Chapter 2 Marc #4
They set out before dawn the following day. The van climbs the steep roads, engine juddering, headlights faint and brave on the thin morning mist. Marc can feel Linus in the back seat – his unfamiliar weight, his foreign breath.
They climb and climb as the sun spreads red on the mountainside. The road winds up and up. Gradually the surface grows rougher, more broken, littered with debris, stones, pocked with holes.
‘Do we—’ Kimble asks.
‘Keep going,’ Linus says. Marc swerves to avoid a fallen limb of pine. The road is more craters than surface, now. His teeth click together on his tongue as the van dips and bounces. He winces and tastes the mineral tang of blood. On and on, they climb the flanks of the mountain.
Marc recognises it as they approach – the turnout.
‘That’s the place,’ Linus says briefly. ‘Where the cars all used to stall.’
‘I’m not familiar …’ says Marc.
‘Visitors to Nowhere – their cars all stalled back there,’ Linus says. ‘So he used to come and get them. It meant they couldn’t leave.’
‘We didn’t stall.’
Linus shrugs, shoulders tense.
Marc watches the turnout retreat in the rear-view mirror.
For a second he swears he sees a blue Mustang convertible there.
He shakes his head. It’s a glitch in his brain, a special effect produced by looking at all those photographs, before he saw the actual place.
He has looked at pictures of Leahy’s turnout a hundred times.
Other people’s memories are beginning to overlay reality.
It happens when you get too deep into research.
Staring at the past, at the faces of the dead, makes them more real than the living. Adam Leahy drove a blue Mustang.
‘Are we nearly there?’ Marc knows they’re close. ‘The gates can’t be too far away.’
‘We’re not going to the gates,’ Linus says. ‘I’ll tell you when to turn.’
At last Linus taps Marc on the shoulder. ‘Turn up there,’ he says. Marc follows his pointing finger. He doesn’t see it at first. The dirt track is almost obscured by yellow flowering broom, nodding in the breeze. Marc turns the van slowly. Pollen dusts the windscreen in the late morning light.
The track narrows and narrows. Soon it has all but disappeared, and the van bounces over turf and rock.
Marc brings the van to a halt. ‘I don’t think we can get any further.’
‘Packs on,’ Linus says. ‘We walk from here.’ He is suffused with a strange eagerness. Marc can see him now, in the lines of Linus’s sad face – the young man who tried to save Adam Leahy’s life.
‘How far is it?’ Kimble asks, shouldering her pack.
‘Half an hour maybe? If you don’t walk too slow.’ Linus grins wide, showing white tombstone teeth.
‘I’m not slow.’ Kimble gives him her most dangerous smile. Linus flinches.
They pack up and lock the van, although what’s the point, up here, really, and set off up the slope. When Marc turns back for a last look, the van is covered in pine needles, pollen and dust, tyres sunk into the leaf litter. It looks like it’s been abandoned for years.
After the rough road, the forest is still and quiet. Somewhere a cuckoo calls.
‘GoPro,’ Marc says. The three of them put on the headsets. ‘We keep these on, ok? All times. Except the obvious.’
Kimble takes a deep breath and smiles at Marc. ‘The air is blue and green,’ she says.
‘Altitude,’ Linus says. ‘Makes you a little loopy.’
But Kimble is right. Marc breathes deeply and his lungs fill with blue and green.
They climb through pine-scented forest, dappled in sun and shade. After a mile or so the slope levels out and they come out of the trees onto a rise. The world stretches out in every direction, green and brown and far below.
‘We’ll set up camp here,’ Linus says. A ring of scorched stones shows that they are not the first, though it seems impossible that anyone else has ever set foot on this spot, in the deepest wild.
‘Let’s go tonight,’ Kimble says. ‘Let’s get into Nowhere.’ There is a set to her mouth Marc knows well. ‘We can—’
‘Stop,’ Linus says. ‘We look for the tunnel. The gate is welded shut but they still come down to Ault to raid. They must be using it.’ He puts a hand to his throat. He swallows and strokes the scar with trembling fingers. ‘We’ll start looking tomorrow.’
‘We’ll find it,’ Kimble says. She loosens, relaxes, stretches hard with her hands high above her head. Nothing makes Kimble calmer than the impossible.
‘And I get paid the same no matter what?’ Linus’s face is suddenly lined and sad. There’s need in it.
‘Like we said,’ Marc replies. He’s not sure what they’re going to do about that part yet, but he and Kimble always think of something.
‘You sure about the gate?’ Kimble asks.
‘You can see it from here,’ Linus says. ‘Take a look.’ He hands her binoculars. ‘Track down from the dip between the third and fourth ridge.’
Kimble looks. Her face blanches. She hands the binoculars to Marc, guides his hand.
He sees a gap in the trees on a rise. Metal gleams in a clearing maybe half a mile away.
It is reinforced with corrugated iron, topped with rolls of razor wire.
It is ugly, meant to tear flesh. There are things speared on the spikes of the razor wire.
They are small bodies. Birds; crows, blue jays.
There’s something with russet fur, maybe a polecat.
A pale, larger body that Marc thinks is a possum.
They are impaled, splayed in death. There are also brighter patches of colour – blue, white, green.
Clothing, Marc realises. Yellow fabric that might be a t-shirt.
A pair of jeans. Streaks of something the colour of rust run across all of them.
‘What the hell?’ he says, to no one in particular.
‘That’s the gate to Nowhere,’ Linus says. ‘We don’t go near it.’ He bends to his pack to put away the binoculars. ‘Better set up camp.’ His fingers tremble on the buckles.
In the distance, by the gate laden with dead animals, a narrow point of light gleams briefly like a star. Something reflective, a mirror perhaps, is trained into the fading light. It comes again, winking in and out, once, twice.
‘What’s that?’ Marc snatches the binoculars from Linus and trains them on the gate to Nowhere, but by the time he’s found the spot, there’s nothing to be seen.
‘I guess they know we’re here,’ says Kimble.
Linus nods, lips pressed tight.
Marc goes close to Linus. ‘You’re afraid,’ he says.
‘Yes.’ Linus’s gaze is direct. ‘I nearly died here. It all comes back.’
‘What are you afraid of?’
‘Them,’ Linus says. ‘The Nowhere children.’
‘They’re just kids.’ Marc welcomes the anger as it begins to stroke gently at his skull.
‘I think they’re like him,’ Linus says.
‘Yes? Who?’
‘You know who.’ Linus swallows. ‘I think that woman you spoke to is lucky to have lived.’
‘That’s a big assumption.’ Marc takes Linus gently by the collar. He’s not sure what he’s doing but Linus’s words make him simmer lightly inside like water coming to boil. ‘You want your fifteen minutes of fame, fine. But you’ve got no moral high ground here.’
‘Hey, Marky Mark.’ Kimble’s grip is so hard on his shoulder he can feel each one of her fingernails. ‘Come on. Help me weatherproof the kit. Put the tent up or whatever. I’m doing everything here.’
‘Be there in a second.’ For a moment he still holds the neck of Linus’s t-shirt bunched in his hands. Then he lets go. ‘Sorry, man,’ he says, the fight they didn’t have still coursing in his blood.
‘You don’t look sorry,’ Linus says. Marc smiles. The adrenaline keeps pounding, he sees it in Linus’s face too. Their bodies shift, tiny adjustments, aligning in readiness.
‘Marc.’ Kimble is still beside him. She fixes him with her blank grey gaze. ‘The tent.’
He starts. ‘Yes.’
Together Marc and Kimble put the gear into canvas and plastic to protect it from moisture and condensation overnight.
Kimble reaches for Marc’s hand and for a brief moment squeezes the webbing between his pointer finger and thumb.
She doesn’t look at him. This signal means What the fuck are you doing?
Marc seizes her index finger and squeezes it twice in return, which means What the fuck have you gotten us into, Kimble, what the fuck are YOU doing?
‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,’ Kimble sings to herself to the tune of ‘She Loves You’ by the Beatles, moving away from him and thrusting a tent peg into the ground. And that’s as close to an answer as he’ll get, for now.
Loneliness hits Marc, blade-like and cold. It’s just work, he reminds himself. He always feels weird when they’ve been on the road for a while. He loses his centre, forgets his home. Kimble doesn’t. She never loses any piece of herself that Marc can tell.
He wants to call Silvie so badly it’s an ache. But phones don’t work up here. Nothing does, he thinks, hilarious. Minds, lives, phones.
Altitude.