Doing What You Have To Do To Get By

By Gareth L Powell

The three inflatables rounded the headland an hour after sunrise. Kadie Jones crouched in the lead boat, wrapped in the noise and fumes from the outboard motor, gripping a heavy service revolver in one hand. She wore a thick military surplus coat and a fur cap with khaki earflaps. As soon as the prow of the boat hit the beach, she sprang out and splashed up onto the shingle, her boots crunching noisily as she ran. Ahead, in the town, the church bell tolled.

“We’ve been spotted,” she said.

The other inflatables slithered onto the beach like predators. Like hers, they each held three people, all armed.

“Harris, secure the boats. The rest of you, follow me.”

She stomped towards the boarded-up shops and apartments lining the seafront. Already there were shouts and she could see locals moving between the buildings. On the hill above the town, a castle ruin glowered, its crumbling towers green with ivy.

“Do you think they’ll put up a fight?” Nate asked.

This was the boy’s first raid. So far, he was following orders, sticking close to her. When she looked at him, she saw his eyes were wide. From beneath her coat, she drew a sword. It was black and sharp. She’d found it nailed to the wall of a pub fireplace in Somerset.

“More fool them if they do.”

FALLOUT
By Gareth L Powell

Despite what was to come, the day started well. An hour before sunrise they landed the rented jet at a decommissioned RAF base in Wiltshire, near Swindon. It was a cold morning and frost glittered on the grass at the edge of the runway.

Leaving the pilot and cabin crew to look after the plane, they pulled four motorbikes from its hold and clipped dosimeters to their lapels. Then they donned helmets and drove their bikes downhill, through dark and empty villages, to the army check point at the M4 motorway junction. Rusty, concrete-filled oil drums blocked the westbound slip road and a tired sergeant blew into his hands. He wore a long coat and a fur hat with khaki earflaps. The men behind him cradled standard-issue SA80 assault rifles.

“We were told to expect you,” he said through his moustache. His breath steamed in their headlights. He glanced at their papers, then back over his shoulder at the unlit, empty carriageway stretching away behind him, into the dead zone. He shivered.

“Rather you than me,” he said.

On the lead bike, Ann Szkatula pushed up her visor. She had silver eye shadow and a matching silk scarf. Behind her, the three other riders each had a foot on the ground, engines running, eager for the off.

“Thanks,” she said.

]]> http://www.garethlpowell.com/friday-fiction-4/feed/ 2 http://www.garethlpowell.com/friday-fiction-2/ http://www.garethlpowell.com/friday-fiction-2/#comments Fri, 20 Feb 2009 09:08:23 +0000 Gareth L Powell http://www.garethlpowell.com/?p=1318 This is an extract from a short story called “The Winding Curve” which I co-wrote with Robert Starr, author of Creek Water and The Apple Lady. The full story appears in Rob’s 2008 collection Sophistry By Degrees.

A year after his wife’s death, Mike finds himself on the old coast road south of town, with his daughter in the back seat. They’ve lingered too long at the cemetery, and now they’re driving around because he can’t face taking her home to an empty house.

Isolated in the dark car, his pale knuckles glow in the light from the instrument panel, and his back’s wet and sticks to the seat.

Out here, his world narrows to the cat’s eyes on the road and the pulse of his daughter’s breathing.

Out here, the stars in the cavernous dark sky haunt him – stars that haven’t moved or changed since a boy on a stolen motorcycle killed his wife, Monica.

Out here, he’s acutely aware that the rubber and steel housing their fragile bodies might not be enough to keep them safe…

And then it starts to rain. Mike clamps his hands on the wheel and leans closer to the dashboard as the dusty wipers squeak across the first spots on the windshield. As if she senses his sudden tension, Faith stops clucking and mooing in the backseat. When he looks into the rear view mirror, he’s sees uncertainty in her wide two-year-old eyes.

And then behind her, he sees something that makes his blood run cold: a single headlight coming up fast through the back window.

Excerpt from “Arches”
By Gareth L Powell

When he arrived, she was waiting in the yard in front of the house. She had a shotgun in one hand and a backpack in the other.

‘Nice car,’ she said, throwing the pack onto the back seat. There were wind chimes on the farmhouse gate. The night air smelled of cut grass, and the stars above were hard and sharp.

‘Where’s the arch?’ he said. Alice slid in beside him with the shotgun across her knees. She pointed across the yard to a rutted dirt path leading down through the fields.

‘It’s down that way,’ she said.

He let the handbrake off and they started rolling.

‘Is it far?’

Alice leaned forward. Her jeans squeaked on the leather seat.
‘It’s in the paddock at the end of the track, by the river,’ she said.

About a mile later, at the bottom of the valley, they bumped off onto a patch of wet ground. Caught in the headlights was the arch she’d promised him, four metres wide at its base and six tall.

He killed the engine.

‘Does anyone else know about this?’ he said.

She shook her head. ‘This is all private property. The only footpath’s on the other side of the river, behind the trees.’

Ed popped the door and climbed out. It was midnight.

‘Stay here,’ he said.

He walked over to the arch. Its sides were purple, and smooth like candle wax. He stroked one, and then walked over and stroked the other, being careful not to step between them.
He found it hard to believe that the first arch had appeared only six months ago. Now there were at least a dozen of them scattered around the country, more than a hundred worldwide.

‘How long’s this one been here?’ he said.

Alice stood holding the shotgun. ‘About two hours – I called you as soon as I found it.’

He walked back to the car and slid into the driver’s seat. His fingers drummed on the wheel.

‘What do you think?’ Alice said, getting in beside him.

Ed stopped drumming.

‘I’m going to go through,’ he said. The authorities had the other arches blocked off – if he passed up this chance, he knew he’d never get close enough to try again.

Alice bit her lip. Her knuckles were white on the shotgun barrel.

‘I knew you would.’

1. Roswell
2. Carnival
3. Natalie
4. Mid Life Crisis
5. Fresh Meat
6. God’s Gift
7. Hot Rats
8. Life Goes Wrong
9. Chip Heads
10. Jetsam

JETSAM
By Gareth L Powell

Toby Milan thought he’d drowned. When Odette and Safak pulled him from the sea, his lungs were full of water and he was unconscious and bleeding from a knife wound to the thigh. They pulled him into Safak’s old twin engine Grumman sea plane and flew him to Barcelona, where he spent the next three days on a hotel bed in the Gothic Quarter, his leg wrapped in bandages.

On the fourth day, Odette brought him some crutches and took him out for dinner. It was raining. They ate in a restaurant on the twenty-seventh floor of a downtown hotel. She ordered squid with fried potatoes. She had a bag by her feet. As they waited for the food, she nudged it over to him. “Some new clothes and a passport,” she said.

Toby reached down and pulled a Russian hat from the bag. It was khaki with fur ear flaps. “Thank you,” he said.

The waiter came over with a bottle of red wine and Toby lifted his glass. “This is the second time you’ve saved me.”

Odette shrugged. She looked out at the yellow city lights and said: “I’m leaving.”

Toby lowered his drink. In the distance, lightning flashed silently over the flooded Mediterranean. He dropped the hat back into the bag.

“It’s Safak, he’s asked me to marry him.”

“Are you going to?”

“I don’t know, maybe.”

The squid arrived and they ate in silence. After the meal, she kissed him on the cheek and left him standing on the hotel’s slippery steps. He watched her climb into a cab in the rain. Then her turned his collar up and limped across the road to the bus station, where he bought a ticket to the container port. There were too many flooded reactors in Europe and he wanted to get out. He was hoping to find a ship that would take him East to India or China, or West to whatever remained of the United States.

SLEEP NOW
By Gareth L Powell

It begins on a sad and lonely September evening, as the sound of a piano draws me to the back room of a small pub on the edge of the park, by the river. Stepping inside, I slide over to a table and order a drink. The pianist sits in the darkness behind his instrument, a cigarette dangling from his lips, his fingers stroking the keys, his eyes screwed tight.

On his third number, a singer joins him. She has long, raven hair and a voice that holds the room breathless. She sings with her eyes closed, her long fingers holding the mike stand. Every now and then, to add emphasis to a note, she shifts her weight from one hip to the other, making the light flash off the sequins in her dress.

I watch her for an hour, until she bows and steps back into the shadows, leaving the pianist alone on the small stage.

I catch sight of her again as she approaches my table. Without a word, she takes my hand and pulls me toward the door.

Outside, in the heat of the night, she slips her arm through mine and we walk.

‘I’ve waited a long time for you,’ she says. She squeezes me, her forehead touching my chest. Then she breaks away and runs off into the park. When I catch up, I find her resting her cheek against a carved stone lion.

‘Who are you?’ I say. She closes her eyes and whirls across the grass, her skirt spinning out around her.

She sings: ‘I could be a mother to scold you, a lover to hold you, a wife to leave you, a widow to grieve you.’

She dances away, toward the fountains, and I follow. When she reaches them, she kneels.

‘I could be a daughter to despise you, a priestess to baptise you!’ And with that, she scoops a handful of water at me. Then laughing, she grabs me roughly by the lapels. Her lips mash into mine, hot and feverish. Beneath the dress, her muscles are hard and tense.

She covers my eyes with her hand.

‘Sleep now,’ she says.

THE CLOUD PRINCESS

By Gareth L. Powell

He came in fast, aerobraking hard, scrawling a fiery trail across Jupiter’s pristine clouds. And then, when he’d shed enough velocity, he dropped, spreading black carbon fibre wings to catch the pummelling jet stream.

Ahead lay a dark whorl of cloud – a raging storm the size of Earth’s moon. And before it, dwarfed by the fury of the maelstrom, he saw the Cloud Princess.

The old airship was labouring at a depth far deeper than the one she’d been designed for, her vast impellers spinning furiously as the storm dragged her in.

She’d seen better days. As he got closer, he could see where some of her docking spines had been torn off. There were panels and aerials missing. Whole vanes had been ripped from their mounts.

He pulled in his wings, falling in a swooping arc that carried him under her rudder, into the shadow of her gas bag. He was aiming for the promenade deck at the rear of the gondola, and the airlock that accessed the main ballroom.

Once there, if he could get to her bridge, there was a chance he could save her.

CHIP HEADS

By Gareth L Powell

Five years ago, the first neural chip implants appeared – soft biotech gel memory chips that held our schedules, important birthdays and anniversaries, the phone numbers of our friends and families…

Over the next few months, the chips were steadily upgraded. New models were released with Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. They took the place of our mobile phones and our internet browsers, giving us inbuilt access to the sum total of human knowledge, twenty-four hours a day.

We became reliant on them.

And then something in the net ate everyone’s brain.

Well, not everyone. There are still some unaffected people – children, some pensioners… and people like me, who dug the chips from their heads and survived.

The affected people move in strange patterns, like shoals of fish or flocks of birds. They are calm and do not see the world around them – until whatever it is that controls them releases its hold, which it does every few days, for them to eat and shit and go crazy… Then they’re back to walking in strange, soothing patterns again.

When they’re released, they’re usually starving. Like ravenous zombies, they’ll eat anything to hand, pursue any animal or unaffected human they see and tear it apart.

Trust me; you don’t want to be caught in the open when that happens.

Currently, I’m living with a handful of unaffected men and women on the upper floors of a downtown tower block. The lift doesn’t work and we’ve blockaded the stairs – but we’re not going to stay here forever.

There are mobile phone masts and Wi-Fi servers everywhere. Somehow, they still have power. If we can knock out enough of them to disrupt the signal that controls the chips, maybe we can make a difference… And maybe we can start to rebuild.

AZTEC JAGUARS FALLING
By Gareth L Powell

It’s nearly time, and they’re in a small plane, flying over the Mediterranean, fleeing the coming catastrophe. The radio’s quiet tonight; hardly any traffic. The clouds overhead reflect the day’s heat.

“How much longer?” she says.

He looks at his watch: “A few minutes.”

They’re both quite drunk. They’ve been drinking ever since the announcement, two days ago. God knows how he’s got the concentration to navigate up here, in the dark.

Folding her arms, she turns to look out the window at the coast of Spain. It’s a ribbon of yellow light.

“Do you think it’s going to hurt?” she says over the noise of the propeller.

He doesn’t answer. She can see his face reflected in the window, illuminated by the dials on the dashboard. She can see the sweat on his forehead; smell the cabin’s mixed scents of engine oil, fear, and hot plastic.

Neither of them sees the impact – they’re facing the wrong way when the comet hits – but the shockwave catches them about a mile off the coast of Barcelona, and they have to ditch in the sea. It’s midnight. The plane flips onto its back as it hits the water, and the tail breaks off.