In the morning, they use the cart to haul large bottles of water up from the filtration tanks by the stream. They wedge bags of supplies between the empty fuel kegs. Danny climbs into the harness, and when Jack laughs, a golden chortle that brightens the mood for a moment, he shakes his rear and starts the thing rolling over the grass with a bray. Sean mechanically pats Jack’s head. Kate leans back to hold Bea uncomfortably in her arms as Tom gives them both another final kiss. The girl is barely awake, squinting through her sleep-swollen face. Kate clasps Tom’s arm. Her eyes are red-rimmed but her smile is warm, before she nods him sternly up the track.
As Danny heaves the cart up the long incline through the woods behind Graham, the camp is lost below them. The track is shaded and cool. Dense undergrowth crowds them, edging into their path. The busy sounds of animals, insects, birds, mostly hidden. When they reach the road they glance at one another nervously before leaving the cover of the trees. Stepping onto the tarmac feels very wrong. They have learned to avoid roads. For reasons of safety, but also for this: the aged asphalt, slowly tending to powder; the cracks, in places gulfs, where the earth bulges and plants have ripped through in a freeze-thaw cycle of decay; the growths of grass on the verges where hedgerows roll into the road. There’s a van on its side and carpeted with moss, and a motorbike grown over with plants. Simply, the differences between then and now still do not elide. Tom’s brow furrows and his eyes lock and flicker as the fear rises, as splinters of half-complete memories slide through his mind: shards of super-roads clogged with crushed cars, people moaning on the tarmac, half dead but desperate in their animal way to escape; the repetitive vertiginous plummeting in his mind as he tried to find help, as he tried to access knowledge from the lopped-off Feed, as he’s nearly trying to do again now.
That first night they stop in a copse at the bottom of a hill. They pull the cart off the road and wait until dark to light their fire so the smoke will not be seen. There are so few people left now that the ones there are must be dangerous. They heat a few of their dwindling supply of tins until they are blackened by the flames and they have to take them off with rags.
“Beans,” Danny utters through a full mouth, and shudders with glee. He glances briefly up at the heavens and winks. “You know this is why I came.”
“Well, don’t choke yourself,” Graham advises. “That would be a damn fool thing to do.”
Danny raises his eyebrows. It’s the only thing Graham has said all day. Then he lies back on the earth to stare at the stars while Graham writes his Chronicle in the firelight and Tom lashes a tarpaulin between trees and lays down rugs beneath.
“I’ll watch,” Tom says.
Graham wafts his offer away with his pen. “No, you two sleep first.”
Tom goes under the shelter and Danny crawls over, pretending to be fat, not bothering to stand. “Don’t touch me,” he whispers as he nestles himself comfy and drapes an arm over Tom.
“In your dreams.”
“That’s what I’m worried about, pal.”
Something wakes him, something more than Danny snuffling against his neck. He peers into the gloom as things ebb away: dreams, touches of things in his mind. The trees are a dark cushion under the starlit sky and the silence here is thick. What woke him? He interprets a shadow as Graham, then the spread-out darkness of the extinguished fire as the old man lying prone. But it’s not.
“Graham, are you there?”
It takes time for Tom’s eyes to adjust, to see the figure lying unmoving by a tree. No sound but his own hoarse breathing. He crawls past the embers to where Graham is bundled, hands in his jacket, head bent forward, his book and pen on the ground. He grabs the old man’s shoulder.
“I’m watching the fire.” Graham jerks and tries to fight him off. “Leave me alone!”
“The fire’s gone out. You’re supposed to be watching!”
“I’m fine!”
“Graham, would you like to talk about it?”
But Graham, grumbling darkly, simply turns away.
Tom fetches a blanket from the shelter and wraps it around the old man. Then he sits under the tarpaulin and watches Danny. Listens to him breathe. Watches the two sleeping men intently until powder blue starts to edge the sky.
For some reason Danny looks the tiredest of them all as they near the top of the hill, although he had slept the most. “Rabbits,” he explains as he pushes the cart up the final stretch of slope with Tom. “I kept dreaming there were rabbits under the camp, burrowing around until there wasn’t anything left for them to burrow through; it was all just hole, right? And as soon as I realized that, everything started to crumble, everything caved in.”
“What happened to the rabbits?”
“I stopped worrying about them then, to be honest.”
They survey the gentle folds of the hills, low light lying over the rolls of earth. Everything is subtle movement: the expanse of the trees’ sun-clipped leaves; the grasses and crops, untamed for years, with the wind playing patterns in their waves. Birds swerve and duck in flocks out in the air. In the distance something—an airplane—had scooped out a long furl of earth as it crashed. Now, covered in foliage, it is another mini-hill.
“When are we going to have breakfast?”
Tom scores a mark on the map with a dirty thumbnail. “How about here?”
Danny cranes to look. “And where’s the facility?”
Tom points somewhere off the top of the map: about eight inches more. “Today and tomorrow at least. Around that village and on the other side.”
“We’ll add weeks to the journey if we go around every village. It’s not that dangerous, is it? I mean, who’s here anymore?” Danny opens his arms expansively, lord of all he can see.
They pluck wild radishes and charlock and stuff them in the cart as they descend the hill, avoiding a motorbike and warily eyeing a dirt-mottled van as they pass. Hand-swirls have cleaned the windscreen at some point. A drawn-out curl of color on the back doors could be rust or blood. Climbing the next hill, stomping up the dried-up tarmac, Danny leaps on a small plum tree, and when they reach the bottom again, Tom pulls the pods from a slender plant with triangular leaves. “Pignuts.” He shows them. “We can eat them while we walk.”
They are passing a bus, rusted, smashed.
“What about breakfast?”
“This is breakfast.”
“You’re kidding!”
“No.”
“Oh,” Danny says, looking glum. Then he brightens. “Are we nearly there yet?”
A narrow stalk of smoke rises in front of them, splitting the evening sky like a crack through glass.
“How far away is that?” Graham asks. “My eyes . . .”
“A few miles?” Tom murmurs as he brings the cart to a stop.
“It’s thick, isn’t it?” Graham says. “Not wood?”
Tom glances back along the distant length of the darkening road behind them. He peers into the nearer, hidden depth of the crowded flanking trees.
“Is it people?” Danny whispers at his side.
Tom scowls. “Let’s stop somewhere soon.”
They light a fire, off the road and behind a hillock. Tom watches the woods, strains to see along the road. It looks empty. The clouds obscure the moon and, as if the trail of smoke itself has spread above them, a darker mood descends. Then Danny discovers that tonight’s beans have bits of sausage in them and can’t stop himself from dancing in delight. He unleashes a yodel into the night.
After dinner, Tom lays out the tarpaulin and blankets. Again, as he and Danny go to bed, Graham says he’ll tend the fire; he’ll take first watch while they sleep. But again Tom wakes to see him shivering in the dark and not watching them at all. He is asleep instead. Danny is too. Both men look relaxed, their faces at peace. So vulnerable. So open to attack while they sleep, from outside and from within. They are so reliant on one another in this world. And then Danny grimaces. Chokes in a tight breath of air. Tom kneels and reaches toward
his neck. Danny’s eyes squeeze, his mouth chews and then spreads into a smile. He chuckles. Then he relaxes, shifts, and rolls onto his side, and Tom lowers his shaking hands and turns back to watch the shadows in the trees, clustering all around them.
There are five columns of smoke stretching into the powder-blue sky when they wake. One is a sparse scuff rubbed sideways by the wind. The others are thicker, and one is a roiling stream of live and looping blackness.
“You didn’t show me how to use the gun.” Danny’s voice is subdued.
They walk to the cart, where Graham sits perched on a keg, frowning as he firmly writes his Chronicle. Inside Tom’s rucksack is a pair of bolt cutters and a hard shape in rags that he hands to Danny.
“No firing. Whoever they are, there’s no need to let them know we’re here.”
Danny squints down the barrel at the trees.
“There’s bullets already in there. We don’t have many. You let the bullet holder out by—”
“The cartridge.”
“Isn’t cartridge another word for a bullet? Graham?”
Graham doesn’t know or doesn’t care; either way, he ignores them.
“Doesn’t matter,” Danny mutters, and then, talking like he’s a crook, “I know whatcha mean. You let it out by . . . ?”
“Thumb that switch there. That’s the one. So push it back in. Good. And take the safety off. That’s right. And now shoot. Except don’t. Just pretend.”
“Pow,” Danny says.
“Nice shot.”
Graham looks up from his book, squints and shakes his head.
Soon they pass a car. It’s not the first—they’ve passed so many they’ve stopped checking for fuel that’s never there—but it is the first that’s freshly burned. The metal clicks as it cools.
“Why did they do that?” Danny whispers, backing away from the thing.
“I don’t know,” Tom mutters. He eyes the tree line and glances, again, back up the road. Searches the surface of the earth-scattered tarmac for tracks. Right now—are they being watched? Is this it? He looks rapidly around them. “A signal? Fun?”
“That sort of shit stopped being fun years ago,” Danny remarks as he too scans around with widened eyes.
There’s no way of knowing how many others are left, but it’s surely not a lot; it can’t be. It took them many months to die, in differing states of lobotomy, lying in the roads, but die they mostly did. The shock. Knowledge ripped violently out. Animals again. Stunned like cows in an abattoir, bolts through their brains. And all the systems gone, all the help, the infrastructures, all dissolved in seconds: there was nothing left and no one able to help them. They were surrounded but alone. Their systems stalled and shorted out because of the fused elements of their brains. They could barely function. For years the stench had been unbearable as slowly the corpses had withered, collapsed, and . . . ultimately disappeared. This car is blistered inside, its innards like charred bones, sterilized, like their firestorm-stripped brains had been. The seats have melted like their lives, like their dreams, like their dangerously malleable world. The dash is viscously dripping and the tires have spread onto the tarmac. They have to turn the cart around and use it like a ram to move the wreck, still too hot to touch, away.
Wind in their hair, touched by the faint smell of smoke. The village looks deserted. An ivy-choked sign asks them to drive carefully. A digital display telling them their speed stays blank. Advertising billboards line the road, naked now that there’s nothing to make the quickcodes anything but the reality of what they are: ink on weather-streaked paper, the augmented veil pulled away. The first house has been smashed. A curtain is sucked between window shards, in and out, like that for years. Dirt smears. There are haphazard cars in the streets. Tires flat. Windows crazed. Doors pulled from their hinges. There are old bones beside the hedgerows.
They creep onward, Tom in the harness, up the center of the plant-cracked road. He tries to keep the cart’s roll constant, to keep it quiet, but all the debris makes it hard. There’s an unspoken agreement that they’re not talking. They pass a shop from whose open door a paste-like mulch spreads, and Tom brings the cart to a stop. Silence suddenly. Sun-scorched quietness. Graham crouches, keeping watch, his hair and jacket ruffled by a warm breeze, and Danny goes in first, his feet skidding on the muck as Tom follows. The shop’s shadows hide the mess across the floor. Shelves have sagged. It’s a shock to see faces on the older printed posters. Smiling children holding piggy banks. Families in cars. are you insured? they ask, smiling. Tom remembers being in the back of a car with Ben, streaming vids and messaging each other on their PrivateStream. Their parents were in the front with their own Feeds muted to their children’s . . .
Whether it’s the memories or the putrid stench clogging his nostrils like oil, something makes Tom’s eyes sting and run. He backs out blinking into the sunlight and Danny bursts out moments later, gasping for air with streaming eyes, a security-locked pack of pens and a notebook held aloft.
“For your Chronicle, Graham,” he chokes out. “And teaching the kids.”
There is a movement down the street, crossing the road.
Tom freezes. Looks from the corner of his eye.
A fox stops, steady on its legs and large. Another jumps down to the pavement from a wall. And another. Then three more. All of them watching, circling, waiting. These things are huge and well fed.
“Let’s . . . go now,” Tom murmurs. Keeping his eyes on the first fox, he kneels for a lump of tarmac and hurls it at the pack, which scatters, circles, and re-forms. Teeth bared. Tails straight. They bark. Danny slides into the harness, shaking, and sets it moving, Tom and Graham edging beside it, watched by the foxes and the dusty broken windows, the breeze gently teasing the refuse and the dust as the foxes finally rest in the road, gnawing again at the splintered, meat-free bones.
With the village down behind them, the facility emerges at last in the near distance: a squat concrete fortress, gray amid the healthy green, the multitudes of leaves flickering in the wind, just as Tom had left it days before.
“Well done, boys,” Tom says, and nods. “We’re nearly there. Let’s do this. Let’s get this fuel.”
Danny, grunting, a hunted look in his eyes, hauls the cart to a stop and palms the dirty sweat from his brow. Then, making a noise like a strangled groan, he grabs Tom’s arm and points. On the winding road below them, through the foliage, a dark shape moves.
“What is it?” Graham whispers, his hands to his eyes. “I can’t see.”
The shape is revealed for an instant in a break between the leaves: a vehicle, low-slung, ovoid, and gray-swirled with dust. Long metal spikes have been fixed to its curved roof and sides. It looks like a rusted, flattened old-fashioned mine, hauled ashore by the filthy and laboring horses that drag it along the road, smacked by swaggering men. At this distance its progress is silent.
“It’s not good,” Tom answers tightly. “But it’s going the other way.”
Danny’s voice is tremulous. “Do you think they set fire to those cars?”
Tom has no idea. He had thought this area empty. He watches the group diminish with distance. Snatches of song sneak around on the breeze. As they top a hill, the men look like they are herding a strange and massive animal—and then they disappear over the other side.
Although they could reach the facility by nightfall, they decide to get close, camp, and approach it at dawn. There are other people. They weren’t expecting this. Should they hide? They don’t know. They haven’t encountered others for a long, long time.
They stare at the fire in silence.
“We’re doing the right thing, boys,” Graham announces finally. “We need those turbines working. We must bring home fuel if Jack and Bea are to survive. I mean . . .” He catches Tom’s eye before pouring them nettle beer, and they sit with their boots off, drinking.
“My mum used to give me beans when I was a kid,” Danny says thoughtfully, after a while, staring at the unop
ened tins.
Tom shakes his head. “Danny, you know what happens when you try to remember the—”
“Mine did too,” Graham interjects. “On toast, after cricket at school. I used to love that. Playing into the evening. Walking home while it was still light, and I’d sit at the table, all dirty, with grass stains on my whites, and I’d have baked beans on toast with cheese grated on it, and squash. Lemon-barley water. Usually we all ate together and we had to be clean for tea, but those nights it was just me and my mum and I didn’t even have to wash my hands.”
Tom takes a deep breath while Graham pauses. This is a mistake. Then: “I can’t remember my mother ever cooking for me. Not once,” he tells them, and Danny and Graham listen with interest as he breaks his own rules. He never talks about his past. And he doesn’t talk truthfully now; or rather, he doesn’t reveal it all. Who his father was. Where they lived. His connection with the Feed. But as he talks, from his words unspool new memories. “We had cooks. Walk-in fridges with food covered in . . . plastic wrap. Is that what it was called? My brother, he used to bully me. With the Feed, it never stopped. Wherever he was, wherever I hid, he could get me. He was relentless. I’d turn it off while I ate so I could have some peace, but that made my father furious. But then, his anger was the most attention I got. I remember sitting up on a high stool in the kitchen so I could reach the surface and eat eggs. I remember sitting there reading out loud to the cooks from books. Real books. That made him angry too.”
“Were you in ute?” Danny asks.
“Oh yes.” The truth was he had been the very first to be enabled before birth. A father’s demonstration to the world: Look how safe this is, why wouldn’t you have your own kids done? By the time Ben had been born, the need for proof had seemingly gone; he hadn’t been enabled until he was four, and how Tom had forgotten this until now he can’t understand, as unpleasant emotions suddenly make him feel very sick. Why had Ben not been enabled in ute? Things from the past reorder themselves in his head, as if a riverbed seen only through moving water is now revealing itself, stilled and dry. The arguments in restaurants. The malleability of promises. The hatred he had felt for Ben hadn’t been hatred, he realizes; it had been . . . envy? And the hatred he had felt for his parents had been obscuring something else for years. Actually, Tom thinks, looking through a heat haze at his past, maybe he had been well prepared for the Collapse because he’d felt so paralyzingly alone before it.
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