Victor was among them, strange for him as he rarely left the tower, and in his hands was a wooden crate with wide slats. Inside, I knew, were the two homing pigeons which had been reared as a hobby of his and had all come back when they were put to the test.
“They already carry an SOS message,” he said, “so just release them if you need help.”
I nodded my thanks, watching as the crate was shrouded and placed behind the front passenger seat. Marie hugged me, as did my little brother, who didn’t seem to understand the significance of the farewell and ran off to play. I looked around but couldn’t find Dan. Neil spoke to me, going over the details of the vehicle and the fuel which I already knew, and he knew I did, he just wanted to speak to me a little longer before standing on the sidestep and leaning up to kiss me on the forehead.
“I’ve got your route mapped,” he told me, reiterating that he knew the roads we planned to take and marking the alternative routes in a different colour. The map we took was unmarked and still folded to the original creases, that way nobody could find or capture it and know our origin. Operational security, no matter how relaxed we had become, was still key.
Just as I thought Dan wouldn’t be coming to see us off, he emerged with Ash and Mitch and both were dressed in boots, trousers and T-shirts under their equipment vests. Both were armed, maybe not as heavily as I was, but both were clearly going outside the walls. Ash jumped in, Nemesis immediately licking his face and bothering him as he looked for a comfortable place to settle down and look out of the windows. My heart dropped slightly, thinking that they had decided at the last minute to come with us until I realised that their bags were of a size to sustain them for a day and not three.
“Drop us off near the split?” Dan asked, meaning to let them out in the low valley before the road leading away from Sanctuary forked north and south west. The lower road led to the inland farm and the two obviously planned a visit.
“We’ll walk back tonight when it’s cooler,” Mitch added with a smile.
I sucked in air through my teeth, mimicking Neil whenever he was asked if something was possible. “Not sure we’ve got room,” I said goadingly.
“Well if you didn’t take up the whole back seat with a cannon then you bloody would,” Mitch said as he climbed in and rested my 417 upright in the footwell to settle himself down. He wound down the window and rested the barrel of his rifle on the edge as though it was the most normal thing in the world. Rafi was already sat in the front seat and evidently unsure whether he should climb down and offer privileged position to the men behind him. But as neither of them gave him a look or spoke to him other than to offer a greeting, he stayed uncomfortably where he was.
The half-hour drive to the split was uneventful. I’d wound down my window, partly because the sun was already growing hotter and making my skin prickle with sweat under the heavy vest, and partly because I’d grown too big to drive the Defender without having to put my right elbow out of the window like Dan always did.
Some questions were aimed at me and Rafi, mostly to check that we had the right answers to hand and were probably designed as reminders for what Mitch called ‘actions-on’. This was not a new concept to me and both men in the back seat knew it. Actions-on for an ambush, actions-on for a vehicle malfunction, for a puncture, for a blocked road, for discovering other people and how to make first contact. I let Rafi answer some, the easier questions which they knew I knew the answers to, and was happy with what he said.
I had to admit that he was a good-looking young man. He was a shade taller than me, wide in the shoulders but slim and toned like a swimmer with short, jet black hair and a quick smile. His olive skin only seemed to darken slightly in summer whereas I went from deathly pale to tanned in response to the seasons. I was almost eighteen, and Rafi was only a little older. I tried to push those thoughts aside and concentrate on the road which was more of a pitted stone track than the smooth tarmac it had been when we had first driven down it years ago; back when a young girl had walked towards the ancient gates of Sanctuary with her arms held wide begging for their assistance.
All around me I saw the passage of nature reclaiming what people had taken. The raw materials harvested from the earth had been refined and shaped and changed to form the straight lines and uniformity that nature abhorred, but everywhere those straight lines existed greenery attacked it slowly, insidiously, bringing it down to degrade and be recycled. Trees overhung the road in places and half the time I was driving off-road in two worn tyre tracks, but those tracks were caused by the horse-drawn carts travelling almost constantly in the warmer months between Sanctuary and the five other places we regularly did trade with.
Being effectively a fortified fishing village, our boats went out and hauled back more fish than we could consume with the couple of hundred people living inside the safety of the walls. This surplus was never wasted, and the teams of men, women and children met every returning trawler with shirt knives and waterproof aprons, some fashioned from whatever worked and others being custom made for the task back in the world, and the fish were gutted and cleaned. Some of those went to be used, some frozen, and others dried in the sunlight to be packed in crates of rough salt reclaimed from the sea water. That sea salt plant was another of Neil’s ingenious plans, and the flat rooves of the town buildings were all laid out with shallow trays which were tended by many hands to bring the buckets of seat water up to evaporate in the bright sunlight and the remaining salt harvested.
Even the guts and wastage never got simply discarded, and whatever wasn’t used for bait for larger swimming quarry, like some of the fish heads, went to the pigs who thrived on a diet of fish guts and food scraps. The chickens were much the same, recycling our food waste into fresh sources of protein in the form of their eggs.
The pigs, primarily bred for meat but still not a large enough population to use up too often, formed a large part of our little ecosystem, as much as my own abilities to fight and defend the people and to train the next generation were a valuable part of the wider organic machine.
The farm where Mitch and I had visited on our first trip outside the walls after recovering from the insane and unexpectedly violent passage across, around and through the continent, had grown and thrived well, with more people being required to live and work there. Neil had spent an entire summer there, coordinating the building of better houses and sanitary systems, even adding plans for a waterwheel and a mill which served to grind the corn into flour for our bread. Another version existed in Sanctuary, although this one had been a museum piece that was refurbished just enough for a small donkey to plod in boring circles and power the stone as it rolled over the crop.
I had spent time there too, along with Dan, and had worked on the defences as a small wooden palisade had been erected and a gate guarded night and day. Those defences could easily be overcome by just two of us, but it was designed as a show of strength as opposed to standing up to any real defence. If they were besieged, then the pigeons housed there would be released to bear messages to Sanctuary and bring forth a mighty vengeance on anyone seeking to take what wasn’t theirs. In reality, the wall stood primarily to keep predators and vermin away from the crops and livestock.
Just as we were, the farm was producing more than it needed so they traded with the other places in our small network of Southern France and the north eastern coast of Spain. Whilst they had been dependent on Sanctuary for a few years, the farm had emerged as a settlement in its own right which cooperated with us for mutual benefit; we supplied arms and training and a steady supply of fish, promising to offer aid whenever they required it and in turn they provided us with fresh food and a small force of seasonal workers to boost the fishing fleet when their productivity wound down in the colder months.
Arriving at the split between the two roads, which was marked by a disused building having been patched up and repaired as a trading post, I pulled the truck to a stop and slipped it out of gear.
“Se
e you in a couple days,” Dan said, leaning forward to give my shoulder a squeeze before giving Rafi a light punch on his right shoulder and saying, “keep them safe. On day four, if you aren’t back, I’m coming anyway.”
Rafi assured him that he would, allowing his nervous tension to pour out as over-eagerness, which made Mitch chuckle. The two men climbed down, Ash’s head popping up from the rear section before he responded to the single word from Dan and scrambled over the seats to follow.
“Stay,” I added, seeing Nem’s smaller head rear up also thinking that she was to stay with her sire. She shot me a look, head slightly cocked, and I reminded her that she was a good girl. The doors shut, and she climbed over into the back seat to sniff at the long rifle occupying the seat, happy to look out of both sides of the vehicle and enjoy the breeze from the open windows.
I watched as Dan turned back to me, nodding and smiling, before speaking to the guard on the trading post and shaking his hand. I slipped the truck back into gear and rolled away just as the meeting outside my window evolved to produce cigarettes and exchanged news in French. I smiled, driving away with the poor accent of Dan still echoing in my ears.
“Okay,” I said, passing the map from my door pocket to Rafi, “follow our route in and keep me posted.”
“What does this mean, keep you posted?” he asked, his finger tracing the route from home to the post.
“It means that I want you to say where we are, and what’s coming up,” I told him. I had given him a map after the evening meal, telling him to study it and learn it because he wouldn’t have instructions the following day.
“Like the rally driving?” he asked with a smile I didn’t see as my eyes were on the road but could hear in his voice.
“Like the rally driving,” I agreed, half expecting to be told of a ninety left ahead.
We drove in silence for the first few hours, me keeping my eyes on the rough road and my thumbs outside of the wheel, him glancing up and down between the map and the road signs as we made our steady progress.
We passed through a few villages and two larger towns, all of them picked clean long ago and marked with white crosses on the doors to signify that there was nothing of value left inside. Picking up the toll roads I was able to gather more speed as the wider expanses of empty tarmac and concrete had fared better through the winters since all maintenance had suddenly stopped. The droning noise of the chunky tyres began to rattle my brain after a steady hour travelling at over fifty, and I could tell from the agitated body language of my navigator that he was feeling it too.
“Let’s give Nem a break,” I said as I pulled into one of the many overgrown rest stops beside the road, not saying that it was the humans who were struggling with the uncomfortable inactivity of a long drive that they were unaccustomed to. We stepped out of the truck, stretching and raising our weapons to make sure that nobody occupied the area, and as I sat on a concrete picnic bench with my feet on the seat to relax Rafi asked me a question.
“Why is your dog called this?” he asked, watching her relieve her bladder in a squat.
“Nemesis?” I asked, seeing both of them look at me at hearing the name. “She was the Greek Goddess of vengeance. She weighed your deeds and decided on how much fortune you deserved.”
“She is vengeance? Like the deliverance of fate?” he asked. “My religion would say that this is divine providence,” he explained, the English words uncertain on his tongue.
“God’s will?” I asked, feeling that the conversation was getting a little deep so early on into a long journey.
“Yes,” he said, smiling that I had understood him, “I like your dog.”
Somehow sensing that she was the subject of discussion, she padded towards him and nuzzled his hand held at his side. He recoiled slightly, unsure of the big animal, so I told her to sit. She sat, glancing only once at me before she turned to look at him expectantly.
“Go on,” I reassured him. “She won’t bite you unless I tell her to,” I added with a playful smirk.
Rafi kept his eyes on the dog, slowly reaching out his hand to smooth down the fur on her head as she sniffed at him for any trace of food. I called her back after a while, seeing him flinch slightly as she moved fast.
We went into the small, low building separately as one of the benefits of using the toll roads were that they all had eco-toilets which didn’t rely on running water. Re-emerging into the light, I went back to the truck and saw Rafi turn to toss me a bottle of water. I caught it as I walked, not breaking step, and opened it to drink a few pulls before lobbing it back to him. He kept his eyes on me, catching it low with his left hand on instinct and smiling despite himself at the cocky display.
Now, I didn’t know if it was being raised by Dan, or whether Rafi was just impressive in his own right, but I couldn’t help feeling a little flutter of excitement when he did that. It was stupid, and nothing to do with the mission, so I hid my blush and tucked an errant strand of hair behind my ear.
“Let’s keep moving,” I said, climbing back behind the wheel.
Mountain Roads
I loved to drive, always had from the first time when I was only just thirteen. It gave me a sense of power and freedom, and always impressed other people because I was good at it. I knew that was down to Dan too, because he had taught me the dark arts from his experience of car chases and using three vehicles to force another to stop by boxing them in and ramming them off the road. I’d done that once, and for no reason I could understand I told Rafi the story of Dan finding Emma and me using the truck we were actually in to clip a car into the central reservation and kill the driver. I told him about the score mark on the roof above my head where a bullet had missed my head by inches. I left out the other details, like me shooting the passenger in the leg and then helping Dan torture him.
A girl has to have some secrets with a boy.
Rafi responded with a story of his childhood, obviously not as violent and war-like as my own but had taken place when he was about the same age.
“My brother, Mateo,” he said laughing at the memory he hadn’t even recounted yet, “when he had his first car before he even had his licence for driving, he took me out when our parents were away for a night and he was to be watching me. He not stopped in time and crashed into the walls. I remember he was so scared of what our father would say that he cried all the way home with only one lights at the front.” He paused to chuckle again. “When our parents returned, we had told them a story of how we were playing in front of the house and fell against the car to make the damages…”
“And they fell for that?” I asked, explaining because I could see I had used a term he didn’t understand. “They believed you?” I racked my brain, trying another way. “Vraiment tu les as fait marcher?”
“They did,” he said with a wistful smile, “I knew later that they did not, but I think they were just happy that we stuck together in our lies.”
He lapsed into amused silence, and I felt suddenly bad for him.
“I’m sorry,” I said weakly.
“Why are you sorry?” he asked.
“Your family. Your brother…”
“My brother?”
“Yes,” I said, “it must have been hard losing someone you were close to.” I went on thinking of my own little brother so long put from my memory.
“He is not lost,” Rafi said, “he works as a fisherman in the town!”
“Oh,” I said, feeling foolish, “I… I didn’t know.”
“It is nothing,” he said with a wave. “Turn left ahead onto the D612.”
“How long for?”
He paused before answering.
“Err… For many hours, I think, until we reach the foothills.”
~
‘Many hours’ was no exaggeration, as the roads were terrible in places. Twice I had to resort to the dried earth and cross drainage ditches beside the road and avoid blockages. One of those seemed deliberately placed, with the degraded tyres and r
usted bodywork of cars lending the impression that the barricade was created by people. On that occasion I reversed the car back a hundred metres and deployed us on foot, creeping up the ditches to the blockage and scanning the area, but if that barricade was intentional then it was abandoned long ago.
We stopped for lunch after the road began to meander like a river, switching back and forth as we climbed further on each straight stretch until we found a wide bend overlooking the lush, green valley we had climbed. We ate from the foil bags of the remaining ration packs and I had to show Rafi how to add the water to the clear bag and heat the contents with the sachet of chemicals. He was intrigued by it, mesmerised almost just as I had been when I first ate them so long ago. I had learned to hate them after a while, even forcing myself to chew down the stodgy mess of the menu options I couldn’t stomach in place of starving and growing weak. I enjoyed a vegetarian all day breakfast, my absolute favourite, cold from the packet with the spoon from my bag and washed it down with more water.
I liked Rafi, more and more with each mile I reckoned, and part of him reminded me of Steve. The old pilot would hold a comfortable silence for hours, only occasionally talking when he had to or when he remembered something of value to his company. Rafi was like that; he kept his eyes on the map and the road signs as well as looking out for any potential danger along our route. He would sometimes tell me more about what he and his brother got up to, painting the picture of a pair of tearaways who were fiercely loyal to one another, and I found myself responding with my own tales, although I realised that I had very little of interest to say from before Dan and Neil found me.
We rested a little longer in the shade of the truck before I forced myself to get moving again.
“Would you like me to do the driving?” he offered, making me frown. “It is okay if no.”
“Yes,” I said hurriedly, realising that he had misunderstood my frown, “that would be good.”
After It Happened (Book 7): Andorra [The Leah Chronicles] Page 5
