The Day of the Nefilim (22 page)

The sun had become a pale orange orb in the sky, as though its fire had been washed away. Just as the darkness had been total, so too the new light seemed to have no center. It was everywhere. It was as though the sky and the light had become the same thing.

Barker’s Mill came through in reasonable shape. The dark-ness had come late on a moonlit evening, while most people had been indoors, and being a small town, it lacked the dangers of a big city.

Onethian had been at Tommy’s house, wondering whether he should write his memoirs, when it happened. The stars visible through the window in front of him disappeared, and a few seconds later the power failed. He went to the kitchen and rummaged around until he found candles and some matches. Then, thinking that this was as good an omen as any, he began writing, which apart from sleeping is how he spent the rest of the Darkness, as it came to be known.

Tommy and Ortega spent the seventy-two hours of the Darkness in the Red Lion. This was an accident, albeit a happy one. Apart from the barmaid, they had been the only people in the place, so they had a plentiful supply of beer, potato crisps and peanuts for the duration.

None of them had any idea what was going on.

“It’s the end of the fucking world, that’s what it is,” said Tommy. Neither the barmaid nor Ortega could come up with any convincing argument to the contrary.

“Not looking good,” lamented Ortega.

“Not looking like anything, is it, mate,” Tommy had replied.

Using matches for light, the barmaid led them to the upstairs rooms. There they spent the three days, thinking that time, or the planet, or something, had stopped.

By the time the light returned and the cold began to abate, they had eaten pretty much everything in the place that could be eaten, and had made serious inroads into the bar’s top shelf.

And they all knew each other a lot better. “Well,” said Tommy, “we won’t forget that in a hurry, will we.”

Ortega said nothing. He was sleeping off a bottle of vodka. Denise was finding her clothes.

“You won’t tell anyone, will you,” she said, slipping her t-shirt on. “I mean it was fun and everything, but we thought it was the end, didn’t we? We didn’t think we’d see daylight again. I sure didn’t, anyway.”

“I’m not so sure we’re seeing it now.” Tommy was looking out the window. The dull, anemic disk of the sun hung in the sky like a paper cutout. He wasn’t just looking at the sun, though; the window also provided a good view of the harbor, and on its far side, the sand dunes that surrounded the military base.

Hovering above the base, motionless, were two cigar-shaped craft. They were big, and they glowed with a soft orange light that hung around them like an aura. He had never seen anything like them before, and they had no markings on them that might give a clue as to whose they were.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “It’ll be our secret. I don’t think anyone’ll be caring about what we got up to, anyway.”

A pained groan came from Ortega’s direction. He was coming around. Tommy smiled. That’d teach him.

Denise went to where Ortega lay. She leaned over and ruffled his hair, then kissed him. She did the same to Tommy and went to the door.

“You’re nice boys. Thanks for the good time. You can let yourselves out, okay? I’d better find the boss and see what’s happening.”

“No worries.”

* * *

WHEN THE LIGHT RETURNED, they left the doctor’s office and returned to the basement where Pig was waiting. With the subway out, they had to walk all the way, and it took them hours of navigating their way through streets full of people wandering around in shock, looking up at the new sky with open mouths, before they finally reached the old theater.

* * *

They were glad to get back to the ship. Exactly how Geoca navigated them through the network of underground passages and caves and found their way to the surface was beyond any of them. He stayed quiet, as though he was listening to something, and spoke only when he whispered directions to Bark. After several hours, the ship emerged from a cave located high in a cliff face.

This was a place that the surface dwellers rarely visited, said Geoca. It was a wilderness area, supposedly protected for the sake of the environment, but actually used by the authorities for secret research that was carried out in large, isolated compounds hidden in the most inaccessible parts of the park.

Geoboy and Geogirl knew about it. They created one of their mental slide shows and showed it to the others. It began with chalets set in idyllic forest settings and against backdrops of majestic mountain scenery. Inside the buildings, grim-faced men and women oversaw animals in cages or in various kinds of apparatus, or being dissected alive or burnt with chemicals. There were diseases beyond imagination. Animals and prisoners wrapped in tinfoil were being cooked alive with radiation. Humans and mutants were there as well, undergoing the same experiments. They all had numbers tattooed on their foreheads; they weren’t going anywhere. There was more suffering here than anyone on the ship could think about.

Bark shook himself loose from the vision. With him not attending to it, the ship was rolling away from its center. He brought them back onto the right course, still wondering at the local humans. How could they do these things?

The others kept watching as the vision continued. Finally, it finished with the sight of acid baths, in which bodies were being dissolved. When it finished and her eyes had cleared and refocused on the material world around them, Reina turned away without saying anything and walked to where Pig was lying on the deck. She sat down beside him.

“Pig, I saw you just now. When you were young. You were in that place, weren’t you? In one of the cages. I recognized you. I don’t know how.”

The vision, which he had seen as well, had left Pig disconsolate, confronted again by memories he would rather leave behind. “I was there, yes. I was born – no, I was created – there. I am no work of nature. I am the result of their experiments. Not really mutant, not of the underworld, like Geoca, but the product of the surface dwellers and their manipulation. I don’t know exactly what they did to make me how I am. I don’t much care.” Pig was choosing his words carefully. “I was rescued from the vivisectionists when I was young. The recollection that I have of my time there is disorganized, just a string of impressions and feelings.”

“Geoca and some other mutants came in the middle of the night, they tell me. They destroyed the place, so that the surface dwellers could not perform their evil there any more, and took away the animals and other victims they found there. I was one of them. They took us underground, and cared for us there.”

“So they raised you as one of their own?”

“Yes. But I like the surface, I like the space, and the open air and the freedom. I would very much like to live under this new sky that is above us now, but it is safer underground. With my friends and their kind. What do you think, Reina?”

“Think of what, Pig?”

“Of our situation. Of what you’ve seen.”

Reina didn’t know what to say. “Well, I don’t know if I’d rather be delivering fruit and vegetables or not. I’m not shedding any tears for the old world, Pig. It was heading for a bad place all along. Now that it’s finally there, ruled by idiots with shit for brains; well, I’m not surprised at all. Disappointed, but not surprised.”

“But there is hope, isn’t there?”

“Yeah, I suppose there is, but you’d have to agree it’s a long shot.”

Pig lowered his head to the deck. She saw the effect her words had on him.

“Don’t worry, piglet.” She scratched him behind the ears. “We’re doing our best. We’re taking the crystal to where it’s needed. What more can we do?”

It wasn’t long before they were high above the open sea. The receding coastline was nothing more than a distant smudge on the horizon. Pig luxuriated in the smell of brine on the fresh breeze. Open space. His snout wrinkled, this time with pleasure.

* * *

A few days later they were above the ice. The light here was dim, as though they were sailing through a perpetual twilight. It seemed as though the long southern night was falling, but that was impossible. No night would ever darken the planet’s surface again.

The illusion was caused by layers of heavy cloud that hung low, obscuring the tops of hills, and blocking the light of the sky. Storms surrounded them as they sailed above the ice sheets and glaciers, looking in vain for the node.

“What do you mean, you don’t know?!” the rest of them had exclaimed when Geoca and the blue woman had admitted to not knowing where the node was.

“We should be getting directions sent to us, but we’re not,” Geoca had insisted. “Each node has a keeper, someone who looks after it and makes sure it is safe. Like the old man in New York. And there should be a keeper here somewhere. We should be able to hear him, but it’s quiet. There’s nothing. Something has happened.”

“Then how are we going to find it? In this weather? We can’t see shit!”

After many hours of searching without knowing what they were looking for, they found a small group of huts in the hollow of a valley. There was no sign of movement, and no tracks in the snow around the buildings.

“Let’s have a look,” Bark said, his mood a little better now that they had something to distract them. His vision of complication after complication stretching out ahead of them like a trail of black holes in space receded a little. They dropped the anchor among some rocks and let the ladder down.

There were three huts. The snow had piled up in drifts against the walls and covered the doors, so that they had to dig their way in. Inside, the huts smelled of cold and damp, the sodden floors littered with empty tins and boxes. Papers were strewn everywhere.

In the last hut, they found the body of a male slumped over a desk and covered in blankets. There was another body on a bunk in the corner.

“Jesus, this place must have been unbelievably cold.” Reina tried the radio sitting on the table. It was dead.

“They froze to death,” said Sahrin. “A nice welcome to the new age.”

“What were they doing here?”

“Some sort of research, I’d say,” said Reina. “Geology or something, judging by these.” The walls were covered with maps, and there were shelves of books with long, complicated titles.

“It was a long shot anyway. Shall we go?”

“Wait a minute.” The Senator looking at one of the maps. He turned to Reina. “Is this a map of the continent we’re on?”

Reina looked. “Er… yeah, it is. Look, here’s where we are, I bet...” She pointed at a spot on the map that had been marked in red. It was close to a bay they had just flown over. And there was the mountain range that they had seen to the south. “So?”

“And this other map. Is it the whole planet?”

“Yes. It shows everything.” Reina explained how the Antarctic was shown on the world map as an irregular white procession of bays and inlets across the bottom of the map.

“I wonder if this could be our answer.”

“How’s that?”

“Geometry. Structure and order.” The Senator went to the desk and picked up a pen and a ruler. “Show me the direction of this planet’s magnetic field.”

Reina went up to the map. “There it is. That arrow there. Magnetic North.”

“And New York?”

Reina showed her. The Senator drew an arc from New York to the red mark on the Antarctic. “Show me where all the nodes you know of are,” he said to Geoca. “With a little luck, we might be able to deduce the location of our destination.”

They settled down to work. Outside, the winds abated and the clouds began to clear.

An hour later, the blue woman stood up. She’d been sitting on the floor, apparently unworried by the cold. Her eyes were glazed over, as though she was concentrating on something that existed on another plane.

“The keeper,” she said. “It’s the keeper. I’m getting him. He’s been ill, and hasn’t had the strength to contact us. He can give us the directions we need.” She slipped back into her trance state.

“That’s it, do you agree?” the Senator asked Geoca and Reina. The maps on the wall were covered in lines. On the map of the Antarctic, there were two points where the paths came together from five directions and intersected.

Geoca and Reina both nodded. The Senator stood back and smiled for the first time in a long time.

“That’s it, then. Our node is at one of those two locations.”

The blue woman had come out of her trance. She pointed at one of the points on the map. “It’s that one, there. You did well. The keeper is there.”

* * *

THE SECRETARY-GENERAL was talking to Vice-Secretary Alexis. She had just flown in from the west coast, and, of course, she had a problem.

“We’re suffering overload, Secretary-General. There are just too many people. We’ve got all the known subversives, and now we’re rounding up the potential troublemakers. But there are just too many of them. The rail system can hardly cope. The grid is providing enough power, but there aren’t enough carriages. It’s fortunate that we planned ahead as much as we did, but twenty thousand carriages fitted with shackles for the North American region alone just isn’t enough. And the camps are crammed to the limit. It’s the same all over the world. The system is gridlocked in China and India.”

The Secretary-General thought for a moment.

“Use freight carriages as well, but only if they have solid sides. No stock carriages, we don’t want to alarm the general population.”

“Very well. But that doesn’t solve the problem of where to put the prisoners. In North America we’ve got seven million in the camps, and we’re adding another three hundred thousand every day. It’s worse in other parts of the world.”

“Then we’ll start the executions earlier than we planned. Get rid of as many as you need to. Just get the numbers down to a manageable level. I’ll leave the details to you.”

“Of course. Thank you, Secretary-General.”

“You’re welcome, my dear. Do you have any other problems?”

“Nothing that we hadn’t anticipated. Looters, of course. They’re being shot on sight. There’s chaos in the cities, but that will decline when we get the troublemakers out of the way and the bulk of the population out into the country. We’re keeping strict control of food and water. The rationing system is going smoothly, as is the curfew. We’re letting them outdoors for eight hour shifts. Anyone found on the street outside their allotted time is treated as a looter.”