Keystone (48 page)

She caught a
glimpse of the crippled Air Force One through the small window in front of her,
but any hope of seeing its fate was swallowed up by a blanket of clouds.

The pod jerked
sharply as the parachutes deployed to control its descent, and they floated
gently down towards an already different world.

Gail woke with a start, her dream
replaced in an instant by the cold, grey ceiling above.

The short
paralysis that accompanied her frequent abrupt-awakenings no longer scared her;
she had grown used to the effect long ago. George had explained to her that
when dreaming, muscles were deliberately disabled by the brain, allowing free
movement in dreams without endangering the body at rest. Sleep walking was the
result of an error in this process. Conversely, and as was her case, when you
woke suddenly you sometimes found yourself conscious in a still-paralysed body.
He’d sounded so knowledgeable about it all until a little questioning revealed
everything he knew came from a BBC documentary he’d watched over thirty years
ago.

In any case,
Gail was used to the phenomenon now because her sleep pattern was completely
messed up, and she almost always woke with a start.

Her husband
put it down to the added responsibility of parenthood; there was simply so much
more to be worried about now that she was a mother.

But she knew
that was only part of the story.

The fact was
that the world was very different now. It was colder, bigger, and much more
dangerous. They had lost so much many years before, and what little remained
was that much more important to them all.

And in the
post-Chaos world, there was often little to distinguish the nightmares from
reality.

She was
greeted by the chill southerly wind as she stepped out of the tent and into the
dull morning. The faint circular glow of the sun barely managed to make its way
through the clouds on the horizon, and she knew that would be all they would
see of it until sunset when it might peek under the sheets of grey, if they
were lucky.

George
beckoned her over to the fire, which was crackling soberly in the centre of the
small clearing around which six tents had been pitched.
 
There were three similar arrangements of
tents in the clearing, which with their sixty-three inhabitants made up their
nomadic village. The tents were far from the usual run-of-the-mill camping
affair. Instead, they were Bedouin-style, like small beige houses with short walls
and long sloping roofs. Inside, the bare minimum of furniture and rugs ensured
that they were comfortable, yet mobile. They had been in their present location
for several months now; since Spring.

 
Spring
,
she thought.
Now there’s a word that
doesn’t mean anything anymore.

She leant in
to kiss her husband on the cheek and grab the tin mug of something they still
referred to as coffee, but which bore little relation to its ancient cousin. If
farmers still produced the beans in Africa, they were keeping it to themselves;
as a rule, anything you couldn’t eat was a waste of land and effort, and trade
had more or less stopped happening on any large scale. Gail had stopped caring
what went into her coffee many years ago, and certainly wasn’t about to ask what
was in her mug on such a cold day.

After taking a
short sip of the acrid black liquid, she huddled up to the fire and used the
heat of the mug to warm her hands.

“It’s not that
cold this morning,” George said, distantly.

She shivered
and leaned in closer to the short flames licking round the dry branches that
had been bundled onto the fire. It was generating more smoke than heat, but to
her it provided immeasurable warmth.

“Where is
everyone?” she asked. They were alone by the fire, which was unusual insofar as
there weren’t that many other places for everyone to be.

“Jake’s
asleep, Ben’s out hunting with the others.”

“You didn’t go
with him?” she said, surprised.

He shook his
head and gave her a sympathetic smile.

She hugged him
back. “You and Jake should go along next time; he needs to be more active and
you need to spend more time with him.”

Even after the
end of the world, it seemed, seventeen-year-olds were still teenagers, and
their son was a prime example.

“Agreed,”
George nodded and poured some more coffee from the pot sitting next to the
fire. “But we’ll be moving on soon, we’ll have plenty of time to stretch our
legs then.”

It wasn’t long
before the twenty tents that made up their village were packed and bundled up
as tightly as possible, then lashed to the sides of their six remaining
donkeys. They were then weighed down with two twenty-litre tubs of drinking
water each. As much as possible was carried by the sixty-three nomads, who led
the animals back to the relative warmth of the north. The water would last them
a couple of days, by which time they would have completed a third of their
journey.

Ben caught up
with Gail and George, who were near the front of the caravan. Jake, as usual,
was straggling somewhere near the rear.

“Have you
thought of what I said?” he asked them, nervously.

They exchanged
a quick look. “Yes,” Gail said after a while.

The ground
beneath her feet was hard and unforgiving. She hadn’t walked far in months, and
was already weary after barely a couple of hours.

“We need to
go, leave this place,” Ben pressed. “Zahra and I have been talking about it
with the others, and we all agree. This land is dead. It was already dying
centuries ago, but now the river is so unpredictable, there is nothing left
here for us.”

“That’s what
we’re doing, Ben. We’re moving, like we always do. There is still food,” George
commented dryly. “We simply need to follow it. And the water is
mostly
clean.”

“Every time we
go hunting, we bring less back than the time before. And each river and inlet
we pass flows stronger in my memories.” Ben held Gail back by the shoulder and
looked her in the eyes. “Jake has no future here, Gail. We need to move on. We
need to leave Egypt.”

George stopped
walking and looked back at them. “What do you suggest, Ben? We go north, and we
need to find a way to cross the sea. And we don’t know what we’re heading to.
We head south, and we die in the desert, unless we’re unlucky and manage to
reach the warlords of Sudan. We go west, and we die in the desert, for sure. As
for going east, well, we know there’s nothing left there.”

Gail looked
along the line of people and donkeys idling past them. Towards the back, she
saw Jake, sharing a joke with Fatima, one of the young girls from the Tek
family, and Saïd, her brother. The three of them were the only teenagers in
their village, and along with two smaller children, the only non-adults.

Ben followed
her gaze. “We need to find more people like us, Gail. Our people are dying, and
there will be nothing left for them. Jake and Fatima get on well enough, but
how about Saïd? Is there anyone he could be interested in?”

“So, what do
you suggest?” she asked. Having children had been difficult for their village;
even Gail and George had never been able to add to their family after Jake’s
unexpected arrival, in the first year of the Chaos. She had fallen pregnant
shortly after their reunion in Amarna, following her kidnapping by
DEFCOMM.
 

After that, it
had taken years to settle into the relative safety of their nomadic lifestyle,
with its migrations between middle-Egypt and the south. By the time they were
ready to start trying to make their family bigger again, her body was already
too old. She was only fifty-nine now, and yet almost two decades of surviving
had been unrelenting; she and George both looked, and for her part certainly
felt, at least seventy.

“Europe,” he
said calmly. “We leave Africa, and head for Europe, through Italy.”

By now the
last of the village had walked past them. Zahra had held back, and the group of
four stood in the middle of the dusty road. Gail kicked at the layers of sand
and dirt till her toe scraped the tarmac beneath. It had been a poor road even
then, but the years of neglect and disuse were rapidly turning it into little
more than a scar running across the arid landscape.

“Europe, Asia
and the Americas were worst hit by the war,” she said reflecting on the few
news reports that had reached them during those early months. “Africa escaped
the worst of it; we should stay here.”

“But Africa is
dying, Gail,” Zahra said, almost in earnest. “You can see that for yourself.
Every year we pass fewer people on the road. And what little remains is still
at war with itself.”

“Europe may
already be dead, for all we know.”

“But the
climate will be better, there may be more food, we might find something left
apart from slum and disease. This place was a mess even before the climate
changed; it has so much further to go to be a good place to live again.”

George put his
hand on his wife’s forearm. “We’re old, now. And tired. Who knows how many more
migrations we’ll be able to make.”

She looked up
at him and saw the love in his eyes, stronger now than ever before. She also
saw a glint that she had not seen for a long time. They had not been apart for
longer than a day since her kidnapping all those years ago. Looking in his eyes
now, she could see that he wanted to go. But he would never leave her behind.

She looked to
her son, who was still at the rear of the group that had overtaken them. He was
carrying Fatima’s rucksack on his chest as well as his own on his back, and
they were walking hand in hand. It was the first time she’d seen them that
close.

“Alright, I
agree we should at least try,” she said after a deep breath. “But we need to
plan this properly; I don’t want to go into any danger we don’t need to face.”

Ben’s face
opened up with the first grin she’d seen from him in days; George wrapped his
arm around her shoulder and pulled her in tight, and they resumed their trek.

On the third day of travelling
north, they passed what little remained of the modern Egyptian town of Tell
el-Amarna.

They enjoyed
the hospitality of a local farmer and his wife for an evening, sleeping mostly
in abandoned houses by the main road, although several of the travelling families
decided to pitch their tents instead. The hospitality consisted in a few
bottles of harsh, homebrewed liquor, along with a dozen rock-hard loaves of
bread. In exchange, the farmer and his wife were given news of the growing
strength of the Sudanese clans, and the lack of good hunting to the south. It
wasn’t a fair trade; the information had been true every year for as long as
they could remember, but it was gratefully received nonetheless.

The old couple
had hosted their party many times over the years, and simply enjoying the
company of people you knew was enough for them.

They didn’t
share their plans to migrate to Europe, and the old couple neither asked nor
seemed to care about where they were all heading. Travellers, though few and
far between, were frequent enough not to warrant any special questioning. The
only thing the farmer and his wife knew was that they either went north or
south, and that sometimes they came past again in the opposite direction.
Sometimes.

Gail toyed
with the idea, as she always did, of staying in Amarna. She had a strong
emotional attachment to the place, and on the surface there seemed to be plenty
of room for their entire village to move in and live.

But the same
drought and famine that affected the region they were leaving had already
blighted Amarna. With the exception of the farmer and his wife, who were too
old to move on and had resigned themselves to their fate, Tell el-Amarna had
already been abandoned. This last couple would wait for their time to come, and
then they would probably decide to leave this world together, rather than risk
being left alone.

As they left
Amarna on the fourth day, Gail felt drawn towards the cliffs where she had made
her discovery all those years ago. She couldn’t be sure what it was, but
something new, something powerful deep down inside her, was pulling her towards
the Amarna Library.

Even so, as
Tell el-Amarna disappeared behind them, she managed to shake the feeling off
and march on.

What little
still passed for government and authority bumped into them on the sixth day.

The lone
horseman, an ancient firearm slung across his back, rested with them for the
evening, gladly swapping some strands of sorry-looking jerky for a refill of
clean, unpolluted water from one of the donkeys’ containers.

There could be
few stories of worth to tell from the shambles that was Cairo and ‘government,’
though to hear the horseman’s rhetoric one could only assume that the city had
risen from its embers and had taken over the world.

His audience
knew better than to believe such propaganda, though it played along willingly,
for the sake of old times.

The truth was
that the sprawling, brightly-lit metropolis that Gail and George remembered so
vividly since their first visits to the country no longer existed. Pestilence
and famine were destroying what war had not, though the process was infinitely
more drawn out and painful.

Slowly, what
had for decades been the largest city in Africa had torn itself apart. Fires,
started by the inhabitants to stem the flow of death and disease to new
quarters, razed whole neighbourhoods, leaving black scars across Cairo. For the
hundreds of thousands of Cairenes who had not either fled to the countryside or
died in the years that followed the Chaos, the city was an unforgiving place,
and the population shrank each year as tens of thousands more succumbed to this
harsh new existence.

Egypt had
played a key role in the Middle-East part of the global conflict. With the
United States, Russia and China out of the picture and the United Nations and
NATO effectively disbanded, the religious powder-keg had finally blown. Israel
had found itself set-upon by Syria and Iran, in all-out, relentless war.

However, Egypt
successfully mediated between the states, staving off the use of nuclear
weapons for months.

By remaining
impartial when history made vengeance so attractive, Egypt’s role in those
stages was decisive in the closing chapter of the Chaos.

So when the
last nuclear weapons were finally deployed, annihilating cities and stripping
the very earth itself of life, Egypt alone in the Middle East, on the fringes
of a world gone mad, was spared.