Brother in the Land
Read Brother in the Land Online
Authors: Robert Swindells
PUFFIN BOOKS
Robert Swindells left school at the age of fifteen and joined the Royal Air Force at seventeen-and-a-half. After his discharge, he worked at a variety of jobs, before training and working as a teacher. He is now a full-time writer and lives with his wife Brenda on the Yorkshire Moors. Robert Swindells has written many books for young people, and in 1984 was the winner of the Children's Book Award and the Other Award for his novel
Brother in the Land.
He won the Children's Book Award for a second time in 1990 with
Room 13
, and in 1994
Stone Cold
won the Carnegie Medal and the Sheffield Children's Book Award.
This edition has a new final chapter.
Other books by Robert Swindells
DAZ 4 ZOE
DOSH
FOLLOW A SHADOW
A SERPENT'S TOOTH
SMASH!
STONE COLD
UNBELIEVER
Puffin Surfers
THE LAST BUS
For younger readers
THE GO-AHEAD GANG
THE ICE PALACE
âHe who places his brother in the land is everywhere.'
The Papyrus Ipuwer.
East is East and West is West, and maybe it was a difference of opinion or just a computer malfunction. Either way, it set off a chain of events that nobody but a madman could have wanted and which nobody, not even the madmen, could stop.
There were missiles.
Under the earth.
In the sky.
Beneath the waves.
Missiles with thermo-nuclear warheads, enough to kill every
body on earth.
Three times over.
And something set them off; sent them flying, West to East and East to West, crossing in the middle like cars on a cable-railway.
East and West, the sirens wailed. Emergency procedures began, hampered here and there by understandable panic. Helpful leaflets were distributed and roads sealed off. VIPs went to their bunkers and volunteers stood at their posts. Suddenly, nobody wanted to be an engine-driver anymore, or a model or a rock-star. Everybody wanted to be one thing: a survivor. But it was an overcrowded profession.
The missiles climbed their trajectory arcs, rolled over the top and came down, accelerating. Below, everyone was ready. The Frimleys had their shelter in the lounge. The Bukovskys favoured the cellar. A quick survey would have revealed no overwhelming preference, worldwide, for one part of the house over the others.
Down came the missiles. Some had just the one warhead, others had several, ranging from the compact, almost tactical warhead to the large, family size. Every town was to receive its own, individually-programmed warhead. Not one had been left out.
They struck, screaming in with pinpoint accuracy, bursting with blinding flashes, brighter than a thousand suns. Whole towns and city-centres vaporized instantly; while tarmac, trees and houses thirty miles from the explosions burst into flames. Fireballs, expanding in a second to several miles across, melted and devoured all matter that fell within their diameters. Blast-waves, travelling faster than sound, ripped through the suburbs. Houses disintegrated and vanished. So fierce were the flames that they devoured all the oxygen around them, suffocating those people who had sought refuge in deep shelters. Winds of a hundred-and-fifty miles an hour, rushing in to fill the vacuum, created fire-storms that howled through the streets, where temperatures in the thousands cooked the subterranean dead. The very earth heaved and shook as the warheads rained down, burst upon burst upon burst, and a terrible thunder rent the skies.
For an hour the warheads fell, then ceased. A great silence descended over the land. The Bukovskys had gone, and the Frimleys were no more. Through the silence, through the pall of smoke and dust that blackened the sky, trillions of deadly radioactive particles began to fall. They fell soundlessly, settling like an invisible snow on the devastated earth.
Incredibly, here and there, people had survived the bombardment. They lay stunned in the ruins, incapable of thought. Drifting on the wind, the particles sifted in upon them, landing unseen on clothing, skin and hair, so that most of these too would die, but slowly.
Most, but not all. There were those whose fate it was to wander this landscape of poisonous desolation. One of them was me.
It was a hot day in the summer holidays. People kept coming in the shop for ice-cream and lollies and coke. We lived in Skipley, behind the shop, open seven days a week and the bell drove you daft. I'd have gone off on the bike but Mum said I had to play with Ben.
You know what it's like playing with a kid of seven. They always want to play at being in the army or something. They get so wrapped up being a soldier that they yell stupid stuff at the tops of their voices so the grownups can hear. It's embarrassing.
Anyway, I played with him a bit in the back where Dad stacked the crates. It was all right at first but then he started wittering; so when Dad went off in the van, I gave him ten pence for a lolly. He ran inside and I got on the bike and left.
It didn't matter where I went, so long as I got away by myself. I had thought of going into Branford but there were too many people there, so I took the road that goes up over the moor. It's a hard pull and I was sweating like a pig when it flattened out. There's nothing to stop the sun up there and it beat down so you could hear it. The heat made the horizon shimmer and the road look wet. I kept pedalling till I was well away from Skipley, then got off and lay on my back in the needle-grass and looked for UFOs.
It was so quiet you could hear bees in the heather sounding
like a sawmill a long way off. The air smelt of peat and hot tar. The sweat on my shirt made my back cold while the sun burnt my knees through my jeans. Now and then a car went by. It sounds kind of sad now, bees and cars and heather, but that's how it was then.
I must have dozed off, because the next thing I knew the sun was gone and half the sky had vanished behind these great black clouds. It was still hot, but with a different sort of heat; that close, threatening heat you get before a storm.
I didn't fancy being caught out here in a storm. They say lightning strikes the highest point, and there were no trees on the moor. As soon as I stood up, I'd be the highest point. I got up, grabbed the bike and began pedalling like mad towards home.
I nearly made it. The top of the last upward bit was in sight when there came a rumbling in the distance and the first big raindrops fell. Pennies from Heaven, my mum called them.
I might easily have gone on. I had only to top that little slope and I'd have free-wheeled all the way down into Skipley, and I'd have been dead, like everybody else. The reason I didn't was because I spotted the pillbox.
It was one of those concrete bunkers left over from the war, World War Two, not the last one. It was just beyond the ditch, on the edge of farmland, partly sunk into the ground and half-hidden in a clump of elder bushes.
I'd been in it before, years back when Dad brought Mum and me and Ben up for a picnic one day when Ben was a baby. I'd gone crouching into the musty dimness, half expecting to find a machine-gun or a skeleton or something. There'd been an empty bottle and the remains of a fire, and I'd played at shooting up passing cars through the narrow slot.
I couldn't crouch into it now. It had sunk a bit deeper and I was a lot taller and I had to get down on my hands and knees. I lugged the bike across the ditch, propped it against the pillbox and crawled in. The remains of the fire were still there, or perhaps it was another one. I didn't go right in, just far enough so I could watch the storm without getting wet. I used to like thunderstorms as long as I was somewhere safe.
As I crawled in there was this sudden gust of wind and a clap of thunder, and the rain really started coming down. It fell so hard you could feel the ground trembling under you. It poured off the top of the pillbox in a solid curtain. I sat looking out through it, hugging my knees and thinking how smart I'd been to get myself under cover.
Then I saw the flash. It was terrifically bright. I screwed up my eyes and jerked my head away. I thought the bunker had been struck: I expected the whole thing to split apart and fall on top of me.
Then the ground started shaking. It quivered so strongly and so fast that it was like sitting with your eyes closed in an express train. Bits started falling on my head; dust and that. I was choking. I rolled over and lay on my side with my arms wrapped round my head.
There was this sudden hot blast. It drove rain in through the doorway and spattered it on my arms and neck; warm rain. I opened my eyes. The pillbox was flooded with bright, dusty light which flickered and began to fade as I watched. My ear was pressed to the ground and I could hear rumbling way down, like dragons in a cave; receding, growing more faint as the dragons went deeper, till you couldn't hear them at all. The light dimmed and there was only silence, and a pinkish glow with dust in it.
Sometimes, I wish I'd stayed there. The dust would have covered me and I would have slipped away, to follow the dragons down into silence. There are worse things than dragons. I've seen them.