Winter's Children

by Michael G. Coney

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Military Sci-Fi

Synopsis

The countryside is hundreds of feet deep in snow, and a small community is managing to exist in the bell-tower of a church, just above the snow level. For sustenance they make journeys to the shops of the village far below by tunnels. They also stay alive by hunting the ferocious and telepathic bear-like animals known as Pals. The individuals in the small group are brilliantly portrayed, in turn defeatist, boastful, querulous, selfish and generous. They are obsessive, they argue; but when danger threatens, as it often does, they immediately band together in their common fight for survival.

Release date: December 21, 2012

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 188

Sample

Switch and Cockade were talking together in the ice corridors.

“I don’t like it,” Switch was muttering nervously, his forefinger tracing abstract patterns on the roughly-hewn walls of the tunnel.

“What can we do?” Cockade held the lamp which reflected infinities in the ice around them. Her voice echoed shrill and hollow.

“I don’t know what the hell we can do except just get out and leave them to it, like you said.”

They were walking again; the corridor widened although Switch was still obliged to stoop. Weirdly refracted through the ice, the word SUPERMARKET danced in the glow of Cockade’s lamp.

“Why don’t we, then?”

“Two of us, alone?”

“Yes.” She was stacking cans on a rough sledge while Switch chipped at the shelves with his pick. The lamp was on the floor, smoking black.

“Just the two of us? We wouldn’t stand a chance.” He paused in his work to watch her face hopefully. Maybe they would stand a chance. Maybe. “The flesh-hunters would get us right away.”

“Not if we took Jacko’s snowboat.” Her voice was sly.

“Just take it? Just sail it away, you mean?”

“Yes.”

“I’m not sure I know how.”

“I do.” She looked smug. “Sometimes he took me hunting with him. Before you came, that is. I can sail it quite easily.”

“What about Jacko and the others?” Switch was experiencing a belated twinge of conscience. “What will they do? How will they manage for meat?”

“There’s plenty down here.”

“Yes, but it’s not fresh. It’s been here for years and years. It’s good to have fresh meat sometimes … I wonder if Jacko had any luck today.” His broad face lightened with anticipation.

“Don’t you want to get away?” She leaned towards him, eyes narrowed. “Do you want to stay? Is that it?”

“It’s not too bad here.”

“Look …” She raised her hand before his face, fingers spread, ticking off points. “The flesh-hunters know we’re here. The Old Man won’t leave. Jacko won’t leave without the Old Man. Shrug and Paladin won’t leave without Jacko. Soon the flesh-hunters will come and we won’t stand a chance. Don’t you see, Switch? We’ve got to move on.”

The sledge was fully loaded now; they began to pull it back along the ice-corridor. Two human beings; the man dressed in a skin-diving suit with a tweed jacket on top, the woman in wellington boots and a sable coat. Trudging along the silver-blue ice-tunnel dragging a sledge stacked with canned food from an entombed supermarket.

“We’ve got to move on,” repeated Cockade.

The Old Man was talking to Shrug and Paladin in the bell-tower.

“I’ve seen them all.” His voice issued piping from misshaped lips. “Cattle, sheep, pigs, goats, horses—domestic animals, they called them. You wanted fresh meat? You killed a domestic animal. Except horses.” He shook his head sagely. “You didn’t eat horses.”

“Why did you keep them, then?” asked Paladin.

“To ride. You rode them across the fields, along the roads, hooves clattering, galloping, the wind singing in your face, the hooves beating time.” The Old Man’s face was flushed like raw chewed leather; his eyes were shining, far away, looking across sixty years.

The old fool will have another turn unless he takes it easy, thought Shrug in the corner, taking another gulp of Harvey’s Merienda from the dark bottle.

“Didn’t the horses’ hooves sink in?” asked Paladin eagerly. He was about twenty-six, pale and intense, a dreamer. The Old Man’s words lent his dreams shape and substance.

“Of course not. There wasn’t any snow, not then. Only in winter, that is … No. The land was firm so you could walk on it, like this floor. All these buildings down below—once they stood firm on land, open to the sky. There was no snow. Only in winter, that is. Then the snow would lie a foot thick, at most two feet; and when you waded through it you could feel the land solid beneath.”

Shrug, still half-listening, shivered, remembering his last trip Up Top. Jacko had taken him in the snowboat to hunt Pads and a gust of wind had capsized the small craft. He had sunk into the powdery snow, thrashing with his legs in search of a footing, and found none. The snow was up to his shoulders before Jacko, spreadeagled on boards, had dragged him to safety. That was the last time he had gone Up Top.

The experience had led to a recurrent dream which tortured him on the days when Switch forgot to bring liquor back from the Wine Lodge. Again he had fallen in the snow, but this time Jacko was nowhere near. As he sank, shouting, his feet touched something and he thought: I’m saved. It was the roof of the Wine Lodge, a mere five feet below the surface.

But the roof was steeply pitched and slippery, and Shrug’s feet, although performing the motions of running, could not obtain purchase. For minutes he ran up the slates while all the time his feet were losing ground and he was slipping deeper, deeper into the snow. He was screaming.

He usually woke at this point to find one of the others slapping his face and shouting at him—but it always took some time to recall where he was. He was glad to see the others, although they were annoyed at being disturbed by his yelling.

But suppose one day they didn’t wake him up?

He took another drink and looked around the small bell-tower, timber-strutted and comfortable. Against one wall was nailed a ladder leading to the hole in the spire, where Jacko went. There was a square hole in the floor beside his mattress and a flight of stone steps leading down to the ice-tunnels. It was all very simple and straightforward in the bell-tower.

The Old Man was still talking; he was always talking. “There were the cars too, and the trains and the airplanes, carrying you fast and safe, much better than the snowboat. They didn’t rely on the wind; they had their own power built in. I used to go to car races sometimes. The Monaco Grand Prix; that was a sight! Cars weaving in and out of the houses like wheeled rockets, their exhaust noises bouncing from the buildings like bombs. The drivers were princes, the winner a crowned king!”

Paladin sighed, eyes burning. “I should like to have been a racing driver,” he whispered, hands crooked around the imaginary wheel as described by the Old Man. “I would have won. They’d have crowned me King Paladin! There would never have been a driver like me!”

Shrug laughed harshly from his corner, then listened, cocking his head. “Shhh … I think they’re coming.”

A regular thumping could be heard, the familiar sound of Switch and Cockade dragging their sledge up the stairs punctuated by the occasional rattle as a can slid over the backplate and went tumbling back down. Next, a scraping as they reached the floor below and pulled their load over to the stockpile; then the clack-clack of unloading and re-stacking.

Presently Cockade’s head appeared, disembodied through the stair-well.

“One of these days you lazy bastards might come and give us a hand!” she shrilled, stumping to the top of the stone steps and sprawling to the dirty floor. Switch arrived next, glancing guiltily at the others and lying down beside her.

“What did you get?” asked Shrug anxiously, misinterpreting Switch’s sheepish look.

Without replying Switch handed him a bottle. He examined it in the light of the lamp which Cockade had placed on the floor. “Tonic Wine,” he said, recognising the label without having to read it—he was a slow reader. “What did you bring this garbage for?” He uncorked the bottle and drank.

“Long way to the Wine Lodge,” explained Switch briefly. “There’s been a fall,” he added as an afterthought. “We had to get what we could from the Supermarket.”

“A fall?” Shrug was alarmed. “It’ll have to be cleared!”

“You volunteering?” asked Cockade sharply.

A potentially awkward situation was averted by a sudden fading of the light. A figure was backing clumsily through the gaping hole in the spire, feet feeling for the ladder.

Jacko was home.

“I’d show them!” Paladin shouted, feet clattering on the wooden floor as he capered, his shadow dancing on the walls. “I’d mow them down, whoosh! Whoosh! One after the other!” He brandished a broken lath, cutting and slashing, driving his imaginary opponent to the wall and dispatching him with a thrust to the gut. “Take that, you swine!”

“Whereabouts?” asked Shrug nervously.

“Over to the south-west,” explained Jacko, pointing, his tall figure dwarfing Paladin. “About a dozen of them, three miles away. I was following a Pad and I saw smoke from a square roof beside a spire, then they came out of the smoke. They were carrying … things. Maybe people. They dumped them on sledges. Then they pulled away north.”

“They know we’re here,” muttered Switch. “It’s only a matter of time.”

“I don’t think so.” This from Shrug. “They’d have been here already, if they knew we were here.”

Cockade sniffed. “You’re too bloody idle to think of moving.” She tore a strip of flesh from the ham of a Pad which sizzled on the improvised spit. They all gathered around the fire in the huge, upturned bell. “If you saw the flesh-hunters coming, Christ, you’d just have another drink and welcome them in. You’re so stoned you wouldn’t feel their knives.”

Shrug belched in disgust, staring into the fire.

“I remember the green fields,” mumbled the Old Man. “It wasn’t always like this; oh, no. In those days a man could walk in the fields, on the roads, anywhere—safe. No flesh-hunters, not then …”

“Jacko!” Cockade’s voice was sharp. “Tell that old fool to shut up. He’s just not with it. Now …” she regarded them all, one by one, sizing them up. “Now, what are we going to do about it?”

“Defend ourselves!” Paladin laughed recklessly. “Mow them down, one by one, as they come through the hole!”

“No chance of that,” Switch sneered. “They’ll smoke us out. That’s the way they work. They’ll pour petrol in here and set fire to the place. Then they’ll chop us when we climb out, coughing up our guts.”

“What do you think, Jacko?” Cockade asked. She moved close to him, putting her arm around him in the way she used to, before his indifference got her down. She had never understood his indifference, never suspected that it might have something to do with herself—then Jacko had brought Switch for her. “Can’t we go and find somewhere else?” Her voice was unusually pleading.

“I’m not leaving the Old Man.” He said it flatly, as a catechism often repeated.

“For God’s sake!” She flung her arms wide in appeal. “Can’t you forget about that old fool? His time’s nearly up, anyway. It’s us that matter; the young ones, you and me and Switch and Paladin. And Shrug. Not that old parasite.”

“You can go without us, if you want.”

“How? We haven’t got a snowboat.”

“Build one.”

“Build one? That’d take weeks! We haven’t got time. Look …” She lowered her voice to a persuasive wheedle. “If you’re so fond of the Old Man, why not take him with us? All of us, with the snowboat and sledges and skis.”

“You know he’s too old to stand a journey.”

“It’s the colours I miss most,” the Old Man was saying, his voice filling the sudden silence. He had been speaking, quietly, all the time. “The green fields and the red roofs, the blue sky and the white buildings. Not like here … Here, everything’s brown. Brown walls, brown floor, brown roof. Brown dirt. This place is the colour of decay …”

“Tell me about the fields, Old Man.” Jacko squatted beside the thin, ragged figure. “Tell me about the trees and the hills.” His eyes were far away, imagining what he had never seen.

“The hills were purple with heather, and the trees were emerald in spring and gold in autumn, and even in winter there was colour, with the berries and the birds …”

“Tell us about the birds,” Paladin murmured, sitting down.

Cockade shrugged and sat down too. The discussion appeared to be over. Discussions were futile, anyway.

A jagged shaft of light speared through the hole in the spire and Cockade stirred, grumbling to herself. She opened her eyes reluctantly and, rolling over, found herself looking straight into Switch’s face which was bloated with sleep. His skin was flushed and his breathing stertorous. She shook him disgustedly.

“Wha’?” He squinted at her.

“Wake up. I want to talk to you.”

“Later.” He rolled over, facing the other way.

She shrugged and lay down again. It could wait. So long as they didn’t leave it too late …

Occasionally the bell-tower trembled to the touch of distant underground thunder.

Paladin dreamed, sweating with his dream companions at the mortar, dropping in the canister, whang as it sailed away over enemy lines. Whump! as the charge exploded, killing, maiming, a cylindrical emissary of death from him, Paladin. Whump! He grinned in his sleep, fiercely.

The Old Man dreamed of rainbows.

Jacko woke, stretched and scratched himself, looked around and got quietly to his feet. He stretched again, sinews crackling, and yawned silently. Wriggling his shoulders into a well-cut overcoat he made for the ladder and began to climb. As always he paused at the hole, scanning the horizon for signs of strangers, then he climbed down the outside ladder and stepped into the snowboat tethered below.

The eternal wind swept by, as it had for years; no stronger, no weaker, just a continuous driving wall against which a man could lean. The surface of the snow was convoluted hereabouts into rippling waves, the tips whipped off by the wind into a shallow mist so that the waves themselves swam out of focus.

Jacko untied the painter, hoisted the sail and pushed off with his foot against the black stone wall of the buried church tower. The boat moved away slowly at first; then, heeling as it left the lee of the spire, it raced across the snow with a keen hissing. Jacko settled himself in the stern, letting out the mainsheet and setting a course for the south-west.

Behind him, the only evidence of the buried village was the church spire, projecting solid and incongruous from the shifting field of silver.

*        *        *

Shrug worked quickly and intently, striving by concentrated thought and effort to outpace and put behind him the demons of the night. He had seen them so clearly that he knew, surely, he could not be dreaming; those huge white shapes which paced the bell-tower towards him, stepping through the vanished bodies of Switch and Cockade, Paladin, Jacko and the Old Man and coming for him only—him, Shrug.

He had screamed once, and Jacko was suddenly there bending over him but still the Pads came on inexorably, pacing about the walls and occasionally dropping to all fours, circling, but all the time closing in on him. Then Jacko had returned to his mattress and gone to sleep again, ignoring the white beasts.

As soon as he felt a little better Shrug had risen, lit a lamp and descended the steps to the ice-tunnels. Stooping, he had scuttled along the corridors, past the tailor’s, Woolworths, the Supermarket; then he had turned right along the spur which led to the Wine Lodge. It was weeks, maybe months, since he had been in the tunnels; certainly he had not been down here since the coming of Switch. Since then, he had relied on the others to bring his supplies.

Finding the spur blocked by the fall Switch had mentioned, he had retraced his steps to the hardware store where he obtained a shovel and a case of blasting charges and fuses. A couple of satisfactory explosions had reduced the ice-boulders to powder without bringing down the roof, and he was now shifting the rubble.

His back was aching already, a dull throbbing concentrated about the lumbar region rising to a crescendo of pain each time he lifted the shovel. The sweat which oozed from his body felt as though it was solidifying to ice-drops on his skin, so intense was the cold in the tunnel. He was seized with bouts of shivering as he toiled.

For the time being, however, he had conquered the demons.

As he worked he thought of Jacko and wondered, once again, why the big man stayed with them. Was he thinking of founding a tribe? If so, the material with which he was starting was hardly inspiring. An alcoholic, a lunatic, and a dotard—which left Switch and Cockade. These two had been together for some time now, but there was no promise of children on the way.

No. Jacko would be better off elsewhere. He could be a leader in one of the larger communities, if. . .