The Iceberg - [Richard Mariner 05]

by Peter Tonkin

  It was an impression intensified by the big warehouse behind the offices. Here, everything that had been constructed by humans had been taken over by other, older life forms, which had then died in their turn. The branches of the adventurous vegetation which had explored the buildings lay about like white bones, twisted and alien. In the square metal box girders high above, the huge untidy nests of nameless, long dead birds extended the shadows and were, seemingly, home to nothing but insects now. On the ground, low bushes, dead and skeletal, rose and fell over piles of invisible produce so worthless that no one had even bothered to stack it properly. There was a silence about the place, emphasised by the chittering of the insects high above; a silence so intense it seemed to whisper. Robert and Ann stood side by side on the threshold of the place, looking across the wilderness of dead things. Ann thought inescapably of the spiders that had run across her body earlier that day.

  ‘I’m not going in there,’ she said aloud.

  The sound of her voice echoed briefly. The vibration of the words seemed to set dust to slithering down walls and settling through the strange dead sunbeams reaching across the dead air.

  In the tiny silence that followed, something stirred. Something strange and close by.

  ‘We don’t need to be in here anyway,’ said Robert more quietly, his eyes everywhere. ‘We just need to see whether there is anything that will get us down.’

  ‘If the winding gear is in this state, nothing mechanical will,’ opined Ann, also quietly. The pair of them were backing out of the big room now, still side by side, their eyes searching for whatever was making that strange, snuffling movement.

  ‘You know I still have the pistol in my camera bag,’ breathed Ann as they fell back through the frame of the main access door into the corridor between the derelict offices.

  ‘Forget it,’ suggested Robert. ‘Let’s just leave whatever is in there well alone!’ and the pair of them turned and fled.

  Outside, they followed the sagging cables across the compound, over the spur line, out past a crazy gate, across the main line and out to the edge of the plateau. As they moved, glancing nervously over their shoulders, they discussed what the thing in the main shed might have been, but they had nothing to go on and could do little more than guess. In spite of the gathering darkness, the blustering of the increasingly boisterous evening wind and the way in which the red-edged shadows intensified the disturbing atmosphere, they tried to keep their speculation within reasonable bounds. It could be anything from a goat thrown off one of the trains to a big dog that had scavenged its way along the ledge from the township. It might even have been one of the monkeys that had fallen from the cliff edge above and flown a little more successfully than the rest. Whatever it was, it was left well behind them once they had crossed the main track, and their quiet conversation began to speculate whether or not there was a direct way down from here.

  The door into the second winding house yielded easily. There was an impressive bolt padlocked shut on the outside but the screws holding the bolt had rusted and the wood into which they were screwed was dust. At Robert’s first push, the whole thing simply tore loose and the door swung inwards on screaming hinges. There was just enough light to see the machinery inside, and to register the fact that it was every bit as rusty as the bolt and hinges were. Caught between desperation and the grudging realisation that it had been a long shot that anything here could have been of much use to them, they went on into the big room.

  It was the view ahead which claimed them first, for beyond the rust-red shape of the machinery, the wall was open to allow the cables access. Through the opening, it was possible to see in the glimmering blue distance the far horizon where the vivid sky crushed down upon the quivering, brick-red earth. After the claustrophobic closeness of the jungle they had been fighting through, the distances were breathtaking.

  Ann blinked tears out of her eyes and looked away. On either side of them were two rooms, glass-panelled, containing the controls of the machines which squatted in front of them. Ann looked into the nearest of the control rooms, noting with wry amusement the posters on the wall above the main control board. One depicted a range of half-familiar black faces - the freedom fighters of a generation or two ago. Beside it hung a poster showing a huge black woman, stark naked, full frontal, with legs astride and hands on hips, all arrogant lip curl, overflowing curves and rich, dark promise trembling on the edge of threat.

  The bull chimpanzee came through the door behind them at a full charge slowed only by the fact that it was crippled. The speed and noise of its entrance had all the impact of an attack by a mountain gorilla. The creature was massive of its kind, a metre and a half high, though hunched and twisted by injuries to spine and legs. Its bones were huge and made all too obvious by the state of the flesh and hide upon them - the one reduced to string and the other to mange by a combination of starvation and disease. Its face was emaciated too, making the size of its red eyes and the length of its yellow fangs all the more obvious. A foam of drool overflowed its thick black lips and spattered onto the black-haired breadth of its chest. Its cavernous belly heaved as it bellowed at them and, below, its gender and its rage were alike shockingly obvious.

  The two humans ran at once, rushing to take refuge behind the hulking metal of the winches themselves. As each of them went a different way, the chimp was given pause and it fell forward onto the knuckles of its massive hands. The thunder of the impact seemed to make the wooden floor shake and it was suddenly borne upon Ann’s mind that the solid foundation of the building ended just beyond the weighty machine. The wooden section which she and Robert were currently cowering upon was in fact built out over the sheer drop down which the cables reached. As if to emphasise the point, the hot red wind battered in through die open section immediately behind them and the cables groaned as though they were in eternal agony. The chimpanzee at once took up the cry, battering the floor with its knuckles, obviously building itself up to another charge. ‘Give me the gun!’ yelled Robert.

  As though the creature understood the words, it ran bellowing round Robert’s side of the machine at once, hurling itself at him bodily, long before Ann could free the weapon from the camera bag. It missed on its first charge and brushed past Ann as it rushed wildly across the open area of the overhang, the fetid stench of its rancid body, rotting flesh, and putrid breath making her gasp. It was slow to turn, giving her an instant more to rip the zipper wide. The gun came clumsily into her shaking fists as the rest of her precious equipment cascaded unnoticed onto the floor. ‘Give it to me!’ snarled Robert at her shoulder and she would gladly have done so, but there was no time left.

  The beast hurled itself forward again just as her wildly twitching thumb found the switch which ignited the red dot. By sheer chance, the dot was on its left nipple. She didn’t even register this consciously before she was pressing the trigger. Her wild attempts to switch on the red dot had set the gun to automatic and it spat a skein of bullets at the chimpanzee, which stitched up the left side of its chest, shattering its ribs and detonating its collar bone, hurling it up in the air, still screaming, and chucked it out through the open wall. Ann watched it go over the edge, utterly unconscious of the fact that the bullets were spitting through the corrugated tin of the roof, following the red dot across the ceiling above her head. The thunderous pounding of the impact was deafening and the dust billowing down the air was joined by a thickening rain of insects.

  ‘STOP!’ screamed Robert and jerked Ann back part of the way towards reality. She dropped the gun altogether. Then, still held by the dark magic of the moment, she stepped over the smoking gun and walked across to the opening. She stood against a low rail, looking down to see where the creature had gone.

  It had not gone far. On the left-hand side of the wood-floored balcony which overhung the two-hundred-metre drop down to the river was a tall structure of wood and metal which had clearly once contained a lift car. On one strut of this, perhaps twenty metres down,
the animal hung like a length of tatty black carpet. Even as Ann watched it, overwhelmed by a disorientating surge of guilt, the creature twitched, probably in its final death throes, and fell free of the strut to disappear down the hollow shaft. After a while, there came a dull thud, flat and final, carried up on the red wind.

  Robert’s arm came round her shoulder then and he folded her in against his broad chest. She began to sob uncontrollably. It was not simply the death of the creature which affected her, nor even the fact that she had actually killed it with her own hands; it was this coming on top of all the death and destruction with which she had been surrounded since she came out into the bush with him. He knew that. He probably also knew that the kiss she had pressed against his lips in the hiding place on the cliff had been nothing more than a ploy to keep him silent. In any event, his embrace was avuncular and bracing, designed to strengthen, not seduce. His gaze in any case was reaching out over the dark curve of her head and down the lift shaft which had just swallowed the body of the chimp. If the rest of this place was anything to go by, its fastenings were probably about as solid as that rusty bolt’s. And the wood struts were probably so wormy they would crumble at a touch. But there was no getting round it: that was the best way down they were likely to come across.

  He shook her gently until her sobs choked off. ‘Come on,’ he said quietly. ‘Let’s get out of here before Tarzan arrives looking for Cheeta there.’

  Wisely, she would not venture onto the wooden structure without a safety harness, so after picking up the contents of her bag they spent die last half-hour of daylight searching for rope. They found it in a supply room off the late chimpanzee’s indoor kingdom just at that trembling blood-red moment when the last of the light died at the end of the short tropical evening. There was an awful lot of it - more than a hundred metres. They searched desultorily in the dark for something to cut it with, without success.

  ‘We’ll have to wait now,’ she said, not too sadly, as they walked back across the compound towards the main rail track, for she was bone-tired and envisaged a night’s exhausted sleep.

  ‘That’s right,’ he agreed. ‘We’ll go back to the winding shed then you can get forty winks. I’ll wake you at moonrise.’

  ‘We’re going down in the dark?’

  ‘It won’t be that dark; it’s coming up to full moon, remember. And anyway, we want to be out of here as soon as possible. Even if no one heard the shots, I still don’t fancy being caught halfway down that shaft if a chopper comes by in the morning.’

  She nodded wearily; she had to agree. Death had become a part of her life. There was no sense worrying, she just had to accept it as a new fact of her strange existence. Even if Nimrod Chala and the terrifying General Gogol failed to catch up with them, they were dead in any case should even the slightest thing go wrong.

  She had expected to lie wakeful and worrying but instead she plunged into a deep sleep in which she dreamed of Nico Niccolo, first officer in the Heritage Mariner organisation and her sometime lover aboard the leper ship Napoli in the wonderful safe old days when all she had had to worry about were cargoes of nuclear waste going critical all around her.

  ~ * ~

  At first when Robert woke her, she thought he must have waited until morning after all. The winding shed was so bright that she felt she could easily have read a newspaper or a book. Only slowly did her groggy mind register the colourless quality of the light. Everything yellow and red had been bleached out of it and only whites and blues remained. And yet it was dazzlingly bright, as though the whole room was trapped eternally in the light from an exploding flash bulb. She blinked owlishly and he shook her once again. ‘Are you awake?’ His voice was loud, its normal, conversational tone sounding like a bellow to her super-sensitive ears. She had become, she realised, one of the hunted; as much a quarry as a fox pursued by hounds.

  ‘I’m awake.’ Her answer was couched in a whisper.

  ‘Good. It’s time.’

  They pulled themselves to their feet and she realised that, although she had fallen asleep curled independently on the wooden floor, he had come close to her in the darkness and cradled her sleeping head in his lap.

  She automatically began to tie the rope round her waist, preparing to wind metre after metre of it round her ribs, but his hand fell on hers. ‘Not so fast,’ he said. ‘I think you’d better find the Ladies before we go. There won’t be any rest stops halfway down the cliff.’

  ‘Great. But where?’

  ‘Anywhere. The neighbours won’t complain, believe me.’

  ‘The only practical places are the two offices, unless you want to go blundering around out there in the dark.’

  ‘That’s about what I thought. You take the one on the right, I’ll take the one on the left.’

  And so she squatted and relieved herself like a native in the bush, except that this was in a rusty old wastepaper bin from beside a desk in the corner, under the ironic gaze of the massive black woman naked on the wall. For some reason best known to Ann, it was the freedom fighters who got used as toilet paper.

  Ann went first, exploring and guiding, and he followed on the safe struts that she had tested in the knowledge that if she fell, the rope round their waists would keep her from falling. As long as Robert could hold on. And, oddly enough, she had not a moment’s worry on that score, even when the furnace breath of the evening wind tugged at her most powerfully. She did have some vivid worries, however, not about the strength of the wood or the security of the metal, but about the blood of the chimp she had murdered and the type of nocturnal creatures that might come out in the darkness to scuttle along the struts beneath her hands. Worries about scorpions, centipedes and spiders made her go slowly, and as soon as she gained confidence and started to speed up again, splinters slowed her down.

  She was a fit woman, muscular and lithe. Her desert boots were thick-soled and took firm hold of whatever she stepped on. What she put her weight onto held up bravely, and remained firm under Robert’s greater weight when he followed her. Only her soft palms let her down and, in the absence of the nightmare creatures she feared, they did not begin to hurt until she was more than halfway down the crazy ladder they were steadily descending.

  There was more than the pain in her hands to worry her by this stage, for as they descended they seemed to pass out of the hot boisterous air of the uplands into the hot, fetid, poisonous air of the dying lowlands. And, while the air was still, it was by no means as clear as the upper air had been. Nor as empty. Clouds of mosquitoes surged upwards, hungry for blood, and soon proved as intimately pervasive as the spiders had been. In fact, given the discomfort of their persistent bites and the literally maddening whine of them around her head, Ann would very gladly have carried a whole range of spiders on her burning skin if they had guaranteed to feast upon the crawling, biting insects moving there now. This was a thought which she held in her heart and treasured even before the word malaria occurred to her.

  Ten metres up, the light of the lowering moon fell in behind the tops of the tallest trees which stood above what was left of the river. On the far bank the greenery stood half a kilometre distant, but on this side it crowded closer, overrunning the thin, intense bank which had been widened artificially into a landing stage. Higher up, looking down on a moonlit panorama, it had been possible to see that only the outermost reaches of the landing stage reached into the water now. But the wet, fetid air of the river still filled the valley sides even though the water hissed along quietly far out from either shore. The nature of the wood beneath her hands changed during the last few tens of metres. It became softer and spongier. The acutely unwelcome visions of centipedes returned, to be joined by fears of ticks and leeches. ‘This is truly foul,’ came the gasping rasp of Robert’s voice immediately above. ‘You believe what they say about malaria?’

  ‘What do they say?’ Her own voice was strained and breathless from the exertion. Perhaps the gallons of sweat she was oozing would wash the damned m
osquitoes off and give her some relief. Except, of course, that the salt in the perspiration only made the bites itch more fiercely.

  ‘That if the bites don’t itch, then you’ve probably got it.’

  Ann considered the burning acres of her skin and feelingly said, ‘I’ll buy that. I didn’t think it was possible to itch so much.’

  ‘Me neither. Little bastards’ve bit my dick.’

  ‘That’ll be hard to scratch,’ she said sympathetically.

  ‘And we’re fresh out of Waspeeze, too,’ he moaned.

  At the very moment he said this, her feet stepped down onto solid ground.

  The rest of her body refused to believe what the feet were telling it, so she continued to move down, collapsing into a heap in the deepening puddle of shadow. At first she thought the sparsely grassed, suspiciously soft ground had managed to retain the warmth of the day to an amazing extent. Then she realised she was sitting on the dead chimp. She jumped to her feet and collided painfully with Robert just as he stepped down beside her. ‘What is it?’ he demanded.