better come with me. They’ll know you had a hand in all that down there.’

  Jaz’s face turned ashen. ‘Into the jungle?’

  ‘Only if we get that far,’ I snapped.

  ‘I’ve always been a city duck, you know. Chittagong would suit me better.’

  I put up my hand. ‘OK, OK, whatever. Just tell me, how do we get out of here first?’

  Jaz hesitated. The moisture in his eyes caught a distant light as he glanced quickly around. ‘Maybe if we go to the warren someone will help us. It’s down the hill.’

  That was the general direction from which I had come; I set off, walking briskly. Jaz removed his clogs and trotted anxiously behind.

  Near the bottom of the hill he caught up and pointed out a street leading to some ramshackle workshops. ‘Through there.’

  Several of the workshops had white flowluxes on. A few tired men were tinkering with boxes and machinery unaware of the pandemonium raging underground. One or two looked up as Jaz in his flamboyant costume flitted across their doorways, but they did not show any interest.

  ‘Do you know anyone here?’ I asked Jaz.

  He plucked at his lips and shook his head. ‘No, but I know Uva does.’

  At the far end of the lane, I saw a krypton beam pierce the outer darkness and then search out a wall, a window, a door. I heard barking. I couldn’t tell if the dogs were coming closer or not. Then a flowlux at the end of the street lit up three soldiers with guns in their hands. They were walking slowly, stopping at every doorway. I held Jaz back. My mouth was dry. My tongue slid back down my gullet. Jaz wriggled, his skin slippery. I tried to grip him hard but I was afraid I might crack a bone. Through a window I recognised the coppersmith from the market – Kris. Deciding to risk it, I led Jaz into the workshop. Kris looked up surprised.

  ‘We have to hide.’ I had to trust my intuition.

  He stared at the gun in my hand.

  We heard a vehicle coming down the lane. It stopped outside the workshop. The engine was left throbbing. I thought they must have followed us. I raised the gun. We could hear the voices of soldiers alighting, orders, boots. I looked at Kris but he avoided my eyes. ‘They are after us,’ I hissed. We heard the soldiers go next door. I couldn’t tell how many. Kris was listening too. Then he seemed to come to a decision. He indicated a storeroom at the back and I hustled Jaz into it.

  ‘Who is he?’ Jaz whispered, putting his head against mine.

  I closed the door. ‘A metalworker, Kris, from the market.’ I didn’t mention the butterfly knife I had seen. If he wasn’t a friend, then he’d be a betrayer. I looked around for a way to escape. Jaz watched me.

  The soldiers clattered into the workshop. I heard a grunt. A slap and the crash of something toppling. One of the soldiers swore. Then there was the thud of flesh being hit. Another crash. Peeping through a crack in the wood, I saw Kris on the ground staring at the shattered struts of the piece he had been working on. A table, behind him, had also collapsed; his tools and his hoard of metal strips were everywhere. I remember feeling guilty for doubting him. Two soldiers gloated over the mess. One had a stick which he used like a bat to hit a ball of wire. The other went up to K
ris and kicked him. Kris doubled up and the soldier kicked him again. I had a gun and there were only two soldiers in the room. I could stop them. There’d be a fighting chance with the rest. A voice called out from across the road. The first soldier went out to investigate while the one who kicked Kris saw our door and started towards it. I eased the safety catch off the gun and tried to still my hand. Then I saw Kris rise, the butterfly knife open in his fist. A moment later he had his arm around the soldier’s throat. I shut my eyes, nausea already in my mouth as though the knife behind the soldier’s back was penetrating my own body. When I looked again the soldier was a crumpled heap on the floor. Kris was standing, sombre and straight, with the soldier’s gun in his hand.

  Jaz rushed over to Kris. ‘You killed him?’

  Kris’s face was set hard, his head slightly bowed.

  Jaz turned to me, panic filling his eyes. ‘He’s dead.’ Jaz looked as though he didn’t understand what he was saying. Perhaps he had never seen a dead man close up.

  The blood on the floor was bright. I saw my grandfather with a flower bleeding in his hand. My world seemed to be fracturing faster than ever. For years I had tried to keep it still, undisturbed, despite the shocks I’ve had to endure. Love, Uva promised, would make it strong; now it seemed she was wrong. I remembered how she spoke of life always springing out of death. The idea filled me more with foreboding than comfort. Death was not what I had come looking for.

  ‘How can we get out of here?’ My throat was clogged. I found it hard to speak.

  ‘There’s the cruiser outside,’ Kris suggested quietly, still looking down. ‘I could show you the way to the hills.’

  Avoiding the body, I edged along the wall to the window. A sleek military land-cruiser was idling empty in the lane, the headlights on. Voices were raised in a building further down.

  ‘OK, let’s go.’ I grabbed hold of Jaz, and shepherded him up to the vehicle. Kris should have been behind me, watching out; instead he stayed behind to collect some things in a holdall. I bundled Jaz into the back seat and tried to beckon Kris. He took no notice and continued packing. Then, after a quick last look, he zipped the bag and clicked a switch. It was only then that I remembered my string bag from the market. I’d left it in Jaz’s bar.

  ‘You drive.’ Kris looked as if something was caged inside him. He shifted the gun from one hand to the other. I slipped behind the wheel. I checked the controls; they were quite conventional, but when I touched the panel lights, the steady throb of the engine dropped slightly. I was terrified it would stall. Kris stood on the footboard and kept the sliding door open. ‘Go right down to the end and turn left. If they come out, charge them. I’ll use this.’ He lifted up his gun.

  I released the brake and the vehicle rolled forward.

  Halfway down the cracked alleyway, a puzzled soldier stepped out into the beam of the cruiser’s headlights. He shaded his eyes with one hand and waved his gun about. I saw Kris had his levelled. He was squinting. ‘Don’t shoot, he’ll jump out of the way.’ I gunned the engine. But as the vehicle surged forward, the soldier stiffened his grip and fired. The shots fractured the upper windscreen into a profusion of silver webs before Kris’s burst of bullets hit him. I hunkered down and jammed the accelerator to the floor: the cruiser flew. A wing and a prayer, a phrase Eldon claimed was meant for angels not airmen, however much they might wish it, sailed through my mind. I dipped my lights, thankful that the force of Kris’s bullets had hurled the soldier out of my path. At the end of the alley I spun the wheel and the cruiser bumped over the painted kerb on to the main road. I checked with Kris, who merely nodded.

  There was nobody else on the road. A rush of reckless hope shot from the ball of my foot, pressing on the accelerator, right up to my head. I drove fast. I had never driven like that before. Speed was a salve then: exhilaration replacing the terror that had been growing in me before. Within minutes we had left the city behind. The road curved ahead and Kris warned of a roadblock after the next turn.

  ‘Roadblock?’ Jaz gasped behind me.

  ‘The road to the hills is on the right soon after,’ Kris replied.

  ‘What about this roadblock?’

  ‘You just hold tight back there.’ I kicked down into a lower gear and accelerated.

  Jaz flopped back and grabbed the grip-bar; Kris braced himself with his foot against the kit-box.

  I took the turn at high speed and swung the cruiser around the oil drums in a slalom. The tyres squealed. The tailcage banged into one drum sending it reeling across the road. I rammed the rest and we burst through the barrier. The solitary soldier in the pill-box opened fire but, with a cool snipe-swerve, we flew out of range. Jaz gave a whoop of delight, clapping hysterically. ‘Go, Marc, go.’ Even Kris seemed to breathe a little easier pressed against the seatback, his gun clamped between his knees.

  Outside the boundaries of Maravil, the headlights cut the night wide open. ‘Is this the right turn?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Kris nodded. ‘Yes.’

  The road was rough but straight. There were no plantations, no houses, no huts that I could see. Plain scrubland, I guessed. As time passed, my muscles slowly relaxed. I had been gripping the steering wheel hard; my shoulders were stiff. I let them drop. I felt heavier. The cruiser felt heavier. I slowed down; there was no sign of anyone chasing us. I was tired. I didn’t know how long I had been driving but we had travelled a good enough distance. I wanted to let go. I wanted to rest. Jaz’s head lolled on the top edge of my seat. I felt his sleepy breath like a warm tide lapping, a soft hand fingering the nape of my neck; stroking, soothing, comforting.

  * * *

  Uva’s breath was never like that; it always seemed so much my own. Even now I do not believe it is possible for it to cease without my life ending. It cannot. And yet, sometimes she seems to fade like our memories of wings.

  ‘You think there are mermaids of the air?’ she asked me once, as we listened to the warplanes patrol the brief electrified twilight of the Palm Beach coast. ‘Some creatures that know more than us, that can save us from damaging our poor sky staring so sadly into space?’

  ‘Why sadly?’

  ‘Don’t you think the clouds are full of tears? Whose could they be?’

  I unfastened the sleeves of her tunic. ‘Your little garuda’s? Or an angel’s?’ I pinched the line from Eldon tipping his hat at a cloud bringing rain to a parched summer’s day. ‘The sky is crying,’ I remembered him saying, ‘another angel has lost its wings.’

  Later, when the road finally split into two, I turned again to Kris. ‘Which way?’

  His head listed to one side as though he had to listen to the magnetic thrum of some inner needle. He then flicked his hand upwards suggesting the track that climbed up the small slope. It led us to the top of a bund containing a vast nebulous expanse that seemed to disappear in the distance. I stopped the cruiser on the ridge.

  ‘Go around the lake, we will soon reach the hills.’

  ‘No more roadblocks?’ My mind’s map of the island was still incomplete, but I knew we must be in the middle north. The scrub jungle around Uva’s parents’ unsurrendered hope: the last wild gene pool in the central mountains.

  ‘They only have those in the cordons around the cities and camps.’

  I closed my eyes and tried to imagine what I could not see.

  Kris opened the door and jumped out. He went down to the water.

  ‘Be careful,’ I called out. ‘It may be contaminated.’

  Jaz, behind me, cleared his throat. ‘I’m thirsty. We don’t have anything to drink.’ He reached out and touched my elbow. ‘Can’t we drink it?’

  ‘I wouldn’t.’ The grey pall above the surface was like the sick air that clung to the waterhole near my concrete compound.

  The wind picked up and the water began to swell and break. The moonlight retracted into small smears, stars became smudged.

  Kris climbed back in and I started the engine. We moved along the bund, slowly, buffe
ted by gusts of wind.

  Then the sky was ripped white. The vehicle seemed to explode. Jaz shrieked. Another searing flash and eruption followed. I raced the engine. After I got over the initial shock, I felt like shouting for more. This was nature. I could contend with it. Outside, bolt after bolt of lightning fused the earth, melting its contours.

  ‘What’s that roar? What is it?’ Jaz tugged at my sleeve, terrified.

  A phalanx of molten spears engulfed us as the rain hit the vehicle, ploughing the earth bund and churning the waters of the tank.

  ‘Rain,’ Kris bellowed. ‘It’s only rain.’

  I had never driven in rain like that. I was sure the bund would disintegrate and we’d go into the lake. I turned off and drove down away from it, between large granite boulders that I could just about see. On the flat we came to a broken enclosure of a colossal rock. I stopped the vehicle. ‘There’s a cave,’ Jaz hollered. The downpour seemed to double; the pounding on the roof was deafening. I picked up a flashlight. Kris clipped another flashlight to his belt, next to his knife, and picked up his gun.

  I led the way, sprinting.

  Inside was dry, and the roar at least was not right in our ears. I shone the torch around the cave: there were remains of walls, stone plinths and neatly cut shelves. While I looked around, uncertain as to what to do next, Kris stripped off his clothes. ‘Hey,’ Jaz started, wide-eyed, as Kris swung, naked, back into the rain. ‘Is he having a wash now?’ Jaz’s voice rose to the light, irrepressible falsetto he liked to play with.

  When Kris reappeared he had a small plastic bottle of rainwater, and a sponge. He handed the bottle to Jaz, and then stepped aside to wipe himself with the sponge.

  I pointed the light at it. ‘This you can drink,’ I said to Jaz.

  He swallowed the rainwater in big noisy gulps. Then he went over to Kris and took the sponge from him. ‘Thank you, Kris,’ he said drying his back for him, tenderly.

  The cave was large and had clearly been made into some sort of a temple. It felt safe, perhaps because it offered us shelter. Sitting there though, despite the dark, I felt there was something more to it. Something more benign.