The Gone-Away World (44 page)

“In there,” says Hellen Fust, “I heard something.” Ricardo van Meents, for some reason wearing desert camo, marches into the house.

The scene is weirdly familiar. I consider it: an armed force in fruitless pursuit of the Bey and his scoundrels. Searching an empty house. An old scar on my scalp is itching.
Oh.
I watch Ricardo van Meents with something approaching sympathy. Visible inside the doorway for a moment, just under the lintel: a flicker of angry, bottlebrush tail. Van Meents doesn't notice.

I close my eyes for a moment and count to three. I wait until I hear the sound of an expensive executive screaming as a sexually frustrated, rabid cat falls on him from above. I wonder briefly whether it is the same cat, imported for this purpose. And then I start to laugh.

Ricardo van Meents comes running out, wearing on his head a furious feral tom with one ear and no nose to speak of. Hellen Fust glares at me, then stalks after him. I am so fired. But since I quit anyway, that's hardly a problem.

That night we pack our things and leave Piper 90. We roll back along the Pipe, sleeping in our cars. We just keep going for days through the patchwork landscape, along tributaries and back to the main Pipe, until we come at last to a noisome little bar on the edge of a collection of shacks masquerading as a town. A sign reads “Exmoor welcomes you.” This seems unlikely. It is more probable that Exmoor doesn't like your face but has decided for the moment not to hit you with an axe handle. This place, at last, is somewhere we can stop and wonder what we have become.

We park up and stretch, and we stare around us at this ugly little place. There's a strong smell of pigs and a nasty-looking bar at one end of town. Sally Culpepper, who has in some measure understood for months that the end must come, and who understands further that with people like van Meents and Fust in charge there will always be a need for actual competence in the form of contractors, sits us in the saloon and puts the beers on the table and tells us that we are, as of now, the Haulage & HazMat Emergency Civil Freebooting Company, head office tbc, and we can call her “sir.” And Jim Hepsobah lifts her up in his arms and then onto his shoulders, and we mourn our lost jobs by dancing on the pool table (amid a collection of alarming stains) and around this ghastly, nameless dive we're in, until the barman starts swearing at us with such depth and natural talent that we all stop to take note.

Z
AHER
B
EY'S LETTER ARRIVES
by means unknown and unimaginable, left resting against the door of the Nameless Bar along with a basket of weird-looking fruit and the first decent cheese I have seen since the Go Away War. The paper is rough, and the words perfectly formed. It is the handwriting of someone who has learned the Roman alphabet as a second script, and as a consequence makes his words reverently, like a visitor in a house with a pale carpet.

We ate the cheese, one mouthful each, and gorged on the fruit. We even shared some with Flynn the Barman, for which he swore an oath of eternal friendship in terms which made my hair stand on end. And then we put the letter away in a box behind the bar: the secret escape route, the last resort. Two weeks later Sally Culpepper's phone rang. Some mayor of somewhere had a spillage of something, and there were brigands on horseback.

We took the job. We did it well. We got another.

From then on it was just life; each single day is short, yet when you come to count them you find that time's strange process has forged them all together into years. We found places to live, we painted fences and front doors, and the seasons abraded the paint and we did it all again. Samuel P. proposed to Saphira one Christmas, and she turned him down. He tried again twelve months later and her uncle set the dogs on him. Tommy Lapland found a grey hair in his pubic region and rushed to the Nameless Bar to show us all, in the process exposing his legendarily ugly member and causing Tobemory Trent to remark that he'd never before been sorry to retain one eye. Sally Culpepper got sterner and more beautiful, and moved in with Jim. Baptiste Vasille built a greenhouse and made wine which tasted of ash and fishbones. We told him it was delicious and breathed a sigh of relief when he drank a great deal of the Premier Cru and reversed his tank over the vines. Annie the Ox started collecting puppet heads. She had a cat, a dog, a monkey and several bears. But her favourite was an elephant head with bent tusks made of hempcloth. On its face was a sad little smile, as if it missed the taffeta savannah and the rolling burlap grasses of home. We never asked what they meant to her, because some things were private, however weird and unsettling it was to see her set them out in a little head-huddle over her bed. So all in all we ate and drank and loved, and passed time living the ordinary lot of people doing people things, and then one day the Pipe caught fire and the lights went out in the Nameless Bar and Gonzo Lubitsch put his big new truck into gear for the first time.

Chapter Nine

Meet Mr. Pestle;
the miracle of fire;
an act of heroism.

T
HE NEW
truck still smelled of plastic, but now it smelled of trucker as well: of too little sleep and a lot of coffee, of paying attention and hurrying. There was a feathery smear on the windscreen where the pigeon had bounced off the cab, and Gonzo had already spilled Flynn the Barman's espresso into the cupholder. Try as we might, though, we couldn't quite get rid of the smell of pig. It stuck to the seats and hung in the air, and from time to time you tasted it in passing if you were eating a piece of chocolate and were rash enough to open your mouth. Give us a few days of bad terrain and no showers, and this truck would be so entirely baptised in us that you couldn't imagine anyone else wanting to go near it, but that whisper of the wallow seemed as if it might be there for ever. I moved my feet along the dash, trying to jam my heels into the handle of the glove box, and they slipped. I lifted them back up and tried again. No good. Our old truck was just that little bit smaller, I could get purchase on the dash and wedge my spine into the seat, but this monster was more luxurious and I wasn't quite tall enough.

Drowned Cross was a day behind us, and for all my misgivings we'd come through the Border without as much as a single monster charging from the gloom or dropping out of a tree. The road had been empty from one end to the other. Once I saw a shadowy figure off to one side, and another time a bird or a bat flittered past the truck, but that was all. The route might as well have been cleared in advance. Even Bone Briskett seemed to feel we'd made good time, and he'd slackened his breakneck pace so that the drivers could breathe a little easier, and told us we were nearly there. Dick Washburn put his head out of the tank and pointed ahead down the road as if he were in command, and Bone's tank suddenly developed a mysterious gearbox problem which bounced him around and shook him up until he went back inside.

We came back into the solid world a little while later, and almost straight into Harrisburg, which was a no-fun town in a completely different way from Drowned Cross. It wasn't much of a burg and there had probably never been a Harris. It was a collection of little concrete boxes for people to be kept in while they were waiting to go on duty. You could see it in the bargain-basement architecture: those neat roads and regulation fences and heartless little prefabs, laid out as if they were a real town with shops and boutiques and cafes and a future, and not just a place of preparation and storage whose tomorrows were inevitably violent and sad. This town was a body bank; the adults were the current account and the kids were on deposit, just waiting to be spent at need.

Harrisburg's only reason to exist was on a muddy rise just beyond the tarmac square which served as the city centre: a big fat storage facility where they kept things no one who lived in Haviland City or New Paris would want to be anywhere near. Bone Briskett's tank rolled up to the gates, and a couple of guys in suits and standard-issue sunglasses came out and looked at him. Bone glowered back and gave them his ID. The standard-issue guys huddled. Bone growled, and the pencilneck popped up next to him and yipped, and they waved us through. The convoy peeled off to one side and we were escorted through to a vast, empty hangar with a lot of soldiers and standard-issue guys around it, and in the middle of this enormous space there were ten objects arranged in a ring. Each of them was a lash-up, a thing about seven feet tall and bolted together in a hurry.

Gonzo sucked air between his teeth.

Between the crossed arms of the standard-issue guys, we could see that each charge was made up of two big containment tanks yoked together. One tank was yellow, in a loud, friendly way which nonetheless was not reassuring. The other one was red, the kind of red which means it's best not to get near it rather than the kind which says come in and have a smoke and a fairy cake. The yellow tanks were marked with the word fox. The red ones had hazard stamps on them, and
STUFF
in black. These things, put together the right way, make what you might term an idiot bomb. It makes a very large bang, but you have to be stupid to want one.

Gonzo jumped down out of the truck, and sauntered over to have a look. The standard-issue guys didn't like that, so there was a great deal of cock waving, which went like this:

Gonzo's massive testicular superiority thus established, he caressed the nearest bomb in a moderately obscene way, and the rest of us climbed out of our trucks and started figuring out how best to lift and stow them. The soldierboys had a forklift, but forklifts don't have a whole lot of suspension and there was no way you wanted these things jolting around. In the end we rigged a set of A-frame pulleys with turntable waists, and we lifted them with actual muscle and sweat so we would be able to feel anything going wrong before it happened.

Mr. Pestle made his appearance as we were loading up the last truck, and he did it with aplomb. He was a genial old gaffer with weightlifter's shoulders and a neat patch of silver wire on his head, and he was craggy with a man's experience. His shoes were two-tone leather like a gangster's in a movie, and they made little noises as he walked:
tink
for one and
tonk
for the other. He threw an arm around Gonzo, and slapped him thunderously on the shoulder with one gloved hand. He was letting us know he wasn't Dickwash, that he was the real thing; that he had the right to tell us what to do, and just maybe he did. There was a faint scar along one side of his face, by the hairline, which might have been shrapnel, certainly wasn't a facelift. Mr. Pestle had a voice like a town crier.

“I'm Pestle, call me Humbert! Pestle like mortar, mortar like in a wall! Ain't that ever a regrettable name? If my mother was alive, God rest her, I'd have her walk behind me and explain herself to every Jack and Jill—especially every Jill! Dead these many years, the old monster, and tongue-lashing the Almighty in heaven or the Devil in hell, depending on her ultimate destination. So you're the guy? Gonzo Lubitsch, man of action? And these here are your deputies! Ha! Ha? Cowboy joke, you're too young . . . And this lady must be Sally Culpepper, who handed Washburn his papery backside and won you people a contract I'd like a piece of myself? Richard”—and by this he meant the pencilneck, probably the name Dick belonged to some crusty upper-echelon SOB and so Dick Washburn was Richard to his superiors, because there can only ever be One True Dick—“neglected to mention you had legs like the Queen of Sheba. Poor dumb animal never stood a chance, did he? Ha!” And he wrapped an arm around Sally too, with a respectful nod to Jim Hepsobah, because Humbert Pestle was not a genial old gaffer at all, he was a silverback, a pencilneck
in excelsis,
and he could read a personnel file and play you like a tuppenny whistle. Pestle nodded to the standard-issue guys, then turned back to us, as a group.

“Ladies and Gentlemen of the Free Company, we have exactly no time at all. You are near as dammit on schedule and I mean for you to stay that way, so let's get this thing started before it's too late to do it at all. Unlikely though it may seem I have a few things to tell you which may actually help. When I was a young man,” Humbert Pestle said, “we used to call it ‘the Dope.'”

Maybe it was that one word which turned the trick: “the dope” is sniper slang for anything which helps you acquire and hit a given target. There was something about him too, a sniff of gunmetal beneath the fluff. Humbert Pestle gestured, and we trotted towards a pale green door in the far wall. He waited until the last of us was through before he came in himself.

B
URNING
FOX
WAS A MOST
fearsome thing. If it came into contact with live Stuff, it would ignite it instead of neutralising it, and that Stuff would ignite more Stuff, and pretty soon the unreal world would be on fire. And the unreal world was wrapped around the Livable Zone like the doughnut around the jam.

At the same time, FOX fire was very rare. You had to get it very hot, for a long time. So this could be an accident, but if so it was a particularly odd one, and if it wasn't then that was something else to watch out for.

Humbert Pestle leaned on the table at the front of the room. I noticed he'd taken off only one glove. It wasn't cold in the briefing room, but he was a respectable age. Or maybe he had a prosthetic, because he was careful with that hand, held it close to his chest as though it were fragile. He flicked on an overhead projector and there was a map, with lines of elevation and the clear, sharp boundaries of a cluster of buildings.

“This is the place. We call it Station 9,” Pestle said. “It contains our major reserve of FOX and a small back-up FOX generating system. And this is the fire.” He pulled a second layer of plastic down over the first, and a great, uneven patch of red swallowed the building, going orange over some storage huts and verging on yellow in the centre. “And this is the storm which is arriving in about twenty hours.” And over the top he laid a pattern of pressure and wind which would fan the flames and lift anything escaping straight to the Border and beyond.

“Ladies and Gentlemen, please!” And when we looked at him, he said it again: “Please . . . Go down there and
put that fucker out.
” Humbert Pestle had lived a life. He knew how to swear and make it stick. And one by one we looked at him and nodded, and Jim Hepsobah looked at Sally, and she nodded too.
Yes, sir.

Jim Hepsobah stepped up and talked about approaches, and Annie the Ox joined him like a maiden aunt talking tea and cake, but she was talking explosive yield and necessary detonation overlap and minimum functional vacuum. Conventional explosives wouldn't get the job done for burning FOX, hence the ten scary objects in our trucks outside. We'd set them in exactly the right place, detonate them in exactly the right sequence, and the blast would suck the air away from the fire and blow out the ordinary part of it, and the sudden combination of FOX and Stuff would do the same to the unconventional part. So all we had to be was brave, fast and perfect.

Okeydokey.

There were two serviceable roads, here and here, and we could have either of them or both of them to ourselves. And we had no time, none at all. Even without the storm winds coming, pressure in the Pipe was so low it was effectively offline in a great arc from Sallera to Brindleby, and there was word of a vanishing. It was unconfirmed but probable: a little place called Templeton, maybe three hundred people gone. Bad at any time, but very bad now because maybe the two were connected.

I'd been to Templeton twice—once on a job, and once with Leah for shopping, because Templeton was one of those rare places which traded with the people from the Border. It was right out on a finger of the Livable Zone, a valley spur which came off the Pipe and nestled in the crook of a lake. The borderliners came in their nimble cars and hefty 4 ×4s and traded unlikely fabrics and new spices. Risky living, to stay ahead of the Stuff and remain unchanged, and even more so, to come within reach of a town. If the folk there decided you were
new,
anything could happen. But now Templeton was gone, and you had to ask yourself whether maybe they'd had a little too much to do with the Border, and it had taken them. I shut my mouth very tight and tried not to feel sick at the idea of Templeton shucked from its shell and swallowed like Drowned Cross. Pestle drew his face down and a little bit of the old, cold bastard was briefly visible within; if Templeton
was
gone, then there was going to be a reckoning this time. You didn't come into his bit of the world and pillage and plunder and steal his people out from under him. He leaned forward again and rested both hands in fists on the table (the plump, naked one squashed around the fingers but held at the knuckle:
a little boxing at the alma mater, old fellow,
and the muscles under his jacket heaved a little; the prosthetic didn't give at all). He asked if there were any questions, and there weren't, that was all there was. He looked around the room, nodded to Gonzo, and walked out, his shoes making that weird little noise again, one going
tink,
the other one
tonk.
We looked after him, and Jim Hepsobah walked up to the front and growled.