Spares - Michael Marshall Smith [98]
“I’d forgotten,” I said.
Legs aching from the run, we tramped toward the village. For the time being, the light in the forest was both safe and almost attractive, as if someone had installed small yellow mood-lights behind every tenth tree. Like all settlements in The Gap, the village looked insignificant against the infinite spread of the forest, but also seemed to pre-date it. Even from this distance we could see the trunks which shot up through the thatched roofs of some of the houses, so thick that it could barely have been worth living in the remains of the shelter they provided. Nobody knows why things are like this, because nobody ever managed to talk to a local for long enough to find out. Before the first sentence was over one or the other of you would be dead. The problem with the villagers was twofold; firstly, their implacable ferocity, and secondly the fact that they weren’t visible all the time. They were easier to see in the dark, but by then you were generally seconds from death. The children were more visible, and seemed to be less angry at us, but they were often used by the villagers to carry mines. For years after I was sideslipped out, at the end—or abandonment—of the war, I couldn’t see a child without being scared out of my wits. It was only when Angela arrived in my life that their ghosts were laid to rest, and it was only when she and Henna died that I understood how much they had protected me from.
“Are you okay?” Vinaldi asked, after a while.
“I guess so,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said.
There were about thirty dwellings, arranged in a rough circle around a central area, with two paths bisecting at approximate right angles. The huts were lit by orange light that slipped and flowed around them, like a golden tide. Sometimes, I knew from experience, this light would coalesce into the birds I’d seen with Nearly and Suej in New Richmond. These birds were brain-damaged and appalling but they always seemed happy, exploding into being like liquid flames. After a chaotic few moments they’d disappear piecemeal, like smoke drifting into a dark sky. The birds only lived in the villages, which were otherwise deserted. None of the villagers lived in the villages, and it seemed that they never had.
“So,” I asked, when we were standing a few yards from the edge of the settlement. “What’s the plan?”
“Shit, I don’t know. Go in there and see if we can find anything, I guess.”
Not a very detailed plan of attack. I pinched the bridge of my nose, trying to hold the second Rapt wave off and keep my head in one piece. “Together?”
“Yes of fucking course together,” he snapped. “Or do you want to go see if you can find some small dark room at the top of some stairs and wander in there by yourself?”
“You don’t think tactically it would make more sense to split up?”
“No, I fucking don’t.”
So we went together, shotguns held at port arms, keeping watch on opposite sides of the path. As we entered the village we stared hard at the huts we passed, searching for any sign of movement within. The huts looked polished and perfect, as always, as if fresh-minted from imaginary materials. You could see the fine detail of each piece of straw in the thatch, the little bumps in the white mud of the exterior walls.
We decided against doing a search of every hut-partly to speed our first pass through the village, mainly because we were frightened. Doing a recce with The Fear is like wandering blindfolded into a room you know is papered with razor blades.
By the time we reached the center, our faces were dripping with perspiration and my finger was moist against