Jade leads me through the warren of alleys and side streets until we emerge onto a main thoroughfare. The rucksack already feels heavy against my shoulders, pressing against my back and slipping my shirt back and forth across damp skin. The cream I had applied is already redundant, and I feel as though my skull is growing ready to split the skin from my head. There’s no real protection any more other than staying out of the sun altogether, and skin cancer is the least of my concerns.
The streets are surprisingly quiet, and the few people there are seem to be milling aimlessly rather than actually going places. I see several people who are obviously not Greek. None of them appear sane. They scrabble in the dust for dog-ends, fighting over a few flakes of rough tobacco. Growths have turned their bodies into grotesque parodies of people, walking warts that gibber and leak from various orifices, both natural and disease-given. I catch up with Jade and walk by her side, her presence giving me a comfortable sense of safety. She’s seen all this before, she knows what to expect; she can handle herself.
I wonder whether these people came to be cured.
“They’re all wasters,” Jade says in answer to my thoughts. The expression reminds me of the uniformed man who had helped me from the boat, the way he had spoken of the piled corpses. “Some of them were given the opportunity, apparently, but they wasted it. Now, they’re down to this. They even worship the Lord Ships.” She seemed to have slipped into her own personal conversation, excluding me even before I replied. “Strange how we regress so easily.”
“But they must know about the Lord Ships?” I say, confusion twisting my voice into a whine.
“Hmm?” Jade looks at me as if she’d forgotten I was there, and a brief pang of resentment stabs at my chest. She wasn’t like this last night, not when she was riding me, sweating her lust over me. “Oh, yeah, they know,” she says. “That’s what I mean. They know the Lord Ships are unmanned, automatons, pilots dead or gone. But they’ve been here for a while, and I suppose in their state the fears of the locals drive their certainties back out.”
We pass a group of young men and women who regard us with a mixture of anger and fear. I can understand what they have to be angry with — aliens in their country, invaders in a world shrinking back to almost tribal roots — but what do they fear?
“Why don’t the locals know about the Lord Ships?” I ask.
“Oh, they do. They just choose not to believe it.”
I can scarcely credit this myself. The fact that a civilised people can let themselves be controlled by ghosts from the past, willingly prostrating themselves at the feet of dead gods, knowing all the time that their actions are a sham. I ask Jade why this is so. I do not like the answer I receive.
“God is dead,” she says. “That’s what anyone here will tell you if you ask them. Do you know what these people have been through since the Ruin? Their population was halved by CJD-two; the Turks decided to nuke the north of the island for the hell of it; and at the end, when it all went totally fucking hay-wire, the Lord Ships condemned them as heathens and witches. Sentenced to death. It was only the fall of the Lord Ships that saved them.”
“And now they worship them all the more since they’re dead and gone?”
“As I said,” Jade confirmed through a sardonic smile, “God is dead. He let them be dragged through hell, now they hate Him for it.”
“Do you believe he’s still there?” I ask. I surprise myself with my frankness about a subject I feel so confused and cynical about. I have never believed in God. I have my own faith.
“I have my own faith,” Jade says quietly.
I think of Della, smile, wonder where she is now, what she’s doing. Sitting back and sharing her infinite wisdom with some other sucker, no doubt. A pang of jealousy tickles my insides, but I force it out and tell myself that Della would hate me for it.
“Here we are.” Jade has stopped in front of what was obviously once an affluent hotel. Now, it seems exclusively to house street-women between the ages of fifteen and fifty. A dozen of them are sitting in broken chairs on the cracked patio and they appraise me, laughing and jeering, as I step behind Jade. My face colours, but I secretly enjoy the attention. Last night has kick-started my libido.
Jade talks to the women in Greek and waves profuse thanks as she backs away from the hotel. I back away with her, wondering whether it’s a ritual of sorts or simple politeness, but the women are laughing again. A dog runs by and nearly trips me up. It’s a mangy mutt, but seems well fed. I remember the pile of corpses along the harbour and wonder what it’s been feeding on, and any sense of humour quickly flees. The women seem to sense this and stop laughing.
“Follow me,” Jade says, somewhat impatiently.
“Where?”
“Bikes.” She strides around the corner of the hotel.
In what used to be the swimming pool there are at least a hundred bicycles of all shapes and sizes, ranging from a rusty kiddie’s tricycle, to a three wheeled stainless steel monster that would have set me back a month’s salary in the days before the Ruin. I wonder what the owner would want for it now. The bikes fill the pool, a tatty metallic pond of tortured frames, tired tyres and accusing spokes. Dust has blown down from the depleted hillsides and formed drifts at the edges of the pool, like frozen waves trying to reclaim it. I see the remains of what I’m sure is a dead dog, buried beneath the network of wheels, handles and pedals. I try to imagine its panic as it realised that the strange, surreal landscape it had slunk into had effectively trapped it. It must have been cooked to death by the relentless sun.
“You Yankee?” says a huge man sitting under an awning.
“No, English,” Jade replies instantly. I’ve already been here long enough to know that there must be a reason for her denying her birth.
“Good. I hate Yankee. Fuckin’ killing bastards.” Jade nods and smiles, and this seems to secure her in the big man’s favour.
“We’d like a couple of bikes, if you have any to spare,” she says, unfazed by his vicious outburst.
He laughs, a sound that would have seemed ridiculously overplayed had it not been for the machine pistol dangling from his belt. As he bellows his mirth at the sky, I take the opportunity to size him up. He’s not just big, he’s massive, at least twenty-five stone, all of it sweaty and sickly and grey. He’s wearing a pair of Bermuda shorts which are grotesquely too small, cutting into his flesh and stretching out in places like the skin on an overcooked sausage. With each shudder of his body, I fear they will burst. His bare chest is studded with black, oozing growths. I’m amazed at how hearty he seems.
“You want bikes? I have bikes! “ He waves his hand at the pool, as if drawing our attention to a fine display of quality antiques. In a way, I think to myself, they are. “But the final question as always, lady? Price?”
“I’ve got your price,” she says, heaving her rucksack from her shoulders. Her loose shirt flaps open and I catch a glimpse of her breasts swinging freely as she bends down. I suddenly fear what this fat man’s price will be, and wonder how close I would get before he could unclip the gun from his belt.
“I’ll take the shiny trike and the hefty mountain bike,” Jade says, pulling a small package from the backpack.
“Hmm, big spending if you want those, little lady,” Fat Man says. I hear something I don’t like in his voice — it is quieter, more serious — and tense as he stretches his neck in an effort to see down Jade’s top. The Sickness picks a bad time to announce its presence to me, jabbing at my chest with white-hot fingertips of pain. I groan and swoon, but pinch a twist of skin on my leg to prevent myself from fainting.
Jade glances back at me and moves off towards Fat Man. She whispers something to him, actually standing on tiptoe so that she can speak into his ear, one hand resting on his pendulous stomach. I can barely imagine how she could give him a better chance to grab at her, but he does not. Instead, the grimness of his face falls away under the emergence of an expression so childlike and angelic that I almost laugh out loud.
Jade turns, looks at me, nods towards the pool of bikes. I wonder what the hell she has shown him. I sidle sideways and lean across the heap of metal, grabbing the handlebars of the stainless steel trike and tugging hard.
Within minutes we are away, the Fat Man calling cheerfully after us and telling us to watch out for the fuckin’ murdering Yankee.
Jade takes the mountain bike, I’m on the trike. I’m surprised to find it well oiled and maintained, the brakes old but well-adjusted, saddle soft and pliable.
“Two questions,” I start, but both are obvious. She eases back until she is pedalling alongside me. We are travelling two-abreast along the main road, but there is no motor traffic.
“He hates Americans because the rest of the world does,” she says. “We’re blamed for it all. The wars. The starvation. The Ruin.” She’s silent for a moment, and I’m about to ask my second question when she continues. “He should visit the States sometime, see what’s left of it.” She pedals harder and slips down a gear, motoring on ahead. Her move offers me a pleasing view of her rump, flexing as her legs pump her along the degenerating tarmac.
“Second question,” she says, “is what did I give him? Right?” She glances back over her shoulder and I nod. “None of your fucking business.” I try to hear a joke in her voice, but there is none. Or if there is, she can hide it well.
We pedal for an hour in silence, Jade leading, me following comfortably on the trike. More than once I think of asking her whether she wants to swap, but my body is stiffening and burning as the infected blood from the growths on my chest surges once more into my veins. One day, a surge like this will kill me. One day soon — perhaps today, riding this bike, my feet describing thousands of circles an hour — black blood will leak from a growth and block an artery, popping a dozen blood vessels at a time until I die. If I’m lucky, it may only take a minute or two.
On the outskirts of the town we pass through the ribbon of huts and tents which go to make up the camps for the un-homed. Eyes follow us on our way, but there is little real interest there. Even the children I see appear old, apathetic and grim instead of lively and playful. We pass a body at the side of the road. A sick fascination forces me to slow down so that I can properly see the dog chewing on its open stomach. There are lizards here, too, darting in and out of the empty eye-sockets to dine on the delicate morsels within.
We pass by. Jade seems unconcerned, but I cannot help but stare out over the sea of torn tents and makeshift hovels. There are families of eight living in one tent; great open ditches full of shit and flies and the discarded bodies of the dead; queues to gather water from a meagre stream, the liquid resembling diseased effluent rather than water. Smells assault us physically, the stench clenching my stomach and throat in its acidic grip. But throughout the ten minutes it takes us to pass through the shantytown, Jade does not slow down once. She does not glance to either side. She does not seem to care.
She has seen it all before.
As we leave Malakki Town and head into the surrounding hills, there is a change. I can feel it in the air, a potential of something that I cannot describe or adequately read. Jade senses it too, and she keeps glancing back at me as if afraid I have begun to lag behind. In truth, I feel as energetic and excited as I have for months, a power pumping through my muscles which has more to do with my sense of freedom than the potential cure I am travelling towards.
The new aura of well-being makes me think about the night before: the passion we had for each other, as if love were at a dirth.
There is a gunshot. Jade’s bike swerves, then leaves the road, flipping over into the dry ditch. I hear a scream, and for a terrible few seconds I cannot tell whether it is Jade’s voice, or my own. Then more gunshots, breaking the air apart like the answer to a silent question.