Sondranos: The Narrative of Leon Bishop (5 page)

“
And what
makes you think Davion remembers your father?”

“
I don’t,”
she said. “At least, I’m starting to think that.
I just want proof before I go all the way out
there. If he isn’t there, I’ll need a damn good reason to get
out.”

“
Why is
that?”

“
Have you
ever met the daughter of an alcoholic? Afraid to drink because she
might like it too much? Religion’s the same way,” she looked at me
with cold, calculated eyes. This was a woman who would understand
why I’d decided to run. Another rumble shook the cellar. More dust
cascaded and danced down the beams of light. I looked back at
Melanie, who’d closed her eyes. She shut them against memory as
well as the dust.

“
We all have
impressions of people. What matters is how we interpret them when
the details change,” I said. It was all I could think to add as I
felt like I’d just stepped into a situation I never belonged
in.

“
Well,”
Melanie’s face soured, and her expression shifted to one of
disgust. “My impression of Davion is that he’s a sod. When I came
this morning, I told myself ‘I’m not letting him brush me away this
time’.”

“
I think that
was wise of you,” I said.

Melanie opened her mouth and
looked at me, cock eyed. The professor part of me had been
speaking. Patronizing, belittling. Or maybe this was what Melanie
heard when Davion pushed her aside for other matters. Either way,
she shook her head and finished the rest of her wine. She closed
her mouth and I heard grit crunching between her teeth. She then
handed me her bowl, glowering. I took it semi-apologetically and
walked back to the cask.

“
I’m fully
aware of what’s going on,” Melanie mumbled.

I still didn’t believe her.
There was distance in her eyes – as far away as my students’ on the
last day of class. She stopped talking long enough to make my heart
drop. She cocked her head to the side and brushed a couple loose
strands of her blonde hair behind her ear.

“
You hear
that?”

I listened. I couldn’t hear
anything outside, but the music still played – something by the
Devotions. “What do you hear?”

She pointed upwards and I
followed her finger. I didn’t see anything she would have been
pointing at. Instead, I heard the radio click off and the song
started over again. It got a few more notes into the tune before
the song’s skipping interrupted the melody. The radio whined, and
then the tune was gone. In its place was a voice – one that was
very familiar.

“
All units:
we require medical attention,” said the co-pilot who’d told me
about the Abbey and the shop. His voice was unmistakable. It was
soft, but it bounced off the cellar speakers, using the silence as
an amplifier. “Coordinates embedded with this transmission. I don’t
know what’s going on but if anyone’s available please help. We’ve
hijacked a local signal, but I don’t even know if this will go
through. They’re coming. We need…”

The transmission cut off. Not
even static filled the cellar.

Chapter
Three:

Two
kinds

I had been
deep in
my thoughts of Daniel and home and
wondering if I should have been out in the Abbey yards looking for
survivors when the door to the cellar door clamoured open. Melanie
shrieked in response. She dropped her bowl, startled. Whatever
Blanc de Noirs was left jumped across the room and soaked into the
floor.

“
Davion?”
Melanie called out.

I looked up towards the stairs.
Two silhouetted figures descended. The first figure carried the
second by wrapping an arm around the other’s chest.

“
One of us
is,” an unfamiliar female voice called down.

The new woman carried Davion
with her as their shadows fragmented the light of the cellar. I
rushed to help while Melanie watched. The new woman was tall, with
more figure than Melanie. She held less weight and her head was
topped by dyed red hair. It had lost its sheen since the last time
she’d coloured it, so the tint mixed with brown roots beneath. A
large shirt, men’s size, hung over her shoulders and de-emphasized
her heavy-set chest. I was certain she wore it for that exact
purpose.

Let it be said that sexual
competition always exists in matters of life and death because
Melanie looked at her breasts first, cocked her head to the side,
and grimaced before speaking.

“
Is anyone
else out there?”

I retrieved Melanie’s bowl and
filled it and my own with more Blanc de Noirs.

I walked over to the woman and
offered my bowl, as if to trade.

“
Thanks,” she
huffed.

At the bottom of the steps,
Davion steadied on his feet and collapsed onto my side as he
shifted weight. I saved the wine. I escorted Davion to the same
barrel Melanie sat on. She begrudgingly let him take her place,
snatching her bowl from my hand, just as careful not to spill.
Melanie swirled the contents, sniffed, and sipped.

“
I’m Annalise
Davenport. And no, ma’am. Nobody else I could see. It was lucky I
caught your friend here before the darts came.”

“
Darts?”

“
Looked like
escape pods. Only they’d been retrofitted with some pretty powerful
guns. They were mowing down anything that moved,” she said. “Though
now that I think about it, they didn’t take aim at us once we left
the main road.”

“
Once your
friend was eliminated,” Davion said.

“
That was the
first time I’d ever met him.”

Melanie had a passivity that
only broke when she was angry. I could sense the opposite from
Annalise. In any other situation, my attention could have been
drawn to her first. In the classroom, I would have deemed her as a
risk for disruptions. Annalise sniffed the contents of the bowl,
glanced quickly in my direction and then gulped the contents. Where
matters of the end of the world occur, even the finest of wines
become nothing more than distractions.

Davion slumped forward, his
hands over his eyes and his head near his knees. He dry heaved
twice. All of us stayed silent as he spat out something white,
rubbed his eyes, and sat up.

“
We’re safe,”
Davion began. “They didn’t use anything that would poison the
atmosphere. If we can find somewhere safe, we can survive
this.”

“
You can’t
know that for sure,” Melanie interrupted.

Davion locked eyes on her.

“
Who are
they?” I asked.

“
I have my
thoughts. But I’d rather not say anything.”

It took ten minutes of Davion
answering the same questions with the same answers before Annalise
stepped forward. She’d taken it upon herself to refill her bowl it
and handed it to Davion. If we weren’t careful, we could drain
every cask in the cellar dry before the day was over. I’d already
begun feeling the slightest numbing of my senses, which usually
resulted in an overpowering urge to reminisce if I’d drunk too
much. Melanie might have also begun feeling the effects, but I
never could have proven it. She then retreated to a spot behind us.
Davion drank and a smile the colour of the Blanc de Noirs tinted
his lips paler than his face; he started to tell what had happened
after he’d ordered Melanie and I to the cellar.

“
I found
Annalise and told her where to go before realizing I had to give up
on any survivors,” Davion said. “If there were more of those darts,
or any people inclined to violence, then any efforts I made would
be fruitless. She helped me back here. It may have only been the
wind knocked out of me, but that was enough. I’ve been fasting for
three weeks now. My body was weaker than it should have
been.”

After a pause, Davion added as
an afterthought: “I am ashamed to say I was unable to save another,
but he brought death upon himself.”

Annalise eyed me from her spot
near the casks and took a deep breath.

Melanie glared at Davion. She
was thinking of her mother, and the state her father had left them
in. I didn’t need to work with shaping young minds to understand
that. “How does someone bring death upon themselves?”

Davion swivelled to face her.
He placed his hand on his side and groaned as he twisted his body.
Melanie knelt before him. He whispered towards her with the energy
of a priest, much like the same energy she’d displayed back in the
Abbey. Had I not known any better, I would have thought her to be
genuinely concerned.

Annalise ushered me to the
side, near the opened cask.

What followed was what Annalise
had seen. I could tell she wanted me to know everything, as her
tone questioned whether or not it would come back to haunt her
later. I’d learn later that she’d had issues with the right story
being told. One story can have different plots, meanings, and
events if the tellers are different enough. Annalise was careful,
afraid of what she said. Annalise didn’t seem to trust anyone, but
I trusted her, and maybe that was enough. Maybe that’s why I choose
now to portray her tale and not Davion’s.

Annalise
Davenport inspects her car
when the
implosion of Sondranos begins. The sudden pressure change in the
atmosphere had been enough to send the engine into fits before it
died completely, so now she hopes something is wrong with the car
and not the system propelling her away from the city. The
sound-proof interior of her Hybrid-Delorix muffled the rumblings of
explosions and detonations.

She kneels down and looks
beneath. The carriage looks fine: black cables and steel rods, no
leaks, and the bright green hydraulic system seems to be fully
pressurized. Unfortunately, there is no tell-tale blue lightning
bolt arcing from the battery to the Transit Strip. It should have a
constant stream of static electricity to a thin metallurgic line
beneath the pavement.

She gets up, wishing she’d left
for home a bit earlier.

Her probation officer wouldn’t
have minded her leaving their court mandated meeting a bit earlier,
he was always more considerate of her given the charges. Instead,
she’d shown him the same respect, and just took on the anxiety of
wanting to leave the city limits internally.

It’s the smell that grabs her
attention.

A gust from behind her of burnt
Aurichrome, on a bitter and alcoholic wind.

Annalise stands on the tip of
her toes to see into the distance, curious. Sondranos crater-life
isn’t flat, as most would expect. There are sudden jutting
hillsides and deep crevasses that make the crater floor feel like a
shaved down version of the Highlands. While she wasn’t too far from
the Terminal, she’d just crested down a hill that blocked her view
of the city by just a few inches on the horizon line.

A man in his truck a few lanes
ahead gets out of his car and stumbles.

He grimaces, and it makes him
look like an actor scrunching his face as exercise. There aren’t
any other cars nearby. Annalise is certain that if there were,
they’d all be doing the same as him. In the distance, Annalise
notices a meteorite plunging from low orbit, though she knows
that’s not what it is. The man next to his truck starts pushing
from the back end, grabbing the tow hitch with a large, meaty hand.
He’s clueless.

Annalise jogs up to him.
Running feels like it would make her panic, so she doesn’t do it.
Keep it calm, she whispers, hoping her body will listen. Keep it
collected.

“
What are you
doing? We have to get out of here,” she says.

“
Damned thing
can’t start,” he grunts as he pushes again.

“
Have you
looked in the other direction?” Annalise mumbles, and scans the
horizon. She refuses to look at the destruction. Already, plumes
have begun to form and shuttles started falling from the sky. This
grabs the man’s attention. He turns around. Annalise can see the
terror in his eyes. They agree on something in that moment – it’s
best left unspoken for now.

“
We have to
go,” she says, again. He shakes his head.

“
I don’t
understand,” he says. “This has to be a joke.”

Silence. Awkward, broken
silence that Annalise doesn’t want to hear.

“
I have a
small arsenal in this truck,” the man finally says. It makes
Annalise feel somewhat safer. But not by much. The man looks at
her, confused, and then corrects his expression. “Most of it’s
highly explosive.”

“
Maybe we
should head for the terminal – it’s close by, right?”

“
I’m not
leaving this truck.”

Annalise
groans, looks at the terminal, and takes a deep breath. Why
can’t
she
just
leave?

“
Damn it,”
she mumbles.

She turns to help the man with
the truck; her heart sinks in her chest. She pushes. The truck
doesn’t move and she feels the tendons in her legs straining and
crying out for her to stop. Dull pain reels down her legs and swims
in her mind. She’s sure she felt the blast, but does her best to
ignore it. She’s been getting better at ignoring certain parts of
Sondranos. Panic: she can control it. She’s done it once, she can
do it again.

They push harder. Annalise
hears the gears rattling under the strain of the truck’s
weight.

A flash of light and it feels
like someone’s throwing Annalise into the car – it gives her and
the man the false sense of strength they need to think they’re
doing well. She ignores the pressure on her back and wrists. The
connection bolt is gone, but the magnetic strip – often used when
the programming goes awry or someone at Transit hasn’t been paying
attention – still clings to the truck for dear life, creating a
kind of friction that turns the movement of the wheels into
momentum in dry glue. If the system were to restart, then it could
send a surge through the frame of the truck so strong that every
combustible item would detonate. Which is why ancient combustion
engines and weapons weren’t allowed in transports, she wants to
say. An explosion on the road would cause the strip beneath to
ignite, severing any chance of a five kilometre restart of the
system.