On Deadly Ground

I said it again. And again for a third time. There was a burning need to tell myself over and over he was dead. I had to convince myself.

  Kate touched my arm to draw attention away from the corpse to something else. The men and women from the upper deck were streaming down the steps to the lower deck. They carried their guns loosely in their hands, muzzles hanging downward. They were rubbing their eyes, shaking their heads; they looked as if they’d just woken from a deep sleep. I could see the hallucinations had left them now. I saw that some looked round at their surroundings, still dazed by the effects of the electric field that had distorted their minds; others looked almost stupidly down at the mangled remains of the man who’d called himself Jesus; yet others stared out at the mass of refugees shuffling through the hot ashes toward the ship.

  They were now perhaps less than fifty metres away. Exhaustion stamped the expressions from their faces, it took the look of pain from their eyes. Even though bare feet must be blistered, lungs seared by poison gas. The deprivation endowed them with a look of near-serenity, forcing you to recall paintings of martyred saints. There wasn’t so much as a hint of aggression amongst those thousands of people. They wanted to find a place of safety for their children. That was all that mattered.

  ‘Rick.’ Kate’s voice was surprisingly soft. ‘It’s not the gas the people are running from. Can you see the real reason?’

  I shook my head, scanning the crowds.

  ‘No, Rick…don’t look at the people, look at the plain itself beyond them. Do you see?’

  I saw. My skin prickled.

  ‘Oh, God,’ I said under my breath.

  Now I could see what had driven the people remorselessly across the burning desert.

  Chapter 135

  If I’d kicked my stupid brain into gear and run and got hold of the camcorder I could have recorded what happened next, so that the whole of humanity would know.

  Instead you have these words. I only wish I could do justice to what I saw. And do real justice to what happened to those burnt shreds of humankind out there on the plain.

  Please, picture this:

  There stands the ship.

  It lies beached, twenty or more kilometres from the ocean. The warship’s guns point outward. One of the anchor chains has unspooled from the capstan and lies in a rusty heap on the ground below. Missile pods are stained with soot. Near to where I stand is the remains of the gangplank, tangled with lengths of cable. It hangs outward, away from the ship, then downward at a sharp angle, looking like some ramshackle kind of diver’s springboard. Instead of overhanging a swimming pool, of course, it dangles over the baked mud.

  On the ship are the sixty or so survivors of Stephen’s group, and the tribe belonging to the man who called himself Jesus. He himself still lies on his back in the dirt. His mouth gapes open at the sky, locked in a postmortem scream.

  The sky is a low, oppressive ceiling of cloud from which lightning snakes. Thunder plays its own doom-laden music.

  The plain continues to crack open to vent gas. Sparks of red-hot ash spew upward.

  And there, in a huge semi-circle, like a crescent of the moon that’s fallen to Earth, are the exhausted survivors of the oasis.

  How many are there? Twenty thousand? Twenty-five thousand? Forty thousand? I can’t be sure.

  There they are. Human beings like us. They carry their children on their shoulders. They can barely walk now. There’s no real sense of movement among them. They are absolutely silent. There’s not so much as a single sob from a single child. The little children don’t even flinch when a spark of hot rock, spat from the ground, hits them in the face.

  And beyond them is what drove them to the ship.

  Here it comes.

  Here comes the flood.

  It was like watching a beach being engulfed by a tide.

  A great sheet of water slid smoothly across the plain towards the ship. There was no high ground for the refugees to make for. The ship was their only means of escape from the flood waters.

  As I watched, my blood thumping in my ears, I saw the water slip round the ankles of the people, then slide over the mud towards the ship itself.

  It came in fast, the leading edge of the water thick with creamy scum. Instantly it swept the bullet-ravaged body of the felled madman away. The water rushed into the cracks in the ground. Instantly, water touched hot rock. It bubbled, hissed, steamed like water being poured onto a campfire.

  In a hundred different places miniature geysers erupted sending a spray of hot water as high as a man’s head.

  Slowly the refugees advanced towards the ship, the water already at knee level.

  I looked back down at the people. It was only now I saw them as individuals, not just one vast blur of half-dead humanity.

  I saw faces of men, women, children. I saw people who reminded me of teachers, doctors, nurses, bus drivers…friends I’d met in the past. A few months ago I could have walked into a cafe and been served by the young man with the famine-pinched face I now saw down below. I could have sat next to the girl with blonde hair who carried a baby in her arms. She was blackened by ash, her eyes bled exhaustion. But just a short while ago I’d have sat near her in a bar and admired the curves of her body and wondered if I had the courage to ask her if she’d like a drink.

  I saw a three-year-old white girl on the shoulders of a giant black man. She held a teddy bear hugged tight under her chin. He had the face of a saint. And I saw the bullet wound in his chest, inflicted by the wild gunfire from when the people on the ship fired at the madman, and then no doubt, still in the grip of the hallucination, turned their guns on the refugees.

  The water rose up the people’s legs. The current strong enough to tug them forward as if they were standing in heavy surf.

  I stood there, unable to move. The enormity of what I saw in turn shrank me into something tiny, useless. A disaster would unfold in front of my eyes. I could do nothing—not a damn thing—to prevent it.

  My eyes scanned helplessly across the faces of the people. I saw a ten-year-old girl holding a two-year-old boy up above the water. I could see her arms shake with exertion. Then suddenly, as my eyes began to pick out individuals, rather than a mass of heads, I saw there were hundreds of young children holding their smaller brothers and sisters up above the flood waters. In the midst of the dense crush an old woman held up a framed painting of the Madonna and Child.

  Just to the left of the old woman, someone held up a puppy. To the right of that a mother held her newborn baby, wrapped in a denim jacket, above her head.

  The push of the water forced the people towards the ship. Now the flood water had reached waist level.

  That’s when something snapped inside my head.

  ‘Come on!’ I shouted at the people on the deck. ‘Wake up! We’ve got to get them out of there.’

  They still stared in that drugged way. I pushed Tesco in the chest. ‘Tesco,’ I panted. ‘You’ve got to help me. Find a rope long enough to reach the ground!’

  He stared at me as if I’d just asked him to saddle up an eagle to fly me to the moon.

  ‘Tesco!’

  He stared at me, just not understanding a single word.

  Tears streamed down Kate’s face as she watched the survivors on the plain. The water had reached as high as their stomachs. Already for some the struggle was too much. One by one they weakened, slipped beneath the surface. The children they carried on their shoulders floated by on the current.

  The giant black man with one child sitting on his shoulders shifted the little girl to one broad shoulder. Then he reached into the flood waters to lift out a two-year-old boy as he was washed away. With one hand he lifted the little boy onto his free shoulder. The two children clung to his neck as he drew another baby out of the flood water and held it up against his wounded chest.

  I shouted, ‘We’ve got to help them! We can’t just stand here and watch them drown. Help me…HELP ME!’

  Again there were only the glassy stares.
No one on deck moved. They continued to watch the flood waters rise as if it was all happening a million kilometres away.

  ‘OK! Stand there and watch. I’ll do it myself!’

  I ran to the gangplank that now overhung the heads of the people in the water. It was too high for any of them to reach up and grasp. But I saw if I crawled to the end I could reach down and grab the children as the adults lifted them up to me.

  I stepped onto the gangplank. It creaked. I took another step. It swayed beneath my feet. The thing wasn’t secure, held only by some jerry-rigged tangle of cables.

  But I knew, even if the thing gave way and pitched me into the flood waters in the next five minutes, I’d have to give it a try.

  I edged along it. It sloped almost as steeply downward as a staircase. I hung onto the wires, strung from post to post, that acted as a safety rail.

  At the bottom I reached out, randomly grabbing hold of a little girl who sat on the shoulders of a woman with grey hair. As soon as I had a grip on the little girl the woman gave a grateful smile. Then she slipped silently below the flood waters.

  ‘Rick…Rick’ I looked up. Kate had come part way down the gangplank. She held out her arms for the child. I pulled my way back up towards the ship, then passed the girl to Kate who in turn desperately hauled herself up, grabbing the cable one-handed. She stood the child on the deck.

  One down. Forty thousand to go.

  Who was I kidding? I couldn’t save them all. But I knew I’d have to keep pulling those children from the waters.

  And the flood was rising at a hell of a rate. It had reached the chests of adults. The ten- and eleven-year-olds now stood shoulder deep. They couldn’t last much longer.

  Still no one cried out. I expected people to shout, ‘Save me…save my baby…’

  Only no one did. They remained silent. Calmly they held the children up out of the flood waters. And as if in some kind of mystical sympathy the thunder stopped. A vast, near-supernatural silence fell on the scene.

  I shuffled down the gangplank on my backside, wary that one slip would leave me sliding down the gangplank like it was a swimming pool chute, to drop me into the water.

  I reached out to where the giant of a man was making a superhuman effort to hold onto six children, somehow keeping their heads above water. This was despite the fact he’d taken a couple of machine gun slugs in the chest.

  I lifted a little Chinese boy from his back. The big man looked up at me with large dark eyes that were as wise as they were weary. He gave me a solemn nod of approval.

  I turned to crawl back up the gangplank.

  But in the way was a tall figure. The face that smiled grimly down at me looked mightily tired, but it was the most welcome sight of my life.

  ‘I guess you could use a hand, brother.’

  ‘I guess I could, brother.’

  My brother’s blue eyes shone down at me; he gave a nod; then he held out his hand. I passed the little boy to him. He turned and passed the boy to Kate.

  I saw the blood staining my brother’s shirt but I said nothing.

  I couldn’t speak at that moment. Emotion had blocked shut my throat.

  I turned back to look down into the flood waters. The giant of a man was holding up a little girl. The other children wrapped their arms tightly round his neck, hanging on as the waters swirled about them, trying to drag them away to die somewhere out there on that flooded plain.

  And so we worked. I lifted the children from outstretched arms. Passed them back to Stephen. In turn he passed them to Kate.

  Sweat stung my eyes. My breath came in hard gusts through my mouth; the muscles in my arms and back ached and ached as if any moment they’d snap from their tendons under the strain.

  I looked up. I saw Tesco moving down the gangplank. He braced his feet against the guard rail posts. He’d joined the human chain between Stephen and Kate. And as we worked, lifting the children from the flood, I saw more and more joining the human chain. Some were our people from Fairburn. Some wore the silk strips of Jesus’s band.

  But now we were working together.

  The big man, now shoulder deep in water, handed me the last child clinging to him.

  I’d no sooner grabbed the child’s tiny wrist than he gave a deep sigh of relief; his face relaxed, he nodded to me one last time and then he was gone, beneath the scummy surface.

  But there was no time to pause. In front of me were thousands more. I carried on, reaching down from the end of the gang-plank to grab more of the children’s wrists, then hauled them up to pass to Stephen behind me, the first link in that human chain.

  Moments later, I saw the painting of Madonna and Child float by on the waters.

  Seconds after that, I saw a pair of arms still thrust up above the water. A mother or a father still held their baby desperately above the surface even though they must have been drowning below it. I swung out as far as I could, arm shooting forward to catch the baby by its jacket as the pair of arms began to slip slowly, almost serenely down, first elbows disappearing into the water then forearms, then wrists, then hands, then fingers, leaving only the fingertips to vanish slowly beneath the surface.

  I wiped the sweat from my eyes and looked out.

  Nothing now.

  Nothing but a lake.

  The floodwaters were higher than the heads of the forty thousand.

  I could do nothing more now. All those people had been swept away toward the distant sea.

  The water continued to rise about the ship’s hull.

  Even as I watched, unable to take my eyes from it, the water changed colour. It turned from black, to brown. Then to red.

  The water must have washed oxides from the earth, turning the flood waters into the colour of blood. It looked as if a great wash of blood had flowed from out of the ground to surround the ship. It rose against the hull. The blood-red waves splashed against the ship. I reached down and cupped my hand in the water.

  When I drew it out it looked as if I held a spoonful of blood—it looked fresh, syrup-thick. And deeply, deeply red.

  Chapter 136

  I carried my brother to the cabin myself.

  He’d not complained about the knife wound. But, with no shadow of a doubt, I knew it would prove fatal.

  He lay on the bunk on his side, the hole in his back covered with bandage and Band-Aid. But the blood flowed freely through the dressing.

  The crimson flow was unstoppable. It ran like water from a tap to soak the white sheets. My hands were red with it, my face, too, where I’d wiped my eyes when the sting of tears had become too fierce.

  He lay on his side, his back towards the cabin wall. I sat on the edge of the bunk. The blood seeped across the sheets to soak my jeans.

  When I looked through the porthole all I could see were the blood-red waters of the flood gushing across the once burning plain, dowsing the fires inside the earth.

  At first I’d been agitated. I’d screamed at people to bring me first-aid kits.

  It was Stephen himself who’d calmed me. He was in no pain. He was calm; his face muscles had relaxed, until he looked so serene he could have possessed the face of a child just about to drift away into sleep.

  ‘You’re not going anyway, are you, kiddo?’

  I gripped his hand. ‘I’m here, brother. I’m staying.’

  ‘Don’t worry…please don’t worry.’ Gazing at the ceiling, he licked his lips. ‘It’s strange,’ he whispered, sounding almost puzzled. ‘But it doesn’t actually hurt.’

  ‘Can I get you anything?’

  ‘My God…it takes me…to get into this state to get waited on hand and foot by my brother.’ He smiled. ‘Suppose it’s too late to expect breakfast in bed.’ He squeezed my hand reassuringly. ‘There’s a wallet in the pocket of my jacket…there on the peg.’ He sighed. ‘If you could bring it…thanks…’

  As I went to get the wallet he asked, ‘How many children did we get out of the water?’

  ‘A hundred and forty.’
A lump had grown in my throat. No matter how often I swallowed it wasn’t going to go away.

  ‘A hundred and forty.’ He nodded, then coughed. Blood ran freely from his mouth.

  I can’t explain it properly. But I couldn’t get this notion out of my head: that he wasn’t so much bleeding, rather that springs had begun to flow in his body; that the blood that gushed out of him wasn’t going to simply congeal and dry there on the cabin floor. Already I was convincing myself deep down that in some mystical way, like a force of nature, his flow of blood would quench those fires in the Earth. And that those endless crimson streams from his open, never-to-heal wound wouldn’t stop until they had irrigated those heat-blasted deserts.

  My eyes were drawn once more to the blood-red flood waters that had transmuted the arid plain of blackness into a lake of glistening red. I couldn’t shift the conviction: MY WOUNDED BROTHER IS FEEDING THAT LAKE WITH HIS LIFE BLOOD.

  I felt a hand on my wrist. ‘Penny for them, kiddo.’ I looked down at his smiling face. ‘See these?’

  ‘What are they?’

  ‘You know what they are.’ He spoke gently, smiling all the time. ‘I took them from the photograph albums when I moved with Dad to America…when I left you and Mum. There’s one of you on that cruddy bike we found in Howard’s Garage. Uh…you with bandaged head…after I shot you. Christ, I worried about that so much. I thought I’d killed you.’

  ‘You had these in your wallet all this time?’

  ‘Sure…you’re family, aren’t you, you lunkhead?’ He coughed, smiled again.

  So it went.

  I sat there with him. In that crowning pool of blood. Everything calm, tranquil. We looked at the photographs. We talked about old times. He told me to take care of myself in the future.

  In movies death-scenes are always short. The dying man or woman says their bit—movingly, if it’s well acted; then they close their eyes, the head rolls to one side. Fade in music.

  In truth, people can take a long time to die. Just as it can take a long time to get yourself born.

  And there was Stephen Kennedy, talking calmly, even joking; sometimes his eyes were bright; then they’d dull and he seemed on the point of drifting away to sleep; then he’d come groggily out of it; make a joke; then hold up the photographs so he could gaze at them.