Long Dark Dusk

Book 2: The Australia Trilogy

by James P. Smythe

Genres: Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Post-Apocalyptic sci-fi

Synopsis

As soon as teenaged Chan Aitch learned the horrible truth about life on Australia and its fateful mission, she vowed to save everyone she could from the gangs and cultists fighting for control of the ship's limited resources. Now that Australia has crashed back to Earth, though, her efforts seem to have been in vain: everyone she cares about is dead or in prison. As one of the few to have survived the ship's return, Chan is now living in poverty on the fringes of a huge city, on a planet she's never known but always dreamed of. She's barely mustering the will to survive when she learns that Mae, the little girl she once rescued on Australia, could be alive. But she has no idea where Mae is, or how to find her. In addition to being alone in an unfamiliar city, Chan has never felt more helpless. But she'll do whatever it takes to find Mae, even if it means going to prison herself to track the girl down. After all, she's broken out of prison before--how hard could it be to do it on Earth?

Release date: April 4, 2017

Publisher: Quercus

Print pages: 368

Sample

One

She says that her name is Alala, but I’m not sure if I believe her. She says that it has a meaning, that in the language her ancestors spoke it would carry some weight, but she doesn’t know what it is now. Nobody remembers. It’s a word that has been lost, from a language that went under the sea. She wears a wrap around her head, that comes down to cover the bottom half of her face, a scarf of swirled patterns trimmed with fur, a kind of golden colour that looks like dirt or sick when you’re up close, but you know it’s worth something from the way she handles it. Along the edge of the scarf, silvery tufts and tassels hang down over her neck. You can’t tell how old she is. She tries to hide that from everybody.

Alala buys what I steal; that’s our arrangement. That’s the joy of her, what makes her so different from everybody else. She’ll take anything if she trusts you – doesn’t matter what it is. She’ll give absolutely anything a price. It’s always a struggle to see her, because she has queues: either others with stuff to trade; or junkies who want whatever she sells that they need; or her own people – she calls them her fingers, fingers in pies, she says, then twitches her fingers while she says it, even the stump of the half-missing one.

I hold today’s merchandise out for her to examine. It’s a knife, of sorts: a filthy black blade, threaded with these red knots, like veins. But not blood or gemstones or anything like that, but glowing metallic, running with electrics. When I picked it up it sparked me so violently that I almost passed out. It’s serious technology, probably from somebody working on the wall. It’s protected, which means it’s got to be worth something. I pass it to her, blade first.

‘Don’t touch the handle,’ I say.

‘Little girl. Give me credit. You think I was born yesterday?’ She doesn’t know much about me. Just my name, where I live, where I came from, and what I’m after. That’s it. Some people here give her sob stories when they try to sell to her: they tell her about who they used to be, or what they’ve lost. Who they’ve lost. I keep all of that to myself. I’m a criminal, escaped and running. Nothing too personal.

‘Will they be coming back for this?’ she asks. ‘They know where you are.’

‘They won’t be coming.’

‘But you did steal it?’

‘In a way,’ I say.

She nods. She understands. Technically, it was stolen. I found it next to the unconscious body of a policeman who had been chasing me. Finders keepers. He chased me nearly the length of the slums, persistent as any police I’ve known. Climbed as well, which is rare. Usually they stop when there’s a danger of their suits getting torn, but he didn’t. I led him the trickiest route I could find, and still he kept it up. He only gave up when he had to; when I jumped a gap I knew he would never make. He fell, and I backtracked slowly, down to his body. Checked he was alive, set off his rescue alarm, took his weapon. Easy.

‘I need the imprint. Otherwise . . .’

She reaches down to the pockets that she’s sewn into her clothes: lots of them, most secret, so that she can turn any of the obvious ones out, show you how poor she is, without giving away what’s in the others. She’s got tricks, and they’re obvious to anybody who’s lived where I have, haggling with the salesmen as I did. Not what I’m after. ‘I only have a cheap card, ten units. If I have imprint, it is maybe worth more, but . . .’ She shrugs, this exaggerated gesture where she puts her hands up in front of her, empty apart from the cheap money card. ‘Take it, go on. You rob me.’ She covers her face with her empty hand, makes out that she’s not looking at me.

I take out the other package from my pack: the guard’s thumb, wrapped in a scarf that looks not unlike the one she’s wearing around her neck. She smiles, through her fake blindness, pulls a card from her sash and hands it over, snatching up the thumb so fast, pocketing it even faster. She’s got her imprint now.

‘Don’t be spending this all at once,’ she says, handing over the cash.

 

I walk towards my home – it is home, even if it feels transitory – past the junkies, past the families huddled around home-made water distillers and trash-can fires, through the rows and rows of shanty houses with their makeshift walls and corrugated metal roofs. On the ground, outlines of yellow lines still exist, faded nearly to nothing; and then, in some places, you can see insignias printed onto walls: a printed shape of a bird here, a flag there. I go past the warehouses, the sheds, their walls opened up, their insides gutted, replaced with a maze of tents and makeshift shelters. I keep going towards the wall, as far as you can get, before the shanties drop away almost completely, and there’s just a few of us, propped up against the back wall of the last warehouse. This is where I like to live. Nobody asks you anything, and everybody keeps to themselves. There’s a peace and quiet like I’ve never known before.

I’m nearly to my own home when I hear the sound of a baby crying. That’s the worst sort of alarm. It could be a visitor, but who would bring a baby here? Everybody hunkers down when they hear it, because no good can come of this. This means police and services both, flooding in here like they own the place. Only a matter of time.

I watch the people here pull shut whatever they have that passes for a door, yanking across plates of sheet metal if they have them, cardboard if they don’t. Fires are extinguished, because they’ll only draw attention. You want the darkness. If you’re in the dark and quiet, chances are the police won’t bother to check you out.

I miss the warmth I used to take for granted, but I have adjusted. I didn’t know how warm it actually was on Australia until I got here. Now I only know months of prickled skin on my arms. Months of it.

The crying’s coming from inside one of the warehouses. It won’t stay there – you’re trapped inside those things, nowhere to run if you’re cornered. I climb up onto the top of the closest building, burned out and slightly more fragile than some of the others. Still, it takes my weight. I look over to see if I can spy them, spot any movement. The baby’s mother – seems like it’s never the father, trying to hide them – will either find somewhere to hide, or she’ll be immediately on the move. Either way, this isn’t going to end well. I don’t know why she didn’t have the baby muted; that’s the easiest way of keeping them quiet, as cruel a thing as it is to do. Now, instead, the baby will be taken, prised from her hands, because babies here are always taken away from the people that live here. The services swoop in, take them somewhere they’ll be better cared for. That’s what happens every time. It’s what’ll happen now.

Unless.

I stay on the rooftops and listen. She’s moving. The sound stops echoing, it’s no longer coming from the warehouse. Now, she’s winding her way through the shanty village. I hear them shouting at her to move on. They won’t help her if she needs it.

So I run with her. Maybe I can help her. Could be we get her somewhere to get the operation done. I know that Alala’s done some, so her, maybe; though she probably won’t touch one that’s this hot. I can’t hear any sirens from cars yet, so she’s still got a few minutes. She could still hide, maybe set the baby unconscious, just for the time being, hide it somewhere. But that’s risky. I’ve seen it where the baby wakes at the worst possible moment, hidden in some compartment in the ground or something; where they open their eyes and don’t have a clue where they are, then just start screaming again. They don’t even know what happened. Babies always seem to cry when they wake up. When do we learn that it’s safer to be awake?

I get from the warehouses to the shanties and I don’t stop. Uneven roofs make it hard to sprint, but at least they’re stable enough to take my weight.

I spot her, a few rows over. The people who live in those sheds are putting out their fires, hissing as she runs past; but I can make her out just enough to keep a track on her. She’s barely my age – younger, I would guess – and I can’t see the baby, not at first. Then movement from the pack on her back, and that’s where it is. Easier to bundle it away than carry it, I suppose. I wonder what exactly set it off crying this time: food; sleep; the desire to be anywhere but here. The mother is panicking. She’s looking around, gasping as she runs. She’s making this panting noise, the air puffing from her mouth like smoke. It’s hard to run in the cold, I’ve learned. There’s still no sign of the police. If I were her, I’d be less worried about running. I would be trying to keep the baby quiet.

But she’s not me. She’s lived here a lot longer. Maybe she knows something that I don’t. I have to change direction, feet slamming onto patchwork rooftops, to keep up, and I’m leaping to another row when I hear the sirens, in the distance.

Damn it. Out of time.

The girl runs towards where Alala lives, over by the entrance, by the fence. Maybe she’s going to try and get out of here, get past the wire fences, past the grey-brown of our concrete and into the poorer parts of the suburbs. Maybe it’ll be easier to hide there. But it’s not like they’ll stop chasing her. They’ll catch her, and she’ll barter. They always barter.

I follow her, silhouetted by the glow from embers of extinguished fires; and then, as she turns to hush the baby, to soothe it, I see her face in the light of the moon. She’s younger than I first thought. Thirteen or fourteen. She shouldn’t be in here, shouldn’t be running. She shouldn’t be in this situation.

I have to get her attention. The police are coming closer. I can hear their sirens; their tyres on the gravelled tarmac near the entrance to this part of the city.

‘Hey,’ I shout, but not too loud. I don’t want to get made, not if I can help it. There’s every chance that the police want me just as much as they want her. Maybe even more. ‘Hey!’ She turns and looks at me while she’s running, and she stumbles. My fault. She’s on her knees, scrabbling, the baby really howling now. The jolt kicked it into a whole new level of panic.

‘Go away,’ she says. She doesn’t want my help. They never do.

Then I hear the engines, unnaturally loud. They’re here on bikes, on trucks. The lights of them coming bob wildly, chucking shadows up all around me.

‘I can get you help,’ I say, but I’m not even really sure that’s true at this point. Still, it’s worth a shot, better than giving up before you’ve even had a chance. But she doesn’t stop. She hesitates. Maybe. I can see it, in her shoulders, her spine. Maybe.

But she’s too late. We both are. The vehicles – two bikes and a truck, both armoured, far more serious than you need to deal with a teenage girl and her illegal baby – screech to a stop in front of her. The remains of somebody’s shanty hang from the front of the truck, ploughed through and destroyed. Fabric and fragments of metal piping. Technically, nobody’s allowed to live here. The police don’t care what damage they might cause. The vehicles rumble, which is intentional. They can be silent, but the police use the sound when they want to intimidate whoever they’re chasing; when they want you to know that they’re unbeatable, inescapable. It’s a growl of intent.

The back doors of the truck open, and the officers scramble out. The two on the bikes step down, leaving their engines on, leaving the lights pointed right at the girl. She shields her eyes with her forearm. I duck down, lower the chance of them seeing me. I don’t want them to force me to make my move. That has to be my choice.

Miraculously, the baby’s being quiet. The mother could still talk her way out of this – as long as they don’t search her backpack. I stay back and down, and I watch. The police are all dressed the same, men and women, doesn’t matter. Thin black fabric costumes, those little plates across their mouths for the air. Only bit you can see is their eyes; the police are fitted with augments to help them track others, to see in the dark, to react faster. Silly, though: augmented body parts make for an easy target. Take them out, and whoever they belong to is temporarily out of action.

The police spit orders at her. I don’t hear what they say, only the fizzing static of their mouthpieces, the high-pitched residue of whatever it is they’re actually telling her. When they direct their orders at you, it comes out as a targeted sound, like they’re talking inside your head. They’re telling her to put the baby down, I’m sure. They’ll take that first, and then her, won’t want the kid caught up in any sort of crossfire, if there is one. They won’t want to damage it.

I can see the police’s hands: all twitching fingers, wavering near their sides. No weapons, to reduce the chance of an accident. They’ll try to persuade her to go with them of her own accord; they might even tell her that they’ll allow her to keep the baby, just somewhere cleaner and nicer. She might even bite, even though she’ll know it’s a lie.

It’s always a lie.

I see one of the cops put his hand on the hilt of his weapon. The thin blue light that says it’s activated blinks once, twice. The mother won’t have seen that from where she’s standing. She begins to kneel, swings the pack to her front and opens it, so that she can put the baby down.

It’s a show of trust. She raises her hands.

I surrender.

How can she be so stupid? How can anybody be so stupid?

I weigh my options. I’ve escaped from nine at one time before – easily. A month or so back, I made it away from twelve of them. Barely escaped, but I made it. Amazing what you can do when you have to. I must get their attention, get them away from her. There’s no sneaking here in this city, no stealthy hiding. If I can get their attention they’ll scan me, tag me. If I’m lucky, I’ll be higher up their list of priorities than the baby is.

I shout to get their attention. They look up at me, all but one of them. I see the little lights in their eyes flicker. ‘Get out of here!’ I yell at the girl, but she doesn’t listen. She doesn’t take the baby and run. She cowers, pulling the infant tight to her. ‘Move!’ I scream, but the girl stays still.

Stupid, stupid, stupid. Somebody gives you a chance, you take it. At least, you should. That’s how Australia worked.

If I run, they’ll take her anyway. They’ll chase me, and I’ll either lose them or injure them, and then I won’t find her when I’m done, because there’s no way she isn’t already locked up, barred and tagged, and everything will have been for nothing.

And I am so, so sick of running.

Different tack. I jump from the roof, close the gap between me and the police. I watch them scanning the area, their eyes darting around the place faster than real eyes would, the little blue-hued reflective glint of their pupils trying to find escape routes, alleys, hiding places, prepping for pursuit.

That’s not my plan, not this time.

I know how to fight the police. Hit one hard enough on the bone between their eyes, right at the top of the nose, and it does more than hurt their skull. Something in their augments scrambles. It’s a flaw in their design; they’ve been outfitted with cheap tech, the government too skinflint to bother getting them anything up to date. Smash one, another, boot yet another in the crotch. Doesn’t matter what gender you are, that’ll crumple you. I slam my fist into throats, push their faces down onto the gravel.

It starts to rain, which is typical. Just a sprinkle, not setting in. I tear weapons from their hands, throw them into the darkness, smash more maskplates, poke eyes. Whatever works. The rain is hot, like the showers I used to love. Haven’t had one of those in a while. Too long. The warm water is nice, satisfying, even though it makes it harder for me to see. The augments give them an advantage in the rain, but disadvantaged is when I’ve always worked best, with my back against the wall; gives me a reason to take risks.

They all fight well, because they’ve been trained. They’ve spent their whole lives working at getting better at fighting, building their skills, their aggression.

But then, so have I.

 

I leave one of them awake, head still lolling, mouth more than a bit drooly. He tried to hit me with his striker, went for the back of my head, but I snatched it, jabbed him in his own neck with it so hard that it crunched something in his throat before the electrics even sparked through his system – but he’s conscious, just about.

‘Where were you going to take the baby?’ I ask him. He makes a noise, but it’s unintelligible, tries to pretend that he doesn’t know, that he’s about to pass out. This is how it always is: you always have to fight for information, no matter how little you actually get. They’re audio-linked to their control, who’s probably listening to everything they say. They have to make it seem like I’m torturing them. And even when they do give up information to me, there’s rarely anything that useful. It’s all the same stuff, over and over. I press my hand to his throat, where I injured him before, and suddenly he can speak, his eye – his one good eye, at least, the light gone out from the other – staring right at me. Suddenly, the power of speech returns to him, and he tells me what I already know, croaking out the words.

He tells me that there’s no way of finding out where the kids have gone, because that information is all special requisition stuff. It’s the same as they always say. He tells me his name, because that’s what they’re taught. Tell them your name, because it makes you more human. You’re less likely to get killed if they know your name. Not that I’d ever kill him, but he doesn’t know that. I don’t kill, no matter what they might think about me.

I hear the sound of backup: a whirring in the wind and the scream of sirens.

Now there’s no choice but to run.

The girl is gone and her baby with her. She must have run while I fought the police. She didn’t wait to thank me, but I don’t blame her. I run back towards my home and I shout as I go, telling the people hiding behind their walls that the fight isn’t over. Most people here are scared. I knew somebody once who would have called them cowards, but the truth of it is that these people are surviving. You do what you have to do. As my mother once said to me: be selfish. That’s the path of least resistance.

The only time I ever tried to not be selfish, I ended up down here. So now I’m doing exactly as my mother asked. And it was selfish of me, helping this girl. The police have information I need. Not the girl’s fault I didn’t get it.

I pick up the pace, heading towards the wall. At least it’s a target you can see from wherever you are in the city, like a point on a compass. Faster, feet slamming onto the concrete so hard they hurt. Don’t go near the rooftops. If they’re in the air, that’ll get you spotted faster than anything. It’s easier to stay down, bolt forward, back past the warehouses, even as the lights of their vehicles start flooding the streets behind me.

Up in the sky, framed against the slight red tint of the dawn, I can see birds flying in formation; a sharp V, an arrowhead, soaring on the gusts coming from the wall.

I stop when I reach the water in front of the city wall. There’s nowhere to run to now; the police are too close behind me. The water here is frozen where it touches the wall itself. Patches of ice spread out across its breadth forming precarious bridges into the water that you don’t dare walk upon. The only thing this water is good for is drinking. It’s too cold to swim in; after a few minutes, hypothermia will set in. But a few minutes are all I need, if I’m lucky, if I get this right.

We call this the docks, because once that’s what it was. Before the wall was built, ships came here; and before that it was an army base, and before that probably fields, farmland, forest. Now, the bits that made it a dock are mostly gone. There’s no pier, no walkways, just concrete, collapsing at the edge, and the remains of an old crane that’s mostly been torn apart for scrap. I sit on the ground where the water meets the land, and I lower myself in, quiet as possible. It’s horrible. My whole body arches away from the cold, and I struggle not to squeal as I go in. I push myself to a drifting floe of ice and sink down until only my mouth and eyes are above the water. I can see lights approaching the water’s edge. I wait until they’re close, until I have to actually hide from them.

When they’re close enough, when they’ve jumped down from their vehicles and are scanning the area, I force myself to go totally under. The cold is murder on my eyes, but I daren’t close them, not even for a second. So I look down, through the water, and I can see so far down. Not to the bottom, because it’s too dark; but I can see a part of the city from where it collapsed, a fault line that tore the land into pieces; and the remains of people, of possessions, of lives.

Those people didn’t know what was happening to them when they died. Not a single part of it was their choice.

I hold my breath; and I pray that my body doesn’t let me down; not now, not when I need it the most.

 

The gasp when I break the water, after they’re gone, is wonderful. It hurts, because it’s so very cold, but I try and stay down, in case they’re still milling around. I wait, bobbing about in the water, attempting to stay motionless, even as my limbs start to ache. It’s only when I absolutely have to that I pull myself out. I kneel on the solid ground for a moment. I can’t stop shivering. I need to.

I find a fire that’s still lit, just outside one of the warehouses and sit next to it as everybody else starts to poke their heads out, to check the police have gone. I warm my hands, my arms; lean in over the coals, just for a few moments, just to feel the heat on my face and listen to the sizzle from my hair as the water slips off.

Then I’m off, before anybody can ask me why I’m so wet; or, if they saw me before, why I was being chased.

My home here isn’t unlike my last: three walls, a roof, a floor; a bed, although I had to work pretty hard to make that what I needed it to be. I got a mattress from the waters at the edge of the docks – somebody threw it there; I don’t know why and I don’t really care – and I let it dry out. But it was too soft, made my back ache, so I had to put wood inside it. My back hurt less, after I made it harder. I also traded for a sheet of filthy torn fabric, but once I’d scrubbed it clean it revealed this pattern that’s really quite beautiful. It took me a while to adjust to the colours. They’re everywhere. There’s nothing dark about being here, not during the daytime. There’s a lot of sunlight, so much brightness coming down from the city, between the city walls. It’s almost blinding.

I found the docks quickly when I first got here, mainly because I had to. The docks are the parts of the city that nobody else wants. The ground is too unstable to build on, and they’re too close to the wall, to the air conditioners that keep the rest of the city cool. They’re useful for the homeless, though, for shanties and shelters: big, unbroken concrete slabs on the ground, then a load of old buildings that have been repurposed. There’s a lot of metal around, a lot of shards of glass on the ground. This is where you live if you’ve managed to stay inside the city itself after you should have been kicked out, if you’ve managed to avoid being chased out. If you make it out of here, you get a place in the suburbs. But that costs.

It looks like Australia, at a glance – people living in cramped conditions, no sense of there being anything permanent about where they live, everybody suffering. But it’s different. There’s something missing here. At least on the Australia we had the arboretum; and we had a sense of unity, I suppose. We might have been terrified, but we were all terrified. Every floor, every section, whatever gang or cult you had allegiance to, everybody was scared. Here, there’s no fear. Instead they’re resigned. They live hand to mouth, day by day, remembering when things were better; struggling to eat, to stay warm, praying that the fans in the wall won’t set too much of a chill in over the night time, that the police won’t come and raid and put out the fires, that there might be a job for them in the morning – a lot of good people, just so beaten down it’s like they’re barely here.

They remember when things were better, and they pray that things will change.

So maybe that’s something I share with them, at least.

Two

I know a man who lives much further into the city, well away from the docks. His apartment is almost central, in a part where you wouldn’t think ordinary people can actually afford to live. His building isn’t as tall as some, though, and that’s something I’ve discovered: height costs here. His name is Ziegler, and that’s all he calls himself. Always that, nothing more. We’re on a single-name basis.

Ziegler.

Chan.

He used to be a reporter, he says, which was a good job. He wrote stories, telling people what was going on. And then that was lost, pretty much, because there are direct feeds for everything; eye in the sky stuff, he calls it. Pie in the sky. He said that like a joke when he first told me about himself, and he laughed, but I didn’t. I didn’t get it. Even after he explained it.

He writes articles, and books about the city – he’s shown them to me, but I haven’t read one yet – so he finds people to talk to from the outskirts, women, men, whoever, and he buys them dinner, and he records their stories. He lets them sleep in his apartment for the night. He has a spare bedroom, painted in this soft pink colour. The bed is small, but it’s better than being outside. And he gives his informants clothes: if not new ones, then certainly they’re clean, better than what they were wearing when they went there. I got a new outfit, once; he let me pick from the wardrobe. Only the wrapped-in-plastic ones were off-limits.

Ziegler and I have a system. I go to one of the contact points outside the docks, and I drop-e him, ping him a blank message that’s totally innocuous. He said to never use names, never give too much information away. They’re watching everything, he said. He’s pretty nervous about this stuff. He set me up with an ID, a name that isn’t mine and that I don’t recognise – Peggy Wolfe, somebody who I’m sure once existed but n. . .