“ALANA!” he cried.
“Here!” cried Alana, distant. He followed the sound, his arms outstretched. He walked forward and reached a wall.
“ALANA!” he cried.
“This way!”
He followed the noise. Came across a metal turnstile and stumbled through it. He walked forward, his scabbard ahead of him like a blind man’s cane. He hit another corner, went past it and nearly fell down a flight of stairs. He saw a red light at the bottom of them. Once he had stumbled to the bottom, he ran towards it, as fast as his bravery would allow.
It was Alana, her head under Loma’s armpit, holding her up. Loma sagged down, she gripped a hologram disk that produced a ball of red light that shone dimly.
“Did they follow?” whispered Alana.
“I don’t know,” said Kirwyn. “We should keep moving.”
Outside, on the surface, the tribesmen stopped. They leaned on their spears and peered into the void of the subway entrance. They waited a while, collecting their arrows. A draft of wind moaned through the subway, making a deep hollow noise. The tribesmen shuddered, walked backwards and then jogged away. One remained, he threw his brick to the ground in frustration and joined the other warriors.
27
Loma collapsed, Alana tried to catch her, but she too was exhausted, the armour slipped through her fingers. The disk that lit their way clattered on the floor. Alana let Loma lay where she fell, she slid down and closed her eyes. Kirwyn had lagged behind, he knelt down, carefully took off his jacket and felt his shirt – it was soaked with blood. He tried to take it off, but the pain was excruciating, so he ripped it off from the neck down.
Alana summoned the energy to get up, she pushed Loma into a more comfortable lying position and tried to take off her helmet, but could find no latch or button. With shaky hands Loma twisted the helmet off herself. Her hair was slick with sweat. Alana brushed hair away from her patient’s eyes and tried to find the source of the pain, but Loma moaned and motioned for her to leave. She gently got up and lent on the side of the tunnel. She saw Kirwyn unravelling bandages from his forearm, and wrapped them around his shoulder.
“Could you help me with my back?” he said weakly, offering the bandages to her. She slid off the wall and knelt behind him. Ideally she would disinfect the wound and stich it up, but they did not have the appropriate medical supplies. She could only stymy the bleeding. When she was done they all reclined by the old tracks, they lay in silence.
Loma stared at the ceiling. Lit red by the disk. She figured that she’d never see Avalon again. She’d never see her friends and family. She would die in a foreign country, a failure to her city. After a few months she’d be considered legally dead. Her parents would organize the funeral. They’d be devastated. She let them down. But they wouldn’t care about that. In too short a time they’d be dead, not long after her friends, her brother and sister, her girlfriend, they’d be dead too. Pretty soon there’d be nobody left alive who had ever known her, even tangentially. She would be just another dead soldier. She thought all this, and despaired, but as the fog of pain thickened around her skull and neck, an emptiness of emotion ensued. She was very tired.
Kirwyn lay on his front. He thought of Saburo. He had a bad feeling the moment he first laid eyes on him. Even if Saburo just fled out of cowardice, there was no reason to flee on the bike with the plane part strapped to it – that would just weigh him down. Why leave the tracking disk also? He fantasized about finding Saburo in the future, finding him and throttling him. Catching him in the act, terrorizing some agricultural town, him and his Cavaliers, just finding him and beating the shit out of him. Such fantasies were unholy, and he was trained to suppress them from a young age, but he had lost a lot of blood, his thoughts were scattered, his mind would always return to the handsome grinning face of Saburo. The thought of his bandaged fist breaking Saburo’s perfect teeth filled him with petty joy.
Alana watched her two patients with one leg folded over the other, leaning back with her fingers steepled. She had bet on the wrong horse. She wanted to be back at Retragrad. She considered ditching them, as Saburo had done. She retraced her steps, dwelling on their mistakes, imagining ways in which she might have rectified them. She wondered whether either of her patients would be able to walk, whether it would be necessary to put them out of their misery. Whether they’d be strong and sensible enough to consent to it. She wondered why the tribesmen had attacked them at that moment, and why they had stopped. She wondered when they would return. She wondered whether they might wait till they fell asleep, and only then cut their throats. They could not stay in the tunnels. There was nowhere to hide. Low visibility. Perfect place for an ambush.
“Loma,” called out Alana, finally.
“Yes?” she replied, in a weak voice
“Are you ok? Can you walk?”
Loma breathed in deeply and sighed, she slowly lifted herself up, got on one knee, but dizziness overtook her, and she had to steady herself on the tunnel wall. She slid back down and lay with her head on an arm, groaning with discomfort.
“I need to rest. I need water.”
Alana offered her canteen. Loma struggled unscrewing it, so Alana had to take it back and do it for her. She looked to Kirwyn.
“You ok Kirwyn?”
Kirwyn took his cheek off the cold tunnel floor. He pushed himself up off the ground, his back and shoulder in agony. He sat up, cross-legged. “I’m ok,” he croaked. “I would like some water please.”
They had brought food for the journey, but it was back in the saddlebags of the bikes. Loma was still gently suckling water out of the canteen, her vision was blurred and she was disoriented. When she had finished, Alana took the canteen from her and offered it to Kirwyn. It was half empty. Kirwyn shook the canteen and gulped down, leaving about a quarter left for Alana. She abstained.
“What’s the plan?” said Alana.
She looked to Loma and then to Kirwyn, neither made eye contact.
At great length, Loma spoke up again. “Bring me my helmet.” She whispered. Alana dutifully complied, handing it to her, then helping her up. Loma put the helmet on, hissing through her teeth in pain. The helmet sealed shut.
She sat in silence, her back propped up by Alana who held it steady with a hand. Kirwyn seemed to be meditating. Loma’s voice crackled through her helmet speakers, more distorted than normal.
“We’re on the central line,” she said. If we keep heading east, we’ll get to a place called Etria, which is outside the city limits. We could go there, regroup, recover. Or we could go back to the surface and look for tyres.”
“How far is Etria?” asked Alana
“About 35 kilometres.”
Alana grimaced. “I say we go back to the surface.”
“Do you think we can fit 3 people and the machine on the bike?”
“If we dump the supply bags, yeah, maybe. It’ll be a tight squeeze but we can make it.”
“What about the locals?”
“They were too scared to follow us. They’ll probably avoid us from now on.”
“They weren’t scared of us. They don’t seem to like the dark though. Radiation probably made them go crazy.”
“We probably won’t see any on the surface, it’s a ghost town… we were there for hours and saw nobody, we just got unlucky is all.”
Kirwyn cleared his throat. The women stopped and looked at him sitting in the red light. “What is—” he began. “What is radiation?”
“It’s like—” Loma faltered, wondering how to explain it to a primitive. “It makes you sick if you’re around too much of it for too long. Lundun has a lot of it.”
“So it’s making us sick right now?”