Children of the Dust (14 page)

The dog lay dead on the threshold, its white eyes glazed and blood staining the dust. Foam at its mouth suggested it was rabid, so he felt no guilt, just stepped across it and entered the room. Morning sunlight came through the window spaces, showed cupboards fallen from the walls, ferns growing in the sink unit, and nettles through the floor. Simon crossed to the inner doorway. The person was crouched in the sooty shadows of a fireplace, the pale smudge of a face and white robes covered with soil.

'Are you all right?' he asked.

The girl held out her hand, as if to ward him away.

'You will not shoot me!' she said.

Simon was not sure if it were a plea or a command, but he laid down his rifle, picked his way among the litter of digging tools, and freshly turned earth and fallen roof-rafters. He thought she was hurt and went to touch her, but she shrank away from him, clutching the wall. Her voice sounded angry.

'Weapons are evil!' she said. 'They are tools of the holocaust! There was a sound of thunder, and fire. Dust fell on the earth, and the darkness followed, and a great cold. All manner of creatures were destroyed. But the evil was gone.

And the perpetrators of evil were gone. Gone for ever, Lilith said. But you've brought it back! You are one of the evil ones!'

'I didn't mean to scare you,' Simon said. 'I was shooting at the dogs, not you.'

'You have no right to destroy any living thing!'

'If I hadn't shot it you'd have been dead!'

'Would I?' asked the girl. 'I doubt that.'

She glanced towards the doorway, as if to make sure the dog was really there. But like most other creatures that had survived outside her eyes were congenitally damaged, milky and opaque and probably blind, or so Simon thought in a moment of pity. He held out his hand.

'Let me help you up,' he said.

'I can manage,' the girl retorted.

She scrambled to her feet and brushed the soil from her gown. It was fine white wool, hand-crafted, with exquisite designs in green and ochre around the edges. Someone had made it. Someone had dyed and blended those soft natural colours. In comparison the clumsy stitches and uneven yarn of his own underclothes might have been fashioned by a five-year-old child. The girl might hold some pretty primitive beliefs but wherever she came from her people were skilled in other ways. He noticed the goatskin bag dumped by the fireplace, fringed with fur and decorated with beads. He noticed the fine beaten metal of her digging tools, a trowel with a carved bone handle, and fancy buckles on her leather sandals. His own moccasins were crude and shapeless, worn to holes after seventy miles of walking, and no one in the bunker possessed clothes and artefacts like hers. Simon began to wonder what the word 'primitive' really meant.

Voices were calling him, borne by the wind across the empty hillside. Harris and Sowerby, woken by the shooting, were coming to find him. But he stayed where he was, staring at the girl, noting the significance. Grandfather Harnden had always said that in the bunker they were teaching all the wrong things. He had been an old man, soft in the head, and no one took any notice, but suddenly Simon knew what he meant. Compared to this girl he was the progeny of an almighty failure, people incapable of doing anything much, and she with her blind white eyes fixed on his face realized it too. She was not blind at all! Black pin-prick pupils looked at him and saw, and he could feel her pity.

'Simon!'

The voices called and he backed away from her. He was used to people dying . . . his sister of whooping cough, his brother of typhoid, his father of skin cancer. But he was not used to mutation. The girl was making him feel guilty, responsible for a war that had happened decades before he was born. It was people like him who had invented the bomb, unleashed the holocaust, turned the world into a radioactive desert, caused the extinction of species and the birth of mutants such as her. They had destroyed everything and preserved themselves . . . dinosaurs in a bunker, his mother said, with their rusting guns, drawing-board experts, and broken-down computers. They were paying for it now, suffering for everything they had done and not done. Their numbers declined as the outsiders thrived, and that girl knew and pitied him.

'Don't look at me like that!'

'Simon! Where the hell are you?'

He turned on his heel, picked up the gun and binoculars, and went outside. His visor was raised and the sunlight burned his face. Shards of broken masonry hurt his feet through the worn soles of his moccasins, and a rusty nail on a nearby gate post gashed his leg through his suit. Simon watched as the scarlet blood seeped through the white material and rapidly spread. People like himself could rebuild cities, perform heart transplants, and travel to the moon ... in theory. But when they ran out of tetanus injections they had not been able to manufacture more.

It was only a gash but Simon knew the implications and he did not need Harris to spell it out. He could not only lose his leg, but his life as well . . . gangrene, lock-jaw, septicaemia. Not that Harris knew much about it. He was a trained engineer, not a doctor. But he was in charge of the expedition, and the survival of many people depended on its outcome. If Simon got sick, Harris would abandon him, and the blood still ran in scarlet trickles down his leg.

'Can you walk?' Harris asked him.

'I'll need a compress,' Simon replied.

'I'll go back to the camp,' said Harris.

Sowerby and the girl came from the ruins.

'She says there's a healer nearby,' Sowerby informed them.

'How far?' Harris asked anxiously.

The girl pointed to the standing stone.

'Three miles along the line, eleven point two five degrees north of north west.'

'You mean they're compass lines?' asked Sowerby.

'Leave that until later,' Harris told him. 'We have to go and gather up the gear. You wait here,' he said to Simon.

Harris and Sowerby walked away across the moor-land, up the hill and down towards the camp, leaving Simon alone with the girl. She squatted beside him, dabbed at the blood with the hem of her dress and examined the wound. He noticed there were hairs on the backs of her hands, fair and fine and thick as fur, albino in the light. Simon recoiled with a feeling of horror. She was not human at all! She was a genetic throw-back! A congenital ape!

'Leave me alone!' he said.

She left without a backward glance and returned to the ruins. But she reappeared a few minutes later carrying the goatskin bag. She had a handful of leaves which she had plucked from the jungle of garden, and she carefully placed them on the grass beside him. Then she took out a knife. Keen and sharp its blade flashed in the sun and he thought she was going to stab him. But she hacked away the long leather straps of her shoulder bag.

'If you bind these leaves to your leg it will stop the festering,' she said. 'Will you do it, or shall I?'

Her white eyes met Simon's in a kind of challenge. He did not want her touching him but finally he nodded. Pale hairy fingers made a compress of leaves, a pad from a white linen handkerchief, bound his leg with leather thongs and fastened the knot. The hood of her overgown, that had been hiding her face, slipped to reveal the snow-white fur of her countenance, her primate features. Her face was not deformed in any way, no degeneration of bone structure. It was the white animal fur that repelled him and made her a simian thing. Mutation was cruel and so was Simon. His dislike of her actually showed and he offered her no thanks.

The ape girl shrugged, picked up her things and went back to her digging. He could hear the hack of her pick and shovel in the dark interior of the ruined building. Appearances ought not to matter. There were mutants everywhere, Harris had said, and they were no less human than the people in the bunker. Simon went to apologize, limped along the track towards the house. Flies were already feeding on the body of the dog and the heat of the day was building up. Stepping from sunlight into shadow he had to wait for his eyes to grow accustomed, and she was just a vague white shape crouching below a fallen roof beam. But then he noticed the forked stick held in her hand, its slow steady motion above the cleared floor space before it jerked and twisted and she laid it down and once more started to dig. Simon watched her curiously. Carefully she unearthed the bones of a skeletal hand, plucked a gold ring from its finger and placed it in her bag. Then she picked up the stick again. A few quick jerks and she unearthed the other hand, retrieved a diamond dress ring and a gold bracelet hanging with charms.

'Grave robbing!' Simon said in disgust.

'Jewels are no good to the dead,' she said.

'I suppose you sell them?'

'I give them to the artisans at Timperley,' she said.

'And what do they give you in return?'

'Nothing,' she said. 'Why should they?'

She seemed not to have heard of trade or barter, although back at the bunker they had been trading with outsiders for years. Every fleece, every goatskin, every scrap of metal was loaded annually into the one remaining army truck, driven to the settlements at Watchet, or Sedgemoor, and exchanged for food. But now they had run out of petrol, just as they had run out of basic chemicals for the culture tanks. There were no more cloned vegetables. The soil in the glasshouse area was exhausted and the land around the bunker failed to grow. They were beginning to know the meaning of starvation and suffering. They were all half naked and undernourished . . . children with rickets, adults with scurvy, old people dying of hypothermia when the winter set in. It was cold underground and often dark, and there were no more spare parts to keep the electric generators going. Their only chance of surviving was to move out. And whatever Simon thought he could not insult a girl with a fistful of gold from whose people Harris had come to beg.

He chewed his lip.

And was bound to accept what she did.

'You need a Geiger counter,' he said.

'I already have one,' she replied.

'I could trade you a battery-powered model.'

She looked at him thoughtfully and picked up the stick.

'This one is mind-powered,' she told him. 'It can find whatever I want it to find, whatever we need . . . wood, clay, or water, gold or glass, old bones and buried scrap metal. What can yours do?'

Simon stared at her. The way she spoke of her mental powers made him uneasy. Maybe she was not sub-human and primitive. Maybe she was super-human, her mind gone way beyond him. Yet he dismissed the thought. It was instinct, he reasoned. Some uncanny instinct that enabled her to home in on things. Powers like that were nothing new. Records of pre-war society showed that many people had claimed to possess them. There was even a name for it which Simon failed to remember.

'I am psychic,' said the girl, as if she had read his mind, 'a water diviner, among other things, and my name is Laura. You had no need to shoot that dog, you know. I could have controlled it. My mind is stronger than an animal's mind. Stronger than yours, too.'

Simon sat on the crumbling edge of the window sill.

There was a throbbing pain in his leg.

He did not believe what she told him.

And he never would. Laura laughed teasingly.

'Once people believed that a nuclear holocaust would never happen,' she said.

Simon limped along the track behind the others. He carried a back pack of camping gear and the midmorning sun made him sweat inside his suit. Just for a moment he wished he were like Laura, stripped to a simple shift with the heavy hooded over-gown stowed away in her goatskin bag, her limbs bare and her long fair hair blowing in the wind. The fine albino fur covered her completely, but it also protected her. Laura had nothing to fear from the ultraviolet light.

Harris and Sowerby seemed to accept what she was, or perhaps they no longer noticed. They had had dealings with mutants before and grown used to it. Usually, Sowerby told Simon, mutant people did not remove their robes, the cowled hoods that concealed their deformities. But Laura walked as if she were proud of it.

Simon was too far behind to hear what they talked of. Standing stones, probably. Sowerby was obsessed with standing stones. He was a qualified cartographer and the maps in the bunker were years out of date. There had been no aerial surveys in Simon's lifetime. Landmarks had vanished. The major areas of habitation had shifted, and only the standing stones remained, visually linking the empty distances. What their purpose was, and why they had been restored, was something Sowerby had always wanted to know.

Sowerby belonged to a generation of academics, hot on theory but pretty useless when it came to practical know-how. Like Grandfather Harnden, Simon's mother had always warned them what would happen. They were dinosaurs in a bunker, not knowing how to knit or sew, spin or weave, make planks from tree-trunks, carpenter wood or make a cart-wheel. Nobody could use a hammer or anvil, fashion metal, pulp paper, or manufacture decent shoes. Everything they did was just bungling attempts, and work on the land and animal husbandry were looked on as punishment duty.

They had clung too long to pre-war attitudes and old ideals, thinking they were some kind of elite. All their energies had gone into keeping up twentieth-century standards. They still dreamed of restoring the country to what it had been. They still dreamed of a technological revolution. They still dreamed of the United Kingdom with themselves in charge. Simon himself had grown up convinced that he was superior to the weavers, and crofters, and fishermen, who dwelled in the outside communities. He had actually believed that an academic education, and an ability to do advanced calculus, placed him above them. But not any more. A mutant girl had ended all that, and all his illusions were gone.

Fearless and free in the sun that would burn him, Laura strode across the hill. She believed that the nuclear war had not marked the ending of civilization, but the beginning. It had been a great event, like the birth of Christ, and part of God's almighty plan. He had allowed mankind to destroy itself and rid the world of evil. Her calendar actually began fifty-five years ago with a purge of fire and a rain of dust and a few chosen survivors. She believed she had been born into a better world than the one that was gone, that her people were better people. She saw Simon as a remnant of the old evil and believed that
she
was superior to
him.