“Jesus Christ,” I exclaimed.
“Well, it's easier than digging for trash if you're hungry, isn't it? At least that's what someone thinks.”
I gazed for a moment at the barren landscape of trash. A brooding air hung over the landfill in the afternoon light. “No, you're right,” I said. “Better getting stuck in the pipe if that's what happens than getting killed up here.”
The sun sank below the horizon at last, but someone had a trash fire going - perhaps they'd found a lighter and used it to start a blaze. We waited until it subsided into darkness. The sullen-faced moon shed a ghostly glow on our surroundings, and the clouds on the horizon had coalesced into a storm front.
"Don't like those clouds," I said. "That's rain."
"I know."
"Here, I'll go first.”
"That's all right, I can go first," he replied.
"I'll go first if you don't mind," I said, "since we don't know what's down there." When you're in a tense situation it's always worse to be dependent on someone else, and I didn't want to be second going down; coming back up would be different.
“OK, if you like, you go first. There's just one thing. While you're climbing down you've got to be dead silent. Don't say a thing. Not until you're at the bottom and even then keep really quiet. Anything you say is going to echo."
"All right. And be careful. I don't want you to fall on me. Is there anyone-" I turned in a circle but saw no one. I waited a moment longer, dropped to my knees and approached the borehole. Beyond a few feet down, the shaft was pitch-black - I mean really pitch-black, so dark I might as well have been blind. I shuddered involuntarily as I felt for the first handhold. Carefully I placed my feet on it one at a time while clinging to the rim. What if the rungs were slippery or broken? I didn't even want to imagine.
"Shit," I said to myself under my breath. Cautiously I felt with my foot for the next rung. It was amazing to discover just how much I relied on my sight - now that I couldn't see my hands, the process of climbing that would ordinarily have been so simple became incredibly difficult.
As I went I started to learn the hang of it. I had to force myself to slow dn, to be careful, to test each rung with my foot before I placed my weight on it, to bridle my impatience and move with a maddening slowness. I tried not to think of what might lie below - stagnant water, a garbage pile, a blocked pipe. Above me I could see Kamal silhouetted against the fast-shrinking circle of sky.
As I climbed I began to tire and just when I was wondering whether I should stop for a rest, I felt with my foot for the next rung and found nothing, only empty space. Had one of the rungs broken? I reached up and after waving around for a few seconds hit Kamal's shoe.
"Kamal," I whispered. "Stop. There's no more rungs."
"Try and hang down from the bottom." Was he crazy? It took me a second to understand what he meant.
Gripping the bottom rung with white-knuckled hands, I walked down the wall of the shaft, my back against the opposite wall, until I dangled from the bottom rung; but still there was nothing beneath my feet. What had happened? Would we have to turn back? How could I face the squalor of the camp after hoping all day for escape? I thought for a moment and seized on a crazy idea. I was so desperate I didn't even think about the consequences. I hesitated - it's difficult to force your body to ignore your natural instincts - then I took the plunge as I gasped and my heart leapt in my chest.
I let go of the rung and fell.
I'd half-feared the crushing impact of broken bones and a slow agony at the bottom, but I fell for only five feet at most. My feet struck thick uneven mud and I reeled into something hard and wet, waving my arms wildly.
"Mark? Mark?" Kamal whispered loudly.
"We're at the bottom," I said. "Here. I'll stand out of the way and you can drop down. It's only a couple feet." As I had, he let himself fall from the last rung and stumbled into me. We were both blind as cavefish. I turned to the wall and ran my hands across a solid surface.
"Kamal? What-"
"Think I've found it," he whispered; we both spoke softly, although truth be told the sound of our fall caused a louder echo than any our voices could. "There's a pipe. Here."
"Is it big enough?"
"Big enough for me. It might be big enough for you." I could tell from the sounds in the darkness that he was crawling into an aperture. Below knee height I could feel a gap - the mouth of the pipe. I fell on my stomach and jammed myself into it head-first. It was only a size too small to crawl on hands and knees, so I had to wriggle through it flat on my belly. The darkness was so absolute I couldn't tell whether I had my eyes open or shut; it made no difference. But the most annoying thing was the muck - a trickle of water and mud sloughed along the base of the pipe. Within minutes I was soaked. All at once I ran into a solid object. Kamal's shoe.
l?"
"I'm blocked. There's something stuck ahead of me - I think it's a rock. Here, back out of the pipe, I'm going to try and pull it out." I wriggled backwards out of the pipe and into the sump at the bottom of the borehole. After a few moments I heard Kamal sliding through the pipe and the sound of his heavy breathing.
"It was a rock. Here, I've got it," he said.
"There could be more."
"Maybe the whole thing's blocked up, I don't know. Here, I'll go back down there again and see if there's anything else. If not I'll tell you." I listened as he crawled back into the pipe and waited for what might have been several minutes before I heard him return.
"No, it's not blocked. But the pipe gets narrower. There's some kind of valve that shuts off the water flow, but they've left it open, thank God." I felt a tingle run down my spine. How narrow did it get? It was frustrating beyond belief to have a glimmer of hope, and then-
"Here, I'll go first this time," I said. I climbed into the pipe and struggled my way through the same section we'd traversed already, until I felt the pipe narrowing around me as if I'd crawled into a funnel. It was barely wide enough to fit my shoulders. Congealed slime crusted the walls of the pipe and grasped my clothes and hair. The tenacious muck tried to pull my trousers down my thighs, and I couldn't pull them back up because my hands were in front of me. I squeezed my way forward inch by inch, pushing and scrabbling with my feet, my legs, my hands, anything that could find any purchase on the slimy interior of the pipe. Occasionally I paused for a minute to rest, and in such moments I could hear Kamal's heavy breathing like an echo of my own. But at other times, despite my efforts, my hands and feet slipped uselessly, seconds stretching into minutes, unable to move. Sometimes I became afraid I was completely stuck, and I struggled in a mad frenzy like an animal in a tar pit until I could move again.
I have no idea how long we spent in the pipe. After a few minutes I lost all track of time and distance. I know it took us well over an hour, but it might easily have been two or three, and when I think back I'm often amazed that I came out sane and alive. I'd never before been so grateful as when, by tilting my head back just a notch, I glimpsed a tiny pinhole of colour I blinked.
"There's light ahead," I said hoarsely. The pinhole grew wider as I approached it and finally, after what seemed like eternity, I found myself peering out from the mouth of the pipe. Directly in front of us lay an empty concrete basin spanned by a metal bridge. I looked down to try to gauge the height of the drop: the pipe jutted out over the basin and the fall looked like at least 20 feet. Even if we landed unhurt, we wouldn't be able to get out.
I rotated over on my side. To the left of the pipe's mouth a railing projected from the edge - if I could get to it I could use it as a ladder to pull myself up. I reached out with both hands and grabbed the middle rung. From there it was simple enough. Hanging from the railing with both hands, I transferred my feet one by one from the interior of the pipe to the bottom rung of the railing and climbed onto the concrete parapet.
"Careful!" I called out softly. Kamal, too, had emerged; just as I did, he grasped the railing and climbed over to join me on the other
side. We had no idea where we were, but for the moment we were free.
Chapter 5
"Thank God!" I savoured a deep, slow breath; the first clean air I'd breathed in nearly four months. "I didn't think I'd ever get out of that. And thank you, thank you again." I took his hand and shook it, I was so pleased. "I'd never have ever thought to try that."
Kamal grinned. "I owed you one anyway. I was about to give up."
"Which way do we go - Let's head for those woods over there," I said, combing some of the mud from my hair with my fingers. My jacket was daubed with slime like the ooze from a pit. A low rise hid the work camp from our view, and although we could only see a couple hundred yards in any one direction, we knew we were in the remote countryside. That might be a problem in itself.
In the years after the Mods took power, the rural population of England dwindled rapidly. Long before the war, farming and manufacturing had come to rely on chemicals produced by genetically altered algae; these algae were grown in cities, not on farms. Few jobs were left available for country dwellers. The necessities of life grew scarce, and everyone except a few stalwarts migrated to the urban areas. This was convenient for the Mod government, of course: the more concentrated we were, the easier to control our movements. They encouraged the exodus by keeping supplies of food, fabric and fuel cheap for city dwellers.
The war only accelerated the trend. Some of the rebels took refuge in the countryside, and to hunt them down government forces "erased" selected villages and towns, irradiating or infecting them to kill Mongrels and other animals. Between the migration and the ravages of the war, whole sections of the countryside had been abandoned for years. If we were in Wales or Cornwall, we might travel many miles before we reached human habitation.
"Do you know where we are?" I asked.
Kamal shook his head. "I know this way-" he said, pointing ahead, "is south, because I found the pole star the other night. But other than that I have no idea. All the people from the train said something different.”
"As long as we get far enough away from there tonight we'll be fine."
"There's no hurry," Kamal said; "they won't follow us, they don't even know we're gone. They don't keep track because people die in the work camp. Even if one of the other prisoners goes and tells them we're not there, they'll just assume we're dead.”
“They might not. They might try and hunt us down.”
“Then there's nothing we can do.f they want to find us they will.”
Unfortunately he was right about that. I knew the science of the Mods had made incredible strides simply by looking at their clothes, their aircars, or their weapons. They could fry electronics at a distance, irradiate entire towns, detect specific species of bacteria in a room using a hand-held device, design new materials, new mathematics, new species.
I thought of the biotech trees that grew like wildfire across south London, with leaves the colour of blood and trunks the colour of chalk. Properly tended they grew five feet a month until they reached thirty feet, and their wood was as solid as any oak. And biotech trees were only the least of what I'd seen, things that made me wonder whether the more far-fetched rumours might actually be true. Yes, Kamal was right; if the Mods wanted to track us they could. But why would they? Our unimportance guaranteed our safety: we weren't worth the trouble. They didn't know about Marengo. How could they?
"We'll stay in the woods for the night," I said. "It'll be better than stumbling around in the dark. Then we'll head south again tomorrow."
"OK."
"As long as we're out of sight of that sewage works. Look at this crap," I grumbled as we set off, still trying to brush some of the filth from my clothes.
"Can't help that now. Maybe we can clean off later on." We picked our way carefully through a moonlit tangle jumble of beech, bracken, oak and pine. The air tasted refreshing after the sour stench of the dump, and however tired I might be I was happy. A short distance brought us to a low stone wall; once, perhaps, it might have bordered a well-tended field. The wilderness had flowed back across abandoned farms and hedgerows, like islands swallowed by a rising sea.
"Let's stop here," I said. Kamal nodded.
A thick litter of dry and rotting leaves lined the ditch beyond the wall. I lay down on this soft surface and quickly fell asleep.
I woke up with the sunrise. The colour of the light filtering through the branches had changed overnight, and the sky had turned an ominous iron-grey that promised rain. Kamal slept a few feet farther down the ditch; the first thing I noticed was how filthy he was. Crawling through the pipe had left its mark. His clothes, his hair, his beard, were caked with dried mud and filth. I glanced at my own clothes and realized I was even worse. It would get ugly when we reached a town or a Mongrel settlement. Our appearance would be enough to deter a saint, let alone ordinary Mongrels.
"Kamal. Kamal." He brushed the leaves off his mud-smeared jacket.
"Sorry, I overslept."
"No, sun's just up."
"All right, let's go," he said. "We'll just have to keep on going south for now."
"Half a minute. How can we make sure we're going south. We ought to use a landmark or something." The woods were featureless. Without anything to guide us, we'd lose our course and wander in circles.
"We can-" He hesitated a moment then snapped his fingers. "I've got it. See that hill on the horizon? As long as that's on the right we're going the same direction as we were last night.”
"We'll keep on going until we find one of the A-roads, then we can try following that. Or we could follow the railroad tracks."
"Not such a good idea," he said, stretching his arms behind his back. "Now that's one way we could get them interested in us. Every time they see Mongrels near something they use they think it's sabotage.”
"They can't have surveillance along the whole railway line. I mean, the trains might have cameras or sensors or something. Besides they mostly just transport Mongrels and Mongrel goods – things we use – on the railways, and they don't care about that.” As Shelley had reminded me, they weren't omnipotent, they were beset by innumerable distractions. They couldn't watch everything all the time, could they?
"See, there you go again, always taking risks," Kamal said, shaking his head. "Just like walking across London after dark. They can't be watching, they won't catch me."
"OK, enough about that already, I know. We'll just go south for now until we find an A-road and follow that. There must be Mongrel settlements out here somewhere."
"There might be," Kamal agreed. "Some people leave London to go other places.”
"Must be tough."
"Well, you can't get food or clothes or synthetics or anything like that, so you've probably got to make everything yourself." I'd heard there were scattered settlements in some parts of the country, small villages that farmed algae and scraped out a meagre existence. By giving up the few amenities the rest of us enjoyed, they gained limited freedom.
I thought of Audrey's idea that Becky and I leave London and decided that if Becky was willing, I'd carry it out on my return. She'd probably refuse at first, although if I mustered the right arguments I could persuade her. But could I leave London? I remembered Shelley and Marengo. A killer virus that might change the balance. A chance to surprise them with their own weapons, with weapons they thought we were too ignorant to use. I'd leave London later, but I had to return there first.
"I've thought of leaving London myself," I said.
"So that brings us to the other question, which is where we do want to go.”
"We don't even know where we are."
"Yes, but eventually we're going to find one of the roads and we can follow the road signs. So once we do, do we want to stop wherever we can or go-where."
I frowned. "Back to London. At least, I'm going back to London."
"That might not be such a good idea. You can't get your old job back. And they've got our DNA and our biometrics on file now. They've got hidden monitors all o
ver London.”
"We'll just have to be careful," I said.
"But why go all that way and run risks when we can go anywhere we want? Why not go somewhere where there aren't any of them? Do you see what I mean?"
"Isn't there anyone - your brother and sister-in-law, anyone who'd miss you if you didn't go back?" I asked.
"Not really. I keep a stray cat I found called Raja- Now he'll miss me for a couple days if he doesn't find anything to eat, but you know cats, if I don't come back he'll find someone else. And my sister-in-law will be happy if I don't come back, so - I kind of hate to disappoint her,” he chuckled. It wasn't entirely surprising he was single. Women in a certain age range seemed to be scarce at that time, although I didn't know whether it was because of the hardships of life under the Mods or for some more unpleasant reason.
"I don't care how risky it is or where you're going, I'm going back," I said. "My girlfriend lives in Islington."
"Oh-h-h, I see." He fell silent for a moment, then at last he sighed. "Well, it doesn't matter where I go, really. If you're going back to London then I suppose will too."
"But look. it's no use even talking about that right now. We don't even know how far we've got to go.”
"That's true."
Ahead of us a rotting log lay felled across our path. The trees were green with the fresh leaves of late spring, and I heard birds hidden in the boughs; a clump of ferns nestled in a velvet carpet of moss. To a Londoner like myself, too long accustomed to the drab monotony of ageing brickwork, glass, steel and sullen grey skies, the riot of colour was beautiful and bewildering. I felt even filthier by comparison as the daylight grew stronger. Kamal and I looked like a couple of sewer rats crawled out of a tunnel.
"God, we look bloody awful,” I exclaimed.
"Well, I-" Kamal glanced down at his jacket and shirt for a moment and broke into a grin. "We? Speak for yourself."
I laughed. "OK, maybe it's just me then. If you say so.”
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