Shuddering from the bang, the car rolled to a standstill.
‘Jee-zus!’ cried Grainger. She was alive. They were both alive. And not just that: they were holding each other by the arm, squeezing tight. Animal instinct. Embarrassed, they unclasped.
No harm had come to them, not even a hair on their head was singed. The Shoot suspended over Peter’s lap had gone blank, its screen reflecting his own bone-white face. On the dashboard in front of him, all the glowing words and symbols were gone. Grainger reached forward to prompt the ignition and was exasperated to find that the engine failed to revive.
‘That’s not supposed to happen,’ she said. Her eyes were a little wild; she was possibly in shock. ‘Everything should still be working fine.’ She kept turning the ignition, to no avail. Fat raindrops began to splash against the windows.
‘The lightning must have blown something,’ said Peter.
‘Impossible,’ said Grainger. ‘No way.’
‘Grainger, it’s amazing enough that we survived.’
She was having none of it. ‘A car’s the safest place to be in a thunderstorm,’ she insisted. ‘The metal shell acts as a Faraday cage.’ Observing the incomprehension on his face, she added: ‘Grade-school science.’
‘I must have been away from school that day,’ he said, as she examined, prodded and tickled controls and gauges that were clearly dead. The odour of fried circuitry began to seep into the cabin. The downpour clattered against the windows, which fogged up until Peter and Grainger were confined inside an opaque casket.
‘I cannot believe this,’ said Grainger. ‘All of our vehicles are designed to take punishment. They’re built like cars used to be, before people started to load them full of dumb-ass technology that breaks down all the damn time.’ She pulled the headscarf off. Her face was flushed, her neck wet with sweat.
‘We need to think,’ said Peter gently, ‘about what to do.’
She leaned her head back against the seat, stared up at the roof. The patter of the rain beat out a military rhythm, like soldiers from a long-past millennium walking into battle with their snare drums slung on their hips.
‘We’ve only been driving for a few minutes,’ Grainger said. ‘The base may still be in sight.’ Reluctant to step outside the vehicle and get soaked, she twisted round in her seat and tried to look out the back window. There was nothing to see except fogged glass and the bed. She swung open the door, letting in a gleeful swarm of humid air, and hove herself into the rain. She stood next to the car for twenty seconds or more, her clothing trembling and flapping as it got pelted. Then she took her seat again and shut the door.
‘No sign,’ she said. Her tunic was drenched, transparent. Peter could see the delineation of her bra, the points of her nipples. ‘And no sign of C-1, either. We must be exactly halfway.’ She stroked the steering wheel in frustration.
The rain passed over. The sky brightened up, casting pearly light on their bodies. Tendrils of air nudged under Grainger’s sleeves, visibly lifting the sodden fabric, travelling underneath like swollen veins. They penetrated Peter’s clothing, too, slipping inside his T-shirt, up his trouser-cuffs, tickling the hollows of his knees. They were especially keen to get past the tight ruck of denim around his genitals.
‘Walking back would take us an hour,’ said Grainger. ‘Two hours, max.’
‘Have the tyres left tracks in the dirt?’
She went out again to check. ‘Yes,’ she said, on her return. ‘Straight and clear.’ One last time she turned the ignition, casually and without looking at it, as if hoping to trick the engine into performing despite itself.
‘Looks like Tartaglione made a deal with God,’ she said.
They packed carefully for the journey. Grainger filled a tote bag with first-aid provisions. Peter found a mildewed old briefcase of Kurtzberg’s, removed a New Testament which had fused into a solid block, and replaced it with a couple of plastic two-litre bottles of water.
‘I wish there was a shoulder-strap for this,’ he said, testing the briefcase in his grip. ‘These bottles are heavy.’
‘They’ll be lighter as we drink them,’ said Grainger.
‘It’ll rain again, twice, before we’re at the base,’ prophesied Peter.
‘What good will that do us?’
‘You just lift your head and open your mouth,’ he said. ‘That’s how the ????? – the natives – do it.’
‘If you don’t mind,’ said Grainger, ‘I’d rather not do it the way the natives do it.’
The outside of the vehicle, they noted, was disfigured with scorch-marks. A web of damage tattooed the hubcabs, and all four tyres had deflated. The vehicle had ceased to be a vehicle and begun its metamorphosis into something else.
Peter and Grainger followed the tyre-tracks back towards the USIC compound. Grainger was a good walker, shorter-legged than her companion but with a brisk enough pace for him not to need to hobble his speed. They covered a decent distance in a short time, and despite the flatness of the land the vehicle grew rapidly smaller in retrospect and then vanished altogether. As they walked on, the tracks became more difficult to discern in the rain-smoothed soil; there was ambiguity between man-made and naturally occurring patterns. The sky’s ominous pall evaporated and the sun shone bright and constant. Grainger took swigs from one of the water bottles; Peter was OK to wait. He was more hungry than thirsty. In fact, the gnaw of appetite distracted him as he walked.
The ground was not the best terrain for progress on foot, but they must have covered two miles at least in the first hour. In the second hour perhaps the same. The USIC base obstinately refused to manifest on the horizon. All traces of their outward journey were by now erased from the soil. They were, of course, hopelessly lost.
‘If we retrace our steps to the car, USIC may send someone to check it out,’ suggested Peter, ‘eventually.’
‘Yeah,’ said Grainger. ‘Eventually. When we’re dead.’
They were both taken aback to hear the word spoken so prematurely. Even though the mistake they’d made hung obvious in the air, there was an etiquette of optimism to be observed.
‘You came to fetch me,’ Peter reminded her.
She laughed out loud at his naivety. ‘That was on my own initiative, it had nothing to do with USIC. Those guys wouldn’t rescue their own mothers. I mean, literally. Why do you think they’re here in the first place? They’re cool, they might as well have SHIT HAPPENS tattooed on their foreheads.’
‘But they’ll notice you’re missing.’
‘Oh, I’m sure. Somebody will come to the pharmacy for a tube of wart-killer and I won’t be there and they’ll think, Hey, no sweat, a few warts ain’t so bad. And when I don’t turn up to test tomorrow’s food, Hey, it’s just a formality, we’ll eat it anyway. Maybe mention it at the next meeting.’
‘I can’t believe they’d be so unconcerned,’ said Peter, but his voice was weakened by uncertainty.
‘I know these guys,’ said Grainger. ‘I know how they operate. They noticed Kurtzberg and Tartaglione were missing – after God knows how long. What did they do? Did they send vehicles out in all directions, driving day and night until they covered every inch of a fifty-mile radius? Forget it, baby. Chill out and read a magazine. Flex a bicep. The fucking world is falling apart and it still doesn’t rate as an emergency. Do you really think they’re gonna panic over us?’
‘I would hope so,’ said Peter.
‘Well, hope is a fine thing,’ she sighed.
They walked further, and began to tire.
‘Maybe we should stop walking,’ said Peter.
‘And do what instead?’
‘Rest a while.’
They sat on the earth and rested a while. Two cotton-wrapped, pink mammals marooned on a dark ocean of soil. Here and there, a few small clumps of whiteflower grew, sweating in the sunshine. Peter reached out to one near his foot, plucked off a fragment and put it in his mouth. It tasted bad. How strange that a substance which, when ingeniously processed, cooked and seasoned, could be delicious in so many ways, should be so unpleasant in its pure form.
‘Enjoying that?’ said Grainger.
‘Not much,’ he said.
‘I’ll wait till we’re back at the base,’ she said, lightly. ‘Good menu today. Chicken curry and ice cream.’ She smiled, willing him to forgive her earlier lapse of morale.
Not much refreshed, they walked on. And on. Grainger had drunk half a water bottle by now, and Peter drank his fill direct from the sky when, just as he’d foretold, another rain-shower drenched them.
‘Hey!’ called Grainger as he swayed erect and awkward, his head tilted back, Adam’s apple bobbing, mouth wide open to the downpour. ‘You look like a turkey!’
Peter put on a grin, as Grainger’s comment was clearly meant in fun, but he felt his grin falter as he realised that he’d forgotten what turkeys looked like. All his life he’d known, starting from the first day his parents had shown him a picture of one in a book. Now, in his brain’s storehouse, where so many Bible passages lay spotlit ready for quoting, he searched for a picture to go with ‘turkey’, and there was none to be found.
Grainger noticed. Noticed and was not pleased.
‘You don’t remember, do you?’ she said, as they sat down together once more. ‘You’ve forgotten what a turkey looks like.’
He confessed with a nod, caught out like a naughty child. Until now, only Bea had ever been able to guess what he was thinking.
‘Mental blank,’ he said.
‘That’s what happens,’ said Grainger, solemn and intense. ‘That’s what this place is about, that’s how it works. It’s like one huge dose of Propanolol, erasing everything we ever knew. You mustn’t let them break you.’
Her sudden vehemence discomfited him. ‘I . . . I’m probably just . . . absent-minded.’
‘That’s what you’ve gotta watch,’ she said, hugging her knees, contemplating the empty tundra ahead of them. ‘Absence. The slow, insidious . . . disposal of everything. Listen: you wanna know what got discussed at the last USIC personnel meeting? Besides technical stuff and the bad smell in the loading bay behind H wing? I’ll tell you: whether we really need all those pictures hanging in the hallways. They’re just a dusting and cleaning problem, right? An old photo of a city on earth somewhere, way back when, with a bunch of guys eating lunch on a steel girder, it’s cute but we’ve seen it a million times walking past it, it gets old, and anyway those guys are all dead, it’s like being made to look at a bunch of dead people, so enough already. Blank walls: clean and simple: end of story.’