*
Selina stood at the summit of the cliff, peering across an empty beach and out to the quiet sea. A mass of wind turbines stood desolately in the distance, grey and motionless; several leaned askew, their blades missing or jutting from the waters below.Priya stood by her, pointing out where the sun caught the uppermost wire of an impossibly high barrier that encircled the entire coastline.
‘There, see?’ she said, pointing out the small black dots that had once been red quarantine lights. ‘And there.’
‘Then there’s no doubt about it…’
Priya ran her long fingers through her hair.
They had walked aimlessly across fields for the entire day, stopping for the evening in a house on the outskirts of an abandoned village. Their stomach’s growled, for except the few blackberries they had found growing some miles before the village, they had eaten nothing and were deeply weary for it.
As the night drew in they comforted each other with recollections of their childhoods; Selina spoke of New Zealand and the struggle her family had endured to afford an apartment of their own, while Priya explained the complicated relationship between her parents, and how she had been deported to India, then Australia, by the Red Cross when they had been imprisoned in Bahrain during the civil war.
‘When the Causeway was demolished my parents were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.’
‘They were insurgents?’ Selina asked, enthralled by the childhood that was as turbulent as any she had heard of before.
‘God no… They were loud and the government made an example of them.’ She pursed her lips and stared into the darkness. ‘Once I was out of the country there was no hope of ever returning, what with both my parents in prison. I couldn’t do anything for them.’
‘You’ve not seen them since? How old were you?’
‘About thirteen, so a good seventeen years…’ the thought sobered her. ‘I suppose it’s too late now.’ She appeared to be lost in thought for a moment, then said, ‘Can I ask you something?’
‘Sure,’
‘I’m a refugee, and it seems like there’s not a government on the planet that wants to grant me citizenship. That’s why I boarded a ship of illegal immigrants and risked everything for a new life in Norway, just in the hope of finding somewhere to anchor myself. You seem like a pleasant girl who’s had a hard but relatively normal life, I can’t for the life of me imagine why you would risk it.’
Selina thought about it for a moment and decided there was nothing she could say to justify what she had done. It had taken her three years to afford the ticket to board the Tangaroa, and she knew there was every possibility that the ship would be destroyed by the United Nations vessels that patrolled the Southern oceans; but at the time it hadn’t seemed to matter. ‘There was nothing to stay for,’ she said.
‘You left because you were bored?’
‘I don’t mean that. There was no future in New Zealand. They’d squeezed every cent out of us and still they wanted more, you know what it’s like, it’s the same everywhere. We lived without electricity for months on end, we rarely saw oil, and still they demanded higher rents, and higher utility bills. Debt was soaring everywhere, and jobs!’ She snorted in disgust, ‘You were lucky if you had a job for longer than a fortnight. Dad was convicted for outstanding payments to the council… the power had been down since Easter, but come August they expected us to pay for electricity! $2,500 for unused light bulbs! It was unbelievable. Well, he was locked up in the debtor’s reformatory and I knew I was going to shrivel and die if I stayed there. I had to get out.’
‘Where were you going?’
‘Russia. I have a cousin living there. She’s close with her employers and they said they would take me on. She’s been working for them for years… I couldn’t expect anything like that at home.’
‘Russia!’ Priya frowned. ‘Nasty.’
‘Free of flu for fifteen years,’ she said positively, before she pulled a face and looked to the ceiling, ‘well, apart from what you hear about the Georgian border,’ Selina shrugged, falling silent. She was overwhelmed by the thought that she would most likely never reach Russia, or her cousin. ‘There’s not much chance for us is there,’ they looked at each other for a moment, both knowing that, if caught, they would be arrested and detained indefinitely for boarding an unregistered haul.
The conversation was sparse after that. They fell asleep on a dusty mattress as the wind outside provoked ghostly lamentations to sigh through the rafters. Selina had feared nightmares of the shipwrecked corpses and the limp bodies drawn down with the Tangaroa, but instead her sleep was long, soporific and dreamless.
In the morning Priya constructed a rudimentary plan, intending them to return the way they had come the previous day and keep to the coast.
They stayed on a road heading North and this time passed numerous signposts, shrouded by a century of growth, but printed unmistakably in English. Then, after returning to the coastline, they caught sight of the distant barrier and there was no refuting it, they were cast-away in the west of England.
Selina watched the array of decaying wind turbines, her eyes glazed with tears. Her hopes were finally dashed, the last vestige of her optimism left hanging in the wind on that distant wire.
‘We’ll head up there, tonight,’ Priya said, hoping her voice was suitably comforting. She pointed to a ramshackle of houses on the horizon. ‘With any luck we’ll find a bite to eat as well. In the morning we’ll try to work out which way the nearest border is and head toward it.’
‘And we want to reach the border because?’ Selina asked, confused.
‘Look, what’s the alternative? Stop here for the rest of our lives? It’s been over twenty-four hours and all we’ve found to eat so far are a few blackberries. It’s going to be nigh impossible but we’re going to have to start from square one and find our way on to another ship somehow.’
Selina looked at her with a smirk until she realised Priya was being serious. ‘Wait a moment, you’re suggesting we can make our way across the border without being seen? Not only that, you think we can evade the authorities, and anyone who might ask us any questions… somehow strike up a relationship with someone willing to get us on a ship…’ she ran her fingers through her hair in distress, ‘let’s not even mention the money involved!’
‘What else are we going to do?’
Selina watched her sincerely. ‘Have you seen a border before? I don’t mean on TV or at the cine-house, I mean have you actually seen one with your own eyes? They’re like mountains. They’re like mountains with a thousand eyes! There was one a few miles away from our town and it was just enormous!’
‘I understand that,’ Priya replied tenaciously, her hands on her thighs. ‘I know Australia spends more money operating their walls than they do on healthcare and education combined; and if it’s anything like that here we’re going to have all kinds of difficulties getting anywhere near it, but the fact still remains that we simply can’t survive here!’
‘Are you sure this isn’t Wales?’ Selina argued desperately, still grasping to the hope they had merely missed the local populace and been wandering in circles. The population of Wales was still struggling to recover, she reasoned, the same as it was the world over. It wasn’t unheard of to travel days without meeting a soul. There might be a town just beyond the horizon, a refuge where they could shelter, where the residents might take pity on them. ‘Perhaps we’re not looking out of the wire,’ she said in anguish, ‘maybe we’re looking in!’
She wiped her wrist across her eyes, knowing she was arguing a foolish point. Priya put her arm around her shoulders and pulled her tight. ‘Come on, we’ll see ourselves right. There must have been a reason for surviving the storm.’
‘So we can suffer an even shittier death!’ Selina replied sullenly, annoyed by Priya’s misplaced confidence.
Priya smirked and ruffled Selina’s hair. ‘You’re full of…’ she began to say, before dragging
her roughly to the ground. ‘Be quiet,’ she hissed, nodding toward a region somewhere out at sea. ‘Look!’
It took a moment for Selina to focus, but after searching the horizon – expecting to see the coastguard scouring the area – she noticed a black sphere gliding a few hundred yards from the shoreline. It soared noiselessly through the sky like nothing Selina had seen before.
‘What the hell is it?’ she said, unable to take her eyes off its shining surface.
‘They’re called Dark Lens’. I’ve never seen one before, but I’ve heard about them. They’re full of cameras and instrumentation that scan for mutations of the virus. You wait, it’ll stop in a moment, see?’ They watched wordlessly as the sphere changed course and scoured the beach below, making small zigzagging movements before hovering over a seemingly innocuous patch of sand and remaining stationary for several minutes. Now Selina could see that it wasn’t a perfectly smooth globe, but instead covered in protuberances and blackened domes hiding a range of cameras, probes and apparatus. It continued to scour the beach, stopping momentarily until it disappeared beyond the cliff face.
‘Jesus,’ Selina exhaled, lying down in the long grass. ‘I thought we weren’t going to have to worry about being seen until we got near the border. I’ve never seen anything like that before.’
‘Didn’t you ever hear about iCDO employees refusing to work in the field?’
‘Well yeah, but I didn’t know those things were the result of it.’
‘They’ve had thirty years to build those things…’ she stopped. The sphere rose into the sky and moved eastwards, picking up speed as it skimmed the coast on its return for analysis.
Priya watched until it had evaporated in the haze of the afternoon. She stood and helped Selina to her feet, then began to walk in the direction of the dilapidated buildings further up the road.
‘I wonder how often they come,’ Selina said, brushing down her bare knees that were, after only a day, dark and grazed.
‘Come on,’ Priya said, gesturing to the houses on the rise of the cliff, ‘we can find out once we’re safely hidden up there.’
Chapter Four.
South-easterly wind.
Twenty knots.
Elysium Part One. Another Chance Page 9