The Alpha Threw Me To The Hyenas

Chapter Eleven: The Signature Book

The line is a hut.

That is the first thing nobody tells you. In my head it had been something enormous, a wall or a fence or at the very least a change in the world you could see coming for an hour. It is a portable building on blocks, with a light over the door and a generator behind it and a barrier arm across the road painted in stripes that have gone chalky.

There were three men. Two of them came out when the headlights hit the building and the third stayed inside with his feet up and did not bother.

Ilyas wound the window down.

"Evening."

"Bit late," the older one said.

"It is."

"You're the Ilthar."

"I am."

The man leaned down and looked past him at me and his face did something I did not care for. Not cruelty. Interest. He looked at me the way you look at a delivery you were told about in advance.

"That her?"

"That is her."

"Right." He straightened up and knocked on the roof twice like he was letting a bus go. "Bring her in and we'll do the book."

Inside it was hot and smelled of a paraffin heater and old coffee. There was a desk with a lamp and a wall of shelving with nothing on it and a calendar from three years ago. The third man did not take his feet off the desk while we were in there.

The book was a ledger. Green cloth binding, the kind they use for stock. It was open flat and it was two thirds full.

I stood there with a taped arm and read it upside down while the older man found a pen.

Dates going back. Names, some of them with a house beside them and most without. A column for the escorting officer and a column for the signature and a column at the end headed RET, which was about three quarters of an inch wide.

Every single box in that last column was empty.

I went back four pages. Empty. I got to a page with a date on it from before I was born and it was empty there too, and the older man saw me looking and did not do anything about it, and that was worse than if he had shut the book.

"How many," I said.

"How many what, love."

"How many people are in that book."

He considered it. "Couple of thousand? It's not all exiles. There's contractors in there, there's survey, there's a lot of survey."

"What is the last column for."

"Returns."

"Nobody has ever signed a return."

"No," he said, in the tone of a man agreeing that it had been a mild winter, and put the pen down.

Ilyas signed. I watched him do it. He wrote the date and my description, because I did not have a name any more and there was nowhere on that form to put a person who had been stripped, and he wrote it in the hand of somebody who has filled in a great many forms.

"Right," the older man said. "We'll take her from here. There's a run out at six, she can sit in the back till then."

"No," Ilyas said.

The man looked up.

"I'm taking her out."

"You are not taking her out. You hand over at the line, that is the whole arrangement, that has been the arrangement since before either of us."

"And I am taking her out."

The man with his feet on the desk took his feet off the desk.

Nobody in that hut moved for about four seconds. I stood between them with my arms taped and I could not read one thing off any of the three of them, and Ilyas leaned over and pulled the ledger round and put his finger on the line he had just filled in.

"That is my signature," he said. "Not yours. Mine. Which means when somebody comes asking, and somebody will, it is my name on it and not one of you three ever has to think about it again. You are welcome."

"That is not the arrangement."

"Then write that in the book as well," Ilyas said, "and put your name next to it."

Nobody wrote anything in the book.

We went back out to the car and the barrier arm went up and I have never in my life seen three men so relieved to watch somebody drive away.

After the hut the road runs for another six or seven miles and then it stops.

It does not narrow or turn to gravel. It stops. There is a place where the tarmac has been cut off square and the ground beyond it is a slightly different colour, and past that there are two ruts where vehicles have gone before, and past that there is nothing at all.

The white did not start where I expected either.

It came on gradually and it came on wrong. For a long time it was just pale ground with dark patches, and then the patches got further apart and the pale got harder, and then at some point I looked out of the window and there was no soil anywhere, and the headlights were going out over a flat white surface that took the light and did not give any of it back.

Salt. Cracked into plates, the way mud cracks, but pale and enormous and going out to a horizon that you could only find because the stars stopped.

He drove on it for three hours.

I did not know it was three hours at the time. I know because I asked him about it years later and he told me without having to think, which is a thing I noticed about that man on several occasions.

Nothing changed for three hours. That is the part I cannot get anybody to understand. It was not like driving through a desert, where there is at least the shape of the country. There was no shape. The salt was flat to about one part in a thousand and there was nothing standing on it anywhere, not a rock, not a post, not a rise, and the headlights showed you eighty feet of it and then more of it and then more.

At some point I stopped being able to tell whether we were moving.

"You are quiet," he said.

"There is nothing to say."

"There is usually."

"I have been asking questions for three days and every single person has told me they cannot answer them." I put my head back against the seat. "I am saving my strength."

"Sensible."

The tyres crunched. The engine went on doing what it was doing.

"Ilyas."

"Mm."

"Have you done this before."

He did not answer that either.

Then, about twenty minutes later, without slowing down first or indicating in any way, he took his foot off and let the car roll to a stop in the middle of two hundred miles of nothing.

He put the handbrake on. He turned the engine off.

The silence that came in when the engine stopped was not like anything I have experienced before or since. There was no wind that night. There was nothing to make a sound and nothing for a sound to come off, and my own ears started making a high thin tone just to have something to do.

Ilyas sat with both hands on the wheel for a moment.

Then he reached across me, opened the glove box, and took out a knife.