Forecast (14 page)

“What now?” asked Burch.

Sutcliffe’s heart sank. “We have no choice but to detach from the envelope. I will separate the gondola and we will freefall to about sixteen thousand feet where the chutes will deploy. It’s our only hope.”

No one argued.

The crew braced themselves, nobody comfortable with the idea of falling out of the sky, nobody in objection either. Sutcliffe looked at each of his crew as he floated his finger over the button to initiate the separation from the envelope. The crew would have to depend on a series of stabilising parachutes that, once deployed, would be discarded to allow a second batch of parachutes to open and slow their final descent.

He pressed the button.

Nothing happened.

He pressed it again.

Something was wrong.

“Fuck!” he bellowed.

“What’s the problem?” said Hennessey.

“No power. I forgot about that.”

“What does that mean?”

The crew waited for his decision. When Sutcliffe made up his mind, he knew without doubt he’d made the right choice, but that didn’t mean he had to like it. “I’m sorry,” he said, putting his fist to his visor. “I wish there was another way.”

“We have to jump?” said Hennessey.

“Yes. I’m afr –”

“Are you out of your mind?” Matthews reacted so fast that his words overlapped Sutcliffe’s.

“The gondola can’t be detached.”

“Brad, we don’t know where we are,” said Burch. “We could be over the Atlantic for all we know. If we land in the ocean, we’ll drown in our –”

“I’m aware of the danger, Keith. Does anyone have a better suggestion?”

“No. Jumping is our safest option,” Hennessey said boldly.

“But we’re so high,” Burch complained.

“We’ll be okay,” said Hennessey. “It has been done before.”

She started unbuckling herself. She stood and took two spare oxygen tanks from the balloon chest and sealed them in both pockets on the lower legs of her spacesuit. Her bold courage inspired her crewmates and one by one they unstrapped themselves and collected their reserve oxygen tanks. Burch and Faraday peered over the edge looking for the way home. The idea of jumping into mushroom clouds was lunacy, but more appealing than staying in the stratosphere on a temperamental gondola, thought Faraday.

Matthews pointed to his partner. “If we’re going to do this, I think you should go first, Brad. Then Claris, Jen, Keith and I’ll go last.”

“Fine,” said Sutcliffe. “It is vital that we jump immediately one after another. That way when we land, we will all be in close proximity.”

Sutcliffe knew it was a moment of his captaincy where he had to lead by example and show himself worthy of trust. He couldn’t show his fear. He couldn’t hesitate. He couldn’t talk his way out of it. He could only do it. The parachutes had been the idea of Mike Townsend in a case of extreme emergency. Not once had it crossed his mind that they would actually use them. He wished now that they’d had more skydiving lessons. Below him, dark, menacing cloud hid the Earth. What lay beneath those clouds he did not know and it deeply worried him. If they were over the Atlantic or the Channel, they were in big trouble. They would plunge into the deep ocean and would be untraceable. They would tread water until their oxygen ran out. Opening their visors to breathe in radioactive air would allow water to seep into their heavy suits, making them lead weights. That weight would pull them hundreds of feet below the surface. During that time, their last thoughts would be their airless lungs and should they not have jumped, dying in a sea of regret, lost forever.

Staring up at the entangled ropes high above the gondola, then dead ahead, admiring one last time the beautiful curvature of the Earth, he touched his helmet and chest in the form of the cross for the first time in his life, then stepped off the gondola.

For a few nerve
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rattling seconds, Faraday peered over the edge and watched her captain disappear into the dark cloud below. On any other day, she would have been determined to set a new record
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breaking altitude jump. Not on that day. She was overcome with the sense that those were the last precious minutes of her life and she couldn’t even savour them.

Hennessey put her hand on Faraday’s shoulder. “You’ll be fine, Claris,” she said softly.

Faraday gently shrugged her shoulders, closed her eyes and jumped.

The faces of her parents appeared in Hennessey’s mind. She could feel their presence, there watching over her, with her. She had parachuted from high altitude time after time, but jumping into the unknown was different. A number of questions danced in her mind. How were Sutcliffe and Faraday faring? What was the world like down there? Was she about to die? She tried to rid her mind of dispiriting thoughts, twisted her head back at Matthews and Burch to give them a supportive nod, took one large stride forward and dropped over the edge.

Burch was next. He inched his way forward, his whole body shaking and his heart pounding. At the edge of both the gondola and undoubtedly his life, he stopped, paralysed with the thought of what he was about to do. Even if he wanted to take another step, his legs refused and he just stood there incapacitated. It was just too high, he couldn’t make the jump and that was that, he decided.

“Keith, come on, move it!” Matthews shouted.

“You go, I’ll go last.”

The last thing Matthews needed right now was a debate on who went first or last. If Burch didn’t want to jump, then Matthews wasn’t going to waste his time trying to persuade him to, therefore jeopardising his own life. Striding three paces, Matthews folded his arms across his chest and plunged into the atmosphere and was gone. Now Burch was alone. By the time he did gather the courage to shimmy his way forward to the edge of the gondola, the crew of Fable
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1 had long since jumped. Quivering, he just stood there. Sutcliffe, Faraday, Hennessey and Matthews were surely dead by now. Feeling unbearably lonely, his body clammed up with vertigo and instead of jumping he closed his eyes.

“Your mother has Alzheimer’s disease,” said the nurse, and Burch closed his eyes, concerning himself with yet more nursing duties that would inevitably continue to put his own life on hold. “And not just the early stages either,” the nurse continued. “We think she may have had it for a few years now.”

Burch opened his eyes, his hands deep in his tracksuit top. He brought one of his hands to his chin and stroked it. The news was a lot to take in. William Harvey Hospital had become like a second home. As a matter of fact, he could not recall a single month that year when he’d not been at the hospital. His mother was a walking health hazard. She was annoying. Not a single day passed when she wasn’t sick or moaning.

“What does this mean? Will she lose her memory completely?”

“Eventually, yes, I’m afraid.”

The nurse explained her developing symptoms, explaining that one day she might not even remember her own son. It shocked him and he thought it over as they exited the hospital. Installed behind his mother’s wheelchair, pushing her to his van, he assisted her into the passenger side where he strapped her in.

“Everything is gonna be alright, Mum, I will take good care of you.”

Overwhelmed by all the probing, tests and inundation of drugs, she didn’t respond and just stared blankly out of the window. When he got her home, he took her to her armchair and made her a cup of herbal tea. When he set her cup down on the table, she clasped the back of his hand. “I’m so proud of you, Keith. You’ve always been there for me, even when your father left. I know I moan too much, but that doesn’t mean I don’t think the world of you. Don’t you forget that?”

Burch had to leave the room with a sudden crushing sense of guilt overcoming him. The old bat drove him up the wall, but he loved her deeply. In a few words she had made him feel important and appreciated and loved. For all those years he had thought she despised him because she had always done her best to make him feel worthless. But he enjoyed her presence and he never felt lonely. She was there for him and he was there for her. And that worked. Unlocking and entering the studio beneath his house, he sat with his back against the wall where he closed his eyes.

Burch opened his eyes. The crew of Fable
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1 was gone, undoubtedly dead. He would be safe on the platform for a while longer. He wanted to mirror their bravery, but he couldn’t get his head around jumping to certain death or staying there, running out of oxygen and dying. Staying gave him a longer life, or an elongated death. He wondered which was worse. He looked up at the ropes attached to the envelope, admiring for the last time his exceptional design. Sutcliffe had presumed right when he had said the envelope would not hold much longer.

The gondola suddenly became the victim of a strong wind and pitched sharply. Burch struggled to keep his balance and lost his footing altogether. As his reflexes snapped to stabilise his centre of gravity, he slipped and fell off the gondola. Plummeting towards the Earth back first, he stared up at the balloon pulling away from him, an indication of how fast he was travelling. The red tracking beacon fitted to the base of the gondola was blinking intermittently, it had worked after all. His limp body fell from the void of space at over six hundred miles per hour and his heart rate fluctuated wildly. In less than thirty seconds, he hit the roof of the dying mushroom clouds. With zero visibility and a visor fogged up with grit, he lost all sense of downward motion.

As soon as he deployed his parachute, his dust
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covered vision turned into the heavenly white light of unconsciousness that blanketed the insides of his eyelids, followed by a darkness that washed away all his haunting fears.

When his parachute opened, the rushing wind faded and it turned disturbingly quiet. The hellish cloud appeared to be endless, though it had started to turn slightly orange, which gradually intensified. Sutcliffe had been free-falling for around fifteen or sixteen minutes. It felt like an eternity. When would it end? More worryingly, where would it end?

There was a break in the cloud and the bright orange light came to life, though he could not be sure of what he had seen. What had he seen? The land below lay indistinct and his primary concern was if the ocean lurked beneath him. Flashbacks of his life appeared in a slideshow of happy memories; the day he met Jacqueline at the ballroom dance class, their first date, their marriage, the birth of Martin, the successful launch of Fable
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1.

Suddenly, the cloud rolled back and a huge fireball jumped up to get him. He tried to scream out, except a surge of panic held back any voice. Seconds later, as the fireball receded, he saw land. It all happened so quickly. The landing was so hard it jolted his bad leg, but he did manage to turn it into a competent roll. The canopy fell around him, immersing him beneath it. Trying to battle his way out, he eventually emerged from the canopy only to be confronted with a scene of devastation that deeply shocked him.

God help us, he thought.

Wherever he was, everything was engulfed by fire. Here and there were blackened corpses, which blended into one with the scorched environment. Some looked purposefully prearranged for a drama, others a more obvious sculpture of death. The afternoon sun had vanished behind a dark ceiling of cloud from which hard black rain fell. Out of the menacing cloud a white shape appeared, falling vertically, and whoever it was made a perfect two
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footed landing. Faraday had made it back safely.

Relieved to see her, Sutcliffe hobbled over and put a hand on her back. “Are you alright?”

“Yeah…I think so.” She studied the dark burning landscape. She looked down at the clock on her spacesuit and made note that although it was quarter to five on Sunday afternoon, the skies were comparable to that of late dusk. “Do you know where we are?”

“Not the faintest idea. We could be in Britain. We could be in Europe. It’s impossible to tell.”

Not far away, two more parachutes burst from the low cloud. Faraday and Sutcliffe charged over. One of the parachutists made a professional landing, skipping on both feet before stopping still. It was Hennessey. Matthews landed a few feet away from her, his landing not nearly as graceful as the American’s. His body tumbled head over heels before coming to a sprawled stop.

Hennessey hauled him to his feet. “You okay?”

Matthews brushed his suit down. “Of course I am.” He looked up at the burning fires and damaged vehicles. It was then that he spotted the dead bodies. Then he saw Faraday and Sutcliffe running towards them.

“You two alright?” asked Sutcliffe.

“We’re fine,” said Hennessey.

Matthews brushed himself down again. “So, what now?”

“Your guess is as good as mine,” said Sutcliffe, looking up at the sky. “Where’s Keith?”

“He went last. I think he got stage fright.”

“Did he jump?”

“He went last, how the hell do I know?”

“How did he seem? Was he panicking?”

“I don’t know. He just said he would jump after me.”

“We have to look for him.”

A large explosion sent shockwaves through the air and the Fable
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1 crew instinctively threw themselves to the ground as small fireballs rained down like fireworks. Had another nuclear bomb just exploded? Flat on their stomachs, they turned their heads to see a coach with huge tongues of fire coming from the windows. The fire glared at them, cursing their survival, burning the coach as if it carried a threatening message.