Forecast (15 page)

Sutcliffe climbed to his feet and tried to patch himself through to Burch, but had no luck getting connected. He tried again and again. ”We need to find Keith. Let’s head in opposite directions and return to the coach in say…ten minutes. If he jumped after you, Simon, he’ll be somewhere nearby. He might be injured. We can keep in radio contact so if you have any problems, let us know.”

“Keep an eye out for other survivors,” Hennessey added.

“Wait, is it wise to separate?” said Faraday. “It’s a battlefield out there. Why don’t we keep trying to radio him?”

“Surely he would be trying to radio us if he could,” Sutcliffe stated. “So he must be having difficulty.”

Matthews shook his head. “He can’t radio us, he didn’t jump. If we go looking for him, we risk losing more of us. I reckon we stay together.”

“You just said you didn’t know if he jumped or not.”

“Obviously he didn’t or he’d be here with us.”

Sutcliffe put his hands on his hips. “All I’m asking is that we look. Ten minutes, that’s all, and if we don’t find him then we have no choice but to go on without him.” He paused until he was sure they appreciated what he’d just said. “Right, see you in ten.”

The extent of the damage inflicted upon the land became more apparent as they headed off in opposite directions. Not one building had remained intact. Wherever they were, it hadn’t been a very populated area; a village or small town. Still, the infrastructure of the place had been reduced to rubble and was still burning. Ruined cars with blown out windows lined the roads, some on their sides, some on their roofs, some without sides and roofs. Poor visibility merely decreased the chances of finding Burch.

As planned, the crew reunited at the burning coach ten minutes later, wearisome and worried, and no one had seen Burch. They concluded that he could have jumped much later than everyone else and could be a hundred miles away, if he’d jumped at all. If he had jumped and landed safely, he would be on his own from now on.

“We’ve got less than twenty hours of oxygen left,” mentioned Sutcliffe. “So let’s get moving.”

“To where?” Faraday asked.

“Well, we can’t stay here.”

“Let’s go,” said Hennessey, getting the group going. “And keep your eyes peeled for Keith.”

Leaving the ruined town, nobody thought to question Sutcliffe as he led the way, each of them yielding to the impulses of bodies too long constrained by terror. Staggering, and sometimes falling, their mud
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laden feet heavy with each step, they trekked across the landscape, crossing a small dilapidated bridge before moving on through country lanes and heading forward. The road they were following flanked burning fields and dead trees blowing miserably in the wind. Matthews looked out across the barren, black fields. His exhaustion made everything seem more surreal. Nine hours earlier they’d been the focus of the country. Where was everyone now? Who had been responsible? Were there multiple players or just one?

The loose footing in the ground slowed the crew to a steady crawl, sometimes diverging, choosing different lines to follow. They were forced to stop frequently, one because they’d been going at it for a while and two, moving in a spacesuit was physically tough. Sutcliffe’s stomach heaved in revulsion and the only reason he wasn’t vomiting was that he was too fatigued. He had never been subjected to such horror and the dreadfulness of it all was too much to bear.

“Where exactly are we heading, Brad?” Matthews asked.

“I’m hoping we might come across a landmark or something that might give us an indication of where we are. Once we know that, we can make a decision about what to do.”

Like police detectives, they investigated the scorned landscape looking for the ultimate clue that would tell them where in the northern hemisphere they had landed. On the way, Matthews spotted something in an upturned car, just off the road. The vehicle, camouflaged by a mantle of soot and ash, looked as though it had been picked up and thrown by a tornado. Inside, on the roof next to the rear
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view mirror, he’d seen a thermos flask. He dropped to his stomach and squeezed through the front window. As his fingers clasped the edge of the flask, he saw, to his sheer horror, the gruesome features of a human face; the flesh burned off the bone and the eyes boiled in the skull, the lips and gums fried off exposing a set of burned teeth that seemed to accentuate a sneer of contempt. With his hand wrapped around the flask, he scrambled away from the car with a shuddering squeal.

“What is it?” asked Faraday.

He pointed to the rear of the vehicle. “In there, Jesus fucking Christ.”

She wondered what could have spooked a man as masculine and as nonchalant as Matthews. Sutcliffe got on his knees and saw the charred body of a human adult. The wristwatch on the arm had stopped at 1.56 in the afternoon. It gave him a chill. Picking up a shard of glass from the dashboard, he got to his feet and walked to the front of the vehicle where he started to prod around the grill area using the piece of glass. He had the crew bewildered.

“What are you doing?” asked Hennessey.

“I think we’re still in Britain,” he said.

“How can you be sure?”

“This car is right
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hand drive. Most other European cars are driven from the left. And the number plate looks like a UK one.” He got up and started to walk. “Come on. We should keep moving.”

Gruelling and most of the time shocking, a few hours passed when Faraday stopped in her tracks, her gaze fixated on a finger of stone at the top of a steep hill ahead of them in the dying light. Without saying a word, she took off up the hill.

“What’s up with her?” Sutcliffe wondered.

Matthews shrugged his shoulders. The hill looked familiar. He consulted his memories and managed to identify the location. And when he did it dawned on him why his cousin had bolted for the summit. He pondered over how different the place looked. The hill leading up to the famous landmark at the top was scarred with the history of Iron Age huts, now scarred with the history of Nuclear Age burns. The stone at the top of the hill had been destroyed, but the base and part of the vertical section of the monument remained unscathed.

“I know where we are,” said Matthews.

Sutcliffe hadn’t heard. He was too busy watching Hennessey running up the hill after Faraday.

Reaching the crumbled monument, Faraday dropped to her knees and began raking at the ground, burrowing away at the soil, digging a hole.

Hennessey came up behind her out of breath and grabbed her by the arm, her eyes bearing into her. “What the hell are you doing, Claris?”

Faraday picked away at the dirt, splitting a fingernail. “Look what I’ve found.” She handed something to her father.

“You know what this is, don’t you Claris?” he said, running the smooth, pointed flint through his fingers.

“No, what?”

“It could be part of a very old arrowhead used as weaponry,” he began, taking her around the topography of the famous hill. “It is believed that many tribes fought over this site during the Neolithic settlement.”

Faraday was distracted by her mother meandering off down the hill pretending to show an interest in the countryside, a view she’d seen a million times before. She sensed the tension between her parents, more than usual, but tried to ignore it.

“I’m boring you, aren’t I?” her father said.

“No. It’s really interesting. Shall we catch up with Mum?”

He sighed. “Yeah, come on. I’ll race you.”

“You’re on,” and before he had composed himself to race her, Faraday shot off, rapidly gathering momentum on the downward slope. She moved with the swift forward motion of a greyhound, every muscle in her body propelling her forward. When she reached the bottom of the hill she put her hands on her hips and walked in a wide arc, catching her breath. She looked back at the hill. Her father had collapsed and her mother was standing over him with both hands clasped around her mouth. Faraday ran back up the steep hill. Upon reaching them, her mother shouted, “Run into town and get someone to call an ambulance, quickly!”

She turned and once again was sprinting downhill. Redruth, the nearest town, was about a mile away, but St. Euny Church was nestled at the bottom of the hill and it was Sunday, and Sunday meant church service. Sprinting through the small graveyard, she entered the church where a service was taking place and shouted, “Somebody help me! My father has collapsed on the hill!”

The kind church people organised an ambulance and fifteen minutes later the paramedics arrived, only to find the dead body of a fifty
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nine
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year
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old man being cradled by his hysterical wife.

Faraday had attended the inquest to hear the coroner’s verdict. He had suffered a massive heart attack. A week later she attended his cremation, before his ashes were taken to the hill on which he had died. Faraday had never heard a silence so eloquent than the tribute given to her father at Carn Brea, the site of his death, with more than one hundred friends and family in attendance. In a hand- carved wooden box crafted by her father as a gift to Faraday, his ashes were collected, among them the arrow
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shaped flint he’d been holding in death and a small grave was made in the hill where the box was buried. A few mournful prayers were said and Faraday, her heart sad and empty, gave her father one last farewell. Then she cried nonstop.

“Stop that, Claris, what are you doing?” Hennessey asked again.

“My father is buried somewhere around here.”

“Don’t do it. This is his final resting place. Don’t deprive him of that.”

She stopped digging.

Hennessey offered her hand. “Come on.”

“You’re right. What am I thinking?” she said, hauling herself to her feet.

Hennessey hugged her.

The daylight had disappeared, but fires scattered all over the land provided abundant light. Matthews arrived at the monument and turned on his EVA headlamps. He found an inscription on the broken wall and read it to the group as Sutcliffe came up behind him. “The county of Cornwall, to the memory of Francis Lord de Dunstanville and Basset A.D. 1836.” He turned to the group. “So that confirms it then. This is definitely Britain.”

Something started to bleep. It was Matthews’ oxygen monitor. “I need to change my oxygen tanks over. Anyone else?”

Hennessey raised her hand. “Real soon.”

“Me too,” said Sutcliffe.

“That gives us about fourteen hours to find shelter,” Matthews announced. “Otherwise, the next inscription on this wall will be in memory of us.”

Standing on the crest of the hill gave the Fable
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1 crew a three-hundred
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and
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sixty
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degree panorama of Cornwall, a rather bleak, foreboding sight dotted with the glow of hundreds of fires, which gave the sky an orange glow trapped by the dark, menacing clouds. Observing the spread of undulating land that sloped away in a very gradual curve, as he switched his oxygen tanks over, Sutcliffe tried to establish his bearings. “Which way is west?”

Faraday swept her eyes across the landscape and pointed to the horizon. “That way, I think. Why?”

Sutcliffe thought the same. Sucking on his water, it gurgled with air and he realised he had just finished his only lifeline. From now on, things would get tricky and he began marching away from the monument, descending the hill with his trademark limp, leaving the group a little perplexed.

Matthews frowned. He didn’t like to base decisions on guess-work as it got you so far until it made you careless. “Wait, why west?”

But Sutcliffe had walked off in radio silence.

Night had fallen. They had been travelling along the dark coast for hours and hours following the light from their EVA headlamps and the fires burning across the land, the ocean always on their right. At one stage, they had all heard two loud explosions in the sky. It sounded as though someone had fired a shotgun. There had been more than twenty small explosions since they had started walking. Petrol tanks blowing up, gas pipes igniting, burning power lines cackling. The land looked as though it had been struck by hurricane, earthquake and fire all in one hit. Now and again they crossed paths with the wreckage of vehicles or the remains of dilapidated cottages, or stumbled upon a corpse. Black rain from a black sky came down so hard on their helmets it sounded like a million spoons being tapped on their heads simultaneously.

Hours later, the ash
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rain hadn’t eased off much, but the sky had brightened a little. A new day was beginning. Sutcliffe, way ahead of the others, was vaguely aware of words being spoken behind him through his headset but, in no mood to speak, had switched off his mouthpiece. A mixture of thoughts raced back and forth in his mind and got stuck whenever someone tried to speak to him. His feet drove him forward, a consistent momentum with an awkward stride. He didn’t think about it, he just walked and periodically looked behind him to ensure the crew was keeping up.

“We have been walking all night long,” said Hennessey, her legs aching. “Does he know where he’s going?”

“I really hope so,” said Matthews. “Otherwise we are wasting precious time.”

“He knows the southwest better than all of us put together,” Faraday commented.