Where Men Once Walked

by Mark L Watson

  “What the hell now?” the Dutchman asked despondently.

  White dust blew across the ground and stuck against their clothes.

  For a long time nobody said anything and they sat there burning in the beating sun and gathered their strength again and eventually it was the kid who rose first.

  “Come on” he said without inflection and began to slowly walk away to the north without looking back.

  The airmen watched him for a moment and then each got up without speaking and followed behind him. There was nothing to discuss. They could not sit there on the rock in the open and, whether they felt they had the strength or not, they knew they had to simply walk or die there.

  They passed, slowly and in silence, across the dusty hilltops, following the track where it had etched into the rock. It faded and reappeared and bent and wound up and then down and they lost it and refound it again until, in the blurred distance, a string of power lines crossed their route.

  Beyond them to the north a tarmacked road glimmered silver against the red and it shook in the haze of the heat there and at that time the sight of it alone was their saviour.

  They clambered down the loose hillside to the road where it was carved in the valley floor like an ancient river and there was no traffic to the south and no traffic to the north and they listened but there was nothing there to hear.

  They walked along the carriageway for a couple of miles until they saw to the west the towering torn skeleton of a disused power station of some type they couldn’t know. They rested there in the shadow of the great rusting tower which was beaten by dust and graffitied from years gone by. They ate grasses that they found growing in the shade and the Dutchman picked apart a cactus and sucked out what little moisture was inside and he left thorns in his fingers and didn’t care. The sun dipped behind the hills and the air grew cool and the men drifted to sleep on the hard stone floor with their heads rested on their arms and each man completely parched almost to the point of death.

  They slept an uneasy sleep. The kid’s head swirled with nonsense from the delirium of the hunger and the thirst and the heat and he passed in and out of consciousness throughout the night.

  He woke and sat up and watched through spinning vision a sand gecko scuttle past and investigate the sleeping Dutchman. It heard him shuffle where he sat and it froze and stayed that way for some time before looking sharply left and then sharply right and zipping away again into the night in an instant. All the kid could think was that he wished he could have eaten it. He heard an owl calling in the dark and stood to see it but its call was lost and as he sat back down it called again. He rose once more and walked to the open but saw nothing and when he sat down it called a third time and he cursed it and went back to sleep.

  He woke again later to the same call, though he couldn’t tell if minutes or hours had passed, and he lay awake listening in the dark.

  He had forced himself, throughout what trials they had faced thus far, to remain relentlessly positive but he felt, sitting there in that open country protected by nothing at all, that his odds of survival had diminished incalculably. He had tested his own resolve again and again and he felt pride that he had made it so far in a world he had thought would be so against him but the spirit and charity of many others had helped him through.

  He knew that without those others and without the Dutchman and the American he would not have succeeded as far as he had but he also knew that the hardest journey was afoot and he wasn’t sure he would even make it through the night.

  He sunk into a despair and before he knew it he sunk again into sleep and when he woke next the sun had broken over the mountains and the rocky ground was spattered in yellow light that made each stone jump in a ballet of sparks and, though he was starving and dehydrated, he pulled inside himself all negativity and found the renewed force to stand again to continue onwards.

  The road was long and hot and empty and wound through the hills for mile after mile, bereft of travellers of any kind and no bird or lizard or jackrabbit showed itself even once.

  After an hour of walking, the road sloped gradually into the river where the water had risen and fifty feet beyond that it climbed back out of the other side and continued into the hills and they sat in the water fully clothed and soaked themselves.

  At midmorning the road finally burst out from the red rocky hills and swept around to the west and in front of them the land fell away down the hillside into the flooded remains of a town beyond.

  Brown water billowed around the ruined old buildings and the slow flowing white waves pulsed in from the gulf and gathered debris against the walls. The tops of the white stone buildings poked out like tiny islands and the place was dead and quiet and long-deserted. Gulls swooped down across the destroyed town picking what they could from the water.

  The glistening white and emerald sea stretched out to the north and to the east to the very horizon and in the distance they saw the flotilla of survivors peppering the flat water.

  They walked along the ridge, looking down to the town and crossed the bridge where the water ran beneath it and the concrete was cracked and breaking and they ran across one at a time for fear of it falling apart under them. They walked apart from each other, spread across the road, for no man had anything worth saying to the next as everything that could be said had been said already and that way they continued along the outskirts of the sunken town until eventually the silence was broken.

  The kid called to them.

  The men stopped and slowly turned.

  He left the road and scrambled down the rocks where they dropped into the water below and clambered down the side of the bank hurriedly.

  The airmen walked across to the edge but said nothing.

  The kid had already reached the bottom as he moved with pace and he reached the line of palms still growing from the dry earth. Hanging in great bunches from the lower limbs, the bundles of red and yellow fruit were drying in the heat and some had fallen to the rocks. The kid awkwardly climbed the side of the tree and pulled one down and both he and the bunch fell to the ground.

  “What are they?” the Dutchman called from above.

  The kid picked himself up and admired the huge bundle of fruit pods in his hand. He held them up proudly to the others.

  “Dates”

  The American and the Dutchman climbed down the loose rocks to join him and between them they set about pulling more bundles of fruit from the trees.

  When they were done they sat on the rocks in the shade of the palms and ate the fruit until they could eat no more. It tasted so good to them that each man swore there that it was the best thing he had ever eaten and that he would need no other food for all the time he lived.

  When they were done they tied bunches together with palm leaf so they could be carried and they hoisted them back up the hillside and walked the road above with the fruit hanging from their backs like packmules.

  With new energy and their spirits rejuvenated by sugar they continued on the road where it curved around the edge of the floodplain and across another stone bridge where it turned to the south past the submerged offramps and they entered again into the hills.

  The road was straight and remorseless.

  It continued, unfazed by heat and time, shouldered by nothing but dry rock.

  Skeletons of trees stood hauntingly on the hillsides watching them with black hollow eyes and wiry arms. A yellow abiard darted from rock to rock in the blink of an eye, and for many hours that was only living thing there was to see.

  Still the road went onwards, unfazed by heat and time.

  They ate more dates and left what remained for the effort it took to carry them outweighed their benefits and before too long they felt sick again.

  The rocks rose and sank and faded from red to white to black and in the heat their vision swirled as though it had no place and their thoughts became nonsensical. By midafternoon the gaps between the three walkers had stretched apart and each man was focu
ssed entirely on his own pursuit through the desert. There was nothing they could do but to breathe and to walk and both were becoming impossible in the heat.

  At some place on the road, indiscernible in that country, the American heard the kid shout out from behind him.

  He stopped and slowly turned around and behind him, some hundred yards back, the kid was standing in the centre of the road with his hand in the air beckoning him back and another hundred yards further behind him the Dutchman was on his knees.

  They ran to him.

  He was buckled in two on his hands and knees on the tarmac, breathing quickly. His face was red and he was wretching.

  When the American asked the problem the Dutchman couldn’t respond and continued to pant until he toppled sideways onto his hip and laid flat on the hot tarmac.

  The kid looked up to the American with his eyes wide

  “What is it?” he cried.

  The American looked just as worried.

  “Dehydration. Heat stroke. Get him out of the road, now”

  They picked the Dutchman up by the arms and pulled him to the side of the road into the rocks and carefully placed him back down again in the shade of the cliff.

  The kid crouched next to him.

  “Breathe slowly”

  The Dutchman batted him away with the back of his hand. He wretched.

  The American looked onwards up the road.

  “We need to find help, we can’t go on and he won’t survive sitting here”

  “What do we do?” the kid asked, his voice shaking with desperation.

  “I’ll find someone” the American said, standing, “wait here with him”

  They exchanged a look between them and each knew the other didn’t believe it possible there in the desert but the American knew he had no choice.

  The Dutchman started to get up and toppled sideways onto the rock and crashed down in the red dust.

  The American put his boot on the Dutchman’s leg.

  “Sit down, and stay there”

  He looked at the kid.

  “Wait for me”

  The kid watched him wide-eyed and said nothing and the American looked once more at the Dutchman and it could have been construed as the look of a man unsure of his return and he held the gaze for a moment and as he turned he blinked slowly.

  He wiped the sweat from his forehead with the back of his good arm and turned and set out along the hazy silver road at a quickened pace, his shoulder drooped for the rifleshot wound.

  The kid watched him go off into the heat like a nomad without his caravan and eventually he disappeared from view entirely and the kid turned back to the Dutchman who was slumped against the rocks with his eyes closed.

  He took his shirt off and draped it over the Dutchman’s head and the Dutchman coughed dryly and opened his eyes though only for a second.

  The kid sat down next to him on the dusty hard ground in the shade of the cliffwall and let his head hall into his hands and the world of orange darkness behind his eyelids spun and he could hear the blood rushing in his temples and he let out a long breath and then just sat there.

  It was an odd joining of dreamworlds where in one instance he was with his nephew on a boat trip many years ago and then, in a flicker, he was on the old stone bridge watching the boy carrying the television through the flooded town and then his nephew appeared next to him there on the bridge and, when the floating bus hit the boy, he wasn’t there with his nephew at all but on the banks of the Nieuwe Merwede with a punnet of berries watching the geese soar. The geese fluttered and he heard a voice and a car approaching from somewhere and then the geese disappeared to white and then to grey and he felt sick. The car came closer and he could hear its engine roaring all around him and then there were more voices and the grey cleared and he could see the kid sitting above him in the back of the truck and the two men in the front, driving them at breakneck speed through the desert.

  His vision spun again and he tried to lift his head but it crashed back down and the kid looked at him and put his hand on him and told him to stay still and then everything again faded to black.

  The kid paced the small hospital corridor, drinking the warm bottled water which the nurse had given him. At the far end, the American was slumped in the plastic chair asleep like some slain Goliath.

  The lights flickered.

  The place was mostly dark though it was still midafternoon.

  A man ran past in desert coveralls and his long hair tied up and he left sand where he ran and there was the shouting of voices somewhere behind the swingdoors but otherwise the place was empty. There were no beeping machines and no nurses rushing or patients on gurneys or waiting families and the walls were cracked and the place was hot and broken and smelled of death.

  An old newspaper lay on the little glass table and though the kid couldn’t read the Arabic script, he flicked through it for the pictures and could discern from what he saw the destruction that had overcome the planet. The front page showed a huge black and white image taken from a helicopter of a mass gravesite somewhere in the desert. Lines of shallow graves as far as the lens could capture, some filled and some empty and construction diggers and an imam walking the line giving blessings, each grave unmarked and without headstone or otherwise.

  Inside he flicked through the pages showing flooding at a great harbour where boats were upturned and fires burned from the water and a map showed the projected damage. There was a terrifying picture from above a vast dust storm of blackness so deep and so dense and so towering that nothing that went in came out.

  While the initial impact had been some thousands of miles away and many weeks prior, there appeared no end to the destruction it could cause and the kid feared that the end of the destruction would be the end of everything. He searched the pages for pictures of home and while he thought one he found may have been of London, it was unrecognisable and he could not be sure.

  They didn’t know how long it had been but after some time a young male nurse in blue coveralls came through the door and nodded to the kid.

  “He’s awake”

  The kid smiled.

  The Dutchman was lying in the metal bed with a drip connected to his arm, the electric fan next to the bed pointed straight at his face. The kid pushed open the swing door and stood and looked at him and the Dutchman looked up from where he lay.

  “How you doing?”

  The Dutchman cocked his head slightly.

  “What the hell happened?”

  “You nearly died out in the desert”

  The Dutchman said nothing.

  The kid smiled and walked over to the bed. There were three other beds in the room but they weren’t occupied nor even made up with sheets or pillows and the kid sat on the edge of the bed next to him.

  “We were in the desert, who found us?”

  The door swung open again and the American walked in.

  “You owe me one, featherweight”

  The kid pointed to the American.

  “That guy saved you, and me too really. He found help”

  The Dutchman shook his head.

  “Great, and he’s never going to let me forget this, eh?”

  “You would probably be stone dead if he didn’t” the kid said, smiling softly.

  “I don’t remember a damn thing”

  He scratched at the needle in his arm and wiggled it around under the plaster.

  “I walked for nearly three damn hours man, I pretty much died out there myself. If it wasn’t for workmen fixin’ up that bridge, that’d be it, they’d be bringin’ you out of there in a bag”

  “You’d been unconscious for a while by then, I didn’t think he’d make it back in time, or even at all. Longest three hours of my life that was. I thought you’d died multiple times” the kid added, “you were unconscious and I was ready to bury you there and go on alone”

  “You owe them workers a cold beer, man”

  The Dutchman nodded to himself.
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br />   “They’re here?”

  The American shook his head.

  “They went on and left, which is just as damn well as you ain’t got no money to buy ‘em one anyways”

  The door opened and the doctor came back into the room and checked the drip and checked his watch.

  “What’s in there?” the Dutchman asked, motioning to the drip.

  “All sorts of fun things”

  “How long do I have to be here?”

  The doctor reached into the cabinet next to the bed and took from it a small white bottle of tablets.

  “Well sir, this is very difficult to answer”

  He twisted the lid and tipped the bottle up on his palm and let two pills fall into his hand.

  “There are things to factor”

  He twisted the lid back on and put the bottle down. He put the tablets down on the top of the cabinet and looked at the Dutchman.

  “You should stay for between two and four days, I should carefully monitor your fluids and you should complete a full course of treatment. You need sodium chloride, you need potassium, you need treatment for shock, and you need to be carefully monitored for cardiac damage. Your friends here are also dehydrated and I have been giving them water with vitamins. You all need food and rest”

  “I hear you” the Dutchman interrupted.

  “But” the doctor said, resting backwards against the wall.

  The Dutchman looked up at him.

  “But, we do not have those things and that is where it becomes tricky, sir”

  He handed the tablets to the Dutchman and reached over and took the plastic cup of water and handed it to him too.

  “I do not feel happy giving you advice which goes against my extensive training, but these are difficult times”

  “What is that?”

  “Eat the tablets”

  The Dutchman put them both in his mouth and took a gulp of the water. The doctor took the cup back from him.

  “You need to rest for this night, but without the medications you should really be taking, I can not help you further. I will give you a bottle of sodium salt and glucose and you drink as much water as you can for as long as you can and stay out of the sun. I can tell you now you will vomit a lot and it will not be pleasant”