Infinity Cage (7 page)

Liam and Bob allowed themselves to be carried along with the push of people squeezing through the north-east gate into the city. The tide carried them up broad stone steps, through another archway and into the large square courtyard Liam had spotted from the hillside. The temple platform.

He looked up at the huge stone walls and the tall Grecian columns running along them. Shadows danced across the stonework, cast up by dozens of flickering braziers. On top of the walls, Roman soldiers paced along walkways, watching the marketplace below. The vast courtyard was alive with noise: the cry of traders’ voices bouncing off the high stone walls round them, the bray of mules and oxen, the warbling coo of hundreds of sacrificial doves crammed into small wicker cages, the anxious bleat of goats.

‘Jay-zus, it’s busy in here!’ uttered Liam. In his ear, the babel-bud translated his words into approximated Aramaic and calmly whispered the words to him. Around him snatches of conversation began to be picked up by the bud and translated:

‘… fifteen shekels for those doves …’

‘… Gentiles, of course … only faithful pilgrims are permitted …’

‘… How much?! You can’t be serious! …’

‘… Over there! Slaughter those over there … at the temple. Not here, you foolish …’

The air was thick with incense burning from every trader’s stall. Across the courtyard, Liam could see that many of the male pilgrims were wearing pale shawls over their heads and odd-looking small square boxes strapped to their foreheads.

‘Bob? What are those box things?’

Bob consulted his database. ‘They are called phylacteries.’

‘Great, so now I know what they’re called. But what are they?’

‘The boxes contain religious texts and prayers, folded up inside.’

‘Uhh … really?’ He nodded, bemused. ‘Right. So, I guess it leaves their hands free.’

In the centre of the courtyard stood the temple, towering over the bustling marketplace, as high as the guarded portico walls that surrounded the entirety of the temple grounds. ‘So, we should make our way towards that building in the middle?’

‘Affirmative.’

They began to weave their way through the milling crowd, jostled and pushed by others eager to take their freshly purchased sacrificial animals towards the temple. Closer to it, they could see a long queue of people snaking out of the temple through a large bronze doorway, down shallow steps to a low knee-high wall that ran all the way round the outside of the building. Every last person in the queue, it seemed, was carrying something to present for a sacrifice: the women mostly had wicker baskets containing fluttering birds, the men leading rolling-eyed goats by tethers.

As they made their way along the side of the queue towards the low wall, Liam’s bud began to pick up fragments of male and female voices again:

‘… look at them! Look … they can’t –’

‘… blasphemy! Someone should stop …’

‘… they should be killed …’

Liam turned to look at the queue and saw eyes locked on them, round and incandescent with rage. He tried a disarming smile and a friendly wave. ‘Just having a look. We’re not pushing in, I promise!’ The babel-bud translated that into Aramaic and he did his best to voice out loud what his bud had whispered into his ear.

Whatever it was they heard him reply, it seemed to only make them more enraged. He reached out and grabbed Bob’s arm. ‘Uh, Bob? Are you translating what these people are saying?’

‘Yes. They appear to be very displeased.’

‘You’re not kidding. I think they think we’re pushing in front of them or something.’ They approached the low stone wall and Liam shook his head and tutted. ‘What is it with some people?’ He craned his neck to look up at the temple building, tall and imposing, the pale sandstone walls warmed by pools of dancing light from flickering oil lamps. He casually hopped up on to the low wall …

… and heard a collective intake of breath rippling all the way down the queue beside them. He could see hundreds of eyes glaring at him, mouths below dropped open, forming ‘O’s of horror and disgust.

Jay-zus, what the hell is wrong with these people?

Bob reached out for Liam’s hand, grasped it and pulled him roughly back down off the wall.

‘Whuh! Why the –?’

Bob pointed to a paving stone on the floor beside the wall. Characters were inscribed in it.

‘What? Let me guess, it says “No climbing around on the wall”, right?’

‘It says:
No Gentile is to proceed beyond this balustrade. Whosoever is caught will have himself to blame for his death. Which will follow directly
.’

Liam found himself instinctively backing away from the wall. He turned to the queue of people and shook his head. ‘I’m sorry, so sorry! I didn’t realize!’

A pair of guards emerged from the bronze doorway leading into the temple and began to approach them. Several of the men standing in the queue stepped out of it and also began to slowly pace towards them. They were shouting, bellowing angrily at him, fists balled and waving in front of their faces. The babel-bud in his ear kept starting and stopping, catching and attempting to translate snippets of Aramaic, then aborting to begin again.

‘You know what?’ whispered Liam. ‘I think we’d probably better turn and go.’

Bob nodded. ‘We are attracting a lot of attention.’

They turned their backs on the low wall and began to walk quickly away from the temple and diagonally away from the snaking queue of pilgrims.

Just brass it out, Liam. Brass it out and keep walking.

They picked up the pace and put some distance between them and the raised voices calling after them. Liam gave it a minute and then turned to snatch a quick glance over his shoulder. There were still a few men following them, men waving their fists and snarling. He saw one of them stoop down and pick something off the ground. He pulled back his arm and launched it at them; a moment later, a sharp stone bounced off the side of Liam’s head.

He yelped in pain. Put his hand up to his temple and felt a trickle of blood.

Bob stopped in his tracks, turned round and started to move threateningly towards the man who’d thrown it.

‘Hold it, Bob. I’m all right. It just smarts a bit.’

‘The action is threatening.’

‘Not particularly welcoming, admittedly, but let’s not kick off a bloodbath here.’

Bob growled.

‘Heel, boy … Let’s just make a quick exit before we start something.’

The motor launch took them west, at first weaving slowly through the labyrinth of skyscrapers, then out across the open channel of what was once the Hudson River, towards what remained of New Jersey. They chugged between the extended rusting arms of freight-loading cranes, emerging from the water’s surface at an angle, like the rotting boughs of vast dead redwoods.

New Jersey rooftops passed silently either side of them: warehouses, factories, shipping offices, then further westwards … apartment blocks, shopping centres, business centres. They passed the upper walls and roof of some sort of stadium. Above the main entrance was a large billboard featuring the fading and flecked red-paint logo of something that looked like a reclining horned imp.

‘New Jersey Devils,’ grunted the cabbie. ‘Greatest ice-hockey team … ever. Period.’ He looked at Maddy. ‘I saw them play once as a kid. That was way back in ’43. Must have been one of the very last games they ever played.’

She nodded politely, then looked back again at the waterlogged landscape sliding past them. Not a world wholly submerged. That might have been more bearable if it had all been lost far
beneath the surface and lay out of sight and mind. But like this? A world struggling to keep its chin above a dirty, debris-encrusted tide? Looking at something floundering to stay alive, she figured, was far worse than looking at something long dead. Here and there she spotted signs of rooftop life: potted plants on terraces and verandas, rooftop gardens covered with bean stalks and tomato plants weaving their way round cane frames, buckets and awnings erected to gather and channel rainwater. She looked up at the brown-tinged, chemically tainted clouds above them and wondered just how drinkable that water was.

Signs of life hanging on here and there. People holding on to hope like those living among the Manhattan skyscrapers. Holding on and hoping that the tide that had crept relentlessly upwards, biting chunks inland, would eventually stop and perhaps recede.

And it’s all so frikkin’ futile,
she mused.
Because in three months’ time most of you poor wretches will be wiped out by the Kosong-ni virus.

A solemn mood had settled on her and Rashim as the launch chugged stoically westwards towards where the last New York cabbie had said the inland tidal surge finally gave way to the soaked edge of dry land: a place called Orange City, sitting right on the cusp of the as yet unsubmerged portion of New Jersey.

Four hours after they’d bid a fond farewell to Walt and Charm, waving them off from their improvised jetty, the cabbie finally pointed ahead. ‘There ya go. That’s where your troubles begin!’

Maddy looked back at him from the prow. ‘Troubles?’

‘Sure. Many of the folks who abandoned the east coast are mostly hangin’ on there. Waiting for the sea to go back out again.’ He shrugged. ‘Then there are those who figure the sea ain’t going nowhere, so they’re heading inland, west towards the FSA. Where
supposedly
there’s some kinda law and order still.’

As the water beneath them grew shallower, it was more than just rooftops breaking the surface; now the flat tops of e-Cars emerged, slick with tufts of algae and ribbon-like kelp. Then the wet green humps of seagrass-covered bollards and trash cans gradually came into view.

The cabbie eased back on the throttle. The laboured drone of the outboard dropped in pitch to a long-suffering grumble and the launch slowed down to little more than a cautious drift as he carefully weaved his way towards where the tide lapped against sodden tarmac.

They drifted beneath an overpass. Maddy looked up at a row of faces staring down at them, lining the railing, curious about the new arrivals. They emerged out the other side from the shadow it cast, towards the wet tarmac ahead.

‘That road dipping into the water there? You’re looking at the end of what used to be Interstate 280,’ he said, pointing. ‘Heads west if that’s where you’re goin’.’ He finally cut the engine and the boat slid slowly to a halt, with the rasp of weeds and kelp against the hull softening her gentle grounding.

‘That’s yer ride, folks.’

Becks hopped over the side into knee-deep water and took their backpacks with her as she waded ashore. Maddy and Rashim splashed over the side and joined her on the empty interstate, warily looking up at the people gathered on the overpass.

Maddy turned round and thanked the last cab driver in New York. He shrugged a
No problem
at them. ‘Good luck,’ he called out. ‘It’s
frontier land
from here on in. You watch yer backs.’

He jumped off the prow into the water, gave his boat a shove backwards and clambered aboard, started up the outboard and gunned the throttle. He waved one more time at them, then turned his launch round in a lazy arc and puttered back the way
they’d come, back under the overpass, heading eastwards, back to the drowned wilderness of New Jersey and New York beyond.

‘Frontier land?’ Maddy looked at Rashim. ‘Like … like one of those western movies?’

‘Lawless,’ replied Rashim. ‘He means lawless. We are on our own.’

Maddy nodded. Either side of the abandoned interstate was a shanty town of improvised shelters and lean-tos. Homes made from scavenged materials, cannibalized from buildings. Twists of smoke emerged from cluttered corrugated rooftops and narrow, muddy rat runs. The stillness and calm of Manhattan and New Jersey was replaced with a hubbub of activity: the barking of dogs, the wail and cry of babies and children, the clang of scaffolding poles being dropped somewhere, the rasp of a grinder cutting through metal, the call of bartering voices, the buzz of a distant chainsaw.

Everyday life eked out precariously, temporarily,
hopefully
, on the dirty leading edge of a mean-spirited flood tide that was busy teasing them with its intentions to advance or recede.