The Brink (10 page)

“Penny for them?” said a voice that shattered his thoughts and scattered the fragments onto the sticky table before him.

“Reb - I thought you were with Gary and Teague,” he managed to say.

“We’re done. I went looking for you but you weren’t in your bunk. Tough day?” she asked, indicating the beers. He nodded. “Mind if I join you?”

“Not at all,” he replied.

“You want any more?” He looked and realised he’d emptied one and done serious damage to the second.

“Yeah, grab me another two. Thanks.”

Reb went inside and he took the chance to flatten his messy hair with the palm of his hand and wipe his face with a napkin, hoping he didn’t look like a homeless man. But he laughed - everyone there was homeless now, they all looked just as rough as he did. It wasn’t easy to leave the prison behind.

Reb returned and he took the two bottles from between her fingers where they hung precariously and lined them up next to the other two. She sat down with several cups of vodka mixed with lime cordial.

“A crate of Coke wouldn’t go amiss,” she said, sitting down opposite him, blocking his view of the people traffic.

“All this crap and not a single box has shown up, even at the bottling factory,” he said, laughing.

“There’s probably a vending machine somewhere with a few rare cans in. They’re going to be worth a fortune in time to come.”

“We need to keep an eye out for one,” he said. “Keep it somewhere safe and wait for them to go up in value.”

“Yeah, that and the secret recipe for KFC.”

They fell silent and Reb contemplated her drinks before moving onto her fingernails. Alan found that most conversations started with the past and usually brought it to a halt pretty sharply as a new piece of history was lost for all time.

The traffic was easing as the survivors looked to preparing their evening meals, such as they were. Ration packs only took a few minutes to prepare and Alan knew that it was more about the routine, about having a ‘thing’ to do rather than fall into the trap of dwelling on reality, thinking negative thoughts about the truth. Like Reb had said, some things would be gone now, maybe never to return. Coke. Good single malt whisky. Family.

By the end of his third beer, Reb spoke and in doing so she never looked up from her hands.

“Gary told me what you’d discussed.”

“Yeah?” he replied. “What do you think?”

“It sounds plausible.” Silence. Then she lifted her eyes and looked around, taking in the prison walls for the first time. “Do you have any thoughts on that?” she asked.

“It doesn’t matter what I think,” he replied. “I haven’t got a clue about radiation and winds and that kind of thing. It might be true. Then again maybe Teague only wanted these trucks because they came up on a scouting mission. There could be a hundred alternative explanations and I don’t see how this one wins first place.”

“I spoke to some of the other patrols from the last few weeks. There’s been recorded locations of at least 8 other trucks - normal transports that would’ve done the job just as well. Teague didn’t care about any of them. He wanted the Rhinos specifically.”

“Is that so odd? They’re built to last and can take some serious punishment. If the scavengers come after us when the move takes place then the supplies will be more important to them than the civilians. They’ll attack those first so putting them in the Rhinos makes more sense to me.”

“Maybe,” she said.

“I sense there’s a ‘but’ here.”

She finally looked at him and smiled. She was pretty for a soldier and, given her background, it was good to see that she’d managed to avoid bulking up on muscle mass, but Alan was starting to see something on people now. When he looked close enough he could make out the expression,
the mark
, the thing that characterised the survivor and he wondered if it’d been on the faces of the people who lived through other disasters. The Panic. World war two. The Somme. He couldn’t describe it more than just a sense that the person might never be happy again, like they’d lost something that could never be returned and it would take a few generations to eradicate. He saw it on the faces of the survivors in camp as they drank, as they ate and talked and listened to music. Grief. Loss. Fear. It flavoured everything and gave it a bitter after taste.

“It’s hard for a civilian to get their heads around what we do,” she said.  “What we think and how we reach those thoughts. I found the same thing with my family back before all this-” She gave a sweeping gesture towards the concourse that managed to encompass the entire planet.

“By civilian, you mean me,” he said.

“I guess you don’t see it from our point of view. We see a Rhino and we know what it’s for, plain and simple. We hear that we’re moving the entire camp to hook up with another settlement and we wonder. Bits and pieces here and there. Cross-talk.”

“You’re saying that your instincts are telling you Gary’s right.”

“I guess I am. Not just Gary, but others have said the same thing. We’ve had nothing from the South in a long time. Radios are playing up like there’s some serious interference. Teague has been getting strange reports that he’s not sharing with even his closest advisors.”

“Have you spoken to Janet? She seems to-”

“I suspect she has an idea but she’s keeping quiet. I don’t blame her, that’s her job. But I tell you something,” she said, leaning forward to whisper to him. “If it comes to that, if it’s death by radiation, I’m doing the deed myself.”

“What do you mean? You’d actually-”

“I mean if Teague thinks we’re going to just lay down and die like that - and I’m telling you it isn’t a pretty way to go - then I’ll do myself first. Go out like a soldier, not spewing my guts up until I’m a hairless shell. Fuck that.” She downed her drink as if it was already happening and the vodka would buy her a little longer.

“Are there no shelters? No bunkers?” he suggested but he regretted saying it the moment the words left his lips. He knew there was one but could he reveal it? They’d all agreed that after it was nearly overrun the last time that they’d never tell anyone it was there, never expose its secrets again. If scavengers got hold of the weapons and the equipment there then the fragile world would crumble beneath them. There’d be no hope at all.

“Not that I’m aware of,” she said. “Besides, they’d be locked up tight and we’d have no way of getting in. Chances are they’d be full of cowards already, government officials and the like. Hell, the acting PM is probably down there, sitting it out while we die up top.”

The concourse was quiet now. Only a few guards walked back and forth to their duties. Evening was coming and outside the light began to diffuse and mingle with the glowing cook fires and small halogen lamps that blinked on by remote sensor. Night. Then day. Then who knew what.

“Have you ever thought of just asking Teague?” he said. She laughed.

“Like I said, civvies just don’t get how we work.”

“Maybe you soldiers just don’t get how we work. Outside of the Army, we generally ask people questions when we want to know answers.” He said this a little bluntly and she seemed to recoil from it, taking a sip from her second drink without looking directly at him.

“No,” she replied. “I’d never ask him.”

“Why?”

“It’s just not done. The chain of command is important to us. It’s not just following orders blindly - it’s about trusting the system, about believing that Teague knows what he’s doing and trusting him to do the right thing. If he says we don’t need to know then we don’t need to know. We should accept that. It isn’t a democracy.”

“What if you’re not a soldier?” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean what if I asked him? The rules don’t apply to civvies.”

“But you’re kind of a soldier to him. The rules kind of apply.” She grinned.

“We’ll see.”

“We’re to meet in the morning. I was told to pass on the message and that’s why I came looking for you. Zero-six-hundred. You’ll get your chance to ask then.”

She looked at him sideways and laughed. “What?” he said.

“You’re a character.”

“Gee, thanks.”

“I know what Teague means now.”

“What does he mean?”

“I-” She paused. The mirth vanished. “Forget it.”

“Come on,” he said. “What did Teague say? I’m starting to feel I’m being singled out here.”

“It’s nothing bad, just...” She stood up and adjusted her uniform. “I’ll catch you later.”

“You’re just going to leave me in suspense like that?”

“Yeah, I am.”

She began to walk away but he called after her.

“Thanks.”

“For what?” she asked.

“The drink.”

“They’re on the house.”

Those cryptic words followed him all the way back out of the centre but seemed to lead him through the survivor camps to the far end of the shopping park, towards the gates where a few of Steve’s mates were on duty. Nothing had been said about his death. Like Gary had pointed out, there was no longer any room for sentiment and it showed in the stoic way Teague’s men and women treated his tragic end.

But as he walked those very emotions tumbled around his insides, hitting his heart and his stomach as they rolled with the motion of his legs, highlighting the differences Reb had made between the Army way of life and the Civilian. Which would win? Which would carry the handful of survivors through this disaster and onto the next? Life itself seemed to hang in the balance. Tip it one way and all would be lost. A barren planet. Death the victor. Mankind joining the dinosaurs on the historical charts as just another extinct species. Tip it the other and it might thrive, maybe even return to its golden age of solar power and medical miracles. But push too far and it might become a global tyranny in the hands of heartless men, supported by technology that lay buried in plascrete tombs just waiting to be summoned from the past like the spirits of the old gods. The price of such a power was always paid in blood and with even a handful of the relics buried in Fort Longsteel or its sister temple, Vaagstad, Alan knew that the outcome could be even worse than all the world’s disasters put together.

With all this swirling like a great maelstrom in his mind, he approached the two men standing in the gatehouse and smiled. Moll was there, being patted by each in turn and loving the attention she was getting. Did she know his plan? Again Alan was drawn to the strange behaviour of his companion and wondered what had been done to her in the labs to create such a strange animal.

“Hey Alan,” said the first, his hand still on Moll’s head as she moved back and forth with delight. “Can we keep her?”

“She’s all kisses and cuddles now but you don’t want to be tied to her,” he replied, laughing. “She’s high maintenance.”

“Oh, I get it; she just wants me for my money.” Alan nodded. “Damn - I thought I was special.”

“We all did,” replied the other. “But she always goes crawling back to him.”

“She knows where her loyalties lie.”

He looked into the blackness beyond the searchlights that scanned the clear road outside. The night was coming in fast. He realised then that he’d never had to do gate duty and Teague had always left it to his own team, maybe because it was the most important task in camp and had to be done right. You get that wrong and a lot of people die.

“Must be hard,” he said. “Staring out into that all night.”

“You’re telling me,” said the first guard. “You start seeing things, especially for the first hour or so of every shift.”

“Yeah, you’re twitching near the alarm button until you settle into it,” said the second. “After a while you get used to it. The quiet down here means if anyone was to sneak up on us we’d spot ‘em.”

“Has it ever happened?” he asked.

“Only on Steve’s watch,” said the first, laughing. “Had a guy creeping up to the gate but it turned out to be a survivor. He wasn’t armed or anything but he was in pretty bad shape.”

“Lucky for him he didn’t get shot,” said his partner. “Steve was always cool under pressure. It’s a damn shame.”

Alan looked again into the dark. There were things moving, he saw them. Flickering, fleeting shapes that shifted and glided through the twilight. Phantasms. Spooks. The spirits of the dead. Tricks of the light upon fragile human eyes.

“He was a good soldier,” he said after a moment or two. “And a good mate.”

“That’s the fucking truth,” said the first. “Always looking out for us. Always doing his duty like a pro.”

“He could be really annoying at times but I’ll let him off for that,” laughed the second.

“Yeah. Legend.” He turned to Alan and said, “How did he die?”

He explained as much as he could and in doing so their tensions and pain seemed to lessen. On the one hand there’d been so much death and what was one more? But on the other they felt the loss so much more keenly because he’d been one of their own, a friend, and a companion and in the crisis they all faced this had become more important than water or food for survival. What was the point of feeding the body if the heart was dead?