Spares

“Shit,” Vinaldi said. “What’s wrong with that thing?”

I reached forward, banged it. Pointless, as it was a lump of solid-state inexplicability, but instincts die hard. Nothing happened, then two seconds later the light came on. It immediately disappeared, and further thumps made no difference.

“Hit it again,” Vinaldi said. “Fuck—threaten to shoot it.”

“There’s nothing wrong with it,” I said quickly. “He must be nearly there. If we don’t catch him he’s going to get pulled in without us.”

Vinaldi slammed his foot down on the pedal—too hard. The back wheels spun, the truck skewed sideways on the ice. He managed to back it off enough for the tires to catch and we slewed toward a corner at the end of the patch of level road.

“We’re never going to catch him,” Vinaldi said between gritted teeth, as he tried to keep the truck under control. “I can’t go fast enough. We’ll go off the road.”

“Just go as fast as you can,” I said, fumbling in my pockets. I got out another clip and slammed it into the gun, then took a couple of foil packets out. “If-we lose him we might just as well go off the road anyway. Both you and me. Our lives are over. And it’s not just us, either.”

“What are you talking about?”

“if we don’t stop Yhandim from flashing back and forth, then more of this stuff is going to spill out. Everything will change, and it won’t be for the better.”

“Maybe you should get into writing greeting cards. Like ‘Happy wedding—bet it doesn’t last.’ Or ‘Sorry to hear you’re dead.’”

Vinaldi increased the truck’s speed until we were careening toward the corner, trying to stay within the tracks created by Ghuaji. Trees flashed by, black branches flicking hard against the windows. Much later than I would have, he pulled the steering and the wheels locked, sending us sliding toward a wall of rock. I shut my eyes, wishing I’d phrased my last sentence differently, and when I opened them again saw that he had somehow pulled the truck round the corner on the skid.

“Nice one,” I said. “But don’t ever do it again.” Then I fell silent just as Vinaldi stepped on the brakes and killed the lights.

We were in a roughly circular clearing. Sixty yards ahead of us I could see the taillights of Ghuaji’s vehicle. The car was stationary.

We were there, wherever the hell “there” was.

“What do we do now?” Vinaldi asked.

“Roll forward,” I whispered. “As quietly as you can.”

We went about twenty yards until the truck was mostly hidden behind an outcrop of rock, then I motioned for him to stop. By then we could see two things. The first was that although the engine was still running, Ghuaji wasn’t in his vehicle. The second was that on the left side of the road was a building, it was made of old, battered concrete and looked disused. No lights showed in any of the windows, most of which were broken. The shape of the walls was naggingly familiar, but it wasn’t until I realized that the level patch was a compound that I understood what it was.

“It’s a Farm,” I said, bewildered. “It’s an abandoned SafetyNet Farm.” Once it clicked, the whole scene fell into place and I turned in my seat, taking it in.

An electrified fence must once have bordered the area. The main building lay up against the wall of the mountain, where tunnels doubtless led away into the hillside like abandoned concrete wombs. I hoped they were empty. Of course, they would be—they’d hardly abandon valuable spares along with the real estate—but for a moment the alternative possibility seemed all too real. Shambling naked bodies, crawling in darkness until the end of time, feeding off each other’s bodies and excrement until there was nothing left.

Until that moment I hadn’t realized what an extraordinary place the Farm had been, what it really said about humanity. As I stared out at the ruins of this one a shiver went down my back, a shiver which had nothing to do with the cold, or even with The Gap. I was thinking how right it was that the Farms should be connected with that other place, how in some way the mentality behind them was identical.

“Why here?” Vinaldi asked.

I shrugged, stirring sluggishly out of my thoughts. “I have no idea. It’s no closer to The Gap than anywhere else.”

“Unless Maxen’s found some method of forcing a way.”

“Can’t be done.”

“Why not? They got us out, in the end.”

“They didn’t get us out. The Gap got rid of us. They just shipped us home.”

“Bullshit. And if the whole thing was just some sort of fucked-up code zone, like they said, why couldn’t someone have found some way of hacking back into it?”

I shook my head. “That’s only what they said it was.”

“You don’t agree?” Vinaldi spoke with heavy irony, which I supposed was fair enough.

“No,” I said, “I don’t.”’

Then we both saw Ghuaji. He was limping out of the old Farm building with something on a long piece of rope. The soldier was walking slowly and awkwardly, one leg dragging painfully behind. It was too far for us to see any detail, but I thought it fair to assume that he would be hurting badly by now, the wounds in his head and body reopening and trying to pull his body down to where it so much wanted to be: six feet below the ground, in a kind of peace. Instead, he was trying to return it to somewhere it should never have been in the first place.

“What the hell’s he holding?” Vinaldi whispered. “And is this going to work, if we’re watching?”

“I don’t know and I don’t know,” I said.

“It’s a cat,” Vinaldi said. “There’s a cat on the end of that rope.”

The cat was small and thin, and in the dim lights radiating from Ghuaji’s car it looked ill and underfed. This wasn’t some pet which had been drafted in for the day. This was an animal which had been brought here some weeks ago, for a particular purpose. The fact it was still here proved that whatever experiment it had been a part of had succeeded. The further fact that it didn’t look as if it had been fed in the meantime, but simply left in the old Farm building until it was needed again, proved simply that Maxen and his accomplices needed nothing quite as much as they needed a good solid kick to the head.

So Maxen actually had found a way back in. Probably, whatever it might be, it couldn’t have worked unless Yhandim and the others had been trying to come the other way too, but worked it obviously had. Perhaps sometimes the two sides had to touch each other. I don’t know. Chance, fate, or darker forces at work, it didn’t really matter. There was no more room for pretending. Twenty years were going to be stripped away today.

We were teenagers, you know. Eighteen, nineteen. That’s how old most of us were when they sent us into something we didn’t understand. They left us there until they realized we weren’t going to win, and then they pulled us out and threw us away—except that when they brought our bodies out they didn’t check hard enough to see if they’d brought out our souls, too.

Ghuaji leaned inside the car and turned the engine off—luckily Vinaldi was ahead of me and killed ours simultaneously. The mountain and the sky were very quiet, the only sound that of Ghuaji’s feet crunching through the snow, and of our own hearts beating. Warmth and cold, getting closer to each other all the time.

“He’s going to see us,” Vinaldi whispered.

“Maybe, maybe not,” I replied. “I don’t think he’s going to be seeing anything very much at the moment.”

“He got here, didn’t he?”

“He did, but he’s also had a bullet through his head. Maybe it wasn’t him who was directing. Maybe he got pulled this way.”

“Don’t start with that shit again,” Vinaldi said. I shushed him as Ghuaji passed over the road thirty yards ahead of us. There was next to no light, and he was looking the other way, but it was still bizarre that he hadn’t caught a glimpse of moonlight glinting off the angles of our truck. That same light caught the side of his head for a moment and I saw blood there, and a darkness on his shirt. He was close to the end—if he didn’t find the way in quickly he was going to die, and our hopes along with him. Suej and Nearly had already been gone for twelve hours. I didn’t want to think about what might already have happened to them, or to the other spares.

The cat on the end of the rope was padding through the snow after Ghuaji, each foot pulled high against the cold. She saw us, certainly—for a moment her head turned and stared at the truck as if concerned that it was in imminent danger of exploding. But then she lost interest and moved forward again, peering around at the world.

When he was about five yards the other side of the road Ghuaji stopped walking, and stood still, head down. The cat padded past him and into the trees at the edge of the compound, trailing the rope behind her.

“What the fuck is going on?” Vinaldi demanded, panicky.

“You must have heard the story,” I said. “How The Gap was found?” Now that it was all going down I felt strangely serene, the way you feel in the seconds after you’ve had a bad car accident. It’s almost as if you know, all your life, that something bad is going to happen to you, come what may: and as if in those seconds, once it has happened, you find your only moments of peace, of relief from the tension of waiting for the ax to fall.

“Heard a hundred stories on the first day,” he said irritably. “Didn’t listen to any of them.”

I nodded. “I heard a few, too, but only one that ever seemed to make any sense.” The cat was ambling around the bases of the trees now, going about cat business, whatever that may be.

“Is this going to be more hippie bullshit?”

“A guy was watching his cat one day,” I continued, ignoring him. “Nowhere near here—out on the West Coast somewhere, and maybe the original guy was some kind of space cadet. Anyway,” I said, pulling my spike out of my jacket pocket and laying it on the dashboard. “This guy spends a lot of time watching the cat, and realizes one of life’s great truths.”

“What was that?” Vinaldi eyed the needle on the dash with suspicion. I opened the two packets of foil, laying them out carefully on the screen of the Positionex.

“A cat’s always on the wrong side of a door,” I said. “You don’t let it out of the house, then outside’s exactly where it wants to be—until you do let it out, when it suddenly needs to be back inside again. You keep it indoors, it always wants to be inside the cupboards—until you shut it in one, when it suddenly wants to come out again. You put a cat down anywhere on the earth, and it’s going to go looking for somewhere else to be.”

I glanced outside to see that Ghuaji was still motionless, and that the cat had worked its way round to the far end of the compound, still sniffing, still looking around. Then I lifted the bottle of Jack’s from the floor and poured a little into the cap of the bottle. I put the tip of my finger into the whiskey and carefully carried the drop of liquid over to one of the foils. I repeated this with the other foil and then watched as the two small piles of Rapt deliquesced. Within seconds there were two pools of concentrated liquid, sitting like mercury on the foil.

“This guy thinks about this for a while, and wonders what the fuck the cat is looking for. He gets the idea in his head that there’s some final door somewhere, and all cats are searching for it. So one day, when he’s stoned and has nothing better to do, he lets the cat out and decides to follow it. First thing the cat does, of course, is come straight back in again. Naturally. It’s a cat. Then after a while it goes back outside, and wanders out into the yard. And this yard, okay, backs out onto a forest, and the cat is used to trailing around out there. So the guy follows it, at a distance, and watches while it does what it normally does.”

“I think Ghuaji’s dead,” Vinaldi said.

“No, he isn’t,” I said. “Now listen. There isn’t much more. This guy follows the cat all day as it tromps round the forest.”

“Must have been good dope he was on.”

“He watches the way it goes behind trees, goes into hollows, comes back out again, generally cats around. And then—”

“Something’s happening,” Vinaldi interrupted.

“What?”

“I don’t know. But I saw something.”

“What?”

“I don’t know. That’s why I say something’s happening.”

I hurriedly reached for the hypo, cracked a new needle on, and sucked the drugs up into the barrel. When it was flicked I looked back out the windshield and saw that Vinaldi was probably right. Ghuaji’s head had come back up, though his eyes were still closed. The cat was working its way farther into the trees, still pulling the rope behind it. It was so far away that you couldn’t see it, only the line leading out into the darkness. I’d always believed the story had been true. It made sense, to me at least. Cats have been worshiped, used as familiars, for an awfully long time. There had to be a reason.

Then I heard something. Bark working against itself, branches laughing, moonlight scraping the sky. I looked down out of the window and saw a single leaf running past the truck, over the surface of the snow. It had two stalks and was using them as legs, running from what or to where I would never know.

“Yeah, it’s happening,” I said. I looked across at Vinaldi and saw that he was shaking, his hands trembling violently.

“Why didn’t I listen to you, Jack?” he muttered. “Why didn’t I just stay the fuck in New Richmond?” I held the needle out to him, but he shook his head violently. “I’m not having any of that shit. It took me two years to kick it back then.”

“You’re taking it,” I said firmly. “You’re going to have to share the needle with me, but you’re taking it. We barely got out the first time, Johnny. We’re older now. You go in without this and your mind’s going to shatter right away.”

Vinaldi just kept shaking his head. I rolled my own sleeve up and jabbed the needle in. In front of us, Ghuaji was now standing bolt upright, and the rope in his hand was being tugged more insistently. The cat was evidently reaching the limits of its tether, but I didn’t think that was going to matter.

Then the Flip happened, and Vinaldi cried out. The spaces between the trees took on solidity, and it became apparent that the trees themselves were merely gaps. I turned my head slowly to look at the old Farm building, and saw that it was the same there. The building was nothing, a lack of something, and the space between it and us was now a thing which I could barely see round.

“Oh Jesus fucking Christ,” moaned Vinaldi, and abruptly held his arm out toward me. I rolled his sleeve, flicked the needle again and sank it in, injecting him with the second half of an extremely strong double dose. The noise outside was getting louder, all of the gaps between sounds becoming sounds themselves as the real sounds faded away—and only when that happens do you realize just how much silence there really is. Silences between lovers, when something really needs to be said; silence from a parent when a child needs some word more than anything else in the world; silences and in-betweens and everything that isn’t an answer. All of these quietnesses and more gathered together around us, funneled into the times and places where things didn’t happen and no one was saved.

One thing has always summed up The Gap more than anything else to me. It’s a warning sign I saw, as a child, in front of a dirty lake. The sign was a perfunctory painting of a little boy who had fallen in the water. In the picture there was no one else around, just this child slipping deeper. His arm reached up, his mouth was wide with entreaty, but you knew he was going to die. “BE CAREFUL WHERE YOU PLAY,” the warning at the bottom said: “HELP MAY NEVER COME.”

Ghuaji’s arm jerked out suddenly, as the rope was pulled taut. His eyes opened, and we knew they had because they threw a beam across the trees. Not of light exactly: a different view, a sideways glance. What we saw across his vision was something not really there at all, but which might have been. The rope jerked again and Ghuaji half-stepped, half-toppled, in the direction of the cat, which had now presumably found that door for which its kind had always been searching.

“Start the truck,” I said.

“Won’t he hear?”

“All we’ll be is a patch of silence.”

Vinaldi turned the key and the engine chugged into life; sluggishly—if we’d sat much longer it might not have restarted at all. We watched as Ghuaji staggered off toward the trees. I motioned for Vinaldi to follow him.

“We can’t go down there in this,” he said.

“Just do it,” I said. “And make sure you’re exactly behind him.”

Ghuaji started to pick up speed, partly because he was reaching a steeper slope, mainly as the pull gathered momentum. As Vinaldi steered the truck off the road and down after him I felt the first twinge of Rapt, the forerunner of forerunners, insinuate itself into my system. “Christ, not again,” my brain said, but it knew it was the right thing to do, and perfect timing. The truck bumped down the slope and the Flip was stronger there, the space between things seeming to resist until Vinaldi had to push his foot down on the accelerator even though we were traveling downhill. Ghuaji didn’t turn, though we were only five yards behind. He couldn’t hear us. The line to the cat stretched out in front of him like a steel cable and it was pulling him so fast he was almost running.

A thrumming sound started to come up out of the ground, melding with the noise of the truck to cancel out and add to the silence. It felt as if the truck were slipping into some slippery channel carved in air, the bumps from the rocky ground only turbulence. The trees were getting ever closer, Vinaldi’s rictus of concentration tighter, when Ghuaji dropped the rope and started running, just as I saw the cat come hurtling back up the other way. It had seen what it had found, and wanted no part of it.

But Ghuaji kept running, and I screamed at Vinaldi to go faster, and the truck now hurtled down the slope toward trees only ten yards away. For an instant the interior of the truck looked like the inside of a tree trunk, all the surfaces mottled and lined, and I knew it was really about to happen.

“Oh, Jesus,” Vinaldi said. He knew it too.

“Look away,” I said urgently. “Took away from me and away from him. Head for the biggest tree then look away.”

In that last instant before I turned my head I saw a huge tree trunk in front of us, Ghuaji now sprinting toward it, injuries forgotten. The tree was three feet across, a pillar of blackness, but now it was not a thing at all. In the darkness of its body I could see shadows of beyond, the tree now merely a gap in the impermeable space around it. Through the gap I could see the shape of other trees, trees which stood in a different forest in a different place.

Then I yanked my head to the side so I couldn’t see either Vinaldi or Ghuaji, and watched the other gaps running past, jumbled and swirled as the truck crunched over boulders and fell after Ghuaji toward somewhere else.

Vinaldi shouted at the last moment, as if trying to make the truck change course through words alone. By then it was too late.

The truck hit the tree head-on and went through.