The Bridge (7 page)

They watched me climb. One of the men stood up, but the others just kept on smoking and talking. I was hoping one of them would come down towards me, so I wouldn’t have to deal with the pack, but they waited until I’d almost arrived, then the one on his feet motioned me over.

I was still wearing what I’d hauled on in the dark on Tuesday night: sweatshirt, jeans, and boots, all stinking of smoke, thick with dust, and ragged from the rubble of smashed-up buildings I’d crawled through looking for food. Dried blood too – Lou’s blood, and Dr Williams’. The Breken man, on the other hand, looked clean and deadly. He was a southerner – dark, and head to foot in dark clothes, with the assault rifle slung on his shoulder like it was part of him, a cherished part at that.
He was years older than the others and looked like he knew how to be in charge. He said, ‘Where are you going? And where’s the car you were in?’

I looked out east across Morstone Flats, mainly so I didn’t have to look at any of them, and nodded towards the sea. ‘They sent me to ask – how far is it safe to go? Can we get to the sea?’

He was watching me, narrow and suspicious. ‘How old are you?’

Not a direction the conversation was supposed to take. The others stopped talking to watch. ‘Seventeen.’

‘Why aren’t you in a squad?’

What the hell was a squad? Assorted answers sprang to mind: no squad would have me; my mother wouldn’t let me; I’m on leave from one. I settled for the shrug. Not surprisingly, he wasn’t happy with that.

‘What’s your bridge?’

Worse and worse. I said, ‘St Clare,’ hoping I’d get the same reaction as at the first roadblock.

But he raised an eyebrow. ‘St Clare? That so? Why do you sound like you’re fresh out of the Gilgate sewers then?’ The rest of them laughed.

That would be because Mace, who I talked this barbaric bloody language with, came from the Breken township at Gilgate, which I couldn’t exactly say, so I pulled out the shrug again. He said, ‘Which is it, then?

‘Gilgate,’ I said.

‘Thought so. You should be in a squad –’

A crack of rifle-fire sent everyone diving. My interrogator moved so fast I didn’t see how he did it – I had barely hit the ground and he was sending off a barrage of shots and yelling instructions to his band. Two of them ran towards the houses under his covering fire. The other one, a woman, lay on the street in a spreading pool of blood.

I took off.

Down the street, round the corner, fast, with the gunfire close and loud. I skidded to a halt by the beetle and swung inside, yelling at Dash to
get moving – get moving now!

It was empty.

The beetle was empty.

They weren’t in it, they weren’t under it. They were nowhere. I stared up the street. Maybe they’d heard the gunfire and run for cover. Maybe Jono had convinced them to leave me behind.

The firefight in Moldam Road stopped as suddenly as it had started. Up ahead I saw a figure in an army uniform running across the street. If that was the sniper, the Breken would be close on his heels. I watched for a while, but none of them appeared, so I headed after him, shaky with relief. We’d found the army at last.

They were down an alleyway
among overflowing bins of stinking rubbish – Dash, Fyffe and Jono, and two soldiers. One of the men swung his gun up at me and I skidded to a halt, but Fyffe called out, ‘No! No! He’s ours!’ She came running and grabbed my arms.

‘They took him! They took Sol!’

I was looking over her head at the others and saying, ‘Where’s Sol?’ when I realized what she’d said. It punched the breath out of me and everything went slow and distant: the soldier kicking through the rubbish; the other one pacing at the far end of the alleyway, gun at the ready; Dash sitting propped up against a wall, pale as sin and Jono next to her with his head on his knees.

I looked down at Fyffe’s dirty, tear-streaked face. She had a graze swelling purple and bloody on her forehead. She tightened her grip on my arm. ‘The Breken took Sol.
Jono hit one of them but they hit him with a gun and they stomped on Dash’s leg and knocked me down and they took … they took Sol and we have to go after them.’

‘Ah!’ The man in the rubbish waved a stick of wood. ‘Splint.’ He knelt beside Dash who was breathing real deep and shaky. The man took out a knife and started to cut through her jeans at the knee. ‘Hold on to something, this is going to hurt.’

‘Wait!’ said Dash. ‘I have to talk to Nik.’

Jono looked up, seriously groggy, groaned, and put his head back on his knees.

The other soldier, much older, came back down the alley. ‘Lucky for you we were around.’

I was struggling to get a grip. ‘You’re the army. We can – can’t we go after them? We can get reinforcements and go looking. Where are the others?’ I looked around, half expecting a combat team to leap into existence, weapons at the ready.

‘The others?’

‘The rest of the army,’ I said.

‘What army would that be, son? If you mean the great and glorious Army of the People, the Righteous Army, the Army of God and the General – or should that be the General and God? – well now, that army’s broken, isn’t it? Split clean open last summer. Half of ’em scarpered up north, or Oversea, even over the fucking river. And the other half – here’s the joke – the other half was
sent to bring ’em back. And that left a skeleton crew,’ he bowed, ‘to hold the line here. So what happens? The South gets wind of this, and takes its chance. And here we are. Screwed.’

‘But, no, but, the General …’ I stammered.

‘Dead. In the mutiny. Don’t go pinning your hopes on any General. This place is finished. By month’s end it’ll be running with hostiles.’

‘No! This makes no sense. What about ISIS?’

‘ISIS? They’re not gonna help the likes of us. No way. We’re on our own.’ He patted his gun. ‘We’re gonna have a Breken-hunt before we head north.’

‘Nik!’ Dash was staring at me hard. ‘You have to go after Sol.’

The older man shook his head. ‘You’d be a fool to do that. A dead one.’

I looked at Dash. ‘What about you?’

The guy waiting to splint her leg said, ‘We can look after them.’

Dash looked at me, bleary-eyed. ‘You have to –’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Course. I’ll … Jesus.’ I looked up at the older man. ‘They’ll have gone back over Mol Bridge, yeah?’

‘I’d say.’

Jono stirred again. ‘I’m coming.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘You’re not.’

The one with the splint shook his head. ‘You’re crazy.
If they catch you, d’you know what they do to people, our kind, over there?’

Not what I needed to hear. ‘Where will you take these three?’

He squinted up at me and shook his head again. ‘If you’re going over there, I’m not telling you.’

‘Why?’

‘Aren’t you listening? This place is going to be overrun. I don’t want hostiles dragging information out of you about where we are.’

Great. That boded well for my future. I crouched by Dash and kissed her. ‘I’ll find Sol. And then I’ll find you. I promise.’

I stood up. So did Fyffe. She was shaky on her feet, and tears shone on her cheeks. She wiped her face with her sleeve, then fished a dirty yellow scarf out of her bag and tied it round her head, tucking her hair into it and covering the bruise on her forehead. She pulled on Jono’s big denim jacket, which made her look tiny. ‘What are you doing?’ I asked.

‘Going with you.’

Over the general outcry I said, ‘No way are you coming with me. No. Way.’

‘He’s
my
brother! Don’t argue. Anyway, you don’t know what they look like, the ones that took him.’

‘So tell me.’

‘Not the same.’

‘Fyffe. Look at you – you won’t last two minutes over there.’

‘We don’t have time to argue. I’m not afraid.’ She grasped the little cross that hung round her neck. ‘If I can’t go with you, Nik, I’ll go alone.’ She looked at Dash and Jono and said, ‘We’ll be back, with Sol.’ She marched off down the alleyway. I followed, protesting.

We weren’t what you’d call well prepared for a foray into enemy territory. We had no weapons, no protective gear, no food, no water, and we were dead on our feet. Also, we had no idea where they’d gone, except Over The Bridge.

We sat on some steps in the doorway of one of the old terrace houses right on the riverbank and watched the foot traffic on Moldam Bridge. We told ourselves we were planning, waiting for nightfall, but we didn’t have much to plan. I guess we were taking a deep breath.

Away west the sun was setting, but that was in a different country where life went on like it was meant to. Sunlight gleamed gold on the arch of the Mol but under that, the night rose up from the river. Bands of armed Breken were crossing back and forth, and alongside them rag-tag crowds came and went, like crossing the bridge was the most normal thing in the world. Like killing Lou and Bella and Dr Williams was normal too. And kidnapping Sol. All in a day’s war.

I had tried and tried to convince Fyffe to go back.
Nothing doing. Now we sat there, argument exhausted, and watched the bridge. Fyffe took my hand. ‘Remember that rhyme?’

‘Yeah, I do.’

She chanted softly:

I thought of Fyffe and Lou and me, hunting each other through the sunlit upstairs hallways and rooms of the Hendry mansion. But the game always came to an end, usually with their smiling mother calling us downstairs to new-baked bread and honey, or biscuits and glasses of milk.

Fyffe peered at me. ‘Are you scared?’

‘Of course I’m scared. Aren’t you? I wish you’d go back. You don’t speak Breken – how are you going to get by?’

‘I speak enough.’

‘Since when?’

‘Since a long time back.’ She bent her head and studied her hand in mine, white against brown. ‘How do you think I talked to the servants? Besides, you do. You speak it well.’ She looked up at me. ‘You kept that quiet.’

‘Yeah, I did. Because, you know, I thought playing the “brown and Breken” card at school would be unfair. I mean, everyone wants to be mistaken for one of the barbarians at the gate, right?’

‘Ouch. I’m sorry. Why should it bug you? It saved our lives today. Just because Jono baits you doesn’t mean you have to bite.’

‘I wish you’d go back.’

‘I’m not going back. You’ll look far less threatening to people if you’ve got a girl. And,’ as if this was the clincher, ‘Lou would’ve gone with you.’

‘Is that what you’re doing? Standing in for Lou? You’re not Lou, Fy. What about your parents? Maybe they don’t even know about him yet. Shouldn’t you go home and tell them?’

‘I can’t get home, though, can I? And even if I could, how could I tell them we’ve lost Sol as well?’ She wiped her eyes with the end of her scarf, took a breath and studied the activity on the bridge. ‘Look down there, something’s happening. Come on, they might be closing it for the night. We better go.’

So it was Fyffe who dragged me to my feet, then stood with her arms outstretched to the city behind us, saying good-bye to the day, and to the world we knew. Then she took my hand and we went together.

Over the bridge.

Fyffe and I walked through the Cityside gate
of the Mol, trying to look like we belonged: two scavengers heading home for the night. A man guarding the gate stepped in front of us. ‘Hold it! What did you find over there? Come on, cough up!’

I nodded back towards the roadblock up Moldam Road. ‘Nothing we were allowed to keep.’

Every time I opened my mouth I expected someone to yell ‘Look! A Citysider!’ but he just laughed. ‘Doesn’t like scavengers, the Commander. On your way, then.’

So we went on, not what you’d call keen, but awed all the same by the scale of the bridge. The gate at the other end was lost in the murky late afternoon and the lattice of ironwork towered over us like a gigantic, empty ribcage. A cold wind blustered through it, trying to push us back to the city.

Everyone was hurrying, heads down, battling the wind and we were dragged along in the jostle and rush. When we got about halfway, we stopped as if we’d both decided that we were getting there too fast. We worked our way to the side of the bridge and leaned over it so no one could hear us.

‘There are so many people,’ said Fyffe. ‘I didn’t think there’d be so many.’

They looked like the people we’d met all day at the roadblocks – their faces set at grim, their step a mix of military march and civilian scurry. I tried the ‘You should go back’ line again, but no joy, so I gave that up and peered over the side. It was a long way down. I’d never looked down onto the river before – not from so high up, not from right in the middle of a bridge. The water was black and tumbling, rushing towards Port. And wide. Hostiles had been known to swim it, but I couldn’t see how, it looked too fast. But maybe swimming it would be better than heading over it into Southside armed with nothing but desperation and a few stumbling phrases of Breken. I needed Lou standing next to me saying,
Come on! What are you waiting for? They won’t know what’s hit them
. And laughing like a maniac.

‘Well, well. It’s the Gilgate sewer rat.’ Not Lou. The commander from Moldam Road. He grabbed my sweatshirt and hauled me round to face him. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘I lost a good person today. If you were in a squad,
I’d have you for desertion. And if you were on my bridge, you’d be in a squad. So I might have you for desertion anyway, since here you are.’ He looked me up and down. ‘You don’t have much to show for your scavenging. Who’s this?’

‘Just – just – she’s with me.’

‘Is she. And you’re joining us. How fortunate for us.’ He gave me a push. ‘Move!’ So we had no choice in the end. We walked down the Mol, past the guards at the Southside gate and into enemy territory, Breken militia breathing down our necks the whole way.

As soon as we stepped through the bridge gate
into Southside, I knew that what we were trying to do was insane. You forget, sitting back home behind the high walls and the locked bridges – you forget that Southside is nearly half of a whole city, and the dark half at that. We gripped hands and I glanced at Fyffe. She looked filthy and fierce, every bit the hardened scavenger she wasn’t.