Haven

by Adam Roberts

  “Is he still breathing?”

  “I think—I think so.”

  “Christ you’ve got me worried now, Gabe. Get him to hospital—if he dies, better that he does it there.”

  “He’s not going to die. I don’t think he’s going to die. But you’re right, yes, of course, you’re right.”

  The back door of the van slammed like a cannonball hitting a giant gong and it was so loud and close and unexpected that Davy twitched in sheer terror. He hoped he hadn’t been seen.

  Soon after he became aware of the van rolling into motion and picking up speed. It was bumpy for a while, and then the vehicle took a corner at such speed that Davy slid hard against the side. Then a period of further acceleration. An anxious slow-down, another corner taken too fast, and then the grinding bluster of the engine accelerating again.

  Davy tried to concentrate on breathing steadily and readying himself. The van finally came to a full stop, quenching its speed on a gravel drive with a sound like a wave crashing on shingle. The door was yanked open, and Davy felt cool air again on his skin. There was a pause. Then he was hauled, none too gently, onto a bed, or a kind of hammock—a stretcher, perhaps, or gurney. And then he was rolled up a ramp and in through an echoey space, where many voices were competing. Out of the throng he heard Gabriela saying, “We have to make sure he’s OK, there are specific instructions from”—and a great bang-clang and jolt as the gurney ran over some ridge in the floor.

  They were in a quieter space now. “Last time he had one of these fits,” said a voice, “he came round in, like, twenty minutes. But he’s been out for longer than that.”

  Was that Gabriela? She sounded different.

  “Epilepsy, is it?”

  “Epilepsy. What if he doesn’t come round? Can epilepsy leave you, like, in a coma? Like, forever?”

  “I’ll check the book,” said the second voice.

  The gurney swung to the right and stopped. “We should put him in a room?”

  “Busy,” said the second voice. “Real busy. I don’t know if you’ve heard but—there’s a war.”

  “Talk to Henry,” urged Gabriela. “She’ll confirm this is a priority situation. Priority situation for the war effort.”

  “Like I can just crank the radio and talk to Henry!”

  “Come with me,” said the second voice. “We can sort something out, I suppose. I don’t know.”

  Then: a lengthy silence.

  This was the most ticklish part of all. He peeped through a millimetre open-eyelid gap and saw he was in a corridor. He hadn’t been restrained. He seemed to be alone.

  He lay still for a while longer and listened carefully for any signs that Gabriela was still with him: any breathing, or sniffing, or shuffling sounds of motion. Nothing.

  He opened his eyes and moved his head. He was on a gurney in a corridor with pale-yellow painted walls, and he was alone. He sat up.

  Nobody left or right.

  He slipped off the gurney and padded to the nearer end of the corridor. There was a door with a glass pane in it—intact glass, with a graph-paper pattern of wires running through it. The other side was more corridor. It seemed empty.

  He tried the handle, and it gave.

  He went through. Halfway along was a branching corridor on the right that ran down a slight slope. He went down it to the door at the end, and this one was locked. And there was the keypad, like the one Henry herself had keyed when he had first been wheeled out of this very facility. Had Davy been paying attention, sat in that wheelchair, when she pressed those buttons?

  Of course he had.

  Say what you like about Davy: he was neither stupid nor unobservant.

  Davy pushed the top left button, the middle one, the bottom left and the middle one again. And the door snicked open.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  HE WORRIED ABOUT the dangers of the part that now lay ahead of him: escaping the hospital grounds. But this turned out to be a simple matter. He hurried across the wide lawn, through the scattered flock of oblivious sheep, and down to a hedge. This was an untended barrier that had sprawled, kept in check if at all by sheep nibbling tender shoots. Thick and dense. He made his way twenty yards along it before he found a hedgebush stem broad and bent enough to give him a leg up. The branches scratched at him, but he hauled himself up, and through the thinner leaves near the top, tumbled out on the far side to lie on his back.

  He was in woodland on a bed of bluebells, bluebells, bluebells. It was the middle of a warm spring day, and he was in woodland, and the trees were stark trunks whose upper portions were vivid with spring green, and the ground was a summer sky of bluebells. He lay for a long time simply staring at the richness and beauty of this thick haze of distilled blue-purple. It was as if he had tumbled through purgatory and into heaven itself.

  It was quiet. Somewhere deeper in the woodland he could hear some birds tutting him. The spread of blue in front of him was hypnotic. In places sunlight came down to lay jewel-gleam patches over the whole. In the shade of the trees the blossoms darkened to a brackish purple and smouldering cyan. The bluebells grew in humps and valleys, following the forest floor beneath maybe, or else just marking places where some plants were taller than others. The myriad blue dots and atoms swelled into a fuzz of extraordinary intensity around one particularly thick and strong-looking upstanding trunk.

  Davy couldn’t delay. It was early afternoon, and the sun was high, so he couldn’t tell his direction. But the thing to do was get away from the hospital and lie low—to get his bearings later and find a way west.

  So he got to his feet, and started off through the miraculous colour, a blue the colour of God’s own eyes. He felt as though he were wading through the shallow sea of dream-stuff. He felt he was floating.

  In five minutes the woodland changed its character; the trees became more closely spaced and more varied in kind, and there was a great deal more dun-coloured and dark-green undergrowth. Bluebells still shone like magic lights here and there, but they became fewer and fewer and finally he could see no more of them. Now the quality of light in the wood had changed: darker, with a quality of menace—or if not menace exactly, then certainly an unshakeable indifference to Davy’s fate. It was harder walking too, picking his way through banks of compacted leaves, weed tendrils that gripped his legs and scrub that came as high, in some places, as his waist.

  Eventually he left the old woodland behind and passed into a more open space. This had once been a farm, or perhaps the large-scale garden of a handsome house—the house was visible, reduced now to a ruin, like a rotten tooth poking up above the undergrowth. What had been lawn was now a varied scrubland of low bushes and saplings and broadsides of nettles. The sun was lower in the sky now, and by the time Davy reached the old house he had a good sense of which direction was west.

  A brown bird flew low past him, and rose to settle on a platform of the broken house-wall. Almost as soon as it had landed it started singing: a scribbling gush of sound that distilled itself into distinct rising bubbles of song before spreading into its gabbling music again.

  A skylark.

  Davy’s heart shrunk for a moment and then expanded hugely, as if it was a lung breathing out and then inhaling joy. He kept blinking. Blinking. He didn’t understand why he couldn’t stop blinking. The bird flew off, and he turned to watch, but it seemed to blur and jolt about the sky, elongated into bizarre shapes and only then did he realise that he was crying.

  Why was he crying? He felt happy. He was free! It was crazy.

  Eventually his tears dripped away and he was his old self.

  There was an old road associated with the house, and though its surface was broken up like crumble and grown through with a great many spear-length pale green weeds it made for easier walking than fighting through undergrowth. The road wound round and down, and then rose up the far side of the valley through another copse of woodland. Here a car had been abandoned, its doors pulled off, discarded on the ground besid
e a chassis wine-coloured with rust. A little ahead was another long-abandoned vehicle, of a completely different shape—the first car a collection of rectangles and squares, this later one all curves and an arch-shaped main body. Why had the people of that bygone age made their cars in such a variety of shapes? It made no sense. It was one of the many things about them that made no sense.

  He kept his ears open, and although he heard various birds, and the occasional snort of an animal away among the trees, he heard nothing. Nothing human. A squad of rooks flew overhead, preceded by their wheezy, croaky rooksong.

  After a while the road improved, and soon it was clear of weeds. Round the corner Davy same to an unruined house—a whole farm, in fact. He came off the road, went into the trees and crept alongside the main building. He thought about giving it a wide berth but something in the set up intrigued him. So he stayed to have a proper look. The roof was intact, there were two barns in good condition and there were even chickens in a wired-in enclosure out the front, and sheep in the fields at the back. But there didn’t seem to be anybody about. There was an old tractor parked down a driveway that looked to be in working condition, but no cars or horses.

  The sun had sunk close to the south-west horizon, and the sky behind Davy was the colour of charcoal. But there were no lights in the farmhouse, and no signs of life. Where was everybody? Off at the war, maybe? Or had the war come here, and claimed the inhabitants? But what kind of marching army would leave good chickens scrabbling about in the dirt when they could carry them off to eat later?

  It wasn’t that Davy felt hungry, but he was conscious that he might be many days on the road and that it would be a good idea to pick up supplies if the chance presented itself. Dare he risk breaking into the house? There might be a lovely full larder inside. But what if the inhabitants returned? What if they were inside now, just being very quiet?

  Eventually timidity overcame daring, and he left the farm alone, making his way through the wood. The sun went down and the forest became murkier, although the westward sky still glowed with a deep blue that reminded Davy of the bluebells, and lifted his heart, and the moon sitting high in the sky looked like silver fruit plucked from a tree of light.

  There was a rustling sound off in the undergrowth that might have been a deer, or a wild pig, or maybe even a big badger: Davy couldn’t see what was causing it. It didn’t sound like a human.

  Soon, in the very last of the light, he reached a row of old houses, all roofless, a few with beams still pointing their black fingers at the stars. It was markedly colder now, and the night was filling the land like floodwater. He had no blanket or sleeping bag, and it wasn’t much warmer inside the wreck than out. But he found a wall at the base of which he could lie, and hugged himself, and tried to sleep.

  He did sleep a little, too, although he woke often with the cold, and once he shivered so fiercely that he rolled hard into the wall and jarred his bad side. There was no sleeping after that, so he sat up and tried to concentrate on anything other than the shining pain from his shoulderblade. The dawn percolated slowly through the woodland, and into the shell of the house, and eventually it was light enough to see.

  It had been too dark to see any of the details of the room the previous night, but the dawn revealed the domestic fashions of a vanished age. Patterned paper was on all the walls, and where it hadn’t peeled off it showed different sizes and colours of fish. The ceiling was a tangle of cobwebs and the carpet a thicket of ferns. But near where Davy had lain down was an ancient sofa, and from this sprouted a little forest of impressively tall-stemmed mushrooms. Davy went up to them with the half-formed idea of picking and eating them. He saw, in amongst the roots of the mushrooms, the shape of a long dead body, collapsed in upon itself. He couldn’t make out any specifics beyond the shape.

  He came out of the house and looked around. It was a brisk morning, with white-grey clouds overhead and the smell of coming rain. He set off on an empty stomach.

  He made slow progress at first through dense scrub and woodland, and then he came down a hill through trees and almost fell into the margins of a deep lake. The trees grew right up to, and indeed over, the lip of the lake, and it was narrow but wide. He had to turn right—that is, north—and pick his way along it. A slight breeze tickled the surface of the water into those transient shudders Davy remembered from the flanks of cows when he had been a herder-boy. On the far side of the water a great many ducks congregated. Rusting metal pylons poked their upper portions out from below the water. His stomach gnawed at itself. He chewed a little grass, but it didn’t really help.

  As he went on the trees thinned, and gave way to sedge and a squelchy kind of turf, and here for the first time Davy ran into people. He crouched down, and hoped he hadn’t been seen: three or four individuals. He couldn’t tell if they were women or men. They were standing around talking. The burble of their voices was just about audible, although what they were saying was impossible to discern. Davy lifted himself a little and took another look: four of them, not three. One was smoking. All four wore similar clothes and all four carried rifles. That didn’t necessarily mean they were soldiers, of course, but military was Davy’s best guess.

  Creeping slowly and keeping his head down as far as possible, Davy retraced his steps. Back in the cover of the trees he felt less exposed.

  The clouds were thinner now, and the water shone with a bright crinkled blue, wavelets like a painter’s brushstrokes. Davy decided he was being ridiculous. Did he hope to get all the way home to the Hill without getting his feet wet? It wasn’t winter any more: the water might be bracing, but it wouldn’t kill him. So he took off his shoes and socks, bundled them in a parcel made of his trousers, and slipped into the lake holding his clothes out of the water in his left hand. With his right he half-doggy-paddled across the stretch of water. Progress was slow but steady, and soon enough he was making the ducks complain in their ratchety voices. Below him, through the waters, he could see the tops of submerged buses and lorries—all lorries, all buses, no cars. That was odd.

  On the far side he climbed out and lay on a heap of turf as large as a bed, letting the thin but palpable spring sunshine touch his skin. He dozed. He woke with a start when a woodpecker, standing on the grass not far from him, began a series of falsetto barking noises. He got dressed, and left the bird grubbing for ants in amongst the grass.

  Davy made reasonable progress through the rest of the afternoon. That night he slept in the wreck of an old bus. It was two storeys high, like a house, and although the lower floor was wholly overgrown and choked with weeds the upper floor was clear. About half the windows had gone and there were quite a few old leaves littering the floor, but though the upholstered seats were a little damp and smelt odd they were also comfortable.

  Davy was woken the next morning by the sound of people outside. He lay very still, and heard voices recede into the distance. He crept to one of the glassless windows and peered out. Down the track he saw a dozen soldiers. Looking the other way he could see more coming this way.

  His heart rate scrambled to a sprint. Stay low, don’t be seen, hopefully they would pass by. Surely they would just go past? Wouldn’t they? Why would they be interested in the top deck of an old ruined bus? He would be fine. Davy crouched down in the space between two seats, with just enough clearance to be able to peer out. There were, he could see with increasing panic in his breast, dozens and dozens of soldiers coming down, and they weren’t walking. They were jogging. With their weapons out.

  They were all men.

  There was a distant sound of detonation: a crumbling low-note resonance that came over like a bell tolling at a funeral. And then, much closer, a much louder and sharper explosion. All the men turned to look back the way they had come, and in an instant they scattered into the trees or took up positions behind the wrecks of cars. Davy’s heart was already racing and could not go any faster. It went faster. Away in the distance a new set of soldiers was moving, darting in and out of
vision, and soon enough the snippy sound of gunfire was audible.

  Another explosion, closer still, and the whole bus rocked. Davy put his hands over his head. Men were yelling, and the discharge of weapons smacked the air over and over. A lower sort of sustained rumble might have been an armoured car, or a tank.

  Davy was breathing rapidly and shallowly. His stomach was molten. There was a real risk he was going to lose control of his bowels. The complex of noises from outside the bus intensified abruptly: bangs, rattles, yells, and one voice—male or female, impossible to tell—hooting a long scream of pain.

  The bus shuddered. Had it been hit? Not that. A crescendoing boom-boom-boom was somebody hurrying up the curlaround inner staircase. Davy was far too terrified to do anything except stay where he was, breathing so shallowly it almost wasn’t breathing at all, his heart going like a gnat’s wings. It was a man: one of Father John’s soldiers. He was on the top deck now. He thumped his booted feet down along the central aisle, didn’t notice Davy, and hurriedly took up a position at the back of the bus.

  Davy was motionless. He was carved from wood, set in stone. The soldier at the back of the bus picked a target down on the road and fired his rifle and the sound was so sudden and loud Davy couldn’t stop himself twitching. He might even have let out a little whimper. The rifle spoke again, a furious bellow, and another.

  Gunfire from outside struck the bus and rang it like a gigantic gong. At this, Davy completely lost composure—he couldn’t control himself to hold it in any longer. He put his hands over his head and crouched lower down, yelling. He knew he shouldn’t yell, but he had to make some kind of sound to vent the terror inside him. It was stupid, though. It was the most stupid thing he had ever done in his life. Now the soldier would know he was there and would come back and kill him. But he couldn’t help himself.