Dark Water: The Chronicles of Mercy

by G. P. Moss

  “It’s normal,” says Sister Evie. “All that pressure has been building up since the cottage. It’s just your body’s way of telling you your brain needs to deal with this, to let it out.”

  I nod but I still feel stupid. Holly and Anne carefully put down the stretcher so Anne can help Alex check left and right along the parallel. I’m happy they’re distracted now – the smaller the audience, the better. I go to Rags. His eyes are still closed but I pray he’s just resting - seeing the gentle rise and fall of his chest calms me.

  Chapter Thirty

  I can see a river from here - it’s a few hundred yards from our exit point, curving to the right. It probably joins on to the last one we healed. With luck, the cleansing of that one will filter into this, feeding the forest, bringing its floor, and feeding system back to life.

  We head towards it. It will need to be cleansed anyway – we won’t be passing any water without treating it as if it’s dark. The darker it is, the more caution must be exercised when first dipping our arms in. I’ve already witnessed one monster fish that could have easily killed Storm. I think of her briefly, biting down and only stopping when I feel my teeth about to pierce my bottom lip.

  There’s a stone bridge which would have been used to transport troops from this side of the forest. It’s suffered a similar fate to many other structures but a few of the supporting columns still hold. Arriving at the water’s edge, I remove my sack and wait for Anne and Sister Evie. It looks quite clear but the evidence from the woodland suggests otherwise. We spread out a few feet apart before our right arms go into the water.

  My breathing slows, becomes even and steady as I clear my mind of all thoughts. I pray. Intone. Without realising straight away, I’ve naturally picked up some of the thankful words from the Sisters. I watch the ripples move gently away while I pray, thanking the water for the structural changes it’s about to make.

  I know when I’ve reached my peak as the feeling of absolute calm begins to give way to a slight sickness. This is the time to stop immediately. To carry on for a long time would mean serious illness, perhaps even death. Although the water changes its own state, some poison is inevitably taken in by the healer. Many wouldn’t be able to do it. Thankfully, some of us can.

  We decide to use the bridge - it’s broken and cracked but hopefully safer than risking a river crossing through water that could hide treacherous depths and unfriendly occupants. This time, Alex will go without his sack - Sister Evie will take it with her own, despite his protests. Anne goes first.

  The solid-looking supports suddenly look decidedly unsolid as her first steps take her over a level concrete section, stopping mid-air for a drop into the river. Just before the edge, she sidesteps onto another level, more than a foot higher. She waits there while Alex sets off. Stopping a couple of feet before the drop, he surprises us by hopping up to his right to land on his backside while swinging his legs across. It looks ungainly and I want to laugh but it worked for him so I keep my face straight.

  From the next level, it dips downwards after a few feet so Anne waits in case he slips. From there it’s a case of hopping, like crossing on stepping stones but care is needed - the gaps are large enough to easily fall through. We wait until they’re both safely across before we go, one at a time to avoid overloading any of the sections.

  Holly goes first, hopping nimbly, while I adjust the straps on my sack, tightening them close to my body. I set off confidently then freeze as I look down at the water. I feel dizzy and disorientated, starting to shake and wobble. Sister Evie is behind me with her hands firmly on my shoulders.

  “Look away,” she says. “Look across at the others – the next level’s not much higher.”

  I nod and manage to climb up, waiting for her while she collects the two sacks, putting hers on her back and carrying the other. Leaving the bags on the second level, she guides me down the slope then to the far bank before returning for the equipment she left behind. Anne goes back with Sister Evie for the final, dangerous trip.

  Extreme care is now needed for the Sisters to transport Rags safely across the water. I try to breathe normally but find I’m holding my breath as they carry the stretcher with absolute concentration – one step wrong and it will be serious injury for any or all of them.

  I can’t look at anyone - that kind of fear is alien to me. Not anymore. As Rags is brought over, I feel embarrassed, that it’s my responsibility to make sure he’s okay. Sister Evie leads me gently by the arm so we’re several yards from the others. She speaks to me in a hushed, kind tone that I feel I don’t deserve.

  “Don’t worry about this, it’s normal. After a shock your mind and body can play the cruellest tricks on you. It happened to me, a little while after the mess. I thought things were bad when the quakes and explosions, fires and airborne particles were hitting us hard. What came after was much worse. When we first suffered attacks by Hounds and Subs, it was such a shock – of course, we’d never encountered such things before. Many of the Sisters were killed and we witnessed much suffering and heartache.”

  I’m grateful for her words but I know I need to shape up and stop this. I look at her as she continues, trying to comfort me when we already have enough problems.

  “The strange thing was that at the time it was happening, I could cope with all this – my body kept moving and my mind functioned, reasoned, determined to survive. It was afterwards that I fell apart. Not spectacularly like a weeping wreck, nothing like that. Instead it was a sense of not being on the same planet, like I was walking around in a parallel universe. I was there but I wasn’t there. It was weird beyond measure. I felt such a deep fear, of things that normally would not bother me. I could not stand being touched, even in the most gentle, caring way. I got over it, slowly. And now,” she gives a huge smile, “I’m fine. Mad as a box of frogs but fine. What you’re going through is shock, nothing more.”

  She makes me drink some of Sister Maria’s water. “You will be fine too.”

  I nod, silently, before joining the others.

  I feel such a failure but she’s telling me it’s okay to be like that sometimes. I know I need to be kinder to myself but I should be tougher. I started this journey from the valley from a sense of duty rather than something I wanted to do. I still feel a responsibility but there are other reasons now. Despite my recent wobbles, I feel that what we’re setting out to do, what we’re doing now, is the right thing.

  Maybe others are doing it. I hope so. But if they’re not then we can still make the difference, showing that it can be done, that it’s possible to leave the fires and forge a new future.

  The greed that caused this – the march of destruction masquerading as progress – has taught us a great lesson. We need to make sure the lesson’s heeded. The earth’s been prodded for so long that it’s finally bitten back. Drilling for oil, drilling for gas, for high pressure water – there had to be a tipping point.

  Mum told me how it started so small. A few wells here and there. A bit of shale gas in the countryside – no big problem. Money drove it. It’s no use now. Perhaps they use it across the oceans, who knows? Nobody uses money here. It’s worthless – there’s nothing to buy. Focus, Mercy.

  Now we’re past the river, we pick up the pace as I take my turn to carry Rags. I like it, it’s giving me a purpose – the watchfulness, watching our feet – all helping to put the past few hours behind me.

  Alex falls back to talk to me. He wants to know about the fires I saw before Storm and I changed direction for the coastal way. I try to give him a sense of the distance. He wants to triangulate, to see if we’re roughly heading in a direction that’ll bring us out on the south or west side of the town. He thinks what I may have seen is the north-east boundary of the town of Longton, a central place he visited a long time ago, in his early military days.

  He says it wasn’t a base, but there were small training camps a few miles away. As Sister Evie takes over from me, I take out my field glasses to give us a se
nse of what’s to come. What I see in the distance makes me feel sick but I’ve been here before. Anne raises her glasses, raising her hand for us to stop. As Alex lowers his, he lets us know what the buildings are we can see.

  “I’m sure they’re army bunkers. Designed long ago when tensions were high with Eastern Europe. They’ll go underground, quite deep – they were home for electronic equipment, command shelters, all sorts of things. Never used for wartime – probably not even when the mess came, but who knows. The Subs like them, that’s for sure.”

  I look again. They’re a fair distance away, but they can’t be human, banging and smashing around. It looks like they’re carrying sticks, or poles. Whether it’s just for making noise with I’m unconvinced – they like to smash people. That’ll be us. I count approximately twenty. It could be more, or less – they move around so fast it’s hard to keep track.

  Anne speaks quietly, gravely, as if the Subs will overhear her.

  “If we count approximately twenty Subs, let’s plan for fifty. We’ll use the rifles, except for Alex who will stay back with Glocks. He’ll have three so he doesn’t have to worry about reloading. He knows he’ll have twenty-six rounds without having to reload. The rest of us should have a spare clip in each side hand pocket with a Glock in the main right one and two spare clips in the main left pocket – if we’re all right handed, which I think we are. Don’t waste valuable time switching between weapons if you can help it. If you use all three rifle clips you’ve emptied sixty rounds – ditch it and use the Glock. That’s ninety rounds each – more than enough to bring them down. Make sure your Glock is the larger, ten round one, not the six.”

  It’s a good point – thinking you’ve four more than you have can be fatal – as we know. Anne continues as we listen to her instructions.

  “We’re going in hard but not too fast. With the rifles, we should be able to start taking them down from a decent distance – a good hundred yards if we want to maintain some accuracy. A thing to remember, and one which you know anyway, is they won’t run and hide. They’ll keep coming until there are none left. Think of them as having twice normal human strength and ten times as angry.”

  I’m hoping Alex doesn’t have to use his Glocks. If he does, it means they’ve breached our line and could reach Rags. We leave him to the side, sheltered in scrub by a willow tree. There’s no room for failure. We sort our weapons and spare ammunition, keeping to the agreed storage pockets for the clips.

  After another hundred yards, we turn our safety clips to off. We’re ready. I’m ready. My heart beats too fast – I need to lower its rate – quickly. My breathing starts to slow as I inhale deeper, carefully controlling the outward breath as I walk slowly but surely towards battle. The domed roofs of the bunkers are now clear as the raucous din of the Subs becomes uncomfortably loud. I’m resolute in my intentions though the sweat runs freely down my back. My stomach tightens into a painful twist as we move ever closer.

  The noise stops. They know we’re here. They start to run towards us, arms raised in a rallying cry of unbridled hatred. As our short, spaced line begins the two-pressure squeeze, we begin to fire at chest height into the baying mob of destruction.

  The Subs fall as they attack but occasionally they get too close as the momentum of their charge carries them on, despite the bullets hammering into them. I’m not on autopilot but I aim to dispatch them clinically with no mistakes.

  I turn my anger into a spiked focus, advancing from the centre while I’m aware of my comrades doing the same a few feet on either side. There’s not much need this time even to alter the position of my rifle as the Subs attack clumsily with no thought for flanking or organisation of any kind.

  They act on pure animal instinct, their only motivation, a chemically enhanced desire to smash, destroy and kill whatever stands in their way. They don’t even look that different when shot - the same twisted hate lingers on their faces until their hearts stop beating. The silence now is weirdly deafening, like a metallic frequency ringing in my ears. Shaking my head, it lessens until finally I hear the voices of the other four.

  The concrete yard outside the front of the first shelter is literally covered with the bodies of the attacking Subs. Lying at every angle imaginable, their blood runs in interconnecting rivers to the outer cracked stone slabs, disappearing into earth already struggling to absorb anything decent. Alex looks around the littered ground - he hasn’t had to fire a single shot, making me feel good, my heart beating a happy rhythm this time. I feel like I just redeemed myself, totally. No mistakes. Absolute focus. I’m back. I head quickly over to Rags. His eyes are open.

  As we drag the Subs to make a huge pile of beaten hatred, there are just two things in common between them. They all have the twisted rage on their faces and their hair is long, straggly, and missing clumps where I assume they’ve ripped it out themselves. Apart from that, their body shapes are the same as ours - a little slimmer maybe - perhaps the result of hypertension. They dress in normal clothes - normal that is before the mess. The few people I’ve met tend to wear military or technical clothing when they can get it - it dries quicker in environments where decent shelter is hard to come by.

  I start to rip some dry scrub as the last of the bodies are moved. Not bothering to take the matches, my striker soon has a small flame, spreading quickly as the clothes set alight. We know it may attract attention, a fire of this size. If more Subs or Hounds come out to look then all the better – we’ll take them down too. If Alex is right, we may see boundary fires sooner than later - the inhabitants may already have seen the tips of the flames here if they’re not too far away.

  There’s a mounded hill behind the shelters - there could be a town beyond it. First though, we’ll quickly check around, see what else is waiting here - something good will make a nice change. As expected, the first shelter door is open. Made of sheet steel, it looks like it’s welded itself to the ground.

  Anne puts on the headlamp though the first several feet are well lit from the sunshine. Everything looks broken. Towards the end of a short passageway, concrete steps lead down to meet a door to the right. It’s shut tight but it looks as if it’s been kicked and bashed. The Subs have been trying to break it down by brute force, and failed.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Alex stares at the door. A hole where the cover for a large lock used to be, looks teasingly back at us - it needs a key. There’s no gap between the door and wall to lever it open, even if we had anything suitable, so it looks like it’s staying there. Anne has an idea.

  “What if we wrap a stun grenade in cloth, ram in into the hole, and run?”

  Alex considers this for a moment.

  “I’ll do it,” Anne says quickly. “I can be back up the steps in a second.”

  I think it’s a crazy idea, for two reasons. First, there might not be anything on the other side of the door. Second, if Anne doesn’t get out quick enough, she can be burned, deafened, blinded, who knows what. In my opinion, the risk is greater than any benefits it might bring.

  This time, I begin to voice my opinion as Sister Evie hurries us back up the steps. As Alex leaves the entrance, leaving Anne down there alone, I realise I’ve spoken too late. A huge bang shatters the air, shaking everything around while intense light blinds me. After a minute, I see a human shape crawling towards us. I try to go to her but I wobble and fall. I can’t hear much - everything sounds tinny and distant.

  I haul myself up, my sore eyes starting to adjust to normal light again and see Anne on her knees, just staring. Her hair and face is a mess of concrete dust as she coughs and splutters, spitting goodness knows what from her mouth. I check Rags – his eyes are still open and he doesn’t look bothered by the drama.

  Finally, Anne manages to stand up.

  “I hope it worked,” she says.

  The five of us start laughing, loud and uncontrolled. It’s the first time we’ve ever been like that and despite the uncomfortable state we’re in, it feels good. I
begin to think we’re a little mad.

  We brush ourselves down as the dust starts to settle in the shelter entrance. Anne looks surprisingly well after her unorthodox door unlocking technique. We’ll see if it’s made any difference, done something that years of Sub abuse failed to do. Sister Evie stays at the top with Rags in case the blast attracts visitors. If we hear a shout, we’ll be back up in seconds.

  I shake my head in admiration as we’re confronted by an open door. The light from Anne’s headlamp reveals a long corridor with adjoining doors on each side. Occasional brick and rock rubble litters a cracked concrete floor but the walls and ceiling have withstood most of the quakes that destroyed so much of the landscape in other places. If it was just the earthquakes and explosions, civilisation would have been able to immediately start to rebuild itself. It was the poisons that came with it, seeping into rivers, contaminating the air, quickly changing the chemical structure of many brains.

  I can’t look at them as though they’ve ever been human. There’s absolutely no chance of redemption for Subs - they just keep coming until they kill or are killed. As for the Hellhounds, Mum said they just seemed to appear. They obviously started off as normal animals but she said she knew of no domestic pets that had turned - plenty were found dead though.

  Sister Evie calls down to ask for help closing the shelter entrance and to carry Rags down the stairs. We pull on a broken steel bar with all our strength until it starts to give a little, freeing itself from the gravel floor and swinging shut with a resounding clunk. It’s dark now so I use the torch to guide us back, joining the others as they search room by room, finding little but folders full of nuclear fallout guidance.