Spares (34 page)

You were there only three quarters of the time. The rest you were somewhere else; fucked up into oblivion by the cocktail of The Gap and heavy Rapt. We called it being “Gone Away,” and it was the only way you could get out of The Gap. You came to recognize a look in the eyes of other people, the look that said they’d just come back from being Gone Away. You envied them those moments of peace, but at the same time you were frightened of what Going Away might mean.

We didn’t get much instruction. We got guns. Some
of the guys had been there a little longer, lieutenants and stuff, but that just meant they were even more fucked up than the rest of us. It was a war fought on the ground, behind trees and under bushes. There were gunships, but they were strange and experimental and shaped like fish, seldom used except for the brass to hide in. All we had was our basic intelligence, and maybe that should have been enough. An eight-man unit among themselves ought to have been able to figure out how to fight—or at least, how to hide effectively—but you’ve got to remember that we were out of our heads the whole fucking time.

Rapt’s effects are not just intense on a dose-by-dose basis: They are also cumulative. After a couple of weeks Rapt remaps your neural paths to the point where you don’t know where the
hell
you are—and we were on it for over two years. We’d be tramping through darkness, not knowing where we were or what to do next, and then suddenly we’d see this big clump of bushes and someone would say, “Okay, let’s go through that bush.”

“What bush?” someone else would ask, confused.

“That bush.”

“What fucking bush? We’re surrounded by the fuckers.”

“That
bush, man: the one you’re almost standing in.”

Relieved: “Oh yeah. That bush. Okay.”

“Wow. Look at it. That’s some bush.”

“It’s beautiful. Look at those leaves.”

“Great leaves.”

Then suddenly: “I don’t like it.”

“Like what?”

“The bush, man. It’s giving me The Fear.”

“It’s just a bush. It’s okay.”

“It’s not okay, man. It’s giving me the fucking Fear.”

“
Okay
. Forget the bush.”

“I can’t forget it. It’s right there in front, of me, man—”

“Not
that
bush. The
other
one.”

“Fuck—that’s even
worse.”

“Shit. You’re right.”

“What are we going to do?”

“We’ll go round it.”

And so we’d go around the bush, and get caught, and get the shit kicked out of us and half of us would die.

Getting around a bush in one piece isn’t so fucking hard. We should have been able to work that kind of thing out—but we couldn’t. Running like hell was a very big part of the tactics out there.

It was a war fought against demons, by men who had become demons themselves. Maybe that’s the biggest thing I took away from it. The fact that anyone, your comrade, your friend, your brother, can in the right circumstances become something you don’t want to believe exists. Once you’ve seen it’s possible, you never look at anyone the same again. And The Gap itself, what did we do to it? It can’t always have been that way. Or maybe it was, and it was just the fact we have the wrong kind of minds, applying consciousness to things that should have stayed buried.

This isn’t making any real sense, isn’t some polished account. I can’t do anything about that, because I can’t remember it with any more cohesion. I guess I could go back over what I’ve done and try to order it, but I won’t. It wouldn’t be true to the way it was. Cohesion, order, chronology; The Gap was the place where you learned those three words meant nothing at all. This was a place where one guy I knew was Gone Away for three days once: three entire days. We could tell he was Gone Away, and we put up with it. You generally could. It was part of every day, and you got used to it. But
three days
…

When the guy came back, he was different. Being Gone Away wasn’t like sleep, or unconsciousness. You were still awake, but you were somewhere else. Short stretches were okay—I don’t think it did too much harm. But three days—that changed him. This guy used to sometimes say things about it, try to talk it out. But he
couldn’t. Wherever he’d been was buried too deep. He sometimes talked like it was a whole other place, as if while his body had been with us, shivering in the trees or cutting the faces off villagers, his soul had been somewhere else, somewhere that was different but no better. I don’t know about that, but I instinctively recognized there was an element of truth in it. About a third of the men around me at any one time would be Gone Away, flicking on and off in ten- or twenty-minute stretches, and it was like marching with a bunch of fucking zombies. Jesus, I used to think, these guys are my friends, the people on my side, and it’s like a sponsored walk with the lobotomized dead.

Most people reacted to Rapt about the same, but some went really weird on it. There would be soldiers who regressed when they were Rapt, started running about like terrible children. Some of these guys regressed in a way that made you think what they were regressing to was the childhood of something that wasn’t entirely human. Or maybe it
was
human, but humanity of a different evolution. It was as if there had once been two tribes, identical in appearance, but subtly different at every emotional and psychological level. Maybe between the trees in The Gap there wandered the childhoods of Gap people, lost but still alive. Maybe they got into some of the men.

As soon as we saw that a guy was prone to react that way we tried to turn him into a drinker instead. It was just too disturbing to see them being like that. We couldn’t deal with it.

Problem was, all any of this did was hide it. Not all of it, just enough. It didn’t go away. All that fear is still inside us, and even now we’re slowly using it up. People try to hide it different ways, by being strong, being weak, being a cop or being a gangster. But everyone feels it. Everyone is still afraid.

When the first surge of Rapt planed out into lucidity Vinaldi and I stopped running, our chests suddenly filled
with liquid fire. I reeled off into the bushes and vomited uncontrollably, my body revolting against the exertion and trying to make it clear it wasn’t having any more of it. Bodies are great, and I wouldn’t go anywhere without mine, but sometimes they’re so disappointing. If we mistreated them as badly as we do our minds then everyone would be dead, and yet there they go, complaining all the time. Someone needs to get all our bodies, sit them down, and give them a good talking-to.

All I could think of as I hurled up my guts was a hope that I wasn’t losing any of the Rapt this way. I knew I was going to need it, and was already thinking of the remaining two packets. What I had was all we’d got, but it was already all I could do not to just shoot it up there and then.

Meanwhile Vinaldi slumped with his hands on his knees, sucking air in like he was in danger of imploding. I guess he did time in a health club or something; compared to me he was fucking Superman. I could feel my body looking on enviously, wishing I treated it that well. I hate fit people. They’re so undermining.

When we’d recovered sufficiently we looked around, slowly turning in a circle. All we could still see, for 360 degrees, was forest—except that the second time we went round, a stream had appeared. (That was normal; either there are more than 360 degrees in a circle in The Gap, or things just don’t work that way.) We realized then that our feet were wet, and thus we’d probably come across that very stream. A large group of leaves was standing on the other side, unable to come across. Though they didn’t have eyes—obviously, because they were just leaves—we could tell they were watching us. Also, that if we tried to go back that way they would stop us.

So we kept turning, and saw that what was behind us hadn’t been what we’d originally thought. It wasn’t simply more forest. In front of us, about half a mile away down a slight incline, there appeared to be a village.

“How did we get here?” Vinaldi asked.

“Fuck knows. Couldn’t you tell?”

“Are you kidding? I couldn’t tell who I
was
. I’d forgotten you existed.”

“I don’t want to go down there,” I said suddenly.

Vinaldi nodded. “Me, neither. But we’ve got to.”

“No, we don’t. We could go somewhere else. Maybe that’s not the place. Or maybe the clothes led us and it’s a trap.”

“Jack, it doesn’t matter if it is or not,” Vinaldi said. “I can’t stay out here much longer. I don’t have the Bright Eyes anymore, remember?”

It hit me then just how much courage he had. Your eyes were operated on the day before you were sidelined into The Gap. There was something about certain types of light in The Gap’s forest—though not the villages—that caused human eyes to burn out from the inside; so a chemical was laser-implanted in a thin layer over your retinas, and this seemed to prevent the light from damaging them. Back in the real world, this chemical caused a slight reflection in certain lighting conditions, hence the “Bright Eyes” nickname. Vinaldi had spent the last—Christ—
two hours
, I found by looking at my watch, in the forest without protection. He was either inordinately brave or an idiot.

“I’d forgotten,” I said.

Legs aching from the run, we tramped toward the village. For the time being, the light in the forest was both safe and almost attractive, as if someone had installed small yellow mood-lights behind every tenth tree. Like all settlements in The Gap, the village looked insignificant against the infinite spread of the forest, but also seemed to pre-date it. Even from this distance we could see the trunks which shot up through the thatched roofs of some of the houses, so thick that it could barely have been worth living in the remains of the shelter they provided. Nobody knows why things are like this, because nobody ever managed to talk to a local for long enough to find out. Before the first sentence was over one or the other of you would be dead. The problem
with the villagers was twofold; firstly, their implacable ferocity, and secondly the fact that they weren’t visible all the time. They were easier to see in the dark, but by then you were generally seconds from death. The children were more visible, and seemed to be less angry at us, but they were often used by the villagers to carry mines. For years after I was sideslipped out, at the end—or abandonment—of the war, I couldn’t see a child without being scared out of my wits. It was only when Angela arrived in my life that their ghosts were laid to rest, and it was only when she and Henna died that I understood how much they had protected me from.

“Are you okay?” Vinaldi asked, after a while.

“I guess so,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said.

There were about thirty dwellings, arranged in a rough circle around a central area, with two paths bisecting at approximate right angles. The huts were lit by orange light that slipped and flowed around them, like a golden tide. Sometimes, I knew from experience, this light would coalesce into the birds I’d seen with Nearly and Suej in New Richmond. These birds were brain-damaged and appalling but they always seemed happy, exploding into being like liquid flames. After a chaotic few moments they’d disappear piecemeal, like smoke drifting into a dark sky. The birds only lived in the villages, which were otherwise deserted. None of the villagers lived in the villages, and it seemed that they never had.

“So,” I asked, when we were standing a few yards from the edge of the settlement. “What’s the plan?”

“Shit, I don’t know. Go in there and see if we can find anything, I guess.”

Not a very detailed plan of attack. I pinched the bridge of my nose, trying to hold the second Rapt wave off and keep my head in one piece. “Together?”

“Yes of fucking course together,” he snapped. “Or do you want to go see if you can find some small dark
room at the top of some stairs and wander in there by yourself?”

“You don’t think tactically it would make more sense to split up?”

“No, I fucking don’t.”

So we went together, shotguns held at port arms, keeping watch on opposite sides of the path. As we entered the village we stared hard at the huts we passed, searching for any sign of movement within. The huts looked polished and perfect, as always, as if fresh-minted from imaginary materials. You could see the fine detail of each piece of straw in the thatch, the little bumps in the white mud of the exterior walls.

We decided against doing a search of every hut-partly to speed our first pass through the village, mainly because we were frightened. Doing a recce with The Fear is like wandering blindfolded into a room you know is papered with razor blades.

By the time we reached the center, our faces were dripping with perspiration and my finger was moist against the trigger of the shotgun. We were wired very tight, our time off from the Rapt running out. We paused there, listening carefully. There was nothing to hear, and nothing to see except tree trunks and huts.

“Vinaldi,” I said, “we’ve got to hurry. The Rapt’s going to come on again soon.”

He considered this, nodded, and then pointed up the path. “I’ll go through to the other side. You start the circles. If you see anything, shout.”