Forecast (18 page)

Faraday went over to her bag and retrieved her mobile phone. She knew it wouldn’t be working because the walls were reinforced concrete, eight inches thick and she was thirty feet beneath the ground. Besides, the network had probably been destroyed, but that didn’t stop her trying redial. The last number she’d called belonged to Nick Parsons. Her heart sank when the dial tone flat
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lined. It was so loud that Matthews on the other side of the room could hear it. From the glow of the mobile screen, he could also make out the disappointed expression on her face.

At his own bag, Matthews fished out his last two amphetamine pills, the ones he’d been saving for the grand celebration after their ballooning triumph. When no one was looking, he popped them in his mouth and swallowed, hoping that this nightmare would all go away and that he would wake up in a few days and find it had all been a bad drug experience. With his wallet in his hand, he sat on the bench and played catch with it for a while. He opened it up to have a look inside, each compartment, one by one. He took out all his bank cards and credentials. He raked through the contents and peeped inside the note compartment. No money. Strange, he thought, convinced there had been two twenties in there the day before. He tipped the change into his palm, added it up in his head, then in a rage tossed the coins to the floor, as though feeding a fleet of pigeons. The bouncing coins twinkled and made a tune as they rolled in pointless circles. Then he tossed the whole wallet on the floor.

“What now?” he moaned.

“We just wait,” said Hennessey.

“Wait for what? To be rescued? To die?”

“The air outside is thick with tiny particles of radiation that will eat away at your immune system. Gamma ray radiation is fatal within the first hour of exposure, but after about eight or nine hours it weakens to about one
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tenth. After a couple of days, it weakens even further to about one
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hundredth, which is still lethal. Right now, we wait it out. In a few days, we can figure out a survival plan. In the meantime, we just wait. And we have to be patient.”

“I apologise. It’s just…never mind.”

Sutcliffe walked across the room and sat beside his worn
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out crewmates, allowing his head to fall back against the wall. He didn’t care about the success of the space flight, or that Fable
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1 had been destroyed – not now, maybe not ever. He could not understand why he was thinking so much about the people he had seen that morning when he had made his way to the F1 Mission Control Base; the annoying neighbour running his car engine twenty minutes before he’d climbed into it to drive to work, the man starting his dayshift at the petrol station with a piece of bloody tissue stuck to a shaving cut, the mother pushing her son in a pushchair at an intersection in St. Ives, the couple kissing up against the gate of the Mission Control Base as families arrived at the launch site. Then his mind switched back to his dead son and he inconspicuously started to cry.

The crew switched off the EVA headlamps on their helmets to conserve battery power, condemning them to the cold, dark interior of the White Room. Exhausted and in shock, they sat in silence. Nobody dared to utter another word and nothing more was said that day.

It had been a very long, cold night. But the Fable
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1 crew had slept surprisingly well. Dressed in their spandex suits, they had made pillows from their shoes and bags and had used items of clothing as blankets.

Sutcliffe awoke to an uncommon darkness. Impenetrable. It hid every detail of the room. The images of Sunday’s tragedy reformed in his head and he felt the shock of it all over again. He wondered whether it had been a cruel dream. The darkness around him served to remind otherwise. He quickly became aware of his aching joints, his feet frozen to the bone and a sharp band of pain across his chest. His spine hurt too from the unsympathetic tiles on the floor. He stretched each limb individually, giving extra care to his left leg, folding it in half, gripping the knee with both hands and pulling it to his chest, then kicking it out straight to loosen the knots. He had been exercising it everyday since the accident. It was no longer a discipline, more a necessity. Everyday it ached. That day it ached more than usual.

It was Tuesday morning and he could imagine people leaving their houses to go to work, morning rush
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hour traffic, the transport system overrun with business people, children in uniform mucking around on their way to school, truck drivers doing their deliveries, construction and tearing down of buildings, the chugging of large machinery and the ringing of telephones. A regular day in a regular month with people doing things in their regular lives.

“What’s for breakfast?” said Matthews, coming awake slowly, stretching and yawning.

The room was too dark to see so he flicked on his headlamps and the far corner of the room came to life. He trained the helmet’s light around the room to find his friends. Sutcliffe was performing leg exercises. Faraday had dropped back off to sleep as quickly as she had woken up. She looked at peace. Hennessey had her eyes closed, but she was awake lying on the bench. That first night, she had woken up in a panic, falling to sleep and waking again all night long, reliving the nightmare of Sunday through her dreams.

“How’s everyone feeling this morning?” asked Sutcliffe.

“Hungry, but otherwise not too bad,” said Hennessey.

“Yeah, I could eat a horse,” Matthews added.

Sutcliffe finished his exercises and turned to his crew. “I think we should pool all our resources together and see what we’ve got between us, when we’re all up.”

Outside in the lobby, Sutcliffe checked on their spacesuits, which hung out of the water on the flat metal bar they had used to force open the main door and now functioned as a clothes support rail suspended between the lengths of the walls. Several cigarette butts littered the surface of the water. They belonged to Keith Burch. He had smoked three or four on Sunday morning alone. He wondered about his missing crewmate and hoped he was still alive. Idiot, he should have jumped at the same time as everyone else. Maybe he had.

It wasn’t until he was back in the White Room that something began to bother him. The atmosphere had started to press down on him filling him with subdued depression. Or was it something else? The thought that they were all going to die down there. If they were to avoid that likely fate, they would have to be smarter, stronger, more resourceful and optimistic, he thought. The ingredients for survival.

Over by the bench, the crew was emptying the pockets of their coats, trousers and bags, retrieving their personal belongings and Sutcliffe joined them, locating his suit jacket.

“That’s not mine,” he said pulling a metallic blue mobile phone from his pocket.

“That’s mine!” Matthews barked. “Why’ve you got it?” There was accusation in his voice.

“I don’t know, but my wallet is missing,” he replied.

“Is this it?” said Hennessey, holding up a leather wallet, which she’d retrieved from her trouser pocket.

“Yeah, how strange.”

“Tell me about it,” said Faraday. “I can’t find my rings.”

While the crew claimed their scattered belongings, pondering over how they could have become so muddled up, Sutcliffe took his possessions to the middle of the room and made a small pile where the crew joined him, adding items to it. Sitting, they circled the pile, like some kind of meditative ritual. Included in the collection was a packet of cigarettes, two lighters, a newspaper, a laptop computer, a variety of basic medicines from the cabinet in the toilet, a Jane Austin novel, a health bar snack, an inhaler stick, a bottle of water, four sets of keys, four mobile phones, sunglasses, chewing gum, an opened roll of peppermints, a bottle of sleeping pills, a flick
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knife and a handkerchief.

“Not much to get excited about,” said Matthews.

“I wouldn’t say that,” said Sutcliffe. “The mobile phones will give us extra light for a while and we can share the health bar and the water. If anyone fancies a smoke, go for your life. Cigarettes lessen appetites. We have two sources of reading material. We have some medicine and if anyone has trouble sleeping, we have pills. It’s better than nothing I suppose.”

Hennessey considered having a cigarette, but thought better of it. Things were not quite that desperate. Instead, she divided up the health bar into equal pieces and handed them out while Sutcliffe took his laptop equipped with two
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way satellite broadband over to the bench. If the autonomous space stations in orbit equipped with specialised wireless transceivers could make a connection through the congested sky, it might still work. He waited for the computer to load, concerned to see the battery display icon only a fifth full of colour. The screen was bright enough to light up most of the room, so Matthews killed the EVA headlamps to preserve power. Sutcliffe moved the mouse and double
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clicked on an icon he wanted to open. The words
Page Expired
appeared above a list of plausible reasons on his screen.

Sutcliffe sighed. “So the myth about the Internet surviving a nuclear war was just that, a bloody myth.”

Faraday came over and shook her head. “Maybe you just can’t get a signal from a satellite transmitter yet.”

“Which suggests the electromagnetic pulse reached them.”

“I doubt it. Broadband satellites orbit hundreds of miles above the Earth. Just give it time. It might still pick up a frequency.”

They waited anxiously, the computer searching for the satellite space stations through eight
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inch walls and radioactive clouds until, eventually, it found one.

“Alright, we’re in.”

Everyone had crowded around the laptop’s rectangular light as Sutcliffe clicked on the search bar and typed in NUCLEAR ATTACK ON EUROPE and hit enter. Thousands of search results appeared. Scrolling through the assortment of headings supplying brief snaps of information, they were able to grasp immediately that the nuclear bombs had been at the instigation of North Korea. Apparently, they had been launched from various sites, Pyongyang the capital being the main launch site. He attempted to open the first publication. It had been published two days ago by the Washington Post. Access denied. He clicked back to the search results. He tried the second heading, the publishers CNN. Access denied. He tried others, one after another. Access denied. Frustrated, he browsed through the search results, determining what he could from the titles and the little snippets of information featured beneath those titles. They all seemed to proclaim the same thing. North Korea had released over four hundred intercontinental three
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stage ballistic missiles at targets in Europe, Russia, the United States of America and their close allies, also launching weapon strikes against South Korean forces and the US forces based around the world. Russia and the United States had retaliated. A title at the bottom of the search results page displayed a fraction of the American President’s response.

“…
international tragedy is occurring. Approximately two hundred and twenty nuclear weapons have been launched from mainland North Korea. Several of those missiles are heading to our
…”

Sutcliffe attempted to open the full article. Access denied.

According to a government source on another search result, the US had retaliated with intercontinental ballistic missiles against North Korea from underground facilities in Montana, North Dakota, Wyoming, Nebraska and Colorado. Other sources mentioned China, though unclear as to why. There were publications from various world news sources – all the respected broadcasting corporations and national newspapers, several government entries and some independent blogs. Some were the prophecies of nuclear experts, obsolete and had nothing to do with the current news.

Apart from the prophesiers, they all had one thing in common. They had all been published two days earlier.

A frightening question came to Sutcliffe. The expression on his face was grim when he shared his thoughts with his crew. “If no articles have been published since the bombs went off, does that mean nobody is alive to write them?”

“What are you saying?”

“Has the entire world population been killed?”

“That is total mush,” Hennessey said. “I dare say the Internet is down and nobody has been able to publish anything since.”

Sutcliffe had a bad feeling, convinced that what the crew had witnessed so far was only the tip of the iceberg. He wondered if, from the safety of their balloon, they had witnessed the brutality and horror of a world nuclear holocaust. All the superpower nations had been involved: China, Russia and the United States. And media sources had specifically stated that North Korea had fired nuclear missiles at the United States and its close allies, which included Australia, Canada, Israel, Japan, South Korea, Mexico, Italy, Spain, Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. Additionally, American forces consisting of Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps positioned all over the world, including the Arabian Gulf, South America, the Western Pacific islands, Uganda and Djibouti in Africa, may also have been targeted. What could several thousands of fission megatons do to the world? They had seen what a handful of nuclear missiles had done to the corner of Europe and Sutcliffe worried that it barely hinted at the scale.

“You don’t think what we saw was the beginning of a nuclear world war, do you Brad?” said Faraday.