The Gone-Away World

Chapter One

THE LIGHTS went out in the Nameless Bar just after nine. I was bent over the pool table with one hand in the bald patch behind the D, which Flynn the Barman claimed was beer, but which was the same size and shape as Mrs. Flynn the Barman’s arse: nigh on a yard in the beam and formed like the cross-section of a cooking apple. The fluorescent over the table blinked out, then came back, and the glass-fronted fridge gave a low, lurching hum. The wiring buzzed—and then it was dark. A faint sheen of static danced on the TV on its shelf, and the green exit lamp sputtered by the door.

I dropped my weight into the imprint of Mrs. Flynn the Barman’s hams and played the shot anyway. The white ball whispered across the felt, came off two cushions, and clipped the eight cleanly into a side pocket. Doff, doff, tchk . . . glonk. It was perfect. On the other hand, I’d been aiming for the six. I’d given the game to Jim Hepsobah, and any time now when the power came back and everything was normal in the Nameless Bar, I’d pass the cue to my hero pal Gonzo, and Jim would beat him too.

Any time now.

Except that the lights stayed out, and the hollow glimmer of the TV set faded away. There was a small, quiet moment, the kind you just have time to notice, which makes you feel sad for no good reason. Then Flynn went out back, swearing like billy-o—and if your man Billy-O ever met Flynn, if ever there was a cuss-off, a high noon kinduva thing with foul language, I know where my money’d be.

Flynn hooked up the generator, which God help us was pig-powered. There was the sound of four large, foul-smelling desert swine being yoked to a capstan, a noise pretty much like a minor cavalry war, and then Flynn let loose some of his most abominable profanity at the nearest porker. It looked as if it wanted to vomit and bolted. The others perforce followed it in a slow but steady progression about the capstan, and then pig number one came back around, saw Flynn ready with another dose and tried to stop. Lashed to the crosspiece and bundled along by its three fellows, it found it couldn’t, so it gathered its flab-covered self and charged past him at piggy top speed, and the whole cycle accelerated until, with a malodorous, oinking crunch, the generator kicked in, and the television lit up with the bad news.

Or rather, it didn’t light up. The picture was so dim that it seemed the set was broken. Then there were fireworks and cries of alarm and fear, very quiet but getting louder, and we realised Sally Culpepper was just now turning on the sound. The image shook and veered, and urgent men went past shouting get back, get clear, and ohshitlookatthatfuckerjesus, which they didn’t even bother to bleep. In the middle distance, it looked as if maybe a figure was rolling on the ground. Something had gone absolutely, horribly awry in the world, and naturally some arsehole was present with a camera making himself 10k an hour hazard pay when he could have been rolling up his arsehole sleeves and saving a life or two. I knew a guy in the Go Away War who did just that, dumped the network’s prized Digi VII in a latrine trench and hauled six civilians and a sergeant from a burning medical truck. Got the Queen’s Honour back home and a P45 from his boss. He’s in an institution now, is Micah Monroe, and every day two guys from the Veterans’ Hospital come by and take him for a walk and make sure the medal’s polished on its little stand by his bed. They’re sweet old geezers, Harry and Hoyle, and they’ve got medals of their own and they figure it’s the least they can do for a man who lost his mind to giving a damn. Harry’s kid was in the medical truck, you see. One of the ones Micah couldn’t reach.

We stared at the screen and tried to make sense of what was on it. It looked, for a moment, as if the Jorgmund Pipe was on fire—but that was like saying the sky was falling. The Pipe was the most solidly constructed, triple-redundant, safety-first, one-of-a-kind necessary object in the world. We built it fast and dirty, because there was no other way, and then after that we made it indestructible. The plans were drawn up by the best, then checked and re-checked by the very best, and then the checkers themselves were scrutinised, analysed and vetted for any sign of fifth columnism or martyr tendencies, or even a serious and hitherto undetected case of just-plain-stupid, and then the contractors went to work under a scheme which emphasised thoroughness and adherence to spec over swift completion, and which imposed penalties so dire upon speculators and profiteers that it would actually be safer just to throw yourself from a high place, and finally the quantity surveyors and catastrophe experts went to town on it with hammers and saws, lightning generators and torsion engines, and declared it sound. Everyone in the Livable Zone was united in the desire to maintain and safeguard it. There was absolutely no chance that it could imaginably, conceivably, possibly be on fire.

It was on fire in a big way. The Pipe was burning painful white, magnesium, corpse-belly, nauseating white, and beside it there were buildings and fences, which meant this wasn’t just the Pipe, but something even more important: a pumping station or a refinery. The whole place was wrapped in hot, shining smoke, and deep in the heart of the furnace there was stuff going on the human eye didn’t know what to do with, weird, bad-news stuff which came with its own ominous soundtrack. On the screen something very important crumbled into noise and light.

“Fuuuuuuck,” said Gonzo William Lubitsch, speaking for everyone.

It was a funny feeling: we were looking at the end of the world—again—and we were looking at something awful we’d never wanted to see, but at the same time we were looking at fame and fortune and just about everything we could ever ask for delivered by a grateful populace. We were looking at our reason for being. Because that thar on that thar screen was a fire, plus also a toxic event of the worst kind, and we, Ladies and Gentlemen, put your hands together, were the Haulage & HazMat Emergency Civil Freebooting Company of Exmoor County (corporate HQ the Nameless Bar, CEO Sally J. Culpepper, presiding) and this was the thing that we did better than anyone else in the entire Livable Zone, and therefore anywhere. Sally was straightaway talking to Jim Hepsobah and then to Gonzo, making lists and giving orders. She set Flynn the Barman to brewing his chews-through-steel espresso, and at last even Mrs. Flynn was up off her on-board cushions and moving at flank speed to make provisions, prepare tallies, and take letters for loved ones and estranged ones and people glimpsed and admired across the floating ash of the Nameless Bar. We ran to and fro and bumped into one another and swore, mostly because we didn’t have anything important to do yet, and there was hubbub and brouhaha until Sally jumped up on the pool table and told us to shut up and get it together. She raised her phone above our heads like the thigh bone of a saint.

Sally Culpepper was six feet tall and much of her was leg, and on her right shoulder blade she had an orchid tattoo inked by some kid a quarter-inch shy of Michelangelo. She had strawberry lips and creamy skin and freckles across her nose where it’d been rebuilt after a bar fight in Lisbon. Gonzo claimed to have slept with her, to have had those legs wrapped around his hips like conjoined Italian calf-skin boa constrictors. He said she left him all but dead and grinning like a crescent moon. He said it happened one night after a big job, beer running from the rafters and everyone shiny as an egg yolk with success and soap-scoured skin. He said it was that time when Jim and Sally were trying not to be a thing, before they just gave in to the inevitable and got a place together. Every time we all met up, me and Gonzo and Sally and Jim Hepsobah and the others, Gonzo’d throw her a wicked grin and ask her how her other tattoo was, and Sally Culpepper would smile a secret smile which said she wasn’t telling, and maybe he knew what that other tattoo looked like and maybe he didn’t. Jim Hepsobah just pretended he hadn’t heard, because Jim loved Gonzo like a brother, and love like that recognises that your buddy can be an ass, and doesn’t care. We all loved Sally Culpepper, and she ruled us with her transparent lashes and her milkmaid’s face and her slender arms that could drop a punch on you like a steam hammer. So there she stood, and there was a reasonable facsimile of calm and attention, because we knew that if the call came it would come on that phone, and we knew she had five-of-five reception here, and that was one of the reasons why the Nameless Bar was our place of business.

So we stopped hunting for lost socks and packing bags, and fretting that we’d somehow miss the starting gun, and settled in to Mrs. Flynn’s provender. After a while we got quietly chatty and talked about small domestic chores, like cleaning gutters and chasing bats out of the loft. When the phone did ring (any time now), we could go and be heroes and save the world, which was Gonzo’s favourite thing, and perforce something I did from time to time as well. Until it kicked off, we might as well not fuss. And then the Nameless Bar went quiet again; in little groups and one by one we fell silent as we beheld a vision of awful destiny.

The vision took the form of a small child carrying a snot-crusted and elderly teddy bear. It marched out into the room with much gravitas, surveyed us all sternly, then turned to Mrs. Flynn the Barman to gather in details for the prosecution.

“Why was it all dark?” it demanded.

“The power went out,” Mrs. Flynn the Barman said cheerfully. “There’s a fire.” The child glowered around the room.

“These are loud men,” it said, still annoyed, “and this one is dirty.” It indicated Gonzo, who winced. It considered Sally Culpepper.

“This lady has a flower on her back,” it added, having found conclusive proof of our unsuitability, then sat down in the middle of the floor and helped itself to a cheese and bacon roll. We goggled at it, and tried to make it go away by rubbing our eyes.

“Sorry,” Mrs. Flynn the Barman said to us in general. “We don’t let him in here normally, but it’s an emergency.” She eyed the child without approval. “Sweetie, you can’t eat that; it’s been on the floor near the dirty man.”

Gonzo would probably have objected to this, but he didn’t seem to hear her; he was still gazing in mute horror at the kid in front of him, and so was I, and so was everyone else. It was unquestionably a human toddler, and from the context certain conclusions had to be drawn which were uncomfortable and even appalling. This infant, swaddled in a bath towel and presently attempting to jam a four-inch-diameter granary bap into one ear, was the Spawn of Flynn.

Now, the fire on the Jorgmund Pipe was deeply unsettling. It represented danger and opportunity and almost certainly deceptions and agendas and what all. It was, however, well within our common understanding. Things burned, things exploded, and then we came along and made them stop. A breeding population of Flynns was another proposition altogether. We looked on Flynn as our personal monster, a safe, disturbing ogre of corrosive profanity and sinister glassware. He was ours and he was mighty and we grew great by association with him, and proof of his dangerous overmanliness was to be found in his fearless sexual trystings with the vasty Mrs. Flynn, but we didn’t really want to live in a world entirely composed of Flynn-like beings in their serried ranks, vituperative and grouchy and unwilling to take an IOU. That was a new order even the bravest of us would find inhospitable, and the glimmer of it, the Spawn of Flynn, was even now throwing pieces of mushed-up cheese at Gonzo’s boot. Mrs. Flynn the Barman, oblivious, finished whatever domestic task she was about amid a flurry of folding cloths and wiping, and trotted out. The Spawn of Flynn blithely ignored his mother and took a chomp from the side of the soiled roll.

“Crunchy,” said the Spawn of Flynn.

Sally Culpepper’s phone made a little chirrup, and everyone pointedly didn’t look.

“Culpepper,” Sally murmured, and then, after a moment, snapped it shut. “Wrong number.” We all made faces to suggest we weren’t fussed.

For a while, the Nameless Bar was filled with the sound of a small child eating and a lot of rough and tough-talking men and women thinking perturbed and unfamiliar thoughts about time and mortality and family. Then the quiet was broken, not by a phone call but by a sound so deep it was very nearly not a sound at all.

You heard it first as a kind of aggressive quiet. The whoosh and snarl of the desert all around us was still going on, but somehow it was subsumed by this deep, bass silence. Then you could feel it as a coldness in your knees and ankles, an unsteady, heart-attack feeling of weakness and vibration. A bit later it was audible, a thrumming gnognognogg which echoed in your lungs and let you know you were a prey animal today. And if you’d ever heard it before you knew what it was, and we all knew, because when we’d first met it was the noise we’d made together: the sound of soldiers. Someone was deploying a decent-sized military force around the Nameless Bar, and that meant they were emphatically not kidding about security. Since it seemed unlikely that they were deploying in order to arrest us, and since in any case if they were there would be absolutely nothing we could do about it, we all crowded through the big pine door of the Nameless Bar to watch them arrive.

Outside, it was cold and dry. The night had set in, witching-hour black, and the sands had given up their heat, so a chill wind was gusting across the wooden rooftops of the bar and the outbuildings, and the gloomy shacks and clapboard homes which made up the no-hope town of Exmoor, pop. 1,309. Off against the brow of Millgram’s Hill was our section of the Jorgmund Pipe; a single shadow-grey line lit by Flynn’s bedroom window and the work light in the paddock, and every now and again by the gleam of another lonely little house along the way. It ran in both directions into the dark, and somewhere on the other side of the globe those two lines met and joined, surely at a place which was as vibrant and alive as Exmoor was not. On the top of the Pipe, every few metres, there was a little nozzle spraying good, clean FOX into the sky; FOX, the magic potion which kept the part of the world we still had roughly the same shape day by day. No one quite knew where it came from or how you made it; most people imagined some big machine like an egg with all manner of wires and lights condensing it out of air and moonshine, and drip-drip-dripping it into big vats. There were thousands of them, somewhere, vulnerable and vital, and let them never stop. I’d once seen some of the machinery involved: long black lozenges with curved sides, all plumbing and hoses, and rather eerie. Less an egg than a space capsule or a bathyscaphe, except this was the opposite; not a thing for journeying through a hostile place, but a thing which makes what is outside less hostile.

Most people tried very hard to avoid noticing the Pipe. They had euphemisms for it, as if it were cancer or impotence or the Devil, which it was. In some places they painted it bold colours and pretended it was an art project, or built things in front of it or even grew flowers on it. Only in pissant remora towns like this one did you get to see the thing itself; the rusty and despised spine of who we were, carrying vital solidity and safety, and the illusion of continuance, to every nook and cranny of the Livable Zone.

In truth it was not a loop at all, but a weird bird’s-nest tangle. There were hairpin bends and corkscrews, and places where subsidiary hoses jutted out from the main line to reach little towns on the edges, and places where the Livable Zone pulled close about the Pipe like a matron drawing up her skirts to cross a stream, where the weather and the lie of the land brought the outside perilously close; but taken all together it made a sort of rough circle girdling the Earth. A place to have a home. Get more than twenty miles from the Pipe (Old JP, they called it in Haviland City, where the Jorgmund Company had its headquarters, or sometimes the Big Snake or the Silver) and you were in the inimical no-man’s-land between the Livable Zone and the bloody nightmare of the unreal world. Sometimes it was safe, and sometimes it wasn’t. We called it the Border, and we went through it when we had to, when it was the only way to get somewhere in any reasonable length of time, when the alternative was a long drive around three sides of a square and the emergency wouldn’t wait. All the same, we went in force and we went quickly, lightly, and we kept an eye on the weather. If the wind changed, or the pressure dropped; if we saw clouds on the horizon we didn’t like, or strange folks, or animals which weren’t quite right, we turned tail and ran back to the Pipe. People who lived in the Border didn’t always stay people. We carried FOX in canisters, and we hoped it would be enough.

Rumour had it some of the outlying towns had been sacked recently, split open and burned to the ground by people—or nearly-people—from beyond the Border, from the shifting places where bad things were. So the myrmidons of the company were patrolling a bit more and asking more questions, and people were sticking close to the Pipe, where it was safe. Step off the path, and maybe you’d get back and maybe you wouldn’t, but you would be changed. Which sounds like strange and awful until you realise that that’s actually pretty much how it’s always been, and if you think any different, it’s because you’ve never left that little stretch of comfort and gone someplace where what you know gets a bit thin on the ground.

The roar of the convoy was close now, and the big spots from the command car were sweeping back and forth, sometimes lighting us up and sometimes showing us the sand and grit all around. Deserts in wildlife shows are sweeping, noble places of savage majesty: photogenic ants and awesome spiders, all clean and sheer, because at that magnification the dirt looks like boulders. Our desert was kind of a dump. When the wind blew from the west, it carried the smell of hot metal and diesel and combat-ready men. When it blew from the east, it carried the distinctive flavour of recently exercised pig. Neither was the kind of smell anyone was going to put in a bottle with a flower on it and market with an expensive and strategically-not-quite-nude super-model. They were real smells, living and nasty and oddly comforting on a night when the world was on fire. So we stood there in the dark, away from the TV and the Spawn of Flynn and the pool table, and we all breathed in and grinned at one another and we were us, very us. Jim Hepsobah took Sally Culpepper’s hand and we pretended we couldn’t see. Annie the Ox murmured something to Egon Schlender; Samuel P. cursed and muttered; Tobemory Trent did nothing at all, still and silent like a grave marker. I thought about my personal version of heaven, which is small and calm and features only one angel, who cannot sing.

Close your eyes and think of a house on the side of a mountain, made of stone and wood. The air is clear and cold and flavoured with snow, and the sounds you hear are the sounds of real people working hard on things they can hold, eat and use. There is woodsmoke, and that woodsmoke is touched with tonight’s dinner and an open bottle of the good stuff. The woman in the doorway wears blue jeans and a white shirt and a pair of cowboy boots, and she has eyes the colour of lake water. This is my wife, and yes, she is as beautiful as all that surrounds her. This is my heart, and it is the one thing I have that Gonzo Lubitsch does not.

The convoy roared in, big and loud and adolescent, and everyone was trying very hard not to snigger, because under the best circumstances you don’t really want to snigger at a full armoured unit, and this was an emergency and these were some nervous young men and women with guns. So we looked very serious and churchy and respectful and wondered what the hell was going on. And then the lead tank stopped in the “reserved” parking space and the lid flipped up, and instead of some grizzled bastard with a regulation sneer there was a pencilneck, a slender, coiffured sonuvabitch, and you could smell his come-fuck-me cologne and the hand-tooled leather briefcase he was carrying.

“Hi,” the pencilneck said. And then, because it wasn’t enough that he should be a management guy, he had to be a doofus as well, he added, “Could someone give me a hand here? I’m stuck in the porthole!” and laughed.

When they send you an escort, it means you need to be somewhere fast, and that’s not so bad. When they send you your own personal pencilneck, it means blame and skulduggery and contractual folderol, and everything you should be able to count on will be all screwed up. It means they intend to lie to you, and they want one of their own on hand to emphasise how open and truthful they are. Sally Culpepper went to condition red, and Jim Hepsobah let go of her hand so that she could go back to being a CEO and a player and not a girl from Darzet who’s waiting with surprising patience for her big, loving lug of a boyfriend to get down on one knee.

The pencilneck rose slowly into the night like the villain in an old spy movie on some kind of personal elevator, except that when his shins were about level with the rim of the hatch (not “porthole”) you could see a couple of nobbled hands, and then forearms almost as big as Jim’s, and then Bone Briskett’s ugly face came in sight, so there was a grizzled bastard in residence as well. He put the pencilneck down on the front of the tank and didn’t say anything, in such a way as to imply that he, Bone, thought the pencilneck was seriously pointless, and would happily run him over if we gave the word. We could all pretend it was an accident and there’d be one less layer of bureaucracy between us and whatever we needed to get this job done.

The Jorgmund Company spanned the world, and it was old and wise and cautious, evolved out of other companies from back before the Go Away War. That meant it took care of itself, protected itself, and that was annoying but probably necessary. There were mayoralties and city states and the like, making up a mosaic of power we called the System, and the idea was that they upheld the law and maintained the army—the people like Bone, who patrolled the edges of the Livable Zone and chased off bandits and worse things than bandits. But in the end Jorgmund ran the show, because Jorgmund had—was—the Pipe, and that was the thing we couldn’t do without. The circle-snake logo of Jorgmund was everywhere, or at least everywhere that mattered. So here we were, and here was this guy, the pencilneck: he had a boss, sure as anything, because men without bosses do not come to Exmoor, not even when the sky is falling. And in the interest of his boss, and his promotion, and all good things, he was out to screw us.

The pencilneck landed on the sand like he was expecting it to swallow him, and it flipped up and over his brogues as he walked and got inside his shoes and dusted his silk socks, so by the time he reached us and looked at Jim Hepsobah and stuck out his hand, and Jim kept his arms folded and Sally shook hands with the pencilneck in a way which said “strike one,” the man from Haviland City looked as if he’d been bleached or whitewashed to the knee.

“Dick Washburn,” the pencilneck said, and right away we were all trying to smother a laugh, and Samuel P. bustled forward and leaned over his paunch and stuck out his hand and said “Dickwash what?” which didn’t faze the pencilneck at all. Richard Washburn, Snr VP i/c whateveritis, gave his name for a second time, clear and sharp, and nailed Samuel P. with a look which said he could take a joke as well as the next man but don’t think he was gonna laugh that one off, and we all revised our opinion slightly upward. Pencilneck, perhaps, but not invertebrate. If Dick Washburn could show some iron here and now, then back home he was near enough an alpha male, and one of the ones the silverbacks kept an eye on in case they caught him sizing up their offices and nodding at the view. In fact, they probably had, and here he was, pointman and focus of all and any ensuing litigation in the matter of the People vs. the Jorgmund Company . A prince who becomes too popular is best destroyed with insoluble opportunities.

We all went inside while the troopers did their hard perimeter thing, and did it pretty well, although they looked confused and unhappy about taking up defensive positions around a building which appeared to be made from cardboard and snot, stuck out on the edge of the civilised world and populated by folk like us, and which would probably be rendered unto box clippings by the recoil from one of the big guns mounted on the armoured personnel carrier. There was a bad moment when four large shapes showed up on the infrared, moving in a rapid arc towards the rear of the Nameless Bar, and two sets of heavy weapons came online and tracked them: shwoopHUNKdzzzunnn! and Sir, contact, sir! followed by Soldier, if you fire that weapon I will stick it up your and guboozzznn as the turrets moved, probable field of fire going through Flynn’s living room and the saloon. Of course, the enemy was the desert pig generator system, currently labouring to produce enough power to run the kitchen and the TV all at once. So the pigs hovered on the brink of spectacular annihilation for a few seconds, and then were classed as zero threat, the guns went zugug-slrrrmm and back to first positions. Bone Briskett (Colonel Briskett) handed over to his second, a scrawny bloke who was probably as dangerous as the whole rest of them put together, then followed us in and shut the door.

Dick Washburn stood in the middle of the room, and we all looked at him. He tried to look back at everyone at once and bottled it. He was surrounded. He looked at Bone Briskett, but Bone was contemplating the awful reality of the Spawn of Flynn and having some kind of god-forsaken epiphany of his own. He glanced at Sally, but she was paying him back for the handshake thing and waiting with everyone else, so he stood there in his ruined mortgage-your-house shoes and his manly yet sensitive yet raunchy aftershave in a room flavoured with stale beer and the aroma of drivers and cheese rolls and pig power, and tried like hell not to look like he was out of his depth.

Consider this man, Jorgmund’s most expendable son. He wears his second-best suit (or third-best, or tenth-, who knows, but he’s surely not risking his Royce Allen bespoke in a tank, not for any kind of promotion) and his face is smooth with Botox and lotion. Without genetic engineering, without intervention or expense, the Jorgmund Company has remade him, barracked him in some halfway ville dortoir and stripped him of his connection with the world in a crash course of management schools and loyalty card deals, surrounded him with pseudo-spaces, malls and water features, so that he is allergic to pollen and pollution and dust and animal fibre and salt, gluten, bee stings, red wine, spermicidal lubricant, peanuts, sunshine, unpurified water and chocolate, and really to everything except the vaccum-packed, air-conditioned in-between where he spends his life. Dick Washburn, known for evermore as Dickwash, is a type D pencilneck: a sassy wannabe paymaster with vestigial humanity. This makes him vastly less evil than a type B pencilneck (heartless bureaucratic machine, pro-class tennis) and somewhat less evil than a type C pencilneck (chortling lackey of the dehumanising system, ambient golf), but unquestionably more evil than pencilneck types M through E (real human screaming to escape a soul-devouring professional persona, varying degrees of desperation). No one I know has ever met the type A pencilneck, in much the same way that no one ever reports their own fatal accident; a type A pencilneck would be a person so entirely consumed by the mechanism in which he or she is employed that they had ceased to exist as a separate entity. They would be odourless, faceless and undetectable, without ambition or restraint, and would take decisions entirely unfettered by human concerns, make choices for the company, of the company. A type A pencilneck would be the kind of person to sign off on torture and push the nuclear button for no more pressing reason than that it was his job—or hers—and it seemed the next logical step.

Dickwash cleared his throat and unrolled the Mission like he’d ever done this stuff himself, spewing officer-grade profanity because, I suppose, he thought that’s what Real Men Do.

“I guess you all know there’s a fire on the Jorgmund Pipe,” he said, giving us a determined frown. “Well, it’s more than that. It’s a pumping station, a major one. There’re thousands of barrels of FOX there and it’s going up like kerosene, burning a hole in the fucking world. ” He nodded ruefully. I think he was trying to do serious, but he just looked as if he’d dropped a load of red wine on the carpet: Christ, Vivian, what can I say? Totally my fault. No! No salt. If you just leave it they can get it out, AMAZING chemical stuff, kills all known vintages stone dead! It’s the VX gas of stains! Yah, I know, I thought so too. But helloo-oooo, sailor! That’s the most gorgeously risqué dress when you’re in that position! He didn’t get any bounce out of the audience, so he tried again, this time with emphatic clichés.

“We’ve gotta go down there and put that fucker out, blow it out, uh, like a fucking candle, otherwise . . .” At which point he trailed his voice and let the breath flow out of him and he paused to let us construct our own metaphor for catastrophe. And that right there is what you call a rhetorical ellipsis, the cheapest device in oratory and one of the hardest to do well. An ellipsis is like a haymaker punch you throw with your mouth, and the only tricks more low rent than that are making fun of your opponent’s ugly puss and bringing up something by saying you won’t mention it. We all stared at him for a minute, and he went sort of pinkish and closed his mouth.

“Explosives,” Gonzo said, and Jim Hepsobah nodded.

“Have to be,” Jim said.

“Make a vacuum?”

“Yup.”

“Is that going to work with FOX?”

“Ought to.”

“Need a very big bang,” Annie the Ox pointed out.

“Oh, yeah,” said Gonzo.

“Can’t have it catch again after,” Annie went on. “Helluva big bang. Can we get that big of a bang?”

Annie the Ox was a blunt-fingered woman with big cheeks who knew about explosives. She had narrow, solid shoulders and heavy forearms and thighs, and she collected puppet heads. It was impossible to say whether Annie collected these things because she liked to have soft, plush friends to talk to, or if they were faces for the people in her life who were Gone Away. I had never asked, because some things are private, and Annie was not the kind of person who answered questions about private things.

She looked at Jim and Gonzo. They looked at Sally. Sally looked at Dickwash.

“Yes,” Dickwash said, with absolute certainty. “I can fix that.”

It always creeps me out being with pencilnecks. Anything over a type E and you can get the feeling what you’re talking to isn’t entirely human, and you’re not entirely wrong. A guy named Sebastian once explained it to me like this:

Suppose you are Alfred Montrose Fingermuffin, capitalist. You own a factory, and your factory uses huge industrial metal presses to make Fingermuffin Thingumabobs. Great big blades powered by hydraulics come stomping down on metal ribbon (like off a giant roll of tape, only made of steel) and cut Thingumabobs out like gingerbread men. If you can run the machine at a hundred Thingumabobs per minute, six seconds for ten Thingumabobs (because the machine prints ten at a time out of the ribbon), then you’re doing fine. The trouble is that although in theory you could do that, in fact you have to stop the machine every so often so that you can check the safeties and change shifts. Each time you do, the downtime costs you, because you have the machine powered up and the crew are all there (both crews, actually, on full pay). So you want to have that happen the absolute minimum number of times per day. The only way you can know when you’re at the minimum number of times is when you start to get accidents. Of course, you’re always going to get some accidents, because human beings screw up; they get horny and think about their sweethearts and lean on the Big Red Button and someone loses a finger. So you reduce the number of shifts from five to four, and the number of safety checks from two to one, and suddenly you’re much closer to making Fingermuffin’s the market leader. Mrs. Fingermuffin gets all excited because she’s been invited to speak at the WI, and all the little Fingermuffins are happy because their daddy brings them brighter, shinier, newer toys. The downside is that your workers are working harder and having to concentrate more, and the accidents they have are just a little worse, just a little more frequent. The trouble is that you can’t go back, because now your competitors have done the same thing and the Thingumabob market has gotten a bit more aggressive, and the question comes down to this: how much further can you squeeze the margin without making your factory somewhere no one will work? And the truth is that it’s a tough environment for unskilled workers in your area and it can get pretty bad. Suddenly, because the company can’t survive any other way, soft-hearted Alf Fingermuffin is running the scariest, most dangerous factory in town. Or he’s out of business and Gerry Q. Hinderhaft has taken over, and everyone knows how hard Gerry Q. pushes his guys.

In order to keep the company alive, safeguard his family’s happiness and his employees’ jobs, Alf Montrose Fingermuffin (that’s you) has turned into a monster. The only way he can deal with that is to separate himself into two people—Kindly Old Alf, who does the living, and Stern Mr. Fingermuffin, factory boss. His managers do the same. So when you talk to Alf Fingermuffin’s managers, you’re actually not talking to a person at all. You’re talking to a part in the machine that is Fingermuffin Ltd., and (just like the workers in the factory itself ) the ones who are best at being a part are the ones who function least like a person and most like a machine. At the factory this means doing everything at a perfect tempo, the same way each time, over and over and over. In management it means living profit, market share and graphs. The managers ditch the part of themselves which thinks, and just get on with running the programme in their heads.

So this almost certainly wasn’t going to be easy. But unless there was an earthquake or another war, Gonzo was going, which meant I was going, and if we were going, the chances were the crew would come with us to make sure we were okay, and incidentally to make sure we didn’t do something amazingly cool which we could then rag them about, and finally to make sure we didn’t come back zillionaires and rub their noses in it before setting them up for life. Gonzo Lubitsch is addicted to playing the lead. I work for a living, I take my bonus home to my wife, and we get drunk and naked and we act like teenagers and feed each other pizza.

Back to the bar: Sally had Dick Washburn penned up in a farmhouse with the entire Mexican army coming down on him. He’d come in rock ’n’ roll, thought he’d wrap the truckjocks by five and get his aerobicised backside back to the city and sink a few martinis and My God, Vivian, the place was a hellhole! But Sally has negotiator gong fu of the first order. In the small world of civil freebooting companies, she is the go-to girl, the top cat, the queen bee and the wakasensei, and her eyes undress the fine print and her fingers trace its outlines and she knows it, owns it, makes it sit up and beg for her touch like a happy gimp. The pencilneck was watching his Christmas bonus shrink like a white truffle in January, and the reckless testosterone feeling he had come in with was fading with it. Vivian’s body in its Lycra workout gear was vanishing and being replaced by the possibility that Sally was handing him his head. So Dick Washburn dug deep and dark into his management-school magic set and tried an end-run, a wicked, one-pill-for-all-ills solution, which is maybe what he intended to do all along: isolate Sally and get us to make the deal for him. A type D pencilneck has vestigial humanity, which is the kind you can fit in a cigarette case and offer people at parties.

“The trucks,” Dick Washburn said.

“What about them?” asked Sally.

“At the end of the run,” the pencilneck said, “you can keep the trucks. They’re amazing trucks.” He hit the word “truck” just a little harder each time, and when he said it the third time, everyone in the room heard it above the ambient bustle. Jim looked up and Sally looked back at him like she knew there was a thing happening, but she didn’t know how to stop it.

“Really amazing, ” the pencilneck repeated.

Sally pointed out that we had trucks; that our possession of and facility in the handling of trucks was central to our professed identity as truckers, which in turn was key in regard to the pencilneck’s presence in our midst, that presence being a consequence of his desire to deploy those talents in the service of the populace and the enterprise for which he was plenipotentiary spokesperson, ambassador and man on the ground, and in whose short-term interest he now sought to bilk, cheat, con and bamboozle us out of due legal and contractual protections in line with industry practice and good solid common sense, but whose shareholders would, like the aforementioned wider population, unquestionably look with disfavour and consequent litigiousness upon the inevitable wranglings and disputations resulting from said rooking, hornswoggling, grifting and humbuggery, should any ill befall in the due exercise of our discretion and judgement in the course of whatever hare-brained adventure the party of the first part (the pencilneck) chose to inflict upon the soft skin and girlish charms of the party of the second part (the naive and open-hearted drivers of the toughest and most competent civil freebooting company in the world).

“We can fix all that,” the pencilneck said. “You have to come,” he leered, “and see the trucks. ” And that time he made it sound like your first orgasm, or maybe your last.

So we did. Sally reluctantly, Jim calmly, Gonzo eagerly, Tobemory Trent sidewise like a crab and all the rest of us according to our lights, we went out of the Nameless Bar and into the Nameless Parking Lot. The pencilneck waved his arms, and forward they came with a grumble and a clatter, with a great white light and the smell of fresh rubber and vinyl and engine, and lo, there were trucks indeed.

But not trucks as we knew them. These were the trucks of legend, the trucks every vehicle with more than six wheels dreams of being. They were black and chrome and they stank of raunchy fuel consumption and throbbing power. If these trucks could have sung, they’d have sung base, deep and slow and full of the Delta. They had leather seats and positioning systems and armoured glass. They were factory new and they had our number plates already on ’em, and there was a hula girl on the dashboard of Baptiste Vasille’s, and a stack of pornographic images in Samuel P.’s, and Gonzo’s truck had flames on the side and Sally Culpepper’s had a red suede dash. Someone out there understood us, our needs, our mad little schticks, the things without which we weren’t the Haulage & HazMat Emergency Civil Freebooting Company of Exmoor County (CEO Sally J. Culpepper, presiding), we were just guys and girls in pound shop clothes.

In other words, this was a honey trap. If you’re giving guys like us kit like that to do a gig like this, it’s because either 1) you’re going to make a ton of profit or 2) you don’t think we have a rat’s chance of coming back alive. Most like, it’s both.

But then again that was hardly news. If they could have done it themselves—if they hadn’t been too damned scared to take on what needed to be done, for fear of their silk-socked lives—they never would have come to us. The Free Company was on the clock and there were only three commandments: look after your friends; do the job; come out richer. To these the pencilneck was adding an apocrypha of penalties for excessive damage and materials overspend which we fully intended to ignore, because he was the tool of a litigation-wary softass outfit and they were afraid not only of death but also of flesh-eating lawyers and class actions and angry investors and antitrust and whatall, and the first and second commandments forbid stinting during a run. Thus we gazed upon his many provisos and codicils, and we said “bah.”

Basic plan:

1. go to place A (depot) and pick up item X (big box go boomboom)

2. take it to place B (the pumping station), which is undergoing state Q (on fire, v. v. bad)

3. introduce item X to place B (big box go boomboom, burning pumping station; burning pumping station, big box go boomboom. Shake hands. Didn’t we meet once over at van Kottler’s place? Gosh, darn, I believe we did!) and instigate reaction P (boomboom, bang bang-a-diddly, BOOM) and hence state R (oxygen deprival, pseudo-vacuum, schlurrrrrp !) thus extinguishing B (~Q, ~P, so sorry, dear old thing, have to go, children have school tomorrow, ciao-ciao mwah-mwah), thus

4. making enough money to buy a small nation-state, farm watawabas and eat mango all day long (boo-yah, sing hallelujah, we didn’t die).

The question I should have been asking all this time—the thing which we all should have been wanting to know, pressingly and insistently—is this: how the hell did part of the Pipe, the all-ways-up most enduring and secure object ever manufactured by human hands and human engineering; the triple-redundant, safe-tastic product of the most profoundly dedicated collaboration in history; how did this invulnerable thing come to catch fire at all? And when you put it like that, the answer is obvious:

Someone made it so.

But hey. We’re not those kindsa people. We are can-do, not what-about—except for me, maybe. The pencilneck smiled at Sally Culpepper, and his victory grin went a bit slack as he realised we’d never had any intention of saying no, and we knew that he knew that we were expected to lose people. Just for a second I thought perhaps he was ashamed. And then he looked down at his feet and caught a glimpse of his messed up year’s-salary shoes, and he hated this stupid, ugly and above all cheap place, and his pencilneckhood rolled back as he found that part of himself which was indifferent, and he slipped gently into the warm water of not giving a damn.

Look at him again: this is not Dick Washburn you’re seeing, not exactly. Dick has vacated possession for this bit of chat. Standing here is not Richard Godspeed Washburn, who sustained a nasty concussion on his fifteenth birthday, the very eve of the Go Away War, and who spent his next weeks in darkness and candlelight as the hospital he had gone to slowly shut down and ran out and fell apart, then grew to manhood in the new, broken world. This is not Quick Dick of the Harley Street Boys, who—before the orphanfinders came and settled him in a home of sorts and things got somewhat normal once again—could open the rear door of an army truck and pinch a pound of chocolate before the soldiers ever knew. This is Jorgmund itself, staring through Dick’s eyes and measuring things as numbers and profit margins. Of course, Jorgmund is nothing more than a shared hallucination, a set of rules which make up Richard Washburn’s job, and every time he does this—slips away from a human situation and lets the pattern use his mind and his mouth because he’d rather not make the decision himself—he edges a little closer to being a type C pencilneck. He loses a bit of his soul. There’s a flicker of pain and anger in him as the animal he is feels the machine he is becoming take another bite, and snarls in its cage, deep down beneath his waxed, buff pectorals and his second-best (or ninth-best) suit. But it’s really a very small animal, and not one of the fiercer ones.

And then it was over. Deal done. Job on. I sidled over to Sally and murmured in her ear.

“So, before Dickwash showed up . . .”

“Hm.”

“Phone call.”

“Yes.”

“Wrong number?”

Sally shook her head. “I lied,” she murmured, just as quiet. “It was a woman. Didn’t know her.”

“What did she say?”

“She said not to take the job.”

“Nice.”

“Yeah.”

“Anything else?”

“Yes,” Sally said. “She asked for you, in particular.”

And Sally didn’t say “Keep your eyes open” because she knew me, and that was fine. She nodded once and took the keys to her new truck from the pencilneck’s unresisting fingers.

Sally and Jim in the first rig, me and Gonzo in the second, Tommy Lapland and Roy Roam in the third, and on to the back of the line. Twenty of us, two to a cab, ten trucks of bad hair, denim and spurs, with Tobemory Trent wearing his special-occasions eyepatch bringing up the rear. Trent was from Preston, born and bred in pork pie country with coal dust in his blood. He lost that eye in the Go Away War, had it taken out in a hurry so he wouldn’t die or worse. Trent spat on the road and roared, Captain goddam Ahab of the new highways, harpoon rack over the driver’s seat in case of trouble. He vaulted into the big chair and slammed the door hard enough to make the rig rock, and there was only one really important thing left to do. Sally and the pencilneck shook hands, Sally turned to look at us from the running board of her truck and there we were, proud and wired and dumb with eighteen-wheel delight. And Gonzo William Lubitsch of Cricklewood Cove, five foot eleven and broad like a Swiss Alp, dropped his trousers and pissed on our front right tyre for luck. Annie the Ox and Egon Schlender hollered and hallooed from number six, and Gonzo dropped his shorts too, exposing a muscular arse in their direction, then leaped into the truck and punched the starter. I had my feet on the dash and I was sending up a tiny prayer to the God who ruled my personal heaven.

Lord, I want to come home.

MOSTLY when we left the Nameless Bar, we headed westwards along the Pipe. Exmoor was a mile or so south of the main trunk road, and the mountains kicked up funny weather, so eighty or ninety miles in the other direction was one of the pinch points in the Zone where you paid close attention to the people you saw in case they weren’t really people at all. Every so often, traders came through town, and there was a special guesthouse in the back of the Nameless Bar where Flynn put the ones he wasn’t sure about. It was comfortable and safe, but it was further from his family. Flynn’s a decent man, but a cautious one.

This time, we went east, very fast. Bone Briskett’s tank was the kind with wheels which can do a decent speed, and he was getting everything he could out of it and asking for more. We drove through the night, and either they’d cleared the road or no one was coming the other way. We hurtled through a steep-sided valley and on along the pinch. The wind was blowing in our favour, off the mountains and away, but even so you could see a broad misty curtain to the south, maybe five miles distant, strange shadows twisting and turning. In a few miles, we could turn left, under the Pipe, and there was a loop of road which would bring us north-eastwards fast. I waited. We didn’t take it.

Instead we drove on, and on, and on, and the dawn was building in the sky, and I started to get that feeling which says “Be ready” because there was one route out here which would bring us over towards Haviland City and full onto a big thick section of the main Pipe. It was an old road, and it would get us there damn fast, but we’d never taken it before because it went through Drowned Cross. I nudged Gonzo and he glanced at me, then shrugged. Drowned Cross was bad country, the far edge of the Border. That was why it was empty, and dead.

We rolled out onto a flat meadow, and there was no more desert. A wide green plain stretched into the distance in front of us, cut by a grey line like a dowager’s eyebrow which departed from the main trunk and headed south. Bone Briskett’s tank took the corner without slowing, and Gonzo tutted—whether at this haste or at our destination, I didn’t know, but I could feel him paying more attention, looking at narrow places on the road and measuring them with his eyes, checking the escort and wondering whether they were good enough.

Right after the Reification and the Go Away War, there was a period of what you might call undue optimism. One particular town was built with two fingers up to the recent past, first of a new breed of bright, safe places where we could all get on with real life again, pay tax and worry about our hairlines and middle-aged spread, and is the guy next door flouting the hosepipe ban during the summer heat? They called it Heyerdahl Point, and they sold it as an adventure in neo-suburban frontiersmanship. About five thousand people lived there. It had its own little capillary of the Jorgmund Pipe making it secure, and it perched on a hilltop so the people there could look down on the valleys below, and out into the dangerous mists of the unreal, and know that they were pushing back the boundary just by being here.

“One day,” they could say to one another over decaf, “all this will be fields.”

Now it was called Drowned Cross.

We came around a curve, and there it was, tucked up on its little hill and dark and empty as your dog’s kennel after you take him to the vet and say goodbye. The road went straight to it, and so did Bone Briskett, and so did we. Drowned Cross got bigger but no lighter, jagged and sprawling across the sky. The big broken tooth over the whole place was the church spire, and the rough-edged thing it had fallen against was the town clock, stuck at five fifteen for evermore. The houses were clean and pale, with terracotta roofs. The windows were unbroken. A couple of cars were parked neatly in the main square, and one had the door open; the kind of town where you left the keys in the ignition while you bought your paper. Birds flew up out of the sunroof as we went by, grey and black pigeons with mad pigeon eyes. One of them was too stupid to dodge in the right direction and bounced off the windscreen. Or maybe the others had pushed him—it’s not hard to believe in murder among pigeons. Gonzo swore. The stunned bird tumbled away and lay in the road. If it was still there when Samuel P. came by, he’d drive right over it.

No one really knew what had happened in Drowned Cross. There weren’t any survivors. No one showed up, addled and desperate, at the next town along the way; no lonely shepherd saw the whole thing from an adjoining hill. Whatever it was, it made no noise, in the grand scheme, and left no image of itself. Something came up out of the unreal and swallowed the place. Perhaps the hill under Drowned Cross eats villages. I heard a story once, on the radio, in which a group of sailors cast adrift came at last to an island where they moored for the night. They had not expected land, so far off course and bewildered by foreign stars; they had anticipated thirst and madness. They wept and kissed the ground and lit a fire to cook their supper, and at last fell into a fitful sleep. Of course, in the middle of the night they woke to a dreadful howling, and the isle on which they stood began to shake, and then great, boneless arms reached from the water to snatch at them, and they realised they had sought refuge on the back of some horrid monster of the deep.

I loved cautionary tales like that when I was a child, but sitting with Gonzo and looking down on the clean, vacant houses of Drowned Cross, I kept thinking of clams slurped with garlic sauce, and the shells thrown back into the bowl. What had happened there was nasty, plain and simple, and there’d been others, since. In the still hours of the night-time in houses all around the Pipe, people woke, and listened, and were afraid of things from beyond the Border. Somebody out there ate towns, whole, and went on his way. People said it was the Found Thousand. I hoped that wasn’t true.

The Cross itself—our road and the other one, the east–west road which went through the town and headed out into what they all figured would be the next slice of reclaimed land—was on the far side of the square. We went slowly, partly because the cobbles were slick with dew, and partly because you don’t squeal your tyres in a graveyard, no matter how much you want to leave. Something glimmered in the dust where the roads met: a silvered piece of metal engraved with what could have been a new moon or a bowl of soup with a spoon in it. It looked expensive, and I wondered how long it had sat there. Since the day Drowned Cross got its name, most likely. It could have been a cuff link, or a bracelet. It seemed sad that someone was missing it—maybe it was one of two, and he still had the other one—and then I felt guilty and crass because whoever owned it was almost certainly dead, and his missing watchstrap whojimmy wasn’t bugging him any more.

And then, as swiftly as it had come upon us, it was gone. A small place, after all. Gonzo turned the wheel, bringing the truck in a wide, powerful turn, and the last empty cottage vanished behind us. Bone Briskett’s tank went roaring out ahead, and Gonzo rapped his hands on the wheel, papapapahhh!

“The open road!” I shouted into the radio.

“Oh, ecstasy!” cried Jim Hepsobah and Sally Culpepper.

“Oh, poop-poop!” yelled Gonzo Lubitsch.

Bone Briskett didn’t say anything, but he said it in a way which made it clear he thought we were mad.

Please, dear Lord.

I want to come home.