Anarchy by James Treadwell

Author:James Treadwell
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Atria/Emily Bestler Books
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

20

She soon forgot that she was more than halfway there. The miles that had sped away under her tires felt as remote as her childhood dreams of flying. She forgot that there’d ever been anything in the world except unremitting white. Where the surface of the snow had softened even slightly, or where its deceptively weightless accumulation had gone on perfectly undisturbed, the wheels of the bike sank far too deep to turn and she had to haul herself and her whole load along as if dragging them underwater. On the wider roads, the ones that followed broader valleys and connected villages and towns, she found parallel strips packed down hard by the tires of tractors or cars. These were a hundred times easier to follow, but the broad valleys ran northwest-southeast, across her route instead of along it, and the villages, she quickly learned, were places to avoid.

She trudged toward one late that first afternoon and saw five or six people in the road ahead. They were standing around a makeshift sled, unloading plastic crates and split logs. They turned to stare at her as one.

“Clear off,” said a woman of about Iz’s age. “Go on.”

“Cheryl?” The man nearest her looked doubtful.

“Didn’t you hear me? Back that way.”

Iz knew genuine hostility when she saw it. She thought of the supplies stashed in her panniers and began wrestling the bike around without a word.

“It’s a time for charity,” she heard the man say.

“Sod that. She can get her charity somewhere else, thank you very much. Somewhere that’s got some left over.” The woman called Cheryl raised her voice at Iz’s back. “Wandering around looking for answers. Bugger off. All of you.”

“Don’t try coming back,” another woman said, emboldened.

“The good angels are watching us,” the man muttered. He sounded full of shame.

“Doing a brilliant job, aren’t they? Stop mooning after her like that and shift some wood.”

She was passed by tractors on the road two or three times. She thought they might stop and help, or at least ask her where she was going, but no, the hard-faced men and women who drove them wouldn’t even look at her as she went by. Like the villagers, they took her for one of the pilgrims, one of the deluded or desperate thousands who had flocked to the southwest in the weeks immediately after the appearance of the winged monstrosity. Iz had seen them on TV too, of course, jamming the roads as the snow rebuffed them, battling on foot if they had the courage, camping in fields like fragments of an army in December retreat, turning to vandalism and theft as their progress failed. They’d mostly given up or been removed by now, so she thought. If there were others making the same journey she never saw them, though she was sure that no one with a need less than hers could possibly have kept going. There were many hours when she’d have given up herself if she’d had anything at all to go back to.

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