Forecast (22 page)

“Yeah,” said Sutcliffe. “But go easy, that’s all we have.”

Blatantly ignoring Sutcliffe, Matthews necked the champagne. It went straight to his head and straight to his mouth. “God bless the first man who trod on a fucking grape.” He said it with an air of drunken bravado.

Sutcliffe snatched the bottle out of his hand and held it up to the headlamps. “You’ve polished off half the bottle.”

“Yeah,” he replied, grinning. “Tastes pretty shit though.”

“Anything that is consumable must be rationed. Right now, Simon, this is all we have to drink. Have some consideration.”

“Have a drink.” His tone was disdainful. “Lighten up.”

Sutcliffe let that one pass. Everyone was emotional right now. Tempers were volatile. He passed the bottle to Hennessey, noticing a small video camera on the bench. “Where did you get that?”

“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about,” she said. “I think whoever owns this camera is in that toilet over there. In fact, I’m certain of it.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Someone filmed our flight into space and… maybe you should just watch the video for yourself and see what you think. Me and Claris are convinced we have been hearing noises coming from the toilet, the one that’s jammed shut.”

He looked at her disbelievingly.

“Just watch it, Brad.”

He rewound the tape a fraction and then pressed play, instantly recognising the staircase at Mission Control Base, the workshop, the elevator, the lobby and the White Room. He heard a voice on the recording and recognised that too.
I’ll leave you to it, just shut the main door behind you when you’re done
, Trev Gable said. And, belatedly, he recognised the brand of camera; a JVC, the same model his son had stolen five weeks earlier. Dropping the camera onto the bench, he ran to the toilet. The crew couldn’t see him in the shadows of the room, but they could hear him beating mercilessly on the toilet door.

“Martin!”

Matthews twisted the helmet and pointed the EVA headlamps towards the toilet where Sutcliffe continued to pound on the door. “Martin!”

He beat it so hard and so relentlessly that the hinge buckled and the door burst open. But something was blocking it – a leg. It moved.

Then followed a faint gruff voice, “…a moment.”

“Martin!” Sutcliffe turned to the crew. “My son, he’s inside.” He tried to force the door open. “Martin, open up the door! Martin! Martin, open up, it’s your Dad!”

Slowly, the door opened and a silhouette appeared framed in the door. Hennessey and Faraday had been right and now the thought that someone had been there the whole time freaked them out. Sutcliffe sidestepped out of the light to get a better look at his son. He saw a puffy
-
eyed boy with dark pupils squinting into the bright light, his elbow moving up to his eyes to block it out. He had a well
-
tended head of blond hair and was incongruously dressed in black trousers and a white shirt with the top buttons undone. The twenty
-
three
-
year
-
old was Trev Gable.

“Trev?”

“Huh,” he replied absently.

Stomach cramping up, Sutcliffe made a sighing sound cut with disappointment. “Trev! What…do you know what’s happened? Do you know what happened to my son, Martin?”

Gable brushed his hand through his hair. He didn’t have the answers to such foreign questions.

Sutcliffe’s mood was irritated and madly impatient. He grabbed a fistful of Gable’s shirt and shook him aggressively. “Where’s my son?”

Matthews was about to intervene when Sutcliffe released the young man and apologised, but his voice remained raised. “Think, Trev. You brought him here to use the toilet before the bombs went off. Where did he go?”

Gable tried to think back to the moment…what had happened? All those faces were looking at him, their mouths asking difficult questions. He thought, Where am I? What is this room and who are these people? Everywhere was so dark except for two glaring lights burning his pupils like blowtorches. “Bombs?”

“You mean you don’t know?”

Sutcliffe saw a large bruise on Gable’s temple and a spot of dry blood. “Trev, listen to me…” His words trailed off, aware now that he was wasting breath. “Alright, alright. We’ll talk later.”

Trev Gable slept for exactly thirteen hours, during which time he didn’t wake once. Finally, his eyes opened. His arms were pinioned behind his back where he’d rolled on them in the night and dribble stuck to his cheek. Sutcliffe realised a few things he already knew. Gable’s presence explained why the elevator had survived the nuclear bombs – it had been underground at the time of the explosions. It explained why the toilet door had been jammed – Gable had locked it from the inside, which also explained why the main door had been jammed on their arrival and why the bolt was oddly broken. Furthermore, it explained the noises Faraday and Hennessey said they’d heard, because on their first night in the White Room, now that he thought about it, he’d heard them too, waking him up once or twice. At the time, he had put it down to creaking walls, bad weather, or both.

Everyone had questions for Trev Gable, but none more so than Sutcliffe. The boy had hardly got to his feet when he was asked the first one. “Remember anything yet?”

Gable took ages to respond, scratching his head, to his surprise locating a large lump on his temple. “I…all I remember is coming down here to use the toilet. The one upstairs had flooded. I heard a really loud rumble, like an earthquake or something. From…it was coming from outside, while I was in the toilet…and I must have slipped and hit my head. That’s all I remember.”

Gable saw Faraday drinking some champagne. “You found the champagne, then?”

No one answered, they just stared at Gable.

“The toilets flooded the corridor and the kitchen so I had to turn off the fridge. I brought the champagne down here and put it in the utility room to keep it cool for you. I brought the margarine as well. It was the only thing in the fridge. Did you see the balloon I attached to the champagne?”

Sutcliffe tapped Gable on the shoulder to regain his attention. Gable turned.

“What about my son, Trev?”

He seemed confused, though more lucid than the last round of questioning. “Something bad happened, didn’t it?”

“There’s been a nuclear war.”

Gable put his hands over his mouth. “You’re jofting.”

“Would we be down here living like this if we were joking?” said Matthews, sitting down on the bench to calm his irritation. “Who is this idiot?”

“Go easy, Simon,” said Hennessey. “The boy’s been through a lot.”

Matthews pointed to Gable’s feet. “What’s that sticking out of your boot?”

Gable glanced down and saw coloured paper spilling out of his heel. He pulled it out and lifted it to his face. “A fifty
-
pound note.”

“What’s it doing in your boot?”

“I don’t own a wallet.”

Sutcliffe returned the focus to the war and his missing son. He was divulging the hazy details of what they had learnt so far when Matthews jumped to his feet. He’d been distracted by something he thought he’d heard coming from the lobby. The sound was weak, so weak he doubted there had been any sound at all. He put his ear to the door a moment, then pushed down on the handle. No sooner had the door opened than he slammed it shut, startling everyone in the room. The rim of the door crashed into the metal frame so hard it sent an echoing shockwave through the White Room, interrupting the conversation Sutcliffe and Gable were having.

“What did you do that for?” asked Faraday.

“Rats,” he said. “Millions of them.”

The water in the lobby was alive. Big rat bodies jumping about chaotically, ugly heads scarcely above the water in a competitive struggle for space. A colony of them spreading disease and misery. Furthermore, they had bathed in the water and had polluted it. Removing the impurities would be impossible. As for removing the rats, the route they’d taken to get there was one
-
way.

It struck a deep chord in Sutcliffe’s mind. Closing the door, he put the palm of his hand to his forehead, tapping it repeatedly. “We forgot to close the hatch when we brought Keith back with us.”

Gable, in the corner of the room, shrieked, then jumped up onto the bench. “There’s one in here,” he yelled.

The last thing they needed at that moment was a rat invasion, Sutcliffe thought. He played the headlamp beam across the floor, doing a sideways sweep of the room. A dark shadow burst across the light, but it was too quick for him to catch. Swinging the light round, he stopped it on Burch where he saw a rat the size of a shoe, its nose and eyes shuddering in its quest for food.

“Shit, it’s on Keith.”

Faraday screamed. “There’s another one back here.”

“Don’t touch them.”

“What are we supposed to do?” she hollered.

Sutcliffe held the helmet close to his side, cutting out the light momentarily. Darkness enclosed the room and a solemn quiet partnered it. Sutcliffe cast the light over the floor, passing over various items in the room; a scattered cardigan, a can of paint, the broken mop head, two empty champagne bottles, Keith Burch.

“Maybe we could explode an oxygen tank over them,” Gable suggested.

Matthews grunted. “And how do you propose we do that?”

“I’ve seen it before in movies.”

“This ain’t a fucking movie. Jesus Christ.”

Sutcliffe expressed his own opinion. “We can’t risk damaging the shaft. The rubble above the elevator is unstable enough as it is.”

Matthews snarled at Gable. “Does anyone have any practical suggestions?”

Faraday retrieved a lighter from the bench and lit the flame. “Why don’t we burn them?”

“Jesus! Are you lot on something? The last thing we need is a fire when we don’t have the means to put one out,” said Matthews. “Think carefully people.”

“And quickly,” added Hennessey. “Rats can carry typhoid and leptospirosis. Whatever you do, don’t touch them.”

Sutcliffe pulled the lights back on Burch and the rat nibbling the air. With a theatrical kick, hurting his bad leg, Sutcliffe scared the rat away. Luckily, Burch was sleeping. It did occur to him that Burch couldn’t be any more infected with death than he already was. And that thought led him to an idea. They had given Burch a sleeping pill to help him relax. They didn’t necessarily need to kill the rats. They just had to make them still so they could be expelled from the White Room and lobby. He bolted to the bathroom, returning with the bottle of sleeping pills in his hand and was unscrewing the cap when Matthews asked him what he was doing.

“If we can get them sleeping, we can use the bucket to get rid of them.”

“Is it wise to waste them? They are the only sleeping pills we have.”

“What is more important?” Sutcliffe said in a snappy tone.

“What makes you think they’ll take the bait?” said Hennessey. “They’re pretty smart, you know. They’ll take one sniff and they’ll know the pills are inedible.”

“Perhaps. But remember they’re probably just as starved as we are. Right now, they’re at their most vulnerable.”

Headlamps skimming the floor once more, Sutcliffe found a rat retreating to the corner of the room standing defensively on its hind legs. Sutcliffe made slow steps so as not to startle the creature, put a sleeping pill on the floor and watched to see if it would take it. Immediately drawn to the white pill, the rat sniffed and its little tongue pecked at it. Turning up its nose, it scuttled back to the corner of the room. “I told you,” said Hennessey. “They’re the most intellectual beings on this planet, except for humans.”

“The only beings more like,” said Matthews.

“Look!” said Gable, becoming excited. “It’s checking out the pill again.”

Indeed, the rat had coiled its nose around the pill and that time it experimented, flicking it up into its mouth, chewing on it.

“He ate it,” said Gable. “He ate it.”

“Where’s the other one?” asked Sutcliffe, swinging the head-lamps back round, checking the toilets and the utility cupboard.

“Over there, near the door,” Faraday shouted from the bench, where she stood frightened with Hennessey close by her.

Sutcliffe laid down another sleeping pill and they all watched in anticipation. The rat went about the same practice, looking before smelling, smelling before tasting, tasting before eating. When it swallowed the pill whole, Sutcliffe decided to use the entire bottle on the rats outside in the lobby. He carried the bucket to the door. He opened the door to the width of the bucket, filling the gap with it to prevent an unwanted raid. He hurriedly lined the sleeping pills along the step, snatching back his hand now and again to avoid a deadly bite. Once he’d laid out all the pills, he closed the door and went to check on his two subjects, now lying on their sides with stiff, outstretched legs. “That should do it,” he said.

“What about the water outside?” Hennessey mentioned. “We can’t walk through it anymore. It’s disgusting and dangerous.”

A good point. They needed a bypass. They needed a bridge. “Simon,” said Sutcliffe, looking over at the utility room. “Help me unhinge that door. We can place it over the water.”