Authors: Craig Saunders
The
voice towered, immense, deafening. His head pounded and his nose bled. Then, mercifully
it, them,
US
, stepped back.
The
door to the elevator opened, and O'Dell walked on loose, numb legs, to one of
the many cars. He clicked a key card from his pocket and a 4X4's indicators
flashed once. He opened the door, pulled himself inside. He tried to start the
ignition, but when he did, his shaking hands betrayed him and flipped the key
into the foot well.
'Calm
down. Calm. The. Fuck. Down.'
He
forced himself to sit still, eyes closed, until his pounding heart slowed, until
his hands settled. Only then did he reached down, find the key, and start the
engine.
For
the first time in over half a century, O'Dell did not know what the future
held. Everything behind him was black, everything ahead dark, too. But the past
was becoming brighter, and that, more than any other horror imaginable,
terrified the Kurt O'Dell. He saw no fire. He'd seen the future, and the fire
had always been the last of it. What came after was a mystery like everyone
else faced each day they woke.
*
Memory
crippled O'Dell, but it bolstered Eleanor. The past spurred her on.
That
voice pounded down on her, trying to break her, but her legs moved faster now
and she enjoyed the feeling. It felt as though they were doing precisely what
they were made for. As was she. Some new remembrance would flood her, some new
delight in her mind at each step she took, and soon even the roar of klaxons
and the ever-present words the woman (shouted?) didn't touch Eleanor, despite
the volume.
She
came to a steel door. It was sliced cleanly down the middle. She could go no
further. The words changed, the siren-sound, too.
'
One
minute. Final warning. Exits will close in fifty-five seconds. Final warning.
Exits will close in fifty-seconds. Final warning...'
The
words meant little, but something about the sound, the change, the way it
repeated and then changed, repeated then changed again. Some urgency in the
tone and the voice both.
The
woman with the huge voice was trying to tell her something. She should
understand
.
Frustrated with herself, Eleanor scratched at her face hard enough to draw
blood.
No.
No.
Whether
she told herself no, or the voice, she wasn't sure.
There
was nowhere to go...and then, there was.
See
red on the wall instead, Mother. Red on the wall.
She
had seen red on walls, all the way. Red in strange arcs, rainbows made only of
red, and red that seemed darker and larger, hard pools on the floor.
She
didn't want to see that red.
Brighter
than blood.
A
round, red spot
was
there. She slapped at it and those steel doors
split, and there was a room behind them. She stepped inside. Buttons, unlit, in
a line that went up to down, down to up. Green, though, not red like outside. She
didn't need to know what to do. The doors closed, automatic. She panicked,
thumping the hard, cold metal, but nothing gave and then she/
US
thought:
Top. The one at the top. Top, like your head. Up.
She
pressed the uppermost button and screamed when the room
moved
.
There
was nothing to hold, no escape. Her palms splayed against the metal and her
back pressed against the steel. Her skin puckered from the cold.
The
large voice was quieter inside the elevator. The words remained a mystery, but
the numbers...
Cleansing
in nine...eight...seven...
The
sensation of movement ceased and Eleanor leapt out as the doors opened.
...two...
The
elevator door slid closed behind her. She didn't hear the final word, but she
knew what it was, and that she was the same, too.
'One,'
she said.
*
XIX.
The Memory of Warmth
Above,
cold was all there was. Eleanor was at first fascinated by it and relished the
feel of her skin tightening and grinned at her breath puffing out like smoke
into the air.
Soon
after, the cold ceased to be intriguing. It began to hurt. First, at her
fingers and toes and nose, then, as she started to shiver, it hurt her nipples,
her lips, the place where she...
Fucked.
The
word sprang to mind, and like other words she grasped, she knew it had more
than one use.
'I
am fucked,' she tried to say out loud, but her teeth chattered and her jaw
would not work, frozen or freezing like the rest of her.
Warmth.
I need to be warm...warmer...
The
elevator had opened out into this room, and she knew it would not take her back
to the warmth. Even if it would, she would not go. She wanted, needed, to move
on. To learn more. But the cold slowed her. Her limbs jittered and thoughts
danced away.
Move.
Move. Move.
She
walked again, her nostrils and lungs hurting from the cold air, far colder than
her body. It stung, and she let it. That pain, perhaps, would keep her moving.
A
door at the far end of the large room stood half-open, so she followed her
instinct; to get away, to be free. The walls of the room were very far away.
After her cell, the warehouse that hid O'Dell's bunker seemed a world itself.
In
room beyond - an office, once - she found a man. His blood, old, had frozen
into crystals. His clothing and his skin seemed to have hardened in the cold.
Ice, or frost, whitened the dead man's hair. The cuts which had killed him
didn't seem awful, but more like lines on a sheet of paper, like she remembered
drawing, long ago. A child, with a red felt tipped pen, drawing in a colouring
book.
She
stepped over him as her legs began to seize up. She stopped, turned, and looked
at the body again.
With
hands that were claws, she tore at the hard, frozen clothing on the man.
Buttons on his shirt and jacket were impossible, so she yanked them loose. As
she moved, her body warmed a little and that lent her the strength to break the
clothes free of the floor below the dead man. Some of the material tore free,
blood crusted harder than concrete. One of his arms snapped, some place inside,
and made stripping him easier. She pulled his clothes on, the ice in the
clothing colder than the air against her skin. She managed to free his shoes,
his trousers, his belt. She pulled the trousers high as she could, just below
her wasted breasts, over the top of her jacket and shirt. The belt defeated
her. Taking it off had seemed simple. Using it again, impossible. The man's
shoes were huge on her feet, but better than the feel of ice on her toes. She
didn't even consider the laces, but found, by chance, two giant pockets in the
side of the trousers.
'Pockets,'
she said, her teeth still chattering. The material moved again, not so hard,
but feeling cold and damp. She put her hands in the trouser pockets and used
them to hold her new clothes on her thin body. Then she followed the corridor
to find more bodies...more
things
.
A
row of coats on hooks over on a far wall were better. She put those on instead
of the man's clothes. They helped, later, as her hands, feet, lips and nose turned
blue. She pulled the coats free (cold, but not damp), one by one, and pulled
them over her shoulders, thrust her arms inside and wore as many as she could.
They were warmer, not frozen or frosted hard. These had pockets, too. In the
third coat she pulled on, she found cigarettes and a lighter. She looked at
each in turn, and even tried to eat a cigarette, which she spat out
immediately. Then she turned the lighter in her hands, round and round,
fascinated. She ran her thumb along the wheel and it ground against the flint
beneath. A tiny spark flew and she laughed, delighted. She did it again and a
flame flickered weakly. She stared and held her finger over it, unfeeling as
her fingers were nearly frostbitten.
Three
or four seconds later she yelped and snatched her finger free of the lighter,
but the flame heated the metal against her other thumb, too. She dropped the
lighter.
Then,
realising what she held, Eleanor picked it up again.
*
Outside,
wet snow stung her face until she found her hood and pulled it over her head,
then hunched and strode into the growing storm. This snow was new to her, but
new to England, too. Cold that froze roads and halted traffic she remembered,
but not this - the kind of storm that killed people from frostbite, from
hypothermia.
But
there were no people.
Eleanor
didn't think such things strange. She'd been alone a long time.
Moving
was enough for her, and moving kept her from dying right there. She might heal
fast, but nothing could heal if it was frozen in the ground. Movement meant
living.
She
seemed to be in an area with nothing but tall metal buildings, or squat ones,
but nothing that reminded her of warmth or home or comfort.
Fighting
to keep moving, weak from starvation and the air itself which chilled her chest
from within, she headed from building to building. In one, she found a frozen
sandwich.
Food
. It was hard and she could not eat it, but later,
perhaps, she might.
Warmth,
she thought. Warmth was all that mattered. She found a small bottle of liquid
that was the colour of piss, but she was thirsty, and it was one of the few
things she found that wasn't frozen. She tipped a little into her mouth and
felt it burn her tongue and then, as a little slipped into her throat, a
burning warmth that sank all the way to her insides.
At
first she gasped, then smiled, and drank a little more.
'Warmth,'
she said.
In
the same place, she found some huge coveralls and a pair of heavy black boots
that were better than the shoes she wore. In the next building, she killed a
man.
*
As
she would for the next five weeks, or thereabouts, Eleanor worked her way
through the industrial estate in roughly a straight line, for no other reason
than to get
somewhere
.
The
first time she killed a man, it proved to be quick and painless. For her.
Violence
after that became more sporadic, and she got better at avoiding it, whenever
she could, because she soon learned how fragile people were...herself included.
She
turned to leave that next building, nothing found but a row of tools, more
boots that were no improvement over what she wore, no clothes better than the
ones on her back that were finally starting to warm her. There, in the darker
shadows thrown by the dim daylight, was a shape. She shouted, startled. Somewhere
deep inside she recognised it as human. It shifted, and she was afraid because
it had been so long.
'Hello?'
she said, finally finding the right, lost word.
The
shape, large and bulky because of the clothes it wore, stepped forward and she
saw that it was a man. He was disfigured, some kind grey, thick growth on the
right side of his face, his eye on that side useless and lost inside the mass.
His teeth, she saw, were darker than they should be, crusted with whatever the
man ate.
Instinctively,
some animal part of her cautious, she stepped back. He came forward, and she
held her hands up, but he began to run. She understood nothing of the
situation, but her core...her core tensed. When he pushed her roughly to the
ground, she held him back with all her strength, but her strength wasn't
enough. He proved stronger. She understood his intent as the stinking man
breathed heavily in her face, his rancid breath and spittle on her face. His
hands, gloves, tore at her clothes, pulled at her over-large trousers. She
kicked and flailed, but each time his strength and weight pushed her down.
For
mere moments, she fell still.
She
remembered pain. She remembered being a captive, and men coming to her. She
remembered offering them
fuck
if they would just not cut her, just not
hurt her. No more.
She
remembered those early words she uttered, hopeful, each time they came to her
with knives and drugs to make her sleep and give in.
Wanna
fuck.
'Wanna
fuck?' she said. The man paused, grinned and nodded.
In
that pause, she brought her hands up and thrust her ragged thumbnails into his
eyes. Both eyes at once, as deep as she could, until his reflexes pulled him
clear of her rage. She wasted no time. She was weak, but he was blind. She
pulled the first thing she could find into her grip. It was almost too heavy
for her to lift, but her anger and fear helped. The weight of the sledgehammer
did the rest as it fell.
She
did not feel bad, because she didn't know how to. All she knew what that she
wanted to live, and that she would not be hurt again.
Afterward,
she was more careful, and before she left the building, she took the man's
gloves and a smaller hammer with some kind of claw at the end along with her as
she walked, in as straight a line as she could manage - going somewhere.
*
Wayland
Redman drifted in his small boat, mostly covered and sheltered from endless
snow by a tarpaulin he found on the first day of his jaunt across the sea, to
freedom, to France. He smelled something wrong, something
repulsive
, as
his boat bobbed hard in the rough estuary that should lead out to the
impossibly wild North Sea, the channel between this island and the great
expanse of Europe. The smell brought back memories of fish stalls on London
markets in the summer. A hint of food poisoning, sometime later in the day,
from crabmeat more green than white, or prawns rancid, somewhere inside.
The
smell was him, and he was well over into delirium even by the end of his first
day on the boat. Night fell, his flesh burned with fever, but he didn't know.
He drifted like the boat, in and out of consciousness. Once, bleary eyed, he
imagined he saw a port, perhaps Calais, and whooped at the sight of France. But
it was merely the docklands around Tilbury, and further up river than he had
started. His boat roamed on the high, heavy water, going nowhere.
The
temperature was a long way below freezing, colder during the night. He woke in
the morning, burning despite his blackened, frozen fingers. He grinned and
snapped one off, threw it into the water to tempt the crabs.
Crabbing
off the pier. Nothing finer.
Something
heavy bunted up against Wayland's boat, and the noise and sudden leap against
the thick water brought Wayland to life, for a moment.
Caught
a big one! Granddad, look!
Boots
thudded against the wooden hull, though, and even in delirium, crabs aren't
supposed to wear boots. The footfalls stopped, close to his head. He looked up,
saw a man shape, his head haloed by grey skies.
'I
think I need help,' said Wayland, his voice no more than a croak, nearly lost
in the howl of the rain and the screaming wind that frozen his face. Wayland's
cheeks, too, had turned black now.
'Don't
worry, buddy,' said the man. 'We'll help you. Take it easy.'
'Thank
you. Thank you. Thank you.'
He
felt strong hands beneath his armpits, pulling him up.
'Throw
him back, man. He's fucking rotten. Look at him. He's full of poison.'
'Fuck
you. I'm starving. Got to be something worth eating on him.'
'You're
on your own, Matt. On your fucking own. I'll starve.'
'Then
fucking starve. I'm eating.'
The
words made no sense, and Wayland's eyelids were heavy.
'Thank
you,' he said. He smiled, and saw a woman's face.
Roo the Kangaroo,
he
thought.
Brought me porridge. I liked her.
*
Later,
in the kitchen below decks on a fishing trawler that had found nothing worth
leaving the sea when it came home, a man named Matt laid a knife against
Wayland's flank and started to slice off thin steaks, which he threw,
green-faced, into a hot skillet.