by Jeff Kamen
She stares deep into the cloud, detached, almost curious in her fear. On it comes, twin lights flaring and a noise like a primal tempest booming off the cliffs ahead of it.
The cloud becomes a looming droning shape that makes a voice inside her head say the word machine, but there is no time left to think and she stands with her thighs growing tense and her hips rotating and she draws back her arm and her muscles feel pure and rich with her hatred. The creature inside the dust is turning in its darkened skins and becoming clearer now. She hears the sound of a great weight being drawn across the dry stone of the terrain and readies herself, taking a sharp breath as the cloud unfolds a short distance away to reveal a great horned vehicle crossing the parting water.
Her eyes fill with a terrible black radiance. The vehicle bears down on her with fire in its jaws, rocking as it runs. Grinding, roaring. She knows she can’t stop it but the rage in her is too great to back away and with a vicious snort she throws the spear. It streaks through the air passing low over the ground and strikes the giant clockwork wheels and snaps into flying pieces. The machine bellows past her with the archers firing their puny arrows wave on wave, and as it departs it seems to suck the pandemonium of its noise towards it like something entering a tunnel. She turns away gasping as the dust sweeps around her, circling in snatching pirouettes. A shower of mud and stones is pelting down and the vehicle is heading towards the facing cliffs and she is certain it will crash but with a long trammelling skid it turns away somehow, soon to disappear in rare blooms of late sunlight. There is nothing to do but return to the stricken convoy, and she is on her way back to help the fallen when she realises the rumbling has not ended. The ground is shaking unnaturally. She is running towards the archers as she looks back. As she tries to understand.
There is something else at the back of the gorge. Not a vehicle this time but a shape of darkness, a shape roiling unfathomably. It looks as though a giant watertower has collapsed between the cliffs, flinging out thick black curds in front of it ahead of an incoming tide. She calls out, her cries merging with the yells of the archers as they warn those who have stalled to save themselves. They brandish weapons to alert those unable to hear them, among whom is a group of hunters chasing goats across the stream and an injured party whose cart has overturned.
She runs towards them, sending the archers ahead to help the stragglers yet to reach the slope. ‘Get everyone to the side, get them clear!’ she cries, and goes to where the wounded passengers are being dragged out from their vehicle by Pétar and others, the mules kicking where they lie, struggling in the harness. ‘Go,’ she roars, ‘all of you go, leave the cart, now!’ and as they turn to look at her she can tell from their eyes they have only just seen what is coming and all then scramble to pick themselves up and get away. Unsheathing her knife, she helps the hunters cut the mules from the tangled lines and they get the beasts upright and run on with them, the hunters leading the beasts by the halter.
They head away like some bedlam pack of mercy, stopping to haul along those people whose legs have given out or who are too lost in trauma to rise from the ground, some clutching at their belongings and others cradling children and all of them screaming in nameless horror as the ground shakes and quivers and in a few places begins to crack. To saw open. To split apart. Revealing a trembling seam of oil that jolts heavily as it surges upwards and spreads in a dark spume across the unsettled stones.
As they run on they can see the slope through a gauze of rising dust. Upon it frantic groups of people are pushing their vehicles up towards the top, where amidst a clump of firs the first to arrive seem to have found a way out and with furious gesticulations are beckoning everyone else to follow. Hard wooden wheels are riding over the rocks and crashing down again and belongings spilling out, and as they enter the haze she notices Lajos leaning from the back of a cart and screaming. As he is attended to by others, she sees them look to where he is pointing and realises he is calling to his sister. Radjík is still in the gorge, lying on her belly at the stream’s grassy verge. Yard by yard the stream is widening into a chasm into which water is pouring in a shower of stones and weltering muck. She seems to be reaching down to someone, straining to retain a grip.
She goes to her at a dead run.
Seeing her approach, Radjík cries, ‘Help me, fuckin help me,’ and on arriving Jaala finds her to be gripping Tomas’ hand. He is trapped down in the rocks, dangling over a deep trench into which Rosa has fallen. She stares, taking in the sight of a pulsing black undersea as it rises up and engulfs her friend in cold and choppy waves.
Bubbling up around her along with ancient fumes are pieces of broken metal struts and the smashed shapes of objects thrown up from whatever underworld colony has been pulverised by the flood. With a gasp of despair she reaches down past Radjík and seizes Tomas’ arm.
‘Tom! Tom!’ Rosa is screaming, clinging to the rocks as the waves wash over her shoulders.
‘Take her hand!’ Jaala yells, ‘Tomas! Take her hand! I’ve got you, I’ve got you!’ and he cries up at her, ‘I can’t take her weight, I’ll drop her,’ to which she says, ‘You haven’t got time, I can lift you both. Rosa, grab his foot, keep hold of him.’ As Rosa struggles to reach up so Tomas lowers himself a fraction, straining to keep hold of Jaala, who screams at them both to climb out while they can. Rosa grabs his leg with both hands, kicking to aid her momentum as he hauls her upwards. He throws up his free hand and is clutched at by Radjík. ‘Pull!’ Jaala yells, and as the couple rise she turns her head a moment, then goes cold as she sees the tide rushing in. There’s no time for it. No more than seconds. Screams are rising distortedly from the slope and she leans back pulling at Tomas’ clothes, begging the couple to hurry, and then with a shrill cry Rosa slips away. The last they see of her is her lovely dark head as she goes under. ‘NO!’ Tomas yells, twisting and flailing about to free himself, and before Jaala can haul him clear he lets his jacket rip and plunges after the girl he loves, becoming mudlike as he enters the waves. He swings his head to clear his eyes and spits, then dives away bellowing.
She sees him grasp the filmy shape of Rosa by the hair. Trying to drag her up again. The pair of them like foetal twins at war. Struggling in the mire and the muck and the putrid-smelling bubbles. What she screams at Radjík she does not hear herself for the torrent’s noise, and grabbing the girl around the waist she pulls her away. Radjík shrieks and shrieks, kicking like a vicious sprite to free herself, forcing Jaala to drag her like a hostage as they go.
The tide is almost upon them. It comes in strafing the gorge walls and the head of it thundering into the stream as it blackens and churns and drops away into an underworld maelstrom of rock and debris and oil. She runs on with the flood beginning to break over them like a spreading black sky, and with a sob throws Radjík ahead.
The girl lands sprawling in the dust and she throws herself after her. They roll away gasping as the torrent roars through beating at the scattered rocks, following the course the machine has taken.
‘JUMP MUMMY JUMP,’ screams a voice, and scrambling up the slope she turns to see a divided family swept away by a force they cannot resist.
Chapter 44 — The Vehicle
He stands in a bleak gulley overgrown with ragged bushes, tufts of colourless grass, looking up at a raging figure glaring from the roof of a large concrete bunker. Ash blows past his feet in dreary flakes and the gulley is grey with it. The front of the bunker is shut off from the world by a steel barrier. There are wheeltracks in the dirt, heading west and back again, none visible in the direction he has come from.
AND THE WEAK VANISHED FROM THE EARTH
AND THE STRONG ROSE GLADLY TO THE SKY
He rereads the inscription, and only then recognises the figure as the bellowing colossus from the flag. It glares at him malevolently. Sculpted fires blaze around the planet at its feet, and among the flames, like a host of incendiary angels, stands a crowd of people reaching upwards, wailing, gazing up at it in fearfu
l devotion. He is about to approach the barrier when he notices something beneath the inscription. He goes nearer, screwing up his eyes to find engraved the words: Burg Ostgrenze. ‘Shit,’ he mutters, meeting the cold steel eye of a camera, and he backs hastily away, then goes running up the gulley as though pursued, realising he has come to his enemy’s lair.
~O~
Walking high bluffs overlooking a westward-running stream, he observes the sun as it ails, taking in the open sky, the universe unlidded and unbounded, striped in deepening bands of amber and smoky reds, printed with black mountain slopes and wheeling birdforms, the splayed limbs of trees.
He feels he has a far greater insight now into why his father has remained in the upper world so long, and not for the first time, as he stops to look out, does he wish he could leap northwards to the desert in a single bound and go after him, go to whatever fraught camp they’d installed in order to survive outside the mountain — there to live and keep themselves, however desperate the circumstances. Yet he knows that reality will permit no such thing. He must replenish his O2 supply first, however unwillingly; must head back to the turmoil of the City and somehow account for himself, account for the fire, and then somehow account for his wanting to depart so soon, taking with him medicines and supplies for hundreds.
All this to discuss with people most likely adverse or indifferent to him, or at best with friends who now might take a graver view of his actions, given their catastrophic losses. He is reflecting on this when a throaty roar resounds through the gorge. Instinctively he runs from sight, and is crouched behind a rock when an armoured vehicle appears. He follows it disbelievingly.
It’s here. The vehicle. The same one he’d seen before, the object on his screen.
Looks like a carrier, maybe a fuel tanker. I don’t know …
It is travelling at speed, dodging from side to side with sheets of dirt blowing up and hanging behind it like things betrayed and lost as the eddies whip and turn. A story in itself that he could digest for many hours — the speed of its departure, its proximity to slamming into the cliffs as it misjudges the turn and skids on again, the sight of the stream convulsing and blackening in its wake — but then a minute later he discovers the story is incomplete. The reason for its urgency comes chasing it with a low and sullen roar. He sees the flooding oil appear in a thunderous wave around a turning. It gathers and warps and pounds on heavily through the rocky corridor, sweeping between the walls in an ongoing detonation of murky liquid and pulverised masonry and the antler-like shapes of branches, of burnt and twisted trees. Great shining loops are flung into the air as the steamhead of the torrent goes crashing over the stream, swallowing the water down and grinding all things in its path into a slewing black river.
The stench of it washes up at him and he throws himself bellydown to keep from being shaken over the edge. The cliffs are trembling and splitting in places as the ground breaks open below, permitting a roiling jetsam of loose and uncategorisable wreckage to vomit up from the netherworld. Up with that pulsing flow comes a smashed ensemble of furniture and equipment and the occasional body, the pallid limbs flopping and rolling lifelessly as the torrent propels them on.
Some time later he gets up again. He stands watching as the ruined aftermath slops back into itself and settles. Stunned, he watches as huge gas bubbles break slowly across its surface, bursting open like heavy flowers of mud. The gorge walls quiver in the fumes and he watches the birds wheeling from the ledges become misshapen, formless, like the shapes of fleeing souls. That Ostgrenze has fallen, has been destroyed, starts as a wild hope in his mind, but it is a few miles to the west and in the black hours before daybreak that he begins to be convinced that it is so.
~O~
He was going cautiously down a wide flat road when he saw the blue lights of their torches. Beneath a slowly turning canopy of stars he’d followed their trail through a great rock ridge they’d tunnelled through, and crunching over the loose rubble left scattered in their wake, he went on a little further, then stood listening. He could hear their noise even from there, and along with it the sound of a river churning somewhere below the road’s dark border.
He went to the rocks that made up the border and climbed up tentatively to peer over, but the river was too deeplying to see and it was too dark to risk climbing any further. Then he looked out. Across the river was a titanic vault of cliffs that stood so broadly across the night that he could not see where it began, nor where it ended downriver. Climbing back down, he surveyed the road again. It seemed to have been built on a slight incline. He looked up it, away from the direction of the torches, but although the road was set pale against the terrain, he could not see where it led to. Its presence was a mystery to him, and as he turned to watch the lights flare and twitch at some midpoint in the air, it occurred to him that the Ostgrenzers must know a great deal more about the overland world than himself.
He thought of the screen’s dark green image again, the tall figure standing before it uttering a warning:
Listen to me. This vehicle, the thing out there, it’s all a part of what they’re doing to us. We’re getting locked in. Slammed down. Made too frightened to question them, or even answer back. All we do is work and provide for them while they plan a future for themselves — not down here, of course, but on the surface ...
‘Sorry, Lütt,’ he whispered, and in saying that name, other memories began to flow, placing him at the moment when he was last called upon to act, and had measured himself in the gaze of his friend inside a chill metal shaft.
Before he set off again, his eye traced the profile of the hulking ridge the vehicle had bored through. He thought it might explain why they’d not travelled any further than he had done in that time, when, lost as he was, he’d gone from point to unknown point scouring the starlit views, meandering hopelessly. It struck him that in spite of their knowledge they’d been knocked off course, for it seemed unlikely they’d choose such a route deliberately, given the obstacles. Taking out his knife, he advanced down the road, sensing the first hatchings of a plan to follow them — for with their own base destroyed, what choice did they have but to head west again and negotiate with the rest of Nassgrube? And what choice did he have himself?
~O~
An hour later he was hunkered down in the rocks looking straight down between the entry posts of a huge metal bridge. The cliffs stood beyond it as a massing wall.
What he’d witnessed so far had astonished him. Not only had they been forced to halt before a wide gap in the bridge deck, but from what he could make out, the tunnel they were positioned to continue into was too small to permit the vehicle entry, were it to get that far. Within it, several people were exploring its narrow depths with torches, some taking measurements.
He looked back at the vehicle, reassessing its bulk, for in life the vehicle was several times larger than he’d conjectured it to be. He thought perhaps up to seventy or eighty cargo cans could fit inside it, and in looking into its quarters, now that the rear ramp was down, he noticed it had more than one hold, a lesser one sealed above the main section where figures were roving amidst the stacked goods.
He winced again. The scale of the operation they were undertaking was incredible. The noise eviscerating. They’d been shearing away the skirts protecting the wheelcarriage on either side, and after cutting the sections into slabs, were now using them to construct what appeared to be two long sets of tracks. He could only imagine they were planning to use them as runners, to be placed across the gap so that the vehicle could roll over them and proceed ahead.
He’d counted about forty Ostgrenzers so far, although so alike were most of them that often he thought he was counting people twice. There were crew members in baggy workgear and uniformed guards working together under the direction of a number of officers. As he looked on, one party was engaged in fitting a massive drillbit into the snout of the craft, using a pulley system and chains anchored to the tall A-frame at the front, while another w
as drilling holes along the edges of the gap. Others in that crew were using pneumatic tools to even up the surfaces where the deck had fallen through. He imagined they were chipping away any weak spots so that the area could be reinforced and made to support the vehicle’s dreadful bulk when eventually it moved forward. He studied the tracks they were building and nodded to himself, thinking things through.
All this activity lit up by a burning white rainbow of sparks as the grinders shrieked and bit and the crew members went about welding and hammering and lifting, dragging gas tubes and cables after them as they worked. He shifted position, shivering. With all the din it had taken him some time to realise that the bridge was located just downriver of a waterfall, and as he listened to its deep washing churn what amazed him was not so much that the vehicle’s masters knew about the bridge, but that such a mighty work of construction could have remained a secret for so long, especially when so many must have been involved in day to day operations. Why the authorising committee had kept it to themselves he had no idea. Why risk it? he thought. Why risk even one traitorous rumour that resources were being spent in such a way, for no apparent reason, and for no one’s apparent benefit?
As he watched, a faint mist of vapour arose from the descending river and drifted away. He followed its frail outward dispersal, chasing off thoughts of food and comfort. He saw that what he was doing now had to be pursued to its end, but what to do next he was not sure.
It seemed he would have to remain hidden until they’d come to the end of their work and were about to drive on through the tunnel. He was picturing himself mounting the back of the vehicle, riding it like a parasite into the dark, when the crew working in the proximity of the ramp stopped what they were doing and stood smartly to attention. Noticing people saluting, he raised up a fraction to find a guard of honour lining the ramp. Moments later, a group of elite officers in whites emerged from the hold.
