The ring of faces smiled back at her, reflecting her good humour. It was as if the soldiers had taken all the anger away with them, leaving just a few relics of the violence behind – some bullet holes in the skin of the buildings, the rust-coloured patches of earth. ‘What happened to the dead?’ she asked.
‘We put them in a refrigeration truck to keep the flies away,’ Tariq replied, ‘though with no fuel, the cooler isn’t running.’
Liv nodded. ‘OK,’ she said, ‘then that’s what we do first – we bury the dead.’
8
Gabriel had no idea how long he had been lying in the shade of the dry wadi when the sound of engines drifted down to him on the wind.
Instinctively he rolled onto his front, adrenalin flooding through him despite his raging fever and the well-drilled operational part of his brain taking over.
He couldn’t be spotted now, not with the blight burning inside him.
He grabbed the trailing reins of his horse to keep it close and listened out, trying to locate the sound. The hot wind moved it around making it hard to pinpoint, which was a good sign. It meant it must still be some way off.
He used the reins to haul himself to his knees then moved the horse into the sliver of shade, stroking its flanks to calm it and tethering it to a rock. He forced himself up the side of the bank, choking down on the sobs that still battled to burst from him, the scratch of the dry earth blissful against his screaming skin. He reached the top and listened again.
The sound was closer now, coming from the west.
The itch crawled over him like fire ants and he rode the waves of it, clamping his arms to his sides to stop his hands from clawing at the prickling skin. When the itch subsided a little he tipped his head on one side to keep his profile low and slowly raised his eye above the line of the bank.
Two white, flat-bed pick-ups were kicking up dust as they bounced across the desert a couple of hundred metres to his left. Their windows were smoked black and the 50-calibre guns mounted on their backs were manned by soldiers wearing red-and-white-checked keffiyeh around their faces. They were Syrian Army – border patrol.
He slid back down the bank, shaking with the effort of just staying silent. All he wanted to do was lie down and rest and never get up again. But he couldn’t. The patrol had changed everything.
He could backtrack, move away from the border to reduce the risk of being found by the patrols; but that didn’t mean he would be hidden from the people they were seeking. He could try and find one of the alluvial caves that honeycombed the desert and crawl deep underground into a tomb of his own making; that would deal with the buzzards at least. But it wouldn’t account for the human traffic. Other people would seek the same shelter, hiding from the heat and the men with guns. And he could not risk being found.
He lay there for a long while, shaking from the fever, as the inevitability of what he must do grew in his mind. There was only one place he could go, one place on earth where the blight would pose no threat.
He waited a long time, until he was sure the patrol had gone, then led the horse along the gulley, keeping low, looking for better cover. The sun was at its full height now and burned mercilessly into his agonized skin. After a few hundred feet that felt like miles he found a partial cave scooped out of the softer rock, big enough for him and his horse, and fell into the stifling shade, clenching his whole body against the blazing itch. He waited out the worst of the day, preparing himself for the journey he must make. Somehow, he had to evade capture and the company of others and find his way back to where the blight had first started and where he knew it already prospered.
He had to get back to the Citadel. He had to go back to Ruin.
9
Liv chose a spot a good distance outside the perimeter fence and led by example, working by hand now the earthmovers were no use, breaking through rock and dirt baked hard as brick. It felt good to disappear into