20

Someone was shaking me. From the position of the sun, I realised I must have been unconscious for several hours. Dundas was sitting up nearby, doused with dried blood from a severe cut above his left eye. Two strangers were standing over us – and pointing assault rifles.

The taller one had brown hair tucked beneath a bandana. Under his wispy beard was a hungry-looking but otherwise handsome face. The shorter one had two blonde plaits topped by a battered black homburg hat, around which she had twisted a colourful scarf that held in place a rosella’s feather. Both were dressed in roughly tailored buff-coloured hemp suits, crisscrossed with army webbing. On their feet were sandals of leather and rope. Hempies.

‘Sit. Pull up your trouser leg,’ she said. ‘I am the Rainbird, and this is the Seedsman.’

The one called the Seedsman slung his gun over his shoulder and handed Dundas a leather waterbag he had untied from his waist. Dundas splashed water onto my face while the Rainbird kneeled to take a look at my leg wound.

I was struggling to comprehend my situation. Looking around, I saw the overturned truck and realised we were lying next to a shallow depression filled with burnt foliage.

‘It was a drone attack,’ the Seedsman said. ‘Welcome to the new Wild West. We must hurry. They usually come back to make certain of their targets.’

The Rainbird used her long fingernails to extract the metal fragment from my calf and washed the wound with water. She rubbed my lower leg with a burning ointment and wrapped it in a compress of moss and leaves. ‘Nutrients from the forest floor, to speed healing.’ My first thought was of probable infection, but I was too dazed to resist. I noticed a badge sewn into her tunic above her left breast. It was the symbol of a stone axe crossed by an AK-47 assault rifle.

The Seedsman looked skyward anxiously. He and Dundas grabbed me under each arm and dragged me to the relative safety of the forest canopy, where the Rainbird fabricated a crude splint from branches and twine.

The hempies seemed to have a sixth sense about approaching drones. ‘Down!’ shouted the Seedsman. Through the forest roof I saw a flash of light as a missile sped from the underwing of a high-flying drone. Seconds later, an explosion ripped apart the remains of the Studebaker, sending them tumbling through the air. We were showered by falling soil, glass and rubber. No one needed to say a word. We set off immediately, not waiting for the attackers to return again.

We walked for five days. I found I could keep up reasonably well. The poultice dulled the pain, and my wound healed with amazing speed. We travelled along dry riverbeds, beside streams in trails of ancient mosses that squelched and fungi that exploded beneath our feet. We seldom sighted the sun or the stars, which were blocked out by the towering canopy that reached hundreds of yards into the air, held up by trunks the width of houses. Our captors seemed to know the trees intimately and used them to navigate. They had names for each. ‘This one is Carson’s Tree, that one Brown’s Spire, and the one over there, Gore’s Oak.’ A little later, ‘This one we named Thunberg.’ The forest to them was a pantheon of saints of the ecological movement. Each tree that thrust into the skies was a unique life-giving force that drew nourishment from the air and the sun and gifted it to the land. I was amazed that so much of this ancient landscape had escaped the attentions of loggers and tourism developers. Its survival, I assumed, had something to do with the recent invention of biodegradable plastic and the spread of digital consumer goods.

On the second day, we happened across the remains of a corrugated-iron shed, inside which lay the blade of a belt-driven timber saw and a pile of recently sawn planks. It was unmistakably 1940s technology. Four mounds of earth lay just outside the shed, and nearby was one of our lorries. The Seedsman regarded the graves coldly, unconsciously fingering the trigger of his gun. He spat. They must have been loggers from Factory 20.

‘You shot them?’ D.F. said, horrified.

‘They refused to stop logging. So now they fertilise trees instead. Keep going!’

We climbed ridgeback mountains, and the following day bathed on the sandy beach of a pristine inland lake beneath the skeletal remains of a dam wall that appeared to have been breached by a massive explosion. I had little doubt they had done it. In the evening, we sat by a campfire, eating roasted roots and fresh berries, which they collected as they walked, supplemented by a rough, grainy bread they made from the wild wheat they carried in their backpacks and cooked on hot rocks.

On the fourth day, we emerged without warning into a clearing. It was a razed timber coop – a sunlit but desolate landscape of sawn-off stumps. Where the rest of the forest was a lush mixture of green and brown, here everything was dry and grey. The Rainbird and the Seedsman froze, looking like early Christians who had suddenly stumbled into the arena of the Coliseum. They embraced, and I saw tears on their cheeks.

The Rainbird pointed her palms towards the soil, closed her eyes and began to speak. ‘Gaia, our true mother, giver of life to all things, avenge this destruction and use the bodies of the destroyers as nourishment to replenish your great cycle of splendour.’ She lay flat with her arms outstretched and kissed the earth. Standing up, she took the Seedsman by both hands and said, ‘Do not be sad. Gaia will soon give new life to the earth,’ before kissing him on the cheek.

The despoliation of the environment and the killing of living things obviously affected them deeply, yet I never doubted they would shoot us dead if necessary. I guess that’s why we didn’t run. Had we been fully fit, we could well have made a dash for it, but with my leg still causing me to limp, we wouldn’t have gotten far. At best we would have gotten lost in the immense forest and slowly starved to death. Dundas was a betting man, and we took our chances that whatever end they had in mind for us was quicker than that.

They ushered us around the clearing’s edge, careful to keep us in the shadows of the trees, away from the skies they feared so much.

I had no real idea who our captors might be, except that they were hempies, the forest people we had talked about endlessly in the revolving restaurant. But the first chance he got, D.F. filled me in. The Rainbird and the Seedsman were the noms de guerre of Virginia Bauer and Ronnie Olfstroon, two of the most famous fugitives on the planet. They had been medical students at the University of Tasmania a decade earlier, where they had joined and then fallen out with all campus-based ecological societies, eventually finding themselves operating alone. Their speciality had been the sabotage of logging machinery. Unlike other such protest groups, though, they weren’t pacifists and were happy to engage in ever-escalating violent confrontation. Eventually they established their own cell of the Earth Liberation Front, which they used to carry out a violent guerrilla campaign against the modern world from a reputed hideaway deep in the unmapped and supposedly impenetrable forests of the south-west of the state. We knew more about the surface of the moon than what lay beneath that forest roof, and no one had any real idea where they might be to within a hundred miles. Despite the many tales told about them, no official hunt had ever managed to locate their base, and it gained the mythical status of a Xanadu of the trees, where the Elves (as they called themselves) practised a socialist hunter-gatherer lifestyle, free from the social stratification, coercive alienation and sexual taboos of the industrial world. From this hideout, it was claimed, they ventured out periodically to strike blows against civilisation.

The occasional manifesto, crudely printed and distributed on university campuses, spelled out their aims, which were heavily influenced, D.F. told me, by the anarcho-primitivist philosophies of John Zerzan and Wolfi Landstreicher. Their goal was to oppose all forms of industrialisation, digitisation and division of labour – and indeed any material or social construct that had emerged since humans erected the first fence. Any artificial barrier they encountered, they pulled down on principle; any tap they passed, they bent; any optic fibre cable or electrical wire they found, they cut. Wherever they passed, the landscape resumed the shape it had prior to humanity’s emergence: rivers flowed anew, marshes reappeared and supposedly long-extinct species re-emerged from the undergrowth. The only evidence of their presence was usually broken irrigation systems, smashed rain gauges and dead cattle. Their two concessions to the post-primitive world were the AK-47 and plastic explosives, which they had used to devastating effect in a number of spectacular guerrilla raids that had turned them into global celebrities.

They had begun by blowing up hunting lodges, then logging camps and tourist accommodation. Their first forays into the cities were to destroy SUV dealerships, although they soon realised the futility of such acts of random terror – insurance companies repaired the damage, and even more of the hated vehicles were produced. They had, they realised, become unwitting tools of capitalism’s tendency to grow through creative destruction, so they became even more ambitious, targeting the infrastructure that made modern society possible. They would appear suddenly in cities to destroy power stations and sever communications systems. Data centres were favoured targets. To symbolise their struggle, their agents blew up the London Science Museum, in effect declaring war on the cultural celebration of human invention.

Their propaganda coups led to the formation of autonomous copycat cells across the world, whose terrorist activities were coordinated by passing handwritten letters between members of their chain. (With all state espionage long having become completely virtual, this method of coordination was considered almost undetectable by the state.) A European cell that was dubbed ‘the Dambusters’ blew up dams, pulled down levees, wrecked desalination plants – anything to reverse the progress of human civilisation. In one demonstration of radical rewilding, another cell reintroduced supposedly extinct wolves back to national parks. The wolves were used as bait: when hunters inevitably arrived to kill the animals, they themselves were murdered.

Their network multiplied, spreading to all continents. They and their supporters seemed to pop up at will, anywhere and everywhere, before melting away again. Having no digital footprint, all efforts to hunt them down failed.

On hearing all this, I assumed I was as good as dead.

On the fifth evening, we ate our meal by a riverbend, which had formed a pond, dappled gold. I watched enormous fish break the surface to eat the insects that swarmed with abundance.

The Rainbird put aside her gun and, using a stone axe, fashioned a spear from a tree branch. She began to hunt among the dark spaces between the rocks. I watched her climbing over boulders, navigating expertly to avoid casting her shadow over the water.

‘Isn’t all life meant to be sacred to you?’ I asked the Seedsman, who was starting a fire with flints.

‘We are all part of the same biological community, if that’s what you mean. Humans are no worthier than any other organism.’

‘You rank us with’ – I looked around and picked up a twig – ‘a leaf or a caterpillar?’

‘Or a fungus. We don’t discriminate.’

‘But you kill to eat?’

‘Every creature does. We also kill to protect the Earth.’

‘Not very pure.’

‘But fully compatible with the natural state of man nonetheless.’ The Seedsman reminded me of a priest expounding from the book of Genesis. ‘Small bands of us can live off the forests this way forever. Without meat for protein, one needs agriculture, and with agriculture comes all else: the division of labour, property, fences, cities, states, wars, smallpox, plague, the burning of coal, factory food, marriage . . .’

‘And the eventual end of humankind,’ said D.F.

‘Indeed. In the beginning was the hunter.’

‘How,’ D.F. asked, ‘did you happen to be there when we were attacked? I assume you were following us.’

‘Actually it was pure, happy coincidence. We saw the explosion and went to see what the drone had hit. When we saw it was Dundas Faussett, founder of Factory 19, we couldn’t believe our good fortune. We had plans of our own for you, of course.’

D.F. nodded, almost admiringly. ‘You’re a student of economic history, then.’

‘The factory age can’t be allowed to return, you know that. It’s what finally ruined the Earth.’

‘What about human happiness?’ I said. ‘Are you against that?’

‘Happiness has too high a cost, sometimes.’

‘And what would that cost be?’

‘The cost of a rock spinning pointlessly in the solar system for all time, with every organism, down to the tiniest microbe, dead.’

‘And you think your return to the forests and the caves won’t bring about the same result eventually? The same basic trajectory of civilisation and planetary destruction, just starting a little further back?’

‘The Neanderthal had no use for governments and economies and technology. Progress was not only unknown and unneeded; it was inconceivable. Human life stayed unchanged for tens of thousands of years. We aim to re-enter that world: to narrow the range of the possibilities open to man, to remove the necessity of progress and even the capacity to conceive it. Only that way will we reverse the damage permanently. With plentiful meat and roots, berries and grains, man will not need to farm. His physiognomy will change. The parts of his brain used for modern living will switch themselves off. Women will rule. Disease and hardship will carry off the weak. Those who can’t adapt will die. We will return to the uninhabited ruins of the failed world, and its sewers and crypts will become our new caves.’

D.F. started laughing. ‘Our Year Zero is 1948, but yours is —’

‘Year Zero.’

‘It’s been tried and failed before, Seedsman. Anyway,’ D.F. paused, ‘you already have the things that will bring you undone. The same things that bring every attempt undone: guns, explosives and human nature.’

‘We never said we were utopians.’ The Seedsman picked up his AK-47 and inspected the barrel as Galileo might have inspected a telescope. ‘Our guns are a means of beating a technologically superior civilisation, that’s all. Weapons always decide the contest between the future and the past: the first club, the bronze axe, the Macedonian lance, the musket, the rifle and the fighter jet. It’s an iron law of history. But what if, for a change, the past and not the future had the superior weapons? The past would win. A Neanderthal with a semi-automatic rifle would defeat a Homo sapien with a bow and arrow.’

‘But what about one with a predator drone?’

‘Unlike you, Faussett, that’s a battle we’re fully prepared to fight.’

The Rainbird returned with a huge fish squirming on her spear. ‘Beautiful here, isn’t it,’ she said.

‘That fish grew so big,’ said the Seedsman, ‘because we shot the loggers and miners who came to destroy the river and its catchments. That’s what our guns allow us to do. Enjoy it.’

I was feeling rather less sanguine about all this talk of murder than D.F. appeared to be.

‘What are your plans for us?’ I said.

‘We’re going to help you,’ the Rainbird answered, ‘or, rather, help each other. We have a common enemy.’ She looked up to the skies. ‘The other day wasn’t the first time they have tried to kill you, was it?’

I remembered the explosion that sank the Liberty ship. Dundas and Bobbie had intended to sleep in it that night. Someone – or something – must have been listening in.

‘The drones,’ I said.

‘My enemy’s enemy is my friend,’ said D.F.

‘Exactly, and tomorrow we’re going to take the fight to them.’

‘What with?’

‘You will see.’ The Rainbird picked up her AK-47. ‘You famously told the world, Faussett, that you would one day turn off the internet.’

‘Indeed.’

‘That’s a good starting point. But our methods’ – she crunched a fresh magazine into her weapon – ‘are rather more direct. Now eat.’