Among the Living, page 10
“Everything we had was in the Discovery,” she said.
“What’s ours is ours,” Emma said.
“Makes for a happy marriage,” Bethan said.
“What about him?” Dean asked, nodding at Goyo. Alile was still tending him, and she heard the question.
“He’s fine,” she said.
“Fine?”
“His nose is broken and he’s bruised his chest, and he’s got some superficial burns. But he’s the strongest man I know,” Alile said. “He’ll be okay.” Dean saw Alile and Bethan exchange a glance, but he didn’t push it. He was with Wren on this one—he’d be happy if Goyo decided to stay behind.
“Has he even decided to come with us?” Dean asked.
“Plenty of time,” Goyo said. “We’ve got to walk, and that’s plenty of time for any infection to show.”
“And if it does?” Emma asked. “You’re going to kill us all?”
Goyo smiled and shook his head, groaning in pain.
“Whatever, just keep your fucking distance from me and my people,” Emma said. “Let’s move out.”
EIGHT
In truth, Bethan wasn’t sure it was a good idea leaving together. But if they were to make it the thirty miles across Hawkshead Island to the coast and Joyce Sound, it was true that they’d probably be safer in one group. Bethan hoped they’d make seven miles before dark. After the low sun dipped below the horizon, she had no idea what they might do, or where they would shelter. It would be cold, and their thin thermal jackets would only protect them so much. If it rained and they got wet, they’d likely welcome the sunrise with hypothermia. Sharing body warmth with Dean and his friends in some hole in the ground didn’t appeal.
Goyo had rallied surprisingly well. His heavy breathing betrayed occasional grunts of pain. Dean had given him some antibiotic cream and gauze from his first aid kit, under Emma’s obvious disagreeing glare, and Alile had treated the lacerations and burns on his scalp, neck and right forearm.
“There’s really nowhere for us to stay, Goyo,” she said.
“Huh.” He didn’t have to speak for her to understand what he was thinking.
“Spiders and mint,” she said.
“Huh.” There was a note of humour in his grunt that time, at least.
Alile walked a few steps ahead of them. Thirty feet ahead of her were Dean, Emma and Wren, close together. Wren and Emma were carrying their backpacks and nibbling on energy bars that they’d refused to share. They stayed ahead, and sometimes they talked in low voices. She didn’t know what they were saying, whether they were scheming. She didn’t know them at all, other than Dean. They presented as much danger as Hawkshead Island.
She hoped they wouldn’t have to defend themselves against Dean’s group. Bethan knew that Alile carried a knife in a sheath inside her left boot, but she’d never used it in anger. The weight of the gun felt alien in her own belt, and she hadn’t grown used to it. Several times she’d considered discarding it into one of the muddy puddles they passed by. She hated guns. But her body had warmed its metal, and though it felt out of place, it was no longer uncomfortable. She hated the sense of protection it gave her, but valued it as well.
She’d hang onto the weapon, just for a little while longer.
Wren seemed to have calmed down somewhat, but she couldn’t tell for sure. And Dean had hardly changed physically in the six years since they’d last seen each other. Thinner, maybe, with a peppering of grey above his left ear and in the stubble around his jaw. But he was still mostly the friend she’d once had.
His ghosting of her still hurt if she really stopped and thought about it, so for the past couple of years she’d tried not to. They’d been best friends, a deep rapport uncomplicated by romance. She still remembered the day when, after a few drinks sitting by a local river, he’d told her that she was gorgeous and sexy, and that he did not fancy her in the slightest. She’d been put out for about three seconds, and then she’d laughed, performing twenty embarrassing seconds of orgasmic groaning and screaming that attracted the attention of a group of older folks walking their little yappy dogs. Harry, meet Sally, she’d said, and then she’d pushed him down on his back and fallen across his chest, demanding that he yield. One-ah, two-ah, three-ah! He’d yielded, and she’d told him that she had never fancied him either. Because he was butt-fucking-ugly.
They’d known each other since the first year of high school and had hit it off over a mutual love of old rock music. He’d bought her a ticket to see Metallica when they toured for James Hetfield’s seventieth birthday, and that had sealed the deal. All their friends assumed they’d end up getting together. They hadn’t, and for her part it was largely because she hated being predictable. That, and he was butt-fucking-ugly.
Bethan had believed that Dean would always be there for her. The concept of ‘friends for life’ had never occurred to her, because she wasn’t in the habit of looking that far ahead. She’d just assumed he would be there when she needed him, just like she was for him. Until one day he wasn’t.
The friendship broke apart after the accident at the fracking plant. It wasn’t because of what she’d done, he’d told her in the brief flurry of messages that marked their relationship’s end, but because she didn’t seem capable of bearing any regret. She’d told him of course she was fucking regretful, but he hadn’t believed her. And even if he had, she didn’t think he had the complexity of character to ally himself with someone who’d killed other people—
Just cut the line!
He believed she was a killer, and that was something she’d found very hard to deny.
A murderer, the press reports said. Never caught, never suspected, but still it was there behind her eyes every time she blinked. Dean had taken steps to ensure he could blink and sleep guilt-free.
Sometimes she wished he’d had the fucking balls to turn her in.
Now, here he was again, and still when she blinked she saw the faces of the three people who’d died after her sabotage in Alaska. She’d gotten to know their histories quite well, felt sorry for their families and kids, but she’d never really experienced the full weight of guilt. It had been a long way from murder, more an accident, wrong place at the wrong time. The fracking site had been operating illegally, and what they were doing could conceivably have led to hundreds or thousands of deaths further down the line.
As the shadow of that act settled around her once more, so did her sadness over how he had acted afterwards.
She’d tried to get him back, once, but he had not even answered that message. It was the last time there’d been any communication between them. It still smarted like fuck.
Unlike closer to the coast, where they’d seen plains of low-level shrubs and taller copses of trees, the landscape here was harsh and verging on desolate. Wide and mostly flat, with a few mounds of rocks here and there and scattered clumps of skeletal trees, a soft breeze blew west to east, driving sheens of grit across the ground and into their faces. When Bethan breathed in she picked up a chemical taint that reminded her of hot springs. They’d seen those sinkholes and geysers following a fault line on the way here in the Discovery, and she knew they’d likely have closer encounters with them on the way back.
The ground was gravelly, with exposed subsoil and hardy grasses, and here and there hazy mists flittered along with the breeze. She couldn’t tell whether it was fog rising from marshy ground in the distance, or water vapour condensing as the sun performed a long slow dive towards its brief night behind them.
The afternoon cold was starting to bite but being active kept them warm. They wore hiking shoes and thermal overshirts, cheap but effective, and as long as an unexpected storm didn’t roll in she thought they’d be fine. She looked ahead at where land met sky. The horizons were difficult to place and perceive, distance and perspective blurred and confused by the bland landscape. The rugged terrain could have been a pile of rocks a couple of hundred yards distant, or a small hill several miles further on. It was a disturbing effect that she hadn’t noticed so much cocooned inside the Discovery. The moving box, those thin composite and glass walls, had lifted them up and out of this place and into another, ostensibly safer environment, where they breathed conditioned air and weren’t subject to the unpredictable extremes of the external environment. Now, they were in the thick of it.
“How you feeling?” she asked Goyo. He did not respond. She looked at Alile, who nodded with a brief smile. He’s not too bad. She and Alile were quite different people, but in the times they’d worked together they had developed a sort of shorthand in communicating that served them well. A look here, a gesture there. Such connections were made in extremis, Bethan knew, and they had been in a dozen dicey situations together. Bethan had once told Alile she was a gentle soul in a warrior’s body.
“So what do you think?” she asked, nodding at Dean and his friends.
“I think they’re fucked up,” Alile said. “They confronted something they didn’t understand. They’re scared. They’re grieving. All that makes them dangerous. Especially him.”
“Wren?”
“Yeah. Mr Macho. Shit to prove.”
“Yeah, I don’t trust him,” Bethan said.
“Don’t trust anyone,” Goyo whispered.
The others stopped ahead of them, and Bethan and Alile paused beside Goyo. His breath was more settled now, and he seemed to have gathered himself, though she was still worried about any injuries that might not be so obvious. She was also concerned about something that they’d only addressed in passing—could Goyo make this journey in his current state? She’d thought it, and she knew Alile and Goyo had too. Probably Dean and his friends as well, though it would only concern them if he held them up.
But saying it would make it real. If they left Goyo behind on his own, he would die.
“Feeling okay?” Bethan asked again.
“Huh,” Goyo said. It seemed his vocabulary was now reduced to insignificant grunts.
“Going to pick us off one by one?” Alile asked.
“Of course not,” he said. “But you two…”
“You’re in no shape to look after us, even if we needed looking after, which we don’t,” Alile said.
“Yeah, I know that. But you’re my friends. And them…” He nodded ahead at where Dean and the others now stood shielding their eyes and looking at something ahead, across the desolate plain. “They need watching.”
“You still don’t think we’ll make it, do you?”
“I can’t tell the future.”
“Isn’t that what you’ve been trying to do for years?” Alile asked.
Goyo chuckled, then he was cut off by a low voice from up ahead.
“Bethan, here,” Dean said, urgent but quiet. Bethan glanced at Alile and Goyo, then hurried the dozen yards to where the others were now crouched down low.
“Compass says that way,” Wren said, holding his wrist up to show his watch pointing the way. “Low ground, probably marshy in places, leading in between those hills.”
“What the compass doesn’t show is the polar bear,” Dean said.
“Huh?” Bethan squinted, scanning the landscape left to right and back again. Perspective continued to play games with her depth of field, though with the slowly rising ground there was more texture by which to make things out. Close to them, a fold in the land hid a drop, beyond which she could make out the heads of a few trees. To the right and closer to the rising hills, mist hung low across what was probably a marshy area, speckled with startling green growth of fern and heathers, and fed by runoff from the slopes as well as the warming and melting permafrost deeper down. The steepest slope was marked with a wide, bare landslide.
“I see nothing,” she said.
Dean pointed the way Wren had indicated. “That’s twelve o’clock. Look at eleven.”
Bethan looked, and it was then that something moved in the distance, a slight shifting against a motionless landscape. A bear, lifting its head.
“It’s got two cubs,” Dean said.
“Holy shit.”
“What?” Wren asked.
“You ever seen a polar bear before?” Bethan asked.
They shook their heads.
“They almost became extinct a couple of decades ago,” Bethan said. “Habitat change, the northern ice sheets melting. Then hunting them was outlawed, and an inoculation programme resulted in a large proportion of the surviving population being tracked, sedated and then jabbed against diseases that were running rife.”
“And a result of that was a boost in population,” Dean said.
“Right. A success story. But one that means we’ve gotta go around.”
“But that valley’s wide enough,” Wren said. “We can avoid them.”
“Momma bear won’t give a fuck we’re not looking her way,” Bethan said. “She has two cubs and this is her turf. And she’s the biggest, meanest land predator there is.”
“There are six of us. We’ll scare it away.”
“Gonna shake your fist and swear at her?”
Wren didn’t reply.
“You’ve still got Wren’s gun,” Emma said.
“Doesn’t matter,” Bethan said.
“Why doesn’t it matter?”
“Because it’s a little handheld pea shooter, and if I shoot her it’ll only piss her off more. No, we’ll head there, up into those low hills. Even then we need to keep an eye, make sure she doesn’t decide to chase us away.”
“We’ll make sure she doesn’t see us.”
“She probably already smelled us.” Bethan glanced back at Alile and Goyo and saw that they’d come close enough to hear the conversation.
“More plants that way, anyway,” Alile said, nodding up at the hills.
“Plants?” Emma asked.
“Potential food,” Dean said. “We’ll be like a panda.”
“Panda?” Wren asked.
“Eats shoots and leaves, right?” Dean smiled at Bethan, and she pressed her lips together to hold in a smirk. Still, he knew. Stuff like that wasn’t lost, however hard he’d brought down the shutters between them.
“Prick,” she said.
“Here.” He handed her an energy bar and a bottle of water. She nodded her thanks and walked back to Goyo and Alile.
“We heard,” Goyo said. “Seems right. This was never our land, less so now than ever. Let’s give her a wide pass.”
“This’ll make the next few miles tougher than they need to be,” Bethan said.
Goyo looked up at the hills, and she watched him assessing them for a second or two. The slopes were slight, the hills low. But still.
She broke the energy bar into three and passed around the bottle, trying not to meet Goyo’s eye. His burns were wet now, painful to the touch and glistening with fluid as the bubbled skin tried to heal itself. His ponytail had survived, but scorched hair had twisted and melted into sculptured scabs that he had yet to pull out. Maybe he’d keep them, like the other scars he carried.
“I’m fine,” he said. “Fitter than you think.”
“I know how fit you are,” she said. She remembered the cliff in Patagonia where Alile slipped and dropped thirty feet, skinning her right hand and cracking a rib before the rope brought her up short. She’d been swinging in space, rope snagged on an overhang, and Bethan hadn’t hesitated in sliding down after her. She’d hauled her in, but it was Goyo who’d kept his composure, clipping on and then slowly pulling Alile back up until she could wedge herself safe. She’d seen him swimming against a flooded river’s flow in Brazil when they’d had to sling a rope to the other side, and in Chile Goyo had run thirty miles with her on an endurance race, keeping her pace and very often setting it. He was older than her and Alile combined, and as fit as either of them. Bethan knew that fitness was a result of living a life out in the world, moving from place to place to escape not only the occasional wanted notice because of his activism, but also the painful truth of the loss of his ancestral home. Bethan had no idea how she might feel if she’d grown up so fundamentally baseless.
“Let’s go that way,” Dean said, pointing along a low gulley that might once have been a stream. The landscape changed quickly here—they’d seen that on the way in—and perhaps the ground had been shifted due to some unseen upheaval, diverting this watercourse into another direction.
“You’re limping,” Alile said. She was looking at Wren, and Bethan saw that she was right.
“Fucking boots,” he said.
Bethan checked them out. The boots Wren and the others wore were dirty and scraped from their descent into the caverns, but she could still tell they were all pretty new. Expensive, too. She’d never heard of the brand but knew just by looking that these were five-hundred-buck boots.
“Limping already, not a good start,” she said. “Only twenty-nine miles to go. Get some blister pads on sharpish, otherwise you’ll be rubbing on raw flesh. After that, bone. You’re a big guy, I wouldn’t want to see you cry.”
She caught the sheepish glance between Wren and Emma.
“Tell me you wore them in before coming here,” Alile said.
“New kit,” Wren said. “Best of the best, I thought—”
“Dean?” Bethan asked.
Dean shrugged.
“You’ve grown soft,” Bethan said. “So you’ve got no blister pads?”
“They were in our first aid kits which your friend kindly burned to ash.”
“Pack of pads for another energy bar each,” Bethan said.
Emma took a step towards her, more out of surprise than threat. At least, Bethan hoped so.
“So we’re trading now, eh?” she asked.
“I know what’s yours is yours, but—”
“Bethan’s right,” Dean said. “We’ve got a long way to walk, and we have to pool resources if we’re gonna make it.”
Emma glared at him, then turned away. She quickly looked back again. “Blister pads?”
“Yeah.” Bethan smiled as she dug into her pocket. Guess boss woman’s got pressure points on her feet and toes too, she thought.
They applied blister pads and swapped energy bars. Before setting off again, the six of them ended up assessing what they all had between them. Bethan felt Dean glancing at her, but she left it to the end before throwing him a smile. Let him suffer a bit. She wasn’t going to make it that easy for him to wheedle his way back in.
