Against Gravity

"Exactly how dangerous is this?" Kendrick demanded. "What happens if we run into a Los Muertos patrol?"

"What happens is, we run. Besides, we're only skirting their territory here. They don't normally bother with small groups like us." Buddy saw Kendrick's alarm and shrugged. "Look, sometimes people do get kidnapped for their ransom value, but that isn't really their style. If they want supplies, they raid a town, or hijack a couple of trucks off the highway. They're mainly trying to take over the black-market operations south of Mexico. That's why Sobrino uses kids like Louie, says they help him maintain his profit margin."

"Buddy, that kid gives me the creeps."

"Me too, me too," Buddy muttered. "What're you looking at me like that for?"

"He's just a kid. Don't you care what happens to him?"

"He's not a kid any more, Kendrick. Life is very hard around these parts. I told you that. Now c'mon."

Buddy called after Joao and Louie, who waited while the other two caught up again. They were moving down a slope now, the black strip of the road visible just a few metres ahead.

Joao gri

Joao shrugged. "They glow in the dark."

Kendrick frowned. "How?"

"Some of them, they eat the flesh of the old gods out in the jungle, and in return the gods fill 'em with light."

"But not literally glowing, right?"

Joao nodded emphatically. "I heard this, they glow. Dance and yell about eating God, all kinds of crazy shit. For real." He shook his head now. "Nobody lie to me. Took this job 'cause wanted to see it myself, maybe."

"You are shitting me," said Kendrick to Buddy.

"I've heard this story so many times," Buddy replied. "Has to be something in it."

Kendrick kept his gaze fixed on Buddy. "So just exactly where is it, then, that this kid is taking us?"

"Two kilometres," said Louie, his eyes bright and sharp. He gestured forwards along the road they had just reached. "Two more kilometres, and I'll show you."

"Two kilometres? And show us what?"

"Patience, Kendrick," Buddy reassured him. "Let's just go look and see."

They made far better progress now that they had the road to walk on. Kendrick had imagined they would have to keep leaping back into the jungle if anyone drove by, but he'd underestimated the vastness of the landscape through which he now wandered. They were alone there, absolutely alone. It was easy to imagine that this road could go on for ever, never varying, always perfectly straight.

Within an hour of walking further, they arrived at the perimeter of another burned-out clearing. An irregular shape in the centre resolved itself into a tank pushed over on its side. At first Kendrick thought it must have been destroyed during the recent months of fighting, but as they got closer his augmented vision picked up its shattered carapace in more detail. It was crumbling and rusted enough to have been there for some time.

Kendrick became aware of a faint flickering to one side of the tank, perhaps a campfire. He stopped, gripped by a sudden fear that they had stumbled across an encampment of Los Muertos, but Louie beckoned them all forward with a casual wave. Buddy stepped forward but, judging by the grim expression on his face, Kendrick wondered if he was finally having his own doubts about how much they could trust this boy.

Kendrick watched as Buddy drew out his gun, the action casual, holding it close by his side as he stepped closer to the burned-out tank. He then kept his fist wrapped around it, concealing it from Louie. As Kendrick came forward, the faint light they had seen resolved itself into a figure.

The man was dressed in the ragtag uniform of Los Muertos, and some instinct told Kendrick that the soldier was dying. Fine threads of something criss-crossed his skin and his flesh hung loosely from his skeletal form. The threads glowed with an unca

It was impossible to gauge the soldier's age: he might have been thirty, he might have been sixty. His lips moved in a constant soundless litany, and he showed no awareness of their presence.

"What happened to him?" Kendrick breathed.

"Ate God, now he's got God all inside him," muttered Louie by way of explanation. "God is in those things you see on his skin."

Kendrick caught Buddy's eye, but Buddy just gri

Kendrick looked back at the Los Muertos soldier. "Buddy, what the hell's happening to him?"

"He's a walking nanite factory, is what's happening to him. Don't get too close."

The Maze? "He must have gone down into the Maze," said Kendrick.

"That's what I figure. Crazy fuckers really think Wilber had a way to talk to God, so they go down in there, get themselves infected with this stuff, speak in tongues or whatever, then they die. But while they're still alive, they're like holy men to the rest of 'em."

Kendrick shook his head. "In some way this is the same kind of thing that's inside us, isn't it?"

"And they're dying for their efforts, just like most of us did. It's a kind of justice, I suppose."

"Joao, that light in him – what the hell is that?"

Joao shrugged without ever looking away from the slumped form before them.

"Maybe the nanite threads absorb sunlight for energy, then release it at night." Kendrick cast a sceptical look at him, but Buddy just gri

It was growing lighter, and Kendrick knew that they'd have to find their way back soon. Unintelligible phrases, perhaps visions of angels and demons, perhaps something far stranger, continued to spill from the dying man's lips.

14 October 2096 Edinburgh

Kendrick barely slept. He woke deep in the night, a sweat-soaked sheet twisted around his body despite the cold of the night outside. Visions of his former life chased around the inside of his skull, along with fragments of a half-forgotten nightmare.

Dreams of the Maze, and how he'd arrived there, were wearily familiar territory for Kendrick; dark dreams that streaked across the landscape of his unconscious mind like brooding thunderstorms. He closed his eyes again before finally waking to faint splashes of dawn visible through the window. He mumbled into the air and the windowscreen became opaque, rooftops fading and the room again becoming dark.

He stared up at the ceiling and found there was little he could do to stop the memories flooding back.

28 January 2088 Washington suburbs, seven hours after the LA Nuke

Kendrick was seated at his breakfast, staring absent-mindedly at the images scrolling across an eepsheet that he'd tacked onto the door of the refrigerator. It was a

He opened the front door and squinted out into the early-morning light. Two men wearing what looked like military uniforms stood there, their expressions impassive.