Page 3

He broke off and slammed on the brakes with a soft curse. They had turned a corner and come up against a roadblock. It had not been there an hour before, and soldiers were still piling sandbags and putting up barriers. For a moment he thought he might be able to reverse and drive away, but one of them had already seen him and motioned him forward.

"Is that a dead man with you?" he asked, peering through the window.

"Yes," Tauseef said. There was no point in denying it.

"Dead people walking need to be destroyed," the soldier said, drawing a pistol from his holster. "That's the rule and..."

"Wait, please," Tauseef interrupted. "He's..." He glanced quickly at the dead man. "He's my father. He wandered away before we could bury him." He was talking faster and faster, and tried to force himself to slow down. "I'm taking him back home to bury him. That's all."

"You'll bury him while he's still moving?" The soldier was still in the act of raising his gun. His eyes glistened avidly with the urge to use it. "I wouldn't call that very kind, would you? So I'll put a couple of bullets through him, and then you can bury him with a clear conscience. Nice of me, isn't that so?"

"But..." Tauseef began.

"Get him out of the car so I can shoot him," the soldier said. He reconsidered. "No, youget out of the car and I'll shoot him right inside so you don't have to pick him up and put him back in. See? I'm a not a bad man."

"Stop fooling around and come back here," one of the other soldiers, with the stripes of a non commissioned officer on his sleeve, shouted. "The roadblock has to be up within the hour."

The soldier looked back over his shoulder, back at Tauseef, and spat. "Go on, then," he said. "Go take him and knock him over the head or something. Or just bury him like that. See if I care." He stalked off, muttering.

Tauseef stuck to the back streets after that. There were very few people around, and no children. Those who could afford it had long since left, or at least had sent their families away. Only in the villages, where the people had almost nothing anyway, and nowhere at all to go, did they still hang on, scratching in the dirt for some means to stay alive.

As he drove, Tauseef glanced at the dead man in the passenger seat, really looking at him for the first time. He was younger than he'd first thought – probably in his mid-forties, with a thin blade of a nose and a muscular physique. If he'd been alive, and properly cleaned up, he'd probably have been quite striking. Tauseef wondered who he'd been. Not that it mattered, of course. Once they were dead they were...

There was a huge flash right in front of the car, so bright that Tauseef was blinded, and a blast so loud he went momentarily deaf. The shock wave came a moment later, slamming into the vehicle and slewing it sideways, Tauseef stamping on clutch and brake instinctively as he fought to keep control. It was too late. The car mounted the near side pavement, smashed into a wall, and the engine quit.

Tauseef sat behind the wheel, stunned, waiting for his hearing and vision to return. Steam rose from the crumpled nose of the car, and he could smell petrol. Somehow it did not seem an immediate concern that the car might catch fire, with him still in it. He could not will himself to move.

Something touched his face, bony fingers moving down his cheek. Slowly, he turned his head. The dead man had turned towards him, his one sighted eye looking down at Tauseef's seatbelt. His hands made circles in the air.

"Yes," Tauseef muttered. "The seatbelt, yes." He rarely used it, but had put it on before the roadblock, and it had probably saved him from going through the windscreen. As for the dead man...well, he was dead anyway.

He forced his hands to work, raised the seatbelt loop. The near door had burst open from the crash. He almost fell out of the car, staggering, and reached in to pull the dead man out. They stood beside the wrecked vehicle, holding on to each other. Tauseef held on to the dead man because he couldn't trust his legs. The dead man held on to Tauseef for reasons unknowable. There was a charred crater in the street where the rocket had struck. Not a single person was visible anywhere, but Tauseef had the sense of many watching eyes.

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