by Tim Lebbon
The rain was even heavier now, and dark clouds boiled the sky. Through the copse of trees I could see mountain slopes being assaulted by the weather, and creeping down the mountainside like the shaky legs of an old, angry god, two tornadoes twisted their way towards us. Black Teeth and his people were gathered behind me, muttering amongst themselves in a language I hoped I would never know.
“Daddy,” Laura said weakly. I smiled and went to answer, but then I felt myself slipping down and out, the rain turned warm on my face as my tears mixed, and someone caught me under my arms as I slipped to the ground.
She’s alive, I thought, alive and she knows me, she sees me, and she’s not ignoring me or telling me to leave her alone, let her live her own life, not like I’d been expecting, not like people had been telling me, because she’d run away with a religious sect and who … who had even told me that in the first place?
“Laura!” I called out, but it was Chele I heard in response, her voice cutting through the tempest.
“Grab hold,” she said, and I heard a sharp snick as wire was cut. I thought I had my eyes open but I could not see anything, and I may have been mistaken. Someone was holding me against them, their hand on my forehead. “Hold her weight, hold it! Ease her down. That’s right … that’s right … gentle now, she’s a baby …”
Gentle now, she’s only a baby, aren’t you just a big baby? I’d used to say that to Laura when she was five, it would annoy and delight her in equal measures as I swung her around in my arms, called her my little baby and set her down on the grass, watching as she staggered with dizziness. She’d giggle as she fell over …
… Laura cried out, and I sensed the source of her voice lowering until it was at my level.
“Laura!” I called, trying to stand, to see.
There was the sound of an explosion from higher up the hillside and the sky was suddenly filled with grit, splinters and leaves. I opened my eyes in time to see the sky falling in.
“We have to leave here!” Black Teeth shouted into my ear.
“I want my daughter!” I shook off restraining hands and went to the trees. Chele was already back on the ground, trying to snip wire with a pair of cutters she’d liberated from someone. Laura was bleeding and crying and writhing. She wanted to stand and walk, I could see that, but pain held her tight.
Another explosive sound and this time the ground shook, the skies turning from dark to black as the tornadoes plucked trees and earth and rocks and mixed them into a barrage of natural shrapnel. I ducked down and knelt beside Laura, pulling a strand of wire carefully away from her wrist. The rain sluiced the wounds on her body, washing the blood into the earth. I put one hand under the back of her neck and lifted slowly. I looked into her eyes, promising that I was here for her.
“Daddy,” she said, “you came to rescue me.” I could barely hear her but I read the words in her eyes.
“Yes honey.”
“I hurt.”
I nodded. “I’ll look after you now, honey, don’t worry.”
“Now!” Black Teeth shouted, and I noticed that most of the people he’d been with had vanished.
Chele appeared on Laura’s other side and held her up, draping my daughter’s arm gently across her shoulders. “Where to?” she shouted.
Black Teeth said something but he was already turning away, his words lost to the storm.
We followed, lifting Laura because she could not move her legs, and each cry made me want to stop and hold her to me. At the same time I was enraged, ready to take revenge for what had been done to her. I kept my eyes on the madman’s back. The wire cutters had vanished from his belt, but that meant nothing.
He hadn’t denied putting Laura up there in the first place.
The storm pushed us on and the tornadoes shook the earth, sucking it up and raining debris down around us. A shattered tree trunk speared into the earth twenty yards to my left. It groaned and fractured, and jagged splinters fired out like the spines of a tarantula. I felt a sting in my leg but kept on moving. I tried to haul in a breath but the air was moving too fast, being sucked away, and I remembered hearing about people whose lungs had imploded during tornadoes.
Laura had her head down. Her hair was blowing about her head like some mad Medusa, but her teeth were gritted, and I knew that she was holding onto consciousness to help Chele and me as much as she could.
Black Teeth was standing by a huge mound of boulders just ahead, gesticulating and shouting as if challenging the weather to a fight. He turned and stepped behind the rocks, and we followed.
There was a cave. The entrance was small and sheltered, lit by burning torches tied onto the walls, but it soon widened into a sizeable hollow beneath the ground. It was filled with people. Behind us, the roar and savagery of the tornadoes and the accompanying storm. Ahead, a cave swarming with those who had sacrificed Laura to the barbed wire. Where my best chances lay I had not had time to consider, but the storm was death for sure. My knee was bleeding where the shard of tree had slashed through my trousers, but I welcomed the cool dribble of blood into my shoe. It made me feel alive. And it meant that Laura was not bleeding alone.
“Where the hell are we?” Chele whispered.
Laura moaned and suddenly became heavier. “She’s fainted,” I said, hoping that was all. We carried her farther into the cave, her feet dragging on the floor, and no one moved their legs to let us pass. They put her up there, I thought, thinking of my first staggering sight of Laura bleeding and twisting on the wire, hung up to cure like a slab of ham. I wondered why the hell they may have lured us down here.
We found a slightly raised area of the cave, free of people, dry and dusty and flat enough so that Laura did not roll when we put her down. I was tired and terrified, panting with fear and exertion. Chele seemed the same. Her eyes were shifting constantly, looking here, there, somewhere else, never fixing on one place or person for more than a few seconds. It was a form of shock I had seen in my own bathroom mirror the night Janine had finally passed away.
“Chele,” I said. She looked at me, and I smiled to hold her gaze. “Thank you. I couldn’t have done it without you. I’d still be out there in the storm.” As if to emphasise how bad that would be the noise increased for several endless seconds, the vibrations knocking grit from the cave’s ceiling and raising a sheen of dust in the air. There was no panic or screaming, only a disturbing look of resignation on most of the faces I could see, as if they couldn’t care less if the tornadoes plucked them from their hiding places.
I’d seen that look before as well. The faces of concentration camp survivors from World War Two.
It became hard to breathe for a few seconds as air was sucked from the cave, and then the chaos ended as soon as it had begun.
Outside, silence. There was no light coming from the tunnel entrance, but no noise either, no sounds of destruction. Could a tornado die out that quickly, I wondered? Could it possibly all end so soon?
“Hey, Nolan,” Chele said. “I did it for me as much as you.” She kept her voice low because there wasn’t much chat in the cave. Most of those who had come in before us were already camping down for the night. A kid was crying somewhere, someone else was whimpering quietly into the subdued light cast by the burning lanterns. And I was sure I could hear the covert sounds of sex.
“Thank you anyway,” I said. “You didn’t have to leave that coach. I know what happened to you, I’m sorry … and up until ten minutes ago I could have related to it. But look … look at her … look at my baby …” I burst into tears. They’d been threatening for a while, I knew that, but terror and adrenaline had kept them at bay. Now, as safe as I thought we could possibly be, I found it easy to cry. When I felt Chele’s arms close around my chest and back I cried more, because she must have cried so much herself. In a way I felt embarrassed, shedding so much grief over my child when she was still alive. But Chele would know how I felt. I was so sure of that that I didn’t even look up. She would know.
Per
haps by touching and holding me, she could gain some vicarious sense of joy and relief.
“Let’s help your little girl,” she said, releasing me suddenly and squatting next to Laura. I joined her there and touched my daughter’s cheek, feeling the stickiness of blood and the coolness of dried tears. Her eyes fluttered open and looked up at me, and even though she didn’t smile I knew that she recognised me. As she slipped back into unconsciousness I hoped she felt safe.
“She’s lost a lot of blood,” I said, trying to see the shading of her lips and skin in the poor cave light. “And her arms …” I peeled back the sleeves of her dress and winced as they stuck in places, either tangled with dried blood or driven down into the wounds by the tight wire. There were puncture wounds all along her arms from the barbs, and longer, deeper cuts where the wire had been wound and pulled taut by her own weight.
It must have hurt so much. I was crying again, but this time there was rage mixed in with the relief, and while I spat on my handkerchief and did my best to clean some of the wounds I was listening out for the voice of Black Teeth.
“I’ll ask if there’s any —”
“I’ll go,” I said. “If you don’t mind sitting with her? She’s asleep now, and I need to talk to these people.”
“I don’t mind,” Chele said, but she looked at me strangely.
“I’ll only talk,” I said. “And I’ll get what we need for Laura.”
Chele nodded.
I leant over Laura and gave her a kiss on the forehead. She whimpered slightly in her sleep. I hated to imagine what she was dreaming.
Standing, turning around, I took my first proper look around the cave. It was big enough to comfortably house the thirty-or-so people accompanying Black Teeth. They huddled in groups or alone, sitting beneath burning torches set in the walls. Some of them seemed to be eating, others sleeping, and one couple were screwing in a darkened corner, unconcerned at being seen or heard. They were mostly dressed in old uniforms bordering on rags, many of them carrying wounds and deformities whose causes I could only guess at. Some wore glasses, a few glittered with jewellery. The pathetic creatures I’d seen carrying the rolls of barbed wire were gathered together at one side of the cave, already sleeping. Any pity I should have felt was wiped clean at the thought of Laura sleeping uneasily behind me. Whatever quirk of fate had made them the workhorses of this sick band, I could not feel sorry. They could shake their heads, say ‘No’, and I’d never feel sorry.
“How is she?” Black Teeth asked. He was standing a few yards away, nearer the cave entrance. A woman was washing his face with a dirty rag. Her movements were soft and tender, but her face was hard.
“Do you care?” I asked.
He blinked a few times as the cloth passed across his eyes, smearing dust and dirt over his eyelids. “No,” he said. “I’ve seen too much to care. But I’m trying to be polite.”
“She needs painkillers, bandages. The worst wounds need stitching. We want clean water to wash her, food and drink, and a way out of here. She needs a doctor.”
“He was a doctor, once” he said, nodding towards one of the malformed wire carriers snoring at the other side of the cave.
I glanced over and then back at him. The woman dampened the cloth on the cave wall, wrung it out and returned to her cleaning duties. Black Teeth barely seemed to register her ministrations.
“Clean water?” I said. “Food?”
“Food!” the madman shouted, and he was greeted by a few angry murmurs. “He wants some of our food!”
“Can’t you smell it?” a voice called from the shadows.
“You’re welcome, alien,” someone else said.
“Barb him!”
“I’ve just seen some of your people eating,” I said. “You must have food.”
Black Teeth shoved the woman away, and she retreated to the rear of the cave. “We’re left food each day, so long as we string up enough fodder. Some days eight is enough. Some days, eighteen. We never know, we’re never told, so we always do as many as we can. When we come back here, there’s food or there isn’t. Mostly there is. We work hard.”
“You worked hard on my daughter.” I couldn’t contain the rage. This bastard was trying to explain himself to me.
“She was fodder.” He motioned me to follow, turned and walked to the mouth of the cave. He glanced back over his shoulder when he sensed that I had not moved. “We should talk,” he said.
I was shaking with a combination of anger and hopelessness. I could never attack him and win, even if I could find violence within me. It all felt so pointless.
I looked back at Laura. Chele was holding her head in her lap, cleaning blood from her face. If talking to this man would help my daughter … so be it.
I followed him to the narrow cave entrance, feeling eyes on my back like gun sights.
“Look,” he said. I didn’t realise we were outside until he spoke, but as I looked around … so much had changed.
The storm had not only abated, all evidence of its existence had vanished. The sky was swimming in stars, not a cloud in sight, and from somewhere behind us the moon shed its borrowed light across the landscape. The grasses, shrubs and other undergrowth had vanished, torn up and deposited in piles already rotting and drying out. The trees were ghostly skeletons of wood, denuded of leaves.
“It’s changed so much.” I said.
Black Teeth sighed and nodded. “We’ve barbed in many settings.”
“But why do it at all?”
“If we don’t, we’ll be taken away and fed in elsewhere, used as fodder in another nightmare. What choice is that? What would you do?”
“I’d rather die.”
He laughed, but it was bitter and sad. “Yes, well, maybe … but here, there’s more than dying. Never forget where you are. Alien.” He looked at me, staring, trying to see past or through me. Yet again I couldn’t help notice the intelligence in his eyes and I wondered what he’d been before he found himself here. Somehow I didn’t want to know.
“The food,” I said. “The water.”
He shook his head. “There was food and water left for us today — we had a fruitful day — but it’s been turned bad because we helped you.”
I shook my head. “That’s crazy. What sort of control could they have to actually make food turn bad?”
“They?” he said. “Capital ‘T’? So, who are They? The government? The military? The evil Galactic Empire? The Bliderbergs? God himself?” he looked up to the sky, his eyes moving jerkily as if counting the stars. “You know what I was before? An anthropologist.. I lectured on ancient civilisations, specialising in social and political aspects, how the organisations in an old civilisation can affect us as well, even if there are no direct links whatsoever. Harmful, eh? Dangerous? ‘They’ must have thought so. Because they stole me away and —”
“My daughter never did anything that could have been a threat to anyone.”
“No. No. Maybe not. Well, that’s my ‘threat’ theory blown out of the water. Not that I ever really believed it anyway.” He smiled and I knew that he was playing with me now, perhaps enjoying my discomfort and pain and confusion because he’d passed up the chance to barb me.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe … well, someone controls all this.”
“Really? What if it is God? Where’s the limit to His control?”
“Don’t be stupid. God is dead, didn’t someone once say? Besides … if I ever did believe, that’s been wiped out since Laura was taken away from me.”
“Si Dieu n’existait pas, il faudrait l’inventer.”
I raised an eyebrow, partly in surprise, mostly because I hated being condescended to. I wasn’t about to ask him what it meant, but he told me anyway.
“If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him. Voltaire.”
“Great,” I said. “My life is now full. And you? You believe in God? Living here, like this —”
“What else is there for me to believe in?
The goodness of Man? Give me a fucking break.” He’d suddenly gone from relatively quiet to loud and angry. I thought he was going to strike out.
“You have medicines, though? Bandages?”
“Same provisos as the food and drink. Today … probably not. Let’s face it, you brought the storm and rotted our food. I hardly think there will be plasters and sterile gauze for you.”
“I hope you die,” I said. It surprised and shocked me, and it was a stupid thing to say. He could kill me here and now. He was mad, after all.
Black Teeth didn’t even register the comment. He looked out over the landscape, perhaps scouting for trees to use for tomorrow’s work.
“I need to get away from here,” I said quietly, turning to go. “I need to help Laura.”
“The reason I spared you,” he said, “was because I thought you’d know the way out. You’re an alien, you should never be in here. For me you were … hope. That’s all.” He turned to me, and the sudden change in his expression was startling. In the starlight he looked like a little boy who had lost his ball over a neighbour’s fence, and now he was asking for it back. Innocence hid the blemishes on his skin and the murder and madness in his eyes.
I shook my head and his expression changed again.
“So what?” I said. “Are you going to barb us now? Now you know I can’t help you?”
“I should. We should. They look up to me because I’ve been here longer than any of them. They’ll call for it. You should go.”
“You’re helping me again? Why?”
“I’ve never got to talk to any of the people we barbed before. Never known them as anything other than fodder.”
“Not even my daughter?”
He looked at me, his eyes dead and resigned to worse than death, and suddenly I wanted to leave as soon as possible, run, run aimlessly from these terrible, pathetic people.
“She was asking for you all the time I strung her up,” he said.
I turned and left him instantly, not allowing myself time for thought or reflection. It was the only thing I could do.
“Through the cave,” he called after me. “A tunnel. Don’t come back out this way, otherwise you’re our fodder again. Go elsewhere. At least then it won’t be me who has to kill you.”