Forecast (23 page)

“How? We don’t have any tools?”

“We’ll have to force it off. I’ll go and get the steel bar from the lobby.”

Before Sutcliffe was even halfway across the room, Matthews pulled out the pistol from his belt and aimed it at the top hinge. He fired off a shot. The noise upset everyone in the room and woke Burch.

“What did you do that for?” Sutcliffe growled. “We may need those bullets.”

“Have you seen the size of the screws on the hinges?”

Sutcliffe, dumbfounded, watched as Matthews turned to shoot off the second hinge and everyone covered their ears, except Burch, confused by all the noise in the room. At the last second, Matthews put the pistol down and performed a step
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kick on the bottom hinge and the door broke away, chipping the wooden frame.

“What’s going on?” Burch moaned.

“Nothing, Keith, just trying to fix a little problem,” Sutcliffe said.

“Was that a gunshot?”

“Everything’s alright. Just try to go back to sleep.”

Sutcliffe turned and saw Matthews carrying the utility room door to the entrance of the White Room.

“Here goes. Let’s hope the little bastards are dead.”

He opened the door to find some of the rats had fallen asleep in the water where they had drowned, though many of them were still capering about and more than two dozen sleeping pills remained untouched. He exited the White Room, closing the door behind him, and instinctively held his breath as the rats danced at his feet. He set down the utility door over the water and returned to the White Room to give the bad news.

“Um, we still have a rat problem.”

“How many?”

“Like, most of them.”

Hennessey stepped down from the bench. “What happens is the alpha rats are the ones who try the food while the others wait for the verdict. They’ll never feed on them now. That’s just the way rats work.”

“So what can we do?” asked Sutcliffe, because he was out of ideas.

“They’re in water, right?” said Hennessey, looking around the room, thinking. “Why don’t we try polluting the water with some kind of chemical?”

“Such as?”

“How about the paint?”

Sutcliffe collected a can of paint and held it up to the head-lamps to study the ingredients. The black
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yellow hazard symbol of a skull set above crossed bones brought a smile to his face. The paint was solvent
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based, contained lead and was therefore toxic. The warning label also advised users to keep the hazardous substance out of the reach of children and pets, meaning the paint would most certainly be perilous to rats.

Sutcliffe went out into the lobby, crossed the makeshift bridge and entered the elevator. Pulling the elevator doors to either side of the bucket, leaving a gap, he peeled the lid off the can and through the narrow gap he tossed the paint into the water. The area turned a pale grey as the white paint blended with the floodwater. The creatures flew into a rage, squealing, their fur matted by the lethal paint. Gradually their protests faded and soon all that remained was a swamp of dead rats. Sutcliffe started collecting the bodies in the bucket. Wearing his spacesuit glove as he pinched their tails and dropped them inside the bucket, his mind was filled with dread. There had been drama after drama and yet, deep down, he still sensed a lot worse to come.

Wednesday became Thursday and Thursday became Friday. Now it was Saturday and the crew had not eaten for six days and were weakening with stress and straightforward exhaustion.

Time had taken on a new dimension. In the White Room, there were no windows, which meant no morning, no afternoon, no evening and no night, just time. Time was the precursor to boredom, which was conducive to mindless conversation about trivial stuff, sentences with little meaning, with little to get the mind working. The flight into the stratosphere seemed a lifetime ago and they strictly avoided the subject of Fable
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1 and the war. Instead, they told old stories and made jokes, laughing but not entertained, smiling but not happy, calm but always on edge. There was always the unshakable sense looming at the back of their minds that before long something else would invade their new home and present them with a problem.

Matthews was popping gum and annoying everyone in the room with it. Unlike the others, he looked quite well. His face was full of colour and the dark fuzz around his chin resembling a sparse goatee appeared neat. All morning he’d been thinking about the rats and he roused the group from a monotonous quiet. “When rats screw, do they enjoy it?”

Faraday laughed, an unwomanly laugh that no one had ever heard before, not even Matthews, and soon the crew responded to her candid and infectious cackle with laughter of their own.

“What sort of question is that?” she said.

“I’m just curious. Is it like a process, like a chore, or do they suddenly feel the urge to give it to one another?”

“I don’t know. Why are we talking about this? Most animals are probably extinct anyway, except for those horrible rats.”

Sutcliffe considered her point. Millions of years of meticulous and engineered evolution had been eliminated in a single day. Evolution had its own way of adapting to change and correcting interventions. But how would it cope with nuclear extinction?

“If that is the case, Claris, and everything
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dead,” Matthews said with a cunning smirk on his face, “it might be up to the likes of us to repopulate the world.”

Had Faraday’s intoxicated mind not been muddied by the effects of champagne and fatigue, Matthews’ comment might have offended her. But the cogs in her brain were delayed, so much so that she was still comprehending the first half of his sentence when he spoke the second half. “Whenever you’re ready, just give me the nod.”

She retaliated. “You know, wit at the expense of others is the lowest form of comedy.”

“Yeah, I know, I read it on a coffee mug once.”

She grunted, sensing it wasn’t a battle she was going to win. He was always far too crass and didn’t know where to draw the line. So she made a face at him and extended her swearing finger, provoking him to laugh more. He got a big charge out of winding up his cousin because she always took the bait and entertained him with her reactions. He picked up the newspaper Sutcliffe had left behind on launch day and skim read the headlines in a quest for something appealing to read, still chuckling at his cousin’s sensitivity. The front page headline spread above a picture of politicians in parliament read: BRITAIN CAN’T TAKE ANY MORE IMMIGRANTS.

“It can now,” Matthews said to himself.

Faraday scowled at her cousin. “You what?”

“Nothing.”

On the next page, Matthews read the weather forecast. Sixteen major cities worldwide with little weather icons next to them. He checked on the cities that interested him. Hanoi – hot. Johannesburg – mild. London – sunny. New York – sunny. Sydney – rain. Tokyo – humid. Toronto – cool but dry. There was no mention of enormous dark clouds of dust and the permanent absence of sunshine, cold in winter, cold in summer – the new fucking Ice Age. The bikini-clad female on page three was every man’s idea of a beautiful woman. Tearing it out of the newspaper, he spat out his gum and pressed it into the wall, pinning the picture to the gum. Automatically, he honed in on Hennessey and Faraday who were watching him with disapproving eyes.

“What? Just trying to make the place more homely.”

Skipping page six, he came to an article on page seven that interested him. The headline: ROCK GOD SUFFERING BROKEN HAND. Intrigued, he read the brief article. “I don’t believe it. It says here, Lewis Chambers had a motorbike accident last Saturday night and shattered several bones in his right hand. Hmmm, it says he’d been drinking.”

“Who is Lewis Chambers?” asked Hennessey.

“You’ve never heard of Lewis Chambers? Piss off!”

Hennessey exhaled in irritation.

Matthews shook his head slightly. “If it’s not American, it’s not interesting, right?”

“You’re talking out of your butt,” Hennessey snarled.

Matthews soon lost his appetite for reading and discarded the paper on the floor. He sighed. “Anyone for a game of I spy? I’ll go first. Something beginning with H, one go each.”

Sutcliffe was not in the mood for games, but he had little else to do so he joined in. “Helmet?”

“Nope.”

“My name, Hennessey?”

“Nope.”

Faraday also joined in. “Humans?”

“Help? We all need help,” said Gable.

“You’re all wrong. Keith?”

“I don’t know,” he whimpered from the floor on which he lay.

“The answer you’re all looking for is Hell.”

Hennessey shook her head. “You’re such a moron sometimes.”

“Hey, I’m just trying to lighten the mood in here.”

Another uneventful day passed. Waiting for the radioactive particles in the air to dissipate. Waiting for the danger outside to settle. Waiting. Waiting. Waiting. The depression had hit them all and the magnitude of their involuntary survival made them numb and bitter and they had nowhere to channel it but to each other.

The Fable
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1 crew slept often because there wasn’t much else to do. Sutcliffe often dreamt of his home in London and the people he knew. His mind always drifted to happy places and happy times. Then he would reawaken to his nightmare and find it hard to distinguish which was real and which was not. Everything had become a blur and he had no recollection of time. He was using Brad Sutcliffe’s body and going by that name, but it wasn’t him. He was nobody and nothing was real.

Sleep should have been easy in the pitch dark. Indeed, for most of the crew sleeping did come easy, but not for Hennessey. Each time she drifted off, images she saw and voices she heard crudely awoke her. She figured that the rats and the melting man at the door had contributed to that, as if their earlier presence had corrupted the wires in her brain and the pressing dark of the room brought up those images. She switched on the headlamps and sat staring at Sutcliffe spread out on the bench with his eyes closed, half-asleep. She watched Matthews squash out a cigarette from the pack and light it. As he drew in smoke, he picked up the champagne he’d more or less consumed and alternated between the cigarette and the alcohol on his way out of the room, leaving discharged smoke behind him. Five minutes later, he came back in and swaggered over to Sutcliffe and tapped him on the knee. Sutcliffe opened his eyes and could immediately tell his friend was smashed. Not only could Sutcliffe smell it, his eyes were half
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cut and he was unsteady on his feet.

“What the hell are we gonna do?” he slurred.

Sutcliffe was becoming sick of people asking him that question and replying with what everyone wanted to hear. They were all adults. They didn’t need consoling and they didn’t need to rely on him. Keeping up the spirits of the crew had sapped his own and a dark mood clung over him. Something moved in the helmet’s light and Sutcliffe caught sight of it. The little white balloon. The helium inside it had reduced and it was falling from the ceiling, spinning in slow circles, the word FABLE
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1 appearing and disappearing. It reminded him of their descent from the stratosphere. It hadn’t been anywhere near as smooth. How they had survived the freefall he would never really understand. Burch hadn’t been so fortunate and his physical state was in the danger zone. It made him wonder how many of his crew needed medical attention. How about his own health? He knew that from now on it would only deteriorate, though in his mind showing symptoms of ill
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health and admitting to them was a sign of weakness and he still held onto the childish fantasy of being immortal.

With that very thought in mind, he rolled off the bench and walked to the other side of the room and started to dress himself in his spacesuit, concluding that a man could sulk in self
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pity or he could pick himself up and get on with things. They could all wait there to die. Or someone could do something about it. For a reserved, private man he felt he was extending himself way beyond his limits. At the same time, his crew responded to his leadership and inadvertently expected it.

“Where are you going?” asked Hennessey.

“I need a break from this, so…”

“You’re going outside? It’s too dangerous.”

“I see no choice.”

She hesitated, then added, “In that case, I’m coming with you.” As she went to get up from the floor, she felt a cramp in her stomach and doubled over. The cramps seemed to be getting worse day by day.

“You’re not going anywhere,” said Sutcliffe. “You know why you’re getting those stomach pains.”

Was that a question or a statement, she wondered. Her throat tightened. Did he know? Had Faraday told him she might be pregnant? Or had he guessed? She heard the blood thumping through her veins, making her face turn red. On the other side of the room, she saw Faraday, her guilty face giving her away.

“You’re famished,” Sutcliffe added, finishing the sentence.

With a discreet sigh of relief, Hennessey nodded, shunning the real reason why she believed she was having the cramps. If she had to tell them, she would wait until a swell in her tummy provided the proof.