‘No, a couple of the women here have had children and assisted with births since all this happened, so I thought I’ll stay here,’ Helen said, subconsciously rubbing her belly again.
‘Sounds like we’d be better bringing Emma here,’ Liz said, smiling, ‘Well if you change your mind, you’re more than welcome to come for a visit.’
With a bang, the door blew open, letting a gust of wind and a spray of cold rain into the room. Gabe, backing into the room, had the four jars of preserved fruits in his arms. Kicking the door closed behind him, he carried the jars to the small table in the room, amid excited murmurs from the other members of the community.
‘Well there’s a hell of a lot more where that came from,’ Charlie said. ‘The Penhaligan place had a lot of fruit trees and apparently Mrs Penhaligan had a talent for preserving.’
‘You’ve certainly proved yourselves more than welcome visitors,’ Helen said, gesturing towards the jars ‘Sad that it was at the Penhaligan family expense… but we’ll put their supplies to good use here’
‘Yes, and if there’s anything you’d like in return, seems only fair,’ Patrick said, as he picked up one of the jars full of golden peaches.
‘No, it’s fine,’ Charlie began to say.
‘Yes, there is actually,’ Imran said, quickly butting in to Charlie’s polite refusal. With a questioning look from Charlie, Imran continued, ‘you could always let us have a breeding pair of your piglets.’
‘You’ve got pigs?’ Charlie asked, surprised but thankful that Imran would think of asking for piglets for the Convent, even if his religion considered them forbidden food. ‘Where on earth did you get them?’
‘You wouldn’t believe it. We found them just walking in the woods, bold as brass. A boar and two sows,’ Patrick said ‘Took us a while to catch them, mind.’
‘And as both sows have had litters, we can give you one from each, so you don’t have full blood siblings,’ Helen said.
Even though the Substation community was just a group of collected individuals, it was clear Patrick and Helen were in charge. Just as Charlie had taken control of the general running of the Lanherne, each community needed a leader. When life was so precarious you couldn’t have people pulling in different directions for their own personal gains. When you joined a community you just had to hope that the best person for the job was in control rather than just the strongest. They had seen many communities simply fall apart because a bully or small gang had forced their control on people.
‘Thanks, and next time we come this way we’ll bring Samson to service your mares, he’s a strong stallion, so you should get some good colts out of him,’ Charlie said, knowing the Substation were at a disadvantage having only female horses.
‘Sounds like a plan,’ Patrick replied.
Outside the storm had almost run its course. The thunder and lightning had moved on leaving only a light drizzle.
‘Looks like the worst of the storm’s passed. We should be OK to go back up on the platforms. Now, let’s find you three somewhere to sleep.’ Patrick continued, as he looked out of the small window.
With a flurry of activity the community began to file through the door and make their way back to the pylon they called home. Smiling at the faces she recognised and nodding hello to those who were new to her, Liz followed Helen up the metal ramp.
‘Don’t you get fed up with all this?’ Liz asked, as she pulled her jacket closer to her body while the wind buffeted around them.
‘You get used to it I suppose,’ Helen replied, ‘and anyway, this is the first place I’ve felt safe in years. Before I came here my life was fucking crappy believe me. If Patrick hadn’t turned up at the last place I lived, I would still be being forced to whore myself to that bastard Adams, just to survive.’
Liz knew Helen’s unpleasant story and didn’t judge her at all for what she had been forced to do. Helen had found herself in one of the rougher communities. Her natural good looks had singled her out and she was soon commandeered as the girlfriend to an ex-prisoner, Adams. Once he had broken her spirit with a series of beatings, she realised there would be no escape from him, so tried to make the best of her lot. It wasn’t until Patrick had intervened during a particularly pointless and harsh beating, that she was finally free of him. Patrick had killed Adams, protecting a woman he barely knew and had received the deep cut that had caused his scar in the process. With the top dog slot now open, many had assumed Patrick would want to take over. But he knew these people were tainted by the way they had chosen to live and would never be able to create here the home he wanted. So, leaving with Helen, and a half a dozen other like-minded people, they had left the barbaric community to their own devices, never looking back.
‘This should be OK for you and Imran. Charlie said he was going to sleep in your cart. Doesn’t he ever relax?’ Helen said, as she stopped by a small wooden cabin on the first level, some fifteen meters above the ground. ‘There’s a central fire going over there, so if you want some warmth in here, take a torch, and light the wood above the grate in the corner of the cabin.’
Liz looked in through the small door at the single room within. It was obviously a guest room as all that was inside was a double mattress on the floor. As Helen had said, in the corner was a metal box which could house a small fire for warmth. At the bottom of the box was a grill through which ash would fall to the ground below.
‘Will you be going straight to the O’Brien’s tomorrow?’ Helen asked Imran, as Liz went off to get a torch of fire.
‘No, we’ve got one more Outposter settlement to warn first. The odd little group that live on the small island in the middle of a lake, the Donaldson clan. Do you know them?’ Imran replied.
‘Yes, we know them and try not to have anything to do with them,’ Helen said, with a sneer.
Imran knew what she was referring to. Mr Donaldson and his two brothers were a little too fond of each other’s wives and children. He knew that more than one of their daughters had given birth to a child. So they must have been impregnated by either their own father or uncle. The place was a mess. The clan had descended into incest and who knew what else, but as Charlie had pointed out, the children were blameless, and for some of them, it was all they had ever known.
‘Well, we’ll give it a go anyway, not that they’ll let us on the island.’ Imran said.
The Donaldson clan didn’t like people sticking their nose into things that didn’t concern them, so were not the most friendly of neighbours to have.
‘I don’t envy you having to deal with them at all,’ Helen said, as Liz returned with a small flaming torch ‘Anyway, I’ll bid you goodnight and see you two in the morning before you set off.’
With a wave Helen began climbing a ladder to the next level, where she shared a cabin with Patrick. As Liz began to put kindling and twigs in the metal box to start their fire, Imran watched from the doorway as the same warm orange glow appeared at small windows in other cabins on their level. With a loud clicking noise two men began to winch the walkway up from the ground, cutting off those on the Pylon from any attack that may come below.
‘Close the door Imran,’ Liz said. ‘You’re letting in a draught.’
Doing as he was told, Imran closed the door and came to sit next to Liz by the small fire that blazed in the metal box. Taking off some of their clothes and hanging them on hooks situated on the walls, Liz and Imran hoped to dry out some of the rain water before morning. With the small fire warming the cabin and curled up in each other’s arms, Liz and Imran drifted off into uneasy sleep. The images of things they had seen that day playing across their minds as sleep claimed them.
DAY 3
At some point while they slept, their small fire had dwindled and finally gone out, leaving the small cabin cold and smoky. Liz awoke with Imran’s arms tightly wrapped around her from behind. As she opened her eyes to the gloomy darkness, she could feel his slow steady breathing on the back of her neck. If it wasn’t for the pressure
from her bladder demanding relief and the need to wash out the ashy taste in her mouth, she would happily have laid within this comforting embrace until Charlie called for them. But her bladder would not be ignored, so reluctantly she gently untangled herself from the arms about her and retrieved her only slightly damp clothes from by the fire. Once dressed she decided it was time she went in search of a toilet. As she opened the cabin’s door a gust of wind managed to force its way through. With bleary eyes Imran lifted his head from the mattress.
‘It’s not morning already is it?’ he asked, clearly wanting to go back to sleep, ‘I’ve had a terrible night’s sleep. No matter where I put myself on this bloody mattress, I seemed to be in a draft.’
Imran slowly sat up moving his head from side to side as he rubbed his neck. Liz could not help but watch the way his smooth muscular body moved, his nipples becoming erect in the cold breeze. Fighting the urge to go back to bed and be with him, Liz glanced out through the door at the other small cabins on their level. From a few of them, smoke was already rising from the small fires within. Some of the Substation community were obviously up and starting to go about the business of a new day.
‘Yep, looks like it’s rise and shine time, sleeping beauty,’ Liz said, as she stifled a yawn herself. ‘You can have a few minutes more while I go pee and then we better start getting ready for the off.’
With a long stretch to force the last remnants of sleep from her limbs, Liz walked off along the platform while Imran’s grumbling faded behind her. She stopped at a small cabin similar to the one in which she and Imran had spent the night, in contrast this was brightly painted, and not only had a small window with a window box, but also a small hodgepodge looking greenhouse attached to one side. Outside of the front door sat a large man in his forties washing some rags in a bowl, which Liz could see on closer inspection may once have been white underwear.
‘Hi, sorry to bother you but where’s the toilet?’ she asked.
‘Round there on the right,’ he replied, wringing out the particularly sorry looking pants. ‘If it’s just a piss you want, do it down the pipe. Anything else, in one of the plastic buckets and take it down with you to the pit, OK.’
‘Thanks,’ she said, with a nod.
The man returned her nod and pegged his still grubby looking underwear to a small line.
‘At least this high up there was always some breeze so they wouldn’t take long to dry,’ she thought, walking past other small cabins on her way to the corner.
Each had been slightly modified reflecting the personalities of those within, trying to bring back a little of the normality of the life taken from them. One had its’ wooden walls crudely painted in a red brick pattern, tomato plants growing either side of the door in pots, while another had white painted columns and an image of Atlas, his shoulders painted to look like they were supporting the weight of the window frame.
When she passed the last cabin on that level she stopped. Covering every inch of the outside walls were small picture frames. Inside each frame, as though showing some priceless ancient artwork, were images from magazines and books of once everyday objects. Televisions, computers, coffee makers, vacuum cleaners and other electrical devices she only barely remembered, sat alongside faded biscuit wrappers, sun-bleached burger boxes, squashed flat shampoo bottles and a variety of other objects now consigned to the past. Looking through the small window she could see this mania was carried on inside too. The walls were plastered with old faded photographs, not of lost loved ones but of things. Someone had made their home into a shrine to a world that no longer existed. So desperate to make sure people did not forget these mundane oddities that they surrounded themselves daily with reminders of what they had lost. Liz wasn’t sure it was very healthy for whoever lived here to hold onto their old life in such an obsessive manner. There was nothing anyone could do to bring that world back and people had to accept that. How could you live and work for a future, if you were so stuck in the past. She stood there for a few minutes looking from one frame to the next, each image sparking a long forgotten memory of her life with her parents. It was when her gaze fell on a picture of shiny sandwich toaster that she was instantly taken back to a time sitting with her smiling father, eating messy hot toasted cheese sandwich’s in their small sunny kitchen, while her mother jokingly scolded him for buying the machine that would hardly ever be used and would just take up cupboard space. Smiles, warmth and love seemed to envelope her as she lost herself to the memory.
‘What did you see?’ said a woman in a gravelly voice, the happy memory disappearing like smoke on the wind.
‘Sorry?’ Liz asked, confused as to what the woman, who had appeared at the small window, was talking about.
‘What did you see? Everybody sees something or someone when they stand here,’ the woman repeated, gently touching a few of the framed photos, ‘If you know how to look, each one’s a doorway.’
‘Oh, I see,’ Liz said slightly stunned, her hand moving to the small photo of the sandwich toaster, ‘…my parents.’
‘And from the look you had on your face it was a good memory, am I right?’ the woman said, her face creasing up with a kind smile. Liz nodded slowly.
‘Thank you,’ Liz said in barely a whisper.
She now realised the walls of objects and images were not merely a shrine to the past but portals to the memories made before the Dead came. You would remember the people and places as they had been at that specific moment in time, not how they ended in the blood and horror.
‘Welcome, welcome,’ the woman chuckled waving a hand behind her, as she disappeared back into her small home.
Liz was about to call after her when her bladder reminded her of its urgency. Almost jogging the last few metres to the corner of the level, Liz was relieved to see that the toilet cubicle was empty. The substation community had found two portable toilets, one of which was on this level. Opening the door Liz was surprised to find they didn’t smell as bad as she had expected them to. Just like the old man washing his underwear had said, there was a small stack of various plastic containers with lids just inside the door. Grateful she only needed to pee, Liz locked the door and sat down. Unlike at Lanherne, where, thanks to Duncan’s water pump, they actually had flushable toilets for as long as the sewers lasted, here no such luxury was available. She was basically urinating through the bottom of the portaloo into a large funnel that fed into a guttering. This then ran down the side of the pylon to the ground where it emptied into a storm drain.
When she was done, Liz slowly walked back to the more utilitarian guest cabin in which she had spent the night with Imran. She was almost there when she glanced over the railing to see Charlie talking to Patrick fifteen metres below her. Putting her fingers in her mouth she gave a sharp whistle, catching their attention.
‘When are we off ?’ she called down to the men below her.
As a response Charlie held up three fingers and then changed their positioning to form a zero, indicating thirty minutes. With a nod to show she understood and a quick wave, Liz went off the get Imran.
After Imran had made a quick trip to the toilet himself, they made their way down the long metal ramp and went in search of Charlie.
‘You look like you had a good night’s sleep,’ Charlie said, when they found him harnessing up Delilah. The dark circles under his eyes were evidence to the contrary and Imran yawned through his less than polite reply.
‘You can eat breakfast when we’re on the road,’ Charlie said, smiling as he ignored Imran’s response ‘We should get to the Donaldson place in about four or five hours, and then get to the O’Brien’s early this evening.’
‘Is Patrick coming with us?’ Liz asked, noticing someone at the substation had also harnessed up one of their horses to a boxed cart similar to their own.
‘They thought they might as well go and get more of the Penhaligan supplies this morning before someone else gets to them first. So they’ll be with us for the first hour un
til we have to turn east and head towards the Donaldson clan at Silver Valley Lake,’ Charlie replied, slipping a feed bag over Delilah’s head.
Giving her muzzle a friendly pat, Charlie then ran his hand down each of her legs, lifting each hoof in turn to check for stones.
‘I’ve not been to the Donaldsons before,’ Imran said, ‘What’s it like?’
‘Dodgy,’ Charlie replied, as he let drop the last of Delilah’s hooves ‘Not only are they more than a bit odd themselves but also their home is on a lake set in the middle of thick woodland. We won’t be able to get the cart very close so one of you will have to stay with Delilah, while we traipse on foot through the forest to the lake. It’s an old wood with lots of dense ground ferns and it doesn’t help that even in daylight it’s quite dark under the tree canopy either. We’ll just have to hope the Donaldson clan have been keeping up with clearing the area of the Dead or we may run into surprises behind every tree. On second thoughts, I think Imran, you should come with me and Liz you look after Delilah’
Liz knew Charlie wouldn’t be holding her back just because she was a woman, so there must be some other reason. She raised her eyebrow questioningly.
‘The Donaldson brothers have a very funny view of women. They think nothing of sleeping with each other’s wives and daughters, so I’d rather they didn’t know you were with us. Just in case.., you know,’ Charlie said, frowning.
Now that Liz understood his reckoning, she nodded her approval. There was enough danger out there, you didn’t need to go looking for more. Imran leaned into the cart and retrieved a small chunk of their hard dry bread from one of the supplies sacks.
‘So if they don’t farm, then what do they eat?’ Imran asked, as he sucked on the hard crust hoping to soften it enough for him to bite into.
‘The area used to be a place for fishing holidays, apparently. It originally had two smaller lakes until the Donaldson’s damned the stream that runs from the Tresillin River. That turned the place into one huge lake, with their island in the middle. So, I guess they eat a lot of fish. Apart from that, no idea,’ Charlie replied, shrugging his shoulders.
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