by G X Todd
You don’t have any training. You just make it up as you go along.
Pilgrim frowned, annoyed at how close to the truth Voice was. ‘Don’t take your boots off when you sleep,’ he told the woman.
Her eyes dropped down to his boots before flickering back up to his face. ‘I get that one. In case we have to make a run for it, right? Don’t want to be running around barefoot.’
He nodded. ‘Your feet are more useful than a weapon. It’s better to run than fight most times.’
Voice scoffed. You’re so full of shit.
‘I got flat feet,’ the girl said.
The woman’s eyebrows went up.
‘What?’ the girl said. ‘I do.’
‘Even more reason to take good care of them,’ Pilgrim told her.
‘My grammy used to say I was descended from mermaids. That my feet have evolved from fins. Said I was born to be in the water.’
‘And yet you lived in the middle of the desert,’ he said.
‘Yeah, but . . . I like taking baths.’
The woman made a soft, breathy sound, a sound Pilgrim recognised as laughter only after it had stopped. He took a swig from the flask, the lemonade tart and sweet on his tongue. There was only a little left. He reached over to pass it to the girl.
‘Did you hear any news from where you’ve been?’ the woman asked.
The girl stopped mid-sip, her face opening up with interest. She looked at him hopefully.
He sighed and took his time settling back in his seat. ‘What kind of news?’
The woman shrugged a little. ‘Any news.’
The firelight no longer danced in her eyes; shadows slipped across her face, hiding parts of it in turn: her eyes, her mouth, her eyes again.
Why’s she want to know? Voice asked suspiciously.
‘Stay away from California,’ Pilgrim said.
He got the sense the woman’s eyebrows lowered a fraction, but maybe it was a trick of the light. ‘California? Why?’
‘I was told emergency sirens went off at Diablo Canyon.’
There was a slight hesitation. ‘Really?’
She wasn’t expecting that, Voice said smugly.
The girl butted in. ‘What’s Diablo Canyon?’
‘A nuclear-power plant,’ the woman answered absently. ‘It was a core meltdown?’ she asked Pilgrim.
‘Maybe.’
‘My God. You think there’s contamination there?’
He shrugged. ‘I wouldn’t like to find out.’
The deadly winds that blow east from California could travel for hundreds of miles, poisoning the lands as they go, Voice added helpfully.
No one spoke, and Pilgrim didn’t share what Voice had said. He didn’t know what thoughts passed through the girls’ heads, but his was filled with images of deformed babies with withered stumps for arms, the entire lower parts of their bodies melted away.
The woman broke the silence. ‘What about other news? Did you hear any new theories?’
‘No,’ he said shortly, resigned to having this same old conversation and wanting it over as quickly as possible. ‘Same theories as always.’
‘What kinds of theories?’ the girl asked eagerly.
He stared at her over the fire, but she seemed happy to wait him out. ‘You’re not going to drop this, are you?’
‘Nope.’ A slow, crooked smile lifted one side of her mouth as if to say he ought to know better than to ask. He’d known her for less than a day, but yes, that was one thing he conceded he knew already.
‘Fine.’ To get it over and done with, he quickly ticked off the points on his fingers as he listed them. ‘Biological attack, poisoning, after-effects of dementia vaccines, aliens, subliminal and/or psychological warfare, chemical agents in the water supply, the mystical forces of sea tides and the moon. And, my personal favourite, some kind of Rapture-type event.’
The girl’s brow quirked in confusion. ‘Rapture?’
‘Crazy Bible stuff,’ the woman said. ‘When the true believers of the world ascend to heaven before the End of Days, leaving the rest of us here to perish.’
‘Is this the end of days?’
‘No,’ Pilgrim said flatly, ‘it’s not. No one ascended. Everyone is still here, the dead as well as the living.’
‘And it doesn’t explain the voices,’ the woman pointed out.
‘Voices?’ The girl looked back and forth between them, as if watching a tennis match. ‘What are you talking about?’
Pilgrim clenched his jaw and inhaled quietly through his nose.
Count to ten, Voice advised, the words prickling with dry amusement.
‘You don’t know about the voices?’ Alex asked, surprised.
Pilgrim couldn’t miss the fear that clenched the muscles of the girl’s face for a moment. She shook her head.
‘She’s spent the past seven years shut up in a farmhouse with her overprotective grandmother,’ he explained.
The girl sent him a dirty look. ‘My grammy said everyone went crazy,’ she said to the woman, effectively dismissing him from the conversation. ‘She told me about this one fella called Jim Jones who brainwashed all these folk in South America? Said he knew just what words to say to get inside their heads. Like he was some kind of magician or something. She said it was mass hysteria, that people can easily be led into doing the craziest of stuff. That things got out of hand.’
‘There’s a kernel of truth in what your grammy said,’ Alex replied slowly, throwing a glance Pilgrim’s way, maybe hoping he’d take over the explanation, or at least help her with it, but he remained silent. She shifted position, wincing slightly, either from his lack of response or from discomfort, he wasn’t sure. ‘The voices are . . . whispers, murmurings, whatever you want to call them. They were inside us. They’re what talked so many people into hurting themselves and others.’
‘Inside us?’ the girl whispered. It was her turn to look at Pilgrim, as if searching for reassurance, but he just stared back. He didn’t want to be a part of this discussion – he had little to add to it.
She turned back to the woman. ‘What happens if you have one?’
‘It’s dangerous. For a lot of reasons.’
‘What if I have one and just don’t know it?’
‘You should know by now. Not everyone has one. Voices don’t manifest until after puberty – for some reason, younger children don’t hear them. Something to do with the anatomy of the brain, maybe, I’m not sure. I don’t hear anything, either, and we’re lucky we don’t. After everything that happened there was a lot of hatred; if you were suspected of hearing a voice you were rounded up and . . . well . . . I won’t go into details. There’s still a lot of fear, a lot of hate. And rightly so.’
She’s not being very nice, Voice muttered. Tarring us all with the same brush.
‘But why’d they want to hurt us?’
Pilgrim surprised himself by speaking up. ‘There’s no easy explanation for that. Why did we force so many animals into extinction? There are shades of grey behind every action. Nothing is ever fully evil or fully good.’
‘Voices still shouldn’t be trusted,’ Alex cut in.
‘So, what, everyone should just continue to be paranoid and live like enemies?’
Alex didn’t seem to have an answer for that.
‘There’s been some integration,’ Pilgrim said, unsure why he was arguing the point. ‘A group up in Estes Park have both hearers and non-hearers living in close proximity. There haven’t been any indications of violence breaking out. They live peacefully.’
‘I hadn’t heard about them,’ Alex said quietly, the orange firelight laying a soft sheen over her eyes. ‘That’s not usual, though,’ she added. ‘Cohabitation.’
‘No,’ he agreed, ‘it’s not usual. But things are shifting. Alliances are being made and broken and remade again. There has been a lot of movement recently.’
The woman’s lips pressed into a straight, unhappy line.
‘Why?’ the gir
l asked. ‘What’s going on?’
‘That’s a good question,’ Pilgrim said, stirring their campfire back to life, flames dancing higher and licking around the wood. He didn’t take his eyes from the woman sitting across from him. ‘Maybe the ones who’ve been treated like rabid dogs up until now are tired of hiding.’
Is it that simple, though? Voice asked. There’s no clear division between people who hear us and those who don’t. It’s not as though voice-hearers bear a brand for all to see. There are just as many people who refuse to acknowledge the voices they hear and live in fear with their secret; fewer who hear nothing at all but are our allies. It’s not just a case of us versus them.
The woman had dropped her gaze to the campfire and was staring into the flames. Her voice, husky and low, seemed to be coming from much further away than inside the barn where they sat, the night sky peeking in at them through the gaps in the roof beams. ‘There were stories in the places we passed through,’ she murmured. ‘Of a man with dark, moth-like eyes. We were told he slips into camps and settlements at night, searching out anyone who hears a voice – even people who were never suspected of having one – and tiptoes straight up to where they lie, as if they call out to him in their sleep. He wakes them with gentle words, whispering, coaxing with slick promises, turning them against everything they love and hold dear. Then he steals them away, like some twisted Pied Piper with his flute. But not before he sets fire to the farmhouses and camps and towns where they live. Sleeping families – children and babies – all burned. And this nameless man vanishes with them into the night as if he’d never been there at all.’ Her eyes met Pilgrim’s, and this time the flickering shadows weren’t shifting over her face, hiding parts of her features, but were trapped inside her eyes, the warm firelight unable to reach the darkness. ‘There are always rumours,’ she said quietly. ‘I understand that. Rumours are what give life to our fears. But my sister and I saw a town burning with our own eyes. A great wall of flames that seemed to scorch the roof of the sky and turn it red. It was as though this . . . this nameless man, this Pied Piper who comes to steal people in the night, was on the road in front of us and he was setting the world on fire.’
A pop came from their own fire, a piece of wood disintegrating in a burst of red sparks, and the girl jumped.
‘Where was this?’ Pilgrim asked.
The woman wrapped her arms tightly around her raised knees, hugging them to her chest as if the cold were bothering her, despite the heat from the fire. ‘Not far from Colorado Springs.’
North-west of here, Voice whispered.
Pilgrim grunted. ‘Sounds like a tale to scare children with. Fires break out all the time.’ Hadn’t they seen their fair share? It took nothing at all, the merest tickle of wind, to carry an ember from one building to the next, for fires to spread quickly from house to apartment to store, each filled to the rafters with abandoned furniture and goods, masses of tinder in the waiting. A ravenous beast of flames could burst into furious life and sweep through a town in minutes; there were no emergency services to keep such destruction in check any more.
Rumours are based on fact at some point in their lives, Voice said. We have heard of these roving groups, too, even saw one less than a week ago. How do we know the burnings aren’t related to them somehow, related to this tale of a nameless man?
‘I suppose you’re right,’ Alex said, and for a disorienting moment Pilgrim thought she was talking to Voice. ‘But I met people who’d lost their brother, cousin, friends. All disappeared. Without word or warning.’
‘How long ago was this?’ he asked her. ‘When you saw the fire?’
‘Four weeks, six at a push.’
‘And this children’s tale said this nameless man was looking for those who heard voices? Specifically?’
The woman nodded. ‘Yes.’
Pilgrim fell into a brooding silence.
‘I still don’t get it,’ the girl said. ‘Where did these voices come from?’
A long sigh left the woman and she fidgeted slightly where she sat. Maybe she was getting as tired as he was with the conversation.
No, she’s in pain. Can’t you tell tell by how pinched her eyes are?
‘No one knows for sure,’ she replied. ‘But there are plenty of theories, just like your friend here listed.’
Lacey’s eyes shifted to him. ‘So what do you think happened?’
She was all wide-eyed curiosity and ignorance, this girl, and Pilgrim felt his annoyance grow. Had her grandmother really thought she would be able to protect her for ever? All she’d achieved was to make her weak and unprepared for the world she now found herself in.
With some frustration, Pilgrim threw his piece of wood into the fire, sending a second burst of red sparks erupting upwards. ‘Look, it doesn’t matter what I think. No one can fix or change the past, and it’s selfish of us to think we have any claim on the future. Enjoy the fact you’re still alive, and be grateful for it.’ He was done with being sociable for the night; all this talk of rumours and a mysterious man going around snatching Pilgrim’s kind had fouled his mood. ‘Enough talk. We should get some rest. It’s been a long day.’
A new concern galvanised the girl into a different line of questioning. ‘You’re going to be here come morning, right?’
He didn’t immediately answer, and his hesitation spoke volumes.
‘You’re looking to dump us.’ It was a flat accusation.
‘I didn’t say that.’
‘You didn’t have to.’
‘Things are different now there’s another person here. And there’s a working car.’
‘I thought we had us a deal.’ The girl was starting to look kind of mulish.
‘We did,’ he said slowly, calmly. ‘But the terms have changed slightly.’
He was aware of the woman silently watching their exchange, her eyes shifting from him to the girl and back again, but now she spoke. ‘I’m not here to mess up anyone’s plans. I’m grateful for your help. I owe you a debt more than I could ever repay. Both of you. But me being here doesn’t need to impact on anything.’
‘It’s not impacting, Alex,’ Lacey told her. ‘We saved you. You’re one of us now.’
‘There is no us,’ Pilgrim stated.
The crackle and pop of the fire sounded very loud in the silence that followed.
He sighed again. ‘Are you happy to go to Vicksburg?’ he asked the woman.
She slid a glance to Lacey then returned it to him. ‘We were headed for the East Coast before we stopped. We’d heard there were scientists out there looking to help.’
What does that mean? Voice said.
Pilgrim wasn’t listening. She was the solution to his immediate problem, and that was all he cared about. ‘Excellent. Vicksburg is east. It’s decided, then. She can take you.’ He pointed at the woman.
But the girl was being stubborn. ‘No. You’re supposed to take me. You have the gun.’
‘You have a rifle,’ he countered.
She opened her mouth to continue the debate, but he raised a hand to cut her off. ‘The deal was you get a ride to Vicksburg. It was never stipulated who had to give you the ride.’
She changed tack. ‘Was there somewhere you needed to go first? We could go there before we head to Vicksburg if—’
‘No. There’s nowhere. I just prefer being on my own.’
The girl’s eyes were big, the firelight reflecting in them.
Careful now—
He lowered his voice, made it conciliatory. ‘Look, let’s talk more in the morning. We need to rest. We’re all tired.’
He didn’t wait for a reply but stood up and dusted off the seat of his pants. He went to the trunk of the car and retrieved his pack. By the time he came back and began pulling out his sleeping bag, the girls were moving, too, gathering their things together. He passed his sleeping bag to the girl, and she looked up at him.
‘You sleep first. I’ll keep watch.’
For a moment she
looked as though she would say more, but then she dropped her eyes and nodded slowly, her shoulders slumping in a way that indicated all the fight had gone out of her.
Pilgrim left her and went to sit with his back against the barn door. From there he could hear the yipping howls of a coyote somewhere out in the darkness of the desert and then a second answering howl, closer, but not close enough to worry him. He could also keep an eye on the girls as they settled down, the low firelight sliding over them like a swarm of miniature cavorting devils. They lay near to each other, probably unconsciously, forming an L shape, their heads making the corner. They spoke for a short while, their voices low, but soon they were quiet and their breathing evened out as sleep overtook them. At the end of their bedrolls, their feet poked out; they had both kept their shoes on.
He spent the first part of his watch observing them. The soft sleep sighs, the small muscle twitches that proved, even while resting, that their bodies strived to defend themselves. He studied the peacefulness on their faces – even the woman’s, whose was bruised and swollen – and soaked up these details, because it felt like he was rediscovering them. He wondered what he would say if one of the girls woke up to find him staring so intently, and these thoughts had him shifting his attention away from the dying embers of the fire and into the shadows. The shadows welcomed his eyes, and his thoughts. He wasn’t rediscovering them; he had known them for a while, and they had known him.
Voice kept him company, although Pilgrim didn’t ask for it.
It’ll be morning soon. Then what?
Pilgrim didn’t so much as grunt in response.
Seriously, what’s the plan? I’m not sure I like how this Alex has been looking at us. She’s not stupid. What if she’s a scout or something? What if she’s the one going round looking for people like us and setting fire to stuff? Maybe those two crazybirds back at the motel caught her trying to burn their place down.
Voice was being ridiculous, and Pilgrim didn’t have to say it for Voice to pick up on his impatience.
You won’t be so quick to dismiss my theories after she’s finished stabbing us in our sleep.
