by Sean Platt
The first day, he found the survival equipment he needed in a shop called L’Essentiel: a small, back-worn air converter and a stack of recharge canisters, goggles, batteries (probably dead, despite their guarantee), water sterilizing pills, a flint fire-starting kit, and a few other bits of miscellany. Nicolai had been surprised to find batteries, but not at all shocked to discover that the emergency food and water rations were already ransacked.
Although he’d been searching for food and water from the start, it wasn’t until the second day that he found any. It wasn’t much, but once out of the city he could always hunt game and use his new kits to purify his own water.
Duly stocked, Nicolai left the apartment building (the fifth he’d searched from bottom to top, using a small laser saw to enter each individual unit) and was confronted by the abandoned metropolis for the final time. Now that he had what he needed and had quelled the panic that he’d been telling himself wasn’t there, Nicolai was able to take the time to stare across the desolation with the respect it demanded.
Paris was empty.
With a thought that the past was the past and that yesterday was gone, Nicolai slid behind the wheel of his captured vehicle and keyed the engine. He drove north but couldn’t help a sense of tourist’s curiosity as he departed. He allowed himself to detour past the Arc de Triomphe, which was standing as it always had in better days. Then he drove toward the Eiffel Tower but found it severed in the middle and lying mostly on its side, its wide base still securely anchored. Had it been bombed? What else would take it down? And really: Why? Knocking down the monument couldn’t have been a simple chore, and it must have consumed valuable weaponry.
Nicolai didn’t know. He didn’t allow himself to care.
When the car finally died, he was outside the city limits, on the far side of countryside sprawl. His instincts warned him to look around when leaving his vehicle, keeping an eye out for bandits who’d heard the engine and were searching for spoils. He emerged with his crossbow mostly unshouldered, a bolt in his right hand, not yet nocked. But there was nothing. The countryside was as uninterested in Nicolai as the city.
As he began walking, he realized he’d become too accustomed to having wheels. The water was too heavy to carry. He slipped five bottles into his backpack’s various pockets and left the rest behind, knowing he could purify what he needed later. What remained would be a gift to whoever found the car.
Once he began moving, hiking north on small roads through pastures bordering the jammed but deserted A16, Nicolai began to feel a strange sense of calm. Paris had been the opposite of Amsterdam. France, in general, was proving to be the opposite of the Netherlands, of Southern France, and of all of his time with Greggie’s crew. He’d sided with the crew (voluntarily, not recruited or coerced) for solidarity and protection, but as he walked alone, Nicolai realized he didn’t need any of that. He’d had friends back in school, but he’d always been his own man. Enzo had died with the last of old Nicolai. That had been the final moment for the boy he’d once been. Ever since, Nicolai had been a man who required no one. He needed nothing but what he had: his feet, his weapon, and his will. He could kill what he needed, and avoid the rest.
His Doodad, charged by the car’s engine, had a fresh fill of miraculous juice. The thing’s last charge had endured for an eternity, but still Nicolai only turned the Doodad on once he was outside Paris, then turned it back off after memorizing the route. On foot, he slowly made his way past landmarks in his mind: Amiens, Abbeville, into the park as he neared Boulogne-sur-Mer. He didn’t so much as touch his Doodad until he began to see signs for Calais but even then merely brushed his fingers across it. The way to the Chunnel was obvious and well marked. He could save the Doodad, and follow his nose.
During the global euphoria of the 2020s, it had seemed like everyone wanted to hold hands — those on both sides of the Chunnel included. During that prosperous time, the Eurotunnel Corporation had jumped at the opportunity to expand Channel Tunnel operations with enormous grants and interest-free loans. High-speed personal conveyances were becoming all the rage (all the luxury and personal space of a car, but far roomier and driven by magnets!), so in what was perhaps a less-bang-for-the-buck move than was strictly logical, Eurotunnel constructed a new lane under the Channel for rich gadabouts who wanted quick, easy, private access to both countries at a high price and with minimum fuss. The conveyances were propelled along the tracks by mags but were actually driven by gyroscope drive. Nicolai had been figuring his plan for weeks: He’d find a conveyance, push it onto the tracks (they were supposed to be ridiculously easy to move; he’d seen documentaries), start the gyro with a few chops on the manual pull-cord, then ride through to the other side. Without the magnet propulsion and at pull-cord speed, it wouldn’t get him there much faster than a moderate jog, but he could put his feet up and sleep, knowing the conveyance would be more or less unstoppable and impregnable until reaching the far end of the long, oval-shaped track.
What Nicolai found veered significantly from his hopes.
The Chunnel’s mouth was mostly caved-in, the nose of a Eurostar train somehow inexplicably wedged upright to smash its way through the Chunnel’s lips. The garage where the personal conveyances were held was across a concrete yard from the tunnel itself, and the span was littered with enormous wedges of concrete, almost as if the place had been bombed. The conveyances themselves seemed to have been ransacked, stripped to their wires as if to harvest their parts. There were crew signs painted everywhere, warning that this was the Chunnel Crew’s domain, and that violators would be disemboweled, their heads left on pikes at the city limits as a warning.
Sighing, seeing black places around the cave-in that only a single person could squeeze through, Nicolai marched away from the Chunnel and toward the waterfront. But the water passage was even worse. The crew who’d claimed the area (apparently the Chunnel Crew; they were hardly original) had camped out along the shore and erected huge bonfires. The day was gray, but Nicolai had been around fires like this before. They burned at all times, and the crew would rotate the grunt task of keeping them fueled. He would never be able to cross unseen — not by boat and not by swimming unless he wanted to ruin his supplies while drowning. Fifty km was a long way to swim for a boy who’d barely touched open water throughout his childhood.
He fell back and hid, thinking.
While eating stew from a can and swigging purified water that tasted of bleach, Nicolai thought. Did he truly believe that England held promises that Amsterdam hadn’t? Maybe, and maybe not. As cruel and dark as humanity could be, it always seemed to hop on in spite of itself. But hope was tricky, and could manifest as dreams of fancy, such as it had in Amsterdam. Alternatively, it could manifest in reality. So which was the rumor of an English airstrip that ferried refugees abroad to American borders? Was it fantasy or reality?
Nicolai looked at the choked tunnel’s mouth, now illuminated both from border fires outside and somehow from inside, as if from internal flames.
Fantasy or reality, did it even matter?
He was tired of living in limbo. He’d been comfortable and happy with his family along the Italian coast, and all he’d done since leaving his house to burn had been in silent pursuit of those feelings. He’d discovered how tough he could be and had proved himself as much more than a spoiled rich boy. But years had passed, and he was exhausted. Nicolai had never wanted to merely survive life; he’d endured this period of survival because he’d believed he would, one day, again be happy and comfortable.
Maybe there was an open airstrip in England and maybe there wasn’t, but there was no question that he had to reach it and find out for himself. If the rumors were true and he made it through, he could finally stop “just surviving.” And if he was wrong or died along the way, then that was okay, too. At least he wouldn’t be stuck living in the middle anymore.
He slept.
Dawn woke him early. It seemed counterintuitive to move in the light, but he’d
spent plenty of time observing crews and living among them. They were almost always nocturnal. Morning was the most likely time of day for a crew to be sleeping, often with only a guard or two half-awake on the group’s periphery. So he slid on his air converter, fitted the nose tube, seated his IR goggles on his head, then unshouldered his crossbow and nocked a bolt. He crept across the concrete-strewn lot like a thief, but there was no point to his stealth. Not a creature was stirring.
The conveyance lane was blocked, so Nicolai squeezed around the upended Eurostar engine and entered the train tunnel. Once he was a few hundred meters in, scant morning light from the mostly blocked entrance had dwindled to something less than gray twilight. He tripped a time or two, almost smashing his crossbow into the ground. After his toe encountered its third obstacle (whether it was part of the track or something that wasn’t supposed to be there, Nicolai wasn’t sure), he carefully set his crossbow aside and used both hands to seat the IR goggles. Too late, he wondered how the things might be powered, and if he’d brought them from Paris for nothing. They worked fine, though, and when Nicolai looked down he saw his own feet in beautiful detail, along with the crossbow sitting beside them. He picked it up and marched forward, now clearly seeing the way.
He moved forward, keeping the crossbow in hand but confidently lowering its aim. The air through the converter smelled canned and stale but kept him clear-headed. Nicolai metered the distance by guessing at the time and estimating his speed. He could sense his descent as the Chunnel sloped gradually downward. Then, later, when the tunnel began to level out and slope gently upward, two things struck Nicolai hard out of the blue.
First, the change in the floor’s pitch probably meant that he was halfway through. His hunger and biological clock seemed to indicate afternoon, and that squared with his covering twenty-five kilometers through relatively uneventful terrain.
Second, he was at the very bottom of the English Channel, with untold tons of water pressing down on him from above.
The notion made him look up. He saw the concrete ceiling, cobwebbed with cracks. The tunnel itself was dry, but he’d passed several small fires on the way in. What did those fires mean? How long could fires burn without being tended? Why were they in a tunnel anyway, and was the oxygen from the vents enough to fuel them? Were they burning specifically to sour the air — to deter (or kill) those who tried to cross without air purification? Who kept them burning, and how often did they come in to replenish them? Or rather, did the fire-tenders bunk in the tunnel with their own air supplies, on-duty and on-site? If so, where were they?
Nicolai, who’d kept his nerve for years and had forged himself a bulletproof shell, began to feel the squeeze of claustrophobia. It wasn’t just the feeling of being shut in. It wasn’t due merely to the water overhead, or the question of what might happen if the Chunnel walls — which might already be weakened — suddenly gave. What he felt was a more global sense of claustrophobia, as if he were trapped in his own skin. Trapped within his life. Trapped in who Nicolai Costa had become. He felt besieged and naked. Was someone watching him now? If the fires were in place to sabotage the air with carbon dioxide and soot, wasn’t it possible that the walls could be sabotaged as well?
His crossbow came up. Nicolai swung it around, waiting. But nobody came because nobody was in the tunnel with him.
It took a long time before he was able to start moving again. When he finally did, he did it tentatively, his former confidence gone. He still had at least twenty-five kilometers left, and felt suddenly sure that they wouldn’t be as easy as the first twenty-five.
Then it hit him: the tags on the rubble outside had been written in English, not French.
Whatever the Chunnel Crew was, its members were English. They weren’t merely holding the tunnel as their turf. They’d be massed on the English side, and if Nicolai had learned anything about the average crews’ mentality, they’d consider all of England to be theirs…and would have made it their mission to keep intruders from moving in via the single remaining choke point.
Nicolai felt cold. He was halfway in, beneath untold tons of water, in a pitch-black tunnel that, if not for his goggles, he’d be unable to navigate by sight. The entire thing might be rigged, and he might be facing unforeseen opposition who’d laid him a trap — a trap into which he’d dutifully climbed.
Sure enough, a few kilometers farther on, the tunnel brightened with a flickering glow of a fire. Slowly approaching it, Nicolai found that most of the huge blaze was burning charwood, a synthetic condensed hydrocarbon material manufactured in the ’20s as a replacement for coal in applications that required combustion rather than mere heat. The fire was massive and blocked most of the tunnel. Nicolai could only approach so closely due to the heat, but the blaze was clearly being fed oxygen through the tunnel’s ventilation system. Transportation engineering turned to terror engineering. It seemed fitting.
The presence of charwood meant that the fire, duly oxygenated, would burn for weeks without tending. That meant that Nicolai wasn’t necessarily facing a mass of fire-tending crew members on the other side, but it did mean he was facing one hell of an impassable obstacle.
He backed away and sat, assessing his options.
He could go back. Surely, that was the fire’s intention.
Or he could try to squeeze around the flames. There was room to one side, but the heat was murderously oppressive, and the smoke being released by the blaze was equally oppressive — bad enough that there must be some kind of petroleum product (probably tires) at the fire’s base. Nicolai knew why they’d done that: to overwhelm air systems like the one he was wearing. Only so much airborne debris could be filtered, only so much carbon dioxide could be scrubbed, and only so much oxygen could be generated. Nicolai had recharges for the system, but he’d already run through all but two of them. The fire would easily end the one he was working on now, and maybe kill the other. Either way, he’d be sunk if he encountered a second fire…and given that the tunnel would slope upward until it reached its end, it seemed likely that what remained would be filled with more of what this fire was belching.
If Nicolai tried to go through, he’d suffocate and die — and that was his best-case scenario, assuming he wouldn’t burn to death.
He strapped his crossbow to his back and began to march forward defiantly anyway. So what if it killed him? He was tired of living in limbo. He’d make it to the fabled English airstrip, or die trying.
As he neared the fire, the air converter began to beep. He would have to back off. A quick look at the readout showed him that the current recharge had failed, already overwhelmed by the blaze. He shook his head, popped in the final cartridge, and moved forward to try again.
Now he only had one shot left.
Nicolai felt the heat then began to run toward the fire. It felt like he was racing toward a blast furnace, but he never questioned whether he should turn around. He imagined his skin beginning to blister and moved faster. His mind painted a macabre scene of his flesh melting from his grinning skull as his hair burst into flames.
He ran faster. And faster. And faster.
Nicolai practically dove through the space between the flames and the tunnel wall then barely caught his footing as he sprinted forward. His pant legs had caught fire. His backpack was ablaze. He’d rammed his arm into something sharp in the fire and could feel blood starting to run. Heat overhead told him that his vision had come true; his hair really was on fire. He had to stop, roll, and extinguish the flames, but doing so would mean death. It was still too hot; he was too close; the air was too black with foul smoke — enough that he couldn’t even see with the goggles.
As flames licked his skin, he kept running.
Just as he was beginning to feel safe enough to drop and roll, the air converter began to beep again.
He couldn’t stop. He had to outrun the poisoned air. He could see nothing but smoke. He had to find fresh air that wasn’t there. He was out of recharges, still at least twenty ki
lometers from England, on fire, out of breath, and about to die. The Chunnel Crew had done their job without even being present. The Italian runner had tried to make his break into their country, and he’d fallen. He would burn, and he would die.
Nicolai began to heave then tripped and fell. He was out of wind, and the last trickles of good air were just now coming through his nose tube. The flow dried, and he sniffed hard, gasping through his nose, willing the recycled smoke to become fresh air. But there was nothing but bile.
He stilled. The IR goggles showed him the ceiling, revealing as some grand joke that he’d muscled past the worst of the fire. He would die with a fine view of the Chunnel ceiling — spiderwebbed with cracks, still holding, with tons of saltwater overhead, waiting to reclaim what was rightly theirs.
Nicolai’s vision failed as he began to black out. He thought, So this is how it ends — in English, no less, because he’d been that ready for England. Hundreds of years ago, some of his ancestors had boarded slow boats across the ocean to America because America was supposed to be the Land of Opportunity. Things came full circle. Nicolai, if he’d found boats instead of planes, would have done the same if he’d lived.
Then a thought occurred to him: If I’ve blacked out, why am I thinking?
It was a worthy question, but it was pointless. He was dead. Blacked out and dead. He must be dreaming the dreams of the dead, because…
There was a beep, surprisingly familiar.
A second passed. Two seconds.
The dream of the dead was vivid with reality. He could hear the crackling of a huge fire. He could smell acrid smoke. He could feel heat and the pain of charred skin.
Nicolai sat up.
He removed his IR goggles, finding that he could see fine by the light of the now-distant, enormous fire. He must have flailed enough to put out his own fires, but by the flickering orange light, he could see that all of the goggles’ readouts had gone dark. They’d stopped working. But judging by the way his head was clearing, the beep had been the restarting of his air converter. He’d lost sight but regained breathing. A fair trade.