Keepers of the Peace (ebook) by Keith Brooke

Author:Keith Brooke [Brooke, Keith]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wildside Press
Published: 2010-12-31T23:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER NINE

20th June to 3rd July 2084

‘Stop! Stop it!’ Amagat’s screams pierced the still heat of the afternoon. ‘Will you just stop it?’

I slowed to a halt. The trolley gave a final lurch and then stopped. ‘You walk or you ride,’ I said. ‘Which is it to be?’

No words, but Amagat stepped away from the trolley and walked a few paces; that was a good enough answer for me. She stopped and turned around, a surreal sight in these surroundings. From the neck down she was the epitome of the sublieutenant that she was. But the lower half of her head was black and red and swollen and the top half was wrapped in a crisp white bandage. It just didn’t fit with the baked desert around her.

‘Leo,’ I said. ‘Will you look after the sub?’

Jacobi caught up with us and stopped by Amagat. ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘You forgot this.’ He threw me one of the cowboy hats. He was wearing the straw hat and he placed the big floppy cap on Amagat’s bandaged head.

Cohen joined us wearing the other cowboy hat. The hole in his body-suit gave me another surge of the creeps. I added one of the other shoulder bags to my own and picked up two plastic bags of drinks. Leo couldn’t carry so much while he was Amagat’s eyes and Cohen and the sub wouldn’t be able to manage much.

‘We can stop in an hour, then we keep on,’ I said. ‘We’ve got to get away from the plane before they send search parties.’ I re-checked the direction against my mind-map and started to march. In the short time we had taken to organise at the plane, the sun had burnt out to a golden memory of its former self. It was still hot, but it was with the dry heat of the air, not the beating rays of the sun. The going was a lot easier than I had imagined it would be and I found a ray of optimism creeping into my mind. Fool that I was.

I took point, walking four or five metres ahead of Cohen, who was a few paces ahead of Leo and Amagat. I set a stiff pace. We had to get clear.

* * * *

After an hour we paused, drinks of fruit juice welcome in the dying heat of the day. It was strange how the sun died out while its heat lingered on. As the sun sank and seemed to swell into a fiery orange ball I noticed that the heat was coming from the ground; the day’s warmth escaping into the evening. I wondered how long it would last.

The land that had looked so flat from the aeroplane was really a series of gentle slopes, broken by the occasional winding gully. The ground was hard and dry. I guess there must have been rains in the Dust Bowl at some time or other — that would be why the ground was set so solid — but judging by the lack of plant life there had been none for a long time.

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