Armwrestling the Dead

with the wagon they will.’

  ‘If you’re planning a raid why not go ahead? Forget the preamble; hit them fast and hard.’

  The answer was clear, as Ruby knew. He had yet to fully marshall his forces.

  There were question marks regarding loyalty.

  ‘You can make your own arrangements for transport. Overland, by truck, as I need every flyer I’ve got.’

  A lie, as present wastage showed.

  I’ll need a driver, Irdad reckoned, someone to talk to on the long haul.

  And what equipment I can hustle, he added, the orange kerchief a blank cheque from Joplinski.

  And look at me, on a fool’s errand.

  And is that my cap she’s wearing?

  ‘Zonda MacIntyre.’

  ‘Pleased to meet you, Zonda,’ he said, rubbing the strangely dry orb of his right eye.

  ‘I can use this gun,’ she told him.

  ‘I don’t doubt it. But can you change a flat, fight off Indians, eat a sandwich with your head stuck out the window over rough ground and piss in a broken bottle?’

  ‘Sure,’ she replied, ‘all of those things.’

  ‘Your mother teach you?’

  Zonda frowned.

  ‘Never mind,’ said Irdad. ‘You’re with me. Let’s see what they have under cover.’

  The truck was a conversion, a hybrid wheels more suited to the altered terrain. The winch and cannon were extras, the latter mounted centrally on the truncated chassis, reducing yet further the space available for storage. Irdad had merely to commandeer it. He still carried the infomats he and Christian had compiled in an earlier incarnation and hoped to get the opportunity to play them back, maybe add a few new ideas of his own without the weight of his erstwhile partner reining him in. He wondered briefly why Ruby had let him keep them, putting that suspicion aside as he schemed how best to regain possession of his blue cap, the headgear Zonda had claimed in his absence.

  It meant a lot to him, that hat.

  Zonda drove at Irdad’s request.

  Under normal circumstances the journey to Base 1 might have taken three days. With the snow he figured eight, although they were pushing for half that by driving non-stop. The truck was easily capable, its fuel cells good for two hundred hours. But they had yet to drive at night.

  As the sun went down, muted behind exceptional clouds, and the ground became more rugged by design, snow or no snow, Zonda held the wheel more loosely than she had previously, enjoying the bumpy feel. She liked the way Irdad kept reaching for his orange headscarf as if frightened it would slip off, unravelling like a trick knot. A reflex he was oblivious to, she decided, deliberately slewing on the oversized tyres. When finally he removed it completely, dropping the gaudy square to the floor, Zonda noticed the tattoo, his family crest emblazoned on a scalp genetically purged of hair save for a few vagrant wisps above his ears and under his chin.

  Irdad told her to slow down, then changed is mind and apologized.

  ‘Do I make you uncomfortable?’ she inquired, vision darting sidelong, a brief exchange.

  He was silent a while, before, ‘No.’

  Zonda stuck her tongue out and hit the brakes. ‘Here, take the wheel.’

  She liked ordering him around; surprised she was able.

  Irdad shuffled over as Zonda got out and scrambled onto the truck-bed with its flimsy tarpaulin tied back, the snub cannon like a fire hose. Pressing the red button and hearing a shell click into position she aimed at the berg directly in front and put her fingers in her ears. The cannon itself wasn’t loud. The berg evaporated with a slap, a vacuum’s short visit causing the entire vehicle to lurch forward several centimetres. She pressed the green button, locking the barrel, and returned via the passenger window. It turned her on, the cannon, but she’d never admit as much.

  Irdad pressed the accelerator gently. He got the distinct impression the girl didn’t care about tomorrow. Her personality was all too simple. Maybe the real Zonda MacIntyre was hiding; shocked and fragile, a different person. He smiled at her, feeling a weight slide from his shoulders. Suddenly ebullient he charged over the smaller chunks and brushed past the larger, a rare moment when all four wheels were on the ground. The girl held the window stirrup, one foot braced against the dash as the truck elbowed shop windows and theatre awnings, crowds of citizens parting like biblical waters. If you stared dead ahead the bergs appeared to flash by at impossible speed, blurred roadside trees whose colours leaked to form a tunnel. The effect was dizzying. Irdad slammed the contours recklessly. It grew difficult to tell the rocks from the snow and the snow from pedestrians wielding shopping and umbrellas.

  Their rough course took them north, following a broad rift valley, the occasional blunt peak visible in the distance beyond the transient horizon, its whites and yellows contrasting with permanent browns and ochres, a set of narrow distinctions that grew less evident the longer he drove and the lower the sun dipped.

  In the sky assembled gaseous, swollen carrion, fat and dark. The elements, ever fickle, jostled one another, wrenching the guts from thermals gravid with electricity, points of acute focus that, dampened through the glass, registered on his eyes as pins of red, blue, green. An accompanying hum Irdad found relaxing.

  Zonda said, ‘Watch out for the gully.’ But by then they were stuck in it.

  A berg slipped, denting the roof and cracking the screen, and the girl added something about Ologists being crazy and not listening to a word anyone said.

  The impact had deformed the cab and both doors were jammed.

  Irdad followed Zonda’s example and clambered out the window. The winch was mounted at the front of the vehicle, giving him no choice but to attack the fractured berg with his bare hands. It was soon dislodged, knocking the cap from Zonda’s head, who told him to be careful.

  Out in the open it was appreciably colder. The atmosphere tightened menacingly.

  ‘I’ll try and reverse out,’ said Irdad, hooking a leg round the door post.

  Zonda nodded. She crabbed onto flatter ground, searching for a solid outcrop among the congregation she might fasten a cable to once the winch was fully uncovered.

  Behind her she could hear wheels spinning.

  To her left the assembled bergs posed like camera-toting newsmen, herself the attraction, her story they wished to cover. Zonda looked away, dazzled by flashes.

  Rightward, she was able to thread her gaze some distance through the gloaming, the prevailing roof shapes disguised as parked cars, discarded shoes, multihued ovens and refrigerators. She felt like a bug crawling about on the carapace of a bigger bug. Irdad and the truck were bugs also, the latter dead and hollow.

  In front of her, where he hadn’t been moments ago, stood a man wearing shades and an enviably large overcoat, his hands thrust deep into generous pockets.

  Irdad decided it was no good. He’d managed to turn the vehicle slightly, enabling them to get at the winch, but it was impossible to do more without the tyres sinking deeper. The gully was a recent feature, the ground undermined by run-off from the bergs and perilously soft beneath. Killing the engine he sat back and yawned. The cab light flickered out, leaving the stored luminescence of his surroundings to tint his flesh a waxy purple. Irdad examined the backs of his hands. The skin pressed to a bloody maroon. He reached for a cigarette, remembering his earlier vow to quit and dismissing it, comforted as much by the fiery orange glow as the subtle action of the narcotic. Zonda appeared as a darker silhouette. She climbed over the cab to get at the cannon, no doubt to blast an anchor peg into the ground, a point from which the truck could pull from. But when there was no further sound he went to look for her. It was near total dark now and his torch strobed from one statue to the next. It he was quick, he thought, he might catch them moving.

  There was no Zonda. He found his cap hanging on a vitreous ear of a figure whose listening apparatus was manifold. It was warm. Her smell lingered.

  Puzzled by her disappea
rance, Irdad returned to the truck.

  He’d give her till morning, then radio.

  vi

  Rising from Ula’s bed, dreaming of rain while awake, upright and walking, Lloyd Monk, brother of Street Monk, ducked under the lintel without realizing the act, the lintel like all lintels a company specified 210 centimetres from the floor, Lloyd himself last measured at 195. Naked, he padded outside having travelled down an empty passage under a second frame as tall as the first, ducking a reflex he had apparently learned.

  He planted trees. Street planted trees. He’d been posted to Base 1 and his brother, his twin, to Base 2. They’d last communicated a week ago, prior to the Great Storm (as already it was remembered), exchanging friendly banter as always, yet tinged with a rivalry neither had felt so deeply since kindergarten when the brothers had competed at everything from building blocks to sports. Their parents were an image reality lightyears removed, the boys’ futures paying for that trip of a lifetime round the galactic spiral to where else but Finnegan’s World.

  To begin again, as the brochures had it.

  The rain was real...

  Monk stuck his tongue out and turned his palms upward, felt the hairs on his legs and chest stiffen as he picked his way in the direction of the orchard. He was soaked within metres. The night was absolute, the rain torrential, abnormal, streaking his flesh and chilling him to the bone. He’d cleared most of the debris the previous day, leaving shards embedded in the cultured soil