Long Way Home

When Buddy came out onto the lower deck one of the children was eating one of the remnant’s eyeballs. It had probably been walking along looking for warmth when it ran into the kids. They were having a fine tug-of-war with it, and its android days were over. Charlie had it by the hair and Davy by its child- sized feet.

‘You kids. Git,’ Buddy said, kicking Charlie’s bum. ‘Head on down to tunnels if you want to eat that android.’ It was the lower deck he begrudged them, not the android. Kids on the deck with their chittering just made things colder, and things were already cold enough. A few steps took him down onto the spiral staircase to get his jug. The quaint filigree of the cast- iron bannister and the thrumming, aligned with the movement of the protective skin of the dome, made every journey seem like an occasion. Buddy had a keen eye for the bubble’s architecture. The lower he got into the base the cooler it got and the sunlight’s inability to penetrate the skin at subterranean depths, and the spotlights they used made shadows stand out like statues and walking seem like underwater swimming.

Evening took a long time getting to Homeland, but when it came it was a comfort. For most of the hours of the day-and most of the months of the year- battling the harmful effects of the nova sun had the place trapped in extended refrigeration, far out in the city flats was a heaven for androids and robots, automata and halflings, but a hell for growing kids and Glaswegians. There was no respectable heat or power source within thirty miles; in fact the actual location of the nearest heat source was a matter of vigorous debate in the bureau, half of which Buddy Delmar owned – if you wanted to call a patched-up upper-tier that had lost much of its ability to screen-out UV rays and a middle tier that was barely functional- of The Last Post Reclamation company.

His single-minded partner, Colonel John Brown, persevered that there were adequate hotspots at Grimley Town which was little more than ten miles away, but Buddy wouldn’t accept that. Grimley Town was even more useless at sheltering from the extreme cold and UV storms than The Last Post. It had only became established because some fool from up north, Wesley Grimly, had been burnt half to death by the sun and frozen half to death in the burr-fields of the badlands. When he finally found an underground kennel, he wouldn’t leave it, and Grimley Town was born, hot and cold like its founder, which is to say people too terrified to travel on another hundred miles south, which had clean water and better UV protection, without losing their guts.

The mausoleum which housed the generators was so hot on the inside that Buddy was almost tempted to live in it, had it not been for its popularity with cockroaches, rats, blue centipedes, and any other creature that could fly, skitter, or bite at the same time. Buddy squeezed himself into a hard plastic seat took off his gloves, cupped his hands to his mouth and blew into them to heat them up, sure his breath smelled of onions. Not that there were such things now. He didn’t begrudge the loss of onions, or most vegetables. Over a lifetime he figured he’d had more than his fair share, only a woman could properly mourn the loss of an onion, but he did miss his plum brandy. The mush he brewed in the mausoleum was only good for one thing and that was to get pleasantly drunk. He had left a bottle of ‘corn’ liquor squeezed beside the sign for the old tube exit and riverside which had been adapted into the fabric of their shelter. He jumped when Mrs Doyle asked ‘if he wanted something’. She let her shoulder dip and her red silk slip fall down over the curves of her breasts and her full glistening lips hung open like half-moons in an invitation. He could only croak out what sounded like an old charts hits, ‘no-oh,’ which sounded a bit strange, even to himself, as if he wasn’t used to talking. Not that Mrs Doyle would know anything about chart hits. She was far too young, and pretty, to know about such things. But he couldn’t help smiling like an old fool. It was her bright red hair that did it; made him long, suddenly, for his wife or a woman and she was certainly all that. He heard other androids scuttling away into the darkness of the old tube tunnels below, dropping down like pebbles into a well. Her cat-like green eyes were those of a bright child, humouring an adult, and made him look away. Some men had made a half-life with these machines, but for him they had traded down to halfling status, and it would be like making love to a smorgasbord of John Dee tractor parts. Colonel John Brown had no time for such weak-willed ways and had a sharpened half-shovel he used for dismembering, but at a pinch had been known to use anything that came to hand. ‘A man that has sex with an android might as well fuck himself up the ass, ‘he often said, a statement that made as much sense to an educated man as most of the things Brown said.

Buddy and Mrs Doyle had an understanding. She didn’t bother him and he didn’t bother her. ‘Well, if you’re sure Buddy.’ Her hips swayed like a dancer as she sashayed into the darkness, her legs seeming to go on forever and soaking up the available light. His tongue was rooted to the roof of his mouth like papyrus and he tried working it loose with ‘corn’ whisky. He looked longingly at the sealed exit door as she opened it and slipped out. The only other route out was a few loose boards and a fall deep into the subway stops. It would be so cold it would be Eskimo hell out there, but at least he’d be free of all the squirming bugs that he felt advancing towards him. He pinched his nose and took another drink before making a run for the door with his bottle.

One of the old hands Dill Greaves had come down to the Mausoleum to get drunk and had fallen asleep with the bottle in his hand. The bugs cut through his clothes like a combine harvester through wheat. He’d panicked and poured ‘corn’ liquor all over set himself on fire, figuring he could roll around the ground and put it out. He was right-mostly. If any of the customers of the Lucky Tavern, the town’s one bar, heard his drunken shouts they’d have probably shot any outsiders as possible android interlopers, just to be on the safe side. The population of Homeland and their resources achieved some kind of equilibrium of plus or minus one by these periodic splurges

Buddy and Brown, having lived the longest, were the acknowledged expert medical men. They had a stock of medical supplies from the old- style chemists. Brown was for just shooting Dill Greaves. He explained it was nothing personal, but that it would be best all round. Buddy was more philosophical. Live and let live. He handcuffed Dill to the bent over shell of a bus stop. If the cold didn’t get him, the leaf cutters might and if they didn’t, the androids might recycle him, or he might survive and live. There were lots of mights and maybes, but the way Buddy figured that was better than what Brown was giving. But Dill squealed so chicken loudly that he injured his vocal cords and Buddy, although he didn’t like to admit it, was fast coming around to Brown’s way of thinking. The smell of burnt meat was also driving the kid’s froth- mouthed and cloth- eared. Charlie and Davie were likely to plough in and eat Dill straight through to the bone and it would be a shame to have to shoot them. It was one thing to cook and eat an android, quite another to eat a semi- barbecued human. Such things were just not done. Even afterwards the two kids still smaned and licked their lips when they saw Dill.

Buddy took the jug back to the lower deck, and placed his favourite orange polyurethane backed chair and tipped it back onto two legs against a red common-brick wall. The splashes of colour were the nearest he could get to a garden amid the ash of the city. He was high enough to get away from the bugs and low enough to soak up the smidgen of ground heat that rose up from the surface. As the effects of the nova waned, the protective shell of the bubble retracted. Light would begin to appear and stretch unevenly out across the decking, across the car ports, Homeland, out past the oblong of water left from the old dock on the River Thames, softened at the edges by ash-grey silt and reed beds and floating memories of coots and ducks. Buddy would have mellowed by the evening and would be ready for some fine conversation which usually involved playing his harmonica, and wailing out the hits of yesteryear. Brown would work until black-out then when he couldn’t see, he’d work some more- and Ribbery was too much of an army man to quit before his commanding officer, even if Brown would have let him.

The two kids quietly disregarded Buddy’s suggestion that they go to tunnels to eat the android and had set up camp in the shell of a double-decker bus. They hadn’t taken out its voice-box yet so for a while Buddy had some lyrical accompaniment with his singing. That was smart thinking because there were times that an android would say something that was useful to them, and besides, as soon as they were shut down their flesh turned mostly to mush and was inedible quicker than egg-white. Buddy often praised the kids’ versatility and intelligence in an argument he had with Brown over the last few years. Brown maintained that they were sewer rats and that’s where they should have been left. Buddy often waited until he was all spoke out before adding that they’d be a good addition to their troop.

‘No android-eating sewer-rat will ever be good enough,’ Brown said, before going on to explain why in a mixture of techno-bluff and Brownisms.

As was his custom, Buddy tippled at the jug until the heat began to ease its way into his bones. The days in The Last Post were a blizzard of cold and dust storms, ‘corn’ whisky took some of the chill away and made Buddy feel misty inside –rain and hot as a summer on the Old Kilpatrick hills. He never got nasty drunk, but he did enjoy feeing misty and alone about the time that used to be sundown, keeping his good mood boiling with a tasteless swig as the dome above him began to change colour. The whisky didn’t dim his intellect any, but it did make him more tolerant of the rare sorts he had to live with: Brown and Ribbery and Deeds, young Robereta, and old Bongo, the cook.

When the evening light had settled down to a spider’s web of darkness pushing out over the western embankments Buddy climbed the stairs and banged on the hatch of the upper tier a time or two. ‘Better warm up that curry mix and add a few spices,’ he said. Old Bongo didn’t answer, so Buddy banged on the hatch once or twice more to emphasise his point, and went back down to the lower tier. It was a kind of Morse between them, and Old Bongo could work out the mood he was in by the way he banged. One of the kids was waiting for Buddy, sitting sprawled out on his chair, looking at nothing in particular, and probably hoping that he would drop a hint that he could join them for dinner.

‘Git from here, Davy,’ Buddy said, ‘if you’re that hungry go hunt up, or trick, another android into helping you.’ It jumped into his head that android couldn’t be much tougher to eat or less palatable than mixed curry Bongo served almost every night, and it was better not knowing what was in the mix. The old man had been a competent burglar before he crossed the river, changed his life around, and became an incompetent cook. The strange absence of rats, in or around Homebase, was a thought Buddy didn’t like to ponder overlong, as if there was some kind of big Bongo sized snake lurking and feeding in the tunnels. Other members of their august establishment were just as likely to complain: ‘Bongo, this tastes like shit,’ which brought guilty laughs and spoons paused in mid-air.

‘Well, I sure hope so that’s what it’s made with. Waste not want not, as my old mother used to say.’ Bongo would cackle at that and everybody would go back to the serious business of eating.

Buddy was just about to say something to the kids when he saw a far off glow. He could tell it was Brown and Ribbery by the way the lights dipped, were spaced apart, and flickered up and down from between the old print works and the library, which had been flattened and pushed together as if by a big hand playing patty-cake, patty-cake. There was nothing worth salvaging there, but they still moved cautiously, with Ribbery protecting Brown’s back. Ribbery was tall and so gawky awkward he made standing still look difficult. He looked helpless, but that was deceptive. He’d been a teenager before the Fall and afterwards he’d flourished, not with the killing, he was never much good at that, but at the constructing make-shifts, at the digging down for caches of food, at the joining of bits of nothing to make something. If he’d been a no-use boy Brown would have run him off long ago, but his ability to work, almost as hard as Brown himself made him a crew member.

Buddy strolled down to ground level to meet the men at the timber tree, where different bits of different sized and shaped wood was sorted and piled. His head torch picked out their faces. ‘It’s a little early for you girrrrrls to be quitting. I can still see my hands.’ He held his hand out into the darkness. ‘Well maybe not,’ he laughed.

Both men had on the customary three layers, but the cold had its way of working up and finding holes and there was a lot of crouching and waiting in their business that didn’t make it any easier. Both had hats pulled down low and bandannas up high to protect them from the dust, so that only their eyes peeked out. With their rifles hooked onto their backs they stood worked over by the wind, the dust and the cold, like two terracotta warriors that had just been dug up. Buddy offered Brown the jug and he swilled it around his mouth and gurgled, but then spat the rest out and handed it to Ribbery.

‘Girl yourself and it ain’t funny.’ Brown went up the stairs so quickly Buddy was left holding onto the railing as if a freight train had passed. Brown was never one for other people’s manners, but if the day had went well he would stand and pass a little time gabbing.

Colonel John Brown was so intense there seemed to be more of him. Androids came in convenient sizes and the kids played with the lower end of the market. Buddy was four inches taller than his partner, and Ribbery at least three, but there was no way Ribbery would look him in the eye and measure up. Colonel John Brown was bigger than he was because of who he was. It wasn’t a matter of reputation it was a matter of being. Brown was bigger because he was Brown. Buddy was the one man in Homeland who could measure up. He started in most mornings by slipping Brown his slice of chaff-toast and remarking, ‘some of the older people in the company were shrinking.’

‘Fuck-you.’ Brown said.

Simple foot soldiers such as Ribbery could never understand such disrespect. Brown was like the Holy Ghost, he made decisions for them and they always turned out to be the right ones. Even the wrong decisions turned out to be the right ones, like the time he wouldn’t stop for water and Ribbery had scooped up some and drank anyway; boy, did he pay for that mistake. The man never wasted time, losing five minutes was like losing a life time. They were all equal in his eyes, and for Ribbery, his colonel, was bigger than anyone he’d ever met.

‘It’s a grand thing that I ain’t scared to take the odd day off or we’d get no rest,’ Buddy said to Brown one morning.

‘You think so. I don’t,’ Brown said.

‘Hell John - if I worked as hard as you there’d be no thinking done. A man like you that keeps digging at the same thing for sixteen hours a day doesn’t have time to figure things out.’

‘I’d like you to think some food into your stomach, or some clean water in your mouth, or…’

‘…that’s the trouble with you John, no imagination. You can’t think beyond the basics’.

Ribbery wasn’t for spitting out any of the good ‘corn’ liquor. He had a scrawny neck and his Adam’s apple rattled up and down so that it reminded Buddy of a clarinet with a golf ball stuck inside.

‘We better be gettin’ up then. The others will be waiting and there’s something you need to hear,’ Buddy said, when Ribbery stopped to take a breath.