The Gone-Away World Read Online Free PDF Page B

and broad like a Swiss Alp, dropped his trousers and pissed on our front right tyre for luck. Annie the Ox and Egon Schlender hollered and hallooed from number six, and Gonzo dropped his shorts too, exposing a muscular arse in their direction, then leaped into the truck and punched the starter. I had my feet on the dash and I was sending up a tiny prayer to the God who ruled my personal heaven.
    Lord, I want to come home.

    M OSTLY when we left the Nameless Bar, we headed westwards along the Pipe. Exmoor was a mile or so south of the main trunk road, and the mountains kicked up funny weather, so eighty or ninety miles in the other direction was one of the pinch points in the Zone where you paid close attention to the people you saw in case they weren’t really people at all. Every so often, traders came through town, and there was a special guesthouse in the back of the Nameless Bar where Flynn put the ones he wasn’t sure about. It was comfortable and safe, but it was further from his family. Flynn’s a decent man, but a cautious one.
    This time, we went east, very fast. Bone Briskett’s tank was the kind with wheels which can do a decent speed, and he was getting everything he could out of it and asking for more. We drove through the night, and either they’d cleared the road or no one was coming the other way. We hurtled through a steep-sided valley and on along the pinch. The wind was blowing in our favour, off the mountains and away, but even so you could see a broad misty curtain to the south, maybe five miles distant, strange shadows twisting and turning. In a few miles, we could turn left, under the Pipe, and there was a loop of road which would bring us north-eastwards fast. I waited. We didn’t take it.
    Instead we drove on, and on, and on, and the dawn was building in the sky, and I started to get that feeling which says “Be ready” because there was one route out here which would bring us over towards Haviland City and full onto a big thick section of the main Pipe. It was an old road, and it would get us there damn fast, but we’d never taken it before because it went through Drowned Cross. I nudged Gonzo and he glanced at me, then shrugged. Drowned Cross was bad country, the far edge of the Border. That was why it was empty, and dead.
    We rolled out onto a flat meadow, and there was no more desert. A wide green plain stretched into the distance in front of us, cut by a grey line like a dowager’s eyebrow which departed from the main trunk and headed south. Bone Briskett’s tank took the corner without slowing, and Gonzo tutted—whether at this haste or at our destination, I didn’t know, but I could feel him paying more attention, looking at narrow places on the road and measuring them with his eyes, checking the escort and wondering whether they were good enough.
    Right after the Reification and the Go Away War, there was a period of what you might call undue optimism. One particular town was built with two fingers up to the recent past, first of a new breed of bright, safe places where we could all get on with real life again, pay tax and worry about our hairlines and middle-aged spread, and is the guy next door flouting the hosepipe ban during the summer heat? They called it Heyerdahl Point, and they sold it as an adventure in neo-suburban frontiersmanship. About five thousand people lived there. It had its own little capillary of the Jorgmund Pipe making it secure, and it perched on a hilltop so the people there could look down on the valleys below, and out into the dangerous mists of the unreal, and know that they were pushing back the boundary just by being here.
    â€œOne day,” they could say to one another over decaf, “all this will be fields.”
    Now it was called Drowned Cross.
    We came around a curve, and there it was, tucked up on its little hill and dark and empty as your dog’s kennel after you take him to the vet and say