The Feed
Page 27
“I had a husband, Tom.”
He feels suddenly how cold the ground is, feels it soaking into his feet. And he feels how small he is compared with the depth of the earth, and the height of the sky, and the very age of the world.
“Of course,” he mumbles. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be.” She takes his hand and squeezes it. “Let’s get back inside.”
They fumble through the empty house. In bed they have a strange half-hug and then they turn from each other. After some time he feels her relax and hears her breathing deepen. He turns, silently, and raises himself on an arm. He waits for his eyes to get used to the dark and then, when he still can’t see, he slides to the edge of the bed and pulls open the curtains. He can soon make out the outline of her body as she sleeps, her mouth relaxed, her hands by her face as if praying. Her eyes twitch beneath her lids in deep sleep. He watches her. Wonders what she dreams. Whether she too could now be taken. Not that he could bring himself to kill her. Nor would she him, of course.
She rolls onto her back, sighs and shifts. Then she turns on her side again, facing away from Tom, and, reaching back, pulls his arm around her. She places his palm on her stomach. There is nothing for a while, just the sense of something full, and then the surface warps, and what was soft is suddenly firm, and relaxes, and then is firm again, as the baby moves beneath.
When he can, he pulls his hand away and turns back to the window. He stares out through the cracked and dirty pane. The lawn is a silvered rug rolling up the hill. The forest is dark there on the other side, over where Danny’s grave is.
“Hey, pal,” he whispers. “I wish you were still here. I don’t know what to do.”
Up early, he makes more supplies: biscuits and a simple mulchy stew. There are some old Tupperwares whose plastic has become opaque, and even some scraps of foil. Graham enters midmorning, sees what he’s doing, and says he’s going for a walk. He won’t be drawn into conversation, and Tom watches him from the doorway as he ambles across the grass and turns to his hut, then walks the other way before pausing, trembling visibly even at this distance, and turns back. He plods past his hut and away up the hill.
Sylene comes down, wearing the robe—Kate’s robe—that had been hanging behind the door. He puts some biscuits on a plate for her and they share a quick smile. Then she warms her hands on the cup of tea Tom gives her and looks at it deeply as she drinks.
“It’s not poisoned,” he remarks to break her solid silence.
Sylene sips again and frowns. “My brain knows I don’t like it, but my body says I do. I can’t describe it.”
Tom goes to speak before he thinks better of it and turns back to the sideboard. Sylene watches him as he wraps up more supplies.
“Will Graham be okay without us?” she asks.
“I’m sure he’ll do just fine.”
“How much longer will it take to get to the tower?”
Tom glances out the window, at the hills and the sky and the distant horizon. “A few weeks. Maybe a month.”
“And . . . did Kate like tea?”
“Yes,” Tom says, trying to sound casual. “Very much.”
Graham waves them off cheerily as they leave that afternoon, but when Tom turns back, he has gone. The air is chill as they ascend the track beneath the few remaining leaves. Water drops shiver on their browning edges and fall occasionally to the ground.
“He was a nice man,” Sylene says.
“Yes,” Tom replies, “he was.”
Sylene breathes in deeply. “It smells different. The air.” She glances at him, her breath steaming out. “You shouldn’t feel bad, Tom. The world’s not fair. Survival has a different code.”
“Things change,” Tom says. “It’s the only given constant.” And they do: the days harden. They stay bright but the air becomes unkind. Then the clouds roll in and stay for good, sitting above them like a frozen layer of sky. They sleep in their warmest clothes under the rug they took from their bedroom, and sometimes they talk, and sometimes they sleep, but time seems to stop watching as they inch their slow way south.
After many days they pass a town, a small one, with decaying buildings in its distant core. Streams of vehicles knot around its domes. The rains have been strong and the earth off the tarmac is bog-like, so they walk the road again: it affords them some stability, even if they are now more exposed. Huge billboards ahead have broken and drooped. Tom looks behind them at the looming clouds, heavy with another load of water.
“I don’t like the look of them.”
Sylene glances up, and when she turns back, she is smiling.
“What is it?”
“Nothing. It’s just funny.”
They pass a row of rusted cars crushed into one another. From how they’re positioned it seems some slewed to avoid the collision, while others took the force full on. A long time ago now. All have been raided and the insides are torn, the bodies gone.
“What’s funny?”
Sylene sighs. “That was the point of no return, when you killed the clouds. You made the world hot enough that they could no longer form, and after that the heat became exponential. The clouds”—she points up and then gestures, with both hands flat, one above the other—“protected the planet from the sun’s rays. So once they were gone . . .” She hitches her rucksack up. “Clouds were myths by the time I was born. One of those things that became extinct. So these,” she says, pointing up again, “are lovely. Even if you don’t like the look of them.”
“I meant I think they’re going to rain on us.”
“Yes, I know.”
“But I’m sorry we killed the clouds.”
The billboards here have collapsed across the road, massive things, their white expanses covered with mold, the vast quickcodes barely visible beneath.
“What are those things?”
“Quickcodes? Very clever. Didn’t you have them? Mark loved them.” He frowns. “You didn’t know Mark. He was . . . Anyway, they were scanned directly by the Feed and only relevant ads were shown. A huge source of revenue, and for the consumer—such convenience. The Feed knew what you thought, what you bought, even when you needed to drink or what your body should eat. So food packaging was personalized. A million ads, personalized for each and every product. For me, for you, for children—different for everyone, depending on your needs.”
They climb down into the jagged foundations from where the concrete pylons supporting the structures were ripped. Cables protrude from pits of water like exotic grasses. The metal legs curve over them and twist like clay.
“What was Bea like?”
They scramble up the other side of the crater. Tom reaches the top first and waits for her to clamber out behind him, examining the road, the clouds above them and the waterlogged country spreading to the side.
“She’s lovely,” he says in the end. “She’s blond, like you, and has your eyes and nose, though the rest of her face is like mine unfortunately.”
“I meant what’s she like as a person?”
Tom inclines his head and nods down the road. “Shall we?”
They climb onto the tarmac, grabbing the creaking fender of a truck to pull themselves up.
“Spirited,” he continues. “Like you. Clever too. She saw things—sees things that I can’t. You know what I mean?”
“That’s kids for you.”
“She sees things that are obvious, but that somehow we just don’t see—”
“Or have the time to notice.”
“That’s right,” he says, returning her smile.
“I had children,” she says. “My boys.”
“Really?” he says. And, after a while, “Did they . . . ?”
“I buried them.”
Sylene has her thumbs tucked into the straps of her rucksack, up by her chest. Her head is down, looking at the road, watching her footing among the debris. She has to lean forward slightly now to see her feet over her stomach. “My parents died first, a long time ago. The
n my husband. He had been trying to fix the solar array. And then my eldest son, Gabe; he was one of the first wave to try to come back, but we knew it had gone wrong straightaway. The second, Darian, he came back later. We thought it was working by then. I wanted him to come back before me so I could bury his body. Even if the transfer worked, our bodies still had to die.”
“So maybe Darian’s here now? Maybe he made it back?”
“Maybe. But how can I find him?” Sylene looks at him levelly.
“I’m sorry. No one should have to—”
“No,” she says, and catches her breath. “No one should have to, but here I am. They saved the old for last. I hoped I wouldn’t make it.”
It starts like the sound of a rattle, or guns in the distance. Tom doesn’t know what it is until it gets louder, and he turns and sees that it’s nearly upon them: a striated wall of rushing gray, drilling into the car roofs, rattling them like cans. “Cover!” he shouts, but the raindrops thrill over them, piercing and hard. His hands are icy in an instant and his fingers ungainly as he fumbles a car door open. He throws himself inside and reaches over to grab Sylene’s rucksack as she forces it in and squeezes into the passenger seat. The car has the cold smell of empty years and their breath instantly condenses on the glass. The air outside takes on an early darkness and water coats the windows. Sylene says something that he doesn’t hear over the cascading rattle.
“What?”
“It’s loud!”
After his ears get used to the stunning noise, Tom reaches around his seat for his bag. He emerges with two hard biscuits. They eat in companionable silence as the raindrops pummel the car and he looks at the patterns in their flow.
“So your boys, they were adults?”
Sylene nods, swallowing her dry biscuit down.
“Children of their own?”
“No. It wasn’t a world you’d wish on anyone. My husband and I . . . went against the advice we were given. We thought we only had enough energy for a decade’s more air when we had Gabe, but we found ways to make it last longer. We knew the heat would kill us first.”
He nods, thinking. “So . . .” He turns to her. She turns to him. “How old are you, Sylene?”
“You shouldn’t ask a lady that. And anyway, age was different where I come from. We lasted a lot longer. By that reckoning, I’m not even middle-aged. I’m comparatively younger than you.”
“Are you ancient?”
“None of your business.”
“But you are a woman at least, aren’t you? I mean, you’re not a man in there?”
“This conversation,” Sylene says, flicking the end of his nose, “stops right now.”
“I just wanted to check.”
“Well, you’re being offensive!”
“Why are you smiling then?”
“I’m not. This horrible biscuit you made.” She sucks her mouth. “It’s all stuck in my teeth. Fill this up, would you?” She turns and rummages in her bag, and he stares at the stretched skin of her waist as her sweater and jacket ride up. She puts a tin cup in his hand; when he doesn’t move, she nods at his window and points. “Come on then, boy.”
He grins, opens his door, and holds the cup outside. The rain whips in, drenching his leg, but when he presents her with the cup, it’s full to the brim.
He watches her drink. “Liquid cloud, right?”
“Tastes so good.”
The road is slick in the morning and the autumnal colors of the cars have been brought out by the rain. Their doors creak open painfully. Hers shuts, spraying water into the air, but the hinges of his lock, halfway closed, and the door will move no more. They walk for an hour, and when an elevated junction appears in the distance, fenced off with billboards that could be hiding anyone, he takes them off the road. They cut a course across the fields until they reach another. They cross it, descend the other side, and continue across the sodden earth.
By the time they camp, nights later, they are eager for the warmth of the tent. “It’s beginning to feel like home,” Sylene jokes as she throws the tarpaulin out and begins to peg it in.
Tom smiles at her over his shoulder, bending down to lay a fire. “Better than your tin cans?”
Sylene narrows her eyes. “Those cans were progress, boy. State of the art in their time. I’d like to see this thing stand up to some serious solar rays. I bet it doesn’t even have beta-particle protection.” She fingers the fabric, challenging him with her smirk.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about. I’m just a primitive, an ape.” He taps his head. “All I know is all I got. What are beta particles?”
The expression of Sylene’s eyes sinks somewhere else. “Nothing. They’re not important yet. They killed my husband, though, after we destroyed the clouds.”
Tom continues to pile the logs up as Sylene carries on with the tent. “Are they a type of radiation or something?” he asks after some time.
Sylene inserts the structural poles and the tent is up. She climbs inside and connects the inner tent to its shell. She takes far longer to do the job than she normally does, and after a while Tom returns to laying the fire. He cooks in the peace. Surveys the land around them. Sylene comes out when the food is nearly ready, her eyes, perhaps, slightly red, and Tom watches from a rock as she pours stew from the pot. She looks more tired than she used to, but generally happier with it too. More relaxed somehow. Her stomach pushes her jacket aside like someone peeking through.
“Here we are.”
Tom takes the tin bowl she hands him and first of all warms his hands, lowering his head to feel the steam. “It’s perfect.”
“You haven’t eaten it yet.”
“It is the most lovely smelling radiator in the world.”
She settles next to him, breath escaping as she lowers herself down.
“I’m sorry about your husband; that must have been awful. But are you happier now?”
When the silence stays unbroken, he rolls his head to look at her, not wanting to take it away from the warmth. She is watching him quizzically. “Yes,” she replies. “Doing all right.”
Once dark, the temperature drops and the night sky is clear, the stars precise and bright. They sit outside wearing two sweaters each under their jackets, gloves, and hats. Their breath steams: the only clouds in the sky.
“Did you know,” Tom says—they are leaning back into each other, their shoulder blades connecting—“that over seven years all the cells in your body will have replaced themselves? You will literally, physically, be a different person.”
“Says who?”
“Says . . . someone I know. I think it’s true.”
“We had nanobots that replaced our cells weekly. A constant clean, renewing them before they had a chance to deform.”
Tom looks up at the stars, his lower lip out. “It means I’m a different person from who I was before the Collapse.”
He feels her nod, the roll of her skull through their hats, and he can see her steam clouds rising upward as she speaks behind him: “There’s no point fighting it. It’s what makes the world go round.”
Tom watches the stars some more.
“It was Danny,” he says. “Danny said that. I wish you could have met him. It sounds silly, but he’s the best friend I can remember having. We weren’t similar, but I understood him. I liked him. He was kind. He really loved Bea. And I don’t want to ever forget him.”
The landscape ripples up to little folds of hills. Sometimes when the wind courses over them from the east they smell a briny sea. They cross roads, but they’re only small in this part of the country. Expanses of emptiness stay silent in the salt-licked air.
Late one afternoon they crest a hill. There is a river below them, an area that has widened into the bowl of an estuary where the slopes are thickly covered with trees.
Sylene gasps. “It’s so beautiful!”
Tom looks at the view again. Before, he had been thinking only about how to traverse it, only seeing the half-
sunk boats in the water, the length of a pontoon snapped and scattered like floating matchsticks, all the signs of destruction. But now he sees the trees, the stillness of the water, the silhouettes of the distant hills sketched out in the miasma of the afternoon’s late light. It is beautiful, he realizes. And to the south, in the distance, maybe—is he seeing this right?—he makes out the faintly notched shapes of the city, one of which, he knows, is the tower.
These are flat days now in the terrain they cover and the way time seems to stretch. They walk constantly, talk occasionally, sleep rarely, and eat not enough. But the city grows upon the horizon. The smell takes Tom by surprise, even though he had been expecting it. Sylene mentions it as they pack up the tent one morning. It seems to slick the air itself, turning it fetid and cloying.
“It’ll get worse,” he says. “If it’s coming from the city, it’ll get worse for sure.”
And suddenly something becomes real. All this time they’ve been walking, the hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of steps they’ve taken; with each one, somehow, the memory of Bea has softened. Her image has become more and more opaque, the essence of her in his head less real. An imaginary child, not a true one. Their mission had, somewhere, at some point, become the mere act of it, but now, with this smell, he realizes: this is it. They may find her here. And if they don’t, she’s gone. Like so many others, snuffed out, deleted from the world, from life. This smell, he understands, is death.
They meet a motorway and flank it. Keeping their distance, they look for people, animals, anything that might be a threat as the vehicles go from sparsely scattered wrecks to a frozen floe of rusted metal and filthy glass. The city becomes clearly visible: a spread of something covering the earth; the low-slung sub-city domiciles; the huger edifices farther in. He points at one, at the horizon, and tells her that’s where they’re going. That’s the tower. His father’s place. Where their homeHub stores their BackUps and Bea’s—as Sylene has told him it will.
Then, soon, the cars are packed so tightly together they act like a scab across the road: a rusted layer of metal, bleeding onto the tarmac. They walk along its top. Slowly. Stepping from bumper to roof to bumper, going from car to car. Gaping rusted holes reveal rotten innards of stained fabric and shredded seats. Ten lanes on the motorway, all packed with crushed-up cars, all of them stopped as they tried to escape, and going nowhere for years.