Three Moments of an Explosion (37 page)

Nick crawled on.

When they landed at the disused airfield they had chosen from the charts, they carried Nick across a weed-flecked runway in fading Scottish light and into a disused office building, where he slept for eleven hours, dreaming while his moat sank into existence, faster than before, as if eager after his hours of motion.

They were woken by the scream of distant warplanes and far-off explosions. They had no communication with any authorities.

“Even if we could, you don’t know where anyone stands any more,” the colonel said.

They checked maps and planned with the hesitant new inchoate democracy of collapse. Nick too. He jumped across his trench and sat as close to the dead center of the RSOV as they could place him.

“It might just be OK,” Anna said. “The radius of the moat is just about half the vehicle’s length. And it’s just about as long, if we make sure he stays in the exact middle. Stop regularly. We might lose the headlights and the back bumper …”

“Shit,” Gomez said. “Let’s risk it.”

A soldier called Sheen drove, fast, weaving the big vehicle through miles of empty road punctuated with abandoned cars and tractors. They shot through a zigzag barricade in a tiny village, where frightened men and women fired shotguns at them.

They stopped every half-hour for Nick to walk or sit where his trench could begin in the ground, for Sheen to investigate the RSOV. It seemed quite solid but, in the afternoon as rain came down, there was an abrupt sound of straining metal, and it folded sickeningly as the floor at its rear sheared through and the vehicle tipped, then skidded and slammed sideways across the road.

They crawled from the wreck. Nick was screaming. His arm was broken. Burrows had been cut badly by glass. Adams was dead, hit in the head by a spinning axle.

“What the fucking fuck?” screamed Sheen. He raged at Nick as if the young man had chosen for his trench to close in. But when they sat under damp trees to tend themselves Anna saw that the mud around Sheen was sinking into a channel.

“Oh, man,” he said with a bad wonder. “I’ve got it.” It was Sheen, in the front seat, whose new moat had cut through the vehicle.

“I’m in a hole, sir,” he said, and laughed. Even when the colonel aimed his pistol at him, Sheen would not move. They had to leave him, sitting in his trench.

The last six trudged on for hours under their equipment and a semirigid dinghy as deflated as it would go. They left the road and made camp, and in the morning walked for hours toward the coast on ground more and more studded with stones.

“I smell burn,” Hancox said.

They ascended a long rise. Beyond the slope the ground tipped again at an increasing angle, to flat ground broken by spurs of flint.

Anna looked into the moat of the keep without a bridge.

“What did they fucking do?” she said.

On the blocky mound of earth and rock that rose from the water, where Birgit’s picture had shown the visible remains of a castle, a tower fallen to age, there was now rubble.

A pile of big blocks from destroyed walls, the pulverized mess of demolition.

“Someone bombed it,” Gomez said.

The sky was full of low dark cloud. Anna thought of bombs, missiles roaring down from some hazy plane or gunship in her mind, to take apart this doorless castle.

Gomez set Castillo and Burrows and Hancox on guard and their new structures notwithstanding they took the order. He and Anna rowed into the yards of water. Nick cradled his arm.

In the middle of the moat Nick said, “You hear something?” He leaned toward the water. “Did you hear that?”

Anna put her ear to the base of the boat. She listened to the slap and wet rustle of the water. Her boat might be nudged from below, investigated with a curious motion by something born of trench.

“Have you seen what happens when you put someone infected in a boat?” Gomez said. The colonel dragged the boat on the stones. “If it’s small enough that the whole thing’s inside infection perimeter? Nothing. You don’t get a trench in the water.”

“Yes you do,” Anna said. “The water goes, right down to the usual depth of the trench, just like earth does. It’s just that more water fills it in all the time, so you never see it.”

Where the stone had been, they climbed into a rough rubble landscape where weeds were already feeling the scorched ground.

“There’s nothing,” Nick said. “Nothing.”

Where the building had been razed the ground was slumped into a basin like that of a cold volcano. Anna could discern the ghosts of walls, the outlines of architecture, and the entrances to caves, overgrown and full of medieval debris and the smell of explosion.

“Birgit wouldn’t have come this far and not crossed the water,” Nick said. To touch the stone and receive something. To break that moat quarantine and contract it.

Anna scooped up earth. She made measurements. She powered up her laptop and fed in numbers. The colonel sat, his back to a snarl of roots, and watched. She felt her heart speeding as she went through these motions, not expecting to understand more but desperate to do so, here in what she could feel through her skin was a locus. She was an antigen here, perhaps. She was something.

Nick sat on a spur of stone. The earth around him evanesced over hours, faster than usual in this, the corpse of the source, the sick castle. “It’s not sick,” he said as if he heard what went through Anna’s head. “It’s a contagious adaptation.”

There was the sharp crack of shots and a shriek. Anna flattened against the slope. Nick ducked. The colonel crawled and took out his weapon and peered across the moat.

“Where are they?” someone shouted.

Anna looked across the water and saw the three soldiers behind a rock on an incline in the grassland. Burrows fired from behind the rise of stone. Hancox struggled to reload. Castillo lay unmoving.

Facing them was a group of clumsily running and firing and hiding men and women. Some were in khaki, some in dark civilian clothes. They ducked behind trees and shot with their various weapons.

People rose from hides in the earth, ran forward and disappeared again.

“They’re coming out of the ground,” the colonel said.

Anna said, “They’re coming out of each other’s moats.”

The attackers were hauling into position some big geared thing like a horizontal crane. They were bracing it behind a rise in the earth.

Men in ragged uniforms jogged toward Burrows and Hancox, bouncing a woman on a stretcher between them. They deposited her directly opposite the soldiers on the other side of the stone that shielded them. She lay quite still. Burrows fumbled with his weapon.

There was some flickering, quick motion, and Anna blinked, because around the woman on the stretcher and the stone by which she lay was now a wide trench, an almost perfect circle, full of black water.

Hancox was staggering back from it, dropping his rifle. It passed exactly where Burrows had been, and he was gone. Anna blinked. The surface of the moat-water churned. She could not tell if it was wind and disturbed sticks she glimpsed in it or a drowning man pulled under by something, waving his rifle.

“Jesus Christ,” she heard Gomez say.

Hancox had his hands up, people were coming at him with weapons raised.

Nick was shouting, “Birgit! Birgit!” Anna looked at him with a sort of bewildered wonder.

“She didn’t get on that plane,” she said.

“Birgit!” he shouted. His face was astounded and urgent with delight.

Anna heard a whispering, at last, from the air, not the water. A great chunk of stone arced elegantly from the ground. The engine was a trebuchet and it had fired. The missile slammed down on the castle foundations, smashing in all directions.

The shrapnel of the earth battered her. Gomez screamed.

“Birgit!” Nick was standing frantically waving his uninjured arm. Another chunk of rock rushed for them, plunged straight down, dislodging remains into a cavern that had been below the keep.

Gomez moaned. His head was bloody. The attackers loaded a wooden barrel onto their siege engine and lit it. It poured off black smoke.

“Birgit, for Christ’s sake!” Nick shouted. He jumped and cried out with the pain from his bone. “It’s me! It’s me!”

The trebuchet creaked. The soldiers knelt by the woman in white and conferred and pointed at Nick, waving.

The attackers tied Hancox’s hands and held him on the shore. They rolled the barrel into the moat where it hissed and burped a last roll of cloud and went under.

Birgit’s people brought a wooden rowing boat to the edge of the shore and her guards placed her gently within, between them, and started to row. Anna tended to Gomez. He was half-awake but bleeding heavily and murmuring, making little sense.

There were about a hundred people on the shore, standing silently watching. Some stood in a big mass on the chopped up ground: some apart, alone or in couples or trios, with moats around them. The moated and the moatless.

Birgit lay in the boat with her eyes closed. She did not move.

One man jumped out to haul the boat onto the beach while the other kept Anna and Nick covered with his rifle, though they were unarmed and all had their hands up. Gomez bled in a little pool.

“Oh, Jesus, Birgit,” Nick said. “Oh no.”

She was still as wax.

The men carried Birgit’s corpse to the rubble of the castle. Nick was crying softly at her.

“We wanted to let her rest,” said one of her bearers. He did not have a Scottish accent. “We were doing alright. We weren’t bothering no one. Were we? Why’d you fuckers have to do this.”

“This?” Nick shouted. “You mean blow this place up? Jesus, this wasn’t us.”

“It’s true,” Anna said. “We’re here to try to figure things out.”

“Who was it then? The bombers? She was here yesterday when they came. She was here a lot. She came here to commune.”

Anna did not ask
With what?

“She made it back over. She wanted to tell us what to do, how to carry on. Get word down under if we could. She knew she didn’t—” He broke off.

“Didn’t have long,” his comrade said. “She was injured bad. We brought her back here to rest.”

The sun was going down when they laid Birgit down on the highest point of the rubble. Nick sat whispering to her dead body and the soldiers let him.

“Who the fuck does he think he is to her?” one of them whispered.

“Her boyfriend,” Anna said. “Ish.”

“Oh and he thinks he’s hurting worse than us?”

“I don’t think he’s thinking about it,” she said. “What are you going to do with us?” She laid her hand on Gomez’s face. He twitched.

They didn’t know.

“We’ll figure it out,” one said. Their shadows stretched as if desperate to cross the water.

As the last light went down, Nick walked away from Birgit’s body to a jut of foundation. He looked at where lights were appearing among her followers for this quiet funeral.

A trench appeared around her corpse in an instant. Anna watched earth fall away into a steep-sided wide circle. It was full of black water again. Anna frowned: they were far above the water level.

She could hear Gomez breathing but he was not talking any more. Anna walked toward Birgit’s moat.

Anna started to run. She ran past one man who looked up in surprise, and she sped up, and when she reached the edge of Birgit’s trench with a surge of strength she jumped and made it across and fell stumbling onto the rocks, toward the body.

“Get the fuck away from her!” The men leveled their rifles.

“No,” Anna shouted. “I’m not going to do anything.” She stood in long silence by Birgit in her white dress, on the makeshift stone catafalque, seeming to shine in the wet black of her moat.

The light ebbed and she knelt and put her ear close to the water of Birgit’s trench, from the inside. As she felt the earth shift under her knees. Between Anna and Birgit’s body she saw puffs of dust and stirrings of uneasy earth as clay sank. A line scored in nothing on uneven gray light.

Nick looked away from her into the darkness.

“Hey,” Anna said.

She was watching the slow self-creation of another moat, faster than usual, though not at the speed of Birgit’s impossibly quick posthumous moat. The earth and rock and the roots of plants were going.

It was Nick’s. He was still and motionless and his trench was beginning, cutting across Birgit’s. Where they met, the water of Birgit’s started to spill into Nick’s rut.

Anna knew she was immune. She worked with the infected and had never had her own keep, until now. This little nub of moat-bordered land was not a true keep, you might say, but then you might say it was two, she thought, where two keeps met.

She sat cross-legged between the trenches.
It isn’t mine,
she thought.

But something began to rise in her, so she breathed deeper, felt her heart speed up.
Then whose is it?
she thought.

Nick was alive and looking into the dark, and Birgit was dead and in new shade, and the moats of Subject Zero and Subject One overlapped like sets, like a Venn diagram, drawn in hole and water. There sat Anna, in the eye-shaped intersection.

Without a moon and with only the faintest light from stars, she could not see anything more than the dimmest shapes. It rained, and she sat as if between links of a chain, an infinity, its components pressed and overlapping, its lines were water.

She waited, immune and surrounded, in the overlap.

A SECOND SLICE MANIFESTO

Les Parapluies,
the first work of our movement, is a work in oil on canvas of a little over a meter in width and seventeen meters in height. Paintless but for its primer across large sections, at certain levels it comprises layers of abstract shapes in various colors. A few centimeters-wide circuits of thin wavy black lines, within some of which are blobs of pale pinkish dun outlined in various colors, themselves containing textured red and centers of grayish creamy white. These shapes are interspersed with lines and jags and precise, opaque vectors.

Between two and three meters from the piece’s base is a cluster of considerably larger black- or brown-edged map-like marks, amoeba-like shapes in red. Around a meter above this second stratum, these shapes begin to shrink again.