by Peter Liney
It was awful. Mainly cuz you knew that was exactly what was going to happen. That somewhere up there, their coordinates were being locked onto, the charge of “Crime Against the State” proven, and any moment now the appropriate punishment would be dispensed.
As much as I couldn’t bear it, as much as I felt as if I was intruding on private grief, like everyone else, I wasn’t able to walk away. All of us were just standing there holding our breaths, hushed apart from the kids, waiting for it to happen. To make matters worse, whatever they’d used to bind the raft together started to give way and one by one the timbers began drifting apart.
Soon, both the man and woman were in the water, not going anywhere. They floundered around for a while, like they were thinking they might just try swimming for it, then, already beginning to tire, turned and reluctantly headed back toward the shore.
Don’t ask me why the satellite chose that moment to blast them. Maybe it had been referred to a higher authority and they decided that, no matter what, they had to make an example of them. But suddenly it happened, a laser spat down its fatal stream of light and both of them kind of disappeared under the water, leaving it crackling and steaming with dissipating energy.
The kids shrieked at the top of their voices. They loved it. You’d think they’d been watching a game and someone just scored. The rest of us turned and silently walked away. What we’d always known confirmed; that the boundary is still drawn as violently as ever.
That aside, the only other thing of note that happened was another Infinity chopper—maybe even the same one—nosing around for a while. Maybe it’s just me, but when they hover there like that, stationary in the sky for minutes on end, it always gets my imagination going. I guess they were just checking that things had died down, and after a while they did leave, which only went to reinforce my belief that I was returning to the tunnels with encouraging news. The Village was being rebuilt, there was no sign of any further Wastelord activity, nor a search for Lena. And maybe it was this mood of relief, of rekindled optimism, that caused my mind to return to what she’d said the previous day, about me having “given up.”
I didn’t see what I could do about it. I’d felt that way for so long, surely now it was too late? Or maybe that’s her whole point? That I wasn’t even prepared to give it a try. I quickened my stride a little, wanting to make that extra effort, to feel my legs breaking their normal slow and weary rhythm.
When it finally occurred to me, it was like having a private joke with myself. The way you do sometimes. When you smile quietly and hope no one asks you why. I mean, it’s crazy. I couldn’t possibly be serious . . . could I?
Again I lifted my pace a little, stretching muscle and sinew that further millimeter. On the other hand, what did I have to lose? And almost without realizing it, I broke into a clumsy jog. I had to get back to the tunnels. There was something I badly needed to do.
After I told them what I’d seen, or rather, what I hadn’t seen, the atmosphere over lunch became noticeably more relaxed. Lena had a little dig at me for not letting her know I was going out, but you could see how relieved she was that there was no further sign of De Grew and his Wastelords. ’Course, I never said anything about the couple who got zapped. What’s the point? It’s just a fact of life, a power beyond us, like a force of nature or something.
I did mention to Jimmy and Delilah about the site of our lean-tos having disappeared. Neither of them seemed that concerned. The little guy didn’t even mention his favorite wrench. I guess in a way it only confirmed what we already knew: our life over there’s gone. This is what we have now. And I think we’re all pretty well agreed, it’s one helluvan improvement.
With what I had in my head, it wasn’t easy to sit there and act normal. I kept agreeing with everything that was being said, trying to ease the conversation along, to make sure no one got into any kind of debate. Thankfully, I can always rely on Jimmy not to ignore the call of his workshop for too long.
“Well . . . gotta go,” he eventually said, in that way that makes it sound like he’s off to his downtown office.
“Yeah, I’d better inspect those tunnels,” I told them.
“Make sure you do this time,” Lena warned.
It’s a terrible thing. I don’t hold with telling lies, especially not to someone you care about, but damned if I wasn’t about to do it for the second time that day. I reassured Lena that inspecting the tunnels was all I had in mind for the afternoon, that she knew she could trust me, then sidled off. Her and Delilah were far too engrossed in their conversation to notice me grabbing a box of candles before heading to the lower levels.
It took me almost an hour. The first time around I didn’t notice the service tunnel linking the two main ones. By cutting through I could form a circuit of some half a mile or so. Ideal for what I wanted. I retraced my footsteps, putting up a lighted candle every thirty or forty yards, till finally the whole stretch was illuminated.
Don’t ask me why, but I still got a watch. If it ever stops, I guess that’ll be an end to it. I’ll throw it away and it can take time with it, but until that happens I continue to strap it on and live a little by what it tells me. It shows seconds as well as minutes, which I was hoping might come in useful. On the other hand, maybe I was being a little ambitious? Maybe that amount of detail wasn’t gonna be necessary?
I think I already told you, I ain’t that good at running. Weights are my thing. I can clean and jerk a couple hundred pounds all day. But as a means of assessing general fitness, running’s a pretty good place to start. It took me precisely three minutes and fifty-seven seconds to heave and huff my way around that circuit. I intended to carry on, maybe do several laps, but there was no way. I had to take a break, get my breath back, wait for the pain to subside so I could check myself out for any permanent damage. Ten minutes or so later I set off again, taking it easy this time but still ending up doubled over and gasping.
It was discouraging. I couldn’t believe how heavy my limbs felt, how much effort was needed to drag them along. I went around a further three occasions, the final time walking the last few hundred yards. I was so exhausted I thought I was going to throw up, though it was my heart that was really worrying me. I had this mental picture of it being asked to suddenly thrash and pound away after years of peacefully ticking over. In the end, I just had to tell myself to stop worrying, that if it was going to blow there was nothing I could do.
I thought it over for a while, then reluctantly decided to go and see Jimmy in his workshop. I mean, I’d promised myself I wouldn’t tell anyone—not yet—but I needed help. Running wasn’t going to be enough. I needed to make me up some weights as well. Mind you, the way he looked at me when I first broached the subject I damn near gave up the idea then and there.
“You what?” he said, as if he hadn’t heard me properly.
“I’m going back into training.”
He paused, still gaping, a frown puckering up his whole wrinkled little face. “You’re kidding, right?”
“No!”
“Big Guy! People our age . . . You know. Not a good idea.”
I can’t tell you how much that annoys me. The gap between our ages might not be that great, but one day it could be the difference between life and death—mine and his.
“I ain’t your age, Jimmy,” I told him. “Now, are you going to help me or not?”
“You going to tell Lena?”
“Not for the moment.”
“So I’m going to be left to explain why you had a heart attack?”
“Jimmy!”
In the end, and despite endless tutting and shaking his head, he gave a very long resigned sigh, like a croupier being forced to take the bet of a bankrupt man. “Okay.”
He started hunting around his workshop till he came up with this idea of securing drums to the end of a length of metal pipe and filling them with sand.
“How much sand do you want?” he asked, as if he thought a cupful would be most advisable.
“Try half full,” I told him.
Again he gave a long sigh, but still commenced pouring the sand into the two drums. The moment he finished, I grabbed the metal pipe, ignored the slight pull in my back as I lifted the whole apparatus, and without another word struggled out the door.
“Your funeral,” he called after me.
“Shut up, Jimmy!”
That evening, Lena was so convinced I was sick she insisted on putting me to bed. I had no color, my muscles were repeatedly going into spasm and my limbs were shaking like they were in a state of shock.
“Probably just a cold,” I told her.
“Clancy, you can hardly move.”
“I’m fine,” I said. “It’ll be gone by morning.”
The following day, when I woke up, I was that stiff it was all I could do to stand up. I tried exercising it off, but I was in such pain I had no choice but to delay getting fit for a while.
Lena wanted me to go back to bed, to sleep off whatever it was, but I stubbornly insisted on getting around; tottering from one place to another, my limbs so rigid I was like a wooden marionette.
A few days later, I started again. Taking it slower this time. Bit by bit, day by day, till several weeks on, it does seem to be getting a little easier.
I swear my muscles are firmer. I mean, I think there’s a limit to what you can do. Sixty-three-year-old unflexed muscle seems to flop no matter what; but flexed, there does seem to be an improvement. I can manage five laps of the circuit without stopping. Plodding through those tunnels, sweat pouring off me, puffing and panting like some recommissioned old steam train.
When I was sure I could keep it up, that it wasn’t going to be a five-minute wonder, I told Lena. As a matter of fact, I think she was pretty impressed. So much so that some days she comes with me. The two of us jogging that candlelit circuit far underground, her tagging along behind using the sound of my footsteps as a guide.
It’s her who’s done it, of course. She made me take a long hard look at myself. I’d become all grouchy and bitter about losing something that, to some degree, I still have. I owe her. But do you know something? It ain’t just her. There’s something else too, that I don’t really know how to put into words. See, I got this feeling that the situation on the Island’s changing. There’s always been a kind of terrible balance here—us, the kids, the Wastelords, satellites, and fog—but now, the existence of Lena and the tunnels seems to have altered all that.
I guess I’m not making much sense. But every time I press another weight, or run another circuit, I get this feeling that I’m not so much trying to get fit again as training up for something. Not that I have the slightest notion what it might be. All I do know is that with each passing day, I can feel it coming closer and closer.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Despite this vague sense that there was a small tear in the fabric of our lives that was getting ever bigger, our existence in the tunnels continued in a fashion that, certainly for Jimmy, Delilah, and me, has been far more agreeable than anything we’ve known since we came to the Island. We’re safer, warmer, and better fed than we’ve been in years. Sure we miss the daylight, the sun, the sea breeze (that being the only time the air ain’t stuffed full of crap), but that’s a small price to pay for what we’ve gained down here.
I went up top again one afternoon, just for a quick look around, but nothing seemed to be happening, and even Lena was beginning to think that maybe De Grew came to the conclusion that he had it wrong, that she wasn’t involved in the break-in on the warehouse after all.
Jimmy put a switch on his light. As if to prove that we hadn’t only recaptured electricity, we were also in control of it again. He also tried hooking up a second one, a bit farther down the tunnel, but it must’ve been too much of a drain on his “generator,” cuz both of them went so dim he had to disconnect it and go back to the original arrangement.
Mind you, I gotta say, the one thing that never gets drained is the little guy’s enthusiasm. He’s working flat-out on some new secret project down there, and every day comes up smirking to himself, barely able to wait to show us what it is. As for Delilah, she’s become a lot more forgiving of him and his junk since she realized he actually can do some of the things he always claimed. She’s never going to fuss over the little guy—Delilah’s never going to fuss over anybody—but I noticed she’s become that bit more attentive of him and his needs.
Once everyone knew about my jogging and working out, I didn’t have to stick to the lower tunnels anymore. It gets kind of tedious going around and around the same circuit. You quit cuz you’re bored rather than tired, so I began to run the main tunnel: starting down the other side of the garden, up through the living area, then on to the main hall and back down again. It was a kind of a “warmer and stretcher,” to ease out the aches, get everything moving so I could get on with what I saw as the main business of the day—lifting weights.
In fact, I was feeling so much healthier, so much stronger, that one morning I thought I’d give myself a real test and take on the slope up to the entrance.
You get a false idea of your fitness when you go jogging. You can go for miles and you feel so easy, so comfortable, you’re convinced you can run forever. Then one day you gotta sprint fifty yards for a bus or something, and after thirty you start wondering if it really matters, and what time’s the next one.
It turned out a bit like that. I started off up the slope, sure it would be no trouble and that I was just going to glide up there on the back of my newly regained fitness. About halfway, I felt as if my lungs were starting to tear; at three-quarters, like they were being wrenched out of me through my nostrils. I just about made it and no more. One further stride I reckon might’ve been my last. I collapsed onto the ground on my hands and knees, gasping and wheezing fit to burst.
It was only when I started to get my breath back, when I straightened up and glanced out through the gaps in the bricks, that I realized someone was outside.
I threw myself back into the darkness, my need for breath gone in a gasp. There was a kid out there. So near I could’ve almost leaned out and touched him. I crouched in the corner, not daring to move, expecting him to start scrabbling at the rubble at any moment, looking for a way in. I mean, he must’ve heard me. Surely. All the noise I was making.
But after a couple of minutes, and with no sign of any reaction, I began to slowly inch my way back to take another look. He was still there, in exactly the same position: facing away from me, hunched over something. I could see the freckles on the back of his neck, the lank and greasy tails of his coppery hair. I froze, too scared to make the slightest movement in case my old bones creaked or groaned.
Finally he shifted position a little, half turning, and I got a better look at him. I guess he was about sixteen or so, unnaturally tall, like he’d been force-fed something; a few wispy ambitions to a beard, a night sky of zits, and this real red and raw look about him, as if he’d been exposed to too much too soon. I also got a chance to see what he was so closely studying. He had this apparatus slung around his neck with a small screen, a set of headphones (which was obviously why he hadn’t heard my puffing and wheezing), and in his right hand was holding a long handle with a kind of dish on the end of it.
It was a bit like a more complex version of those old-fashioned metal detectors. In fact, at first that’s what I thought he was: an elaborately equipped scavenger. Then it hit me. It wasn’t a metal detector at all. It was something else. A thermal plotter or sound detector and . . . Jesus we’re in a lot of trouble.
He started sweeping the dish back and forth, his eyes never leaving the screen, repeatedly, and rather angrily, punching buttons, as if the apparatus wasn’t working properly. I felt sick. They hadn’t given up, they’d just been closing in. Another kid came into view over in the direction of the square, using exactly the same equipment. They must’ve divided up the city and were going through it section by section, looking for us.
“Come on, you piece of shit,” I heard the red-haired kid mutter at his detector. “What the hell’s wrong with you?”
He altered the angle of the dish to the ground, sweeping from side to side again, then suddenly stopped, a frown appearing on his face. He repeated the action, now concentrating on just the one area, slightly turning his wrist from side to side, starting to look a bit excited. Oh Jesus, no! Lena and Delilah!
I watched in horror as he locked onto what he’d located, as he squinted at the screen, desperately trying to clean up the image. He punched a few more buttons, was about to cry out to his companion, but then stopped himself. At that moment the other kid shouted something across that I couldn’t quite hear.
“Nah! It’s a piece of crap,” the tall kid replied, his voice sounding so strange spilling down into the tunnel.
He repeated his actions yet again. Squinting even harder at the screen. Did he have something? His dish was certainly pointing in the direction of the living area. I thought about running down there, hushing Lena and Delilah up—before he was sure, before he could pinpoint them—but surely he’d pick me up if I did?
I was just about to take the chance, to tiptoe down there as best I could, when he came out with a whole mouthful of curses, spat on the bricks next to the door and, removing his headphones, started to make his way over to his companion.