Doomsday Game, page 23
* * *
They made their way back through the rubble and Winifred took the wheel of the electric cart. Katya told her where to drive, and they were soon on their way back towards the centre of the facility.
Katya ordered Winifred to pull over next to a fire escape. They disembarked, and Kip helped Katya up the steps and inside a building.
Jerry glanced south through a window and saw tiny figures in white exiting troop carriers that had parked in one of the other quadrants. They were wearing hazmat suits, and they fanned out, heading towards different parts of the facility. A helicopter flew overhead, bound for the wreckage of the jet.
Katya, still leaning on Kip, guided them next to a tall steel door with a sign reading STAGE TESTING PLATFORM. ‘I think you can guess what’s in here,’ she said, sliding a card down a wall-reader.
The door swung open in response. Inside, Jerry saw long benches piled high with manufacturing equipment, and at the far end stood a smallish transfer stage surrounded by measuring devices.
‘There are spare portable sets over there and ready to go,’ said Katya, pointing to the far wall. Jerry saw modified backpacks clearly intended to carry portable stage components—a design he had never seen before. ‘We should grab one each, just in case.’
‘Just in case of what?’ asked Selwyn.
Katya shrugged. ‘Any unexpected eventualities.’
They did as she suggested while Katya programmed the stage. Jerry felt his heart beating ever faster as he stepped inside the circle of field-pillars. It felt like events were moving much more quickly than he felt he could really deal with.
The light built up around them, and Jerry felt a familiar moment of weightlessness before finding himself standing on a much larger transfer stage built from rough-hewn wooden planks.
They were on Nova Terra, an alternate where neither humanity nor any other species had evolved to the level of civilisation, a whole world’s worth of untrammelled wilderness.
Jerry breathed in, scenting pine. The stage was open to the air, and he saw dense forest stretching across a shallow valley, A steep-sided mountain rose up into the sky some miles distant.
He followed the others down broad wooden steps. A dirt trail led to Newtown—a settlement already twenty-thousand strong, much of it built from native wood.
It was approaching dusk, and most of the buildings were lit from within. Woodsmoke rose from multiple chimneys, while farther away, close by a river that wound down from the mountain’s steep slopes, stood a foundry.
Trucks and SUV’s were parked side by side fifty metres or so from the stage, accessible by a gravelled path bordered on either side by long grass.
They found the rest of the Pathfinders waiting by one of the trucks, Chloe amongst them. Jerry walked towards her, and then suddenly they were in each other’s arms.
The others made their own greetings, and he heard them telling each other their stories. Then they stopped talking as Rozalia clapped her hands and got their attention.
‘Here’s the plan,’ she said. ‘We’re going to take some of these trucks along with whatever supplies they can carry and get the hell out of town. I figure our best option right now is to make our way to Splitsville.’
‘Splitsville’s a good hundred kilometres from here,’ said Kip. He looked dazed, like he hadn’t quite caught up with events himself.
‘But it is on the Normandy coast,’ said Nadia, standing by Rozalia’s side. ‘They have boats there—even a couple of schooners.’ Jerry couldn’t miss the excitement in her voice. ‘Me and Roz are damn good sailors. Beg, borrow or steal one, I don’t care. We won’t be safe from the Authority until we’re in open water.’
‘And go where?’ asked Kip.
‘South, of course,’ said Winifred. ‘I figure we can head for Portugal. We’ll put in some place along the coast and set up for ourselves. There’ll be other people there eventually, once the evacuation really gets underway. But maybe by then the heat’ll be off us and they’ll leave us alone.’
‘Or maybe we’ll spend the rest of our lives running from them,’ said Jerry.
‘What’s your plan?’ asked Selwyn. ‘Go live on some post-apocalyptic and see how long it takes before something eats, poisons or irradiates us?’
‘Okay, okay,’ said Jerry, raising his hands defensively. ‘I hear you. I’m just saying nothing about this is going to be easy.’
‘Jerry my lad,’ said Selwyn, a gleam in his eye, ‘would you have it any other way?’
Somehow, Jerry couldn’t find an answer.
He followed the others towards the line of trucks, and the more he walked, the more he felt the past falling away.
He realised suddenly that his life as a Pathfinder was over.
He looked at Chloe and took her hand, feeling her fingers tighten around his. There’s three of us now, he realised with a shock.
‘Listen,’ Jerry said to her as they climbed into the cabin of one of the trucks, ‘we should at least consider naming it Randall.’
She regarded him slyly. ‘And if it’s a girl?’
Jerry opened his mouth, then closed it again.
‘Why don’t we just wait,’ she said, ‘and see what the future brings.’
VI
Eight Years Later
Nadia
Nova Terra
She watched the kid pick his way down the tumble of rocks on one side of the waterfall, moving from boulder to boulder, one hand tucked in close against his chest.
She squinted against the light and saw he was carrying something in his hand. Whatever it was, he was taking great care not to drop it.
‘Hey,’ Nadia called up. ‘Careful there, Randy. I’m the one who’s in trouble if you break your neck.’
‘I found something!’ His voice betrayed excitement. He reached down to a slippery-looking boulder with one booted foot, his one free hand braced against the rock behind him.
Just watching the kid make his way down such a precipitous slope one-handed was enough to age Nadia by a year for every minute he took to get back down to the ground. Every day with Randy was a reminder of why she could never have been a mother.
Randy reached the last boulder, then gently hopped down to the flat, muddy soil next to the creek. He was awkward and gangly-looking, a collection of barely-held together sticks granted sentience and set to the task of terrifying any adults within a twenty-mile radius by risking his life climbing up the side of goddamn waterfalls.
He came towards her, both hands cupped around something she couldn’t see.
‘Show me what you’ve got there,’ she said, and he showed her a tiny grey-green creature that squirmed and made a ribbit sound.
‘A frog?’ She looked up from it and stared at the kid, aghast. ‘With all the kindness in the world, Randy, but what the fuck?’
Randy grinned nervously, his cheeks colouring. ‘Mom says you’re not supposed to say words like that to me.’
‘Your mom is eighty kilometres away, wondering why in hell your father and I are taking so long to get you back home.’ She rapped him on the head with her knuckles, smiling to show her affection.
Randy ducked away, grinning too. ‘Now tell me,’ said Nadia, ‘what in the name of Christ are you doing risking your life for the sake of a damn frog?’
‘It’s not just any frog,’ he said. ‘It’s for Uncle Yuichi.’
She looked at the frog again. ‘Yuichi asked you to collect frogs?’
‘No,’ he replied, as if she were slow. ‘He asked me to collect ones with these markings.’ He lifted it for her further inspection, and Nadia saw it had yellowish markings on its back. ‘It’s for medicine.’
‘What kind of medicine?’
‘Anti…’ Randy screwed his face up. ‘Antibee…’
‘Antibiotics?’
A wide grin spread across the kid’s face. ‘Yes!’ He pulled the frog close to his chest. ‘It’s because they’ve got that disease up in New Paris and they need antibiotics.’
‘I’m pretty sure frogs don’t have anything to do with antibiotics,’ she said carefully.
‘Actually, they do.’
She turned in surprise and saw Jerry standing grinning a few feet away. ‘As long as they’re the right frogs,’ he added. ‘It’s some property of their skin.’
‘Uncle Yuichi said I should look for more of these frogs and write down where I found them so they can use them for making medicine,’ said young Randall, proudly.
‘Yuichi’s idea?’ Nadia asked Jerry.
‘Rozalia’s, actually,’ Jerry replied. ‘He’s just picking up from where she left off.’
Nadia’s own smile became brittle, long-remembered pain twisting it into something closer to a squint.
‘Go on back to the camp,’ she said, making a swatting motion.
The kid ran ahead of them and she and Jerry walked side by side back to where they’d set up a couple of tents. The horses were grazing nearby while coffee brewed in a pot set over a campfire.
Jerry took the pot off the boil and poured some coffee into a tin mug, passing it to her. He’d let his beard grow out, and it was just about long enough that it brushed against his upper chest.
She drank the coffee appreciatively and they chatted for a while about the trip. Randy went off to feed the horses, having deposited his frog in a plastic container with holes in it for safekeeping.
‘I figure we’re maybe three days from home,’ said Jerry. ‘Long as the weather stays clear, anyhow.’
Nadia finished her coffee. ‘I should go do some hunting so we’ve got something for dinner.’
Jerry nodded and glanced towards the sea, visible beyond the trees no more than a kilometre or two away. ‘You know, Yuichi told me that Randall Senior once insisted he’d like to be buried at sea.’
Nadia laughed sourly. ‘One time, when he was drunk, he told me he wanted to have his ashes mixed into a vat of chocolate so he could be eaten by underwear models.’ She got up, chuckling to herself, and shouldered her hunting rifle. ‘With the greatest of respect,’ she added, ‘Randall was full of shit at the best of times.’
He shrugged. ‘Well, at least we’ve got him back. It’s still better than not burying him at all.’
‘Is that what you’re going to do?’ asked Randy, emerging once more from their tent. ‘Throw Randall in the sea?’
Jerry grinned. ‘We’ll figure out just what we’ll do once we’ve got your namesake home. And it’s burial at sea, okay?’
Nadia glanced automatically towards the horses grazing nearby, and the saddlebag that contained Randall Pimm’s ashes. It had taken most of a decade to persuade the Authority to return his remains to those who knew him best.
Just retrieving them had required a three-week round trip to New Paris. It was some kind of a victory, at least. Oskar’s remains had simply gone missing.
It would have been nice, somewhere down the line, for all the hard work the Pathfinders had done for the Authority to be acknowledged, not least by letting them bury their dead properly. But she had long ago reconciled herself to the fact the Authority had no desire to make anything easy for them.
Now they were going to take Randall Senior back to Anywhere, the settlement they had founded, and give him the goodbye he deserved.
* * *
She ruffled Randy’s hair and grabbed hold of her hunting rifle, making her way inland before she could change her mind about what she was thinking of doing. She pushed deep into the woods, keeping an eye out for cave bears.
Usually, you could hear them coming from a mile off, although they were getting scarcer as more refugees arrived and Nova Terra’s population exploded.
She came across deer tracks and followed them for a while until the light became dim and almost ghostly in its quality beneath the dense forest canopy. She stopped and breathed in the air, thinking: this was the place to do it. Here, they’d never find her.
They’d look for her—she knew that, of course. But in the end they’d figure a bear or a lion or some other primeval critter caught her unawares and made a meal of her. And then they’d get on with the rest of their lives the way they should.
She reached down into her satchel, checking yet again that the bottle of pills was still there. Not that it could have gone anywhere.
She heard a twig snap from somewhere out of sight.
She turned in a circle, looking deep into the trees, her rifle at the ready. It’d be more than a little ironic, she thought, if a bear did in fact choose this moment to maul her to death.
Nothing moved. Birds sang love songs to each other from across the wide glades.
‘Okay,’ she said, her voice trembling just very slightly. ‘Now how about you show yourself, whoever the hell you are?’
Please don’t be Randy, she thought, listening.
She heard footsteps, to her right. She turned to see a dark-skinned figure standing next to a gnarled and ancient-looking oak, her hair cut close to her scalp.
Nadia’s mouth worked for several moments, the rifle very nearly slipping from her grasp. ‘…Rozalia?’ She staggered slightly and caught herself with one hand on the branch of a tree. ‘You’re…’
‘I’m not who you think I am,’ said the other woman, a warning in her voice. ‘At least, not exactly.’
Rozalia—or the woman who could have been her twin—wore dark green fatigues belted at the waist. There was a device clipped to her belt, and Nadia’s mind flashed back years, to when she’d last seen a similar-looking device mounted on the pressure suit of an identical woman.
‘I remember you,’ said Nadia. ‘I remember the tattoo.’
Not-Rozalia reached one hand up to the tiny red rose tattooed below one ear. ‘What about it?’
‘You were going to get that tattoo on your twentieth birthday,’ Nadia explained, her voice hoarse. ‘Except the brakes on your shitty little Škoda gave out and you nearly ran me over on my Vespa. That was the first time I met you. I guilted you into buying me a coffee to make up for it.’
A faint smile curled up one corner of not-Rozalia’s mouth. ‘Or at least, that’s how it happened in your universe. Right?’
Nadia nodded. ‘Right. So…why are you here?’
For a moment, not-Rozalia appeared indecisive. Her fingers twisted at her sides, and she stared off into the forest for a moment.
‘Good question,’ she said, turning back to look at Nadia. She sighed. ‘You must have wondered who the hell I was, after the last time I saw you.’
Every single night for eight years, thought Nadia. ‘So how long have you been following me?’
‘Since a while back,’ she replied vaguely.
‘I never heard or saw anyone the whole way here,’ said Nadia.
‘You wouldn’t have,’ said not-Rozalia. She moved a little closer, then stopped when Nadia took a half-step back. ‘I just want to show you something,’ she said, putting out her hands in a don’t-run gesture.
Nadia nodded, both hands still on her rifle, and watched as the other woman tilted her head back as if scanning the forest canopy above them. After a few moments of waiting, something came flitting down through the air towards the woman.
She reached up with one hand, turning her palm upwards. The thing—whatever it was—landed on her hand with fluttering wings that looked somehow odd.
Nadia moved closer, despite her caution. At first she’d thought it was some kind of bird, like a finch or some other tiny denizen of the forest. Instead she saw a drone with gossamer-thin plastic wings that glinted oilily in the sunlight. It hadn’t made a sound.
‘I’ve been watching you using this,’ not-Rozalia explained with an embarrassed grin. ‘You wouldn’t have heard or seen it.’
Nadia licked dry lips. ‘How long?’ she asked, stammering slightly. ‘Since when—?’
‘I saw you by the river a few days ago,’ said not-Rozalia. Her voice was gentle in a very deliberate kind of way. ‘You were sitting on a rock and you had some pills in your hand like you were about to swallow them.’
‘You saw that?’
‘Then that kid shouted for you and you put the pills back in a bottle before he could see them.’ Not-Rozalia opened a box the size of a pack of cigarettes and put the tiny drone inside it, then grinned apologetically, tucking the box into a pocket. ‘I was trying to pick the right time to say hello.’
‘There’s got to be some other reason you’re here,’ said Nadia. Her fear and caution had abated, and in their place was a curious longing she hadn’t felt in a long time.
But this person was not Rozalia, no matter how much she looked like her. She was someone else, a stranger.
Then it hit her: this was Rozalia as she had been, before her cough grew worse and worse and her cancer shrank her to nothing. It had been so long Nadia had almost forgotten what a healthy Rozalia looked like.
‘You took me by surprise when I saw you,’ said not-Rozalia. Nadia didn’t need to be told she was talking about Gamma Three. ‘I didn’t know who you were, but I could tell you were someone like me—otherwise, there’s no possible way you could have been there. Yet somehow you knew me.’
‘Are you alone here?’ asked Nadia. ‘Or are there others?’
‘Just me,’ not-Rozalia said guardedly. She looked off into the forest, then back again. ‘There used to be more than just me. It’s…kind of a long story.’
I’ll bet it is, thought Nadia.
‘I fixed the brakes on that Škoda and went and got this tattoo.’ One corner of her mouth twitched. ‘To my eternal regret. The tattoo, that is. I spent my whole life wishing I had never got it.’
‘So why didn’t you have it removed?’
Not-Rozalia looked at her like the explanation was more than obvious. ‘Well, the world ended. What could I do?’
Nadia grinned and began to laugh. So did the other woman. ‘How did you even find me?’ asked Nadia. ‘And why come looking?’
Not-Rozalia’s hand reached unconsciously towards the box on her hip. ‘There’s ways to track a person through n-space, if they’re travelling between alternates. And as for the other question…I guess I wanted to know more about you.’
