Forecast (17 page)

Gradually, the screams faded and the flames on his body were extinguished by the water in which he fell. Farrell watched his smoking corpse float off along the tunnel, now a furnace of heat. Hauling himself out of the water, he sat on the ledge, rocking back and forth, delirious.

Hours and hours passed. Eventually, Farrell found the strength to start moving. With his skin prickling and his clothes cemented to his body, and with enormous pain across his back and shoulders, he clambered out of the tunnel. As he re-emerged into the world, he saw that the sky was dark but there were fires burning everywhere and the entire township of Hayle was gone.

Farrell put some pressure on the trigger. In unspeakable pain, the freakish relic of a man knew he otherwise faced an agonising death. The Kimber Elite Compact .45 pistol was the cure. About to close his eyes, he suddenly saw four figures dressed in white suits and white helmets far off on top of a large hill. He thought they had to be paramedics looking for survivors. They could treat him. Scrambling to his feet, he clasped his hands around his mouth to amplify his voice but no sound came out. He pointed the pistol lazily into the air and fired it twice, the shots reverberating in the smoke
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filled sky. He believed that the paramedics had heard it, but they continued over the hill where they disappeared. Howling into the night sky like some ghastly monster, he sauntered along the base of the hill, his head bent and arms limp, his body trembling with terror. Skin hung from his fingers and face like hot cheese. He hobbled parallel with a narrow stream. Scattered body parts could be seen everywhere; legs, arms, whole torsos. Some of the bodies remained in full form and looked like burnt mannequins. The smell of charred leaves and smouldering corpses assaulted the air. Farrell could hear his blood thrumming in his ears. He soldiered on, the pistol hanging loosely in his grasp. The air was thick with smoke and black rain fell like heavy snowflakes. He whimpered as he made his way across the charcoaled land to where he had seen the paramedics. If he could just catch up with them, they could fix him.

Reaching the top of the hill, he saw a barren, colourless terrain of destruction and death and the paramedics were nowhere to be seen. Then he vomited.

The rubble filling the elevator shaft that led to the subterranean White Room was comprised of broken bricks, broken glass, even the remains of a swivel chair. Cast iron posts, wooden planks and pipes protruded from the mass of rubble, all garnished with dark brown ash from the contaminated skies above.

Oxygen in their tanks had fallen dangerously low and the four balloonists were aware of the countdown to certain death. The oxygen would soon run out, like their options. Sutcliffe, standing in the shaft, looked up at his crew. They were staring down at him with the ignorance of hope. He felt like mentioning that they’d spent more hours talking over the possibility of failure than he cared to remember and that somehow it had done nothing to help them in their present situation, but decided not to say anything, figuring that morale could do without any more cynicism. His head dropped in despair and the crew could tell by his body language that any hopes of surviving were rapidly fading.

“I’m sorry,” he said, and that was all he could manage.

“That’s it then,” said Matthews. “We’re fucking dead.”

“There must be something we can do,” said Hennessey.

It crossed Sutcliffe’s mind that if their lives were about to end, they were in a position to choose how to end it. There were several options. They could contaminate their lungs with radioactive air. They could suffocate in their spacesuits. They could wade out to sea and drown. They could cremate themselves in one of the many fires. They could throw themselves off the cliff-top. About to put those obscene and disturbing ideas to the group, he looked down at the rubble and something caught his eye. It got him thinking.

Hennessey and Matthews were arguing. She was angry because Matthews was trying to lay the blame on Sutcliffe for bringing them there and she was defending him. Faraday stood dumbfounded with her arms by her side staring at the burning horizon. Sutcliffe paid little attention to them. He could see something protruding from the rubble. It looked like severed cables. Elevator cables? If they were elevator cables, there could be an elevator, he decided. He began sifting through the wreckage, burrowing a hole in the centre of the rubble hoping that, by some miracle, he would come across the elevator’s roof. Despite extreme fatigue, he found a renewed energy and the speed of his labour got faster and faster.

“What is it, Brad?” said Hennessey.

“I think the elevator’s down here. Someone give me a hand.”

Matthews jumped into the pit, bending his knees as he landed. Helping his partner clear the rubble, lobbing bricks and great hunks of steel into piles in the corners of the shaft, they’d made a hole three feet deep in no time at all. This might work, Matthews thought. He was quite impressed with Sutcliffe’s ability to find a solution to a problem, to manipulate even the most difficult of situations. He had to admit, as much as he preferred to take control of things, that Sutcliffe’s actions were not without merit.

“Can we help?” said Faraday.

“If there is too much weight, it may cause the rubble to topple,” said Matthews, barely looking up. “Just wait there a minute.”

Faraday turned to Hennessey, shaking her head. “What he means is that it’s no place for a woman.”

“I heard that,” he said. “If we are on top of the elevator, the excessive weight might cause the roof to collapse. Then we’ll never get into the White Room.”

“Point taken.”

At twenty feet, there was still no sign of the elevator. Sutcliffe wondered if Matthews had a point. Maybe the weight of the rubble
had
crushed the elevator.

“Are you sure the elevator’s even still here?” said Matthews.

“No. Just keep digging.”

Fifteen minutes later, they were still digging through the rubble and their hope was diminishing with every breath. Hennessey and Faraday were growing restless, drawing on the last of their oxygen. Sutcliffe lifted a large piece of concrete and it revealed a flat metal surface. He got on his knees and knocked on the metal with the flat of his hand. An echo.

“It’s hollow.”

They hurried to clear a space and came across a square hatch. Peeling back the hatch, they peered into its black void. It was just about big enough for a human to fit through. Matthews went in first. Dropping inside, he found it hard to move his legs, as though he’d jumped into a swamp. He switched on his EVA headlamps and steered the light with his head, investigating the elevator, noticing that he was standing in two feet of water. The elevator doors were sealed shut. He worried that, without electricity, they wouldn’t open.

Sutcliffe told Faraday and Hennessey to be careful on their way down the funnel
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shaped hole because the rubble was unstable. With vigilant footsteps, picking their way, they descended and some concrete dislodged and rattled down the slope. At the base of the shaft, Faraday planted her boots on either side of the square hatch. Moving light could be seen coming from inside the elevator with what she presumed was the ripple of water. Matthews appeared beneath the hatch with his arms stretched out in front of him.

“I’ve got you, Claris. Just let yourself fall through.”

“I can manage,” she said.

She dropped into the elevator with ease and landed with a big splash. Hennessey came after Faraday. Sutcliffe last. Huddled inside the elevator, the crew observed the conditions as Matthews put his fingers in the vertical line where the elevator doors met, but his gloves were too thick and he couldn’t establish a grip.

“I’m going to have to take my gloves off,” he said.

Detaching the aluminium couplings, he pulled off his gloves and, like a pianist, flexed his fingers, enjoying the movement. He gained a firm grip on the doors and forced them apart. The doors began to open fractionally and the water slowly started to recede. One final thrust and the doors cracked open a few inches, enough to push an arm through. The water gushed out around them, flooding the lobby outside the White Room. While Matthews pushed one door, Hennessey pushed the other, all the while thinking that Matthews was not such a bad guy after all, even admitting that she was beginning to like him.

Following the light of the headlamps, they stepped into the lobby through the water, now six inches deep. The large steel door of the White Room opened via a steel handle, but when Sutcliffe tried it, the door wouldn’t budge.

“It’s stuck,” he said.

“Let me try,” said Matthews. “I should be able to grip it better.” He pulled on the door handle as hard as he could, then kicked it in frustration. “Fuck!”

“The frame might have buckled in the explosions,” Sutcliffe said.

Faraday made a gasping sound. “My oxygen!”

Sutcliffe frantically tried the handle again. Matthews bolted into the elevator and reached his arm up through the hatch and retrieved a steel bar jutting out from the wreckage, six feet long. He’d spotted it on the way in. Pulling back his arm, he whipped the hatch down and ran back to the door. He lodged the bar between the door’s edge and the metal frame.

“You all pull, I’ll push,” he instructed.

In unison, they gripped and worked the handle, the steel bar slowly prising the door away from its frame and it opened with a snap. They stood staring inside the black hollow room in nervous silence. The darkness was imposing, as if something dreadful would suddenly jump out and attack them. Sutcliffe closed the White Room door, went to the elevator and pulled the doors shut. He began doffing his helmet and gloves and urged everyone else to do the same. He explained that their spacesuits were contaminated with invisible radiation particles and they didn’t want to transfer the contamination to the one place free of it. Faraday had already taken her helmet off and she was sucking in large breaths when everyone began to shed their suits. Hennessey further added that it would be wise to rinse the suits off in the water at their feet even though it wouldn’t fully rid the garments of radiation. In doing so, they could use items from the spacesuits inside the White Room such as the helmet’s EVA headlamps, the diaper collection device and the backpack with the communication equipment in case Burch tried to make contact with them.

Hennessey peeled out of her spacesuit and allowed it to fall into the water. Matthews observed her lean body and calculated that it was exactly as he’d imagined. He stared fixedly at the shape of her hips, her thighs and her small breasts hidden beneath the one
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piece spandex mesh suit. She went to unzip the front entry but stopped when she saw him looking over her with invading eyes. “Do you mind?” she said.

He smiled. “Not if you don’t.”

“Well, I do.”

Faraday, still in shock from her encounter with suffocation, felt frightened to enter the White Room. Into that false sense of security, she sensed something not right, that if the White Room was going to be unliveable, they would have nowhere else to go.

Standing on the threshold of darkness, they entered the White Room, their antler
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like headlamps guiding the way. Sutcliffe ran his lights about the dark room. They had been there twenty eight hours earlier, but it felt like an entirely different place. The room no longer had an air of possibility about it. It looked to have come through the bombing unscathed, though he couldn’t see everything inside yet and therefore couldn’t be certain. Aside from its isolated position, the thick, impenetrable walls prevented the radiation from seeping in, except for the tiny traces clinging to their clothes, like bacteria. And apart from a few fractures in the wall and some dust on the floor from vibrations in the ceiling, the White Room had survived the blasts.

The tired Fable
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1 crew sat down on the benches while Sutcliffe finished his inspection of the place, accidentally bumping into the stepladder in the middle of the room and knocking over a can of paint with his foot. On a hook on the wall, his freshly pressed suit hung like a piece of museum art. He studied the room in a quest for useful resources. Already, he had discovered a few important facts. The security bolt at the top of the White Room door had broken away from its mount. He would fix that later. One of the toilet doors had jammed tightly shut, probably the frame had buckled in the blast, like the main door, so only one toilet operated for now. He hadn’t tried the flush because he knew it might work a few times while the water pressure was still good, but because the pumps wouldn’t be powered with electricity, the toilet wouldn’t refill the cistern with water. A mop and bucket was tucked behind the toilet and that meant the cistern could be filled manually with seawater using the bucket down at the beach.

Matthews opened the flask he had found in the wrecked car. Inside was a dark liquid that smelt much like tea, about two
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thirds full, a cup for everyone. He drank some, then gestured with it to Hennessey, who turned it down.

“I’m not sure I want to risk it. It could be contaminated,” she said.

“Impossible. It’s an insulation flask,” Matthews replied.

“I don’t want to risk it.”

“Fine, I’ll drink yours.”

Sutcliffe and Faraday shared the tea. It made Sutcliffe realise how hungry and thirsty he was and why he was feeling so under the weather. A glass of orange juice, two cups of coffee, the contents of his in
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suit drink bag and a splash of cold tea were all that he had consumed since Sunday. Scrambled egg on brown toast and grilled tomatoes was the last meal he had eaten. That had been almost thirty hours ago. Where would his next meal come from? Being somewhere safe, somewhere they could relax, lifted a huge weight off their shoulders, but from now on things would get tougher. He thought of his family, the first time he’d dared to. Everyone he knew and loved was probably dead. His father. Old friends. Good friends. Ground crew. His old friend Mike Townsend, his remains dispersed somewhere above the White Room. And his son. Martin had had his problems growing up. But he’d been a good child to father. Sutcliffe couldn’t help being filled with a thousand regrets. He fought back the overwhelming urge to cry. Anger was what he felt, a deep sense of hatred for the people responsible for killing his family, his friends, his countrymen and his world. Conceivably, the instigators of the nuclear attack had died in the same despicable way, but that did not serve as justice or retribution.