Under the Blue

by Oana Aristide

  For some time now, the spaces have been wider than before. More open. Human settlements are further apart. The feeling is that of a desert, not just desertion. Throughout the days, they struggle to find shade. There were trees, plenty of them, the whole length of their journey, but over the last few days their numbers have dwindled, until they disappeared entirely, and any lone tree they come across stands out in the ochre landscape like some precarious and valuable apparition, each one credibly the last of its kind. When they do find shade, it’s almost invariably by the side of some reddish rock, a bit off from the road, or in the shade of a house. They have to leave the Lioness in the sun with all the doors and the boot open, looking more like a golden beetle about to take flight than a car. When they return she is an untouchable pile of seething metal, giving off a sickening smell of molten rubber that he prays are not vital engine parts. They can’t touch her directly, and they sit on towels.

  Now and again he apologises to the car for the indignities she has to suffer.

  One evening he looks at the mile-count and panics over how little progress they’ve made, sees the lack of forward momentum as an undeniable sign that they are losing their minds. Despite the girls’ protests, he pushes on after dark. But in fact, it is an easier drive than he had feared. He doesn’t spot road signs until they’re so close it’s too late to read them, but the road is taking him neatly in the south-eastern direction that the compass indicates. If he makes enough progress tonight, he reckons that tomorrow they might reach Istanbul. He drives slowly on account of the darkness, the Lioness’s headlights falling on dead dogs and abandoned cars, bicycles, piles of garbage and a deflated football. He catches glimpses of dusty, illegible shop signs. The sky is clear but there is no moon, and they’re in some village or small town of sorts, the houses looming over the road.

  The girls fall asleep.

  They have never spent the night in a human settlement. He has not questioned that decision – it had always seemed sensible to drive on until they were in a field or a forest and set up night camp there. But now, when he’s tired and suddenly wants to stop, and can’t do that for sprawling houses, he asks himself why he doesn’t just stop. Is it fear of other people? Or is it the proximity to so many dead? Back in the day, how would he have felt about spending the night in a cemetery?

  A couple of times he thinks the town is finally coming to an end, the houses are becoming sparser, only for them to huddle around him again after the next turn. Sometimes he must be on wider roads, because the houses disappear from view on either side. But there are so many cars around he’s sure he’s still in a town of some kind. If it had been day, if the girls had been awake, this would have been a good time to stop and take some petrol, go into the houses and stock up on provisions.

  The Lioness has about a fifth of a tank left. If this continues, he’ll have to stop anyway and refill the tank from the canister in the boot.

  He drives on, mystified as to the magnitude of this place. He’s once again on a stretch of road without any houses, without even the ubiquitous garbage bags. But there are still cars here and there, and at one point he drives through what he realises is a roadblock that had been partially cleared. A strange feeling comes over him, a nagging impulse that he is missing something, some crucial clue, and eventually it overwhelms the fear of stopping.

  He listens to the girls breathing next to him. He switches off the headlights. As his eyes grow accustomed to the dark, he notices the length of the road ahead, straight as far as he can see. Then, he distinguishes shapes beyond the nearest vehicles. He sees a glimmer in the distance, and realises it’s a stretch of water. They must be near Istanbul – that explains the endless suburbs. He finally dares open the door. He walks over in the direction of the water. Something happens to him then, a readjustment of his mental map, almost like the GPS back in the day going, ‘Recalculating …’ He becomes aware that he is not on a road on the outskirts of a town, but on a bridge, that there’s water on both sides of him, that the bridge is enormous and so is the water.

  Yes: that dark, dead coast to the right is Galata, the European side of Istanbul, and at the other end must be Asia. When he was here last, in 1995 or thereabouts, he’d taken a taxi at night and infuriated the driver by asking him to drive up and down the bridge five or six times: he couldn’t get enough of the sight. The spectacle of this city, the wealth of lights. There was a harmony in the arrangement of the ancient metropolis, it sung with those lights. He can’t quite believe it, but this silent, dark land hides the Topkapi, and the Hagia Sophia, and the black mass that he can now hear sloshing against the shore is the Bosporus, where once yachts and fishing boats lit up the night. This bridge he’s on, from the shore it used to look like a lava flow, so full of cars and their headlamps. So full of life. He remembers how he felt watching it: full of a strange benevolence towards humanity; as though he was watching a sleeping child.

  And then, in the same breath, it hits him, how hopeless it is to believe that he can somehow make amends for the past. It is gone, the relevant moment in time is just gone, it’s wishful thinking to imagine that he can change the slightest thing about the past. The smidgen of authority that he has, what little power to shape things, it lies entirely in this mutilated future.

  ‘It was stunning,’ he tells the girls. ‘You should have seen it. Don’t know what I was thinking not waking you up.’

  Jessie, crouched on the ground in the shade of the service station, is looking incredulously out at the dusty expanse beyond the car park where Harry had stopped, some twenty miles from the southern outskirts of Istanbul. She and her sister slept through the night, and only woke up when the sun started baking their car.

  ‘Spires, minarets, yachts rocking by the shore of the Bosporus. Ramshackle houses, palaces, skyscrapers. Millennia of beautiful intricate layers.’ He’s remembering the Istanbul of twenty-five years ago. This, he knows, is the closest he’ll get to show it to Ash. It doesn’t feel like he’s lying.

  ‘It’s like the city was on pause, just waiting for someone to turn the lights back on.’

  ‘How’d you see all this in the dark?’ says Jessie.

  ‘The moon. The reflection in the water.’

  11

  To their right, a forest fire darkens the sky. They’ve become blasé about the fires; they no longer drive a long way around. Keeping an eye on the flames, they just drive past, raising the windows against the smoke and the heat, content to know that they’ve got an escape route should the wind pick up or change direction. This, he knows, is not prudent with so many blocked roads.

  They have left that fire behind them when they see a couple of burnt-out vans in the middle of the road. He stops the Lioness in front of the wrecks.

  ‘Go for it. We can squeeze through,’ Jessie says.

  The two vans blocking the road are not in a straight line across the tarmac, but at an angle, and with a bit of manoeuvring he might just be able to drive through. Jessie gets out of the car and walks over to the wrecks. She stretches her arms out at the narrowest point between them.

  ‘Try it!’ she shouts, and jogs back to the Lioness.

  Then there’s a sound, like the pop of a champagne cork. He is looking at the hedges where the pop came from, doesn’t notice at first that Jessie has fallen to her knees just within the Lioness’s open door. Her head is hanging low; it’s like she’s suddenly drunk and attempting to crawl into the car.

  ‘No!’ Ash shouts.

  A drone lifts from the bushes by the road. It darts halfway around the car, and shoots something that bounces off the chassis.

  That cork-popping sound again. He doesn’t know where to look, what to do.

  ‘Get her in!’ Ash shouts. She rolls down the window and points the rifle at the drone. The thing veers leftward and flees behind the burnt-out vans.

  He finally regains some degree of composure and reaches across the passenger seat to Jessie. She is completely limp, and he has to tug and tug at her, he
feels his head bursting with the effort. He manages to pull her into the car, her upper body on the floor and a tangle of legs on the car seat. He closes the door.

  There’s no blood. She cannot be dead.

  ‘It won’t fire, this thing won’t fire!’ Ash shouts at the rifle.

  The drone returns. Three pops in quick succession hit their windscreen but fail to break it.

  ‘Why won’t it fire?’

  Something inside him still hesitates, still thinks that he should get out of the car and tell everyone to calm down.

  He turns the wheel and the Lioness obeys, but she is sluggish, and there’s an odd sound from the back. The tyres, they’ve shot the tyres. He steps on the gas, forces the car to jolt forwards. He gives as much gas as he can, and she’s moving, but the wheel is impossible to hold straight and they’re lurching from side to side.

  The drone appears a few feet from his open window. Harry brakes, and the drone’s strange popping shots miss the car. He winds up his window and speeds ahead. ‘Close the window!’ he shouts to Ash.

  He looks in the rear-view mirror, but he doesn’t see her. He turns around. She’s slumped on the back seat, unconscious or dead, the useless rifle in her arms. ‘No, please, God, no.’

  He reaches over, wants to shake her awake, when he becomes aware of a roar. He turns around, just in time to see the helicopter that is blocking their way. Late, too late, he steps on the brake.

  *

  He opens his eyes. A framed piece of sky. A window? But why is it above him? He adjusts his focus and sees a steering wheel, too, just above his head. He doesn’t understand what he’s seeing.

  Sluggishly, he raises an arm and looks at his watch: it’s five past three.

  He tries to make sense of this information, but he feels very tired. He needs to rest some more.

  It bothers him that he can taste blood in his mouth, a disgusting, stale taste, as though the blood has been there for a while. He probes his teeth with his tongue and gives himself a jolt: it’s the tongue that’s sore; he must have bitten into it. And there’s this other pain, in his lower back.

  His legs are somehow above him. He turns to the left and finds himself staring into the tan leather of a headrest.

  So he is in the car. What a crazy angle.

  He tries to move his legs but freezes mid-motion: the girls. Where’s Ash?

  He turns to the right and sees Jessie there next to him, on the floor. He remembers now, remembers seeing her asleep only a short while ago. The thing that pushes into his back must be her knees.

  He cannot see the back seat from here.

  He tries to push himself up without putting any more weight on Jessie, but it’s impossible. He is facing the wrong way, his head down and his legs up. He kicks at the door, and eventually it flings open. But there’s a lurch in the whole car, they’re not stable. He looks through the windscreen, registers that the glass is dangling in a shattered sheet on the dashboard. Beyond it, the view is blocked by something metallic.

  He forgets again, everything, and has to lie perfectly still to collect himself. He gets distracted by the opening above him. It’s only two or three feet away, but it seems impossibly distant. He’s positioned completely wrong. He’d need to levitate out.

  Most of all he would like to go back to sleep.

  Ash. Where’s Ash?

  He turns on his side and manoeuvres his legs so they squeeze between the front seats, then he lets himself slide into the back seat. Ash is there, and he has to support himself against the door so as not to crush her. She looks to be sleeping, too.

  He kisses her forehead.

  The Lioness’s back window is shattered as well, but through that one at least he can see the road, and some distance away a roadblock. He crawls out on all fours, turns over once he is on the tarmac.

  He can hardly believe what he’s seeing: the Lioness lies on her side, skewered through the windscreen by a helicopter’s landing skids. The helicopter itself lies on its side as well, its windscreen shattered, the rotors mere stubs. The thing looks like a military helicopter, sharky and evil.

  He stands up, slowly, looks around. The world is the same as always – blazing hot, the daylight white and blinding save for a dark cloud in the distance. He staggers to the Lioness, pats the chassis. ‘We’ll fix you up in no time.’

  Then he walks to the helicopter and peers in through the side. The pilot wears a helmet that looks more like an astronaut’s than a pilot’s. But Harry doesn’t need to see his face – the man is sectioned in half by a broken rotor blade.

  He is worried now. He should get the girls out.

  Ash, in the back seat, is the easiest to reach. He kneels by the car, crawls halfway in, grabs her under the armpits and drags her out. He lays her down on the other side, in the shade of the helicopter. He listens for her breathing, checks her pulse. She has no visible injury.

  He goes back for Jessie.

  He circles the car twice, trying to find the easiest way in. ‘We’d need a door right here,’ he says, of the dust-covered underside of the car that is now vertical. ‘Of course, what we’d really need is to be somewhere else. Somewhere. Entirely. Different.’ There’s no other way in than the way he got out. Inside, he manages to stand on the side door and find the lever that fully reclines the passenger seat. He steps on something odd-looking, picks it up and realises it’s some kind of dart, or syringe. It should tell him something, he knows that; the thing causes another cramp in his gut. But he lets it fall to the floor, then he grabs hold of Jessie and somehow clambers out with her.

  ‘Best car in the world. Our Lioness,’ he pants. ‘Head-on collision with a heli. And look at us.’

  He checks up on Jessie as well. A large bruise on her left thigh, but otherwise nothing wrong.

  ‘What you both need is some water.’

  He opens the boot, and half their stuff falls out. The water bottles are intact.

  ‘Plastic is amazing.’

  It’s still five past three. Or his watch has stopped.

  He looks up at the sky. The sun is high. That dark cloud he saw earlier, it’s from a forest fire. He can smell smoke. There’s dust in the air.

  He sits by the girls and sprinkles water on their faces. He massages Ash’s hand, kisses it. He washes his face, then drinks greedily. He stretches his arms; nothing hurts really. He’s surprised he doesn’t feel better about things.

  He shifts a little to get a clearer view of the Lioness. It’s obvious what happened: the pilot tried to block their way, then, when he realised Harry hadn’t seen him, he tried to lift. But it was too late, and the landing skid hit the Lioness’s windscreen. The opposing forces of rotor and the car’s weight flipped the helicopter on to its side, causing the Lioness, now attached to the helicopter, to flip as well.

  Why is he crying?

  He remembers everything now. The drone. The syringe in the car; the thing shot tranquillisers at the girls. This means that Jessie and Ash weren’t just paranoid. And all along, he has been helping their pursuers with his messages.

  He stands up, turns towards the roadblock. Where did the drone go? What if there are more of them? Other helicopters?

  There’s no movement by the roadblock, but beyond it there is a wall of black smoke. The fire.

  They have to get out of here. He starts taking their stuff out of the car. He lines bags, bottles, food, cooker up by the car as though they are museum exhibits. It’s slow, but it can’t be helped, they won’t be able to carry everything and he has to pick what’s vital.

  Every so often he steps out from behind the car and checks the road and the sky.

  He comes across the spare cartridges in the boot, and remembers the rifle. Jesus, I did that too. He pulls it out from the back seat. Sitting spread-legged on the tarmac, he loads the weapon. There, they’re not defenceless any more. Soon, he knows, as soon as he’ll have time to think, he will feel very guilty indeed.

  A sound comes from behind the helicopter. It�
��s Jessie. She’s moving, trying to raise her head. He gives her some water to drink. She’s still not fully awake.

  He tries to shake her awake. There’s that whole bag of pills they’ve been lugging along, but what should he give her?

  The smoke is becoming really bad. That forest fire seems to be getting nearer.

  ‘Jessie!’ He shakes her again.

  He walks over to Ash, spills some more water on her face. She sputters and turns sideways. He is relieved, but he needs more than that. He needs her to wake up and walk.

  The sky has become reddish from the dust. This is one of his worst fears: they’re stuck on foot with a fire nearby.

  He keeps packing, in a frenzy now, but when he thinks he’s done and tries lifting the bags, they’re far too heavy.

  Should they leave the petrol? They will need to find a functional car with petrol in the tank, and its keys. He stands with the petrol canister in his hand, dithering, at the same time resenting the loss of precious seconds.

  They’ll leave it. After water, it’s the heaviest item.

  He hadn’t realised it but these last few minutes he’s been coughing. Jessie is almost fully awake; she is sitting on the tarmac. He crouches by her. ‘You have to wake Ash. Jessie! Can’t you give her something?’ Jessie’s eyes are drowsy, and her head wobbles. She appears drunk.

  He stands up, looks down the road. There are no cars that way. The other direction, it’s just the two burnt-out vans.

  If the wind doesn’t change direction, and if they don’t find a car very soon, they’re done for.

  Jessie coughs. For the first time, she looks at him as though she’s actually there.

  ‘Do you hear me?’

  She nods.

  ‘What happened? Where’s Ash?’ she says.

  ‘Here, here behind you. You have to get her to wake up.’

  Jessie turns, grabs Ash’s arm and pulls it. Ash opens and closes her eyes. He helps her sit up.

  Jessie has another coughing fit.

  ‘It’s the fire,’ he says. ‘We’ve got to get out of here.’