Paradigm (9781909490406) (22 page)

Directly in front of him, against the wall, was her body. As a single flicker of light floated down, it landed on the dull stare of the lifeless face of Lucia Webb-Davenport, sat propped upright against the wall next to a pile of shiny coins and a faded book. Her dark red hair was strewn with blood, her palms closed tightly around a deep puncture wound that had ruptured her stomach—at the centre of which was the cause: a black-and-orange rusted pair of scissors.

‘
I
t's gone
,' said Jonah. ‘It's almost all gone.'

They stood at the foot of what had once been the museum of natural history as a circle of crows cawed loudly from the parapets at the top. Most of the stonework on the outside of the building had crumbled around the edges; big lashes had zebra-striped the stone where torrents of water had poured down roofs in gushes on a daily basis, month after month. Pink streamers of light threaded themselves between the clouds, casting a psychedelic glow over the remains of the shattered city.

There was something so beautiful in the way the devastated cityscape basked in the sunrise and the shadowed depth of a skyline they hadn't even remembered that, as the ten of them sat there in their pristine white suits, they cried. Alice was silent but let the tears trickle down the inside of her helmet into the shoulders of her suit and stood with her back to the buildings and her face to the sky as the sun dried her cheeks. Jonah held his head in his hands, while Filip stood on part of a crumbled wall looking out at the road, shaking his head.

His voice echoed into her ear through the in-suit communication.

‘You all right, Davenport?' She looked over in his direction and nodded her head. Jonah lifted his head to watch the exchange between the two of them, unable to hear the words, then lowered it again onto his arms, hugging himself together tightly, teeth clenched.

‘I'll live,' said Alice quietly.

‘I know,' said Filip and held one hand out towards her.

The journey from the top deck of the Ship through the shaft and out into the bright light of the morning had been less ceremonial and far more straightforward than Alice had imagined.

It hadn't taken more than a couple of hours to ascend slowly—hand over hand—and, when she reached the round metal grate with its slightly worn rubber seal, she was almost disappointed that it was over. When Alice clicked open the manual combination, like a safe, the small circular door opened. As she popped out onto the floor of the room less than half a metre below and sat back watching the others tumbling down the tiny step, hysteria took over and she laughed continuously until her stomach ached and her cheeks burned.

V
ery little that
had been discussed underground as part of their training could have prepared them for that first morning. As they poured out of the Industry building to sit on the museum steps and watch the sunrise, Alice began to feel a bond with Filip, and at the same time realised that a distance was growing between her and Jonah. Everything felt different above ground and Kunstein had been right: things would change now, and there would be some very difficult decisions.

Delicate ribbons of pink glittered across the skyline, filtering in and out of what building remained in the distance.

‘I'm fine,' she whispered to Filip into the communicator and then walked over to where Jonah was sitting on a step, looking out into the silent road. Filip didn't respond but walked to a pile of rubble on the opposite edge of the museum where the others had gathered in a group. Alice could hear him humming gently through the communicator, a song that she hadn't heard for years that made her heart lift and fall.

The streets were strewn with washed-out cars, plastics and mounds of unidentifiable items. They looked like a bizarre form of art.

‘It's where the street lights were,' said Alice, tipping her head. Jonah looked at her.

‘What?'

‘When the wind gusted the water, and it was deep enough, everything gathered around the street lights and swirled around like a sink hole. Then it got sucked downwards by the current and made these…things. Look at the lines of them at the edges of the street. Everything has a pattern—even out here.'

They walked closer to the clump sculpture nearest to them. It was part smashed-up car, part rags and bones and the remainder contained what looked like the insides of a children's clothes store.

‘They sold curtains made of that stuff in Greenham's,' said Jonah, pointing to a speck of material preserved under crushed glass on what used to be the dashboard of the car. ‘I recognise the design.' He reached out his arm and pulled the tiny sliver of cloth and pressed it to the skin of his helmet cover.

‘What's going on between you and Filip?' he said quietly.

Alice felt her body freeze stiff.

‘Nothing,' she said. ‘Nothing at all.'

‘But it's a different nothing to what's going on between us,' said Jonah and let the piece of material flutter off into the soft wind, spinning like a sycamore helicopter back into the debris. A second later it had disappeared out of sight. Alice looked until she could see the rise of a tower block or two in the distance. The sight of one in particular gave her ugly butterflies in her stomach.

T
hey set
up a camp in the Industry building they had emerged from, down the street and directly opposite the museum. As Alice's team hauled the last of their supplies up the shaft and into the containment room, Filip's team secured the entry and exit points with steel plates and barricades. Around the walls of the containment room, a few floors from ground level, there were plastic-wrapped pull-down beds that were still in relatively good condition. In fact, in comparison to some of the other buildings, the one owned by the Industry was in excellent shape.

‘Is this the way we came in?' said Alice to Filip.

He nodded slowly. ‘I think we came in through the windows on the far side.'

‘Which must mean that the lift is on the top floor. We just need to reactivate it like Kunstein said so that they can send supplies from the main control room and we can send down anything that we need to.'

‘How do you do that directional thing? Your mind must be just a criss-cross of maps.'

‘I can find my way around,' said Alice, smiling.

‘You sure can,' said Filip and threw her one of his tight, crooked smiles.

W
hen they were done
, Alice and Filip gathered everyone into the containment room that they had spilled out into just an hour or so earlier. She looked across the eight faces in front of them, all now familiar from the briefing sessions that had been held on the Ship. There were the two industry workers, Grenfell and Walford, the oldest of the scouts. She and Filip had been allocated one per team. Alice had been offered Grenfell Jones, the least geeky-looking of the two but not by any considerable margin. He had half apologetically semi-bowed to Alice when formally introduced. There was something about him that made her sad but she welcomed him to the team warmly.

The others on her team she had chosen herself: Jayden Morris, one of the strongest and fittest on the Ship whose thick bulky muscles gleamed in the light; Quinn Delaney, a quiet mathematical genius who was always top of the resettlement and community modules. Alice had suspected that she'd been helping develop and programme the systems in the control room—Kunstein had all but told her as much. And then there was Jonah. Kunstein had expressed her reservations about Jonah—at times vehemently—but Alice had insisted, no,
demanded
, that Jonah be allowed to join her team.

‘I can only allow ten people in total and that includes you, Filip and two of our existing people,' Kunstein had reminded her. ‘You don't want to include any… dead wood.' Alice had looked at her with clear, dispassionate eyes.

‘Neither do I,' she had said. ‘Jonah comes with me for a reason.' And the decision was made.

I
t was still only
mid morning when they had completely secured the containment room as their base camp. Stuffed into the lockers disguised as wall panelling, just as Kunstein had described, were the weapons and ammunition. Most of them Alice left secured in their containers, coded with the detailed alphanumeric combinations that she and Filip had been schooled to remember. But she did take two handguns. The dull metal was cold and hard, the colour of an unforgiving night sky. She handed one to Filip and watched as he ran his finger down the barrel.

‘Hey, hot shot—threat to life emergencies only,' she said. ‘I know you were top of the class but remember what Kunstein said.' Filip nodded, slipping the gun into the holster around his waist.

‘We shouldn't have gone outside without them when we first arrived,' he said. ‘I remember Kunstein saying that too. We've got to stick to the script, Davenport. We might think we know the world up here but since we left, it's become a very different place.'

‘And I've become a very different person,' said Alice, slotting the gun into her holster.

A
fter their first
breakfast above ground, Filip locked down all the provisions and secured the sliding door that led to the shaft as Alice briefed the teams with what Kunstein had told her.

‘This first night will be the hardest,' she said. ‘Temperatures should be warm enough that we don't need the additional blankets stored here but it will
feel
different out here. We'll debrief before bed but I want everything prepared for either sleep or defence. When we return to base this evening, whatever we have come across today, those two things must be foremost on our minds. I am going to need one volunteer from each group to work on the base—uploading images, setting up communications, etc. Quinn—you're it from our team.' Quinn blinked, smiled and continued fusing the wiring together that she had been working on since they had arrived.

Filip pointed towards a bulky, sullen-looking girl with determined line of concentration painted across her face. Even the hair scraped back into a tight ponytail was under control. ‘And, Kelly,' he started, ‘you can be ours. Don't you be hassling Quinn, okay? You'll both have work to do.'

The girl flushed and shared an intimate glance with Quinn. There was something about some of the romances that had begun underground that made them deep and untouchable, unconditional even.

Alice continued with half a smile on her own face until the topic drifted into a bleak reiteration of the rules.

‘Today will be mostly about orientation and exploration before we start locking down the boundaries of the new community. There's going to be a pretty significant clean-up operation and we need to understand how to manage that. Quinn, we'll need some calculations over the next few days that can help us with the waste disposal metrics and whether we need to expand the perimeters.'

There was nodding in agreement and a short round of applause before Filip stood up to join Alice.

‘You have all been chosen for a reason,' he said, looking at each one of them. ‘For your skills and your vision and commitment—for who you are
and
what you will bring to this expedition.'

Alice glanced across at Jonah. He was leaning back in his chair with his body postured to the front in assumed engagement but with a gaze that was lost in the swirl of leaves that had gathered outside the window. It was the same look he'd had in the classroom where he'd looked outside through a window and at leaves that were completely imaginary. But now they were real and there was something hypnotically simple about the way they turned over chaotically in the breeze, dancing uncontrollably in a fluttering, loosely co-ordinated conga, line after line weaving in beautiful circles. She realised that Filip was still talking.

‘We will see things today that we never expected to see,' he said with a calm, simple resignation. ‘Things that will startle us and may disturb us. We have all been through the same training, have been given the same support and will have the same goal. As Alice has already said, today is about orientation but it is not about risks. Do everything in pairs and do not take any chances. The air is clear and everything within three miles is radiation-light but the suits will protect against any chemicals that might have spilled out from the buildings so, for now, keep them on. Treat the scenes with respect but try not to lose your heart in this city—nothing exists in the way it did before. And finally, and most importantly, if you encounter anyone else, remain calm. Sweeps have not shown any survivors but we need to remain vigilant. Remember; refer anyone to me or Alice and we'll engage in negotiation. Right, Alice?'

Alice was grateful she'd tuned back in with enough time to answer Filip with confidence. ‘Absolutely,' she said.

W
hile Filip took
his team east, Alice, Jonah, Jayden and Grenfell headed west across the city and towards the river. Alice paired herself with Jonah upfront while the other two followed them closely behind, measuring them pace for pace. The thick, black sludge that caked the streets squeaked in the warm of the sun under their feet against the swish of their protective suits as they squashed out any residual air from within the cracks in the mud. Pieces of buildings that had been shattered by the heavy rainwater lay spreadeagled across the pavement while others sat staunchly squat in the cool sunlight, windows smashed but otherwise erect.

‘Most of these will need to be destroyed,' said Alice. ‘They're rotten to the core.'

A
selection
of cars with cracked paint stood motionless in the roads, some on their sides and others on their roofs, one still with a laminated ‘For Sale' sign in the windscreen. Above them, a hawk circled in a lonely spiral, screeching petulantly as if desperate for them to look up. It spun around and around and then disappeared somewhere beyond the stone clay sky across the flood plain and into the dense safety of the woody copse that separated the housing estate from the river.

Every few blocks there was a shuffling sound that usually revealed itself to be little more than something insignificant discarded in the wind. At the corner of most intersections, there was a pile of human and animal matter; broken femurs, skulls, prosthetics, false teeth, jawbones, hipbones, jewellery, knuckles, tailbones, snouts and sockets. Crushed and wave-battered with no discernible features and none preserved in position. Muddled together they formed a delicately balanced installation of modern life until the current of a breeze rearranged them into a new format, a different adjustment. Alice watched as they sighed and settled like pre-historic sculptures. But it didn't make her feel sad. It didn't make her feel anything. Jonah linked her arm tightly and she smiled and returned his grip, the corners of her mouth just visible. Inside the mask, she watched as he breathed quickly, in-out-in-out-in-out.