The Rainbow Bridge

a Jago story

After the end of the world, there is a world.

Life doesn’t stop. It changes.

And it changes me.

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1.

‘Shut the fucking door!’

‘It’s snowing.’

‘You think?’

Flakes were drifting down through the darkness.

‘It’s only September,’ Tighe said, by way of an explanation, slamming shut the door hatch and clambering down the steps in the near darkness, the red light from the glowing fat-bellied stove allowing him to pick his steps between cots. He looked over to where Harmon was lying. ‘You just got back?’

‘Yeah.’

Three days out in the cold, nights freezing in shared tents, days spent walking from village to village, making friends, giving aid, and as the only medic on the base since the real doctor went home with appendicitis, he was Johnny-on-the-spot when it came to sore throats, measles, broken limbs and everything in between. Those he could treat, he did, and those who needed to go to hospital he told to go, though he doubted more than half of them would even attempt the journey. It was a long, long way to Dushanbe and there was no guarantee of being treated when they got there. Besides, it was harvest-time and the thin ground gave little enough that they could afford to ignore it when it did grow.

The door opened again, but closed quietly. The hooch they shared was two thirds below ground, a wooden superstructure over a twelve-by-twelve hole, six feet and six inches deep, just big enough for four cots around a perma-lit stove. But unlike Tighe, Alex knew how to come and go without releasing too much of the accumulated warm air. ‘Stinks like a dead dog in here,’ she said, finding her cot. She looked over at Tighe, ‘You forget to wash behind your foreskin?’

‘Fuck off, Alex.’

Harmon heard her cot creak as she stretched out. ‘You asleep?’ she asked, turning towards him.

‘Not yet.’

‘Heard the news?’

‘The news that I’m not going to get any sleep?’

‘You share a hooch with Tighe, so you’re…’

‘Chicago’s gone,’ Tighe butted in.’

Alex tutted in irritation. ‘He’s right,’ her voice flat. ‘It’s gone.’

‘What do you mean, gone?’ Harmon asked, rising up on one elbow in the near dark. ‘Internet gone down? Earthquake? Lake Michigan burst its banks?’ There was a long moment of silence, broken only by the faint howl of a wolf out there somewhere in the hills, answered soon after by another.

‘Just, gone,’ Alex said.

‘That’s three cities that we know of,’ Tighe said. ‘Shanghai, Kyev. Now Chicago. Probably lots of small places we never heard of. Maybe we’re next.’

‘Someone’s fucking with us,’ Harmon said. ‘We’re in a no-name valley in a country that no one could point to on a map, Taj…’

‘…ass-crackystan,’ Tighe interrupted.

‘Don’t be ignorant, Tighe. We’re on the Silk Road,’ Alex said. ‘’Some of the most ancient cultures and beautiful cities that ever existed are from this part of the world.’

‘The Silk Road is a thousand years ago,’ Tighe said. ‘We’re living like troglodytes in the ass-end of nowhere. And it’s snowing.’

‘…the nearest Western country is two thousand klicks away.’ Harmon said, sticking to his point.

‘Turkey isn’t “the West,” Mike,’ Alex said. ‘It’s the Levant.’

‘Greece, then. Three thousand clicks away.’ They both paused to listen while Tighe munched on his MRE.

‘You not heating that up?’ Alex said.

‘Guard duty in about eleven minutes.’

‘Well, enjoy.’

‘My point is,’ Mike Harmon said, dragging the conversation back to the main point, ‘Whatever the history of this picturesque country, when it comes to comms, as Tighe said, we’re in the ass-crack of the nowhere. We can’t rely on any news that has to travel twelve thousand miles from home to get to us.’

‘You reckon something sneaky is going on?’ Tighe asked, still munching on his food.

‘Harmon don’t believe in conspiracies, do you?’ Alex said. ‘He’s fully subscribed to the fuck-up theory of life.’

‘I subscribe to the “Can I sleep now?” theory.’

Tighe binned the empty MRE wrapped and clambered up the steps, opened the door to the hootch, allowing in a blast of cold air, slamming it behind him. Harmon closed his eyes. Sighed. Relaxed. Lay back in his cot enjoying the darkness and quiet.

‘Harmon?’

‘Alex?’

A pause, then, ‘I believe it.’

A longer pause. ‘You do?’

‘Yeah. And I think, what the actual fuck is going on?’

‘I don’t know.’ He was so tired that, right now, he didn’t much care.

‘I’m getting scared,’ her voice quiet.

‘You don’t get scared, Alex. You told me. You’re an island girl, grew up with five brothers, went to school with a bunch of cartel wannabes.’

‘Some of them graduated into the real thing, including two of my brothers.’

‘Point stands.’

He heard her choose to say nothing; knew he wasn’t helping. He glanced at his watch, the luminous hands against the black disc against the black darkness of evening. ‘I’ve got thirty-six hours of leave. I’m not moving from this bunk ‘cept to shit, piss and refuel.’

‘Lovely,’ Alex said.

He relaxed. Breathed. He could hear the faint howling of the wind sliding between the cracks in the roof of the hootch, and the creaking of the segmented aluminium chimney that rose from the stove, and those noises only relaxed him more. He stayed relaxed for a long time. Then he relented. ‘You’re scared?’

She’d been lying on her cot, silent in the dark. But he knew she was awake. She said, ‘I’m a soldier. War, peace, and all-points in between, I understand. This aid thing we’re doing, the whole “Hearts and Minds” business, I think it’s pointless but I get the logic of it, I understand the argument. But what’s happening now, around the world? If it was a solar flare taking out the grid, or a nuclear strike or, fuck, if it was a zombie outbreak, I could understand.’ She took a few moments to gather her thoughts. ‘But places don’t disappear, Michael. And places are disappearing.’

She rolled off her cot, and sat on the edge. In the faint red light from the stove he could make out the contours of her face. ‘Room for me in there?’ she said.

He pulled back the unzipped sleeping bag he was lying beneath, moved over to give her some space. She leaned forward and unlaced her boots, took them off, then slipped out of her combat pants, and climbed in beside him. They lay facing each other for a minute or too. Their breathing began to synch.

She snuggled deeper into his sleeping bag, feeling the warm comfort of his presence, the safety of human touch. His arms wrapped around her, as the coming night wrapped around them both.

epigraph: Caroline George. The Vestige.