Cecelia Holland - Floating Worlds

“Come on,” Han Ra said. He squatted to go through the door. The man with the hand torch followed him. The darkness they left behind in the room swarmed with men.

“What about her?” someone called, behind her.

“Leave her. She’s a woman. What can she do?”

They left her. Passing by, the last to go knocked her carelessly to her knees. She went after them to the low door and shut it and crept back to Bunker lying on the floor.

“Dick.” The room was utterly dark. Her hands groped over him. He was rigid, doubled up in a knot on his side on the floor, and for a moment she could not feel him breathe and thought he was dead. Her fingers slid over the skin of his ribs and down and touched the slime of blood.

“Paula.”

“Wait.” She scurried off around the room. “Just a minute—I’ll get a light—” She banged into the end of the bed so hard that for a few steps her leg would not hold her. Feeling over the wall she reached the dip-lamp in the chink by the cupboard and lit it. The medical patches were in the old cupboard. She knelt beside him and pasted one square to each of his elbows.

“Paula.”

“Don’t talk.” She yanked the bedcovers off the bed and wrapped him in a blanket. The dip-lamp made the room stuffy in a moment.

“Get out,” he said. His voice wheezed.

“I won’t leave you.”

When he breathed in, his breath whistled. “Stupid bitch. Both of us. Get out. Luhan. Doesn’t know. Where. The air car.”

“Oh.”

He closed his eyes. His skin looked black in the feeble light. She tore pieces from the second blanket and made a bandage over the slit in his belly and fastened it with a nail. He tried to help her move him but he could not even stand. She dragged him up the tunnel. Every few yards she stopped to rest, and while she rested held him tight in her arms to keep him warm. By the time she reached the surface, he was unconscious.

The warm night was unusually windy. The long slope led away from the mouth of the tunnel toward the lake. She laid him carefully on one blanket and pulled it by the edge down across the grass. The wind rustled behind her and she started so hard she went cold, thinking it was Han Ra coming back.

A hundred feet from the tunnel, the slope broke off in a sheer fourteen-foot drop, like a bite taken out of the hillside. She hid Bunker in the shadow at the back of this notch and returned to the secret room. All their food was hidden in a hole dug out of the wall behind the bed. She put it into a sack, took the sack and some rope out across the wasteland to the only tree in the area, and hoisted it up to the high branches, away from dogs.

Bunker was where she had left him: awake now. She felt of the bandage. It was so full of blood it squelched when she touched it.

He whispered, “Tools. Fire.” His voice sounded as if it were rising through water.

“I’m afraid to leave you here. It’s too close to the tunnel.” She bundled him up again in the blankets. There were only three or four hours left until daybreak. His eyes were closed and she thought he was asleep again, but when she lifted him with his arm around her neck he pushed with his feet, trying to help. She took him off over the gentle hump of the next hill and down into a narrow gulley whose sandy bottom yielded under her feet.

When she had found him a soft shelter she went back at a run to the tunnel. On the slope, she stopped still. Above the tunnel, near the crown of the slope, was the flat turret of the building’s gatehouse. A light shone through it. While she watched it faded out. She went at a jog up to the gatehouse and looked in the door.

She could see down the stairway, and the light was just disappearing away along the corridor that led to Jennie’s flat. Quietly she followed it. For the first time, she remembered she had no clothes on. Her bare feet made no sound on the slick plastic floor. Ahead, the light bobbed along; the people carrying it were one dark moving thing, now and then a head and shoulders silhouetted against the ball of light before them. They went into Jennie Morrison’s old flat, and Paula went into the next one.

There was a hole blasted through the wall between this place and Jennie’s. Chunks of plasticrete and shelving littered the floor. She stepped carefully over a sink basin.

“They’re gone,” someone said loudly, in the next room. “That bitch got him out.”

“I told you to do for her.”

“We’ll find them.”

She put her hand on the wall and looked through the hole into Jennie’s flat. The low doorway under the sink was open wide and the light shone out from the secret room. Long shadows passed back and forth through it: the legs of the men walking past the light. They were looting the place. She backed up a step into the ruined apartment behind her, stooped, and in the rubble found a piece of plasticrete she could lift.

“We could use this cupboard for firewood,” one of the raiders said. “I wonder how they got it in here?”

She threw the chunk of building stone at Jennie’s kitchen wall. At the thud someone yelled.

“What’s that?”

Paula was hurrying through the darkened apartment, gathering up pieces of stone. She went back to the hole and threw the debris against the wall around the low doorway. Something crumbled and a shower of dust fell like hail.

“Hey! Who’s that? What’s going on?” A head poked out the doorway, and she flung a stone that came nowhere near him and he ducked back.

“Get away or we’ll shoot!”

She leaned against the wall in the dark room, listening to them. When no more rocks fell around them, they began to talk in low whispers, and suddenly three men burst out of the doorway. A gun went off half a dozen times, like thunder in the closed space, and the three men raced out Jennie’s door and down the corridor, taking their light with them. Paula went into the secret room. Bunker’s tools, matches, the last of their clothes, and the dip-lamp were all piled on the bed. She wrapped them up in her winter coat and lugged them up the tunnel to the wilderness.

From where she was sitting, she could see the whole lake. Three people were coming toward her along its edge. It was strange how even now that the lake had no water in it at all and the mud was dried firm as concrete, people walked along the edge instead of across. Habit. They saw what they were used to seeing. Paula sat cross-legged in the lee of the ruined building watching the three people come on.

The woman led them. Paula had seen that of the three of them the woman was the boldest. The two men followed her trustingly. They reached the big boulder that marked the southernmost tip of the lake and turned to walk along the edge of the meadow, following the curve of the next hillside. Paula stood up.

Instantly the man second in the line saw her and tapped the woman on the shoulder and pointed. Paula waved to them. They broke into a run toward her. Paula waited until they were nearly on her and went off past the ruin. They fell in around her.

“Where is your friend?” the woman said. “We were expecting him.”

“He’s busy.”

Beyond the ruin where Paula had waited for them the land was broken into ridges where the grass still grew thick and there were still many trees. Narrow defiles separated the ridges, their beds made of round stones. She led these people down a twisting gulley, past the place where she and Kasuk and Junna had come into the New York dome, two years before. At the mouth of this gorge, she went between two old trees and into a cave in the hillside. The cave was lined with polished tile. It was an old terminal on the Underground. A big blue arrow on the tile pointed into the gloom; a sign above it read INDEPENDENT LINE. The air car was parked against the opposite wall.