by Peter Liney
When she finally finished, when she’d said all she wanted to say, she lapsed back into silence with no ceremony whatsoever. If you’d nodded off on the back seat and just woken up, you wouldn’t’ve known anything had taken place.
She hadn’t had to tell me and I think she knew that, but I guess she’d wanted to get the story out, and being Gigi she’d made it all very matter-of-fact, like a long, articulated shrug. Or maybe she felt she owed it to me ’cuz we were on our way back to the City, ’cuz she knew how much I needed to trust her.
Not that I made a big thing of it. It was what it was and both of us knew that; no matter how long we lingered over it, it would never entirely sit right for either of us. I mean, the thing about human nature is that despite what some people tell ya, very few of us are one hundred percent good or bad, and Gigi’s a perfect example: when she’s in the light, you’re not sure what’s going on in the shadow; and when she’s in the dark, you wonder where that glow’s coming from. I mean, I had to trust her, that was all there was to it . . . but I had to keep an eye on her, too.
It took us more than three hours to reach the highway, and when we did, we were in for a bit of a shock. The power strip wasn’t working. Well, I say it wasn’t working, when I checked, it was working—it just wouldn’t connect to us. I didn’t know why; maybe there was something wrong with the limo’s reader, or perhaps Doctor Simon had withdrawn the credit? Though I’d always thought he’d try to maintain any link with us he could, no matter how tenuous—well, not “us,” exactly, more Lena—and now, of course, little Thomas.
With Jimmy having taken out most of its technology, the limo wasn’t talking to me or telling me what was going on, but the read-out indicated we had less than a gallon of gas in the tank and would fail to reach the City by eighty-eight point three miles, though it had no answer to my question about where we might find more.
That didn’t leave us with too many options: either we went as far as we could and then walked the rest, or tried hitching—which I didn’t have a great deal of faith in, being as there were so few vehicles around. The only other possible alternative was to call on a few private dwellings and see if they had any gas.
We tried a couple of likely-looking smallholdings—being as I reckoned they’d be more likely to keep a store—but they’d been abandoned and stripped of anything of value.
“You gotta go where no one else’s been,” Gigi told me. “Outta sight of the road.”
She was right, of course: all this stuff left in full view of everyone, like the occasional discarded vehicle—someone was bound to have checked it out. The next track that headed off the road and out into nowhere, I ventured down, taking it slowly, lurching left and right, trying to ignore a slight grinding noise coming from the back suspension.
It must’ve been the best part of three-quarters of a mile before we got to the farmhouse, but it was the same story all over again: the place’d been abandoned, ransacked, and Mother Nature was already starting to get to work, having her way with the upstart interlopers.
We gave it a quick once-over but there was nothing so I returned to the road, drove another couple of miles, then tried again, this time finding the homestead even further down the track.
The good thing was that this one wasn’t deserted; the bad thing was that the residents weren’t all that friendly. Even before we’d come to a halt they’d started shooting, sending bullets ricocheting off the limo’s reinforced body. I reversed back as rapidly as I could, spun around when I had enough room, and got outta there a helluva lot quicker than I went in.
“You okay?” I asked Gigi.
She nodded, glancing over at the fuel read-out, obviously as worried as I was.
By the time that we got back to the road, the limo was flashing up that we had precisely twelve point four miles of gas. Either we could go that far down the highway and hope for the best, or try another track or two. A little further on, I made the decision for us, this time diving off on the other side of the road, almost immediately entering a thick pine forest.
“Fingers crossed,” Gigi commented dolefully.
“Yeah,” I replied, feeling a whole canyon away from a point of hopeful.
We came to this sun-starved clearing with a faded wooden two-story house and a coupla barns. Through the open double-doors of the nearest one I could see a large circular saw—in fact, going by the wood stacked everywhere, timber had obviously been—and maybe still was—the occupants’ business. There didn’t look to be anyone around. I went and knocked on the front door, then returned to the limo and started blowing the horn, but still no one appeared.
I gave a frustrated sigh and turned to Gigi, but she was staring into the nearby forest.
“What’s up?”
“Thought I saw someone.”
Both of us stood there for several moments, scrutinizing the dense darkness of the pine trees, not able to see more than a few feet inside the tree line. I was concerned we were about to be shot at again and ready to jump back into the limo.
“Can’t see nothing,” I told her. “Maybe a deer?”
Gigi shrugged and followed along behind me as I cautiously went to enter the nearest barn. Everything inside—miscellaneous tools, numerous parts, general junk, a workbench—looked like it had just been left, like the owner had walked out five minutes ago.
We immediately started to hunt around for gas; me going one way, Gigi the other, soon building up confidence and becoming more invasive, shifting stuff around in our search. Suddenly Gigi stopped, giving this little grunt and staring at the ground.
“What’s the matter?” I asked, making my way over.
There was a large pool of dried blood soaked into the dirt, deep and dark, like it was several inches deep.
“Something got itself slaughtered,” she said.
“Yeah,” I replied, not wanting to pay it too much attention; just at that moment we had other, far more pressing, things to worry about. I noticed this large tarp covering something bulky stacked up against the wall and went over to yank it off—to our delight, we were confronted by several large drums. I gave the nearest one a kick—whatever was in there, it was full.
I screwed the top off and took a sniff. Yep, it was gas all right.
“I’ll get the limo,” I said, our mood immediately lifting.
I turned for the doorway, but stopped. There were two guys standing there, haunted-looking, pale to the point of sickness, one holding a rifle, the other an ax. For a moment we all stared at each other as if words were unnecessary, that we all knew what the situation was.
Finally the guy with the rifle broke into this sick, nigh-on toothless grin—the very image of a mass murderer you saw on the screen when you were a kid but no one would talk to you about.
“We got ourselves a girl,” he kinda sang, with just the hint of celebration.
His companion merely grunted; Gigi, with all her strange clothes and feathers in her hair plainly not to his taste.
“Fine by me,” the first guy smirked.
“We don’t want any trouble,” I told them. “Just gas. We’re happy to trade.”
“Oh, you’ll trade,” the guy with the rifle sneered.
“She your daughter?” his companion asked.
“No.”
“So what you doing in here with her?”
“Ya dirty old bastard,” the first guy taunted.
He wasn’t pointing the rifle directly at me, but it wouldn’t take a split moment to swing it in my direction. And for sure I didn’t like the look of the polished blade on his companion’s ax, nor the thought that it might have some connection with the bloodstain on the ground.
“Come here,” the first guy ordered Gigi.
“Go fuck yourself,” she replied, as gutsy as ever.
“Whoa! I’m gonna enjoy this even more than I thought,” he purred, moving toward her.
“Leave her alone,” I told him.
He turned toward me, a look of irritation on his
face, as if I was of about as much consequence as a single fly at a barbecue. “Shut up, old man,” he said.
“Leave her.”
“Why? . . . ’Cuz you can’t manage it anymore you don’t want me to either? Tell you what, you can watch,” he said, taunting me by sliding the zipper on his pants up and down.
I took a step toward him but he swung the rifle up and pointed it directly at my chest. “Ya know something, I really can’t see the point of you.”
“Just leave her alone,” I persisted.
He almost burst into laughter, as if he couldn’t believe I’d have the nerve, then braced the muzzle of his rifle hard up against me, so all it would take would be the lightest of touches. His smile grew with the slow tightening of his trigger finger, the expression he could see on my face, the fact that I was about to be blown all over the wall behind me.
I knew exactly how far that trigger needed to travel, that one more barely perceptible movement would end my life, but ya know something . . . ? It never happened.
Suddenly he got this look about him as if somewhere deep inside he’d just been dealt the most resounding blow. His body somehow contorted and twisted and he fell to his knees, his eyes gaping wider and wider, becoming colored and clouded, and then—Jesus, what the hell?—steam started coming out of them! His eyes were evaporating, the liquid inside boiling, and sure enough, they began to dry and crack, to smoke and finally burst into flame.
He gave the worst possible scream you could imagine, and you know what? . . . As his mouth gaped wide open, I could see down his throat—there were flames in there, too.
For some reason his companion blamed me, as if he thought I’d used some kinda invisible weapon on him. He came at me with his ax, swinging that big, shiny blade back and forth, intent on chopping me into pieces—but then he suddenly froze too, giving out with a cry of agony as the same thing happened to him: his eyeballs swelling and steaming, his entire body starting to smolder and burn.
I thought about trying to douse their flames, throwing water over them as they screamed and rolled on the ground—as much ’cuz I couldn’t bear what I was seeing and hearing as any other reason—but it was too late, already they were starting to shrivel up like bacon in a pan.
At that moment, and thank God I did, I saw we had to get out of there, that the fire was spreading from the two guys and over toward the gasoline store. I tipped over the nearest drum and Gigi and me rolled it outta the door as fast as we could.
The limo was parked some distance from the barn and we didn’t quite make it before there was this almighty kerrumph! and a rushing wave of hot air scorched the back of my neck as flames, metal and timber flew all around, and Gigi and me threw ourselves down behind our vehicle.
We had to wait there for the fire to die down, ’til I thought it was safe, then we rolled the drum back around to the other side of the limo, where the filler cap was. Jeez, those flames must’ve been quite something: there were blisters all along the paintwork of the limo like the body of some scaly reptile.
I managed to pour some gas in, but the drum was so unwieldy, and without a funnel, a helluva lot of it was ending up on the ground and starting to run in the direction of the barn. I had to continue pouring, all the while keeping an eye on that building trail of gas, ’til eventually I knew we had to get out of there, and pretty damn quick.
Wouldn’t you know it? For the first time ever, that engine didn’t start right away. Gigi screamed, her hand going to the door-button, but I pressed start once more and thankfully, this time the engine hummed into life and I stamped on the gas and swept outta that place with the flames chasing after us.
There was another explosion as the drum went up, another huge burst of intense flame, but d’you know what? That fire was nothing, not compared to what we’d seen start it.
What the hell—I always thought “spontaneous human combustion” was an urban myth, one of those things you hear about as a kid, but as you get older you realize couldn’t happen. To actually see it, people bursting into flames like that—? Jesus! How, for chrissake?
CHAPTER FIVE
I couldn’t help myself—maybe I saw it as some kind of sentimental symmetry—when we got to the same lookout where over a year ago we’d said goodbye to the City, I stopped to say hello. Standing there with Gigi, wordlessly gazing down at that dark, intimidating sprawl, my thoughts drawn to the last time I’d stood there, when Lena had told me she’d gone blind again. How panicked I was, but how calm she was, almost as if she’d been expecting it.
We hadn’t heard a whole lot about what’d been going on in the City since we’d gone over the mountains, and most of what we had heard was second- or third-hand. Jimmy spent some time trying to get a signal on his screen (and knowing him, he probably would’ve managed it eventually) but everyone else was so firmly against it, particularly Lile, who warned him that if he upset her peaceful world she would make his hell, that in the end he reluctantly gave up. Though now, going on some of the things we’d witnessed, what we’d seen back at that barn, maybe we should’ve kept ourselves better informed.
Spontaneous human combustion! . . . Come on. There had to be a reason for it—and I wouldn’t’ve minded betting we’d find it in the City.
The thought of returning to that place, all the bad memories it held, made me feel quite sick. As long as I live, I’ll never forget those nights they came for us: the mass beating and screaming of the Specials as they cleaned yet another area of undesirables; the Dragonflies thundering overhead, the panic and fear as they drove everyone to that evening’s hunting ground to be slaughtered—the old, the poor, the homeless and the sick, all those they regarded as society’s waste . . . and of course, I had to deal with the hardest memory of all to shift: the death of little Arturo, the Mickey Mouse Kid.
You probably wouldn’t be surprised to know that we’d thought about naming the baby after him. The kids, especially Gordie, were all for it. But, I dunno, Lena and me just felt that everyone should have their own name, be an individual, a memory in their own right. Arturo was a really special little guy and we didn’t think he should be confused with anyone else, no matter how precious they might be.
“Drop me near the Square,” Gigi suddenly announced, gesturing over in that general direction.
I turned to her, momentarily confused. “What?”
“Somewhere around that way.”
“I ain’t dropping you off anywhere,” I told her.
“Why not?”
“We gotta stick together.”
She groaned, plainly having a gripe, and it was all too obvious what.
“We don’t have a clue what’s been going on,” I continued, doing my best to head her off. “We gotta look out for each other—I need your help as much as you need mine.”
“Yeah, yeah,” she sneered, not hearing a word, only that I didn’t trust her.
I turned and made my way back to the limo, a long and heavily exaggerated sigh issuing out from behind me, but at least she’d followed.
“So where we going?” she asked as the doors slid shut beside us.
I pulled away, rejoining the highway, for a few moments saying nothing.
“First there’s someone I gotta see,” I told her.
Driving back down those hills and into the suburbs was one helluva barbed education. Unbelievably, there was still the occasional fire around, though why and what could be burning after all that time, I couldn’t imagine. Surely all that hydrazine-derivative stuff that’d powered the punishment satellites was long gone?
There were a lot more vehicles around, people trying to go about their daily business, doing their best to keep things moving along, though it was soon obvious that notions of “normality” had taken a helluva disturbing turn.
The first one I saw, I’ll tell ya, my stomach took the express elevator to the basement and hit the bottom with a real jolt. The posters weren’t so much a surprise—Nora Jagger looking out all stern and steely, dressed in quasi-
military uniform—nor the many screens showing videos of her performing various duties. What put the damn fear of God into me were the holograms.
They were everywhere: pedestrian squares, road junctions, cleared blocks where fires had once raged—these huge laser statues of Nora Jagger, probably thirty or forty feet high.
She looked so damn real, so damn menacing, and what I knew of that woman, some of the things I’d witnessed her do—well, to see her towering over us as if she was about to swallow us in one gulp, was something I could’ve done without.
“The Bitch is everywhere,” Gigi spat, never one to mince her words.
Whoever’d been in charge when we were last there was obviously gone, and I wouldn’t want to guess at their fate. In fact, looking back on it, the process of her accession had obviously been well underway even then. We never saw anyone else, just assumed, but whatever Nora Jagger had been then, now she was obviously the very embodiment of Infinity: the public face. And Gigi was right, the Bitch really was all over: open spaces, blank walls, any place where her image could be projected or hung, there she was, glaring down at us, daring us to do anything wrong.
The City was still surprisingly scarred; the after-effects of the fires, blackened and collapsed buildings, were everywhere. In some places it looked like it could’ve happened yesterday—nothing had been touched—but in the wealthier suburbs it was clear someone’d been put to work cleaning up. A little further on we got to see who: a large work-gang had been assembled, a motley group of the unwashed and unwanted, busy toiling away while armed Specials lounged about watching over them like guards surveying a chain-gang.
“Jesus,” I muttered, partly ’cuz of what was going on, partly ’cuz I couldn’t believe we’d been stupid enough to return. I’d never felt such an overwhelming sense of submission, of a city under siege from within.
