Scuffle

  Dave Hutchinson

  First published April 17, 2002 in Sci Fiction, edited by Ellen Datlow.

  He means to stick around for a while after the group splits up. The house and the hills around it have somehow become a part of his internal landscape. But it turns out he has underestimated just how much the people were a part of that landscape too, and with them gone he’s lost.

  After three weeks drifting through empty rooms and down deserted corridors the frosty sound of orphaned wind chimes starts to gnaw around the edges of his mind, the quiet candlelit nights to outline a peculiar madness, like x-rays shining through flesh.

  With the house abandoned, kids from the village start to come up at night on nasal little quad-bikes, to smash windows and fuck drunkenly in the orchards. The group had never been that popular in the village, anyway, even before the Crash—a bunch of hippy drop-outs bashing drums and indulging in free love and dope and tending their goats instead of getting themselves honest jobs. Finding Jimmy still in residence doesn’t seem to deter the kids, only makes their vandalism all the sweeter, and night after night he stands at the mullioned windows and watches them dancing about their fires.

  None of which is so bad. Paris was worse. It’s only when he finds himself, in full cammo and barely breathing, stalking them through the trees one evening with a knife taken from the kitchens and honed down to an edge you could shave a pig with, that he knows it’s over for him here.

  * * *

  The spring’s slow unwinding of roads and railways sees him drifting vaguely South out of Scotland with the available transport, thumbing lifts on carts and lorries, jumping freightliner trains, doing odd jobs here and there to keep himself in food and running money.

  For a while, he haunts the echoing abandoned steelworks of the South Wales coast. Later, he falls in with a group of lantern-eyed young people travelling, for reasons he never really discovers, from Brecon to York in a ragged convoy of makeshift gasogenes and horse-drawn caravans.

  He thinks for a while that he senses something of what he lost when the group broke up. The kids are dirty and poor and nothing in the convoy ever seems to work quite right, but Jimmy feels a certain hope among them, a certain peace he had been thinking he had lost for ever. They genuinely seem to want an alternative lifestyle, to reject the world that gave them the War and the Crash. There is even a quiet girl with a bead-bedecked flute, snug nights in her caravan while storms bombard the convoy with hail the size of lychees.

  And when they reach York the kids sell their vans, set the horses loose on the moors overlooking Ripon, and go back to their parents. The girl with the flute is spirited away by a middle-aged couple driving a bronze hydrogen-cell Mercedes, who hug and kiss her and tell her her pony is looking forward to seeing her again, and all Jimmy can do is stand there and stare as the kids leave one by one, until he’s standing alone on the grass verge again.

  * * *

  The unwinding of roads sets him down in an old methane-conversion coach, where he spends a stormy night’s breakdown at the roadside somewhere in Northamptonshire. While the other passengers snore and fidget and fart, Jimmy sits and stares at his reflection in the streaming window, until the growing pressure of his bladder forces him out into the dark and the rain.

  When he comes back, jacket over his head to try and keep himself vaguely dry, one of the passengers is at the front arguing with the driver. As Jimmy stops in the doorway to shake rain off his coat, he hears the passenger demanding to know how long they’ll have to wait here. The driver, who just wants to sleep, is saying that the mechanics have to come down from Lincoln, and with the roads the way they are there’s no telling how long it might take them to arrive.

  “I’ve got an appointment in Cambridge tomorrow morning,” the passenger says. He’s a tall, gaunt-faced man, wearing a wrinkled suit.

  “You should’ve got the fucking train, then, mate,” the driver tells him. But he says it quietly, so the other passengers don’t hear.

  The passenger looks out through the windscreen. “There must be a garage out there somewhere.”

  The driver snorts. “If you think I’m going out there to look for a garage, mate, you must be crazy. I’ve radioed my base and there’s a mechanic coming. Now do us all a favour and go back and get some sleep, eh?” And he gives Jimmy a wink as he comes back up the steps into the bus.

  The passenger reaches into an inside pocket of his jacket, pulls out his wallet, and flips it open. As Jimmy squeezes past into the aisle, he catches just a glimpse of a laminated card inside the wallet, and the eagle-and-sickle of the Rykov-Forsythe Commission embossed on it.

  He finds his seat more or less by touch, breathing hard. Sits staring at his reflection again, imagining it staring back at him from the bulletproof glass of the dock in some Tallinn courtroom. He glances up at his rucksack in the overhead rack, mentally rehearsing the moves necessary to get at the Heckler in an emergency. Just bad luck, he keeps telling himself. Just bad luck.

  He watches the Commission cop return muttering to his seat. Quite why the man is travelling by coach, when in most of the old Union they travel in heavily-armed air-conditioned comfort, will just have to remain a mystery. He’s also alone, which is unusual to say the least. But that too will have to remain a mystery.

  Jimmy sits very still for a very long time. The storm passes eastwards. Stars show themselves between racing rags of cloud.

  Finally, when he’s a certain as he can be that everybody else on the bus is asleep, Jimmy stands and takes his rucksack down from the rack and walks up the aisle. The driver is slumped back in his seat, mouth open, eyes shut, snoring. Jimmy leans forward and presses a fat red button on the dashboard.

  The hiss of the door’s hydraulics seems terribly loud to him, but it’s probably not much louder that the driver’s snoring. Jimmy steps down into a smell of rain-wet grass and trees, pushes the door closed behind him, and takes off at a right-angle to the road, along the line of a hedge marking the edge of an immense grassy field.

  * * *

  The Crash, the end of the War, caught Jimmy in a Paris straight out of a Bosch painting, civilisation entirely broken down, the city walled off from the rest of France by Occupation forces stationed in the suburbs.

  Jimmy had been slipped through the roadblocks early one drizzly morning with nothing but a knife and a length of razor-fine wire and instructions to hunt down and kill a certain woman.

  He never found out who the woman was, or why the Alliance wanted her dead. He never found her at all. The Crash and its attendant chaos drove the last fragile vestiges of law and order from Paris. Jimmy didn’t even bother to make contact with his control in the outer suburbs; once he was out of the city he just kept going.

  Sometime later he wound up in a kickboxing parlour in Cologne. For a time he made a tidy living for himself and for Rudi, the dark unsmiling Polish boy who had blown in one night and appointed himself his manager, but the gunslinger ethic of it all started to bother Jimmy. Kids were coming from all over Europe, gaunt and hollow-eyed, for a crack at the little New Zealander. And by then the Rykov-Forsythe cops had got their act together and the Hanseatic Trials were starting, and it was only a matter of time before someone performed the simple equation which identified him as a war criminal, and turned him in for the reward or to settle an old score.

  One gritty morning at the end of March, he dug his nest-egg out of the wall of a bombed-out office building and drifted away without saying goodbye to Rudi. He spent three weeks hitching unhurriedly towards Hamburg, lost among the armies of refugees washing back and forth across Europe, then another week working his way carefully to Sopot, and stowed away on a coal carrier bound for Harwich, no plan in his head but escape from the war zone.

  * * *

  Jimmy’s op cost New Zealand Special Forces a fortune; his night-vision is abnormally good, even on a rainy moonless night. He runs flat-out for sixteen or seventeen kilometres. Probably the Commission cop is so pissed-off at having missed his meeting that he won’t notice one less passenger on the coach when it sets off again, but best safe than sorry.

  Dawn catches him on a low hill overlooking a shallow valley of gently-steaming woodland. Beyond the valley, panes of mist drift gently away towards the uncertain horizon across a nearly flat chessboard of immense hedgeless fields and Forestry Commission reforestation projects, new Wildwoods planted to balance the huge expanses of scientifically-plotted crops stretching away across the drained Fens to the Anglian coast. Now the robot harvesting machinery is useless, the fields are growing mostly wild. Some corners have been ploughed and replanted, but most seem to be sinking gently back into a vaguely mediaeval state.

  Perfectly peaceful, save for a great granular cloud of crows bursting into the air to the orchestration of two shots from a 12-gauge shotgun.

  * * *

  As far as he can judge—and he can judge very well—the shots came from the vicinity of a Hans Christian Andersen cottage deep in the woods, in a clearing at the far end of a straight forestry road. He approaches it cautiously, picking his way anglewise from tree to tree until he has a good view.

  The cottage sits quiet and still, a thread of smoke twirling up from the chimney. At one side of the clearing an old Honda Landmaster stands on at least two flat tyres, bonnet up and passenger door open. He can’t see any people; on his approach, he thought he caught a flicker of motion in the corner of one of the cottage windows, but no one has shown themselves. From the cover of the trees, he watches a squirrel come up over the peak of th
e thatched roof, stand on its hind legs to sniff the morning, and drop back out of sight.

  Then everything slows down.

  He feels rather than hears it, a high breathy rushing sigh like a reflex sparking along his nerves, somersaulting him backwards from a standing start as the arrow buries itself throat-high in the tree he was standing against.

  The moment of landing is an orderly mind’s joy, like a jigsaw box spilling on a table and all the pieces spontaneously falling into place. Everything is just where it should be, suddenly in focus, every noise crisp and sharp, bare feet snapping a twig somewhere out of sight to his left, faint creak of tension in the body of the bow…

  The released string makes hardly any sound at all. He cartwheels away from the arrow, flickflacks once and tumbles into the air.

  And then something is whistling towards him while he’s still off the ground. He tries to twist away from it but a small solid mass whips up and strikes him behind the ear.

  It’s no good. He’s too rusty; those long Winter nights with the group have taken the edge off him, eroded his concentration. He stumbles as he lands, and barely has time to raise his head to see an incredibly fast grey something rushing towards him between the trees… singing…

  “Fucker!” The roar of the shotgun is horribly loud, terribly precise. “Leave him alone, you fucking bastard!” And another shot, exploding twigs and leaves off the ground barely a metre from his foot.

  And the grey thing is gone, whispering bare footsteps flittering away into the dimness under the trees as the pain approaches him out of the same grey musty distance.

  * * *

  “It’s been out there about a fortnight. It won’t let me go anywhere. There’s almost no food in the house; we keep having brownouts, I can’t freeze anything.”

  Jimmy’s still a little high after the fight. Her movements are too sloppy and imprecise in the still landscape of the kitchen. Everything is too correct, the big Aga stove, the pine table, the dark oak cupboards. Everything in its correct place, planes of mass across the room. He could go through here blindfolded, at a full run, and still not bump into anything.

  “This might hurt,” she warns, tipping a bottle of clear fluid against a cotton-wool ball. Jimmy smells the high clean sweetness of pure alcohol, winces slightly as she touches it to the bruised spot behind his ear. “Sorry,” she says.

  He shakes his head. “It’s okay.”

  “The skin’s not broken, but you’re going to have a really bad bruise here.”

  “Fine.” In the circumstances, he should think himself fortunate just to have a really bad bruise.

  She crosses to the sink, drops the cotton-wool ball into a fliptop bin, sets the bottle on the stainless-steel draining board, beside the shotgun. Her name is Bethany. She has long brown hair and tired eyes, and she never lets the twelve-gauge out of her arm’s reach.

  “You’re Australian,” she says.

  “New Zealand.”

  She leans back against the worktop. “The Americans were here. In Peterborough and Northampton. And everywhere else, I suppose. Rest and recuperation, they called it.”

  He’d forgotten that, after seceding from the Union, Britain had, after a fashion, become an Occupied country. “I don’t imagine they had much rest,” he says, thinking of France and what they had done there.

  “My Gran said it was just like the Second World War,” Bethany says. “Overpaid, oversexed and over here, she said. The Americans.” She goes over to the Aga and picks up the kettle. “I mean, she wasn’t old enough to have lived through the Second World War. I suppose she read about it in a book or saw a film about it or something. Would you like a cup of tea?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Tea.” She holds up the kettle and waggles it gently. “A cup of tea. My Gran said it’s the best thing for shock.”

  “Fine,” says Jimmy. “Whatever.” He looks over at the kitchen’s third occupant, sitting in the corner by the Aga, a little boy, maybe eight or nine years old, almost overwhelmed by a chunky white fishing sweater. The boy’s eyes flick from Jimmy to Bethany as they speak, but so far he himself hasn’t said a word.

  Bethany fills the kettle, brings it back to the Aga. “We ran out of tea bags last week. I’ve been drying out the old ones and reusing them. I hope you don’t mind.”

  Jimmy shakes his head.

  “It makes the tea a bit weak, but it still tastes all right.”

  “It’ll be fine, I’m sure.”

  “And we haven’t got any milk or sugar.”

  “I don’t use them.” Although he’ll have to have something soon, to make up for the calories he burned outside, or he’ll get hypoglycemic. He feels vaguely light-headed, and he doesn’t know whether it’s an approaching hypo, or the sheer disjointedness of the situation. Less than an hour ago, he was running across Northamptonshire, free as a bird. Now he’s locked in a cottage with a little boy and a crazy woman.

  He bows his head and looks down at the tabletop, on which is resting an arrow. It’s perfectly straight, pencil-thin, over a metre long, and flighted with grey goose-feathers. At the business end is a beautiful little leaf-shape chipped from bottle-green glass, sharper than a scalpel and bound to the shaft with leather thonging as fine as cat-gut.

  “You said it won’t let you go anywhere,” he says, looking up at Bethany. She just looks back at him, expressionless. “So, what’s happening here?”

  All of a sudden she scoops the shotgun off the draining board. “I’ve got to go to the loo,” she tells him. “Won’t be a minute.” And she disappears through the door into the hall.

  Jimmy watches her go, then he looks at the boy. “Well,” he says. “What’s it like, having a mad mum?” The boy just stares at him, wide-eyed. Possibly that’s answer enough.

  Also on the table is the thing that made the bruise behind his ear. It’s a form of bolas, three small heavy wooden balls attached to a common centre by strands of razor-wire. The balls are knobby with lovely little carvings of birds, fish, foxes, and at the point where the strands of wire meet is a little wooden handle, similarly carved. The thing had wrapped itself around a tree after almost braining Jimmy, and it had taken him fifteen nervous nitpicking minutes to get it off, Bethany keeping watch with the shotgun.

  The kettle’s jetting a thick plume of steam. Jimmy gets up and takes it off the heat. In a little tin on the windowsill are the dried teabags. Jimmy selects four of the least mangy-looking and drops them into a teapot and pours water onto them. Then he stands looking out of the window above the sink and stares at the screen of trees beyond the clearing, thinking about that momentary grey rushing thing.

  “It’s got yellow eyes,” Bethany says from the kitchen doorway. “Corn-yellow. I saw it up close once.”

  He looks round. “What’s going on, Bethany?”

  “It’s an elf,” she says calmly and matter-of-factly.

  “It’s a what?”

  “An elf,” she says. “An Earth Spirit. Don’t you have them in Australia?”

  * * *

  “It killed my husband. Out on the forestry road. I found him.” She swallows, looks away. “His head was gone.”

  Jimmy looks into the fire. The living room is small and dark, the furniture covered in clean but faded Laura Ashley fabric. The boy has followed them from the kitchen, sits on a cushion in a corner, watches them with a rapt expression on his face, as if he’s watching them composing scriptures.

  “Didn’t you call for help?” Jimmy asks.

  Bethany sniffs, runs the back of her hand under her nose. “The phones still don’t work. They haven’t got around to debugging the local exchange. Christ only knows when they’ll get the mobile network up and running again.” She looks at the window. “After I found Tom I just ran straight back here and bolted the door. I didn’t dare come out again for two days. When I did step outside, it was out there waiting. Out at the edge of the wood.”

  “And it’s kept you here ever since.”

  She nods. “If I go outside it shoots arrows at me. Sometimes it tries to get into the house.”