The Bridge (6 page)

Mid-afternoon, Jono and Dash got back. They’d scored three sticks of day-old bread, a jar of meat paste, some tins of corn, and four bottles of water. Also a lot of stories about hostiles rampaging across St Clare and Sentinel. ‘Word is,’ Dash said, ‘they’ve taken the riverside between Torrens Hill and Moldam North. Someone said they’ve got Watch Hill and the Central Comms building, but that can’t be right. I’d say they’ve taken some pockets here and there along the riverbank and that’s it. They must know they can’t win. They’ll be back over the bridges by morning with the gates locked behind them. Count on it.’

Around sundown, the minister of St John’s, who was looking very hassled and beleaguered by now, took Jono and me across the square with some sheeting and we hauled Lev back into the churchyard. The minister said that when the Services arrived Lev would be dealt with properly, and in the meantime did we want to say a few prayers for the old guy?

We said okay, and we all went back into the crypt and lit a couple of candles on the small altar there and sat on the benches. Jono said some words, and then Fyffe said some better ones, tears streaming down her face.
Because, of course, Lev wasn’t the only dead person we were thinking of. Dash nudged me to say something, but I shook my head. The lump was too big in my throat and, anyway, I couldn’t see the plan or the reason behind this one at all. Lev – well, maybe Lev’s time had come, I don’t know. But for the rest … as far as I could tell it was a futile, stupid, meaningless waste. And that’s all it was.

The minister said we could sleep down there if we wanted though it wasn’t exactly the Ritz, and we said that’s okay, we were too tired to notice. When the lights went off for black-out we left the candles burning. I sat with Sol and played a memory game with him until he went to sleep. Then Dash said to me, ‘Where did you go? This morning. You scared me, disappearing like that.’

‘I wanted to look around, see what was happening.’

‘Why not come with us?’

‘Tell you later.’

She was silent then, which was a bad sign, but the truth is, I didn’t want to tell her about my encounter with her ISIS buddies. I lay down and watched the candlelight flicker across the ceiling and thought about Lou and Bella, and Dr Williams. I heard Fyffe crying, muffled against Jono’s shoulder, and I guess I cried too.

I thought about the people who’d done this. The Breken on Southside – also known as Soulside and Suicide on account of what happened to city folk who strayed over
there. Southsiders, Shantysiders, Shadowsiders – they had lots of names, most of them unrepeatable.

What did we know about them? They were barbaric, we knew that – they kidnapped children for spare parts and fed aid workers to the river. They’d started coming here from Oversea, and from out of the Dry, four, maybe five, generations ago, and by all accounts they were still coming. They were running from their own wars, and from lands made unliveable by the breaching of the mega-dams in the South, the power-station meltdowns in the East, and everywhere, the desert, the spreading Dry. They wanted our land and our water and they’d take whatever else they could. In the early days they’d overrun the whole south side of the city and only ISIS and our troops prevented them from teeming over the bridges and taking the north as well. The vids from the unmanned drones that ISIS put in the air showed us two cities now: ours – the real city – and its shadow, a crowded, dark, derelict place where savage twins of each one of us watched over the river and made plans to replace us.

Over the years, quiet times had come, both sides drawing breath, but then the fighting would surge again as our troops went over to try to establish some order, or the Breken regrouped for an assault on one of the bridges.

But they’d never taken a bridge. They’d never crossed the river in numbers.

Until now.

Help did arrive, but it took three days
, and consisted of a single harassed-looking officer from Information Services on foot with a message. The message was this: Things will soon be under control. Could people please go home, or if they had friends in the north, now might be a good time to visit. Thank you and God bless you all. And now, he had a list of rendezvous centers to visit, so please could he just get on with it?

In the uproar that followed, a woman at the back called out what everyone was thinking: Wasn’t the Breken strategy to rip out the center – Watch Hill and the core of the major services – scare the population north, and walk on in? After all, comms were down, and we hadn’t seen anyone from the army, police or emergency services for three days. So wasn’t this message an admission of defeat?

The yelling went on for some time after that, but
the officer was ready for it: Did this woman not understand that the Breken were a rabble with no chance against our own superb fighting machine? Did she not have confidence in the General? And would she like to give her name, because a reply from the General could certainly be arranged.

That shut everyone up. The man gathered up his case, slapped on his Services cap and stalked out. Then people went crazy. Dash led us back to the crypt where we held a council of war. We decided to find our own way north to deliver Sol and Fyffe home to Ettyn Hills, then Dash and Jono were coming back to be what help they could. They were still ISIS cadets, after all, and proud of it. And me? First things first, I said. Let’s get out of the city.

But how were we gonna do that? The trains weren’t running. Dash could drive and so could Jono but what were the chances of just happening on a car? Slim to nonexistent, or so we thought. But then we came to Fettlers Lane and the beetle. And that seemed to convince Fyffe and Jono that God was On Our Side. Which, if true, would’ve been helpful four days before, but there didn’t seem much point in saying so.

So that’s how we came to be driving up Fettlers Lane in a broken down taxi-cab looking for a road north.

What we found was a roadblock. A barricade of old furniture had been thrown across Drummond St, and five
people stood in front of it. Three men, two women. They had assault rifles slung over their shoulders, and faded red bandanas over their faces. Breken.

Dash gripped the wheel. ‘O God … ogod, ogod, ogod … I could run them down. I will – will I?
WILL I?
‘ But the beetle had zero acceleration and the rest of us were yelling, ‘They’ve got guns!’ She braked.

A boy – dark like me, and maybe my age – came towards us and peered at Dash. Lucky for us, we could’ve been theirs. We looked like looters. We were ragged and filthy. I could pass for a southerner and the others were fair enough for easterners. The boy shouted over his shoulder at his band, and then let loose at us with a stream of Breken. Beside me, Dash stared straight ahead, her eyes on the hostiles and maybe her thoughts on how easily she could gun the engine and do them damage. Sol leaned over my shoulder to get a better look. Fyffe pulled him back.

I looked at Sol and put a finger on my lips. Then I leaned out the empty doorway on my side and stood up so the Breken boy would have to look at me over the top of the cab and not at the others inside. He spoke again, another stream of Breken. I sent up a silent prayer to my mother and to Lou and to whoever else might listen, and answered him, in Breken. He didn’t even blink, just carried on. ‘What’re you doing here?’

‘Looking round,’ I said. ‘Why not?’

‘Because you’re not front line, are you? Just scavengers, yeah? What’s your bridge?’

I tried, ‘St Clare,’ the closest one to school, and he seemed to buy it.

‘Found anything?’

‘Just this,’ I slapped the beetle’s roof, amazed and relieved that this was working.

He shook his head. ‘You should never have been let through. You better get back by dark or we might mistake you for them.’

Then, miraculously, he waved us away. Dash reversed down the street at speed, and took the first corner she could find. She pulled up outside a smashed-up cinema with red curtains waving through broken glass doors. Somewhere nearby a kid was wailing, or maybe it was a cat, but the street was deserted.

Dash leaned on the steering wheel. Nobody spoke. Then she hit the wheel with the palms of her hands and looked daggers at me. ‘How? How did you do that?’

Sol started to whimper. Fyffe hushed him and said, ‘Macey taught you, I guess?’

‘Was it Macey?’ said Dash.

‘Course it was,’ I said. ‘Who d’you think?’

‘Why did he?’

‘Why? He’s from over the river. It’s his language. So what?’

Jono chimed in helpfully from the back seat. ‘So,
everything. Jeez. For all we know you’re one of them. A plant. A sleeper!’

‘Shut up, Jono,’ said Dash.

‘Hey!’ he said. ‘I’m not hanging round with any Breken-speaking –’

‘Stop!’ said Fyffe.

‘Any Breken-speaking what?’ I said.

‘No,
stop
!’ Fyffe took Jono’s hand. ‘We’re in trouble here – and maybe Nik is the answer to our prayers. I mean, we prayed to be looked after, didn’t we, and here’s Nik, able to get us through.’

‘You never told me,’ said Dash, still boring holes with her eyeballs.

‘What’s to tell? I speak some Breken because Mace does, and he practically brought me up. You maybe noticed that it’s not the most popular language in school, so I guess I didn’t speak it aloud. All right?’

No. Not all right.

‘What else haven’t you told me?’

‘Dash …’

‘What else?’

‘Nothing! Dammit!’

‘What about ISIS?’ said Jono. ‘They must know. That must be why –’

‘Listen,’ I said to Dash. ‘We’re taking Sol and Fyffe home, remember? Can we try and do that? Because, I’m just guessing here, but it might not be as easy as we thought.’

She looked straight ahead out the windscreen and didn’t speak. I rubbed my hands over my face and stared out the window too. Rubbish gusted across the wreckage of shopfronts and the sky was lowering to gray; maybe it would rain soon.

‘Nik?’ Sol.

‘Yeah, buddy?’

‘Can we go home now?’

‘Yep. Just as soon as we sort something out.’

‘Okay … When?’

I looked at Dash.

‘You should have told me,’ she said. She gunned the engine and we took off.

We met more roadblocks through the afternoon. And the same story at every one: men, sometimes women, with guns and questions.

‘What do they say?’ asked Dash after we’d been waved away by another one.

‘Nothing much. They ask what we’re doing.’

‘And what do you say back?’

‘I tell them we’re scavenging, exploring, that kind of thing.’

‘I don’t get it. They always wave us east, never north. I thought they wanted to scare us north and leave the city to them.’

Jono stirred. ‘Hey, yeah. That’s right. We’ve been
going east all this time. Can’t you ask your
brethren
to let us through?’

In a fight with Jono, I’d be the one surfacing with fewer teeth than I took in and fewer bones in working order, but there’s times, I swear, there’s times it’d be worth it, just to see how far I could get. I bit my tongue and shut up.

But Dash pulled the beetle chugging to the gutter. ‘It’s true, Nik. We’re in Moldam North already. We’re gonna end up at Port at this rate.’

‘There must be a way through,’ said Jono. ‘They can’t be holding the whole bank – that’d mean they had all the bridges. No way could they have all the bridges. They’d need firepower and organization way beyond what they’ve got.’

‘We don’t know what they’ve got,’ I said.

‘You might,’ said Jono.

‘Jono,’ said Dash. ‘Leave it!’

I said, ‘If they’re so disorganized, how in the hell are their roadblocks so well armed? And where the hell is our freakin’ army?’

‘Go and ask them,’ said Dash.

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Sure.’

‘I’m not kidding. We need to go north and we’re not going north. I don’t know how much longer this fuel cell will hold up. You can talk to them – you could be one of them. Go, ask.’

‘I’m not one of them!’

‘Okay, okay, but you could be. If the cell gives out while we’re still here, we’re stuck. We could be there by tomorrow night if we can just get through. Ask them how far they’ve got, that’s all.’

‘Got my vote,’ said Jono.

Fyffe stopped praying in that whispering way of hers and said, ‘We’ll make it. I know we will.’

Silence from everyone. I listened to my heart hammering.

Dash said, ‘I’ll keep the engine running – if they sense you’re a city kid just take off back here and we’ll run for it.’

‘Dash, if they sense I’m a city kid, they’ll shoot me.’

Jono said, ‘Scared, are we?’

‘Jono –’ said Dash.

I got out of the car and looked back at their faces – wide eyed and pale under the dirt. I must’ve looked as bad. ‘Yeah,’ I said to Jono. ‘I think we are.’ I looked at Sol. ‘Back soon.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘Don’t go.’

I went to look for a roadblock.

I headed back to the corner
we’d just come around and stopped in the doorway of a tiny shop that a week ago had been a friendly little lunch bar. A whitewash scrawl on its broken window announced cheese rolls and meat pasties, which, in different circumstances, might have depressed me – we hadn’t eaten anything for a whole day. A street sign on the wall said Moldam Road. Behind me, the road ran down to the river through terraced houses hung with signs about rooms to rent, money to lend, old gear to buy and sell. A couch, a table and chairs, and a flatscreen sat on the pavement outside one of them, and I wondered whether that was looters busy looting, or some brave soul thinking, why should business stop for war? In the distance Moldam Bridge, the Mol, arched against the afternoon sky.

Ahead of me the road climbed a hill through more
of the same. About twenty houses up was the roadblock we’d just been turned back from – four people were sitting on the pavement smoking. They were Breken, and they had guns.

Taking armed hostiles by surprise seemed like a bad idea so I walked into the middle of the road. Of course, walking up a hill with hostiles training guns on you isn’t such a great idea either. I made myself put one foot in front of the other while my brain was spinning in panic about how was I going to ask anything without them thinking there was something odd about this scruffy kid – like, why does he look so terrified and why is his Breken so bad?