7
I reached up. Morag felt tiny between my metal and flesh hands; she seemed to weigh next to nothing as I lifted her down. The last of the light went as Vicar moved something very heavy over the hole. Darkness. Thermals did not help much as there was no heat down here. Then I made out the line of radioactive paint that pointed our way out. It was stale, cold and dry down here, the air thick with dust as I breathed in millennia-old dead people. I heard Morag whimper next to me.
‘Don’t worry, I can see,’ I said, not entirely meaning it. She jumped at the sound of my voice in the darkness, even though she was holding on to me. I could make her out silhouetted in the red, oranges, greens and blues of the thermographics. I felt a strangely voyeuristic thrill at the beauty of a person’s heat signature seen in the dark. I thought I could hear Vicar’s heavily muffled raised voice above me.
‘C’mon,’ I said and began pulling Morag down the radioactive line of paint, banging my head and bumping into things as I dragged her after me.
The exit was a tunnel of poured concrete that Vicar must have made himself. I could smell the unmistakeable odour of sewage and pollution that was the Tay at the end of the tunnel. I could see large rodent heat signatures in the tunnel and, beyond, black waters and the intermittent heat signatures of the Rigs.
‘Mind the rats,’ I told Morag, not so much a problem to my various layers but the diseases they carried would do the girl no good. I made enough noise going along to try and scare them. They ignored me. I was the trespasser in their world. The plastic and metal they weren’t interested in but they knew flesh. Eventually I ended up carrying Morag.
At the end of the tunnel I peered out, looking for Rolleston’s people. We were beneath one of the raised toll roads, the multiple-lane motorway that headed out over the Tay towards Fife and more parkland. The water either side of the bridge was clear. The Rigs used to reach this far up the river, but like the old road bridge they had long since been rendered down into waste by metal- and concrete-eating microbes to make way for the toll roads.
Out on the Tay, east of the new bridge, I could see a police riverine patrol boat making its way towards the far bank and the lights of Newport-on-Tay. On dry land behind us, beneath the toll road, were the various dregs of Dundee: junkies, the odd traditional drunk, trash burners and assorted homeless – people like us. They all looked authentic enough; that kind of resigned desperation is difficult to fake.
‘I’m going to have to put you down now,’ I told Morag. She nodded. There was a sucking noise as her boots sank into the soft, polluted, foul-smelling Tay mud.
‘Where to?’ she asked me. She was obviously afraid but coping well. It was a good question. I was dead. Rolleston would just hunt me until I was dead, and he had the resources to make sure it happened. I leant against the wall and lit up my penultimate cigarette, dragging down a lungful of the wasted sweet smoke, my internal filters already removing all the poisons. My life would be spent on the run. A series of near misses, each one getting closer and closer until the Major, or more likely the Grey Lady, got me. I looked down at the frightened young girl beside me. She looked back at me expectantly.
‘You got kin?’ I asked her. She nodded.
‘Where?’
‘Fintry.’ Christ, I thought, the Rigs must’ve seemed quite appealing to her. Even by Dundee’s standards Fintry was a shit hole.
‘They sold you into the life?’ I asked. She nodded.
‘They got quite a lot of crystal for me ‘cause I was pretty and young,’ she added by way of explanation. I didn’t ask her how old she’d been. Fucking wonderful, I thought. This girl may have even fewer options than I did. I took another drag of the cigarette; the glow lit up my burnt face and I saw Morag flinch.
‘You got people you can go to?’ I asked. She looked like she’d been slapped. I turned and made my way through the sucking mud towards the intermittent lights of the Rigs. I heard her struggle through the mud after me.
‘Hey,’ she said. I ignored her. ‘Hey!’ I kept going. ‘Fucking stop, you cunt!’ she yelled. I stopped and swung round on her.
‘I’m dead, do you understand me?’ I asked. ‘The people I’ve pissed off don’t stop and never fail. Sooner or later they will find me and kill me. Now I don’t know whether or not they know about you, but if they don’t the best thing you can do is run and hide as best you can.’ She looked up at me. I couldn’t quite read her expression; the fear was gone and something else was there. She looked like she was going to argue and then suddenly the life was sucked out of her.
‘So where are you going to die?’ she asked. I hadn’t really thought that through.
‘Dunno,’ I said. I hadn’t got enough cash for the booths, though that would’ve been nice. Drifting away, becoming disembodied in spirit. The Grey Lady quietly entering the booth and snipping my silver cord with a bullet, blade or toxin. That would be peaceful. ‘I guess I’ll get some cigarettes, go back to my cube, put on some Miles Davis and drink as much whisky as I can before they come for me.’ Morag nodded.
‘Sounds kind of nice,’ she said. I smoked my cigarette down to the filter and flicked it into the mud. I turned and headed back towards the Rigs. Morag kept pace with me. I let this continue for a while, before stopping again.
‘What are you doing?’ I asked her, thinking that despite my earlier impressions she was just in fact another dumb rig girl.
‘Coming with you,’ she said. I stared at her for a while, knowing that all she would see would be her own reflection in the black polarised lenses that use to be my eyes, but she stared back at me defiantly.
‘I’m going to get killed. I don’t think you understand. This is no media. These guys don’t miss and have endless resources. To all intents and purposes it’s the government after me.’
‘What’ve I got?’ she asked. And then it struck me – Ambassador, what Vicar had said, the trip to Hull. False hope or not, this was probably the only hope she’d ever had. If she wasn’t already, then soon she would be old enough to get drafted and she’d end up a recreational worker, servicing the troops, officers first while her looks held up, then NCOs, then the squaddies. She would be used up by her early twenties. If she were lucky, sneaky, vicious and preyed on her fellow whores she would get NCO rank. Do unto others as she’d had done to herself. More likely she’d be discharged with no trade skills, not even the basic infantry skills of survival. If she dodged the draft it would be much the same, only in a more Darwinian environment. Coming back to my cube, drinking some whisky, listening to jazz and waiting to get shot in the head probably seemed like quite a good option for her.
‘What about Ambassador?’ she asked. It seemed to me she was trying desperately to keep the hope out of her voice.
‘Darling, it’s a pipe dream. The people it would need to speak to are the ones trying to kill it and us.’
‘But we could go to Hull?’ she asked.
‘Yeah, we could die in Hull instead, but all things being equal I think I’d rather die in Dundee.’
‘But if we could push this a little further, find out some more, maybe something’ll happen?’ she said, pathetic eagerness creeping into her voice. I was trying to decide what was worse. Destroying her hope outright or continuing down the road letting the hope build only to watch it crumble and die when they caught us.
Maybe it wouldn’t come to that, I caught myself thinking as we resumed our trudge towards the Rigs. Maybe when the end was close enough and Morag had lived a little more than she should’ve with her assigned lot in life, a laser pistol to the back of her head would be kinder.