He set off south, into the darkness.
*
Even at a distance, Peterborough garrison displayed itself to the night by the glow of floodlights. This night was unlike any of the hundreds of nights Lawrence had spent in Peterborough, for he had never known any glory garrison anywhere to waste gold shining into the night. It was like some tale from the Public Era.
For hours he walked. The hump of light floated ahead on the dark horizon. Pounding of engines from behind forced him to take cover down the embankment as another convoy rolled past. Might this frenetic mobilisation be something to do with him? He had no idea how far The Captain’s influence extended. Was he walking to his own coffin? He lay on the embankment, anguishing over what to do. Reverse and head north towards Nottingham or Lincoln? He knew nothing about those places. The one edge he had at Peterborough was that the city was familiar and there might still be old friends there. So, he continued towards the hump of light despite the sense of walking into a trap.
In the last few miles he came to landmarks he remembered from his life in Peterborough, notably crossroads where lesser drains ran off into the marsh, then a large circular junction with a wide, major drain that had once marked the outskirts of the Public Era suburbs. Baying hounds added a nostalgic accompaniment—he had forgotten that the area around the town held a population of feral dogs much loathed by the locals for predation upon sheep and goats and, legend had it, occasional children.
He left the drain and skirted towards the overgrown suburban ruins around the surviving core of Peterborough. Most of the ruins were overgrown places of cats, foxes and rodent life, amongst which existed a few hamlets inhabited by clans of simple, illiterate people who sold meat and fish to the glory garrison, or else hunted in the surrounding fens. They did not like visitors. It was avoiding these humans Lawrence had in mind, whilst taking little notice of the baying dogs getting closer, until a dog bolted past, turned and snarled at him. Damn the brutes! He must be offending their territory or some such insult. More of them padded around him, panting and swishing through the grass. They still did not concern him much; he kept to his course along the edge of strip fields, knowing this track would lead him to what appeared to be a canal but was in fact a river that turned the land to the north into a sodden wilderness by flowing into it. This river traversed the core of Peterborough, which made it an easy route into the centre of the city.
“Fuck off, you,” he snapped at one of the dogs, batting it across the head after it had taken a bite at his right hand, fortunately protected by a thick leather Value System working glove. This was the first time he had really looked closely at any of them. The light from the city centre reflecting off the low overcast yielded a pale illumination like a full moon in which the dog’s eyes burned with lust, its ribs corrugated its flank in a striped pattern of shadows. It was half-starved. This observation had barely registered when the dog leaped at Lawrence’s face at just the moment he aimed a great kick at its throat, which actually struck it in the belly and flipped it on his back. He was a slow digging his knife out with clumsy, numbed fingers in the thick gloves. Another dog jumped up and bit his shoulder, crushing like a man-trap but unable to pierce the heavy canvas overalls. He was struggling to beat it off when he felt paws scrabbling on his shoulder blades and his head was getting yanked back—the damned brute had bitten the end of the oil cloth he had wrapped around his head as a makeshift sou’wester. He hacked this new attacker with the heel of a boot, catching it somewhere painful enough to force it back with a yelp. Now he had the knife in hand he rammed it deep under the rib cage of the character trying to chew his shoulder off. It uttered a high-pitched scream and fell writhing and yowling. Damn, human voices from a patch of lanterns a hundred yards or so away. He was terrified a local would take a pot-shot at the fight with a rifle; this terrified him far more than some desperate brood of hounds. They had jumped back to a more cautious distance after the fate of their comrade, now reduced to a final, gasping death-pant. Lawrence backed away in long, quick paces, being careful to keep his movements deliberate and measured to avoid any hint of panic. The pack followed, dancing about whining and nervous, increasingly agitated by the approach of more humans from the hamlet, angry and swearing ones with lanterns hung out on poles, sweeping about and getting nearer. One of them fired what must have been a musket, or else a blunderbuss, as a terrific flash followed by a cascade of sparks and a boom erupted from the bushes, the pack of dogs bolted leaving two more of their number thrashing about yowling, caught by the fan of shot. Lawrence turned and sprinted, hoping like hell the lanterns had dazzled the shooter since they could not have failed to hear his pounding boots and branches splintering. On reaching the towing track along the side of the river, he stopped
