“Better walk fast, mano,” Vinnie tossed at me. He turned on his heel, heading to the shadier side of the street, loping along on his long legs, almost faster than I could follow. I didn’t complain. There was no point.
We moved forward steadily all that day, dropping into a kind of routine — walk for an hour or so, find a store and lift a few cans of Fizz or Tapo, walk again. All the time, eyeballing every Pharma we passed, even though we knew it would be tomorrow before we could reach the areas around the river with their shabby stores. The bad news was that older stores meant older units without StayClosed, so more people — which added up to less stuff to go around.
Even though we stuck to the shade, within a few hours the skin on Vin’s face and hands was streaked with red and my hands were tingling. My face was beyond that, heading towards burning. I kept my eyes ahead, on the rippling back of Vin’s Bluesuit, his muscles working rhythmically as he walked. Not looking to the sides, not looking at the purple faces pressed to the glass, the empty eyes looking at me. Mocking me, making me wonder if in fact they were the lucky ones, because it had only been a few hours for them. Grilling to death under an unfiltered sun could take a few days.
Just after dark, we stopped at a BloMo that still had plenty of Thinpax and cans, although gaps on the shelves showed where others had already been through. We’d seen people flitting along the streets, moving in the same direction as us, towards the river. Nobody wanted to go to the Other Side unless they had to. Now we were all heading there.
We gorged on multiple meal combos, and then built nests from crumpled plastiwrap to rest for a few hours. I peeled my Bluesuit off one shoulder. The skin there was almost as red as my hands.
“We could just stay here, mano,” Vin said through cracked lips. “Eat candy and Thinpax ‘til things are all fixed up.”
“The food won’t last forever. And when are things going to be all fixed up? Who’s out there to do it? Seen anyone that looks like they know what they’re doing? Plus, how’re you doing without the Beppies?”
Vin just looked at me with red-rimmed eyes. His hands had gone from trembling to quivering. I’d had to open his Thinpax.
“We’ll find you some,” I told him. “If we keep moving.”
Vin sighed and curled up on a bed of Virtue Pads. “I’ll take your word. For now, mano.For now.”
We slept for a couple of hours and then moved on, There was no full dark without the filter. Stars blazed above us, each one a burning sun in its own right, adding up to a grayish light that prickled our already-burned skin.
It was by this grayish light that we saw our first bodies outside the StayClosed. Vin walked into the first one — he didn’t see it, hanging from a useless CityLec pylon. He grunted when he hit it and fell backwards, knocking me down behind him. We sprawled on the ground, side-by-side, looking up at the body, a darker grey shadow against the drab sky. He’d hanged himself with some kind of cord, looped over the Metoplex arm of the pylon. The sidewalk was scattered with the Thinpax cartons he must have stood on, then kicked away. Dark, curly hair stood out around his head like a black halo.
We picked ourselves up and walked on without speaking. There were more bodies over the next day or so. Mostly hanging. Some in stores, beside empty bottles of Drainfix and Stilosopa, sprawled out in gruesome puddles of bloody vomit, their bodies twisted in agony, their faces grey and rigid, stuck in a permanent howl of pain. The hanging ones were quieter, their purple faces and bulging eyes the outdoor twins of the people stuck to the StayClosed glass.
However they died, they soon began to stink in the queer, still heat of the Vault. We walked through the sweet and meaty stench, waded on through it, as our skin baked and curled under the relentless sun. We took turns to lead, the other following close behind, falling into the same rhythm, walking like machines, ducking into stores for fuel — just quick in and out, because in there the stink was often worse, the heat and the bodies trapped together. Vin seemed to be coping OK without the Beppies, although there was a hard set to his jaw that suggested he was clenching something inside, something he didn’t want to let escape. We didn’t talk.
A pale, silvery dawn was beginning as we crossed the broad strip of Geocrete that ran alongside the river that lay between City Central and the Other Side. When I studied history, one teacher showed us an old picture on FloScreen of something she called “nature”: flat courtyards of green stuff called “grass,” dotted with brown sticks with darker green fluffy stuff on top — she said nobody knew what they’d been called. Through the middle of the picture ran a coil of blue, curving through the grass — she said that was what rivers used to look like. Our river didn’t look like that. Our river was a swirl of brown running through a deep Geocrete channel. It ran across the whole Vault, and took a loop right around City Central, with a series of bridges crossing over to the Other Side, before rejoining itself to run through the rest of the Vault and out the far side.
With our usual brilliance, we managed to arrive at the river nowhere near any of the bridges.
Vin groaned and sat down on the cracked Geocrete a few metres away from the channel. “Just a moment,” he said. “Just give me a
