Chaos Theories Collection

by Moody, David

  ‘A perfectly good name,’ she replied, indignant. ‘What about you?’

  ‘Criccieth.’

  ‘Oh, but that’s a hell of a journey.’

  ‘Tell me about it.’

  ‘I’m Jane, by the way.’

  ‘Steven.’

  ‘Mind if I walk with you?’

  ‘If you like,’ he said, setting off again. She pulled ahead slightly, as if making an effort to not seem too forward, but the pace was too much and she soon dropped back and drew level.

  ‘I saw you when you got off the road,’ she told him. ‘I’d been thinking about doing the same. You know what it’s like, though, you always want someone else to do it first.’

  ‘Seemed to make sense. Hopefully shave a few miles off the trip.’

  ‘That’s what I reckon. Anyway, however it works out, it’s nice to have a little company. I’ve had enough of being on my own.’

  ‘Me too, Jane.’

  ‘I’m scared. Are you scared, Steven?’

  ‘I am.’

  19

  ‘I know this area pretty well,’ Jane said. ‘Grew up around here. All looks different today, of course, and I’m usually on the road, but I think I know where we are.’

  ‘That’s good, ’cause I don’t have a clue anymore.’ Steven studied the map but it was increasingly difficult to make sense of the creased up, dog-eared piece of sweat-dampened paper. ‘I think I’m still heading the right way. Problem is, everything looks the same now.’

  ‘I know. So sad.’

  Walking with Jane had made the last hour pass with relative speed, but their pace had noticeably dropped. She was out of shape, but even the strongest would have struggled to maintain any speed in these conditions. The air was bone dry, not a single hint of moisture left. It was like breathing in sand, and the world around them had come to resemble an endless desert. The colour had been bleached from everything, all the myriad shades of green slowly leaching into muted yellows and browns, dying almost as they watched.

  Their conversation had been a welcome distraction. Jane told him she’d been visiting her brother in an open prison near Evesham when, according to her, the balance had tipped. He’d asked her what she’d meant by that. ‘Took us all by surprise,’ she’d explained. ‘One minute everything’s all right, next thing I know it’s the end of the bloody world and everyone’s freaking out. Considering how long it’s been hot like this, it was like everyone got up one morning and suddenly switched into panic mode.’

  ‘It was the last couple of energy pulses, wasn’t it? So much stronger... All that heat and light. It’s hard to keep pretending everything’s okay when something like that happens.’

  ‘Tell me about it. Honestly, you should have seen them in the prison. Broke my heart to leave Gary behind, but what choice did I have? I mean, I know it’s an open prison, but they’re still under lock and key at the end of the day. Gary said the lad in the cell opposite him had it worst. He said the sun was in his room most of the day. Said he could hardly breathe. Spent all his time sitting in one corner, trying to keep in the shadows. Heaven knows what it’s like for them now...’

  When the emotion became too much, she stopped talking. Steven thought he should say something to try and comfort her, but he had nothing left. The apparent inevitability of their situation was hard to take. He pictured her brother’s friend cowering in one corner of a box-like cell, drawing his legs up tighter and tighter, making himself as small as possible as the sun’s rays filled the room, desperate to keep even a single strand of hair from falling into the light. And that’s what’s coming for all of us, he said to himself. We’ll all end up like that, trying to get ourselves into smaller and smaller spaces, anything to stop the burning...

  ‘There’s the road again,’ Jane said after a while, breathless. Steven looked where she pointed, back the way they’d come, and saw that she was right. They’d climbed a gradual slope now and had a largely uninterrupted view east. The road they’d left behind stretched across the landscape, snaking like a long grey scar, like someone had dragged a knife along the surface of the Earth and carved a hideous groove. There were people still following the road, step after step after step. He wondered if they all had specific destinations like him, or whether they were just walking in the vain hope of finding somewhere to try and shelter from the coming firestorm. A pilgrimage into oblivion.

  Over the top of the rise at last, and Steven and Jane started to follow the slope back down. Distracted, Steven tripped over something which had been left sticking up in the yellowed grass. He was on his hands and knees before he realised what had happened and he studied the thing he’d fallen over with confusion. It was mud-coloured and bizarrely featureless: just a misshapen lump, really, with no clearly defined edges or joins that he could see. Confused, he reached out to touch it then immediately recoiled. ‘It’s like a chamois,’ he said. ‘My dad used to use something like this to clean his car back in the day. Just a scrap of leather. We bought him a pressure washer and years later I found his old chamois like this, all dried up, stiff as a board.’

  ‘That’s exactly what it is,’ Jane said, standing over him and looking down. ‘Cow hide.’

  Steven got up and looked at the thing from another angle. He could see it now: the tell-tale bumps and grooves of the ribcage, crushed legs folded under the body, the mummified face, parchment-like skin drawn tight over the creature’s skull as if it had been vacuum-sealed. And there were more of them. Visible only as dark brown patches in the light brown grass at first, he saw another and another then another, several small mounds dotted around the larger ones... ‘Christ, must have been a whole herd.’

  Jane kept walking, wiping her eyes. He caught up quickly. ‘You know this is it, don’t you,’ she said, voice low but still clearly audible in the absolute silence of everything else.

  ‘It might not be,’ he said quickly, more an instinctive reaction than anything else.

  ‘Oh, come on... Take a look around you. The whole world’s dying. Even if things don’t get any worse than this, I can’t see any way back from here. The damage has already been done.’

  Steven knew she was right, but he didn’t want to accept it. Not yet. He checked his map again. ‘If you’re right about where we are, we’ll reach a river soon. It looks massive on this map. Think about that, Jane, some water. Even if we can’t drink it we can bathe in it... cool down for a little while.’

  ‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘It’s me. I’m just tired. I get cranky when I’m tired.’ She wiped her eyes then looked at her wet hands and cursed herself. ‘You’re an idiot, Jane Butler, wasting water like that.’

  ✽✽✽

  The sun-dried monotony of the countryside was disorientating. They reached the river before either of them realised they were anywhere close. It was an understandable mistake. They’d naively been looking out for a wide water flow, its level a little lower than normal, perhaps, but still easy to spot. Steven had managed to convince himself it could present a problem, that they might struggle to get across the raging torrent, but the reality proved to be wholly different. He was actually in the river, walking across its dried-up, cracked bed, before he’d made the connection.

  ‘Is this it?’

  ‘I used to come here with my uncle and my cousins when I was little,’ Jane said. ‘Uncle Jack had a boat. He’d take us fishing but I didn’t like that. He used to say it didn’t hurt them, but I said to him, how do you know? Seriously... someone shoves a big bloody hook in your mouth and you’re trying to tell me that won’t hurt?’

  She was rambling now, but that was only to be expected. They had to keep walking for a while longer before they found any water. Steven found a couple of fish first, dried-out and welded to the brick-like mud, trapped forever like fossils. They were hard to make out, only their distinctive bone patterns and flat, blank-eyed faces giving them away.

  ‘Is this it?’ she said, sounding genuinely annoyed. The once raging torrent had been reduced
to a mere trickle, a damp shadow of its former self. Appearing inexplicably angry, Jane stood in the water at its deepest point with her hands on her hips, the flow barely lapping over the top of her sandals, hardly covering her toes. Steven stood next to her. Whilst by no means cold, the water was, at least, marginally cooler. He knelt down, scooped up a handful and lifted it to his mouth. ‘I wouldn’t,’ she said. ‘Probably not a good idea.’ She was right, the muddy water had an oily tang, and he just used it to wash and cool himself with instead.

  They spent a few minutes in the river trickle, enjoying the sensation of being wet more than anything else. The distraction was welcome, but Steven knew they were wasting precious time. He tried to egg Jane on and get her moving again. ‘Don’t rush me,’ she scolded him.

  ‘We need to keep moving.’

  ‘Just a little longer...’

  ‘I’ll go without you,’ he said as he climbed up the opposite bank, now just a low lip of tightly packed, dried-out mud

  ‘Don’t, Steven, please. I just want a couple more minutes with my memories.’ She splashed her feet in the dirty water like a child jumping in puddles. ‘It’s easier looking back than ahead.’

  ✽✽✽

  They decided they’d split up soon, Jane heading into Pant while Steven continued north towards Criccieth. They paused at the edge of an odd-shaped field under the shade of a sprawling oak, both sensing the reluctance of the other to take the next step. ‘How long’s it been?’ Jane asked.

  ‘Not sure. Got to be almost a day,’ Steven replied. He knew exactly what she was asking. The field was vast. No shade at all.

  ‘And when do you think the next one will hit?’

  ‘Not long.’

  ‘Can we risk it? This field’s massive.’

  ‘Don’t know. Can we not risk it?’

  The prospect of being caught out in the open when the next energy pulse struck was terrifying, but what was the alternative? Steven was acutely aware that they’d wasted more time than was necessary in the river, could they afford to waste even more taking another diversion now? Might that diversion, or even this frustrating hesitation, be the difference between him getting to see Sam again or not?

  ‘I’m going for it,’ he said and, before she could argue, he did it. He looked back and saw she was following, looking over her shoulder as if she thought the heat and light might be creeping up on her.

  ‘Slow down,’ she gasped. ‘Wait for me.’

  ‘No, you catch up with me for once.’

  This time of year, he thought as he walked, desperate for any distraction, a field like this should have been harvested. He tried to imagine the cool dampness in the air, remembering Roy’s tale of travelling to Hull last autumn with a friend. He tried to visualise moist, dark brown earth churned into relatively uniform furrows, but the memory was too far removed from what he saw today. Today he was walking over the remains of the last crop to have been planted here: wilted leaves, limp stems and dead flowers. No nutrition, no life. It looked like a field in Africa rather than England, a desperate dustbowl on the edge of a desert, not the prime arable farmland it had been until a few weeks ago.

  He could hear Jane close behind now but he kept his head down and kept walking, focused on crossing the field. He shouted back to her, trying to encourage her as best he could. ‘Hey, it’ll be November in a fortnight. You know what that means, don’t you?’

  ‘What?’ she said, panting, her voice a parched whisper.

  ‘Bonfire night. It’s always cold on bonfire night. Fog, rain... you wait. A few weeks time and we’ll be wishing it was sunny again.’

  ‘It’s my birthday in November,’ she gasped, almost drawing level now. ‘It always rains on my birthday. Snows sometimes.’

  ‘What date?’

  ‘Twenty-fifth.’

  ‘Meet you back here then.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Twenty-fifth of November. I’ll meet you back in this field. We’ll have a little party, okay?’

  Steven looked up and around, the world still unbearably bright despite the sunglasses he wore. They’d been crossing the field for a while now but seemed to be making little progress. Not even halfway. He tried to inject a burst of pace but he didn’t have it in his legs. Jane stumbled, catching herself before she fell. ‘My fortieth birthday,’ she said, ‘a few years ago now, mind, we had this big party arranged in the village. Booked the hall out and everything. I only live just down the road so I was walking. Had a foot of snow fall on the afternoon. Out of nowhere, it was, fell while we were setting up. We got snowed in, everyone else got snowed out. Just me, my hubby and the kids. We were the only ones who made it, us and two others. Might as well have stayed at home and not gone to the expense. Good night though, what I remember of it.’

  ‘I promise you, I’ll be at your next party even if there’s six foot of snow.’

  ‘I’d be happy with one foot again. Imagine that...’

  ‘I am imagining it. How old are your kids, Jane?’

  ‘Jade’s nineteen, Bill’s twenty-one. Both at uni. Jade’s in Southampton, Bill’s in Aberystwyth. If I’d had more time I’d have gone to see them instead of my useless brother. Now I don’t know if I’ll...’

  Steven walked a few steps further, then realised she’d stopped. His plan to distract her had backfired. Christ, she hadn’t even mentioned the fact she had kids until now, and clearly for good reason. She’d known all along there was little chance she’d see either of her children again and she’d kept it swallowed down, a reality too painful to face. Now she was just standing there in the middle of the field, one small speck in an ocean of dust. Steven walked back towards her and took her hand. ‘Come on. We need to keep moving...’ He pulled her away but she wouldn’t move. His mind began to play tricks – is it getting hotter? Is it getting brighter? Did I just feel the wind again? He looked around but couldn’t see anything and he couldn’t bare to look into the sun, such was its ferocity. ‘Just move!’ he screamed at her, and he yanked her arm so hard he almost wrenched her shoulder from its socket.

  ‘Leave me alone.’

  She tried to pull back but he wouldn’t let go. He marched across the remainder of the field, Jane chuntering and moaning just behind him.

  When they finally reached the other side they collapsed against the trunk of a sycamore tree and sat together in its desiccated leaf litter, both of them sobbing with effort and regret.

  ✽✽✽

  They spent a short while looking at the map. The end of Jane’s journey was in sight, but the longer Steven studied his route, the harder it seemed to become. The effort and gains of the day were immediately negated when he plotted the sixty miles or so he had left to travel. He’d walked so far, tried so hard, and yet he seemed to have barely scratched the surface. But what was the alternative? ‘You’ve got the mountains coming up too,’ Jane added unhelpfully. ‘You need to find yourself a car, Steve. I’d lend you mine but it’s stuck back near Shrewsbury.’

  ‘Mine too.’

  She took the map from him. ‘Look... here’s Pant where I’m heading, but coming with me’ll take you out of your way. Your best bet is to keep going onto Llanymynech, see if you can’t catch yourself a lift there.’

  ‘Sounds like a plan.’

  ‘Don’t know about that, but it’s probably your best option. Get a car and you’ll be in Criccieth within a couple of hours, maybe even before dark.’

  That was all the encouragement he needed. The prospect of being with Sam by the end of the day seemed to refresh and revitalise him, making the rest of his impossible journey seem that much more achievable. Jane made him memorise her phone number and made him promise to come back here for her birthday next month.

  20

  Llanymynech wasn’t what he was expecting. It both looked and felt like something out of the Wild West. Desolate. Dangerous. Steven crept into the heart of the small town feeling like an outlaw, an intruder, like he shouldn’t have been there. He reached a crossroads �
� Welcome to Dodge – and leant up against the side of a pub in the relative cool of the long shadows, considering his next move.

  The streets were empty. There were people here, of that he had little doubt, but where they were and what they were doing was a mystery. Given the option, he’d have been in the coolest room of his house, doing very little, and it was safe to assume the inhabitants of Llanymynech were all doing the same. They may even have been watching him. That thought made him feel uneasy but he put it from his mind.

  He inched forward then looked into the pub. The dryness of his mouth seemed to intensify when he saw the distinctive shapes behind the bar: the bottles, the glasses and the beer pumps. He could tell from the lack of light and the stillness inside the building that it was empty. He tried a door but it was locked, probably never to re-open. He thought about trying to break in but there didn’t seem much point. He could have done with a drink, but he was working against a clock which seemed to be ticking ever-faster. The next energy pulse was beginning to feel overdue.

  He glanced in both directions, looking for traffic or people and seeing neither, then crossed the road and paused again outside a hair salon. There were too many distractions in this alien, skeletal place, because now he found himself looking at the empty chairs and the mirrors and sinks. Places like this were redundant now. He thought about Jane and the hundreds of people he’d seen on the road since Shrewsbury... how they’d all looked as rough as he did. Wild hair, sunburned skin, chapped lips, ragged clothes, soaked with sweat. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen anyone who cared what they looked like. He couldn’t remember when he’d last given his own appearance any thought.

  But it was what he saw on the other side of the crossroads, opposite to where he was now standing, which was of greatest interest. A garage. A small forecourt with four second-hand cars for sale; two blue, one red and one silver, all dust-covered and tired-looking. The fuel tanks would almost certainly be empty, but it was a start. Even a quarter-tank would get him most of the way to Criccieth.