Rites of Passage (6 page)

He knelt slowly, and I could almost hear the creak of his joints. He reached out and picked up a scrap of paper. He rose and joined me in the doorway, where the light was better, and held out the old newspaper.

“Christ, Pierre. 2040. What, fifty years ago? Look, a headline about the peace pact with China. Lot of good that did!”

He’d told me about what had happened to China. The military had taken over in a bloody coup, overturning a government they accused of not doing all they could to feed the people. And then the people had overthrown the junta, when the military had proved as useless as the government.

Not long after that, China invaded India, and Europe came to the aid of the subcontinent, and a world war broke out. It lasted five days, according to Edvard. And after that the world was never the same again.

That was the beginning of the end, Edvard said. After that, there was no hope. What humankind had begun with wars, the planet finished off with accelerated global warming.

He stared at the scrap of newspaper. In his clawed hand, the paper crumbled.

I took his arm. “C’mon, Ed. Let’s get something to eat.”

~

W
e sat around the fold-down table in the truck and ate spinach and potatoes grown in the hydroponics trailer, washed down with the daily ration of water. Danny talked enthusiastically about the maps he’d found in Paris.

Kat’s smile was like a mother’s watching a favourite child. She was sixty, grey and thin and twisted like a length of wire. There was something shattered in her pale eyes which spoke of tragedy in her past, or knowledge of the future, and Danny loved her with a tender, touching concern.

He jabbed a finger at the map. “There’s the trench, right there, just north of the African coast. I’m sure if we drill deep enough...”

“We could use some fresh stuff,” I said. “I’m tired of drinking recycled piss.”

Danny smiled. Edvard raised his glass and examined the murky liquid, smacking his lips. “I don’t know. As victuals go, this is a fine drop. Good body, a hint of mustard.”

I watched Kat as she ate, which she did sparingly. She’d given herself a small portion, and didn’t eat all of that. Before the rest of us had finished, she pushed her plate away and left the table, limping to the door of the berth she shared with Danny. He watched her go, then followed her. I looked at Edvard, as if for explanation, but his eyes were on his food.

After the meal I moved outside, taking my rifle with me, and in the spill of light from the truck I had a bath. I sat naked in the sand, taking handfuls of the fine grains and rubbing them over my body. I felt the grease and sweat fall away, leaving a fine covering of sandy powder. I dug deeper, finding the cooler sand, and poured it over my belly and thighs.

I thought about Kat, and told myself she’d be fine. Minutes later, as if to confirm that hope, the truck began rocking as Danny and Kat made love. I found myself thinking how Kat must have been good looking, way back – like the naked women in the old magazines. But I stopped those thoughts as soon as they began, stood up and pulled on my shorts.

I was about to go inside when a door opened along the flank of the truck and Edvard looked out. “Pierre?”

He stepped from the truck and climbed down. We sat in silence for a time and stared into the night sky. The storms were starting high above the far horizon, great actinic sheets of white fire.

At last I said, “Is Kat okay?”

He flashed a glance at me. “She’s ill, Pierre. We all are.”

“But Kat–?”

He sighed. “Cancer. I don’t know how advanced it is. There’s nothing I can do about it, apart from give her the odd pain-killer. And I’m running low on those.” He paused, then said, “I’m sorry.”

I said, “How long?”

He shook his head. “Maybe a year, two if she’s lucky.”

I nodded, staring through the darkness at the dim buildings. I wanted to say something, but the words wouldn’t come.

“You think Danny’s right about the Med?” I asked at last.

Edvard shrugged. “I honestly don’t know.” He was silent for a time. “I do recall when there was sea there, Pierre, and magnificent towns and cities. The rich flocked there.”

Not for the first time I tried to imagine the great bodies of water Edvard had described, water that filled areas as vast as deserts, and heaved and rolled... I shook my head. All I saw was a desert the colour of drinking water, flat and still.

He looked into the heavens as the night sky split with a crack of white light. It was Edvard who’d explained to me why, despite all the storms that raged, we never experienced rainfall: the little rain that did fall evaporated in the superheated lower atmosphere before it reached the earth. I thought of the storms, now, as mocking us with their futile promise.

I stared around at the buildings. “You think we can rebuild? I mean, make things like they were, before?”

Edvard smiled. “I like to think that with time, and hard work... Like Danny, I’m an optimist. I really think that people, at heart, are good. Call me a fool, if you like, but that’s what I think. So, if we could band together, always assuming there were enough people to feasibly propagate the race... then perhaps there would be hope.”

“But to get back to where things were... civilised?” I finished.

“That’s a big call, Pierre. We’ve lost so much, so much learning, culture. We’ve lost so much expertise. So much of what we knew, of what we learned over centuries of scientific investigation and understanding... all that is gone, and can never be rediscovered. Or if it can, then it’ll take centuries... even assuming the planet isn’t too far gone, even assuming that humanity can reform.”

I thought about that for a time, then said, “But with no more oceans, no more seas...”

He smiled at me. “I live in hope, Pierre. There might be small seas, underground reserves. I heard there are still small seas where the Pacific ocean was–”

“Couldn’t we...?” I began.

He was smiling.

“What?” I said.

“The Pacific is half a world away, Pierre. This thing might get us to the Med, if we’re lucky. But not the Pacific.”

I considered his words, the barren vastness of the world, and the little I knew of it. At last I said, “If we’re the last... I mean, I haven’t seen another human for years.”

“We aren’t alone, Pierre. There are others, small bands. There must be.” He was silent awhile, and then said, “And anyway, even if life on Earth is doomed...”

After a few seconds I prompted him, “Yes?”

“Well,” he said, “there’s always Project Phoenix.”

He’d told me all about Project Phoenix, the last hope. Forty years ago, when the world governments had known things were bad and getting worse, they pooled resources and constructed a starship, full of five thousand hopeful citizens, and sent it to the stars.

Towards the east, where the sky was blackest, I made out a dozen faint glimmering points of distant stars. I thought of the starship, still on its journey, or having reached its destination and the colonists settled on a new, Earthlike planet.

“What do you think happened to the starship?” I asked.

“I like to think they’re sitting up there now, enjoying paradise, and wondering what they left behind on Earth–”

He stopped and looked up into the night sky, then fitted his hand above his eyes to cut out the glare of the magnetic storm. “Dammit, Pierre.” He scrambled to his feet.

I joined him, my heart thumping. “What?” Then, as I scanned the sky, I heard it – the faint drone of a distant engine.

Edvard pointed, and at last I made out what he’d seen.

High in the air, and heading towards us, was the dark shape of a small plane.

I reached out for my rifle, propped against the side of the truck, and shouted at Danny and Kat to get out here.

“It’s in trouble,” Edvard said.

The engine was stuttering as the plane angled steeply over the distant buildings, a dark shape against the flaring storm. We watched it pass quickly overhead and come down in the desert perhaps half a kilometre beyond the truck.

Danny and Kat were out by now. “What was it?”

I said, “I’ll go and check it out.”

Edvard’s hand gripped my arm. “It’s no coincidence. A flyer doesn’t just drop out of the sky so close. They knew we were here. They want something.”

We all looked to Danny. He nodded. “Okay, I’ll go with you. Edvard, Kat, stay here.”

Kat nodded, moved to Edvard’s side. Danny entered the truck and came back holding a rifle. We set off across the sands, towards where the flyer had come down.

“Jesus Christ,” I said, bubbling with excitement. “Wonder who it is?”

Danny flashed me a look. “Whoever it is, chances are they’re dangerous.” He raised his rifle.

I could see he was thinking more about the flyer, and what might be salvaged from it, than who the pilot might be.

My mind was in turmoil. What if the pilot were a woman? I recalled the images of models in the magazines I’d hoarded over the years, their flawless, immaculate beauty, their haughty
you’re-not-good-enough
gazes.

My heart was thudding by the time we crested a slipping dune.

In the stuttering white light of the magnetic storm we could see that the flyer had pitched nose-first into the desert. Its near wing was crumpled, snapped into flapping sections.

I thought of the irony of finding a beautiful woman sitting in the cockpit... dead.

I took a step forward. Danny said, “Remember, careful.”

I nodded and led the way.

We approached slowly, as if the crumpled machine were a wounded animal.

“A glider,” Danny said, “jerry-rigged with an old turbo.”

I lifted my rifle and we stepped cautiously towards the shattered windshield of the cockpit.

“Oh,” I said, as I made out the figure slumped against the controls.

It was a man, an old, wizened man, thin and bald and stinking. Even from a distance of two metres I could smell his adenoid-pinching body odour.

Danny cracked the cockpit’s latch with the butt of his rifle. He hauled back the canopy, checked the pilot for weapons, then felt for his pulse.

“Alive,” he said, but his gaze was ranging over the craft and the supplies packed tight around the cockpit.

I reached out and gently eased the pilot back into his seat, his head lolling. I looked for injuries; his torso seemed fine, but his left leg was snapped at the shin and bleeding.

Danny thought about it. I guessed he was calculating the worth of the glider and the supplies against the long-term cost of giving refuge to another needy stray. “Okay, go back to the truck and tell Kat to get it over here. Tell Ed to have his equipment ready.”

I took off at a run.

Five minutes later Kat braked the truck beside the glider and we jumped out. Edvard limped through the sand and knelt in the cockpit’s hatch. After examining the pilot he did something to the leg, binding the shattered limb, then nodded to Danny and me. We eased the pilot from the glider, trying to ignore his sour body odour, and carried him over to the truck.

On the way I realised that he wasn’t as old as I’d first thought. He was in his forties, perhaps, though his skeletal frame and bald head made him look older. He wore tattered shorts and a ripped t-shirt and nothing else.

We installed him in the lounge and Edvard got to work on the leg, aided by Kat. Danny fetched the toolkit and for the next couple of hours we took the glider apart and stowed it in the cargo hold. We ferried the supplies, packed in three silver hold-alls, to the galley.

“Water,” Danny grinned as he passed me the canisters. “And dried meat, for chrissake!”

“Where the hell did he get meat from?” I wondered aloud.

Danny shook his head. “We’ll find that out when we question him. If he lives.”

I looked across at Danny. “You hope he dies?”

He weighed the question. “He dies, and that’s one less mouth... He lives, and what he knows might be valuable. Take your pick.”

It was late when we returned to the lounge. The pilot was still unconscious, his leg swaddled in bandages. “Broken in a couple of places,” Edvard reported. “He’ll pull through. I’ll stay here with him. You get some sleep.”

In my berth, I stared through the canopy at the flaring night sky, too excited at the prospect of questioning the pilot to sleep.

~

T
he rocking of the truck brought me awake. Outside, the desert was on fire. I pulled on my shorts and lurched into the lounge. Kat must have been driving because Danny was sitting in his armchair, leaning forward and staring at the pilot.

“You don’t know how grateful...” the invalid said in heavily accented English between sips of water – a half ration, I saw. He indicated his leg with the beaker. “You could have left me there.”

Guarded, Danny said, “We reckoned it was a fair trade, the wreckage of your plane, the supplies. We’ll feed you, keep you alive. But you’ll have to work if you want to be part of the team.”

Edvard sat on the battered sofa against the far wall. He said, “What can you do?”

The man’s thin lips hitched in an uneasy smile. “This and that, a bit of tinkering, engineering. I worked on solar arrays, years ago.”

I said, “What’s your name?”

He stared back at me, and I didn’t like the look in his eyes. Hostile. “What’s yours?”

“Pierre,” I said, returning his glare.

He nodded, increasing the width of his smile. “Call me Skull,” he said.

It was obviously not his given name, but considering the fleshless condition of his head, and his rictus grin, it was appropriate.
Skull
.

Danny took over. “The meat you had in the glider. Where’d you get that?”

“Down south. Still some game surviving. Shot it myself.”

“South?” Danny sat up, hope in his eyes. “There’s water down there, sea?”

Skull looked at Danny for a second before shaking his head. “No sea. The place is almost dead.”

Edvard said, “Where did you come from? With supplies like those, a plane? My guess is a colony somewhere.”

I didn’t like the way Skull paused after each question, as if calculating the right answer to give. “I was with a gang of no-hopers holed up in what was Algiers. Conditions were bad. The only hope was to get out, move north. But they didn’t want to risk it.”