Jesus, he said, good thing I didn’t ask for a striptease. He unbuttoned her pants. Threw his hands up when he saw the leggings and left her to fumble them down while he hunted for a condom in the glovebox. Made her turn around. No offence. I can tell you were a good-looking woman.
She heard him spit on his hand and then he pushed her legs apart and shoved himself in.
You like that? he said. Do you? Hey?
His spit barely lubricated her, she rubbed raw. His breathing was loud in the cab, opening tiny splits inside. The shelter house, crawling away from the shelter house with him in the dark behind her. She gripped the back of the seat with her numb hands and looked out through the fog on the windscreen at the road and the mountains descending east, she thought it was still east, this is nothing. He had her by the hips, grabbed at her hair but there wasn’t enough of it so he ran his hand down her face, forcing her mouth open, down to her throat. She yanked his arm away with both of hers, falling forward and hitting her cheekbone on the headrest. He came out of her, swore and pushed her head against the seat. Held her down that way, breathing over her, the stink and slap of flesh as he worked in and out.
When he was done, he offered to help get her clothes on but the feeling was coming back into her fingers in stabs by then, and she wouldn’t let him touch her again. He fiddled with the radio and she knew that if he told her to get out now she would have no choice. But he put the truck in gear and pulled back onto the highway.
He asked her if she liked classic rock and when there was a newsbreak he asked if she’d been anywhere near the howler, if she’d heard about the flu outbreak in Fengdu. Then he just drove and she leaned against the window and counted each turn that brought them down the pass.
Hey, wakey wakey. The driver was nudging her shoulder. She sat up fast, shrugging him off. Don’t be like that, he said.
The snow was gone and the sky was brilliant. Her eyes followed a hawk labouring up and up and then diving in a steep V. The mountains were hills now, green with bush. A fast-flowing creek running alongside the road.
This is the last bit, he said. Thought you’d want to see. He palmed the wheel into a slow turn, humming to the radio. Around the bend, the view opened onto a wide valley, and there was the XB again, running through it under the sun, as if the range had just been a minor interruption. But this was a different XB, this was the first one. Fengdu. Its wall ran north and south, beyond her sight, but she could only see one gate, fortified with barbed wire and guard towers. The road cutting through the No Go to the gate was fenced in and lined with concertina wire. A queue of vehicles and a queue of bodies. That human queue was built on hope, on the hidden promise of something better, but Li was still high up enough to see over the wall. She had a brief impression of a long metal cage running between the wall and a second barrier. On the far side of that, smoke rose from a vast industrial zone. A flash of greenhouses further north and the start of a metropolis that made Valiant look like a suburb. But Li tracked back over the wall to what was outside it.
The driver said, That’s where you’re headed, right?
Permacamp sprawled north and south along the No Go’s perimeter fenceline, like makecamp, but it carved into the No Go as well, and it was gated and fenced like Transit. It wasn’t like either of those, though, not really. There were checkpoints and guard stations, roads branching out through defined settlements. Precise, endless rows of army tents interspersed with toilet blocks and washing lines and solar panels, and small container settlements and fenced-off administration areas with real buildings, and patches of cultivated land. It looked like Agency. She imagined the numbers of unsheltered living in this camp, moving through its ordered world, where everything was recorded and accounted for.
She tried to imagine Matti in there but she came up empty. So she looked east instead, across Fengdu, squinting against the distance, and imagined she saw the grey shine of ocean. Boats that didn’t sink.
I can drop you on the outskirts, the driver said. I can’t risk getting spotted setting you down before I clear customs. There’s taxis running to the camp all the time down there.
She saw where the highway came out on the valley floor, how much traffic there was on it, the trucks queuing up outside the gates of Fengdu. The fringes of the camp started at the side of the road and there it looked scrappier, dustier, less regulated, like you could jump a truck, or maybe just walk a while before anyone stopped you.
A beeping started up inside the cab. The driver glanced at the CB and then at his phone in its dock, frowning, but Li already had the phone out of her pocket. Two messages.
You didn’t say you had a phone.
Two messages. She couldn’t listen with him there, the smell of him, his body filling up all the space. Can you pull over? Let me off here?
I would’ve traded for the phone.
Li looked at him and what she felt must have been in her eyes because he shut his mouth, turned back to the road. A few minutes later there was a passing lane and he pulled over. She threw her pack down and got out without speaking or looking at him again.
The first message was from Rich. I wanted to call you before we get out
