The Fly-By-Nights (21 page)

In the middle of the afternoon, when the leader called the customary short halt to allow for calls of nature, Doris Ainsworth came bustling up front to the rauper to speak to him.

“These trees and the countryside all around—” she told him, “—all of the green things—Jon, I tell you it’s not natural! The radiation levels are down, I know, but still there’s mutant growth in all this stuff; in fact these are almost new species! In the last hundred miles or so the change from what we used to call ‘badlands’ to what we see now—the difference in the quality of the soil, and the obvious viability of rich
clean
growth in all this vegetation—it’s truly astonishing! And if things continue improving like this the further north we journey, then I’ll readily concede to a belief in just such a paradise as the kindred have told us they’re accustomed to! Why, if not for the awful fear of fly-by-nights, we might even have built our homes and settled around that tumbledown old farm back there; or perhaps right here, right now, where no one would need to go short of anything ever again!…Well, shelter perhaps, next winter, but certainly not good food! Oh, and by the way—here, do try one of these apples. Not quite ripe just yet but pulpy, pungent and utterly delicious!”

“Madame, I thank you,” Big Jon told her. “Yes, and I too am sorry there are such things as fly-by-nights—but alas, there are! So please don’t go making suggestions of that sort to anyone else; for there are some who might just be stupid enough to give it a go…only to die in the very first raid, or as soon as they run out of ammunition.”

“Ah!” the lady replied, rapidly blinking as she backed off. “But—did you call it a suggestion? Hardly that—no, never! It was nothing more than an ‘if’, that’s all.”

“Why yes, of course it was,” said the other. “And ‘if’ pigs could fly…?” But Doris was already making her way back to her own position in the convoy. Observing her retreat, Big Jon took a bite of apple, chewed meditatively for a moment, then spat it out. Too bitter for his liking, he felt it would give him wind. Anyway it was time to go, and he mounted his rauper’s rusty flank…

Some three hours later, having climbed a long slow rise through wild but flourishing countryside, the convoy looked down from a basin’s rim on a broad valley offering vastly dissimilar views. The now almost non-existent road—its surface reduced by time, weather and burgeoning scrub to tilting blocks of concrete and asphalt under dense layers of bramble and creeper—descended steeply to the valley’s floor, where it then proceeded more or less parallel with a wide river whose source lay somewhere beyond a hazy northern horizon. East of the defunct road, rising contours diverted the water toward far distant regions; but something a little less than two miles due north and ahead of this divergence, twin bridges a quarter-mile apart had long ago surrendered to the flow. Now their half-submerged skeleton sections formed gapped jetties against which the rushing water gathered speed and energy, spinning itself into gleaming whirlpools as it was sucked below, resurfacing on the southern side in spiralling eddies and gushing foam.

East of the river and almost directly ahead of the convoy, the remains of a medium-sized town lay clearly visible. Mainly in ruins, still a handful of squat, three- or four-story buildings on the river’s edge—possibly mills that once ran on hydroelectric power—had survived, barely. Most of them had lost their roofs, and the entire top floor of another had collapsed inward.

Away from the river across town, a railroad’s once-terminal remained mostly intact, with arrow-straight tracks running east through ruined suburbs. About halfway to the eastern limits of unaided vision, a train’s carriages lay scattered like cast aside toys across badly cratered tracks; while at a similar distance but a mile or so north of the wreck, a great crater almost a quarter-mile in diameter sat central in a scene of total devastation. In fact, nothing but this ashen moonscape
remained
to be seen: just this vast rayed bowl with its shallow lake, where despite the passing of so much time only a blue-green algae had found a way to survive and even flourish; and outside the crater’s raised rim, a star-burst effect of symmetrical white rays, laid down by the outfall over the blackened debris and desolation of what was once a small village…

“Well, and so much for lands east!” Big Jon Lamon muttered morosely to himself where he stood in the turret of his rauper and surveyed the valley’s expanse. “And whatever our journey’s ultimate destination…” he shook his head, and then continued determinedly, “it definitely
won’t
be in that direction!”

As for the countryside to the west:

Houses and other buildings when blown up, knocked or burned down, soon become rubble and ashes. But trees, foliage, all the green things in general—while they too suffer occasional disasters—they tend to return: they grow back again and quickly, often to the extent of shoving aside and burying the rubble and the ashes. Here in the westerly reaches of this valley, however—whether as the product of Doris Ainsworth’s theory of nuclear radiation and mutation, or simply the result of evolution in an environment radically transformed by the absence of Man and his poisonous works—here the green things tended to grow, and to grow…and to keep on growing!

Which would definitely appear to be the rule in the rising countryside to the west of the river, where the derelict road—or more properly its smothered and increasingly obscure outline—continued to parallel the water as far as the collapsed twin bridges…and then disappeared utterly beneath the outer canopy of an immense forest!

Big Jon’s bottom jaw fell open. Where earlier he had judged a stand of giant oaks and a rookery of fat glossy crows “astonishing,” now he found himself rethinking that previous evaluation. For what he saw down below, thrusting itself into being on the riverbank opposite the fallen bridges—then opening out to climb rising contours to a ridge some four or five miles west—at the same time spreading out and reaching across the valley’s floor all the way to the northern horizon…now
that
was truly astonishing! Indeed for long moments he could only stare, finding it hard to take in and accept the sheer enormity of it!

While at this elevation and distance it served little purpose to even hazard a guess at the actual
height
or
girth
of the larger members of this vast evergreen forest, still Big Jon arrived at a mental assessment. Those mighty firs had to be all of one hundred and fifty—or even one hundred and seventy—feet tall! And in their higher canopies they appeared packed so very close that only a few gaps showed, none of them large enough to indicate clearings of any appreciable size.

As he continued to gaze down on that gigantic forest, one undeniable truth quickly made itself apparent to Big Jon: that unless there was plenty of free space beneath that vast canopy—between those huge boles and below the lower branches, where the sunlight must surely be shut out and undergrowth mainly absent—no power on Earth was ever going to force a way through; which of course included the convoy’s trundles and every other vehicle that had found the going hard even on what was left of the old roads, let alone through a trackless green fastness!

But on the other hand, who could say? At this distance appearances might well be misleading, deceptive even through powerful lenses…. Oh really? Yet despite having serious misgivings about that last, still as Big Jon lowered his binoculars he was telling himself there was always hope…

For all that the column had remained stationary for only a minute or so while its leader surveyed the way ahead, a handful of men had come forward from their places several vehicles back to see what was the difficulty. One of these was the chief mech Ian Clement, and following the line of Big Jon’s worried, fixed gaze, he too looked down into the valley at what he had to assume was the prospective route ahead. In that same moment it was as if he read his leader’s mind, and:

“Big Jon!” The chief mech groaned and shook his head. “Even a quick glance down there tells me we’re in really bad trouble, and that’s a fact! The vehicles are just about done in as it is—but now, with that great green barrier down there? I mean—”

“I know what you mean!” the leader growled, at once silencing the other. “So please be quiet, Ian, and let me think…”

By which time Zach Slattery had come hobbling up front; and as the small group of ominously silent senior clan members made way for him, he leaned against the rauper’s jutting prow, joining his peers where, as a man, they stared helplessly down into the valley.

Momentarily lost in thought, finally Big Jon saw Zach, gave himself a shake and said: “Well then, old friend, how about it? Your mind is ever sharp, so do you see any choices we can make? Do
you
have any suggestions?”

“There are always choices,” Zach answered, his voice a grim rasp. “Unfortunately, I can’t see one that will do us any good! As for suggestions: while I don’t know about anyone else, right now my own mind feels like a huge dark vacuum: horribly empty!”

Nodding his understanding—and speaking quietly, almost to himself, but knowing he must decide one way or the other—Big Jon then said: “Maybe if we stay up here and leave the road, it might just be possible to follow the high ground west, and—”

At which point:

“Not a hope in hell!” the chief mech barked, forsaking the customary niceties. “What, we should leave the road—potholed, creeper-ridden relic that it is—and drive cross-country? That was bad enough when there were so-called badlands, but at least we could see where we were going! I mean, these shrubs and this greenery and what all, it may be pretty to look at, but if anything it makes the going just as rough as driving through scrub and rubble, and at the same time hides the many pitfalls! Let’s have one thing understood: even if we stay
on
this ruined road, we can only cover a few more miles before the wheels, axles and engines give up the ghost. But to leave the road, to go
off
it? Well, I don’t know…” Finally beaten, defeated, the chief mech shook his head. “I just don’t know…” And as his words petered out he could only offer an impotent, almost apologetic shrug.

Then for a long moment silence reigned, until: “And so much for
that
choice!” said Zach. “But Ian is right, of course.”

“Yes, I know he is.” Big Jon nodded tiredly.

“Which leaves us with the valley,” said Zach. “But at least it’s downhill!”

“That’s right,” said Ian Clement, resigned to the fact that his work was at an end, that he’d done his best but could do no more. “And if the gears should burn out,” he continued, “or the engines decide to quit, I suppose we can always freewheel—at least to the bottom and as long as the brakes hold out!” And he offered a derisive, humourless snort.

“And then, when we’re down there,” said Big Jon, “depending on how things look close up, there’ll be other choices to make. Whether or not we try to push on through—but of course that’s
if
any of the vehicles are still functioning—” and he glanced at the chief mech. “Or—”

“Or abandon the vehicles to the trees and go on foot,” said a new, younger voice: Garth’s voice, from where he’d joined his father at the front. “Of course, we’ll still have the bikes and no lack of fuel. The outriders—as they were—should still be able to scout ahead, finding us the easiest routes. And if just one of the smaller trundles is still working and able to squeeze through, maybe we could use it to carry fuel, arms and ammunition. As for the animals: all their lives they’ve known only us; we’d have to carry the birds in their cages, I suppose, but the beasts, what’s left of them, will need to go on foot along with us. Which I’m sure they will, just as long as we’re leading and feeding them…”

Done with speaking, Garth looked in turn at each of the men and found all of them staring back at him—some slightly disapprovingly, perhaps—but none of them offering any opposition or argument against the logic of what he’d said. And as for Big Jon:

Looking down at Garth from the rauper’s turret, the leader blinked twice and said, “The voice of youth: a calm voice, with nothing of panic in it. The voice of reason, which admits of no insurmountable difficulty but looks to the future—any future—because there
has to be
one
! And people, I like that sort of voice!”

“And why not?” said Zach. “For there’s a lot of commonsense in what it says and a good deal of hope even in what it
doesn’t
say! Let’s face it, we can’t be far from journey’s end, not now…just a few more miles at most. Are we suddenly grown incapable of walking? No, not at all! Myself, I’ve only one good leg but I’ll give it a go. And anyway, what with the convoy’s mileage recently: why, for all the time it’s taken we might just as well have walked the last twenty or thirty miles!”

“That’s very true,” said Big Jon, scanning the faces of the elders—some of whom still seemed dubious—as they turned to look up at him. “But at least before walking we can coast, well, for the next few downhill miles at any rate! So then, does anyone have any better ideas? No? Then you’d best get back to your places, for time’s wasting and the future’s damned impatient!”