by Peter Liney
Sheila appeared looking like she’d broken off from yet another workout, all glowing and glistening, saving a special greeting for Jimmy. In fact, I gotta say, between us, what with all the shouting and excitement, we created quite a Mardi Gras.
Gordie was unable to resist showing off the Typhoon Tandem, riding it around in circles, making an obstacle course of the huts and shelters, Isobel running behind him laughing hysterically. Hanna undoubtedly added a few more to her fan club just by being what she was, while the Doc and Nick kinda kept their distance, receiving the occasional curious look, I guessed ’cuz they weren’t joining in with everything that was going on.
Sheila invited us to eat, chivvying Isobel away when she asked to hold the baby again, and there we were, all of the gang sitting in a circle around her fire. I told her exactly what was going on, that we were on the run and Nora Jagger couldn’t be that far behind us. I also offered to keep moving if she wanted us to, if she thought we might bring trouble down on them.
“We’re all here for the same reason,” she said, gazing around. “Clustered under the protection of a rogue satellite. It had to happen one day. I’m just grateful it’s taken so long.”
I took a bit more of a studied look around: the Commune had probably doubled in size from when we were last there, and again, it was mostly society’s more vulnerable who’d sought out its shelter; there was even a couple in wheelchairs, though God knows how they’d made it.
“It’s an SPZ,” Sheila said, chuckling when I looked a little mystified. “Satellite Protection Zone.”
“Can you communicate with it?” Jimmy asked her.
“Nope. Not yet.”
He thought for a moment. “Any juice?”
“Small generator. Haven’t got a lot of gas, but you’re welcome to it.”
Jimmy was obviously thinking through what his options were. “Depends how long they take to find us,” he said after a bit.
“If they find us,” Delilah chipped in, like she thought it needed saying.
“Not sure they haven’t already,” Sheila commented, “what with that damn thing constantly flying around up there.”
“You’ve seen it?” I asked, immediately knowing what she was talking about.
“Nah. No one’s seen it.”
“’Cuz it’s invisible!” I said, directing my comment at Jimmy.
“Big Guy! There are no invisible planes, drones, flying saucers, or anything else anyway.”
We ended up in a bit of a free-for-all, even the Doc joining in, saying he’d heard rumors, but Jimmy kept on laughing the whole thing off as if we’d gone crazy.
However, as the argument began to die down, Lena joined in. “There is something,” she said. “I’ve seen it.”
There was silence, no one quite sure how to respond. Jimmy vigorously scratched the back of his head, his ponytail wagging from side to side like that a happy dog. “Lena—” he started.
“I’m telling you, Jimmy.”
“Maybe something . . . but not invisible,” he insisted.
Gordie started snickering, like he couldn’t believe we were really arguing about invisible planes, and Hanna flicked him with the back of her hand to shut him up.
In the end we just had to agree to differ; in any case, with Nora Jagger and the Bodyguard so near we had far more pressing problems to deal with.
Sheila immediately took control, putting out her own fire and sending out the message for everyone else to do the same; for the next few days we’d be living off smoked meat, cold stuff, drinking only water.
I didn’t know if it was a legacy from her old army days or because she was one of the first to settle there or what, but people plainly saw her as their leader, and when one guy started whining about us, the threat we’d brought in our wake, she immediately squashed him down, telling him he could leave anytime he wanted.
The other thing she arranged was for everyone to chip in a little from their shelters—branches and leaves mostly—to help us build one big enough for our whole gang so we didn’t have to go out into the forest to find stuff and maybe make a lotta noise chopping it down.
Delilah wasn’t exactly gracious, making some comment about how she’d be more comfortable down a rabbit’s hole, though she was right about one thing: it wouldn’t last for five minutes. Mind you, the way things were looking, I wasn’t sure we were going to either.
Lena and me, Gordie and Hanna—even Doc Simon rolled up his sleeves—did everything we could to make it as bearable as possible, finding more branches, some with leaves still on, down by the woodpile, collecting grass and moss to lie on.
It was when we returned from one of those trips, laden down with all manner of stuff, that I realized Jimmy had gone somewhere.
“Where is he?” I asked Lile.
“Back up the hill,” she told me, “the way we came in.”
I thought about following him, seeing what he was up to, but I guessed he’d just appointed himself look-out and was up there keeping an eye out for Nora Jagger, which made a lotta sense.
He didn’t return for a coupla hours, and when he did, was plainly deeply preoccupied.
“What’s up?” I asked.
“There’s no such thing as invisibility,” he told me.
“Jimmy!” I groaned.
“What there might be are ways of making yourself impossible to be seen.”
“Same thing, ain’t it?” I said, feeling slightly bemused.
“No, not at all,” he said, and this time I recognized that look he got when something had revved his motor. “I’ve put sensors up there; they should give us some indication of whether there’s anything flying around or not.”
“And if there is?” I asked.
“Then I guess we’ll have to work out how it’s making it impossible for us to see it and try to reverse the process.”
It’s amazing, that bad leg of his has always been a barometer: if the little guy wasn’t happy, he’d be limping and hopping around like a three-legged dog, but if something’d got him that bit inspired, you’d think he was about to leap on the table and do a tap-dance. He’d got seriously pissed off back on the farm at the Doc taking over his workshop, and probably even more that everyone had started to look on the guy as our “resident expert”—but now, with the hint of a challenge he could rise to, he’d already gotta bit of swagger back about him.
Early the following morning I awoke to see Jimmy sneaking outta the shelter, stretching his leg over one sleeping body after another, kinda losing his balance at the end and toppling outta the entrance. Curiosity got the better of me and I roused myself and followed after him, though it says a lot that he was so pumped up, he was almost up to the top of the hill before I actually caught up with him.
As usual when he’d got in one of his obsessive moods, he wasn’t that pleased to see me, nor much into conversation.
“What’s going on?” I asked, but he never answered, instead going around checking on what I guessed must be the vibration meters he’d stuck into the ground. He studied one after another, his face giving away very little.
“Well?” I asked.
“Yeah . . . There is something,” he eventually admitted.
“I been telling you that for weeks!”
“So why can’t we see it?”
“It’s invisible!”
“Nothing’s invisible, Big Guy,” he said, with pointedly forced patience.
“This is.”
“Just hidden from view,” he reiterated, checking the meter on his last sensor.
“Whatever,” I muttered, not being concerned how he dressed it up.
“Night and day?” he asked me, and I realized he was reviewing what I’d already told him.
“Yep.”
“Any noise?”
“Just what we heard the other night,” I reminded him, realizing he hadn’t been paying attention. “A slight vibration.”
“That’s it?”
I shrugged. “A shadow.”
“Yeah.”
“Why the hell didn’t you say so!” he cried, his thoughts plainly veering off in another direction. “Oh, Jeez. I need to go back down.” And with that he set off downhill at such speed I half-expected him to lose balance and topple forward flat on his face.
“Jimmy!”
“Not now, Big Guy,” he shouted back as he disappeared amongst the trees.
I stayed there for a while, trying to follow his train of thought but eventually giving up. How many times had we been through this? How many times had we seen him get all worked up this way? On the other hand, to be fair, one way or another, it usually worked out to our advantage.
Before going back down, I headed over to the far side of the hill. In the distance I could see a fair bit of the plain; there was the thinnest trail of smoke drifting up from it, as if a spider had descended from the sky and left its web hanging there.
It could’ve been anyone, of course. There were probably any number of different communities in the Interior—amongst the hills, out on the plain, in the forest—that didn’t know about each other. On the other hand, if it was Nora Jagger and the Bodyguard, there was no question they were closing in on us.
If it wasn’t for that damn Shadow-Maker ghosting around in the sky, I might’ve still rated our chances; as it was, I knew it could only be a matter of time. And then what? The punishment satellite wasn’t on our side any more than it was theirs—it was like looking to the referee to give ya some kinda advantage. And who knew how well it was working—maybe while we’d been away it’d finally expired? Maybe George’s execution had been the last act for both of them? In which case we were nothing but sacrificial lambs waiting for the arrival of the slaughter-woman.
CHAPTER TWENTY
It sure was an odd situation. Normally you’d prepare for the arrival of an invading force—fortify your position, check your weapons—but with the satellite supposedly ready to punish any acts of violence, there was nothing to do but wait.
I was still feeling guilty that it was me who’d brought this upon everyone, me who was being hunted by Nora Jagger, but Sheila just shrugged it off like it was bound to have happened one day and we might as well get it over with. The one guy who had complained had moved into the forest somewhere and set up home with his partner, but in all honesty, that didn’t make a lotta sense, not when no one knew how big an area the satellite covered, how much leeway you had before you were no longer afforded its protection.
Just to make life that bit more difficult, it started to rain heavily, and turned out, branches and broad leaves weren’t much better than being out in the open. Everything was dripping, and most of it ended up going down your neck. Thomas started to get distinctly grizzly, crying for something but not knowing what, noisily rejecting everything that was offered. His mood soon infected Lena.
All of us were sitting in a long line with a damp grass bank at our backs, branches propped over us, peering out through the gaps, the leaves getting more and more weighed down by rainwater. Hanna and Gordie were at one end, not cuddling or anything but in a tight huddle, occasionally giggling and whispering, not helping matters at all. Lile was draped across Jimmy, snoring away, though he was so engrossed in his thoughts she could’ve been a hibernating bear in his lap. At the other end, Doctor Simon was looking about as miserable as a human being can be, again inspecting his soft suede shoes, obviously appalled by their sad condition—though, actually, I had an idea it might’ve been more down to the turn of events. Bad enough he’d run away from Nora Jagger, but to be found with us? I couldn’t help but wonder how he was gonna play it when she did arrive, what excuse he’d come up with. The others seemed to think he’d be damned by association, that by throwing in with us he’d lost all hope with her, but I wasn’t so sure.
The final one of us, of course, was Nick—really, there are no words, not for a situation like that. We open our mouths and all those familiar old clichés and platitudes spill out like someone emptying the garbage. I’d tried talking with him a couple of times, taking a more—I dunno—philosophical approach, but no matter what I said, not one word of it felt right. The only woman he’d ever loved, the only woman he’d ever made love to, who’d been his closest companion even after losing the ability to maintain a conversation was no more. How can you look at that philosophically? That’s a gut thing, deep down inside, where you know you only exist to fuel a haunted lonely pain and everything else has gone.
In the end I got so fed up sitting there getting that wet it didn’t matter if we were inside or out, that I went out for a walk. Everywhere was sodden and running, with not a sound apart from the muffled, continuous drumming of the rain. All the animals had apparently taken shelter in the forest, while the occasional bird was hunched up in a tree, waterlogged and forlorn, as if they’d never ever fly again.
Oddly enough, it was that that started me thinking: how would this weather affect the Shadow-Maker? Could it still fly? ’Cuz if it was going about its usual business spying on people, then with visibility reduced, surely it would need to fly at a much lower altitude?
I thought it over for a while and then headed back to the shelter. Gordie and Hanna had also gone out somewhere, the Doc was making polite conversation with Lena about Thomas’s crying and Delilah was stretched out on her own ’cuz her old man was busy sorting through his junk.
“I was just thinking—” I started to say, but he held his hand up.
“Busy, Big Guy,” he told me.
“Maybe we should go up the hill?” I persisted.
“You wanna catch your death, that’s up to you,” he said.
“With this weather, if that thing’s flying, wouldn’t it have to get lower?” I asked. “Maybe we could see it.”
He stared at me for a moment as if I was being real irritating and he was a saint for not mentioning it, then a frown suddenly opened up on his face. “Yeah, well . . . guess we could take a look,” he said, the hurried way he got up and put on his old plastic poncho at odds with his casual voice.
As we made our way through the Commune, Sheila called out to us from her shelter, asking where we were going, and when we told her, invited herself along.
Little rivulets of water were dancing down the hill, turning everything muddy and slippery, but we still made it up there surprisingly quickly. Mind you, when we reached the top and got out in the open, the rain bombarding the ground with such force it was bouncing back up again, I wondered if it’d been such a good idea. There was no shelter at all; we had to stand there getting wetter and wetter, our conversation slowly becoming waterlogged and wasted.
“Maybe it’s too wet for it,” Sheila eventually suggested, but neither Jimmy or me felt the urge to comment.
We must’ve stayed there for an hour or more, behaving a bit like animals in a field, knowing there was nothing to do but wait for the rain to stop and the wind to dry us. It was probably the fact that I was feeling so soaked and miserable that at first I didn’t notice Shelia go on alert, that she was standing absolutely still, gazing up into the leaden sky. “What’s that?” she muttered.
I kinda inclined my head in the same direction as hers, wishing my old ears worked better, but yeah, now that I was concentrating, I could hear something—I couldn’t tell you exactly what, just a kinda slight disturbance.
Jimmy lowered the hood of his poncho so he could hear better. “It’s coming this way,” he said, glancing at me.
It approached so slowly, with such a sense of stealth, of creeping up on us, a coupla times I thought it had stopped. It was more like a hum than a hiss, a soft drumming, getting closer and closer until it was almost right overhead.
“Where the hell is it?” Jimmy cried, staring up, his mouth wide open.
“I told ya!” I said. “It’s invisible!”
He just stood there shaking his head, his soaked old ponytail looking a bit like a slug crawling up the back of his neck. All t
hree of us were holding our hands to our brows, shielding our eyes from the ceaseless rain. You could hear it, you could feel it—dammit, it was right over us—but there was nothing there.
“It’s invisible!” I repeated, but suddenly Sheila pointed at something.
“There!” she cried.
At first I thought her imagination was just trying to please, that it was no more than a thickening of low cloud, but finally I did see something: a dark outline moving slowly along the line of the hill, a ghost ship piloting the mists of the River Styx. It was the underneath you could make out, the bit that was darkest, as if there was shadow even if there wasn’t light.
“Get down!” Sheila called as it seemed on the point of stopping, and all three of us threw ourselves to the ground, sliding on our stomachs over to some long grass, surprised we could get any wetter than we already were.
For some time it just hovered there, a dull, overbearing shadow, as if stretching out its technological tentacles and exploring all its suspicions, probing and prying, then slowly it began to move on and that soft humming noise faded into the general sound of rain.
The three of us tentatively got to our feet. “What the hell was that?” I asked, still staring after it.
“The thing that’s been spying on us,” Sheila said, all too obviously.
“But was it a drone, or what?”
No one answered, all of us still listening intently, mindful that it might return. There was no doubt in my mind now: whatever that thing was, it would eventually take away my identity, my free thought and will; it was what had keyed Miriam and disposed of Gigi.
“We gotta bring it down,” Jimmy said, as if we had no other choice.
I turned to him, wondering if rainwater had seeped into his head somehow. That was the one and only occasion we’d caught the slightest glimpse of it, and even if we did have a weapon that could do it harm, the satellite would punish us for using it.
“It’s only a matter of time if we don’t,” he said.
We all fell silent, overwhelmed not only by what we’d seen, but also by what he’d just said. I mean, he was right: we had to bring it down, or at least try, but how could we—an unarmed band of rag-tag nomads—bring down something like that?