Crispin's Army

As she toiled uphill behind Crispin, Josie felt quite extraordinary. Everything happening to her had an unreal quality to it, and she felt as if she might at any moment wake up in her own bed, wondering at the strangeness of it all. She had killed. She had killed the Security man on the ground, and however many there had been in the helicopter. And, horror of horrors, whoever had been in the house had surely been incinerated.

She stopped, bile burning in her throat, clasped herself about the waist and threw up into the grass until she had nothing left to throw.

Crispin stopped his furious pace and came back to her. He placed a solicitous arm round her shoulders.

“It’s all right,” she gasped, brushing a strand of that nondescript brown hair from her eyes. “I just haven’t killed anyone before. It comes as a bit of a shock. That’s all.”

“I understand,” said Crispin. “I went through it too. But we can’t stop. The cloud’s almost on us.”

Josie stared at the ugly cloud skimming the hills. Was that part of why she had been sick? “Keep going,” she instructed. “I can keep up.”

She wiped her mouth with her sleeve, and they resumed their cracking pace.

They were rising up through a broad meadow thick with summer wildflowers and butterflies, and somewhere bees were humming. This too was something new and strange for Josie. Throughout her life, her feet had never known anything but unyielding man-made surfaces, her eyes had never seen anything but vistas of human creation. She had never been close to the hills before, let alone venturing into them.

In that she was very much an average Urbian. And now she cast her eyes about, drinking in every detail of the landscape, and realised with a start that like every other of the millions of city-dwellers, she had never felt the least desire to discover what lay up here.

It would have been nice, she mused, to explore it under other circumstances.

They entered the woods, and the sensation was different again. Gone was the infinite openness Josie had found so alien. Here they were hemmed in on all sides, something she was so much more familiar with and somehow more comfortable with. But it was not buildings or people that surrounded them, but trees, trees in greater profusion than she had ever seen in her life, and trees that were individuals, with gnarled and twisted trunks, wrinkled bark and thick moss, so unlike the trees lining city avenues, trees that looked as if they had come off a production line.

Her reverie was interrupted by the sound of a helicopter approaching from the rear.

“Down!” Crispin yelled, and pushed her roughly to the ground. “Lie on your back, and cover your face with your arms.”

Josie did as she was told. The helicopter passed low over the treetops, circling, watching. Then it moved away.

“Why do we hide our faces?” said Josie.

“You’d be surprised how a human face stands out,” said Crispin. “I wonder if they saw us? These breastplates may shield us from radiation, but they betray our presence here in the country. If there were mud we could smear them with it to disguise them, but there hasn’t been any rain for a couple of weeks. The ground is dry.”

“We could cover them with branches,” Josie suggested. She moved to get up, and the leaves of a thick clump of plants brushed her face, the only exposed skin she had.

“Watch out for the stinging nettles,” Crispin said with a smile.

Josie scowled at the irritation on her cheek. Crispin plucked a dock leaf and proffered it. “Rub it with that,” he said.

She rubbed her face with the leaf. It felt cool, and began immediately to soothe.

“Better?” Crispin asked.

“Yes,” said Josie, with a note of surprise in her voice. “One plant cures the ills of another. That’s clever.”

“What’s even cleverer,” said Crispin, smiling, “is that they always grow close together.”

He held out his hands. She took them, planted her feet over his, and he hauled her upright. They hastily gathered some greenery and twined the stalks through the D-rings of each other’s breastplates to at least break up the effect of a convex mirror announcing their whereabouts.

“Here,” said Josie, pulling the potassium iodide pellets out of her pocket. “Take another one of these. Just to be on the safe side.”

“What are they?” Crispin asked.

“Potassium iodide,” Josie explained. “The radiation hits the thyroid gland and causes cancer. This stuff saturates the thyroid and keeps that from happening. It’s about the only real protection there is.”

Crispin gave her the look of dismay she had seen so many times before when something was utterly beyond his comprehension.

She smiled and patted him on the back. “Don’t worry about trying to understand it. Here.” She tapped the packet and a pellet dropped into the palm of his hand. He swallowed it, and Josie took one also. “It looks as if we need each other to survive.”

“I think we always will,” Crispin said softly. “And I don’t just mean for practical things.”

They pushed on. As she watched Crispin forge a path in front of her, Josie had the distinct impression that in spite of his garb and his urban accoutrements, here was a man who had returned to his natural environment. This place which was so unfamiliar to her was home territory to this man who had been so gauche in the city. She felt a warm glow of confidence, an assurance that however hostile the way ahead, she could depend on him to bring her through.

As the day wore on, the climb got steeper, and the forest sparser. The soil was thinner and poorer, with the underlying quartz-studded granite breaking through at ever more frequent intervals. The trees were reduced to stunted dwarf specimens in sheltered spots among the rocks.

Josie looked back. They had managed to climb above the level of the fallout cloud, which now extended like a veil from horizon to horizon. Through its murk she could perceive the city, far below, viewed in its immensity, and away in the far distance, scudding white clouds, natural clouds, and the pallid glint of sunlight on the sea.

Walking became climbing, and Crispin was tireless, driven on by the urge to distance himself as far as possible before dark from the city, its poisonous eructation and its equally poisonous law enforcement agency. As he moved onward, his eyes constantly scanned the mountains ahead, picking out a route that might offer both speed and minimal danger.

As they reached the snow line, Josie gave a cry of alarm. A helicopter appeared far below, moving close in to the mountainside, hovering occasionally, then moving on. There was no place it could land. Finally, as Crispin and Josie watched, it settled as low to the ground as it could and hovered, disgorging a party of eight armed men. They were all wearing radiation protection suits and masks.

As the helicopter flew off, four of the men began working their way down the slope while the others climbed.

“What do we do?” said Josie. “Wait here and pick these four off?”

“No,” said Crispin. “There’s too much cover. One of them would be sure to call for help, and then we’d have armies of them on our necks. We’ll have to keep going. It’s unfortunate that we’ll be leaving them a trail in the snow, but that can’t be helped. Come on, let’s get moving.”

And they moved on into the snow. The slope was dotted with bushes that rose up, thickly coated with drifted snow on their windward sides, like ranks of strange snowmen, giving some cover to Crispin and Josie as they climbed.

“One thing’s for sure,” said Josie. “Those suits will be cumbersome and hot. It’ll take them maybe two hours before they find our tracks.”

“That’s right,” said Crispin. “Let’s take advantage of those two hours.”

A majestic peak rose directly before them, with high cloud drifting over its shoulders. Crispin began a leftward traverse towards the more promising looking of those shoulders.

Presently they passed beyond the vegetation onto featureless open snow. After a few minutes, Josie glanced back and glimpsed the men altering their course, moving to the left.

“They’ve seen us!” she shouted.

“Not surprising,” said Crispin. “We must look like a couple of ants crawling across a sheet of paper. No doubt there’ll be a chopper along in a minute to pick us off. Have your zapper ready.”

They moved upwards, their boots crunching into firm, compact snow.

“Must’ve been good weather recently,” Crispin observed. “No soft fresh stuff on the top. That can’t last, even in summer. With our luck there’ll probably be a storm tonight.”

Glancing every few minutes to check on the progress being made by their pursuers, the two fugitives made steady progress up the shoulder, but they were tiring. Little by little, the four figures behind them were gaining ground. But no helicopter appeared.

The shoulder, they discovered, took the form of a steep ridge, with a sharp drop on the other side into a hanging valley, a small U-shaped valley truncated at its lower end by a larger valley cutting across it, carved millenia before by the action of a glacier as it made its grinding progress towards the sea.

With painful slowness, they edged up the spine of the ridge, maintaining hand and footholds with great difficulty, forced on by the need to remain out of the range of the weapons being carried by those coming after them.

At last they had scaled enough of the ridge to be able to drop onto the gentler plane of the slope at the head of the hanging valley. Awkward and breathless, they trudged across the snow.

A shot rang out. Josie cried out and slumped forward in the snow.

“Josie!”

“It’s okay,” she gasped. “It hit the breastplate. I’m not hurt. It just knocked the wind out of me a bit.” She hastily got to her feet. “But they’re in range. Just. Quick, get them with the zapper.”

Crispin helped her pull the zapper off her shoulder. Another shot sizzled into the snow at his feet. He took aim at the figures on the ridge, suddenly aware of how his arms were trembling with the cold and fatigue.

He fired. A puff of white appeared on the lee side of the ridge, close to the leading man. Close enough to unnerve him. With a cry he lost his footing and careered down the slope in a fury of flying snow, leaving a jagged furrow behind him, and came to a halt in the valley bottom, some sixty metres below.

All eyes remained on him, those of his comrades and those of Crispin and Josie. For a few moments he lay still, then he waved an arm feebly.

“He’s alive,” said Josie.

“Yes,” Crispin agreed. “With who knows what broken bones and other injuries. But we must get moving.”

They began climbing again. The three remaining men on the ridge began scaling it with renewed determination. But they did not use their weapons again, realising that they were in the more vulnerable position.

They had only been climbing for a couple of minutes when the long awaited sound of a helicopter motor came to them through the still alpine air. Josie prepared the zapper once more as the machine rose up towards them.

It levelled off when it was parallel with them, banked, and attacked, sweeping in towards them with guns blazing. Bracing herself with one leg extended and the other knee pressed into the snow, Josie returned fire, while Crispin aimed blaster fire at the men on the ridge, ensuring they kept their heads down.

Mortar fire from the chopper produced a trail of craters in the snow as if an invisible giant were stamping through it, making for Josie and Crispin with all speed.

“Make it good, Josie!” Crispin called, his voice tremulous with fear.

Josie fired. The windscreen of the chopper shattered, the firing stopped, and it broke off the attack, swooping low over Josie’s and Crispin’s heads, perilously close to the snow, then curled out in a wide arc and dropped into the valley, settling close to the injured man lying there.

“Can you knock her out from here?” said Crispin.

“No problem,” said Josie. “Just keep an eye on those jokers on the ridge.”

She opened fire on the helicopter just as its pilot was about to venture out. He ducked back into the cockpit and gunned the motor. But Josie’s fire had shattered his rotor blades, and the centrifugal force flung them far afield, to stand embedded in the snow like black fingers.

“Good shooting,” said Crispin. “Let’s go.”

And they renewed their struggle up the mountain. With the heat off temporarily, the three men on the ridge also began to move, endeavouring as far as possible to remain sheltered behind its crest.

The pursuit continued up the broad saddle-shaped pass. And still the pursuers were closing the gap quite perceptibly.

“I don’t know what we’re going to do,” Crispin gasped. “They’re obviously fresher and probably fitter than us, and there’s nowhere to give us cover.”

They fought through a wall of pain that stabbed through their ribs like stilettos, gained their second wind, and put on a spurt, aided by the gradual softening of the slope which, ultimately, flattened entirely. It was beginning to get dark. Crispin recognised that the bitter cold of night on the mountain would prevent them running, and if they could find no hiding place they would have to choose a spot to make a last stand.

Somewhere far off to their right, they heard a muted detonation.

“What was that?” Josie puffed.

“Avalanche,” said Crispin. “Common enough.”

“What happens?” said Josie.

“Big mass of snow gets too heavy, slides down the slope. Save your breath. Going to need it.”

And they ran, hearts pounding, lungs bursting in their chests, blaster shots thumping into the snow to left and right, unnervingly close. One shot pinged off Crispin’s breastplate.

They were taken by surprise when the terrain suddenly began to drop away steeply in front of them. Their leg muscles, unused to such unremitting exertion, were giving them painful cramps. They reluctantly ground to a halt.

Crispin glanced back at the three men labouring through the snow, hot on their heels. Then he considered the lie of the land before them. Their bodies would not permit them to negotiate such a slope at speed.

“If only there was some way we could move faster,” Crispin mused. Then he snapped his fingers, or at least, made the motion, his gloves preventing any actual snapping. “I have an idea. Take off your breastplate. Quick!”

Puzzled, Josie did as he urged. “What are we doing?” she asked.

Crispin smiled enigmatically. “Something I haven’t done since I was a child. Lay your breastplate face down like so. Make sure the zapper is safe across your back. And just do as I do.”

So saying he began pushing his breastplate through the snow, and when it had gained momentum, he jumped on it and sat down. With many misgivings, Josie imitated his actions, uttering a cry of horror as she was carried down the slope at breakneck speed. She felt like screaming as she pitched down the slope, her coccyx buffeted relentlessly by every lump and dip in the packed snow beneath her, and she wondered how long she could endure.

She saw Crispin hurtling ahead, his greater weight propelling him down the slope with far greater velocity. She wondered how on earth they were going to stop, other than by hitting something large and solid.

As the land dropped away to her left, she became aware of something approaching from that direction, still white, but a different terrain, cutting a swathe through the landscape like a great river. Crispin had seen it too, and was making moves to evade it by jerking to the right, but to no avail. When a collision was clearly inevitable, Crispin threw himself from his breastplate and went ploughing through the snow.

He picked himself up and signalled to her to throw herself sideways as he had done.

I’m going to die, she thought, as she lunged forward with arms outstretched, and felt chest, hips and knees jolt against hard packed snow. She slid on, unable to stop herself, until she collided with a low hummock of softer snow, stopped and lay still, feeling as if every bone had become disconnected from its neighbour.

“Josie!”

Crispin’s voice seemed to be coming from far away. Her ears were full of sound, but she couldn’t tell whether it was coming from within her head or from without. She spat out a mouthful of snow and turned her head painfully to see him stomping towards her with an idiotic grin on his face.

He put his hands under her armpits and hauled her bodily to her feet. She felt woozy, and clung to him for support.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“I think so,” she replied, endeavouring to get her legs to work again. “Did you say you used to do that as a child?”

“Not on such dangerous slopes, though,” Crispin admitted. “It’s called tobogganing.”

“I’d call it suicide, myself,” said Josie, wondering if Crispin had injured his head in his fall.

“But look,” Crispin enthused. “Look how far we’ve come. And look again. There’ll be a blizzard along in a minute or two that’ll cover our tracks nicely.”

Josie looked. “Yes,” she conceded. “There’s nothing like a bit of lateral thinking to get you out of a jam.”

“Come on,” said Crispin, pulling her by the hand. “There’s a bank over here where we can dig a snow cave. But we’ll have to work quickly.”

They took off their helmets and used them as shovels, burrowing into the snow as the first swirls of the blizzard fell on them.