The Forcing, page 20
‘We’ve been through this, Frankie,’ said Har, taking a step towards her. ‘There ain’t nothin’ down there ’cept dead land and deader Messicans.’
Francoise freed one of her hands and ran a fingertip along the woman’s cheekbone, a yellowing echo there I hadn’t noticed before.
Sue Frank turned her face away. ‘Please,’ she said. ‘I’m scared.’
‘So am I,’ says Francoise.
Another Chance
When I was young, before the world changed, I resented time. I couldn’t wait for the workweek to be over, for the summer to come or the conference to end so I could be home again with May and Lachie. The unhurried flow of my limitless horizon of days was something to be endured. Now, it barely registers, no matter how hard I try to hold on.
The story is writing itself now, spilling out every morning as if it has been waiting there forever, ready to be told. I sit at my desk and look down at what I have written so far, over two hundred pages. May is dead. Kwesi and Lan and Samantha, and so many others too. I think of everything that must come, these events now predetermined. And I wonder, did we ever have a choice?
I shake my head. Of course, we had a choice. It is nothing but weakness that led me to even consider such a question. And perhaps that, in itself, is part of the answer. We were weak. Too easily misled, too readily captured by our own delusions, we convinced ourselves of our own helplessness. And so yes, absolutely, we could have changed it. In myriad ways and at an infinite number of junctions, other choices could have been made, and each of those decisions would have rippled out through time and space and across all of humanity, and the course of history might have been changed.
And as I look out across the sound and watch a flock of gulls fishing in the light on the water, I know that somehow we have been given another chance. Every day is an opportunity.
36
It had been over three hours since we had concluded the deal, traded vehicles, and resumed our journey south. I didn’t have the energy to argue anymore, so I let Argent drive. No one had spoken a word since leaving, Argent’s attention fixed on the faded white line ahead, Francoise between us on the front bench seat, her head nodding in half-sleep, a green shadow in the dim light of the instrument panel.
The humidity began to rise – slowly at first, and then after another hour or so, in great wet dollops that glued the clothes to our skin. The night air streaming through the open windows was heavy with the scent of the Gulf, salt and sea and crude oil, and the gut-churning smell of decaying flesh. I looked at my watch and glanced over at the Chevrolet’s speedometer. The junction should be coming up soon. We could either continue south towards the Mexican border, or turn east and make for the coast, wherever it was now. I pulled out the map, unfolded it and flicked on the overhead light.
Argent narrowed his eyes. ‘What’s that map telling you?’
‘The road to the coast is coming up. Ten miles at most.’ I clicked off the light.
‘That’s where we part,’ said Argent. ‘You know what they say about three.’
‘Suit yourself,’ I said, steady as I could. ‘Enjoy the walk.’
Argent laughed a deep laugh that jolted Francoise awake.
‘You’re a persistent shit, I’ll give you that,’ he said, wiping his mouth with the back of his wrist. ‘Let me clarify. This is where you fuck off. I stop the truck, you get out, and she and I keep going to the border.’ He looked over at Francoise. ‘I’m calling in our little deal, gorgeous.’
Francoise looked away. ‘We can’t cross at the border.’ Her voice was so quiet I could barely hear her. ‘You heard Harley. It is too heavily guarded.’
Argent jerked his head around. ‘In deference to Harley what’s-his-name, if you have money, there is always a way.’
‘No. You won’t get that close. Frankie told me they are shooting on sight.’
Argent glowered. ‘What the fuck does she know?’
I stared past Francoise at Argent. I’d had enough. ‘You go ahead and find out, you blustering idiot. But do it on your own. And by the way, this is my vehicle.’
Argent slowed the car and pulled over to the side of the road, rolling for a while on the shoulder, and then braked to a stop. He killed the lights, swivelled in his seat and pulled out his handgun and pointed it at my face.
‘Get out of the fucking car,’ he said.
Francoise leaned forward, putting herself between me and muzzle of the weapon. ‘No,’ she said. ‘If you want to go south, the Gulf is the only way. By boat.’
‘Fine,’ said Argent, pushing Francoise back into the seat. ‘We’ll go to the coast. Now get the fuck out of the car or I’ll blow your brains out.’
I knew that this time he wasn’t bluffing. I could see his finger tightening on the trigger. Francoise struggled but Argent pinned her back. The black muzzle stared me in the face. It would take my head off.
‘Alright, Argent,’ I heard myself say. ‘I’ll go.’ I reached for the door. Then I realised. Francoise was right – by boat was the only way.
Looking back, I’m not sure if this was the way it unfolded. Memory has a fluid quality that has always surprised me. But it was something like this, and even if the details aren’t exactly right, the outcome was the same.
I turned and faced the gun. ‘Can you sail a boat, Argent?’
Argent hesitated. I could see the doubt spread across his face.
‘What are you planning to do?’ I continued, pressing what I thought might be an advantage. ‘Hire a skipper and a yacht? You’ll be damned lucky to find a boat that’s seaworthy, from what I’ve heard, let alone a crew. And where is it that you are planning to go? You keep talking about this paradise of yours. If it’s any distance at all then you’ll have to sail – you’ll never find enough fuel to motor. Anything more than a hundred miles or so and you had better know how to navigate.’ I took my hand off the door handle and closed it around Francoise’s fist. She turned her hand palm up, opened her fingers and threaded them between mine. Her hand was rough, the callouses hard like tree bark.
We sat there for a long time in the darkness at the side of the road. No one spoke. Argent lowered the pistol into his lap and looked outside at the darkened road ahead. He seemed to be weighing up the information, negotiating with himself.
‘What deal were you talking about, Francoise?’ I said. ‘Tell me.’
Francoise clutched her satchel and rolled the flap up into a tight cylinder.
‘She comes with me,’ said Argent. ‘That’s the deal, shithead.’
I didn’t believe it. Not for a second. I grabbed Francoise by the shoulders and twisted her around so that she was facing me. I tried to look her in the eyes, but she averted her gaze.
‘Does he know, Francoise? Have you told him?’
She shook her head.
‘Know what?’ blurted Argent.
‘Nothing,’ she snapped. ‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘I want to hear it from you, Francoise,’ I said. ‘Whatever he has promised you or threatened you with, don’t believe it.’
Her face was wet. ‘I’m sorry. I…’
‘Just remember,’ said Argent, his mouth close to the back of her head. ‘Teacher here wanted to leave you behind. I’m the one that got you out of there, away from the power plant.’
Francoise clutched my forearm. ‘I’m doing it for you,’ she said. ‘Please go. He will kill you.’
I let go of her shoulder and grabbed my pack. I knew she was right. I opened the door and stepped out onto the gravel shoulder. I looked back inside, but it was too dark and I could not see her face.
‘We’ll take the map, too,’ came Argent’s voice from within.
I pulled the folded map from my pocket and dropped it onto the passenger seat. The old V8 grumbled to life. I closed the door and stood back as the car rolled away and gained speed, and then I watched the tail-lights slowly merge into a single red point on the road ahead then disappear.
37
With the moon setting in the west, I checked my watch and started walking. After a few minutes I’d established a good pace, tracking the centreline of a crumbling highway through a deserted land. I had memorised the route I wanted to take, south to the junction and then southwest towards Corpus Christi and the coast. At least a hundred miles, four marathons. In my pack were four litres of water and enough food for two days. I would travel at night and in the cool hours of the morning, at the fastest walk I could manage, resting during the day.
After an hour I estimated I had covered about six kilometres; after two, thirteen. I stopped by the side of the road and sat on the ground and drank. I felt strong. I felt alone. I watched the sky lighten in the east and felt ashamed for what we had done to the sunrise, and I knew that I should never have left her alone with that psychopath.
I reached the junction by early morning, the sun just above the horizon, my shadow jerking long-legged and bone thin across the tarmac, the road signs long since pushed over, the posts burned for fuel, the steel sheeting used for roofing in some recycled shanty town. Since being left at the roadside I had seen not a single living soul, nor bird nor animal of any kind. It was as if the surface of Earth and everything that it contained had died or moved to less-damaged latitudes.
I walked to the middle of the intersection where the camber of the roadways reached an apex, a high point on the flat ground that stretched away as far as I could see in every direction. A twisted line of power poles strung away into the distance like a trampled fence. I figured I must be eighty miles from the coast, less maybe, but I could see no trace of the sea. The air trembled in the rising heat. A clear copper-sulphate sky, devoid of any cloud, spread over me to every horizon.
I checked my compass, sighted southwest, and was about to shoulder my pack when something caught my attention, off to the south in the direction of the coast, a thin dark line bisecting the horizon, almost imperceptible. At first, I thought it was an illusion, some trick of the heat haze dancing above the sand, a finger of dust or vapour. I fumbled in my pack, found my binoculars.
It was smoke, a thin grey tendril rising untroubled into the morning sky about five miles off, no more. At its base I could make out an encampment of sorts: vehicles, slung canvas, movement. Were these survivors, kind souls like Harley and his family, doing their best to live, or were these marauders, the itinerant survivalists Harley had spoken of, preying on those stupid or unfortunate enough to travel these roads alone?
I decided not to take the risk. I would leave the road and move across country, stay hidden for the rest of the day, and come nightfall, bypass the camp to the south and put as many miles behind me as I could before sunrise. I stowed the binoculars and pushed into the burnt, dead scrubland south of the road, looking for somewhere that would swallow me up.
After more than half an hour of trudging, I found a shallow depression between two blunt outcrops of siltstone. I sank to the ground, huddled in the strip of shade under the overhang and closed my eyes. Now that I had stopped moving, stopped thinking, fatigue swept through me. I fought it back, forced myself to drink and eat. Then I crawled to the lip of the outcrop to survey the camp. A slight breeze had come up, and I could smell woodsmoke and the faint but distinctive odour of charred meat.
I focused on the cluster of vehicles, four in all. A tarpaulin was strung between two of the trucks. Just beyond, I could make out the end of an old trailer home, the cladding warped and brown. And standing in a circle, as if engaged in a friendly conversation, were four people. At this distance I couldn’t make out their faces. I scanned right, focused on the far vehicle. It was a black four-by-four with heavy welded caging. Farley’s Tahoe.
I sank back down into the depression and looked up into the poisoned sky.
38
The sound snapped me from a dazed half-sleep. A single crack, the now-familiar retort of a gun. It came on the dying sea breeze, laden with the chemicals of decay and inundation, the physical result of all that I had warned them would come, so many hours and days trying to convince anyone who would listen, my sceptical students, so easily manipulated by all of the garbage on the internet and in the media, where any hack or grievant could post whatever rubbish they liked, camouflaging it as official, credible, where everything was exactly the opposite of what it claimed, where every site whose tagline claimed to provide ‘independent objective information’ was guaranteed to be a platform for extremist polemic, where facts and truth were garbled and mashed and cherry-picked to suit agendas so warped that I would, some nights after May had gone to bed, sit shaking at my computer, impotent despair flooding through me, overwhelming me so that I can still feel it even now.
Once, just as the political battle was reaching its crescendo, as it became increasingly clear from the daily news polls that the Repudiation Coalition was going to win, I had made a rare foray into the treacherous wilds of the blogosphere, pointing out the numerous scientific errors and inconsistencies sprouted by the coalition’s chief spokesman, a bug-eyed, hugely well spoken and preposterously charming Englishman named Hollinghurst. The lightning speed at which my very short missive was strewn across the world, and the strength and sheer savagery of the backlash, surprised and deeply shocked me. I spent days afterwards trying to reply, as affably and humbly as I could, to the dozens of vitriolic and hateful comments that clogged my inboxes, writing back to each person, trying to present a balanced view and apologising for any offence I may have caused, all the while riven with a deep gut-wrenching unease that I could neither banish nor confront. The whole experience had left me drained and depressed, and I had fallen into a period of dark self-doubt, during which I began to question everything I had believed about people and the future, and the fundamental good in humankind. I concluded then that what people desired above all was misery – their own, but most importantly, others’. They feasted on calamity. Like moths to streetlights, they could not help but be drawn into the blaze where they exhausted themselves in a futile, mindless dance, thrashing themselves to death in the glare. It provided meaning in a meaningless universe.
And now, as I lay in this shallow scrape in the ground, the light of day rapidly fading, the sun long since obscured behind a bank of low slate clouds, I reflected that it had all come to pass. Everything was here, written in this barren ground, in the pangs of hunger in my belly, in May’s erasure from the world, in the gunshot that still echoed in my ears. No, I thought, it was worse, much worse.
I reached for the binoculars and squinted through the low-angle light towards the encampment. There was movement now, people moving about between the vehicles. I was sure now that it was Harley’s Tahoe. And then I heard men’s voices raised in argument, guttural, cave-dwelling brays. A door slammed, an engine roared to life and one of the other vehicles, a big red pickup, tore away towards the road in a tornado of dust. It careened onto the highway and sped off in the direction of the coast.
I swung the glasses back towards the encampment. Three men stood clustered around two other figures, both prone on the ground. One of the men bent over the pair, busying himself with some task, his arms flapping about as he manipulated the bodies. I knew immediately that the figures on the ground were Francoise and Argent. I had heard only one shot. I hoped that it had been for Argent.
I stowed my gear and started to crab my way forward. I needed to get closer while there was still enough light to plan a way in. A series of waist-high outcrops running roughly perpendicular to the road provided good cover, and I quickly halved the distance to the camp. Light was fading fast.
I scanned the encampment again. Francoise and Argent, it must surely be them, seemed to be lying up against some sort of oblong, steel structure – the remnants of an old water trough perhaps. Between one of the vehicles and the trailer an orange light flickered, growing in intensity as twilight passed into darkness. A pang of woodsmoke reached me, soured by the sting of tar. I could make out three of them, their faces and chests bathed in orange firelight. They were standing in a rough circle, passing around a bottle.
After a few minutes one of the men left the fire and walked towards the trailer, where a weak yellow light shone in one of the partially shuttered windows. The door opened, and the man disappeared inside. I took another look at the two men by the fire, and then huddled down behind the low rock shelf to wait.
I awoke with a jolt from some thirst-induced dream, heart hammering, eyes wide. I looked at my watch. Gone two am. I shivered in the cold, my lower back stiff and sore. I scanned the encampment. A quarter-moon had risen and now bathed the landscape in reflected grey light. There was no movement. The fire had burned down. No lights showed from the trailer home. Silence reigned, the quiet of a fast-emptying world.
I slung my pack and moved across the moonlit ground at a run. I had determined that my only hope was to move decisively, as quickly as I could. Speed was the only thing I had left. I reached the first vehicle in a matter of minutes, my breathing regular, a sweat just starting to break. The camp was quiet. I could see the water trough and the two figures, bound and motionless. A pang of dread drove through me. Had they shot one of them, left the other to the horror of a night next to a cold corpse? Nearby, the dying glow of the coals cast dim shadows behind two men asleep under blankets. I slowed to a walk but kept moving. The Tahoe was to the left, close.
I worked my way behind the water trough, crouched down, very close now. It was definitely them. I could see no wounds. I crawled forward, examined Francoise’s bindings. Her wrists were roped behind her back and tied to a chain. The chain appeared to be secured to the trough’s heavy steel legs. I reached out and touched her hand. It was warm. I snaked under the trough until my face was only inches from her head, reached over and put my hand over her mouth.
