Into the Fire (28 page)

Jimmy entered, taking his time, peering around, checking no one was watching. “Take a look,” he eventually said, pointing at the largest of the trees.

I paused, not really understanding what I was s'posed to be looking at, wondering how senile dementia first manifested itself.

“It's a tree,” I eventually commented.

“No!” he said impatiently. “Look! Up there!”

I got a bit closer to the trunk and peered up through the lattice of branches, finally spotting something caught almost at the top. It looked like some kind of battered metal container.

“What is it?”

“What d'ya think it is?”

“I don't know!” I cried, starting to get a little irritated as usual.

“You should. It kept us prisoners long enough.”

I stared at it again, and though it took me a while, finally I realized. “Satellite?” I asked.

“Cool, huh?”

“Why wasn't it destroyed?”

“I dunno. Obviously it got hit, but for some reason its fire went out on the way down. I guess it's been lodged up there ever since.”

I looked again, realizing in that moment that Jimmy had finally found the thing he thought would redeem him in our eyes.

“So?” he said, indicating the tree.

“What?”

“Get it down!”

“
What?
”

“It ain't no use up there.”

“Are you kidding me?”

“You can do it.”

“Oh, can I?” I said sarcastically.

“Sure you can!”

It was useless to argue, and anyway, tell the truth, I was that bit intrigued. “Okay,” I sighed.

I might've been able to climb a fallen tree, that was more or less horizontal, but that was a bit different from one reaching thirty feet into the air. You've never seen such clumsy ineptitude. Every branch I put my weight on broke. I went up, down, up, down—then spent several embarrassing moments just hanging there, twirling around like something on a Christmas tree. In the end, and only Mother Nature knows how, I finally worked myself up into a position where, by stretching up as high as I could, I could just manage to dislodge the satellite and send it crashing down to the ground.

Jimmy made this loud shushing sound and started checking all around to see if I'd attracted anyone's attention then, the moment he was sure it was safe, eagerly set to work poking, prodding, even sniffing at it. Meanwhile, as many others had learned before me, I discovered that climbing
down
a tree is a damn sight harder than climbing
up
.

“Come on, Big Guy,” Jimmy urged, pulling out a large plastic bag he'd obviously brought to wrap up the satellite, “we gotta get this back before anyone sees it.”

“Yeah, thanks, Jimmy, I'll just fall down, shall I?”

“Whatever!”

It took me a while, and I cursed him repeatedly and colorfully, but finally I slid down the last few feet of the trunk to the ground.

“Let's go,” he said, even before I was done checking myself for cuts and bruises.

It might not have been a whole satellite but it was surprisingly heavy, not to mention damned awkward to carry. Thank God we didn't have that far to go—the last thing we needed was anyone challenging us, maybe thinking a couple of aging looters had something interesting hidden away. A group of young guys did check us out as we passed by, probably prompted by Jimmy's overly elaborate disguise, but they changed their minds when I gave them the look.

The worst part was getting it over the fallen tree—we dropped it several times after the bag ripped to uselessness—but eventually we toppled it over the wall into the churchyard and it crashed to the ground

Jimmy followed on behind, then me, finding him already busily scrutinizing his trophy. I don't know how much of it remained—a little more than half, I'd've guessed. A lot of the innards had been shot out, bits trailing off—including a kind of broken arm, which, I guess, was its source of solar power. According to Jimmy, it would've had two originally, so presumably one got dislodged somehow.

“Jesus!” the little guy muttered, shaking his head.

“What?”

“If I'd known this was what was terrorizing us, I wouldn't have bothered. It's out of the Stone Age.”

“Really?”

“I thought it'd be something real sophisticated. ‘The Final Solution.'” He stopped for a moment, getting down on his hands and knees, sniffing it again. “Can you smell something?”

I knelt down next to him, also sniffing around, the pair of us like a couple of old bloodhounds. “Maybe . . . Not nice,” I said, though I wasn't really sure. “Lena was always talking about a bad smell.”

“That's the trouble with getting old,” Jimmy grumbled. “Nothing works the way it did. I know that smell,” he told me, though he obviously couldn't remember what it was.

“Maybe something took up refuge in it? A squirrel or a bird or something?”

Jimmy never bothered to answer, just took out some tools he'd hidden under the tree with his disguise. I realized my time was up, I'd served my usefulness and could go.

I don't know whether he'd bothered with breakfast or not, but the following morning Jimmy was gone before I was awake. I knew he'd confessed all to Delilah 'cuz I heard their argument in the night: that familiar story of her threatening to leave him if he was going to fill her world with junk yet again.

I went down to see him but he didn't say much, only that the construction of the satellite was so outdated, he didn't even have the right tools to work on it. I stayed for a little while, watching him try to improvise, getting that obsessed look about him. When it became apparent he wasn't going to say any more, that any suggestions I might have wouldn't be welcome, I left him to it.

I mean, as pleased as I was to see him burning with a little passion again, I really couldn't see the point—it wasn't as if the laser was still intact and we could build some kind of cannon or something. All he really had was an oversized squashed tin can with a few odd wires and broken circuits inside, which I wouldn't have thought much use to anyone. Mind you, we weren't talking about “anyone,” we were talking about Jimmy.

I was helping Delilah again, this time by taking the garbage out, which meant walking it up the street a ways and maybe throwing it on a fire, rather than have it stack up and create suspicion. As I headed back I saw Gigi coming out of the smoke from the opposite direction.

I thought she'd probably come to see Gordie. The rivalry between her and Hanna for our little matinee idol was now pretty much out in the open. Not that I understood it—I'd've thought Gigi far too cool and Hanna altogether too serene and sensible. But there you go: love makes fools of us all. Plainly we were in for another day of fighting over who was going to do what for the invalid, and as is the way of these things, the more they tried to please him, the less he appeared to appreciate it. In fact, I had an idea the little shit was beginning to really enjoy himself.

As it turned out, Gigi hadn't only come to see Gordie, she also had something for me. She paused as we entered the churchyard and handed me a note.

It was only folded in two, but I almost tore it, how fast I straightened it out.

I read it through twice, the kick in my stomach even harder the second time.

“What's going on?” I asked Gigi.

She shrugged in that way she and Gordie have, like she's indicating indifference, but actually she's about to give you bad news. “She tried to escape . . . A Special got hurt.”

“Is she okay?”

“Yeah, yeah. She's fine.”

I started envisaging it in my mind and my impotence erupted into anger. “
Shit!
”

“It wasn't the first time,” Gigi added. “More like the fifth or sixth.”

It was funny, no matter how concerned I was, I still couldn't help but feel that bit proud. “Really?”

“The night you tried to get in there.”

“She tried to escape?”

“She knew it was you—she made it to an outside door, but they caught her and dragged her back.”

I tell ya, that almost reduced me to tears: the thought that while I'd been trying to get to her, she'd been trying to get to me, that we'd been that close. “Can you get a message to her?”

“Not anymore,” Gigi admitted after a moment. “They got her drugged and secured to the bed. Orders of the bitch.”

“Nora Jagger?”

“There must be a God,” she said grimly, “'cuz sure as hell, she's the devil.”

I cursed several times, kicking at some nearby rubble. Not only was I making no progress, with every day the task was becoming that much more difficult.

Gigi started to walk toward the shelter, expecting me to follow, but I spun around and headed back to the street. I couldn't go in there: sitting around and talking, going over it yet again—what was the damn point?

“Catch you later,” I called.

Gigi looked a little surprised, but I was gone before she could reply.

For some reason that had upset me as much as anything. It'd never occurred to me that Lena might try to escape. In fact, she'd probably be that bit angry with me—of course she'd try to escape! That was her all over, the way she was . . . but now they had her secured to the bed, attending only to her basic needs, like she was some queen bee.

It was more habit than anything that sent me in the direction of Infinity, but somewhere along the line I acknowledged that there was no point, that I'd seen all there was to see. I continued walking, though, so lost in my frustration I didn't give a thought as to where, on and on until eventually I found myself at the ocean, not far from where we came ashore the night we escaped.

I went down the beach and sat on the sand, gazing out across the murky sea to a point where the smoke and water merged to form nothing. I couldn't actually see the Island; for all intents and purposes it no longer existed.

That place had been the most oppressive hell I ever could've imagined. The years I spent wanting to get off it, pretending it didn't matter, 'til in the end it didn't, 'cuz all hope had gone.

I gazed up and down, despair lapping at me in the same way the waves were the sand. I hadn't noticed them when I first sat down, but now I saw there were a few zombie-sick about: little groups who barely had the strength to sit upright, just like on the night of our
escape. What was this illness, for Chrissake? Were we likely to get it? Did anyone recover? It looked a bit like a one-way ticket. Okay, if they were lucky, they got replacement organs, but that was only a part of the story—'ccording to Gigi there was a list of other symptoms as long your arm that someone else's organs just couldn't cure.

Really, I can't tell you what the thought process was—maybe it had something to do with the Island and remembering that once I'd thought there was no way we could ever beat that place. Or maybe it was an old head like mine just needing to be left ticking over for a while, to make sense of stuff in its own sweet time: the zombie-sick, the fires, what happened at Dr. Simon's, that damn enticer, and even the convoy of white trucks that turned up at Infinity most afternoons . . .

Whatever it was that caused me to put everything together, to fit isolated facts into an understandable picture, it was like a flash of lightning picking me out on the beach. All my thoughts, conscious and otherwise, suddenly clicked into perfect alignment.

Jesus!
There it was: I had an idea!

That night, when everyone was asleep, I slipped from my sleeping bag and made my way down the wall toward the fallen tree, keeping as quiet as I could.

After I'd left the beach, I'd returned via Infinity, just to check I was right, that it was the same routine every afternoon. It was the final piece in a very complicated jigsaw.

When I got back to the shelter I insisted on cooking, even though it was Delilah's turn—which gave me the opportunity to pocket the knife we'd picked up at the camping store. I also took some organi-plasters and bandages, and rummaging through the garbage, found an appropriate screw-top plastic container.

I didn't go all the way down to Jimmy's “workshop,” just far enough that if I did make any noise the others wouldn't hear me.

There wasn't a lot of moonlight filtering down through the smoke, but enough for me to see what I was doing. I'd scrubbed the knife spotless earlier, sterilizing it as best I could in boiling water,
and now I placed it on a low branch along with the plastic container. Tugging my shirt up to my armpits, easing my pants down a little, exposing my bare skin to the cool of the night. Jesus, was I really going to do this?

Pain's a funny thing. You can never really appreciate how bad it is until you're actually suffering it. I guess 'cuz Nature wants you to learn, but then forget—otherwise you're just gonna live your life in fear.

I placed the blade flat against my bare hip, feeling its shrill coldness, then took a deep breath, and another, all the while telling myself that if I thought about this for too long I'd never go through with it.

The problem was, it had to be precise. I couldn't just make a quick slash and leave it at that: it had to be deep enough that it looked authentic, but not so deep it would do me serious harm. I stood there for another agonizing moment, gripping the knife as tightly as I could, the blade poised over my flesh while every fiber of my body screamed at me not to do it.

Jesus!
Oh God—!

I managed to stifle it to some degree, but I still gave out a cry of pain, knowing I couldn't stop there, that I had to keep going: push the knife down, slide it through my flesh, cut a long, deep incision.