Savages

34: Reservations

The reservation wasn't what Sannah had imagined. Not at all.

She shivered and pulled her coat around her knees, trying to retain some body heat in the cold altitude of dawn.

The icy concrete she sat on—the foundations of a huge bridge, six lanes of motorway spanning above her, with only the occasional roar of a graveyard-shift car zooming overhead—bit her skin through her trousers, and the thin air seemed to suck all the warmth from her body, like a vaporous vampire draining her blood.

Down beneath her feet, the bridge's huge foundations gave way to bare, dusty rocks, a border of weeds struggling through at the boundary.

The rocks then dropped steeply to a valley bottom, in which was some sort of industrial yard, packed with somnolent trucks in matching green and white livery, parked in neat rows.

Each vehicle was marked with a sunburst and the letters "SVP", which Sannah recognised as the logo of an electricity company.

Beyond the van park, a chainlink fence topped with barbed-wire separated the rows of vehicles from similar rows of identical, flimsy looking houses, as closely packed as—and barely bigger than—the vans.

Beyond that, towering over everything, its constellation of red and white lights sucking up the blue dawn, chimneys smoking, was a power plant.

The motorway Sannah sat beneath curled towards that complex of smoke and metal; the cars she heard above her head eventually appeared in the distance, speeding their way beneath its smoke and chimneys, their shiny tops reflecting red and white lights.

Besides the intermittent traffic sounds above, the plant itself emitted a constant low thrum, belying the sleepy silence of the pathetic settlement below.

Tucked into the elbow of the motorway, under the thighs of this sprawling industrial complex, within reach of barely a fingertip of sky.

That was the reservation.

It wasn't what Sannah had imagined.

She'd thought it would be like the forest, if anything. At least a few trees or something. But except the weeds surrounding the concrete she sat on, there was nothing natural.

Instead, earthen paths trailed between the caravan-y homes, concave with years of footfall. The place looked both temporary and aged: the ramshackle shelters worn and patched; the detritus of many lives crowding around them: children's toys; deckchairs; gas canisters; kennels.

It was almost dawn, the world still damp with darkness, and lights were starting to come on in the houses.

It had been pitch-black when they arrived in the taxi, so this was the first proper look Sannah had got at the place. She was glad she could take it in now, alone, with Gaen and Deera still sleeping in the funny little makeshift shelter behind her; tucked into a shadowy crevice where the motorway and its concrete supports met.

She wouldn't want Gaen to register her shock. Her disappointment.

Sannah turned her head to glance at the shack. No sign of either of them. Both still sleeping.

She wasn't surprised. They had been exhausted enough after the adrenalin of the port attack, and then a long car ride, and a blind struggle over the fence into the van-park, scrabble up the cliffs and concrete, all without a moment of light.

Gaen said it was too risky, for anyone in the reservation to see them. He'd finally turned on Brock's screen when they got into the funny little shelter, the weak blue glow reconnecting Sannah to reality after a disorientating half-hour of blindness, knees and palms grazed and sore.