by the relentless sun.
“You Yankee?” says a huge man sitting under an awning.
“No, English,” Jade replies instantly. I’ve already been here long enough to know that there must be a reason for her denying her birth.
“Good. I hate Yankee. Fuckin’ killing bastards.” Jade nods and smiles, and this seems to secure her in the big man’s favour.
“We’d like a couple of bikes, if you have any to spare,” she says, unfazed by his vicious outburst.
He laughs, a sound that would have seemed ridiculously overplayed had it not been for the machine pistol dangling from his belt. As he bellows his mirth at the sky, I take the opportunity to size him up. He’s not just big, he’s massive, at least twenty-five stone, all of it sweaty and sickly and grey. He’s wearing a pair of Bermuda shorts which are grotesquely too small, cutting into his flesh and stretching out in places like the skin on an overcooked sausage. With each shudder of his body, I fear they will burst. His bare chest is studded with black, oozing growths. I’m amazed at how hearty he seems.
“You want bikes? I have bikes! “ He waves his hand at the pool, as if drawing our attention to a fine display of quality antiques. In a way, I think to myself, they are. “But the final question as always, lady? Price?”
“I’ve got your price,” she says, heaving her rucksack from her shoulders. Her loose shirt flaps open and I catch a glimpse of her breasts swinging freely as she bends down. I suddenly fear what this fat man’s price will be, and wonder how close I would get before he could unclip the gun from his belt.
“I’ll take the shiny trike and the hefty mountain bike,” Jade says, pulling a small package from the backpack.
“Hmm, big spending if you want those, little lady,” Fat Man says. I hear something I don’t like in his voice — it is quieter, more serious — and tense as he stretches his neck in an effort to see down Jade’s top. The Sickness picks a bad time to announce its presence to me, jabbing at my chest with white-hot fingertips of pain. I groan and swoon, but pinch a twist of skin on my leg to prevent myself from fainting.
Jade glances back at me and moves off towards Fat Man. She whispers something to him, actually standing on tiptoe so that she can speak into his ear, one hand resting on his pendulous stomach. I can barely imagine how she could give him a better chance to grab at her, but he does not. Instead, the grimness of his face falls away under the emergence of an expression so childlike and angelic that I almost laugh out loud.
Jade turns, looks at me, nods towards the pool of bikes. I wonder what the hell she has shown him. I sidle sideways and lean across the heap of metal, grabbing the handlebars of the stainless steel trike and tugging hard.
Within minutes we are away, the Fat Man calling cheerfully after us and telling us to watch out for the fuckin’ murdering Yankee.
Jade takes the mountain bike, I’m on the trike. I’m surprised to find it well oiled and maintained, the brakes old but well-adjusted, saddle soft and pliable.
“Two questions,” I start, but both are obvious. She eases back until she is pedalling alongside me. We are travelling two-abreast along the main road, but there is no motor traffic.
“He hates Americans because the rest of the world does,” she says. “We’re blamed for it all. The wars. The starvation. The Ruin.” She’s silent for a moment, and I’m about to ask my second question when she continues. “He should visit the States sometime, see what’s left of it.” She pedals harder and slips down a gear, motoring on ahead. Her move offers me a pleasing view of her rump, flexing as her legs pump her along the degenerating tarmac.
“Second question,” she says, “is what did I give him? Right?” She glances back over her shoulder and I nod. “None of your fucking business.” I try to hear a joke in her voice, but there is none. Or if there is, she can hide it well.
We pedal for an hour in silence, Jade leading, me following comfortably on the trike. More than once I think of asking her whether she wants to swap, but my body is stiffening and burning as the infected blood from the growths on my chest surges once more into my veins. One day, a surge like this will kill me. One day soon — perhaps today, riding this bike, my feet describing thousands of circles an hour — black blood will leak from a growth and block an artery, popping a dozen blood vessels at a time until I die. If I’m lucky, it may only take a minute or two.
On the outskirts of the town we pass through the ribbon of huts and tents which go to make up the camps for the un-homed. Eyes follow us on our way, but there is little real interest there. Even the children I see appear old, apathetic and grim instead of lively and playful. We pass a body at the side of the road. A sick fascination forces me to slow down so that I can properly see the dog chewing on its open stomach. There are lizards here, too, darting in and out of the empty eye-sockets to dine on the delicate morsels within.
We pass by. Jade seems unconcerned, but I cannot help but stare out over the sea of torn tents and makeshift hovels. There are families of eight living in one tent; great open ditches full of shit and flies and the discarded bodies of the dead; queues to gather water from a meagre stream, the liquid resembling diseased effluent rather than water. Smells assault us physically, the stench clenching my stomach and throat in its acidic grip. But throughout the ten minutes it takes us to pass through the shantytown, Jade does not slow down once. She does not glance to either side. She does not seem to care.
She has seen it all before.
As we leave Malakki Town and head into the surrounding hills, there is a change. I can feel it in the air, a potential of something that I cannot describe or adequately read. Jade senses it too, and she keeps glancing back at me as if afraid I have begun to lag behind. In truth, I feel as energetic and excited as I have for months, a power pumping through my muscles which has more to do with my sense of freedom than the potential cure I am travelling towards.
The new aura of well-being makes me think about the night before: the passion we had for each other, as if love were at a dirth.
There is a gunshot. Jade’s bike swerves, then leaves the road, flipping over into the dry ditch. I hear a scream, and for a terrible few seconds I cannot tell whether it is Jade’s voice, or my own. Then more gunshots, breaking the air apart like the answer to a silent question.
III
The hillside is smooth, stripped bare of plant life, topsoil scoured away by the biting winds. Sound travels further here. The gunfire is coming from around a bend in the road ahead. Its executors, and executed, are hidden from sight by an old stone wall.
Jade curses bitterly, trying to untangle her legs from the wreckage of the bicycle. I notice that she is keeping her head down almost without thinking about it, and I wonder how many shoot-outs she’s been witness to. I crawl along the dry ditch, leaving the trike behind, hands reaching out to drag the bike away from her legs. I try to tell her to keep still, but the gunfire has increased to a screaming crescendo and she can only frown at my words.
Eventually, through a combination of her kicking and me pulling, she extracts her legs from the twisted bike. There is a raw gravel burn on her left knee, blood already seeping from a hundred pinpricks in the skin and merging into angry red rivulets. She sucks her palm, spitting out black pellets of stone, sucking again, spitting. I feel queasy watching her, and then the Sickness comes along and sends me into a faint.
The gunshots fade away — either the shooting has finished, or I’m really losing it. I slump in the ditch, Jade staring at me past the splayed fingers of her right hand, palm pressed to her mouth. The last image I see is Jade spitting a mouthful of blood and gravel into the air, and the sun hiding behind clouds like the ghost of an airship.
IV
