IMPACT (Book 1): A Post-Apocalyptic Tale (13 page)

He slipped another Dorito between his lips, incapable of participating in the drama that was unfolding outside. As surreal as Atlantis was, it had a way of reversing first impressions. One might have initially regarded this unimaginatively named subterranean hell hole as something out of a sci-fi novel. But, after a few months inside, it was the outside world that had receded into a haze of unlikelihood.

Without an illiterate commentary by some dick in an expensive suit, there was little to suggest these serene images were the preamble to the end of the world. It was as if America’s dubious love for drama had been exhausted once an actual threat was headed their way. During the build-up, there had been endless drama, when the calculations suggested it would simply be a near miss, a drive-by without any meaningful consequences. But once the horrible truth was revealed, all the fuss appeared to die down, like the morning after a small-town festivity.

At first a light entered the top-left corner of the screen. He stopped chewing. It was a vast fireball, its white blaze almost unbearable. He later wondered if what he saw was their own goddam rock – Colossus, bane of the Americas. There was no way to be certain, other than perhaps investing time into calculating the angle of incidence and the like. But he had no real interest in doing anything of the sort.

After the initial flair of light, the feed’s images had dimmed, as the webcam’s exposure mechanism tried to compensate for the extreme brightness. Suddenly, that grain field was projected into a thick digital night, the powerful shooting star wandering across it, propelled by what appeared to be unfathomable rage and hatred.

For an instant, Walscombe had admired the long, shiny tail it left in its wake, momentarily feeling moved.

Then the image had plummeted to black.

Walscombe started chewing again.

* * *

It was a weird morning.

Walscombe had walked to the mess hall to have breakfast. The usual walk along the corridors, the usual food, the usual company sitting at the usual table. Except—

Don wasn’t there. Walscombe almost dropped his tray and the food he’d picked from the table Jeff unwaveringly insisted on laying out for them.

Don late? It was unheard of. This was a guy who insisted on maintaining a strict adherence to the pre-impact Atlantis timetable no matter what (clearly a Sisyphean effort, as Walscombe saw it).

Jeff raised his melancholic eyes towards Walscombe’s and read the surprise in them.

“I know,” he said, “I tried his compad – nothing. So I went over to his room and tried knocking–” Jeff paused, taking a sip of the liquid shit they had instead of coffee, “–after a while, he replied. Said he’d be right with us.”

Walscombe shrugged and took a seat opposite the quiet technician.

“So how are things?” asked Jeff.

“I’ve completely run out of imagination, so it’s getting harder and harder to jerk off,” he replied with a smirk. He enjoyed the ill-concealed irritation on Jeff’s face every time he talked like that. Just as the other man was about to let it go, he casually added, “Wish we had some porn lying around, an old-fashioned mag. I should go through the dorms again at some point.” Walscombe popped a cookie into his mouth, savouring the scandalized twitch of Jeff’s lips.

This was unfair. He actually liked Jeff. He was smart, reserved, and interrupted his chess games only if he really had to, unlike Don. But this small, guilty pleasure was difficult to give up.

“He’s never done this before,” Jeff said thoughtfully. “Be late, I mean.”

Walscombe feigned indifference, but he did think this might actually be a cause for concern. It definitely was unlike Don to be late. On the other hand, it was pleasant to sit and have breakfast without him.

“It’s OK, Jeff. Hey, want some more of these disgusting cookies?” he asked as he stood and walked towards the counter again. Jeff shook his head, still ruminating over Don’s lateness.

“Yeah, I know. They suck.” Walscombe whistled as he grabbed a handful of them.

He heard Don enter the room.

“‘Morning, Major,” he said, wondering whether Don would ever pick up on the sarcasm in his voice when he called him that. “Would you like–”

He paused.

Don was walking towards the table, wearing his full uniform as usual and, as always, expecting one of them to deliver his breakfast. But today his face was covered in shaving cream.

“Good morning, gentlemen,” said Don as he took his seat. His voice was absolutely normal. “I’m sorry for being late. Glad to see you started without me.”

Jeff looked at Walscombe. The quizzical contortion of the tech’s eyebrows almost made him burst out laughing.

“I’d rather have tea, Walscombe, this morning, please,” Don said to him.

“Ah–” he was uncertain how to approach this. It was worrying, but, to be honest, it was also rather entertaining. “– yeah. Sure, Major.”

He’s freaking lost it
, he thought, as he poured the brown sludge into a plastic cup.
Donnie Downer has lost his marbles
.

He walked back to the table and lay the cup in front of the Major. He then shot a look at Jeff, who looked so bewildered that Walscombe feared Don might freak out if he noticed it. (
Freak out
more,
you mean
, Walscombe said to himself.) Jeff cleared his throat, concentrating on his breakfast.

Walscombe sat down, doing his best to control his own expression, but he couldn’t help throwing glances at the head of the table where Don was staring down at his cup of tea, lost in thought.

The three men sat in silence. Walscombe knew he should have seen this coming. The man was clearly insane, always had been. How else to explain his fixation with running Atlantis as if nothing had happened? Like there still was a government, a president, a world out there who gave a fuck about the place.

Don ran his fingers through his neatly cropped hair. In doing so, he left a long white smudge of shaving cream along his temple. He looked up at them, with that splattered trail of foamy soap wobbling as he said, “Eat up, gentlemen. There’s lots to do, as usual.”

Walscombe thought his stomach might burst as he tried to contain his laughter.

* * *

Much to Walscombe’s annoyance, Ivan opened with a Sicilian Defence, moving the c pawn to the d4 square. He responded with a Hungarian Variation, which he often did when his opponent decided to go that route, and distractedly wondered what Don was up to. After breakfast, Don had wandered around the base, disappearing down one of Atlantis’s labyrinthine corridors.

Despite his initial amusement, he felt slightly unsettled by the whole issue. Especially given the fact that Don was, after all, a dangerous man. Fit, muscular, and constantly armed with his service pistol, he might realistically pose a threat if his sanity was gone for good.

[email protected]> You’re slow today, Comrade.

Ivan’s chat message appeared on the screen, interrupting Walscombe’s thoughts.

[email protected]> Are my advanced chess tactics confusing you, capitalist scum?

He smiled.

[email protected]> Don’t flatter yourself, ruskie. Just busy with a few things, over here in the land of the free.

He concentrated on the game again, his eyes floating above the chess pieces neatly laid out in front of him. When he bought this set on EBay, almost three years ago, he never would have guessed how important it was to become in his daily life. Then again, he never could have guessed the world was only a couple of years away from total destruction.

As he considered his next move, he heard Jeff’s voice, loaded with trembling hysteria, call out to him. “Walscombe!”

He turned to the door, expecting to see Jeff with a big gunshot wound from Don’s pistol, or something equally as appalling. But he stood, uninjured and wide-eyed, at his door, panting like crazy. He’d obviously ran all the way to Walscombe’s room.

“You
have
to see this,” Jeff said, the words heavy and breathless.

“See what?”

These interruptions generally frustrated him, but the anxious note in Jeff’s voice combined with the whole Don issue made him genuinely curious.

“The CCTV!” said Jeff as if this explained everything.

Walscombe turned to the three small security feed monitors in a corner of his room. They were pointed to the endless rows of nuclear missiles in the storage hangers, and Walscombe only turned them on for a few minutes a day as he went through his safety checks. Today, he’d forgotten to switch them off.

Nothing odd there. Just the usual, boring images.

“What’s wrong with them?” Walscombe asked.

“Not
those
,” Jeff replied. “The ones in S and S – come and see.” Jeff was already setting off, his whole body twitching with concern.

Normally, Walscombe would have dismissed such an invitation, especially when busy playing chess. But not today.

He quickly tapped a message on his keyboard.

[email protected]> Ivan, Gotta go. Think I’ll be back soon, but it might take me a while.

Walscombe stood up. As he was about to leave the room, Ivan’s reply came in.

[email protected]> Off to consult ‘Playing Chess for Dummies’ again?

I wish
, he thought. He was inexplicably nervous, like walking out that door and following Jeff could lead him to darker places than Security and Surveillance.

“Come on!” came Jeff’s voice from the corridor.

Despite his concerns, Walscombe hurried after him.

* * *

Security and Surveillance was a small monitoring station on level 3, crammed with CCTV screens that received feeds from cameras along the perimeter, on ground level, and from a number of Atlantis’s inner corridors. It monitored all entrances and exits for vehicles, personnel, and visitors. S and S had been manned by a small team of five or six people who’s names Walscombe had never bothered learning.

He was finding it difficult to keep up with Jeff. He’d never seen him so nervous.

“What were you doing up in S and S?” he asked.

Between pants, Jeff replied, “I… well, sometimes I like to go up there, and read. It’s really quiet. I know
everywhere
is quiet, but the
quality
of the silence there–” he waved his hand, as if this had nothing to do with anything. “Anyway, I got this crazy idea that Don had decided to leave. To go outside. So I went to check. I haven’t seen him all day, you know–”

Walscombe nodded. Neither had he, but this wasn’t necessarily out of the ordinary.

“And? Did he?”

“No–” said Jeff as they finally entered the small office. His body was almost shaking now as they crossed the room, heading for the CCTV monitors. “I mean, he might have, I don’t know. But I didn’t see him on the screens.”

“So?”

Jeff was standing in front of the monitors that displayed images from the north side of the base. They were labelled EXT.N.1 through EXT.N.8. “Thing is, I didn’t see Don, but I saw this…”

He stepped to the side, allowing Walscombe to see for himself.

And there, replicated in those rectangular screens, was the wasteland that surrounded Atlantis on ground level. Each of the images providing a different perspective of the same uninspiring view, one that the impact of Colossus had barely made more desolate. Immutable, unchangeable, fixed desolation which was constantly guarded by the electronic eyes of the cameras. It was like listening in on a conversation in which demented men were constantly providing their dull view on nothing at all.

“What, Jeff, I can’t–”

The other man rested his trembling finger on a corner of one of the monitors.

Walscombe leaned forwards, holding his breath as his sight focused on that small portion of the screen.

A colourless, pixelated shape was moving. A human shape. And it was waving towards them, arms outstretched and desperately signalling its presence.

Jeff looked at him, his eyes suddenly large and bulging.

“There’s someone
out there
, Walscombe.”

Adrian was beginning to lose hope.

Here they were, in England, just a few miles from Bately, after months of tiring travels and more dangerous encounters than he cared to remember. And yet, they were lost.

Every step they took might be leading them farther away from his aunt’s house, closer to some unknown danger. And there were lots of those out there.

It wasn’t just the meteorwraiths and the other men (it was almost always the men) that travelled the land, threatening, stealing, killing, and terrorising. It was also the creepy people like the guy on the boat. Or the young man and his dead wife–

“Ady, are you tired?” Alice asked.

“Yes, I am,” he replied. It was true. Their steady pace, fuelled by his desire to put as much space as possible between them and that sad, horrid house had slowed to a weary dragging of their feet across the muddy soil. They couldn’t keep walking and the sun beyond the clouds was setting. It was getting cold and dark. It was time to find a suitable place to spend the night.

We’re so close
, he told himself, clenching his fists in exasperation.
So damn close
.

“Let’s go there,” said Alice, pointing towards a copse, the curved branches of its trees mingling and resting upon one another like tired elderly travellers pausing to regain their strength.

“It’s not quite night yet, but I think we should try and sleep, Ady,” she said, gesturing to the thickening mist around them. “Anyway, we can hardly see where we’re going.”

Adrian nodded.
We don’t even know
where
we’re going.
.

“Looks all right,” he said.

The two children lay their things at the centre of the small clearing below the branches, and began the familiar routine of preparing for the night. They each drew their own sleeping bag from their weathered backpacks, and unfolded them, carefully positioning them on top of the sheets of cardboard they had found somewhere along the way. Then they gathered branches and leaves, whatever they could find to help conceal their position. It had been tiring, at first, but they were now used to it, proceeding through each step efficiently.