'Where the fuck is she?'
Moon had set up her own little lean-to, more solidly built and private than the others. Snowy had always thought that if she could have put on a door with a padlock she would have. Now everything was gone — the backpack Moon had made from a spare flight suit, her tools and clothes, her homemade wooden comb, her precious store of washable tampons.
Bonner was rampaging through what was left, smashing apart the walls of the lean-to. Naked save for now-disintegrating shorts, with his bulked-up muscles and mud smeared over his face and chest and in his spiky hair, Snowy thought there was very little left of the timid young pilot he remembered looking after when they had first met, on assignment to a carrier in the Adriatic.
Ahmed came out of his own lean-to, wrapped in a silvered survival blanket. 'What’s going on?'
'She’s gone. She’s fucking gone!' Bonner raged.
Sidewise stepped forward. 'We can all see she’s gone, you moron—'
Bonner hit at him with a slashing blow. Sidewise managed to duck out of the path of the young pilot’s fist, but he was caught on the temple and knocked flat.
Snowy ran forward and grabbed Bonner’s arms from behind. 'For Christ’s sake, Bon, take it easy.'
'That two-brained bastard has been fucking her. All the time he was fucking her.'
Ahmed seemed utterly dismayed — as well he might, thought Snowy, for if Moon was gone, taking their only hope of procreation with her, all his grandiose plans were ruined before they had started. 'But why would she go?' he moaned. 'Why be alone? What would be the
Snowy said, 'What’s the point of any of it? We’re all going to die here. It was never going to work, splot. All the bog iron in the world wouldn’t have made any difference to that.'
Sidewise managed a grin. 'I don’t think Bonner is worried about the destiny of mankind right now. Are you, Bon? All he cares about is that the only pussy in the world has vanished, without him getting any of it—'
Bonner roared and swung again, but this time Snowy managed to hold him back.
Ahmed sloped back to his shelter, coughing.
When relative calm was restored, Snowy went to the rack where they had hung a row of skinned rabbits, and started preparing a meal.
Before the first rabbit kebab was cooked over the fire, Bonner had made up a pack. He stood there, in the gathering twilight, facing Sidewise and Snowy. 'I’m pissing off,' he said.
Sidewise nodded. 'You going after Moon?'
'What do you think, shithead?'
'I think she has good land craft. She’ll be hard to track.'
'I’ll manage,' Bonner snarled.
'Wait until morning,' Snowy said reasonably. 'Have some food. You’re asking for trouble, going off in the dark.'
But the reasoning part of Bonner’s head seemed to have switched off for good. He glared at them out of his mask of mud, every muscle tense. Then, his clumsy pack bumping on his back, he stalked away.
Sidewise put another bit of rabbit on the fire. 'That’s the last we’ll see of him.'
'You think he’ll find Moon?'
'Not if she sees him coming.' Sidewise looked reflective. 'And if he tries to force her, she’ll kill him. She’s tough that way.'
The rabbit was nearly done. Snowy pulled it off the fire, and began to push bits of it off the spit and onto their crude wooden plates. Every night he had divided up their food into five portions. Now, with Bonner and Moon gone, he divided it into three.
He and Sidewise just looked at the three portions for a while. Ahmed was back in his shelter. Out of sight, out of mind. Snowy picked up the third plate and, with the blade of his knife, scraped off the meat onto the other two plates. 'If Ahmed gets better, he can look after himself. If not, there’s nothing we can do for him.'
For a time they chewed on their rabbit.
'I’ll leave tomorrow,' Snowy said eventually.
Sidewise didn’t reply to that.
'What about you? Where will you go?'
'I think I’d like to explore,' Sidewise said. 'Go see the cities. London. Paris, if I can get across the Channel. Find out more about what’s happened. A lot of it must have gone already. But some of it must be like the ruins of the Roman Empire.'
'Nobody else will ever see such sights,' Snowy said.
'That’s true.'
Hesitantly, Snowy said, 'What about after that? I mean, when we get older. Less strong.'
'I don’t think that is going to be a problem,' Sidewise said laconically. 'The challenge will be to pick how you want to go. To make sure you control at least that.'
'When you’ve seen all you want to see.'
'Whatever.' He smiled. 'Maybe in Paris there will be a few windows left to smash. Thousand-year-old brandy to drink. I’d enjoy that.'
'But,' Snowy said carefully, 'there will be nobody to tell about it.'
'We’ve always known that,' Sidewise said sharply. 'From the moment we clambered out of the Pit into that ancient oak forest. It was obvious even then.'
'Maybe to you,' Snowy said.
Sidewise tapped his temple, where a healthy bruise was developing from Bonner’s punch. 'That’s my big brain working. Churning out one useless conclusion after another. And all of it making no damn difference, none at all. Listen. Let’s make a pact. We’ll pick a meeting place. We’ll aim to rendezvous, every year. We may not make it every time, but you can always leave a message, something.'
They picked a site — Stonehenge, on the high ground of Salisbury Plain, surely still unmistakable — and a time, the summer solstice, easy to track with the timekeeping discipline Ahmed had instilled in them. It was a good idea. Somehow it was comforting to Snowy, even now, to think that his future would have a little structure.
When they had done eating, the dark was closing in. It wasn’t cold, but Snowy fetched himself a blanket of crudely woven bark and wrapped it around his shoulders. 'Hey, Side. Was he right?'
'Who?'
'Bonner. Did you pork Moon?'
'Too right I porked her.'
'You fucking dark horse. I never knew. Why you?'
'Atavistic urges, mate. I think she was responding to my smarter than the average brain.'
Snowy mulled over that. 'So our big brains are good for one thing, then.'
'Oh, yes. They were always good for that. Probably what they were for in the first place. All the rest was bullshit.'
'You fucking dark horse.'
IV
Snowy followed the ape people.
He didn’t live as they did. He used his snares to trap game up to the size of pigs and small deer, and used knives and fires and lean-tos for protection and butchery. But he walked where they walked.
They wandered impressively widely, through the great forests that blanketed southern England, forests that concealed the ruins of cities and cathedrals, palaces and parks. He became concerned if he lost sight of Weena, reassured when he found her again. He grew to know all the individuals in the little group — he gave them names, like Grandpa and Shorty and Doc — and he followed their lives, their triumphs and tragedies, as if he were watching a small soap opera.
They were frightened of the rats — the big ones, the rat-wolves that seemed to hunt in packs. He found that out quickly.
He wondered how he must seem to them. They were clearly aware of him, but he didn’t interfere with them or the food they gathered. So they let him be, unremarked. He was like a ghost, he thought, a ghost from a vanished past, haunting these new people.
After a few months, with the long, long summer of these late times at last drawing to a close, they came to a beach. Snowy thought he was somewhere on the Sussex shore, on Britain’s south coast.
The hairies did a little foraging at the fringe of the forest, ignoring Snowy as usual.
Snowy wandered along the beach. The forest washed right down to the shore, as if this were a Robinson Crusoe tropical island, not England at all. He found a place to sit, facing the crashing waves.
He picked up a handful of sand. It was fine and golden, and ran easily through his fingers. But there were black grains in there, he saw, and some bits of orange and green and blue. The multicolored stuff must be plastic. And the black stuff looked like soot — soot from Rabaul, the killer volcano, or from the fires that had swept the world as everything went to shit.
It’s all gone, he thought wonderingly. It really has. The sand was a kind of proof. Moon rock and cathedrals and football stadiums, libraries and museums and paintings, highways and cities and shanties, Shakespeare and Mozart and Einstein, Buddha and Mohammed and Jesus, lions and elephants and horses and gorillas and the rest of the menagerie of extinction — all worn away and scattered and ground down, mixed into this sooty sand he trickled through his fingers.
The hairies were leaving. He could see their slim forms sliding silently into the deeper forest.
He stood up, brushed the sand off his palms, shifted the pack on his back, and followed them.
CHAPTER 18
The Kingdom of the Rats
