Paradigm (9781909490406) (26 page)

It's probably just a level two storm,' she said, cupping her hand into his ear. ‘It'll be a little painful on the skin but not deadly. If we can make it to the trees then we'll be sheltered enough and they won't follow. They can't tell if it's going to get heavier. Only we are gifted with that insight.'

L
ily took
the slippery ladder first. Carter followed and they crept towards the muddy path and into the thin spread of woods that lined a track towards the north. Water trickled through the leaves at a steady rate until finally the rain stopped and there was only the sound of a rubbery squelching as they tramped down the path and the intermittent whistle of birds.

It's not much further now,' said Lily looking ahead. ‘We probably have another hour before we hit the border.

A
s they neared
the Transporter stop at the north-east corner of the loop of river that wound its way around the Community, Carter stopped. The shelter was the same simple construction as that on the other side of the river that he'd been dropped off at just days earlier. Surrounded by a protective film of trophene there was a FreeScreen, scrolling news across the front.

‘This place is just for the Scouts. It won't work properly without a card,' said Lily. ‘It probably won't work at all after all these years. Leave it. Come on; we need to get closer to the tunnel, it's almost time.'

The opening of the tunnel was a large hole set back into the bluff of the embankment that rose high above the river. Layers of rich sediment deposited by the Storms had coated the hillock in a covering of white flowers and, save for the smooth trophene retractable lid, the whole surface was a sprinkling of intricate blossom, still wet from the downpour. From underneath the ground there was a vibration and then a soft rumbling.

Carter looked at the FreeScreen. ‘Lily,' he called, his heart pounding and a sick feeling overcoming him. ‘You have to come and look at this.'

‘It's happening,' said Lily. ‘It's coming soon'

‘No, you have to look at this, it's important.'

‘Carter, we don't have time. When the Transporter passes through, you have to wait and I will explain to the Industry guard inside the tunnel so that they'll let us through. We only have seconds to slip past and inside before it shuts automatically. The guards are under orders to shoot unknowns so I'll go first and let you know when it's clear, okay? Here, why don't you let me hold the book bag?'

T
here was
something in her voice that Carter knew was wrong. As she reached for the bag, Carter moved it out of her way.

‘It's not heavy, and besides, you have the pictures,' he said.

Everything that happened next was fast and confusing. The grate opened quickly, smoothly and with minimum effort. There was a rush of air—partly from the Transporter as it whooshed past and partly from the arrow-straight throw as the rusted pair of scissors arced from Lily's hand directly into his shoulder. Distracted by the pain, Carter held on tight to the bag as she tried to grab it, stepped backwards and almost missed the final glimpse of Lily as she pushed herself inside the tunnel. Before he could follow her, the lid snapped shut tight, leaving just a few strands of her hair floating on the breeze near his face.

In the distance, the Transporter was already a thread of black winding its way east towards Drakewater. He still had the bag of books, but Lily had gone.

Carter glanced at the entrance to the tunnel and then back at the FreeScreen. It was the headline that had first caught his attention that, at that moment, terrified him the most.

T
here was
no more to the story, just the headline looping continuously. He stumbled backwards. The blunt wound in his shoulder throbbed even though there was hardly any blood. It had all been part of the test. She'd used him. She had tested him. And he'd failed.

‘Lily!' he screamed into the smooth lid of the tunnel. He heard his own voice as distant, somewhere in the background of his own mind. There was a silence before the horrific confirmation and a parting sentence from Lily that made the blood in his veins run cold. Her voice echoed through the other side of the tunnel.

‘Go now, Carter. Run. Before I send the Industry to kill you.'

A
s they crossed the river
, Rachel, part of Filip's team and Jayden took turns rowing; big propellers-worth of water churned over in effortless crunches of waves, making the crossing in half the time. Filip had covered Jonah's body, slumped in the corner of the boat, with a sheet of green corrugated plastic that he had found on the street. The part-burned, mottled plastic magnified parts of Jonah's face, making the boils seem bigger and more gruesome than they were. As much as Alice wanted to look at him, wanted to remember who he was, she couldn't and turned her head away to watch the boat, balanced on the roof of the supermarket. She felt a numb pain in her hands that radiated throughout her body and made her eyes glow cold and white.

The strokes of the rowers became more pronounced as the boat that Filip's team had put together lurched closer to the shore. Nobody had said a word since Alice had staggered out of the supermarket, splinters of bone and small lines of hair stuck to her. Filip and Alice sat still, opposite each other with their knees touching.

‘Put your hands out,' said Filip in a low voice so that only she could hear him though the suit. Her lip, which she had bitten hard throughout the silence of their return trip, held the metallic taste of blood.

‘What?'

‘Put your hands out. Flat, in front you. Palms upwards—just do it.' Alice put out her hands, the pink of her hands visible through the thin, clear grey skin of the suit glove. Filip placed his hands, palms downward, above Alice's without touching even a fibre of the suit. He left them there until Alice could feel the energy, the warmth that his hands generated between them—something unseen and alive that they had created. Then, slowly, he lowered them onto hers and rubbed them gently along the length of her hands until their fingertips touched. She looked up at him but his eyes were closed tight in concentration.

‘Share with me what you feel,' he said through the suit. ‘Let me feel it. Let me share it.' His voice was clipped and metallic but charged with everything meaningful. Alice poured out her emotion to him and it felt equalised, divided and controlled. But all the same, she knew that something inside of her had died with Jonah.

W
ithin twenty minutes
they were all back on the east bank of the river, the rowers exhausted and Jonah's body already starting to cause an unnerving chill between them. Grenfell and Walford carried him back through the city, holding his broken body on their shoulders as the sun beat down on them. Alice was silent for the entire journey, stopping at times to pick something up out of the piles of bones on the street and then lay it back down again. There was a cool sadness between them that the nine remaining Scouts could not contain.

As they neared Unity Square, there was a shuffling in one of the shops. It wasn't until they caught sight of a row of snouts snuffling from behind a wall and the first whining howl ripped through the alley that they realised they were in trouble.

‘Wolves!' screamed Rachel, terror echoing through the empty streets. ‘Run!'

Those at the front of the pack that bounded out towards them had bald patches, stripped of fur, and the same bleeding sores that Jonah had got from the river. They snarled at the group with sharp yellow teeth. Without hesitation Alice drew her gun and pulled the trigger twice and the bodies of the lead wolves dropped to the pavement. The two others that followed received the same treatment, falling with a sweet whine and a limp onto the road opposite them.

‘We need to get inside and get safe,' said Alice, out of breath, the gun in her hand shaking a little. ‘Day one in the new world is done.'

L
ocked
in the containment room on the fifth floor of the Industry building near Unity Square, the teams ate the first batch of synthetic provisions and removed their suits. Jayden and one of the others had painted Jonah's body in liquid trophene while they decided what to do with it. It was starting to harden.

‘Remember, whatever happened to him, he was one of us—he will
always
be one of us.' Filip said to the teams.

There was an eerie silence as Alice came back into the room, opened a box of fauclate and passed it around the group.

‘You know what's weird?' she said in a strange voice. ‘When I went into that supermarket and saw chocolate on the shelves—even though it was spoiled and I couldn't eat it—I didn't even feel like it. This…' she held up a piece of the sweet, fibrous synthetic product, ‘…is all I wanted.'

‘That's conditioning for you,' said Kelly, her arms around Quinn who was tapping numbers into the model of a spreadsheet.

‘No,' said Alice wryly, ‘that's not conditioning. That's real choice.'

T
he first sunset
above ground seemed to be the longest one any of them had ever experienced in their days before the Storms. Through the window cavity they watched the ball of fire glide slowly from the sky spitting a band of red, pink and mauve rays down onto the city. When the darkness hauled a dark grey lid across the sky, Alice pulled down the bunks and they each sat with a slate configuring the plans and eating the rest of their evening food allocation.

Within a few minutes of finishing refreshments, the group began, one by one, to drop into a deep sleep, slates open in front of nodding heads and tightly closed eyes. In the blackness, Alice felt a hand slip down between the mattress of the bunk above her, ruffling her hair and caressing her shoulder.

‘Goodnight, Butterfly,' said Filip. ‘Sweet dreams.' She reached up and touched his fingertips, rubbing her palm gently against his.

‘Why do you call me Butterfly?' said Alice.

Filip laughed quietly. ‘Because you've changed,' he said.

Alice shrugged. ‘Goodnight,' she whispered back to him but in the depths of her tiredness, although the contours of her lips made the shapes of the words, no actual sound came out of her mouth.

A
lice awoke sweating
in terror with a stiff arm, her fingers still interlaced with Filip's through the crack in the bunks. Hutchinson's face through her nightmares was burned into her memory. Rachel and Jayden were crammed into one of the small bunks and Quinn and Kelly lay curled like kittens in the corner of the room. Outside, the sun was already blazing hot, although Alice thought it couldn't have been more than eight o'clock in the morning. The sight of the sun was good, although the glow of the natural light that brightened her was quickly brought down by the sight of Jonah trussed in trophene wrap on the other side of the room. She handed out day packs to her team and Filip did the same before she stood in front of the group, now down to nine.

‘Our first priority is security,' she said. ‘Not for us but for the others who will come. We need to secure a perimeter around this city and drive out anything that might threaten us while we are building our new community. The wolves we saw yesterday, I think, are an anomaly.' She looked over at the statisticians.

‘I agree,' said Quinn. ‘From the monitoring Kelly and I did of yesterday's expedition, there were no other significant signs of life.' She stood up and pulled down a map of the city she had drawn on some scroll paper, with the near-horseshoe shape of the river in thick, bold blue. ‘While you didn't venture far north, both teams explored east and west—almost as far as the river in both directions. Unless the woods and copses to the north hold significantly different terrains, I don't think we're going to find any mammals other than those that have strayed into the area by mistake.' She looked at Alice. ‘And I think we can eradicate those.'

‘I will,' said Alice in a hard voice, ‘shoot anything that threatens our safety here.' She beckoned the teams to the windows and pointed indiscriminately.

‘So, now we've been into the old world and we've seen the beauty and the horror of what's out there,' she said. ‘Not everything—but we've observed enough to know what we need to do next. What happened yesterday was horrific, but we need to keep strong. It is because of—and not in spite of—what happened yesterday that the plan continues and is now even more important.'

Filip called the others to the window and pointed out into the street.

‘Over the next few days, we want each one of these cars taken to the edge of the river and used to create a barricade,' he said. ‘Layer them two or three thick in depth and height. If any of them are in drivable condition then do that, but it's highly unlikely. Otherwise, just push them. The Industry muscle team will be arriving tomorrow to help with the clear-up, but they will need direction. There's some usable winching equipment in the garage we found, about half a kilometre east of here. Walford, can you see if there's anything we can trailer over here?'

Alice watched as a dove landed on the steps below and pecked at the grass growing through the cracks in the pavement. It looked up at her and, for just a second, she wondered whether it had ever been to Prospect House. When she spoke aloud, her voice sounded louder and truer than it did in her head.

‘And I don't care how you do it, but I want that barricade electrified,' she said. ‘I never want anyone on the other side of that filthy, hallucinogenic trail of poison that used to be a river.' She pointed to the horseshoe shape on Quinn's map. ‘And where the loop ends, we continue the barricade around us so that nothing can get in.'

‘And no one can get out,' added Jayden. Alice turned around to face him.

‘Exactly,' she said. ‘What happened to Jonah was devastating, a tragedy and something we need to have mitigating plans for. I don't want anyone else in that river or coming up here to find things that remind them of their old life that drive them crazy. No one.'

A
s the others
gathered their kits to prepare for the day, Filip pulled Alice towards him, nestling one arm around her waist and looking out at the city. His hands felt different to Jonah's. There was something electrically adult about him.

‘You knew that would happen, didn't you, what happened with Jonah?' He licked a finger and rubbed some dirt from her cheek. ‘Not that exactly, but something. You knew he wasn't ready to come back out here. That was brave.' His words fell like secrets against the backdrop of the noise of the others and Alice let her own hands slip to her sides. She let out a sigh that whistled between her teeth.

‘Not that exactly, but something, yes. I had to know what someone like Jonah would make of a world like this. I hoped…' she let her voice stumble to a whisper. ‘I hoped he would be all right. But hoping forces you to place your trust in things that do not exist. We can't afford to do that when the others come. We have to prepare them and prepare
for
them. Kunstein was right—we have to bring them into a transformed world where things are different, completely different. We have to make it so that the new world is who we all are.

‘Right now, people are just starting to understand the devastation we were in before the storms. But there will be some of them who think that if they could just get back to their old house or find their photographs or their favourite blanket, everything will be okay. We need to destroy everything—a world wiped clean of memories of the place—the world—that put them in this situation. It could be anything that triggers them—a landscape, a chocolate bar, a ship on the roof of a building…'

The conviction in Alice's voice was her mainstay. She bit down and waited for Filip's response. The pigeons, having had enough of their conversation, flew off the windowsill and out into the cotton-fresh blueness of the morning. Filip watched them disappear before he spoke. His voice came clearly—the tone not accusatory, but clear and straight; one of the qualities that Alice most admired in him.

‘Was that Jonah's purpose on this expedition? Did you bring him out here to see how people like
him
might react to the world?' He spoke carefully, leaving the explanations to Alice.

‘People like
him
are people like
us
but with less training,' said Alice. ‘We are all the same in many ways—we just have different things that trigger us or set us in motion. Jonah's purpose out here was just to be Jonah, just like your purpose is to bring yourself and your skills. And he was all I had—he was what I brought. Regardless of which one of us pulled the trigger, we are both culpable, Filip. But I more than you—I brought him out here hoping that he would survive, and somehow knowing that he wouldn't. I just didn't expect it to happen so soon.'

Filip folded his arms tightly around Alice's waist and held her tightly. The delicate way with which he did it allowed her to melt some of her sadness into him and for the moments that they stood there, her shoulders softened. As they framed the open window, drinking in the vastness of the city, Alice began to get a vague idea of the scale and the scope of the dangerous work in front of them and, whilst it scared her to the core, she knew she must carry on.

That afternoon, they built the first of the pyres.

S
tarting
in one residential corner of the city, the clean-up was formally initiated when they selected where to begin. Alice felt determined, practical and almost detached.

‘When the others come we'll need houses to put them in,' said Alice in front of Kelly's hand-drawn map. ‘They'll need something that they can create as their own in this new world. This area here,' she pointed on the map to a cluster of streets to the north-west of Unity Square, ‘was the residential area in the hub of the city. As they were on higher ground the structural water damage wasn't as catastrophic—we may not even need to rebuild these in the first instance. They're all two-storey, two-bedroom properties and they'll need clearing of all material items and repainting. White and with no distinguishing features. When we run out of white paint, use cream, antique then fawn. After that we go to other hardware stores. I want everything that we can't reduce to a raw material for reuse or recycling burned. That includes everything personal, everything with a label or a logo, a pattern or a sign. Everything symbolic, religious, iconic, descriptive has to be destroyed.'