CHAPTER THIRTY
They woke to a world made entirely of mud. Creatures of mud now themselves, birthed from mud, they opened their eyes. They were lying in an apocalyptic world of destruction and dissolution. Ben lifted his head from the sludge. Nikolas was on his hands and knees, retching, spitting mud and water from his mouth. Ben had never heard such a wonderful sound. He made a noise. Nikolas looked over, and then their fingers joined, clasped, enough touch to survive on until they could drag themselves closer, arms tight, faces pressed together. Ben could feel Nikolas’s heart pounding in his chest, supposed his was too. They were both naked, all clothing torn off in the tumult of the water. They were so coated with mud there was no telling if they were injured; all he could see were Nikolas’s eyes. Suddenly, sound returned, senses returned. He could hear wailing and crying and barking. His body came alive to pain. Everything hurt. He eased apart from Nikolas and began to examine him as best as he could through the muck. Nikolas pushed his hand off and climbed to his feet, a surer indication he was blessedly fine than Ben’s examination. He put his free hand out and pulled Ben up, too.
Everything was gone. There were no buildings, no trees, no roads, no crops or fields, just mud with strange shapes embedded and coated in its deceptively smooth hold. They were the only things standing in a wasteland. It was as if a nuclear explosion had hit, but instead of dust, its deadly fallout was mud. Nikolas then seemed to come back to himself. He turned to Ben and began a swift examination until Ben complained testily, “I’m fine.” His voice was almost gone, ragged, hoarse. It came out as no more than a whisper.
Nikolas croaked through equally strained vocal chords, “I think we were shouting there for a while.”
Ben didn’t remember. He tried to swallow, but his mouth was still full of mud. He spat. “We need water.”
The ludicrousness of what he’d just said suddenly hit them both. They began to laugh, but couldn’t, and found themselves just holding each other, squashing mud, tasting it as they kissed, both ignoring the other’s tears. Ben reckoned they were owed some. Nikolas pulled off Ben’s mouth and tried to wipe the mud from Ben’s face, but it only got worse from the filth on his hand. “Come. We must…do something.”
Ben agreed, but neither of them could think what to do. Finding something to wear seemed like a good first objective, and they began to scavenge, carefully picking their way between the deceptively mud-soft debris. The mud hid broken, twisted metal and shards of glass, twisted cars and metal roofs. Nikolas tried once or twice to find a piece of metal he could use to pick the lock off the cuffs, but to no avail. Very quickly, their feet and hands became cut, but they did find some clothes. Pressed under a piece of corrugated roofing were three men. They were from their hotel, businessmen on a weekend conference. One was only a torso, head and one arm, the rest having been ripped away; but the other two looked as if they were merely asleep in the mud. They were still wearing their suits. Ben and Nikolas stripped them of their trousers, not speaking, not commenting on what they did. Nikolas found a sharp edge of the roof, ignoring the blood he could see on it, and ripped at the legs until he’d formed two pairs of shorts. They pulled them on. They took the shirts and bundled them up to keep until they could remove the handcuffs and wear them. They pulled off black leather shoes, but they were too small to fit either of them. Nikolas searched the pockets and found the men’s wallets, extracting what identification he could find and stashing it carefully in his pocket. They rested for a moment, thinking their own thoughts, then one after the other they briefly touched the bodies, making promises, and left them in the mud.
They didn’t know which way to head. By the angle of the sun, they thought the beach was behind them, and as they reckoned the destruction would be worse there, they headed away from it, inland, they hoped. It was incredibly slow, moving through and around the obstacles. They didn’t say much. Both of them had begun to shake badly from the shock, but they ignored it, knowing it would pass with activity and purpose.
They gained some very real purpose when they came across the shape of a car half-buried in the mud, for inside they could hear the sound of crying. They waded over and peered inside. Two dead adults were in the front seats, but in the back sat a child strapped into a booster seat. She appeared entirely unhurt and didn’t even have any mud on her. They freed her and lifted her out. She put out her arms and clung to Nikolas with a child’s unfettered desire for the safety of an adult’s arms, even a total stranger covered in mud. He perched her on one hip, absentmindedly stroking her hair as he looked around. Ben was searching the car with his free hand. With a sound of triumph he came up with two bottles of water. Water had never tasted so good. They rinsed and spat and then drank deeply. The girl shook her head when offered some and began to cry again, helpless wails of the truly bereft. They took the water with them and continued. It was more difficult for Nikolas to negotiate the obstacle-strewn landscape now as he had to hold the child with one arm, his other still attached at the wrist to Ben, but after a while, and with some sign language, he persuaded her to ride on his shoulders where she clung to his forehead and hair, freeing his other arm.
Gradually, they picked up a ragtag group of survivors. First was the young woman they’d joked about what seemed like years ago, not just a few hours when everything had been normal. She too was naked. Ben stripped off the shirt he’d tied around his waist and helped her into it. She wasn’t speaking at all, even to tell them if she was hurt. Ben offered her some water, and she drank gratefully, then began to cry, suddenly and shockingly. That set Nikolas’s little charge off again. Nikolas swung her down and handed her to the young woman. Unexpectedly having to take the little bundle of dress and tears, the young woman stopped crying and sat down with the baby, shushing her, rocking. Nikolas glanced at Ben. Ben was about to speak, but they heard someone else crying for help. They waded over and found another survivor from the hotel, the young man who’d rented them their jeep. He was trapped under some crushed debris, a concrete wall having collapsed on his leg, trapping it between the rebar. They tried to bend the bars, but they were steel and wouldn’t give, even to their combined strength. The man was crying out in agony as they ground his ankle with the metal in their attempts to free him. They tried to pull him and bend the metal at the same time but his screams were terrible to hear. There was nothing they could do. Promising to come back, send someone, just promising anything they could think of, they left him with the remains of the bottles of water and walked away. They could hear his pitiful cries for what seemed like hours as they walked the woman and the little girl away through the mud. Nikolas swung the child onto his shoulders once more, and they carried on.
They found two more children within the space of a few minutes. Both were just sitting in the mud, staring. They were naked too. Nikolas gave one his shirt. The other one had to stay naked until they came across more bodies, which didn’t take long. They took a shirt off an old man and dressed the boy in it.
By the time they reached the edge of the debris field, they had fifteen survivors with them. Some were tourists, some locals, most of them children, as if their more flexible bodies and buoyant optimism had kept them alive when the adults had failed and gone under the water. Perhaps adults had put them first, saving them. The children weren’t saying. No one was saying much at all.
Suddenly, the apocalyptic landscape became one of a normal, Philippine day. Roads appeared. Fields had crops. People milled everywhere, roads blocked with vehicles and bicycles and military jeeps. Overhead, helicopters were buzzing. It seemed as if they’d walked into a strange world and where they’d come from was normal. It was as great a shock as the initial stepping off the plane to the beauty and heat. And it was incredibly hot. The mud had baked on their skin and was cracking off. They were the survivors of the mud, and they stood out like a strange alien species from the clean-clothed people rushing toward them. They were herded to a makeshift set of tents around a central building, which looked as if it was a school. They were led into a tent and then given bottles of water, which they accepted gratefully. Someone came to take the girl off Nikolas’s shoulders, and as the young man was speaking her language, she allowed herself to be detached and carried away.
Finally, they were alone. They were too shocked and tired to speak. They sat on the ground, holding their water. Ben hung his head, slumped, staring at his cut feet. Nikolas shifted his cuffed hand and held Ben’s fingers. For the first time in public, they were holding hands, and nothing had ever felt more intimate or more right. They entwined fingers, pressing, speaking with this private, silent language and knew they’d been favoured that day by God. They still had each other. Dressed in dead men’s clothes with only borrowed water to their names, they had everything they could ever need or want.