Soon they came to what looked like a track. It was nothing but a winding ribbon of earth, almost invisible, crooked and devious. But the vegetation here grew a little sparser, and Snowy could feel how the ground did not give under his feet as it did elsewhere. A track, then — and surely a human-made track, not animal, if the ground had been compacted as much as it felt.
They didn’t say anything. Nobody wanted this little bit of hope to be punctured by another lecture from Sidewise. But they all followed the track, walking single file, moving that much more briskly up the shallow slope.
Snowy already felt exhausted, strung out.
He found he wasn’t thinking of his wife, his buddies back home, the life that seemed to have vanished forever. Everything was too strange for that. But he longed, absurdly, for the snug safety of his cold-sleep bed, with its enclosing carapace and humming machines. Out here he felt very exposed — his PPK didn’t add up to much protection — and he was very aware that when darkness fell in this strange, transformed place they were going to be very vulnerable.
We have to find some answers before then, he thought.
After maybe another hour the trees thinned out, and with relief Snowy found himself walking out in the open. But he still couldn’t see much. He was on the breast of a broad shallow rise, its summit hidden over the nearby horizon. The ground was chalky, he saw, and the soil thin and heavily eroded. Nothing much grew here but heather, and shoulders of bare rock stuck out of the ground.
The sky was clear, save for a scattering of thin, high cloud. The setting sun cast long shadows on the ground. It was so low that Snowy would have expected the sunset to have started already, a tall Rabaul-ash light show. But there was no redness in the western sky; the sun shone bright and white. Was the ash gone?
Moon yelped. “Tracks! Vehicle tracks!” She was pointing a little way down the slope to their right, jumping up and down with excitement.
They all ran that way, their improvised packs bouncing on their backs.
She was right. The tracks were quite unmistakable. They had been made by some off-road vehicle, and they ran at an angle down the slope.
The mood was suddenly exultant. Bonner was grinning. “So there’s somebody around. Thank Christ for that.”
“All right,” Ahmed said. “We have a choice. We can keep on heading for the high ground, looking for a viewpoint. Or we can follow these tracks back downhill and find a road.”
The high ground would probably have been the smarter move, Snowy thought. But in the circumstances none of them wanted to let go of these traces of human activity. So they started downhill, following the twin scars in the hillside.
Sidewise walked beside Snowy. “This is dickheaded,” he muttered.
“Side—”
“Look at it. These are vehicle tracks, all right. But they have turned into gullies. Look over there. They’ve eroded right down to the bedrock. Snow, in an area like this, above the treeline, it can take centuries for a covering of soil and vegetation to re-establish itself once it’s removed. Centuries.”
Snowy stared at him. His thin face was gray in the fading light. “These tracks look like they were made yesterday, as if somebody just drove by.”
“I’m telling you they could be any age. I don’t fucking know.” He looked as if he was dying for a cigarette.
The tracks wound down the hillside, eventually leading them into a broad valley that cupped the silvery streak of a river. The tracks veered off the rough ground onto what was unmistakably a road following the valley wall, a neat flat shelf carved almost parallel to the valley’s contours.
The group clambered into the road surface with relief. They started to hike down the road, along the valley toward the lower ground, their mood staying high despite their fatigue.
But the road was in bad shape, Snowy saw. It was overgrown. There was still some asphalt — he could see it as black fragments in the green — but it had aged, becoming cracked and brittle. Plants and fungi had long since broken through the surface, and in fact as he walked he sometimes had to push through thickets of birch and aspen seedlings. It was less like walking along a road than over a sparsely vegetated ridge.
Sidewise was walking alongside him again. “So what do you think? Where are we?”
They had all been trained up in the basic geographical features of Europe and North America. “The valley isn’t glaciated,” Snowy said reluctantly. “So if we’re in Europe, we aren’t too far north. Southern England. France maybe.”
“But it’s been a long time since anybody maintained this road. And look down there.” Sidewise pointed to a line etched in the side of the far valley wall, just bare rock.
“So what?”
“See how level it is? I think this valley was flooded once. Dammed. At the water’s surface you get a lot of erosion — you get horizontal cuts like that — because when the flow is managed, the water levels fluctuate fast.”
“So where’s the dam?”
“We’ll come to it,” said Sidewise grimly.
After another hour of walking, they did.
They turned around a breast of the valley, and there it was. A branch of this roadway actually led down to the dam, and must have run over it to the valley’s far side.
But the dam was gone. Snowy could make out the piers that still clung to the shore, heavily eroded and overgrown with greenery. Of the central section, the great curving wall and gates and machinery that had once tamed the river, there was nothing left but a hummocky arced line on the valley floor, a kind of weir that barely perturbed the river as it ran over it.
Moon said, “Maybe somebody blew it up.”
Sidewise shook his head. “Nothing is impervious. There are always cracks and weaknesses, places the water can get into. And if you don’t do anything about it, the leaks get worse, until…” He fell silent. “All you need is time,” he finished lamely.
“Fucking hell,” growled Bonner. “Fucking buggering hell.”
It seemed to Snowy that the unavoidable truth was starting to sink into them all. Even Sidewise didn’t need to say any more to make it so.
Ahmed strode ahead a few paces, and peered further down the valley. He was a pilot; like them all, he had good eyes. He pointed. “I think there’s a town down there.”
Maybe, thought Snowy. It was just a splash of greenish gray. He could see no movement, no car windshields or windows glinting, no smoke rising, no lights. But they had nowhere else to go.
Before they left the higher ground Ahmed fired off a couple of the search-and-rescue flares he had retrieved from the shelter. There was no reply.
They followed Ahmed as he made bold, defiant strides along the grassed-over roadway, down the valley toward the town. The light began to fade. Not a single light came on in the town they approached; it was a well of darkness and silence.
In some places the river’s banks had reverted to marsh, with low, green-clad hummocks marking what might once have been buildings. Elsewhere the banks were lined with elder and graceful willows — old-looking willows, Snowy thought reluctantly — and the floodplain beyond was covered by a forest of poplar and ash. Beyond, he could see arms of the oak forest spreading over the low hills.
Long before they reached the center of the town they had to abandon the grown-over road, as it slipped under the surface of the broadening river. Further out into the river, Snowy could make out shapes, lines, under the shallow water.
“If you build around a river,” said Moon slowly, “you reclaim the land to either side. Right? But when you abandon the town, the water table is going to rise because you’re no longer pumping out groundwater for industrial use, and you’ll get flooded out.”
Nobody commented. They walked on, skirting the river and its marshy fringe.