J. Ballard - The Drought

As darkness settled over the river, Ransom went up onto the bridge of the dredger, where Philip Jordan pointed toward the distant city. Huge fires were burning from the skyline, the flames swept off the rooftops as the immense canopies of smoke lifted into the air over their heads.

"They're trying to burn the whole of Mount Royal down," Ransom said. "This must be Lomax." As the light flickered in Philip Jordan's face, he saw the beaked profile of Jonas. He turned back to the fires and began to count them.

An hour later they walked forward along the drained bed, the heat of the waterfront fires driving across the river like a burning sirocco. The entire horizon was ablaze, enormous fires raging on the outskirts of the city. Larchmont burned along the river, the flames sweeping down the streets. The boathouses along the quays were on fire, the hundreds of fish transfigured in the dancing light. Overhead, myriads of glowing cinders sailed past like fireflies, lying in the distant fields to the south as if the clinkered soil itself was beginning to burn.

"The lions!" Catherine shouted. "Doctor, I can hear them!" She ran forward to the edge of the channel, her face lit by the flames.

"Miss Austen, look!" Philip Jordan took her arm. Above the embankment of the motorbridge, illuminated like an immense screen, stood one of the maned lions. It climbed on to the balustrade and looked down at the inferno below, then leapt away into the darkness. They heard a shout from the slip road, and a man raced past the burning quays, the maned lion hunting him through the shadows.

As they climbed up the bank, a figure moved behind one of the stranded launches. An old crone swathed in a bundle of rags clutched at Ransom before he could push her away.

"Doctor, you wouldn't be leaving an old body like Ma Quilter? To the taggers and the terrible flames, for pity's sake?"

"Mrs. Quilter!" Ransom steadied her, half-afraid that the fumes of whiskey that enveloped her might ignite them both. "What are you doing here?"

"Looking for my boy, doctor…" She gestured like a distraught witch at the opposite bank, her wizened face beaked and fearful in the pulsing light. "It's that Lomax and his filthy Miranda, they've stolen my boy!"

Ransom propelled her up the slope. Catherine and Philip, the old Negro carried between them, had scaled the bank and were taking shelter in one of the gardens. The falling cinders flickered around them. As if set off by some prearranged signal, the whole of the lakeside town was burning simultaneously. Only Lomax's house, at the eye of this hurricane, was immune. Searching for his own home among the collapsing roofs, Ransom heard more shouts carried above the roaring timbers, and saw the two cheetahs racing in pursuit down the burning corridors.

"Philip!"

The cry came to them in a familiar demented voice across the river. Mrs. Quilter turned, peering blindly into the flames, and shouted hoarsely: "That's my boy! That's old Quilty come for his Ma!"

"Philip…!" The racing figure of Quilter approached the bank through the burning streets across the river, a huge flapping object in his arms. He reached the open shore, shouting Jordan 's name again, and then lifted his arms and released the great bird. The black swan, still stained by the oil, lifted vigorously, its long neck stretched like the shaft of a spear toward Philip Jordan. He watched as it crossed the river, wings working powerfully, the burning cinders falling around it. As it flew over, disappearing in a wide arc on the dark glowing tide of air, Philip waved to Quilter, who stood watching them as they vanished from sight, his pensive face flickering in the firelight like a lost child's.

By dawn the next morning, they had covered some five miles southwards. All night the city had burned- behind them, and Ransom pushed the small party along as fast as he could, fearing that Jonas and the fishermen had been driven across the motorbridge. But the road behind them remained. empty, receding into the flaring darkness.

At intervals they rested, sitting in the back seats of the cars abandoned along the roadway. As the fires of the burning city flickered in the driving mirrors, Ransom and the others slept intermittently, but Mrs. Quilter spent the night scurrying from one car to another, sitting in the darkness and fiercely manipulating the controls. Once she pressed a horn, and the dull blare sounded away down the empty road.

Her new-found passion for automobiles was unabated the following morning. As Ransom and Philip Jordan limped along through the warm dawn light, the old Negro borne between them in his litter, she accidentally started one of the cars.

"What would my Quilty think of me now, doctor?" she asked as Ransom protected the gear lever from her rapacious hands. The engine roared and raced under her dancing feet.

Five minutes later, when he at last persuaded her to move along the seat, they set off in the car. To Ransom's surprise the engine was in perfect order, and the fuel tank half full. Looking out at the vehicles abandoned along the road, Ransom assumed that they had been left there during the tremendous traffic jams of the previous week. Stalled in motionless glaciers of metal that reached over the plains as far as the horizon, their occupants must have given up in despair and decided to walk the remaining miles.

Behind them the city disappeared from sight, but twentyfive miles further to the south Ransom could still see the smoke staining the sky. On either side of them, beyond the vehicles driven onto the verges, the fields stretched away into the morning haze, their surfaces like buckled plates of rust. Fencing posts leaned in the air, and isolated farmhouses, the dust drifting against their boarded windows, stood at the end of rutted lanes. Everywhere the bright bones of dead cattle lay around the empty water troughs.

For three hours they drove on, twice stopping to exchange cars when the tires were punctured by the barbs of scrap metal on the road. They passed through a succession of deserted farmtowns, then sped toward the coastal hills hidden below the horizon.

The gradient began to descend as they entered the approaches to the river crossing. The number of abandoned cars increased. Ransom drove slowly along the one lane still open, the distant steel spans of the bridge rising above the stalled cars and trucks, carried over the hump like scrap metal on a huge conveyor.

A quarter of a mile from the bridge they were forced to stop, wedged between the converging traffic lanes. Ransom walked ahead and climbed on to the parapet. Originally some three hundred yards wide at this point, the river was now almost drained. A thin creek wound its way like a tired serpent along the bleached white bed. A few rusty lighters lay along the banks, which jutted into the air like lost cliffs facing each other across a desert. Despite the bridge and the embankment on the opposite shore, the existence of the river was now only notional, the drained bed merging into the dusty surface of the surrounding land.

Turning his attention to the bridge, Ransom could see what had caused the huge traffic jam at its approaches. The central span, a section some one hundred feet long, had been blown up by a demolition team, and the steel cantilevers rested stiffly on the riverbed, the edges of the roadway torn like metal pith. In the entrance to the bridge, three army trucks had been shacked together as block vehicles. Their hoods and driving cabins were crumpled and blackened.

"What was the point?" Philip Jordan asked as they made their way down onto the riverbed. "Don't they want people to reach the coast?"

"Of course, Philip." Ransom held tightly to the poles of the litter as he found his footing in the powdery crust. "But not too quickly."