The Tankermen (12 page)

The cabin doors opened and slammed shut again, and Finn could see splashed white boots standing by the front wheels. He prayed they’d have no business up the back of the tanker. Through the muting effect of his helmet he heard a burst of static speech. That’s it, he thought, they’ve noticed us.

The boots moved along the truck until they were just about level with Finn’s face. He stared at them, at the smears and droplets of brown-black oil. Then his whole body flinched at a loud clank. The cylinder above his head began to slide out. He sweated there, watching the boots shift as the two tankermen got a grip on the box.

They carried it a few yards away, then laid it down and knelt on the floor. Jed crept in beside Finn, his visor up. Finn put a hand on his shoulder to keep him still—it would only take one sideways glance for the tankermen to spot them.

He heard Jed’s whisper, so faint it was like a voice in his own head. ‘Look at their hands.’ Finn tried to focus on the grubby white gloves working on the white floor.

They were unscrewing something . . . white bolts. But there was something unnatural about the way they did it: the arms of their suits seemed to get very twisted. Finn watched a hand clamp on a screw head and twist it—it made two full turns. And the suit, pulled tight around it, showed up the shape inside as not quite hand-like. The thumb was okay, but the fingers seemed too narrow, as if there were only two of them, and those welded together, and locked into a curve.

‘Pincers,’ he mouthed to Jed.

‘Bionic men,’ Jed mouthed back. The oval of his helmeted face was vivid red and trickling with sweat.

Finn tried to shrink against the floor as the two figures stood and picked up the cylinder. One lowered himself into a
hole that had opened in the floor, and the other followed him down.

As soon as they were out of sight Jed took off his helmet and wiped his face and neck with a handkerchief. Then he froze, and Finn heard two sounds that made his skin shrivel: a low moan that could only be human, and the constant, alarmed mewl of a kitten. He tore off his own helmet and tried to tune his ears to the sounds coming from the opening in the floor: dull thuds and shufflings, the dreadful mewing, something that flapped.

‘What’s going on down there?’ he muttered to Jed.

‘I hate to think, mate.’

They both ducked their heads uselessly as a gloved hand appeared, gripping the rim of the opening. The two tankermen climbed out. One reached back into the hole, and the slab door slid up into place, and they screwed it closed with their pincer-hands. Finn felt the back of his neck tighten: now they would turn, and see them, and get their guns, and—

‘They move slow,’ whispered Jed about a centimetre from Finn’s ear. ‘If they see us, hop on the bike and we’ll burn out of here.’

Finn nodded and watched the blank ovals of the tankermen’s eye-pieces as they stood and walked past the tanker, farther into the whiteness. He spread-eagled himself underneath it and tried to see where they were going.

Their suits were near-impossible to pick out against the prevailing white glare; Finn had to use their dirty boots as his guide. The only other thing he could make out was a circle of metal around what looked like the door of a bank vault, directly in front of the tanker at some unjudgable distance, and it was towards this that the tankermen walked. They opened it, stepped inside, and pulled it to behind them without casting a single glance backwards. Finn and Jed both
let out their breath, and Finn rested his forehead on the glossy floor for a moment.

‘Did you see the way they walked, though?’ said Jed, and Finn raised his head and nodded.

‘Kind of . . . slow, and . . .’

‘Kind of
spastic
. You know, as if they couldn’t quite control it.’ Jed was still whispering.

‘Yeah.’ Finn remembered his first sighting of a tankerman, noticing the effort involved in holding the hose still. Maybe the hose hadn’t been the problem; maybe it had been the tankerman’s own limbs. There was something wrong with them, maybe. Maybe the suits didn’t work and the people inside had been contaminated by the stuff they handled—partially dissolved, maybe. Finn shuddered.

‘Know what I’m reminded of?’ Jed was wriggling out backwards. ‘That movie
Terminator
, where the guy’s really a robot, sort of dressed up in a person’s body. But he’s a bit clunky, a bit basic. You know, just programmed to do a certain range of things.’

‘Like terminate? Thanks, Jed, that’s really cheered me up.’

Jed kicked Finn’s behind as he too squirmed out. ‘I mean, those guys are like robots that haven’t had a body fitted yet. Those suits are to make ’em look human without having to go to all the trouble of making a body that looks realistic.’

Finn stared hopelessly up at him. ‘Someone’s already gone to a lot of trouble, making robots that walk, and fire weapons, and
drive.
What kind of money would there be behind that amount of technology?’

‘You’re right. We’re dealing with big bikkies here, real power.’ Jed was stripping off his jacket; underneath it his T-shirt was patched with sweat. ‘You’d think they could afford air-conditioning,’ he said in his normal voice, glancing around at the nothingness, the exhausting, shapeless light.

‘They’re probably watching us or listening to us, somehow. The place has got to be bugged.’

‘Maybe.’

Finn hung his helmet on the bike’s handle and they both ran, doubled over, to the door-sized opening in the floor. It was a grating, not a slab—a white-on-white pattern of squares that filled the rectangle made by the screw heads.

‘Whatever that smell is, it’s from down there,’ said Jed, pulling his head back and making a face.

‘And so’s whatever’s making those horrible noises.’ Finn glanced at the bank-vault door, then knelt and grabbed the ridge in the centre of one of the screws. Jed reluctantly followed suit. He didn’t want to see what was causing that moaning, that mewing. But what else were they here for?

‘Maybe we should go through that door after those guys,’ Finn said, pausing in his work.

‘No thanks. If they can’t stand fresh air, I’d hate to try breathing what they
can
stand! Besides, you never know how many mates they’ve got in there, or how many weapons. Ah, there we go.’ The head of his screw budged at last, and Jed unwound it about ten centimetres, at which point it refused to move any further.

‘Funny stuff they’re made of,’ Finn said. ‘Is it plastic or metal?’

‘Beats me. Something you can only get at Martian Mitre 10 probably.’ Jed began work on the last screw.

As soon as it was loosened, the grating sank without a sound and slid sideways out of sight. ‘Phew, lucky we weren’t standing on it,’ Jed said sensibly to cover up his surprise. ‘There’s something not very nice down there,’ he added, sniffing. ‘It’ll be their garbage disposal unit, what do you reckon? Shit, that wasn’t very sensitive.’ He glanced at Finn’s light-bleached face. ‘Sorry, mate.’

Nothing was visible in the cavity but more whiteness. Finn lay down and stuck his head into the hole.

The smell assailed him, of rotten meat and raw sewage: pestilential air, edged with a ghastly sweetness. Finn shook his eyes clear of the dizziness it produced, glanced around quickly and brought his head up with a jerk.

‘What do you see?’ said Jed.

Finn rolled away from the hole, gasping for breath. ‘Don’t look,’ he said. ‘It’s horrible.’

Jed looked anyway. ‘Faugh!’ he exclaimed at first, retreating. Then he took a deep breath and hung his head over the edge for as long as it lasted. He sat up panting, to find Finn staring at him, his lower lip clamped white between his teeth.

‘Your dad might not be one of them,’ said Jed flatly. ‘Let’s go down and see.’

Finn nodded, still stunned.

‘There’s a little ladder,’ said Jed. He waited for Finn to nod again before continuing, slowly and clearly. ‘It’s white, so it’s hard to see. I’ll show you. Try to breathe through your mouth, okay? That way you won’t feel so much like chucking.’

They lowered themselves through the opening into a low-ceilinged corridor, only about two metres high and perhaps six wide, but endlessly long. A narrow walkway, raised a few centimetres above the floor, ran down one side of it, off into infinity, and the remaining space was taken up by a row of large, open cages with walls and roofs of rough metal scaffolding, encrusted, inside and out, with bodies.

It reminded Finn of the cockroach traps Janet used in the kitchen, light cardboard frameworks with glue-coated floors. A week behind the fridge and they’d be a mass of shiny brown bodies, some expired, many still alive, sitting over the black beads of their own excrement with their antennae waving,
trying to wrench their legs free. But these were not cockroaches. These were his own species, real live humans.

His brain reeled under the shock. The people were concentration-camp thin and hairless, their clothes sagging around them, their closed eyes sunk into blackened circles. They all looked the same, like anatomical diagrams, the workings of every joint exposed under the dulled skin. Around them, pressed up against them, were animals of all kinds. Mostly cats, dogs and birds, some were too wasted to identify.

The worst thing was the life that still held on to many of them, the merest trickle of it. Things moved: a wing gave a residual flap, a face buried itself deeper into hands, a mouth unstuck itself. From these minimal movements and subdued sounds Finn only wanted to flee.

He made himself step on to the walkway and move past the first few cages. Jed was right beside him, holding and partly supporting him by his upper arms. ‘It’s better here,’ Jed said hollowly. ‘At least everything’s dead.’

Where they were standing, the dead things could be distinguished from each other—they still had more or less the forms they’d lived in. Further on they became less like separate creatures and more like massed carrion, until beyond a series of frames from which Finn heard a single soft sound of something falling, there were cages adorned only with bones.

‘I can’t look any more,’ he said wretchedly, turning to Jed’s chest.

‘Your dad,’ Jed reminded him. ‘Is he in this one?’ He turned Finn back and shook him.

‘I can’t tell!’ Finn’s voice was skating up towards hysteria. ‘They all look like skeletons!’ In horror he watched a pair of eyes opening in the mess, then rolling closed again. ‘Anyway,
I don’t want to find him here.’

‘If you don’t find him, we can’t get him out,’ Jed said patiently. ‘Clothes. Don’t look at faces. Look at clothes. Do you recognise anything they’re wearing?’

That was easier, but still horrific. Among the bodies in the third cage Finn saw a policeman’s uniform, blackened and tattered across the chest. There was a soft floral dress, some once-natty business suits, a school uniform or two. When Finn spied a small pair of striped kid’s overalls he bent over and noisily brought up the diluted remains of his dinner.

Jed was there with his crumpled handkerchief. ‘Get angry at the bastards,’ he insisted through his teeth as Finn mopped his face. Finn would hardly have recognised him, meeting him like this. The blue sparks in his eyes took away all his Santa Claus quality. ‘Keep looking,’ he said harshly.

Finn’s father was on the outside of the second cage. Finn had walked past him twice before he noticed the silver tiepin, with its little ruby, that Janet had given his dad the first Christmas after they married. His dad was fixed sideways on the framework, almost at floor level. Something with a small, pointed, red-furred face had been pressed up against his ear—after an appalled second or two Finn recognised it as a fox. His father’s clothes were spattered with the same filth that coated the floor.

Finn knelt down on the walkway and slowly wiped his father’s face clean with Jed’s hanky. ‘Dad, can you hear me?’ he said.

There was something wrong with his father’s face. In twenty-four hours it had been sucked dry, hollowed out. The skin was grey, and the greyness was leaking up into his father’s dark hair through the temples. Finn’s vision began to crowd with flying black specks, and he realised he had stopped breathing. He took in a gasp of the foul, hot air, and
heard himself begging, in a still, hopeless voice that expected no response, ‘Open your eyes. Say something.’

Finally, the grey lips moved a little, and Finn felt himself wilt with relief. He hunched closer to his father’s face, scrutinising it for further signs of life. The tingling throughout his body accelerated slightly. He thought his father whispered his name, then ‘War . . . war . . .’

‘Water!’

His father gave the slightest of nods.

Putting a hand to his father’s cheek, Finn felt the tiny hairs on the back of his index finger catch against the scaffolding. They stuck to it, and the pins and needles were at once amplified into a beating ache. As he cried out, he snatched his hand away, leaving the hairs behind on the frame.

‘These cages!’ he said fearfully to Jed. ‘There’s something—don’t touch them, whatever you do! They’re like flypaper, and if you get stuck they do this to you—drain your life away . . .’ His voice faltered, looking down at his father.

Jed took one of Dr Finley’s arms and tugged it gently. ‘Dunno what they use to hold them on, but it’s pretty powerful stuff. You’d tear the skin off if you just pulled.’ He frowned.

‘. . . still . . . war . . .’ Finn’s father whispered across a swollen tongue.

‘We’ve got to get him some water,’ said Finn. ‘Even if we can’t get him off the cage, we can maybe stop it eating away at him so fast.’

‘Yeah, and we should get some for these other people, the ones who are still alive. I’ll see if I can count how many.’ Jed slowly walked off, watching for movement, feeling for pulses. Finn heard him murmuring to people, promising water, heard their answering moans.

And he heard something else—a low thud like a distant,
heavy door slamming shut. He jumped up, and backed down the walkway. ‘Jed? I think they’re coming. They must be on to us.’

Jed pulled him inside a cage, and they both stood utterly still and listened. The tanker above them started up. ‘Oh no, they’ll flatten my bike!’ whispered Jed, but the engine’s roar stayed neutral. Through it Finn thought he heard scratchy tankerman talk. ‘They must have spotted the trapdoor,’ he whispered, and clutched Jed’s arm. They waited, straining their ears.