Spares (31 page)

“According to the maps this road should never have been here at all.”

“I thought I’d left that kind of stuff behind,” Vinaldi said. “I thought that was all gone.”

“Me, too,” I said quietly.

Suddenly, Vinaldi’s head snapped to the left, and his eyes seemed to pan quickly across the trees by the side of the road.

“What is it?” Tasked quickly.

“Thought I saw something,” he said, voice thick in his throat.

“Saw what?”

“A woman. Or something. Something in white, running through the trees alongside us.”

“Along the road?”

“No. About thirty feet into the trees.”

Uh-huh, I thought, pulling my coat a little tighter around me. I glanced out my side window. The trees seemed a little less dense for the moment, and I realized we were passing something that might once have been a picnic area. It was long, long gone, but for a moment I saw a shape out in the overgrown clearing. Like a picnic table, with four clumps of darkness around it. For a second I even thought I could see four pairs of orange pinpoints turn to watch us pass, but that was probably only because my eyes were held so wide open, and because I hadn’t blinked in an awfully long time. The one thing I knew for sure was that it was nothing to do with the Rapt I’d taken. This was exactly the kind of thing I’d become a Rapt addict to avoid.

Vinaldi heard the intake of my breath. “You see something?”

“No,” I said. “Nothing real, just more dreams.”

“We’re getting closer, aren’t we?”

“We must be. Look at the panel.” Ghuaji’s light had stopped moving, about half a mile ahead. Wherever we were going, we were nearly there.

Vinaldi let the truck grind to a halt, and his head
lowered slightly until it was resting on the steering wheel.

“Mother of God on a skateboard,” he said, his voice for the first time very shaky. “Now I realize you may have been right about going back. Suddenly, your whole sitting-very-quietly-somewhere-and-hoping-it-will-all-go-away option seems to speak of immense good sense and judgment.”

“Yeah,” I said, lighting a pair of cigarettes. “But you were right. I have no choice. If Suej and Nearly are in there I have to be, too. You don’t, though. You can leave me here, and go back.”

Vinaldi stayed still for a moment, breathing heavily. I knew this was not for show. I knew he was really thinking about it.

“You wouldn’t stand a chance on your own,” he said eventually.

“No one ever does. But we’re all still here.”

At that he pulled his head up and looked at me, and, slowly, started laughing. “Any more glib crap like that,” he said, “and I’ll kick you out into the snow and go back and find a hot meal and a warm woman and sit and laugh at the thought of you freezing to death.”

I grinned and passed him a cigarette. “It’s a deal.”

Shaking his head, Vinaldi gunned the motor and we surged along the road which now seemed even darker, even more abandoned.

And that’s when the indicator light on the Positionex went out.

“Shit,” Vinaldi said. “What’s wrong with that thing?”

I reached forward, banged it. Pointless, as it was a lump of solid-state inexplicability, but instincts die hard. Nothing happened, then two seconds later the light came on. It immediately disappeared, and further thumps made no difference.

“Hit it again,” Vinaldi said. “Fuck—threaten to shoot it.”

“There’s nothing wrong with it,” I said quickly. “He must be nearly there. If we don’t catch him he’s going to get pulled in without us.”

Vinaldi slammed his foot down on the pedal—too hard. The back wheels spun, the truck skewed sideways on the ice. He managed to back it off enough for the tires to catch and we slewed toward a corner at the end of the patch of level road.

“We’re never going to catch him,” Vinaldi said between gritted teeth, as he tried to keep the truck under control. “I can’t go fast enough. We’ll go off the road.”

“Just go as fast as you can,” I said, fumbling in my
pockets. I got out another clip and slammed it into the gun, then took a couple of foil packets out. “If-we lose him we might just as well go off the road anyway. Both you and me. Our lives are over. And it’s not just us, either.”

“What are you talking about?”

“if we don’t stop Yhandim from flashing back and forth, then more of this stuff is going to spill out. Everything will change, and it won’t be for the better.”

“Maybe you should get into writing greeting cards. Like ‘Happy wedding—bet it doesn’t last.’ Or ‘Sorry to hear you’re dead.’”

Vinaldi increased the truck’s speed until we were careening toward the corner, trying to stay within the tracks created by Ghuaji. Trees flashed by, black branches flicking hard against the windows. Much later than I would have, he pulled the steering and the wheels locked, sending us sliding toward a wall of rock. I shut my eyes, wishing I’d phrased my last sentence differently, and when I opened them again saw that he had somehow pulled the truck round the corner on the skid.

“Nice one,” I said. “But don’t ever do it again.” Then I fell silent just as Vinaldi stepped on the brakes and killed the lights.

We were in a roughly circular clearing. Sixty yards ahead of us I could see the taillights of Ghuaji’s vehicle. The car was stationary.

We were there, wherever the hell “there” was.

“What do we do now?” Vinaldi asked.

“Roll forward,” I whispered. “As quietly as you can.”

We went about twenty yards until the truck was mostly hidden behind an outcrop of rock, then I motioned for him to stop. By then we could see two things. The first was that although the engine was still running, Ghuaji wasn’t in his vehicle. The second was that on the left side of the road was a building, it was made of old, battered concrete and looked disused. No lights showed in any of the windows, most of which were broken. The shape of the walls was naggingly familiar, but it wasn’t
until I realized that the level patch was a compound that I understood what it was.

“It’s a Farm,” I said, bewildered. “It’s an abandoned SafetyNet Farm.” Once it clicked, the whole scene fell into place and I turned in my seat, taking it in.

An electrified fence must once have bordered the area. The main building lay up against the wall of the mountain, where tunnels doubtless led away into the hillside like abandoned concrete wombs. I hoped they were empty. Of course, they would be—they’d hardly abandon valuable spares along with the real estate—but for a moment the alternative possibility seemed all too real. Shambling naked bodies, crawling in darkness until the end of time, feeding off each other’s bodies and excrement until there was nothing left.

Until that moment I hadn’t realized what an extraordinary place the Farm had been, what it really said about humanity. As I stared out at the ruins of this one a shiver went down my back, a shiver which had nothing to do with the cold, or even with The Gap. I was thinking how right it was that the Farms should be connected with that other place, how in some way the mentality behind them was identical.

“Why here?” Vinaldi asked.

I shrugged, stirring sluggishly out of my thoughts. “I have no idea. It’s no closer to The Gap than anywhere else.”

“Unless Maxen’s found some method of forcing a way.”

“Can’t be done.”

“Why not? They got us out, in the end.”

“They didn’t get us out. The Gap got rid of us. They just shipped us home.”

“Bullshit. And if the whole thing was just some sort of fucked-up code zone, like they said, why couldn’t someone have found some way of hacking back into it?”

I shook my head. “That’s only what they said it was.”

“You don’t agree?” Vinaldi spoke with heavy irony, which I supposed was fair enough.

“No,” I said, “I don’t.”’

Then we both saw Ghuaji. He was limping out of the old Farm building with something on a long piece of rope. The soldier was walking slowly and awkwardly, one leg dragging painfully behind. It was too far for us to see any detail, but I thought it fair to assume that he would be hurting badly by now, the wounds in his head and body reopening and trying to pull his body down to where it so much wanted to be: six feet below the ground, in a kind of peace. Instead, he was trying to return it to somewhere it should never have been in the first place.

“What the hell’s he holding?” Vinaldi whispered. “And is this going to work, if we’re watching?”

“I don’t know and I don’t know,” I said.

“It’s a cat,” Vinaldi said. “There’s a cat on the end of that rope.”

The cat was small and thin, and in the dim lights radiating from Ghuaji’s car it looked ill and underfed. This wasn’t some pet which had been drafted in for the day. This was an animal which had been brought here some weeks ago, for a particular purpose. The fact it was still here proved that whatever experiment it had been a part of had succeeded. The further fact that it didn’t look as if it had been fed in the meantime, but simply left in the old Farm building until it was needed again, proved simply that Maxen and his accomplices needed nothing quite as much as they needed a good solid kick to the head.

So Maxen actually had found a way back in. Probably, whatever it might be, it couldn’t have worked unless Yhandim and the others had been trying to come the other way too, but worked it obviously had. Perhaps sometimes the two sides had to touch each other. I don’t know. Chance, fate, or darker forces at work, it didn’t really matter. There was no more room for pretending. Twenty years were going to be stripped away today.

We were teenagers, you know. Eighteen, nineteen. That’s how old most of us were when they sent us into
something we didn’t understand. They left us there until they realized we weren’t going to win, and then they pulled us out and threw us away—except that when they brought our bodies out they didn’t check hard enough to see if they’d brought out our souls, too.

Ghuaji leaned inside the car and turned the engine off—luckily Vinaldi was ahead of me and killed ours simultaneously. The mountain and the sky were very quiet, the only sound that of Ghuaji’s feet crunching through the snow, and of our own hearts beating. Warmth and cold, getting closer to each other all the time.

“He’s going to see us,” Vinaldi whispered.

“Maybe, maybe not,” I replied. “I don’t think he’s going to be seeing anything very much at the moment.”

“He got here, didn’t he?”

“He did, but he’s also had a bullet through his head. Maybe it wasn’t him who was directing. Maybe he got pulled this way.”

“Don’t start with that shit again,” Vinaldi said. I shushed him as Ghuaji passed over the road thirty yards ahead of us. There was next to no light, and he was looking the other way, but it was still bizarre that he hadn’t caught a glimpse of moonlight glinting off the angles of our truck. That same light caught the side of his head for a moment and I saw blood there, and a darkness on his shirt. He was close to the end—if he didn’t find the way in quickly he was going to die, and our hopes along with him. Suej and Nearly had already been gone for twelve hours. I didn’t want to think about what might already have happened to them, or to the other spares.

The cat on the end of the rope was padding through the snow after Ghuaji, each foot pulled high against the cold. She saw us, certainly—for a moment her head turned and stared at the truck as if concerned that it was in imminent danger of exploding. But then she lost interest and moved forward again, peering around at the world.

When he was about five yards the other side of the
road Ghuaji stopped walking, and stood still, head down. The cat padded past him and into the trees at the edge of the compound, trailing the rope behind her.

“What the
fuck
is going on?” Vinaldi demanded, panicky.

“You must have heard the story,” I said. “How The Gap was found?” Now that it was all going down I felt strangely serene, the way you feel in the seconds after you’ve had a bad car accident. It’s almost as if you know, all your life, that something bad is going to happen to you, come what may: and as if in those seconds, once it
has
happened, you find your only moments of peace, of relief from the tension of waiting for the ax to fall.

“Heard a hundred stories on the first day,” he said irritably. “Didn’t listen to any of them.”

I nodded. “I heard a few, too, but only one that ever seemed to make any sense.” The cat was ambling around the bases of the trees now, going about cat business, whatever that may be.

“Is this going to be more hippie bullshit?”

“A guy was watching his cat one day,” I continued, ignoring him. “Nowhere near here—out on the West Coast somewhere, and maybe the original guy
was
some kind of space cadet. Anyway,” I said, pulling my spike out of my jacket pocket and laying it on the dashboard. “This guy spends a lot of time watching the cat, and realizes one of life’s great truths.”

“What was that?” Vinaldi eyed the needle on the dash with suspicion. I opened the two packets of foil, laying them out carefully on the screen of the Positionex.