On our sixth day in the Field we set out from our makeshift camp a little before dawn, feeling around in the dark to fold up our packs without making a light. Ash’s screams as he’d been dragged off just two nights before were still fresh in our minds, though nobody said it out loud – like by talking about it we’d extinguish any possibility he was still alive.
I was the slowest and by the time I’d slung the pack over my shoulder the others were all standing over watching me. Except for Ivan, who was staring to the eastern horizon, watching the light creep over the distant peaks. His eyes were scanning to and fro furiously like he was reading a newspaper. I wondered if he expected to find some essential datum which would get us across safely. Like the one square in a sudoku which, after it’s filled, suddenly all the others cascade into place. That, or they come tumbling down onto your head and the contradiction kills you. Click, boom.
And my ankle was getting worse. It was definitely swelling now and the pain was not going anywhere. It would be difficult today to avoid a limp. I kept the leg of my pants over it but I thought I saw Gen side-eye me as I clambered awkwardly to my feet. Well, I won’t tell if you don’t, I thought.
We left. When we first set out Ash had been keen to get us to rough up our camps, so you couldn’t tell where we’d been. He’d made us kick about the detritus of Lego blocks where we’d slept and cover our makeshift latrine with torn chunks of pastel-coloured foam, weighed down with crapped-out battery casings. But now he was gone nobody seemed to care any more. Anything that was stalking us wouldn’t have a problem spotting us a mile off. Cutting through the thickets of polyester hair and plaited lianas, we left a trail anything could follow. And I was increasingly sure the sorters went on smell, not sight.
Ivan went first, then Gen, then Atee and Kiran and me. So off we rode into the valley.
The day before we’d passed through a valley of Lego bricks, which even by the standards of the Field made my eyelids pulse with colours. Years ago this would’ve been a goldmine, when the price of Lego was going up and it was increasingly more attractive than the euro as currency whose value wasn’t liable to dramatic fluctuation. I could imagine flocks of petrol-fed drones with nets descending on this field to pick it clean. But now it was too far from the boundary to be accessible – a medium-sized drone would burn more than half its tank just to get here, unladen. Plus, the price of petrol had climbed even faster than the price of Lego, when you could get it.
So there they were, heaps upon heaps of the stuff, untouched by human hands. It was a clear day and they were aggressively mosaic in the sun, so fraught with colour that it blazed into meaningless pixels which curved away upwards towards the ceiling of the sky, made the sky itself look like it was made of Lego, absurdly quantised.
Sunstruck, Kiran had actually said, “Makes you want to fill your pockets with it.”
Ivan hadn’t even turned around. “If you do that, the sorters will pull you down and dismember you. Then they’ll eat your pockets out and shit those bricks back right where you got them. So the bricks will still be here, but we’ll be without a botanist.”
“Jesus,” said Kiran. “It was a joke. Let off, Ivan.”
Not looking around, Ivan waded ankle-deep into the Lego, testing the pile with his heel. Bricks tumbled down the pile, but it held. “Rest up. We cross to that peak” – he pointed to a crag of what might’ve once been a treehouse, sticking absurdly from the Lego mass – “and no stopping until we get there.”
Well, reader, we didn’t stop, even when the bricks gave way under my foot and I fell twenty feet, landing on one ankle at an awful angle, Gen shouting my name. Corners and edges cut into my palms, my forearms, my knees. I tried to stand. When I looked back up the slope everyone was looking down at me in worry.
Except for Ivan. He was the furthest away and looked like he’d only just realised everyone else had stopped. As I watched he turned. His expression was slate-blank, a hint of mild concern or confusion. Nothing else at all.
Dawn happened quietly around us and the sun burned off the mist, revealing a landscape of butchered teddy bears and eyeless soft toy animals of every description. Many lacked arms or legs and had the stuffing pouring from naked wounds. I remembered with a shudder Ivan’s line about Kiran and the Lego. But the plain was quiet and our path through the mounds was stable on the packed earth, if perhaps slightly spongy. I got the impression the Field was testing us.
I looked for something to use as a stick, but I knew even if I found something it was more than my life was worth to take it with me. This place had a logic to all the things in it, catalogued and placed lovingly by the sorters’ appendages (pincers? claws? I’d still never seen one – my imagination grew them from the plastic-strewn ground, a monstrous Heath Robinson machine of Meccano and Barbie arms). We were walking through a Haeckelian purgatory, exact and desolate. I wondered how the teddy bears related to the Beanie Babies on the sprawling tree of un-life.
Ivan, a long way ahead of us, came over a verge and yelped. Atee and I looked at each other and he muttered, “Here we go again.”
Gen was already halfway to the verge and when she stopped it looked like she had passed through the skin of a bubble into a world of pure light. She was outlined in some sort of shimmering halo.
As we drew closer the air grew warm and even in the broad sunlight there seemed to be a sort of intensifying brightness in the air, somewhere between the gaps between the atoms of it. I could feel the hairs on my arms start to rise, like we were all regressing into apes or wolfmen. Eventually I came to the lip of the valley – I was limping openly now, concentrating on reducing pain rather than concealing anything – and I looked over the edge into the heart of the sun.
The eyes of a thousand angels stared back at me and their eyes were incendiary flares. I gasped and turned away. Even with my eyes closed the light was burned onto my retinas. It was discombobulated, disjoint; there were eddies and shapes in it which swam.
Squinting hard, I edged up to the verge and took another look. In the valley was a savage growth of mirrors. In every direction they proliferated, vanity mirrors, car mirrors, little handheld mirrors with gammy plastic handles that maybe once had fit into a child’s palm. Mirrored spheres and mirrored bowls. Shards of mirror and cracks of mirror ground finely into dust that itself was a mirror. Instead of reflecting the light they seemed to intensify it, fold it in on itself and compress it to a point or a line or a space of immeasurable fierceness.
Gen said, “This is insane. It’s too dangerous. We have to go around.”
I pulled my gaze away from the blinding thing before me and looked at Ivan. He was squinting at the mirrors with an unreadable expression on his face. He was lit from a strange angle by the mirrors, which lit the crags of his face in an unfamiliar way and made him look like an action figure.
“There’s no other way through. Look – to the south our way is blocked by that concrete crag. And if we cross to the north we’ll hit that silicon marsh we saw yesterday.”
I swallowed. The silicon marshes were where the sorters put circuitry, rotting lithium batteries, anything electronic. The very air was unbreathable there. And I’d seen flashes over the horizon which I thought were small explosions.
“Okay, so we cut all the way around to the south. We find another way around.”
“No. We go through.”
“What? Blindfolded? Ivan, are you out of your mind?”
Ivan turned to us. “No,” he said, though we weren’t sure which question he was answering.
Instead of explaining he leaned to the ground and picked up a flat piece of plastic which had once been the cover for a computer or console of some kind. He settled it on the floor, took out his knife, and as we watched he cut a thin slit in it. Then another, along the same line. He held it up to his face and made a mask of it, the slits giving him robot eyes.
“Snow-goggles. Move quickly. Once we have set off we’ll need to cross fast or the sorters will notice we’ve borrowed these.”
To Ivan’s credit, we almost made it.
The air in the crater was stiflingly hot and felt as though it had hung there for a thousand years. From behind our makeshift masks, plugged against our faces with toy-stuffing, the mirror-light was still bright but not so much so I couldn’t see Gen, Kiran and Ivan a long way ahead, walking silently in single file. Atee was closer to me and kept looking around to make sure I was still there, but even though he was waiting I was still falling ever further behind.
I heard a sound behind me – a squunch sound of things breaking. It sounded very close and very far away at the same time, as though the light was muffling it and not the stuffing in my ears. I spun around, but all I could see was the mirrors and the sky above.
Then movement, out to my right. I turned abruptly and twisted my ankle, cried out in pain. Atee shouted my name out ahead, and I thought I heard Kiran say, “Shit”.
And then it was upon me.
All I felt was hands, grasping and writhing hands, pulling at my clothes, my limbs, pulling my feet out from under me faster than I could cry out. They held me in the air, my snow goggles askew so all I could see was a tiny sliver of blue sky, cut across suddenly by something huge and white. With a stomach-sickening lurch it pulled me high into the air, or so it felt; I could no longer tell which way was up or down. I could hear screaming from far away and wasn’t sure where it was coming from. I hoped it was me. That the others were running as fast as they could.
A hand passed kindly over my forehead and I blacked out.
Many years passed. A few seconds passed. My snow-goggles fell from my face and the sunlight woke me. It was carrying me. I blacked out again.
I woke, and realised I was in trouble.