~ * ~
FIVE
When he had smashed everything in the flat belonging to his wife and young daughter, Pete went out to get drunk. The whole of his left side ached where he had landed after being flung from the van that had taken them away. Echoes of his own scream resounded in his head to shame him. If he ever saw his wife again, he would kill her.
The pub was his local, a survivor from the 1930s, perched on a street corner beside an abandoned warehouse. Inside, it was smoky and claustrophobic, a heavy dance beat making conversation difficult. Pete strolled across to the bar. The other men moved up to make room for him, calling greetings. Everyone knew what had happened. No one mentioned it. Pete dealt in used cars and worked as a bouncer three nights a week. He carried a knife but mostly didn’t need it. Men respected him.
He flexed his aching shoulders and ordered a pint. Rage was still close to the surface.
‘Gimme the stool,’ he said to the man next to him, reaching out to flick the socket behind his victim’s left ear.
Ricki, a skinny wirehead, recoiled. ‘Sure,’ he said, and slithered out of Pete’s way. He looked sick even for a wirehead. Pete gave him a long, uneasy stare. Too many men had acquired that dry, brittle look over the past few weeks. Ricki looked away, and picked up his glass, moving further along the bar.
Pete sneered, and heaved himself up on to the stool. Pain traced fire down his leg and across the small of his back. Trapped nerve. Probably pulled muscles, too. He saw again the tall vehicle careering towards him, lights blazing. He had thought he could hang on, but hadn’t quite jumped far enough. His hands had slipped across the glass, leaving him no chance as the van cornered sharply. But he remembered the driver’s face, her staring eyes, her terror. He laughed.
‘Cunt,’ he said.
‘You going after her?’ asked Mike, the electronics man who got him most of his cars.
Pete drank his beer. ‘Nope,’ he said. Everyone present knew that he had very little chance of finding her. ‘Don’t need to. She’ll see me in every shadow. And when she’s had enough of fucking shadows, she’ll come back.’ He finished his beer while the other men laughed. ‘But I won’t be here. I’m going to Mongolia.’
That was too much of a challenge. Every man in the area had been down to the barracks to apply for a place. Expedition to Mongolia. Adventure guaranteed. High wages.
‘Oh yeah?’ said Mike. ‘Why’d they want you?’
Pete stuck out his chest, swaggering. ‘They’re looking for big men,’ he said, putting heavy emphasis on the last two words. ‘You ever seen a man as big as me?’
‘What, they gonna fuck their way across Asia?’ sneered Mike.
That was enough excuse for Pete. He flung himself off his stool, picked Mike up by the shoulders, and shook him. ‘They want men,’ he roared, ‘not worms.’
‘Hey, hey,’ the smaller man gasped. ‘Take it easy. You need me to get your cars.’
‘I’m going away,’ said Pete. ‘I don’t care shit for your cars, nor your fucking neck.’
But he liked the smart, gutsy thief. He dropped him on the floor, lost for what else to do. This was goodbye. If he hadn’t been leaving in the morning, he and Mike would have searched London for that van, for his wife.
Mike scrambled away from him, then jumped to his feet, ready to run. ‘Why Mongolia, anyway?’ he demanded. ‘Why all the hype? What’s in fucking Mongolia?’
Pete turned away and strode out of the pub. ‘Nothing for cunts like you!’ he yelled over his shoulder. He stomped back home, hurt and angry.
In front of the cracked mirror, he stripped off his clothes and twisted to look at the deep bruises spreading across the muscles of shoulder, arm and leg. He knew he was lucky not to have broken a bone. He grinned at himself in the mirror, a heavily muscled man with a huge cock. The expedition flew out in the morning on a specially chartered flight to Ulan Bator. After that, he had no idea. But he knew it had to be better than here. The ones who stayed here would end up like Ricki. Mongolia was the place for men.
~ * ~
SIX
The great dam had burst, and everything was gone. In one chaotic night of earthquake and flood, Amira’s world was torn away by the torrents of water surging down the valley.
She had awakened to the rattling of pans and a child screaming. The whole house seemed to be on the move. She had leapt out of bed, flung on her dress, and hustled the children outside, afraid that the wood and plasterboard walls would collapse on top of them.
Outside, a strong wind blew cloud-tatters across the moon. In the fitful light, she saw glimpses of her neighbours standing, like her, by their doors. She held the children close to her body and turned to stare down the hillside. The wind was cold and the grey-white moonlight cast hard black shadows across the village.
Then the earth shook once more and they were flung to the ground. Above the shrieks of terrified children, a huge roar filled the air, the wind increased to a gale, and she saw a wall of water surging along the valley below. The dam had burst and the liberated waters of the artificial Lake Sudan were roaring towards her, drowning everything in their path.
The wave-front hit the lower reaches of the village and spilled up the hillside. Houses collapsed like children’s toys and she scrambled to her feet and tried to run. Then she was underwater, choking and clutching at the ground. The wave tumbled her along for a few metres then withdrew, sucking her two small sons away with it.
She scrambled after them, half-running, half-falling down the hillside, screaming their names. But they were gone, drowned with hundreds of others.
Now she sat shivering in the pale dawn, hugging the baby to her breast while the other two surviving children hid their faces in her dress and cried.
As the sun rose on the devastation, the villagers looked about them in despair. The waters had retreated from the hillsides, but the fields on the valley floor, so dry yesterday, now lay under sheets of filthy water, a few trees standing mournfully above the flood. The houses were gone, replaced by a wilderness of mud and rubble and scattered possessions.
Amira told herself that she was lucky to have survived, but how could they live now with no homes, no fields, and the livestock and her two young sons drowned? She wondered if the men had somehow known that this was coming. Perhaps this was why they had abandoned the village one by one, sneaking away and leaving the women to keep things together.
Cold and exhausted, the village women gathered together to grieve. They had worked so hard to rebuild their lives after the government had moved them from their old homes upstream of the high dam, and now their security was shattered once more.
They sat together and sang songs of grieving, songs for the aftermath of war, songs to brace themselves for the task of beginning all over again.
~ * ~
SEVEN
A pale glow bathed the freezer compartment. Glancing back at the open airlock, Jason could see the world outside, like an overexposed photograph, awash with sunlight. Trucks moved in the distance and faintly, he could hear the sounds of machinery and voices shouting. But inhere it was cold and silent and still. His breath condensed, misting the readout as he bent over the first cryogenic unit. He wiped the surface with his sleeve, and held his breath while he read the display.
The units were stacked six deep, drawers that could be pulled open if anything went wrong. Inside, the naked bodies of the stellanauts lay still, scarcely breathing, their skins frosted with a lacing of ice. Eyes closed, faces relaxed and peaceful, they lay like corpses, beginning their long sleep. A sleep that might last a thousand subjective years as they sped towards the stars at close to the speed of light.
Jason shivered and thought of Pat, her hot, sweaty body pressed against his, her heart racing. He could not imagine these beautiful young icicles making love; now or ever. ‘And yet you’re going to the stars,’ he whispered, staring in at a handsome Japanese man, his well-formed muscles sheathed in ice, brittle as frozen rubber. ‘I could s
nap you in two. But you’ll be raising children on a new world long after I’m dust.’
~ * ~
Pat watched through the one-way mirror as the next batch of half a dozen young gods and goddesses entered the cryogenic chamber. Diane, her technician, waited by the door as the stellanauts slipped out of their robes and embraced one another. These were tall, lean East Africans, their heads almost brushing the ceiling of the tiny room. All had perfectly functioning physiologies, and not a faulty gene amongst them. Though the radiation from an alien sun might slowly damage the DNA of future generations, the colonists would begin in perfection.
The stellanauts swung themselves on to their couches, and Diane moved along the double row, carefully connecting the monitoring equipment and checking the readouts. She said nothing; already the stellanauts were composing themselves to enter trance-state, beginning to slow their own body functions to the point where the freezing process could safely begin.
Diane collected up the robes and left the chamber, sealing the heavy airtight door behind her. As ever, Pat felt her heart contract slightly at the muted thud of the closing door. The thought of lying down in that stark, white room knowing that you would never again see the Earth or anything familiar scared her. And yet these stellanauts seemed unmoved. Perhaps they had been so busy preparing for a new world, they had never become attached to this one.
She took a deep breath, and jacked into the Net. The stream of data enveloped her, and her consciousness entered the cryogenic chamber. Input from the monitors in the couches flooded her nervous system, replacing her sense of embodied self.
She became separately aware of each of the six bodies against her own, their contours nestling closer than a lover as her kinaesthetic awareness accepted its task. Eyes, ears, fingertips and skin absorbed the data flow as she concentrated all her senses on the task of interpreting the multiple stimuli. Pulse, respiration, blood-pressure, body temperature, skin chemistry, brain activity, she monitored them all, alert for abnormalities, her own identity distant and thin as she became the machine’s intelligence.
The stellanauts slipped together into trance-state, and gradually their brain patterns changed. Their body functions began to slow and, as they did so, Pat directed the computers to begin reducing the temperature in the chamber. The lights dimmed slowly, and life seemed to leach out of the room.
Sensations of the growing cold and stillness made this part of the job dangerous for Pat. She had to prevent her own body functions from becoming too closely entwined with the data. To keep a measure of distance, she concentrated a part of her awareness on the visual monitors, on seeing them from the outside. The stellanauts ‘ faces were relaxed, their eyes closed. As the temperature fell, the rich brown of their skins took on a shade of grey. Frost began to form along their cheekbones and at the tips of their noses. Ice traced a fine pattern over their hands and feet, spreading gradually up their limbs until at last their bodies were encased in a lacework of white. The light had faded to a pale blue, bleeding the last of the colour from the scene.
To a casual observer it might have looked like a morgue, but the data told Pat that they were still just alive, body functions slowed to a fraction of normal. Like this, they would age only an hour for every year that they slept. They were effectively immortal.
When she was sure that the stellanauts had stabilized, Pat brought her awareness back to herself, and jacked out of the system.
‘Well,’ said Diane, who had come into the room to join her, ‘that’s the last batch. They’re ready to go.’
Pat nodded, not wanting to acknowledge the fact. A tension that she had scarcely been aware of was dissolving between her shoulder blades. She would never have to go through that again. ‘See that they’re loaded on board,’ she said crisply. ‘I’m going back to my quarters.’
Later, when she was alone with Jason, they cried, and clung together. Although why they should pity the gods themselves, they weren’t sure.
~ * ~
EIGHT
George was on duty. Strapped into his black plastic and steel riot-gear, his head covered by a civilian version of the army datacom, none of the boys could tell which member of staff was confronting them. For George, this was a particular advantage. If the boys knew that he too patrolled the corridors, then any credibility he might hope to retain as a sympathetic counsellor would be lost.
He was so deep in his own gloomy thoughts that he almost trod on the penis. It reared back from him, snarling. He took a startled step backwards as the penis snuffled and spat. Then it scuttled past him and disappeared into an empty classroom.
George took two quick steps to the door and peered in. His infra-red sensor spotted it squeezing through a gap in the floorboards, and he swore.
‘It wasn’t mine,’ he told himself. ‘It was too small.’ He reached out to close the door, and discovered that his hands were shaking. Has mine turned aggressive? he wondered. I’m sure that thing had teeth.
As he continued down the corridor, his datacom registered a disturbance coming from the games room. He broke into a run.
The noise resolved itself into a chant as he burst through the door.
‘Poofter! Poofter! Poofter! Poofter!’
Half a dozen boys stood around in a semicircle at the far end of the room, kicking another lad who lay on the floor with his face to the wall.
‘Stop that at once!’ George bellowed, his voice artificially magnified and sieved to remove the higher registers.
The chanting broke off and the boys turned around. They looked defiant and a little afraid. His datacom listed their names in red across his vision.
‘His prick’s run off, sir,’ said Sanderson.
‘He’s a fucking fairy.’
‘That’s enough,’ George rumbled. ‘Go to your rooms.’
‘It weren’t us, sir,’ said Dodd. ‘It jumped up and ran off itself.’
‘It’s ‘cos he’s a queer, isn’t it, sir?’
George could suddenly smell their fear. ‘It’s all right, boys,’ he said, trying to make his grotesque voice sound gentle. ‘I’ll deal with it. Go to your rooms.’
They filed past him, but the last one turned round to yell: ‘Poofter! ‘ and they all ran off up the corridor, laughing and shouting.
George knelt down on the floor, clumsy in his heavy plastic armour. ‘Are you all right, Tony?’
In response, the boy drew himself into a tighter ball. He was naked from the waist down, his trousers and underpants lying in a tom heap a few feet away.
‘What happened, lad?’
Getting no reply, he laid a gloved hand on Tony’s shoulder and pulled him over on to his back. The boy grabbed his groin and screamed, then scrambled to his knees and began hitting his head against the padded wall.
‘Tony, stop it.’ George reached to restrain him, but Tony shoved him in the chest, leapt up, and ran off. Caught off balance, George fell over backwards, and by the time he had struggled to his feet, the boy had disappeared.
Christ, he thought, staring down the corridor, Tony Evans? Whatever’s causing this, it’s not sympathy with women. He tongued his alarm, and a claxon blared. ‘Poor little bastard. What’s he going to do?’
~ * ~
NINE
Janet’s nightmares were disrupting the whole refuge. Usually staff didn’t sleep over; the four-storey old town house was always overflowing with fugitive women and their kids, there was no space for a staff room. But for the last three nights Trish and Carole had been camping out in the office on the ground floor, with a baseball bat and an axe close to hand.
The windows were heavily shuttered, and the doors bolted and double locked. It wasn’t just vengeful husbands and lovers who had to be kept out. This was a rough neighbourhood, and everybody knew that number seventeen was a house full of women.
Carole came back into the room. She pulled off her shoes and scrambled under the covers, cuddling up to Trish. ‘Brr, it’s cold.’
‘How is she?’
‘A bit calmer now. It was the hand on the windscreen again. It just comes straight through and grabs her by the throat.’
Trish grunted and shifted on to her back. The mattress was uncomfortable, she was cold, and there was too much noise on the street. The low-level fear in the pit of her stomach wouldn’t let her sleep. She wanted to scream, but Janet had been doing enough of that for everyone. ‘What time is it?’
‘Nearly three.’ Carole snuggled close again, and Trish wrapped her arms around her lover’s warm, familiar body. She stroked her hands down Carole’s spine, tweaking the roll of extra fat at her waist. Carole giggled, and they kissed.
‘You feel tense,’ Carole said. ‘Shall I give you a back rub?’
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