Lachlan Walter - The Rain Never Came

‘Fuck me drunk,’ Tobe said, stopping us dead.

I said nothing, gawping at what the smear had become. A great wall made of rubble and junk stretched before us, running from north to south. It was so long that I couldn’t see where it stopped. I felt dwarfed by it, insignificant—all my joy, sorrows, successes and setbacks rendered meaningless.

It made me wonder if there was any point in going on.

But we did, stopping next to a stretch of the wall made of old doors, broken wardrobes, ruined tables. Red and Blue collapsed in a heap. The sun beat down, directly overhead, its light reflecting off the wall.

We slowly drowned in it.

‘Shit.’

‘You bet,’ said a high-pitched voice.

I looked at the girl. She was smiling at me. Tobe turned, swapping the bumper to his other shoulder, and looked at her as well. Still smiling, she winked at him. He returned her smile. For a moment, it was happy families all round.

‘What do you reckon?’ I asked Tobe.

He looked at me. ‘We should cut her down, my back’s killing me. Then we’ll get a bit of shade up and make camp. I don’t fancy spending the night in the Borough.’

We crouched down, carefully laying the girl and the dead roo—which she hadn’t seemed to notice, despite it rubbing up against her—onto the highway. Only a few metres ahead, the blacktop simply stopped, swallowed up by the wall.

‘Don’t move,’ Tobe said to the girl, taking his knife from his boot. ‘I wouldn’t want to stick you.’

He started cutting away the twine around her ankles. I dumped my pack, opened a fresh canteen, and took a long drink.

‘Am I your bloody servant or something? Get to work!’

Shamefaced, I fished around in my pack. I pulled out a tarp, a hammer, some nails. I started knocking up a rough lean-to. It was a tight squeeze, the tarp stretched tent-like between the wall and the ground. I flopped in the shade; Red and Blue joined me. They panted some more, desperate, pleading.

I poured them a drink, didn’t spill a drop. They both licked my face to say thanks.

‘Nearly there,’ Tobe muttered.

He kept hacking at the twine around the girl’s wrists. She still hadn’t moved. The twine gave; Tobe fell back on his haunches. Like the snap of a finger, the girl was up and running, following the wall to the south. Red and Blue lay there on the blacktop, too buggered to chase after her.

She was gone before I was off my arse. Tobe got to his feet and casually raised his rifle, then looked down its sight.

‘Please, mate,’ I whispered. I don’t know if he heard me, but he lowered his gun, shaking his head. ‘It curves,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘The wall curves. See?’

He held out his rifle. I reluctantly got to my feet and had a better look. The girl had disappeared; the land had forgotten her. And then I saw what Tobe was talking about—far in the distance, the wall curved to the west. I passed the rifle back. Tobe looked to the north.

‘Same again.’

‘Big wall.’

‘No shit.’

We stood there, staring at the monstrous thing before us. Neither of us spoke. Not knowing what else to do, I sat back down in the shade. It was too hot to stay out in the sun. Tobe shouldered his rifle, stared into the distance.

‘Let’s have a squizz,’ he said. ‘You up for it?’

Lying there in the relative cool, I decided that I didn’t actually have the oomph. ‘I’m knackered, and it’s bloody hot.’

He looked down at me, sneering slightly.

‘Red! Blue! Come on!’

They didn’t move, just whined a little.

‘Right, then, if that’s how it is,’ he said, already walking away.

‘Have fun,’ I said, and leaned back on my pack.

Irested a while, flat-out in the jerry-rigged shade. Red and Blue lay asleep beside me, occasionally letting out deep sighs of happiness. They started snoring, their paws twitching.

When the mood took me, I would roll onto my side or stretch my arms or hug my knees to my chest and work cramps from my legs. I drank a lot of water. I slowly started to feel human again.

A gunshot rang out, an enormous crack of manmade thunder.

‘Tobe,’ I said, breaking from my lazy daze.

Red and Blue jumped to their feet, instantly awake. They darted out of the shade, barking madly. I joined them outside, saw nothing out of the ordinary. A fresh coat of flies covered the dead roo; I walked over and shooed them away. I rooted through my pack, pulled out another ratty tarp, threw it over the carcass. It wasn’t much, but it was something.

Another shot rang out.

Red and Blue sniffed the air and took off. I chased after them. They ran hard, following the wall to the south, disappearing behind its curve. I surrendered to the inevitable, staggered back to camp, rooted through my pack again, pulled out my barely working binoculars, and took a better look. The section we had made camp next to—old doors, broken wardrobes, ruined tables—stretched on a while before giving way to tall sheets of rusty corrugated iron. Each sheet stood on its end, eight or nine feet high. There were hundreds of them, one after the other. Far ahead, I saw an abrupt change, a sliver of black. I fixed on it, found a chink in the wall’s armour—at the bottom of a sheet a chunk was missing, revealing a dark hole barely a foot and a half wide.

A gate wants to be opened; a fence wants to be climbed.

I gathered my things and set off. The sun had passed over the wall, casting me in shadow. For that, I thanked someone I don’t believe in. The thought of Tobe or the girl didn’t enter my mind—the urge to explore had overcome me, cramming out all else. I pushed on, finally crouching down in front of the hole I had discovered. Looking through it, there was nothing but shadow and dappled sunlight, jagged shapes jutting every-which-way. A faint glow came from somewhere far inside, bright enough to make everything seem knotted and gnarled. I whipped off my shirt, wrapped it around my hands, and took hold of the broken sheet of iron. Despite my makeshift gloves, I could feel the heat in it. I wrenched it roughly. The metal groaned, shifting a little. I put my back into it. Nails in the iron slowly worked free, a grinding scrape that shook my teeth. The sheet started to peel away. Another groan, deeper this time. Nails started dropping to the ground like spent shells.

I jumped back, some primitive instinct.

I stuffed it up, of course—I tripped on my feet, ended up on my arse. The sheet of iron started falling, slowly-slowly-slowly, creaking like an old tree in a gale. I got back to my feet and guided the sheet to the ground.

‘Shit.’

It was all I could say.

‘Shit.’

I couldn’t look away. I slouched out, my hands braced on my knees. I sat down, parked my arse. I kept staring.

It was a mess of stuff, more than you can imagine, no matter how many ancient tips you’ve seen, all of it stacked into enormous piles. The piles were towering, with gaps between them only wide enough for someone skinny to squeeze through. I stepped into this new world. To my left, a pile of ordinary household items. They would have been good salvage if they weren’t so ruined—old washing machines, dryers, fridges, rolls of rotting carpet. To my right, a pile of broken wooden furniture. Behind that, a pile of televisions and more broken wooden furniture.

‘Shit happens,’ I said, reading the graffiti scrawled on one of the piles.

I stepped further into the gap, entered an open space maybe six feet around. The piles beside me stopped abruptly, then across this open space, the piles started again. There was another gap between them. I looked left, looked right. Two other gaps ran between three other piles, all burrowing into the guts of the wall itself. At the end of one gap was a faint glow. The others showed me nothing, the piles simply curving away into darkness.