Spares - Michael Marshall Smith [108]
The stillness was broken by a ripple that passed through the whole group. The ones nearest to me took little running steps forward, until they were right up against my legs. The ones behind pressed closer in, and I was about to scream when I realized what was happening. They were greeting me, and greeting me as a friend.
Silent smiles broke out on gray faces, all directed at me, and small arms reached up to touch my coat and arms. Not a single sound came from any of them, though their mouths opened and shut as if they were speaking. It was like being surrounded by a cloud of moisture that kept resolving and dissolving into hands and arms and faces. There were girls, and boys—some in their early teens, others little older than babies. Coming so soon after the thoughts I’d had while being Gone Away, their apparent affection was so unexpected as to be almost unbearable. It was as if I’d been brought back from being Gone Away to be shown exactly what it was I was missing.
Or, perhaps, that I could have it again.
After a while the contact stopped, and the group parted in front of me. The original boy led me forward again. The rest of the group was turning that way, too, as if preparing to move off with us.
Letting my other hand run briefly over the insubstantial gray hair of the nearest little girl, I took my mind off the hook and decided to follow them to wherever they wanted to go.
At the time I strongly believed that the children would be the most surprising sight The Gap had to offer. Half an hour later I was proved wrong.
We walked through the forest in silence, the boy steadfastly leading me and the others following behind. More than once I turned to check if they were still there and saw a column of them stretching back into the darkness. The ground remained rocky and uneven and, though it was difficult to tell, I reckoned we were gradually moving uphill. A heavy mist was collecting between the trees, white and soft and apparently lit from within.
After a while I began to see objects on the ground, guns and empty ammunition cases. I assumed it was random debris left over from the war, but as we progressed I knew that couldn’t be so. Most of the weapons had the U.S. Army insignia stamped on them, but others were of unfamiliar design, and had clearly once belonged to fighters from The Gap itself. A few lay haphazardly, but the majority had been collected into piles round the bases of trees.
Then larger pieces started to appear: moldy backpacks, broken radios, fragments of larger weapons lying tilted like gravestones in an abandoned churchyard. The children paid them no attention. Larger shapes loomed in the mist ahead, and as they resolved into recognizable forms I was forced to grind to a halt. The children didn’t seem to mind, and watched as I walked open-mouthed over to the nearest shape.
It was a jeep, a U.S. Army light vehicle of the type which was very occasionally used during the war. Most of the time we had to travel on foot, because the majority of the forest was very heavily wooded and the position of trees tended to vary from one minute to the next, but there had been a few jeeps of exactly this type. Mostly they were reserved for brass, and the joke was that the only gear which worked was “reverse.” I ran my hand over the cold metal of the vehicle’s hood, wiping the moisture from it. It was crumpled and bent around a large hole. From the damage and the thick coating of carbon, it looked like it had taken a hit from some kind of rocket launcher.
I looked farther into the mist, and realized that all of the other larger shapes bulking between the trees were also vehicles