Tomorrow’s World (30 page)

Then the sneer froze on his face, and his glassy blue eyes flitted to my left. I thought it was an attempt at misdirection, and was surprised he'd resort to such a crude and obvious tactic.

But his eyes actually focused behind me. The next thing I knew there was the
WHOOSH
of a knockdown being discharged. Unfortunately Paula must have been seeing double. She must have seen two Paretos about to attack me and, as luck had it, she fired at the wrong one. The gel sac flew past the Pareto and hit the foyer door with a cross between a
THUNK
and a
SPLATTER,
leaving a vivid green stain. The next sound was the clatter of a knockdown falling to the floor; the effort of firing it had been too much for Paula.

The sneer returned to the Pareto's face, bigger than ever. I tried desperately to think of a way to wipe it off. I couldn't hope to match his strength, let alone his reactions. He'd block or evade whatever I threw at him, and counter so fast I couldn't do likewise. A fair fight would be anything but fair—so instead of fighting fair and throwing a punch or kick I raised my hands as if in surrender…

And then I spat at him.

Numbers hate that even more than Names do; they're obsessive about cleanliness.

His hands instinctively came up to his face and I stepped in with a right hook that landed so solidly I felt his jaw dislocating and my arm jarring all the way up to the shoulder. I had a brief, nightmarish vision of the Pareto shaking his head, holding his jaw in his hands and clicking it back into place, and that awful sneer reappearing. With that in mind I followed the hook with an elbow strike. Such techniques don't look nearly as spectacular as a punch to anyone watching, but they do a dozen times the damage. The Pareto in front of me was living, barely breathing, proof of that; he pitched forward, reaching out for the nearest thing to grab hold of. The nearest thing was me, but I wasn't about to be grabbed. I took a step to the side and the Pareto clutched at thin air, then went down so hard I knew he wouldn't be getting up again until long after we were gone.

I hurried over to Paula, who was shakily getting to her feet.

“You okay?” I asked.

She nodded, and blinked a few times. It must have cleared her head, because her eyes were a lot more lucid after the last blink than the first one. We grabbed our packs and ran for the foyer doors.

I rammed my card in the reader and waited for the doors to slide open.

They didn't.

Paula looked at me and then we both looked at the reader. We were just in time to see it swallow my card.

More in hope than expectation I watched Paula take out her card and slot it in the reader. The doors remained firmly closed, and my hope disappeared along with the small plastic rectangle as it was swallowed by the reader.

My first impulse was to try the same thing on the airlock that I'd done on the stairwell door. However the airlocks are built to withstand a superstorm, and I knew that even if by some miracle I kicked down the inner door without breaking my foot, I'd shatter my leg on the more substantial outer one.

Even after a blow to the head, Paula is a whole lot sharper than me. She proved it by running over to the nearest of the fallen Paretos and taking the card from the ID pocket on the sleeve of his black coveralls.

I gave her a ‘That's my girl smile,' but she didn't smile back. There was an Olden Days saying about counting chickens. I couldn't remember exactly how it went, but I knew it was meant for situations just like this.

Paula took a deep breath, then slid the card home.

Nothing happened.

Then, just as my shoulders sagged, the doors slid open.

A little light flashed and there was a beep, reminding us to take some filtermasks from the dispenser beside the reader. Paula took four, and then the supply dried up. I considered running back for the other Pareto's ID in a bid to free up more filtermasks, but didn't want to give the reader time to change its mind about the validity of the card. And, anyway, all the filters in the dispenser wouldn't be enough to let us live happily ever after. So I followed Paula into the airlock.

The doors closed behind us with a hiss. For a horrible moment it seemed like the outer doors weren't going to open, and the airlock would imprison us until more Paretos came to finish the job the other two had started.

But seconds later there was a louder hiss. My ears popped as the pressure changed, and the warm, tainted air of the Outside washed over us. I'd never thought toxic air could be so good to breathe. I slapped on a filtermask. Paula did likewise, and we ran out into the dusk.

We didn't stop until there were ruined buildings on either side and a cracked and pitted road ahead of us.

W
E DIDN'T KNOW WHERE WE WERE GOING, BUT KNEW
we had to get there before night fell; in the darkness it would be a matter of ‘when,' not ‘if,' one of us had an ankle-breaking accident. Once the filter mask Paula had given me ran out I didn't bother replacing it. Paula didn't say anything, but I know she felt the same way because she didn't bother replacing hers when it fell off a few minutes later.

After a little while we saw a sign saying HOTEL up ahead. It seemed like as good a place to stop as any. Actually, it said H T L in letters that were meant to light up but wouldn't have had anything other than toxic rainwater running through their circuits for the last half a century.

It should have been romantic—two runaways, off to see the world—but we were quickly disabused of any such illusions. The first five or six bedrooms were overrun with cockroaches, and they'd turned each mattress into a breeding ground.

We didn't bother checking out any more bedrooms after that; we went to the dining room and made a table our bed, with our day packs as pillows. It was so hot we didn't need blankets, which was just as well because all the ones we'd come across were filthy beyond belief. We did, however, need air-conditioning, not only to purify the toxins, but to moderate the temperature. In its absence all we could do was lie there and sweat.

Paula fell asleep quite quickly. I suppose that's one advantage of not having an overactive imagination.

I just lay there with her head on my shoulder, and my hipbones digging into the hard tabletop. My coverall already felt loathsome and dirty, and so did I. I longed for a cold drink and a hot shower; for cool, clean air and a soft mattress. As I listened to the scurrying of rats, the scuttling of cockroaches and the whine of flies, a voice inside me asked the same question over and over again:
How long can we live like this?

I finally fell asleep in the hour before dawn…

And woke up at first light, stiff and sore, with something tickling my ear. Unfortunately it was a cockroach, not Paula, nibbling my lobe. I swatted it away and it was so big it fell onto the table with a metallic
CLINK.
It lay there on its back, coppery and hideous, with its legs thrashing at the air as it frantically tried to right itself. The only thing more disgusting than the top of a cockroach is the underside of one.

Not the ideal start to the day.

I don't know if it was my swatting movement that woke Paula, or the sound of the falling cockroach, or the weak gray light filtering in through the broken windows. Whatever, she stirred and moved against me. I'm guessing that in those first few moments she'd forgotten where she was because she smiled when she felt the length of my body against hers. Then she opened her eyes and the smile died as she took in the squalid surroundings. All she could say as our situation sank in was, “Oh, Ben!”

I couldn't say anything at all.

We were so filthy by the next day that we raided the first chemist we came to for shower gel and headed down to the river, even though the water was probably so full of toxins it wasn't safe to bathe in, let alone drink.

Our skinny dip cleaned away the sweat but left our skin horribly itchy.

I asked Paula the question I'd put to myself earlier: “How long can we live like this?”

Practical as ever, she said, “We'll have a better idea when we've seen how much food and drink there is in the ruins.”

As it turned out, we couldn't find anything to eat and drink at all. Too many people, no doubt every bit as desperate as we were, had beaten us to each house and shop by forty or fifty years.

While we didn't find food or drink we found plenty of other things, and at first the novelty of them distracted us from our thirst and hunger. Everywhere we looked there was something we wanted to examine more closely, either because it was particularly quaint or poignant: mailboxes with letters addressed to people who'd long since died; garden furniture for sitting Outside; playparks with swings and roundabouts; rockeries with foot-tall plastic gnomes; and cars vandalized in every kind of way—windscreens smashed, tires slit, doors dented and scratched. Some were burnt out, others covered with paint that had been flung from pots or sprayed in angry aerosol attacks. Words like
Mass Murderer
and
Planetkiller
appeared over and over again.

And, inside the houses, we came across countless unsusual things that told of a bygone age:

A collection of costume dolls, an album of stamps, and bundles of football cards.

Photos of newly-weds sharing their first kiss as man and wife; proud parents christening babies; retired couples posing on vacation in faraway places. I couldn't help but wonder what had become of all those people; of their hope and love, their joy and pride.

And then there were the other buildings:

A courthouse and jail block with unlocked cells and graffiti scratched on the bare plaster walls.

A filling station which had been burned almost to the ground, probably by eco-terrorists rather than by accident.

A boutique full of moth-eaten clothes that hadn't been in fashion for over half a century, from trousers with flared bottoms to striped halter-tops.

A museum with golf clubs and fishing rods and other reminders that the Outside had once been viewed as a healthy place to be.

A bus station with timetables for coaches that hadn't run for sixty years.

And a church that had fallen victim to every conceivable form of sacrilege. Despite all the signs of abandonment by God, someone had apparently sought refuge there; a perfectly articulated skeleton clad in disintegrating clothes was spread out on a duvet near the altar, as if somebody had simply lain down and died.

As always in such situations I felt like a cross between a tomb raider and an archaeologist.

“I wonder who it was,” Paula said, looking at the bones.

Something in those words and the way she said them made me look from the skeleton to her.

Aware she was being watched, Paula met my gaze and asked, “Why are you staring at me like that?”

“Because of what you just said—about wondering; and the way you said it—wistfully.”

Paula looked back at the skeleton, and said, “The past's never seemed so immediate.”

“What about that first time you were Outside, when we went to the library?”

“I suppose I knew on a subliminal level that what I was seeing had nothing to do with the reality of my life, and so I made no effort to engage with it. But now I know this is my world, I'm starting to wonder about it.”

“Looks like we're not as different as we thought,” I said, but she didn't seem to hear.

“In the museum I found myself wondering about the games people once played,” she said, as if thinking aloud.

“In the courthouse I began wondering about the people who'd scratched their names into the cement of the cellblock walls.

“In the bus station I got to thinking about where the buses had gone to, and who'd stood in line waiting for them.

“Everywhere we look, I find myself thinking about something to do with the past, whereas before I never gave it a second thought.”

“Looks like you have a sense of wonder after all, Paula. It just never had a chance to come out in the community.”

“I'm starting to feel like a different person,” she said. “I still can't identify with the past like you do, but I want to find out about it. I
wonder
about it. There are thoughts filling my empty moments, thoughts of vanished lives.”

She looked up from the bones in front of the altar, and said, “The downside is that some of those thoughts that fill the empty moments are about our future, as well as other people's past—and those thoughts are ones I'd rather not be having.” She looked back at the skeleton.

I knew exactly what she meant.