Forecast (28 page)

The second room was dark and sombre, save for the elegance of furniture arranged efficiently around it. Three fold up beds lined the back wall. A long shelf bore a collection of dusty photographs in silver frames. Each photograph featured an oldish man and woman and a second woman, younger, very pretty, no doubt the daughter. Three old wooden chairs were set around a circular table with an oil lamp on it. Next to the oil lamp was a radio. He wanted to take it. The radio may not provide communication, he thought, but it could provide hope. Faraday would probably be able to do something with it. The solid brick walls were decorated with large paintings; landscapes, portraits, abstracts. An innocuous piece seemed quite undeserving of its location – a frail old man walking through a bird sanctuary surrounded by dozens of pelicans so well depicted it had museum potential written all over it. He studied it for a moment, admiring the technical skill involved. In the far corner of the room was an old piano in average condition and next to the piano was a dysfunctional fireplace, the mouth bricked up and protected by a cast
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iron grate and a tripod of fire tools. The luxurious room contained an air of classical elegance, homely and welcoming with all the furnishings in wood. The furniture itself had not a sign of wear and tear and although a little old
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fashioned, it all seemed to be in pristine condition.

Something in the room moved. Flinging his head to where he saw it, the headlamps picked out a cage which seemed to be moving with a mass of intertwining shadows. Moving closer to it, the light revealed several people encased in a large floor
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to
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ceiling impound constructed of welded wire mesh. Jammed inside the cage were at least ten people, all very frightened. As he shuffled closer to them, they put their hands up to the light to protect their faces and most screamed.

Crouched down on the hill staring absently at the lurid landscape, Faraday wondered what was taking her cousin so long and now she found herself worrying. Then she saw a man in a spacesuit trekking over the hill. It had to be Trev Gable. He wasn’t wearing his helmet. His oxygen had expired ages ago so that explained why. She stood and waved her arms hysterically at him. He didn’t see her. She ran down to him and he still hadn’t spotted her until she tapped his shoulder. He turned sharply and the face she saw did not belong to Trev Gable. The dark, warped features of the face, which seemed out of sync to the rest of his body, gave her a huge fright, until she realised that he was wearing a gasmask. Still, she knew it wasn’t Gable because she could see dark, beady eyes staring back at her through the glass. When she looked down, she saw he was tapping in his hand a metal pipe for a weapon. Then he pulled out a gun.

It came to him, he thought about it, and he realised that he would have to do something he had never done before. Something he had never dreamt he would ever have to do. Something so horrific and strength
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depleting it would conceivably scar him for the rest of his life.

Sutcliffe closed his eyes as he spoke. “We’re going to have to amputate it.” He prodded softly around the inflamed foot. “If we don’t, he’ll die.”

Burch was asleep and Hennessey was cupping her hand over her mouth in anguish. The gangrene had spread with alarming speed into dangerous territory.

“How?” she said. “We don’t have the right equipment.”

“We will have to make do with what we’ve got. We have two first
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aid kits. There are plenty of bandages inside and antiseptic creams.”

“What are we supposed to cut it off with?”

He pulled out the safety
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knife, the one from the life-raft that he’d used for cutting the securing line.

“That isn’t going to work, Brad.”

“It’s all we have.”

“Wait a minute.”

Hennessey walked quickly to the far wall where all the clothes hung on hooks and dug her fingers into her cardigan pocket looking for her handkerchief. She found it and turned, clipping Matthews’ jacket with her elbow. It fell off the hook and dropped to the bench. She picked it up and out fell a sharp dagger. An inscription on the handle read Black Prince. She brought it over to Sutcliffe. “Look what I found.”

“Where did you get that?”

“It fell out of Simon’s jacket.”

“It’ll do the job.”

Burch awoke from an uneasy sleep and felt the skin on his scalp tighten with some nameless terror. Sweat poured down his face.

“Keith, listen to me, carefully,” said Sutcliffe, putting a hand to his shoulder. “You have gangrene in your left foot and it’s quite advanced. It’s spreading now to your leg. We’re going to have to amputate it. I’m so sorry.”

“Leave it,” he slurred. “There is…no…”

“Keith, if the infection were to permeate into the bone, there would be more complications and you will die. You just can’t risk it.”

Burch passed out.

“It’s now or never,” said Sutcliffe.

He asked Hennessey to hold Burch’s leg up so that some of the blood would drain out of the foot while he gathered the materials he needed. He took a bandage from the first
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aid kit and tied it as tight as he could around the bottom of the shin to cut off circulation. He prepared two pairs of disposable gloves for him and Hennessey, all the bandages he could find, the sponges, antiseptic spray, adhesive tape and the last of the painkillers. Using the pills first, he lifted Burch’s head, opened his mouth and rinsed three down his throat with water.

“Do you know what you’re doing?” Hennessey asked.

“If you’re asking me if I’ve ever done this before, then no.”

“Are you able?”

“Do I have a choice?”

“I suppose not.”

“Well, then, put his leg down and hold it still. If he wakes up and screams, stuff something in his mouth so he has something to bite on.”

She held up the handkerchief and flapped it until he saw it.

“Put your gloves on. It’s about to get messy.”

Sutcliffe slapped on his gloves and gripped the dagger firmly in his more agile right hand. He took a few deep breaths. He was trained in first
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aid, but he was not trained for amputations and feeling sick with nerves he aligned the blade beneath the bandage. Hennessey looked away. Sutcliffe quailed at the idea of cutting into Keith Burch, however necessary. He wrenched himself into some semblance of control, drew back the dagger and slashed into the skin, quickly and convincingly. Burch stirred, then yelled, and he didn’t stop, not until Hennessey filled his mouth with the hand-kerchief and even then it only muffled the sound. She glimpsed Sutcliffe sawing the limb and the blood gushing out. She turned away, but her ears could not avoid Burch’s screams.

“He’s going to need another fix,” said Hennessey. “Give him more painkillers.”

“I don’t think they’ll make much difference.”

Sutcliffe hacked through the bone and was almost through the last hunk of flesh when he gave the foot a sharp tug, detaching it from the leg. The moment it happened, he knew it had made a monumental mark on his entire life. While Hennessey struggled to keep Burch still, Sutcliffe dabbed the excessive blood using the sponges and spouted the wound with antiseptic spray, dressing it with several bandages that soaked up the remaining blood. Tying another bandage around the severing to pinch the arteries shut, he applied a final layer around the stump.

Outside the subterranean hideout, cheating the cold in his spacesuit, Sutcliffe walked to the edge of the cliff with the severed foot wrapped up in a bandage in his hand. Standing motionless on the sheer cliff staring out at the littered beach, he could scarcely make out the ruined appearance of the listing cruise ship. Repulsed and deeply ashamed of himself, having committed a barbaric act against humankind, he took one last look at Burch’s amputated foot.

“We will have to amputate, I’m sorry.” The doctor held the X
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ray of his leg up to the light box on the wall.

“Surely there’s something that could be done,” said Sutcliffe, pushing back his short fringe with a nervous hand.

The doctor shook his head and Sutcliffe felt the colour ebb from his face and the beat of his heart surge with a rush of blood.

“As you can see here,” the doctor began, “the limb has been extensively traumatised from the fall and, if you look carefully, you will see that the breaks in the tibia have punctured the soft tissue. I can’t see any other option.”

Sutcliffe leaned forward. “I want a second opinion.”

“I can arrange that for you, but you should be prepared for the same analysis.”

The doctor left and Sutcliffe was overwhelmed with self
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pity. An immediate flash of scenarios appeared in his head. How he would get about on one leg. How he would care for Martin. How he would ever love or be loved again. Life in a wheelchair. No life. He stared absently at the window. He’d been staring at it for so long he hadn’t noticed the arrival of night. All night it rained and all night he gazed at the rain making smudges out of the distant night lights.

That was the moment it came to him.

The sight of it could have been a twist of fate or it could have been a sign. For whatever reason, the small red balloon had floated past his window with the words Brave Boy written all over it. And he had seen it and it had given him inspiration. Having been to the casualty ward a few times for injuries Martin had sustained as a child, he knew that balloons were a reward given to help indignant children keep calm in hospital. A child leaving the casualty ward had let go of the balloon by mistake. The human blunder would change his life in ways he could never have imagined, for he had just set his heart on flying a balloon into the darkness of space.

The next day, Sutcliffe received good news from an orthopaedic trauma specialist.

“You’re looking at several operations, including reconstruction below the knee and a long spell in hospital but, yeah, I believe the leg can be saved.”

With disquiet, Sutcliffe threw the dismembered foot down to the beach. It landed among the dead rats with an explosion of black sand and dust. He’d been strong, as strong as everyone else, but now, after days of dread and defeat, it had caught up with him and he was beginning to have desperate thoughts. Suicidal thoughts. It could be over in an instant, he thought. One short step off the cliff. He began to detach the fastenings on his helmet. When it came off, he inhaled a sharp breath, the air sweet and polluted, refreshing and deadly. But in a few seconds it wouldn’t matter. It would all be over. He would be with his son in a far better place. Final thoughts went out to his crew. For his part, he had done all he could and they no longer needed him. With him gone, it meant one less mouth to feed. He took a step forward on the cliff, his toes flirting with the edge and a spout of gravel dislodged and tumbled down the cliff face. He sat down with his legs hanging over the edge, his knees apart, his body pitched slightly forward. He was thinking about God and that terrible uncertainty about what would be revealed on the other side. He was lurching forward when he suddenly remembered the pistol. Hennessey had made him bring it with him because she thought he might be faced with dangers. Who knew what horrors roamed the landscape. From his thigh pocket, he took it out and stuck it in his mouth. Slowly, he squeezed on the trigger. At the last second, he changed his mind and lodged it at his temple.

Goodbye world and good riddance.

He shut his eyes and pressed the trigger.

Then his eyes flung open. Something in his mind had snapped. What am I doing? he thought. There was still a lot to do and still a chance they could be rescued. Angry at himself, he put away the pistol and reattached his helmet. He stood up and hurried back to the shaft, wondering how Matthews and Faraday were going in their search for Gable. They’d been gone for ages.

He tried to patch through to them. “Simon.”

He waited. “Claris, you there?”

He tried them again. “Simon? Claris?”

Why were they not responding? Then he remembered that his extravehicular communicator had been exposed to water when he had fallen into the water on the cruise ship. Perhaps water had seeped into the electrics. That would explain why he hadn’t been able to get through to Gable the second time and why he couldn’t get through to Faraday and Matthews right then. He worried about them all, especially with the weather worsening. The frost had melted because of the rain, but there were flashes of lightning in the sky, indicating more storms on the way. Then, close to the Mission Control Base, Sutcliffe saw something that he decided to follow.

Understanding that the scene before him was not at all normal, that something was very badly wrong, Matthews pulled off his helmet and stared at the caged humans. It was not the normal mechanics of a hostage situation. A grave apprehension rose within him. Though the people locked in the cage hardly constituted danger, it was who had locked them up that had him worrying. Behind the wire mesh squares, among the frightened faces, appeared a face he recognised. The beetle
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browed face of Trev Gable.

“Trev!”

He was shifting his weight from one foot to the other, agitated. He looked this way and that, down at the ground for a second or two, then to each and every face around him with a blank stare.