Magic Dirt: The Best of Sean Williams (55 page)

But when he tried to ring Jacqui from a public phone, the lines were dead. The last time he had spoken to her had been from Hamish’s home the previous night, and nothing had been amiss. A line must have come down since then, probably as a result of the storm.

He got back into the car and continued on his way. Not long afterwards, the snow stopped falling, but the thick, fairy-floss clouds remained and the radio stayed dead. The closer he came to the city, the thicker the ground-cover became; even the tyre-tracks of the cars preceding him seemed faint. Slowly he decreased his speed until he was travelling at barely above sixty kilometres per hour.

Just outside the first main intersection, the snow became too thick to pass. A number of cars blocked the highway, making further progress impossible. Pulling to a halt, he walked to join the others who had gathered on the roadside, scuffing incredulously at the snow. It crunched faintly beneath his feet, like sand.

“This is just great,” said one woman, a bedraggled mother of four children who squealed and squawked from a nearby station-wagon. “My mother’s expecting us this morning, and we’re already an hour late.”

“Can’t get past it,” said a middle-aged man with a biker’s beard and dirty leathers. He radiated an aura of patient, if faintly puzzled, pragmatism, and Stewart found his attitude calming. The biker gestured at the bank of snow in their path. “I’ve just come from further on. The traffic’s bogged in solid. Take a tractor to shift it.”

“Maybe it levels out. We might be able to force our way—”

“Lady, it was up to my waist when I turned back, and getting deeper. Unless you’ve got a bulldozer handy, I can’t see how you’re gonna get through it.”

“What the hell are we supposed to do, then?”

“Try another way in, I guess.” The biker scratched at his beard. “Come down via the hills maybe.”

The woman was not happy. “Forget it. I’m going to wait. The council can get their act together.”

The biker smiled. “Maybe, but I don’t think snowploughs are all that common round here.”

“Any idea where it came from?” Stewart asked.

“The greenhouse effect,” said the woman. “It fell through a hole in the ozone layer.”

The biker looked unconvinced. “Beats me, to be honest. It hit right out of the blue. No warning, no nothing.” He lashed out with a leather riding-boot, sending a snowdrift scattering. “But that’s not what really worries me.”

“What, then?”

“Touch it, and you’ll see what I mean.”

Stewart hesitated, then stooped to the ground and plunged his hand into the drift at his feet. To his surprise, the snow wasn’t cold; not even cool. It was as warm as the earth it covered and felt gritty on his palm and fingertips.

“It’s not cold,” said the biker, “it’s not melting, and I doubt you could build a snowman out of it. If it’s
really
snow, I’ll eat my leathers.”

Standing up and glancing around, Stewart tried to make sense of the phenomenon. Snow lay everywhere: a thick blanket of white definitely becoming deeper in the direction of Adelaide. It hung from trees like scraps of torn sheets, too unusual to be truly beautiful. If it wasn’t snow, he thought, then perhaps it was ash. Had there been some sort of volcanic explosion in Adelaide’s vicinity? As far as he knew there were no volcanoes, active or dead, for many hundreds of kilometres, although the city did lie on top of a fault line ...

“I’m heading for the hills,” said the biker, stamping off to his bike. “No point standing around here all day.”

Stewart agreed and went back to the Toyota, leaving the mother alone to deal with her kids.

Two hours later, coming down the last leg of the Great Eastern Freeway, he passed the biker going back up. Recognising the car, the biker flagged him down.

“Don’t bother. Blocked that way too. Worse, if anything.”

“Shit.” That explained why he had seen few cars coming either way, even though it was close to peak-hour. “Where now?”

“Me, I’m going back to the lookout. Might be able to see something from there.”

Stewart followed the motorbike back up the freeway to a concrete car-park hollowed out of the chest of the foothills. There, he produced the binoculars he had taken with him to study the comet and turned them on the landscape below.

Through the clouds, which hung low and heavy over the hills, he could see little. Handing the binoculars to the biker, he leaned forward over the concrete barrier, trying to pierce the cloud-cover by sheer force of will.

The clouds parted for an instant, allowing them an unobstructed view.

“Jesus
Christ
,” whispered the biker.

“What? What can you see?”

Wordlessly, the biker shook his head and handed the binoculars back to him.

Stewart focused the lenses, swept his amplified stare across the suburbs and streets of the city. White, everywhere, just white. No details. It looked as though fog or heavy mist had covered the city, obscuring it from sight. But it wasn’t mist.

“Look at the city centre,” suggested the biker.

Landmarks lay buried beneath the white pancake. He didn’t realise he had found the city centre until he recognised the silhouette of the State Bank building, the tallest in Adelaide. It too was shrouded in white, as though a cloth had been draped over it, but it didn’t look as tall as it should have been. The buildings around it were similarly foreshortened, and some appeared to be missing altogether. He frowned: the snow couldn’t be that thick, could it?

As he watched, puzzled, the State Bank building slumped and fell over, melting into the snow like a spear of ice-cream under the hot sun.

“Oh my god,” he breathed.

“The city’s going under,” said the biker. “It’s burying it.”

“But...” Stewart lowered the binoculars. “That’s ...”

“I’m getting out of here. Something weird’s going on, and I don’t like it.”

“The snow ... ?”

“It’s
not
snow, I know that much.” The biker raised his nose to sniff the wind. “Can you smell it? The air is turning.”

Stewart found an edge to the air, like rotten eggs, blowing up from the foothills.

“My wife works in the city,” he said, a fire beginning to burn in his stomach.

“You got any kids?” asked the biker.

He shook his head.

“I’ve got three.” A dirty hand flapped at the terrible whiteness. “Somewhere under
that.”

“You’re not going to leave them?”

The biker worried his beard with one hand. “If they’re okay, then they can look after themselves. If they’re not, there’s nothing I can do.”

“We have to
try
, don’t we?”

The biker looked uncomfortable for a moment. Then, without replying, he strode back to the bike and kicked it into life. The roar of the engine leaped from the hills as he sped back to the highway.

Stewart stayed until the cloud-cover closed again, cutting off the view of the city. There was nothing new to be seen, apart from the gentle, silent collapse of the city centre; just an endless snowfield that stretched as far as the sea. No details, no signs of life.

His stomach gnawed at itself as he drove on down the freeway. The snow piled higher and higher, until he rounded a corner and reached a solid wall of the stuff with a handful of cars parked in front of it. The bike leaned on its stand among them, and Stewart was gratified to see it, although the biker himself was nowhere to be seen.

A clot of people had gathered near the blockage. Walking up to them, Stewart addressed the short, balding man who seemed to have elected himself leader.

“The biker. Where did he go?”

The man pointed over the snow-dune. “In there. With Gary.”

Footprints led over the dune. Thanking the bald man, he followed the double tracks. The snow was at least three metres deep in places and as hard to walk through as soft sand. As the tracks wandered on, the dunes piled higher, licking at the rock walls where the freeway had been cut out of the hills. An icing-sugar canyon. He shivered, although it still wasn’t cold; it was, in fact, oppressively hot. The smell of rotten eggs was strong in the still, stifled air.

He turned a bend and caught sight of the biker and the man called Gary. They were standing not much further on, looking at something on the ground between them. He called to them, and both glanced at him in surprise.

Gary was tall, with a pot-gut and thinning black hair. As Stewart approached, he realised that the man’s face was as white as the snow around them.

“You don’t want to see this,” said the biker.

Stewart forced his way between them and stared at what lay at their feet. At first, all he saw was a dash of red in the ubiquitous white, until the details fell into place.

It was the body of a woman, partly buried. Her clothes were gone, and her staring eyes full of empty accusation. Although there was no blood evident, the condition of her body suggested a violent, hideous passing—or subsequent mutilation.

“There’s a car up ahead,” said Gary. “Abandoned.”

“Someone dumped her here?” asked Stewart, forcing the words through the gorge rising in his throat.

“We don’t think so. She must have crawled from it, got buried, and suffocated. If I hadn’t tripped over her, we never would’ve found her.”

“But who ... ?” He gestured at the corpse, lost for words.

“Skinned her? Look closely.”

Reluctantly, Stewart did so. The snow lay across her vivid flesh like ribbons, or ropes. More: it seemed to be digging in, somehow, as though she might yet struggle free. This impression alone was enough to disturb him, until he noticed something else.

“It... It’s moving!”

The biker nodded. “It’s
eating
her.”

Stewart’s stomach spasmed. Staggering backwards, he clutched his mouth and simultaneously wiped at the snow that had settled on his skin. “Oh, Jesus ...”

The biker put a steadying hand on his shoulder and smiled without humour.

“It probably won’t hurt you,” he said. “Or us. We’re still alive, you see.”

Stewart swallowed his nausea and forced his hands to be still, cursing his foolishness. He had been exposed to the snow on several occasions and it hadn’t harmed him. “But ... I don’t understand.”

“The car,” said Gary, “was almost gone. It looked ... dissolved. The snow was stripping it back to nothing.”

The biker nodded, and gestured at the body. “Same with her. She’s just raw material.”

“For what?”

The biker waved a hand at the canyon of snow. “For whatever this stuff really is.”

“Machines,” said Gary. “Nano-machines, or something. Designed to dig in and separate the useful stuff from the rest. Like ants, but smaller.”

“Is that possible?” asked the biker.

“I can’t see why not.”

Stewart could feel panic rising through his confusion. He allowed himself to be led away from the body, back up the freeway.

“The comet,” he whispered, half to himself.

Gary nodded, as though he had already considered the idea. “It’s possible.”

“Aliens?” The biker raised his eyebrows.

“Or something non-intelligent. This stuff could be a life-form, some sort of mindless bug.”

“Do you think so?”

“No. It hit the city dead on. That suggests a purposeful intent.”

“Maybe they home in on metal?”

“Or high-density electric fields.” Gary shrugged at the biker’s question. “I don’t know. But if it
is
aliens, then this could be just the beginning—phase one, if you like. Maybe they’re going to build something next. Or take over.”

The biker nodded slowly. “The air’s starting to smell bad.”

“Exactly. Depending on how much of this stuff there is, world-wide, it would be fairly easy to change the environment. And if the snow’s self-replicating, then it’d be even easier. Once the bugs are loose, there’d be no stopping them.”

“How long?” Stewart heard the question before realising that he had asked it. A scream was building at the back of his throat, and he swallowed to force it down.

Gary shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m not a scientist.”

“You’ll have to ask the aliens,” suggested the biker, “if they exist.”

They walked back to the cars in solemn silence. The walls of the canyon loomed over them, higher than before. In the short time they had been studying the woman’s gory corpse, the snow had thickened.

When they reached the last snow-dune, Gary turned to them and, as though he regretted his earlier words, said:

“Remember, it’s only a theory. I could be wrong.”

“Then why haven’t we seen any planes?” asked the biker. “And why aren’t the radios working?”

“I don’t know. But I don’t think we should start a panic over what might turn out to be nothing.”

“Nothing?” The biker shook his head. “We’ve been invaded by
something,
haven’t we? Surely we should try to fight back?”

“How? How do you fight
snow
?”