There’s a gunshot and Jonah thinks, Fighting back. But one of the guards kicks up a cloud of dust as he hits the ground, his pistol still clasped in his left hand.
Useless to fight back . . . pointless to resist the tide . . . It is not his voice.
The trickle of bodies becomes a wave. They are being forced up and over from below, and the size of the pile of corpses necessary to get them over a twelve-foot wall must be unimaginable. That’s the clawing and scraping, Jonah thinks, clothes and fingers and teeth grating against the concrete wall. They flow onto the metal walkway and rain to the ground below, and set against the sky it seems to be one huge, grotesque living mass.
The man and woman working on the engine have pulled pistols from their belts. They dash to where three children cower beside the bus, and whisper words of love to each of them before shooting them in the head. Then they hug each other, and Jonah hears them counting, un, deux, trois, before—
—the boat is drifting along the canal, seven people sitting around its cockpit looking shocked and afraid. They are all wet. The vessel seems to be driving itself, and when Jonah looks back he sees the elegant movement of a mechanical flipper shoving at the churned water, giving the craft speed.
Behind the boat and back along the canal, Jonah can see a slick of burning oil reaching from bank to bank. There are shapes writhing in the fire and others emerging from it, swimming under their own power until they sink and the flames on their heads are extinguished with a hiss.
In the boat, a small child slips to the deck and falls still. Her mother attends to her, while the others watch, exhausted.
They are wretched and without hope. Again, the voice is not Jonah’s, and it feels like a solid strange weight inside his skull.
The mother breathes a sigh of relief. Her daughter sits up. Jonah wants to shout, because he sees nothing in the little girl’s eyes, but he is just as silent here as he was before. The girl’s mouth falls open, and—
There are maybe fifty people running across the desert of black ice. Grim-faced men and hard-faced women are arranged around the outside of the group, while at its centre are a dozen children and several very old people. They wear heavy animal pelts, and the adults and a few of the kids carry an incredible amount of equipment on their backs. The old people and very young children carry only their own clothes. Their breath plumes around them, but running keeps them warm, and their pace seems to be steady and comfortable. It takes a moment for Jonah to realise that he is running with them.
They delay the inevitable . . . That stranger’s voice, rasping and heavy.
A mile behind them there is a wall of people. They also run, but there is no breath pluming around them, and they carry nothing. Many are naked and pale. Their pursuit creates a distant thunder of thousands of pounding feet, and a humming on the air.
There is no wasted talk within the small group, and also no apparent destination ahead of them. Jonah feels a spike of desperation, but there is a confidence among the people that he cannot deny. They know where they’re going, he thinks, and then a tall old man stumbles and cries out.
For a moment the group slows, but then one of the women shouts and they run on. She stays behind with the old man, and Jonah, unseen, remains with them.