Forecast (20 page)

“What was that?” Matthews growled.

“I hate to imagine,” Sutcliffe replied.

Haunting, spine
-
chilling, the tapping on the door continued like that for several hours.

Thud…thud…thud.

Thud…thud…thud.

Thud…thud…thud
.

“Do you think he’s gone?” Faraday asked.

Sutcliffe pulled his head away from the cold steel door. “I can’t hear anything, but I don’t think he’s got the strength to climb out of the elevator. Did you see the state of him?”

“Who do you think he was?” she said, joining him at the door. “You don’t think it was Keith by any chance?”

“No, I would’ve been able to tell if it was. I would go out and speak to him, but I’m worried he might shoot me.”

“Don’t, stay here. It’s too risky.”

Once again, the room fell spookily silent. Hennessey, Faraday, Sutcliffe and Matthews listened for the sound of movement, a moan, anything to indicate if the man was still out there. The silence was unbearable. Sutcliffe didn’t dare open the door and check. He didn’t feel that the man was out to hurt anyone, but he couldn’t trust that he wouldn’t.

Then…
boom
…and a reverberating after
-
sound from outside.

Even from inside the room, they sensed the full force of the discharge. The man had fired his pistol. What at? It occurred to Sutcliffe that he’d probably taken his own life.

“I think he’s just killed himself,” said Hennessey, eyes wide with worry.

In the next minute, Sutcliffe was going for the door, a pressure building as he slowly pushed down on the handle. He stopped. “Simon,” he said, flicking his head towards the door.

Faraday and Hennessey stayed near the back of the room in agitated fear as the men opened the door a fraction. Using the headlamps, they illuminated the lobby and searched it. Nothing. Sutcliffe lowered the headlamps half
-
expecting to find the man face down in the water, polluting it with blood. Nothing. He pulled the headlamps round, observing Matthews briefly, seeing his attention shift and his eyes widen. Matthews had spotted something in the elevator. A pair of legs, the light revealed. On closer inspection, they found the dead body slumped to the floor beneath the stepladder Matthews had set up earlier to exit the hatch. The pistol was loose in the man’s palm. Blood splashed everywhere, as though someone had thrown a bucket of red paint up the elevator wall. The man’s wilting head had a smouldering dark hole marking the spot where he’d chosen to end his life. Blood streaked across his face and chest. Sutcliffe couldn’t imagine what he’d been through. The image of his son appeared in his head. He hoped death had come quickly and painlessly for Martin and a solitary tear descended his cheek.

“What do we do with him?” asked Sutcliffe.

“Get him out of the elevator for starters,” said Matthews. “We can leave him in the corner of the lobby so the girls don’t see him.”

With Sutcliffe at the man’s feet and Matthews with the man’s arms, they set him down in the lobby, his legs and waist submerged beneath the water and his head flopped against the wall. Sutcliffe found the man’s wallet in his pocket. It had burnt severely and most of the cards inside were damaged, except for a MasterCard. The name on the card read Fred Farrell. Matthews went back into the elevator and retrieved the pistol. He took out the cartridge. There were eight bullet bays, but only five bullets.

When they returned to the White Room, Hennessey was still cradling Faraday. “Is he dead?”

“Yes, he is.”

Hennessey felt guilty for feeling relieved.

Matthews pulled out the souvenir pistol. “But he left us a gift.”

Faraday watched him twirl the pistol in his hand like a toy, making her uncomfortable. “Be careful with that, Simon.”

“I’m always careful.” He pressed his ear to the White Room door feeling more in control of things and less vulnerable now that he was armed. “There’ll be more of them out there, suffering. They don’t stand a chance without food or shelter.”

“Or spacesuits,” said Faraday.

“True, true.”

Hennessey watched Sutcliffe sit down and his head drop onto his lap. Clearly, the death of the man had affected him in ways it had not affected Matthews. Perhaps he didn’t know how to deal with it. She considered him a good man. She had only known him for four weeks but he had many human qualities that appealed to her. Matthews was more handsome and had style, but Sutcliffe was the type of man you could count on in bad times. He was simple and kind and gentle. He was articulate and sensible. He was…rising to his feet in a hurry. Without saying a word, he stomped to the end of the White Room, opened the glass display cabinet and retrieved the spare helmet. Then a moment of rage, or madness. He raised the visor and slammed it into the bench.

“What are you doing?” asked Faraday.

“I can’t just sit around and do nothing.”

“So you’ll just vandalise our equipment instead?”

“We don’t need this helmet, it’s only a spare.”

The visor came away with a crack and banged to the floor. He disappeared into the toilet with it. When he returned to the room, he was holding the mop. The air was pregnant with anticipation with everyone watching the day’s drama in confusion. Sutcliffe began tugging at the mop’s absorbent white strips, yanking the head until it came away in his hand.

“Great, now the mop,” Faraday moaned. “How are we supposed to clean the floor?”

Sutcliffe wasn’t listening.

“Are you going to tell us what it is you’re doing exactly?” asked Hennessey.

“I’m making a spade.”

He explained, as he worked, that he couldn’t relax knowing there was a dead body outside the White Room and that, in light of the fact they hadn’t made the effort to nurse the man when he had come looking for help, the least they could do was give him a respectful burial. Hennessey tried to talk him out of it. She put her hand on his shoulder and tried to point out the dangers and that he shouldn’t go out in case others were out there. He clasped her by the forearm and explained it was the honourable thing to do. There was a moment between them, Matthews and Faraday saw it. No one had mentioned it, but everyone knew their relationship was friendlier than either of them cared to admit.

Sitting on the floor with his legs crossed, Sutcliffe spent some time attaching the mop handle to the visor. The metal jaw at the end of the mop was difficult to open because the spring clip had snapped off. Still, with a little persistence, Sutcliffe managed to feed the visor into the metal jaw, which worked as a strong clamp. Using a handful of the absorbent strips, he tied knots around the joint until the tool was sturdy enough to do the job he had in mind. In the meantime, Matthews prepared himself for the environment outside, dressing in his spacesuit, because he felt compelled to help Sutcliffe, knowing his friend couldn’t manage on his own. Ten minutes later, they were dressed in both hemispheres of their spacesuits feeling the oxygen flowing from behind their heads. For a moment, they endured the odours of bodies long unwashed until the bad air entered a charcoal cartridge, filtering out the body smell. Then they left the White Room, closing the door behind them.

Matthews had trained in the British Army before deciding that the army was not for him. During three years of intense training, he’d learnt to survive in hostile conditions, environments such as the ocean, the desert and the jungle. Camping and cooking over a fire. Techniques for crossing fast-flowing rivers. He had also learnt first
-
aid and CPR. But they hadn’t taught him how to survive a nuclear holocaust in the army, or how to get a heavy body through an elevator hatch and up a thirty
-
foot shaft.

Agreeing on a method, they decided the best way to get the intruder out of the elevator was to have Sutcliffe standing on the roof pulling him up with Matthews on the stepladder supporting the weight. With the efforts of pull and push, they hauled the gruesome corpse out through the hatch and set him down on the rubble to catch their breaths. Dragging the body up the inverted pyramid of rubble proved much harder than either of them had expected and it took the best part of fifteen minutes to get the job done.

Soft black rain drizzled from the sky and the wind on the cliff was like some invisible demonic force. Scattered fires still marred the land and the sky had not cleared but a fraction. Like the sky, the land looked colourless and miserable. Where to bury the body? That was the next challenge. At the top of the hill seemed like a suitable place to conceal the man, they discussed. Most shrines for unique and revered individuals were set on hills or great mountains. And Fred Farrell had certainly been unique. Matthews went back to the shaft and retrieved two arm
-
sized pieces of wood from the rubble and some loose cable and he fashioned a cross by tying the two bars of wood together.

Rejoining Sutcliffe at the top of the hill, he watched his partner kick the spade to turn it the right way round before he dug it into the ground and the solemn work of burial began. The hole they made was not deep and it accommodated the body to its precise measurements. They positioned him facing skyward, arms resting on his pelvis, legs pushed together. They spread the excavated soil evenly around the body, covering him up. Matthews dug the bottom of the cross deep into the ground and stamped on the soil to tighten its poise. A few blocks of broken concrete were positioned at the base of the cross to support the structure and to make the grave look more authentic and Farrell’s name was scratched into the wood using a bent nail.

“What’s that?” said Sutcliffe, staring out into the grey blizzard. “Over there.”

They tracked a single figure swaggering across the hill and, as it got closer, they saw it was a half
-
naked human.

They had spotted another survivor.

The White Room defined time. Time passed quickly. Time passed slowly. Sometimes, it felt like it didn’t pass at all, as though they were stuck in some time warp. Often it seemed to slip away from them, relentlessly moving them closer to the end. Without the two boys, the dark and frigid room felt incomplete. Sutcliffe and Matthews had only been gone for about an hour, though it seemed much, much longer.

Hennessey and Faraday sat quietly on the bench. They were hungry and emotionally drained and they wondered what it was like outside now. They wondered if the skies had cleared at all and if the sun had come out. They wondered if the fires had stopped. They wondered if more survivors were out there.

They both heard a sound.

Something had scuffed against the cinderblock. A faint sound, like a pencil being drawn on a wall. It was almost impossible to tell where the sound had come from as the light from the headlamps only splashed around them. Beyond that was just a fog of black. But they had definitely heard something.

They heard it again.

“Did you hear that?”

Faraday nodded. “What do you think it is?”

“Maybe one of the spare oxygen tanks has fallen against the wall.”

Hennessey had been fiddling with one of the lighters, flicking the ignition cog, spinning the device in her fingers and now she was taking it to the utility room. It was inside that room that she saw eleven oxygen canisters stowed away in their racks, all vertical, nothing abnormal about them. In the dim, sputtering light, when she saw the handheld video camera on the shelf, she hadn’t expected it and it gave her a surprise. Strange place to keep a camera, she thought. She wondered what she could do with it. She could film the crew, make a documentary or something, if the batteries still had power. She could use it to keep a record of their health. Pushed into the back corner of the utility room, she also discovered a crate of champagne. There were six bottles in total. There was something tied to the crate. A white balloon. Someone had written FABLE
-
1 across it with a black marker. Next to the crate she saw a large tub of margarine. That further surprised her. “Claris, you won’t believe what I’ve found,” she said.

“What?”

She took a bottle from the crate and held it up to the lighter. “Fancy a drink?”

Obviously, staff from Mission Control had been planning a celebration for the crew on their return. Someone had placed the champagne in the White Room’s utility cupboard to keep it cool. The party would have been huge, she presumed, and would have probably continued into the early hours of Monday.

“Is there anything to eat?”

“There’s a tub of margarine, for some reason.”

“Beggars can’t be choosers.”

Hennessey popped the cork on the champagne and plugged the hole with her mouth, the contents spewing down her throat. She passed the bottle to Faraday who glugged four mouthfuls. The champagne bottle, inept in her grasp, felt like a lead weight, the first indication of her diminishing strength. All of a sudden, she had a terrible thought and the satisfaction was gone from her face. While so many countries around the world were burning and suffering from the mass destruction of North Korean fury, she thought, they sat drinking champagne in the basement of a building unaffected by the blasts of bombs – a sick irony.

“This feels so wrong.”