The Raft: A Novel (45 page)

To Andy, the lights of the recharge station were brighter than the golden glow of the Pearly Gates. Kayle took one more bend around the mountain and then they were there, finally. He pulled the autovehicle off the road and parked in one of the empty bays beside two big rigs. The AV shut down and the seat belts retracted from their bodies.

Kayle looked out the window. There was nobody at the station. The lights of the signs beamed above the four big recharge cylinders. There was a small convenience store behind them, no one there but a lone woman at the counter, sluggishly paging through a tabloid magazine.

Andy opened the back door and was just about to dart off, when Kayle yelled, “Whoa, kiddo! Easy.”

Sarah told him she’d wait in the car with Maggie. The last thing they needed was for Maggie to catch sight of the sugary junk food that lined the shelves.

Kayle got out and walked behind Andy as he hurtled across the concrete towards the lavatory. The country air was bitterly cold, but Andy wasn’t outside long enough to feel it. He had rushed through the door, out of sight. Kayle opened the door to the lavatory to check if there was anyone else in there, and could already hear the steady stream of pee in one of the stalls.

“Meet me in the shop as soon as you’re done,” Kayle called out. “Andy?”

“Yes, Dad,” Andy replied.

Kayle went into the clinically lit warmth of the convenience store. The girl behind the counter was no older than eighteen or nineteen, and Kayle wondered how safe it was for her to be holding fort after dark. She lifted her head from her magazine, acknowledged Kayle’s arrival with a nod, but offered nothing else. He walked to the fridges at the back and grabbed two small bottles of still water and a can of Vintage Elixir, some organic energy drink he’d heard someone at work talking about. He was reading the incomprehensible ingredients on the side of the can when the door chimed and his son entered the store.

“Feeling better?” Kayle asked. “Mission accomplished?”

“Ja.”

“Did you wash your hands?”

“There wasn’t any soap but I used hot water.”

“Come on. Let’s get back to the ladies.”

Andy smiled and Kayle guided him back through the shelves towards the counter. He looked up at the clock on the wall. About another thirty minutes of driving, he guessed, and then they’d be at the lodge. He’d tucked that good Pinotage in the boot when he was packing—Sarah’s favourite. Just right for what he had planned: make a big fire, throw the blankets off the bed and onto the floor. The kids would go to bed and the two of them could curl up in front of the fire and catch up on each other’s lives—all the deep, silly, sexy things they’d been too distracted to share in the last few weeks.

On the way to the front of the store, he grabbed a box of imported dark chocolates and two small chocolate bars for the kids. He put it all down on the counter and the girl scanned and slid each item over the thumbprint reader. She looked pale, almost sickly, as if she’d been sentenced to that convenient store indefinitely.

“Dad?”

“Hm?”

Kayle glanced down. Andy was standing with his back to the counter, staring through the glass doors. Kayle turned to see what was holding his son’s attention. Beyond the recharge pumps and across the concrete, he saw the car—his car. The back door was open.

“I forgot to close it,” Andy said guiltily. “Maggie.”

Kayle spun around.

Maggie was out there. By herself. She’d climbed out and was walking up the grassy embankment that hugged the road. Sarah was in the passenger seat, completely oblivious.

Kayle burst through the door into the cold night. His eyes flitted from Sarah in the front seat, occupied by something on her lap, to their daughter, now climbing towards the dark mountain road …

“Sarah!” Kayle shouted, picking up speed.
“Jesus!
Sarah!”

Sarah’s head jerked up. She turned and saw the backdoor. Open. Realisation hit:
Maggie. Where’s Maggie?
She sprang from the passenger seat, stood for a fraction of a second.
Maggie. Where’s she gone?

That’s when Kayle saw the lights.

Two yellow lights beaming in the darkness, two yellow flaming eyes, a hulking creature waiting for just that split second—just that terrible moment—to awaken from its slumber. A car, racing around the bends, screaming from its tyres.

“Maggie!” Kayle yelled as he ran. “Maggie!”

His daughter was in the road, far from their parked car, far from her mother tumbling through the bushes towards her. The eyes grew larger, brighter, the creature screamed louder and higher, it spun around the final bend, and then there they were on that fateful stretch, on a collision course towards a moment: one that would alter their lives forever. A moment that would delete a timeline.

Thump.
A small sound. Almost no sound at all.

The car struck Maggie and she flew into the darkness. The two yellow lights flashed past, and then they were red and then they were gone. Vanished. Hidden by another bend in the road. The car hadn’t even slowed down. But Kayle wasn’t thinking about the car. Kayle thought nothing at all. Fear was erupting from the top of his head, spilling everything he was and would ever be into the world, leaving no remainder. Fear. Hot and blinding and cold and deadening. Destruction. No name. No place. No memory. Just destruction—and horror.

Kayle hurtled towards the embankment. But he could not move fast enough. He could not see over the rise of the embankment. He wanted to fly over it, into the wall of the night that was hiding an unimaginable truth from him.

But he didn’t fly, he fell. His foot struck a corner of a concrete curb and he went hurtling down to the ground. His jaw struck the surface and he tasted blood from his tongue.

Kayle raised his hands in the direction of the road. His ears were ringing. His pants were ripped where his knees had met the hard earth.

And as he saw his shrieking wife emerge from the darkness, running through the bushes with their limp daughter flapping in her arms, flapping and lolling and bleeding, there was
knowledge
, sudden and immediate. She was gone. His daughter was no more. Maggie was dead.

Dust and skeletons

T
he Silver Whisper showed us the world.

As the sun and moon rolled overhead, we soared across every kind of terrain. We sped across a range of snowy peaks where two continents crashed into each other, over an ancient city, long silvery seascapes, patches of steaming marshland. We looked down on shambolic blankets of houses tossed in heaps around large cities, trailing into thin clusters as the countryside took over. We slipped through wrinkled canyons, over gushing rivers, and across grasslands bowed by the wind. We saw woods, cracked deserts, salt flats, twisted jungles and neat bays lined with the glittering towers of expired super-cities.

Each landscape could have been the surface of its own planet. Over every horizon a new face of the earth was revealed—broken and beautiful, peaceful and perilous—and I realised then the many outlandish faces of Man were but miniature reflections of those very outlands.

The final horizon of our journey had arrived and we were approaching the ragged valley where the Silver Whisper had first come crashing down. Gideon was the one who noticed the reading on the screen. The number of kilometres left to travel clicked to less than thirty, a short stretch from our destination.

There was a small farmhouse on a square of pasture to the left of us, which might have been the house of Jai-Li’s unremembered family. I saw the route the young girl must have taken back to the pod. As I tried to imagine her down there, I felt something well within me—a sense that Gideon and I had become a part of that lore, of everything we’d heard. We were flying among the words of a story, into the realm of myth, a modest Holy Land only we had been allowed to know.

As the kilometres on the screen dropped to zero the Silver Whisper floated down and circled in the air above the rocky earth. We were hovering directly above the spot where the pod had once crashed, the only detail of interest in an otherwise unremarkable location. The pod lowered slowly, setting up a gentle rustling in the nearby brush and scattered trees. Small rocks and pebbles clattered in their places. We touched the ground and the whirring of the engine subsided and then stopped completely.

On either side, jagged cliff-faces extended upwards. The arid land was hot and unforgiving, and the trusses of dull green plants crawling up through the gaps between the rocks alluded to a long, waterless history.

Gideon grabbed our bags from under the seats as the side of the pod opened. The warm desert air rushed into the cool interior. I shouldered my rucksack and stepped out. I scrambled down a pile of dusty rocks with Gideon close behind me. When we were about twenty metres from the pod the door retreated into the body of the pod, closing seamlessly.

“Where do we go from here?” Gideon asked. I stopped and looked up and down the valley. I’d seen the farmhouse as we’d flown in, which meant the tower was most likely in the opposite direction. That was as much as I could deduce.

“There. I think,” I said, pointing towards the narrowing walls of steep mountainside before us. “I want to say I’m sure, but …”

Gideon did not hesitate, and began to walk in the direction I had suggested, placing one careful foot in front of the next on the bed of loose rocks.

“There isn’t a sure thing left, Mr. Kayle,” he said, pushing on confidently as if he’d seen a large arrow painted on the side of the mountain. “I’m quite sure about that.”

I followed him, over rocks that crackled and clapped beneath our feet. As we walked away, I looked back over my shoulder once more to pay my last respects to the vessel. The metallic bubble had served us well. It sat easily in its spot, catching the blue sky and orange cliffs, as if holding on to a memory of its own. It was finally ready to take Jai-Li and her child to the temple. It was her story that had allowed us to get to where we were. I would never forget that. But it was Shen—the one who had ingeniously intertwined our paths—who deserved more than our gratitude.

We owed it to him to go on.

He deserved an ending.

We hiked our way through the rocky gorge, along the flat, winding scar of a long-dried river. We’d been walking for a couple of hours and the scorching weather was doing us no favours. We drank small quantities of water frequently, to stave off dehydration. We passed the skulls and skeletons of small and large animals, reminding us of an all too likely outcome. Gideon’s face was impassive. Either he was feeling no fear or he was able to control his emotions perfectly. I was faring less well. Each hot breath and sip of warm water did nothing to replenish me. I said nothing but could not help feeling we were marching towards our deaths. Any time now and we’d fall to our knees beneath the blue sky, defeated by the heat. We’d become two more fossils—two more dusty warnings for anyone foolish enough to pass.

“Gideon, I need to rest a moment.”

Gideon stopped. He tilted his face to the sky and blinked at the sun. I took a seat on a rock and pulled up my shirt to wipe the sweat from my face. Gideon grabbed a bottle of water and gave it to me. I threw back my neck and sipped, but held back from drinking more than I should. The water barely seemed to touch my throat, vaporising at the back of my mouth.

Big black birds circled overhead, waiting for our bottles to empty and our bodies to collapse under us—waiting to feast on the soft meat of our sunken eyes and swollen tongues. They’d seen this before. They knew how it ended, and perhaps even how long it would take to end. They circled in front of the sun, speckling the earth in moving shadows.

Gideon sat down next to me and had a sip of water. He dragged his forearm over his face and put the bottle back in the bag.

“I’m glad you’re here, Gideon,” I said. “I couldn’t do this without you.”

“Neither could I, Mr. Kayle. We should go. Let’s keep walking.”

Gideon lent a hand to lift me from the rock. He cupped a hand on my shoulder and then turned and navigated his way over the rocks. The birds broke their formation and flew towards the turn in the valley, perhaps towards something freshly dead beneath the murderous sun. We followed their lead.

As we walked, the shadows of the valley shifted, the day bled away. Once the sun went down, the temperature would drop drastically and we’d suffer the night.

Finally, the valley tapered and we had to climb over a pile of enormous boulders. We rounded a bend and the valley came to an abrupt end. Past the exit to the gorge there was a flat expanse of brown desert sand. Gideon and I stood atop a boulder and stared out.

“There,” Gideon said, pointing. “Do you see that?”

I could see it perfectly. At the edge of the horizon, a colossal black structure wavered through a mirage of heat. It was a man-made craft, the largest astromining ship ever built, the size of a small town. We were staring at Chang’e 11.

“We need a single day to get to it,” Gideon said. “There’s no point going now. Come the night, we’d be stuck in the middle of the desert. For now, we should find a place in the mountain to camp. We need shelter and water. More than that, we need to prepare ourselves, Mr. Kayle—our bodies and our minds. The desert does not forgive fools.”

Time

I
opened my eyes and I could hear and feel the rush of water beneath me. It took me a moment to figure out where I was. Finally, it came to me, with absolutely no sense of relief: I was on the ocean. I was on the raft.

I must be dreaming. Another cruel dream.

“Kayle,” I heard. I rolled my head to my left. It was Daniel, the young man who’d first brought us to the whale. He was holding the side of the raft. “You did it. You made it. It’s over.” He was standing in the water beside me, smiling awkwardly.

“
Gideon
…” My throat seared with pain.
“Andy … Chang’e 11
.”

“Take it easy now. Everything will be all right,” he tried to comfort me. “It was a long stretch, but it’s all over.”