Paula fell asleep quite quickly. I suppose that’s one advantage of not having an overactive imagination.
I just lay there with her head on my shoulder, and my hipbones digging into the hard tabletop. My coverall already felt loathsome and dirty, and so did I. I longed for a cold drink and a hot shower; for cool, clean air and a soft mattress. As I listened to the scurrying of rats, the scuttling of cockroaches and the whine of flies, a voice inside me asked the same question over and over again: How long can we live like this?
I finally fell asleep in the hour before dawn…
And woke up at first light, stiff and sore, with something tickling my ear. Unfortunately it was a cockroach, not Paula, nibbling my lobe. I swatted it away and it was so big it fell onto the table with a metallic CLINK. It lay there on its back, coppery and hideous, with its legs thrashing at the air as it frantically tried to right itself. The only thing more disgusting than the top of a cockroach is the underside of one.
Not the ideal start to the day.
I don’t know if it was my swatting movement that woke Paula, or the sound of the falling cockroach, or the weak gray light filtering in through the broken windows. Whatever, she stirred and moved against me. I’m guessing that in those first few moments she’d forgotten where she was because she smiled when she felt the length of my body against hers. Then she opened her eyes and the smile died as she took in the squalid surroundings. All she could say as our situation sank in was, “Oh, Ben!”
I couldn’t say anything at all.
We were so filthy by the next day that we raided the first chemist we came to for shower gel and headed down to the river, even though the water was probably so full of toxins it wasn’t safe to bathe in, let alone drink.
Our skinny dip cleaned away the sweat but left our skin horribly itchy.
I asked Paula the question I’d put to myself earlier: “How long can we live like this?”
Practical as ever, she said, “We’ll have a better idea when we’ve seen how much food and drink there is in the ruins.”
As it turned out, we couldn’t find anything to eat and drink at all. Too many people, no doubt every bit as desperate as we were, had beaten us to each house and shop by forty or fifty years.
While we didn’t find food or drink we found plenty of other things, and at first the novelty of them distracted us from our thirst and hunger. Everywhere we looked there was something we wanted to examine more closely, either because it was particularly quaint or poignant: mailboxes with letters addressed to people who’d long since died; garden furniture for sitting Outside; playparks with swings and roundabouts; rockeries with foot-tall plastic gnomes; and cars vandalized in every kind of way—windscreens smashed, tires slit, doors dented and scratched. Some were burnt out, others covered with paint that had been flung from pots or sprayed in angry aerosol attacks. Words like Mass Murderer and Planetkiller appeared over and over again.
And, inside the houses, we came across countless unsusual things that told of a bygone age:
A collection of costume dolls, an album of stamps, and bundles of football cards.
Photos of newly-weds sharing their first kiss as man and wife; proud parents christening babies; retired couples posing on vacation in faraway places. I couldn’t help but wonder what had become of all those people; of their hope and love, their joy and pride.
And then there were the other buildings:
A courthouse and jail block with unlocked cells and graffiti scratched on the bare plaster walls.
A filling station which had been burned almost to the ground, probably by eco-terrorists rather than by accident.
A boutique full of moth-eaten clothes that hadn’t been in fashion for over half a century, from trousers with flared bottoms to striped halter-tops.
A museum with golf clubs and fishing rods and other reminders that the Outside had once been viewed as a healthy place to be.
A bus station with timetables for coaches that hadn’t run for sixty years.
And a church that had fallen victim to every conceivable form of sacrilege. Despite all the signs of abandonment by God, someone had apparently sought refuge there; a perfectly articulated skeleton clad in disintegrating clothes was spread out on a duvet near the altar, as if somebody had simply lain down and died.
As always in such situations I felt like a cross between a tomb raider and an archaeologist.
“I wonder who it was,” Paula said, looking at the bones.
Something in those words and the way she said them made me look from the skeleton to her.
Aware she was being watched, Paula met my gaze and asked, “Why are you staring at me like that?”
“Because of what you just said—about wondering; and the way you said it—wistfully.”
Paula looked back at the skeleton, and said, “The past’s never seemed so immediate.”
“What about that first time you were Outside, when we went to the library?”
“I suppose I knew on a subliminal level that what I was seeing had nothing to do with the reality of my life, and so I made no effort to engage with it. But now I know this is my world, I’m starting to wonder about it.”
“Looks like we’re not as different as we thought,” I said, but she didn’t seem to hear.
“In the museum I found myself wondering about the games people once played,” she said, as if thinking aloud.
“In the courthouse I began wondering about the people who’d scratched their names into the cement of the cellblock walls.
“In the bus station I got to thinking about where the buses had gone to, and who’d stood in line waiting for them.
“Everywhere we look, I find myself thinking about something to do with the past, whereas before I never gave it a second thought.”
“Looks like you have a sense of wonder after all, Paula. It just never had a chance to come out in the community.”
“I’m starting to feel like a different person,” she said. “I still can’t identify with the past like you do, but I want to find out about it. I wonder about it. There are thoughts filling my empty moments, thoughts of vanished lives.”
She looked up from the bones in front of the altar, and said, “The downside is that some of those thoughts that fill the empty moments are about our future, as well as other people’s past—and those thoughts are ones I’d rather not be having.” She looked back at the skeleton.
I knew exactly what she meant.
We exhausted our food in four days and, despite rationing our drinks to the point of being permanently thirsty, our bottles were as dry as our throats by the day after that. My throat was raw as well as dry, as if something in the air was burning it, and I developed a wracking cough. Paula was the same and, like me, her voice became croakier by the day. As if things weren’t bad enough our skin got steadily itchier, and contact with water only made things worse.
That night, our fifth Outside, there was a colossal thunderstorm. We were so thirsty we ran out of the house we’d made our home for the night—a luxury bungalow that was no longer luxurious—and stood on the patio with our mouths wide open and our arms outstretched.
But the rainwater tasted vile on our tongues and left our faces burning. We boiled some of it in an old pot, on a fire of ripped up cardboard boxes and broken chair legs, lit with a scavenged cigarette lighter. But, after twenty minutes of bubbling away, the water was still so foul we couldn’t make ourselves drink it.
It was as good a time as any to bring out what I’d taken from my desk back in the haven: a syringe full of clear liquid.
Paula looked at it for a very long time. Then she looked at me and said, “Ben, what’s in that?”
“Promise not to turn me in if I tell you,” I croaked.
She almost managed a smile.
“It’s Slo-Mo,” I told her. “I found it on a callout a few weeks ago. When you were being a good cop I was being a bad cop—I never bothered handing it in.”
“Why not?”
“I thought it might be fun to try a few drops of it some day.”
Paula looked from me back to the syringe.
“We can watch each other die a lingering, miserable death,” I told her. “Or we can take some of this and die in each other’s arms after what seems like a lifetime of love.”
“That’s what they used to call a no-brainer, isn’t it?”
We shared out first laugh in more than a day.
There was nothing funny about the silence that followed.
Paula reached for my hand and gently closed it around the syringe, saying, “Not here, Ben. Let’s find somewhere special to…”
She wasn’t able to finish the sentence. She didn’t have to. I knew how it ended.
“I can think of the perfect place,” I said.
Jen had taken me there once, but it was such a long walk we’d only had a few minutes to look around, and even then our filtermasks were used up before we got back to the community.
“What sort of place is it?” Paula asked.
But I wouldn’t tell her. I wanted to surprise her with it, the way Jen had surprised me. I was helped by the same toxic haze that was slowly killing us, for it hid the tell-tale shapes from view until we were nearly upon them. They appeared as if by magic in front of us, dark and unmoving amidst the swirling pearlescence. I watched Paula as she looked at these shapes, which must have been so unlike anything she’d come across before.
“Trees,” she said, disbelievingly.
“It’s the relic of a forest,” I told her. Then I didn’t say anything, because I was too caught up in the excitement of being in the presence of something that was almost as alien to me as it was to her. I just stood there with a tightness in my chest and throat that had nothing to do with the ill-effects of the toxic haze.
I could tell Paula was feeling the same things, too, because she said, “It’s… It’s…”
I picked a word for her: “Amazing.”
She nodded. “If only we’d come across this place earlier,” she said.
I knew what she meant—the light was fading fast. The darkness closed in all around us like a physical thing. As it did, we drew closer together.
It should have been eerie but I didn’t feel frightened, and when I stole a glance at Paula I saw she wasn’t scared, either. Her eyes were glowing with something I’d never discerned in them before, something that couldn’t be reflected light, not in the fast approaching darkness.
She led me deeper into the forest with a tug of the hand, wanting to explore.
Instead of growing more hesitant as the darkness deepened, we walked faster and faster. And then we were running, laughing with wild, carefree abandon like a couple of children, discovering a strangely beautiful world that was dramatically different from the only one we’d ever known. It was a world where there was give in the ground beneath our feet; where every texture felt with our fingertips was different from the last, and not a single one was perfectly smooth.
Finally, inevitably, I tripped over a tree root. Paula fell down next to me. The darkness was complete by now, and rather than get up we crawled on hands and knees until we came to a place comfortable enough to lie down in: a make-do mattress of what I took to be pine needles, softened by time and the elements so they were no longer jaggy.
I flipped over onto my back and Paula settled on her side next to me, head resting in her palm, the fingers of her other hand tracing my cheekbones.
My thoughts turned to the syringe in the pocket of my coveralls, and I said, “Paula—”
She knew me well enough by then to read my mind. “Not now,” she said. “Not yet. Let’s just spend a night here. All I’ve seen of the Outside is what remains of the worst of it; I want to experience what remains of the best of it.
So we lay there silently appreciating the place and each other. I waited for her to get bored and restless like a Number should in such a situation, but she snuggled up to me contentedly. In this place, Paula truly was a different person—and, with her beside me, so was I.
After a time I’d no way of measuring—we’d long since abandoned our i-bands—she fell sound asleep with her head resting on my chest.
Moments later, emotionally drained, I was sleeping, too.
I dreamed of birdsong high above, and wind whistling through the branches.
And woke up in the middle of the night to find I hadn’t been dreaming, at least about the wind. All around me I heard the creak of trees swaying and branches bending in something much stronger than a breeze. I don’t know how long I lay there with my eyes closed, listening to those unfamiliar, evocative, strangely beautiful sounds: the roar of the wind as it roamed the skies far above; the howl it made passing through the high branches; the creaking of trunks straining against their roots; and the rustle of small things I could only guess at moving all around us on the forest floor.
When I opened my eyes I found I was looking into Paula’s. I don’t know if my waking had woken her, or if it was the other way around. Her expression was one of awe. “Paula, what is it?” I asked, intrigued by what had put that look on her face.
She didn’t answer, and I thought she hadn’t heard. Then she turned to me, and it was as if she’d returned from somewhere very far away. “Ben,” she said, with the same bewilderment in her voice that I’d seen in her eyes, “I think I just had a… I think I just had a dream.”
I’d rarely seen anyone, let alone a Number, look so intensely moved.
“What did you dream of?” I asked, sharing her wonder.
“I can’t remember details, just a feeling. I just remember that things seemed different while I slept.”
“In what way?”
She struggled to find words, another thing I wasn’t used to seeing a Number do. Finally she said, “The world was young, not old, and we had time enough for love.”
Reaching into the thigh pocket of my coveralls and bringing out the syringe of Slo-Mo, I said, “The world might not be young, Paula, but we do have time for love.”
She looked at the syringe and I looked at her. I wondered if she was anything like as afraid as I was. I wanted to say something that would make things easier for her. Given the situation, it should have been almost impossible to think of what to say. But the words came to me unbidden: “I won’t let you die without making sure you believe in love, Paula, and I’ll tell you everything I know about the way the world was when the wind had many names.”
EPILOGUE
TIME LOST ALL MEANING FOR THE TWO OF US. THE earth might have turned once or made a thousand revolutions, the sun might have stopped rising, the moon might have fallen, and the brightest star might have burned itself out. Paula and I could have been the first people in the world, or the last, or the only two who ever lived. We talked until our thoughts turned into feelings, and then discovered just how many things can’t be put into words: the secrets and mysteries; the beauty that’s more than skin deep, and the magic that makes people so much more than a sum of their parts.
Only once did anything intrude into our world, a light so bright it was like every sheet of lightning that’s ever flashed across the sky.
After that I didn’t see or feel or hear anything.
Until a sound that was vaguely familiar yet somehow very strange. I couldn’t pin down what it was. There was a word for it, but I’d forgotten it long ago.
Then I remembered that the word was ‘language,’ and I listened to the sound.
The language was strange but familiar, like the sound had been before I realized what it was. I felt like I should have been able to understand it. I thought that on some level I did, and yet I had no idea what was being said.
I opened my eyes and looked into two pools of blackness that were full of secrets I understood, mysteries I’d solved, memories I shared. Each black pool was set in silvery blue, and they were so beautiful I could have looked into them forever. I felt like I already had looked into them forever, and it hadn’t been long enough.
>
There was a pinprick on my arm. Suddenly time accelerated and I could barely breathe. I was lying on the forest floor next to Paula, looking into her eyes and seeing my own confusion mirrored there. The world was spinning so crazily that, even though I was lying down, I felt like I was about to fall over. I held onto Paula and she held onto me as though we might be flung off into opposite corners of the universe at any moment.
Looking up to see what was happening, all I could make out was a spiral of pink and brown, white, and blue. A wave of nausea rose in my throat. I swallowed it back and closed my eyes.
When I opened them the spinning had slowed and the colors were resolving themselves into the faces of people looking down on us; the branches of trees; and the beautiful blue of a sky streaked with pure white clouds.
Someone spoke, and the language I hadn’t been able to understand suddenly made sense now that I was no longer hearing it in slow motion.
They explained what had happened, or at least what they knew of it. A tremendous coronal mass ejection—a solar flare in common parlance—had engulfed the Earth, burning out electronic circuits, erasing hard-drives and databanks; disabling the Ecosystem and resetting mankind’s technological clock to the year zero in the blink of an eye.
It did something else, that flood of charged particles that swamped the Earth: it ionized the toxins in the atmosphere, burning off the leaden haze that had blighted the planet for so long.
Some of the shell-shocked people who emerged from the crippled community had found Paula and I lying in the forest. They thought we were dead because the Slo-Mo had virtually put us into stasis. But then a faint whisper or a moan told them we were still alive, and they’d given us some Rush to bring us back to the world.
To a new world.
We ate some of the food they’d brought from the community, and slaked our thirst with rainwater they’d collected earlier that morning—water that was sweet and safe to drink without being boiled, just as the air was good to breathe without being filtered. We told them our names and our story, and they told us theirs, and we sat with them at the river’s edge and watched the sun disappear behind the distant havens. It was something they said they’d seen many times now, but still it awed them. The setting sun streaked the blue of the sky with fire and turned the river to a shimmering sheet of liquid gold and amber. There had to be a hundred people in that foraging party but not a single word was spoken, such was the reverence for sky and sun and river, for the difference between day and night, and the magical transition between the two.
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