The Gone-Away World (46 page)

In my ear Jim Hepsobah was broadcasting while he worked,
Hostile, say again, hostile! We are under attack!
But the interference from the fire was bad, and only broken phrases came back. The others were either setting their explosives or fighting for their lives, maybe both. It mattered, but it wasn't relevant. We had our own job to do.

Moustache removed the hook from some kid whose name I never had time to ask, and stepped towards us.

Gonzo went to meet him.

Things happened.

I had never seen Gonzo fight at full stretch. I had never realised how scary my best friend was. Gonzo stepped towards Moustache, moving in a straight line (hard forms; closest distance between two points, close with the target and strike, and keep doing it) and scooping up a short steel bar along the way. Encumbered by the suit, Gonzo was not as graceful as Moustache. He moved like an ice shelf. Moustache stopped. He didn't like what he was seeing. And then he slid forward into a new stance, and the hook started to move around his body on its chain.
Whirr, whirr, whupp.
And again.

Gonzo was at full speed when he hit Moustache's blurring shield. His steel bar caught the hook perfectly and he wrenched back on it, hard and unsubtle, which was not what Moustache was expecting. Moustache had a choice: follow the wrench and risk grappling, or release the weapon and take the opportunity to strike. He must not have fancied grappling with a big man in a flabby suit, because he chose the second option. The hook spun away, and Moustache launched a hand high, twisted, slammed Gonzo with a foot like a rivet gun,
kerchunk!,
then stepped back along a different line so that Gonzo's blinding riposte with the bar blurred through empty air. So. One up to Gonzo, but not for nothing.

Moustache came back in, which proved to be a mistake because Gonzo was waiting for it. The bar slammed into his chest, and something broke. Moustache rolled out, taking Gonzo's leg on the way, a single shot to the muscle of the calf which must have deadened it, because Gonzo staggered and had to hop to regain his balance. Moustache scuttled over to his right and scooped up his hook again, and instead of going after Gonzo, he came after us. Specifically, he came after the FOX bomb. His hand whipped out and flicked once, twice, like a man fly-fishing, and the hook sailed over my head and into the machinery of the bomb. It sliced through a hose, and hit the gubbins and gaskets. It stuck. Moustache pulled, and it came free. Something went
plink.
It wasn't the hook. It was the bomb. As Moustache reeled in his weapon, something sprang after it: a length of tubing and some bits of metal.
Plink.

Through the terrible howl of fire only thirty feet away; through the suits; through testosterone and fear and my own breathing, I heard that damn thing break, and I moved. I moved, and Gonzo moved with me, perfect mirrors. I lunged for the loose, flapping conduit, the magnetised metallic gooseneck which was connected to the Stuff tank on the bomb. I lunged, and I got it. And Gonzo, more human, less sensible, shunted Jim Hepsobah out of the way, so that both of us were dead centre of the target when the thing happened, and all the best-laid plans went thoroughly agley and the situation was, as Ronnie Cheung would have said, bollocksed from here to Buddha's colon.

Above us, the valve on the Stuff tank shattered. The Stuff inside raced down the magnetic tube and flooded out. We stood, together, under the waterfall, and who knew what was happening? The Stuff was interacting with us, bonding with us, doing whatever it did, and I'd have horns and a tail and Leah would never kiss me again. But there was no time. Five minutes exactly, and so we had five more to rig the back-up and not let everyone down, and that's what I shouted into my radio as I spun out of the stream and raced for our truck. Moustache stared. Maybe evil moustache men didn't have friends who'd do that for them, or maybe he hadn't imagined that anyone who wasn't an evil moustache man would accept falling through a stream of Stuff and carry on with their mission. Whatever—Moustache was distracted. Almost absent-mindedly, Gonzo bowled the steel bar through the air, and Moustache clocked it about a half a beat too late. It sank a few inches into his temple, and he fell straight over onto his back. He didn't even shudder, he was just gone. Don't care. Not important.

I reached the doors of our truck and hauled them open, then glanced over my shoulder. Gonzo was staring at me through his visor, and he seemed to be all right. Maybe the suits had kept us safe, maybe the presence of so much leaky FOX had made it all okay, neutralised it. Maybe all that time on Piper 90 had made us immune. And maybe there was a special retirement farm for old dogs where all the rabbits were too fat to run away and an eccentric millionaire hired professional masseurs to stroke them every evening in front of a log fire. Jim Hepsobah wasn't moving and neither was Sally Culpepper. They were all petrified. Oh, bloody hell, maybe they were
petrified.
I screamed at them, a rageful yawp full of command and desperation.

“Four minutes and twenty seconds and then we're fucked. I don't care if I have got fucking horns and a tail, do this and you can cut them off me, but stop standing there like a fucking bikini parade and move the bloody bomb!” I had become Ronnie, but Gonzo at least was hit between the eyes by it, moved alongside me in a heartbeat, and he almost lifted the damn bomb without the hoist. Then Jim and Sally were there and we had three minutes and that's impossible, but we were doing it. We were over target but under deadline—we knew that because we were alive. And staying that way, yes. We didn't have time to stop and pick up the wounded, but thank God, Moustache wasn't the kind of guy who left any. Gonzo's suit had dissolved along one arm, and his skin must be burning, but he didn't slow. We fled.

“New bomb,” Sally was saying. “New bomb in place! Evacuate
now,
repeat
now.
Confirm by solid tone
only,
” because each handset can send a single note for Morse or to test a channel, and seconds later it came back, a series of tones blending into a chord, and we knew they could hear us and they were alive. We set the timer for ninety seconds and jumped back in our trucks. At ninety seconds we were passing through the searing heat outside, and the tyres were actually skidding in the melted surface of the road. Eighty seconds, and we skidded over the gates and dragged a piece with us for a moment, and we could see the other trucks and the rest of Bone's boys way out ahead of us. The radio channel lit up with questions and demands:
What the fuck? What enemy? Jesus, put your foot down
and Jim Hepsobah like a minister:
Shut up and tell me it's done!
And it is. All charges set. One minute to detonation, and Gonzo nearly turned the truck over getting us around the curve of the hill.

We tucked in under the brow, twenty trucks and as many tanks and armoured vehicles, paint scorched and wheels melted, and we hid and hunkered down, and waited.

“Three seconds,” Sally Culpepper said, and I was sure she was wrong.

Then the sky went white above us and I squeezed my eyes shut, and even so I could see the shadow of the hill against the white of the fields beyond, and the image of a steering wheel. The trucks shook and shuddered, and one of the tanks on the very outside of our huddle flipped over.

When we looked around the hill, Station 9 was gone, and in its place was a black, smoking ruin, and no fire.

Good feeling.

Chapter Ten

Homecoming;
some slight confusions regarding fidelity;
a new experience.

I
T IS
the day after, and the world is new. Everything is clear and crisp, and the colours are very bright. I am alive, and so is everyone I love. This simple fact amazes me, and makes me giggle, so that Gonzo, who is not a giggling sort of a person, pointedly ignores me as we drive along. I feel brand-new, washed and somehow reconnected. My memories and my present are all shook up and have fallen somehow the right way around. I am me. It's terribly exciting, and I giggle again.

Gonzo has sustained a minor (heroic) injury. I have none. Despite all the funny looks and the obvious concern, I am unscathed. I have not grown demonwings or turned green or become a monster. In fact, I suspect this very immunity is what is making everyone so nervous. I am the guy who took a gazillion volts through the palms of his hands, and they earthed in the soil at his feet without as much as making his hair stand on end. I am the woman who fell from a plane and walked away unscathed. It happens. Not often, not reliably and not when you want it to. But miracle escapes do take place, and I have had one. So, in truth, has Gonzo, although his arm is angry and bruised and burned, and his ribs are taped up and he looks like a thundercloud. Gonzo is always angry after being afraid, possibly to distract you.

So, a day of rest. By tacit agreement, Gonzo is taking me home.

Heaven's gates are getting on a bit, and the wood has peeled around the top. I painted them years ago in response to Leah's need for a white fence, but neither of us liked the effect, so we chipped and scraped the paint off and let the moss grow. Now, wind and sun and water have contributed to the mossy assault, and the remaining glossy white has rolled up and flaked. Shove the gates roughly and a little snowfall of dry paint tumbles to the ground. Gonzo batters them open with an accustomed hand, and they bounce to a halt in the rut left by previous shuntings,
winging
and
wanging
as the ripples of the impact exert torsion on their fabric and test their remaining strength. Sometime soon they will break, and I will have to get new gates. Perhaps I should buy new gates now, and leave them in the open for a while before I put them up so we never actually have new wood at this entrance.

Climbing back into the driving seat, Gonzo dances the cab through the narrow gate. It's actually delicate, what he does to sneak the thing between those posts without scraping the cab or knocking down my uprights. He sort of shimmies it through. He takes the long drive slowly, concentrating, and I know every bump. There's the twin dips first, rainwater puddles made worse by taking a car over them while they were wet. Then there's the channel, an iron watercourse set into the road and preceded by a drift of gravel. It makes a hump, and on the other side there's a dip where water flowing along the upper lip has washed away the soil. The whole thing produces a combined height differential of several inches. Gonzo takes the cab over it one wheel at a time, and we rock gently. After that, the puddles, the dip (where a dirt track from the old contruction days crosses the drive), the footsteps (which I will tell my children, when we have some, are the footsteps of giants, because they have grown in magnitude since I carried Leah through a rainstorm and lost my left boot to the suction) and the lintel, where a single slab of stone marks the entrance to our forecourt. Gonzo takes them all gently, preserving my history as well as ever I could.

Any moment now she will open the door. She will not fling it wide because boldness is sometimes rewarded with a travelling salesman or someone late and lost upon the road. Once it was a burglar, although that is a charitable description of the creature who approached her, a creepy, wheedling sociopath with more than theft on his mind and a sack of convictions for crimes murky and unpleasant; but Leah is not some troubled urban incapable. She can take care of herself, and she knocked him on his back and waited with him until the gendarmes came and carted him away.

So she will open the door just a crack, to be sure there's no disappointment in store. She will peer. She will see the truck, but it will be unfamiliar—something she already knew from the foreign engine noise and the sound of the tyres on the lane. So she will look through the tinted windscreen, and she will see us, or perhaps not until we open the doors. And then she will be unleashed, and throw wide the big front door and walk down, not quite scampering, to meet me. Arms about me, no deep kisses because the heart must be satisfied first, and her eyes will pick out any new scratches on me. I have been away for over a week. Leah is a member of the Free Company. Sometimes she rides out with the rest of us, medic and shift driver, but she hates to watch me in action, so often she works from the house, fielding calls and quartermastering. When we are separated, we count hours. When we are together, we never do. Tonight there will be drinking and celebration, and finally to bed, to hold and to have and to be had.

The porch light is on because it gets dark suddenly up here: the sun hits the mountain ridge behind us and a shadow rises from the valley, bringing on night like a blindfold. You don't realise, until you have lived somewhere where this happens, how long twilight is or how much of it relies on reflections from the landscape all around. No twilight here, to speak of—just a dusky glimmer off the peaks and the smell of trees in darkness. We got the place cheap because it's on the fringes of the Livable Zone. Look down the valley to the very end, and you can see into the Border and what lies beyond.

When the grateful nations—mayoralties by then, but they hadn't acknowledged yet how small they had become, and Jorgmund was barely born—were handing out space, they parcelled land according to a complicated system of pluses and minuses so that everyone could have a bit to call their own. Land in the city was at a premium, and you could just about get a share in a new apartment block with your allocation. My bonuses from the Pipe were pretty hefty, and if we hadn't needed a place to live we could have bought ourselves a plane or a diamond the size of your fist. But we did.

We looked at Tallacre Lofts, which was the sort of Boho of the new world, a long agglomerated mess of construction, quasi-random and intricate, designed to make a home in not very much room. Tallacre sites were typically on the edge of town but well inside the Livable Zone and so thought to be a safe, secure, inexpensive place to be. We walked around one: default beige and
lifestyled
interior (I have no idea what that means) and cream leather sofas, and you had to look hard before you could find the stitching where someone had reconstituted the hides of a lot of smallish sheep from the war zones. There was a built-in kitchen and a little balcony looking over New Paris (which was being built by a company from what had been Grand Cayman in the teeth of furious opposition from the French) and recessed lighting and a power shower. Everything matched, and the lines were cool and enduring. It was a great flat. Leah was weeping by the time we got in the car. She hated it so much she could barely move. Every muscle in her body was rock hard, and her hand gripped mine on the gear stick. The flat was mean and empty and it was a coffin waiting to bury her. She hated everyone who told her it was a good place; she wanted to burn it down, to make them swallow the damn couch.

I promised we would never have to live anywhere like that. I told the agent we'd get back to him. He urged me to be quick. I waited half an hour, then rang back and told him we had a better site in mind. I said it with a ringing certainty, and I heard him freeze, heard him wonder where the hell I was going and how could he get there too. Then I cradled the phone and held my wife as she shuddered, and wondered what the hell I was going to do now.

We lived on friends' sofas and in their lofts and woodsheds. We slept in the parking lot of the Nameless Bar and got so cold we nearly froze. And then, two weeks later, Jim Hepsobah walked me along a mountain a couple of hours out of Exmoor and told me he was building his place twenty miles further along the Pipe, but he'd had to toss a coin to decide. In the evenings you could see the storms beyond the Border, but that didn't worry Jim and he didn't reckon it'd worry me. We'd both been a lot closer than that. You couldn't see the Pipe running behind the escarpment at the back of the plot, pumping its good juju into the air all around. There was silence and dew, and birds. Probably badgers, Jim said, if you knew where to look. And then we sat there and didn't talk, and after a bit I borrowed his phone and called Leah, and she and Sally Culpepper came over from Jim's plot and Leah and I called the local guy and said this was ours, and he fell over himself trying to get it all done because no one wanted these old isolated places on the Pipe and the Border, not now, and maybe not ever again. So we got about a gazillion hectares or acres or whatever it is thrown in, useless and pretty and full of badgers. The house is part log cabin and part stone manse, and it's part Frank Lloyd Wright A-frame and part Bauhaus, and the gates are flaky. That's what heaven is. A place where none of that matters.

And now the door is opening a little, and now a lot, and then she comes out in a bustle and a swirl, and we are climbing out of the truck. But something is wrong, and more than wrong. She comes down the steps and across the forecourt, but her trajectory is off along the gravel, and when she takes flight, she lands squarely on Gonzo and clings to him, and stares into his eyes rather than mine. It is Gonzo she has missed, and Gonzo alone, and she glances over at me with moderate curiosity only when she has drunk him in and patted him in a familiar way and grabbed him along various dimensions to be sure it is all still there. Then, to my endless horror, she sticks out her hand as if we've never met. And I, idiot that I am, shake it, and Gonzo looks relieved and pats her on the hips, and she leads us into the house.

G
ONZO IS
screwing my wife. More than that. He has stolen her love. It is in this weird and awful manner that I am learning of a long-running affair, a thing of months and years. I am being replaced. I
have
been.

I follow the lovebirds indoors, wondering why I don't want to kill them. I ought to want to. It is my genetic and cultural right—not to do it, but at least to feel the desire. Perhaps it is simply too enormous, and the affair itself too much an enormity, and I cannot see the edges of my anger because I am so far within. Perhaps, but seemingly not. Mostly what I feel is a desire to melt away and vanish, to un-be. I am a needless thing, and I am embarrassing only myself. Gonzo and Leah seem unbothered.

Inside, she has redecorated. It's odd. She has (understandably) removed all my things. They are probably in the garage, stuffed into a vagabond's kettle and a red hanky on a stick. She has replaced them, not with new, but with old. My comfy armchair, ragged and tumbledown and had from an artist's studio in Berlton, in which I used to sit and in which on more than one occasion we have made precarious love, has gone. In its place there is one of those weird wicker things which look infinitely more cosy than they are, which creak when you sit on them, and smell of grass in damp weather. Gonzo slumps into it and reaches, blind, for a pair of furry indoor boots which wait alongside. At some point they have been chewed by a dog, which is mysterious because we don't have one. But Gonzo does have one. A faithful hound comes lolloping in from elsewhere (a room which ought to be the kitchen, but it appears in fact to be a den, a plush Gonzo-space of spice and sandalwood, off-limits without special invitation to women of any kind).

In my mind I can see one home—mine—and with my eyes I see another. This corner is empty because the ghastly vase we put in it broke—but it's not empty. There is a set of shelves jammed into it, covered in old sporting trophies and yearbooks from the Soames School, all bound between hard covers to preserve them. Here there was a little occasional table (although it was really a perpetual table, in that we never moved it or thought about putting it away) on which were Leah's photographs from her nursing days and my pictures of us. Now, there is a faux-mahogany tallboy displaying garish red and gold china, slightly chipped. At one end, a ghastly stuffed toy wearing a T-shirt saying “Love Me Like a Bunny, Baby!!!” is scrunched up against the wood. I seem to remember Gonzo winning it from one of those machines with a claw which supposedly reaches down into the box and retrieves a prize, but which actually rummages around limply before dropping anything heavier than a weaselfart and coming up empty. It took him seventeen goes, I think, and then he won the bunny rather than the cow. The cow was wearing a shirt which said “Got Horn?”

Leah brings beers, and we talk inconsequences until I can't stand it, and I excuse myself and stand on the veranda wondering what on Earth to do. Should I storm out? Confront them both? Confront them singly? Talk to Leah in a forgiving, husbandly way, or with wrathful, god-like disdain? Could I manage either? I have no idea.

Inside, Gonzo is telling her about the day, the accident, the
plink
and the fear. I can't hear the words, but I know the tone, the awestruck “How in the hell we lived, I'll never know,” and then his voice deepens, and I know he's telling her about the torrent of vile, impossible crap which fell on us and what happened or didn't happen. She glances out at me, pale with worry. I see her lips move in a question: “Is he . . .” And I turn away before I can see her ask if I am okay, because no, I am not okay, I am in hell.

Perhaps that's it! Perhaps I have not been betrayed; I have been cast away. Perhaps I was transported to a parallel world in that moment. A vast rift of energy and broken matter threw me, Buck Rogers style, into a realm unfamiliar and fearsomely strange. Except that I know it didn't. I just got damp. And so I weep because it seems like the only thing to do, and after a bit I can feel Gonzo's eyes on me through the window, but when I look round, he is climbing the stairs to bed. To my bed, no doubt. The big one made from giant slices of local trees and sanded by hand in the forecourt. My marriage bed. And then, in the doorway, there is Leah, and I wait for her to say something to make it all all right. Perhaps we are in some weird, impossible plot, an undercover operation by trained professionals, and they have asked her to play this role to defray suspicion, because Gonzo, Special Operations Gonzo, is being put into play against some threat to the world. I will be the ace in the hole, the secret, and Gonzo will be invulnerable because of me and this bizarre deception.