Terminal World (17 page)

‘I feel like shit.’

‘You may not believe it, but that’s probably a good sign. Can you sit up?’

Meroka did as he suggested, letting out only a single groan of discomfort. ‘Something hurts in my chest.’

‘You might have done some damage when you were convulsing - fractured a rib, perhaps, or torn a muscle. I didn’t get to you fast enough.’

‘Guess you had problems of your own.’ She pinched her fingers into the corners of her eyes, digging out grit. ‘You did good, Cutter. Made the right judgement.’

‘I hope so. In daylight, I’ll give you a proper examination, see if I can work out what you’ve done. In the meantime, it’s best if we stay here and monitor our progress. If I’ve overshot, I’ll need to administer a corrective dose.’ He tapped at the row of watches on his still-exposed wrist. ‘We’ll know soon enough.’

Meroka got to her feet. ‘That’s not going to work.’

‘We weren’t planning on going anywhere until your friends arrive to take me. I don’t see that anything has changed, barring the zone shift. Are you worried that they won’t be able to get here now?’

‘They’ve got drugs. Maybe not as good as your city stuff, but it won’t stop ’em getting through.’

‘What, then?’

‘You say we’ve shifted up?’

‘Most likely, yes. If we hadn’t, you and I would probably be starting to feel even worse now.’

‘How far up?’

‘I don’t know - I couldn’t make that kind of measurement, not in the time I had. That’s why I may have overshot. Or undershot, for that matter. But the severity of the symptoms ... that would suggest to me that this isn’t a small shift.’

‘Not the same as just going from Neon Heights to Circuit City, then?’

‘More severe than that, I suspect.’

‘Severe enough that vorgs might be able to survive here, when they couldn’t before?’

‘I can’t say. I haven’t had a wealth of experience with vorgs.’ He paused, the remark hanging in the air like a neon-lit challenge. ‘Should we be moving on?’

‘Need to look at the horses.’

Quillon placed a restraining hand on his patient. ‘You need to stay where you are, until we know I got that dosage right.’

Meroka brushed him aside and stood up, more steadily than he would have imagined possible. He watched her stalk off in the direction of the fallen animals, taking the occasional lurch or stumble, but somehow managing not to fall down. Either she had gained a sudden, medically unlikely tolerance for the zone transition, or she was as tough as saddle leather. Quillon couldn’t draw any measure of superiority from the fact that he felt clear-headed and in full control of his faculties. Tolerance was a genetic gift, not something you acquired through diligence and determination.

She stopped at the fallen horses, knelt down and touched the neck of Quillon’s animal, under the hard, round swell of its cheek. She waited silently and then moved to the other one.

‘Both dead.’

‘I’m sorry. I can’t say I’m surprised, though.’

Meroka stood up. ‘None of that medicine of yours would’ve made a difference?’

‘Human-specific antizonals don’t even work on monkeys, Meroka. Do you think you can make it back on foot?’

‘Who said anything about going back?’

‘That was the arrangement. You hand me over to these people who are supposed to show up. You return to Spearpoint.’

‘Things’re different now.’ She left the horses and started up the slope towards the higher ground, talking back to Quillon all the while. ‘Can’t stay here, not now. Not if the vorgs are on their way.’

‘What about the people? They’ll be expecting to find us here now.’

‘They’ll figure we had to shift things around. If they’re coming from that way,’ she gesticulated in the vague direction of the main path, ‘then they’re going to be in one motherfucking hurry to get away from the old boundary. There are other routes they can take, avoiding this place.’

‘Then we’ll never meet them.’

‘Didn’t say that. Just that we gotta be flexible now. There’s another meeting point, ten, twelve leagues further on. Done some business there already. That’s where they’ll head, ’less the zone shifts again.’

‘And if they’re not there?’

‘Then we need to find some new friends, someone else who can give you a ride to Fortune’s Landing.’ Meroka paused - he’d had the sense that she was going to say something else. ‘Hey, Cutter. Maybe you ought to see this.’

‘See what?’

‘Just get up here.’

He followed the rise to where Meroka was standing, exactly where he had stood earlier that night, looking back at Spearpoint. It was still there, still illuminated against the purple- and orange-streaked dawn sky, a light-studded dagger pushed up through the skin of the world, twinkling in the cold distance, too near to make him feel as if they had travelled any significant distance, too far away to offer the promise of sanctuary.

‘At least the shift doesn’t seem to have affected it,’ Quillon said.

‘Keep watching.’

He did, and then he saw what she meant. Because even in the few seconds that had passed since his arrival at her side, he had seen a patch of illumination go out, a swathe of lights - a whole precinct or district - turn suddenly dark. The lights did not return; there was a ribbon of blackness cutting across Spearpoint that had previously been illuminated. And as he kept watching, another ribbon appeared below that one - the lights flickering on and off this time, as if some ancient, overstrained generator had just cut out and then restarted, before losing the battle against the darkness. It didn’t end there, either. In seemingly disconnected parts of Spearpoint, squares and rectangles of darkness appeared - not just in Neon Heights but in the upper levels, taking out parts of Circuit City and even the angel spaces. The squares and rectangles pushed out fingers and filaments of blackness, joining disconnected areas, squeezing the visible light into narrow, harried motes and margins, as if the visible lights were people being herded into stifling pens by armies of dark enforcers. The motes and margins dwindled to nothing, and the pace of the shutdown appeared to be quickening, across all of Spearpoint. No part of the city was spared, irrespective of the prevalent technology. Only those low-lying gas- and fire-lit quarters did not seem to be strongly affected, but their contribution to Spearpoint’s brilliance was so limited and feeble that it was as if the darkness had already taken them. As the brighter lights died, electric, neon and plasma-banks guttering out, so the faint, ruddy glow of the lanterns and fires of Steamville and Horsetown shone unchallenged for the first time, a sombre orange-tinged radiance that only reached a small distance up Spearpoint’s rising flanks. The rest of the vast structure, save for a few motes and margins that had not yet been entirely eclipsed, was pitifully dark.

Then he saw the angels. They had been in flight before, circling the high elevations, tiny moving dots reflecting pastel light from their glowing wings. Now they were falling, tumbling down on the buffeting thermals, wings flickering and fading into darkness.

‘Looks like you got out at the right time,’ Meroka said.

For a moment he couldn’t answer her, stunned into silence by the callous offhandedness of her remark. In Quillon’s lifetime there had been squalls and shifts that had occasionally interfered with part of the city, but nothing remotely on the scale of the blackout he was now witnessing. This was a storm to rival anything that had happened in recent generations, perhaps even centuries. Nor was it some vicious but temporary spasm, the Mire lashing out with petulant fury before returning to normality. The lights would have begun to come on again by now if that were the case, but the darkness only grew more sullen with each minute that passed. A few spots of illumination remained, dotted here and there at different altitudes, but they looked likely to be choked out and swallowed at any moment.

‘You think I care about myself now?’ he asked. He stilled his tongue, waiting for her to say something, something he could spit back in her face. ‘That’s a city, Meroka. Thirty million people. Right now most of them are either going to be dealing with the onset of crippling zone sickness - what we just went through, only without drugs - or they’re coming to the realisation that they’ve just lost every life-support system they’ve ever known. Or both.’ He paused. ‘Air. Water. Medicine. It’s all over, until the zones snap back.
If
they snap back.’ He spoke with a fierce resolution, barely recognising his own voice. ‘They’re either hurting or they’re going to hurt, really badly. All of them, except for the very few that anyone’s going to be able to help. The Boundary Commission was right: something big was coming. But they couldn’t have imagined anything on this scale. This is the end of everything.’

‘They’ll fix things, Cutter. The lights’ll come back on.’

‘Meroka, listen to me. I spoke to Fray about this. The authorities knew something awful was going to happen. They were waiting, getting ready for it to hit. Not some local reorganisation of boundary lines, but something big, something catastrophic. That’s why there was a drug shortage. They’ve been stockpiling antizonals, knowing this was coming at us.’

‘So it’ll be all right. They’re in control.’

‘Look,’ he said, forcing her to stare back at the darkening spire. ‘It’s getting worse. There are fewer lights than even a minute ago. The parts that held out until now are failing. Does it look to you as if there’s anyone in control? Does it look to you as if that’s a city about to pick itself up and carry on?’

‘It’s only been a few minutes.’

She was right and he knew it - it was too soon to make rash assumptions - but in his heart he felt an icy conviction that things were not going to improve quickly.

‘Even if they stockpiled drugs, there won’t be enough to go around. They’ll be lucky if they can get enough medicine to the people supposed to be in charge, let alone to the citizens.’

‘It’s not our problem right now,’ Meroka said. ‘Doesn’t mean I don’t care, all right? Doesn’t mean I haven’t got a heart. But the zone change has happened here as well, only we don’t have a city around us to hide in.’

‘We’ve got the drugs,’ Quillon said.

She inhaled deeply. ‘Ain’t nothing we can do for the city now. Take us two, three days to get back without the horses anyway, and what use are we going to be then? That dinky little bag of medicines won’t stretch far, will it?’

‘If I could do something, I would.’ But Quillon knew he would need to tap deeply into his supply of antizonals just to keep the two of them alive from now on.

‘We keep moving,’ Meroka said. ‘Just like I was telling you. Find the other meeting place, and hope someone shows up. What we don’t do is spend any longer here. Place is already starting to creep me out. I can smell those fucking vorgs.’

‘We just leave the horses?’

‘What did you have in mind?’

‘I don’t know. Bury them or something.’ He shrugged helplessly. ‘So it’s not so obvious we were here.’

Meroka seemed to give the idea at least a moment’s consideration before answering. ‘Done much horse burying?’

‘What do you think?’

‘Take you a day with a little shovel like that, open a grave big enough, assuming the ground doesn’t turn to rock as soon as you get under the topsoil. Then you’ve still got the other horse to get rid of. Two days, and that’s assuming you’ve got the strength to move a ton of dead meat when you’re done shovelling.’

‘So we just leave? Just leave and start walking?’

‘Couldn’t put it simpler if I tried.’

‘This is easy for you, isn’t it? Change plans, change gear, keep moving. It’s what you do. But I’m not you, Meroka. I’m frightened and I’m not sure you really know what you’re doing.’

She looked around theatrically. ‘You see anyone else around offering you advice?’

‘No.’

‘Then it doesn’t look like you’ve got a fuck of a lot of choice, does it?’

Meroka went back down to the camp and began to sort through their belongings, throwing aside what they could not carry on foot. Quillon lingered for a while before walking down the slope to join her. Behind him, Spearpoint’s darkness had only intensified, even as the sky paled towards daylight and the steel-cold promise of a new day.

They walked into dawn and then sunrise, following the wide, wheel-rutted path that the Skullboys had already traversed, Meroka never once looking back, as if she had seen all that she needed to.

Quillon envied her that pragmatic acceptance - taking it to be that, rather than some fundamental lack of curiosity - but he could not stop turning around to view Spearpoint, always with the hope that something might have changed, that there might be a glimmer of light where before there had been darkness. But as the day brightened, it became increasingly difficult to tell in any case. Spearpoint was no longer a black sliver against night skies, but a distant blue-grey mass, a mountain of impossible steepness, its intrinsic blackness muted by leagues of intervening atmosphere, making it virtually impossible to tell whether there were lights burning or not. Certainly he saw no evidence of movement, no trains or flying things, but that didn’t mean that there wasn’t some kind of civil recovery in progress. The complex, energy-hungry infrastructure of transit systems would be the last thing to return, in any district.

Across the land, the semaphore towers stood deathly still.

Meroka’s pace was unforgiving, but he still insisted that they stop every couple of hours, either to re-administer the antizonals or to perform enough tests to satisfy himself that he had estimated the dose well. He had been monitoring his watches carefully. While they were no longer keeping synchronous time, the cumulative differences were no more than he would have expected if the zone had remained fixed after the convulsive change of the previous night. They would need to keep taking the drugs, but at least the situation did not seem to be worsening. Based on the dosages he was giving out now, there was sufficient vector-specific medicine in the box to last the two of them somewhere between a week and ten days. When that was exhausted, there were other drugs, less effective, less finely tuned, but which would still keep them alive for a few days more. But not weeks, and definitely not months. The medicines had been calculated to serve him under entirely more benign conditions, where it would only have been necessary to administer a tiny fraction of the daily dosage he was now measuring out.