IMPACT (Book 1): A Post-Apocalyptic Tale (6 page)

Bill drew a deep breath. “I’ll need to give this some thought. Plan the logistics, you know.” The others nodded. “I’ll get back to you about this tomorrow.”

“All right then,” said Ms. Brand, standing. She started collecting the tea cups as the others rose.

“Thank you again, Marge. The tea was fantastic,” said Moore, handing her his own cup. Ms. Brand blushed.

“I’m sure we’re all very happy to have you here, Mr. Moore.”

Sean nervously cleared his throat again.

Not quite all of us
, thought Paul.

* * *

They stood outside on the school’s doorstep and said their goodbyes.

Sean scuttled off almost immediately with a quick, awkward wave of a hand, and disappeared into the night, his hood raised.

One by one, they gradually all headed home, until only Catherine, Edward, and Paul were left standing there.

“It was nice to see a new face in Church, Mr. Moore,” said Paul, his words condensing in white puffs of vapour. “There are very few willing to listen to the Word of the Lord, nowadays.”

“Oh,” Edward was slightly embarrassed. “I’m actually agnostic, Father.” Catherine looked at him, with a faint smile. Paul knew she, too, was an agnostic – or perhaps an atheist. “We were there ‘cause Mathew wanted to pop in. His mother, you see…” Moore just let the words hang there, before moving on with a vague gesture of his hand. “We’d just arrived, and I didn’t want to leave him alone.”

“Oh, I see,” said Paul.

“I hope I haven’t offended you, Father.”

“Please, call me Paul. And no – you haven’t. But do let Mathew know he’s welcome to come by any time he likes. And you too, of course.”

“Thank you, Father. And please, both of you, call me Edward.”

“Where are you staying?” asked Catherine.

“Oh, we found an abandoned house, just north of the castle. Stunning view. We just set up camp there, I hope it’s OK.”

“Absolutely,” she said. “If it was empty, that’s fine.”

A slight, embarrassed silence fell on the three of them.

“I’ll be off then,” said Catherine. “It was nice meeting you, Edward.” She smiled and extended a gloved hand. They shook, and Paul wondered whether Moore was aware of her attraction towards him. If he was, he didn’t show it.

“Nice meeting you, too. All of you.”

They each waved, and ventured off in different directions, across Bately’s deserted streets.

As Paul walked past Angus’s house, he heard a faint wailing sound coming from behind the drawn curtains.

Atlantis was to be his tomb.

Walscombe had known this the instant the news had come through about the failed attempts at diverting the meteorites’ trajectories. He had laughed when he heard that the largest of the three rocks, Colossus, was headed straight for the US of A. Just his luck.

He had watched with detached, almost scientific interest as the concealed, hyper-regimented world of the facility rapidly fell apart. It happened within a matter of hours. Soldiers, researchers, scientists, technicians – all weeping like toddlers. Not only weeping, in fact. Many lost it all together. He could still vividly recall the image of a Colonel in the cafeteria who had sat quietly, watching the updates roll in on the screens and then, with no warning whatsoever, had simply smashed the glass he had been drinking from, neatly collected all its fragments but one, and swallowed them. With that single remaining fragment, he sliced his wrists open. Then he had sat upright, staring blindly ahead, oblivious to the chaos around him, until he flopped, lifeless, on the cold floors of Atlantis.

Hierarchy collapsed almost immediately. Officers shouted orders, red-faced and shaking, while the swirling mass of people ignored them completely. Walscombe had found these specific high-ranking individuals particularly interesting. Their desperate calls for order and rationality in the face of the imminent, absolute disaster they (and the whole world with them) were about to face, had the somewhat opposite effect of making them appear utterly and totally insane.

And yet, Walscombe too had panicked. No use denying it. Although panic, in him, was little more than a negligible increase of the heart rate, and a slight disruption of his logical reasoning. He had stood motionless, as hundreds of his colleagues and co-workers fled towards the upper levels, each carrying whatever belongings they had managed to gather. None of which would ever help them survive, or would ever prove to be of any use after the impact of a meteorite the size of Colossus.

Walscombe had stumbled alongside the powerful torrent of human bodies, not quite knowing what to do.

“The fuck are you doing, man?” someone had asked. He turned around and found Cliff, a senior technician he’d occasionally had a drink with, at Bob’s Bistro & Lounge, in town. Cliff was carrying a bundle of creased clothes, a gas mask, and a backpack overflowing with odds and ends. Cliff was on his way out with all the others.

“What?” Walscombe had asked.

“Get the fuck out of here! Come
on!
”

He had actually considered this for an instant, before coming to a surprising conclusion.
I have nowhere to go
, he had thought. And it was true. No family, no friends he could honestly say he cared about (if there had been any, he’d lost touch with them years before, in any case), and no woman in his life.

This, of course, was by design. The selection process that had lead him to become Chief Safety Officer of this nuclear hell hole was aimed at limiting the chances of appointing anyone who might waiver or fail to comply should orders come through from up top. Having emotional ties was an issue when your responsibility was launching a devastating nuclear attack that could lead to the death of millions of people and, if anyone was left to fight, would result in war.

I have nowhere to go. And guess what? I don’t care
.

In the seconds before replying to Cliff, Walscombe made the decision that would, ultimately, prolong his life far beyond that of most of those who were now fleeing.

“I’m staying,” he had said.

“W-
what
?”

“Yes, Cliff. I’m staying here.”

The other man had obviously been in a hurry to leave, but his concern – which Walscombe had found rather touching, really – made him hesitate.

“Are… are you sure?”

“Yeah. Yeah, really. You go, Cliff.”

“Well,” Cliff said, “maybe things won’t be as bad as they say, right? Maybe, I’ll see you out of here, when things settle down.”

“Yes. Exactly.”

Cliff, who Walscombe believed was as good a man as they come, had awkwardly extended an arm and shook his hand. For an instant, Walscombe feared that he might actually hug him. Luckily, it didn’t happen. Cliff nodded a manly good-bye, and ran off with the rest of them. Walscombe, of course, never saw him again.

Of the ten who had remained, only he and Major Donald White had stayed voluntarily. The others had just ended up stuck there. Then, news came through of what had happened outside after Colossus. And suddenly, they were grateful.

That didn’t prevent seven of them from committing suicide though. The endless days inside the cramped, sunless facility caught up with them, and they simply couldn’t face it any longer.

Walscombe, Don, and Jeff had reserved a special room for the bodies. At first, with only one dead, they hadn’t realised that a larger space would be required. After they found the third corpse hanging from the ceiling, they’d had to relocate them all. That hadn’t been a particularly enjoyable day. They carried them, one by one, to one of the meeting rooms. Walscombe had felt an unfamiliar fear of death as he struggled along the corridors, carrying Lieutenant Chris Hawthorne on his shoulder, the dead man’s feet dangling in front of his nose. He sometimes thought he could still smell the foul stench of their rotting bodies.

Then a slightly surreal daily routine had set in. He, Don, and Jeff would have breakfast in the cafeteria. They had three years’ worth of disappointing food supplies stockpiled. Once every couple of days, Don would call a meeting in which they (but mostly he) discussed an interminable series of pointless matters. And, after a few maintenance tasks that kept them busy throughout the afternoon, they each retreated to their uneventful personal lives beneath the surface before meeting for dinner.

It had gone on for months. And months. Until, finally, Walscombe too decided it was time to throw in the towel. There were only so many days he was willing to spend attending the needs of a useless top-secret nuclear weapons facility, reading the same novels over and over again, and trying to contain his irritation with the other two survivors. There was no one to keep the secret from for a start. The novels were fucking awful. And conversation with Don and Jeff was almost enough to drive anyone to suicide, even without the help of Colossus and company.

That was when it first happened.

He was standing there, methodically checking whether the knot that would eventually break his neck and suffocate him was strong enough, when the message arrived.

It wasn’t the first inbound online communication they had received of course, but even those had ceased weeks before that. He suspected that a few hacker whiz kids around the world had managed to get online somehow, but he had neither the technical skills nor the will to keep trying himself. He’d repeatedly tried pinging the military servers they’d previously communicated with, but gave up after the first few weeks. Who cared, after all? His mind was made up.

But, there it was – a message.

For a second, he was mildly irritated. He’d meticulously planned his suicide, and the disruption of a carefully planned procedure was one of those things he found particularly irritating. Yes, he was going to do himself in and was wearing his best remaining suit for the occasion. Now, here came this communication, rudely interfering with his plans.

He had leaned towards the screen. There was Ivan’s first message:

[email protected]> Is anyone there?

And, just as Walscombe’s eyes had lingered on that simple, but extraordinary question, came the second:

[email protected]> And, if so, do you play chess?

“What are you doing here?” asked the man behind the rifle.

He wore a green raincoat and must’ve been in his sixties, although Alice found it hard to tell with the adults. She considered reaching out for Adrian’s hand, but the dark hole of the rifle’s muzzle held her still, as if hypnotized. Their death could creep out of that small, circular opening any second. Her mind only faintly registered the fact he was speaking English.

They both just stood there, incapable of speaking.

The man shifted his gaze to the massacre taking place on the beach, where the men in the black uniforms continued gunning down the scavengers. The gunshots pierced the air around them relentlessly.

The man swallowed and Alice read fear in his eyes. He seemed to be wrestling with some internal decision he was finding hard to make.

“Shit,” the man said and bit his lip. Then, after a second, he lowered his rifle. “Keep down. Follow me.” Without waiting, he turned his back to them and started walking away. Adrian looked at her. A single drop of sweat was slowly travelling down his earth-stained temple, leaving a trail of almost perfectly clean white skin behind it.

He motioned towards the man, the frown in his eyebrows asking her if they should follow. She watched the hunched figure disappearing among the high grass, and – for the hundredth time since all this began – felt the awful sense grief at not being able to trust anyone in the world any more.

Adults had once been protective, generous. Her parents (
Don’t DON’T don’t think about them now
, she told herself), her relatives, their colleagues from work. Everyone had always smiled and asked her sweet, simple questions. They had lived in a world close, but separate from hers, and the overlap was one of love and gentleness. That’s what she had grown to expect. They were adults, she was a child and that’s just how things worked.

Now, well, now adults had
changed
. They scuttled around, with hostile faces and eyes wide open, almost as afraid as she and Adrian were. And those that weren’t afraid, they were dangerous.

The shots from the beach stopped. Adrian and Alice both turned, and saw those mysterious men in their evil uniforms standing still among the scattered dead bodies of the scavengers.

“Let’s go,” said Alice. Anywhere was better than close to those men.

They ducked low and tried to catch up with the man in the raincoat before he got too far.

* * *

The man turned, from time to time, to check whether they were still there. He didn’t seem particularly happy that they were.

He held his rifle with one hand, using the other to wade his way through the tall grass stalks that grew along that stretch of the beach. For a while, they had heard the voices of the men in the black uniforms somewhere behind them, but they’d faded to little more than whispers. After a while, they vanished all together.

Adrian watched the man’s boots ahead of him sink in the muddy ground as they crawled. He didn’t smell good, and the boy noticed the grey hair on the back of his head grew in greasy knots along his neck. Adrian felt for the butcher’s knife hidden beneath his jacket. There it was, ready to be drawn out if necessary.

“Wait here,” the man said, stopping abruptly. They were close to the beach. He had led them westwards for about a mile or so, then followed a soft curve that had brought them close to the water again.

He stood straight, peering above the grass, scanning the view for something. Then he pushed through the green stalks, and disappeared beyond them.

They waited, in silence, while the rumble of the Channel waters engulfed them. The wind picked up again, and the overgrowth surrounding them curved and swayed. To the children, it suddenly felt like the whole world were tilting over.

The man was back.

“Come,” he said, and turned back. Once again, they followed.

They stepped out onto the beach where a modest fishing boat was fastened to a small mooring. Waves rocked and lapped at the vessel’s hull where fading letters spelled out
Elaine
, the evanescent reminder of someone long gone.