Lie of the Land

by Michael F. Russell

  13

  Sitting on the roadblock on the north road out of the bay, Carl pulled Howard’s deltameter out of his pocket. Howard must have had it in his own pocket, his body wet and cold from six days lying on the hill. Carl sniffed the phone, expecting the lingering scent of putrefaction, but it just smelled of plastic. One day he would be able to leave the redzone; the deltameter would tell him when it was safe. It would point the way to when he could get back into his car and drive.

  Better park Howard’s car somewhere. Garage it. Top it up with biodiesel every now and again. Run the engine. Keep the tyres inflated, ready for when he could take off. To where?

  Somewhere. The road would open. The masts would fail and the delta field would open, and he could drive on to where he wouldn’t feel like someone in a cage. But that was for the future; just now he was an inmate who would have to do his time.

  There was an old stone cottage a short distance away from the road, chimney at either end, and no windows or door. It stank of animals and shit. Two rooms, the corroded hulk of a stove in one, and no floorboards or furniture in either. No internal walls as such but there were beams standing, holding up most of the ceiling. The bottom three steps of the wooden staircase were missing. Carl looked up. The roof was intact, apart from over one gable-end.

  He tried the staircase and it held, so he tried a foot on the first step, let it take his full weight. The wood protested, and he thought the whole lot would come crashing down. But it didn’t. He climbed and poked his head up, level with the upper floor to see what was what. A metal bed frame in one of two rooms, and nothing else. Musty smell of decay and the sheepshit stink on the ground floor.

  The staircase held him. The bare floorboards in the bedroom held him. Carl edged towards the bed, testing every step, pressuring the wood, listening, waiting to plummet. The skylight in the bedroom was still unbroken. The cobwebbed stalk of a light fitting, minus bulb and shade, hung in the middle of the ceiling. He sat, gently, on the bare metal springs of the old bedstead. It squeaked. Ribbons of wallpaper had peeled and drooped; most of the paint that had once been on the ceiling lay in flakes on the bare floor.

  Carl lay back and waited, his feet still on the floor, ready to rise at the first sign of trouble. But bed and floor held his weight. He lifted his legs onto the springs; they still had their bounce, and it wasn’t too uncomfortable, no, not at all . . .

  He closed his eyes.

  Eric. Lesley. Sarah. Eddie. All now populating a dream world. Were they real, or had he dreamed his previous life? This life involved Simone, and the dreaded by-product of real sex. It wasn’t even that; it hadn’t been sex, not really. What had it been? Comfort. A gift from terror. She hadn’t been wearing underwear. Didn’t say anything to him, afterwards, just left the room. Spunk on the carpet. He blanked the details, the pressure, and the urge.

  At least with CivCon and food riots he knew what he was dealing with – all that stuff had origins that could be understood, oppression that could be traced and plotted. Even an ugly world moulds itself around a person, and they become the impression it makes of them.

  After a while he found closing his eyes easier than keeping them open.

  He was grateful for extinction.

  •

  It was dark when Carl came back to the hotel. As he reached the back garden he heard a stag’s bellowing moan echo round the dark hills, sounding his power. George had told him they’d be shagged out in a few weeks after the rut was finished. Carl let himself in quietly and listened for activity. The clock, ticking in the lobby, was the only sound.

  His eyes grew accustomed to the dark. There was always light, he just had to give himself the chance to see it, to stand and look until the black released the objects it was holding. Carl made his way to the kitchen, found the lamp on the table, and the box of matches. He opened the door of the stove to warm up. Lighting the lamp, he sat at the kitchen table.

  Outside, the wind was picking up. In the silence he could hear dry leaves scraping against the back door. Fried fish and potatoes were warming in the oven, enough to take the edge off his appetite. As he chewed the food, he thought of the sleeping village, and him creeping back to it, stealing into this house, like a burglar breaking in. Was it a foetus or an embryo? He knew there was a difference. It was all a matter of time. Maybe it was awake, percolating its mother’s nutrients, more thing than person, inside the sleeping Simone; maybe he and it were the only two entities awake in the village.

  He heard a noise in the corridor.

  The door opened. It was Simone, in her dressing gown, yawning, candle in hand

  Carl collected himself. ‘I thought I was being quiet when I came in.’

  ‘People are never as quiet coming in as they think,’ she said. ‘I just wanted to tell you something.’

  Carl stiffened.

  Simone warmed her hands on the stove. ‘Adam told me that they could use someone at the forestry. One of the guys hurt his arm. If you’re feeling up to it – I don’t know if you are – you could fill in for him.’

  ‘Doing what?’

  ‘I’m not sure. Helping cut more of those probably.’ She pointed at the basket of logs by the stove.

  Instinctively, he wanted to say no. He didn’t want anything to do with Simone’s twat of a brother, or anyone else for that matter. He thought for a second.

  ‘I’ve never used any forestry machinery before. Maybe I’d just get in the way.’

  ‘You don’t have to use any machinery. He said he could use you.’

  The wind gusted against the kitchen window, moaning in the chimney flue as the rain started.

  He told her he would think about it.

  •

  Hard workers. All of them. Cutting wood. Catching fish. Growing food and fixing things. Everyone mucking in, unless they were too old or too young. Everyone doing their bit. Everyone except him, the parasite feeding off the hard work of others, eating their food, absorbing their heat, shagging their women. Too clever to get his hands dirty like the hard workers. He can hardly hold a hammer. Where does he go during the day? What’s he doing mooching around the hills when there’s work to be done? Let him get on with it. Get a grip. Get his head down and lend a hand. Do his bit. Muck in.

  Well, the hard workers could all piss off. Let them watch him. Let them invent whatever stories they wanted.

  It all came down to calories — energy. Young kids got the most, followed by working men and women. It was Howard’s first-winter survival system. Carl wasn’t young and he wasn’t exactly useful. He was now on the bottom rung of the rationing ladder; he may as well have had a yellow U for useless stamped on his forehead. He lay on the bed, lime-green alcopop bubbling in his stomach, and fell asleep. In his dream, a giant adder was coiled and standing, at the foot of his bed, watching, tasting the darkness with its flickering tongue.

  14

  Being under surveillance, with no escape possible. He was used to that. Emails, texts and calls intercepted. His ID a permanent locus on the CivCon watchlist. Anonymity was a thing of the past for most people. At least he wasn’t safety-chipped, like the kids. What he did, where he went, what he said and who he said it to, was of sufficient interest to someone, somewhere, that various procedures were enacted to ensure it was all logged and cross-indexed, put through pattern-recognition filters, and presented as a case file to some CivCon technocrat. Liberty and incarceration were entirely matters of procedure, depending on what Sentinel recommended. After a while, he had learned to live with that. If there is no immediate physical threat, people can learn to live with just about anything. There was nothing he could have done about any of it, so ignoring it as best he could seemed to make sense, otherwise it would have driven him crazy. Same applies now.

  After a few days spent mulling it over, Carl finally decided to act on Simone’s suggestion. Walking up the track from the north road he could hear the forestry machines before he saw them, smell the strong, sweet scent of freshly cut pine. Splint
ered branches, their fibrous ends wrenched apart, littered the track up to the conifer plantation; caterpillar chains had gouged a mudtrail over the rough ground. He followed the trail and the noise of the machines until he came to a clearing. There were guys there he recognised, a pick-up truck and a Portakabin. Through the trees, Carl caught glimpses of the felling machine, its claw reaching out to grip a ten-metre trunk, cutting it at the base, turning it as if it weighed no more than a broom handle. Each trunk was stripped of branches and sliced in ten seconds flat, puffs of blue smoke belching from the machine’s exhaust. The roar and the wrath of a huge beast, smashing a path through the trees as it harvested low-grade carbon.

  Stacks of cut trunks were waiting to be lifted by another machine onto the pick-up truck. George had said there were seven in the forestry work crew. Today, there were only two guys in the Portakabin, one older man, late fifties, wearing thick black-rimmed glasses, dozing in a plastic chair, a cap on his head and booted feet crossed on the tabletop. The other, a thick-necked younger man wore an oily orange boiler suit and was playing a hand-held gaming machine. It took him a few seconds to realise that Carl was standing in the doorway. The game-player looked up, kicked the sleeper’s boots to wake him up.

  ‘The gaffer said you might be along. You were with that other guy when he died, the bald guy.’

  ‘Howard,’ said Carl. ‘Yes, I was. I’m Carl, by the way.’

  ‘I know,’ said the nameless gamer. ‘And you got pneumonia on the hill.’ There was nothing like the direct approach; a smirk on the guy’s face, the trace of secret amusement. The CivCon smile.

  ‘Yes, in both lungs,’ said Carl, trying the bluff approach. ‘That’s the kind of double I could do without. Sorry, I didn’t get your names.’

  Gamer toggled his thumb, first at himself. ‘Casper. And this is Shit for Brains.’

  Shit for Brains stretched himself from his doze. ‘You’re a twat, Casper,’ he laughed, arms crossed, boots still on the tabletop. ‘It’s Dennis. So you’ve come to join our band of merry men have you, Carl?’

  Carl said yes and tried to see the funny side of it. He’d once shadowed a fire crew for the night: two call-outs, one a faulty fire alarm and the other a chimney fire. Mainly, there seemed to be a lot of eating, cleaning and playing of pool involved in being a firefighter, but Carl managed to get 1,200 words out of it. These jokers, Dennis and Casper, were different. He would have to get along with them, maybe for a long time. This was work of a different kind.

  Almost two hours later he was halfway up the forest track when he stopped what he was doing. Though the day was cold, the exertion had warmed him. After dragging about twenty loads of branches up the hill, something important dawned on him. He hadn’t really thought of it when Casper had shown him his job for the day, but now he was starting to wonder what the fuck he was actually doing.

  He looked back down the forest track to the Portakabin, where a droning crane-lift grabbed a clawful of man-sized logs and dropped them onto the back of the pick-up. The machine in the forest had stopped felling and stripping; Casper and Dennis were standing around waiting for the driver of the crane to finish loading. A few at a time, the claw-lift picked up the trunks of spruce and placed them expertly in the vehicle, which rocked as each new load was banged down. There are supposed to be seven guys in the wood crew, thought Carl: one’s doing the work, two are standing around, and four aren’t even here. He looked at the head-high stack of offcuts he’d built up over the last two hours.

  Why the fuck was he dragging bundles of useless branches further up the forest track? He dropped the rope and walked back to where the logs were being loaded. The more he thought about what he’d been doing, the more it didn’t stack up, so to speak. And Casper giving it the old CivCon look. That bothered him. Something wasn’t right, and Carl had a gut feeling that the wrongness of the situation was at his expense.

  The pick-up was loaded with twenty or so logs, then it rumbled off towards the village. Someone at the boatyard would chainsaw the wood into smaller logs for the fires of Inverlair. Another guy, blond crew cut and red scar on his cheekbone, got out of the claw-lift; Casper was sitting on the Portakabin’s step, playing his game as Carl walked over to him.

  ‘I was just thinking there,’ said Carl, pointing back up the track. ‘Why do all the offcuts have to be moved up the track?’

  In reply came the smirk, the secret smile. Casper shrugged. ‘Site management,’ he said gruffly, fiddling with his game.

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘See the gaffer if you want an explanation,’ Casper said, glancing at his mate. The blond man laughed, turned back to the claw-lift. ‘Adam’ll fucking batter you for dropping him in it.’

  Casper just giggled, glanced up at Carl. ‘See the gaffer.’

  As he walked back to the village, Carl was sure he heard the words ‘site management’, followed by more laughter.

  At the boatyard, he saw Adam’s pick-up, heard a rattling chainsaw make short work of the spruce trunks. It was a cold day. Though the sun was out and there were few clouds, it was breezy, from the east. That usually spelt cold and dry, George had said.

  Adam Cutler had plugged an electric chainsaw into a biodiesel generator and was oblivious to Carl standing at the gate. When he finally caught sight of him, Adam eased up on the revs and lifted his goggles. He came over, leaving the chainsaw idling on a bed of fresh sawdust.

  ‘You finished already?’

  ‘Not quite,’ said Carl. He rubbed his stubble. ‘I’m sort of wondering why I have to move that stuff at all. It doesn’t make sense.’ His eyes narrowed. ‘If you’re taking the piss . . . I’m not interested.’

  Adam grinned. ‘Oh, lighten up for fuck’s sake.’ He shook his head. ‘Can you not take a joke?’

  Carl frowned. ‘A joke?’

  ‘Yeah, the guys are just messing with you. Of course there’s no need to move the fucking branches, they just want to see how you take it, that’s all, see who they’re dealing with.’

  ‘Right,’ Carl said. ‘I see. There’s plenty to laugh about, I suppose. It’s a very . . . humorous situation, this.’ He gestured at nothing in particular. ‘Everything’s funny. Hilarious, if you look hard enough.’

  Striding back to his chainsaw, Adam waved Carl away. ‘Oh, come on, man. People respond to things in their own way. Crying about it won’t put food on the table, and that’s what’s important right now, more than ever.’ He picked up the chainsaw. ‘The work crew get more food because they work, so thank your lucky stars you’re on it.’ He revved the chainsaw. ‘And thank my sister as well,’ he shouted.

  Over the next few days, Carl turned up for work, cut kelp for the biofuel processor plant; the extra food, his work rations, slipped down nice and easy. He moved from Room 14 into Room 7, casting off some of the traces of death. Three days later, when there was no need to cut any more logs or kelp, he went down to the pier to help unload the Aurora of its catch of mackerel and pollock. Even that task only involved taking a few boxes to the community-centre freezers on a handcart. People were getting fed up of eating fish every day, but alternatives were thin on the ground, apart from venison and the odd rabbit or grouse shot by the old gamekeeper. He learned, as he guessed, that Casper was a nickname and that it was indeed connected with the friendly ghost. They’d never be bosom pals.

  After a week, Carl arrived at the clear-felled forest. Today he was supposed to learn how to operate the log-grabber. The guys were in the Portakabin.

  ‘Adam wants to see you,’ said Casper, without looking up from his game.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Dunno. He’s at the house.’

  Dennis was paring a piece of wood with a penknife. He didn’t look up either.

  Carl assessed the situation. ‘I’ll nip down later.’

  Shifting in a plastic chair, Dennis coughed. ‘I think he wants to see you now.’

  ‘Now? I’ve just got here.’

  ‘Yep,’ chirped Casper, his eyes still gl
ued to the action. ‘That’s what de man say.’

  They wouldn’t meet his eye. He turned on his heel and set off.

  Adam’s house, a massive harled bungalow, was one of eight ranged in a line behind the main part of the village, on the northern headland. Carl walked the main road back from the forest and along the headland until he reached the track that led to Adam’s house. Built on top of a double garage and partly buried in the hillside, the house was shielded by a belt of mature willow trees that provided shelter on the seaward side.

  He didn’t like this; no, not one bit. Something was wrong. He knocked on the heavy varnished back door. A woman in her early twenties opened it. She was small, fair-skinned, with long hair tied in a ponytail, dark rings under her blue eyes. She told Carl that Adam was in his office.

  Some people are touchy about their places of origin, especially when they’re living somewhere else. The woman was definitely from either America or Canada. Carl recognised her. She’d been too hungover, the day SCOPE had gone live, to go with her friends for a drive. Her friends never came back.

  What could Adam want with an office?

  It wasn’t really an office as such, more a storeroom, though a semi-circular desk had four screens arranged upon it. Three of them still had cellophane wrappers around them, brand new.

  Another door was open. Footsteps sounded from below, coming up stairs. It was some kind of cellar, probably down to one of the garages below.

  There was no greeting from Adam. ‘This was going to be my nerve centre,’ he said, pointing to the screens. ‘Links with the boatyard and with both fishing boats. A monitoring system for the biofuel plant – we had a CivCon contract to serve their Inverness depot. We even had a contract in place with a seaplane firm; it would have cut through a shitload of biosec red tape. Just think about it: shellfish delivered fresh to European buyers in a few hours.’ He pressed the tip of his index finger against one of the screens. He pushed, applied a little more pressure, and the screen fell off the desk, corner first, crashing onto the floor. ‘Every litre of diesel and every rivet and every lobster. Every debit and credit with every customer and supplier, logged automatically.’ He smiled. ‘My accountant would’ve loved it.’