Paradigm (9781909490406) (28 page)

‘It's not really true though, is it, Grandfather?' Carter asked, wide eyed and afraid.

‘Everything is a story,' said the old man. ‘No one knows what is true anymore. But I think it's safe to say that the Deadlands were and are never a place to be—even if you are one of these so-called Scouts. I can only hope lessons have been learned.'

‘How did Richard Warren get here? How did he survive out there all alone in the Storms?'

‘Nobody knows,' said his grandfather. ‘He never told me. But he was a survivor, just as you are. He said that not long after the waters dropped, he got sick with a fever and his brother left him there to die. Years later he woke up here in the Community. The Industry saved him. They saved us all.'

A
s he rubbed
the crusty sleep from his eyes, the crispness of the edges of his dream evaporated and Carter was left alone in the darkness of the trees with the sound of his grandfather's words resonating inside his head. There were so many things he remembered, yet there were so many things that remained forgotten. The bent-down grasses of the trail behind him had already begun to repair, springing back in the night blackness. He held on tightly to the bag, clasping the contents to his chest, feeling a strong resolve deep inside himself.

With no torch, only the pale moon to guide him, Carter felt his way through the trees, moving westwards towards the long road of the ridge. He couldn't risk going through the open valley to be confronted at night by the wolves, but wandering around in the forest at night seemed to offer little more comfort. Even though the sound of the nightjars was considerably better than the growling of the sharp-toothed pack, he needed to be high out of the reach of predators if he was to have even half a chance of making it through the night.

Shivering, he continued onwards until he stumbled upon a worn-out building with a flat porch roof that overhung a smashed-out room filled with empty shelves. Exhausted, he hauled himself onto the surface covered with soft leaves and bird droppings. High above the scratching on the ground, he curled foetal-like until the darkness pulled its arm around him. And, as it came, it dragged him into the depths of deep sleep, the rusty black scissors and book bag held tightly in his hands like talismans against the night.

T
he first and
only thought in his mind when he woke up was the tower. If the dream of his grandfather had unpicked the idea from his head, the rest from the second sleep crystallised it. When he opened his eyes, the sun had cast a leafy green light across the woodland and he was, to his own surprise, still alive and invigorated from the sleep.

From the broad ledge of a roof he had fallen asleep on, he couldn't see above the canopy of trees but there were a smattering of clearings in the wood before the contours of the valley turned around the ridge, following the same S-shape of the river. He could just about make out the top of the tower to the south west of where he was, glinting dangerously in the sunlight. The track would take him south west around the ridge and then back eastwards towards the tower. It would take him most of the day.

Carter lowered his body down onto the ground, his stomach rumbling furiously as he looked around for anything to eat. He snacked on the rest of the food he'd transferred from the book bag to his pockets and scanned the forest. There were bitter berries, purple-drop hangers and white nettle-ferns, and all sorts of grasses. He had to start thinking about something other than the synthetics he was used to. But even through his hunger, something inside him felt stronger than ever.

There would be no chicker out here. He plumped for some black berries filled with a dark red juice that trickled down his chin as he gorged himself on them. He'd tasted things that were marginally worse and, apart from a slight dizziness, they didn't seem to have made him feel any sicker than the pain in his arm. After he ate, he cleaned the wound in his shoulder with some damp leaves until it was free of blood. The puncture wasn't deep but the grey-blue cloud of a bruise had spread across his chest and down his arm. Gritting his teeth, he moved onwards.

B
y early afternoon
, although he was sweating and tired, he'd made good progress. From the narrow ridge he could see down into the valley and across towards the Community. A worm-like Transporter snaked through from Proclamation Plaza until it disappeared, deep underground into the Catacombs. The flashing glitter of the Barricades in the warm orange sun blinded him if he looked directly into its glare but everything seemed normal; tiny ants of people moving slowly through the thin streets with a small gathering in Unity Square. He wondered if one of them was Lily.

He could see the vehicle park too and a cluster of wolves lounging in the sun in the open grassland. At the edge there was the small brick building that he and Lily had crouched together on, as the rivulets of rain ran down their necks inside their clothes. Carter had been shielding her from the worst of it, protecting her with his body while he felt her warm breath on his shoulder—the same shoulder that now ached with the pain of the puncture wound she had given him.

Then, standing between him and the wolves, was the Tower block. It loomed dark below him at the edge of the gorse-covered valley surrounded by a moat of undergrowth and bushes. He blinked in the sun. He would be there soon.

F
ar to the west
, a mess of dark grey clouds plotted the late afternoon downpour in earnest. Carter accelerated his pace down the side of the ridge towards the Tower. He had between two and three hours to make it to shelter before the rain started. Keeping one eye on the occasional movement of the rats in the bushes, and the other on his intended destination, he moved quickly and carefully.

F
rom the edge
of the ridge, the Tower looked different than it had all those years ago when he had crouched in the ruins on the Blue Hills with Isabella. He'd imagined that beyond the Tower was blackness but the light from the sun no longer looked like it was being sucked into a vortex. At the lower levels, the light flowed through the Tower like water. All across the valley, between the trees, were smashed pieces of buildings and the old life.

By the time he reached the base of the ridge, a gentle flurry of rain had started and the Tower, nestled between the ridge and the river, almost seemed further away, like the trunk of a thick tree reaching up to the sky. Carter measured the distance and looked at the sky, silently picking up his pace despite the pain wracking his body. Within minutes he'd broken out into a sprint, crushing leaves and jumping over the moving creatures that darted out in front of him as he hurtled through their woodland. Luckily, they seemed more wary of him than he of them.

He had to hurry. There wasn't much time.

B
y the end
of the first week, forty of the Industry support team had arrived above ground. Although they popped out of the shaft green and bleary-eyed, they were fast, obedient and expertly trained, exponentially more effective than Grenfell and Walford. They requested that Alice read them the opening pages of the manifesto, the rules and the plan in their two-hour readjustment break so that they could get straight to work. And they worked like machines, worked
with
machines, somehow reigniting the engines of some of the vehicles and using them to haul things from one end of the new community to another.

‘This is for construction purposes only,' said Alice firmly to the teams. ‘Once we have established ourselves, there will be no more personal transport. These vehicles will be decommissioned and destroyed. Quinn is finalising the details for a public transport system that will span this area.'

W
ithin three weeks
, all the cars, trucks, waste metal and fencing that they had dredged from within the city had been piled up on the banks of the river creating a shiny, multicoloured barricade all around the edges. To the south-east, the support teams had set up recycling areas for the rest of the metal, foodstuffs and building materials.

‘We link up the energy that's being used underground, generated from cell division,' said Quinn. ‘It's the cleanest energy you can get and we've learned a lot from Drakewater on security. We can use some of the existing infrastructure for power distribution when the repairs are finished and then we'll have a full above-ground electrical supply.' Alice looked at her face carefully.

‘That's not a small job; I don't envy you. Do you think this is even a good idea, the right idea? When the power's back and everyone's above ground, how do we make sure we don't return to the mess we were in before?'

Quinn looked back at her screen.

‘
We
don't,' she said. ‘You do. You and Filip. And I don't envy you, either.'

Alice nodded and smiled.

‘Touché,' she said. ‘But it's what we all have to do.'

‘
A
re you sure about this
?' Filip's face was lined with dust from the inside of one of the houses in Drummond Row where Alice had insisted they meet in secret.

‘I have to,' said Alice. ‘I have to go there one last time to be sure, to stop the dreams and to finish this once and for all.' She took his hand and held it tightly to her face. ‘How can I ask all of them to forget if I can't do this myself? I need to be complete with this.'

Filip pulled her close.

‘I'll come with you, but you have to promise me that we use the time out there beyond our barricade in the… what do you call it again?'

‘The Deadlands.'

‘We make our time in the Deadlands count. We make it worthwhile. We use it to show people what the dangers are like out there so that they know what happened, so that they know what we did to this world and why it can never happen again. Agreed?'

Alice nodded her head.

‘Agreed.'

Filip smiled and kissed the top of her head and headed towards the doorway.

‘We'll go this afternoon. I'll get the equipment together and you brief Quinn on what needs to happen while we're gone. And Alice…' He turned before leaving the room, ‘I love you.' He closed the door quietly and Alice looked at her fingers, red-rimmed and bitten and wondered whether, after all this time, she really was strong enough to be the person she needed to be.

T
he tunnel
that looped under the river and into the south west corner of the new community had been, before the Storms, a pedestrian subway. Tiny pieces of coloured mosaic tiles clung to the walls as if held in place by chewing gum. Alice had been through there many times on her own when she should have been at school but nobody ever caught her or told her mother, not even the man with the dog who played his guitar.

He was usually there with a dog that had a thin piece of rope around its neck. The dog would always whine if she stopped to watch. The two of them would sit in a dusty alcove set back into the wall of the tunnel that had a shelf at the back of it and a bricked-up doorway where the man kept his sleeping bag, a book and a sock full of money. There was a mournful quality on the faces of both the man and the dog but, however much she petted the dog until he his tail wagged in a sorrowful loop, it was the man whom Alice wanted to save the most. The dog, she thought, would be better off staying away from Prospect House.

‘What is the point of that book?' said Alice to the man one morning, wondering if the man could even read. ‘When do you get time to read it?'

The man looked at her and smiled. ‘It's a history of Ancient Rome,' he said. ‘You don't read it; you absorb it.'

Alice couldn't imagine that, if she were only to have one book in the world, that the Ancient Rome book would be it.

‘Why do you keep your things on that shelf?'

‘Because it's the safest place,' he'd said in return and let her stroke the dog while he changed a string on his guitar. ‘It's where nobody would think to look.'

A
lice shivered
as they neared the entrance to the tunnel. Inside it looked dark and terrifyingly eerie. As Filip shone a torch around the sides of the walls, eyelets of mosaic winked back at them as if complicit in their secret task.

‘Is this it?' said Filip. ‘Is this the right one?' Alice looked at the inch-square tiles in their multicoloured alliance: scenes of a windmill, a beach, and children playing, all oblivious to the events that had chipped their hard-tile surfaces and changed the world above them forever.

‘Yes,' said Alice. ‘This is it.'

T
he floor
of the tunnel was dressed in the same way as the streets; paper, plastics and twigs that had been pushed to the sides as the water had subsided and eventually dried to small dirty rivulets that left tramlines on the sides and in between the floor tiles. In one corner there was a doll, missing one arm but still dressed in the remains of what would have been a light-pink cardigan, now dark brown with dried sludge.

‘Are you sure you want to do this?' Filip held Alice's arm tightly.

‘Yes,' said Alice and walked onwards, holding her torch out in front of her, casting a bright white flare through the darkness.

W
hen they climbed
the steps that led upwards to the other side of the city, they were greeted with an explosion of wild colour. The stairwell led upwards to the pavement on the far side of the road that had once run alongside the river, now covered over with trash and soil, thick with plants and grasses.

In the time since the water had subsided on the rich fertile ground on the other side of the river, fields of piercing blue flowers had dotted the wasteland like shrapnel, and poppies crowded across a new field that had been fertilised with the overspill of silt. The shops that had once lined the waterfront were destroyed, contents strewn over the length of the walkway, and further upriver, in the distance, Alice could make out the skeletal shape of the boat still wedged in between the buildings further upstream.

‘Let's get away from here,' she said, pulling Filip into the littered side streets. ‘I don't trust being near the river.'

T
hey moved inland
, following the trail of the streets past abandoned houses and stores, picking their way over hillocks of glass that had been smashed into needle-thin splinters, and the shattered bones of humans and animals lost in the Storms. In the debris they untangled individual tragedies. There was a kennel with the skeletal remains of a dog still chained inside, and a pram that had somehow become entangled in the shredded canopy of a shop and hung dolefully, swinging as the wind blew. And, more than once, they passed withered strings of bones that still hung from thick cords of rope attached to the highest parts of buildings like macabre flags clad in the wasted rags they'd died in, except the shoes that lay scattered. In her mind, Alice could hear the delicate strains of the Bruch concerto and her heart felt heavy and desperately sad.

‘Are you ready to start filming?' said Filip. ‘We need to capture the danger and destruction out here.'

‘Is it fair to show them this?'

‘Is it fair
not
to? This is the best deterrent we have, but it will only work once we are established and we have something to compare it against. Our future generations deserve to know what destruction we created and the devastation it caused.'

Filip stepped sideways to avoid the partial skeleton of a horse, its legs boldly spread across the width of the pavement. Alice bent down to stroke the open skull, split into two pieces by half of a stone gargoyle that had fallen from the building above. The other half was still stuck there, grinning inanely as it gazed out across the river.

‘You're right,' she said and they both switched on the cameras attached to the helmets of their suits. They squeezed hands tightly and Alice walked in front, scanning the devastation with the wide lens.

‘My name is Alice Davenport,' she started, ‘and this is the Deadlands.'

T
he journey
to Prospect House took them just over two hours and in that time they had to stop filming on three occasions.

‘Some of this stuff is just too horrific,' breathed Filip. They sat and held each other close in the dark alleys where skeletons had gathered in corners, some whole but most in parts. Through the labyrinthine streets they paused to peer into the darkness of the water-damaged shop fronts and cold, empty offices. An undertaker's shop devoid of coffins sat with its lonely sole headstone still attached to the wall. There was still the faint smell of chemicals mixed with salt and wild garlic that hung with lavish intent in the air.

‘They probably sailed off down the river with the bodies still in them,' said Filip. Alice shook her head. ‘Burial at sea,' she replied, and in the gloomy gruesomeness, for a moment they both found something small to laugh about. They sat there in the macabre gloominess holding hands until they both knew it was time to move on.

W
hile Alice had been prepared
for the destruction of the city and having to confront everything that had ever meant anything to her, what she was not ready to have to face were the rats. With thick, hairy bodies the size of small dogs, they skittered amongst the ruins flicking their tails and baring creamy stained teeth set in wide, red-rimmed mouths. Both Alice and Filip screamed when the first set came towards them and ran through the water-torn backstreets to a building with stairs steady enough to climb.

Behind them came the wolves, one pack tearing through the streets in rapid succession, snapping hungry mouths and baying like demented lunatics, clawing at the doors of shops and leaping through half-broken windows after their prey. Alice and Filip watched them from a third-floor roof, hidden out of sight but shooting at them with loud snaps of pistol fire that were enough to make them retreat momentarily back to the edges of the city streets.

‘Where do you think they came from? They're not indigenous.' said Filip.

‘Maybe from the other side of Drakewater. Maybe they escaped from a zoo—who knows what else is out there?'

‘They came at around this time before when…' Filip couldn't bring himself to say Jonah's name but they both knew the time that he was talking about.

‘Even out here, there's a pattern,' said Alice and they crept back down to the streets to continue their journey. ‘And some patterns can't be broken.'

I
t took
them three hours to reach the higher ground on the other side of the city. Although the graffiti on the walls had crumbled to a pale wash of colour and some buildings had drifted into mounds of dust, the district felt familiar to Alice. Familiar, but not in a good way. Not in the same way that her nostalgia for the house in the country warmed her soul with memories. This was a sour recognition of a life she had been more than happy to leave behind. Eventually, they came to the end of the last house in the row, and from behind the backdrop, the tall square building loomed up in front of them.

They had arrived at Prospect House.

The cheap yellow grass that had once covered the local authority's offering of a park opposite the block of flats was now a luscious green, reminiscent of a meadow. Most of the rubbish had been cleared to the sides of the park and heaped in piles. A smattering of white-and-yellow flowers poked through the long grass that buzzed with midges and butterflies that flapped lazy wings in the bright sunlight. A solitary car on its roof sat in the middle of the grass, rusted and worn with brambles crawling out of the windows and over the roof, smashed headlamps looking out across the view. It had the feel of a modern art sculpture park.

When the calm, almost peaceful air had settled over them, they followed the weedy path to the entrance to the flats. Bees hummed excitedly around a bush, heady with flowers, reminding Alice of a summer afternoon she'd spent cutting back the trees in the garden with her father before things had changed.

‘What do you want to be when you grow up, Alice?' he'd said to her, kind fingers caked in thick black earth.

‘I want to be an explorer, Daddy!'

Alice had then run into the bee-filled bushes covered in thorns, pulling them apart with tiny hands. Her father spent hours with her that afternoon pulling out the splinters of bramble and treating the stings with antiseptic cream. Between the whimpering cries, Alice repeated the same seven words over and over.

‘I still want to be an explorer.'