She/They moved towards it.
***
Billy and Reave reached the top of the hill and looked out over a destroyed valley. There was a city, just like the Minstrel Boy had predicted. He hadn’t, however, prepared them for the sight that met their eyes.
The war zone at Dur Shanzag was the only thing that Billy could compare it with, and even there, there hadn’t been such a terrible destruction of the landscape.
The centre piece of the whole area was a huge white tower that soared thousands of feet into the air, dwarfing the domes and high-rise buildings that clustered round its immediate base. A wall ran round the tower and its attendant structures. Beyond the wall the desolation began in earnest. Like a dark stain on the earth, miles of shacks and ruins spread out from the walls of the inner citadel, and across almost the whole valley. In the area of the shacks, there were huge faults in the fabric that drilled giant circular holes in the broken-down city. The size and number of the faults seemed to diminish near to the citadel, and around the walls the ground was quite stable.
A thousand little fires seemed to be burning among the shacks and the air of the valley was foul and polluted. A filthy river sluggishly wound its way through the ruins. Its banks were crowded with all shapes and sizes of dilapidated craft. Others crawled slowly across its surface. The streets and alleys between the shacks were thronged with jostling humanity. They were a total contrast to the area inside the walls, where a pristine order and calm seemed to reign.
Billy looked doubtfully at Reave.
‘You think this is really the place to go?’
Reave surveyed the valley.
‘It don’t look too pretty, but there’s people. It can’t be all bad.’
Billy wished silently that he shared Reave’s optimism,
‘Okay then, let’s go.’
They started down into the valley. Before they’d reached the bottom, the road had changed direction twice to skirt huge faults in the side of the hill. They made their way down to the flat lands and found themselves among the outer edges of the shacks. They seemed to be built out of any and every material that might be at hand and could be crudely knocked together. Some were built around the ruins of older and what had once been more substantial buildings.
Thin ragged children peered out of doorways, and there was an air of appalling squalor and poverty. Billy glanced at Reave.
‘It don’t look like people have too much of a good time round these parts.’
Reave pointed to the tower that rose high above them into the polluted air.
‘I bet the folk up there do all right. That’s got to be where the high living goes on.’
‘You think we can get in there?’
Billy looked at their torn, filthy clothes. He rubbed a hand over his chin. It felt as though he hadn’t shaved for a week. Reave just grinned.
‘We can but try.’
They walked on deeper into the city. They passed more and more people. Three times, Billy tried to approach groups of people and talk to them. Each time, before he could say anything, they shrank away from him and hid their faces in their filthy rags. Disconcerted, Billy went back to Reave.
‘I don’t know what’s wrong with us, but nobody seems to want to know us.’
‘Maybe they don’t like strangers.’
‘They seem terrified when I try to get near them. There’s something else, as well, that bothers me.’
‘Yeah? What’s that?’
‘Well, I don’t know if it’s the bad air, or something wrong with my eyes, but there’s something sort of, how would you call it, insubstantial about them. Like you could shine a bright light right through them. Do you know what I mean?’
Reave looked around and slowly nodded.
‘They do seem kind of transparent. Like ghosts or something. I thought it was just a trick of the light.’
He pointed towards the tower again.
‘That looks pretty damn solid.’
Something moved in Billy’s memory.
‘I know what these people look like. They’re just like the folks we saw on the road out of Graveyard.’
Reave looked at Billy in puzzlement.
‘What folks?’
Billy remembered how Reave had been asleep when he and the Minstrel Boy had seen the strange column of prisoners and their sinister guards pass them on the broken road.
‘It was just something that reminded me and the … Hey! Look at that.’
A medium-sized fault had suddenly appeared some twenty yards down the road. Two shacks and about a dozen people had flickered out of existence. All that remained was a circular hole in the ground. For a few seconds, Billy and Reave stood transfixed, then, simultaneously, they both hit the buttons on their porta-pacs.
‘This whole fucking place is falling to pieces!’
‘I think we ought to try for the citadel. If we can’t get inside, I’d rather we got the hell out of here.’
Reave nodded.
‘I’m with you, Billy boy.’
They hurried on. A crowd had gathered around the newly formed fault, but it quickly dispersed as Billy and Reave approached.
‘They seem to treat us like poison.’
‘We don’t look too good.’
‘Neither do they.’
‘That’s true.’
They turned into a broader avenue, where men and women struggled under heavy burdens. A group of children strained to pull a large clumsy cart with big solid wheels. A man walked beside them with a long cane, encouraging them to greater efforts. As before, the crowds hastily parted to let Billy and Reave pass.
A commotion at the far end of the avenue caught their attention. A sleek and very solid-looking, field grey, armoured car was forcing its way through the crowd, who fell over each other to get out of the way. Reave quickly glanced at Billy. The armoured car seemed to be heading straight for them.
‘Think we should run?’
A loudhailer mounted on the armoured car supplied the answer.
‘You there! Stop! Do not attempt to move!’
Billy groaned.
‘Not again.’
‘Why always us?’
‘There seems to be something about authority that makes it home in on strangers.’
The armoured car squealed to a stop beside them, and the turret swivelled ominously, pointing the snout of some kind of heat weapon at them. The speaker boomed again.
‘Take one pace away from each other and place your hands on your heads!’
Billy and Reave did as they were told, and a hatch in the side of the machine swung open. Two men in grey uniforms and steel helmets climbed out and covered Reave and Billy with machine pistols. Tear gas canisters and long flexible rubber truncheons hung from the webbing of their tunics. Patches on their shoulders carried the single word Personnel and the figure 3.
For Billy, there was something strangely familiar about their captors. Then he had a horrific flash of recognition. Their uniforms were the same as those of the sinister guards he’d seen on the road out of Graveyard. The fear he had felt then came back to him. He broke out in a cold sweat.
One of the uniformed men poked Billy with his gun.
‘What are you doing here?’
‘Just passing through.’
‘The two of you, together?’
‘Yes.’
‘And what is your purpose for coming here?’
‘We got lost, and this was the first city we came to.’
‘It’s hardly satisfactory. You better come with us.’
‘But we …’
Before they could protest, they were bundled into the back of the armoured car. Their wrists were clamped into manacles on the wall, and they roared away. Both the vehicle and the men inside it were just as solid as Billy or Reave, and had none of the ghostly appearance of the rest of the population.
The machine halted, and through a small ventilator Billy could see they were waiting to enter a tunnel that led through the tower’s perimeter wall. A thick steel door slid back and they moved on. After a couple of minutes the armoured car halted and the rear hatch opened. Billy and Reave were released from their manacles and ordered to get out. They were pushed into an enclosed courtyard where an escort, in similar uniforms to the armoured-car crew, waited for them. One of the escort, who had a figure 2 on his shoulder instead of a 3, walked over to the car commander. He jerked a thumb at Billy and Reave.