Escape Velocity: The Anthology (9 page)

      
A young man suddenly appeared upside down in the window hole. “Martials!”

      
Her father started at the noise and covered his chips protectively with his hands.

       “
Er, whadya say?”

       “
Martials, old man. Piles of ‘em. Whole camp’s surrounded. Just spreadin’ the word.” He winked at Nessa and lifted himself out of view.

      
Nessa shouted, “Philemon, wait. Come back.”

      
The young man dropped back down. “Yeah?”

       “
Where’s Mosey?”

      
Her father shouted while stuffing clothes into a shabby vinyl bag. “Girl, don’t talk—git packin’.”

       “
I think he’s guarding the generator tonight,” Philemon said, then lifted back up.

      
The rumble of explosions began pumping through the room.    “Get a move on, girl. Sounds like the heavies are restless.”

       “
I’m coming.” She powered down and stowed the cooker. She slung her school bag over her shoulder, grabbed two small, pre-packed bags, and followed her father out the door.

      
Dusk had fallen. Braman watched the confused tangle of panicked people, scurrying back and forth like escaping rats, shouting, swearing, crying, and colliding with one another in the dim light. He looked back at Nessa. “Get to the riggers’ shop in town, like we planned. Take the tunnel, it’s safest.”

       “
Which way are you going?”

       “
Dunno. Prob’ly try the gap in th’lectrical fence. Not sure’f many know ‘bout that yet.” He disappeared into the fray.

      
She raced toward the generator building.

      
Pushing through all the rushing, frightened people was like swimming in rough water, and Nessa was soon exhausted. She was catching her breath in a recessed garden plot when the whole area was bathed in deep orange as a fiery explosion bloomed over the buildings ahead. A shattering roar crashed over her half a second later, and she knew the generator was no more.

      
In that moment she saw Mosey, racing in the opposite direction with his rifle. She pursued him to the base of a steel electrical tower, half collapsed but still rising higher than anything nearby. He was already scaling the gridwork when she arrived.

       “
Mosey, stop!”

      
He looked down, clearly shocked to see her. “Nessa, we’re overrun. Get outta here!”

       “
Come with me,” she shouted.

      
He looked confused for only a moment then shook his head. He resumed his climb.

       “
No, stop. You’ll get killed!” She dumped her gear, clambered onto the bottom girder of the tower, and began to follow him upward.

        “
Stop it, Nessa. Get down.”

       “
You
get down. Where do you think you’re going?”

       “
I’m going to stand here and fight.”

       “
This isn’t fighting, it’s suicide.” She reached him, and grabbed his ankle before he could pull it away. “I know you need to fight. But not like this! Dying now, here—it’s pointless.”

      
He tried to dislodge his leg from her grasp. “There’s nothing else for me here. And I’ve got nothing more to give. But I’m gonna take some of ‘em with—”

       “
That’s not true. You can still be great, you
will
be great. I know it. I’ve
seen
it. But first you have to get off this tower. Otherwise you will be
nothing
.”

      
He wavered. He looked up to the top of the tower, then over the buildings to see the tanks and infantry swarming past the breached defenses. He looked back down at her, into her eyes—those brilliant eyes—and his anger and fear faltered. But he could see no alternative. “I have to do this!” he barked in frustration. “Running away would just—”

       “
The people don’t need an anonymous martyr—they need a leader. They need
you
, but they need you alive.” She kept her eyes on his, gripping his attention, focusing her mind on his. Piercing the clouds of his confusion, she opened to him a moment of vision, a flash of insight and clarity. In that brief instant he could see, for the first time, a future for himself that was worth living.   

       “
I…I see it now…. But what if it’s not real?”

       “
It
is
real. I know it is.”

An artillery spotter activated the zoom on his scope. “Hey, there’s somebody on the tower.”

       “
What are they doing?”

       “
Can’t tell. There’s two of ‘em. Wait—they’re armed.”

       “
Snipers. Take ‘em out.”

      
The spotter activated the laser rangefinder on his scope and let the computer do the rest. “Target confirmed: energy tower, sector 7G.”

       “
Fire.”

       “
Tally-ho.”

Nessa sensed the laser guidance beam brush across her hand. Alarmed, she turned to search the darkened hills. The night was thick with smoke and dust, and constantly fractured by flashes of light and noise, but nothing escaped her gaze. She shouted at Mosey to get moving but saw the distant muzzle flash. She knew there was only one option left.

      
The shell screamed in at terrific speed. Nessa flung one arm out as if to protect herself, and gripped Mosey with the other. A few whispered words and she felt a growing pulse of energy within her like a beast awakening. The cacophony of the raging battle muted itself to her ears as an orb of electric light formed around her and her companion. She tracked the shell with her eyes. At the last moment she tensed her body and a crackling, brilliant surge of white light stabbed from her outstretched arm toward the incoming projectile. They met, and the light embraced the shell like a soft, dreamy pillow—then crushed it. The roaring fireball rolled over them, engulfing the tower, shredding the steel like linen, and smashing through the buildings beyond.

      
As the blast tore them from their collapsing perch, Nessa wrapped both arms around her ward and buried her head against him. Plunging down, Nessa cried out a last desperate plea—for Mother.

“
Mosey!”

      
Someone hissing his name. He cracked his eyes. Night.

       “
Get up, man. They’re coming.”

      
He remembered the battle, the explosion. “Who’s coming?”

       “
The martials, man. They’re right up the road. You got to move.”

      
He rolled over. Everything hurt. He crawled across cool grass until Philemon pulled him into a thick bank of shrubs. They were in the wooded park half a mile from the havens. “How did I get here? I don’t remember anything after the shelling.”

       “
Dunno. Guess your body took over and ran off like a mad fool, same as everyone else.”

       “
Where’s Nessa?”

       “
I seen her a while ago, draggin’ all her stupid gear down that trail by the school. Don’t know where she is now, though.”

      
A military patrol appeared at the edge of the park, a few hundred feet away. Their lights flashed through the night.

       “
Time to fly,” said Philemon. “Can you handle it?”

      
Mosey took a deep breath. “Yeah, let’s move.”

From a nearby hill, Nessa watched the two figures slip out from the bushes and deeper into the woods, away from the patrol. When they were clear, she shouldered her schoolbag, picked up her flak-tattered luggage, and padded down to the trail. A lovely woman with brilliant, piercing eyes was waiting for her. Together, they headed for the riggers’ shop.

Being of Sound Mind

Roy Gray

Packaging is my life. Boxes and bottles along with tubs and trays are tools of my craft. Paper and plastic, glass and board, films and foils are the fabrics I work. Creating new packs to get food from farm to factory to fridge or, in management speak – manufacturer to distributor to retailer to consumer, filled my day.

      
But no more, because now I’ve reached those ‘sunny uplands’: free time, secure pension, financial independence.         Only after retirement do you realise what you miss and it’s not the specifications and requisitions or the leaflets and labels. No; what you lose is Friday lunchtime at the Rodney drinking the week’s calamities into laughs, pert secretaries asking after a few spare boxes when changing office or moving house, eight a.m. angst – when deliveries are late and your managers aren’t, cheerful gossip from operators in pink hair nets and white overalls whilst their high speed bottling line stands idle and accusing. Now you can only mull over those grey February Mondays when chummy analysts were keen on an overnight loan of the instruments they needed to check conditions in their fridge, or greenhouse, or a flash of lab technician’s cleavage brought a glimpse of the coming spring.

      
When you want to write, retirement seems the ideal opportunity to make that step but sitting at home slaving over keyboard and reference books suddenly becomes a lonely way to live. In factory and lab people were everywhere but now, with a distant, divided family, there’s no one. So, suddenly, with no warning on the radar, loneliness looms like a long hard winter.

      
But you persevere: past rejections, rewrites and revisions, ignoring unhelpful editors and agents and (all too helpful) vanity publishers. And manuscripts pile up. Then one day, at a nadir in your new career, you hear a child’s voice piping at your door. Puzzled, you save your work as you surface from your screen. You see a little girl peeping round that door and instantly summer arrives in a bundle of bright smiles, long hair, dolls, toys, and unanswerable questions.

       “
Hello,” she says. “Where’s mummy?”

       “
I don’t know where your mummy is but we’ll find her,” you answer, opening the door wide. “What’s your name?”

      
She skips in, giggles, and looks around curiously, all sunlight and smiles. “You know my name. I’m Sara and this is Dolly.”

      
She holds up an open top box, a homemade model of a bedroom for a doll, its interior furnished with bits and pieces of packaging; film, foam, board, plastics. Inside, Dolly lies on the bed. Nicely done, presumably by her parent or grandparent.

      
Sara places the box on the floor and pulls Dolly out with one hand, holding the box down with the other. The rasp of Velcro as Dolly wakes tells me why she hadn’t fallen out of bed. Sara, doll in arms, bounces over to the computer.

        “
Can we play, Granddad?” she says sending an attack of the vbvbvbv’s into my current opus. ‘Granddad’, that seems odd but you have grey hair and a beard. Maybe children of her age call all elderly men ‘Granddad’. What would you know of such things?

       “
You certainly can,” you say, not sure if ‘we’ means Dolly or yourself are about to play. Sara answers that question by sending Dolly dancing over the keys until a dialogue box opens, locking the keyboard. “Perhaps we should find your mother first?” you suggest. “She might be wondering where you are.” You really want to go downstairs to see how Sara got in. You’re sure her parents would be less than keen on her wandering into a stranger’s home and might well be outside frantically searching for their missing daughter. Also you are beginning to feel nervous; there could be serious complications to Sara’s presence.

      
Sara looks up as if you are the lost child. “Mummy knows where I am.”

       “
Well that’s OK then. Would you like a drink? I‘ve got orange juice and chocolate biscuits.”

       “
Yes,” then after a pause, “please,” and she picks up Dolly and put her arms out to be carried down as I rise from the chair. “I want to spin,” she says, looking at my swivel chair as I pick her up.

      
I plonk her on the seat and wheel the chair out until it spins freely. She immediately holds her arms, Dolly and feet out straight. I set the chair spinning quite slowly and Sara looks at me crossly. “Faster.” I push again. Her smile returns then, with squeals of delight, she increases the spin rate by pulling her legs in and hugging Dolly.

      
I watch, careful to ensure the chair won’t topple then, as it slows, sweep her off and down the stairs to more squeals and giggles. Downstairs the doors are locked, the windows closed. How had she got in? I ponder the problem while Sara eats biscuits and gulps her orange juice. She seems happy, carefree and well looked after, perhaps three to three and a half and neat, in a blue dress (albeit with orange juice stains now) white sandals and blue socks. I dash upstairs to retrieve the doll’s bedroom.

       “
I think Dolly needs a waste basket in her bedroom, don’t you?”

      
Sara looks down into the model and then up to me. “Mummy has one by her bed.”

       “
Then Dolly should too,” I say. “Do you want me to fix it?”

       “
Oh yes, please,” a joyful voice despite her mouthful of biscuit.

      
I rush into the bathroom to fetch an old hotel shampoo bottle. In the garage I cut the top off, find the Velcro tape, and then quickly return to the kitchen.