by Peter Liney
It was only when we continued our flight toward the tunnel entrance, showing no sign of slowing, that their attitude changed. They opened up with some kind of heavy-duty automatic, and even though the limo’s bodywork was reinforced, it was missing a little in places and bullets were getting through. I swerved to the side, tried to get directly underneath them so they couldn’t get a shot in, and then swung back and dived into the tunnel. They dropped as low as they dared, spraying a few more bullets down the hole, but we were gone.
Thank God, I still remembered that place in every detail, mainly ’cuz of the number of people who’d tried to lose me in there—usually a customer of Mr. Meltoni’s who’d got a bit forgetful about who had first calls on his cash. I squeezed through a gap in the barriers, doubled back, took this service-way I’d discovered one night and finally emerged not that far from where I first entered, heading out through a giant underground parking lot and exiting the other side. It would take a while, but I’d go back into the side streets and thread my way through what was left of the Projects.
As it turned out, leaving the City that way was surprisingly easy, maybe ’cuz that was the route Infinity was hoping the unwanted would take; it was a kinda organized rat-run for all the flotsam and jetsam they wanted flushed out into the wasteland of the Interior.
Once we were completely clear of the suburbs and out into the country proper, the road became pretty much deserted and Gigi fell asleep, leaving me with just my thoughts for company. The City had been far worse than I’d imagined. Fear and intimidation had given way to what seemed more like absolute submission. And you didn’t have to be a genius to work out that after the City would come the country, and that maybe the process had already started. Nora Jagger was hell-bent on ruling us all, and as crazy as that once would’ve sounded, I wasn’t entirely sure what could stop her.
I didn’t get the implants at all. How many failed guinea pigs were there roaming around, for chrissake—hundreds? Thousands? How many different implants had there been? And once the perfect implant was developed, the one that’d make everyone do exactly what she wanted, how were they gonna convince people to get it inserted? Sure as hell I wouldn’t, and I’d fight to the death to stop anyone putting one in Lena or Thomas. I just didn’t get it.
Then there were the animals—had they been used for experiments? Wolves, for chrissake? It didn’t seem very likely. On the other hand, they had apparently spontaneously combusted.
As always, far, far too many questions.
The sky had just the faintest pink ribbon of dawn edging it as we reached the cave, the moon in graceful bowing retreat. I drove the limo back up the slope, slipping here and there, a drowsy Gigi already out, preferring to walk up, though actually, apart from the odd cosmetic mishap, that vehicle had proved itself time and time again.
It wasn’t easy finding that one approach to the cave, getting the angle just right so the limo could slip in. As I squeezed out, it occurred to me that I should be taking the lasers, but I guess I kinda used the state of the power-packs as an excuse not to bother.
Emerging out into the cool freshness of a new day, I expected Gigi to make some smart comment about how long I’d been, but actually she was standing there with a big frown on her face, gazing around as if something had just happened.
“What’s up?” I asked.
She just stood there, shaking her head. “Weird,” she commented.
“What?”
“Something just sorta . . . ‘passed through,’” she said, struggling to put it into words.
“What d’you mean?” I asked, my suspicions immediately aroused.
“I dunno . . . Everything kinda went dark for a moment.”
I didn’t need to hear any more. Immediately I started to climb the slope, for a few moments even breaking into a trot. “Gigi!” I called back, “Come on! Let’s go!”
We went over the mountain as quickly as we could, but actually, both of us were really tired and had to stop to rest several times. It was well into the afternoon before we finally came in sight of the farm.
I didn’t know what I expected to see—a gang of crazies besieging the place maybe, Infinity in force, the house burned down—but actually, the closer we got, the more normal everything appeared. The barn door was open, which presumably meant Jimmy was tinkering away in there; smoke was coming from the house chimney, so someone was cooking. Everything looked fine, and in fact, when we got that bit closer, we were in for a really welcome surprise.
We’d only been away a couple of days but the wheat had really made progress. It had to be six or seven inches high—you must’ve been able to sit back and watch it happen. The two fields we’d so strenuously plowed were no longer brown but a slowly growing wash of spreading green.
“Wow!” cooed Gigi, surprisingly impressed.
“This place must be Shangri-La,” I commented. “Anything grows.”
It was a miracle, all right, and I was mighty impressed, but it didn’t deflect me from the miracle that I’d been thinking about every minute of the last couple of days. I couldn’t help myself, big old bullet-head I may be, but I couldn’t wait a moment longer: I dropped my stuff and ran toward the house like an old Romeo seeking out his beloved Juliet.
As I careered past the barn, Jimmy came out and called across to me, “See the wheat?”
“Yeah!” I shouted, leaping over one of Lena’s wires in my haste, and I heard him give this knowing little laugh, like it was pretty obvious what was going on. I bounded onto the porch, almost misjudging it, but righted myself enough to topple cleanly through the front door.
I found Lena in the bedroom, breastfeeding Thomas: my miracle in two parts.
“Can I have some of that?” I joked.
“Clancy!” she cried, wanting to leap up, but she couldn’t disturb the little guy.
I went to her, put my arms around them both, and Thomas, immediately sensing a rival for her attention, started a snorting protest.
“How are you, little guy?” I asked, but he was too busy reattaching himself to Lena.
“Is everything okay?” she asked.
“Yeah. Fine,” I replied, though I knew she’d immediately picked up on the fact that there was something wrong. “I’ll tell ya when you’ve finished.”
No matter how keen she was to know, she still took her time feeding Thomas, observing all the rituals, making sure he was winded and comfortable, finally putting him down in his drawer. The moment she turned to tiptoe away, he summoned her back with a loud burst on the kiddie-klaxon, but at the third attempt he gave up and with a coupla last weary protests, finally fell asleep.
Lena led me out and into the kitchen. Gigi was already there with the others, still understandably upset about what had happened to her “resistance” friends, but telling them all about what life was like in the City now.
Plainly Jimmy wasn’t that happy with me. “Big Guy!” he protested.
“What?”
“You didn’t bring the lasers!”
“The power-packs were really badly corroded—”
“I can fix that,” he said, as if I was insulting him.
I shrugged, like I should’ve thought of that but had been too engaged with other things.
“Jeez,” Jimmy moaned, “not cool. Not cool at all.”
“I can go back for them,” I said, though I didn’t really mean it.
Thankfully, Lile kinda brushed him aside, wanting to hear more about the City, and I filled them in on anything Gigi had missed.
“I don’t get it,” Lena said, when I finished.
“What?”
“Those two guys that attacked you—they had the same implants as the animals?”
“Maybe.”
“How?”
“I dunno . . . Guess it could be just coincidence,” I conceded.
“Two examples of the same weird thing isn’t likely to be coincidence,” Hanna pointed out.
“Sounds odd to me,” Delilah agreed.
“People! Bursting into flames?” he sneered.
“Spontaneous human combustion,” I repeated.
He guffawed, looking around at the others, appearing genuinely surprised that no one else joined in.
I didn’t say any more. How could I? I mean, I’d been there, I’d seen those guys catch fire, flames coming out of their mouths and eyes, and I wasn’t sure I believed it either.
’Course, that wasn’t the only disturbing news we’d brought back with us. There was also—and Gigi made a real point of spelling it out, like she wanted to be sure the nickname would stick and everyone would use it—“the Bitch and her Bodyguard.” The information that now there was a small army of people who could do what she could—or at least fifty percent of it—stunned everyone to the degree that it felt like all the life had been drained outta the room, even more so when I went on to tell them what the Doc’d said: that Nora Jagger had it in mind to control everyone through implants.
“I wouldn’t believe anything that guy told me,” Lile croaked, plainly determined to dismiss as much of this as she could.
“Me neither,” Gordie agreed.
Lena turned to me, a frown on her face. “Why did you go to see Doctor Simon?”
There was a brief but undeniable hesitation. “Just . . . to know what was going on,” I replied.
She looked decidedly suspicious, like she had plenty of other ideas, and I thought I might be well advised to change the subject. “Anything happen around here?” I asked. “Anything at night?”
“Nothing I heard,” Jimmy replied, as if, if he hadn’t, then for sure nor would anyone else.
“Thomas slept better,” Lena informed me, plainly hinting I was far too keen on picking the little guy up when he cried.
I chuckled, leaned across and gently poked him in the ribs. “He likes our little father-and-son chats.”
Delilah, assisted by Hannah and Gordie, cooked up a meal, everyone plainly delighted to be back together again; this sense of relief that bordered on denial. The moment everything was eaten and cleared away, Lena was up and taking my hand, ready for bed, fortunately unable to see the smirk on Delilah’s face and completely ignoring me when I said I really should take a shower first.
We made love with more enthusiasm, more gratitude maybe, than we had at any time since Thomas was born. The little guy provided us with some fairly noisy accompaniment at one point and I could feel Lena noticeably stiffening, almost on the point of stopping, but in the end she decided to just ignore him and keep going.
I was that tired after hiking over the mountain on no sleep there was no chance of me checking outside that night; in fact, for once I actually slept right through. I woke a little after six, going out onto the porch and scanning around as if I’d be able to tell if anything had happened—but no, it all looked pretty much as it should—well, apart from one thing.
I could hardly believe it. That wheat had not only grown another three or four inches, it’d started developing some pretty ripe-looking ears, too. I squatted down and took a closer look, feeling almost intimidated by how fast it was growing. It looked so damn healthy, too; such a vivid green, the stalks so strong and erect.
A few minutes later, Jimmy came out on his way over to the barn.
“Have you seen this?” I called.
He strolled across, the closer he got, the more impressed his expression. “Cool!” he cried. “Nick said it was good stuff—MSI GM.”
“Careful where you stand—it’ll go straight up the leg of your pants,” I told him.
Jimmy laughed heartily, for once exposing that gap in his bottom teeth he was so self-conscious of. “We’ll be baking before you know it,” he said, still chuckling to himself as he continued his walk to the barn.
For the rest of the day I kept going over to check. It was unbelievable—a real agricultural phenomenon—by late afternoon it had grown a further two inches. In fact, it didn’t look so much like it was growing as rising up, as if something underneath was pushing it out.
I brought Lena out, walked her amongst it, thinking she’d be as excited as I was, but she didn’t really seem to get it, maybe ’cuz she couldn’t actually see what was happening, that we were now coming out of the front door to be met by a whole sea of burgeoning green life.
“Remember how you grew that stuff in the tunnels?” I said, feeling compelled to put it into perspective. “This is like two whole fields of it: the richest, greenest crops you could ever imagine. It’s beautiful.”
She nodded, standing for a moment holding a stalk of the wheat in her hand, but still not appearing that impressed, and I wondered if it was the thought of something familiar changing that was damping her enthusiasm. She smiled, made some light comment, then headed back to the house, and for the first time in a while I noticed she was checking her wires to make sure she was going in the right direction.
That night we made love again, but Thomas got the better of us this time, interrupting a man when he least wants to be interrupted. I forgave him enough to use him as an excuse to go outside later, to walk him around the farmyard, even going over in the direction of the woods at one point, listening intently, but there was nothing ’cept the occasional echoing call of a distant owl.
Maybe I was wrong about all this? Maybe the Bitch and her Bodyguard didn’t have the slightest idea where we were, our little paradise felt peaceful and trouble-free once more. In fact, the way that wheat was bursting up out of the ground, I couldn’t help but think that in some way it was a shining omen of an even brighter future.
CHAPTER SEVEN
I thought my sense of wonder couldn’t possibly be tickled any further, but the following morning when I went outside, believe it or not, that wheat had not only pushed up a few more inches, it was showing signs of starting to ripen! I wasn’t met by a solid sea of green this time, but the occasional ripple of something closer to gold. It was amazing. It truly was. Some of the ears looked almost ready to be harvested: bulging with life, with the seed we hoped to grind into flour.
I was so in awe of what was happening that it went through my mind that maybe it was that little bit too good to be true, that it was growing at such a rate it wouldn’t be able to sustain itself. There’s this creek that runs down the side of the property. At some point the adjacent spread (twenty times our size, but with all its outbuildings and farmhouse burned down) must’ve blocked it off and diverted it across their land, but since everyone had upped and left, Mother Nature had obviously decided to right a wrong and start it flowing our way again. I’d been thinking we should clear some of the old irrigation channels, and with the wheat growing so fast and possibly needing a little extra water, now would be a good time to do it.
After breakfast we formed a working party: Lena, Gordie, Hanna, Gigi and me. Delilah stayed behind to look after Thomas, as she often did now—Lena being younger and stronger than her, while Jimmy was obviously also playing to his strengths, concentrating on much more important things out in his workshop—stuff that didn’t involve manual labor.
By the time that we’d finished, we’d managed to get several channels cleared and running in the direction of the fields. It didn’t seem like it was enough; the ground was lapping the water up long before it reached its destination, but it had to be going somewhere—and I wasn’t sure it was needed anyway. Like I said, I’m a city boy and this farming was all trial and error—who knew how those new types of seed worked?
Late in the afternoon, Delilah came out with Thomas. The little guy’d just woken up from his afternoon nap, all dazed and dozy, but he was starting to fidget in that way that usually preceded some fairly loud demands for food. She handed him over to Lena like he was a bomb that was about to go off, giving a short sigh of relief, then stepped back to take her first close look at the wheat.
“What’s this?” she asked.
“Wheat,�
� Gordie told her, like she wasn’t being too bright. “For the bread.”
“Wheat?”
“Yeah.”
Delilah grunted, stepping forward to take a closer look. “Spent some time on a farm when I was a kid. Wheat didn’t look like this.”
“They changed it,” I told her.
She gave a long sigh, turning away as if she’d lost all interest. “Can’t anything stay the same?” she grumbled. “Not even plants? Why we got to alter everything? What good’s it done us?”
In a way she was right: changing stuff hadn’t done us as much good as we’d hoped; on the other hand, it hadn’t done us as much harm as we’d feared either. I mean, let’s face it, no matter how much we try to alter things, we’re only here for a while—Nature’s the constant.
After we’d eaten and played with Thomas for a while, the little guy eventually heading off to snuggle down with the Sleep Fairies, Lena suggested we went out for a ride on the tandem, and despite it getting late, I thought it might be kinda fun.
It’s amazing how much I’ve taken to that thing. I’m an ex-big guy, for chrissake—I drove every kinda of transport there was, and most of it was fast and furious. That tandem looked like it was the free transport to the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party. But something about us going out on it, combining my efforts with Lena’s, made me feel like we were a real team.
We gently meandered along the road for a while, enjoying its relative smoothness, then turned up this track, heading through the forest and up toward the first real hills of the Interior.
It’s funny; I’d always thought people instinctively sought out high ground ’cuz they wanted the view, but Lena enjoys it as much as I do, so I guess there’s something else going on. Maybe it’s spiritual, trying to get that bit closer to heaven? If it is, then I gotta say, we did a pretty good job that day, what with the view, the sunset, the final whispers of the day, the way we were holding onto each other like it was the first and last time. It was all we could do to give that final sigh and drag ourselves away.