Knock! Knock!
Dean recoiled in desperation as Valhalla slipped beneath him. He struggled to attempt repairs he could no longer comprehend. His mind filled with voices, liberated by exhaustion and despair.
Dean, are you coming home?
He sunk into the belly of the pod, the hum of the small engine filling the void.
You came back for me! I knew you would. Happy birthday, Dean.
The lights turned themselves off. The oxygen supply was nearing depletion.
In his delirium he was back on the Estrella, letting the ghosts inside.
Space rushed in, eager to embrace him.
The knocking at the hull finally stopped.
One Hour Later
Brae na Ùrd
By R.J. Bell
The wind blew straight into their faces as they walked up and over the shoulder of the hill. They were almost bent double under their packs against the steep incline.
“Nearly over,” Pete said breathlessly. He was ahead of the others and the “shortcut” had been his idea.
“If you say so, man,” Chris replied.
The hill gave way to undulating forest, split in half by a fast-flowing river that ended in a raging waterfall spanned by a narrow wooden bridge. They heard it before they saw it.
They dropped their gear and rested on the blankets of heather under the trees. From the bridge, they could see straight down the valley. The mountains looked as if they were peering over each others’ shoulders. The town was just visible, looking deceptively close from their vantage point, and houses and farms dotted the bowl of the valley, close together and far away.
Walking on, they found that the forest stayed loose, only growing denser along the slope that rose above them, almost sheer. Below them the river babbled along, moving slower here before rushing over the narrow opening of the waterfall.
“What do you think? Pitch here?” Kieran asked, his pack dwarfing his small frame. His face was still damp with sweat.
“Yeah,” Pete dropped his rucksack, letting it fall from his back with exhaustion. “It’s still light, enough time to get some wood.”
Pete, Kieran, and Chris sat around the fire in the center of their camp. Their tents formed the points of a rough triangle between the trees and around the flames that were spitting sparks up at the cloudless night sky.
“Man, look across to the other side of the river,” Pete said, pointing with the glowing end of a stick he’d been using to poke the fire.
The flat, wide ledge they were on dropped down to the river and rose back up on the other side, looking as if it came up from a much greater depth because the river was out of sight from where they were sitting. The clear sky and the light of the moon made everything a strange, washed-out grey, and the hill on the other side was dappled with it.
“Yeah, it is beautiful out here, man,” Kieran said, and passed Pete the joint he’d lit.
“Thanks, man.”
Chris pulled a small flashlight from his pocket and unfolded his map. He found where they were easily enough: the river was the most prominent feature on the contours. He traced his finger along the paper.
“If we’re here, then the river loops around farther up and away to where it starts in the mountains.”
“I thought these were the mountains,” Kieran said.
“Foothills; we’d need gear for real mountains. Thanks, man,” Chris said, taking the offered joint from Pete. “There’s a ruined church on the opposite bank—I think we can cross at the loop. We should go tomorrow.”
“Will the tents be safe here?” Kieran asked.
“Yeah, the nearest road’s miles away,” Pete told him.
The path they took rose gently and then began to drop again. The forest gave way to wind-blasted peat land, single trees standing here and there. Their leaves and branches wrapped around to one side, as though always caught by the wind. Looking down, they could see the river and, as they carried on along the path, they saw snow on the peaks, which huddled to peer around each other like the rest.
Pete was looking through his monocular. “There’s someone on that mountain. I can see them against the snow.”
They all looked, and saw a small, laden figure walking slowly in a zigzag course up to the summit.
The river loop had flat land on either side of it, and they stopped to eat before crossing it.
“You hear about that satellite that came down?” Pete asked them.
“Yeah, my mum was all like ‘Do you really think you should go?’ and I was all like ‘Yeah mum, it’s safe, really.’ It is safe, isn’t it?” Kieran asked.
“Yeah man, it happened months ago,” Chris reassured him. “And miles away. They’ll have cleared it by now.”
“You think we can find it?”
“You can if you want to, but I’m not walking that far on this trip.”
The church was dark. Dark grey stone crumbled in the shadow of a snow-capped mountain. An actual mountain, whose bulk curved up in front of them; it looked insurmountable.
“When was this built, Chris?” Pete asked as he put his hand on the remains of a wall.
“Dunno, the map didn’t say. It looks old though—really old.”
The inside was open to the sky. The roof had gone a long time ago, but there was still some cover in what was left of the steeple. Pete climbed as far up as there were stairs to climb on and started to wind his portable radio. When it crackled to life, he twisted the long metal receiver around. The pitch and whine rose and fell and broke into static at times, but no voice came through.
“You get anything, Pete?” Kieran asked from the shadows beneath him.
“Nothing, man. Was hoping to catch the scores from the game last night. Must be too many things in the way for anything to get through on this old thing.”
While retracing their route back to camp, they spotted two jets streaked along low through the valley, passing side by side and close enough for their markings to stand out. They rose and banked hard over the mountains, passing over the ruined church on their way.
Two more planes passed over their camp just before Pete lit the fire for the night. They came in just as low, or maybe lower, than the original pair and disappeared, the roar of their engines echoing off the hills.
They were eating when low booms echoed from the direction the planes had gone. One, then two and then a third, rolling out flatly into the night.
“What the fuck?” Kieran said through a mouthful of pasta.
“Be war games, man,” Chris wiped his plate with bread. “Saw the navy doing the same thing when I was a kid; blasted the shit out of some old boats on the west coast.”
“Should we move?”
“Nah, there’ll be signs around where it’s happening, and we didn’t pass any on the way.”
Pete collected water from the river, which was colder and higher here than it had been at the spot where they’d first arrived. The snow was melting off the mountains and running into the river. They wouldn’t have to boil it, at least.
Deer bounded through some shallows a little farther up from where he was kneeling. Four of them ran by, one after the other, jumping into the water and splashing through it in a cloud of spray. They didn’t stop when they reached the far bank, running in a nearly straight line up and over the hill.
“Man, you should have seen those deer this morning.” Pete passed the joint to Chris and drank some tea to clear his throat.
“Wonder what spooked them?”
“Probably me, man. I was pretty quiet going down, but they must’ve heard me with the carrier when I got down onto the stones.”
“But they ran towards you?”
“Yeah. They’re flighty—once they’re off, they’re off.”
They heard more planes passing overhead, too high up to see from the ground. Once, they saw the contrail of what looked like two or three bigger planes flying in an arrowhead formation.
“Bombers?” Kieran asked.
“L
ooks like it, man. We’re so used to being cramped up in town; we forget how much empty space there is. I mean, they’ve been doing this, what, maybe ten or fifteen miles away? The world’s not as small as we think,” Chris said.
They clubbed their cash together and drew lots to see who would walk back to town for some food and something to drink.
“I’m not carrying a crate of beer,” Pete said, holding the shortest straw in his hand.
“We’ve got fifty, man; get a couple of bottles of Scotch. Might as well be a blend. You can fit it all the pack.”
A land rover passed Pete, tearing down the road and around the corner out of sight, barely slowing for the turn. It was mid-afternoon when he made it into town, and it was quiet. No other cars had passed him, and no cars moved in the streets. The shop was open.
Inside, the shelves were empty in sections. He picked up beans and some other tins, keeping the load light for the walk back. Behind the counter, the shopkeeper looked haggard. He scanned the items through one by one. “You want a bag?”
“No thanks, I’ll fit it into this,” Pete answered, holding the pack open. “Two bottles of whisky as well, please.”
“Any brand?”
“Whatever’s cheapest.” Pete looked around at the empty shelves. “No deliveries?”
The shopkeeper handed over two bottles and rang up the total. “People leaving, going away for a holiday, I should imagine.”
Pete handed the money over and waited for the change. “Good weather for it. Thanks, man.”
The sun had dipped out of sight by the time Pete got back to the camp. Chris was boiling water in the kettle over the fire.
“Where’s Kieran?”
“Farther up the river, I think. He’s having a wash.”
Something was rushing up through the trees and bushes towards them suddenly, and they both turned to hear it. Kieran came to a jerking stop in front of his tent, nearly tripping over the ropes.
“You’ve,” he swallowed, trying to catch his breath, “got to see this.”
The deer had been ripped open along its stomach. Its eyes were gone and there were tears along the flesh of its throat. Its tongue hung limply out of one side of its mouth.
“What happened to it?”
“Dunno. It probably just died and got carried away down the river.”
“What did that?” Kieran pointed to the wound on its stomach.
“Animals, man. Other animals. Scavengers—there aren’t any big predators left in Scotland anymore.”
“Kieran, man. You need to relax,” Pete said, starting to giggle.
“Hey man, can you hear that?” Chris asked from inside his tent.
There was a pause as he waited for one of the others to wake up. He’d rolled a spliff to help him nod off before he’d crawled into his sleeping bag, and had only just lit it and taken a puff when he heard a distant sound like waves rolling onto a beach.
Then the sky was screaming down at them and Chris climbed out of his sleeping bag as quickly as he could. He half-stumbled and half-ran out of the tent, mindful of the joint between his lips.
Pete was already outside next to the dying fire and staring up at the sky; Chris did the same until he noticed the spliff had gone out. He fished a light from his pocket and re-lit it, took a draw and passed it to Pete.
Planes were passing overhead, one after another, in groups. They caught sight of running lights where their wings would have been.
“Four groups, I think,” Pete said.
“My dad told me they have to use up whatever they get allocated for a war game,” Chris told him.
“Is that true?”
“Dunno, but it makes sense. Maybe they don’t get given the same if they don’t use it all.”
Distant explosions filled the night air from far away, and none of them tried to sleep through it. Before dawn, they heard the beating sound of helicopters passing back overhead from where the planes had gone. They never saw any of them, but the noise carried across the valley.
“Man, I can’t believe we have to back tomorrow. It feels like we just got here,” Kieran said as he dipped his feet in the river. The water was ice cold and it stung for a minute.
“Yeah. We can always come back in a few months though,” Pete told him.
“Maybe we could go to the islands next?” Chris asked.
“Yeah, that’d be good, man. Haven’t been to Jura in years.”
Chris walked along the river and climbed up onto the wooden bridge over the waterfall. The gap was narrow, worn through the lip by the water relentlessly grinding the rock away. Hundreds of thousands of years later and it had cut a more or less straight slice through the lip. Its own pressure propelled it faster here at the bottleneck.
He leaned on the rail and looked out over the valley. The moon wasn’t full anymore, but it still gave enough light to see. The town was lit up and he could see its lights disappearing off behind the lean outline of a nearer mountain. Other, smaller lights dotted the valley floor—alone and isolated, like the stars above them, but still part of the same space.
Nothing moved. The air was still and quiet and cool.
The lights went out.
“Maybe a power cut?” Kieran said.
They stood on the bridge looking out across the valley. In the moonlight, they could still see vague outlines of the town’s buildings and the smaller houses that followed the river.
Pete was about to say something when distant explosions broke the stillness. They came from over the hills to their left—east, from where they stood. No planes had passed them in the night. The explosions sounded closer and different. There were smaller cracks between the larger reports, sharper somehow, but falling right on top of each other.
They packed up their gear just before dawn without a word.
The weather turned darker when they found the road. Grey clouds blocked the sun, and a light rain started to fall and get blown into their faces by the wind gusting up from the valley below.
Their packs were much lighter without the food; coming out was always easier than going in. Because they’d walked along this way before, time seemed to pass quickly. No part of the trail seemed to be as difficult as it had on the hike in.
“What do you think that was last night, man?” Pete asked them both. None of them had really wanted to talk about it, but they still had a long way back to town, despite how much shorter the trip felt.
“Another exercise?” Kieran asked.
“Yeah, maybe. Strange they weren’t on at the same time, though,” Chris said.
“Maybe they were,” Pete said.
“Nah, we would’ve heard them too. If we could hear them from the bridge, then we should have heard them from camp.”
“Why would they be on at the same time?” Kieran asked.
“It’s usually how they do it. My dad was in the army. Called it ‘Combined Arms’ so all of the parts know how to work together.”
“Anyway,” Pete interrupted, “maybe that caused the power cut. Somebody tripped something, or damaged a pylon and cut the power. The noise died away pretty fast.”
It hadn’t died away. They all knew that; they had heard the noise simply stop all at once. It had seemed to rise in pitch just before it ended—the cracks and explosions coming so fast that they became one noise in the echo. Then it had simply stopped.
They spotted a car at the side of the road, hard up on the grass and resting gently against a tree. One door was open. The back window was smashed.
They approached it slowly and started to slip their packs off. Chris crept up to the passenger side, where the door was open. Flies buzzed loudly despite the wind.
A woman was in the seat. Her eyes were open and her lips were blue. Black veins stood out at her neck and along her ruined face.
Chris almost fell back and started dry heaving. Kieran and Pete peered in when they helped him up and ended up heaving as well when they were all clear. Pete pulled his cell phone from his pack and turn
ed it on. The battery was still full, but he didn’t have any reception.
“Chris, man. Try your phone. You as well, Kieran.” He was shaking slightly as he turned the phone off and then back on.
“No signal,” Kieran said.
“No signal, man,” Chris echoed.
“We’ll get someone at one of the houses along the road. They’re not much more than a few miles away.”
They passed another empty car. There was no one in it, and it was undamaged and sat across the road, almost blocking it.
The first house they came to was dark and empty. They knocked at the door and peered in the windows, but nothing moved in the shadows.
Kieran dumped his pack and started to climb over the wall into the back garden.
“Man, what are you doing?” Chris asked.
“We need to make sure, man. We need a phone.” He slid over the top and down the other side. The drop was higher than he expected, and he half-fell as he hit the ground.
The back door was open. Kieran crept in. He didn’t hear anything apart from his own breathing and slowly made his way to the front door, finding a key still in the lock. He opened it quietly and let Pete and Chris inside.
“Phone’s dead and there’s no power,” Kieran said as Chris reached for the handset.
“There’s no one here?” Pete asked.
There was a creak. They stopped moving.
Kieran ran for the door first.
They heard gunfire, clear and distinct, from somewhere farther up the valley, miles distant. They saw the darting light of tracer rounds rising from a patch of dark green forest on the far slope.
Pete stopped and dug the radio out of his pack. He wound the handle and slowly turned the aerial around clockwise. The whine rose and fell and crackled. A voice started to patch itself together, and Pete turned the aerial back and forth along the line where he’d heard it.
“…uation. This is the National Emergency Broadcast Station…infection, repeat, do not take any measures which expose you to infection…olent, infected persons are…avoid on sight, they are extremely…erous…” The voice broke up again.
Pressure Suite - Digital Science Fiction Anthology 3 Page 7