A City Called Smoke: The Territory 2 (20 page)

“I’ve never been away from Pitt,” Sister Constance said, and even here, away from prying ears, she dropped her voice to a whisper at the mention of this most forbidden subject. “But I’ve heard …” She paused. “Just keep following the river.”

No one moved. They seemed to be waiting for Squid to act first. He looked at his mother. He had found her. In this place beyond the fence he had finally found her, and now he was going to leave again.

“Come with us,” Squid said.

“I can’t,” Sister Constance said. “I am rostered to do the prisoner count in less than an hour. I need to remain behind and cover your escape otherwise you won’t get very far before they realize you’re gone.”

“No,” Squid said. “You were sent here because of me. That’s not fair. You’re not supposed to be here.”

“Maybe not, Squid,” she said, taking his hand in hers, “but neither is my place searching for Big Smoke with you. If all my days here have meant that I can allow you to escape and get closer to reaching Big Smoke then I have played my role in all this.”

Squid didn’t know whether it was that he didn’t want to be away from his mother now that he’d found her, or if he couldn’t stand the thought of her being here, or maybe both. It seemed she could read his mind, because she seemed to understand what he was thinking, something no one else had really ever been able to do. She smiled at him.

“Don’t worry about me,” she said, letting go of his hand to touch his face. “I have seen you again. I am happy. You need to go, quickly now. We do not need to make this harder than it already is. I need to return before someone notices I’m gone.”

Squid looked at his mother. He thought again of how he had dreamed she would come and take him away from Uncle and the dirt farm. Things were different now, though. In that moment he knew that he was less of a child and more of a man. It was now he who wanted to save her, to take her away from this place.

“I’m going to come back for you,” Squid said. “Once the prophecy is complete, once I’ve got this weapon, I’m going to come back for you.”

Sister Constance nodded, though Squid could tell that she didn’t really believe it would happen. He meant it, though. Whatever happened from now on, he would get her out of here. His mother joined the list of people he would save. Her eyes had brimmed with tears again as, he was sure, had his own.

“Go,” she said.

Squid turned to Nim, Mr. Stix and Mr. Stownes. “Let’s go,” he said before turning and reaching for the ladder, stepping out into the maintenance shaft. He looked back at his mother one last time.

“I’m coming back for you,” he repeated before he looked up and began climbing toward the surface.

At least she wasn’t in a cage. Lynn had decided to take after Squid and look for the bright edge of this dark situation, and if there was nothing else worth taking away from it, at least there was that. She wasn’t in a cage.

She was aboard the Holy Order dirigible, as she had been for the past week, but unlike the pirates of the
Blessed Mary
, who’d insisted on locking her in that cage barely high enough to sit in and barely wide enough to turn around, the Holy Order had merely locked her in the hold. She had plenty of open space and there were even windows in the wooden walls of the hull. It was easy to be lulled into the false sense that she wasn’t a prisoner on her way to meet her fate at the hands of the High Priestess.

Despite this façade of apparent freedom she had been unable to find anything to help her make an escape. The hold was completely empty. The only contact she had with a red cloak was when they opened a locked flap on the bottom of the door to slide through food and water. The windows were barred and sealed closed, not that they really needed to be. They didn’t exactly represent an escape route. The only thing that was out there was empty sky and a long fall to the red dirt below. The toilet in the corner of the hold was a hatch that opened, but once again there was nothing down there but a long, long drop.

She did have a plan, though. She had grown up in Alice. Though there were parts of the city she had never visited, she knew most of it well enough. She had often seen the Holy Order dirigibles arriving and departing from the Supreme Court or the cathedral; they flew in low over the city to tether at the roof. She had often seen them fly overhead when she’d been in the park with her father. Of course, at the time she hadn’t known, and she supposed neither had her father or anyone else who had seen them, that at least some of them were flying all the way out beyond the ghoul-proof fence to a secret prison in the badlands. It was reasonable to assume that this dirigible would fly the same route. Her current plan was to wait until they were flying in over the park and drop down through the toilet hatch, hopefully landing in the tops of one of the gum trees that grew there and letting the branches break her fall before she herself broke into pieces on the ground. What she would do after that to evade the Holy Order and escape the city, well, she hadn’t figured that part out yet. She would be the first to admit that it wasn’t a perfect plan, and she could only imagine what Squid would say about it, but it was all she had at the moment.

Right now though, she had to pee. She looked over to the corner of the hold. She hated using that toilet. It meant having to squat above all that empty space and that long fall to the ground below. Despite this now being her second flight on a dirigible she was no closer to conquering her fear of heights. Given that she had been dropped from the first dirigible she’d flown in, she felt completely within her rights to remain terrified of flying.

She unwound the thin rope from the metal hook that kept the toilet hatch fastened down when not in use and lifted the wooden hatch. She was about to drop her pants and do her business when she froze. There was something below them.

She dropped down and knelt on the wooden floor, slowly peering out over the hole. Lynn’s entire view was filled with red dust rising into the air. All she could see down there was movement, as if the ground itself was undulating, shimmering, crawling forward. She knew what it was. She could make out the individual figures. Even from up here she could see the way they moved in their stuttering motion, shuffling forward in stops and starts. They were ghouls, not just a scattered group like she and the others had run into during the dust storm, but the main horde. This was the horde she had ridden to battle against, the horde that had devastated the Diggers, the horde that still moved inward toward Alice.

It was strange seeing them again. Not just because it was odd from this high above, a distance that meant she couldn’t see the terrifying and disgusting nature of the ghouls: their cloudy white eyes, the way their flesh fell away from their off-white bones and left behind clumps of the claggy goo that had once been blood, or the way they were permanently disintegrating into that gray-red dust that floated away on the wind behind them. The detailed horror of each individual ghoul may have been discernible, but it had been replaced by something else. Looking down on the horde left Lynn feeling hollow. The number of ghouls was clear. Even facing them down in the Battle of Dust it hadn’t seemed like there were this many, but looking down now from above, she could see that the horde stretched on and on and on across the red landscape.

They were clearly heading in the same direction the dirigible was flying. Lynn knew, of course, that they were headed for Alice, but seeing it made her think of all those people outside the city in the slums – especially now that she knew the High Priestess had no intention of letting them inside the walls and was in fact drawing more people in to die. There were so many ghouls that those outside wouldn’t stand a chance. She didn’t know how close they were to the city, but they’d already been flying for a week and dirigibles moved much faster than the wandering ghouls. Even if Squid managed to get free of the prison, find Big Smoke and find the weapon, Lynn had the sinking feeling that he would never make it to Alice before the ghouls did. Looking down through the hatch, Lynn realized what the next step in her plan was. Once she’d jumped free of the dirigible and escaped the Church her goal was simple. She had to find a way to save those outside the city. She had to get the Outsiders inside.

“That’s certainly a fence,” said Mr. Stix.

“Did we get turned around or something?” Nim said. “Walked back toward the Territory by mistake?”

Squid shook his head. “No,” he said. “Look at the posts, they’re white, not black, and spaced further apart. It’s a different fence.”

“And we’re on the outside,” said Mr. Stix.

They’d been following the river for a week, Nim helping them find food and showing them how to filter the murky brown river water through reeds and grass to clean it up. The stories told to children within the Territory made it seem that the badlands were nothing but emptiness, red dust overflowing with ghouls that would suck you dry if you took two steps beyond the ghoul-proof fence, but Squid had quickly realized that wasn’t the case. They had not yet encountered a single ghoul. Which was lucky, he supposed, because they no longer had any weapons with which to defend themselves. And not only were the badlands not a scorched wasteland of nothingness, the land seemed to become more full of life with each passing day. Trees were more plentiful, and there were birds in the branches and desert creatures scurrying beneath the sand.

Ever since they had left Pitt, no one had commented on whether they were wandering toward nothing. Squid could tell they had begun to think that, though, particularly as more days had passed without any sign of human habitation. Even Squid himself had begun to wonder whether Lynn had been right all along and there was nothing out here. Then, they had spotted the fence, and all doubt had been lifted from his mind. This was it, he knew it this time, this was another settlement. This was a place surrounded by a fence just as the Central Territory was.

They spent the afternoon following the fence east away from the river, searching for a way through. It was late in the day, and the world around them was beginning to turn orange when Nim spotted the rising dust coming toward them from inside the fence.

“Seems someone has spotted us,” Mr. Stix said. “I imagine our best course of action would be to wait for them to arrive.”

So, the four of them waited on the outside of the fence, watching the cloud of dust coalesce into the shape of a vehicle. Squid recognized the sound it made, the steady rumble and occasional pop of an engine burning bio-fuel. But as the vehicle became clear Squid noted the difference in design from the bio-trucks he had seen. The Territory’s bio-trucks were large rumbling things, all square edges and boxy with an enclosed cabin and a shielded engine bay. This was a smaller, sleeker-looking thing, obviously not designed for towing trailers or hauling large loads. It was low to the ground, the four large wheels dominating its shape as they rose up almost higher than the vehicle itself. The roaring engine was at the rear of the vehicle and uncovered, spewing sound and smoke out behind it. The structure of the vehicle was just a frame of old metal pipes holding the wheels, engines and seats in place so that the vehicle was more empty space than anything else as it tore toward them. Two figures were inside. One, obviously the driver, sat low and worked the steering wheel and controls. The other stood beside him, holding on to a handle with one hand and brandishing a rifle with the other. They approached the fence at breakneck speed, about as fast as Mr. Stix and Mr. Stownes’s bio-cycles had gone.

As the vehicle reached the fence it turned suddenly, the wheels stopping so that it slid sideways and spun. The man with the rifle now faced them. He was dressed in a loose-fitting white uniform, tinged pink and brown with dirt. A white cloth was tied around his head so that his scalp was covered, and it extended in a flap down the back of his neck. He wore a pair of brown goggles with darkly tinted lenses that obscured his eyes. There was a circular patch sewn onto the shoulder of his sleeve, red writing on a black background. His skin was dark, not quite as dark as Nim’s, but certainly more than just colored by the sun.

“Who are you?” he said, his voice gruff, his words direct. “State your business.”

“My name is Squid,” Squid said, this time not hesitating to take the lead, “and this is Nim, Mr. Stix and Mr. Stownes. We have come from Alice. We’re searching for Big Smoke.”

The dark-skinned man looked to his colleague. He was an older man dressed in the same white uniform with the same brown goggles wrapped around his face, his skin leathery and wrinkled, his moustache and beard cut short and shaved so that they only surrounded his mouth and covered his chin, a style Squid had never seen before. He stood so that he could address them.

“You’re from the Central Territory then?” the older man asked. “That’s the only Alice I know of.”

“That’s right,” said Squid. “You know about us?”

“Aye,” the man said. “I know you’re a bunch of crazies, and anyone who knows anything stays well away from your borders.”

“What do you mean?” Squid asked. “You go outside your fence?”

“Not if we can help it,” the old man said, “but traders’ve got to make the runs to other settlements – ’cept for yours, of course; too much risk of being killed by you religious freaks if we get too close.”

“And the Runners,” said the younger man with the rifle.

“Aye,” said the older man, “and the Runners, though nobody likes to talk about them.”

“Are you saying there are more settlements out here?” Mr. Stix said. “How many?”

The old man shrugged. “Half a dozen that I know of,” he said. “’Course, some are mighty far away.”

“It’s true what they say then,” the younger man with the rifle said. “You Centrals don’t know anything about anything outside your fence? That’s wild.”

Squid shook his head.

“Told ya,” the old man said, “all insulated crazies that think the damn suckers are a punishment from God.”

“The ghouls,” Squid said, “you call them suckers?”

“Well,” the old man said, “that’s what they do, ain’t it? Suck you dry.”

“I suppose.”

“So,” the man continued, “how’d you even get out here? I heard no one left the Central Territory.”

“We …” Squid stopped, thinking for a moment before he continued. “We escaped,” he said. “Not all of us want to live the way the Church makes us.”

The old man examined Squid for a long time before he started nodding slowly. “I can respect that. Name’s Ernest, this is Kit. You said you were looking for the Big Smoke. Why?”

“We heard there was a weapon there,” Squid said. “Something that can destroy the ghouls.”

Ernest nodded. “True enough,” he said. “Stories like that have been going round since the Collapse. Ain’t no one ever found anything though, and people have tried. The city’s a dangerous place too, crawling with suckers and who knows what else.”

“You’ve been there?” Squid asked.

“New Sydney?” Ernest said. “Hell no, I ain’t one for suicide.”

“New Sydney?”

“Yeah,” Ernest said. “If you’re looking for the Big Smoke, that’s it, New Sydney, built to be the last city standing after the Collapse. Gone now though, just like everything else.”

Squid looked from Nim to Mr. Stix and Mr. Stownes and back through the fence to Ernest. “Will you show us how to get there?”

Ernest looked at him. “You have any weapons?”

Squid shook his head. “No.”

Ernest raised an eyebrow. “You’re out here without weapons?”

“We lost them,” Squid said.

“Damn stupid thing to lose,” Ernest said. “Look, there’s a tower and a gate a ways up the fence. You head in that direction and we’ll meet you there, let you in and point you in the direction of New Sydney. We may even be able to provide you with some weapons. Something tells me you lot are all right, ’specially if you’re trying to get away from the Central Territory.”

“Thank you,” Squid said.

Ernest turned and sat back in the driver’s seat of his bio-vehicle.

“Wait,” Squid said. “What is this place?”

“This here,” Ernest said, “is Reach, last settlement before the world turns mad.”