Chloe stupidly nodded. She was the numb centre of a ringing calm.
‘Okay,’ Drury said, and spoke into a walkie-talkie, telling someone that he had secured the woman but that the man, Harris, was dead. ‘Billy bought it too.’
The voice crackling out of the walkie-talkie said something about not finding McBride.
‘Come on back,’ Drury said. ‘There’s some tidying-up to do.’
He handed Chloe goggles and a mask. After she’d fitted them over her eyes and mouth he fastened her wrists with a cable tie and with an oddly delicate courtesy helped her climb onto the bench seat of his speedboat.
‘As long as you don’t give me a reason to shoot you, we’ll get along fine,’ he said.
‘Where are you taking me?’ Chloe said.
‘I think you know where.’
A Range Rover roared up; four men tumbled out. While they carried the bodies of Billy and Henry away, Drury spoke with the driver, a bearded man with a piratical eyepatch. The men came back and two climbed into the Range Rover; it executed a three-point turn and sped away.
Drury went off through the stand of lightning trees. One of the men who’d stayed behind inspected Chloe with a cold direct stare; the other pulled down his face mask and lit a cigarette and said something that made them both laugh. They wore red quilted jackets and desert camo pants, were armed with small sub-machine guns with blunt barrels, slung carelessly over their shoulders. Chloe looked away. That jolt of alarm when a crew of big noisy young men came barrelling up onto the top deck of the night bus: it was nothing to what she felt now. Shock had numbed her to the bone and one of her shoes had filled with water when she had climbed into the boat. A fine spray of Henry’s blood dotted her hands.
There was a flash of blue light beyond the trees; Drury came back at a run. He told one of the men to give him his sub-machine gun and a spare clip, and walked over to the other boats, two aluminium-hulled skiffs with big outboard engines. Gunfire hammered holes low in the hull of the nearest, the hard percussion echoing out across the river, and Drury pulled out the empty clip and jammed in the spare and shot up the second skiff. He tossed the sub-machine gun back to its owner and the three men crowded into the speedboat.
As they swerved out into the brown flood, heading downriver, Chloe turned to watch the funeral pyres of the burning RVs as they dwindled and faded into the murk. Thinking of Henry, trying to formulate a prayer or a promise. He had children somewhere, she thought, and remembered the empty coffin at her mother’s funeral and vowed that she’d make sure that he went home. If she survived this she’d make sure he went home.
The speedboat slammed down the middle of the wide cold river, following its lazy loops through stony land hazed by dust. It was way past midnight. Chloe hunched in a corner of the bench seat she shared with Drury, remembering the trip down the Thames from Freedom Tower after the Jackaroo avatar had been assassinated. An age ago. Another world.
Drury and the two men up front said little to each other and completely ignored Chloe. Which was fine by her. Drury was a rival of McBride’s, but he was no friend of hers. He had kidnapped Fahad. He had shot the man who had shot Henry. Shot him to see how the ray gun worked, what it did. Shot him because he could. And she was absolutely certain that if she and Fahad couldn’t give him what he wanted he’d kill them. He’d probably kill them anyway. So she had to stay alert. Be ready to take any chance she could.
She fell asleep, woke as the boat nosed towards a gravel beach. The men cranked up a camping stove and boiled a pot of coffee. Drury handed her an aluminium mug and she held it between her bound hands and sipped while he fired up a chunky tactical radio with a whip aerial and a telephone handset. Telling the person at the other end that he couldn’t hear one fucking word in three. Saying, ‘He did what? Inside?’ Looking at Chloe and slinging the radio’s strap over his shoulder and walking off down the beach, talking at length out of earshot, coming back and telling her, ‘Things are moving along nicely.’
She needed to pee. Another humiliation. Drury opened a folding knife and asked her if she was going to be good, shrugged when she didn’t answer and cut the cable ties at her wrists.
‘Run a hundred kilometres in any direction, there’s nothing but river and rocks,’ he said.
One of the men gave her a roll of toilet paper; she squatted behind a clump of grey wirewool, pretending that her captors weren’t in earshot.
Drury insisted on tying her wrists when she came back. She was given a sleeping bag and lay amongst the others on the hard cold ground, trying not to see Henry dropping down after he’d been shot, nothing like the way it was in films, trying not to see the bubble of blood rising between his lips. She woke to the same dull light and the same cold wind. Her captors fried up bacon and eggs; she ate a leathery fried egg between two slices of spongy sliced white bread and washed it down with tea. The men pissed into the river; she went behind the clump of wirewool again.
Drury didn’t bother to retie Chloe’s wrists, this time. She followed him into the speedboat and they set off again. After a couple of hours they passed through a shoal of sandbanks. The largest were crested with what she supposed was vegetation. Shocks of blood-red filaments; stiff tangles of jointed, semi-translucent tubes; heaps of blue-green bubbles quivering in the cold wind; low stacks of stiff plates that glistened like wet leather. Monocultures of different plants from different biological clades passing by like exhibits in a botanical garden or special effects in a movie.
The goggles fastened over her eyes slightly distanced her from the world. Cold wind blew into her face. Dust scratched at the rim of her mask, settled in her hair and the creases of her clothes. She jammed her hands between her knees for warmth.
Things like bundles of knotted rope slid from a sandbank and lashed away into deeper water. More special effects. Then the speedboat cut past the last of the sandbanks and there was only the river again.
Lunch was a cheese and tomato sandwich and a bottle of water.
They were running close to the bank of the river now. Passing cliffs of banded sandstone, fluted and rounded into fantastic shapes by erosion. An arch stepped out into the flow of the river like a bridge; the speedboat steered around the far side and the river bent and there were fleets of small islands again, with blunt prows upstream and long tails of gravel downstream. Several were crowned with skinny towers clad in what looked like pitted porcelain. The wind keened and fluted around them as they spun by.
Chloe asked Drury if they were Elder Culture ruins; Drury said he had no idea.
‘My expert in this alien shit told me they could be ruins or they could be nests. The kind wasps or termites make.’
A couple of hours later, Drury took out his radio and fiddled with it, talked briefly to someone, then leaned forward and told the two men in front that everything was good.
The dust haze thickened, blew aside to reveal a cliff or bluff of red rock bulging over the river, sloping down run-outs of rubble, and a rocky shore. There was something funny about the sky, a pearly gleam or shine like the reflected glow of spotlights.
The speedboat throttled back and turned, puttering into a sleeve of water pinched between tilted shelves of rock. The motor cut. The speedboat drifted past a small motor cruiser, grounded on a steep fan of pebbles.
The men stirred around Chloe. One of them helped her climb over the side of the speedboat and she followed them, splashing through icy ankle-deep water to the shore. Drury took her arm and steered her up a slope, pebbles rolling and turning underfoot, to its crest.
She stopped, gripped by freezing déjà vu.