“Fuck off, fatty,” Dan quipped at his friend in a way that wasn’t at all unkind. Whilst seemingly offensive, the kind-natured insult was, I had to admit, factually correct.
In the years since we had first found Sanctuary and been forced to defend it against a small army, Neil had grown… comfortable, whereas Dan had lost some of his bulk and trimmed down to be much leaner than before. I’d changed too, but that was what Marie attributed to my hormones. I was taller, obviously, but I had grown hips and needed new body armour as my chest no longer fit the one Dan had looted for me back when I was a kid. I knew I’d changed, mostly because some people looked at me differently when I walked, especially in the shorts and vest I wore to exercise in the heat.
Neil was carrying a bottle of water, clear plastic and well-worn with a label long since lost to hands gripping it every day. Wordlessly, ignoring Dan’s abuse, he handed over his drink to me and we passed it between us, taking turns to gulp down long pulls of the tepid liquid and wipe the excess from our chins. The fresh water was one of Neil’s earliest projects in Sanctuary; one of which he was proud, and we were eternally grateful. Cold water in summer was something of a forgotten memory, as the sterilisation process used sunlight and large, clear vessels that I didn’t fully understand.
I didn’t need to, not really, I only knew that Neil knew how to do it and had taught a half-dozen other people who took their turns at providing the town with fresh drinking water. The kitchen used a supply straight from the river that ran from the cliffs above our town, and they boiled it before cooking the food.
“Anyway,” Neil said, “I was looking for you.”
Dan looked at me, and I looked back at Neil.
“Which one?” we said in near unison. “Jinx,” we said in stereo again, bumping fists tiredly as we always did when we voiced the same thought.
“Both,” Neil said, smiling at us in that kindly uncle way.
“Urgent?” Dan asked, bending at the waist and leaning on his knees as he still tried to reclaim his breath. In contrast, maybe because I was seventeen and he was nearly forty, I was recovered enough to stand straight and just breathe heavily.
“I don’t think so,” Neil said, taking back his nearly empty bottle and drinking the last bit we had graciously left him, “otherwise Victor would’ve said something last night.”
“The Wizard,” Dan quipped, making me smile.
He always referred to Victor as the wizard in the tower, as he sat in the highest room in the town at the top of the central keep and worked day and night on his l’encyclopédie to complete his life’s work of our skills as a kind of manual for human survival. He had even recruited a young French woman who could sketch with a skill unsurpassed among our people, adding detailed drawings to his words, and the tombs of knowledge extended to almost six packed volumes, each with a detailed reference section at the end.
“Indeed,” Neil said, changing into another accent without explanation as often he did.
“Okay,” Dan said, “shower and breakfast first.”
“After we’ve finished,” I said, smiling wickedly up at him. His face dropped.
“Not swimming,” he complained, “I hate swimming.”
“Trust me,” I said, waving a goodbye to Neil before I turned and jogged to the far end of the walkway, hearing Dan’s still-laboured breathing as he kept pace behind me. I heard Neil raise his voice again from behind us.
“Round-ah two… fight!” he called after our backs in the same video game voiceover.
Dropping down the staircase at the far end, far slower this time because running down uneven spiral staircases hundreds of years old wasn’t for the faint hearted or the sensible. I waited at the bottom, seeing Dan emerge carefully a handful of seconds after I did, then we jogged down to the small beach and stripped off our running shoes and socks at the stone walkway before running barefoot across the wet sand. The tide was out, making our protected bay seem much smaller than it was at full flood. Our run was a little over a jog, but still a maintainable pace without burning out our muscles. Reaching the far end and climbing carefully down the rocks, we stepped into the clear water, both of us shuddering and Dan making a small, high-pitched noise as his waist met the cool sea water.
“Giggle band!” I announced in a sing-song voice, knowing that he would be smiling at the joke behind me without having to look.
True to his word, Dan was not a strong swimmer. I hadn’t been, but over the last few years I had crossed the bay at least twice a week in the warm weather to strengthen my skills through trial and error and replicate what I had seen on TV back in the world. I swam in a relaxed freestyle, keeping my head out of the water as my sodden ponytail slapped from side to side. Beside me, Dan swam like an old woman. It was a curious mix of breaststroke and an intermittent doggy-paddle that he used to apply a burst of speed when needed or when he felt anxious that he was sinking.
Reaching the end nearest the town, hard under the walls of the ancient stone keep which formed part of the walls, we rescued our footwear and padded barefoot back into the castle to wash and dress before finding ourselves a breakfast of fresh bread, fish, eggs and fruits.
Now I was never a fan of fish, seeing as it smelt bloody awful, but a few years living in a fortified coastal town where the staple diet came from the sea, I had learned to love it.
Well, maybe love wasn’t the right word, but I ate it. Some days we had bacon, but as the population of pigs still hadn’t yet grown large enough to slaughter a few of them on a daily basis I had to make do with what there was.
I exchanged smiles and nods with the others, answering their polite greetings in both French and English as the town was truly becoming bilingual by then. Those who didn’t speak French or English as their native languages usually used English, or a curious mix of both. Now, my French wasn’t great, but I had picked up enough to at least be polite. Dan, despite his normal attitude towards foreign languages being to speak English in a loud, slow and ultimately condescending fashion, had taken to the language far better than expected, even being able to hold simple conversations in the native tongue. Marie was the same, her fluency lending her an air of being almost local, in spite of never having learned French, but instead picking it up by spending time with Polly, who had relinquished the leadership of the town willingly to them not long after Sanctuary had been defended against Le Chasseur and his Legionnaires. Marie split her time between caring for their son, Leah’s much younger brother, and maintaining order of the town’s economy as it was.
We were happy. We hadn’t fired a shot in anger since the last captured attackers had been rounded up and executed by firing squad far away from the sensitive souls of the peace-loving civilians inside the safety of the walls, and everything just somehow worked well, with everyone pulling their weight for the greater good. I had to admit that it even worked better than our first home since everything began over five years before, back when we lived in caravans in a supermarket car park and when we subsequently took over the beautiful old manor house that was strangely marred by being a prison. Those days, indeed those places were long gone now. Lost to history and memory.
Our happiness was tainted by Victor’s news, however, because it seemed that some of the surviving humans - after the global plague had claimed the lives of ninety-nine people out of every one hundred - still wanted to fight.
Worth the Risk
“Ah, entrez please,” Victor said, whipping off his round spectacles which hadn’t been in place when they had first met. The task of recording the skills of humanity by hand had obviously taken a toll on his eyesight.
“May I offer you a drink?” he asked politely, rising to gesture at a pewter tray and a selection of bottles.
“It’s ten in the morning, Victor,” Dan said carefully, not wanting to insult the man, but wanting to convey that hitting the high-proof alcohol before midday was unbecoming of them.
“It is?” Victor asked, his face registering surprise until he look
ed at the bright sunlight coming through the open shutters to his room. “Of course it is. I apologise. Some coffee, perhaps?”
I opened my mouth to accept, stopping before I could utter a sound and frowned at Dan who had just declined for us both. Ignoring it, I concentrated on what the man wanted to say as, from the look of him, he hadn’t slept much recently.
“Of course, to the reason for my summoning then?” he asked, sitting in a battered leather chair and smiling. “We have received a message, a voice message from a nearby place by radio.”
“Saying what?” Dan asked.
“Offering trade, mostly.”
“Mostly?” I asked, sceptical of the academic’s lack of detail.
“Yes,” Victor said with a slight hint of discomfort, “they appear to have been having some problems with local bandits and the like, but I do—”
“Maybe it would be better if you let us hear the message instead of telling us?” Dan asked, hiding his annoyance and leaving out what I knew he wanted to add; the man was dressing it up to be something different to what was actually said.
“Yes, here you go,” he said, picking up a piece of rough paper from beside him and handing it over. Dan had hoped that a voice recording had been taken, but seeing the scribbles in what looked like Spanish, French and then English made it clear to him that he wouldn’t have understood a word of it anyway.
The paper, evidently having been screwed up at some point before it was retrieved and flattened out to allow the unused side to be scribbled on, read haltingly.
“I had to have it translated from Spanish, or at least the Catalan dialect,” Victor said, trying to excuse the lack of accuracy and proper grammar. Dan grunted in answer and not even I understood whether it was a negative or a positive grunt or just one of acknowledgement that the man had spoken. The last few years hadn’t helped his inter-personal skills much. He had never really clicked with Victor, thinking the man a little strange having never worked a day in his life but spent it studying all over the world until he was a font of knowledge which was all but useless in the cold light of the post-apocalyptic day.
Looking at the handwritten translation, I stored up my questions until I had finished reading and fully absorbing it.
“Hello to all who survived God’s plague,” it began.
Great start, I thought, let’s bring religion into this when it was humans who did it to themselves.
“Warm greetings from the General Council of the Principality of Andorra. We seek anyone near to us for trade and to offer aid and assistance. We have goods available for trade and wish to establish contacts. Thieves”—this word had been crossed out in French above it twice—“have attacked us, but our valleys are strong.”
Dan read it again, his lips moving and his brow furrowed, before handing me the paper and leaning back in thought.
“What’s the confusion over thieves?” he asked suspiciously.
“It is an approximation. The word did not directly translate as such,” Victor explained wearing a pained expression.
Dan grunted again in bland acknowledgement. I read it over again, before offering the quick version as I understood it.
“So,” I began, “there are survivors in Andorra, wherever that is, and they want to make friends and trade with anyone, but people have tried to steal from them?”
“That’s how I see it,” Dan agreed darkly.
Victor saw the looks on our faces, clearly not understanding our multitude of problems that the message posed.
“Your hearts are not lifted by such news, no?” he asked uncomprehendingly.
“This is how I see it,” Dan said, fixing the man with his most neutral look and explaining simply, “one”—he held up the thumb of his right hand—“we don’t know if this message is genuine; it wouldn’t be like it’s the first time someone has lured unsuspecting victims into a trap. Two”—he held up the index finger—“we don’t know what kind of assistance they’re asking for and we aren’t a charitable organisation. Three”—the middle finger flipped up to join the other two digits—“the ‘thieves’ mentioned aren’t filling me with confidence. Have they been attacked? How many attackers? Are they well equipped? Well led? Organised? Are the people who sent the message geared for defence? Are we likely to get shot at for turning up on their borders?”
“Four, five, six,” I added, flicking up three fingers of my own, “how far away is it? What is the route like? Are there others in between there and here?”
Victor took a breath, answering my questions first.
“It is roughly two hundred kilometres, and the route is a mixture of toll roads and mountain roads with two long tunnels in between.” He paused, and I bit back my first hurdle about alternative routes as he went on to explain and nullify any interruption. “If those tunnels are impassable then the journey will be forced to go through Spain and add possibly another one hundred kilometres. The route can easily avoid any major towns, and we don’t know of anyone between here and there.”
That was maybe one positive, I thought. We had made contact with a lot of people all over the world and the radio equipment had grown with each scavenging run into the towns and cities within easy reach before fuel became a scarce resource. We still had plenty of diesel, but few of the vehicles were hardy enough to undertake such a journey given that the roads were falling apart and were overgrown in most places.
It really took the end of the world for people to realise how much nature wanted to blot out our presence.
Still, the distance itself was a problem. “Two hundred K?” I said to Dan, half in statement and half in question.
“Closer to one hundred and eighty,” Victor said, receiving two glances and being ignored by both of us.
“A week on foot, at least, not counting detours and the mountains or the weather,” Dan said, “a whole day in a vehicle if we’re lucky and don’t have to find alternative routes. Two, maybe three days there and back. Is that worth the resources for trade?”
“What of the trade caravans of old?” Victor interjected, interrupting our public but private operational planning brainstorming session.
“What? Horse and cart permanently on the road?” Dan asked with poorly hidden scorn.
“It is possible, yes.”
Dan snorted softly to both accept and partially dismiss the idea.
“I’m not sure I like it,” he said finally, “in winter it would be impossible. Isn’t it a ski resort? That means snow, you realise?”
“Much the same as we get here,” Victor countered, “only higher up, obviously.”
“How much higher up? What’s the elevation we’d have to gain?”
“Over two thousand metres,” he answered in a deadpan voice, seeing both of our eyebrows raise in response.
“That’s one hell of a drive let alone a walk if things go wrong,” I said, playing devil’s advocate even if I was starting to feel the familiar itch of wanting to get outside the walls for any kind of adventure, “but…”
Dan shot me a look, knowing that I was trying to find a way to go.
“But what?” he asked suspiciously.
“But I could do it in the Land Rover and be back in less than three days. Just to check it out,” I said hopefully.
Dan stared at me for a time, one eye narrowing as he thought.
“It would use up a valuable amount of our remaining fuel,” he said, “and I don’t fancy much heading into Elne or even Perpignan for more to filter and use,” he said, echoing a recurring conversation we had about the remaining refined fossil fuels. Neil was the closest we had to an expert in those things, and he was confident about using diesel after filtering it and pouring in additives to make it burn cleaner so as not to clog the engines up and break them permanently. His theory allowed that diesel could be used for another ten years, despite the common belief that it would be useless, just so long as the engines were driven carefully that was. The older and more industrial the vehicle, as he put it, stretched those
odds out further still.
“But it’s worth a try?” I asked, flashing him a hopeful smile which I knew he had to try very hard to resist.
“Let me think about it,” he said, meaning that he wanted to ask Marie to tell him all of the factors he hadn’t considered. “Can I keep this?” he asked Victor, taking back the paper and holding it up slightly. He nodded his gracious assent, winding Dan up further without realising it. He turned to me and said the words that gave my adventurous spirit more than a spark of excitement.
“Get a map, work it out, find a Spanish speaker and decide who you’re taking. Then I’ll decide.”
I nodded, holding out my hand for the message Dan still held and turning to look at Victor who had already risen to shuffle through the papers on his desk and begin folding the map to the correct area.
“I’ll catch up with you this afternoon,” Dan told me, leaving the room deep in thought.
“We are here,” Victor said, pointing at our tiny, enclosed bay close to the border with Spain, “and Andorra is… here,” he said moving the pencil diagonally up and left on the map in a direction resembling west by northwest. “These are the tunnels, and the second one is just inside Andorra itself.”
“Why is it Spanish?” I asked. “Why not French?”
“Ah,” Victor exclaimed, happy to be able to provide a history lesson, “perhaps Polly is the better person to ask of this, but I know that this entire region of the Catalan is almost separate from both countries, not like the people are one or the other but that they are an… an individual.”
“Okay,” I said, realising that his answer didn’t help at all, and looked back to the map.
“Only two roads in?” I asked.
“Yes, one south to Spain and one east to France,” Victor answered.
“What do you know about the place?”
“Tourism mostly,” he said, “a small population of under one hundred thousand people. Self-governing, although technically overseen by both countries in equal part.”
After It Happened (Book 7): Andorra [The Leah Chronicles] Page 2