Spares (42 page)

“Well, look here,” he said, swaggering up until he stood a couple of feet from Nearly, his legs planted solidly apart. “What’s a girl like you doing out walking with a couple of queers on a night like this?”

“Thanking God I’m not in that car with you,” Nearly quipped, with her unique talent for diplomacy.

“Funny you should say that,” the man said with a smile, “’cuz that’s just what we had in mind. Thought maybe we’d try to warm you up.” Behind him, a back door opened and No-Beard in the rear seat put his foot out onto the snow. Meanwhile his buddy turned his attention to Vinaldi and me. “You two gentlemen can just step back and let us get on with this, or you can get the shit whaled out of you.” He shrugged at his cohorts in the car. “Think that’s a fair choice, don’t you, fellas?”

“More than fair,” drawled No-Beard. “Can’t no one say more fairer than that.”

The chief turd nodded happily and crossed his arms. “So. What’ll it be?”

“Hmm,” Vinaldi said mildly, looking away. “That’s a difficult one. Too difficult for a queer like me to answer, what with it being so cold and all, so my brain is nearly as frozen as yours.”

There was a pause. “What?” the guy said.

Vinaldi clicked his fingers, as if suddenly blessed by inspiration. “Hey,” he said. “I’ve come up with another option I’d like to run past you.”

“What the fuck you talking about? What option?”

“The one where I punch your face through the back of your head.” Suddenly, Vinaldi was an indistinguishable blur of movement. Chief Turd tried to parry the first couple of blows, but he didn’t have a prayer. Vinaldi’s fists moved too quickly for me to even see, and before anyone knew what was going on the guy was on the ground, blood flooding out of his nose. No-Beard was already halfway out of the car, but I kicked the door back into his face, then crunched it against his leg.

“Also,” I said, producing mine and pushing the barrel hard into one of his eyes, “we have large guns. So get out of the fucking car.”

Vinaldi and I herded the four of them off the road while Nearly climbed into the backseat of the car. Then I got in to drive, and Vinaldi climbed in the back with Nearly because the front passenger seat looked like someone had dissected a moose on it I turned the car round and Nearly waved cheerily at the checked shirts as we drove back off down the road. I stared out the front window into the last of the twilight, and as the lights of Covington Forge began to appear in the distance I could tell that whatever was going on in my head was getting worse.

By the time we were onto Route 81 my head was hurting badly, and I was gripping the steering wheel to prevent my hands from shaking. There was nothing to do except watch the road, and no conversation to drown out the one I was already having with myself.

“What is it between you and Maxen?” Nearly said quietly then, breaking the silence. I didn’t answer. “I mean, I get the sense this guy hates you real bad.”

“It’s nothing,” I said, lighting a cigarette. Vinaldi should really have been driving. It took me three attempts to get it alight.

“The fuck,” Nearly said calmly. Her tone very clearly said that she’d been building up to this and was unlikely to stop for animals or small children. “What you mean is it’s none of my business.”

“Yes,” I said tightly. “That’s exactly what I mean.”

“Well it is
so
my business!” she shouted, suddenly furious in that force-of-nature way women have. “I’ve got a right to know. Psycho lunatics come slamming into my life, take me beyond the Twilight Zone and completely ruin my shoes, and you say it’s none of my business?”

“No one has any right to know anything about my life which I don’t want them to,” I said, forcing the words out slowly and clearly.

“Not even someone who likes you?” she said, her voice different.

“Especially not them.”

“They helped you, didn’t they?” Vinaldi asked suddenly, out of the darkness in the back.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Sure you do. The kids. They helped you find the ship.”

“What kids?” Nearly asked.

“You didn’t see them, I guess, because you weren’t there the last time. Maybe just because you don’t know about them, or maybe because old Jack and I have got a fair dose of The Gap inside us as well. I think it’d be fair to say that, don’t you, Jack?”

“Just shut up, Johnny.”

Nearly:
“What
kids?”

“When that little girl—Suej, or whatever—went down, I saw something.” Despite myself, I found I. was listening to Vinaldi. I’d thought that last vision had been
mine alone, a product of misery and fear. “There was a whole bunch of children standing round her, Gap children—except they didn’t look right. They show you where the ship was, Jack?”

I didn’t answer, and Vinaldi took that as a yes.

“You know what they were, don’t you Jack? You know why they looked so weird? Didn’t you see the scars on them? On their necks?”

“Johnny, please don’t tell this.” My whole body was shaking now, the headlights on the highway in front of me a Jackson Pollock of red and white blurs against black.

“I’m going to tell it, Jack, and you know why? Because you’re full of shit. You go round the whole time with a chip on your shoulder about how badly you’ve fucked up. You think everything’s tainted, that somehow you did something which has spoiled the whole world. You spend your whole time saying to yourself ‘Well, I’ve fucked up this life so I’m just going to sit here and wait for the next one.’ Well you
didn’t
This whole mess is because of Arlond Maxen, and it’s not your fault the guy hates you. He hates you because of something you did which was
not a
fucked-up thing to do, and
that’s
why all those spares died, and why Mal died, and why you’re probably going to die too.”

“What?” Nearly shouted, and then said it again more quietly.
“What?
Johnny, what are you talking about?”

I knew there was nothing I could do to stop him, so I just kept the car on the road and tried not to listen as Vinaldi told her.

It happened two months before the war in The Gap was abandoned. Mal and I were part of a unit which was very deep in-country. North and South don’t mean a whole lot in there, but if most people were in the South, we were so far North we were off the compass. I don’t know how Vinaldi got to hear of it. A rumor, he said. I certainly didn’t tell anyone, and neither did Mai. We hoped no one would believe us.

I think everyone pretty much knew by that stage that the war wasn’t one we were going to win. The villagers were too tough, too unyielding. They had The Gap on their side, and the farther away you got from the point where everybody sideslipped in, the more inexplicable and terrifying it got. It was like you were going deeper and deeper into yourself, into places you were never supposed to see. Some of the people in our unit had rigged up plastic bottles of Rapt solution, and had a constant drip into their bloodstream.

But our orders were to keep on going, and so we did. We crawled, we staggered, we ran—all more or less in the same direction, farther and farther away from any-thing we recognized as real. There’d been talk of meeting up with another unit which had been sent this way, but none of us really expected that to happen anymore. We couldn’t even tell what color the air was by then; with the combination of drugs and deep strangeness around us the chances of us doing
anything
cohesive or deliberate were absolutely minimal. We could only look after each other. By that time that was the most we could do. Everything in that world was trying to kill us, and the only sane purpose any of us could find in it was to try to keep as many humans alive as possible.

On the day in question we were hacking through the densest forest any of us had ever seen. The trees grew so close together they were touching, and you could be confronted with solid walls of trunks which you might have to journey half a mile to go round. It was so tangled that it was even difficult to think, as if the building blocks of thought were too heavy to manipulate. It was unbearably, swelteringly hot, and we were carrying two of the unit on makeshift stretchers. They’d been injured in a firefight with villagers the week before. We’d bandaged their mouths up, so they wouldn’t scream, but I don’t think there was any one of us who couldn’t hear their agony in our head. They stank of shit and blood and skinFix, and one of them had Gap maggots in the wound in his leg. He said he could feel them
eating him. Maybe he could, but we left them there, because they were eating the gangrene which would otherwise kill him even sooner than his injuries. Every one of us was cut somewhere, had ragged handmade stitches spidering over some part of our bodies. We hadn’t eaten in four days, and worse than that, we’d run out of cigarettes. Even the Rapt was getting low, and our Lieutenant was beginning to panic. He knew that none of us could go on much longer, but we were hundreds of miles away from anywhere. We were less than zombies by then, the walking dead’s walking dead. We didn’t care who won the war anymore. We didn’t really care if we were going to survive. We were just going to keep on fighting until we all dropped, and then that would be the end of it.

Mal and I were struggling along in the middle of the line carrying one of the stretchers, and so we weren’t the first to see the village. Mal was limping badly from mine wounds to his thighs, and the guy we were carrying was having a very bad time of it. He’d taken a head shot and you could see his brain. I was half delirious with hunger, exhaustion, and nicotine withdrawal, and when I first heard someone hiss that there was a village up ahead I was inclined to dismiss it as another illusion.

But soon enough we realized it was really there, and stopped. The tree cover round the village, now about two hundred yards ahead, was too thick for us to see anything even with binoculars. Faintly, carried through the thick and swirling air, we thought we could hear shouting, and even singing.

Gap villagers don’t sing. They simply don’t do it. They’re not very cheerful people.

The Lieutenant decided to leave one person with the wounded, and that the rest of us should go ahead to check out the situation. He motioned to me to lead us forward. He generally did.

We crawled across the forest floor, keeping behind bushes, sliding under piles of whispering leaves. An insane level of caution had become an unthinking instinct.
There was nothing we wanted to see more than some of our own kind, but nothing we needed less than another firefight. As we got closer the singing became more distinct, and finally we were able to recognize the tune. It was from a song which was getting big airplay just before we went into The Gap, though the words seemed to be different.

Either way it meant the singers were some of ours, and we hauled ourselves to our feet and walked the rest of the way, Mal and I walking point. I don’t know what Mal was thinking—about noodles, probably—but I was fantasizing about cigarettes. I could almost feel the smoke in my lungs. I thought I might try having five at once.

The village was in a large clearing, and from forty yards away we could see soldiers in the remnants of the same army fatigues we wore. They didn’t seem to be doing anything very much, seemed in fact to be wandering around with a glazed look in their eyes. There was something odd about them, and I held my hand back to the others, urging them to be quiet and keep out of direct sight.

No one wanted to be in that village more than I, but I was getting a weird feeling. Instead of going straight into the front, I led them around the side and we carefully approached the village from a different angle. The closer we got, the easier it became to distinguish another sound, beneath the guttural singing and shouting. It sounded a bit like crying, or more precisely, like a number of people crying very quietly.

You didn’t see many tears in The Gap. People were either dead or glad to still be alive. I looked at Mai. We turned to the Lieutenant and he shrugged, clearly out of his depth. Then we walked into the village.

The first thing we saw was a little girl. Both of her legs had been cut off at the knee, and she was tied to a board which was propped up against one of the houses. She was crying quietly to herself, her eyes gazing without sight past us into some inner world. As the others
stared at her I ducked my head into the house. I nearly vomited when I saw what was inside, and I thought I’d seen everything by then.