That happened, sometimes. More often, the police battalions were just a euphemistic way of solving the knotty problem of what to do with an occupied and presumably annoyed civilian population. As the Union advance pressed westward to the Atlantic, they had left hundreds of empty villages in their wake. We’d been on the trail of this one particular battalion for a couple of days now.
Nobody was under any illusion that the Alliance forces were any better than the Union; there had been atrocity on both sides. But as journalists we knew which side our bread was buttered on. We were travelling with the Alliance; we were hardly going to file stories accusing them of human rights violations.
We pulled up in St Ursula’s little village square and dismounted from our various vehicles, stretching our legs. The Alliance had already come through here a few hours earlier and pronounced the coast clear, but soldiers fanned out to search the buildings while we journalists stood around smoking and chatting and doing pieces to camera. Someone unpacked a portable catalytic stove and brewed coffee. The smell drifted on the breeze.
I wandered away from the main group. None of the buildings in the village seemed to be damaged. There was no sign that the War had come this way at all. But there were no villagers. There wasn’t even a stray dog.
The school was a little way up the single street from the square. I lit a cigarette and put my hands in my pockets and walked up to it. It was white, and there was a little black bell mounted on a swivel over the front door. I walked up the steps. Someone behind me was shouting.
I looked over my shoulder. One of the Alliance officers was running towards the school, shouting something and waving his arms. It was the little ginger-haired major from New Brunswick, the one who claimed he’d worked on the Chicago Tribune before the War. We all thought he was a dickhead, and did our best to ignore him.
I turned back to the door, turned the handle, and pushed.
“Anyway,’ said the ugly little man on the other side of the desk, “it’s not very much, but it’s something.” He smiled awkwardly. “It’ll keep you off the streets.”
I looked around me and blinked hard. I said, “Did you just offer me a job?”
Somewhere, between pushing open the door of St Ursula’s school and waking up in Rex’s office, three years had passed. I didn’t know how I had returned from France. I didn’t know the War was over. I didn’t know the elves had taken control of Britain.
I had turned up in the village a week or so earlier, an animal dressed in rags, as Liam put it. The village council didn’t know quite what to do with this raving madman. They’d cleaned me up and fed me and, when I didn’t seem too dangerous, Rex offered to give me a job at the Globe’s offices, sweeping up and moving rubbish and stuff.
I didn’t know why I came out of it when I did. Maybe Rex said something that brought me back from wherever I had gone to hide.
I didn’t know what I saw when that school door swung open, but late at night, when I was lying in bed, terrible things beat on the thin walls of sleep, looking for me.
I opened my eyes.
There was a smell of burning in my bedroom.
I sat up. The light of a full moon was flooding in through the windows and falling on an elf which was sitting on the end of my bed smoking a spliff.
I shouted something and flopped back onto my pillows.
“You’re looking well,” said the elf. “Newspaper work obviously agrees with you.”
I said, “Did anyone see you come in?” Elves were not the most popular people in Britain. If anyone had seen this one enter my house the most optimistic thing I could look forward to would be a vigorous lynching.
It took a huge toke on the joint and blew out a stream of smoke that was silver in the moonlight. “It’s half past three in the morning,” it said. “Anyone out at this hour isn’t going to believe they saw me, even if they did. Which they didn’t.”
I sat up again and mashed the pillows down behind my back. The elf called itself 56K Modem. That wasn’t its real name, of course. The elves took whatever pleased them, including their names. Modem once told me its real name. It sounded like snow settling on a frosty road.
“What do you want?”
Modem tapped ash onto the floor. “Aren’t you going to offer me a drink?”
“Do you want one?”
“No. But I’m rather hurt you didn’t offer.”
Modem was wearing a collarless white shirt and jeans. Its feet were bare and its fine grey hair was bound into a metre-long rope. I rubbed my face to try and wake myself up. “What do you want?”
“I heard that Rex killed the pig.”
“Everyone else knows about it. Why shouldn’t you?”
“It’s an interesting situation, don’t you think?”
“It’s a fascinating situation, but I really need to get some sleep so I’d appreciate it if you’d come to the point.” Modem had been visiting me, on and off, for a couple of years now. The first time, I had tried to run away screaming, but these days I was almost blasé about it, as if I wasn’t sitting in the same room with one of the most dangerous predators on the planet. I could even do small-talk with it.
On the other hand, I had never found out why Modem visited. It usually spent the time taking the piss out of us, telling me how pathetic we were and how brilliant the elves were. I had a feeling — and this was nothing more than a feeling — that, somewhere in the black hole of memory between St Ursula and Belton, I had done something for the elves, or been forced to do something for them. It was a prospect that brought me out in a cold sweat.
Modem looked at me and tipped its head to one side. The moonlight made it look ethereally beautiful. “We were wondering if you’d like us to intervene.”
“No. Can I get some sleep now?”
Modem looked hurt. “Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
The elves hated mankind, of course. They had been masters of the world for uncountable centuries. And then we had come along with our technologies and we had cut down the forests that were their natural habitats, driving them back and back until all they could do was watch as our cities were built and wait until we were vulnerable.
“We’re quite interested in Rex Preston,” Modem said.
I felt ice touch my heart. “Oh?”
The elf uncrossed its legs, recrossed them, brushed a piece of lint off the thigh of its jeans. “Actually, I’m interested in what you think of Rex Preston.”
I looked at it. “Why?”
Modem thought about it for a moment. “Professional curiosity?”
“He’s a newspaper editor. How on Earth can you be professionally curious about a newspaper editor?” The first rule about the elves was: you didn’t annoy the elves. That was the only rule, really, but I’d learned that there was some latitude. You could annoy some of them more than others; it was just impossible to tell which ones. You had to wing it.
“His paper is on its knees. His wife works for his competitor. He just killed his last animal. But he won’t give up.” Modem tipped its head to one side. “Personally, I find that kind of…devotion interesting. I’ve noticed something similar in the Resistance.”
I burst out laughing. The Resistance was a largely theoretical thing, armed with whatever weapons they could scrounge from the days when the Alliance was based in Southern England. They killed elves here and there — on the orders, legend said, of an ex-New Zealand Special Forces Colonel who had found himself stuck here just after the War. For every Resistance success, the elves destroyed a village or a town. Popular opinion had it that the Resistance had caused more loss of life than the elves themselves.
“Rex isn’t with the Resistance,” I said. “It would get in the way of putting the paper out.”