by Adam Roberts
After a minute, or perhaps eighty hours, Davy uncurled and looked about. The soldier was lying on his back, and not moving. Then the bus started shuddering again, and again there came the boom-boom of booted feet on the inner staircase, and Davy’s fear tipped over into a mess of sparks that consumed the back of his head and took his consciousness away.
HE WOKE IN silence, and late afternoon light.
It seemed he had been out for the rest of the day.
He was still on the bus, but he was no longer in between the seats. Instead he was lying on his back in the aisle. His ribs hurt.
When he sat up, slowly, wincing at the soreness in his chest, the other soldier was still lying there a little further down the aisle. He was wearing a monocle of crusted red-black blood and matter. He was grinning. He was utterly motionless.
There was no human sound, although in the world outside birdsong was filling every crevice of air and life. The song of life and of being alive. Davy looked down at his own body and saw, in the middle of his chest, the print of a muddy boot.
Somebody had dragged him out from between the seats, treading hard upon him as they did so. Since Davy’s unresponsiveness had not been of the sort that could be shammed, the individual—whoever it had been—had concluded that he was dead, like the other man. Davy’s sham fit had enabled him to escape Wycombe once, and now a real fit had enabled him to evade Father John as well. Luck working overtime. He remembered Mother Patel telling him that he was blessed, “I tell you, three times these fits will save your life, young Davy. Three times!”
Two down. What else remained?
He was genuinely curious.
He was also very thirsty. He made his way gingerly down the stairwell, left the bus and hurried away from the old road with its litter of dead male bodies.
Chapter Twenty-Two
DAVY WENT THROUGH the forest into what had once been an open field and was now turning into a wood. He found a shed as the sun went down, rusted metal walls, doorless, floored with a layer of old leaves, and curled up inside.
He slept awkwardly, thirsty and hungry and uncomfortable. In the morning, woken by the dawn chorus, he stumbled out. No humans were around.
There was enough long grass here for him to be able to wipe dew into his mouth and take the edge off his thirst. He chewed some stems, even though it made his stomach ache worse. Then he made his way west through a circle of ruined houses, up a road lined with other architectural wrecks and round a corner. There were various objects containing standing water, but he wasn’t so stupid as to drink from them.
The sky was an ashen white, and once the birdsong settled it was weirdly quiet.
One bird was making a different song from the others: a continuous humming rattle-buzz noise. Davy looked up and caught a glimpse of an impossible gliding bird—long and thin, black-bodied and apparently headless, with stubby little wings too far back on its torso. The wings did not move.
The flier passed from south to north and was soon out of sight. It took quite a bit longer for its drone-like call to fade away.
The old road up ahead was choked with rusting cars and seemed to go into the wasteland of an old deserted town. There would be nothing to eat or drink there, so Davy cut left, into the trees again, and made his way, best as he could tell, east-south-east. His night’s sleep had not left him rested, and he experienced a flicker of light on his retina, as if another fit were coming. But instead of building into the whole storm of sparks and vision, it was just that one flicker, and its strangely persistent after-image, on the back of his eye.
Maybe it was lightning?
He was halfway into the woodland when he heard a great rumble, away to the north: thunder. It sounded like a vast door being slammed shut, far and far and further away. So maybe it had been lightning? He checked the sky, but the white haze was thinning and blue was beginning to show through. It didn’t seem like storm weather. The one great roll of thunder echoed and resonated, and then died away. Davy waited for a second, but it never came.
He walked. As the day went on the sky cleared, and turned a smoky blue, intermittently visible through the canopy of spring green overhead. A big, bent tree had fallen over, perhaps a year earlier. Now it looked like a tree on its knees. Beyond it the forest started thinning out. Davy heard something and stopped, anxious, but it wasn’t people. It was four deer, running. They passed twenty yards in front of him, less galloping than flowing from right to left, their backs a slow sine wave up and down as their legs hurried. In moments they were gone.
He came to the edge of the wood and looked down a long slope to the big river. The Thames, at last. A scatter of ruined houses, and a few broken roofs poking out of the water’s edge, but no people around. The sky was pale blue and the sun was actually warm on his skin.
His first instinct was to run straight down, plunge into the water and swim to the other side, but something in him made him hold back. Caution, caution. Who knew where the dark angel might be? Waiting for him to show himself, always.
So instead Davy found a vantage point and sat for half an hour. Birds came and went, and at one point a fox appeared, red against the green like a flame in the field. But no people.
He let his eye wander over the flank of the hill on the far side of the river. His hill. The whiskers of his mind twitched: nervous, anticipatory. A great breadth of green and blue-green and brown, slotted here and there with darker patches and blobs. No motion. Textures of intricacy in amongst the bigger spatches of colour: millions of individual leaves. Davy watched, and watched. Near the far bank branches strained down towards the river’s surface as if tugging at their own invisible leashes to reach and drink. There was a tremble in the canopy and one crow, black wraith, big as a dog, his wings moving so slowly it didn’t seem possible he could raise himself upward on them, broke from the cover and flew. Davy watched him go.
Enough. Or too much.
He couldn’t hold back forever. Davy trotted down the slope and folded his shoes and socks into his trousers, as before. He waded into the water and swam one-armed. River water went into his mouth as he went, which was all right, because he was thirsty. The current pushed his trajectory into a long diagonal, but he reached the far side without incident.
He climbed a tree, and waited to dry off in the warm air. Nobody came up or down the river. When he was dry enough he dressed and moved north.
Within an hour he had come to a part of the riverbank he recognised. From there it was an easy path inland and up Shillingford Hill. Familiar sights greeted him like old friends. And here was the path that led to his own farm—his home. He could even hear the cows lowing.
Round the corner and there was the house. Nobody seemed to be about. A memory of the whole yet strangely silent farm, back in the Chilterns, came to him. Where was everyone? Here were chickens in the yard, and there were three cows in their enclosure. They trotted over to greet him, and he stroked their noses.
He took a breath and opened the door to the kitchen and went inside.
He found Gal, sitting on a chair near the kitchen table, and nursing a young baby. She looked up, stared at him astonished and said, “You’re Davy. You’re Davy come home again. They all think you’re dead!”
“Hello Gal,” he said. “Where is everybody?”
“Your Ma is away. Somebody blew Goring up, you heard, I guess you heard, yeah? A bomb was dropped from the moon, people say. Your sisters are away with her. Your Da is up at Hellington, trying to buy another cow. My god Davy, I can’t believe you’re alive! You look so grown-up now! Where have you been?” Her nipple, thick as a finger, slipped from the baby’s mouth, and the bairn made a sound of deep satisfaction.
Of all the strange reversals and violent changes of fortune that had characterised Davy’s life over the last few months, this abrupt arrival home was the strangest and, in its way, the most violent. Everything was the same. Nothing at all was the same. Who would have thought that the unstrange spaces of home could ever estra
nge themselves?
Davy looked about. Home, home, home. “Oh the places I’ve been,” he said, and sat himself down on the far side of the kitchen table.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Adam Roberts was born in London two thirds of the way through the last century. He currently lives a little way west of London and teaches English and Creative Writing at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is the author of sixteen SF novels, including New Model Army (Gollancz, 2010), Jack Glass (2012)—winner of the BSFA and Campbell awards—and Bête (2014). His most recent novel is The Thing Itself (2015). He is also the author of various works of literary criticism and review, including the recently expanded and updated History of Science Fiction (Palgrave, 2016)
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