Forecast (36 page)

Sutcliffe suddenly pulled away. “This hasn’t got anything to do with repopulating the world, has it?”

She grinned. “No, this is two passionate people requiring each other’s love and company in a dire situation. Whatever happens, happens.”

“I’m cool with that.”

Casually, they got undressed and Hennessey lifted her arms for him to remove her shirt. Moments later, they were naked beneath several insulation blankets and fully embraced. Hennessey voiced her satisfaction as Sutcliffe penetrated her, slowly at first, gaining depth and momentum. She began moving her hips, her joy driven so far to the edge of bliss that she forgot for a moment where she was. She smiled into the darkness of the room, their relationship young and fresh, making some sense of their lives. By the end of it, he was grinning, she was moaning, then panting, then laughing. Colour had flourished back into her cheeks and she felt his body shudder in the last moments of pleasure.

“What are you thinking?” Hennessey asked.

Eighteen months, maybe more, had passed and Sutcliffe was standing next to the door of the White Room, ear pressed to the cold steel, listening. Before then he’d been staring at the wall for almost four hours straight. He had something on his mind. He looked over towards Hennessey huddled beneath the insulation blankets. The last candle had burnt down to a mere inch in length, but its special flame stood at almost two inches tall, providing abundant light on the contours of her beautiful face.

“I think it’s time for us to leave,” he said.

“Okay,” she said without a second thought.

After a while they got busy packing for the journey ahead of them. Hennessey wriggled into her spandex mesh garment and looked at Sutcliffe building a survival kit from the resources in the White Room, watching the bones beneath his shirt move back and forth. Sutcliffe was aware that Hennessey was watching him with a certain wariness and continued to pack a case with items for their need; the safety
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knife, a lighter, the last five tins of food, a couple of handheld flares. He also packed surgical scissors, the last bandage and a few plasters from the first
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aid kit. He asked Hennessey to roll up four insulation blankets and pack them into Burch’s old back-pack. He came across the JVC camera and decided to take it with him, even though it no longer worked. He also collected the picture of the Fable
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1 balloon from the bathroom cupboard as a souvenir and stood staring at it.

“Thinking about the balloon expedition?”

The flight to the edge of space seemed so insignificant. It was such a long time ago that talking about it required effort, one he didn’t feel like making.

“I was thinking about my son. He was quite into photography. That’s why he stole the camera.”

“He stole it?”

“Yeah, the rascal. But it kept him entertained.” He pocketed the photo. “Ready to go?”

“I suppose.”

Both Sutcliffe and Hennessey had that feeling, one that could not be put into words. The time had come to leave the White Room – a place of belonging and of misery. The room looked sorry for itself with its sagging ceilings and dirty floor, the black smoke stains up the wall from the fire, the blood stain on the other wall, a missing utility door, a broken toilet door, scattered insulation blankets and life jackets, two abandoned first
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aid kits, the space helmets and the life support systems, a radio, a dead laptop, an empty water drum, the champagne bottles with melted candle wax stuck to the glass, the empty tins, flattened boxes, a bucket with a mop head inside, many scattered shoes, the crew’s old clothes and bags suspended on the hooks and, next to the clothes, a gasmask. The room bore all the signs of a refugee settlement.

Sutcliffe ran over the emotions of his time living underground. The man coming out of the White Room that day was not the same man who had gone in. He had lost something of his soul, he felt. He had seen and done enough terrible things in the past year and a half to have all the evil engraved on his brain, embodied in his memory forever. The strained relationships had enveloped his entire life at a multitude of levels. They both brooded over their former lives – the crew, the discoveries, the conflicts, the deaths. The events down there had become nothing but a hazy procession of mental pictures and it was a moment to reflect, but that was all. Considering that he had slept only an hour or two, Sutcliffe felt quite alert that morning, dressed in his business suit. He still managed to retain the elegance of a businessman, despite the crumples and excessive filth and his shirt missing buttons. It would be in his suit that he would leave the White Room, his departure replicating his arrival with his head still held high.

Hennessey took him by the hand to stop him. “Before we leave here, I want to confess something to you. What Simon said, about me joining the Fable
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1 team to gather information for NASA, it was partly true. My superiors wanted the historic balloon flight to be synonymous with NASA. Chandra II and the Akroid balloon were just an excuse to get me onboard.” She waited for his reaction. He was about to speak when she got in before him. “I just want you to know that if I’d known you beforehand I wouldn’t have done it. It’s just…it’s important, to me, that you understand I wasn’t out to hurt anyone.”

“I appreciate your honesty, Jen. I’m a little disappointed. At the same time, with all that’s happened, it seems so insignificant.”

“You’re not angry?”

“What would be the point?”

She tightened her hand around his and smiled.

They departed the White Room in a fug of musty air. Sutcliffe stepped out into the lobby to leave for good, but his hands couldn’t complete the job of closing the door because to him it meant closing a door on a fortress of protection and leaving it behind felt wrong. As if by magic, the door swung shut and he saw the American’s fingers on the handle.

“It’s the right thing to do,” she said.

They crossed the door bridge and stepped into the elevator. The carpet in the elevator had rotted away somewhat. The dry blood of Fred Farrell still marred the elevator wall, morbidly presenting them with the image of a man desperate to end his life. Hanging from the hatch in the roof hung enormous icicles, blocking their exit. Sutcliffe stood on the second rung of the stepladder and snapped them off, dropping them to ground where they shattered into shrapnel

Wearing the backpack with four insulation blankets stuffed inside, Hennessey climbed the stepladder and out of her home, while Sutcliffe looked back one last time before leaving. At the foot of the pit, he closed the hatch and emitted a large breath. He put down the accessory case and fitted on his thermal gloves. Hennessey had made it halfway up the snow
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laden rubble already leaving footprints. When Sutcliffe reached the top, she was getting on her gloves. He clambered out of the shaft feeling weak and weary, taking note of his hot breath making clouds in the bitterly cold air. The colour ebbed from their faces immediately and they narrowed their eyes in the dim daylight, straining their vision. When the searing light faded and the world appeared before them, they saw the physical features of the landscape had changed again with much thicker snow and ice and a pale sky that still hid the sun. The land looked like a moonscape, a lifeless black and white world with an infinite shadow cast down.

The cold buried beneath their skin. The morning breeze tossed Sutcliffe’s thick hair. He had to admit that it was a pleasing change of sensation. Replenishing their lungs with an indefinable scent, the first sentiment they felt was the exposure, which gave them a sense of vulnerability. Without their space helmets they felt naked to the bone. What they felt was not fear, more the feeling of adjusting to change. The coming days would present them with their futures or their deaths. And after so many months of uncertainty, they would finally learn their fate. Sutcliffe gave it three days, four tops, before the starvation, dehydration or cold killed them. Since the bombs had changed the world, they had taken each emotional setback, one after another, yet they still moved on with the determination of survivors.

A snow
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entombed body appeared at the edge of the cliff. Only the head and right shoulder were protruding from the snow. The head was cocked to one side and was facing the icy Atlantic. Hennessey charged off towards it and Sutcliffe tried to stop her.

“Jen, wait!”

Reaching the body, Hennessey got to her knees and started brushing away the snow. The dead eyes were slightly open, the lips bloodless and parted, the hair crystallised and some decomposition had formed around the face.

Sutcliffe arrived with outstretched arms. “She’s dead, Jen.”

Hennessey stood up and went into his clasp. “It’s not fair,” she said. “It’s just not fair.”

“I know.”

Her throat tight with emotion, Hennessey fought the urge to cry, forcing her lips together to silence her whimpering. When she was certain she could speak without sobbing, she said, “Claris loved the ocean. She told me she always used to sit and watch the ships go by in her hometown. I guess she died in a good place.”

“Yeah, she did.”

Sutcliffe was thinking he was going to have to build another grave. It would be his fourth. It would be the fifth. It would be his last, he decided. Although he insisted she didn’t have to, Hennessey helped carry Faraday’s body to the top of the hill to the gravesite that seemed to be continually expanding. The tips of four crosses were poking out of the snow, clinging to existence. The handle of the makeshift spade also protruded from the snow beside the graves where it had been for eighteen months, always on standby, waiting for the next customer.

First they shovelled away the snow to clear the graves. Then they dug a hole in the hard ground and it took them close to an hour. From the shaft, they unburied some wood from the snow and constructed a cross to complete the grave. The sight of five wooden crosses filled them both with a surfeit of emotions. Paying their final respects to the crew of Fable
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1, Fred Farrell and Trev Gable, they left and resumed their steady march along the coast. Each step equalled the cost of two on ordinary soil in ordinary clothes on an ordinary day.

Miles passed and they each felt the overwhelming sensation of homesickness, with the atmosphere outside just as bleak as the land-scape itself. Sutcliffe felt as though he’d give his right arm to walk into a pub for a pint or sit down in a fire-heated restaurant where he could order a hot meal and some home baked bread. The idea of taking a hot bath or sleeping in a comfortable bed flirted with his mind. Simple things that he had once taken for granted were merely fading memories.

After a while, they passed alongside a river frozen solid, no bridge in any foreseeable direction, though crossing the iron
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like ice required no bridge. Soon, they arrived at a clearing where the snow thinned and jutting out of the white ground they saw fragments of bark. So far there’d been no promise in their search and Hennessey stopped, slipped off her backpack and dropped it.

“Let’s camp here for the night. I’m pooped.”

“Alright,” he agreed. “I’ll make us a fire.”

As the light from the day began to fade, they made a great fire using the debris of trees pulled out from the snow and they shaved them down using the safety-knife. They sat in silence, warming their hands on the flames, the shapes of the fire fascinating and hot on their faces with the cold of night pressing against their backs. They both soaked up the warmth, the indulgence new and unfamiliar to them. They wrapped themselves in the insulation blankets and took out all the food, choosing between soup and artichokes. There were only five tins left; a number corresponding with the crew of Fable
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1 and the number of graves upon the hill. For the first time in eighteen months, they heated the food in the fire and warmed their cold stomachs.

“December? January?” asked Sutcliffe.

“What?”

“The month?”

“I’d say early January.”

“In that case, it’s my birthday soon.”

Hennessey smiled. “Is there anything in particular you want?”

“Wouldn’t mind a bar of soap, or a toothbrush.”

“I was thinking more along the lines of a new sports car or a cruise around the Pacific Islands, but if it’s a bar of soap you want, I’ll see what I can do.”

They talked more, sharing thoughts on the time they had spent in the White Room, gossiping about each member of the crew and what the next day might bring. They dwelled particularly on their old lives in Britain and America. And when the long day of burial, trekking and big change finally caught up with them, they cuddled up close, shivering nonstop beneath their blankets while the dying fire cracked and hissed, offering inadequate heat and light on their bodies. Sutcliffe closed his eyes and reopened them with a thought. If he slept, he might not wake up. He had no fear of death. Being there with Hennessey made it all easier to bear even with the bitter wind soughing over them and the surrounding gloom of darkness. If he died, there, on that night, he would die with dignity and self
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pride and he would die beside a woman he had grown to love. At peace, he allowed his eyes to close.

At first light, in a dense morning mist, the unexpected blare of a trombone
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like horn echoed throughout the land. The first time it sounded, they awoke, remembering suddenly where they were with absolutely no idea why they had awoken. The dying embers of the fire popped and smouldered at their side and a mist impenetrable to the eye had settled around them. Then they heard it again and the booming one
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tone horn made them twist out of their blankets and rise to their feet on high alert. It sounded as though it’d come from a prehistoric mammal. Sutcliffe did not know what he expected to see, but what he saw he was not expecting at all.