“Bad?” he cried, looking up with a jolt. “Bad? We’re finished, Harding. It’s over.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean we’re fucking dead! Are you deaf?”
“Explain,” he demanded.
“Have you ever in your life respected a single chain of command?”
“No.”
“No?”
“No.”
“That’s right. Harding could always do a better job I bet. Harding is the man. Harding will get you through.” Teague went off down a rabbit warren of ideas, babbling to the point of losing coherency but never losing that southern accent or form of speech that had set him apart from everyone else, that he felt made him more of a man than lesser mortals. Alan let him go, let him wander in the dark until it was time to come back and when he did the tears were falling so freely that they made a glittering puddle of spent emotion on the polished surface of the table.
He sat back in the chair and gathered the bits of himself together before speaking again. When he did it was a hollow noise that came out of his mouth. Lifeless. Void.
“There was an exchange. North Korea into South Korea. I don’t know the full story; I only got the reports the other day from a fragment of data we picked up on some of the older equipment. Other countries were involved and it looks like the scale of the nuclear battle rapidly escalated.”
“How bad?” he asked.
“It wasn’t global annihilation but it was a jolly good ruckus by all accounts.”
Silence again. An all pervading silence. The implications had taken a seat in the board room and were smiling at them from across the table. They were the majority shareholders in the fate of the world and it began to look like they’d come to a decision.
“How long?” he asked.
“Less than 24 hours until the first of the dust cloud arrives. After that, no one knows. It’s never really happened before. Nuclear Winter? I don’t have the answers for you, Harding, not a single one. All I do know is that by tomorrow anyone not in shelter will be covered in radioactive particles. It’ll be in the water, the food, everything you touch. Then it’s illness and ultimately death.”
“How long have you known?”
“A few days. Before you say it-” He held up his hand. “Not enough time to do anything other than what I’ve done.”
“So the move? The plan to ship the supplies?”
“True. That was the plan, to join with another settlement. But we ran out of time.”
“Why?”
“Because that settlement is underground and has sealed itself shut now. There’s no hope of them letting us in. Protocol forbids it.”
“Protocol? Fuck protocol - they have to!” he cried, outraged. Teague sighed and offered him a pathetic smile, the same gesture you might offer an idiot.
“Harding - it’s too late. Sooner or later you have to come to terms with the fact that you cannot save the world. It’s too big a task for any one man, any group of people, perhaps even a Government.”
“You’re not even going to try?”
“We did, remember? No one saw the change in the wind. No one predicted the weather variables that brought that cloud here ahead of time. If I’d sent you out for the trucks, if we’d loaded them up with the survivors and driven there, you’d have exposed them to so much radiation that they’d have been dead before you arrived.”
“There has to be a way!”
“Don’t you think that I’ve thought of that? Don’t you see that I’ve been through every possible option right down to hand-picking the healthiest survivors and loading them up into the Rhinos to try? Do you see how desperate I am for a solution?”
“So why are we going? Why are you sending us out in the trucks?”
Here Teague paused and took a long, deep breath. He was at his end, Alan could see that. The man was broken and he had little left before he knew that death must come. He’d seen it before. In Longsteel. In the dark.
“You’re going to take all our supplies, all our personal notes and drive right up to that settlement and leave them there, outside their doors.”
“What?”
“Major Bryant managed to stock the bunker with enough equipment, supplies and fresh water to last him a good few years but when they finally emerge they’ll need the things only we have here. I agreed, given the hopelessness of our situation, to have those two Rhinos parked there, ready, for that day. It might just give them a fighting chance.”
Alan felt himself falling. It was a kind of free-fall of emotion that defied even his own mind to try and understand but left him with the only option a poor, fragile human being has when faced with insurmountable grief. Turning away from Teague he buried his face in his hands and wept. Not for himself. He knew there and then that the radiation wouldn’t kill him. It would kill those he loved instead. Take away everything he’d known and leave him with nothing. They were both selfless and selfish, contradictory tears that paved wet roads down his cheeks and lost themselves in his thick black beard.
“I saw a list once,” said Teague suddenly. “A list of 27 names. Volunteers.”
Alan looked up through unfocused eyes. That number cut through his grief with such precision that he couldn’t speak. “When Reb told me what she’d seen you do, it confirmed what I knew about Longsteel. Of course, I’d heard rumours through the ranks, but after the disaster we just assumed the place had been buried in rubble. Then Alan Harding shows up in camp without a scratch on him, a giant dog at his side and I made several connections.”
“You knew,” he managed to say. Teague gave a slow, sad nod.
“Yes I did. Is it true? You cannot die?”
“It’s true, as far as I’m aware.”
He smiled - this time it was real and filled with hope.
“The others?”
“After the disaster we stayed at Longsteel and held off against raiders. We couldn’t risk leaving so much equipment unguarded that we felt we had a duty to protect it. In the end we were starting to be overrun and so sealed the place shut. That’s when anyone left in the south came north to escape the wasteland.”
“Where are they now?”
Alan shrugged. “I don’t know. Most fled after that and I’ve not seen them since.”
“But you stayed.”
“Yes. I did.”
“Why?”
“It’s my home,” he lied. “It’s where I belong.” The real reason still lay in the laboratories in a small container - his last bit of hope that he clung to with all his strength, glad that he’d volunteered to be its protector.
Teague stood and looked out of the long black window again. Dawn was coming and both he and Alan knew that it would be his last. It charged the room with a despondent energy and etched itself in Alan’s mind for years to come, still seeing the brave relic of a man stood there; looking out with his hands clasped behind his back and dried tear tracks on those rough cheeks.
“You’ll do what I ask?” he said.
“Yes,” replied Alan. “I’ll get the trucks there.”
“Then what will you do?”
“I don’t know. Maybe the radiation will be the thing to finish me.”
“You don’t believe that and neither do I,” said Teague, laughing. “May I make a suggestion?”
“Go on.”
“If we survive this - and by ‘we’ I mean the royal ‘we’. If mankind can hold on then I don’t want what happened here to be forgotten. I want people to know that we made a stand. Some of us rose above the mediocre existence offered to us and tried to live for something bigger, tried to make a difference and laid down our lives for it. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” said Alan. “I think I do.”
There were no fond farewells that morning. There were no words. The three of them were escorted to the bunk house by two guards who stood over them like silent sentinels as they packed away their belongings into bergens and took apart the only home they’d known since the disaster.
The little shrines were sealed in plastic bags. The beds were folded up. Posters and trinkets were either left or taken down.
Neither Reb nor Gary realised that in the solitude of their private preparations that Alan took very little. His books, his little pieces of himself he left behind as they were. It was as if he was breaking away from one life in readiness for the next and he could take none of his former self with him. Indeed, as he looked at what he’d been carrying; a stained coffee mug, a little plastic toy of a monkey a survivor’s child had given him, some paperback books and the key to his flat, he felt that the time was right to make up his mind, one way or the other.
What Gary might have noticed, however, was the amount of warm clothing Alan packed into his bergen at the expense of two of his three water bottles. Extra shirts, extra jumpers, a coarse blanket, a bivvy bag, all wrapped in plastic and buried deep in his pack. He’d even taken out a large number of his foil packed ‘meals ready to eat’ and scattered the remnants across the bed.
Alan noticed him watching from across the bunk house and he softly shook his head, telling him that now was not the time for words or explanations.
The guards hurried them along as the sun crept up towards its ever shifting place in the sky. Thick, fat clouds of grey and black began to gather overhead and the scent of a storm, that odour of moisture that precipitated heavy rain, stung their noses as they walked boldly through the camp towards the waiting Rhinos.
No one spoke. Not even the camp stirred. There were people moving around the tents and shacks but when they saw the grim procession they just stood staring, saying nothing, silenced by the stony faces and the cold expressions of the guards. Rumours would begin an hour or so afterwards but by then the three of them would be far down the road and deaf to their whisperings. A short while later and the camp would be silenced forever.
Reb climbed into the same truck she’d brought back from the outpost and an unspoken precedent seemed to overpower them and cause Alan to resume his place with Gary in the other. Still not a single word passed their lips and as the guards stepped back to let them pass, the humming engine and the fan of the heater were the only sounds to be heard in the hot, stifling cabs.
Reb moved off first, heading directly for the open gates at a slow crawl. The lumbering machine, now made even heavier by its cargo, rocked on its wheels as she passed over the speed humps. Gary, cursing the thing as he tried to force the gearstick into first, finally managed to set off in her wake, his face set in a cold determination that never wavered as they drove on. It never altered when the guards smiled and waved at them. It remained fixed as if it were a carved image of its owner up until the camp disappeared from the rear view cameras and into memory. Then the stone visage cracked and crumbled and sobbed to itself in silence, never moving and never ceasing to drive onwards towards its final destination.
By mid-morning the sky had turned to a purple bruise that spread across the horizon and blackened the sun. It seemed to swirl and eddy as it hung there and as Alan watched it gather through the screen, Gary broke the hours of silence with a hoarse whisper.
“I was right, wasn’t I?”
The shattered fragments of silence held true for a moment more. Then Alan spoke.
“Sort of.”
“What does ‘sort of’ mean?”
“There was an exchange. Korea. Some others. The dust cloud-” Here he gestured to the spreading wound above. “Is on its way. Teague said he ran out of time.”
“So what the hell are we doing out here then?” It was Reb this time, listening in to the conversation through the open-mike system installed in the cabs.
“We’re to take the trucks to this other settlement and leave them there.”
“Leave them? Why?”
“Because this settlement is underground and it’s sealed shut now. They won’t let us in because of the radiation.”
“So what the hell are the trucks...?” Reb’s voice faltered. “Oh Jesus...”
“He’s sent us out here to deliver our supplies to this other settlement but we’re not going to be allowed in? What the fuck?” cried Gary. “What the hell are we supposed to do after that?”
“Die,” muttered Reb.
“That’s it!” roared Gary, stopping the truck and crunching the gearbox until he found reverse. “We’re going back.”
Alan reached over very slowly, placed his hand on Gary’s arm and shook his head. It was nothing. A small, insignificant gesture, but it stopped the hulking mass of steel and electronics in the middle of the road, dead.
For a moment they stared at each other - Gary with hot, molten rage, Alan with compassion but a steel determination to do what he was asked to do. Neither spoke but a million words passed silently between them.
“Guys - look!” said Reb.
Gary turned first, breaking the connection and stared at the screen and the horrors that’d materialised upon it. The clouds had finally burst, spilling forth small stones and ash and dust in a torrent that swept towards them, smashing down upon the cab like thousands of hammer blows, like breakers upon the shore until all sound was drowned out by the cacophony. Moll cowered in the foot well as the barrage continued. The cab swayed and the lights dimmed but worse perhaps than all this was the siren. It issued from the console and the glaring trefoil that appeared in the centre of the screen flashed continually as if to finally break their minds with the horrible truth they’d known all along. The wailing gave way to the monotone cackle of the Geiger counter as it mocked them in their tiny prisons, rising to lifeless fever pitch that condemned them where they sat.
Gary, his head in his hands, rested his body on the steering wheel and wept. Alan had nothing left. It was as if that decision had finally been made for him. The old life was gone. The self-sufficient gardener who’d volunteered for a medical test was no more. He’d died at the camp along with all the others and his remains, like theirs, was now pounded into mulch and consumed by radiation.
What was he now? He wondered as the nuclear storm raged around him. The answer to that lay years ahead of him, staring back at him from an unknown place in the future that his longevity had now put well out of his reach.
Finally, as the storm began to settle into a rhythmic tapping of smaller fragments on the cab, he believed he could begin to find out.
An hour or so later and they found the courage to drive on. Meanwhile, the sky above them continued to roll through constant shades of grey and black and purple as the ash cloud broiled and rolled beneath this violent, inverted ocean. It was as if the world were in agony, burned and still burning, and terrible blisters had formed on its surface, splitting open and spewing forth vile black fluid.
The ash and stone showers gave way to driving rain. Thick dirty globules pelted the ground and formed murky puddles. It filled the depressions made by the hail, attempting to smooth over the rough hammer marks it’d left behind like the earth were one great piece of wrought metal that had been worked on an anvil of its own making.
Moll slept through the worst of it, tucked into as small a shape as she could manage in the foot well beneath Alan’s feet. The Rhino had borne the brunt of it and now continued to trundle along at an even pace, grinding over stone and rock with its enormous wheels and steering smoothly around the wrecks of cars now made almost unrecognisable by the hail. Glass and metal alike had been crushed and smashed and pulverised into mounds of scrap and Alan wondered if it were possible that anyone would have survived it.
“I almost envy her,” said Gary, subdued and cold. “I wish I could just sleep through it and wake up on the other side.”
Alan said nothing. His thoughts were trying to drag him back to the camp, the shopping precinct which by now would have been razed to the ground. People dead. Women. Children. Friends. Anyone left alive would now be irradiated beyond any hope of living.
But he resisted. If he was to make it then he had to value his sanity more than life itself. His body would heal - it’d proven this time and ag
ain, but what about his mind? If he broke, if he gave in to the depression and the grief, would that heal as easily? If the next step was to be taken, how could he safeguard his mind?
He thought about this as he popped open a compartment and withdrew a kettle, looking for something, anything, to distract himself with for the time being.
“At least we can have a brew,” he said, plugging it into the dash and filling it with his own water.
“There’s always a plus side, eh?” said Gary.
He made two cups and handed one to him.
“Thanks,” said Gary.
“Least I can do. You’re the driver.”
“Speaking of which...” He leaned over and took an envelope from the glove box, passing it to him. “You’d better open it. They’re the co-ordinates I think.”
Alan looked at the neatly printed lettering on the front of the cheap, brown envelope before tearing open one side, taking out a slip of white paper and passing it to Gary. It was Teague’s delicate script and he looked at it for a moment before discarding it.
“Okay?” asked Alan.
“Yeah. I know where we’re going.”
“You do?”
“Yeah. Should take us about 6 hours at this speed. It’s near my Uncle’s place; he lived in a village not far from there. I know the way.”
“Do you want to take the lead?” asked Reb.
“Yeah, it’ll be easier now I think I’ve got my head around this shit-heap.”
When the road widened, Gary overtook and slowed down to allow her to resume her place in the line. As they passed each other, she toasted them with her coffee cup.
“At least you can smile,” said Gary.
“We have to, mate. Otherwise we won’t get there. We’ll turn around or do something crazy.”
“Like what? If anyone survived that storm then they won’t have much longer left to live anyway. Did you see the rad counter? It was almost off the scale.”
“Look,” she began. “The way I see it, we have coffee, plenty of food, an open road and a good 6 hour drive until we’re finished. We might as well enjoy our last day on earth.”
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