The Tankermen (16 page)

‘Sure, mate. You get back in there and look after those sick people. And—Finn?’

Finn looked back, one hand tingling on the tanker’s tail-light. Again, Jed’s stooped silhouette made him look like a stranger.

‘You did a good job, mate. Saved my life.’ The voice was definitely Jed’s now, gathering strength already.

‘Be careful, Don,’ he heard his mother say before he disappeared into the rock.

‘Yeah, I will,’ he called back over his shoulder. Then he pulled up short. One of two tankermen kneeling beside the open grating looked up and reached for the weapon it had laid aside.

‘You sneaking bastards!’ yelled Finn. In a rush of rage, he lifted his own weapon, lined up what he thought were the sights and pressed what in a normal gun would have been the trigger. There was a loud fizz, and the tankerman fell back, a spout of black fluid slapping on to the floor around it.

The second tankerman was armed now. Finn felt the weapon being trained on him for a half-second before he flopped to the floor. The fizz sounded above him, and a piece of tail-light bounced past his eyes. He got up and ran a zigzag across the glossy floor towards the tankerman. Its black eyes wavered slowly left to right, and the gun drooped in its hands. Finn veered in behind it, slashed its suit open down the back, and pushed it aside, soggy under his foot, so that it wouldn’t fall forward across the hole in the floor. He tried not to look at either of the tankermen as he relieved them of their weapons, then scrambled clumsily down the ladder and sealed the grating behind him.

Janet was peering through the cage wall, her anxious face framed by a white pigeon’s lifeless wing and a possum’s tail. ‘Oh Don, it’s you. I heard you shouting—I thought you’d been caught!’

Finn brought in the three extra guns. ‘I don’t know if these are any good—two of them have been fired already—’ He was interrupted by Janet, who put her arms around him, guns and all, and burst into tears.

‘It’s okay. It’s okay,’ he heard himself repeating, wanting to hug her back but scared to drop any of the weapons in case one went off.

‘You’re all right?’ Janet stood back and blinked aside her tears to look at him. ‘What happened up there?’

‘I had to get rid of a couple more of those insect-things.’ Put that way it sounded no more serious than stepping on an ant. Unsteadily, Finn put two of the weapons down on the walkway. Janet wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, looking embarrassed.

‘I’m sorry, Don. It’s not very useful to cry, I guess.’

‘I wouldn’t blame you if you went stark raving mad in here,’ he said through the throbbing in his head. Over her
shoulder he surveyed the row of people they’d rescued. ‘Here,’ he said, pulling a fresh bottle of distilled water from his mother’s pack. ‘Have a drink, and we’ll give some to Dad and the others. There’s nothing we can do now except wait.’

They waited twenty minutes, and it felt like a lifetime. There was no getting used to the charnel-house smell, to the thrumming in their skin and bones of the force the cages carried, to the noises of the dying animals and the laboured breathing of the people they tended. All they could do was move doggedly from one victim to another, sponging faces and helping them drink a little more water each time. ‘We’re just getting you an ambulance. Help’s on the way,’ Finn heard himself saying, his calm voice amazing him. ‘Just rest now.’ He learned the features of each of the people in his care, but he couldn’t discover how long they had been there, how they got there or even what their names were. Their tongues were stiff and swollen, and though some could open their eyes and look at him, all he could see was the blank suffering he had read in Jed’s face. They seemed hardly human at all, however much his brain told him they were, however angry he was at the tankermen on their behalf.

‘Your father opened his eyes,’ said Janet. ‘I think he’s sleeping now—his breathing seems more even. A
little
more even, anyway.’

Finn leaned over a tall man and willed him to stay alive. ‘Won’t be long now. Any minute now,’ he said, his hand on the man’s chest. He thought he saw the flicker of an eyelash, and frowned in concentration.

‘If only we could get them outside,’ Janet said. ‘It’s so uncomfortable in here, and so hot. Not to mention demoralising . . . What do you think, Don? Should we try it?’

‘I think they’d probably be a whole lot better, but I don’t like to move them without stretchers.’ Definitely the man’s
eyelids moved, and Finn murmured more assurances to him.

‘I guess not. I hope Stella’s managing. What if they don’t believe her?’

‘They will,’ said Finn firmly. He couldn’t bear to think anything else.

A distant clanging a few minutes later made them look at each other and silently creep to the cage door.

‘It’s from way down the back,’ whispered Janet. ‘Can you see anything?’

‘Yes, but—I don’t know. It’s so far away. It’s them, all right. More of those guys in the suits. What they’re doing, though . . . Hang on, it looks like they’re taking one of the cages apart . . . They’re putting the bars in a pile—that’s what all the racket is.’

‘God, I never thought I’d be praying the ambulance
wouldn’t
come,’ said Janet. ‘Not just yet, anyway.’

‘I know, ‘cause it looks like they’re coming up here.’ Finn scooped the weapons up off the walkway and hid them under the skirt of one of the women they had rescued. He fetched the gun Stella had used and thrust it into Janet’s hands, and they both stood just inside the cage door, motionless.

There were four tankermen, each carrying a number of cage bars. They trooped by without a glance, then busied themselves setting up a framework next to the first cage.

Janet signalled to Finn and pointed at the walkway. It was moving, extremely slowly. No, he realised,
they
were moving, cage, floor and all, being shunted back down the corridor to make room for a new cage. The floor must be a gigantic conveyor belt. He felt, as he watched from underneath his half-closed eyelids, all his suppressed rage and fear strengthening inside him until he could only just prevent himself shaking with it. These strangers must be either monstrously cruel or terrifyingly ignorant. He preferred the
latter possibility—they must not know what they were doing, tearing these people out of their families, out of normality, milking the life out of them. And what appalled him just as much was his own helplessness, because it seemed to him that there was no way he could ever let them know. The only language he shared with them was that of violence; he couldn’t think of any other way of stopping them than killing them. He could see no way to interact peacefully with them, no sign language, no common ground. They seemed to be an unmistakably hostile presence.

Janet was signalling again. He tore his gaze from the tankermen and saw her pointing to her gun and twitching her head towards the workers. Clearly she was thinking along the same lines as he was: let’s get rid of them now while we’ve got the chance.

But he shook his head and mouthed no. His own feeling simmered down under the force of cold practicalities. The air was so thick already, he was afraid releasing the tankermen’s fluid would suffocate them all. Not to mention the stuff seeping across the floor—they’d have to move the sick people on to the walkway out of its path, where they’d be hopelessly exposed if another working party happened along. Besides, he didn’t want to sit down here with four more tankermen’s corpses—knowing about the two upstairs was bad enough.

A burst of speech from one of the tankermen, and the job was completed. They tromped back down the walkway, and Janet and Finn relaxed a little, as they waited for silence again.

‘What’s the matter: haven’t they
noticed
the two dead ones upstairs?’ said Janet. She picked up a water-bottle and sipped from it.

‘They can’t have. Or they just don’t care, maybe. Maybe they don’t see us as a threat once we’re inside here—I don’t
know. They seem pretty slack about security. Wherever they come from, they mustn’t have any predators on them—they don’t seem to know what to do with us, besides catching us and melting us down.’

Janet looked across at him. ‘Where
do
you think they came from?’

Finn knelt beside one of his charges, a woman in a tattered business suit, wasted to almost nothing inside it. ‘I don’t know.’ He sighed and shook his head.

‘I’d like to think, in a way, that they came from another world, another planet or whatever. The idea of things like that evolving here, or being created by—lord, who knows what sort of people? It’s hard to take in. It’s much easier to say that they’re aliens, that they just don’t belong in this system we’ve got here.’

‘I guess so,’ said Finn. He sighed. ‘I guess that would make it less awful that we’ve killed some of them—it’s like we were getting rid of a virus or something, killing in self-defence. That’s always used as an excuse, isn’t it?’

‘I suppose so,’ said Janet doubtfully. ‘You know, once upon a time I really didn’t think I had it in me to want to kill anything much bigger than a mosquito. When I had Alex, I thought, “Well, yes, I
could
kill anybody who threatened this baby in any way”—I
knew
I could do it, then. And when I see this outfit—’ She glanced up at the things dripping and dangling from the cage and went on, her voice losing its evenness. ‘I just feel that anyone who could
conceive
of such a thing—let alone build it and make it function—ought to be eliminated, wiped out. That’s my gut reaction; that’s what my instincts tell me. It’s not just my child, or Richard, or you any more. It’s fighting against a whole way of thinking about people, or perhaps
not
thinking—just using us, the way loggers use trees, or we use battery hens or cattle. It’s an abomination!’ She finished in a whisper and Finn
saw her lean close to his father’s face, biting her lip to hold back tears. He looked away—he had to avoid feeling anything if he was going to last much longer down here.

Then Janet lifted her head, listening, and Finn heard it too—footsteps, human footsteps, running overhead.

‘Don! Janet! Are you okay down there?’ Stella’s voice at the grating was urgent, frightened.

Finn ran to the ladder and released the door. ‘We’re fine.’ If it was possible to feel good in that place, he felt it seeing his mother’s face and three men in uniforms peering over her shoulder, squinting in the unexpected light and trying to rub the pain from their jaws.

‘Thank Christ! The tail-light’s been blown off the tanker, and with these corpses up here I thought there’d been a real battle.’ She was scrambling down, giving Finn a quick hug, ushering the men in, all at the same time.

‘Jed’s on his way to hospital,’ she told him, and that was the last he heard from her until the whole operation was over. Ambulance officers and police were all over the place in a uniformed, dark-blue swarm. Finn stayed below until all the living people had been put on stretchers and taken out by the trapdoor, until Jed’s bike had been heaved out of the hole, until all the animals that wore collars or tags or seemed to have a chance of surviving had been removed, but he left the police to their own devices when they began the grisly business of detaching the dead.

Upstairs, police stood about in groups, a squad of them around the bank-vault door. A couple looked Finn up and down as he emerged from the trapdoor, and he realised for the first time how filthy he was, his once-white T-shirt now grey, smeared with brown, and sodden with perspiration. He was still holding one of the tankermen’s guns—he must look like a real desperado.

He was unable to raise a smile at the thought. How long had he been inside this throbbing white space? It felt like years, as Jed had said. Perhaps you didn’t have to actually touch the cages; perhaps just being inside the wall aged you. He felt as if he’d just lost a twelve-round boxing match—every part of him was bruised and beaten.

The open rectangle beyond the tanker was alive with red and blue flashing lights, and there was a line of police guarding the entrance. Finn stepped out between them, and one started and looked at him.

‘Excuse me,’ said Finn.

‘People keep doing this, popping out of the wall. Frightens the life out of me every time,’ said the policewoman.

Finn stood there a moment, silently grateful to be free of pain. His mother was sitting on the kerb wrapped in a blanket, drinking hot tea. ‘Over here, sonny,’ said the ambulance officer tending her. ‘You’ve had a few bad frights tonight. Come and have a cuppa.’

‘Did Janet go with Dad?’ Finn asked his mum, wrapping a scratchy grey blanket from the ambulance around him.

‘Yes. About five minutes ago. They rushed him off pretty quickly. They didn’t leave me time to come and get you, but they seemed to think he’d be okay. He had a better chance than some of the others, they said.’ She was staring straight ahead, clutching her tea with both hands as if she were trying to thaw them out.

Finn sat down close to her. ‘Well, I’m glad
you
didn’t go, too.’

‘They wouldn’t’ve let me, anyway. We have to be questioned, you and I. We have to give statements. All that palaver.’ She seemed to be trying to maintain that machinelike frame of mind that had kept her from cracking up inside the wall.

Finn accepted a plastic cup of black tea. It was hot and very
sweet, and immediately it banished the gnawing tiredness in his bones. He looked at his mum, and at last she looked back at him, her stubble hair sparkling red and blue in the lights. Pockets of dark skin hung below her eyes.

‘But what are they going to do about the tankermen?’ He spoke through clenched teeth to keep them from chattering. Outside the wall it was possible to think straight, to really register what had been happening, with hallucinatory clarity.

‘I heard someone say something about explosives.’

‘What, blow them up?’

‘To open the door. There are two doors, they tell me, with a little room in between, full of suits and weapons. The first door wasn’t locked, but apparently they’ve had their best “locksmith”—i.e. safe-cracker—in to have a look at the second door, and he’s never seen anything like it.’