“About time,” the voice says. I open my eyes and grimace as the sun dazzles me. I feel heat on my front, and realise instantly that my shirt has been removed. The sun is slowly cooking the growths on my chest, turning them an angry red as if embarrassed at their nakedness.
“How long…?” is all I can manage.
“Half an hour,” Jade says, leaning into view. She tips a water bottle over my face and then splashes more across my body. I flinch, but then sigh with pleasure.
Groggily, I sit up. I realise that the hillside is silent, just as I see the crimson mess of Jade’s hand holding the bottle. “Oh Christ, your hand.” I reach out, but she withdraws.
“It’s all right! Bloody, that’s all, looks worse than it is.”
She has washed her leg and is wearing what looks like her knickers as an improvised bandage. She looks away from me, as if ashamed of her wounds, and wraps a strip of cloth from her shirt around her hand. It instantly soaks red. She cringes, flexes her hands and draws in an uncomfortable breath.
“How’re you feeling?” she asks.
Memory suddenly jerks me upright, instils me with a sense of urgency. “Where are the guns? Who was shooting?”
“Don’t worry, while you were doing your Rip Van Winkle they got into a truck and drove off.”
“Did they see us?”
“If they had you wouldn’t have woken up.”
I try to stand, sway, sit down again. “Who were they shooting?”
Jade looks up the gentle hillside, trying to see past the crumbling wall. “Once we get moving again we’ll find out.”
“So many guns…” I say, trailing off, leaving the obvious unsaid. So many guns, how many people?
We haul the tricycle from the ditch, brushing off the accumulated rubbish of decades. Apart from a twisted spoke or two the machine is undamaged, but that’s more than can be said for Jade’s bike. It’s ruined, all pointing spokes and bent frame, the saddle deformed almost ninety degree out of true. The front wheel is buckled beyond repair, the rear tyre flat and shredded. I realise how lucky Jade had been. Torn hand and slashed leg, true, but if the ground had been as unkind to her as it had to her bike, we’d be looking at more than a bit of leaking blood right now.
“You were lucky,” I say.
She nods. “Come on, we’d better get a move on.”
“Jade.”
“What?”
“Why are you so pissed with me?”
She stares at me. I realise how old she looks under the superficial attractiveness, how her eyes never really laugh but bear whatever terrible things she has seen like a brand. I wonder how I would feel if I was cured of the Sickness; I like to think it would give me a new-found energy, a reason to be grateful, a duty to thank life every single day. I know Della would want it like that.
“I’m not pissed at you, Gabe. Oh Christ, it’s something you’ll know soon enough.”
Her words scare me more than I’d like to admit, burrow their way into my thoughts like insubstantial maggots. “What are you leading me to?” I ask, for the first time. Until now, I’d always trusted her implicitly. A stupid reaction for someone I didn’t know, maybe, but there had really been no reason to think otherwise. And she seems to know what she is doing, she’s streetwise and confident, knows things, like how to get the bikes and how to get me to String. But just what the hell had I really gotten myself into?
“I’m leading you to a man called String. He’s a bit of a witch-doctor, I suppose you’d say.” She punctuates each point with a nod of the head, as if explaining to me the rules of a game instead of the particulars of our current situation. “String can cure people of the Sickness — he cured me,” she continues, tapping her chest. “But on the way to where String is, you’re likely to see some nasty things. That’s just the nature of things — the way things have to be. It doesn’t really matter, sometimes it’s just got to happen. But the things you see might not be nice. Like what’s around that corner.”
She waves a hand over her head, then turns and gazes in the direction she indicated, giving me her back to stare at as she continues. “I’ve been this way once before, remember. I’ve seen these things already, I’ve experienced them. The Ruin’s a right fucker, but just when you think you’ve seen everything bad it’s got to throw at you, there’s something else. But some bad things are good as well.” She turns back, and her haunted expression sends a shiver down my spine. “Remember that. There are sayings: Cruel to be kind; Good comes from evil.” She bends and sighs as she eases her rucksack onto her shoulders. “I’m not pissed at you. I’m just not looking forward to seeing all the bad stuff again.”
“What bad stuff?” Her words have planted the fear of damnation in me, sent an arrow of terror streaking through my veins and pincering my heart between its dozens of heads. “What am I going to see?”
Jade nods at the tricycle, indicating that I should travel on it, then walks on ahead. “Best see for yourself. Up here. Around the corner.”
At first, I think it’s a stagnant pond. There is a light steam rising from it, though the surface appears uneven and scattered with protruding growths of fungi. Then, I realise what I am really seeing. In a dip in the ground — perhaps where water had once gathered naturally, before the Ruin decimated the atmosphere of the planet — there is a lake of twitching bodies. The movement I had mistaken as ripples on the surface of the water is their dying shivers, translating through the hundreds of corpses as if by electric shock. There is a pool, of sorts; the bodies lay in a quagmire of blackened, soupy mud, dust having sucked up the spilled blood and spread under the bodies. The steam rises, like nebulous spirits making their final journey.
But surely there can be no peace here. Not where for every five bodies that lay still there is one still alive, squirming silently in the white-hot agony of approaching death. Not here, where the stark white dead eye of a child stares from an otherwise shattered face. No peace here, where the rich stench of death and dying is a meaty tang in the hot air.
I stop pedalling and the trike drifts to a tired pause in the middle of the road. I cannot begin to estimate the number of bodies. Shock has frozen my mind, the sheer unexpectedness of this sight paralysing my thoughts.
In the city, yes, I had seen the great mound of corpses along the quay. But there, perversely, it had not seemed obtrusive. Maybe it was the casual way that people had regarded the bodies, barely looking at them, treating them more as a landmark than an object of pity or disgust. In the city, I had been prepared for anything. The Ruin had changed so much and the face of humanity had changed with it, often blending back into ages past like an ill child, retarding in years.
But here, in the country, on a hillside that had once been beautiful, and could be again, the sight is almost surreal with contradictions. The deep blue of the sky, decorated with an occasional cloud cheerful in its fluffiness; and the bloody red mess of open meat, steaming insides, pulsing wounds.
I begin to cry. I cannot help myself and Jade, in her defence, moves away and sits under a tree stripped of life years ago. The tears are warm and heavy in the approaching furnace of midday, streaking the dust from my face and falling like hot blood onto my shirt. They merge with sweat and the leakings from my growths, to form a liquid testament to my wretchedness.
I sit that way for several minutes, willing the tears to stay because they blur my vision and camouflage, however falsely, the sight before me. Then Jade walks over to me and places a hand on my shoulder.
“I don’t understand,” I say, realising the stupidity of the statement. Who could possibly claim to understand the insanity of this moment?
But Jade seems to know.
“There are lots of reasons,” she says. “Population control, for one. At least half of those you see are children. The others are men and women of a… breeding age. No old people. No ill people.”
“But it’s just so misguided. So
Jade is silent for a moment. She seems to be staring over the bodies, perhaps glimpsing some vague future that lies beyond their steaming deaths, but nearer than we think.
“But it does work,” she says, pained. “More food, more medicine, more water. Times have changed since the Ruin, you know.”
“I never dreamed…” I cannot finish. I can barely comprehend the terrible truth of what I have seen. On the harbour, the bodies… I suppose I thought that they had died in some natural, acceptable way, and merely been
