Harlan’s torch barely makes a dent in the darkness. It’s nothing more than a rag on a stick, soaked in oil and set alight. The chill wind threatens to snuff it out at any moment.
We’ve been out of the forest for an hour now, walking on what Harlan calls the Old Alaskan Highway. The surface is black and hard, unusually smooth. Some sections of it are split, plants pushing up through the cracks. It reminds me of the cliff we just climbed down.
My thigh has got worse. Not just a little worse. A lot. The pain is constant now, radiating upwards in long, sluggish waves. It’s hard to pinpoint its exact location. I don’t know how fast infection spreads, but the shards of metal still buried inside me are almost certainly speeding things along. My fingers keep straying to the cut. Even under a layer of bandage, touching it raises the pain another notch. The flesh is swollen, tight under the fabric of my pants, and the burning itch is almost unbearable.
And it’s not just my leg. My head has started to ache, pain pulsing slowly but insistently at the base of my skull. Despite the cold, I can feel myself starting to sweat. Fever. Even I know it’s the sign of a growing infection. If these people aren’t where Harlan says they are, or if they’re not willing to help…
Several times I catch myself breaking into a jog, and have to tell myself to drop back. I don’t know the way, and Harlan won’t be able to keep up with me. He’s limping, his ankle swollen from the wolf bite. My own, from the night before, seems to be OK–a couple of tiny cuts, nothing more. Compared to my thigh, it’s barely worth noticing.
But it does occur to me that Harlan needs to get his own wound treated. We haven’t spoken much since we left the forest, and I still can’t shake the guilt of having put him in danger. But he volunteered to take me, and we can’t be too far now.
A building looms up out of the gloom: a squat, single-storey box, lurking on the edge of the highway.
“Edge of town,” says Harlan. They’re the first words he’s spoken in an hour.
“How far?” I say, doing the best I can to keep the fear out of my voice.
Harlan shrugs. “Judging by the house we passed? Maybe one or two miles. Could be wrong, though–this damn fog confuses me, you know? There was this one time, I was up by the Black Rapids, tracking that deer, and got lost for—”
I interrupt him. “Tell me about these people. The ones we’re going to see.”
“They’re just people, like me.”
I take a deep breath. No point in snapping at him. “How do you know them?”
“Ran with ’em for a time. Folks tend to stick together. Gives you a better chance out here. We came up from—”
He stops.
“From?” I say
He shakes his head, a black figure cut out of the darkness by the torchlight. “Doesn’t matter. Just remember what you gotta tell ’em. Then we’ll be even, you and me.”
I’m about to press it, ask him why he left these people, why he wants me to tell them that he kept me safe. But then I hear the voice in my head, the one that whispered to me to leave Harlan to die. It’s been silent since the wolves attacked, but now it’s strident, angry, as if there’s an actual person behind the words. He’s not telling you because he’s going to hurt you. There’s something he doesn’t want you to know about. What is it, Riley? What’s in the dark?
“No,” I say to myself, shaking my head, like I’m trying to dislodge something.
“You say something?” Harlan says.
In answer, I stride past him, moving on ahead, aware that I don’t know the way but needing the movement, needing the rhythm to calm my mind. Whatever he’s done, whatever his relationship is with these people, it doesn’t matter. I don’t have a choice. I find these people, or I die. I try to ignore my headache, which feels like it’s getting worse with every step.
More buildings appear, most of them set back from the road. Like the first, they’re only one storey. Some of them have dishes and antennas on their roofs. They look like alien artefacts.
At one point, we cross under a structure, built over the road’s surface, fifteen feet off the ground. It’s only when Harlan plays his light over it that I see it’s an old sign. There are three slabs of dark green metal, each with writing on them. HAMILTON BLVD. ALASKA HWY. WHITEHORSE CITY CENTER. There’s a gap between ALASKA HWY and WHITEHORSE CITY CENTER, like a missing tooth.
Underneath the sign, there’s the oddest thing. It’s a big machine of some kind, right in the middle of the road. It’s only when I get closer and spot the wheels that I realise it’s a vehicle.
It’s like Carver’s Boneshaker, only much bigger, with a closed-in cockpit and a box-shaped back end. The metal surface is rusted, the tyres long since rotted away. Harlan pays it no attention, but as he passes its front end he runs a hand along the metal, tracing the curve, a small smile on his face. It’s a strange gesture, but before I can ask him about it he’s walking off into the darkness.
The road begins to slope downwards, off to the left. The buildings get bigger, with larger windows and double doors. The glass in the windows is mostly gone, smashed to pieces, and some of the buildings are in ruins–missing a wall, missing a roof, sometimes no more than a few broken pillars. There are more vehicles on the road, hulking and silent.
As we walk, I hear a very soft sound, a tiny clunk. Off to our right, behind one of the buildings. I stop, listening hard. The sound doesn’t come again.
“Harlan,” I say. “You hear that?”
“What?”
The town is completely still. I shake my head. “Nothing.”
Whatever it was, we don’t have time to investigate. We keep walking, heading further into town, but with each step I feel like someone is watching me. Several times I look round, thinking I’ll catch a shadow moving between the buildings. But there’s nothing.
I feel like it’s just my imagination, but then I realise that I’m getting used to the darkness–either that or the buildings are reflecting a little light, amplifying it. I can see further down the road, and I can even make out another sign alongside it. The sign reads TWO MILE ROAD.
“Not long now,” Harlan says. “Almost at the river.”
A few minutes later, we hit the river itself. I’m expecting a massive body of water, but what I’m not expecting is that it’s choked with objects. Barrels, pieces of wood, floating structures that looked like waterborne versions of the buildings we’ve been passing. And there are things in the river that look a little like the vehicles on the road, only without wheels.
Boats. That’s what they are. For the first time in what feels like forever, I actually smile. Back when I ran with the Devil Dancers on Outer Earth, we had one book: Treasure Island. We’d all read it a dozen times, burying ourselves in stories about giant ships crossing the Spanish Main, on the hunt for—
The smile drops off my face. That book is long gone. So are the Devil Dancers. There’s just me, and if I don’t focus, I’ll be gone, too.
We cross a bridge over the river. Parts of it are gone, gaping holes in the surface, and we have to be careful as we walk around them. I manage better than Harlan, moving on the balls of my feet.
As I make my way across, I see a particularly strange boat, one I didn’t notice before. It’s a white, enclosed cylinder, with a cockpit up front. The cylinder is supported by two smaller ones, bobbing on the surface of the water. Along the sides of the cylinder, near the top, the metal is torn, as if something was ripped off it.
There’s a light reflected in the cylinder’s surface.
It’s there and then it’s gone–one second, no more. At first, I think it’s Harlan’s torch, but it was too steady, nothing like the flickering flames. What I saw is the reflection of an electric light.
Harlan saw it, too. When he turns to me, his eyes are bright. “They’re still there. They didn’t leave!”
I don’t get a chance to answer. Harlan starts jogging, heading up the road towards the light. “Come on,” he shouts over his shoulder.
The road curves sharply, and there’s more forest on my right–we must be at the other edge of town. And then I see the building, bigger than any we’ve come across before, fat and boxy. There’s a sign on the side of the road: WHITEHORSE CITY HOSPITAL.
Our path opens up onto a wider apron in front of the building, strewn with abandoned cars. My eyes have adjusted to the dark now, and I can see the double doors set into the front of the building.
Harlan slows down as we reach the doors. He’s bent over, wheezing, but as I come to a stop alongside him he flashes me a huge smile.
“They’re really here,” he says. His accent has grown thicker, spurred on by his excitement. He pushes open the door. “We’ll get inside, we’ll sit down with ’em, and then they can take those things out of your leg. Then you tell ’em–tell ’em how Harlan saw you right. Tell ’em how—”
His words are cut off as a bullet blows a chunk of concrete out of the floor.