Children of the Dust (7 page)

'He shouted at me!' sobbed Catherine. 'He shouted rude words and told us to go away! All we did was swing on his gate! We never meant to let the sheep in his field! I don't like him, Sarah!'

'You'll like him this time,' Sarah said.

Spasms of pain racked her body as she pushed the pram down the long road past Ryelands Guest House, and up the hill towards the next village. Sleet lashed her face and the dark woods waited and there were two miles to go before they came to a turning on the right. And although Catherine cried, Sarah could smile. This was how things were meant to be and Johnson was part of the plan.

Once off the road it was hard walking. The pram jolted over loose stones and the shopping trolley leaked crimson juice from a broken bottle of plums. Fallen trees and broken branches blocked the track and they had to detour through mounds of dusty undergrowth. Sarah was weak and sweating with the effort and twice on the way she had to stop to be sick. Then from the high empty hill-top where the trees had been felled she saw the smallholding below, glasshouses bright with electric light and pale smoke rising from the cottage chimney.

'I don't want to go there,' Catherine said bleakly.

'I know,' said Sarah. 'But there's nothing else I can do. And he'll look after you, you see.'

Johnson came to meet them at the bottom of the track, the shape of a man in a navy blue overall, lean and tall in the twilight. An improvised helmet with a curved plastic visor concealed his face and he carried a shotgun. He had survived like Catherine because he took no chances, and the rifle was aimed at Sarah's head.

'I don't want to hurt you,' Johnson said quietly. 'But I'll kill you if I have to. I can give you lettuces. Take them and go-'

Sarah pushed Catherine towards him.

'I'll go,' she said. 'But I'll leave Catherine here. We've taken good care of her. She isn't sick and she's able to work for her keep.'

Johnson stared and hesitated.

Then lowered the gun.

'I've been waiting for this,' he said.

'You'll take her?' Sarah asked.

'I'm not much good with kids,' said Johnson. 'Never had any of my own, but I'll take her. What did you say her name was?'

'Catherine,' said Sarah.

Johnson nodded and opened the gate.

'Bring your shopping trolley, little lady.'

Alone, without Sarah, Catherine crossed the threshold of Johnson's land and stood forlornly beside him. Live chickens scratched in a nearby glasshouse, and there were goats and sheep in another. Others contained lettuce, and cucumbers, and unripe tomatoes, trays of seedlings and bedding flowers. The blast had not damaged them. The glass was plastic and the hills formed a sheltering amphitheatre all around. It was a good place in which to survive. Sarah parked the pram against the dry stone wall.

'You'd better have Catherine's things,' she said.

'There's seeds too, and all the tinned food we had left, and a twelve-bore shotgun.'

'A gun,' said Johnson. 'You've got a gun?'

'One like yours,' said Sarah.

Johnson laughed.

'This gun's not real,' he said. 'It only works by fooling people. I carved it out of wood the week after the bombs went off, and painted it to look like real. Real enough to frighten people away anyhow.'

'They told us in the village,' Sarah informed him.

Johnson sighed.

'What else could I do? I had to turn those poor devils away. I don't have enough food to feed the whole wretched population. Enough for the living maybe, but not for the dying. If food would have saved them I would have given it willingly, believe me.'

Sarah did believe him.

Johnson was a good man.

'Will you come and stay with your sister?' he asked her.

Sarah shook her head.

'I have to go home,' she said. 'My little brother is sick. I see you have outbuildings here. There are five live calves at Harrowgate Farm waiting to be collected. Nobody knows they're there. I barricaded the barn door to keep them safe but I think you should have them. You can use Farmer Arkright's Land Rover, and there's diesel in a tank by the implement shed.'

A squall of icy rain came sweeping down from the hills, ran like tears down Johnson's face as he lifted his eyes to the sky. He said, if he had never believed in God before he believed in Him now. And this was the beginning of a brave new world. Sarah shivered and pulled up the hood of her duffle coat. She had to go, she said, and looked at the garbage bag figure of Catherine for the last time. Johnson rested his hand on the child's shoulder.

'I'll look after her,' he said. 'I'll teach her to grow. We'll build a world from the dust, she and I. It won't be easy, but we'll do it. A moral society, based on human decency, free people, co-operating without violence, better than the old. There's a nuclear winter coming on, cold like we have never known. But the glasshouses are centrally heated. There's plenty of wood. The well water's good. If I can get diesel enough to keep the generator going — if I can scavenge enough hay and concentrates to keep the animals alive ... if I can keep the green plants growing . . . we'll make it. We'll make it anyway, your sister and me.'

Sarah coughed and smiled. Bright blood flecked the back of her hand and she did not worry. Johnson was part of the plan, a man with a vision which she herself would never share. Her part was over, her purpose played out. She had lived for Catherine and now she gave Catherine to him. Finally satisfied Sarah turned away, leaving man and child together in the rainy darkness.

'I'll call you Kate,' she heard him say. 'And you call me Johnson. There will be others, I expect, but it's you and I who have to make ready.'

Johnson and Catherine, the pram and the shopping trolley, went rattling away towards the house as Sarah headed home up the long track. She had no reason now to go on living. Death would be a relief, Veronica had said, and in the sideboard drawer the bottle of tablets waited. She would give half to William and take the rest herself, two lives ceasing together. It was better that way.

Pains gripped her stomach and she vomited blood, and the hood of her duffle coat rubbed raw the sores on her scalp. In a world that was dark and ugly, where the wind whined through the silences, Sarah knew that she was ugly too . . . her youth and prettiness, her love and life and hope, laid waste by the holocaust of war. But some things could never be destroyed ... a child with her dreams ... a man with his visions . . . and a gorse flower that bloomed in the dust. Sarah touched it, damp yellow petals, gold and fragile and strong. Alive and beautiful, it bloomed for the future, radiated the glory of God. In the end people turned to Him, and Sarah
could not be sorry.

OPHELIA

Quite by chance Bill Harnden survived the nuclear war. Normally he would have been lecturing at Bristol University but that afternoon he had to drive to Bath for a meeting of the South West Arts Committee. Suddenly a woman came running from a wayside cottage and flagged him down. She told him her name was Erica Kowlanski and she was a leading authority in the cellular cloning of vegetable and animal protein. She showed him a blue identity card which guaranteed her a place in any nuclear fall-out shelter, and begged him to drive her there.

Bill had been fully aware of the dangerous international situation but that was the first he had heard of the imminence of a nuclear attack. It was the car radio, not Erica Kowlanski, which finally convinced him it was really happening. His first instinct was to turn the car around and head for home. But home was thirty miles away across the river Severn, and London had already been hit. With Bristol next on the strike list he knew he would never make it. All he had time for was to save the woman and himself.

'My pass will cover both of us,' she said urgently.

Shocked out of thinking, Bill Harnden followed her directions, drove along by-roads east of Bath. The road led uphill towards a wooded escarpment and he could see the streets of Georgian houses below, traffic snarl-ups along the motorway, and hear the sirens of police cars waiting. Then the road dipped down again and the quiet fields took over, England on a sleepy afternoon in early summer, full of bluebells and buttercups and cattle grazing. He could not believe it was all about to end.

'Turn left at the next junction,' Erica Kowlanski said.

High wire fences and red notice boards told him that the area ahead belonged to the Ministry of Defence, and wire gates guarded the entrance to a disused stone quarry. Soldiers checked the woman's pass and waved Bill through. He parked among armoured cars and black official limousines, transferred to an army truck full of civic dignitaries and top civil servants, and was driven away.

A concrete tunnel and a roadway of curving light led deep inside the hill. Corridors branched away in all directions like blood vessels from a heart. He stood and waited in a great reception hall, a lone civilian among all the military personnel. It was more than a bunker. It was a vast purpose-built subterranean city, a labyrinth of rooms and passageways, as if the whole hill had been hollowed out. It was not the only one, Erica Kowlanski informed him. Scattered over England there were maybe a dozen underground complexes such as this. He guessed he could count himself lucky as the outer doors closed and sealed him inside.

Or was it luck, Bill thought, to be separated from his wife and children, to know that they died whilst he lived on? Alone in his cell room shared with a couple of American GIs, sitting on a hard bunk bed and staring at the blank pale green walls around him, somehow he could not think of it as luck. Apart from his briefcase containing lecture notes, a volume of Shakespeare's
Hamlet
which Veronica had given him for Christmas, and a photograph of her and the children which he kept in his wallet, he had brought nothing with him to remind him of his former life. He was a man in a vacuum, and everything he loved was swept away.

Time, of course, healed his grief. He grew used to the regimented routine of the bunker, mealtimes and work shifts, days and nights that began and ended with the sound of a buzzer. He grew used to the communal living of dining halls, assembly halls, shower and relaxation rooms, Grant and Elmer who shared his cell, and the total lack of privacy. A degree in English literature was useless there, and so was he. He was put to work in the supplies department, shifting dehydrated foodstuffs from the storerooms to the canteen kitchen, a man in a navy blue government-issued overall, number 423 on the admissions list, his identity gone.

Among all the high-ranking Army and Air Force personnel, among all the Lord Mayors, County Surveyors, Education and Police Chiefs, top scientists, communications experts, District Administrators, and gum-chewing Americans from the nearby airbase, Bill was just a low-status civilian in the bottom grade of the hierarchy. He did what he was told and was not expected to question it, nor did he know what went on among the upper echelons of power.

General MacAllister, who was in charge of the Avon bunker, was not a man to be found mixing socially with his subordinates. A remote moustachioed figure in a khaki uniform, he issued the orders, but he did not confide. All Bill knew of the overall situation was what filtered down to him through the ranks. As Elmer so succinctly put it, the contingency plans for surviving nuclear war had been one almighty cock-up.

The Avon bunker had been constructed to house seven hundred and fifty people, with supplies for up to two years. In actual fact less than five hundred of those who had been designated places reached it in time. Due to radioactive fall-out communication with other bunkers was impossible to establish; nor, at the end of the statutory fourteen days, could anyone begin to administer law and order and emergency aid to the surviving population of the Bath-Bristol region. It was more than six weeks before the radiation level dropped below critical. By that time there was apparently no civilian population left alive. The cities were flattened and the nuclear winter had already set in.

Temperatures plummeted way below zero. England became as cold as Siberia and the dust remained in the upper atmosphere obscuring the sun. Snow lay six metres thick, covering the ruins of cities in a white freezing shroud. There could be no reconnoitring, no aerial surveys to assess the final damage. Radio communication still remained difficult, but it seemed that three major bunkers at Plymouth, Cheltenham and Cardiff had not survived. Those surviving in the minor bunkers were cut off, some buried beneath the rubble of buildings, some short of supplies. But the blizzards raged. Hurricane force winds had been recorded. And Avon could not assist.

Stocked to administer to the requirements of the whole Bristol-Bath catchment area, there was no shortage of food or clothing or medical supplies in the Avon bunker. But the pre-fabricated field hospitals, tent-shelters for the homeless and mobile soup-kitchens, were never used. The pre-war estimates for survival had been proved wrong. For those outside the chance of survival was next to nothing, and those in the bunker were there for life. Bill Harnden would never be going home.

The nuclear winter lasted for almost two years. Not until the sunlight returned and the long darkness ended could the government bunkers begin to collate their evidence. From Cambridge, Cumbria, Avon, Aberdeen, Hereford, Derby and Yorkshire, the helicopters made their surveys. Incredibly people
had
survived outside but the population of the British Isles which, before the war, had been an estimated sixty-five million, had been reduced to a handful ... tiny scattered settlements of people struggling to survive in the desolate wastes of a once productive land. And for them it was only the beginning. Sickness, starvation, mutation and radiation-linked cancers, would reduce them still further over the years to come.

Nothing grew in the cold black deserts of nuclear dust. But the slow sun warmed the land and in a few more months, the scientists predicted, it would begin to grow. Then it was discovered that the ozone layer around the earth had been damaged by the holocaust and too much ultraviolet light was passing through the atmosphere. This would cause skin-burns, skin cancer, retinal damage to the eyes, and congenital deformity. Protective clothing had to be worn by anyone venturing outside, and it seemed that human beings would never again freely inhabit the surface of the earth.