Lost Girl (25 page)

There was transport to consider too.
Ditch it
. He was stranded here now, and near-broke. The spectre of the search grinding to a halt was too appalling to consider, and it now mantled
him like a black cloak. Next time they spoke, he’d beg Gene to get him a new vehicle.

There had been nothing on the news yet about his move in Taunton. At best, the crime would only make local news anyway. But before he abandoned the car, even the southwest channels on the
vehicle’s media had failed to mention the home invasion. Its omission made the father feel even weaker and more nauseous. When he took a sip of his beer, he immediately wanted to spit it
out.

But he was closer. Despite everything else, he was closer to
the one
. And closer to the truth of what happened to
her
. A notion of Semyon Sabinovic and Oleg Chorny, these Kings
of Death, appeared again in his mind and quietly burned there. Somewhere around here, behind a shuttered window and locked doors, perhaps the men had once planned their own move: to step upon his
family’s front lawn two years ago and take his little girl. He almost wanted at least one of them to be alive so that he could destroy him. He’d make sure they were deceased while he
was in the neighbourhood.

Anger remained his only source of strength through exhaustion, and that alone must carry him across the finish line. Because if the abductors were dead, two other men remained: the one who had
paid for her, and the lawyer that had brokered the kidnap with Yonah Abergil. Maybe three if the second car, which took his daughter to her destination, had a driver. They were the men who’d
reduced him to a scruffy transient with blood on his hands. A spree killer, a vigilante. And, by God, he would deliver their fate, if his own fate delivered enough time. Two more, maybe three more
killings and then he was done. It didn’t seem possible, and nor did it seem real that he was making such calculations while drinking a pint.

The father became aware of a figure seating itself, to his left side, who he spied from the corner of an eye. An old man, bearded, mad-haired: another solitary figure, wet and crumpled from a
scurry to this miserable cave that offered small comforts while the sea battered the town. He turned away from his new neighbour.

There was little chatter in the pub, no music. Mostly loners sat about the old tables and slumped in mismatching chairs; their sombre air was matched by the dim yellow lighting. All were
watching one of two screens. Each broadcast different news channels quietly. Both had recently switched from India to show the fires in Australia. The great tinderbox had really gone off this time.
Fire superstorms had surrounded Perth and Melbourne. Sydney and Adelaide had gone up days before. The bulletin said there were over twelve hundred separate fires surrounding and converging on
Sydney. Crown fires in every city, flashing through the dry treetops faster than cars could accelerate, burning out the oxygen beneath. One hundred and twenty firefighters dead already, trapped
between narrowing walls of smoke and flame. Heat and drought for years were the culprits yet again, but accompanied by fast winds this time, which would not abate even while the rain fell
hopelessly onto the sea. Chronic water shortage, rationing: a too-familiar pattern. The father thought of the past summer and took a long drink of his beer.

‘They’ve had six weeks of fifty-degree heat in the interior towns. Imagine that.’ The old man next to him had just spoken; the back of his matted head still confronting him. It
wasn’t clear who the old man spoke to: the father, or the room. No one nearby seemed eager to engage with the shabby figure.

‘We broke forty this summer, for a few days. But they’ve had forty-eight degrees seven times in the cities this year.’ He half-turned to the father, speaking over his shoulder.
‘Their agriculture has gone. They won’t even try to keep what’s left of the wheat farms after this.’ The old man shook his head wearily, but knowingly, as if he had been
waiting for this news after a long period of being ignored. ‘Tasmania can’t take any more from the mainland. New Zealand doesn’t want any more. They already got more Chinese than
the Canadians. This is the worst they’ve ever had it in Australia too. They have pyrocumulonimbus now. Thunderstorms made from smoke. Hundreds of miles outside these cities, the hail will be
black.’

The screen showed a map; three-quarters of the east coast of Australia was bright red. Cutaways showed what looked like a mountain range only it was black smoke, as wide as the camera could
capture. A rim of tiny orange flames flashed near the foot of the black mountains. ‘That smoke’s going into the stratosphere. Could turn the place to winter. Block out the sun. Only a
volcano or nuclear war would do the same.’ The man spoke with an authority that was somewhat jaded and dry. He’d probably been in business once, something now defunct. The father
recognized the old chummy tone, forceful and deceptively benign. ‘Chinese and Indians will do the same thing very soon out of desperation, mark my words, with sulphur. They’ll fire it
from artillery to block the murdering sun. Treaties don’t mean anything to them. Then we’ll all be in trouble.’ The man shook his grizzled head and finally looked at the father
with a face leathered by weather hot and windy, his flesh deeply lined and black-spotted with melanoma, the stark contrast of pure white hair making him look slightly aboriginal. There was no drink
on the shelf before him. That was what he wanted: a sap to buy an old rummy a round.

The father returned his gaze to the bleary window and looked at the froth rising, seeming to hover and then crash behind the seawall. In the far distance, he could see the thin, blurred outlines
of two surviving wind turbines.

The old man followed his eyes, and his thoughts. ‘An installation from a mad artist. That’s what I always think when I see them on a clear day. The ones still standing. There were
two hundred out there, twenty years ago. I watched them go up. A fitting sculpture upon the tomb of a species now. The ruins of a civilization already falling, don’t you think? Red herrings,
false hopes.’ He sniggered. ‘I piss upon their graves.’ The man laughed louder. ‘Wind farms, biofuels, zero point energy, carbon capture and sequestration. You old enough to
remember all of that? I’ve seen it all come and go. But you’re probably too young to remember the space mirror plans. Ha! Then it was cold fusion. Now it’s geo-engineering with
sulphur, to save us from the heat. Last roll of the dice, and it will be the last roll. Sulphur will drop the temperature and kill the only crops that are still growing. We’ve already crossed
the line. Why make it even worse? Desperate people, desperate times, desperate solutions. All counter-productive. Just let it go to hell, that’s what I’d do. It’s what the planet
wants, but we can’t accept it.’

Despite his misgivings, the father found the man’s monologue a welcome distraction from the infernal wait for Gene Hackman’s call. He found himself smiling too, as if the
vagrant’s pessimism had discovered a comfortable chair inside his mind. ‘Drink?’

‘I can’t get you one back. But if that’s not a problem, I’ll take a glass of that.’ He nodded at the father’s pint.

The father went to the bar. The landlord asked him if it was for the old man. ‘I don’t like that old bastard coming in here. It’s your money, but that’s his last drink
before we shut. You got that?’ The father nodded, ordered a second glass for himself and made his way back to the window. ‘Make it last,’ he said to the old man.
‘You’ve already got me in trouble.’

The old man looked embarrassed and uncomfortable upon his stool, and the father’s heart spiked with pity, briefly. ‘Cheers.’ He raised his first glass, still half-full, and
nodded at the sea. ‘You keep up with this, so what’s next?’

The old man swallowed half the contents of his pint glass in three gulps, then gasped, grinning. ‘Season of hurricanes this year. Worse than two years back. We’ll be going up a notch
on the graph. Wind’s already coming in at sixty-four—’

‘No. Out there. Further out. I’ve lost touch, with so much.’

‘The sea? We’re waiting. Still waiting. Nearly ice-free now. Gone for good in a few years, I think. They’re still mourning the last of the cod round here, but they won’t
be coming back, they’ve gone the way of the pliosaurs. It’s the hydrogen sulphide I’d be worried about. Under the ocean floor. If it bubbles up, that sea out there will look like
jellied sewage. The stink alone would knock you out. I think our descendants will smell that within a hundred years.’

The father smiled. Ironic that it was no longer human emissions doing the most damage to the atmosphere; the earth’s own expulsions had become far more deadly, and the planet now seemed to
be pursuing a purpose of its own. Great fields of permafrost were releasing their terrible and long-withheld breath into the air, while the forests and oceans absorbed less carbon dioxide than
ever. ‘There’s still a bigger picture,’ he said to the old prophet. ‘Everywhere. Here. Us.’ There had been a time when nearly everyone spoke like this too. Such a
discourse had since become socially unwelcome, once the climate was no longer an existential problem, part-denied and easily ignored. The father wondered if he was one of the few people remaining
who could withstand what the old man predicted. But they had once held court everywhere, men like this, in bars, streets, public transport; platforms for their bits of science, an obsession with
the news, their Armageddon scenarios. They became popular after local disasters, then just as quickly tiresome, often contradicting each other.

The old man’s avuncular tone hardened. ‘I can’t tell you a thing that wasn’t already known forty years ago. And that’s the craziest thing. What did we think would
happen? We deforested the land to cultivate livestock, we allowed our numbers to burgeon without limit. And we still burned the coal. We are still burning coal. Two hundred and fifty years, give or
take a few, of intensively burning coal for this? What were we expecting? That’s the only thing that astonishes me. We knew. We’ve known what was happening for close to a century. But
we kept burning the black stuff. And now we have those feedbacks everywhere. This storm is because of the coal we burned twenty years ago.’

The father couldn’t contradict the man. From the theories of the scientists down to their street apostles and evangelists, the most accurate guesses and realistic scenarios had been
present, hinted at, suggested, even explained, for decades. As the father knew from his time in logistics, no matter how deep the slide into the appalling became, nothing had ever been allowed to
disrupt an economy. Even now, in some places.

The old man wiped his beard. ‘The planet’s been more than patient. It was around for over four billion years before we set the first fires to clear the land. But it only took ten
thousand years in this inter-glacial period for us to spread like a virus. We were the mad shepherds who didn’t even finish a shift before we poisoned the farm and set fire to the barn.
We’ve overheated the earth and dried it out. So it’s time for us to leave, I think. Don’t you? We are already deep into the sixth great extinction, right now, this very
minute.’ He nodded at the window. ‘There’s no whimper or bang, just a long series of catastrophes. Year after year, decade after decade, always worsening, always leaving things
changed after each crisis. The past is unrecoverable. Extinction is incremental. There is no science fiction. Advanced physics, inter-galactic travel, gadgets? An epic fantasy, the lot of it. There
is only horror ahead of us now.’

The father smiled. ‘How long do we have?’

The scruffy figure took another long drink and smacked his lips, encouraged, his murky eyes possessing an inner light. ‘In less than ten years half the species on this planet will be
extinct. That’s a fact and that should be the indicator for us. To live through that. Think of it. But this place isn’t about us, not any more, if it ever was. We’ve already
overheated by four degrees. Some places are already at five and rising. And there must be close to nine billion of us. The earth cannot carry us any longer, not in those numbers, and not even close
to that figure. If I was a betting man, I’d guess that at least eight billion of us will die back, in order for our species to even continue for another couple of centuries. Eight billion
over the next two hundred years, give or take a few decades. It’s more than we can imagine. But I think we’re beginning to get the gist of it.’

They sat with that thought between them, like an uninvited stranger at the table, and they watched the fire onscreen as the rain belted the windows close to their faces.
Where can we
go?
the father wondered.
We are alone in space. There is nowhere to go
. The quick, cold realization never failed to produce an icy tension, the size of a snooker ball, behind his
sternum. The very earth was getting smaller. To migrate north as a species and to go higher and higher as the heat rose, and to compete for fewer and fewer resources . . . The closing of borders.
The end of food exports. The ever-emerging hostilities to seize fresh water and arable land . . . All of these things were part of the penultimate stage of mass collapse; the idea could still take
his breath away.

One of the screens switched to an artillery barrage in Kashmir. The landlord pushed the volume up. A few more tousled heads in the bar turned to the news. The father couldn’t hear clearly
from where he sat.

Subtitles indicated that Pakistan was now demanding half of the water in the Sutlej, Ravi and Beas rivers, and for India to completely desist using water from the upper parts of the Jhelum and
Chenab rivers . . . During the last twelve hours, the British and United States governments had urged all their citizens to leave both countries. Diplomatic staff were in the process of being
evacuated.

The vagrant had finished his drink and was licking the tangled beard around his mouth. The father checked on the barman: he was watching the latest from India intently with two customers.
Carefully, the father moved his second glass of beer towards the old man. Slid away the empty glass and hid it under the window counter. ‘You’re local?’