“Why did the SDN never try to use those lasers against the nukes that hit New York, Chicago and Los Angeles?” the aide asked in disbelief.

They were being ushered down another flight of stairs to the secondary evac’ pods. The President’s pod was now clear, and the pilots had confirmed that Air Force One was going down.

“They’re not active,” he said shaking his head. “Not technically allowed by international treaty. They’re not even supposed to be up there. But we still have them in case we need them.”

“And you didn’t think that would be now?”

Each evac’ pod took five occupants. She was relieved when she and the General were each herded into separate capsules opposite each other.

“Like stopping the holes of a sieve with your fingers,” he shouted over to her as the door closed.

The door to her own pod closed. She found herself sat next to a cook, two stewards, a man in a dark suit and a marine. The rockets on the evac’ pod fired and the negative G force pushed her against the restraints towards the ceiling. The cook’s harness was badly fastened and he knocked his head against the side of the cabin, losing consciousness instantly.

She caught a glimpse of the crippled Air Force One through the small window in front of her, but any hope of seeing its fate was swallowed up by a blanket of clouds.

The pod jerked sharply as the parachutes deployed to control its descent, and they floated gently down towards an already different world.

Chapter 90

Gail woke with a start, her dream replaced in an instant by the cold, grey ceiling above.

The short paralysis that accompanied her frequent abrupt-awakenings no longer scared her; she had grown used to the effect long ago. George had explained to her that when dreaming, muscles were deliberately disabled by the brain, allowing free movement in dreams without endangering the body at rest. Sleep walking was the result of an error in this process. Conversely, and as was her case, when you woke suddenly you sometimes found yourself conscious in a still-paralysed body. He’d sounded so knowledgeable about it all until a little questioning revealed everything he knew came from a BBC documentary he’d watched over thirty years ago.

In any case, Gail was used to the phenomenon now because her sleep pattern was completely messed up, and she almost always woke with a start.

Her husband put it down to the added responsibility of parenthood; there was simply so much more to be worried about now that she was a mother.

But she knew that was only part of the story.

The fact was that the world was very different now. It was colder, bigger, and much more dangerous. They had lost so much many years before, and what little remained was that much more important to them all.

And in the post-Chaos world, there was often little to distinguish the nightmares from reality.

She was greeted by the chill southerly wind as she stepped out of the tent and into the dull morning. The faint circular glow of the sun barely managed to make its way through the clouds on the horizon, and she knew that would be all they would see of it until sunset when it might peek under the sheets of grey, if they were lucky.

George beckoned her over to the fire, which was crackling soberly in the centre of the small clearing around which six tents had been pitched.  There were three similar arrangements of tents in the clearing, which with their sixty-three inhabitants made up their nomadic village. The tents were far from the usual run-of-the-mill camping affair. Instead, they were Bedouin-style, like small beige houses with short walls and long sloping roofs. Inside, the bare minimum of furniture and rugs ensured that they were comfortable, yet mobile. They had been in their present location for several months now; since Spring.

 Spring, she thought. Now there’s a word that doesn’t mean anything anymore.

She leant in to kiss her husband on the cheek and grab the tin mug of something they still referred to as coffee, but which bore little relation to its ancient cousin. If farmers still produced the beans in Africa, they were keeping it to themselves; as a rule, anything you couldn’t eat was a waste of land and effort, and trade had more or less stopped happening on any large scale. Gail had stopped caring what went into her coffee many years ago, and certainly wasn’t about to ask what was in her mug on such a cold day.

After taking a short sip of the acrid black liquid, she huddled up to the fire and used the heat of the mug to warm her hands.

“It’s not that cold this morning,” George said, distantly.

She shivered and leaned in closer to the short flames licking round the dry branches that had been bundled onto the fire. It was generating more smoke than heat, but to her it provided immeasurable warmth.

“Where is everyone?” she asked. They were alone by the fire, which was unusual insofar as there weren’t that many other places for everyone to be.

“Jake’s asleep, Ben’s out hunting with the others.”

“You didn’t go with him?” she said, surprised.

He shook his head and gave her a sympathetic smile.

She hugged him back. “You and Jake should go along next time; he needs to be more active and you need to spend more time with him.”

Even after the end of the world, it seemed, seventeen-year-olds were still teenagers, and their son was a prime example.

“Agreed,” George nodded and poured some more coffee from the pot sitting next to the fire. “But we’ll be moving on soon, we’ll have plenty of time to stretch our legs then.”

It wasn’t long before the twenty tents that made up their village were packed and bundled up as tightly as possible, then lashed to the sides of their six remaining donkeys. They were then weighed down with two twenty-litre tubs of drinking water each. As much as possible was carried by the sixty-three nomads, who led the animals back to the relative warmth of the north. The water would last them a couple of days, by which time they would have completed a third of their journey.

Ben caught up with Gail and George, who were near the front of the caravan. Jake, as usual, was straggling somewhere near the rear.

“Have you thought of what I said?” he asked them, nervously.

They exchanged a quick look. “Yes,” Gail said after a while.

The ground beneath her feet was hard and unforgiving. She hadn’t walked far in months, and was already weary after barely a couple of hours.

“We need to go, leave this place,” Ben pressed. “Zahra and I have been talking about it with the others, and we all agree. This land is dead. It was already dying centuries ago, but now the river is so unpredictable, there is nothing left here for us.”

“That’s what we’re doing, Ben. We’re moving, like we always do. There is still food,” George commented dryly. “We simply need to follow it. And the water is mostly clean.”

“Every time we go hunting, we bring less back than the time before. And each river and inlet we pass flows stronger in my memories.” Ben held Gail back by the shoulder and looked her in the eyes. “Jake has no future here, Gail. We need to move on. We need to leave Egypt.”

George stopped walking and looked back at them. “What do you suggest, Ben? We go north, and we need to find a way to cross the sea. And we don’t know what we’re heading to. We head south, and we die in the desert, unless we’re unlucky and manage to reach the warlords of Sudan. We go west, and we die in the desert, for sure. As for going east, well, we know there’s nothing left there.”

Gail looked along the line of people and donkeys idling past them. Towards the back, she saw Jake, sharing a joke with Fatima, one of the young girls from the Tek family, and Saïd, her brother. The three of them were the only teenagers in their village, and along with two smaller children, the only non-adults.