The Last Storm, page 14
Cee looks startled, glancing around in case anyone is taking a special interest. I laugh. They won’t, not yet, not until they see what this thing can do. What I can do.
“Here?”
“Not here.” I look down at the finished apparatus. It’s beautiful, an integral and powerful part of me. It’s like looking at myself opened-up, viewing my own insides and how I’m put together. The apparatus is so much more than a sum of its parts. I touch the individual pieces, one by one, and with each touch I remember where I found them, not only those I discovered in the eye but also the components that called to me within the tumult. I was always destined to find them and build this. I’m no slave to destiny, nor a fool to fate, but sitting here with Cee, the apparatus open on my lap, feels more right than anything I’ve ever done.
“Somewhere close,” I say. “Sometime soon.”
Cee looks up at the sky. It’s blue, stark, scorched pale by the sun. The woman selling water from the shack told us there’s been no rain in Abbey Springs for over seventeen months. This is the petrified heart of the Desert, and on the way into town we saw where this Desert had burned. It was a wonder the whole place hadn’t gone up.
“Out there,” I say, smiling. “At the Burn.”
Cee nods, seeing sense in my choice. I’ll bring down rain on the part of town it might have saved.
The various components that go to make up my new apparatus are warming from their exposure to the unrelenting sun. It’s a much simpler, more adult apparatus than the one my father crushed into the ground. That had been the construct of a child, overcomplicated and clumsy, too open to breakages and malfunctions. As a child I’d viewed what I carried in my blood as confusing and mysterious, and something that necessitated a complex device to channel. Now, I’ve found my way to building this new, simpler apparatus, and it looks beautiful. The fixings are more sure, and the thought that went into building it was far, far more certain. That younger apparatus had been built out of expectation, because it was what I was meant to do. This one is constructed from desire.
Cee is confused by it because she doesn’t understand how I can do what I do simply by plugging myself into this machine of random parts. But I am also a part of the apparatus; its battery, its drive, and its fuel.
I hear it clicking and ticking as it expands in the heat.
I whisper back.
* * *
It’s past midday when we reach the western part of town. It’s hot enough to burn unprotected skin in a few minutes, cook food on bare concrete or the metal of abandoned vehicles, and I feel myself wilting like a dying flower. But inside I’m more alive than I’ve been for some time. The eye is firm and solid around me, so established that the walls of tumult that mark its edges feel too far away to recall. Cee and I are wearing wide-brimmed hats and our exposed limbs are coated in a layer of barrier cream she bought from the town’s drugstore. It’s thick and gloopy and years out of date, and it doesn’t soak into our skin, but it’ll keep us safe for a while.
Most other people have good sense and have found cover. Instead, we’ve found the Burn.
From comments around town, I’ve gleaned the basics of what happened to Abbey Springs the previous summer. It’s the same sad story related again and again all across the Desert, and in other drought zones around our poor planet. Abbey Springs seems to have got off more lightly than some.
The fire raged across the Desert after starting in scrubland. There are a thousand ways for such a blaze to begin: sun shining through a shard of broken glass onto a scatter of dried plants; sparks from a passing vehicle; a clumsily discarded cigarette butt. Sometimes, it’s intentional. On a landscape fried dry by terrible drought and baked day after day by a merciless sun, fire was a demon that stalked from place to place, searching for where to settle its blazing roots.
The residents of Abbey Springs saw the smoke and dust, and as the conflagration approached they saw the flames as well, a grinning smile of fire closing on the town’s western extremes. They were prepared for such an event, with wide streets designed to slow or halt a fire’s spread. There was precious little water to fight the flames, so when they recognised the size and fury of the bush fire the town set about bulldozing buildings to provide even larger firebreaks.
It still took out a quarter of the town over the space of a day and night. Seven farms beyond the town limits went first, along with a dozen farmers and all their remaining heads of cattle. Two hundred homes, stores, several manufacturing units, and the town’s small school were also destroyed, and five townsfolk lost their lives fighting the firestorm.
I heard pride in the voices of those who told us snippets of their tale, because they had prevented the whole town from burning to the ground. They call the ruins ‘the Burn’, and they provide frightening evidence of the dangers faced by anyone living in the Desert that so much of America has become.
The western edge of town is now a barren area scattered with the remains of burned buildings and melted asphalt. The structures on one side of the street have facades scorched by the conflagration. Organic spreads of melted glass reflect the day in soot-tinged monochrome. Timber cladding is warped and discoloured, doors are cracked, roof shingles blown, exposed wooden support posts split and splintered. What I can see inside these buildings, through broken windows and doors, suggests that the interiors were also touched by fire. Beyond, the Burn is a wasteland. The fire came last summer, but the weather since has brought little to smooth the memory of its touch. There has been no rain to wash away the soot, and dry winds have drifted ash against tumbled walls. Charred trees stand in skeletal testament to the fury of the fires, most branches burnt to fragile ash, leaving only seared trunks pointing to the skies. No buildings remain standing. Most construction in the town is timber, and here and there in the Burn a single brick wall or chimney breast is all that remains of a once-large building, the masonry cracked and powdered from the heat. Several metal doors still stand in solitary frames, warped security between nothing and nowhere. Where the structure has burnt down to blackened remains, the twisted wreckage of the building’s skeleton are left behind: metal furniture, deformed cookers and other kitchen goods, cracked toilet pans, the exploded screens of TV units, all of them crushed and dead. Everything is black and grey, although here and there rust has taken hold of the exposed metals, even in the baking sun and arid atmosphere of the Desert. It gives a colour palette of startling oranges to the desolate scene.
There is one large splash of colour. Many of the ruined buildings had basements, and most of them are filled with the charred detritus of the structures that once stood above them. One basement, though, has a wide wall facing the road, and someone has taken time to paint a mural. It’s a woman’s face, expertly wrought. Her eyes, crying tears of soot, stare accusingly into mine, and her mouth is half open in an attempt to draw breath against the flames that destroyed this place, and against the heat and polluted air that seek to finish what those flames began. I look across the road and into her eyes as if she is someone real, and perhaps she is. Perhaps she is everyone in Abbey Springs and beyond.
“Spooky,” Cee says.
“I think it’s beautiful.” I start across the road, kicking through debris lightened and lessened by fire. Cee follows me as I know she always will, even after knowing her for only a few days. She followed me across the Desert and found me again, and she will follow me into the Burn, until I find somewhere suitable to kneel and open the guitar case and attach myself to the apparatus, and bring rain to wash away the painted woman’s tears.
CEE
Ash looked confident and in control. Calm as she found a concrete slab to kneel on, measured as she set the apparatus down before her, slow and methodical as she sterilised thin needles and pushed them into her arms. Cee felt a brief pang at this, but only fleeting, and it was a memory that tasted stale and raw.
Ash’s needs, she knew, were nowhere so base and basic as her own had once been.
Cee stood some distance from Ash, giving her space and peace. She hadn’t asked for it, but Cee sensed it was the right thing to do. She needed no distractions. Out here in the Burn, in the remains of a place that had once been home to many but was now a wasteland, silence hung heavy, like a drape of heat and stillness. Cee held her breath.
She had been holding her breath for a long time, since leaving Maxwell three years before and heading into the Desert, forever staying one step ahead of the wraith of addiction and dependency stalking just a few steps behind her. Always afraid that the strings would reattach themselves to her arms, she had been searching for something new, fresh, and all-encompassing. Cee had been looking for her new addiction.
In the Desert, she had found so much to distract. She had killed six people, including the four Hotbloods who’d taken Ash. The first was a woman who called herself Princess, who led a small caravan of RVs and trucks across the Desert. She’d been trading in young kids. Cee didn’t realise until the middle of the first night she spent camped with them, when a car pulled up and four men got out. She’d seen something of the truth in their eyes. She’d heard more of the truth in the cries coming from the RVs, and when she confronted Princess she laughed and pulled a knife and asked Cee what the hell she expected of this world.
As if pain and suffering was inevitable. As if the only route to take in life was the way of wretchedness, adding more suffering and heartache to an already-tortured world.
Cee had fought with her, taken that knife, and stuck it into Princess’s throat. The dying woman had still been hacking blood when a caravan door opened and a naked, sweating man asked her what the fuck the noise was.
Cee didn’t remember much more about that night. Only the warm blood covering her, turning her into a demon that scared the men so much they fled. It scared the kids too, and they’d run into the night, crying and screaming at the things they had seen, scarred forever.
Princess was the first, but she had not broken Cee’s held breath, nor stalled her flight ahead of the memory of the addiction.
The second was a man who had offered her drugs. They’d agreed to share a cheap motel room, and when he took out the Ice paraphernalia and prepared to shoot up, she’d told him no.
If he’d left it at that she would have just walked away. But he was an addict, his blood already cold, and he came across the bed at her with a loaded syringe. She met him with the knife that had finished Princess. He tried to squirm away from her as she held the knife stuck in his chest, following him on her knees to make sure. His eyes were wide and glassy from the Ice. She didn’t understand how she’d not seen it before.
When the first splashes of rain pattered down around Ash, Cee felt her held breath beginning to ease. She closed her eyes and turned her face to the sky; everything she had been through those past three years flitted through her mind’s eye, casting shadows and plays of light like sunlight through a moving tree canopy. They were memories both bad and good, but mostly indifferent. Her forearms no longer itched. Her mind was clear, her conscience settled. As the first drops of Ash’s new rain splashed on her forehead and cheeks and her closed eyelids—as if seeking entry and encouraging her to watch—Cee gasped in a huge, fresh breath and knew that this was the beginning of her future.
Dandelion had been more right than she could have possibly known. Ash was special.
She’s doing it! Cee thought. She’s actually doing it, and everything she told me was true.
Cee would help and protect her with every breath she had, with the bloodied knife in her right pocket, the blooded gun in her left. This wasn’t just rain coming down from clouds coalescing from a clear blue sky. This was hope and a promise for the future, and everything Cee had been waiting for.
She opened her eyes and breathed deeply, drawing in the fresh taint of new rain from sunburned air. And there she was, Ash, arms spread wide as if to gather in all the water she was bringing down.
Cee’s new addiction.
The rain was warm but it smelled fresh and clean, as if it fell from purer skies. Cee remembered a rainstorm a year before, its greasy feel like rank fuel falling from a plane. It had started burning her exposed skin, the smell singeing the insides of her nostrils, stinging her eyes. Others around her had sought shelter after the initial delight at rain falling for the first time in months, and one woman crouched with her hands on her knees, puking in the middle of the street. The flash floods that flowed down concrete-hard streambeds to the south of the town swept away cars and people, and left behind a toxic sludge that drowned cattle and stray animals for the following three days. It was poisoned rain, returning to earth the toxic chemicals pumped into the skies from there and further afield over many decades. She’d heard of these instances of acid rain, a rare but deadly confluence of meteorological factors and the human stain. That was the first time she’d witnessed it for herself.
Ash’s rain washed away those memories, freshening the images in her mind and giving a purity to the fire-blackened surroundings. She breathed in beauty, tasted water like none she had ever tasted before, and even the sound of raindrops hitting the ground seemed celebratory. It was as if the rains Ash now conjured from fleeting skeins of new clouds fell from somewhere in the deep, distant past, before humanity started imprinting its toxicity on the world. These raindrops might have been falling for three hundred years, from a height and distance beyond Cee’s understanding.
She started to cry, and for the first time her tears felt as pure as the rain.
“Amazing!” Cee shouted, and Ash glanced across at her, startled. Cee froze, worried that she’d disturbed Ash. She looked up, waiting for the rain to stop, but it continued falling, if anything heavier than before. Ash smiled and looked up again, eyes closed and arms spread wide to welcome the downpour.
She forgot I was here, but she was happy when she remembered, Cee thought. She ran across the Burn, splashing through dirty puddles, careful not to trip over scattered debris. She circled Ash, trying to ascertain the limits of the rainfall. Back at the wide road dividing the Burn from the rest of Abbey Springs, the ground only showed a spatter of drops. Deeper into the Burn, closer to where the edge of town had once stood, there was no rain at all. She skipped from concrete slab to road to bare ground, kicking through soggy and sloppy debris, and felt it splashing up her shins, a gloopy mess that stuck to her like glue. This was localised to Ash. Looking up, Cee saw the hazy light grey clouds forming above her new friend and the Burn, and there was no real air movement to disperse them. It was amazing. It was impossible. It was beautiful.
Cee didn’t know how this was happening, or where this fresh, welcome rain fell from. That didn’t matter right now. All that mattered was the grin on her friend’s face.
She was still crying, and she wished that her friend Maxwell could see her now. He’d saved her, and she liked to think it had all been for this.
Cee wiped her hands across her face and back through her short hair. It felt like a cleanse. She did it again, and again, and each time her hair felt cleaner, her face less scarred and marked by the years in the Desert. She hoped the rain would never stop.
“Don’t stop!” she shouted, and Ash grinned at her. The smile was open and warm and unselfconscious, an expression of pure joy, not marred nor tempered by doubts.
This is what I was saved for, Cee thought, but this is what Ash was born for.
“Don’t stop!” she shouted again. Water flowed across bare concrete slabs, washing away ash and soot. It gurgled in growing streams along shallow ditches. It pinged off a metal door still standing upright in a half-tumbled wall to her left, and played jazz on a tangle of blackened metal framework. Cee rubbed her hair again, and each time her fingers seemed to pass through easier, as if this clear clean water—
—from somewhere else—
—was washing away years of accumulated dirt, dread, and dust from the Desert.
She ran again, leaping from a rise of six concrete steps and splashing down in a puddle in what was once someone’s backyard. It took her back many years to when she was a little girl splashing in puddles in the village where she grew up, and the pure unalloyed joy was the same. She jumped and did it again, and again, and each time the dirty brown water splashing up her bare legs left streaks of sticky wet mess on her shins. But it felt cleaner.
She ran back up the steps and onto the concrete slab, arms outstretched and spinning slowly around, face turned to the sky. She opened her mouth and stuck out her tongue, and the rain didn’t taste like here and now. It tasted of something and somewhere better. She started dancing, pulled her T-shirt up over her head, tugged down her shorts and underwear, and stood naked in the rain. It was glorious. She wiped her hands down across her stomach and legs, washing away dirt and filth and years of desperation and despair. The water sloughing from her body and mixing with that on the ground looked red with the spilled blood of those she’d killed, carrying away the subconscious dregs of guilt she’d always carried. It was brown with the uncut drugs she used to buy and put into her body however she could—up her nose, down her throat, into her veins. It was black from years of memories. She wiped again and again, bathing in the downpour and stomping on her shed clothing, swilling the material around with her feet to cleanse them as well. The feeling of fresh rainwater falling onto her body was freeing, cooling, calming. She revelled in the sense of freedom and freshening, and even when she saw the first townsfolk emerging from between charred buildings, she did not feel embarrassed. Some of them glanced at her, and some did not. But even those who looked did not look for long.
They all looked up to the sky, from where impossible rain was falling. And then some of them looked at Ash, still alone where she knelt on the concrete slab, because even though nobody knew what was happening here, Ash was so obviously the centre of things. She was the origin of the rain and its locus, and the people who now walked out into the Burn—six of them, then ten, then twenty, adults and kids alike—all seemed to understand that.
