Rites of Passage (7 page)

“So you stole the supplies and the plane and got the hell out,” Danny finished.

That sly pause, again. A shrug. “A man has to look after himself, these days.”

I thought of the failing colony in Algiers, confirmation that there were others still out there.

“You’re one lucky bastard you spotted us,” Danny said.

Skull made a quick pout of his lips, as if to debate the point, then said, “Where you heading?”

“The Mediterranean,” Danny said, and left it at that.

The stranger had this way of trying not to show any reaction, as if to do so would give something away. I wondered at the company he’d kept, where he’d had to hide his emotions like this, wary and mistrustful. At last he said, “You’re joking, right?”

Danny shook his head, serious. “We’ve crossed Europe I don’t know how many times, drilling for water. I think it’s just about all dried up. My reckoning is, at the bottom of the Med, or where the sea used to be, there’ll be a better chance of striking water.”

“Salt water. Undrinkable sea water.”

Danny smiled and played his trump. “So what? I have a desalination rig all ready if that’s the case.”

“But south... the Med?” Skull shook his head. “You’re mad, you know that? You heard about the scum down there? The feral bands? They’d kill you for what you got, no questions asked.”

Danny shrugged. “We can look after ourselves,” he said, and the confidence in his voice made me feel proud.

Skull licked his lips. “Madness.”

Edvard said, from the couch, “Well, we could always leave you here, if you don’t wish to accompany us.”

Skull lay his head back, staring at the ceiling. “I’ll take my chances with you people,” he said.

~

T
he following day the desert gave way to high bare hills, and then a range of mountains. I sat with Danny in the cab as we drove along what might have been a highway, years ago; now it was little better than an eroded track. According to the map, we were travelling through a range of mountains called the Cevennes. We passed remnants of what had been forests, stunted trunks that covered hillsides like so many barren pegs, dead now like everything else.

This was as far south as we’d ever been, and it seemed brighter out there than I’d ever experienced. This high up, we had a perfect view of the plains to the south, a drift of golden sand that stretched all the way to what had been the Mediterranean sea.

The sun was going down when I said, “What Skull said about feral bands...”

Danny snorted. “His sort – the kind of bastard who runs out on a colony and takes their supplies... his sort are cowards. Anyway, he’s a liar.”

I looked at him. “He is?”

“There’s no colony in Algiers. I heard they died out way back, twenty years ago or more.”

“But he must have run from somewhere?”

“Yeah, but not Algiers. He didn’t want to tell us where he came from.”

“Why? What’s he hiding?”

“We’ll find out in time, Pierre, believe me.”

For the next hour he concentrated on driving, as we wound down the crumbling highway and left the hills behind us. As darkness fell, Danny braked and the truck came to a halt. After the drone of the engine, the silence was resounding.

We left the cab and moved to the lounge.

Last night Danny had allocated Skull a tiny berth at the rear of the truck, and served him his meals there. This cheered me – I wasn’t alone in not wanting mealtimes spoilt by Skull’s presence.

“Meat’s on the menu tonight,” Edvard said. He carried a steaming pot and set it down before us.

He ladled broth into our bowls and the smell sent my head reeling. For a second, I almost welcomed the arrival of the mysterious stranger.

“You okay, Kat?” I asked.

She smiled at me. I was encouraged by the way she was spooning the broth; she seemed to be enjoying the meal. I glanced at Edvard. He was chewing with his eyes closed, as if savouring not only the meat but the memories of past times it conjured.

After the meal, for the first time in months, my belly felt full.

Later I excused myself, wanting to be alone with my thoughts. I left the truck, dug myself a little hollow of cool sand, and settled down.

The night was silent, the sky unusually still. No storms ripped the heavens, for once. The air was heavy and hot, oppressive. I controlled my breathing, enjoying the cooling sand, and considered the journey south.

A sound made me jump. I thought it was Edvard, come to join me. But the skeletal figure that came hobbling out on crutches, fashioned from lengths of metal cannibalised from the wreck of the glider, was the pilot.

He eased himself down onto the sand beside me and nodded. “It’s cooler out here.” The little light spilling from the truck made his face seem even more skull-like. I took shallow breaths, not wanting to inhale his acid stink.

“That’s why I’m here,” I said.

A pause. Then, “Maybe you’ll listen to sense, Pierre. I’ve tried the others. They’re too old, set in their ways.”

“They’re my friends,” I said, and then as if to make it clearer, “my family. We’re in this together.”

I looked at him. His sly eyes appeared calculating. “Listen to me, Pierre. You’re no fool. If we head south, to the Med...”

“Yes?”

A pause. He licked his lips. “There’s dangers down there, things you haven’t encountered in Europe.”

“You said. Feral bands–”

“Worse!”

“Worse than feral bands?”

“Much worse. Feral means animal. You can deal with animals, outwit ’em. These people... these people are no fools. They’re evil, and calculating.” I wondered, for a second, if he were describing himself. “You ever seen what human beings can do when they’re desperate?”

I thought back to the ruins of Paris, before the desert engulfed the city. I considered the people I’d lived with, and why I left. Yes, I almost told him, I’ve experienced desperate people, and survived. But I said nothing, reluctant to share with Skull what I’d never told anyone else, not even Danny or Kat or Edvard.

“Like Danny said,” I murmured, not looking at him, “we can look after ourselves.”

Skull spat viciously. “Fools, the lot of you!”

I considered what Danny had said last night. Into the following silence, I said, “What are you frightened of, Skull? What are you running away from?”

He looked at me, then grinned. “No, you’re no fool, are you?”

“Well?”

I didn’t expect him to tell me, so I was surprised when he said, “People so fucking evil, so purely bad, you cannot imagine, Pierre.”

And he left it at that, as if challenging me to enquire further.

~

I
was at the wheel of the truck the following day when we came to the escarpment overlooking what had once been the Mediterranean sea.

Danny said, “Would you look at that.”

Kat and Edvard squeezed into the cab.

The land before us fell away suddenly to form a vast, scooped-out crater bigger than the eye could encompass. The dried-up sea bottom was cracked and fissured, as steely grey as the pictures I’d seen of the lunar landscape. The horizon shimmered, corrugated with heat haze.

I glanced at Danny. He was staring, speechless. I realised that before him was the goal he’d set his heart on months back, when he first had the idea to journey south.

“We’ll drive on another four, five hours, then stop for the night,” he said. “Over dinner we’ll look at the map, plan the next leg of the journey.”

Edvard and Kat moved back to the lounge. I was pleased that Skull had not bothered to show himself.

I mopped the sweat from my face. It was sweltering in the cab: the thermometer read almost thirty-five Celsius. Next to that dial was the outside temperature: fifty-five, hot enough to bake a man in less than an hour.

Danny took the wheel and drove along the coast, parallel to the escarpment, looking for a shallow entry down into what had been the sea. Five kilometres further on we came to a section of the coast which shelved gradually, and Danny eased us over the edge, moving at a snail’s pace. Baked soil as fine as cement crumbled under the truck’s balloon tyres. We lurched and Danny eased back the throttle, slowing our descent.

At last the land flattened out and we accelerated, the headwind blowing the dust behind us. A great plain stretched ahead, rilled with expansion cracks and dotted with objects I couldn’t at first make out. As we drew nearer I saw that they were the rusted hulks and skeletons of ships, fixed at angles in the sea bottom. We passed into the shadow of one, a great liner red with rust, its panels holed but the sleek lines of its remaining superstructure telling of prouder times. I found it hard to imagine that so great a vessel could actually
float
on water: it seemed beyond the laws of physics.

Danny pointed. In the lee of the ship’s rearing hull I made out a pile of white spars, like bleached wood. We drew closer and I saw that they were bones. The domed orbs of skulls sat amid a scatter of ribcages and other bones.

I shook my head. “I don’t see...”

“My guess is that there was a colony on the ship, ages ago,” Danny said. “As they died, one by one, the survivors pitched the bodies over the side.”

“You think there’s anyone left?” I asked, knowing the answer even before Danny shook his head.

“This was probably thirty years ago, at a guess. Back when the drought was getting bad and nations collapsed. Tribes formed, the rule of law broke down. It was every man for himself. People gathered on ships, while the oceans still existed – away from the wars on dry land.”

I shook my head, thinking of the horrors that must have overtaken the shipboard colonies in their last, desperate days.

We drove on, heading south.

A couple of hours later, to our right, the sea-bed rose to form a series of pinnacles, five in all. They towered above the seared landscape for hundreds of metres, their needle peaks silhouetted against a sky as bright as aluminium.

Danny glanced at his map. “They were the Balearic Islands, part of old Spain.”

“People lived up there?” I asked, incredulous.

He smiled. “They were small areas of land, Pierre, surrounded by sea. Islands.”

I shook my head, struggling to envisage such a configuration of land and sea. On the summit of the nearest peak I made out the square shapes of dwellings, the tumbledown walls of others.

We left the stranded islands behind us.

Three hours later the sun went down to our right in a blaze of crimson. Ahead, indigo twilight formed over Africa, the sky untouched by magnetic storms.

Kat called from the lounge, “Food in ten minutes!”

Danny brought the truck to a halt and we moved back to the lounge. He unfolded one of his maps and indicated our position.

Kat served us plates of fried potatoes and greens – rationing the meat. She was carrying a plate across the lounge for our passenger when Skull emerged from his berth and limped to the table.

“Don’t mind if I join you folks tonight? I was getting lonesome back there.”

I returned to my meal without a word. Edvard indicated a chair and Skull dropped into it, wincing.

Danny stubbed a forefinger at the map.

“This is where we are now, and this is where we’re heading – a hundred kilometres north of what was the coast of Africa, off a place called Tangiers.”

Skull stopped chewing. He looked across at Danny, uneasy. “Let me see.” He leaned forward, peering.

He looked up. “I don’t like the sound of it.”

I took a swallow of water, aware of my heartbeat and the sauna heat of the room.

Danny nodded, considering. “And why not?”

“Like I said before, there’s feral bands down there. We’d best avoid them.”

“There specifically, Skull?” Danny asked. “How come you’re so certain?”

Skull chewed, not looking away from Danny’s stare. “I heard stories, rumours.”

Danny lay down his knife and fork in an odd gesture of civility that belied the anger on his face. “Bullshit. Tell us straight – what the hell do you know?”

Skull’s eyes darted from right to left, taking in Danny and Kat, Edvard and myself. He looked uneasy, a rat cornered.

Edvard said quietly, “You didn’t come from Algiers. So where did you come from?”

The silence stretched. Skull used his tongue to work free a strand of fibre from between his teeth. “Okay, okay. I was travelling with some people. Only they weren’t people. Animals more like, monsters. A dozen or so of them. They had a vehicle, a collection of solar arrays lashed together around a failing engine. Anyway, they were heading west, towards Tangiers.”

Danny nodded. “Why?”

Skull shrugged. “They didn’t say. They invited me to stay awhile. They needed an engineer to help out, they said. So I travelled with them a few days, a week.”

“Why did you leave them?” I asked.

“Because I reckoned that soon, once I’d helped out with the arrays, I would’ve outlived my usefulness and they’d kill me rather than have me using up food and water. They were that kind of people.”

He looked around at us, then bolted down the last of the food, stood with difficulty and hoiked himself from the lounge.

“So what do you think?” Danny said. “He telling the truth?”

Edvard voiced what I was thinking. “I wouldn’t trust him as far as I could spit. Which isn’t far, these days.”

“We’ve come across gangs before,” I said. “We just have to be careful, that’s all.”

Kat nodded. “I second that.”

“What I’d like to know,” Edvard said, “is what’s so important about Tangiers that this mob was heading for it?”

~

I
was in the cab with Edvard the following day when we came across the hovercraft.

It was late afternoon and we were roughly a hundred kilometres north of the trench, our destination. The sea bottom desert stretched ahead for as far as the eye could see, flat and featureless.

I was nodding off in the heat when Edvard slowed the truck. I sat up and looked across at him. He indicated the horizon with a silent nod.

I scanned. Far ahead, coruscating in the merciless afternoon glare, was the domed shape of a vehicle, entirely covered by an armature of solar arrays. At this distance it looked for all the world like a diamond-encrusted beetle.