She heard shots behind her, quick sustained bursts, and glanced around. One of the RVs was on fire from stem to stern and two men were silhouetted against the flames, firing into them. Other shots sounded far off, an erratic pop pop pop blowing on the wind.
Henry ran into a space between two lightning trees and Chloe followed, dodging around clumps of stuff like stiff string, coming out of the other side of the copse and seeing the river, seeing boats drawn up at the edge of the water, one of them the speedboat that the drone had been watching, seeing two men turning towards them. Henry swung his pistol up and one of the men fired at him, a hard clatter and a flash of yellow flame. Henry fell and Chloe yelled and ran to him, rolled him over. There were bloody rips in his hunting vest and she couldn’t find a pulse when she laid a finger on the angle of his jaw, couldn’t find a pulse in his wrist.
She locked her hands together and pressed on his chest, and something rattled in his throat as if he was trying to breathe and she pressed again and his mouth opened and a smooth glossy bubble of blood rose out of it and spilled over his chin. Then someone grabbed her and lifted her up and pulled her away. Another man stooped and picked up the ray gun and Henry’s pistol. A tall man in a quilted white coat, wearing a face mask and goggles, long black hair in a loose ponytail, turning the ray gun in his hands, saying to Chloe, ‘This is McBride’s secret weapon?’
Chloe nodded dumbly in the iron grip of the man who’d grabbed her.
‘How does it work…? Aha.’ Chloe flinched as the tall man pointed it at her. Then he shrugged inside his coat and said, ‘You can let her go, Billy.’
She almost fell to her knees. Henry lying dead at her feet. Her hand on the sleeve of her camo jacket, feeling the shape in the sheath at her wrist. Her attention on the tall man, who said to the man who’d let her go, Billy, ‘I thought I told you I wanted both of them alive.’
‘It was him or me,’ Billy said.
‘Did I hear you give a warning? Did you fire a warning shot? Did you shoot to wound?’
The tall man’s voice rising to a shout at the last sentence.
Billy stood his ground. ‘He was armed, Mr Drury. He was going to shoot. So I shot him.’
‘Because it was either him or you.’
‘Like I said.’
‘How about him and you,’ the tall man said, and raised the ray gun.
48. Downriver
Mangala | 30 July
The plane was a sturdy banana-yellow four-seater with blunt wings cantilevered above its cabin. It flew low, bouncing in sudden air pockets, rising and dipping alarmingly but always pressing on against the buffeting headwind, its prop burring like an angry hairdryer.
The pilot, a young Italian guy dressed like a WW2 air ace in a leather jacket with a fleece collar, said it was hairy weather and getting worse. ‘Part of the storm must have pushed ahead of the rest.’
‘But you can fly in it. You can get us there,’ Vic said. He was strapped in beside the pilot; Nevers was on the bench seat behind, crammed in amongst camping equipment that Vic hoped they wouldn’t need.
‘I can get you there, no problem,’ the pilot said. ‘But maybe I can’t wait around as long as you’d like.’
The plane followed the river as it ribboned across the red and grey landscape. The pilot navigated by landmarks, now and then consulting a map displayed on the tablet on his knees. The horizon all around was obscured by a deep ochre haze in which fugitive whips of light flickered. Static discharges, according to the pilot.
‘Fucks up the instrumentation, but as long as we can see the river we’ll be fine.’
Vic wished that he could share the young man’s optimism. He was heading into the unknown, looking for who knew what, in the company of someone he couldn’t trust. It was some kind of plan, but definitely not the kind he’d imagined.
At last the plane flew over a curved range of hills and dropped towards a wide basin floored with a chaotic terrain of broken blocks and narrow canyons: an ancient impact crater bisected by the course of the river. The pilot pointed down, jabbing his forefinger three times for emphasis, said they were going in.
‘Where do we land?’
‘On hills on the far side. Don’t worry. We use the headwind to brake us.’
Vic’s stomach airily lifted as the plane bucked in conflicting currents of air. A range of hills resolved out of the haze, barren slopes suddenly looming in the windscreen. The plane’s nose pitched up and the prop roared and with a sudden bang they were down, rolling uphill towards a crest, crunching over stones and turning sideways, lurching to a halt.
The engine cut off and the blurred disc of the prop resolved into three spinning blades, stopped. In the quiet cabin, Vic could hear his heartbeat and the whine of wind outside. Behind him, Nevers said calmly, ‘Not bad.’
They unloaded quickly, wearing goggles and face masks because of the dust, hunched in the chilly gale. The heavy roll of the inflatable boat, a tent, food and water. It made a small mound that they covered with a ground sheet, pegging its flapping margins firmly into the hard dry ground.
‘How long can you wait?’ Vic asked the pilot. ‘A day? Two?’
‘Not even a day, in this,’ the pilot said. He shook hands with Vic like an executioner measuring him for the drop, Vic slung the rifle he’d borrowed from Karl Schweda over one shoulder and his kitbag over the other, and he and Nevers set off.
They descended into a long draw and crossed a dry stream bed and climbed the slope beyond. The bleary unsleeping eye of the sun was fixed at the horizon, cold and red and huge in the dun sky. Jagged black tufts bent in the wuthering wind. The abrasive hiss of dust. The slope topped out and they started across a rough tableland. Irregular slabs of rock set in drifts of sand; dry gulches packed with leathery vegetation. They cut around the smaller gulches, scrambled down into the larger ones and climbed back up. Navigating by the fixed point of the sun because they had lost sight of the river.
Vic was sweating under his layers of clothing, couldn’t quite get his breath inside the mask clamped over his mouth and nose. Grit chafed his elbows and knees. He stopped every so often to swap the strap of his heavy kitbag from one shoulder to the other, wiped dust from his goggles. He was definitely out of condition. Too old for this Boy Scout shit.
Nevers waited patiently each time Vic halted, calmly scanning the empty landscape that faded into reddish-brown haze in every direction. He had jammed his left hand in the pocket of his jacket, which gave him a slight list as he walked, but otherwise he seemed unencumbered by his gunshot wound.
Vic looked all around too. He had the uneasy feeling that someone was following them, just out of sight.
They passed through a field of stacks of flat rocks piled higher than a man, like figures in some long-abandoned game. The feeling of being followed grew stronger. Once Vic thought he saw something flicker at the edge of his vision and spun around and walked backwards for a few paces, seeing only rock stacks fading into the diesel haze.
They climbed into a gulch too big to navigate around, pushing through presses of stiff leathery vegetation, splashing through a trickle of water at the bottom, scaled the other side. Vic hauled himself up using the vegetation as handholds. His arms and legs ached. The strap of the kitbag cut into his shoulder and its weight unbalanced him; once he fell to his knees and stayed there, helpless with fatigue, until Nevers came back and hauled him to his feet.
There was a short string of Boxbuilder ruins at the top of the slope. Vic unhitched the kitbag and flopped down on a flat stone in their lee, unable to do anything but breathe.