How long? How long? There was a new noise in the tunnel which he’d accepted as mechanical until the first hot, smut-bearing wave of smoke rolled over him and he knew that it was the convulsion of choking lungs. Stupidly he twisted his neck, hoping to see the orange glow of fire through the pother, but at once had to screw his eyes tight and hope to weep away the smuts under his eyelids. His own lungs heaved and gasped, building an explosion of coughing, quite unmasterable. He forced his lips shut between each bout of choking, sucking the needed air through his nostrils. His whole will focused on this effort, sometimes successful, sometimes not. The gases, air no longer, became hotter. The racket was the universe, frontierless, filling flesh and brain, tunnel and rock. In a little clearing of sense he saw that the guard Mr Trotter had talked about—the one who’d got his trousers burnt—had been caught when the tunnel was open at both ends, so that the heated air and gases from the engine would rush up the tunnel as if it were a factory chimney, dragging clean air behind it. But now the tunnel was closed and the gases had nowhere to go … the top end was the worst …
He twisted again, and felt rather than heard or saw that the engine was almost on him and there was no chance of creeping back down the line of Khandhars. He cringed into the rock, still convulsed with choking but now willing his flesh away from the slow-grinding wheels and the flail of shafts and rods and the jetted leaks of superheated steam. A spark landed on the back of his neck and stung like a hornet, but the terror of the blind monster pounding past blanketed out the involuntary twitch of pain. He could feel the rock jar each time a tooth of the engine’s driving cog engaged its mate in the rack and transferred the contraption’s whole weight another six inches. His mind dipped into blankness and out again, almost at once, because the wheels were still groaning past. He knew if he stayed where he was he’d be dead, but still he lay through two more spasms of choking, then flung out his left arm gropingly behind him. His knuckles rapped into greasy riveted metal, moving, moving away, gone. He rolled to his buttocks, feeling for the rail he was going to follow as he crawled down.
As he knelt the swirl of gases in the blocked tunnel changed their nature. They became a blast, a long gust moving all one way, up, out. Out. No kind of intelligence told him that the tunnel was no longer blocked—his body knew and was standing, stumbling up the track after the engine. He fell almost at once, bashing his right thigh against the cog-rack, but rose and staggered on. The engine couldn’t have reached the doors … someone had opened them … the guards had heard the noise or seen smoke pouring from the cracks …
The movement of air changed, lost its onrush, swirled loosely up. A man was coughing and swearing on the left. Foxe flung himself that way, was only prevented from falling again by the open leaf of the doors, groped along it, choking all the way, and stumbled round the end, falling against the man who was standing there and beginning to push the door shut.
The man swore at him. Foxe fell to the ground with the pent and useless breath in his lungs bursting out of his mouth, and his chest heaving retchingly for more, and finding air. He opened his eyes and through the haze of weeping saw a man standing over him, black against the town-glow of the night sky.
“What in hell you doing?” shouted the man. “You all drunk?”
The tone of voice was not that of a man talking to an enemy, or even a suspect, but the exasperated note of a responsible soldier to a feckless comrade. Of course—Louis’ uniform. And a face blackened with smoke and contorted with choking. Foxe might be anybody. He rose swayingly to his feet, his vision clearing, and saw the guard half-wreathed in a swirl of the smoke that was still pouring from the tunnel and streaming skyward. The nearest lamp was some way off along the tracks, but gave light enough for Foxe to be aware at once of the guard’s posture beginning to change, of his arm reaching for the gun that had been slung from his shoulder while he heaved at the door.
Foxe was unarmed, and Quentin was out of reach in the slack of shirt at the small of his back. Helplessly he raised his left hand, cupped, fingers pointing at the guard, and as the safety-catch clicked he blew. The puff ended in a cough. It was as though Foxe had had a bullet in his throat and had shot it out across his pointing fingers. The guard seemed to jerk back at the sound, then slowly crumpled to his knees. Foxe picked his gun from his hands, drew a breath and lurched into the smoke.
He met the other guard in the middle of it, chest to chest, but Foxe was heavier and moving faster so they both fell over the cog-rack with Foxe on top and the man shouting with surprise, losing all his breath, and gasping in a lungful of the smoke. Foxe managed to hold on to some of the air in his lungs and didn’t need to draw a fresh breath until he had picked himself up, staggered clear of the smoke and turned, with the gun still in his hands. In front of him a swirl of smoke solidified and became the second guard, convulsed with choking but at the same time reaching for his gun. Without conscious decision Foxe pointed his own gun and pressed the trigger. The barrel jerked and threshed and the guard, as if connected to it by puppet strings, jerked and threshed too for an instant before collapsing back into the smoke. Foxe stopped pressing the trigger.
The bubble of clamour that had enclosed him while his gun was firing seemed to burst, letting in other noises again. The engine was still churning away between lit unloading platforms. Several men were yelling up there. A gun began to fire—at Foxe, presumably—so he pointed his gun in that direction and pressed the trigger again. Five or six shots came out of it, and then no more. Empty? Jammed? Foxe shrugged, dropped the gun and sat down on the ground. He saw a man jump out of the engine and scuttle across a platform. Another gun started up, very close. Foxe looked round and saw someone lying on the ground and firing along the line of the tracks. Now people were running out of the tunnel through the thinning smoke, some of them shooting as they ran. It looked dangerous, and Foxe guessed that he ought to lie down too, but he stayed where he was, watching the scene ahead.
In the distance a rocket spangled the sky with green and pink spots, and beneath it the engine was still churning away, though it seemed to have halted. Its puffs had lost rhythm and were interrupted by erratic thuds and crashes, and some of its insect-like rods seemed to be flailing at random now. A tremendous jet of sparks shot up in its smoke, making the whole column glow like a roman candle in a fog. Now the machine seemed to be trying to free itself by jumping about. Its left wheels rose clear of the track, settled with a crash and rose again. There was a slow, wumping explosion. Large pieces of metal floated twirling up into the dark above the lamps. The whole contraption keeled over onto its side and stayed there, silent now, steaming and smoking.
Foxe watched it for a few seconds, and then as if in sympathy keeled over too, with a fresh burst of gunfire clattering beside him. As he dropped into the quiet dark he was thinking that they’d never be able to find spares for a contraption like that.
THE MOUNTAIN
1
Four days later Foxe sat on the branch of a fallen tree in the rain forest. The slope of the ancient volcanic crater was here so steep that the tree’s fall had made a sort of window in the leaf-cover, and for once it was possible to let the eyes focus on something other than the shadowy maze of tree-trunks and rediscover real distance. What matter that all the eyes found in that distance was the tops of other trees, a shapeless spread of gigantic broccoli tops? It was better than the claustrophobic shadows.
Foxe had brought Quentin here to explore what might be an interesting source of edibilia under the rotting bark. Quentin showed no interest in it at all and was crouched on the stub of a broken branch grooming obsessively at the haunch which had been soaked in Louis’s blood. To Foxe the place now looked speckless but the smell of it still seemed to worry Quentin.
Just as obsessively Foxe’s mind kept tracking and retracking through images of the escape. Some deaths haunted, while others didn’t. The man Robbie in the hut outside the Pit, for instance, whose gaze Foxe had
held while Plantain came and stuck a knife between his ribs—the change in that man’s eyes Foxe saw again and again. But the image of the man in the mess-room, sprawling to the floor while blood pumped from his neck—that didn’t come unless Foxe summoned it. It was less strong, even, than the image of the naked sergeant, haunches on the table, puffing at his cigar while he gathered energy for a fresh bout of rape; and Foxe hadn’t even seen that man die. He might have caused the death, but it hadn’t happened until the cook had set the other prisoners free. Then there was little doubt of what they would have done …
Foxe knew that this secondary escape had happened because some of these other prisoners had come up the tunnel while Foxe and the Khandhars were still at the top, recovering from their ordeal—those who had survived it. Foxe himself seemed to have been the only one of the leading party to have stayed conscious while the engine went past, no doubt because he was far fitter than the others, and but for him the doors would have been shut again before Pine and his rear guard, following up behind the retreating smoke, had reached them. But Pine had heard his gun fire and had come charging through, and the rear guard had driven off or killed the guards at the railhead. Then they had dragged the rest of their comrades out and tried to revive them.
Foxe had recovered from his faint during this process. As the Khandhars came to, however faint or feeble they were, they pressed out the perimeter of their bridge-head, moved off on patrol, or helped with the rescue. Six of them never came to.
There was no counter-attack. The night was full of bangs and yells, but they all seemed fairly distant, part of the happy uproar of Carnival. No doubt from there the noises at the rail-head had sounded much the same—a few soldiers firing a celebratory fusillade, and letting off an extra-large cracker. Foxe was recovering—feeling restless, even—by the time the patrols came back with transport; two lame donkeys and one sound one, and five decrepit bikes. Some time after midnight they all moved off.
Foxe had been resting in a narrow alley when he heard the next real explosion. All round him, mostly darkened, stood the familiar patched and improvised shanties he had known in Back Town, and the night air had the same stink of stagnant water and excrement and spiced cooking and generalised sweet rots. Ahead and behind the straggle of Khandhars also rested, but Foxe needed the halt more than most because he had volunteered to wheel one of the bikes with a body strapped to it. He was further from collapse than most of the others, and he felt that if he was pushing a bike he couldn’t be expected to shoot any more men, but it was a vile form of hearse, needing to be wheeled at a tilt with its bony saddle resting against his hip, which meant that its wheels tried to slither sideways whenever they crossed one of the slimy trickles which veined the shanty area. So he was standing panting in the shadows when he heard four deep bangs that rattled the tin roofs all around and juddered the earth itself. As the last explosion died the hum of aeroplane engines spread gently through the night; no doubt they had been there before, but drowned by the racket of carnival which the bangs now stilled. Four similar explosions, further away, shook the night. A plane roared its engines and came swooping over the roofs, firing a long burst of tracer into the town. Beneath and around these noises Foxe heard people screaming.
“Bombing the road out of town,” said someone.
“But they’re bombing the town, not the road,” said Foxe.
“Sure. Can’t see the road, and they got to bomb somebody.”
That was another image which continually re-made itself inside Foxe’s skull. What was specially horrible was that the planes—there seemed to be two of them—had come nowhere near the Khandhars, but had dropped four more sticks of bombs at random and then spent ten minutes circling around, swooping occasionally to loose off their guns, before droning away. The screaming continued for some time, following the Khandhars into the night as they wound up a steep hill track between rustling groves. They must have managed about another three miles before Plantain let them collapse in a banana plantation.
Drugged with shock and exhaustion Foxe had slept without dreams. They had been woken, groaning, still in the dark, breakfasted on bananas and travelled on, Foxe still obstinately wheeling his corpse-laden bike. Still there seemed to be no pursuit, and they had managed several more miles before the sun rose to show them well away from any kind of cultivation, crossing a sloping plateau of shale and brownish scrub and spiring cactus-like plants. The place had looked to Foxe as though it had been blasted long ago by some appalling spillage of poison which a few weird and unpleasing plants had adapted to endure, perhaps even feeding on the deadly leavings of the accident. There was no real path across this waste, but shelves of the underlying rock jutted through the scree and made for smooth walking, sometimes for several hundred yards at a time, though between shelves Foxe had to lug his bike along twisting, thorny tracks to reach another stretch of easy going.
They had been crossing this tract for more than a hour when Ginger came back along the file at a weary lope.
“Plantain say to come, Doc. Gimme this bike.”
Foxe had nodded and jogged forward, to find the front of the column halted and Plantain staring ahead.
“Couple women coming, Doc. Better they not know how they seen us. OK?”
“I suppose so,” Foxe had sighed. “Does it work with women?”
“Why not?” Plantain had said, obviously amused.
“Better you don’t come asking Cocoa that kinda joke,” someone had said.
It was amazing how relaxed, even happy, they seemed, despite their losses and exhaustion. Foxe as he walked on ahead felt very different; he seemed to be in the process of being withdrawn, both internally and externally, from any existence he understood, no longer either the observer or the magician of the night before, but somebody quite new, a blank character, waiting to be engraved. I was reborn on the Mountain. Suddenly, when the two bright blobs of red and yellow in the distance had acquired the shape of humans walking towards him, Foxe remembered the gardener who had killed the snake outside his laboratory window. He remembered his own feelings at the scene, slightly amused, rather contemptuous, wholly detached. Now he, Foxe, had more in common with that gardener than he had with the man who had watched from behind the doubled glass.
As the women came nearer Foxe had put his hand into his shirt and withdrawn Quentin, who, after a bout of nocturnal fidgets, had been dozing peacefully against Foxe’s skin and seemed displeased to greet the morning. The women were close enough now for Foxe to see that they were watching him with some suspicion, and he remembered that he was still wearing uniform, but must otherwise look as though he’d spent the night in a burning building. He smiled and called, “Good morning.” They stood and watched him with their heads tilted a little away—mother and daughter, plump, dark brown, pocked, unsmiling.
Foxe strolled on, waiting till he was within four feet of them before he spoke again.
“Look at me,” he whispered, holding Quentin up in cupped hands before him. Their faces changed. Perhaps for a moment they thought he was about to make some kind of sexual display; then they looked with sudden amusement at Quentin himself, until they saw the symbol on his back; finally their cheek-muscles stiffened and their glances rose to Foxe’s. He blew very gently across the ruffling fur, almost as though he were trying to administer the precise minimum dose of the intangible drug, first at the mother, then at the daughter. The drug took hold at once.
“Turn away from the path,” he said. “Look at the sky. Hear nothing. See nothing.”
Round they swung, docile cattle. He waved his arm and waited by them while the slow file came along the rock; hooves clopped, bikes rattled, tired lungs grunted and sighed, but nobody said a word to Foxe and nobody met his eye, as if wary of the power latent there. Uncomfortably he swung away and stared in the same direction as the women until the last of the file came limping past; then he turned his captives along the track and told them
to wake and walk on without looking back. He stood and watched while their movements eased out of stiffness into the natural buoyant gait of a people used to carrying loads but walking for the moment free. The thought came to him that he would like to have sent a blessing after them, if he’d known how.
No more of that, he thought as he padded to catch up. Not even to save my life. The hindmost man was recognisable from far off, tall and stooped and wearing the rags of a mauve shirt. He carried no weapon, but trailed a branch behind him.
“Still with us?” said Foxe, suddenly cheerful at the sight of him.
“Nowhere to go,” muttered Mr Trotter.
“What’s the branch for?”
“Dogs. Bloodhounds. They smell this, they go the other way.”
A month ago Foxe would have wondered whether this was magic or fact. Now the question seemed irrelevant, and in any case Mr Trotter suddenly left him, darting up the scree and tearing a handful of tendrils from a flat-creeping plant that grew there. He handled his find with a piece of rag bound round his palm, and the next time the file wound its way through the scrub between one stretch of rock and the next he spent some minutes weaving these tendrils across the entrance. He studied the effect, made a couple of adjustments to achieve a more natural look, and left it.
“And what’s that?” said Foxe.
“Fire-gourd, Colocinthis Urens. Hurts real bad to touch. When it green you can pick it how I do, but when it wither those poison-hairs go hard, burn you through your jacket and pants.”
Mr Trotter spoke with the confidence, the near-arrogance of the expert doing his thing. He seemed less tired than the others and as he loped to catch them up his head quested from side to side for specimens of vegetative ammunition against pursuit.
Walking Dead Page 20
