The Night Market (6 page)

Standing beside a clumsily-built campfire that still
smoldered, watching the sun climb through the polarized lenses of her gas mask,
breathing heavily through the nanomesh filter, Yael couldn’t help but question
herself.

She imagined her doubt as a burden that she shrugged
off her shoulders, left to rot in the sand behind her as she headed toward the
concrete and steel skeletons that towered over the Waste like nails in rotten
wood. Yael pictured her fear as a second skin, dead cells molted into the wind,
heavy with dust and poisonously sweet nanites.

The sand was as treacherous and unstable as any beach
she had ever been on and her progress was slow. One dune gave way to another as
the sun crested the near hills. Yael worried about how hot it might get if she
didn’t get into the shade, but that didn’t turn out to be a problem. The next
anonymous dune proved to be the last, crowned with a dense cluster of
succulents that braved the constant wind. Beyond that, there were foothills and
endless concrete rubble.

Her mask superimposed text across a reflective plastic
film that coated the inside of the lenses. Each color detailed an environmental
hazard: unexploded ordinance, active biological war compounds, residues of
volatized toxic metals. Yael wandered through the wreckage and wondered what a
city could do to inspire such hatred.

The first pieces of concrete she saw were peeking out
of low mounds almost lost in dusty brown grasses. The broken fragments of walls
were laid out in rows reminding her of tombstones, lines of them marching toward
the angry skies. She had to pick her way carefully, avoiding metal exposed by
years of wind, jagged sections of pipe that had once been underground, the
crumpled remains of cars and machinery.

The wind battered her as she walked. Even with the
mask the dust was so fine that it slowed her progress to a crawl and left her
panting for air. The grass disappeared abruptly, there on one side of a low
hill and then gone on the next, her galoshes sinking ankle deep into sand composed
of multicolored bits of disintegrated glass. The poisoned soil was a silvery-grey
color with an oily residue that stained the bottoms of her boots purple. Yael
pushed on, following the pieces of asphalt that remained from an ancient road.

She saw nothing green in the Waste, only tufts of
brown sawgrass and the scorched trunks of long-dead trees. Yael found herself
scanning the horizon in a sort of desperation to see a living thing. In
Roanoke, no more than one in three buildings was inhabitable from flooding or
contamination. The rest had their windows boarded and were covered with
graffiti, little more than a sign in English and the Visitor’s bizarre language
warning the curious not to proceed. When she escaped her parent’s estate – a
frequent event once she discovered a navigable culvert beneath the main wall – Yael
spent much of her time with the local urchins, among rows of abandoned homes
and office buildings, or in small and mysterious tunnels burrowed beneath the
city. She was familiar with silence and desolation, but she had never experienced
anything that compared with the Waste. Even the sky itself was wounded,
reddish-purple clouds roiling and thrashing as if the atmosphere boiled. The
air was utterly arid, the soil broken and parched.

Yael paused at a wall that was intact enough to put
her back against and then crouched, waiting. Though nothing materialized, she was
bothered by a persistent feeling of being watched. She was used to that
feeling, however, from her time spent in the cool of the tunnels or in the dust
of the abandonments. When the living departed they left behind more than
scattered and forgotten possessions. They left behind ghosts; memories ebbed in
the places where they had lived, echoes of warmth and laughter, passion and
cruelty. Yael had seen such ghosts before and was not afraid of them.

Yael wondered how long the Waste had been uninhabited,
when it had been reduced to the rubble that she walked along. Whatever war or
calamity had destroyed what must have been a great city, it was so ancient that
even the small traces had been erased. There were no signs of violence, but
there was little that was intact enough to bear those scars. Perhaps the broken
towers in the distance, she thought, staring through polarized lenses. Maybe
they would have something more to say to her.

She turned away reluctantly. The road she followed did
not go in that direction.

The ghoul had told her to follow the road for several
hours to find an encampment of sorts, a squatter’s village at the edge of the
uninhabitable core of the Waste. There, he had insinuated with his foul voice,
she could find a guide and a way across the desolate lands between her and the
forgotten city of Kadath, if she had something to
trade.

His glistening lips gave the word an indecent quality
that sent shivers up her spine, trudging between the low walls that had once
been houses, underneath a broken sky. Yael was still divided on the idea of
seeking help. She knew she would need it, she was a practical girl. But she had
no idea what she could offer in return that she would actually be willing to
give.

She would trust in Tobi, in the shallow wound he had
left in her arm and the destination he had provided her. Without that, Yael was
little more than a runaway, and she knew enough of men in lawless places to be
cautious. She still wasn’t sure how she would approach the encampment when she
realized that she really was being followed.

It was the sound that gave him away – and from the
sound, it was definitely a him – his footsteps echoed and reverberated off the
miles of broken concrete. There was virtually no other sound to hide it in the
desolation. Whoever he was, he was making an effort not to be heard, trying to
time his footsteps with her own, but every time she had to change her stride or
work her way around an obstacle, she could hear a stuttering footfall,
out-of-sync with her own steps, before coming to a rapid halt.

Yael walked on further, trying to get a good look out
of the corner of her eye, to figure out exactly how far she was from her
pursuer, but the circular lenses of her mask cut off too much of her peripheral
vision for her to judge. She would simply have to take a chance, and do what
she had done many times before, when she realized she was being followed
somewhere lonely.

Yael casually turned the first intact corner she could
find, where her own ragged asphalt road intersected with another, even more
decrepit, path winding through mounds of broken cement and rusting metal a few
feet taller than herself. The moment she was sure she was out of sight, she
broke into a sprint, running the length of the wall of debris. At the end of the
wall, she turned right again, following a path that was hardly apparent. There
was little cover, but with any luck her stalker would still be searching the
original intersection for her, trying to decide whether she had turned or not,
and she was moving fast. Yael had played soccer for years, for her school’s
team or just for fun. She was inevitably the fastest girl on the field. It
didn’t take long for her to round the rest of the pile of debris. She made a
third right to arrive on the road where she had started, one block back, the
lenses of her mask fogged with her breath.

There was a man there, staring at the ground where she
had turned, his fingers pressed against the poisoned topsoil. He was thin, the
kind of skinniness that went to the bone and spoke either of a lifetime of
desperate poverty or the final stages of addiction. His clothes were too large
for him and too warm for the weather. He was so caught up reading the ground
she had walked that Yael managed to get within five feet before he noticed her
approach. She held up a compact black can, a spray nozzle pointed in his
direction.

“This isn’t mace. It’s a military-grade chemical
deterrent and neurotoxin designed to inflict agony, blindness, and permanent
neural damage. It violates the Geneva Conventions six different ways. You won’t
be able to open your eyes or even stand for days, though you will probably to
learn to speak again. And I’m not one bit afraid to use it. Think about that
before you turn around and explain why you were following me.”

The man – boy, really – turned around slowly, looking
famished and ridiculous in a fur cap complete with earmuffs. His clothing
looked to have been cobbled together from bits of salvaged leather, crudely
tanned hides and fragments of recycled cloth. His cheeks were sunken, his eyes
were hollow, but his hands didn’t shake, so at the very least he wasn’t a
ghoul.

“Please don’t spray me! You don’t need to do that. You
won’t spray me, will you?”

“You followed me. Explain,” Yael demanded, shaking the
can menacingly. “Now.”

“I was just... I was only... Are you really going to
use that stuff on me? Because I don’t want to be blind.”

“Then answer the question.”

Sweat literally poured from his face on to the dirty
rags and fur around his neck. His eyes darted from side to side frantically,
seemingly more concerned with his surroundings than the weapon in front of him.
A brownish tongue darted out to lick lips that had cracked open and bled in the
sun.

“I was following you because you looked like you
didn’t know where you were going. I thought maybe you would need a guide or
something...”

Yael released the safety on the side of the can, the
propellant hissing momentarily.

“Okay, okay!” The man put his hands up as if Yael were
arresting him. “You’re small and alone. You looked like you were weak. There are
wild dogs, big packs of them. They get vicious when they drink the water here.
Smart, too. Thought they might get you, ‘cause it ain’t safe to travel through
here alone. Figured I could go through your things once the dogs were done.”

“Not safe alone? Then you aren’t...”

Either the one behind her was quiet or Yael hadn’t
been paying enough attention. He wrapped her in a bear hug, crushing her arms
to her chest and forcing her to drop the can and her duffel. Her ribs bowed
under the pressure. Someone grabbed her mask and tore it from her face,
laughing as if he had done something funny. A short man with red hair whose face
was covered in enormous freckles went scrambling to the ground after her bag. The
man holding her was big and overwhelmingly strong. Her head barely reached the
level of his chest and her wild kicks bounced harmlessly off his thighs. He
laughed and then threw her to the ground, sending up a puff of multi-colored
dust.

One of them grabbed her by her hair. Another started
to tug at her windbreaker. They didn’t pay any attention to Yael’s hands
scrambling around the pouch at the front of her belt.

The man who pulled her hair was tall and dark-skinned
with no hair. His teeth were broken and yellow when he smiled at her. Then he
saw what was in Yael’s hand and his smile grew less certain, confusion creeping
across sun-ravaged features.

His confusion was understandable. The thing in Yael’s
left hand looked a great deal like a pen. In her right hand, she held what
appeared to be a car alarm remote. But looks aren’t everything.

It was not a pen. It was five inches of titanium with
an industrial diamond tip. She sank it all the way through the man’s tattered
work boot, piercing the sole and pinning him to the ground. He cried out, and
the man struggling to tear the impervious fabric of her windbreaker paused, giving
Yael a chance to roll over and kick him in the teeth. He lost his grip on the
perfectly slick cloth and tumbled backward.

Yael scrambled to her feet, ignoring the dozen men
around her and scanning the ground instead. Her mask had been thrown aside and
lay just a few feet away. Yael sprinted, ducked a pair of outstretched arms and
then tripped over someone’s leg, rolling when she hit the ground. She searched
the ground frantically for the mask, while one of pursuers again grabbed her
hair, jerking her head backwards and making her eyes water. Yael’s fingers ran
along nothing but the coarse sand. The man put his boot between her shoulders,
pulling her head backwards so fiercely Yael thought her neck might snap.

Her fingers brushed against the mask. She grabbed it
with her free hand, pressing it to her face while she pushed both buttons on
the remote.

The can of chemical deterrent beeped twice, softly,
where it lay on the sand. Then it exploded in a cloud of violet gas, causing Yael
to cough even with the partial protection of the mask pressed across her face.
The man behind her gave one final, agonizing tug, tearing a section of hair
from her scalp, then he fell over backwards, consumed by coughing. Yael curled
into a ball to minimize her exposure to the gas and quickly strapped her mask
back on. She still spent a few moments coughing before she could manage to
move. She stood up cautiously and surveyed the scene, glad the lenses of her
mask had been designed to filter the blinding gas.