The Bridge

by Jane Higgins

  That shut everyone up. The man gathered up his case, slapped on his Services cap and stalked out. Then people went crazy. Dash led us back to the crypt where we held a council of war. We decided to find our own way north to deliver Sol and Fyffe home to Ettyn Hills, then Dash and Jono were coming back to be what help they could. They were still ISIS cadets, after all, and proud of it. And me? First things first, I said. Let’s get out of the city.

  But how were we gonna do that? The trains weren’t running. Dash could drive and so could Jono but what were the chances of just happening on a car? Slim to nonexistent, or so we thought. But then we came to Fettlers Lane and the beetle. And that seemed to convince Fyffe and Jono that God was On Our Side. Which, if true, would’ve been helpful four days before, but there didn’t seem much point in saying so.

  So that’s how we came to be driving up Fettlers Lane in a broken down taxi-cab looking for a road north.

  What we found was a roadblock. A barricade of old furniture had been thrown across Drummond St, and five people stood in front of it. Three men, two women. They had assault rifles slung over their shoulders, and faded red bandanas over their faces. Breken.

  Dash gripped the wheel. ‘O God… ogod, ogod, ogod… I could run them down. I will – will I? WILL I?‘ But the beetle had zero acceleration and the rest of us were yelling, ‘They’ve got guns!’ She braked.

  A boy – dark like me, and maybe my age – came towards us and peered at Dash. Lucky for us, we could’ve been theirs. We looked like looters. We were ragged and filthy. I could pass for a southerner and the others were fair enough for easterners. The boy shouted over his shoulder at his band, and then let loose at us with a stream of Breken. Beside me, Dash stared straight ahead, her eyes on the hostiles and maybe her thoughts on how easily she could gun the engine and do them damage. Sol leaned over my shoulder to get a better look. Fyffe pulled him back.

  I looked at Sol and put a finger on my lips. Then I leaned out the empty doorway on my side and stood up so the Breken boy would have to look at me over the top of the cab and not at the others inside. He spoke again, another stream of Breken. I sent up a silent prayer to my mother and to Lou and to whoever else might listen, and answered him, in Breken. He didn’t even blink, just carried on. ‘What’re you doing here?’

  ‘Looking round,’ I said. ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because you’re not front line, are you? Just scavengers, yeah? What’s your bridge?’

  I tried, ‘St Clare,’ the closest one to school, and he seemed to buy it.

  ‘Found anything?’

  ‘Just this,’ I slapped the beetle’s roof, amazed and relieved that this was working.

  He shook his head. ‘You should never have been let through. You better get back by dark or we might mistake you for them.’

  Then, miraculously, he waved us away. Dash reversed down the street at speed, and took the first corner she could find. She pulled up outside a smashed-up cinema with red curtains waving through broken glass doors. Somewhere nearby a kid was wailing, or maybe it was a cat, but the street was deserted.

  Dash leaned on the steering wheel. Nobody spoke. Then she hit the wheel with the palms of her hands and looked daggers at me. ‘How? How did you do that?’

  Sol started to whimper. Fyffe hushed him and said, ‘Macey taught you, I guess?’

  ‘Was it Macey?’ said Dash.

  ‘Course it was,’ I said. ‘Who d’you think?’

  ‘Why did he?’

  ‘Why? He’s from over the river. It’s his language. So what?’

  Jono chimed in helpfully from the back seat. ‘So, everything. Jeez. For all we know you’re one of them. A plant. A sleeper!’

  ‘Shut up, Jono,’ said Dash.

  ‘Hey!’ he said. ‘I’m not hanging round with any Breken-speaking—’

  ‘Stop!’ said Fyffe.

  ‘Any Breken-speaking what?’ I said.

  ‘No, stop!’ Fyffe took Jono’s hand. ‘We’re in trouble here – and maybe Nik is the answer to our prayers. I mean, we prayed to be looked after, didn’t we, and here’s Nik, able to get us through.’

  ‘You never told me,’ said Dash, still boring holes with her eyeballs.

  ‘What’s to tell? I speak some Breken because Mace does, and he practically brought me up. You maybe noticed that it’s not the most popular language in school, so I guess I didn’t speak it aloud. All right?’

  No. Not all right.

  ‘What else haven’t you told me?’

  ‘Dash…’

  ‘What else?’

  ‘Nothing! Dammit!’

  ‘What about ISIS?’ said Jono. ‘They must know. That must be why—’

  ‘Listen,’ I said to Dash. ‘We’re taking Sol and Fyffe home, remember? Can we try and do that? Because, I’m just guessing here, but it might not be as easy as we thought.’

  She looked straight ahead out the windscreen and didn’t speak. I rubbed my hands over my face and stared out the window too. Rubbish gusted across the wreckage of shopfronts and the sky was lowering to gray; maybe it would rain soon.

  ‘Nik?’ Sol.

  ‘Yeah, buddy?’

  ‘Can we go home now?’

  ‘Yep. Just as soon as we sort something out.’

  ‘Okay… When?’

  I looked at Dash.

  ‘You should have told me,’ she said. She gunned the engine and we took off.

  We met more roadblocks through the afternoon. And the same story at every one: men, sometimes women, with guns and questions.

  ‘What do they say?’ asked Dash after we’d been waved away by another one.

  ‘Nothing much. They ask what we’re doing.’

  ‘And what do you say back?’

  ‘I tell them we’re scavenging, exploring, that kind of thing.’

  ‘I don’t get it. They always wave us east, never north. I thought they wanted to scare us north and leave the city to them.’

  Jono stirred. ‘Hey, yeah. That’s right. We’ve been going east all this time. Can’t you ask your brethren to let us through?’

  In a fight with Jono, I’d be the one surfacing with fewer teeth than I took in and fewer bones in working order, but there’s times, I swear, there’s times it’d be worth it, just to see how far I could get. I bit my tongue and shut up.

  But Dash pulled the beetle chugging to the gutter. ‘It’s true, Nik. We’re in Moldam North already. We’re gonna end up at Port at this rate.’

  ‘There must be a way through,’ said Jono. ‘They can’t be holding the whole bank – that’d mean they had all the bridges. No way could they have all the bridges. They’d need firepower and organization way beyond what they’ve got.’

  ‘We don’t know what they’ve got,’ I said.

  ‘You might,’ said Jono.

  ‘Jono,’ said Dash. ‘Leave it!’

  I said, ‘If they’re so disorganized, how in the hell are their roadblocks so well armed? And where the hell is our freakin’ army?’

  ‘Go and ask them,’ said Dash.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Sure.’

  ‘I’m not kidding. We need to go north and we’re not going north. I don’t know how much longer this fuel cell will hold up. You can talk to them – you could be one of them. Go, ask.’

  ‘I’m not one of them!’

  ‘Okay, okay, but you could be. If the cell gives out while we’re still here, we’re stuck. We could be there by tomorrow night if we can just get through. Ask them how far they’ve got, that’s all.’

  ‘Got my vote,’ said Jono.

  Fyffe stopped praying in that whispering way of hers and said, ‘We’ll make it. I know we will.’

  Silence from everyone. I listened to my heart hammering.

  Dash said, ‘I’ll keep the engine running – if they sense you’re a city kid just take off back here and we’ll run for it.’

  ‘Dash, if they sense I’m a city kid, they’ll shoot me.’

  Jono said, ‘Scared, are we?’
/>   ‘Jono—’ said Dash.

  I got out of the car and looked back at their faces – wide eyed and pale under the dirt. I must’ve looked as bad. ‘Yeah,’ I said to Jono. ‘I think we are.’ I looked at Sol. ‘Back soon.’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Don’t go.’

  I went to look for a roadblock.

  CHAPTER 10

  I headed back to the corner we’d just come around and stopped in the doorway of a tiny shop that a week ago had been a friendly little lunch bar. A whitewash scrawl on its broken window announced cheese rolls and meat pasties, which, in different circumstances, might have depressed me – we hadn’t eaten anything for a whole day. A street sign on the wall said Moldam Road. Behind me, the road ran down to the river through terraced houses hung with signs about rooms to rent, money to lend, old gear to buy and sell. A couch, a table and chairs, and a flatscreen sat on the pavement outside one of them, and I wondered whether that was looters busy looting, or some brave soul thinking, why should business stop for war? In the distance Moldam Bridge, the Mol, arched against the afternoon sky.

  Ahead of me the road climbed a hill through more of the same. About twenty houses up was the roadblock we’d just been turned back from – four people were sitting on the pavement smoking. They were Breken, and they had guns.

  Taking armed hostiles by surprise seemed like a bad idea so I walked into the middle of the road. Of course, walking up a hill with hostiles training guns on you isn’t such a great idea either. I made myself put one foot in front of the other while my brain was spinning in panic about how was I going to ask anything without them thinking there was something odd about this scruffy kid – like, why does he look so terrified and why is his Breken so bad?

  They watched me climb. One of the men stood up, but the others just kept on smoking and talking. I was hoping one of them would come down towards me, so I wouldn’t have to deal with the pack, but they waited until I’d almost arrived, then the one on his feet motioned me over.

  I was still wearing what I’d hauled on in the dark on Tuesday night: sweatshirt, jeans, and boots, all stinking of smoke, thick with dust, and ragged from the rubble of smashed-up buildings I’d crawled through looking for food. Dried blood too – Lou’s blood, and Dr Williams’. The Breken man, on the other hand, looked clean and deadly. He was a southerner – dark, and head to foot in dark clothes, with the assault rifle slung on his shoulder like it was part of him, a cherished part at that. He was years older than the others and looked like he knew how to be in charge. He said, ‘Where are you going? And where’s the car you were in?’

  I looked out east across Morstone Flats, mainly so I didn’t have to look at any of them, and nodded towards the sea. ‘They sent me to ask – how far is it safe to go? Can we get to the sea?’

  He was watching me, narrow and suspicious. ‘How old are you?’

  Not a direction the conversation was supposed to take. The others stopped talking to watch. ‘Seventeen.’

  ‘Why aren’t you in a squad?’

  What the hell was a squad? Assorted answers sprang to mind: no squad would have me; my mother wouldn’t let me; I’m on leave from one. I settled for the shrug. Not surprisingly, he wasn’t happy with that.

  ‘What’s your bridge?’

  Worse and worse. I said, ‘St Clare,’ hoping I’d get the same reaction as at the first roadblock.

  But he raised an eyebrow. ‘St Clare? That so? Why do you sound like you’re fresh out of the Gilgate sewers then?’ The rest of them laughed.

  That would be because Mace, who I talked this barbaric bloody language with, came from the Breken township at Gilgate, which I couldn’t exactly say, so I pulled out the shrug again. He said, ‘Which is it, then?

  ‘Gilgate,’ I said.

  ‘Thought so. You should be in a squad—’

  A crack of rifle-fire sent everyone diving. My interrogator moved so fast I didn’t see how he did it – I had barely hit the ground and he was sending off a barrage of shots and yelling instructions to his band. Two of them ran towards the houses under his covering fire. The other one, a woman, lay on the street in a spreading pool of blood.

  I took off.

  Down the street, round the corner, fast, with the gunfire close and loud. I skidded to a halt by the beetle and swung inside, yelling at Dash to get moving – get moving now!

  It was empty.

  The beetle was empty.

  They weren’t in it, they weren’t under it. They were nowhere. I stared up the street. Maybe they’d heard the gunfire and run for cover. Maybe Jono had convinced them to leave me behind.

  The firefight in Moldam Road stopped as suddenly as it had started. Up ahead I saw a figure in an army uniform running across the street. If that was the sniper, the Breken would be close on his heels. I watched for a while, but none of them appeared, so I headed after him, shaky with relief. We’d found the army at last.

  CHAPTER 11

  They were down an alleyway among overflowing bins of stinking rubbish – Dash, Fyffe and Jono, and two soldiers. One of the men swung his gun up at me and I skidded to a halt, but Fyffe called out, ‘No! No! He’s ours!’ She came running and grabbed my arms.

  ‘They took him! They took Sol!’

  I was looking over her head at the others and saying, ‘Where’s Sol?’ when I realized what she’d said. It punched the breath out of me and everything went slow and distant: the soldier kicking through the rubbish; the other one pacing at the far end of the alleyway, gun at the ready; Dash sitting propped up against a wall, pale as sin and Jono next to her with his head on his knees.

  I looked down at Fyffe’s dirty, tear-streaked face. She had a graze swelling purple and bloody on her forehead. She tightened her grip on my arm. ‘The Breken took Sol. Jono hit one of them but they hit him with a gun and they stomped on Dash’s leg and knocked me down and they took… they took Sol and we have to go after them.’

  ‘Ah!’ The man in the rubbish waved a stick of wood. ‘Splint.’ He knelt beside Dash who was breathing real deep and shaky. The man took out a knife and started to cut through her jeans at the knee. ‘Hold on to something, this is going to hurt.’

  ‘Wait!’ said Dash. ‘I have to talk to Nik.’

  Jono looked up, seriously groggy, groaned, and put his head back on his knees.

  The other soldier, much older, came back down the alley. ‘Lucky for you we were around.’

  I was struggling to get a grip. ‘You’re the army. We can – can’t we go after them? We can get reinforcements and go looking. Where are the others?’ I looked around, half expecting a combat team to leap into existence, weapons at the ready.

  ‘The others?’

  ‘The rest of the army,’ I said.

  ‘What army would that be, son? If you mean the great and glorious Army of the People, the Righteous Army, the Army of God and the General – or should that be the General and God? – well now, that army’s broken, isn’t it? Split clean open last summer. Half of ’em scarpered up north, or Oversea, even over the fucking river. And the other half – here’s the joke – the other half was sent to bring ’em back. And that left a skeleton crew,’ he bowed, ‘to hold the line here. So what happens? The South gets wind of this, and takes its chance. And here we are. Screwed.’

  ‘But, no, but, the General…’ I stammered.

  ‘Dead. In the mutiny. Don’t go pinning your hopes on any General. This place is finished. By month’s end it’ll be running with hostiles.’

  ‘No! This makes no sense. What about ISIS?’

  ‘ISIS? They’re not gonna help the likes of us. No way. We’re on our own.’ He patted his gun. ‘We’re gonna have a Breken-hunt before we head north.’

  ‘Nik!’ Dash was staring at me hard. ‘You have to go after Sol.’

  The older man shook his head. ‘You’d be a fool to do that. A dead one.’

  I looked at Dash. ‘What about you?’

  The guy waiting to splint her leg said, ‘We can look after
them.’

  Dash looked at me, bleary-eyed. ‘You have to—’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Course. I’ll… Jesus.’ I looked up at the older man. ‘They’ll have gone back over Mol Bridge, yeah?’

  ‘I’d say.’

  Jono stirred again. ‘I’m coming.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘You’re not.’

  The one with the splint shook his head. ‘You’re crazy. If they catch you, d’you know what they do to people, our kind, over there?’

  Not what I needed to hear. ‘Where will you take these three?’

  He squinted up at me and shook his head again. ‘If you’re going over there, I’m not telling you.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Aren’t you listening? This place is going to be overrun. I don’t want hostiles dragging information out of you about where we are.’

  Great. That boded well for my future. I crouched by Dash and kissed her. ‘I’ll find Sol. And then I’ll find you. I promise.’

  I stood up. So did Fyffe. She was shaky on her feet, and tears shone on her cheeks. She wiped her face with her sleeve, then fished a dirty yellow scarf out of her bag and tied it round her head, tucking her hair into it and covering the bruise on her forehead. She pulled on Jono’s big denim jacket, which made her look tiny. ‘What are you doing?’ I asked.

  ‘Going with you.’

  Over the general outcry I said, ‘No way are you coming with me. No. Way.’

  ‘He’s my brother! Don’t argue. Anyway, you don’t know what they look like, the ones that took him.’

  ‘So tell me.’

  ‘Not the same.’

  ‘Fyffe. Look at you – you won’t last two minutes over there.’

  ‘We don’t have time to argue. I’m not afraid.’ She grasped the little cross that hung round her neck. ‘If I can’t go with you, Nik, I’ll go alone.’ She looked at Dash and Jono and said, ‘We’ll be back, with Sol.’ She marched off down the alleyway. I followed, protesting.

  We weren’t what you’d call well prepared for a foray into enemy territory. We had no weapons, no protective gear, no food, no water, and we were dead on our feet. Also, we had no idea where they’d gone, except Over The Bridge.