News From Elsewhere (11 page)

“I’m not going to leave her,” said Justine flatly. She had picked herself up and was now kneeling by the child, who lay curled up on the grass like a tired baby. “I
can’t
leave her.” Futilely she began to stroke the small curved back and murmur meaningless soothing words.

“We can’t do anything,” I pointed out wearily. The effort of trying to cope with things I could not understand was becoming too much. When I left the hospital, despite all the warnings, I had not realized how weak I still was. But now I felt as if I were being put through some kind of endurance test—and I knew that I couldn’t last the course.

“Darling, you look terrible,” said Justine. “Sit down a few moments while I try and get to a telephone.”

Somehow I knew that getting to a telephone was just a waste of time. There would be a lot of people trying to get to telephones—and a lot of telephones that would never be answered.

“We’re not leaving each other,” I panted as she helped me to lower myself to the grass. “Whatever happens we’re not being separated for a minute.” I was feeling vaguely sick, and used what little energy I had left to fight the sensation down. I tried to smile. “Maybe I have the plague, too.”

At that moment the child stopped coughing and opened 
her eyes. She seemed to be staring through us.

“I’m sorry,” she said in a voice that was hardly more than a whisper. “Tell Mummy I’m sorry. I—I didn’t—”

Her mouth fell open and a wide vacancy was suddenly frozen on her face. She was dead.

Justine began to cry. She picked the body up and shook it in her arms, as if willing life to return.

“Put her down!” I said sharply. “Put her down and stop that!”

“But—”

“Damn you, we’re getting away from here!” I could feel my own hysteria rising. “We’re getting out of this bloody mess if we have to crawl on our hands and knees.”

It was already too late.

Justine gave me an oddly beseeching look—then suddenly she was sick. She began to retch and shake, and within seconds she couldn’t even stand up.

I lay there on the grass, watching her helplessly. Every spasm that shook her seemed to be passing through me as well. Like the others, she was changing from a human being into a tormented animal; and even while the thought cut me like a knife, I was praying for her to die quickly, praying that she would not suffer long.

I pulled myself toward her and tried to hold her hands, but the strength of the convulsions was too great and I had to let go. The rest of the park became no more than a backcloth to this private tragedy. I was dimly aware of people still being struck down and going through the same terrible stages, of others running about hysterically, but none of it meant anything.

All that mattered was that Justine was dying. It was a fine autumn day, with the sun shining tranquilly through a sky flecked with cotton-wool wisps of cloud. But the world below had turned into a nightmare. The thin veil of human dignity had been tom away, and we were as wretched and helpless as a colony of ants poisoned by a gardener of whose existence they were not even aware. I was too weak, too numbed with shock to wonder why or how. All that mattered was that Justine was dying.

As I watched her, time became meaningless. The seconds hung like minutes, the minutes became days, eternity was marked in the lines of pain brought to her face by each racking cough.

There were a few moments when she was lucid, a few even when she could talk.

“Go—go away,” she pleaded faintly, and then there was another grating spasm of coughing. “Please . . . please don’t stay, darling. . . . Don’t want you to—to see me . . . like this.”

It was no use. I couldn’t have moved even if I had wanted to. There was no strength in my limbs. Nothing but terror and grief.

She did not die peacefully as the child had done. She died in the middle of a convulsion, her body slackening suddenly under the strain and falling into an untidy heap like some piece of grotesque sculpture.

I looked at her face, remembering how she used to smile, how her eyes would become almost luminous with pleasure—and love. This other expression that was carved there did not belong to any human being at all.

I had seen too much. Even if I had not still been weak from the operation, I felt I had witnessed more than it is possible to endure while still keeping a grip on one’s sanity. The sun was bright, but all around me there seemed to be a slowly contracting ring of darkness; and as the darkness dosed in, I did not fight against it. I simply prayed that it would become absolute, bringing me the last luxury of total oblivion.

But it was a luxury that I was denied. The unconsciousness lasted for not more than nine or ten hours. The next sensation of which I was aware was a feeling of intense coldness and pain in my operation scar. I opened my eyes and blinked. The sun was low on the horizon, and shadows were slanting eerily across the park.

I could hear voices. For one delicious moment I was convinced that I was just awakening from some fantastic dream and that the world would still be sane and wholesome. But then I saw Justine, and the nightmare was real.

There were still the voices. I sat up too suddenly, and the pain danced through my legs and abdomen until I was afraid I would faint again. But when it had died down, I noticed that there was a jeep not far away. A soldier stood near to it. He seemed to be counting. We saw each other more or less at the same time. The voices I had heard were coming from a radio in the jeep. The soldier switched it off.

I picked myself up and walked unsteadily toward him. He stared at me dumbfounded. “Jesus! You survived it then?”

“Survived what?” I demanded harshly. “I’ve lived through this bloody mess, if that’s what you mean. I wish to God I hadn’t.”

He meant to be kindly. “You’ll feel better in a while, I expect.”

“Will I? I watched my wife die.”

“Did you, mate?” came the rough answer. “Well, I’ve got a wife and a couple of kiddies in London, and I don’t like to think about them either. . . . H-bomb there—about midday.”

I gazed dully around the park at the litter of corpses. “How—how did this happen?”

“Sabotage. Happened in about thirty towns. Some bastards must have sprinkled the filthy stuff.”

“What stuff?”

He gave me a twisted grin. “Germs. They call the stuff that fixed these poor devils botulinus toxin. . . . They used different bugs in different places.”

I looked at him, trying to take the information in. “The war’s started, then?”

There was a loud and bitter laugh. “You’ve been asleep, mate. The war is damn near over. As soon as we knew we were being attacked we threw the lot back at them—’most every flaming warhead we’d got. . . . Now both sides are packing it in. Shortest war in history. Here, listen to this.” He turned to the jeep and switched his radio on.

“. . . reports from the radar network indicating that no missiles have been launched by the enemy for almost two hours. It is assumed that the devastation suffered in their home territory is at least comparable with the damage inflicted by them, and the retaliatory use of chemical weapons by our missile groups and air forces, together with pattern bombardment by nuclear weapons, appears to have effectively neutralized their striking power. It is emphasized, however, that further attack by isolated automatic devices may be expected, though these are not

anticipated on any wide scale. Meanwhile, although casualties on both sides are estimated to exceed ninety per cent of the civil population, no reliable figures can be given until all available data has been studied. Survivors are assured that centralized military government, together with the means of reorganization, still exists. A list of survivor-concentration areas to which all healthy civilians should make their way will be given at the end of this newscast. Contaminated persons, however, are warned that—”

The soldier switched it off. Suddenly I saw that his automatic pistol was pointing at my chest. “Must be getting tired with tallying too many stiffs,” he apologized. “Got any identification? Orders to check on everybody still alive.”

“This is damn silly! Do I look like a saboteur?”

“Who does?” he said indifferently. “Now what about it?”

I saw that his trigger finger had taken the first pressure, and felt hastily in my pockets. “Hospital discharge certificate and driving license. Will they do?”

“Drop them on the grass and stand back.”

He inspected them and seemed satisfied. “Here you are, mate.” He handed them back. “What are you going to do now?”

“I haven’t given it a bloody thought.”

“If I wasn’t wearing a uniform,” he remarked wistfully, “I know what I’d flaming well do. I’d find myself a nice big car, fill it full of grub and clothes, and get the hell out of here.”

“Where to?”

“Wide open spaces where there ain’t no ruddy people.” He waved vaguely at the litter of dead around the park. “When this lot starts cooking, you’ll need a gas mask and a flamethrower. Reckon it’ll make the old Plague look like measles in the nursery. Every town’s the same. Get out and stay out, that’s what I’d do.”

I thought about it for a moment or two. “Will you help me bury my wife first? I don’t think I can manage it alone.”

He gave a grim laugh. “Don’t be barmy! Forty-five million dead, more to follow—and you want to bury your wife! Now hop it while the going is good. If any of my lot 
sees you and they don’t shoot, chances are you’ll get volunteered into the army. We’re a bit shorthanded, like.”

I gazed at him indecisively for a few moments. Then I turned to go. The logic of events was moving faster than my tired brain could cope with it. Now, I realized, I was living in an age where to survive was considered a . suspicious act. In less than a day, civilization had reverted to barbarism. Those who are not with us are against us.

After I had taken a few steps I stopped and called back to him. “What did you say the name of that bug was?”

“Botulinus toxin, mate. Friendly little thing, ain’t it? Better thank the Big Boy Upstairs for making you ruddy well immune. . . . But don’t press your luck.”

I thanked him and made my way out of the park, trying not to look at the bodies I passed.

I didn’t know where I was going. I just walked. The streets of the town were also littered with the dead. In the deepening September twilight their bodies did not look quite so terrible, and at times I pretended to myself that they were just sleeping off the aftereffects of one colossal celebration.

A celebration indeed! The coronation of Botulinus Rex!

In the marketplace among a group of stricken housewives who had presumably been shopping, I saw the body of an old man sprawling in the gutter—still clutching tightly in his hand a long piece of wood to which a tom placard had been pinned.

There was still enough light for me to read its message:

Repent ye, for the Day of Judgment is at hand!

I looked down at the old man and wondered vaguely if he had been surprised at the speed with which his prediction had become stop-press news. I wondered, too, if he had expected to find himself included in such a terrible judgment.

Feeling oddly self-conscious, I eased the placard out of his stiff fingers and laid it over the top part of his body—a tattered paper shroud.

Then, feeling like an automaton, I just kept on walking—trying to shut out of my mind the bitter knowledge that there was nowhere to go. . . .

The events of the rest of that night are clouded over in my mind. But when dawn came I found that I had been 
sleeping on one of the benches in a church. There were a million vacant beds in the city to choose from—including one that I knew I could never again sleep in alone—but somehow I had been drawn to the church. It was peculiar, I thought as I sat up and tried to ease the aching in my limbs, because I had never regarded myself as a religious sort of man.

However, I was now- no longer alone. Others had evidently been subjected to the same strange motivation. Scattered around the pews there were three or four men, several women—some of them with babies and small children—and, huddled pathetically below the altar, a small boy of about seven who did not seem to belong to anyone present.

It was another bright morning. Sunlight streaming through the tall, narrow windows might almost have convinced us that we were at the beginning of a normal, early autumn day. But as we saw the grayness in each other’s faces, the lines of tension and pain and sorrow, we knew with bitter certainty that, no matter how bright the sun, darkness would remain for a long time on the face of the earth. . . .

Looking back now over fifty years, when my morning’s weaving has been done and my chair has been placed in the farmhouse doorway so that I can gaze across this lovely Derbyshire valley, I hear the voices of the children at play . . . children of the Dark Age.

I hear them talking of the Great Ones—the godlike men whose civilization once spanned continents and whose descendants now live in tribal groups scattered over a strangely quiet world. I hear them talking of the Great Ones, the men of my own generation, the lords of the powered machines, and I realize that it is no longer possible to separate myth from reality. Nor, perhaps, should I try. For children have always needed heroes—just as adults have always needed ideals.