Eric Brown - Rites of Passage

“Jesus Christ,” I said, bubbling with excitement. “Wonder who it is?”

Danny flashed me a look. “Whoever it is, chances are they’re dangerous.” He raised his rifle.

I could see he was thinking more about the flyer, and what might be salvaged from it, than who the pilot might be.

My mind was in turmoil. What if the pilot were a woman? I recalled the images of models in the magazines I’d hoarded over the years, their flawless, immaculate beauty, their haughty you’re-not-good-enough gazes.

My heart was thudding by the time we crested a slipping dune.

In the stuttering white light of the magnetic storm we could see that the flyer had pitched nose-first into the desert. Its near wing was crumpled, snapped into flapping sections.

I thought of the irony of finding a beautiful woman sitting in the cockpit… dead.

I took a step forward. Danny said, “Remember, careful.”

I nodded and led the way.

We approached slowly, as if the crumpled machine were a wounded animal.

“A glider,” Danny said, “jerry-rigged with an old turbo.”

I lifted my rifle and we stepped cautiously towards the shattered windshield of the cockpit.

“Oh,” I said, as I made out the figure slumped against the controls.

It was a man, an old, wizened man, thin and bald and stinking. Even from a distance of two metres I could smell his adenoid-pinching body odour.

Danny cracked the cockpit’s latch with the butt of his rifle. He hauled back the canopy, checked the pilot for weapons, then felt for his pulse.

“Alive,” he said, but his gaze was ranging over the craft and the supplies packed tight around the cockpit.

I reached out and gently eased the pilot back into his seat, his head lolling. I looked for injuries; his torso seemed fine, but his left leg was snapped at the shin and bleeding.

Danny thought about it. I guessed he was calculating the worth of the glider and the supplies against the long-term cost of giving refuge to another needy stray. “Okay, go back to the truck and tell Kat to get it over here. Tell Ed to have his equipment ready.”

I took off at a run.

Five minutes later Kat braked the truck beside the glider and we jumped out. Edvard limped through the sand and knelt in the cockpit’s hatch. After examining the pilot he did something to the leg, binding the shattered limb, then nodded to Danny and me. We eased the pilot from the glider, trying to ignore his sour body odour, and carried him over to the truck.

On the way I realised that he wasn’t as old as I’d first thought. He was in his forties, perhaps, though his skeletal frame and bald head made him look older. He wore tattered shorts and a ripped t-shirt and nothing else.

We installed him in the lounge and Edvard got to work on the leg, aided by Kat. Danny fetched the toolkit and for the next couple of hours we took the glider apart and stowed it in the cargo hold. We ferried the supplies, packed in three silver hold-alls, to the galley.

“Water,” Danny grinned as he passed me the canisters. “And dried meat, for chrissake!”

“Where the hell did he get meat from?” I wondered aloud.

Danny shook his head. “We’ll find that out when we question him. If he lives.”

I looked across at Danny. “You hope he dies?”

He weighed the question. “He dies, and that’s one less mouth… He lives, and what he knows might be valuable. Take your pick.”

It was late when we returned to the lounge. The pilot was still unconscious, his leg swaddled in bandages. “Broken in a couple of places,” Edvard reported. “He’ll pull through. I’ll stay here with him. You get some sleep.”

In my berth, I stared through the canopy at the flaring night sky, too excited at the prospect of questioning the pilot to sleep.

The rocking of the truck brought me awake. Outside, the desert was on fire. I pulled on my shorts and lurched into the lounge. Kat must have been driving because Danny was sitting in his armchair, leaning forward and staring at the pilot.

“You don’t know how grateful…” the invalid said in heavily accented English between sips of water — a half ration, I saw. He indicated his leg with the beaker. “You could have left me there.”

Guarded, Danny said, “We reckoned it was a fair trade, the wreckage of your plane, the supplies. We’ll feed you, keep you alive. But you’ll have to work if you want to be part of the team.”

Edvard sat on the battered sofa against the far wall. He said, “What can you do?”

The man’s thin lips hitched in an uneasy smile. “This and that, a bit of tinkering, engineering. I worked on solar arrays, years ago.”

I said, “What’s your name?”

He stared back at me, and I didn’t like the look in his eyes. Hostile. “What’s yours?”

“Pierre,” I said, returning his glare.

He nodded, increasing the width of his smile. “Call me Skull,” he said.

It was obviously not his given name, but considering the fleshless condition of his head, and his rictus grin, it was appropriate. Skull .

Danny took over. “The meat you had in the glider. Where’d you get that?”

“Down south. Still some game surviving. Shot it myself.”

“South?” Danny sat up, hope in his eyes. “There’s water down there, sea?”

Skull looked at Danny for a second before shaking his head. “No sea. The place is almost dead.”

Edvard said, “Where did you come from? With supplies like those, a plane? My guess is a colony somewhere.”

I didn’t like the way Skull paused after each question, as if calculating the right answer to give. “I was with a gang of no-hopers holed up in what was Algiers. Conditions were bad. The only hope was to get out, move north. But they didn’t want to risk it.”

“So you stole the supplies and the plane and got the hell out,” Danny finished.

That sly pause, again. A shrug. “A man has to look after himself, these days.”

I thought of the failing colony in Algiers, confirmation that there were others still out there.

“You’re one lucky bastard you spotted us,” Danny said.

Skull made a quick pout of his lips, as if to debate the point, then said, “Where you heading?”

“The Mediterranean,” Danny said, and left it at that.

The stranger had this way of trying not to show any reaction, as if to do so would give something away. I wondered at the company he’d kept, where he’d had to hide his emotions like this, wary and mistrustful. At last he said, “You’re joking, right?”

Danny shook his head, serious. “We’ve crossed Europe I don’t know how many times, drilling for water. I think it’s just about all dried up. My reckoning is, at the bottom of the Med, or where the sea used to be, there’ll be a better chance of striking water.”

“Salt water. Undrinkable sea water.”

Danny smiled and played his trump. “So what? I have a desalination rig all ready if that’s the case.”

“But south… the Med?” Skull shook his head. “You’re mad, you know that? You heard about the scum down there? The feral bands? They’d kill you for what you got, no questions asked.”

Danny shrugged. “We can look after ourselves,” he said, and the confidence in his voice made me feel proud.

Skull licked his lips. “Madness.”

Edvard said, from the couch, “Well, we could always leave you here, if you don’t wish to accompany us.”

Skull lay his head back, staring at the ceiling. “I’ll take my chances with you people,” he said.

The following day the desert gave way to high bare hills, and then a range of mountains. I sat with Danny in the cab as we drove along what might have been a highway, years ago; now it was little better than an eroded track. According to the map, we were travelling through a range of mountains called the Cevennes. We passed remnants of what had been forests, stunted trunks that covered hillsides like so many barren pegs, dead now like everything else.