Where Men Once Walked

by Mark L Watson

  “Would he run alongside us if you left him?”

  “Who knows. Probably not. I said he wasn’t stupid but I don’t think he’s smart enough for that”

  The kid shook his head and stepped off the bike and opened the hold and took out the bag of grain. The dog watched it.

  He unfastened the top and poured some into his hand and walked away from the bike into some space and sat on the ground.

  The dog watched.

  The kid tossed a small handful of the untreated grain into his mouth and chewed on it. It was gritty and dry but didn’t taste bad. He poured a little more in his palm and held it out to the dog but didn’t make eye contact with it and the dog craned its neck forward and sniffed the air but didn’t move. The kid poured the grain onto the floor next to him and sat without looking at the dog.

  The man stood next to the bike watching.

  The dog watched the grain and the kid and it looked back at the man and after a moment it stepped slowly forward to the pile and sniffed at it and then licked it and stood turning its tongue at the grain in its mouth.

  The kid let it eat for a moment and slowly reached his hand out and put it on the ground in front of the dog and the dog watched it but didn’t move and when it had stopped watching the kid lifted it up slowly and stroked the dog’s head while it ate. He moved his hand backwards onto its neck and scratched behind its flybitten ears and eventually took it gently round the neck. The dog pulled but the kid had a grip on it and he rose to his knees and then his feet and picked the squirming dog up and walked back to the man.

  “Here” he said holding the animal out to him.

  The man took it in both arms without saying anything.

  “Sorry dog” the kid said as he climbed back onto the bike, “it’s for your own good, I guess”

  The man climbed back on to the bike with the dog and they set out again to the east along the waterline, past camps and flooded villages and fires on the land and fires on the water.

  They picked through tracks and fields without stopping and eventually at some time that evening the petrol tank on the bike drained its last drops of fuel and they scraped to a stop in the middle of the open countryside.

  The two men and the dog stood next to the motorbike in the cool of the dimming light.

  “You want to walk and get fuel?” the man asked.

  The kid looked around in every direction and then back at the man. He opened the container up from the bike and took out the matches and the knife and put them in his pockets and took the empty bottle and threaded his belt through the handle so that it hung from him and tucked the radio under his arm.

  “How far do you think we are from Port Said?”

  The man looked to the north.

  In the distance there was a faint glow on the horizon but little more.

  “A few miles”

  The kid shrugged.

  “Come on then”

  They walked along the water where the Suez had run until they saw in the distance against the dark sky the towering spires of the El-Abbasy mosque and the cranes of the docklands, signalling the location Port Said or indeed that where it had once been.

  The town appeared marooned entirely from the mainland and though much of it still stood, it was accessible by water only.

  “We can swim that” the man said to him.

  The kid nodded.

  “Probably”

  They stood for a while.

  “You wanna wait until morning and try and get out there?”

  The man agreed that it was probably the best solution and, while they had nowhere to spend the night, they would at the very least survive and could make a better effort to cross the water in full light.

  They walked slowly through the dark until they found a barn at the corner of a field where animals had once been kept and they sat together in the hay like rogue cattle. The dog was unsettled and sniffed around the place in circles again and again until eventually it found a place under a feeding trough where it lay with its ears pricked, listening to the night.

  “What’s in Austria?” the man asked as they sat in the dark. They had no food and no water.

  “A girl”

  The man nodded.

  “What’s in Warsaw?”

  The man smiled.

  “A lot of girls”

  They laughed.

  “My home, I’m from Poland, my family are all there. I am going to them”

  “What are you doing all the way out here?” the kid asked.

  The Pole said he had worked for a German drilling company and had been aboard a container ship trying to bring equipment back to Europe from Saudi Arabia when they were boarded by pirates. He said he had hidden for some time below deck and when it was quiet he had surfaced to find many of his colleagues dead and nobody at the helm and the ship otherwise deserted. He said the ship was still in motion and would have inevitably crashed and that he had gone overboard into the water and swam for two hours until he reached land somewhere south of Quseer. He said that he had no idea how long ago that was and that much had happened since and he had walked most of the way to where the two had met.

  “How’d you get the rifle?”

  The man shrugged.

  “Found it”

  “Does it fire?”

  “Yeah, but it’s no good. I have some shots left but I wasted too many trying to shoot birds for food. I’m not really a good shot”

  The kid smiled.

  “And the dog?”

  “It’s not my dog”

  They sat.

  “What about you?” the man asked.

  “What about me?”

  “What are you doing out here, riding around the desert like a bandit?”

  “I crossed overland from Myanmar. Through India and up the Gulf”

  The kid nodded.

  “On that bike?”

  The kid laughed and told the man some of his story and the man listened and chewed on a string of hay.

  “Does the radio work?” he asked when the kid had finished.

  The kid shrugged.

  “Maybe. It needs power”

  “So why are you carrying it about with you?”

  “Because there’ll be power somewhere, and when there is I can pick up any broadcasts there may be. Governments are sending out emergency broadcasts from everywhere they can, radio transmissions can work at such long range”

  The man agreed.

  The kid lit a small fire with the matches and some wood he pulled away from the stable and they sat by it and talked and eventually fell asleep next to each other in the hay with the dog looking on.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Port Said to the south Mediterranean Sea

  Daylight came early and flittered in through the old walls and danced on the hay and the kid rose and walked to the door, or to the space where the door had once been, and looked out.

  In the light he saw the horizon of Port Said, no more than a couple of miles across the water on which the low sun shimmered and bounced its blinding silver light.

  The Pole slept in the hay with his robe wrapped around him and the rifle cast off to one side and the dog nowhere to be seen and the kid watched him for a moment and scratched his head and looked back to the north and set out alone on foot towards the water.

  When he reached the edge he stood for a moment and thought.

  He took off the thawb and dropped it to the ground and tied the scarf tightly around his head and tightened his bootlaces and tucked the knife into the back of his trousers. He discarded the matches and unthreaded the flask from his belt and set it on the ground and stood and watched the water. He held the small radio in his hand and he thought about discarding it too for he would not make it across the water without it getting wet but he decided to bring it regardless and if it didn’t work then it didn’t work and nothing more would be lost. He slipped his belt through the handle and slid the radio around onto the back of his trousers and stepped forward in
to the water.

  Silhouetted birds glided and called above, black like flies in the distance against the backdrop of the old port town.

  The water ran cold into his boots.

  He walked through the shallows until he was at waist height and it levelled out there and he walked for some distance before it rose above his belt. He pushed through the muddy silt and stumbled over obstacles concealed beneath and pushed through driftwood and broken metal and wire and there were bodies there of men and children and cattle and birds and eventually the land beneath his feet dropped away and he sunk into the water to his ears and began to swim.

  He kicked and kicked and paddled with his arms and grasped at driftwood as it passed by for more than as hour without respite, until the muscles in his legs burned and pulled and his heart raced and his lungs forced themselves to work beyond their capability, and he even though he only passed a mile, he thought he would sink at any moment and nobody would ever know he had been there.

  He knew he was too close to give up and die there.

  His boots were heavy and holding him down and all he could think of was kicking them off but he knew he couldn’t. He knew that regardless of the torment and the pain, he would make it to the other side and when he did he would regret not having boots.

  To live or to die trying.

  He floated on his back and tried to catch his breath.

  The water stunk of everything that had died in it. His boots pulled his legs down and his muscles roared in pain trying to level them again.

  He repeated in his head that he was too close to give up and die there. Not after everything that had come before.

  He thought of home but he couldn’t focus and he closed his eyes for a moment and pushed everything from his mind and steadied his breathing and righted himself again in the water.

  He looked at the buildings to the north and took a breath and spat and pushed forward. He swam like he had been taught as a boy, slowly and calmly, taking strong steady strokes and remembering to take deep breaths as his arm came over. He thought of nothing but his breathing and when his legs tried to tell him to stop he told them he wouldn’t and this way he continued until his arm brushed past a fencepost under the water and when he stopped swimming his feet fumbled around and found ground below.

  He stood upright in the dirty water and screamed and smashed the water with his hand in celebration and in pain and swore to himself and stood for some time breathing heavily.

  The sprawl of Port Said lay wrecked ahead of him.

  He walked through the shallow water across the south of the city, past the auto factory and the squat old office blocks, shattered and creaking, their contents spilling from windows and floating mindlessly around their perimeters. The towering cranes to the north east stood up against the bright sky, black and strong and he knew that at the bases of those structures he would find the harbour.

  The ground rose and fell beneath his feet and at times he walked clear of the water and at times he swam again until he reached the highland, streaked with apartment blocks and at the school wall he nearly fell to the ground and sat for some time.

  He removed his boots and tipped the water from them and sat them upsidedown on the wall and removed his socks and wrung them out and laid them there too. The sun was burning his skin and he hoped his clothing would dry quickly and he took the keffiyeh and his shirt and laid them on the brickwork and stood the radio next to them.

  He laid back with his head on the stone and stared at the sky and lay dozing in the sun while birds circled overhead and his mind ran away from him to another place he did not know.

  In the distance the booming horn of a passing ship sounded against the silence and he sat and watched over the buildings to the north where it sailed. He smiled to himself for that was exactly the thing he had hoped to see there and he hoped that, while the town was flooded and derelict, there would still exist some kind of port where a boat could be boarded.

  He sat on the wall and watched it until it was out of sight. He could see no others but he knew they would be few and infrequent and he was happy to wait as long as it may take.

  He heard voices from the south along the road and he jumped down from the wall and watched as a ragtag group of wanderers passed by with sacks of items unknown, dressed in all fabrics and colours and one of them sang as he walked and they led dogs on chains and mules and ponies overladen with baskets and bags.

  The kid stood backwards against the wall.

  The front man was the tallest of the group, wrapped in a filthy shawl and he carried across his back two rifles of different types and wore a long beard thick with dirt. They walked slowly, looking around them everywhere for anything they could salvage or wear or eat.

  The kid ducked in behind the gate and waited for them to pass.

  He tried to peer around the edge of the wall to watch them as they went so that he would know it safe to come out from his hiding place, but he didn’t want to look too early and be spotted there. He sat on his heels in only his trousers and waited. He could hear nothing and the man’s singing faded away to the west somewhere behind the stonework and he leaned sideways to the edge of the old wall and looked around the corner and his heart leaped when he saw, not six feet from him, one of the nomads reaching up onto the wall for his boots. His heart thumped and his head shot backwards behind the wall again and his mind raced to determine what to do. He was sure in that split second that the man was alone but he knew he could be wrong and regardless he didn’t know how close the rest of the posse still were.

  He had fought too hard to swim with those boots to go and lose them like that. He thought of the Dutchman and the American and he made his call.

  He jumped out from behind the wall as the man was turning away with the boots in hand and grabbed the back of the man’s filthy long hair and threw him sideways against the brickwork. The man had not expected it at all and was not ready and stumbled sideways and lost his footing and crashed to the floor and slumped against the wall. His tunic fell open revealing a pistol in his belt and the kid put his bare foot down hard on top of it so it could not be removed and bent in and took the man by the scruff of the neck and held him down and the man wriggled and kicked and the kid took the pistol from him and stood up.

  The man dropped the boots and slowly raised his hands where he lay.

  The kid stooped and picked up the boots and set them down next to him. His knife was inside one of them. The gun wasn’t raised at the man but the man didn’t move regardless, his eyes wide and darting from side to side. The kid knew he couldn’t stay there like that, half dressed with the man on the floor at his feet and he watched the end of the road should the wanderers come looking for him but, as yet, there was nobody there.

  He took the socks from the wall and put them into the boots and took his shirt and pulled it on quickly and awkwardly and wrapped the keffiyeh loosely around his neck and took up the radio. The man pulled himself up to sitting and leaned back against the wall. He was wrapped in a greasy brown and white tunic, torn and soiled and charred at one corner. He wore a belt of leather and from it hung trinkets and a small coin purse of velvet and a few feet away on the ground the man’s satchel sat open.

  The kid walked across to it and the man went to stand and the kid levelled the gun at him for the first time.

  The man stopped.

  He looked into the bag, full of nothing more than rubbish and items once of value, discarded in every place that the man had travelled and the kid rummaged through them with a single hand while the other held the gun outstretched. He pulled from the pack a can of some food he did not know and a wrap of tobacco and he put them both in the pocket of his trousers and stepped away.

  The man said nothing.

  The kid picked up his boots and, without putting them on, nodded at the man where he lay and turned and rounded the corner and was away and, though he watched over his shoulder, he didn’t see the man again nor any of his posse.

  His
clothes were mostly dry though his boots squelched as he walked and he discarded his socks entirely for they were ruined anyway and beyond repair. He passed quietly east with the pistol in the back of his trousers and the knife in his boot and stopped in a derelict laundry building in a sidestreet and sat against the door and opened the tin with the blade. It turned out to be beans of some kind and he ate them cold and enjoyed them and set out again and by the time the sun was at its highest in the sky he had reached the point where the water flooded out from the harbour.

  The docklands were huge and reached up to the glaring golden sun overhead, silhouetted obelisks of old trade abandoned at the planet’s own whim. A slow warm breeze blew along the waterfront and the kid stood and regarded all before him and stood for some time as the thoughts turned in his head. The place was given to the sea and the only sound there was the gentle lapping of the waves at the concrete boardwalk and the occasional squawk of a passing gull, for even they had little to feed on.

  He continued to stand and watch the water and after some time he went to the edge and put his feet in the shallows and sat with his eyes closed in the sun like a tourist and that way he remained until he heard the shout and the crack of the rifle behind him.

  He turned quickly.

  Some distance back, the Pole was standing with the rifle pointed at the floor, frantically trying to load or reload the breech.

  The kid pulled the pistol from his belt and levelled it at the Pole and took aim and squeezed back the trigger and volleyed a single shot. A second later the Pole spun backwards, throwing the rifle across the concrete and crashed backwards to the ground, shouting.

  The kid kept the gun aimed and walked across to him where he lay on the floor and pointed it down at his head.

  The Pole wriggled backwards on the ground with his eyes wide. He was clutching his arm and blood was seeping through his fingers.

  “What the hell are you doing?” the kid shouted at him.

  The Pole was looking at his arm and breathing heavily.

  “You shot me” he screamed.