Down: Trilogy Box Set (105 page)

The best road from Paris to the coast was also the most dangerous one. John had put everyone on rover alert. He had tempered his warnings with the reassurance that their protectors, a hundred Italian soldiers chosen by Garibaldi, were capable of dealing with threats from all manner of predators roaming the countryside. But all of them knew that an attack could still happen. They also knew time was running short. They had five days to get to Dartford and it would take almost two more days to get to Bulogne-sur-Mer. That left three days to make the crossing and they didn’t even know if they could find safe passage across the channel. John had considered taking steam cars to shave a day or more from their timeline but without armed soldiers keeping pace, the women and children would be far too vulnerable.

At their last brief rest stop in a glade, Martin had told Tony, “I just want to tell you, I’ve made a decision.”

“About what?” Martin had replied.

“If we don't make it back in time, if the whole MAAC thing doesn’t come off as advertised—basically if we’re stuck here, then I don’t want to carry on. The thought of being trapped here is beyond impossible.”

“I don’t want you talking like that.”

“I’m sorry, but I have to. You’re a doctor. You’re also my rock. I don’t think I’ll be able to do it myself so I want you to do it for me.”

Martin’s stoicism had cracked a bit and he hid his wet eyes with a hand. “Would you please stop!”

“Just tell me you’ll help me,” Martin had begged.

Martin lowered his hand and showed his red eyes. “I will help you and then I’ll do it too.”

The rest of the Earthers were in the other covered wagon. The children slept on the floor at their feet and the six adults took the hard benches.

“Look at those angels,” Delia said, adjusting their blanket. “Dreaming peacefully without a care in the world.”

“Sam wants a sword just like Trevor’s,” Arabel said.

Trevor was chuffed. “Did he really say that?”

“He did. This morning.”

“What did you tell him?” Emily asked.

“That he was too young.”

“Good,” Emily said.

“I’ll buy him a plastic one when we get home,” Trevor said.

Arabel’s mood turned. “If we get stuck here, he’ll have to learn to use a real one.”

“Don’t even think that,” Emily said.

Arabel asked, “What are our chances of getting home? Tell me please while the children are asleep. I want the truth.”

Enough eyes fell upon John that he felt obliged to answer. “We’ve overcome a lot of obstacles to get as far as we’ve gotten. If we get a few lucky breaks we’ll make it.”

“Seems to me the biggest problem is finding a boat,” Trevor said.

Brian had been quiet for hours but he piped up, “Bound to be one. Boats and the sea go together like tea and milk.”

“God, I’d love a cuppa,” Delia said. “And a plate of jam-filled biscuits. And … Oh, I’ll shut up. No more talk of delectables, but if we get back I’m never going to complain about the canteen at work again.”

Yet once triggered, the ever present food conversation took wing. They traded favorites and revised their first- thing-I’m-going-to-eat list.

Emily stopped the flight of fancy with a non sequitor that had been weighing on her. “Paul said he knew how to fix this.”

“There’s a lot of smart people working on the problem back home,” John said. “Didn’t you say they were the best minds?”

“They are and I hope they have an answer,” Emily said. “I only know that I don’t have one and I’ve done little else than work through thought experiments. Paul was
the
expert in strangelets. Not in MAAC, not in the UK, but in the world. No one had his depth of theoretical knowledge. It’s a tragedy I didn’t have a chance to talk with him.”

The wagon stopped abruptly, waking the children.

John quickly sidestepped them on his way out. Trevor and Brian followed, gathering weapons just in case.

“Want a bow?” Brian asked.

“I’ve been getting on pretty well with a sword lately,” Trevor said.

“Whatever works, mate,” Brian said. “Whatever works.”

In the other wagon, Charlie hopped out too and ran toward John’s group.

The wagon driver pointed to the halted column twenty yards ahead. He spoke no English and by way of explanation offered an exaggerated palms-up shrug.

The captain of the Italians, one of Garibaldi’s trusted underlings rode back to the wagon. It was dusk and the woods lining the narrow road seemed to press against their column.

“What’s the matter?” John asked, sword in hand.

“One of my men saw torchlight in the woods,” the captain said in impeccable English. He had been an officer in Mussolini’s army and had studied classics before joining the fascists. Garibaldi admired him for his experience and erudition. “In case of trouble I did not want you to be off guard.”

Brian squinted into the woods and nocked an arrow.

“Thanks,” John said. “I think we shouldn’t stop. We should go all night if your men can take it.”

“My men are strong. We will keep riding. The woods are dangerous. There has been talk of how you say, grandi gruppi of these beasts.”

“Sorry, I don’t understand.”

“These beasts, these rovers, have found that they cannot steal food and people from towns and cities if they roam only in small groups. So, they have learned to cooperate and form big groups. This is a great danger, I think.”

A soldier let out a horrific scream from the rear of the column and others shouted in Italian, “To arms! To arms! Rovers!”

The rovers attacked from both sides, pouring out of the woods, brandishing their long, curved knives. Every portion of the Italian column was being attacked simultaneously.

John hacked at the nearest rover and put him down, then fended off another three. Yelling curses in French, a rover slashed the belly of the captain’s horse, spilling its guts. The captain went down, his right leg caught under the dying beast. Pinned, the nearest rover made quick work of him, stabbing him repeatedly in the chest.

Up and down the line, the battle raged. Steel clanged on steel, fists thudded onto skulls, musket balls and pistol shot slammed into flesh. There were nearly as many rovers as soldiers but the rovers had the advantage because they were fearless and savage and denizens of the night.

At close range, most of Brian’s arrows found their mark. When he exhausted his supply he drew his sword and fell in with Trevor. They protected each other’s backs, hacking and thrusting at the ragged, foul-smelling men.

John kept trying to fight his way back to Emily’s wagon but for every rover he destroyed, another attacked.

In the wagon Delia and Arabel clutched the terrified children and pulled them to the front. Emily took one of the swords lying on the floor and pushed Martin and Tony aside.

“Where are you going?” Arabel shouted.

“To fight!”

“Don’t!”

Emily didn’t listen. She jumped out the back and saw a rover straddling an Italian, about to plunge his knife. She swung her sword down onto the top of his skull and cleaved it.

The soldier smiled at her, said, “Grazie, signora,” and sprang back into action.

Another rover came at her. She used her favorite Krav Maga move of deflecting his raised knife arm with an inside-out lateral forearm deflection, ready to counterattack with her sword but he was too strong and the knife kept coming.

She felt a spray of blood on her face.

The rover’s knife was gone and his hand too.

John finished the man off with an upwards thrust to his chin.

There wasn’t time to say anything. There were more rovers coming but John stayed planted by Emily’s side.

Inside the other wagon Martin, Tony, Tracy, and Charlie huddled in fear, listening to the horrible sounds of fighting.

“What should we do?” Tracy cried.

“We have to stay here,” Tony said. “They’re rovers. We’ll be slaughtered.”

Charlie was muttering to himself and the monologue got louder.

“What are you saying?” Martin said.

“Rovers killed my brothers,” he said slowly, moving to the wagon flaps. “Rovers killed my father. Rovers killed my grandfather. I am going to kill them.”

“For God’s sake, sit down, Charlie,” Martin said.

“I’m not afraid anymore. I was afraid but now I’m not.”

He took one of the swords and then he was out the back.

The three of them looked at each other in shock. All they could do was listen to the awful sounds. Cries in Italian and French, then a shout from Brian and a reply from Trevor.

The wagon flap parted again.

“Charlie,” Tracy said.

But it wasn’t Charlie. It was a rover, his fetid breath instantly fouling the interior.

The rover locked eyes on Tracy and opened his toothless mouth exposing a brown tongue. He crawled fully in. Less than six feet separated them.

Tracy tried to scream but nothing came out.

But Tony did scream.

It wasn’t a scream of terror but of rage.

He hurled himself at the rover who was off guard, his mind probably set on raping.

Tony head-butted the man’s skull and the rover grunted in pain. Somehow his knife came to be in Tony’s fist. He pounded it into the man’s torso over and over. The only thing he had ever pounded so hard was bread dough.

He heard Martin talking to him.

“You can stop, Tony. You can stop. You’ve finished him.”

Tony did stop. He dropped the bloody knife and began to sob.

Martin held him and said, “That was the bravest thing I’ve ever seen.”

Writhing, agonal bodies of rovers and soldiers lined the road. John, Emily, Trevor, and Brian were finding fewer and fewer rovers to fight and then, the remaining attackers slithering back into the night and it was over.

The Italians let out an exhausted victory call. Emily sat on the ground, too fatigued to speak.

“You’re a tiger,” John said, between pants. “I’d take you into battle every day of the week.”

“The children,” she gasped, trying to rise.

He helped her up and got to the wagon the same time as Trevor and opened the back. Arabel and Delia cried out in relief. The children were safe.

The fifty or so remaining soldiers tended to their wounded. The ones that could be saved were bandaged. The ones too far gone were bundled, groaning and hideously writhing, into the supply wagons for deposit somewhere more dignified than the side of the road to be carved and eaten by the rover stragglers.

John assembled the Earthers. The wagon drivers were destroyed. They would consolidate into one wagon. John and Brian would drive.

Suddenly Tracy asked, “Where’s Charlie?”

They searched frantically. Two rovers were on their bellies, shirtless and groaning away, their flanks a bloody mess. They were lying on top of something. John pulled them aside.

“Doc!” John shouted.

Martin examined Charlie’s lifeless body then pulled the lids down over his staring eyes.

“Poor, poor Charlie,” Tracy cried.

“Come on,” John said, softly. “We’ve got to go.”

“We’ve got to bury him properly,” Tony said with conviction. “We can’t let those bastards have him.”

John sighed and agreed.

He didn’t say what he was thinking.

If we don’t hurry we’ll be digging more graves.

They couldn’t see it but they heard it.

The early morning fog was so heavy the only way they knew they had arrived at the coast was the sound of the breaking waves.

John and Brian had driven the wagon virtually non-stop for a day and a half since the rover battle. One last dangerous night in the French countryside had now yielded to a murky dawn.

The two men had been pushed to the limit, refusing to let Trevor come up to relieve them. They wanted him with the others in the wagon in case of another attack. Pressed together, the others intermittently dozed on each other’s shoulders and tried their best to keep the restless children amused.

Now they had arrived, closer to their goal but still far away.

John pulled back on the reins. “I’m scared to go any further,” he said. “We could be heading to a cliff.”

Brian agreed. “Pea soup.”

They climbed down and went to the back to help the others out. The soldiers dismounted and collapsed to the ground.

“You look like shit,” Emily said, holding onto John.

He kissed her. “You say the nicest things.”

Brian started walking away and John asked him where he was going.

“Small matter of a boat,” Brian said. “Just a quick rekkie.”

There was nothing they could do until the fog lifted so they sat in a circle and divided up the remaining food and water.

John took out his pad and drew a short, thick exclamation point.

Three days.

The sun never shone on this world but it was there, behind a permanent blanket of clouds. As the rising sun warmed the ground the fog over the land faded first.

John thought he heard something and stood.

“What?” Trevor said.

“I don’t know,” John said, looking around.

“Is it Brian?”

“I don’t think so.”

The fog lightened.

“Jesus,” John said.

They all stood.

Sam tugged at his mother’s dress. “Mummy, why are there so many horses?”

Stretching to the east, some two hundred yards away, was a continuous line of horses, hundreds upon hundreds of them and a thousand soldiers or more with dozens of caravans and wagons, an army materializing from the miasma.

The Italian soldiers, too fatigued to reach for their weapons, could only point weakly and lament their fate.

A single rider approached at no more than a trot, as if by coming slowly, he might magnify his authority.

Standing beside his caravan, Stalin handed over his spyglass and said, “You see, Pasha? I told you we would find them.”

Loomis adjusted the focus and found Emily standing among the Earthers. His tears puddled the image and he gave the telescope back.

“Tears of joy?” Stalin asked, laughing.

“You won’t hurt her or any of them, will you?” Loomis asked.

“If they remain good and loyal subjects, why would I hurt them? Same goes for you, Pasha. Remember that, please.”