Five

The old canal

Oct 08, 2024

Dronikus, a novel set on a burning planet called Earth.

Hideously loud roiling, sucking, and gurgling

Back in the water, despite weakness and hunger, he felt his body returning to health. His spirit was strong; it would take more than a long night of agony, rolling around in his own shit, to break him.

He moved from canal to canal, to river and then back to canal, winding his way towards the city. He passed through lands once quite rich and fertile, that were now water-logged or, when still dry, parched by extreme temperatures. He saw places where the rising waters had broken the banks and levees. What had once been fields, orchards, and paddies, were no marshy bogs. Up higher, grasslands were burnt a pale shade of yellow and most trees had few – if any – leaves. Where there was evidence of past human habitation he saw the advance of nature’s vanguard – weeds and hardy shrubs.

At night – and often during the day when too tired to continue swimming – he would hide under a bridge, in a disused building, in a glade, or simply under a bush. He ate what he could find, often picking through piles of rotting garbage, salvaging unrecognisable organic matter which he managed to ingest.

Early one morning, the sun not yet past the horizon, as he prepared to leave the underside of a bridge where he had sheltered the night, he heard the familiar whirr of a dronikus approaching. He froze, holding his breath. It passed not many metres above his head. He breathed freely for a moment but then – inexplicably, frighteningly – it looped back and stopped in mid-air close by. It hovered there for an eternity, before finally moving off. After sitting still for a long while, Zola finally persuaded himself that the dronikus’s passing was coincidental. He entered the water once more and took up his journey.

He swam far more slowly and cautiously than before, staying closer to the bank, taking shelter whenever there appeared to be movement or human habitation. On occasion, far off in the distance, he saw humans, solitary or in small groups. More rarely he noticed desultory domestic animals browsing the last of the edible grasses.

His goal, the city, was getting closer, not too far off in the direction of the rising sun. Eventually the fields gave way to human settlement, and as he passed he saw the shacks and makeshift abodes of new arrivals, joining the many millions clustering around the metropolis.

After going through a series of canals meandering through patchy housing and small holdings, he found himself in a wide, fast-flowing canal that cut through miles of shacks packed tight up to the water’s edge. These were a random mix of styles and materials, large and small, some of brick, some of iron sheeting, some balancing on stilts out over the water, some even dug into the banks. And there were people, lots of people. He had reached the outskirts of the city.

As he passed by, carried by the current, Zola saw throngs in the streets around the houses, women doing laundry and children playing on the banks, people cooking at fires, others relaxing, drinking. Even though he was spotted at various points – a man waving, a group of kids shouting, a few gesturing wildly at him – it didn’t worry him as there were no dronikus about and he was hardly likely to be recognised. He was happy to be rapidly approaching the end of his journey.

The water reeked, stinking of sewerage and other decaying matter. As he drifted it occurred to him that he knew this canal. He remembered it from his previous life. It had been a feature on all city maps, feeding into the central river that bisected the city and had been part of the boundary of the Old Town. As he recalled this, he had another sudden terrifying recollection: before joining the river, the canal went into a deep narrow tunnel at the end of which were a series of enormous metal grids, in place to filter the larger debris. Many were the horror stories of people lost into the tunnel turning up as bloated corpses, trapped against the metal.

This horror was his now.

He heard it before he saw it; the noise caused him to jerk his head up and see that he was rapidly approaching the mouth of the tunnel. He saw it as a black semi-circle below buildings that straddled the canal. It sucked water with such a ferocious intensity that it made hideously loud roiling, sucking, and gurgling sounds.

Zola struck out towards the bank, where giant concrete blocks formed the canal walls. But even his powerful stroke and his desperation were of little use against the power of the water. Within seconds he was sucked into the tunnel. In darkness his body was thrown about in a watery turmoil.

He managed to find the surface and draw a deep breath before being dragged under once more. He plunged towards the bottom and forced himself down and out of the worst of the current. He fell into a bed of slime and he rolled and slid with the current, trying to maintain contact with the bottom. But again his body was lifted and tossed and dropped and lifted again and finally slammed into the metal grid.

The water pummelled him with objects, hard and soft, as it rushed by. Pressure built in his lungs. Guided by some deep instinct, Zola pulled himself down and along to the lowest point of the grid. Here his scrabbling, desperate fingers found a narrow gap between it and the tunnel wall, next to a bracket that held the metal in place. He squeezed his body, forcing it inch by inch, through the opening. The metal and the bricks tore into his flesh as he dragged himself through the space. As his legs cleared the grid, his body was lifted up by the current and sent tumbling through the liquid darkness.

His lungs felt like they were about to explode. He released some spent air, fighting with all his power to resist an inward breath. This was his last act as his brain shut down and he lost consciousness.

Turbulence at the end of the tunnel rolled his comatose body over and over, before spitting it out into the open, calmer waters of the river. He hung face down, naked, bloodied and lifeless, and began drifting downstream.

Hey, what's that sound?

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