There was a prolonged bout of gunfire from upriver and a roar as another building collapsed, unseen.
“Let’s not think about it,” I said, thinking all the same. Machine-guns, pad-rifles, it was a war up there. And here we were preparing to paddle right into it. “Let’s just go.”
Chele knelt at the front of the dinghy, with Laura in the middle and me at the back. It sank so that its rim was almost at the level of the mud, and I feared that any surge or wave would swamp us, the weight dragging us instantly down to whatever lay below. I knew that we wouldn’t be the first or last bodies added to this rancid river.
Just as we were about to set out the thudding shock of a pad-rifle sounded from somewhere nearby. The rounds roared along the street, and I saw the flowering explosions of brick and mortar as they struck a house on the opposite side. Great clots of masonry strafed the mud, its splashes remaining visible for a few seconds as they were carried away on the current. Windows burst in, a third of the roofing slates were smashed into the air like a flock of startled birds, the front door and surround exploded into the guts of the house, holes the size of our boat appeared across its facade. We ducked down as low as we could get, frightened but fascinated, and watched in awe as the house slumped down into the mud like a tired old man. The pad-rifle continued firing for a few seconds more. It pounded the debris into dust and then fell silent, until the only sound was the crunch of the mud river sucking the house remains down into itself. Soon, the only sign that a building had existed there at all was the central staircase, exposed to the elements like the bare backbone of some long-rotted beast.
“That was from nearby,” I whispered.
“Stray rounds,” Chele said.
“No way, that was sustained. Someone targeted that house. This one might be next.”
“If we move they may see?“
“If we don’t,” I said, “they’ll find us when they come looking.”
“Maybe we can be on their side,” Laura said quietly. I was almost relieved at the naivete of her statement. There was some child left inside her after all.
“Row,” I said, untying the rotten rope and pushing us away from the wall. Chele picked up an oar and sank it into the mud.
It was like rowing through porridge. Although the mud flowed like a river and kept its own level like water, when I tried to pull on the oar it felt like concrete. I could see the muscles standing out on Chele’s neck as she heaved. Laura sat in front of me, stroking the terrible wounds on her arms with muddy fingertips. I thought about infections and gangrene and pollution, and as if conjured by my musings a rat the size of a small cat ran along the top of the wall we had just vacated. It stared at me with a hunger than could never have been manufactured. This may just be a scene, as Chele had said, but its components were real enough.
We tried keeping to the relative shelter of the buildings and garden walls, rowing against the flow, gaining inch by inch. At one point my paddle snagged on something and I nearly lost it. Reaching down into the mud my hand closed around something soft and yielding, and pulling it away from the paddle realised that whatever it was wore cloths. I did not look down lest I saw it.
But I did catch sight of things in the gardens to my left. I thought they were shrubs and trees at first, branches stripped of leaves and left bare and pale in the grey light. Then I realised that they were limbs. Dozens of bodies were drifted together against one wall, half submerged arms and legs and heads protruding above the mud as if stretching forever for dry brickwork. Faces with mouths and eyes filled with muck. Torsos with horrific wounds. Slicks of blood around them, dark and shiny like oil on water.
I turned away and kept paddling.
The gunfire continued, more sporadic now. Perhaps the numbers on both sides were so reduced by the fighting that there weren’t that many left to shoot.
I hoped that was the case.
“Push harder!” I said, heaving back, feeling my biceps burning, my back straining with the effort. I’d been close to collapse since we saved ourselves from the quagmire. Whatever kept me going now, it would surely not last for much longer. If we let up the current would grab us and drag us out into the faster-flowing central spread of the flooded roadway. And from there… who knew.
Either that or we’d be three more bodies washed against a wall.
Laura dipped her hands in on either side of the dinghy and started to pull as well. She flicked mud up at me — it stank stale and dead, as if filth itself could rot — but I didn’t mind. She was helping. And perhaps having something to do would divert her attention from whatever she was still dwelling upon.
I knew her so well. I was here, we were moving, but she still felt far from saved.
Things floated by. At one point a slick of fresh blood enveloped the boat, and the fleshy objects squelching against the wood were stark against the dark brown mess. Many other things, too, a real mix and match of a life, as if someone’s history was being systematically destroyed somewhere up ahead. A perverse, reverse evolution. There was a shoe, laces still tied but empty; a notebook, pages sprawled like a dead bird, one side used, the other waiting for thoughts that would never come; an unopened tin of dried rice; a sock; a dinner plate, still stained with the grease of its last supper. Spectacles, a boxed pen set, half of a door, a flap of leather from a torn jacket…
It went on.
And then we reached the end of the street where the mud opened up into a lake of filth, and at last we could see what the humps protruding from its mess were.
Bandstands. Three of them, the one in the centre so tall that its whole platform was above the flood-line. It reminded me of small-town America, hot-dogs, Fourth of July parades and brass bands. The other two were smaller, submerged beneath the mud with only their roofs and supports touching daylight. And on each bandstand, people with guns.
Fighting over nothing but mud, filth and shit.
Dying there, flipping into the air, spinning, tumbling into the muck and being carried slowly towards us by the current, past us eventually, back along the street.
More corpses to meet the wall.
The central bandstand seemed to be under siege from the other two, and it was here that the pad-rifle fire had originated. Strangely, its impact on the wooden structures was minimal, and at first I thought it was because they were so open that most rounds missed. But then I saw someone stand against the railings of the central bandstand, prop a pad-rifle on the rail before him and loose off three rounds at the structure to our left. The first two struck a woman hunkered down on its roof, shattering her like a broken mannequin and flinging her pieces far out over the mud. The third round hit the edge of the roof… but only a few shards of wood sprung out.
“It’s all selective,” I said. “All this destruction is selective”
“They’re pad-rifles,” Chele said. “You can’t pick and choose?“
“You saw what happened to that house. How do you think those two bandstands are still there?”
“Bad shots,” Laura said. The gunfire erupted once again, figures dropped and splashed into the mud, some screaming, guts blown out, limbs askew.
The buildings still stood, bearing the designer-scars of battle.
“Have they seen us?” Laura asked. We were bobbing against the gable wall of a house bordering the park, pressed there by the current and exposed to anyone who happened to glance our way.
“I think,” I said, “that their own little scene simply doesn’t include us.” I was comfortable with this idea, if a little confused, and it seemed to fit right into what we were seeing.
“It’ll have to stop soon,” Chele said. “They’ll all be dead.”
There was a sound like the buzzing of distant insects beneath the gunfire. And as the three powerboats roared into the park? two emerging from the distant haze of mist, one coming straight up the street behind us? and a line of bullets coughed out brick dust by our heads, I realised how wrong I was.
We
The boat slicing through the mud behind us slowed down, and a man on the bow loosed a burst of suppressing fire at the bandstand on the left. The noise was shockingly loud. Another hail of bullets came our way, kicking up great gouts of mud and releasing its stench into the air. Bullets buzzed by our ears, ricochets singing behind us, and I was sure I could feel the breeze of their passing, smell their rich metallic tint as they exploded against the wall and the boats’ hulls.
The driver of the powerboat fell back, his face swallowed by a fresh red hole.
