Doctor Who_ Cat's Cradle_ Warhead - Andrew Cartmel [64]
Using only the very tip of the blade, with utmost care, she gently tipped the bee over. It crawled around groggily, then lay still. Justine considered for a moment then went back to get her canteen. There was even less water in it than she’d thought. It made the pale surface of the stone a deep rich grey as she poured it around the bee, careful not to pour any directly over the insect itself. She kneeled and watched while the bee moved around on the wet patch of stone. For a time it seemed the bee was growing weaker. At one point it stopped moving altogether and she held her breath. Then the buzzing started again, louder than before, and the bee jigged sideways, hovered and lifted into the air. It floated above the stone then shot away like a bullet. Justine smiled. She lifted the empty canteen to her lips and licked a final drop off the screw thread rim. Taste of metal in her mouth. She breathed the residual cool moisture from the dark tin interior. It didn’t matter. It was almost three o’clock.
At three o’clock – and then again at seven – it would rain.
* * *
The rain began two minutes late, a drumming on the leaves above her. The leaves of her tree. She was halfway down the hillside now, deep in the middle of the woods. Justine had found the ruins on the morning of the second day of her vigil. Not really ruins, just the traces of foundations and two crumbling fragments of dry‐stone walls. The trees were thickest here and Justine had found one particular tree that became her own. She estimated that the farmhouse had been abandoned two or three hundred years ago.
There had been a mill here, too. She knew that because of the stone. The big circular millstone which someone had left leaning against a tree one afternoon in another century. Leaning against her tree. A weathered old millstone. It was evocative of an older, saner world. Farms and the sort of farmers she associated with pastoral ad campaigns for wholemeal bread. Justine wasn’t fooled. A mill was a machine. It was part of a system of exploitation. A rape that had begun centuries ago and was slowly turning into murder. But there was still a chance to resist. The way the tree was resisting. It was absorbing the stone, the bark slowly enclosing and swallowing it. One day there would be only the tree and you’d never know the stone had been there.
The leaves were heavy with the continuing rainfall, branches bowing down with the weight of it. As Justine moved through the trees some of the high leaves shed water, a secondary rainfall soaking her combat jacket until it was heavy and cold across her shoulders.
The rain had fallen at three o’clock, seeded from the clouds by small aircraft. In four hours they would fly again. Fertilizing the sky. It was a sort of machine, really, a water pump in the sky intended to replenish England’s parched aquifers. It wasn’t natural rain. And it wasn’t working.
Justine grasped a handful of twigs and pulled the branch down to her face. She held it carefully so as not to tear the leaves off it. Rainwater streamed off the waxy leaf surfaces, spilling down to her open mouth. The leaves were soft on her lips and fragrant. The water was cold on her tongue and had a faint bitterness. It was acid rain from the industrial heart of the continent, the Ruhr and Rhine, carried back across the English Channel by the new weather systems. A reversal of the old order. Justine remembered the days when the acid rain had come from England and drifted to the woods of Scandinavia. She thought of days before that when the rain had come at random and you could drink it. Really drink it. Days before she’d been born. The rainwater she was tasting now contained tiny but measurable amounts of cadmium, dioxin, lead, and plutonium. She drank until her thirst was gone. There were