Chapter 1: Genesis (2856)
Johnny Frost was too stoned to drive, but he got in the car anyway. Three of his friends piled in, slamming the doors, actions that made his head vibrate. Joe got in the passenger seat, the leader of this outfit. Ellie and Wasp got in the back.
It was late at night, past midnight and they had spent a long evening smoking, talking and watching TV. Eventually Joe had gotten restless and wanted to go out for a drive, to clear his head or whatever it was that got into him on nights like this. To see the streets, to see something other than the four walls of the flat, he never really revealed the forces that drove him. They weren’t going anywhere, just driving around, they might stay in the city, or they might go down to the Delta. It was Joe that decided when they drove, and it was him that decided where they went. It was Johnny’s car though, and it was him that paid for the petrol. Already the car was filling up with smoke. Johnny didn’t mind, the cops didn’t go out much these days, the roads were always quiet, and he was too wasted to care much about anything. He was hoping that they could swing by his girlfriend’s later and see if she was still awake.
Joe was the only one equipped to make decisions, and Johnny passively took the turns he was instructed to, going with the flow, his brain thoroughly disengaged.
‘Down there,’ Joe would instruct in his husky chain-smoker’s voice, and Johnny would swing the long car round in a wide arc. Most of the time though, no one was in charge of the direction they were taking, and it was as if Beryl was driving herself, a long yellow beast moving slowly through the night, with four people asleep in her belly.
They were south of the river now, meandering through the deserted night-time streets. What little traffic remained in Evermarch had long since ceased, the buses had stopped running before it had even got dark, sticking to the times from when there had been a curfew in place. The only people that went about at this time of night were either running furtive errands, or spivs, or heretics.
‘Are we going to the Delta?’ asked Johnny.
Ellie and Wasp were having a stupid giggling conversation in the back. Ellie was a big solidly built teenage girl. Wasp was a short and narrow fourteen-year-old boy, his growth stunted by a mother that had smoked all the way through her pregnancy.
As always Joe was in the front, either smoking a joint, waiting for it to be passed to him, or rolling another one. This was another reason Johnny liked to drive, Joe rolled much better than he did, Johnny found it all but impossible to do while in a moving car and wasn’t particularly good at it when sat in his own home either.
Barely doing thirty, they cruised through Shields and into South Bannock. Joe finished rolling the joint he had been working on, using an old newspaper on his lap as a table, lit it and took a draw.
‘You want to hit the Delta?’ he asked, scratching at the scraggy beard that grew patchily on his sunburnt and freckled face.
‘Not been there in a while, I suppose,’ murmured Johnny. ‘How hot is it down there now, do you know?’
‘Why don’t we find out?’
Johnny nodded, and when the joint was passed to him, he took a couple of long draws then passed it back. He felt better now, with a destination to aim for. He’d not long filled the tank of Beryl, the old Splinter that she was, and he always liked visiting the Delta. To him, it felt like going on holiday.
The only thing he didn’t like about it was that whenever they headed south, he could see Wormwood. The others didn’t have to look at it and Joe would turn to talk to the others, but there in the sky hung Wormwood, a vast lazy red star, the size of a penny piece, but giving off little more light than the moon, an angry pustulant wart on the face of the cosmos. Like a negative after-image from looking at the sun, that burned into the soul, or rather through it, like a jet of flame through a sheet of tissue paper. People could go crazy looking at it for too long, but when Johnny drove, every so often his eyes would flick up to look at it, as if checking it had not moved closer, or grown larger. It was a reflex action, like a tongue probing at a rotten tooth.
Johnny tutted and pulled down the sun visor, resolving to pay as little attention to Wormwood’s evil presence as he could.
‘We should score tomorrow,’ said Joe, stretching back in his seat. ‘We can head over to Mickey’s and get a nine bar from him.’
‘He owes you money?’ asked Johnny, some old memory stirring in his mind.
‘Yeah, and two packets of fags.’
Johnny turned the car onto the dual-carriageway, they were close to the Delta now. Even with the windows rolled up they could feel the air temperature changing as they approached the Transition Zone.
‘They’ve blocked the road,’ said Johnny, the only one looking out of any of the windows.
Joe looked up, then checked his pockets. ‘Fuck! Stop, pull over!’
Johnny gently rolled the car onto the pavement. Joe bailed out, taking his gear and his coat with him. Ellie and Wasp, clambered out the back, throwing questions at Joe, but not getting any answers.
Without another word, their leader stalked off into the empty side streets, Wasp yapping at his heals while Ellie pulled on her hijab and followed on after them.
Johnny sighed, not for the first time realising he was the only one with any manners. ‘Well, goodbye then,’ he said to himself as he leaned over to the passenger seat to sweep the loose tobacco that Joe had scattered everywhere, onto the floor. After a cursory glance around the car to see that nothing had been left behind that might get him lifted, he pulled back out onto the road.
Fuck it, he thought to himself, I’ll go to the Delta by myself.
The roadblock consisted of four police cars positioned across the southbound carriageway. As Johnny drew up to it, a white van was being waved through, pulling away from the checkpoint.
He was nervous and suddenly regretted his decision to go anywhere near the police in the condition he was in. It was too late now though, he wound down the window on the driver’s side and leaned out to talk to the copper that was waving him down.
Johnny knew from past experience that they didn’t really care about anything except if you didn’t have a beard or fringes on your shirt, both of which he had, or if you were a woman out in public without a veil. And even then, they just gave you a warning. The cops were a lot more easy-going than they were back before the reditus.
The cop shone a torch at him. He was a fat middle-aged man, someone from well before. He too wore a beard, and his uniform was made faintly ridiculous by the fringe that had been sewn onto the bottom of his jacket.
‘Where ye headed son?’
‘I’m going to see my girlfriend in the Projects. I’m allowed. We’re bubbled.’
‘Uh-huh,’ nodded the copper passively. ‘Papers?’
‘Haven’t any, sorry,’ replied Johnny with a gulp. ‘I read you don’t need them now, I read that.’
‘Every day, it changes son,’ sighed the cop. ‘You have a pass at least?’
‘I’ve got that,’ said Johnny gratefully and fumbled it out of the glove box.
The cop looked it over and eventually said, ‘This is a year old.’
‘Oh right,’ stuttered Johnny, who now just wanted to get out of there before they lifted him. ‘If it’s not valid I can just turn round and go home, it’s no problem.’
The cop stood back and took in the car. Beryl the Yellow Peril, a twenty-year-old hand-painted Cavalier.
‘Where on earth did you get this car, son?’
‘It’s a Splinter,’ explained Johnny. ‘From the Delta. She’s taxed and everything. No worries, I can turn round, its fine.’
‘Och well, no, on you go then, but watch yourself. The muta are out in force tonight, I’d go straight to your girlfriend’s and stay there if I were you, you don’t want to get caught up in anything.’
Johnny gave the copper a friendly smile and a wave as he pulled away, Beryl rolling sluggishly down the hill out of the Transition Zone.
‘Phew!’ he said to himself, then rolled down the windows to enjoy the tropical heat of the Delta as he moved through the Zone from a chilly night in Evermarch to the sweltering evening heat. The air was heavy and wet, his car had no air conditioning, and he was soon unbuttoning his shirt to let the air cool the sweat forming on his body.
He had been surprised to hear the policeman use such a derogatory term for the Committee, but maybe the old guy was passed caring. Even Johnny didn’t call them the muta, just for safety’s sake as much as anything else. It was probably fine, but, well, it felt rude, and you know, God was listening. It didn’t stop Joe or the other two, they were terrible blasphemers. His thoughts drifted elsewhere, to pleasant thoughts of his docile girlfriend, Stiffy, who lived out in the Projects.
‘I’ll go see Stiffy, she what she’s up to,’ he said to himself. It took another half-hour to get there, along a wide straight road that followed the coastline from the Delta to the Projects. There wasn’t much countryside in between, just patches of jungle, that extended further into the interior. The road was built up with shanties, warungs, newsagents and other small shops, business that would have been bustling with activity even at this time of night, before the reditus, but that were now all shuttered up and dark.
Stiffy was home, she was awake and alone. Her mother and sister were at the local clinic, and they would be there for another week, both were recovering from a Splinter virus.
‘It’s gone right round the Projects,’ she informed him as they lay back in bed together.
‘How are they?’ he asked.
‘It’s just a precaution, that’s what they said. The doctors are keeping everyone in that has got it. They’ll get out once they’re not infectious.’
Johnny nuzzled into her warm soft neck.
‘You can stay here for a while if you like,’ she giggled. ‘It would just be you and me.’
‘Aye, could do,’ accepted Johnny happily. It would be good to give his lungs a bit of a break from all the weed he smoked with the others when he was back at the flat.
***
Samuel had a good view from his flat on the 12th floor. It was a Project flat, small, but comfortable enough if you kept it tidy, which he did. He sat in the dark of his living room, on the only armchair, facing the window, a tall black man in his mid-thirties with short hair and clean-shaven cheeks.
He preferred to watch the Delta out of his living-room window these days, rather than the TV. There was nothing on anyway. He could see all the way across the river to Evermarch on a clear day, but tonight he was watching the goings on closer to home, down on St George Street. A squad of muta were putting up a barricade. There was already a recently built watchtower there, between the General Store and the Bridal Shop, that had been bad enough, but now it looked like they meant to start harassing people as they went about their daily business.
‘They is bringing in the curfew again, I can tell it man. They is locking it down like they did last year,’ he said to the black cat that was asleep on his knees.
He sighed and reached over to the coffee table. He re-read the letter that had come for him this morning from the Committee. All the others like it, over the last year, he had ignored, but if the muta were back out on the streets, that was another matter.
‘If they want I, they can come for I,’ he said to the cat, then crumpled up the letter and threw it in the rough direction of the kitchen bin. He tutted, and left where it lay, not wanting to disturb the sleeping cat.
Des had called earlier to say she would be round. Maybe she would and maybe she wouldn’t. With what was going on right now she would be better off lying low. She liked to move around “under cover of darkness” as she described it, so he expected her any time between now and five in the morning.
Living in the Projects he was better off than most of the people in the Delta and Des liked to come round if she could, to get away from the crowded apartment she shared with six other single women. Samuel had never been there, men were not allowed in the building, but Des had told him it was a hell-hole, damp, crowded and infested with cockroaches. There was no hot water, and the electricity was intermittent. On top of that, the other women were all nasty, always telling on each other to the muta for even the most minor of public decency infringements. Samuel and Des had dated before the reditus though, and whenever she could, she would come across to stay at his place, a palace by comparison.
At two in the morning there was the lightest of taps at his door.
‘Let me in,’ whispered Des through the letterbox, ‘Me closed up again, me doubled over with the agonies, Sam.’
He opened the door and the slight figure of his girlfriend scuttled into the flat. She then lay down on his sofa and threw her head back. ‘Me closed up again, Sam.’
He kissed his teeth and put the kettle on. Once it was boiled, he made some tea, then filled a plastic bottle with hot water and wrapped it in a towel. She sat up and took the bottle, then put it on her tummy.
‘Me sister, me mother, me cousins, we all closed up,’ she said as she literally writhed with pain on the sofa.
‘What happened this time?’ he asked. ‘Me no hear nothing.’
‘How should I know,’ she growled, ‘Some Canaanite, some Zion, some whore of Babylon, me no know, some Onanite stoned to death for spilling he seed on the ground. How should I know?’
‘Come on Des,’ said Samuel as he settled back into his chair. ‘Not this ting again.’
‘You take a look Samuel,’ she said, using his full name as she did when she was angry. ‘You know they burn the whores down in Goldengreens? They be up here next.’
‘That can’t be true, Des.’
‘You look out you window so high, but you no see these tings, Sam?’ she kissed her teeth then groaned. ‘I see these tings, Sam.’
She noticed the crumpled-up letter in the doorway to the kitchen.
‘You get another letter, Sam?’
‘From the Committee.’
‘What it say?’
‘They want I, then can come for I.’
‘You bring that letter to me now, you hear me?’ said Des with her hand out.
Sam dutifully retrieved the letter from beside the bin and handed to her. She smoothed it out, then studied it with great care and interest.
‘Why you no do what they say?’ she asked. ‘It’s no great hardship.’
‘Easy for you to say.’
‘Easy for you to do. Easier than for me. Go get the snip-snip and they leave you alone. They find out me closed up, I tell you they burn me.’
Sam muttered and turned away. Des sighed.
‘Have you eaten?’ he asked eventually.
‘How can I eat in this condition,’ she moaned. ‘You some kind of stupid man? Just put me to bed.’
When she was in Samuel’s bed, she was hardly any more content and continued to moan and prattle.
‘Me family all hiding down in the Arches. What a way to live. How you be so lucky, man? How you get a place in the Projects with all the clansmen?’
She knew well enough it was because of his job, so he continued to pat her hand and say nothing. Eventually he got undressed, then got into bed beside her.
‘Where you going?’ she asked.
‘It me own bed, woman,’ he murmured as he lay his head on the pillow.
‘Don’t be putting dat ting anywhere near me, man,’ she warned as she rolled over to face the wall.
‘Be quiet, woman,’ he sighed as he closed his eyes. ‘You talk too much.’
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