It doesn’t make sense to fear it, because you’re never around when it happens. Fear hunger, or cold, or the pain of sickness — but this? And yet this is the one that preys on me. I bumped up against it in the darkness hearing her say those words.
I fear annihilation.
Boathwaite can say what he likes. A sane person knows they’re headed for the end of something. But the thought that things will continue, there’ll be kind words at their funeral, or even just a pulse of blood in someone, somewhere, that dumbly recalls that they were here — that gives the rest of it some point. A sane person expects that.
That girl had cast her message adrift on a sea of time so that she could live again briefly in the mind of whoever saw it. Maybe she didn’t know that, but that’s how it was.
Everyone expects to be in at the end of something. What no one expects is to be in at the end of everything.
*
When I woke up in the morning there were six inches of snow on me. I was a little feverish, but Shamsudin was badly ill. His skin was grey and he was breathing hard. He kept saying he’d be fine, and he insisted we moved off as normal, but he barely got ten yards before he stumbled.
He said not to get close, but I was all done with that. I figured I was gone, or as good as gone, if he was.
I helped up from the place where he’d fallen and I lay him back down on his bed and covered him with all the blankets we had. Then I boiled some soup from the rabbits and gave it to him, spoon by spoon, as he lay shivering.
Between bouts of sweating he was able to sleep, and I held his head in my lap and he felt like a baby. I thought about Ping, and as I pictured her face I told him I loved him.
He murmured in his sleep.
The flush of fever in his face made him look almost youthful again.
After an hour or two, he woke up and asked me if I held out hopes for the afterlife.
I said not, but if anyone deserved it, he surely did.
‘I have been in Andalus,’ he said. ‘I think paradise will smell like the flowers of bitter oranges.’
I said I had always thought something similar.
By then, he had exhausted himself with speaking and just held onto me until the two of us were moved to a feverish intimacy, clinging together in loneliness and fear of death.
*
When the sickness got bad again, he raved and told me to shoot him. In his lucid moments, he wanted to talk about his childhood. He said his mother had always been proud of him. I said I dn’t doubt it. Just like the girl from Polyn, he wanted a witness.
When the sun came out, I opened his jacket to get some fresh air on him. His skinny chest burned like fire.
Later that afternoon, sores broke out on his face, and the infection spread to his lungs so he had to sleep upright. The horse had sickened too, but I didn’t have time to tend it.
I boiled up some herbs in a bucket for him to breathe them in. That seemed to help him, and he slept easier that night.
At first light I was up to gather more plants. I found a bunch of them. And while I was doing it, I caught sight of a deer. I had my gun with me, and I thought, to hell with it: either the sickness will get us, or Tolya’s men will get us, but at least this way we won’t die hungry.
I was pretty dizzy with fever myself, and it took me three shots to put her down and half an hour to drag her back to our camp.
She was a young female who must have got separated from her herd.
Shamsudin was sitting up, but groggy, and I shouted out that we had fresh meat.
It struck me that it would do him good to eat the liver so I butchered that out first. By the time I was ready to cook it, I could hear that his breathing was rattling again.
I went over to him and his eyes were glazed and he gripped my arm as he breathed hard, struggling like a man in a race. His tongue seemed dry and spongy, however much water I tried to put down him.
Maybe if I’d used a bullet he would have died more comfortable, but I couldn’t do it.
About noon, Shamsudin died, then the horse died. But I lived. Well, that’s the kind of luck I’ve had.
FOUR
1
AFTER THE HORSE DIED, I had to go on foot. I delayed to bury Shamsudin and then I moved on southeast, feeling my way through the taiga for the start of the highway that would take me home.
It was the worst season to travel. Meltwater made even the smaller rivers impassable. And if you got wet, and then the temperature dropped, you ended up with your pants all armoured with ice.
I’d always been a wiry and uncomplaining sort. Four hours of sleep would get me back to myself after a day’s work. Now I was aching and short of breath. I’d stop every hour, then every half-hour, then every fifteen minutes. Finally I was walking for a hundred yards and resting for five minutes. I carried my belongings on a birch frame which dug into my arms.
Soon I was too weak to hunt. The ground was soaked through, so with the last of my strength I lopped the branes off a larch and spread them out for a bed. Then I crawled onto it and waited to die.
I must have lain there days as the sickness worked its way through me. Day and night wheeled about the sky. On the third or fourth morning, I sat up and drank a pint of water from the stream in my cupped hands.
Why I should have been spared, I couldn’t think. I heard a tale later that the plague in Polyn was an artificial one, engineered to be deadly to men but to spare women. It wasn’t out of any sense of chivalry: just practical to kill male soldiers and leave females behind to wait on the victorious army and bear children. It sounds unlikely, but not unlikelier than many other things I know to be true.
As soon as I was strong enough to stand, I hoisted up my pack and stumbled on. I picked fiddle-heads and ate them as I walked. A couple of them had caterpillars on them and I munched them too because I was so hungry. I was thinking about counting my shells and seeing if I could spare some to hunt with, when I smelled a terrible sweetness on the wind.
About two hundred yards further on, I came upon a heap of bodies stacked like logwood. Some were half-dressed, but most had been stripped and their limbs were naked and waxy in the sunlight. The remains of the caterpillar went bitter in my mouth.
They had been killed with blades and some were only trunks. Tolya’s head sat on top, mouth downcast, winking out from under drooping eyelids.
The bodies were soft with decay, and ants were busy on their mouths and eyes. I guessed they had been dead two or three days.
The tracks of their attackers had melted away with the snow, but here and there were dropped objects — a boot, a saddle-bag, saucepans — that made me think the struggle had been in the dark. The guards were well armed. I doubted that anywhere else in the region were there such guns and weapons as they carried. It would have taken a large number to subdue them by force. But the relief of surviving the Zone and the power of their guns might have made them unwary. If someone had come stealthily, sneaked up on them at night, they might have been too drunk or bleary-eyed to defend themselves.
I blacked my face with dirt, loaded my carbine with all the shells I had and skirted the track until darkness fell.
It was the mildest night we’d had since autumn. The land was shedding winter like a wet dog shaking itself dry. Now and again, a chunk of damp snow flopped out of the branches and made a sound like a footfall. Each time I heard one drop, I flinched.
I sat and snoozed under a tree for a couple of hours before dawn. When I opened my eyes, it was still dark. There was silence, then I felt a blade at my throat and a hand close over my mouth. It smelled of soil and caribou meat.