Forecast (29 page)

“Trev!”

Matthews said his name again and again, but Gable did not respond. His face was a picture of panic. Matthews called his name again and finally he got a reaction.

Gable wheedled his way to the front of the cage and gripped the bars. “Get me out!” he shrieked.

“What’s going on here?”

“Get me out!”

“What is all this?”

“The Tanners,” said a voice from the back of the cage. The tone was female.

“The who?”

“Family from up the road.”

A woman slowly edged her way forward, her dirty long fingers piercing through the cage. “They’ve been terrorising the neighbour-hood for years and they’re still doing it.”

“What do they want?”

“Father and three sons. Crazy, the lot of ’em.” The woman appeared surprisingly calm and Matthews realised she was the one in all the photographs. “They want food and they don’t want to share it.”

“Get me out of here!” Gable shrieked again.

Matthews tried to open the gate to the cage and saw that a brass padlock firmly sealed it and there was no sign of a key. He asked the woman who had it and she replied one of the Tanner brothers. He skirted the room for a tool to penetrate the padlock. Beside the fireplace he spotted a pair of brass ball andirons. He collected one. It was as heavy as a hand
-
sized rock. Back at the cage, the prisoners stepped away from the gate watching as Matthews smashed the andiron ball down on the brass padlock.

In the meantime, Matthews had more questions. “So, what is this place?”

The woman sighed. “We are all neighbours. My house used to be above this bunker. My husband built it in the back garden years ago. He was convinced something like this would happen one day. This cage we’re in used to be stocked full of food and water, enough to last me and my family a year. Or so we thought. Our bunker was famous in the village for all the wrong reasons. Everyone used to poke fun at it. Kids used to break in and vandalise it. We were the laughing stock of the community. When the news announcement came, everyone piled down here to escape the nuclear bombs. The food went within four days. I guess nobody is poking fun at us anymore.”

Matthews digested the information, not liking what he was hearing. But it did explain how the people had survived the war and who the men with weapons were. He knew now that the men in parkas outside were foes, not friends. As he thought about her account of things, he kept at it even though his arms were growing tired. Sparks jumped off the padlock, but it showed no sign of breaking.

Then Matthews stopped trying altogether. He backed away from the cage, thinking. His eyes narrowed and his jaw tightened. One man behind the gate thought Matthews had completed the job and tried to open it, rattling the thin bars impatiently. Banging his clenched fists on the cage in a fit of anger, he swore several times, but Matthews paid no attention to him. Gable could see the wheels turning in Matthews’ head, something he had seen a few times. The vacant stare. The secretive silence while he churned things over in his mind. It gravely concerned Gable, for in the few days he had known Matthews he had been able to sum up that he was selfish and untrustworthy and dealt ruthlessly with problems.

“Why have you stopped?” Gable asked.

It had occurred to Matthews, in a moment of clarity, that the people in the cage were desperate and deprived and had wiped out the bunker’s resources, leaving the original occupants without food. If they were released, they might track him and Faraday back to the White Room and wade through the supplies Sutcliffe had acquired from the cruise ship. He weighed up the pros and cons of letting the people out and, concluding that there were no pros, decided not to take the risk. Suddenly, the Tanner brothers didn’t appear to be so villainous. Perhaps they’d been the wisest of everyone and had put an end to individual selfishness and greed. Their system was harsh and inhumane, but if it prolonged life and brought about social order in a disorderly environment, were they such bad people?

“I’m sorry.”

Gable rattled the door. “You’ve got to let us out.”

“No can do, mate.”

Gasping and snivelling emanated from the small crowd and someone got angry.

Gable’s voice rattled with terror. “Why not?”

“That’s just the world we live in now.”

Matthews heard something from the next room, voices and someone clunking about. He moved quickly to the corner of the bunker, ducked down behind the old piano and switched off his headlamps.

Standing in a room lit by the beam of a flashlight, with a bloodied carcass of something on the gurney before her, Faraday was ordered to undress. The man held a gun to her ribs and pulled his gasmask down around his neck revealing a rough face blemished with old acne scars and a squashy flat nose. He was in his late twenties, no older, Faraday surmised. The constant gun prodding was starting to frighten her. “I have friends out looking for me.”

He shoved her in the shoulder.

“Please don’t do anything to me.”

The man grunted and snatched away her spacesuit and the spandex garment, reducing her to a single t-shirt that stopped at the middle of her thighs. Faraday folded her arms against the cold and watched as the man slung her spacesuit over a wall rail. Seeing him in possession of another spacesuit made her bitter and angry and it made her worry about Gable.

“Where’s my friend?”

“Move,” he said bluntly, pointing to a second door he wanted her to go through. He switched the flashlight off reducing them to darkness, took her by the arm and she felt the gun spear into her ribs again. She heard the clatter of metal and the mewling breaths of other people. Then an oil lamp was lit and the room came into colour. The cage imprisoning her held other people, the smell of their deteriorating hygiene overpowering, their withdrawn faces frightening her. The young man settled into a chair he’d pulled up and sat looking over his prisoners, face dead calm and serious. He licked his palette with his tongue and kept at it. People in the cage started to cry.

Matthews was cowering in the corner of the room, squatting low, and the weight of his body was hurting his knees, legs and lower back. The detainees were becoming more and more restless too. There was something very odd about the whole situation. Confinement in small spaces made people bitter and rebellious. That wasn’t the case there. The prisoners were petrified.

Faraday fought her way to the front of the cage. “At least tell us how long we have to stay here like this?”

“Not for much longer sweetheart.”

Faraday rattled the cage bars, then turned round and filed through the array of faces in search of her cousin. But he wasn’t there and she didn’t know where he was. Then she recognised Trev Gable, though he showed no signs of knowing her.

“Trev…you okay?”

A small graze across his chin and his hair thick with blood said otherwise. He had taken a blow to the head, his second in a week.

“Trev, it’s me, Claris.”

“They beat him,” said an old woman at the back of the cage.

“Why?”

“For information.”

“About what? What exactly is going on here?”

“They wanted to know where he came from and where he got the spacesuit.”

“How long have you been in here?” asked Faraday.

“Three days, maybe four.”

Faraday glared at the young man rocking in the chair tapping the gun in his hand. “Why are we locked in this bloody cage?”

“He’s just doing as he’s told, waiting until the others return.”

“Why, what happens then?”

“Dinner.”

“What’s so special about dinner?”

There was tension in the woman’s voice. “We’re it.”

Matthews had overheard the old woman and he didn’t like what he was hearing. The implication was much darker than he had first imagined. He didn’t want to believe it, though it did make some sense. Now everything fell into place. The people in the cage were petrified because they were being preserved for food. It dawned on him that the blood and bones strewn across the gurney in the room next door were not animal – they were human.

Seated in front of the prisoners, tormenting them by pulling faces, the young man’s presence made it difficult for Matthews to get to the cage. He was in the way. Then Matthews realised that all he had to do was overpower him and obtain the keys clipped to his belt. The andiron ball was at his feet. Gradually, very discreetly, he rose and moved forward, taking with him the andiron ball. Clearing the fireplace, spiralling around the beds, he suddenly tore through the bunker but caught his boot on a low table and a vase toppled, exploding on the floor. The man swivelled towards the distraction at the precise moment Matthews cracked him over the head with the andiron ball. The man fell off his chair clutching his skull and blood oozed out. Determinedly, one hand over his head, the man wobbled back to his feet, blood bursting through his fingers. Matthews lifted the andiron ball aiming a second strike. Lethargically, the man lifted his gun and pointed it at Matthews head. He froze, knowing that one hasty move would cost him his life. From his temple, the gun was moved down to his cheek and was pressed so hard into the hollow flesh between his teeth he thought it might pierce through into his mouth. But he stubbornly refused to be killed there and used as food. He sensed the man trying to summon the strength to force the trigger and Matthews pulled back his head as the chamber was emptied. Bullets glided into wood, metal and furniture. The gunshots spooked the prisoners. The man reeled back and, realising he was out of bullets, threw the gun at Matthews, who ducked and it missed his face by a fraction. He lifted the andiron ball and the man put his hands up over his head to protect himself, tripped on his own feet, fell and crawled into a ball on the floor, his hands still raised over his head. Matthews cracked the ball over his ankle and knew by the horrifying scream that it had shattered a bone. Both his hands reached for his foot, exposing his head. Matthews applied the andiron ball to his skull again, a brutal ping sounded on impact.
Ping, ping, ping
, Matthews bashed the head until the shape altered and the man stopped screaming.

Faraday stared at him with cold eyes. She was shaking her head, appalled. “What have you done?”

“I’m not letting this fucker eat me.”

Unclipping the keys from the dead man’s belt, he tried to unlock the cage, but the mechanism inside the padlock had buckled and it failed to unlatch. He picked up the bloody andiron ball and bashed the padlock repeatedly. He must have hit it over thirty times before it broke apart. Only wanting to let Faraday out but unable to prevent the stampede as the cage burst open, Matthews moved out of the way, panic resonating throughout the bunker as people ran for the door and ran for their lives. One of them was Gable, until Faraday grabbed him by the arm.

“Let him leave,” said Matthews.

“No, he’s coming with us.”

She whisked him over to the dead man, peeled the gasmask off of from around his neck up over his disfigured head and gave it to Gable. “Here, you’ll need this.”

The gasmask, smattered with blood, had a broken strap and she helped him place it over his face, then tied a tight knot with the straps at the back of his head.

Matthews retrieved his helmet from behind the fireplace, fitted it, and they all made their way quickly to the other room where Faraday was reunited with her spacesuit and spandex garment. She threw it on with the assistance of her cousin, fitted the helmet, the gloves and the boots and got the oxygen going. She held Gable’s hand and took him out of the bunker where heavy rain fell from the sky.

“Wait here one second,” said Matthews. He ducked back into the bunker. Down and down he went, heading deeper and deeper into the mysterious dungeon, into deprivation and misery.

Outside, Faraday and Gable waited impatiently for him. What was taking him so long? All the other prisoners had scarpered from the bunker. But now they were returning, screaming and shouting.

“Why are they coming back?” Gable shrilled.

“The Tanners!” said Matthews.

Faraday turned to see him holding a radio in one hand and a drum of water in the other.

“Who?”

“I’ll explain later,” said Matthews. “We need to go.”

Three hooded men wearing gasmasks appeared at the top of the hill. One of them was firing his gun and the prisoners were dropping like flies, clutching their wounds. Matthews heard a gun-shot and a bullet exploded in the turf in front of them. A spot of mud detonated near Gable’s toe. A loud noise and another puff of exploding mud. The sound of a gun going off and a pain in Gable’s calf. He screamed. Another bullet grazed Matthews’ suit at the back of his thigh. They weren’t trying to kill them, he thought. They were trying to immobilise them.

“Keep going,” Matthews urged.

They cleared the hill and charged down the embankment, but Gable’s injury slowed them down. He was crying and hobbling and only Faraday was keeping him moving with the firm grip she had of his bicep.

Matthews worried the men would appear at the top of the hill in a prime hunting position and execute them. He struggled with the water drum with it being so heavy and awkward to carry.