We emerged from the woods into a meadow; across it trees grew in a dense line like a natural culvert.
"That's got to be water,” I said.
"I don't know, we'll see."
We crossed the clearing. Concealed in the shade ran a broad, shallow stream. I barely hesitated: I waded into the water, dropped to my knees and plunged my head below the surface. My clothes were so filthy and lice-infested I wanted to soak them too. Unfortunately it takes more than cold water to rid yourself of lice. They are the most obstinate vermin on earth. As long as there are humans there will be lice.
"Are we lucky or what,” I said. “First we've escaped and now this." After months of drinking filthy camp water, I no longer feared any bacteria the stream might carry. I stripped off my shirt and jacket and tore off the wretched remains of my trousers to soak them also. The dirt on my arms and face rubbed off in layers like a second skin.
"I'm just going to keep my fingers crossed and pray," Kamal said. "You see those clouds? That's rain by tonight."
"I know. But look over there." Across a field, a line of trees bordered a low stone wall. "That's got to be a road. I don't know which road, but it's a road and it goes somewhere."
"Better and better," Kamal replied. "Didn't think there'd be a road around for miles."
"All they really did was take a landfill and have us dig it up. There were roads here long before them. And maybe, if we're really lucky, there'll be some of the old road signs left, so we can tell where we are."
"Maybe we're in Cornwall. Someone on the train said we were going to Cornwall."
"If it's just something someone said," I demurred, "God knows, some people say nearly anything. Remember that lady on the train? telling us the Mods'll do this, the Mods'll do that. You'd think she'd met with them to talk it over or something." It was strange how quickly I could forget what she'd told me about Marengo, how illusory it seemed with London many miles away; a lurid story of a future hell, nothing more.
Beyond the stone wall a road led from north to south - clearly one that predated the Mods. They never used roads, but even if they had, they'd never have left anything valuable to them in such poor repair. Grass sprouted through the fissures in the asphalt, rain had worn potholes and craters at every few feet, and only a few segments remained intact. But despite its condition, it was our best hope.
We followed it for what might have been hours, my damp clothes clinging to me as I walked. During the entire time we found neither road signs nor intersections; we were as ignorant of our location if we'd landed in a jungle without a map. It must have been midday when an old church tower, one of the stone churches that dates back to the Middle Ages, appeared through the trees ahead.
"Look." Kamal pointed.
"It'll be deserted.”
"There could still be something to eat.”
"What, a nineteen-year old sandwich?" I said.
"Very funny. No, I mean - if it's one of those villages that got erased, you know, where they killed everybody, there might be some tinned food or something." We'd been walking all morning and I was so ravenous I could hardly think of anything else. I was concerned about Kamal too; he still reminded me of a walking skeleton clothed in skin and rags. I was surprised he'd been able to walk that far after struggling through the pipe. Besides, if nothing else the houses offered shelter from the coming downpour.
Adjacent to the village, an old petrol station displayed the petrol price from nineteen years ago. Five quid a litre! Clearly pre-war, I thought. No one had used the pound sterling since I was a kid. Beyond the repair shop a neat row of shuttered shops lined the high street, all of them wrapped in a picturesque stillness. It was difficult to believe anyone ever lived there. The town could have been a life-sized museum piece gradually crumbling into dust.
The petrol station had been swept clean - the glass smashed and the shelves barren. We started next on a house in a two-story brick row. The hinges on the gate had rusted thick. We had to climb over it instead of opening it; I paused for a moment when I saw a wasp alight on the rotting wood.
“Watch out. Sywasp,” I said. In a careless moment decades before the Species War, an abortive experiment had released aggressive biotech wasps engineered to carry a sting lethal to humans, their poison as toxic as a cobra's venom. The pests spread rapidly and occasionally claimed lives – their victims were usually children. For a moment I hesitated but then the wasp flew away.
A dense mat of creepers and ivy obscured the front windows and a few bold tendrils had colonized the living room ceiling. Thick dust like grey fur quilted the remains of the furniture; cobwebs clung to the stair rails and the empty corners. An ancient TV with a smashed screen(from force of habit I wondered whether it contained GIPTS) rested atop a table against the wall, and some fake flowers stood in a dry vase, resplendent in their eternal bloom.
"Here. Kitchen'll be that way," I said. We walked through the corridor under the staircase into an L-shaped kitchen. A microwave lay shattered on the linoleum floor. The tile counters, although covered in dust and scattered mouse dung, were otherwise undisturbed, and the wooden drawers were rotting. There were few marks of the erstwhile owners, although in one of the cupboards I came across some glasses and a china mug with a jaunty slogan - "BP - The Future of Energy". I wondered what BP was. Probably something to do with the Mods.
"It's infested with termites," I said. “I just hope it doesn't collapse or something.”
“Somebody's been here recently. Mongrels, I mean. Not Mods. The whole village was raided.”
“It can't have been that recently.”
“It might be.”
I flung open another cupboard drawer at the rear end of the kitchen, just beside the door leading into the living room. "Jackpot!" I shouted. The first shelf held a fire extinguisher and an empty bottle of bleach; the second shelf was well-stocked with tinned goods. I counted three tins of baked beans, two of rhubarb pie mix, a jar of Marmite and - most precious of all - three water bottles with the seal unbroken so that a decade and a half on, the water inside hadn't evaporated. The marmite wouldn't be edible, but the rest was fair game. "Whoever went through here missed this one," I said.
"That's odd," Kamal said. “Doesn't make any sense.” I handed him one of the cans.
"Who cares? Never look a gift horse in the mouth. Here, we'll have to find something to open it with. Maybe a screwdriver."
"There might be one back at the petrol station," Kamal said.
"All right then, back we go." We retraced our steps to the petrol station and garage, where the screwdrivers still hung in a tool rack. They might be rusted but they would work.
"Look, they've got a chisel." We returned to the empty house where the cans awaited us on the counter. I took the chisel and began driving holes around the lid, while Kamal did the same to another tin. It took me a few minutes. If you've ever tried to open a tin without a tin opener, you'll know it's clumsy work. I got it open at last, and we ate it straight from the can with our fingers like a couple of hobos. I have to say baked beans and rhubarb pie mix never tasted so good before.
"Thank God, I needed that," I said. "And you look a little too thin, you have me worried."
"Don't worry about me," Kamal said, amused; "I've been a lot farther. But yes, I was getting pret-ty hungry. And before we go I want to check some of the other houses. There might be something there too."
"Why not. They probably all do. It's like you said, if everyone in the village was killed they'd have left their food. People've probably raided it on their way through to other places - just like us - but it's remote, there can only be so many people that come through here. We can find more and take all we can carry. Here, we'll keep those water bottles and fill them up later. Come on."
Yet a quarter of an hour later, I had to conclude I was wrong. We ransacked the two neighbouring houses and a couple of the shops; everything edible had been eaten. At last we gave up in baffled frustration.
Kamal shook his h
ead. "This isn't right. It doesn't make any sense. Why that one house? You'd think either most of them would've have food, or none of them at all."
"Why does it matter? Someone missed it. If we went through the whole town we could find some other things someone missed."
"If we're going to stay here all night I don't see why not. It's going to rain."
"We might not have to stay here all night," I said. "See that smoke?" As we left the chemist's, I'd noticed a thin column of smoke trickling into the sky and melting away on the breeze, rising from farther along down the road. "That's got to be a village or a house."
"It could just be a campfire."
"Who the hell would be camping out here? What for? No, it's got to be some kind of settlement. Besides, either way they'll have food."
"We can go see," Kamal conceded. "But it's just as likely we'll end up stuck in the rain and have to come back here."
"I'd still rather try. It's got to be only - what, an hour's walk, it doesn't look that far."
"All right," Kamal said reluctantly, "we'll do it. Might as well try our luck."
As we left the village by the high street, I observed something I hadn't noticed before, and an uncanny shiver ran down my spine. I said that the village was lifeless, and it did at least appear deserted; but it had an alert, watchful air, as if an unknown pair of eyes had seen us come and go yet said nothing. Unfortunately, I assumed the impression was only the work of my imagination, so I didn't mention it at the time. I only remembered it the following morning - when it was too late.
About a mile down the lane we found the origin of the smoke. It issued from a village, presumably like the one we'd just left but inhabited. It would be just in time. A drifting fog bank was closing in fast, and the first few scattered drops of rain had begun to fall.
"See, look at that. What did I tell you," I said.
"The only trouble with just wandering on in is, we look like a couple of scarecrows," Kamal said. “They're going to hang us out to feed their dogs or something.”
"Well, now you speak for yourself, why don't you.”
"Ok, ok, I know. First you said it and now I said it.”
“They must see some pretty shabby looking tramps anyway. I mean, anyone who's travelling out here has got to be either desperate or just released from that work camp- so maybe they're used to seeing people like us,” I said. “Maybe it wwas onl matter. And either way there's nothing we can do about it. Just got to chance it."
"Wait a minute." A figure approached us down the road. Under one arm he carried a gun, a rifle or a hunting-piece, and with the other restrained a wolvo – one of the biotech dogs that had largely displaced the old breeds, broad-shouldered and muscular, its fur red and grey like a fox, lion-jawed with bright yellow eyes.
It was illegal to own firearms. The gun by itself would give the Mods sufficient justification to crack his skull or whisk him off to the work camp. But out here in the middle of nowhere, if he kept quiet he could avoid attracting their attention. Besides, the wolvo waiting patiently for its master's signal would be a more deadly weapon still.
"Hell," I said irritably.
"Nothing we can do about it now. We'll just have to be as friendly as we can and not give him any reason to shoot," Kamal murmured. The stranger paused some feet away from us: a stocky, clean-shaven man swathed in a raincoat, the hood tied around his face.
"Good afternoon," I called out.
"Stay where you are." He came closer and the wolvo glowered at us as if he wanted to tear our throats out. They barked more seldom than most dogs, thanks to their superior intelligence, but they could easily kill most of the old dog breeds in a fight. "Put your hands up." We obeyed mechanically.
"Hey, this isn't very friendly," I said, trying to be disarming. "We've been on the road all day, we saw the smoke from that fire. We just wanted to ask if you know where we can stay for the night." Some vagabonds survived by preying on their own species, and the Mods seldom bothered to hunt down stray Mongrels unless they were a threat. So it was very likely the stranger was just distrustful, nothing more. It was also possible he meant to rob us, but if he did he'd be disappointed. We had nothing worth taking.
"Where're you headed?" he asked.
"South to London."
He frowned. "To London? That's a long way. And where did you come from?"
"From Moorends, north of Doncaster," I improvised. I had no idea where we were in England, and the town of Moorends came to mind for some ungodly reason.
"And what are you going to London for?"
"My friend's got relatives in south London, and we'd heard things were better there, so we're going to look for work."
"Where were you last night?" our interlocutor asked us.
"We slept a few miles north of here," I said. That part was true. The night before that was none of his business. If he were clever enough he'd put two and two together anyway. But he drew a completely different conclusion.
"That's a lie," he shouted. "You just came from the other village. You were there last night."
"We were nowhere near here," I said, baffled. He walked forwards. At first I thought he'd unleash the wolvo, but instead he circled around us.
"Start walking," he ordered peremptorily.
"Where?" I asked. I heard a click as he cocked the gun.
"Just start walking." A brown-brick two-story building adjoined the road running into the village. Parallel greenrows, the long plastic-covered trenches some farmers used to use to grow algae, crossed a nearby field. The wooden gate to the fence was already open. The stranger marched us through and the wolvo burst into a deep-throated bark.
"Shut up!" someone called out from across the street, disturbed by the wolvo's unholy racket. A kennel stood in one corner of the yard; in the other, a woodshed up against the fence. "Go on, get in there. Get in there!" the stranger shouted at us. Kamal stifled an exclamation.
"What the hell-" I began.
"Oh, just get in there, you filthy little gits." The door to the woodshed closed behind us and left us in the darkness. A padlock clicked shut in the latch. We were prisoners. "Be back for you in the morning," our unknown acquaintance gloated through the door. Judging by the sounds outside, he tethered the wolvo to a post - probably next to its kennel - and shut the gate in the fence as he left. Already I could hear the pitter-patter of raindrops on the roof of our shelter. Any minute the storm would break.
"What the fuck? What the fuck did we just walk into?" I asked Kamal. It was so dark I could hardly see anything, although a little light crept in through the chinks and crannies in the woodshed.
"Wish I knew. I think we've been mistaken for somebody else."
"Who?"
"The deserted village we just left. He said we were there last night," Kamal said.
"So you think there was someone there last night and he thinks we were - whoever."
"I can't think of any other way to explain it. It's very strange. He didn't come out from the village and then see us - he came out looking for us. Or - not for us, because he couldn't have known anything about us."
"That's true," I said.
"And maybe he'll come back down here in the morning, open up the shed door and turn the wolvo loose on us."
I imagined the wolvo h its massive shoulders bounding into the shed and I shuddered. Wolvos like to go for your face, for your neck. They have an uncanny instinct. "If he wanted to do that why wouldn't he just do it right now?"
"I don't know. The whole thing is very strange. My guess is he wants to talk to his neighbors. And it's going to rain cats and dogs. Listen."
"That's the one good thing about all this," I said, "at least we've got shelter. Sorry, I was wrong. We should've stayed in the other village. My fault." Ironically, although we didn't know it then, we'd been saved by our own mistake.
"Don't worry about it. You know, I believe that - anything that happens happens for a reason, you know, it's fate. So if we didn't stay in the deserted villag
e, there's a reason for it."
"Really. And what might that be," I said.
"Well, I don't know what it is myself. It's part of a - a higher purpose. There's a word for it in Urdu."
"Sorry, my Urdu's pretty limited," I said. Non-existent would have been more precise.
"All right. This isn't a good way to say it, but I think God can bring good out of anything that happens. When I die that's not terribly important, you know, by myself I'm not important. But it's what God brings out of that that matters. So if we didn't stay in the other village there's a reason, it was meant to happen that way. And if we die here there's a reason for that too.”
Now it's always been my experience that if there is indeed a God – a Providence, God, Fate, a Superior Being by whatever you name you prefer – they have a malicious sense of humour. So the only God I fully believed in at that time was the most capricious one of all, Chance. Words like faith and God and prayer were tasteless in my mouth like water, they meant nothing to me. I made it a rule, however, not to argue the subject, because all arguments about religion consist of questions without answers. If you don't know, why bother to disagree? And given where we were just then, Kamal's theory seemed so ridiculous I barely repressed a laugh.
“Don't tell me you're one of those Heavenward people. Those Ascension cults.” The Heavenward was one name for the various religious sects that proliferated like mushrooms before the war. They believed the Mods were imposed on us by God, not our own mistakes, and that it was incumbent on us to adore the divine mysteries of Providence, love our suffering and obey our new masters. The radical fringe of Heavenward, the Ascension groups, believed that it was a sin to fight or even question the Mods. They claimed that the Mods were described in the book of Revelation, the real beauty of the book of Revelation being that it's so obscure it could plausibly mean anything. I knew a little about the Heavenward because my mother had been part of a Heavenward church. Up until she disappeared.
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