Forecast (19 page)

“To be honest, I don’t know what to think. But it does look like countries from all over the world were involved. And, I’m sorry to say, Jen, it looks like America took the brunt of it.”

Hennessey found it hard to react to information so intense. She knew her physical discomfort ranked second behind the mental torture of it all. Physical pain went away in time, mental pain stayed forever. Right now, she didn’t know how to deal with the idea that her country and her people had been eliminated.

“This is all just assumption,” she said. “We still don’t know the full story yet.”

Sutcliffe could see through her façade. She wasn’t as tough as she liked to make out. He studied his comrades circling the laptop, their downturned mouths and grim faces, their mind lasering over the myriad of problems they faced. He wanted to remain positive, say something profound and inspiring, look on the bright side and keep spirits high, but he didn’t want to lie.

“Look, things are going to get a lot worse before they get better. But if we all pull together, we can get through this.”

“How can it get any worse?” said Faraday.

Sutcliffe was about to speak when Hennessey stepped in. “Brad is referring to the weather. We could be on the brink of a nuclear winter.”

“What do you mean by nuclear winter?” Faraday asked.

Hennessey gestured the explanation to Sutcliffe.

“Actually, I was thinking more along the lines of sanitary problems, shortages of food and water, being confined to this room for God knows how long. I’m not entirely clued up on the after
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effects of a nuclear disaster.”

“A nuclear winter is where all the particles of excavated dust and soil and crap go up into the atmosphere and block out the rays of the sun,” Hennessey explained. “Because the sun can’t penetrate through the clouds, the temperature drops dramatically and the result is a world of ice and extreme cold. You were right on the money, Brad, when you said things were going to get a lot worse because they really will.”

“Isn’t that all just scientific speculation?” said Matthews, lifting his shoulders and eyes widened to strengthen his point. “Nobody has ever experienced a nuclear war before so, for all we know, the weather might not change at all.”

Hennessey shrugged her shoulders. “All I’m saying is that with all this radiation about, conditions will become insupportable.”

“If people survived on minimal resources during the Stone Age and Ice Age, I’m sure we can do it too,” Matthews said.

Faraday lifted her head. “I don’t recall the Stone Age and Ice Age eras having radioactive food and water to contend with. I think the Nuclear Age is far more challenging than previous ages, don’t you?”

“At least we’re still alive.”

“Great,” she replied. “Lucky us.”

She began to cry and although it was good that she gave vent to it, Sutcliffe thought it could further harm spirits. Or perhaps not. Perhaps her tears would influence others to cry, and that might clear the way for positive thinking. Sitting beside Faraday, he put his arm around her shoulder, encouraging her to bury her head into his large chest. She did and it seemed to amplify her crying, her head jerking as she sobbed, softly at first, then more animatedly.

“Let it out,” he said in a soft voice, rubbing and patting her back. He turned to his crew. “Everything’s going to be alright.”

Through sheer strength of will and physical prowess, Sutcliffe had been able to find a temporary solution to a permanent problem. He had played a pivotal role in bringing them safely to the White Room. Matthews could admit that. But now the room was filled with mixed tensions. Everyone felt inadequate to the task of prolonging their survival because the grim truth was that survival was beyond their control.

Matthews, however, thought differently. “I don’t want to be the one to state the obvious, but if we stay here without food or water, we’ll be dead by next week. And I don’t intend to die.”

“We talked about this,” Sutcliffe reminded. “We need to wait at least a few more days before we do anything, just until the worst of the radiation has receded. We have a little water and that can keep us going for at least ten days.”

“Fuck!” he groaned as he paced the room. He kicked the wall. More than usual, his behaviour was strange, aggressive. His hands were constantly shaking and a continuous sweat broke and face. His temper was short and he was agitated. Turning, he all but shoved Sutcliffe aside as he moved to the middle of the room, spotlighted by the headlamps. He obviously had something important to say and Sutcliffe saw the wisdom in letting him get it out uninterrupted.

“We have spare oxygen tanks in the utility room, right?”

Sutcliffe nodded.

“Right, we go outside in our spacesuits and make a large help sign in the ground near the entrance to the shaft. We use the rubble to make letters.” He saw the cans of paint on the floor beside the stepladder. “Better still, we paint letters on the ground. That way, when a helicopter or search plane passes over, they’ll know where to look for survivors. They could be looking for us now and we’re wasting precious time.”

Sutcliffe didn’t express his own feelings, that the chances of an aerial rescue were slim with cloud cover obscuring the sight of land. Dust that thick would clog the workings of engines anyway. And considering many countries in Europe had been hit with nuclear bombs, the chances of an international search when there were survivors in their own countries to consider were even slimmer. He also knew that you didn’t change minds by arguing. By not arguing, it showed dignity and a semblance of control. Besides, he was too tired to be argumentative and he simply shrugged and said nothing.

Hennessey was going out of her mind. She kind of agreed with Matthews, because right now the prospect of spending time down there in the White Room with people from backgrounds massively different from hers was beginning to perturb her. Living in a room full of hungry, depressed individuals while factions and animosity prevented them from pulling together had all the makings of conflict. She felt something she had sensed many times throughout her career, that the presence of death was as near as the air she breathed. She walked to the other side of the room where she collected a can of paint and handed it to Matthews.

“Do it,” she said to him.

Matthews felt as though he’d stepped into the earliest beginnings of the Earth. Seeing the bleak, barren land confirmed the horror of what they had survived. At the same time, the country seemed at peace, free of clutter and of noise.

Squatting, he scooped a pile of ash into his gloved hand. He could see every individual grain, each one representing a human, each a mark of death. The ash of an identity. A strong puff of wind dissolved the pile into the air, erasing its existence. Standing up, he brushed the ash aside with his feet to make a space on the ground. With the white paint, he began crafting HELP in the ground and he made the letters large for anyone piloting an aircraft to see. He marvelled over his work, positive it would attract the attention of aid workers, but his confidence quickly waned as soon as he looked into the dark sky, understanding that the chances of an aerial rescue were very slim.

Matthews spent some time that afternoon exploring the ruins of F1 Mission Control Base. A restless man at the best of times, he found himself growing bored and impatient; with waiting around in the White Room, the people he was imprisoned with, everything. His fuse was shortening and he put it down to the fact that he’d run out of drugs. He would have done anything for a hit at that point. He felt as though he was suffering a prolonged comedown, unable to stop his hands shaking, and felt that at any moment he would shatter into a million pieces. Indeed, the thought of going back to the White Room was worse than the thought of why he was there at all.

Matthews stopped still. What was that? Was that fresh smoke? Thick smoke, twirling into the air. A new fire? He wondered what was burning so fiercely. He decided to investigate and was about half a mile away from the White Room when he saw the first body of a female, twisted and broken. Near her corpse he saw the thriving fire filling the air with motes of black smoke and dust. Matthews proved himself, once again, able to be shocked. The enormous fire was burning dozens and dozens of bodies. They had been purposely stacked in a deep ditch and were being cremated. Another dead body appeared. It was being dragged on its back across the ground. The hooded woman dragging the body was a shabby thing with broad shoulders and thick arms, wide at the hips and late forties in age. Her clothes were formless and draped across her shoulders was a dirty blanket. Seeing the woman informed him that there had to be other survivors living in the midst of a torn society with food and water absent and hunger and death always present. She barely noticed Matthews standing there and continued dragging the body towards the immense fire by the heels, its gender indeterminable by the vast degree of burn. At the edge of the ditch, she stopped to catch her breath. Matthews watched her pick up the body and flop it over her shoulder like a sack of firewood. Then she threw the corpse into the ditch and onto the pile.

Approaching cautiously, he raised his visor a fraction. “You alright there, lady?”

The hooded woman paid no attention to him.

“Who are you?”

The woman stalked off and disappeared over a hill. Matthews stared at the fire, the flesh of men, women and children popping and hissing in the burning heat. The woman was returning with another body, that of a young boy slung over her shoulder. The boy was no older than ten, still with the backpack he had been wearing at the time of the explosions, now burnt to his back. The strong woman used two hands to swing the child’s body onto the mass grave.

“Hey, anyone home?”

She took large steps back from the edge of the ditch. For most of a minute, she stood staring down at the ground. Then she drew back her hood, unveiling her head, and acknowledged Matthews with a wraith
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like stare. And at that moment, as he caught sight of her, he saw something that made his blood run cold. One side of her face was missing and he could see the definitions of her skull. With her head low, she spoke to him softly. “We were all supposed to burn.”

It only took her three strides to reach the edge of the ditch where she leapt into the fire, cackling like a burning witch as the flames engulfed her human form, eating away at her life. Soon she was as dead as the pyramid of people below her.

Matthews’ heart lurched. “Fucking hell!”

The image of burning bodies and the anonymous cremator might have been the reason why Matthews forgot to close the elevator hatch on his return to the White Room. He didn’t know it yet, but that little slip of the mind was about to prove disastrous.

Inside the White Room, he refused to talk about what he’d seen, said nothing was wrong and that was the end of it, but everyone knew he had been affected by it. He was aware of the value of keeping the details of the mystery woman to himself. But for now, all was quiet. Faraday had her head buried between her knees. Sutcliffe and Hennessey sat beside each other on the bench, just thinking. Everyone was quiet with the same thoughts playing in their minds. Silence, no conversation, only thinking and Sutcliffe realised there had not been a single sound from outside in all the time they’d been in the White Room. He realised it because there was a sound now.

Thud…thud…thud
.

Sutcliffe and Hennessey both shot looks at the door. Faraday pulled her head out of her knees, convinced she’d heard something, and Matthews froze. Someone was out there, knocking. Who? A survivor? There were other sounds. Scratching on the metal door and a deep moan. There it was again.

Thud…thud…thud
.

“Keith!” said Faraday, jumping to her feet. “Thank God.”

The crew had unintentionally neglected to think about Keith Burch, mainly because there were so many other things to think about. But Sutcliffe and Matthews were vigilant, conscious to the fact that Burch’s oxygen supply would have expired over fourteen hours ago and he would have had to have taken off his helmet to breathe. That being the case, he would have inhaled radiation from the contaminated air. Though radiation sickness was not contagious or infectious, caring for someone with radiation sickness would be extremely difficult without the appropriate medicine or professional capability. The men approached the door with caution, as if the entire area was primed to explode. Sutcliffe released the lock at the top of the door, which he had fixed not thirty minutes earlier, and slowly pushed it open. The area in the lobby was too dark to see.

“Hello?”

He pushed the door open further.

“Hello, is anyone there? Keith, is that you?”

“Someone get the helmet,” Matthews ordered.

Faraday went to the corner of the room, collected the helmet and passed it to Sutcliffe, who lifted it up and steered the headlamps into the lobby. No one there. They had all heard it, the unmistakable sound of someone knocking on the door. He was about to step out of the White Room when, all of a sudden, a ghastly, malformed face appeared in the light, the black eyes of a genderless creature with blistered skin staring back at them, frightening the life out of both Sutcliffe and Matthews, whose reaction was to scoot a few steps back. Sutcliffe almost lost the helmet and just about managed to keep the headlamps on the monster’s face, which looked like an unfinished sculpture of clay with deep impressions and ridges in its melted skin. It snorted through its nose and mouth like a wild animal. Its clothing, ripped and burnt, hung off its injured frame in tatters. Sutcliffe looked down and saw a pistol in its hand. Reacting on impulse, he slammed the door in a startled flash of panic and bolted the lock. He went to the back of the room where Hennessey had pulled Faraday into a fearful crouch.