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Page 21

by Martin Parish


  "Afraid you lost me there.”

  "I'm thinking too hard anyway," Kamal conceded with an grin that betrayed his own sense of relief. "I do that. I can't help it. That's why my sister-in-law has me, and you know what, I don't blame her.”

  “Well, they just shot themselves in the foot now, didn't they,” I said, the shock dissipating like fog and leaving clarity in its wake. I was free, the road ahead lay empty, and London was growing closer with every passing minute. We'd be within sight of it by dusk.

  And they'd lost their chance to stop us. With a bioweapon of our own, we could slaughter the Mods as they planned to slaughter us. We could create a new world, a world born in blood, one where homo sapiens would no longer need to grovel before homo excellens like a prisoner begging a judge for mercy. Now the tables would turn, the horse cast off the rider, the servant become the master, the ape claim parity with the man. For a moment I felt dizzy with power. The final decision was less than thirty miles away, growing closer with every step.

  “That was their chance,” I said. “They had us, they let us go. They think they've got us under their thumb. They won't have any idea what's coming until it hits them.”

  “Doesn't seem like it, no. They're very confident.”

  “Very confident.” Almost unnaturally confident. Why? I thought again of the girl dying in Reading. If they'd already launched a pre-emptive strike against us, they wouldn't care about two stray Mongrels. The disease they'd crafted would spread like wildfire. Perhaps the Mod had released us because he knew how unimportant we were, he knew what was about to happen...

  “Kamal. Jesus Christ, Kamal. We've got to get back.”

  “Why? What's the hurry?”

  “You remember that girl in Reading?”

  “Yes.”

  “How do we know they haven't released their own bioweapon? Remember what Ben told us? How do we know?”

  “I don't see why that'd happen just now,” Kamal said. “I mean, it's possible.”

  I had to get back. Because as important as Marengo might be to the human race, I had something more important still.

  The uncertain light through the Venetian blind illuminated her where she lay next to me, still sleeping. Of all states sleep is the one closest to death, and for a moment a strange terrible thought ssed my mind that perhaps she was dead, she seemed so still; but her chest rose and fell rhythmically and reassured me. I remembered how we'd made love the night before and a pleasant thrill ran through my nerves, as if the world had shifted beneath me and I'd floated off it into the air. She was so lovely I leant and softly kissed her cheek. She stirred lazily.

  "Sorry, darling, I didn't mean to wake you up," I said, and kissed her neck.

  "That's all right, I'd been meaning to get up anyway." She was always a late riser when she could help it.

  "Listen, darling, I've been thinking.”

  "Oh, don't do that, it's such a waste of time," she said listlessly and closed her eyes.

  "It's about what we were talking about last night. I mean, I don't mind walking down there but it seems like – well, maybe we'd be better off just moving altogether.”

  She shook her head. "No. This is a really good TA. You can't move because you've got your job and it pays well, and I've got my job, I don't want to move, it'd be too far. I mean, what could I do? Get a job working for them? I don't want to work for them, they're so strange, they always look at you as if you're some sort of dog that - I don't know, that has to be treated kindly and punished when you don't heel. And their eyes just give me the creeps, it's as if they're looking straight through you."

  "You get used to it," I said. "But I know, you're right. I was just - I don't know.”

  "Besides, it's all right. As long as you're careful and you don't do anything silly it's all right."

  "You know me - I'm the soul of caution.”

  "I'm sure you are. Now be quiet, I want to get some more sleep."

  "I thought you said you were going to get up," I said. "Just look at the light. It's going to be a beautiful day, we could go anywhere, we could-"

  "Later. Later." She turned her head back to the pillow and I kissed her again. The memory of her face rekindled the same rush of pleasure. I felt as if we were linked by an intangible bond, as if our minds could communicate even though we were miles apart. And I knew there was something wrong. I couldn't identify what precisely I feared, but a vague sense of unease haunted me, a compound of a dozen different impressions – the girl in Reading, Kamal's strange ideas, Shelley's death, the enigmatic expression in the Mod's eyes. I felt that I wanted to see Becky before I found Shelley's husband – just to make certain that she was there and safe. A seed of doubt had planted itself in my mind, like a solitary weed that infiltrates and finally overruns a garden, and until I uprooted it I'd have no peace.

  Chapter 12

  From the back roads we ventured onto the M4 and the last stretch of the road to London. I pushed the pace as hard as I could. We stopped only to eat and drink from the water bottles we'd carried from Reading, and to detour off the M4 for water.

  We saw a handful of other travellers – cyclists or people on foot, journeying either to Slough or to London. Maidenhead had been "erased" during the war, and Windsor Castle and Eton had been looted and destroyed, so that Slough was the only major town en route. Nearing London we encountered ever more activity, as if the city's dwindling pulse still made itself felt on the concrete artery that once helped sustain its life. At intervals, we passed a few remaining blue highway signs that told us the distance to Watford and Heathrow, reminders of how close our destination lay. Galvanized, I hurried down the windswept M4 until Kamal finally asked me if I was trying to leave him behind.

  "We're nearly there," he reminded me. "It's no good walking like that. We can't get to Islington or Hackney by tonight. We're going to have to stop somewhere."

  "Yeah, but somewhere in London."

  "Probably near London Heathrow. We can make it that far easily.”

  "Does anyone live out by London Heathrow anymore?" I asked.

  "Actually, a lot of people do. And a lot of the hotels are still standing.”

  "All looted."

  "We aren't looking for a room and suite," he said.

  It wasn't until late afternoon, where the M4 snakes past an abandoned golf course now overgrown with trees and weeds, that I espied the blue sign that announced the M25 exit. Only a quarter of an hour more, and we saw the concrete "rat's nest" where the M4 and the M25 meet dead ahead. One of the exit ramps had crumbled into a jumble of concrete blocks, like the ruin of a child's Lego-set building. Kamal looked at me, his eyes shining with quiet exultation.

  “Look. What do you know,” he said with a grin. “We're there. That's London.”

  I couldn't bring myself to share his enthusiasm. The future hung heavy on me like a cloud.

  “Yes, we're there,” I said. “Almost.”

  It was easy to find shelter; there were only too many untenanted buildings in a metropolitan area like London, a city built to house twelve million and now home to three or four at most. We left the freeway near the Heathrow Crowne Plaza Hotel. The hotel had lain unused for well over a decade; both sides bombed Heathrow into oblivion during the war, and only the cratered rubble of the hangar buildings remained – a lasting monument to indifference.

  The problem with staying in the hotel itself, as Kamal pointed out, was that it could very well collapse while we were there. No point tempting fate. Besides, the stairways were probably blocked up. So we took a staff house instead, a plaster-and-brick two story semi-detached building, with a smashed French window on the first floor and a disused chimney protruding from the slate roof. We had to leap a fence to get inside, but it seemed the safest place available.

  “Look, Mark, four star hotel, no room service. Why don't you go down to the front desk and complain,” Kamal needled.

  “Probably have to pay extra for that. We're staying free,” I said. “I'll take free ov
er room service any time.”

  We made ourselves as comfortable as we could to spend the night. There were still a few odds and ends of furniture, a couch, sun-bleached plastic lawn chairs. I reclined in one of them, improvising a pillow from a moth-eaten old cushion, and for a few hours took refuge in sleep.

  A stiff breeze through the window chilled me awake. I shook Kamal by the shoulders. He rubbed his eyes.

  "Come on, let's go! It's morning, just look outside."

  "Hold on just one minute here," he said, shaking his head. "What time is it anyway, 3 AM?”

  “How would I know. I don't have a watch.”

  “Feels like it's 3 AM. I want to get shaved and cleaned up.”

  "I already did. If you'd been up you'd be ready by now. Besides, there's only so much you can do, there's no water."

  He laughed. "All right. Whatever. I guess you want to get there before the sun's up. So this lady in the camp," he said as he climbed to his feet. “She said this friend of hers lived in Holloway, right?”

  “Yes, that's right.”

  “So that's where we want to go, isn't it.”

  “Y-es.”

  “You say that as if you're not sure,” Kamal said ironically.

  “No, no, of course I'm sure. That's what she said, was Holloway.” I knew I ought to go to Holloway immediately, because it was always possible I'd be noticed by surveillance and rearrested. It was vital the secret of Marengo's hiding place reached Shelley's husband first. But I wanted to see Becky. I dreaded the violent convulsions that would follow a bioterror strike - the aircars strafing the streets, the biorobots and commando detachments, and worst of all the bioweapons. The bodies of the infected left lying out like garbage, the sick and ill left to die untended. I could feel the shock of the cataclysm in my body like the brutal crash of a giant wave when it breaks. I needed to make sure Becky was safe – of all the problems in my mind that one was most important.

  So I tried to make a compromise – and hoped I could get away with it.

  Kamal and I had to walk almost as far that day as we'd walked the day before. We took a circuitous route through West London, deliberately skirting the Westminster-to-Fleet Street region where the Mods' buildings were located, and stopping only to buy water or food. I was anxious above all not to spend another night on the road. Kamal, however, didn't seem to care how soon we arrived.

  "We'll get there when we get there," he said. "Will you look at that? They're selling synthetic coffee for .3 nationals a pound. You want some?"

  "Are you telling me you want to stop to buy coffee?”

  "I'll need some when I get back. My sister-in-law's going to tell me what an idiot I am the next time I see her," he said; "it'll make up for her having to see me again." He didn't seem to realize what was about to happen, I thought irritably; he wanted to dawdle and buy coffee? Why didn't he understand?

  “We're not back yet,” I reminded him in an undertone. “We could get picked up on surveillance.”

  “I think if they really cared about us they'd have caught us by now,” Kamal said.

  “I believe you,” I said. “But I'd hate it if you got proved wrong.”

  “The fact is, it doesn't matter how fast we walk, as long as we get there today it's the same thing.”

  We found our way using the few maps that still adhered to the disused bus stops - so faded you could hardly read them. I soon realized that if the Mods had designed and released a new disease – as I'd feared after we left Reading – it hadn't yet struck London. Surely the girl dying in Reading had only been a failed experiment. Pedestrians and cyclists thronged the streets, coffee shops sold cheap delicacies made from flavoured algae paste, stores sold clothing, food and synfuel, and there were signs of new construction in several districts – a warehouse(probably to grow algae under glass), machine shops, fuel plants, some of it even construction begun after my arrest. Clearly long-delayed prosperity had returned to some areas of West London, and in spite of the abandoned buildings that pockmarked the streets you could pretend life was going on as it always had, as it always would.

  In another few weeks or even days this superficial calm would melt into chaos. I believed now that the Mods were planning genocide; and our only chance to prevent it was a pre-emptive first-strike. Somewhere in North London lay the weapon that might offer us our last chance. Did I really have the sheer unadulterated nerve to grab the lever of history? to pull the trigger that would take all those lives? Could Becky and I go into hiding before the war broke out?

  And the nearer I came to my destination the more intense my doubts became. Perhaps I was only beginning to grasp for the first time what Marengo really entailed. I decided to postpone the unanswered questions until afterwards. All I really had to do was find Shelley's husband, like passing a baton in a relay race. It wasn't mine to keep; I was only an emissary with a lethal message, a weapon that other hands would wield. I could tell her husband what I knew then see Becky again.

  It's really very simple, I told myself. Just remember that.

  We reached Holloway Road in late afternoon, marching at a rate that would have done credit to a legionary. To the south of us, the crystalline government buildings towered over Central London, dwarfing the few remaining skyscrapers and office complexes in the City to the East. Holloway was a populous district, and we passed a steady stream of people returning home from work at the fuel plants in West London; four or five months before, I would have been one of them.

  We turned off the main street down a quiet side lane fronting on a rotting brick terrace. Judging by the markings on some of the fences, it was a TA with joint upkeep. I picked out the building we wanted by the number, daubed on the front gate in white paint, and knocked on the door since there was no bell. A thin middle-aged man with crew-cut brown hair and thin pale lips answered.

  “I'm Mark Henshaw. I'm looking for Bob. Shelley's husband,” I said.

  “Who's Shelley?” he asked, holding the door ajar with a freckled hand.

  “You're Martin, right?”

  “What do you want?”

  “Have you heard of Marengo?” I mumbled.

  He hesitated a moment; his mouth opened then shut again. “I can't – who are you?”

  “I knew Shelley in the work camp. She told me everything.”

  “Ah.” He nodded and cast a wary glance along the street. “Come inside. Watch out though.” I saw what he meant when my glance met a pair of hungry yellow eyes through a doorway. It's only a wolvo, I told myself and restrained a shudder.

  “Don't worry, she's worse than she looks. Here. Come through here.” Kamal and I followed him into an unfurnished room like an empty shell. The wolvo trailed us and lay down in the doorway, a faithful if frightening guardian. Martin cut straight to the chase without wasting time on any pleasantries; I noticed his hands were shaking and I caught a whiff of an unusual scent in the stagnant air. “Where's Shelley?”

  “She's dead.”

  He paused a moment and licked his lips nervously. “How? What happened?”

  “Another one of the inmates killed her for some batteries – for food, really.”

  “That's a shame. I guess I didn't think I'd see her again but that's a shame.”

  h="0">Yes. It is.”

  “So she told you all about Marengo though?”

  “Yes. She did. Where she'd stored it and -”

  He interrupted me, stammering. “There's one thing I want to make sure you understand right now. I don't know anything about Marengo except the name. I don't want to know anything other than that. I'm not part of what Shelley and Bob were doing and I don't want to be,” he said, choosing his words with careful emphasis. “I don't want to know anything other than that. Not about you, not about how you got back here, not about Marengo or what it means. So if you came here looking for any help from me, you'd better look elsewhere.”

  I studied his clear blue eyes and freckled white face, long and tapered like an eggshell, and inwardly I wrote h
im off. In the event of a mishap he'd be as reliable as a tin pickaxe. I wondered how Shelley got along with him, but I suppose friends are seldom completely alike.“Shelley said you'd know where to find Bob. Her husband.”

  “Now that's something I can tell you,” he said, relieved. He removed his glasses and wiped them on his sleeve. “I can tell you where he is if that's what you want. He's been hiding down the Tube.”

  “Isn't that dangerous?” Kamal said with a frown. “I mean, they could follow him down there.” They could see in infrared, and concrete walls were no obstacle to their sophisticated instruments. If the Mods went down the subway after him, they could track him as easily as a fugitive fleeing across wet cement.

  “It was the best he could do, he didn't have too many choices. There's some other people live down there, you know, and they don't bother to round them up too often. And the Mods don't like to flush them out, because some of the tube stations are still booby-trapped from back during the war, so it's risky. One thing about the Mods is they don't like taking casualties. But if he'd stays aboveground, on the other hand, he'd get seen by surveillance sooner or later. I was thinking once enough time's gone by we could try and get him on the road out of London, but he didn't want to leave. They may've found him now, though,” Martin added, “because the last few times I took him food he didn't take it.”

  “How do you know?” I asked.

  “I take him food once a week, and paper and a pen, then I leave it for him at the Finsbury Park tube station, down the Seven Sisters entrance. If he needs anything he'll write it on the paper so I see it when I come back.”

  “And they never noticed you going back and forth to the Tube station for four months?” Kamal asked.

  “Well, the thing is they can't watch everybody all the time.” Just what Shelley had believed – evidently what she told Martin as well. “They're distracted right now, they're doing a lot of different things, I mean, they're trying to launch a colony on Mars, and they've got all kinds of things going on. So they can't watch all of us. As long as you don't do anything incredibly stupid...That's why Bob had to go underground. Only trouble is I don't know what's happened to him. What you can do though is this. Head down the Finsbury Park station – they call it Finsbury Park because there used to be a park near there, I think, but it's-”

 

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