White and Other Tales of Ruin

I

Della is the only person I still listen to. I hear the views of others, weigh the significance of their opinions; but Della is wise, Della is good. Sometimes, I think she’s one step removed from everyone else.

She once told me that you can distinguish between truth and lies by the way the speaker tilts their head: slightly to the side, truth; forwards, a lie. It’s not effective for everyone, of course. There are professional liars out there who know how to control such noticeable mannerisms, and there are people like Della, who spend their time marking these liars. They are the most accomplished deceivers of all. I am sure now that Della spun me more than a few mild deceits in the time I knew her.

There is a pile of bodies heaped against the harbour wall as I step from the gangway and onto the mole. Two or three deep, a hundred metres long, with seagulls darting their heads here and there to lift out moist morsels in their red-tainted beaks. I’d always wondered where that red mark came from, ever since I was a child. Della told me it was tomato sauce from all the chips the gulls used to steal, and I believed her for a while. Then she told me they were natural markings. Now, I know the truth.

“Where do they come from?” I ask the policeman who stands at the bottom of the gangway. He glances over his shoulder at the bodies, as if surprised that I even deigned mention them.

“No worries,” he grins through black and missing teeth. “Dead trouble, rioters. Normal, all is normal.” He grabs my arm and helps me onto the mole, nodding and never, for one instant, relinquishing eye contact until I tip him.

“Rioters, eh?”

The little man forces a mock expression of disgust, and I actually believe he wants me to smile at his display. “Rioters, wasters, trouble. No more worries.” He performs an exaggerated salute, then turns and makes sure my tip is safe in his pocket before helping down the passenger behind me.

I stroll quickly along the dock, sweat already tickling my sides and plastering my wispy hair to my forehead. I try not to look at the pile of corpses, but as I approach the gulls let out a raucous cry and take flight in one frantic cloud. Three young boys run to the corpses and begin levering at them with broom handles, lifting limbs so that they can scour the fingers and wrists of those beneath for signs of jewellery. Evidently they have already been picked clean, because by the time I reach the harbour and hurry by with my breath held, the kids have fled, and the gulls are settling once more.

II

“There’s a guy called String,” Della said, handing me another bottle of beer and lobbing a log onto the fire. “He may be able to help.” So casual. So matter-of-fact. It was as if she were talking about the weather, rather than my fading life.

“String?” The name intrigued me, and repeating it gave me time to think. He’d been all over the news a few months ago, but then I’d thought nothing of it. At the time I’d had no need of a cure.

Della stared over at me, the light from the fire casting shadows that hid her expression. Calm, I guessed. Content. That was Della all over. She had short hair, which she cut herself, and her clothes consisted of innumerable lengths of thin coloured cloth, twisted decoratively around her body and giving her the appearance of an old, psychedelic mummy.

She had no legs. They had been ripped off in a road accident, just at the beginning of the Ruin. She was too stubborn to wear prosthetics.

“Lives in Greece. On one of the islands. Can’t remember which.” She frowned into the fire, but I did not believe her faulty memory for a moment.

“So what could he do? What does he know?”

Della shrugged, sipping her beer. “Just rumours, that’s all I’ve heard.”

I almost cried then. I felt the lump in my throat and my eyes burning and blurring; a mixture of anger and resentment, both at my fellow humans for tearing the world apart, and at Della for her nonchalant approach to my fatal condition.

“I’m pretty fucking far past rumours, now. Look.” I lifted my shirt and showed her my chest. The growths were becoming visible, patterns of innocent-looking bumps beneath my skin that spelled death. “Just tell me, Della. I need to know anything.”

She looked at my chest with feigned detachment. It was because she hated displays of self-pity rather than because she didn’t care. She did care. I knew that.

“His name’s String — rumour. He’s a witch-doctor, of sorts — rumour. Rumour has it he’s come up with all kinds of impossible cures. I’ve not met anyone who’s gone to him, but there are lots of stories.”

“Like?”

She shrugged, and for the first time I realised what a long shot this was. I was way beyond saving — me and a billion others — but she was giving me this hope to grab onto, clasp to my rotting chest and pray it may give me a cause for the few months left to me.

“A woman with the Sickness eating at her womb. She crawls to him. Five days later, she turns up back home, cured.”

“Where was home?”

“London Suburbs. Not the healthiest, wealthiest of places since the Ruin, as I’m sure you know. But String, so they say, doesn’t distinguish.” Della poked the fire angrily with a long stick. I could see she wanted to give this up, but she was the one who’d started it.

“Which island, Della?”

She did not answer me, nor look at me.

“I’ll know if you lie.”

She smiled. “No you won’t.” From the tone of her voice I knew she was going to tell me, so I let her take her own time. She looked up at the corrugated iron roof, the rusted nail-holes that let acidic water in, the hungry spread of spider’s webs hanging like festive decorations.

“Malakki,” she said. “Malakki Town, on the island of Malakki. He’s got some sort of a commune in the hills. So rumour has it.”

“Thanks, Della. You know I’ve got to go?” I wondered why she had not mentioned it before. Was it because it was a hopeless long shot? Or perhaps she just did not want to lose me? Maybe she relied on me a lot more than she let me think.

She nodded. I left a week later, but I did not see her again after that night. It was as if we’d said goodbye already, and any further communication would make it all the more painful.

III

There is a good chance that I will never return from this trip. The lumps on my chest have opened up and are weeping foul-smelling fluid; the first sign of the end. I wear two T-shirts beneath my shirt to soak up the mess.

And if my disease does not kill me, Malakki is always there in the background to complete the job.

The island is awash with a deluge of refugees from the Greek mainland, fleeing the out-of-control rioting that has periodically torn the old country apart since the Ruin. From the harbour I can see the shantytowns covering the hillsides, scatterings of huts and tents and sheets that resemble a rash of boils across the bare slopes. All hint of vegetation has been swept away, stripped by the first few thousand settlers and used for food or fuel for their constant fires. Soil erosion prevents any sort of replanting, if there were those left to consider it. There is a continuous movement of people across the hillsides; from this distance they resemble an intermingling carpet of ants, several lines heading down towards the outskirts of the city.

In the city itself, faceless gangs ebb and flow through the streets, moving aimlessly from one plaza to the next or sitting at the roadside and begging for food. There are hundreds of people in uniform or regulation dress, most of them carrying firearms, many of them obviously not of standard issue. Whether these are regular army and police it is impossible to tell, but the relevance is negligible. The fact is, they seem to be keeping some form of radical order; I can see thin shapes hanging from balconies and streetlamps, heads swollen in the fierce heat, necks squeezed impossibly narrow by the ropes. A seagull lands on one of the shapes and sets it swaying, as if instilling life into the bloated corpse. Retribution may be harsh, but there seems to be little trouble in the streets. The fight has gone from these people.

I reach the edge of the harbour and look around, trying to find a place to sit. The boat journey has taken eight days, and in my already weakened state the stress on my body has been immense. Inside I am still fighting. I cannot imagine myself passing away, slipping through the fingers of life like so much sand. I can barely come to terms with the certainty of my bleeding chest, the knowledge of what is inside me, eating away at my future with thoughtless, soulless tenacity. The Sickness is a result of the Ruin, perhaps the cause of it, but for me it is a personal affront. I hate the fact that my destiny is being eroded by a microscopic horror created by someone else.

Over the course of the journey, I have decided not to sit back and accept it. I wonder whether this is what Della intended — that her vague mention of a rumoured cure would instil within me a final burst of optimism. Something to keep me buoyant as death circles closer and closer. And that is why I am here, chasing a witch-doctor in the withering remains of Europe’s paradise.

I see a vacant seat, an old bench looking out over the once-luxurious harbour. I make my way through the jostling crowd and sit down, realising only then that this position gives me a perfect view of the long heap of corpses against the wall. I wonder if they are there waiting to be shipped out, perhaps dumped into the sea. I muse upon the twisted morals behind their slaughter, try to remember what reason the policeman had been trying to impart to me. Trouble, he had said. Poor bastards.

“You ill?” I had not even noticed the woman sitting beside me until she spoke. I glare at her. She is the picture of health, or as healthy as anyone can be in today’s world. Her face is tanned and smooth, her hair long and naturally curled. As for the rest of her, her robustness sets her aside. She is trim, short, athletic looking, but still curved pleasingly around the hips and chest. Her bright expression, however, is one of arrogance. I take an immediate dislike to her.

Apart from anything, it is presumptuous to assume I even want to talk.

“And is it your business?” I ask.

“Might be.”

The relevance of the answer eludes me. Thoughts of String are still long-term; in the short term, I have to decide what to do now that I have arrived.

My thoughts are interrupted, however, by the sound that has become so familiar over the years. A swarm of angry bees, amplified a million times; a continuous explosion, ripping the air asunder and filling the gaps with fear; pounding, pulsing, throbbing through the air like sentient lightning. A Lord Ship.

Around me, along the mole and in the plaza facing the harbour, people fall to their knees. The act effectively identifies those who have come to the island recently, for they remain standing, glancing around with a mixture of shock and bewilderment.

“What the hell are they doing?” I gasp in disgust.

There are two men huddled at my feet, their eyes cast downwards and their hands clasped in front of their faces in an attitude of prayer. They are mumbling, and I can hear the fear in their voices even over the rumble from the sky. I nudge the nearest with my foot, and he glances up at me.

“What are you doing? Don’t you know what they are? Why don’t you try to live for yourself?” The man merely looks at me for a second or two — even then, I’m unsure whether he understands — before remembering what he had been doing. He hits his forehead on the ground, such is his keenness to prostrate himself once more. His voice raises an octave and becomes louder; he is sweating freely, shirt plastered to his back; two ruby drops hit the pavement from his clasped hands where his nails have pierced the skin.

I stand, dumbfounded. “They must be fools! Don’t they know?”

“Leave it!” the short woman says.

“What?”

“Leave it! Leave them be! Don’t say anymore!” She stands next to me and stares into my eyes, and what I see there convinces me that she knows what she is talking about.

My pride, however, tries one more time: “But don’t they know — ?”

She grabs my elbow and begins to lead me through the kneeling crowds. The dirigible has drifted past the edge of the town, pumping out its voiceless message, and now it appears to be heading inland. The hillsides have stilled, the dry ground hidden beneath a carpet of procumbent humanity. I try to resist, but she walks faster, surprising me with her strength. She seems to know where she is going. Within a minute we have scampered into a shaded alleyway and she has dragged me into the shadows, hushing me with a hand over my mouth as I go to protest.

“Watch,” she whispers. “Things can get a bit weird around here.”

Like a snapshot of life, the entrance to the alley affords us a framed view of what is happening in the streets. As we slump down into the heat, the sound of the airship gradually disappears into the distance. The people begin to rise, gaze cast downward at first, then glancing up, then staring forcefully at the sky as movement becomes the prime motive once more. Voices call out, shouts and songs and screams. Some of the people remain subdued, but these seem to bleed away from the streets immediately. Others seem possessed of a frantic activity, running quietly at first, leaping into the air, rolling across the pitted tarmac, bumping into each other, exchanging silent blows. Within seconds their voices have returned; they scream, curse, fight their neighbour, their friend, their family. Less than three minutes after the first people have risen from their subdued pose, the street is a mass of flailing limbs and struggling bodies. It is repulsive.

“You’d better come with me,” the woman says. “Maybe you’ll be safe if you do. Maybe you won’t.”

“Makes no real difference,” I say, feeling the warm reminder of imminent death in my chest.

“Didn’t to me when I came here, either,” she says. “Does now. Believe me, you want to live.”

The declaration provokes a stupefied silence from me. I follow the woman further along the alley, soon finding myself creeping through dusty backstreets where old women huddle under black shawls in doorways like sleeping bats. I can smell the mouth-watering aroma of genuine Greek cooking.

As if identity is an afterthought, the woman turns several minutes later. “I’m Jade, by the way.”

“Gabe.”

From far away, we hear the first sounds of gunfire. The steady roar of the rioting crowd escalates with the effects of fear and fury, and the crackling of rifle fire continues.

“I’m looking for a man called String.” We are hurrying through dusty yellow alleyways. Shots herald the death of a few more rioters. My utterance seems melodramatic, to say the least.

“I know. Why else would you be here?” Jade does not turn around, but I guess that she senses my surprise. I can almost see the satisfied grin on her face. I bet she grins a lot, at other people’s misfortune. Her long hair swings between her shoulder blades as she rushes us through the twisting byways. She seems to know her way; either that, or she has me completely fooled.

Someone jumps into our path, a snarling, scruffy man with Sickness growths around his mouth. Jade stumbles to a halt and I walk into her, grabbing her hips to steady us both. The stranger begins shouting, gesticulating wildly, pointing at the air, at his forehead, almost growling as he motions towards me. Jade shakes her head, very definitely, confidently, and the man shouts again. I can see something in his eyes — the glint of madness, the desperation he must feel at the unfairness of things — and smell his degradation in the air; sweat, shit, aromas belonging nowhere near a comfortable, civilised human.

He is mad. He is ruined.

For a couple of seconds, I fear his madness will infect me. Indeed, this seems to be his motive, for he lunges past Jade, hands clawing for my throat.

She punches him in the gut. The movement is smooth and assured. He falls to his knees, gasping for breath and unconsciously adopting the same attitude as the hundreds of people at the harbour minutes before. He leans over until his forehead hits the dusty path, then his whole body shudders as he once again gasps in foul air. A smudge of muck sticks to his sweating forehead as he looks up at us.

“Do we go now?” I ask, but Jade disregards me completely. She whispers to him, indicating me with a derisive nod of her head. In the jumble of conspiratorial words, I hear String mentioned more than once. At each utterance of his name, the grubby man jerks as if given a minor electrical shock. I wonder how a name could invoke such a reaction.

Fear. Respect. From what I know, and what Della told me, these are the two things that String would revel in. One commands the other, both ways, and in the end it does not seem to matter whether he is good or bad.

Jade looks up at me and smiles her confident smile again. “We can go now.”

“What did you say to him?” I ask as we pass the man, still kneeling in the dust, eyes apparently staring at some point a few metres behind my head as I pass him.

“We can go now, “ Jade repeats, effectively denying me any explanation. I suddenly wonder whether I really want to follow her.

From the harbour — now several hundred yards away by my reckoning — comes a more sustained burst of rifle and machine-gun fire, and then a stunned silence. Jade seems unconcerned.

I wonder how much higher the pile on the harbour will be by morning.

IV

“In Here,” Jade says. I follow her through a narrow doorway and we feel our way along a twisting, oppressive tunnel. I hear the scampering of tiny feet, and wonder whether they are rats or lizards. When we emerge into the courtyard, I am struck by the sight of beautiful pots of flowers, hanging from every available space on the balconies above us. Then I realise that the flowers are painted onto roughly cut wood, which in turn is nailed to handrails and windowsills. The revelation depresses me enormously.

The buildings rise only three storeys, but they seem to lean in close at the top as if the perspective is all wrong. I look up for a few more seconds, but still there is only a small, uneven rectangle of sunlight filtering down from above.

“Is String here?” I ask.

Jade laughs. “Don’t flatter yourself, buddy. Did I say I’d decided to take you to him? Hmm? If I did, I’ve sure forgotten it.” She opens a door in one corner of the courtyard and disappears into shadow. I follow and watch in embarrassment as she strips off her shirt and splashes her bare chest and shoulders from a bowl of water.

She glances at me, amused. “Surely you’ve seen a naked woman before.”

I cannot help myself. I stare at her breasts and feel a stirring inside which has been absent for so long. She seems to be doing it on purpose, teasing me, but she excites me. She’s arrogant, confident, brash, intriguing… invigorating.

Jade turns away and finishes washing as if I’m not there. She starts to unbuckle her trousers, but I have a sudden twinge in my chest and go out into the courtyard to sit down. A few minutes later she reappears, unperturbed by my sudden bashfulness. She is carrying a bottle of wine in one hand.

I have not tasted wine for months. The last time was that night at Della’s, when she told me about String. The last time I saw her. “Wine,” I mutter, unable to keep a hint of awe from my voice.

“Ohh, wine,” Jade mimics, taking a swig from the bottle. I feel that we should be using glasses, but such luxuries died out during the early years of the Ruin. I gladly take the proffered bottle and drink from it myself. I do not bother to wipe the neck. Jade could have TGD, Numb-Skull, QS… anything. But I’m dying anyway. What’s another fatal disease to such as me? It would be like sunburn to an Ebola victim.

“Where are we now?” I ask.

Jade throws me an amused little smile — condescension seems to be her forte — and takes back the bottle. “Globally, we’re fucked.”

“I meant where are we, here, now. Your place?” I cannot keep the frustration from my voice.

“No, not my place. I don’t live anywhere, really. I stayed here for a while when I first came to Malakki, then after…” She trails off, looks away, as if she had almost said something revealing.

“After…?” I prompt. She takes another swig from the bottle and I stare at the new shirt, clinging to her still damp skin like an affectionate parasite. Her nipples are trying to break through. I think of the growths on my own chest, slowly killing me.

“After I went to String, I was going to say.” She stares at me, but I sense that she is really looking at something far away.

It hits me all at once. I realise that ever since Jade had led me from the troubled harbour, I have been doing little but complaining and asking questions of a person I do not know. Her avoidance of many of my queries frustrates me, but I did not have to come with her, did I? She had offered her help like a latter-day Samaritan — a breed of person that seems to have all but vanished, swallowed into the gullet of mankind’s folly — and I had willingly accepted. She had very probably saved me from a bullet.

With a painful flash of clarity, I imagine my own body on that grotesque heap on the harbour; my pale skin splitting under the sun, gases belching to join the overall smell of the dying town, eyes food for birds and rats and street kids. Diseased or not, the dead are all alike.

I had decided to live. This girl might just help me.

“String cured you?”

Jade gently places the bottle on the stone surround of the lifeless fountain and pops the buttons on her shirt. She slips it from her shoulders and holds it in the crooks of her elbows, her gaze resting calmly on my shocked face.

I stare at her breasts. They are small, pert, the nipples still pink and raised from her recent cold wash. Her skin is pale, but the smoother area between her breasts is paler still, almost white. I feel a twinge in my own diseased chest, then stoop forward to look more closely. All sexual thoughts — teasing my stomach, warming my groin — vanish when I see the scars.

“Do you think I’m attractive?” Jade asks, and there is a note of abandonment in her voice which brings an instant lump to my throat.

“I… yes, I do. But…” I point at her chest, realising the absurdity of the situation for the first time — an attractive woman, revealing her breasts to me on this hot afternoon, sweat already glistening on the small mounds. And my reaction, to point and gulp my disbelief like someone seeing a do-do for the first time in centuries. But maybe that’s what she wants.

“I wasn’t a few weeks ago.” Jade sighs, lifts her shirt back onto her shoulders and sits on the fountain wall. I see her mouth tense, her face harden, and she reaches for the bottle. But she cannot halt the tears. They are strange, these tears. They clean the grime from her face, but they seem dirty against her skin. Her mouth twists into an expression of rage, yet she seems to be laughing between sobs.

I step towards her and hesitantly hold out my hands. It’s a long time since I’ve held a woman, and I feel clumsy with the gesture. She waves me away and takes another swig of wine, spitting it into the dust when a further spasm of laughter-crying wracks her body.

It takes a few minutes for her to calm down, a time in which I feel more helpless than I have in years. She cries, laughs, drinks some more, but her initial rejection of my offer of comfort has hurt me. I feel foolish, being upset by this denial from a stranger. But I really wanted to help.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I’ve had a rough few weeks.”

“You could have fooled me.” I say it quietly but it makes her giggle, and that makes me feel good. After a pause during which a group of old women shuffle through the courtyard, and Jade procures another bottle of wine, I ask the question. “Will you tell me?”

She waves at a fly, wine spilling down the front of her shirt like stale blood. Then she nods. “I’ve been going to help you since I saw you on the harbour. It’s obvious why you’re here. Do you have growths?”

I nod. “The Sickness.”

“I had it too.”

I nod again, glancing at her chest as if I can see the smooth scar through her shirt. “So I guessed.”

“And, yes, String cured me.” Her American accent has almost vanished. As if she is speaking for everyone.

“He’s genuine, then? I’d heard so many stories that I’d begun to think he was a myth. A hope for the new age.” I look down at my feet and cringe when a spasm of pain courses through me, as if the Sickness itself can sense a danger to its spread.

“There is no hope after the Ruin,” Jade says, though not bitterly. “Not for mankind. There’s personal hope, of course. There always will be as long as there’s one person alive on the planet. Human nature, animal instinct, survival of the species, no matter what the odds. That’s why String does what he does. But mankind was fucked the minute the Ruin set in.”

“The crop blight?”

She shakes her head. “Long before that, I reckon. How about the fall of Communism?”

“Why that far back?”

She shrugs. “Just my personal opinion.” She looks at the front of my shirt, a glint of concern marking her voice. “You need to see him soon, I think.”

I look down and see blood seeping through the material, spreading like ink dots on blotting paper. One of the growths has split and started spewing my life out into the heat, and I have the disturbing feeling that our talk of cures and hope has encouraged it. My personification of the Sickness makes it no easier to accept.

“How does he do it?” I ask. It’s the question I have been yearning a positive answer to since the Sickness first struck me.

I see something then, a shadow of an emotion pass across Jade’s face. It is only brief, as if a bird had passed across the sun and cast its silhouette down to earth. If I knew her better, I could perhaps discern what that look meant, decipher from her tone of voice what sudden thought had made her blush and twist her hands in her lap.

She tilts her head slightly towards me, and I think of Della. “I don’t know,” she says. I nod, reach for the wine. Maybe later I can ask her again.

“Will you take me to him?”

“Yes.” The answer is abrupt, definite.

“Thank you.” I smile and feel a warm glow as my cheer is reflected on her face.

“But first,” she says, jumping up, “we eat. Then, we drink some more wine. Then, we sleep.”

“Can’t we go now?”

She shakes her head, motioning for me to precede her into the building. She slams the door shut behind me and flicks on a light, revealing one large room with bed, fridge, curtained bathroom area and an old computer monitor with a picture of a goldfish glued across its redundant screen.

“Why?”

“It’s nearly dark, one.” She holds up a finger to count the point. “It’s about twenty miles up into the hills, two.” Another finger. “People are hungry, three. It’s got pretty bad here. Last month they ate two Frenchmen.”

I am unsure whether or not she is joking, but the implication of what she has said is so shocking that I can’t bring myself to question it. Instead, I sit on the edge of the bed as she goes about preparing some food. She does so in silence, only occasionally humming some vanished tune under her breath. I watch her moving about the room; lithe, confident, her body echoing her surface personality. Underneath, I am sure, there is still a lost person.

We eat. Old salad and a sausage shared between us, but I am ravenous and the food tastes gorgeous. I wonder where I am going to sleep.

V

In the dark, memory fails me.

For a whole minute I believe that the hand caressing my stomach belongs to Della. I cannot bring myself to talk. I fear that this will taint our friendship with jealousy and resentment, but I want it so much, have always wanted it. Della must know that. I cannot lie to her, and even lying by omission seems impossible.

I have never mentioned my love for her.

I know I should turn away, but it feels so good. Since the Sickness struck two years ago I have chosen to distance myself from sex with women, taking matters into my own hand. I acted before I was ever turned down, unable to bear the humiliation, preferring voluntary abstinence to enforced sexual solitude.

I sit up, turn away.

“Oh please,” a voice whispers, fighting through tears which I can just see as floating, glinting diamonds in the dark. “Oh please, don’t reject me. It’s been years, so many years. Feel!” A hand grasps my wrist and I remember then where I am, whom I am with. Jade forces my hand to her chest and drags my palm across the smooth scar tissue between her breasts. It is cool, like glass.

“Gone now, it’s all gone now.” I cannot ally the voice with the feisty, arrogant woman I have known for only several hours. Tears do not suit her. Her beseeching words make me blush in the dark.

“What about me?” Old fears shrink my penis in her hand, sending a flush of heat through my diseased chest. I twist the sheets beneath me, trying to hold back the tears. I feel something touch me, stroke the growths, and I cringe back.

“Okay, it’s okay,” Jade sooths. “Wait.” Her weights leaves the bed and then there is light. She is standing by the door, hand on the light cord, proud and beautiful in her nakedness. The pale white patch on her chest is almost attractive, set against the light tan she has picked up in the last few weeks. She catches my eye, then looks unselfconsciously down my body, eyes resting on my groin and causing a new stirring there.

“Nobody has loved me for years,” she says. She is crying again, but her voice is strong and I wonder whether they are really tears of anguish anymore. She comes back to the bed and sinks her head into my lap.

I close my eyes and think of Della. And my overwhelming emotion is a sense of relief that it is Jade here, and not her.

Jade is wild. Our lovemaking is fast and furious, passion-filled and almost violent in its intensity. By the end we are both crying. She remains sitting astride me, wiping tears from my cheeks, and I kiss her salty eyes and whisper that she is beautiful.

“How could you, when…?” I ask, half-pointing to my chest with unwilling fingers.

“You’ll be beautiful too, soon,” she says. Nobody has ever called me beautiful before. I like it.

In the morning we wake late. Passion seems to have fled with the dark, and although we smile and kiss it feels more as friends.

vi

“String is in the hills.” Jade is tightening the straps on her rucksack, checking the lid is screwed onto her water bottle, rubbing sun cream onto her bare legs and arms. She hands me the bottle and I smear my balding scalp with cream.

“How will we get there? Last night you said twenty miles. That’s a long way to walk, and I’m not so strong lately.”

“Maybe we can hitch a ride with a Lord Ship,” she smiles. “Come on.”

It is even hotter than the previous day, and before long sweat has pasted my shirt to my sickly body and soaked through to darken the material. I can feel the sun working on my arms and trying to find a way through the cream, and I guess that I’ll end up getting horribly burnt whatever measures I take to prevent it.

Jade has changed. She’s still the no-nonsense girl I had met the previous day, but she seems somehow more relaxed in my company. There is still an undefined tension, however, a distance that I cannot help but feel sad at.

After last night, I would have hoped for more.

I

“Faith is as personal and as private as a thing can be,” Della once told me. “If you understand someone’s faith, you know their soul. But most people aren’t very comfortable with the idea of personal faith. Sometimes, it’s just too much effort, too challenging. They have to ascribe to some pre-ordained vision of things, where there are books and preachers and teachers to lead them through the minefield of knowledge. Prophesies tell them what they need to know, words written millennia ago by some holy-man drunk on monastery wine and eager to bury his cock in the young girl from the local village. Then they wonder why their faith lets them down so much, and causes so many wars and death and hatred. Simple reason — it’s not their faith. It’s a ready-made idea of faith. De-humanised. Just add belief.”

It was a hot summer’s day, only a couple of years before the Ruin really took hold and threw people back two hundred years into anarchy and poverty. Della sat in a garden chair, reaching over every now and then to snatch a sweet from the table next to her. I was lying on the lawn, mindful of insects and ants, feeling the sun cook my exposed scalp but not really caring. The sunburn would be a brand of the day, a reminder of what Della was telling me. She was a wise woman, and I knew nothing. I loved her.

“You have faith? “ she asked. The question surprised me, but I felt I recovered well.

“Of course.”

“Good.” She said no more. I was afraid that she would ask me where my faith was set. She’d know if I lied, she’d read me like a large-print book held under a magnifying glass. Because in truth, my faith was based solely in her. I wondered whether she really ever knew that.

“You may need it one day.”

She did not look at me. She stared into the eye-blue sky, a strange smile on her face. A smile I did not like. She carefully took another sweet from the table without looking at what she was doing. She could just as easily have snatched up a bug.

“Why?” I said, finally.

She glanced down at me, then nodded up at the sky as if the fluffy white clouds could explain everything. “Bad days coming.”

Fuck, was she right.

II

Jade leads me through the warren of alleys and side streets until we emerge onto a main thoroughfare. The rucksack already feels heavy against my shoulders, pressing against my back and slipping my shirt back and forth across damp skin. The cream I had applied is already redundant, and I feel as though my skull is growing ready to split the skin from my head. There’s no real protection any more other than staying out of the sun altogether, and skin cancer is the least of my concerns.

The streets are surprisingly quiet, and the few people there are seem to be milling aimlessly rather than actually going places. I see several people who are obviously not Greek. None of them appear sane. They scrabble in the dust for dog-ends, fighting over a few flakes of rough tobacco. Growths have turned their bodies into grotesque parodies of people, walking warts that gibber and leak from various orifices, both natural and disease-given. I catch up with Jade and walk by her side, her presence giving me a comfortable sense of safety. She’s seen all this before, she knows what to expect; she can handle herself.

I wonder whether these people came to be cured.

“They’re all wasters,” Jade says in answer to my thoughts. The expression reminds me of the uniformed man who had helped me from the boat, the way he had spoken of the piled corpses. “Some of them were given the opportunity, apparently, but they wasted it. Now, they’re down to this. They even worship the Lord Ships.” She seemed to have slipped into her own personal conversation, excluding me even before I replied. “Strange how we regress so easily.”

“But they must know about the Lord Ships?” I say, confusion twisting my voice into a whine.

“Hmm?” Jade looks at me as if she’d forgotten I was there, and a brief pang of resentment stabs at my chest. She wasn’t like this last night, not when she was riding me, sweating her lust over me. “Oh, yeah, they know,” she says. “That’s what I mean. They know the Lord Ships are unmanned, automatons, pilots dead or gone. But they’ve been here for a while, and I suppose in their state the fears of the locals drive their certainties back out.”

We pass a group of young men and women who regard us with a mixture of anger and fear. I can understand what they have to be angry with — aliens in their country, invaders in a world shrinking back to almost tribal roots — but what do they fear?

“Why don’t the locals know about the Lord Ships?” I ask.

“Oh, they do. They just choose not to believe it.”

I can scarcely credit this myself. The fact that a civilised people can let themselves be controlled by ghosts from the past, willingly prostrating themselves at the feet of dead gods, knowing all the time that their actions are a sham. I ask Jade why this is so. I do not like the answer I receive.

“God is dead,” she says. “That’s what anyone here will tell you if you ask them. Do you know what these people have been through since the Ruin? Their population was halved by CJD-two; the Turks decided to nuke the north of the island for the hell of it; and at the end, when it all went totally fucking hay-wire, the Lord Ships condemned them as heathens and witches. Sentenced to death. It was only the fall of the Lord Ships that saved them.”

“And now they worship them all the more since they’re dead and gone?”

“As I said,” Jade confirmed through a sardonic smile, “God is dead. He let them be dragged through hell, now they hate Him for it.”

“Do you believe he’s still there?” I ask. I surprise myself with my frankness about a subject I feel so confused and cynical about. I have never believed in God. I have my own faith.

“I have my own faith,” Jade says quietly.

I think of Della, smile, wonder where she is now, what she’s doing. Sitting back and sharing her infinite wisdom with some other sucker, no doubt. A pang of jealousy tickles my insides, but I force it out and tell myself that Della would hate me for it.

“Here we are.” Jade has stopped in front of what was obviously once an affluent hotel. Now, it seems exclusively to house street-women between the ages of fifteen and fifty. A dozen of them are sitting in broken chairs on the cracked patio and they appraise me, laughing and jeering, as I step behind Jade. My face colours, but I secretly enjoy the attention. Last night has kick-started my libido.

Jade talks to the women in Greek and waves profuse thanks as she backs away from the hotel. I back away with her, wondering whether it’s a ritual of sorts or simple politeness, but the women are laughing again. A dog runs by and nearly trips me up. It’s a mangy mutt, but seems well fed. I remember the pile of corpses along the harbour and wonder what it’s been feeding on, and any sense of humour quickly flees. The women seem to sense this and stop laughing.

“Follow me,” Jade says, somewhat impatiently.

“Where?”

“Bikes.” She strides around the corner of the hotel.

In what used to be the swimming pool there are at least a hundred bicycles of all shapes and sizes, ranging from a rusty kiddie’s tricycle, to a three wheeled stainless steel monster that would have set me back a month’s salary in the days before the Ruin. I wonder what the owner would want for it now. The bikes fill the pool, a tatty metallic pond of tortured frames, tired tyres and accusing spokes. Dust has blown down from the depleted hillsides and formed drifts at the edges of the pool, like frozen waves trying to reclaim it. I see the remains of what I’m sure is a dead dog, buried beneath the network of wheels, handles and pedals. I try to imagine its panic as it realised that the strange, surreal landscape it had slunk into had effectively trapped it. It must have been cooked to death by the relentless sun.

“You Yankee?” says a huge man sitting under an awning.

“No, English,” Jade replies instantly. I’ve already been here long enough to know that there must be a reason for her denying her birth.

“Good. I hate Yankee. Fuckin’ killing bastards.” Jade nods and smiles, and this seems to secure her in the big man’s favour.

“We’d like a couple of bikes, if you have any to spare,” she says, unfazed by his vicious outburst.

He laughs, a sound that would have seemed ridiculously overplayed had it not been for the machine pistol dangling from his belt. As he bellows his mirth at the sky, I take the opportunity to size him up. He’s not just big, he’s massive, at least twenty-five stone, all of it sweaty and sickly and grey. He’s wearing a pair of Bermuda shorts which are grotesquely too small, cutting into his flesh and stretching out in places like the skin on an overcooked sausage. With each shudder of his body, I fear they will burst. His bare chest is studded with black, oozing growths. I’m amazed at how hearty he seems.

“You want bikes? I have bikes! “ He waves his hand at the pool, as if drawing our attention to a fine display of quality antiques. In a way, I think to myself, they are. “But the final question as always, lady? Price?”

“I’ve got your price,” she says, heaving her rucksack from her shoulders. Her loose shirt flaps open and I catch a glimpse of her breasts swinging freely as she bends down. I suddenly fear what this fat man’s price will be, and wonder how close I would get before he could unclip the gun from his belt.

“I’ll take the shiny trike and the hefty mountain bike,” Jade says, pulling a small package from the backpack.

“Hmm, big spending if you want those, little lady,” Fat Man says. I hear something I don’t like in his voice — it is quieter, more serious — and tense as he stretches his neck in an effort to see down Jade’s top. The Sickness picks a bad time to announce its presence to me, jabbing at my chest with white-hot fingertips of pain. I groan and swoon, but pinch a twist of skin on my leg to prevent myself from fainting.

Jade glances back at me and moves off towards Fat Man. She whispers something to him, actually standing on tiptoe so that she can speak into his ear, one hand resting on his pendulous stomach. I can barely imagine how she could give him a better chance to grab at her, but he does not. Instead, the grimness of his face falls away under the emergence of an expression so childlike and angelic that I almost laugh out loud.

Jade turns, looks at me, nods towards the pool of bikes. I wonder what the hell she has shown him. I sidle sideways and lean across the heap of metal, grabbing the handlebars of the stainless steel trike and tugging hard.

Within minutes we are away, the Fat Man calling cheerfully after us and telling us to watch out for the fuckin’ murdering Yankee.

Jade takes the mountain bike, I’m on the trike. I’m surprised to find it well oiled and maintained, the brakes old but well-adjusted, saddle soft and pliable.

“Two questions,” I start, but both are obvious. She eases back until she is pedalling alongside me. We are travelling two-abreast along the main road, but there is no motor traffic.

“He hates Americans because the rest of the world does,” she says. “We’re blamed for it all. The wars. The starvation. The Ruin.” She’s silent for a moment, and I’m about to ask my second question when she continues. “He should visit the States sometime, see what’s left of it.” She pedals harder and slips down a gear, motoring on ahead. Her move offers me a pleasing view of her rump, flexing as her legs pump her along the degenerating tarmac.

“Second question,” she says, “is what did I give him? Right?” She glances back over her shoulder and I nod. “None of your fucking business.” I try to hear a joke in her voice, but there is none. Or if there is, she can hide it well.

We pedal for an hour in silence, Jade leading, me following comfortably on the trike. More than once I think of asking her whether she wants to swap, but my body is stiffening and burning as the infected blood from the growths on my chest surges once more into my veins. One day, a surge like this will kill me. One day soon — perhaps today, riding this bike, my feet describing thousands of circles an hour — black blood will leak from a growth and block an artery, popping a dozen blood vessels at a time until I die. If I’m lucky, it may only take a minute or two.

On the outskirts of the town we pass through the ribbon of huts and tents which go to make up the camps for the un-homed. Eyes follow us on our way, but there is little real interest there. Even the children I see appear old, apathetic and grim instead of lively and playful. We pass a body at the side of the road. A sick fascination forces me to slow down so that I can properly see the dog chewing on its open stomach. There are lizards here, too, darting in and out of the empty eye-sockets to dine on the delicate morsels within.

We pass by. Jade seems unconcerned, but I cannot help but stare out over the sea of torn tents and makeshift hovels. There are families of eight living in one tent; great open ditches full of shit and flies and the discarded bodies of the dead; queues to gather water from a meagre stream, the liquid resembling diseased effluent rather than water. Smells assault us physically, the stench clenching my stomach and throat in its acidic grip. But throughout the ten minutes it takes us to pass through the shantytown, Jade does not slow down once. She does not glance to either side. She does not seem to care.

She has seen it all before.

As we leave Malakki Town and head into the surrounding hills, there is a change. I can feel it in the air, a potential of something that I cannot describe or adequately read. Jade senses it too, and she keeps glancing back at me as if afraid I have begun to lag behind. In truth, I feel as energetic and excited as I have for months, a power pumping through my muscles which has more to do with my sense of freedom than the potential cure I am travelling towards.

The new aura of well-being makes me think about the night before: the passion we had for each other, as if love were at a dirth.

There is a gunshot. Jade’s bike swerves, then leaves the road, flipping over into the dry ditch. I hear a scream, and for a terrible few seconds I cannot tell whether it is Jade’s voice, or my own. Then more gunshots, breaking the air apart like the answer to a silent question.

III

The hillside is smooth, stripped bare of plant life, topsoil scoured away by the biting winds. Sound travels further here. The gunfire is coming from around a bend in the road ahead. Its executors, and executed, are hidden from sight by an old stone wall.

Jade curses bitterly, trying to untangle her legs from the wreckage of the bicycle. I notice that she is keeping her head down almost without thinking about it, and I wonder how many shoot-outs she’s been witness to. I crawl along the dry ditch, leaving the trike behind, hands reaching out to drag the bike away from her legs. I try to tell her to keep still, but the gunfire has increased to a screaming crescendo and she can only frown at my words.

Eventually, through a combination of her kicking and me pulling, she extracts her legs from the twisted bike. There is a raw gravel burn on her left knee, blood already seeping from a hundred pinpricks in the skin and merging into angry red rivulets. She sucks her palm, spitting out black pellets of stone, sucking again, spitting. I feel queasy watching her, and then the Sickness comes along and sends me into a faint.

The gunshots fade away — either the shooting has finished, or I’m really losing it. I slump in the ditch, Jade staring at me past the splayed fingers of her right hand, palm pressed to her mouth. The last image I see is Jade spitting a mouthful of blood and gravel into the air, and the sun hiding behind clouds like the ghost of an airship.

IV

“About time,” the voice says. I open my eyes and grimace as the sun dazzles me. I feel heat on my front, and realise instantly that my shirt has been removed. The sun is slowly cooking the growths on my chest, turning them an angry red as if embarrassed at their nakedness.

“How long…?” is all I can manage.

“Half an hour,” Jade says, leaning into view. She tips a water bottle over my face and then splashes more across my body. I flinch, but then sigh with pleasure.

Groggily, I sit up. I realise that the hillside is silent, just as I see the crimson mess of Jade’s hand holding the bottle. “Oh Christ, your hand.” I reach out, but she withdraws.

“It’s all right! Bloody, that’s all, looks worse than it is.”

She has washed her leg and is wearing what looks like her knickers as an improvised bandage. She looks away from me, as if ashamed of her wounds, and wraps a strip of cloth from her shirt around her hand. It instantly soaks red. She cringes, flexes her hands and draws in an uncomfortable breath.

“How’re you feeling?” she asks.

Memory suddenly jerks me upright, instils me with a sense of urgency. “Where are the guns? Who was shooting?”

“Don’t worry, while you were doing your Rip Van Winkle they got into a truck and drove off.”

“Did they see us?”

“If they had you wouldn’t have woken up.”

I try to stand, sway, sit down again. “Who were they shooting?”

Jade looks up the gentle hillside, trying to see past the crumbling wall. “Once we get moving again we’ll find out.”

“So many guns…” I say, trailing off, leaving the obvious unsaid. So many guns, how many people?

We haul the tricycle from the ditch, brushing off the accumulated rubbish of decades. Apart from a twisted spoke or two the machine is undamaged, but that’s more than can be said for Jade’s bike. It’s ruined, all pointing spokes and bent frame, the saddle deformed almost ninety degree out of true. The front wheel is buckled beyond repair, the rear tyre flat and shredded. I realise how lucky Jade had been. Torn hand and slashed leg, true, but if the ground had been as unkind to her as it had to her bike, we’d be looking at more than a bit of leaking blood right now.

“You were lucky,” I say.

She nods. “Come on, we’d better get a move on.”

“Jade.”

“What?”

“Why are you so pissed with me?”

She stares at me. I realise how old she looks under the superficial attractiveness, how her eyes never really laugh but bear whatever terrible things she has seen like a brand. I wonder how I would feel if I was cured of the Sickness; I like to think it would give me a new-found energy, a reason to be grateful, a duty to thank life every single day. I know Della would want it like that.

“I’m not pissed at you, Gabe. Oh Christ, it’s something you’ll know soon enough.”

Her words scare me more than I’d like to admit, burrow their way into my thoughts like insubstantial maggots. “What are you leading me to?” I ask, for the first time. Until now, I’d always trusted her implicitly. A stupid reaction for someone I didn’t know, maybe, but there had really been no reason to think otherwise. And she seems to know what she is doing, she’s streetwise and confident, knows things, like how to get the bikes and how to get me to String. But just what the hell had I really gotten myself into?

“I’m leading you to a man called String. He’s a bit of a witch-doctor, I suppose you’d say.” She punctuates each point with a nod of the head, as if explaining to me the rules of a game instead of the particulars of our current situation. “String can cure people of the Sickness — he cured me,” she continues, tapping her chest. “But on the way to where String is, you’re likely to see some nasty things. That’s just the nature of things — the way things have to be. It doesn’t really matter, sometimes it’s just got to happen. But the things you see might not be nice. Like what’s around that corner.”

She waves a hand over her head, then turns and gazes in the direction she indicated, giving me her back to stare at as she continues. “I’ve been this way once before, remember. I’ve seen these things already, I’ve experienced them. The Ruin’s a right fucker, but just when you think you’ve seen everything bad it’s got to throw at you, there’s something else. But some bad things are good as well.” She turns back, and her haunted expression sends a shiver down my spine. “Remember that. There are sayings: Cruel to be kind; Good comes from evil.” She bends and sighs as she eases her rucksack onto her shoulders. “I’m not pissed at you. I’m just not looking forward to seeing all the bad stuff again.”

“What bad stuff?” Her words have planted the fear of damnation in me, sent an arrow of terror streaking through my veins and pincering my heart between its dozens of heads. “What am I going to see?”

Jade nods at the tricycle, indicating that I should travel on it, then walks on ahead. “Best see for yourself. Up here. Around the corner.”

At first, I think it’s a stagnant pond. There is a light steam rising from it, though the surface appears uneven and scattered with protruding growths of fungi. Then, I realise what I am really seeing. In a dip in the ground — perhaps where water had once gathered naturally, before the Ruin decimated the atmosphere of the planet — there is a lake of twitching bodies. The movement I had mistaken as ripples on the surface of the water is their dying shivers, translating through the hundreds of corpses as if by electric shock. There is a pool, of sorts; the bodies lay in a quagmire of blackened, soupy mud, dust having sucked up the spilled blood and spread under the bodies. The steam rises, like nebulous spirits making their final journey.

But surely there can be no peace here. Not where for every five bodies that lay still there is one still alive, squirming silently in the white-hot agony of approaching death. Not here, where the stark white dead eye of a child stares from an otherwise shattered face. No peace here, where the rich stench of death and dying is a meaty tang in the hot air.

I stop pedalling and the trike drifts to a tired pause in the middle of the road. I cannot begin to estimate the number of bodies. Shock has frozen my mind, the sheer unexpectedness of this sight paralysing my thoughts.

In the city, yes, I had seen the great mound of corpses along the quay. But there, perversely, it had not seemed obtrusive. Maybe it was the casual way that people had regarded the bodies, barely looking at them, treating them more as a landmark than an object of pity or disgust. In the city, I had been prepared for anything. The Ruin had changed so much and the face of humanity had changed with it, often blending back into ages past like an ill child, retarding in years.

But here, in the country, on a hillside that had once been beautiful, and could be again, the sight is almost surreal with contradictions. The deep blue of the sky, decorated with an occasional cloud cheerful in its fluffiness; and the bloody red mess of open meat, steaming insides, pulsing wounds.

I begin to cry. I cannot help myself and Jade, in her defence, moves away and sits under a tree stripped of life years ago. The tears are warm and heavy in the approaching furnace of midday, streaking the dust from my face and falling like hot blood onto my shirt. They merge with sweat and the leakings from my growths, to form a liquid testament to my wretchedness.

I sit that way for several minutes, willing the tears to stay because they blur my vision and camouflage, however falsely, the sight before me. Then Jade walks over to me and places a hand on my shoulder.

“I don’t understand,” I say, realising the stupidity of the statement. Who could possibly claim to understand the insanity of this moment?

But Jade seems to know.

“There are lots of reasons,” she says. “Population control, for one. At least half of those you see are children. The others are men and women of a… breeding age. No old people. No ill people.”

“But it’s just so misguided. So wrong. How can anyone think this can help?”

Jade is silent for a moment. She seems to be staring over the bodies, perhaps glimpsing some vague future that lies beyond their steaming deaths, but nearer than we think.

“But it does work,” she says, pained. “More food, more medicine, more water. Times have changed since the Ruin, you know.”

“I never dreamed…” I cannot finish. I can barely comprehend the terrible truth of what I have seen. On the harbour, the bodies… I suppose I thought that they had died in some natural, acceptable way, and merely been stored or placed there. The gunshots I heard, the shouts, and the riots I had placed in a mental file marked ‘Disregard’. My own tenuous hold on reality, perverted by the Ruin, could never stoop as low as this, and so my mind precluded the possibilities that had been laid out so obviously for me to see.

“I don’t believe it,” I say. I have stopped crying, but the anguish is even deeper now that the tears have dried. “It’s just horrible.”

“I’m sorry,” Jade says suddenly, “I should have warned you.”

I smile up at her where she stands next to the tricycle, reach for her uninjured hand and feel a warm rush of relief when she returns the pressure of my grasp. That means a lot. It helps.

We turn from the terrible sight and I try to crowd the hateful images from my mind. But though I avert my eyes, my senses will not let me forget. I can still smell the unmistakable stink of death. I can almost taste it in the air. Either that, or the bitterness of my own impotence is polluting my body as well as my mind. And even as I cycle away, Jade walking beside me, I can hear the sounds from the pool of dead people. The sounds of dying, and corpses deflating. The sounds of the Ruin.

“What will happen to them?” I ask.

“They’ll be put to use,” Jade says quietly. “Things are too bad now to waste anything.”

I cannot ask what she means. I don’t wish to know.

V

We travel a further three miles that day, taking it in turns on the tricycle, before exhaustion claims us. I wait by the side of the road while Jade wanders off to find somewhere to camp, trying to find some shade under a shirt stretched across the handlebars. She is gone for nearly half an hour and I am becoming worried, but this does not stop me from falling asleep. When I wake up she is standing there, looking down at me, a strange expression on her face. Yet again I don’t know whether to be frightened or excited by this unusual, confident, aggressive woman.

We wheel the trike most of the way, but for the last few hundred paces we have to virtually carry it up the steep gradient. By the time we reach the small plateau she has chosen for our camp we are both exhausted, and sleep claims us before we can erect the shelter.

I wake up from a dream of cool water, innocent nakedness beside a waterfall, greenery and fruit growing all about. Jade is rubbing cream into my bare legs where the sun has found its way through the cotton of my trousers, which I see lying in a heap beside me. Before I am fully awake I see that curious expression in her eyes once more and her hands move quickly up to my groin.

Whatever stresses had been tempering Jade’s attitude to me earlier that day seem to have evaporated with the sun. Perhaps it was the tension of knowing what was to come, but feeling unable to tell me beforehand. Maybe the fear that we could have fallen into trouble leaving Malakki Town had distanced her from me; after all, she has been this way before. She is doing all this now as nothing more than a favour for me. Whatever the cause, she seems as happy now as she was last night.

The memories of the day, the trials of the journey thus far, the twinges from my chest cause me to remain limp, even as I watch Jade strip. But she works on me with her hand, her mouth, and soon we are making love under the astonished sky.

We drift towards sleep around midnight. I see a shooting star, but Jade says it is just another falling satellite.

I

“I’m older than you think,” Della said to me. “It’s as if losing my legs provided less of me to age; time can’t find me, sometimes, because I’m not whole, I’m a smaller target than most. I’m older than you think.”

I almost asked how old, but in reality I did not want to know. Her age was just another enigma which identified her, an unknown that made her even more mysterious and exotic in my eyes. She scratched her stumps as I looked around the overgrown garden. I tried to appear blase but actually felt so nervous in her presence that I could faint. She was not ashamed of her terrible wounds — seemed to display them as a badge of worldliness, sometimes — but still I hated them. It was extremely disorientating looking at the stumps of legs that should continue on down to the floor. Instead, they were cut short at the edge of the wheel chair. Sometimes, when Della scratched them all night, she drew blood. I tried to get her talking.

“So what happens now?”

It was the start of the Ruin. The Sickness was still to come, lying in wait in some distant African cave like the ghost of a wronged nation ready to exact a chilling, relentless revenge. The first nukes had fallen in the Middle East, and money markets across the globe had crashed the previous month. Britain was already threatening a worldwide ban on trade, import or export. In some areas of the country, martial law had been declared. It was rumoured that people were being shot. In London, the army was hanging looters they caught pillaging the pickings of the Numb-Skull plague in the streets; their bloated bodies became home to fattened, less homely pigeons than those that adorned Nelson’s column.

Della shrugged, rolled her eyes skyward. “Well, you heard them, kiddo, telling everyone how good it would be. The Lord Ships are mighty fine and high, ready, they say, to restore to us all that we’ve lost over the last few years: justice; law; peace; even food. In the process, where do you think the Lords live? What do you reckon they eat?”

“I don’t know.”

“Somewhere nicer and something better than you, that’s where and what.” She flinched as her nail caught a fold of skin and opened a cut. A tear of blood formed on the stump and I watched, fascinated, as it grew, swelled and then dropped like a folded petal to the ground. When I looked up, I saw that Della had been watching me watching her.

“But don’t you think it’ll all work out for us?” I asked, naive and blindly trusting. “They say it’s the answer. ‘Government from afar’, they say.”

“I think the Lord Ships will last a long time,” she mused. She sat back in her chair and stopped worrying her absent legs. I knew the signs — she was warming to the subject, not only because she loved sharing her wisdom with me, but also because it meant she did not hurt herself. At least, for a time.

“At the end of that long time,” she continued, “there’re going to be a lot less people in the world. I think the Lords’ll rule adequately, considering, but they’ll also reap any rewards of their labours before anyone else even knows they’re there. The worst thing is…” She trailed off. This was something that Della never did, she had an angle on everything, an opinion for anyone who would listen. She stared up at the moon where it was emerging from the azure blue of a summer sky. I’m sure that for those few moments she was alone, and she had forgotten how different life had become.

“What’s the worst thing, Della?” I asked. Each time we spoke, I remembered her every word, repeated them to myself like a mantra as I drifted off to sleep. They were precious to me, in a way priceless. Some people — a few — still read the Bible. My bible was the lake of words I remembered from Della.

“The worst thing, kiddo, is that they’re going to be gods.”

Della sent me away then, complaining about her stumps, saying her legs were aching and she could only ever put the ghosts to sleep when she was alone. I knew what she meant, but sometimes I lay awake at night, imagining a pair of discorporated limbs stumbling unconnected down a straight, dusty road.

I left Della to her thoughts, knowing that I would benefit from them the next time we met. Della was a treasure.

II

I wake in the night and hear the distant sounds of engines, protesting as if hauling a huge weight up a steep slope. Disembodied lights climb the darkness in the distance, pause for a while and then continue on their journey. Jade does not hear them, or if she does she pays no attention.

I think of the massacre, of the bodies cooling in the night, providing food for whatever wild creatures remained. I huddle closer to Jade, but sleep eludes me. The darkness is haunted by the silvery twinkle of stars, their brightness distracting and surprising at this altitude. Sometime in the night, just before the darkness flees and there is a brief lull in nature to greet the dawn, I hear a faint sound from the south. A wailing, but possessed of many voices; a calling, like the tortured grind of metal on stone. I sit up and listen harder, but then the birds start singing and their song drowns the noise. I am glad.

When Jade wakes up I tell her, but she merely shrugs and smiles. “Another Lord Ship over the town.”

“But I didn’t hear it coming.”

“Sometimes they just drift in from over the sea, then out again. Sometimes, they’re as consistent as the tides.”

I shake my head. “But they’re not manned anymore. The Lords died, or fled.”

Jade shrugs. When she has no answer, she shrugs.

She begins to prepare breakfast — a thick, stodgy gruel made from a paste in her bag and powdered milk, a few drops of water added to lighten the load on our stomachs. She looks tired, as if she was the one kept awake by the night, not me.

“I heard engines last night,” I say, watching for a reaction. She raises her eyebrows, but she does not look at me. I wonder whether she is beginning to regret her offer of help. I wonder how sane she can really be.

Jade does not speak for the next hour. We eat and wipe our bowls clean, then roll up the sleeping packs ready for transport. I sit for a few minutes on a large rock overlooking the valley we had travelled up the previous day. The Sickness is not too bad today, the pain bearable, the growths only leaking small amounts into my already stained and caked shirt. From my observation point I cannot make out the gully where the bodies lay, nor the dried streambed, not even the wall that had hidden the terrible slaughter from our view. On the horizon, marked more by its haze of smoke than the actual outline of buildings, lies Malakki Town

Jade taps me on the shoulder and informs me that we should be going. I smile, but she is as unreceptive as before. I begin to fear that she is like this because, just as yesterday morning, there are things to be seen today that she cannot bring herself to talk of. The thought stretches the skin over my scalp with terror, but I cannot bring myself to ask. I try to remember our sex from the night before, but it seems like the memory of another person’s story, told long ago.

III

Around midday I see the first of the birds. It is high up, almost out of sight in the glare of the callous sun. It is circling in a way that induces a vague feeling of disquiet; drifting, around and around, wings steady.

“Look up there,” I say. Jade stops and follows my gaze.

“Nearly there,” she says.

I feel a jolt which seems to trigger a rush of blood from my chest. I slump on the saddle, slip sideways onto the hot dust of the road. A groan escapes me as the light-headedness dulls my vision.

“String?” I manage to whisper through the haze of pain.

“Just over that brow,” Jade replies. I try to hear pity in her voice, but even my own yearnings cannot paint indifference a different shade. “Come on.”

She grabs under my armpits and heaves me back into the trike’s saddle. I have no strength to pedal, so she has to push me the final stretch to the top of the small hill. As we reach the summit and look down into the shallow valley beyond, I am dazzled by something in the distance. At first I think it is the sun reflecting from a body of water, and my heart leaps into my chest. Water! A wash! A bath, even! Then, while my eyes adjust to the glare and detail rushes in, I realise how wrong I am.

What I do see is far more fantastic than a deep lake in an area stricken with drought.

There is a small village in the valley. The collection of tents and ramshackle huts seems discordant with my preconceived image of String and his people, but the closer I look the more I can detect a design in the apparent chaos of the scene. The whole layout of the place is pleasing to the eye — not only providing colour in a bland land blasted by winds and heat, but also offering a geometry that seems to comfort with its very order.

Around the village is a moat. The sun reflects from something bright, hard edged, many angled. Jade turns to me and truly smiles for just about the first time that day.

“String’s lake of glass,” she says. I want to ask more, but suddenly feel the urge to find out for myself.

We start down the hillside and are soon approached by two guards. They are carrying guns, ugly squat black cylinders that could spit hundreds of rounds per second. They are both tall, muscular, fit-looking, their skin a healthy tan, clothes neat and presentable. They seem to be wearing what approaches a uniform: thin cotton trousers; khaki shirts buttoned at the wrists and neck to protect from the sun; peaked caps to keep the glare out of their eyes. They are cautious but confident as they stop a dozen steps in front of us and casually place hands on their guns. They regard us with what I can only describe as pity, and I am jolted from the grey haze that pain still holds across my senses.

Pity is the last thing I expect.

“You’re Tiarnan, right?” Jade says. The guard on the right tenses, then nods. He steps forward, swinging his gun to bear evenly upon us.

A sense of unease itches at me, tensing my muscles and stiffening my neck. No one knows we’re here, I think. No one will miss us. There are a thousand bodies back down the road, what would two more be added to it? More food for the dogs? More human detritus to leak slowly back into the soil, replacing the goodness we’ve bled from the planet for centuries? I wonder if Della will miss me. I wonder if she ever expected to see me again, once I left that final time. I had the suspicion then — and it still niggles now, even though I’ve come so far — that she sent me here to give me hope in my final days. She never really believed in what she told me; she did not have any real faith in her words of comfort.

“Jade Kowski?” The guard’s expression does not change but there is familiarity in his voice. His gun swings slightly until it’s pointing directly at me.

“Hi, Tiarnan. Who’s your buddy?”

Tiarnan waves a hand at the other guard. “Oh, that’s Wade.” He lowers his gun — but Wade, I notice, does not follow suit — and approaches Jade. “What the fuck are you doing back here, girl?” He claps her on the shoulder and ruffles her hair with fatherly affection, though I guess Tiarnan to be younger than Jade by at least half a decade: straggly beard, kid’s smile in a face already aged by the sun and the Ruin.

“Brought a friend.” Jade nods down at me where I slump weakly on the trike. “String still entertaining?”

Tiarnan shrugs. “When people make it here. Still pretty exclusive, though, y’know?” He looks me over, removing his dusty sunglasses and squinting in the sudden brightness. At first I feel like an exhibit in a museum of dying people, but then I detect the same pity in his eyes that I saw earlier. He glances at my shirt, muddied by the fluids leaking from me. He sees Jade’s bandaged hand, notices the bright redness of the scrape on her leg set against the more subtle pink of sunburn.

“Hell, Jade, you sure ain’t looking after yourself.” He looks across at his companion and some secret signal lowers his gun. “Wade, do me a favour, push our friend here down to the moat. Jade, why not walk with me? You can tell me why you’re still in this God-forsaken country after all String did for you.”

“You’re still here,” she says, but Tiarnan laughs and starts off towards the glittering moat.

Wade pushes the Trike — I could have pedalled, but I am tired and in pain and not about to pass up the opportunity of a free ride. When we reach the moat I can see what it really is. I wonder at the work that went into making it; the weeks of travelling to and from towns and deserted villages to collect all the materials; the dedication; the planning. The idea itself is sheer brilliance.

The moat is at least twenty metres across, composed entirely of broken glass. Bottles, window-panes, bowls, mirrors, windscreens, all smashed down into a sea of sharp, deadly blades. The sun glares from its multi-faceted surface and throws up a haze of light, and it is all I can do to keep my eyes open. It is effective as a thick fog at concealing what lies beyond.

I wonder how we will cross, but then I hear the musical crunching of glass cracking and shattering. Before I have a chance to see what is happening, Wade is lifting me from the trike and sitting me gently on a large, flat-bedded vehicle that has crawled across from the other side. Wade and Tiarnan help the other two men on the strange boat as they haul on a rope, dragging it across to the inside of the moat.

“Nearly there,” Jade says, bending down over me and blocking out the sun. “You okay?” As if the question gives my body a chance to answer, pain shouts and I fade out. The sun recedes, voices float away, and I fall unconscious to the grinding sound of breaking glass.

IV

“How are you feeling?”

I open my eyes. “Like I’m going to die.” It’s dusk or I’m indoors. Whichever, the torturous sunlight has abated.

“Well, I’ll see what I can do about that.” The voice is gentle, low, understated. But there is a power there, a certainty of control, a glaring confidence. Even before I see who has spoken, I know I am talking to String.

I turn my head and there he is, sitting calmly beside my bed, Jade standing behind him and Tiarnan next to her. String is a surprisingly small man — for some reason I had been imagining him huge and powerful — and another surprise is that he is black. It is only now that I realise I have seen no other coloured people on Malakki. The world is getting larger.

“I thought Jade, perhaps, would have told you about me?” He is trying not to smile, but there is laughter painted all over his face.

“Only what you can do,” I say. I manage to sit up, cringing as the Sickness sends a wave of shivering heat through me.

“It’s progressed quickly, hasn’t it?” he says. It is more a statement than a question, so I say nothing. “May I?” He reaches for my shirt before I can object and gently pops the couple of remaining buttons. I look down as he bares my chest, and even I recoil in disgust.

String, however, retains his composure. He passes his hand close to the ugly growths and I’m sure I can feel the subtle movement of air. It is comforting. He is frowning, his big eyes so full of a pained compassion that I cannot recognise the look for several seconds. Even Della is more concerned than compassionate, a state that I think is based upon realism rather than choice.

“It must hurt,” he says.

“You bet.” But I’m used to the pain, the burning that tears at my chest as if some rabid animal is trapped within, trying to escape. Used to it, but still it tortures me unremittingly, driving blade after blade of discomfort between my joints, into my limbs, piercing my lungs. It’s the faints I cannot conquer, the regular grey spells when my body seems to say, right, that’s it, enough for now. “But the pain won’t last forever.”

String looks at me, then his face splits into an infectious smile. I feel myself mimicking him, and it appears that Tiarnan was born grinning. I look at Jade. She smiles back at me, but I still don’t know her quite well enough to read the expression. I wonder once more whether everything bad has happened, or if there are still terrible things left for me to see.

“That’s true, Gabe,” he says. “Because I’m going to cure you.”

V

An hour later, when I am feeling stronger, String takes me on a walking tour of the village. It is larger than I first thought, stretching back along the course of the shallow valley and into a ravine formed by a small stream. The waters have long gone, but the streambed seems fertile and lush. Vegetables and fruit grow in profusion. I taste my first red-berries in years. String tells me it is the fertiliser they use.

There are hundreds of people here, going about their daily routine with a calm assurance. Some huts serve as meeting places or stores, but most of the people appear to live in tents, either self-serving or abutting old cars, lorries and buses. I see no active motor vehicle of any kind. Some of the residents throw a curious glance my way, but seem to sense why I am here — perhaps it shows in my tired walk, my hopeful eyes. They turn away again, though I cannot tell whether it is from respect or simple disinterest. I wonder how many people like me they see. I ask String, and the answer surprises me more than it really should.

“Most of them are people like you. Or they were, until I cured them.”

I become more aware of the layout of the colony, and realise that it is far more established and self-sufficient that I first assumed. The glass moat merely encircles the front portion of the village, ending where sudden cliffs rise from the ground and soar towards the sun. The bulk of the dwellings and other buildings exist further into the ravine, sheltered from both the sun, and casually prying eyes, by the sheer cliffs on both sides.

“We’ve been here a long time,” String says. “We’ve created quite a little oasis here for ourselves. Not just one of food and water, but… well, I like to think of it as an oasis of life, an enclave of what little civilisation remains.” He smiles sadly, and for the first time I really believe how genuine he is. “Where do you come from?”

The sudden question startles me. “Britain.”

“I’m from the Dominican Republic. Ever been there?”

“No, of course not. Isn’t that where…?”

String is still staring directly at me, as though he can read the constant unease in my face. “Voodoo? No, that’s Haiti. Different country. Though I believe some of my ancestors were Haitians.” He leaves it at that, though my query feels unanswered.

“What state is Britain in?” he asks. The change of subject distracts me, and I cannot believe that he does not know. He seems the sort of man who knows everything.

“Britain is dissolving.” The word appears unbidden, but it suits perfectly what I am trying to say. “It’s regressing. The army has taken control in many places. Rumour has it there is no central government anymore.” I think of my last few days there, making my way to Southampton through a countryside ripped apart by flaming villages and sporadic, random battles. At first, I had thought the gunfire was army units taking on looters and thieving parties, but then I saw that they were really fighting each other.

“On my last day there, I saw a woman raped in the street my three men. One after the other. It was terrible. But the worst thing wasn’t the crime itself, but the fact that the woman stood up, brushed herself down and walked away. As if she was used to it. As if…it was the norm. Isn’t that just gruesome?”

“It’s a sad new world,” String says. We stroll for a few seconds, each lost in our own thoughts, most of them dark. “What of the culture?” he asks

“What do you mean?”

String stops walking, smoothing his shirt. He is not sweating. I am soaked. I wonder whether it is my Sickness bleeding the goodness from me, or whether String is so used to the sun that he no longer perspires. “The culture; the history; tradition. The soul of the place. What of that now?”

I suddenly feel sad. I wish Della was here with us, I am certain that she and String would talk forever and never become bored or disillusioned. “It’s gone,” I say.

String nods. I am sure he already knew. “I thought so. That cannot happen.” He motions for me to follow him and we walk towards the cliff face, passing into the shadow of the mountain. He starts climbing the scree slope without pause, and I suddenly wonder whether he intends to haul himself to the top. I look up, see the thin wedge of blue sky high above, reminding me of that first day in Jade’s courtyard.

“Here,” he says. I look. String is standing at a split in the rock, a crevasse that could easily be the doorway to a cave. Its entrance looks like a swollen vulva, and I wonder whether it is man-made. I also ponder what is inside, in the womb of the rock, hidden in shadows. As I near String he holds out his hands, halting me.

“Gabe, Jade brought you here. She’s a good woman, though I’ve told her before she should leave this dying place. She’s too independent to join us here, more’s the pity.” He stands framed by the cave entrance; his skin shines in the shadows as if possessed of an inner light. I feel completely insubstantial. “I’m going to cure you. You can be assured of that, though I know that until it’s done you probably won’t allow yourself to believe me. But I cannot cure everyone. There’s not enough medicine for the billion people with the Sickness. And there really aren’t that many people who I think deserve curing.”

I go to say something, but he waves me down.

“I’ve already decided that you’re worthy. Jade is a good judge of character. But we’re only a small community, and we treasure what we have. We have to. Because we have treasures. Do you have faith?”

“Yes,” I reply without thinking. He has a way of springing questions without warning, the only way to find an honest answer.

“In what?”

I think of Della; not only my utter faith in her goodness and knowledge, but also what she said to me. If you know someone’s faith, you know their soul…You may need it one day. “In a friend.”

“What’s her name?”

“Della.” I am not surprised that he knew the sex of my friend, He reminds me of Della in many ways, and she would have known.

He asks no more. I feel that I am about to swoon, but String is there before my body can react to the thought. He grabs me around the shoulders, and his touch seems to strengthen me. I have the unsettling certainty that he knows everything about me, understands that my feelings for Della lie way beyond simple friendship or even love. He knows my soul. But I am not worried, I have no fear. I think he deserves to know.

He points to the cave. “I’m going to take you in there, and show you some things. They’re things I show everyone I cure, once, but never again. They’re precious, you see, and precious things are coveted. Especially in the shit new world we inhabit. And ironically, that’s why I’m showing you. So that you know how special what we have here is. So you know that knowledge of good things shouldn’t always be shared, because too many bad things can dilute good things. Do you understand?”

I nod. He confuses me, his words twist and turn into obscure, half-seen truths. But I also understand him, fully, and it pleases me to think that there are still the likes of him living on our dying world.

“I can’t deny the power there is in me,” he says. “You may think I’m some sort of… magician? Witch doctor? I’m none of those things. In the old days, before the Ruin, I may have been called charismatic. But now, I’m a funnel for a power of a more fundamental kind. The real magic, my friend, is here.” He stamps on the ground, coughing up a haze of dust around his legs. He squats, grabs a handful of the dried soil and looks at it almost reverently. “The power of the greatest magic flows through my fingers with the dust.” The breeze carries trails of dust from his hand and into the cave entrance, like wraiths showing us the way. “The power of Time; the immortality of Gaia.”

I feel frightened, but enlivened. The Sickness sends a warm flush into me, but for once my body combats it, cooling the fever as if the atmosphere of the cave already surrounds me. String possesses me with his words, and I feel no repulsion, no desires to flee. My skin tingles with a delicious anticipation. I wonder what is in the cave, and I am sure that it is beyond anything I can imagine.

“This is holy ground, Gabe,” String says. “I don’t mean religious-holy. I don’t care for religion, and have none save my own. Similarly, you have your own faith, and that’s how things should be. But this site is powerful. It has a holiness that precedes any form of organised, preached religion. It has the power of Nature. It is the site of a temple, a shrine of rock and dust and water and sky that pays constant, eternal homage to Nature itself. See, up there.” He points to the strips of sky between the cliffs.

I look up and see the birds there, circling, drifting on up-drafts of warm air from the ravine. I sigh and feel any remaining tension leave me, sucked into the sky by the soporific movement of the birds, swallowed by the sight of their gentle movement.

“The temple is a place of faith, worship of the cosmos. The site of a temple was often ascribed by the flights of birds, their cries, their circling. As if they knew more than man of the powers of creation. And why shouldn’t they? Man has long distanced himself from the truth, even though there are those who profess to seek it. He distances himself even more by worshipping gods who suit him, gods who tell him that he is set above the animals, and they are his to lord over. Man has denied Nature. That’s why he no longer knows true holiness. But the birds, now. See the birds. They know.

“This is Nature’s temple. Come inside. Let me show you wonders.”

I

We enter a tunnel. It smells damp and musty, the walls sprouting petrified fungi and lank mosses. True darkness never falls before light intrudes from above. It is cool this deep in the rock, and the air seems to possess something more of the climate I am used to: moisture. I breathe in deeply, relishing the coolness on my lungs, hearing String laugh quietly to himself in front of me.

The floors are uneven and the ceiling low enough in places to make me stoop. String is short, so he can walk through normally. A smell reaches us from further in, a waft of something familiar yet long lost carried on warmer currents of air like dragon’s breath. I cannot quite place the scent, but I do not feel inclined to ask String. He is going to show me, anyway, and I am almost enjoying the adventurous mystery.

Looking up, I can make out where the light is coming from — natural vent-holes that reach high up to the top of the cliff — and in doing so I miss the abrupt change from tunnel to cave. I stop, stunned by the sheer size of what lays before me.

The cave is massive. I can see that it has been hacked from the rock by crude tools, their marks still peppering the wall and ceiling like the timeless signatures of those who did the deed. It could be recent or ten thousand years old, there is no real way of telling. There are no vents in the ceiling here, but the walls are inlaid with a strange glowing material which gives out a muted light. It looks like glass, feels like metal, and it’s warm to the touch as if heated from within. String stands in the centre of the space, smiling and staring around as if wallowing in the grandeur of whatever has been achieved here. And just what is that? What is the smell that tickles my memory once more, encourages me to silence, comforts me, conjures a million facts from a million minds other than mine?

“Books,” String says. He holds out his arms, indicating the hundreds of boxes stacked around the edges of the cavern. “About two hundred thousand in all. Mainly factual, though some fiction. We want out descendants to know our dreams, don’t you think?”

I cannot talk. It is not simply the sight of so many boxes, but the effort that had obviously gone in to bringing them here. And not only that, but the thought and experience and life that has been poured into making every book here. Billions of hours of struggle, work, strife, pained effort in creating, writing, producing and then dragging these books through a dying world to build a library for the future. It is staggering. It is so huge that I can barely comprehend it.

String has a proud glint in his eyes, the look of a father for his adoring children. “Philosophy, biology, psychology, botany; maps, travels books, cultural works, histories; stories, poems, novels, plays; even some religious works — much against my better judgement, but who am I to chose what people will believe in the future?”

“You’ve got it all here, in your hands,” I manage to say at last. The enormity of what is here makes me slur. “You can shape the future from this place.” For the first time I am truly frightened of String, this man who Della only vaguely heard of and who now holds my soul, as well as my fate, in the palm of his hand, to do with as he will.

“Not only this place,” he says. “And it’s not me who will shape it. There will be people in the future — two years, fifty years, who knows — who will feel the time is right. Now… to tell the truth, it’s still all in decline. I’ve merely brought these things together, protected them from the random destruction that’s sweeping the globe. It’s happened before, you know? The Dark Ages were darker than many people imagine.”

“So we’re heading for a new Dark Age?”

String sits on one of the boxes, lifts a flap and brings out a book. It is a gardening guide, splashes of forgotten blossoms decorating the cover and catching the strange light from the walls. “Maybe we’re already there. But when it’s over, I hope it won’t take long to get light again. I hope all this will help.”

“Who are you?” I ask. The question seems to take him by surprise, and I feel a brief moment of satisfaction that I have tackled him at his own game.

“I’m String. I’m just a lucky man who found something wonderful. I’m doing what I can with it, because… well, just because.”

“You found all this?” I say, aghast. “You must have. No man could do all this.”

He shakes his head, a wry smile playing across his lips. “Faith can move mountains,” he says, and for once I see that the saying can be literal. “I dragged all this here. Some I had with me when I arrived, most of it I went out and recovered. Before it was destroyed.”

“I saw them burning books in the streets in England,” I say quietly, the memory of the voracious flames eating at my heart. I remember thinking that the fire had always been there, waiting for its chance to pounce on our knowledge and reduce it to so much dust, restrained only by whatever quaint notion of civilisation we entertained. In the end, all it took was a little help from us. Wilful self-destruction.

I come to my senses. “So what else is it you want to show me?”

He nods to the far end of the cavern, where another dark tunnel entrance stand inviting us enter. “I found it soon after the crash,” he says. “I crawled in here to die. Then I realised I was in a very special place — had the power of life in my hands, quite literally — and the rest just happened.”

“Crash?” Disparate shreds of his story seem to be flowing together, images from the last few hours intrude, as if they mean to tell me something before he speaks.

“I was a Lord,” he says. “I flew a Lord Ship. As far as I know, I’m the last one left alive.” He stands and heads towards the dark mouth. I follow.

II

“Some people are not what they seem,” Della said. It was cold, the chill November winds bringing unseasonable blizzards from the North and coating Britain in a sheen of ice. Thousands would die this winter, freezing, starving, giving in. The national grid had failed completely six months previously. It had been a severe inconvenience then, rather than life threatening. Now, though, as frost found its way into homes and burrowed into previously warm bones, it was mourned more than ever. Only the week before, in Nottingham, an old theatre full of people had burned to the ground. They had been huddled around a bonfire on the stage, like a performing troupe acting a play about Neanderthal Man. The heat of their final performance melted the snow in the surrounding streets, and when it re-froze the local kids began using it as a skating rink. Surprising, how well children adapt, as if they’re a blank on which the reality of the moment can imprint itself.

I handed her a dish of curry from the vat she constantly kept on the go above the gas fire. The smell had permeated the whole house, ground its way into furniture and carpets and Della herself. I loved it; I loved her. I never told her.

“Hmm,” she mumbled, “not enough powder. Next time, more powder.”

I nodded my assent, hardly able to sit still with the acid that seemed to be eating away my tongue and lips. My chest felt warm. I had seen the discoloration there for the first time the week before, but I still had not told Della. It was as if telling her would confirm my worst fears to myself.

I had been told that the army was seen dumping bodies into a dry outdoor swimming pool and burning them. They’d even rigged up some sort of fuel pump, pouring petrol into the pool through the old water pipes. It meant that none of them had to get too near. I did not want to be one of those dead people, burnt in a pool, bodies boned by flames and whisked into clogged drains.

“Take old Marcus, for instance,” she continued. “You know Marcus?”

“The old guy who sits in the park pissing himself?”

“That’s right, the scruffy old tramp who lets kids kick him, lies under a bench because he’ll only fall off if he sleeps on it, eats grass and dandelions and blackberries and dead dogs.” She nodded. “Marcus was a pilot, years before the Ruin. He flew in the Gulf war. Did they teach you about that in school?” I nodded. Della shrugged as if surprised. “What do you think of him now?”

I could only be honest. “He’s an old tramp. I suppose… I suppose every tramp is someone. Had a life before they took to the streets. Before, anyway.”

Della smiled, wiping her mouth and burping loudly and resonantly. “There you are, you see. I’ve made you think of him as a man, just by telling you something about him. Before, to you, he was a nobody, a tramp, someone without identity. You never even thought he was human.”

I realised how right Della was. I imagined Marcus as a young man with a wife, going on family holidays, proud and arrogant in his pilot’s suit, flying helmet under his arm as he posed for the papers. “He’s still out there, and he’s going to freeze,” I said.

Della scoffed. “Marcus’ll still be alive when you and I are dead and gone. It’s as if he’d adapted for the Ruin before it happened. He’s always been ready. His life has always been a ruin.” She looked at me across the candle-lit room, scratching slowly beneath her chin. A breeze whistled in under the corrugated roof, flickering the candles and making Della shimmer with feigned movement. “What do you think of him now?”

I sighed. “I suppose… well, he’s a tramp, but I can appreciate him. He’s human.”

Della nodded. “Some people aren’t what they seem. Some are much more than you think, or at least better than they like to portray themselves. Some… a few… are much worse. Much of the time you’ll never know which, but it’s you that counts, what you think of them. Some people can really pull the wool over your eyes, kiddo.”

I went to get Della a beer, grabbed one for myself, sat and stared at her for an hour or two. Neither of us talked. Silently, in my own way, I was worshipping her. I wondered who the real Della was, but deep inside I had always known. She was my salvation.

III

“String,” I say, “where are we going? Is it dangerous?” It feels dangerous, the cool air chilling me instead of comforting me this time, the darkness haunting, not hiding. It’s as if the dark here is a presence, not just an absence of light.

He turns and leans gently towards me, lowering his head and looking at me through wide eyes. They glimmer, reflecting the memory of the strange light in the cavern behind us. “Not dangerous,” he says. “Wonderful!” He walks on, then stops and looks at me again, head to one side, one corner of his mouth raised in a sardonic smile. “But dangerous if you’re on your own. Dangerous, without me.” He moves on.

For a moment I speculate on what String did before the Ruin, before he took on the mantle of a Lord. But the mere idea of him existing in a normal world seems alien and abstract, and in a way it disturbs me more than the knowledge of his Lordship.

Around an outcrop of rock the darkness recedes, and suddenly we arrive at another cavern. This one is open to the sky. A great split in the rock, millions of years old, has formed what is effectively a deep pothole, its entrance eroded by weathering until the walls have shallowed out into a gully. It reminds me of a great fossilised throat, and String and I are standing in the stomach. The hairs on my neck perk up and goose bumps prickle my arms and shoulders. I have the sense of being an intruder, like walking in on someone having sex or gate crashing a funeral. But the feeling is more primal. I feel as though have offended a god.

The gully appears empty, and accessible only from the tunnel we have just emerged from. The floor is uneven and raised at one edge like a ramp to the walls. I can see no reason for my unease, but Della always told me that feelings tell more than sight, and I’m terrified. I assume that String’s words have made me nervous and skittish, but when I glance at him he appears in the same frantic state. That scares me more than anything: the idea that this man is scared of whatever sleeps here.

“What is it?”

String does not hear me, or chooses not to. “Can you feel the power? Does it grab your skull, twist your spine? Can you sense the majesty of this place? This is the real god, Gabe, this is the genuine Provider. A god you can feel. A god who will help you, cure you.” He looks at me, his eyes wide and alive, glimmering with emotion. “You’ll be cured. Made better. Just like Jade. Just like all the others outside.”

I want to go. Suddenly the last place I want to be is here, in this deep gully that encases me like a prison, or a tomb. But String grabs my arm and guides me to the edge of the hole, the place where the ground is ramped against the wall. I start to tremble as we approach it, and I think I can feel String shaking as well.

He hauls me up the slight incline until we are standing on a small ledge, our heads touching rock where the overhang curves inward.

I look down. There is a large stone slab on the top of the raised area, edges blurred by time. I try to convince myself that its surface is not decorated with crude letters and drawings, but they are there, and they will not be denied. The pictures show mere remnants of what must once have been a magnificent tableau: half a reptilian head; the face of a god in the sun; a trail of bones, skulls crushed under wagon wheels. The words are similarly weathered, and I can not decipher any of them. But for that, I am pleased. They look so alien — so unlike anything I have ever seen, in life or history — that I can barely imagine how old they are.

“I think it’s a tomb,” String says. “And whoever is buried here must have been someone… special. This is where the power comes from.”

I can feel it, an implied vibration that enters my holed shoes and seems to shiver my bones, fingering its way through my marrow and cooling everything it touches. I want to shout, but something prevents me. It feels like a hand over my mouth, but I can still breathe. I want to run, but I am restrained. Something holds me where I am, though String is standing several steps away.

Then I can go, and I do. I turn, shout incoherently, and run. String tries to hold me, but grabs only my attention.

“Not that way,” he hisses. I realise that I had been heading towards the blank, strange wall of the cave. I spin, throw his hand from my arm and sprint into the tunnel. The darkness seems more welcoming than the polluted light of that place.

It takes me several minutes to find my way out. Emerging from the cave is like a re-birth. The daylight is wonderful. I keep running until I am far from the ravine, almost at the moat of broken glass, and there I collapse into the dust and stare up at the sky, eyes closed, while the sun slowly burns my face.

IV

“Did you see it all?” Jade says. There is an unfamiliar weakness in her tone. I open my eyes. She is standing over me and moves forward to block out the sun.

“Christ Jade, is there any more? Anything else you’re waiting for me to find out on my own?” I can feel the coolness of tears on my face, soothing the sunburn that stretches my skin across my skull. I’d been crying a lot recently. It was not unusual, lately, not only for me but also for the world in general. If tears could heal we’d all be a damn sight better than we were before the Ruin. But tears could only hurt and haunt, and remind us of our eventual, inevitable weakness.

“You saw the library? And the…” She cannot say it. I feel a sudden burst of anger.

“The what? The library and the what?” Perhaps she thinks I really had not seen it, but I’m sure she can see way past my anger. I’m sure she knows all there is to know about me. I feel transparent, the same way I am with Della. Only with Della, I like the feeling. She comforts, she does not confuse.

“The tomb,” she mutters.

I nod, anger draining with my sweat and tears. “Yes, I saw the library, and the tomb. Or whatever it is. I hated it.”

“It’s not bad, it’s — ”

“How the fuck do you know what it is? How do you know it’s not bad?”

Jade recoils from my outburst and I revel in a momentary glee at the brief panic in her eyes. “String healed me, Gabe. I told you, I showed you.” She put her hand to her chest, as if to hold in the goodness that had replaced her Sickness.

I sit up. “With the aid of whatever lies in there?”

Jade nods. “It’s something old and powerful. We can’t pretend to understand it, just as Christians don’t presume to understand God. He frightens them, maybe, but they can’t ever hope to explain Him. It’s like that with this place. It has something wonderful, and there’s nothing wrong with using it. String has found out how to do that. He’s doing some good in the world. You know as well as I do, there’s precious little of that going on anywhere else.”

I begin to laugh. I stand up, feeling the fear being cooked away by the sun. Or if not removed altogether, then diluted somewhat. Fear is a strange thing when you’re dying — sometimes, it seems so pointless.

“I’ve come this far.” Jade and I walk slowly back to the large tent in the middle of the settlement, a great sweeping structure held up by steel stanchions and sheltered from the outside by two layers of light, soft material. Suddenly something clicks into place. The colour of the tent raises an uncomfortable sensation in my guts.

“This is a Lord Ship,” I say. “What’s left of the ship he crashed in.”

“He used it to build the whole settlement,” Jade says.

“Always thought the Lords were an evil bunch of bastards, in it all for their own gain.” Della’s words echo: The worst thing, kiddo, is that they’re going to be gods.

Jade shrugs. “What you were meant to think, I suppose.”

“No,” I say. “No, it’s something I was told.” I feel an incredible sense of disquiet as I realise that my future — my life, my soul, my continued existence and well-being — now relies upon Della being both right and wrong. I hope the Lords were not all as selfish as she made out; and, in whatever strange way it may be possible, I hope that String is a god.

I wonder whether she knew that String was a Lord when she told me of him.

V

String is in the large tent, sitting at a table in the corner. The space beneath the main canopy is divided by swaying curtains of the same material. I touch it, rub it between my fingers, surprised at how light it is. It feels almost oily to the touch, yet I can see through it.

“It’s extremely strong,” String says. “It’s all that survived the crash. Apart from me, of course.”

“What about the motors, engines? Weapons?”

String shakes his head. “The mechanics of the Ship burned when the pile melted down. I got away before it went up. The fire didn’t touch this lot, thankfully. It was built to endure. As for the weapons, that was a fallacy. The Lord Ships never carried weapons. We were a mobile, self-sufficient government, not an army.” He stands, gestures us towards him. Tiarnan is already there, along with several other men and women. There is food on the table, glasses, bottles of wine and, in the centre of the table — as if honoured for its very existence — a large bottle of Metaxa.

“Please sit down.” String waits until Jade and I have taken our places before he sits. He turns to me, his expression slipping into seriousness for a moment.

“Tomorrow morning, I will cure you.”

“How?”

“A potion. Simple. Rubbed into your chest, your temples, your stomach, it acts quickly. By tomorrow evening the growths will have hardened and dropped off. They will not recur.” String hands me a glass of wine. His blase statement stuns me with its simplicity. He is talking about my life or death, yet he promises everything with a confidence that makes it difficult not to believe.

I turn to Jade, who is staring ravenously at the food arrayed across the table. “This is how he did you?”

She nods, but does not look at me. I can hardly blame her. There is more food here — in both variety and quantity — than I have seen in months. Lamb, roasted whole; a piglet, apple stuck in its mouth like a swollen tongue; fresh fruit; duckling, sliced and presented with pancakes and sauces; crispy vegetables, steaming as if to gain our attention.

“Why not now?”

String shakes his head. “Tomorrow. The power of the place is at its greatest around dawn. You’ll feel it when you wake up. You will be fresher, stronger from the food. Tomorrow, Gabe.”

I am too tired to argue, and I have come too far to risk upsetting him now. I wish Della was here with me, ready with an apposite phrase or two, but at the same time I’m glad she is not. At least at a distance I can adore her fully. If she were here, it would be too obvious.

We eat. We drink. The evening passes gloriously slowly, and I surprise myself by enjoying most of it. Dusk falls, but the heat remains, trapped within the tent by the folds of strange material hung out like drying hides. String is a polite host, accommodating and generous with his precious food and drink. I satisfy my hunger ten-fold, feeling guilty when I think of what Della may be eating tonight, but also aware that if she knew she would be selflessly happy for me.

We emerge into the night with the stars and the alcohol flows ever-more freely. String makes his excuses and disappears. Couples pair off and begin to make love shamelessly under the heavens. I see the occasional light scar on chests or abdomens, but no signs of the fully-fledged Sickness. It is like a new world. I see a flash across the horizon and Jade points it out. “Shooting star,” she says.

Soon, the revelry dies down and is replaced by the soft moaning of lovers, the slow movement of shadows close to the ground. Jade and I walk to the banks of the dried stream and sit amongst the fruit bushes and rows of tomatoes. The smells tempt our taste buds, even though we are still full from the meal. I pluck a tomato and bite in, closing my eyes as the warm juices dribble down my chin. I see small shadows skipping between plants, scratching on the dry ground; a lizard, as long as my foot and with glittering eyes, runs up the slight bank towards us. We sit as still as we can, waiting for it to scamper away. It waits, frozen by starlight, staring at us before turning and walking casually back into the stream of plants.

Jade giggles. It is a sound I have not heard from her, and I like it. She reaches for my shirt but I push her away.

“I’m ugly,” I say. “This is a good place. I can’t show my ugliness to it.” I wonder if the Metaxa or wine was drugged, because I cannot help but feel fine.

“You’re not ugly. It’s the Sickness that’s ugly, the world, the people in it. Not you.” She shuffles next to me and begins unbuttoning my shirt. This time I let her. “Tomorrow, all the ugliness will be gone.”

“Is there anything else, Jade? Anything you haven’t told me? Is this it, is this all?” But she is taking her own clothes off now and she does not answer me. I think I see tears, but it could just be other worlds reflected in her eyes.

VI

I may be dreaming.

The ground feels solid beneath me as I sit up, the sky looks as wide and intimidating as I have ever known it. I see a dart of light streak from east to west, and wonder whether it is a shooting star or another satellite destroying itself in despair.

I hear a sound that is familiar, but out of reach. My head is light, and it feels as though I am spinning around the world. A dream, maybe, or too much wine and Metaxa?

I stand, careful not to wake Jade where she sleeps beside me. She is still naked, and her skin looks grey and dead in the moonlight. I reach out and touch her just to ensure she’s still there. She is warm, and my touch imbues her skin with life.

I hear the noise again. Jade stirs, turns, mumbles something. I cannot distinguish most of the words, but I think I hear my name, and an apology.

There is movement from the other side of the stream bed. The noise quietens, and as it fades recognition dawns: the crunching, tinkling sounds of the huge boat crossing the moat of glass. Something has come into the camp. I wonder if I should wake someone, tell them, but then realise that whatever is happening is a part of the camp’s life — they would surely have guards out there day and night. Instead, I slither down the bank and push my way into the mass of vegetation.

Voices reach me, quiet and muted, issuing orders. Then the sound of wheels on the dusty ground, like a fingernail on sandpaper. I push through the plants, breathing heavily to draw in the smell of growing, living things. Dark shapes dart away from me, one of them scampering across my feet with a panicked patter of claws. I walk into what can only be a spider’s web, the soft silk wrapping around my face and neck, and rub frantically to clear it away. After a time I begin to think I am lost, walking in circles between the ranks of plants, but then I reach the opposite bank. I’m surprised at how wide the stream bed is. It looked a lot narrower in the daylight.

A voice mutters nearby. I’m sure it is Tiarnan, the guard who brought us in. His tone is quiet but firm, confident but casual, as if he’s well used to what he’s doing. I crawl slowly up the bank until I can see over the gentle ridge.

The sound of wheels begins again as I catch my first glimpse of the wagon. It is about the size of a car, a flat-bedded trailer moving roughly on four bare wheels. There are three men pushing it. In the darkness, at first, I can barely make out what they are transporting. But as it nears me on its obvious journey into the ravine, sudden realisation strikes. It looks like a cargo of clothes, but why three men to push it?

Bodies. Piled high on the cart, limbs protruding here and there, moving with a rhythmic thump thump that could so easily be the sound of a head jerking up and down against the wood.

I gasp, duck down, a scream screeching for release. But I contain it. Somehow, I hold in my terror and let it manifest itself only inside; a rush of blood pulses to the growths in my chest and bursts one, and I have the sudden certainty that I am about to die, here, now, within sight of a strange crime and an expanse of lush plants. My breath comes in ragged gasps, as if someone else is controlling my respiration. I try to calm down, but my heart will not listen to me. I want to double up in agony, the pain from my chest sending tendrils of poison into my veins, spreading it slowly but surely throughout my body.

That’s the poison from the Sickness, I tell myself, it’s leaking into me and soon I’ll die. And then maybe they’ll add me to the cart and wheel me away, to wherever they’re taking the hundreds of other meaningless corpses. I take another look over the bank and see Tiarnan standing down by the glass moat, exposed in starlight. He and three other men are lifting bodies from the moat-boat onto a second cart. As I watch, Tiarnan’s partner fumbles and there is a sickening clout as the body hits the ground head first. He bends to pick it up, and I hear something which makes it all seem so much worse, if that is possible — a quiet laugh.

I turn and try to spot the first cart, but it has already been swallowed by the blackness. The grumbling of its wheels sounds like the gurglings of a giant’s insides, issuing from the dark throat of the ravine. I wonder where they are taking the bodies. A breeze sighs through the rows of plants at my back.

It’s the fertiliser, String had said.

The lake of dead bodies; the massacre I had heard and not seen, the terrible twitching of the dying as flies already began to settle on the fresh blood; the sound of wagons that night, a mile or more from where Jade and I had made love and slept.

I feel sick. Not just nausea brought on by the Sickness, but a sickness of the soul. I double up in pain as more tainted blood floods my system. As utter darkness begins to blank out the moon and stars, and the agony recedes into faintness, the last thing I hear is the interminable rumble of the loaded carts being pushed across the stony ground. Again, and again.

VII

Jade is looking down at me. I experience brief but vivid deja vu. Is Jade my guardian angel? Her face is a mask of concern. As my eyelids flutter open she looks up, beckons someone over. I think the sky is a deep grey colour, but then realise that I am inside one of the tents.

String is there. He looks similarly worried, though is eyes betray something else, a confidence that I find strangely repulsive.

“Jade, I saw…” I begin, but though I remember espying something terrible, I cannot recall exactly what it was.

“Keep still,” she says, a quiver in her voice, “just lie still. The Sickness almost had you. String gave you the cure. Rubbed it on your chest, your temples, your throat. He thought you might have been too far gone, so he fed you some of it as well.”

“Fed me?”

Jade shrugs apologetically. “A tube, into your stomach. You’ll have a sore throat for a while. You were wandering around in the fruit plantation when I found you, mumbling, calling a woman’s name. You looked like the walking dead.”

Memories begin to force their way into the light. With them come terrible images, and an awful realisation that turns me cold.

“Jade, I saw bodies, hundreds of bodies. They’re using them, storing them.” I am whispering, but as soon as I begin String appears above me again, his hand lowering towards my face. I cry out, certain that he is going to silence me forever, but Jade is holding me down as String places his hand on my forehead. His skin is cool and clammy.

“He’s burning up. It’s a fight, now, between the Sickness and the cure. I hope I got him in time, but sometimes it’s a matter of will. The cure is just the catalyst.”

Faintness clouds my vision, but I bite my lip and try to stay conscious. I have to tell Jade, warn her, make her get away from this place.

“Will you tell him?” I hear her ask. I can imagine her expression, distant and worried, just as she looked when there was more bad stuff for me to know.

“Not yet.” String replies. “Later, when he’s better. Not now.”

“I think he saw something,” Jade whispers.

I sense String looking down at me. “I’ll have words with Tiarnan. Stay with him, Jade. He’s got a fight on his hands.” Footsteps recede into the distance. All I can see is the unremitting greyness above me. “If you need me, ask someone to find me. I have some work to do.”

Jade bends over me again, softly telling me to be quiet, conserve my strength. And although I have some things to tell her, my body forces me to obey her. I drift once more into welcoming unconsciousness.

VIII

I feel different. Lighter. As if a weight, both physical and mental, has been lifted from me.

I sit up. I am still in the tent, but alone. The flap moves softly in the breeze.

Again, I wonder whether I’m dreaming. But the bed beneath me, hard and slightly bowed in the centre, feels solid. The air smells good, laden with the scents of cooking. I have a burning thirst and a sore throat. That’s where they put the tube in.

“Jade!” I can hear nothing from outside. Inside I feel changed. I suddenly realise what is different.

I lift the rough cloth shirt I am wearing and look at my chest. The growths are crusted black with leaked blood, looking like shrivelled mushrooms sprouting from dead flesh. But I am not dead. It is the Sickness that is no more, stumped in its tracks, driven from within to shows itself as a crispy, rotten mess on the outside. Displaying its true nature.

Tentatively I lift my hand, suddenly desperate to touch myself there but aware of the pain which will inevitably come with the contact.

“Go on,” Jade says from the entrance. “It’s all right. Touch it. See what happens.”

I look up, all wide eyed and scared. Jade is smiling and the expression suits her. I touch one of the growths with my fingertips, barely brushing it. It feels hard and dry, like an over-cooked sausage. There is no pain, no sensation of contact at all. I touch it again and jump as it falls off and tumbles to the ground. Lying in the dust, it looks like nothing.

Beneath the old growth there is a flash of bright pink skin. New skin.

“It’ll fade to white,” Jade says, moving towards me, tears in her eyes. “What did I tell you? Isn’t he something?”

“I feel different,” I say.

“You’re better. I remember the feeling. You’re just not used to being healthy. It’s cleaned your blood, driven out all the bad stuff. You’re cured, Gabe.” She runs her hand across my chest and the growths come off, sprinkling into my lap and onto the floor like a shower of black hailstones. All I feel is a slight resistance, a tugging at my chest. “You’re beautiful.”

I reach out for her and hold her close, crying, feeling happy and sad and scared all at the same time. “Jade, I saw something terrible.”

She pulls away. “The bodies?”

I nod, struck dumb with surprise.

“Gabe…” Jade looks away, avoiding my eyes, and I terrify myself by laughing. It reminds me of the soft laugh of Tiarnan’s partner as he dropped the body, but that only makes it harder to stop. I want to hate myself but find I can’t.

“Is this really the last thing, Jade?” I ask through tears of mixed emotion. “Is there anything else after this? Whatever it is I’m going to be told, or see, now?”

She looks at me nervously, shaking her head. “This is just about the biggest, Gabe.”

We stay silent for a while, me waiting for her to talk, Jade sniffing and wiping tears away from her cheeks. She cannot meet my gaze, her hands will not touch me. We are islands separated by a deep sea of knowledge. I am waiting for her to let me take the plunge.

“Right,” she says, standing back and preparing herself. She looks into my eyes. Suddenly, I don’t want to hear what she is going to say. Out of everything possible, any words, that is the last thing I want to hear. Because it is something terrible. “Right,” she says again, wringing her hands. I swing my legs from the bed in readiness to flee the tent, steal the moat-boat and make my escape before she can say any more. But String is standing in the doorway. I pause, my heart thumping inextricably clean blood around my body, but find myself too scared to enjoy the sensation.

“Shall I tell him, Jade?”

She shakes her head. “It’s about time I levelled with him, I think.” I sit back down. Jade steps closer until we are almost touching.

“Gabe, the cure that String gave you is distilled in the presence of the tomb, under the mountain, in the realm of the flight of birds, from the brain fluid of the dead.” She turns away and looks pleadingly at String.

I feel empty, emotionless, a void. I should feel sick, I suppose, but I’ve had far too much of that already. I’m shocked, but somehow not as surprised as perhaps I should be. I feel disgust, but second-hand, as if this is all happening to someone else. “Oh,” is all I can say.

“All things must be made use of, Gabe,” String says, a note of desperation in his voice as if he’s trying to persuade himself as well as me. “It’s a new world. If humanity wants to go and slaughter itself, then at least I can bring some small measure of good from it.”

“Did you kill them?” I ask. It seems the most important question to me, the pivotal factor that will enable me to handle what has happened, or not.

“What?” String seems surprised. He could just be buying time.

“Did you kill them? All the dead people I saw last night. Being taken into the mountain. Did you kill them?”

“No.” He looks me in the eye, his gaze unwavering. He smiles grimly, tilts his head to the side. “No. You heard them killed, so Jade tells me. You saw them dying out there, alone, in the heat. We just use the raw material.”

“Brain fluid?” I am filled with a grotesque fascination in what has happened to me, abhorrence countered with a perverse fascination. I wonder briefly how he knows of the cure — how he discovered it — but shove it from my mind like an unwanted guilt.

String nods. “Yes. I won’t tell you the details.”

“Good,” Jade murmurs. “Gabe, come here. Come here.” She throws her arms around me, hugs me to her. I can feel her tears as they drip onto my shoulders, run down my chest. It feels good.

“Are you leaving?” String says.

“Damn right!” I don’t believe I could stay here.

He smiles, and this one touches his eyes. “Good.” He turns away.

“String.” He glances back, squinting either at the sun or in preparation for whatever else I’m going to say. “Thank you.” He nods as he walks away.

Later, Jade and I leave. The moat-boat takes us across the broken glass. I realise that I have never considered what the moat is intended as protection against; now, I do not want to know. I try to avoid standing on the darker patches in the wood, but they are everywhere, and it is almost impossible.

String is nowhere to be seen. Perhaps he is beneath the mountain, beyond the place of books in the cavern that the birds know all about. Brewing.

Tiarnan has had the trike oiled and serviced. This time, on the way back down the mountain, we take it in turns.

I

“Sometimes, you’ll have to put up with bad things to accept some good,” Della said. “‘There are more things in Heaven and Earth’, and all that. Sometimes, you may not understand how good can come from events so terrible. But there are places we were never meant to see, ideas we were never meant to know. Even if it’s a person doing these things, it’s with blind faith, not pure understanding. Maybe that’s why it’s so special.”

She was in her garden again, stubbornly wheeling herself between fruit bushes, plucking those that were ripe, cleaning the others of the greasy dust that hung constantly in the atmosphere. I was following on behind her, bagging the fruit and wondering what she was going to do with so much. There were only so many pies she could make.

“I can’t see how any good has come of the Ruin. Millions have died. The world’s gone to pot.” I thought of the marks on my chest, slowly growing and expanding. I had still not told her. “Millions more are going to die.”

She looked up at me from her wheelchair. “If you see no good in the Ruin, it’s ‘cause you’re not meant to. Me, I see plenty of good in it.”

“What? What good?”

Della sighed. I wanted to hold her, comfort her, protect her. But I knew I never could. “Look at all that,” she said, indicating the basket of fruit I carried. “I’ll never use all that. A few pies, a tart, a fruit salad. All that’s left will turn brown, decay, collapse in on itself. Then I’ll spread it on the ground and it’ll give new life to the seedlings I plant next year. New from old. Good fruit from bad flesh.” She took a bite from a strawberry, cringed and threw it to the ground. “So, in years to come, when all the mess of the Ruin has cleared up or rotted down, the world’s going to be a much safer place.”

I did not understand what she meant. I still do not understand now. But I like to think she was right.

II

We arrive back in the town and make straight for the harbour. There is a ship at anchor there, a large transport with paint peeling from its superstructure and no visible emblem or flag of any kind.

“Pirates?” I guess.

“That’s all there are nowadays, I suppose.” Jade has become quiet, withdrawn, but I am uncertain as to the cause. We made the journey from String’s in one go, travelling through the night and keeping a close look-out for roaming gangs of bandits. I’m still not sure whether I believe the cannibal yarn Jade spun when I first arrived here, but I kept my eyes wide open on the way down. Wide, wide open.

I wasn’t about to be eaten after receiving a miracle cure.

“I suppose I could find out where it’s heading.”

“Good idea,” she says. “I’ll try to get us some food.”

There is a subject that we are both skirting around, though I can tell by the air of discomfort that she is as aware of it as I: Where are we going, and are we going together?

III

“When you’ve got a tough decision to make, don’t beat around the bush. That’ll get nothing sorted, and it’s prevarication that’s partly responsible for the mess the world’s in. Remember years ago, all the talk and good intentions? Farting around, talking about disarmament and cleaning up the atmosphere and helping the environment, while all the time the planet’s getting ready to self-destruct under our feet.”

Della threw another log on the fire, popped the top from a bottle with her teeth and passed it to me, laughing as it foamed over the lip and splashed across her old carpet. It was an Axminster. I wondered what it was like in Axminster now, how many people were living in the carpet factory, whether it was even still there.

“Take that Jade. Now, whatever it is she wants she’s already made up her mind, she’s that type of woman. So why piss around when time’s getting on? Ask her what’s up, tell her what you’re up to. That’ll solve everything.”

She scratched at her stump, drawing blood. Not for the first time I wished I could write down everything she said, record it for future use. But somehow, I thought I’d remember it all the same.

“If there’s a problem there, with you and Jade, it’ll be there whether you confront it now or in a week’s time. Pass me another chicken leg.”

I passed her the plate. She laughed at my retained sense of etiquette. “Manners maketh fuck-all now, Gabe. Faith maketh man. Just you remember.”

IV

I open my eyes, the remnants of a daydream fading away. I wonder how Della could have known about Jade all that time ago. I wonder how she could have known about String. I realise that, in both cases, it was impossible.

Faith maketh man. I certainly have faith. Whether it’s fed from somewhere or I make it myself, I possess it. And it possesses me.

I move away from the bench as I see a uniformed man come down the gangplank from the ship. There is a noisy crowd on the mole, trying to get a glimpse of what is being unloaded from the hold. A few men in army uniforms lounge around, cradling some very unconventional fire-arms. I guess they could wipe out the town within an hour or two with the hardware they’re displaying.

I approach the man, hoping the uniform is not a lie. “Could you tell me where this ship has come from? Where it’s going?”

He spins sharply, hand touching the gun at his belt, but his expression changes when he sees me. Perhaps he thinks I may have some money because I’m a European. I prepare to run when I have to disappoint him.

“Came from Australia. Goes to Europe. Take you home, eh?” He rubs his fingers together and I back away, nodding.

“Hope so.”

Jade is sitting on a wall near a row of looted, burnt shops. She has some fruit, and is surreptitiously nibbling at a chunk of pink meat.

“How did you get that?”

She smiles. “Used my guiles and charm. Made promises I can’t keep. Just hope I never see him again.”

I frown. “Well, maybe it won’t matter.”

“What do you mean?” she says, but I think she knows.

“The ship’s going to Europe. Are you coming with me?” There, right out with it. No beating around the bush. No prevarication.

“No,” she says. I feel myself slumping with sadness. She hands me some meat, but I do not feel hungry. “Have you got someone there?”

I look at her, thinking, trying to decide whether or not I have. “Not as such,” I say. “Not really. I don’t think so.”

“And what does that mean?”

I shrug. “I’ve got faith in someone, but I don’t really think she exists.” If you know someone’s faith, you know their soul. I feel that Jade has always known my soul, and I think I may love her for that.

“I can’t come, Gabe,” she says. “It’s not too bad here. I know a few people. I’ll survive.” She nibbled at some fruit, but I could tell that she was less hungry than me. “You could stay?”

“You could come.”

We leave it at that.

V

As I board the ship, a roll of Jade’s bribe money sweating in my fist, I hear a sound like a swarm of angry bees. I glance up and see the flash of sunlight reflecting from one of the Lord Ships. It is at least two miles out to sea, drifting slowly across the horizon, but it provokes the reaction I expect.

The whole harbour side drops to its knees. Soldiers go down too, but they are soon on their feet again, kicking at the worshipping masses, firing their guns indiscriminately into huddled bodies. I search the crowd for Jade, then look for the alley she had pulled me into on that first day. I see the smudge of her face in the shadows, raise my hand and wave. I think she waves back.

The ship remains at anchor long enough for me to see the bodies piling up.