Guardians of the Phoenix
It was dawn when we set off from beneath the twisted skeleton of the Eiffel Tower and crossed the desert to Tangiers.
We travelled by day through a blasted landscape devoid of life, and at night we stopped and tried to sleep. I’d lie in my berth and stare through the canopy at the magnetic storms lacerating the troposphere. The heat was insufferable, even in the marginally cooler early hours. When I slept I dreamed of the women I had seen in old magazines, and when I woke in the searing heat of morning and Danny started the truck on the next leg of the journey, I was silent and sullen with melancholy longing.
Two days out of Paris, heading through what Edvard informed us had once been the Auvergne, we picked up the fifth member of our party.
Around sunset, as the horizon burned and a magnetic storm played out in a frenzy overhead, the truck stuttered and came to a halt. Danny hit the steering wheel. “Christ! It’s one of the main capacitors.”
“Not again?” Fear lodged in my throat. This was the third time in as many weeks that the truck had failed, and every time Danny’s desperation had communicated itself to me. He tried to disguise it, but I could see the dread in his eyes, in the shake of his hands. Without the truck, without the means to cross the ravaged land in search of water, we were dead.
Danny was our leader by dint of the fact that he owned the truck and the drilling rig, and because he was an engineer. He was in his fifties, small and lean, and despite what he’d been through he was still optimistic.
I’d never heard that word till I met Danny, four years ago.
I stared through the windscreen. We were on the edge of a city: its jagged skyline of ruined buildings rose stark against the dying light. Over the decades sand had drifted through the parks and esplanades, softening the harsh angles of the buildings, creating beautifully parabolic curves between the shattered streets and vertical walls.
“Edvard!” Danny called. “Kat!”
Edvard’s balding head appeared through the hatch. A little later, on account of her limp, Kat joined us. Her lined face wrinkled even more as she peered through the windscreen.
Danny indicated the scene before us. “Do you know what happened here?”
Edvard looked at the map on the seat between Danny and me. “Clermont-Ferrand. It wasn’t a nuclear strike. I know that much. Too small a place to be a target, nuclear or biological.”
Danny looked at him, scratching his greying beard. “So you reckon it’s safe?”
Edvard thought about it, then nodded.
Kat said, “I just hope there’s no one out there.”
Stalled like this, we’d be easy pickings for marauders — not that we’d come across any of those for years.
“Okay,” Danny said, “come on, Pierre. Let’s see what the damage is.”
I took my rifle from the locker, hung it over my shoulder, and followed Danny from the truck. Even though the sun was on its way down, the heat was ferocious: it was as if we’d stepped into an industrial oven. We walked down the length of the truck, pausing at the foot of the ladder welded onto the flank, and Danny gingerly picked open a small hatch. He pulled out a toolbox and two pairs of gloves and passed one pair to me. The rungs of the ladder would take the skin clean off our palms if we ascended unprotected.
Danny nodded, and I followed him up the side of the truck and across the top. The heat radiating from the solar arrays and the steel surface of the truck hit me in a blast. I picked my way carefully after Danny, wary of allowing the exposed flesh of my legs to get anywhere near the hot steel.
Danny stopped at the apex, hauled open an inspection cover and passed it back to me. For the next ten minutes he rooted around inside, grunting and cursing as he checked each capacitor in turn.
I unslung my rifle and scanned the darkening city, wondering what this place might have been like fifty or sixty years ago, when the streets and buildings had been full of people going about their everyday business — before the nuclear and biological wars, before the governments collapsed under the strain of trying to hold together a dying world.
I heard the hatch open below and saw Edvard limp out of the truck and across the sand to the nearest building. He paused before it, looking ragged and frail, staring up at the ruin before stepping inside
I scanned the horizon, looking for signs of life. A part of me knew it was a futile exercise. I hadn’t seen a live animal for months, or other human beings for three years now. Even so, I searched the ruins with hope, and a little dread — for if we did happen upon humans out there, then chances were that they’d be as hostile as the last lot.
“Pierre!”
I started. “Sorry, I–”
“Just pass me the cover.”
He took it from me and slipped it back into place. “Fixed?” I asked.
“For now. Don’t know how long it’ll last.” He shook his head. “But we’re lucky. If it’d been something major…”
I nodded. Danny laughed, trying to make light of his own relief. I backed down to the ground and, as Danny slipped into the truck to tell Kat not to worry herself sick, I waded through the sand towards the shattered buildings.
Edvard had moved into the shadowy interior of the nearest shell. I followed his dimpled prints in the drift and leaned in the doorway, watching him.
Edvard was Norwegian, and he’d had to explain to me what that meant, now that nations no longer existed. He’d been a doctor in Oslo before the colony died out. He was slow and wise, and as ghostly-pale as the rest of us. It was Edvard who had taught me how to read and write.
He had aged quickly in the four years I’d known him. He’d slowed down, and the flesh had fallen from his bones, and when I’d asked him if he was okay he’d just smiled and said he was fine, for an old man. I reckoned he was in his late forties.
The room was empty, but for drifts of sand, scattered paper, and a skeleton in the far corner. The bones had collapsed, and the skull had rolled onto the floor and come to rest on its right cheek; in the half-light of the room, the empty eyes seemed to be staring at us.
“Ed,” I said. “The truck’s okay. A blown capacitor. Danny fixed it.”
He turned and smiled. “Excellent.” He seemed distant, lost in thought.
“What?” I said.
He pointed at the skeleton. “I remember when I would have taken those bones, Pierre. Can you believe that? Nutrients, you see. The marrow in the bones. Boil them up, make a soup. Pretty thin, but nourishing…” He shrugged. “No good now, of course. All dried out, desiccated.”
He knelt slowly, and I could almost hear the creak of his joints. He reached out and picked up a scrap of paper. He rose and joined me in the doorway, where the light was better, and held out the old newspaper.
“Christ, Pierre. 2040. What, fifty years ago? Look, a headline about the peace pact with China. Lot of good that did!”
He’d told me about what had happened to China. The military had taken over in a bloody coup, overturning a government they accused of not doing all they could to feed the people. And then the people had overthrown the junta, when the military had proved as useless as the government.
Not long after that, China invaded India, and Europe came to the aid of the subcontinent, and a world war broke out. It lasted five days, according to Edvard. And after that the world was never the same again.
That was the beginning of the end, Edvard said. After that, there was no hope. What humankind had begun with wars, the planet finished off with accelerated global warming.
He stared at the scrap of newspaper. In his clawed hand, the paper crumbled.
I took his arm. “C’mon, Ed. Let’s get something to eat.”
We sat around the fold-down table in the truck and ate spinach and potatoes grown in the hydroponics trailer, washed down with the daily ration of water. Danny talked enthusiastically about the maps he’d found in Paris.