We moved on, toward the Company.
HOW WE FARED AT THE HOLDING PONDS
Dead fin and fluttering gill, the tremor disembodied, the slap-crawl of something meant for four legs that had two. Little curling shrimp creatures trapped in puddles that hatched and died, hatched and died perpetual, the same organism over and over, its own procreation. Toxic. A closed vessel. A piece of genetic material dovetailing, perpetual and never ending, and never really living, either.
Across half the surface of the larger pond, a leaking of blood like a sightless eye, that had no origin, no source, but somewhere down below the blood kept pumping out diseased—drink of it and die—and perhaps it was one of the Company’s more diabolical traps. Or perhaps it was beyond their control. No one there to turn it off so it kept spreading and wasn’t their problem anymore, or their fault. Who would create such a place?
That was the nature of the holding ponds that abutted both the Company building and the desolate plain, those salt flats that weren’t natural at all but ground-up plastic, glass, and metal. The waste produced that they could not burn or chose not to burn. It lay at the bottom of the holding ponds, too. It pushed up against the edges of the Company building like the sticky caviar of some industrial fish. It gushed out around our boots, clung there in clumps. It gave the lakes their color, so they reflected every hue that could be imagined, but, combined, made for us a dark green in a certain light, a pale blue or pink in others. That slight glow resonated in the curling wisps of mist that came off the flats, dissipated into nothing long before reaching knee height.
This was pollution and contamination at the source. This was where the biotech had been tossed to die or drown or be eaten by other discarded biotech, or scavenged by vultures or coyotes or people like me, who had the arrogance to think ourselves professional scavengers of living tissue. Down there, too, more dead astronauts, a clump of them lashed to the bottom of the smaller pond, their contamination suits still bright orange, little or nothing left of their flesh or bones inside.
I had not hunted here for ages, but I knew the place, had always hated it, found it mournful and diseased and the purest evidence of how much the Company must despise us. I did not like being part of its ecology, but I’d had no choice until Mord’s rages, his unpredictable stance toward the Company, had made it off-limits. Then the conflict between the Magician and Mord, the Mord proxies, had kept it off-limits.
Wick had not been inside the building since he’d left the Company.
“As nice as you remember?” I asked Wick as we approached.
“Nicer.”
It had never been nice, but now the side of the Company building along the length of the two lakes sagged inward and had become fire-blackened, and carrion spackled the white so that what had been pristine had become streaked red, green, and smudged charcoal with white peering through. Now, too, wall shards like thick eggshells, some two stories high, cut the artificial sand where they had fallen from Mord’s rippage, some landing in the lakes. Along with the elongated lumps of fused-together helicopter like crumpled black dragonflies: the helicopters sent out to attack Mord. An oddly bloodless tableau, and not a pilot remained inside—not even a scrap of skeleton.
What had been less dealt with was Mord’s shit, which lay at the approaches to the Company building in gently sloping piles like badly made bales of hay. It was dried and old and picked clean; thankful we were that Mord rarely came here now.
But we had to find the side door—camouflaged, there but not there, meant to open only to a careful, knowledgeable hand like Wick’s. A place half underwater that few used or even knew about. It wouldn’t have been possible before Mord ravaged the Company, and might not be possible now, but it was the first place to try.
Worse, there was a bear, and I say worse because at first it had run away from us across the dead plain, looking back over its massive shoulder as if confused as to its purpose.
Should it continue across the plain toward the horrible wonder of Borne-as-Mord, who had now reached a broken cluster of buildings and continued to dominate our line of sight? Or should it pursue us?
It slowed as if encountering a stiff wind. The beast turned, thoughtful, lingered there, then came back toward us, eating up the plains at a gallop. Looking through the binoculars, checking landmarks, estimating speed, I told Wick I couldn’t be certain but thought the proxy would reach us in less than ten minutes.
Roughly, if we did not find the door within five minutes, we would have to abandon the attempt and be driven farther south, out into the desert. From there we would have little chance of curling back to the city through the devastated west. We’d join the dance of foxes for a time, out in the dust bowl of the ancient seabed. And then we’d die. Of thirst. Or predators. Or the bear would catch up to us.
In the near distance, the lake and all that tragedy of half-lives, of the mysteries of existence and why we did the things we did, to each other and to animals. And us, struggling through the difficult purchase of the artificial sand that we might make it to the side of the Company building, find a door, get inside before we became a bear’s dinner.
In the middle distance, the dead plain and across it, the bear closing in, and then the living blot marks of bobbing, lumbering bears that had been drawn to Borne, stragglers who were still behind him in his disguise, but not very far. Some would succumb to the last of the buried biotech that had risen; those defenses appeared like smoke, like emerald-and-azure dust with purpose. Shimmering displays that disappeared into the wind at a thin angle, then reappeared as sheets of undulating microorganisms. We had seen a bear caught in that net buckle and fall, spasming, jaws spread wide, as if it could not breathe. But then the net broke, the bear rose, the old defenses revealed as ghosts, the Company without dominion.
In the far distance, things began to occur that we could not quite believe but could with the binoculars see well enough. Perhaps it was a mirage. Perhaps we thought it shouldn’t be a thing you could glimpse in daylight, but for a long time we tried to deny it.
Wick laughed at the sight, and the sheer ridiculous intensity of the venomous bear approaching fast, the diaphanous beauty of the biotech over the plains. It did not go unnoticed between us, the irony of that—or that to escape the lesser threat we must take the greater risk. The oppression of that was like a heat on our necks, a knife at our throats. We had lost the Balcony Cliffs. We had given up our temporary shelter. We’d lost the city proper. And now we were about to lose the surface. Apparently we’d been richer than we thought, to suffer such continual diminishment and still be alive.
But what was endurance and shared diminishment if not devotion? For there was the care with which Wick guided me across the shallow part of the sand bridge between the two holding ponds, the ground-up shoals of refuse, the rotted plank some clever soul had laid down in shallow water, the uncertain route to the edge of sanctuary.
There was hope in that gesture, and a letter in my jacket pocket.
* * *
Funny what you remember and what you don’t. I remember how the wet sand was engulfing my feet like it wanted to suck us under and I remember the unhinged look on the bear’s face, the almost human disregard for its own safety as it careened through the sand at the far edge of the first holding pond, snarling with each step. I remember what Wick was saying but not why he was saying it, and I was caught in amber or was a ghost again. I was watching the bear as if transfixed by the sight of my own death approaching. All I could do was stand there, hoping a side door would open.
The bear bounding, full of life, full of fire, and us, alone and small, so small, next to it. And something true about that, something I couldn’t quite see.
While down in the holding pond, almost at our feet, a large brown boulder down in the depths beneath the dead astronauts, covered with dead reeds, began to reveal itself, as huge bubbles quaked on the surface.
Wick found the door.
The door was jammed shut.
The door wouldn’t s
ave us.
The bear was almost there.
But there was a crack in the wall nearby. A crack big enough to form a passageway. A crack big enough for us but not for a bear.
It wasn’t a dream. It wasn’t a nightmare. This was the thing happening to us. I remember how tired we were, from lack of sleep and fatigue and rationing our water. We weren’t prepared, not fit, not ready to meet our deaths with furious, desperate resistance. There were the pools we’d scavenged from and the Mord proxy rampaging toward us—and us clinging to the strip of land more like wet and porous sand, stuck between a bear and a crack in the wall. Bear or a crack, a seam.
We still had time. I thought we had time.
The Mord proxy’s mask of anger and hatred and bloodlust, and maybe I had no argument with that. Maybe there was no real answer to that. But I was human, and I’d rather die lost in the dark than with my neck ripped open, face bitten off, entrails falling out.
* * *
The hidden bear, the one waiting for us, erupted from the holding pond as I grabbed Wick and pulled him into the crack with me, pulled Wick into that tiny chance at salvation—and that bear, silent in its intent, slammed into the wall outside, the impact so great dust welled up and the water from the bear’s fur lashed me with wet, dirty drops.
Wick was inside the building. I could see that he was inside the building with me. But a rush of brown fur eclipsed the opening, the light, and there came a blast of carrion stench, and I knew it wasn’t far enough. It wasn’t far enough.
The static cry from Wick, the narrow stomach-churning claustrophobia as I ripped my way farther in, rough, raw rock against my cheek, Wick screaming, the bear swiping at him.
I grabbed Wick with one arm painful around his waist, and I wrenched him on top of me, and he stumbled, and fell backward into the crack and the great bear’s claws swiped down and Wick shrieked again and then we were on the floor, pushing off blindly into the greater darkness.
* * *
I barely fit, my butt against one wall and my hands pushing out in front against the other, and sidling along crablike as fast as I could, so fast I was tearing my clothes, my skin, shoving our pack in front of us with my hand and then, when it fell, lodged below, the roar of the bear so close. The air close and thick, filled with dust and cobwebs.
Wick shoved in beside me, bumped up against me, a fast-shuffling push farther in. I wanted to run, to scramble, desperate to go in deeper, to go in so deep the fangs, the claws could not get at us, but there was no such thing as speed in that place. It was too narrow. You could not run. You could barely sidle.
“Come on, Wick! Faster!” Either I was saying that or I was just screaming or I was silent and focused on trapping myself farther in without tearing up my palms again.
“Pick one thing to concentrate on—the most important thing—and put all the rest aside,” my mother was saying. On a ship. In a broken city. Through the long grass as we hid from men with guns.
“Are you hurt?” I was asking Wick. I couldn’t see if he was hurt.
“My shoulder,” Wick said. “Blood.”
Venom.
We were mindless crustaceans dead-alive. Forever reduced to a force that tumbled forward away from the jaws snapping at the entrance. Not even autonomous, butting my pack with the top of my head to move it forward, it a terrible obstacle and behind us the sounds of the bear frantically tearing at the walls, pulling chunks away and scrabbling at the widening space while “Drrk! Drrk!” rattled around our skulls and sailed over us and rumbled from on ahead to put fresh fear in our reptile brains about phantom bears awaiting us.
* * *
Wick had gone silent and limp, and I didn’t know if that meant he was dead or unconscious, but with a gasping lurch he reanimated and I think that meant his last diagnostic worm had done something to stop the bleeding. I reversed myself enough in that tight space to look back with Wick now inching right into me, up my body, about to crawl over me if I didn’t inch forward, too, which I did. I could see in the light not taken from us by the bear’s silhouette that Wick’s shoulder had been shredded by the swipe: four claw marks stretched across, tearing away the fabric there, the welling of blood slower than it might have been, unable to see in that dim light how deep or shallow the damage might be. How seeded with dirt and the dead flesh of other prey.
The claws carried the same venom as the bite, but not every bear had venom. I could see that the last worm had died, forming a flowing white fringe around the wound. Had it died from encountering the venom or because it was weak and Wick had put too great a strain on its capacity?
The bear had ceased its demolition of the wall. The murderous eye held to the widened crack to pin us with its stare. Bloodshot, self-aware, taking our measure. I couldn’t look away, even as I kept sidling, contorted. “Drrrk. Drrrk,” and a kind of snarling sneer.
Then the eye was gone and the shadow of the bear’s great weight removed itself from the crack.
Wick had regained his senses, come to rest there halfway across my lap, and I had stanched the last bleeding with a piece of cloth torn from the end of my undershirt.
“Fast,” he said. “They are so fast.”
“You’re hurt. We need to get to someplace secure.”
“Venom,” Wick said, echoing my concern.
“You don’t know that.”
“I can feel it. The worm knew it. The worm always knows it,” he said.
“You can survive the venom.” People did. People had been known to. But not people already sick. Not people who had already gone through so much.
We were only twenty or thirty feet inside the passageway.
The bear had disappeared altogether. We could hear no sounds of growling. The strip of sky enticed us, a pure whitish blue. Such a hopeful glare, beckoning to us.
“I don’t think he’s gone,” I said. “And I think there’s a second one now.”
“Throw a pebble,” Wick said. “I can’t.”
But neither could I—even after eight tries in that cramped space, because I had to throw underhand. On the ninth try, the pebble flew true, and nothing swatted it from its trajectory. Nothing came roaring back to snuff out the light.
“The bears are still there,” Wick said.
“How do you know?”
“I don’t, but we can’t risk it.”
“This passageway is deeper than I thought,” I admitted.
“What if it dead-ends?”
“We come back. Risk it. But you’re hurt.”
“I can get up. I can walk.” Although “walk” was a laughable proposition in that fissure, that fault line.
“Crack of light or crack of darkness?” I asked.
“You build traps,” Wick said. “What do you recommend?”
“That we wake up from this bad dream.”
Wick laughed. It was the sound of a man resigned to whatever might come.
“Dark crack, then.”
“Passageway.”
“Crack.”
“Crack-passage, because if I die I don’t want my last words to be wasted on an argument about this.”
Neither of us for a moment thought that hint of blue sky came without great cost.
Nor could we forget what we had seen in the far distance as we escaped the bears. For there, wreathed by smoke and fire, lamented by a chorus of distant screams and explosions, two behemoths had battled—mirror images—Mord versus Mord, and no doubt that Mord would win. And no doubt that Mord proxies milling bewildered at their feet must choose a side, and perhaps choose wrong. The two great bears up on their hind legs, grappling, drawing apart, chasing each other, then in reverse, and biting, swiping with massive paws armed with lethal claws, and most deafening even from here were their bellows and roars and exertions.
Borne fought Mord for the control of the city while we took our chances inside the Company building, and we did not know which god would be revealed victorious when we returned once more to the surface.
*
* *
We headed into the darkness.
It was a miserable passage. The pack continued to be a misery even as we needed it—held out in front until my arm tired, or shoved along in what was like a kind of prison shuffle. The sky went from a thin line to a gray floating fissure and then was gone even as an optical illusion. I did not know how far up the crack extended, had no sense of a ceiling.
A sheen came off of Wick, an unhealthy angry red glow. But even this uncertain light helped me reassure myself by the pattern on the wall that Wick followed—that the slight hand in mine wasn’t an illusion, as it sometimes seemed, when my hand went numb.
Sideways we advanced, and if the crack-passage had dead-ended I don’t know what we would have done. We might have despaired and given up. At times the crack narrowed so that I was pushing against both walls to progress, afraid I’d get stuck. But it always eased up again, so that what I’d thought before was intolerable and narrow became a gift of generous space.
My eyes adjusted, but there was nothing to see. The walls harbored not a hint of biotech, not even Company moss. This emptiness pressed down on my chest, filled my lungs, and I fought off episodes of a scrabbling panic and nausea, a kind of succumbing to mindlessness that would have been so much easier than this continued condemned shuffle, one-two, one-two, one-two, push the pack, one-two, one-two, one-two, push the pack.
I talked to Wick as we pushed on, to keep his mind off his wound, and he would murmur back or squeeze my hand or make some other signal he had heard me.
“What was I like back then?” I asked him. “When you first met me?” A complicated question.
“Happy, distant, beautiful.”
“Not like now. Unhappy. Accessible. Ugly.”
“Just like now,” Wick said. “Right now.”
“I can’t feel my hands,” I said.
“I can’t feel my feet … with your hands.”
Hysterical laughter. Or just hysteria.
We sang songs. Stupid, ridiculous songs, in our terrible, ragged voices, which we made up on the spot. Or old tunes my parents had known, that I had to teach to Wick.
Borne Page 25