Wixon's Day

by Phil Williams

  “No,” the pilot concedes, staring into the fire. He sees himself in his mind’s eye, standing on the deck, ready to stay there under the stars forever, and he admits to them, “I could’ve died happy right there.”

  “You would’ve, if I hadn’t intervened,” Copin chortles back, not taking him seriously. The pilot looks back into his eyes, though, with melancholy that says it is true, and the Kand goes awkwardly quiet. Hart watches the brief exchange curiously, though makes no comment. She waits, letting Copin start up a joking rant about the bandits, and shuffles closer to Marquos. He takes note, realising he has no idea who she is, yet would rather hear her talk than Copin. Without introduction, the pilot asks her “Is it true that you had a pet cockroach?”

  Copin laughs loudly as Hart glares at Marquos in reproach. She replies “Don’t believe everything you’re told. Copin likes to tell stories about other people so no one will talk about him.”

  “Don’t be defensive,” Copin smiles back. “There’s no harm in keeping pets.”

  “Lovely,” Hart replies. “But I have had no need for insect companions. Copin decided it was the case when I reprimanded a bug that had got into my stew. Apparently, if you lose your temper with an object, people assume it was your pet.”

  “Oh Hart,” Copin laughs, “Why did they name you so, when you have none!”

  “God no, now he’ll start with the names.”

  “Just Copin with what I’ve got.”

  “Please, Marquos, open the door, let the cold in so we can all die now.”

  “I could wish for nothing more,” Copin rumbles on, “Then to die in your loving embrace, Hart.”

  As the pair bicker on, Marquos cannot help but smile at them. He realises that at the moment, with nothing more than their simple banter, the Deadland is the most alive it has been in seasons. Eventually, Copin runs out of steam, however, and turns in to sleep on the bed without request or invitation. Seeing that Marquos is about to make a comment, Hart puts a hand to his shoulder and whispers for him to stay put. He pauses, appreciating the intimacy of their proximity, but he has no thoughts of sex now. His emotions have been worn down from this journey, and he tells her quietly “Hart, I don’t know-”

  “Shut up,” she tells him bluntly. “Don’t get any ideas. I want a word.” She waits a moment longer, hearing Copin slump on the bed, before saying “Tell me truthfully. Did you come up here to die?”

  Marquos looks back at her oddly, perturbed. He averts his gaze, mumbles an answer, “I don’t know exactly. I was in the Mines, I got involved in something.”

  “And you did the right thing, didn’t you?”

  “Not by choice,” Marquos shakes his head. “It was thrust upon me. I didn’t just help those mines run, I stood by and let children die down there, took it all until I had no choice but to act. Then I finally get forced into doing something and the whole world seems to fall down on me, Mine Guard chasing me, Border Guard attacking me, Kands wanting me to join their war. It’s not for me, none of that kind of responsibility ever was. The guilt built up and up inside me, down in those mines, but by Kail if your people can take care of Red then I’ve done my bit for the world I’ve wronged. I thought that coming up here, there’d be no way anyone would follow. By the time I got back, everyone would forget what I was ever supposed to mean to them. I’d be free again. When I saw those stars tonight, I wasn’t just looking at a beautiful sight. I was looking at my freedom.”

  “The fact that you found a cause worth fighting for,” Hart says, her eyes judging him coldly, “Should be a good thing. Maybe you don’t even realise it yourself, but your idea of freedom, trying to go at it alone in places like this, that’s not a way of preserving yourself.” She taps a finger into his forehead, to drive her point home, “That’s you acknowledging, somewhere in your twisted skull, that the only way you’re going to avoid getting connected is by dying.”

  Marquos stares at her, speechless at the suggestion. She gruffly continues, “It’s not my business, I don’t know you, that’s just what I’ve gathered today. And if that’s the way you’re going to be, I’d appreciate it if you could hold off until we get back to Estalia, rather than take us down with you.”

  Hart stands, satisfied that her point has been made, and strides away to join Copin. She pauses in the doorway to the bedroom, leans back and says “And for all our sakes, join us in here for the night. None of us want to freeze to death.”

  15

  As soon as light starts to seep over the mountains, the Kands prepare to set out for their search for Rosenbault, leaving Marquos behind to warm the boat. Hart and Copin insist that they can move faster without him, and will only have the day to conduct their search, considering the cold and their diminishing supplies of fuel. He does not argue, having had the night to sleep on Hart’s words and waking with thoughts that he is quite certain he does not want to die.

  Marquos occupies himself for a short while investigating the damage that the storm did, which is mostly superficial, and then turns the boat around to be ready for a return journey. He takes it a short way up the river to find a pool wide enough to turn in, and pauses in the calm water, craning to see where the river leads to. It stays level for some time, slipping between the rocks, which likely means they are either already near its source or will eventually face a steep rise, impassable on the boat. Calmed by the night’s rest, Marquos is satisfied that he has seen enough anyway, Copin’s words ringing true in his heart, and he takes the boat back to their previous spot to wait for the Kands. The daylight will not last long, and he wants to stay out on the deck to take in the view, but the cold forces him back inside to the fire, baffled at the thought the Kands can endure hiking in this weather.

  Marquos plays mournful tunes on his flute to occupy himself, thinking of possible speeches he can make to convince Hart that he is not the liability she took him for. He regrets what he said about the children, and his fear of becoming attached, but starts to doubt his own beliefs. Is that why Nicole and Teri refused to go with him? Was he lying to them when he said he wanted companionship? He would like to persuade Hart otherwise, if only to prove to himself that it’s possible. His concerns are interrupted, however, by the sound of movement on deck. He jumps to his feet and calls out “You must’ve hurried back!”

  No one answers, the movement on deck stops. Hearing another footstep, Marquos tenses. He hurries across the boat and picks up the revolver. The door opens and he sees a man’s boots taking cautious steps down the stairs. The tip of a rifle slips into view, then the ragged furs that conceal the remnants of faded armour. Marquos raises his gun, finger on the trigger, and orders “Don’t move.”

  The gyrocopter pilot stops at the base of the stairs and looks at Marquos through his dark goggles.

  “How did you get here?” Marquos asks with disbelief. Qait Seyron pulls his goggles and mask down and gives the pilot a strange look.

  “I walked, mostly,” he says quietly. “I know you don’t want me on your boat, but if you’d be so kind, it’s rather cold out there.” Qait gestures to the fire, slowly shuffling towards it. Marquos holds the pistol steady and snarls “You took my girl, you bastard, I ought to shoot you where you stand.”

  “Relax, I’m sure she’s fine,” Qait sighs. Ignoring the threat of the pistol, he places his rifle by the stove and takes a seat, whilst Marquos stands edgily in front of him. The tracker lifts a few coals into the fire and rubs his hands, wrapped in rags.

  “Fine?” Marquos makes no effort to conceal the anger in his voice, “You know what the Mine Guard do to children?”

  “They give them a home, some food and a purpose,” Qait rolls his head back and looks into Marquos’ eyes. “I believe that’s more than you could offer.”

  “I was taking her back to her parents!” Marquos says. The tracker looks at him calmly, not intimidated, and rests back into his seat. He replies “What are you complaining about, you sent Kands after her didn’t you? As if it wasn’t enough that you had
her living with them before.”

  “They were safe enough people.”

  “I don’t care. What I’m interested in is what you’re doing bringing them up here.”

  “You don’t know?” Marquos can’t help but laugh back, the absurdity of Qait’s pursuit suddenly apparent. “You followed us all this way, and you don’t know why?” Qait does not react, his tired eyes saying that he has experienced this all before. Marquos lowers the pistol as he rants on. “Risked your life against the bandits and the cold? And the river? Into the one hell that no one dares tread? And you don’t know why?”

  “If you had something important enough to lure you and your Kands here, then it was important enough for me,” Qait explains simply.

  “You want to know what’s up here?” Marquos has to smile. “There’s nothing. Nothing at all.” The tracker looks at him doubtfully, but the pilot goes on, “They call it the Deadland for a reason.”

  Qait gives him a few moment’s silence, showing no surprise. The tracker waits for a time allotted in his head before commenting “And what about the Kands?”

  Marquos glares back, mouths a response, “What difference does it make?”

  “They make a lot more difference than you. Where are they?”

  “They went to find a doctor,” Marquos tells him, “Who wanted to change the world. Who was silenced by your people.”

  “Rosenbault,” Qait replies with a nod. “That’s what I thought.”

  Marquos pauses, seeing the tracker really does have a purpose, and carefully questions, “You know him?”

  “Of course. I tracked him up here two seasons ago. That’s why I was quite able to track you up here again. I know there’s nothing in the Deadland. There’s about a dozen gangs of bandits left in the whole of the North. I think half of them were killed yesterday in your little melee. They’ve been dying out for some time.”

  “But if you knew about Rosenbault…” Marquos shakes his head, “Why? Why wouldn’t you bring him back? Help him? Wasn’t there any hope?”

  Qait gives Marquos a pitying look. He eyes the pistol and says “How about you lower that thing and we have a little chat? It will be a while before they come back. I’ve got a few things you need to hear.”

  Marquos lowers the gun without complaint, finding the tracker’s unprecedented calm strangely pacifying. The pilot sits in the seat opposite Qait and silently waits for more.

  “The Deadland is a jarring place,” Qait says, “I can see why you’d feel disillusioned coming here, but you can’t have expected much better. As for Rosenbault, that’s an even weaker dream to clutch at. I came after him expecting the worst, but I always hoped for the best. Believe me, if there was hope, I was going to bring it back with me.”

  Marquos says, “I’d expect you to say that.”

  “Of course you would. You don’t know me. I doubt you know anyone in the Border Guard, so you’ve just been lapping up everything those Kands told you. This is a story you need to hear the other side of, though. At least listen to it.” Qait waits for confirmation, and Marquos merely raises his eyebrows, prompting the tracker to go on. “The Kands will have told you Supreme Commander Felez shut down the Rosenbault Project and drove him away. If that’s true, then it was for all the right reasons. I learnt all about it when I was tracking him.

  “I’ll start at the beginning. The beginning of his downfall, anyway. Rosenbault was getting nowhere with his research and kept demanding more and more resources for the experiments. He was desperate and unpredictable, and it resulted in an accident that destroyed half a building and killed thirteen people. Dozens more were injured. Rosenbault and a few loyal followers fled, and the Border Guard were left to clear up the mess. He’d been very quiet about everything, so no one outside his experiments was too sure what progress he had made, except that he was yet to provide anything remotely productive. After his departure, the guards sifted through the remains of his laboratories and realised quite how far off course he had gone. All that he had left behind was weapons. Devastating weapons. The Border Guard tried to test a few, which led to more accidents, before it was all buried. None of Rosenbault’s files were left behind, there was no explanation for what he had been doing, and most of his colleagues that remained were as in the dark as everyone else.

  “Now when it comes to trying to change the world, most of these scientists you hear of working with the Border Guard give up at some point, and go back to changing the world some other way. The truth is there’s no way anyone’s bringing the light back to this world, and all that’s left is to try and find ways to grow food without it. And to try and find ways to keep ourselves warm. Rosenbault kept trying to do something bigger, though. When I learnt about him, and learnt that no one had found the man, I started my own investigation. It wasn’t so tough; I found him in the Meth Fields, but I messed up. I surprised myself, that he was where I’d expected, and didn’t try to capture him on my own. They fled before I could bring the Guards to help, and the laboratory was burnt to the ground. It took me another season to catch up to Rosenbault here, in the Deadland. I came to wondering how Rosenbault could have slipped through, but I soon realised he had probably never even run into a bandit. There were more bandits back then, but not by much. Most of them were run down without food and too disorientated to head south. Those that did were quickly wiped out by the Border Guard. Truth be told, you would have got here without event if not for the sound of your boat’s engine.

  “My journey was not without peril, but I was prepared for much worse. I took my time, learnt the terrain and gradually uncovered his location. An old bunker set deep in the rocks, a short distance from here. It’s a remarkable structure, still there today, made from concrete and lined with cables that used to carry some kind of fuel to a series of lanterns I didn’t understand. Rosenbault called it electricity. He said it was a fuel that did not require mines, and did not produce smoke. He could not create it himself to demonstrate, though. You can see it in the skies, though, when the clouds part and the thunder cracks. The bright blue flashes of lightning, great streaks of concentrated electricity. He said it could power lights, but he did not care to elaborate.

  “You see, when I found Rosenbault, he was a changed man from whoever had first devised the Project. He had fallen apart long before Felez shut him down. When I came into the bunker I was surrounded by pillars of warheads. Shells from guns you could not conceive the size of, as wide as trees and taller than a man. The walls were plastered with images that I did not understand at first. Maps of an unfamiliar world, pictures of unfamiliar civilisations in various stages of decay. I walked through the corridors of that bunker for almost a day before I found the professor, and it was like a maze of nightmares. One or two maps and pictures were clear, images of a hopeful time where the world was lit. The rest were scarred by reality. I saw piles of bodies stacked higher than buildings, homes ablaze, explosions too large to fit in the frame of a photo-capture…and the maps…so many maps. Covered in circles, coloured in different shades and gradually growing less clear. Rosenbault had pasted all these images on the walls as a working brainstorm, and his writing was scrawled illegibly across them with black ink. It became more and more crazed as the gallery went on. There was one map in particular that kept coming up, though, and I took note of how it changed over time. He had numbers written above it, high numbers, and each reproduction of the map had different circles, different parts coloured in, as though progressing in seasons. It had names written all over it, but none of them meant a thing to me. Then I found one map where almost the whole image had been painted black, except for one tiny patch in the middle. It was only then that I understood exactly what it showed.”

  Qait looks at Marquos to make sure he is listening, and the pilot stares back intently. The tracker says “The old maps were different to the ones we have today, and probably aren’t accurate anymore, but the shapes are basically the same. What really struck me about it was how little was left. What a tiny fractio
n of the whole was not covered in black. The world is so much larger than I thought. We all know that there is land beyond the seas that surround us, but who would ever think there could be so much of it?” Qait pauses again and sighs. “Estalia is the tiniest mark in a massive world, and going back over the different maps I realised it isn’t even our Empire. Not as we understand it. Rosenbault wrote dozens of different names around it at the different stages of things he had crossed out. Astalia. Estlia. Anglia. Engald. And there were closer maps, more detailed ones Estalia itself, with different names scrawled on them. The Metropolis, Land One; the Drain, Tames. He took a particular interest in the Deadland, maps that stretched far above where we are now, and one place was circled over and over, Clyde. Gare Loch.” He shakes his head, “He found out more about our world than I’d ever thought possible.

  “I found Rosenbault shortly after figuring it all out, in a room lit by candles. He was writing on more maps, doing calculations of some sort. The room was full of boxes, piled high with supplies. It must have been an old war bunker, with enough strangely sealed food to sustain the doctor for many seasons. I approached him with my gun raised and asked him to stop writing, and he answered me as though aware I had been there all along. He told me to wait for a moment, and I did. I found a man frail from working too hard and filthy beyond reproach. He had been alone for so long that he had no comprehension of who I was, just happy to have someone to talk to. That is, someone to listen to him. He laid down his pen and spoke to me. Most of the time when he spoke he had a smile on his face. That’s the thing that really sticks in my mind, that constant smile. He was smiling because he was mad, simple as that. Absolutely mad.

  “I sat with him and let him talk for a long time. When the candles burnt down, he set out new ones, and when he got thirsty he produced bottles of water. Clear bottles, of a material I had not seen before. He explained to me that the next bomb was going to be the one. He had figured it all out, and all he required was one vital ingredient. I asked what the bomb was for, and he started explaining it to me. He told me that the answers to all our problems lay far back in history, long before any records we have. You must know the stories of the Gracian Kingdom, right?”