A Boy and His Dog at the End of the World

by C. A. Fletcher

  I risked a quick look at John Dark and caught her wincing as she moved. Her wound was obviously hurting. Maybe the stitches had torn open. The torches were burning down and we were running out of time.

  I knew what we had to do.

  There! I shouted, pointing at the red cube cut into the darkness above. We take the horses to the fire!

  She stared at me. I pointed at the horses and did my best to mime that we should all go up the steps to the safety of the concrete box and the fire within.

  It will be safe, I shouted. There are walls! The fire will last longer than—

  She shouted something angrily at me, but she was nodding agreement. I think she was telling me she understood and I should shut up and we should get on with it before the last two sticks of fire began to gutter away and leave us blind and undefended in the darkness.

  She stepped quickly across and gave me her torch, then quickly unhobbled the horses. She took the reins of all of them in one hand, slinging the gun over her shoulder before she reached for the torch. Then she nodded up at the square firelit cave.

  Al on zee, she said.

  Slowly and awkwardly, with the wolves following all the way. John Dark led the horses over the barrier, which they didn’t like, and up the narrow, steep steps between the endless lines of seats, which they liked even less. Jip came with us, doing his own kind of circular patrol around us, keeping close but growling at every wolf who ventured a little nearer than the others. I brought up the rear, walking backwards, trying to keep the wolves in front and to either side of me within the edge of my vision. I had my bow slung on my back, but in my free hand I carried an arrow, ready to stab at anything that leapt at me. Other than the low growling, there was very little noise apart from the scrape of the horses’ progress up the wet steps. I backed into one of the horses as we went and it whinnied and lashed out at me with its hoof. It missed, but the side of its leg made glancing contact and knocked me over, so fast and unexpectedly that I fell awkwardly, face down with one arm tangled in a seat. I heard something snap and for a moment knew for certain it was my arm, then realised it was the arrow. The torch lay on the concrete steps below me, half rolled under one of the plastic seats that was already beginning to catch fire from it, and beyond that two pairs of wolf’s eyes gleamed hungrily, low to the ground and getting closer.

  I felt wolf paws on my back, and knew I was done for, and then I heard the wolf on top of me bark warningly at the two pairs of eyes that then slunk back a bit, and I knew it was Jip defending me and not a wolf at all. I scrambled to my feet and darted forward to retrieve the torch.

  Jip stayed close to me for the rest of the clumsy retreat up the terrace, as if he didn’t quite trust in my ability to take care of myself, which was probably an accurate assessment of the situation. He kept up a low, almost subsonic growl all the way. I found the rumble of it next to my leg was quite comforting. There was one final spasm of ungainliness as John Dark had to yank and cajole the already very spooked horses into the confined space of the landing, and then we were in—protected on three sides by solid walls with a staircase behind us that we’d have to keep an eye on, and only the open end of the box to defend.

  We stood there, panting hard, suddenly immobile and not sure what to do now other than wait.

  Mared, she said.

  The horses had not liked being led to the back of the landing, past the fire. They were crammed in next to each other, still skittish. John Dark said something else, something I missed but that sounded irritated and worried. I followed her gaze. The fire was not as big as I’d remembered. And there was certainly not enough wood to keep it blazing until dawn.

  It’s okay, I said. I’ve got it.

  The plastic seat I’d accidentally set fire to was still burning halfway down the terrace. It backlit the wolves who were now arranged in a lumpy half-circle among the lines of seats sloping away below us. The prickling on the back of my neck and the growling that Jip was directing up into the darkness above the mouth of our cave made me sure the circle was a full one and there were wolves up there waiting to leap if we ventured too far.

  I pointed out the burning seat to John Dark, then pointed at the seats beyond the mouth of the cave. Then I unslung the bow from my back and put an arrow in, ready. She understood my sign language and nodded.

  As she walked out and lit two seats on either side of the steps below, I watched her back by keeping my arrow trained into the gloom above us. No wolf sprang down on us then or later in the night as we made more forays out to light more plastic beacons when the first and then the following pairs guttered out. It might have been that there were no wolves circling above us. It might have been that those that were there were so impressed by my marksmanship that they were too scared to try it. Or, and I think this is the real truth, the noxious chemical smell of the thick black smoke that plumed above the burning plastic made them run somewhere safer, downwind.

  We made it through until first light, protected by the fire. Safe, but at the cost of a foul chemical taste and smell that stayed in my mouth and nose for days afterwards. I understand why there’s still so much plastic in the world, still pale fragments of who-knows-what-it-once-was washing up on the beaches, or just junk slowly weathering away like all the seats in the stadium. If you’d tried to burn it all on a rubbish heap, you’d have choked the world to death.

  The dawn was accompanied by a complete absence of wolf, except the dead one down on the old playing field.

  John Dark and I had taken it in turns to sleep. The light came while I was dozing and I woke to find her poking at me with her boot and nodding towards the field.

  Eels on two party, she said. Lay loo. Eels on two party.

  I think lay loo means wolves. But whatever that meant, it was good, because it was her younger happier face saying it.

  Then a serious look came over her.

  Eel foe parlay, she said. Tew nay pars un day Freemen. Okay. May eel foe parlay day Freemen.

  She pulled the key from her pocket, looked at it and showed it to me.

  Okay? she said. Okay, Griz?

  I nodded. At the time I didn’t really know what she meant, but at least she wasn’t trying to tie me up. I sensed things were better between us now. After our shared ordeal, I felt she knew I had saved her and the horses, and that whatever the misunderstanding about the key was, it was at least now agreed to be a misunderstanding, and that we would sort it out.

  Maybe it was the sunshine peeking over the edge of the stand opposite, but everything felt more secure. More optimistic. Safer. Trustworthy.

  Turned out she wanted to tell me a story.

  And we already know how safe those things are.

  Chapter 23

  Freemen

  The story of the Freemen came in fits and starts over the next few days as we travelled. It was told in a mix of mime and pointing at words in the dictionary, and because of that I might still not have it quite right, but I think I have the general idea. I do know I have the specific reason John Dark came to this place looking for the one Freeman in particular. I know what her grudge against him was. He had killed her daughters.

  But before we get to who the Freemen were, or maybe even still are, I should put us on the road again. After the night of the wolves, we left the stadium, taking our honey and the horses. The one that had been wolf-bit seemed almost unaware of the damage to its flank until John Dark put a thick wipe of honey across the wound, and then it flinched and whinnied and tried to bite her. I was holding its head and the convulsion nearly pulled me off my feet.

  She had quizzed me at first light about the way I had found the key. As best I could, I explained about the tower and the pile of clothes and my feeling that the person—who she called “Freeman”—had killed himself by jumping off the platform. She asked me about the clothes and I told her about the boots and the red-hooded jacket. The jacket seemed to confirm things for her.

  It also untethered something behind her eyes, and she sa
t for a long while, not looking at me but not looking away either, as if she had forgotten I was there while she watched whatever it was that had been pulling her away. I think knowing that the Freeman she was hunting was dead was not a simple release for her. I think she had filled whatever the hole was inside her with the quest to find him, and now that was not possible, she didn’t feel satisfaction, but a different kind of loss. I wonder if that explains why she rode with me. She suddenly had no purpose. Maybe she rode with me while she worked out what her new purpose was going to be. Maybe she just wanted company. Maybe she knew more about where I was going than she let on. But she did ride with me, and I was happy with the company, and grateful for the horse to ride on. And as we rode, as we camped, as we sat by fires and streams, this is what she told me, in the most halting and patchwork way.

  She and her family lived away from the sea, near the mountains between what used to be France and Switzerland. She said it was good farmland and there was snow most winters. There was a big lake on the Switzerland side and they went there and fished in the summer. They were horse people like we were boat people. That part of the story was easy enough to understand. They lived there because of the Freemen, although none of her family had ever seen a live Freeman. The Freemen had once lived there, because of the “brain circle” underground.

  That’s where our trouble with communicating made things a little hazy. She said there was a big circle, underground, and it was said to be full of a brain. That seemed wrong, so after some back and forth with the dictionary we agreed that by brain she meant machines, or a computer. She had never seen them as they were locked away in a circular tunnel a hundred metres under the ground, but they must be long dead as there was no electricity to wake them up and make them remember things. Her father’s father’s father had gone down into the rock and seen the endless curve with one of the last Freemen. He had said it hummed. And then the Freemen had turned off the lights and it had stopped humming and they had left it and locked the entrance as they went.

  It was a story her family told, that they had come here when the last of the old people who worked on the big underground machines were very old, and had helped them until they were gone. Those old people were Freemen. They had worked until they died, trying to make the underground ring remember so much about what humans had discovered so that it became human too. They had tried to teach her great-grandparents their secrets, but it was too late. They were already horse people and farmers. They were not science, she said. That’s what John Dark said, and it was what she had been told: they were farmers, and not science now. Her family had been told that the underground brain was just one of several across the world. She said there were once other groups of Freemen trying to do the same thing.

  Life, she said by pointing at the words in the book. Life in machine. Body die. No babies carry new life. Freemen try make life go in machine.

  And then she found another word, and her blunt finger stabbed it to the page.

  Freemen mad.

  Freemen say: life in silicon.

  I asked her what that meant.

  She shrugged and said it was something her great-grandparents told her it was what the Freemen said a lot.

  Freemen say life bigger than people. No babies. No new bodies. So life not in bodies. In silicon.

  Silicon is a kind of rock. Life in rock?

  It made no sense then. It makes less sense now even though I know a little more about the Freemen and the scientist who they named themselves after. But I got that part of the story in plain English, later, from my worst enemy. And even though that helped it sort of make sense, just thinking about the size and the ambition of what they tried and failed to do leaves me feeling sadder and more alone somehow. Definitely more helpless.

  You had an internet. You lived in a web that linked you with all the answers that ever were, and you carried them everywhere with you in a glass and metal rectangle that was pocket-sized but could talk to satellites. You never needed to be stupid, or not know things about everything.

  We’re out here on the wrong side of a dying world trying to piece together the story of what’s happened from torn fragments that we can only snatch at as they flutter past us in the wind. Like with the army tank with the doll’s head in the gun-barrel under the fallen petrol station canopy, I will never know why everything happened. Or what it meant. I will never see the big story.

  She said there were other Freemen and though the tunnel was locked away, her family always remembered where the door was in case one of the other Freemen came, but they never did. Not for three generations, by which time it was quite clear the Baby Bust Freemen were long gone.

  And then the Freeman came from the east, riding out of the mountains, carrying the key that matched the symbol on the door of the Freemen’s cave. The key that I had thought was a pendant. The man who killed them all.

  He came from far away across the mountains. He was not one of the old people. His family learned from the Freemen. They did not become horse people. Not farmers. Not only farmers. They learned what their fathers and grandfathers learned. To be what he was. Electricians. The word in the dictionary was almost the same in French as English, only with an e instead of an a.

  Understand machines not, she said, pointing at the words. Only know turn on power.

  So I think the electrician and his family had been taught how to maintain the power at a place where other Freemen had buried a brain machine, and had passed that on down the generations.

  Power electrician home not work, John Dark indicated. Bad time. Electrician come find family me.

  So maybe when the underground computer brain his family had tended all the long years had died, he came looking for one of the other ones to make that work.

  Except he couldn’t and it didn’t.

  Brain dead, she stabbed. Power dead.

  She was crouched beside me over a campfire in the dark when she told me that, because I remember she had to tilt the pages to catch the light from the flames as she did so.

  Ordy natoor footoo, she said out loud, and spat into the flames.

  And then he had killed her family. Not on purpose. But when you’re dead the how doesn’t matter as much as it does to the ones you left behind. He brought a disease.

  La pest, she called it.

  Maybe that’s what made him come looking for another Freeman settlement. Maybe his family died of la pest. Anyway, he brought it with him, because she saw the boil scars under his arms when he bathed. And his were healed but the ones that her family got didn’t.

  Jay duh la sharns, she said, her face twisted and sour as she spat into the fire again.

  Sharns, as she later showed me in the dictionary, is spelled “chance” and means lucky.

  The sour twist in her face meant she wasn’t.

  He left while she was nursing the last of the people she had loved, and then when she had buried them, she followed him with nothing in her mind but the need to send him after them.

  I understood without her having to put a name to it, but before she put the dictionary away for the night, she showed me anyway.

  Vengeance is the same word in both languages.

  Chapter 24

  An itch between the shoulder blades

  She showed me her armpits. After she told me about la pest, she showed me there were no boil scars. She wanted me to know she had not caught the disease and was not carrying infection with her the way the electrician had. She meant it to be friendly, to show things were okay between us and that was the way she wanted them to be from now on. Up until that point, I had not thought ahead enough to worry that if he had infected her family, she might be carrying la pest in the same way. It didn’t quite stop the worry she had now raised in my mind, because I didn’t know much about how diseases worked or how the germs went from person to person. I wasn’t that clear on what germs actually are and if they all work in the same way.

  So we rode on together, and now I worried a little bit about w
hether I was going to catch la pest, but not enough to leave. I decided that however it was that germs went from person to person, if it was going to jump from her to me it would have already happened, probably when I was sewing her up, my hands smeared with her blood. But she looked healthy and strong and after a couple of days I forgot about it. There were other things to fill my head by then.

  The higher ground began to slope away to the east, and we entered a new area of vegetation. The scrubby moorland, overgrown and extensive as it was, was nothing compared to the huge swathe of trees we now found ourselves descending into. What had been the midlands of the mainland was now really a great forest of broadleaf trees, mainly beech and oaks and sycamores. On the map, the land ahead should have been full of towns and villages, webbed together with roads and railways. It looked clear enough on the map, but as we looked down on it, it was now hard to make out how the variations in the patchwork of forest matched the confident—but much more than a century old—marks on the paper. We were looking down on a wilderness of treetops. Maybe this was what looking down onto clouds looked like. Only green.

  This was when my compass really came into its own, because when we entered the wood, there was no more chance of navigating by landmarks. We rode in among the trees and it was immediately a very different world. Because of the sun filtering through the high canopy of leaves, the dappled light all around us was green. It was almost like being underwater. But it was most like being in a story, one from my childhood, the one about the hobbit that Ferg read us one winter when the weather outside was too fierce to do anything in for weeks on end. It was a story I loved, but I had had to imagine the woods and the forests and the strange creatures that peopled them because, as I said, there is no real woodland on the islands: the only dwarves there are the trees themselves, which are stunted things it would be easier to trip over than fall out of.