insisted was the road. Even living through the deluge under a flimsy roof hadn’t prepared them for the scale of devastation wrought by the water. Valleys were completely impassable. Huge rivers of mud slithered along, murmuring and burbling incessantly as they sucked down and devoured anything that protruded into their course.
Progress was slow, even though they’d now fashioned themselves sturdy hiking attire (even Tina wore strong leather boots). Two days spent trying to navigate through the buckled, decrepit landscape. They kept to the high ground, where swathes of dark-green aboriginal grass were the only relief from the overlapping shades of brown. Even they were sliced by deep flash gorges where the water had found a weak seam of soil. There was no map, and no recognizable features to apply one against. So many promising ridges ended in sharp dips down into the mud, forcing them to backtrack, losing hours. But they always knew which way to travel. It was simple: away from the serjeants. It was also becoming very difficult to stay ahead. The front line seemed to move at a constant pace, unfazed by the valleys and impossible terrain, while Stephanie and her group spent their whole time zigzagging about. What had begun forty-eight hours ago as a nine mile gap was down to about two, and closing steadily.
“Oh, hey, you cats,” Cochrane called. “You like want the good news or the bad news first?” He had taken point duty, striding out ahead of the others. Now he stood atop a dune of battered reeds, looking down the other side in excitement.
“The bad,” Stephanie said automatically.
“The legion of the black hats is speeding up, and there’s like this stupendously
“What’s the good?” Tina squealed.
“They’re speeding up because there’s like a road down here. A real one, with tarmac and stuff.”
The others didn’t exactly increase their pace to reach the bedraggled hippie, but there was a certain eagerness in their stride that’d been missing for some time. They clambered up the incline of the dune, and halted level with him.
“What’s there?” Moyo asked. His face was perfect, the scars and blisters gone; eyes solid and bright. He was even able to smile again, doing so frequently during the last few days they’d spent in the barn. That he could smile, yet still refuse to let them see what lay underneath the illusory eyeballs worried Stephanie enormously. A bad form of denial. He was acting the role of himself; and it was a very thin performance.
“It’s a valley,” she told him.
He groaned. “Oh hell, not again.”
“No, this is different.”
The dune was actually the top of a steepish slope which swept down several hundred yards to the floor of Catmos Vale, a valley that was at least twenty miles wide. Drizzle and mist made the far side difficult to see. The floor below was a broad flat expanse whose size had actually managed to defeat the massive discharges of mud. Its width had absorbed the surges that coursed out of the narrower ravines along either side; spreading them wide and robbing them of their destructive power. The wide, boggy river channel which meandered along the centre had siphoned the bulk of the tide away, without giving it a chance to amass in dangerously unstable colloidal waves.
Vast low-lying sections of the floor had turned directly into quagmire from the rain and overspill. Entire forests had subsided, their trunks keeling over to lean against each other. Now they were slowly sinking deeper and deeper as the rapidly expanding subsurface water level gnawed away at the stability of the loam. Watched over the period of a day or two, it was almost as if they were melting away.
Small hillocks and knolls formed a vast archipelago of olive-green islands amid the ochre sea. Hundreds of distressed and emaciated aboriginal animals scurried about over each of them, herds of kolfrans (a deer-analogue) and packs of the small canine ferrangs were trampling the surviving blades of grass into a sticky pulp. Birds scuttled among them, their feathers too slick with mud for them to fly.
Many of the islands just below the foot of the slope had sections of road threaded across them. The eye could stitch them together into a single strand leading along the valley. It led towards a small town, just visible through the drizzle. Most of it had been built on raised land, leaving its buildings clear of the mud; as if the entire valley had become its moat. There was a church near the centre, its classic grey stone spire standing defiantly proud. Some kind of scarlet symbols had been painted around the middle.
“That’s got to be Ketton,” Franklin said. “Can you sense them?”
“Yes,” Stephanie said uncomfortably. “There’s a lot of us down there.” It would explain the condition of the buildings. There wasn’t a tile missing from the neat houses, no sign of damage. Even the little park was devoid of puddles.
“I guess that’s why these guys are like so anxious to reach it.” Cochrane jerked a thumb back down the valley.
It was the first time they’d actually seen the Liberation army. Twenty jeeps formed a convoy along the road. Whenever the carbon-concrete surface left the islands to dip under the mud, they slowed slightly, cautiously testing the way. The mud couldn’t have been very deep or thick, barely coming over the wheels. A V-shaped phalanx of serjeants followed on behind the jeeps, big dark figures lumbering along quite quickly considering none of them was on the road. On one side of the carbon-concrete strip, their line stretched out almost to the central river of mud; on the other it extended up the side of Catmos Vale’s wall. A second train of vehicles, larger than the jeeps, was turning into the valley several miles behind the front line.
“Ho-lee shit,” Franklin groaned. “We can’t make that sort of speed, not over this terrain.”
McPhee was studying the rugged land behind them. “I cannot see them up here.”
“They’ll be there,” Rana said. “They’re on the other side of the river as well, look. That line is kept level. There’s no break in it. They’re scooping us up like horse shit.”
“If we stay up here we’ll be nailed before sunset.”
“If we go down, we can keep ahead of them on the road,” Stephanie said. “But we’ll have to go through the town. I have a bad feeling about that. The possessed there know the serjeants are coming, yet they’re staying put. And there’s a lot of them.”
“They’re going to make a stand,” Moyo said.
Stephanie glanced back at the ominous line moving towards them. “They’ll lose,” she said, morosely. “Nothing can resist that.”
“We’ve no food left,” McPhee said.
Cochrane used an index finger to prod his purple sunglasses up along the bridge of his nose. “Plenty of water, though, man.”
“There’s nothing to eat up here,” Rana said. “We have to go down.”
“The town will hold them off for a while at least,” Stephanie said. She resisted glancing at Moyo, though he was now her principal concern. “We could use the time to take a break, rest up.”
“Then what?” Moyo grunted.
“Then we move on. We keep ahead of them.”
“Why bother?”
“Don’t,” she said softly. “We try and live life as we always wanted to, remember? Well I don’t want to live like this; and there might be something different up ahead, because there certainly isn’t anything behind. As long as we keep going, there’s hope.”
His face compressed to a melancholic expression. He held one arm out, moving his hand round to try and find her. She gripped his fingers tightly, and he hugged her against him. “Sorry. I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right,” she murmured. “Hey, you know what? The way we’re heading, it takes us right up to the central mountain range. You can show me what mountain gliding is like.”
Moyo laughed gruffly, his shoulders trembling. “Look, guys, I hate to fuck up my karma any more by breaking up your major love-in scene here, but we have to decide where we’re like going. Like
“It has to be down to Ketton,” Stephanie said briskly. She eyed the long slope below. It would be slippery, but with their energistic power they ought to cope. “We can get there ahead of the army.”
“Only just ahead,” Franklin said. “We’ll be trapped in the town. If we stay up here, we can still keep ahead of them.”
