The Brink

by Pass, Martyn J.

  “I guess so,” he replied.

  “In 6 hours I intend to do my duty and go and join my family. At least we can decide that much for ourselves, it’s more than the rest of the world got. There are a heck of a lot of people who woke up this morning and didn’t know it would be their last day on earth.”

  “That’s true,” said Alan.

  “It just feels like we never got a break, you know?” said Gary. “We barely survived the Panic, a single Russian scientist prevented a world-wide plague and now, just as the human race gets back on its feet, the sun decides to take a holiday and cripple the entire planet. It’s like we’re always being tested, you know? Like there’s some celestial gym instructor up in the sky, telling us to do another set before giving us a break.”

  “Wow,” laughed Reb. “That’s almost spiritual, pal.”

  “I know,” he replied. “Call me bloody Ghandi.”

  “What happens now though?” asked Alan. “Is there any hope for these people we’re leaving the supplies for?”

  Gary shrugged. “It’s all theory but I remember studying this in basic. Nuclear winter, effects of fallout, that sort of thing. Other than small examples like Nagasaki and Hiroshima, we’ve never come close to understanding what a global conflict might do to the planet.”

  He took a sip from his coffee and settled in to talk about something he knew, something he was happy to share with him if it meant he didn’t have to focus on the next few hours. Alan was happy to listen - more than Gary could know.

  “What will happen now - in theory - is that there’ll be some serious temperature changes around the world. I don’t know the exact science, but the dust the explosions have thrown up, plus any firestorms that have added to it, will reduce the amount of heat we’re getting from the sun. This could last up to a year or so, maybe longer. Crops will suffer, obviously and growing stuff in irradiated soil isn’t going to go so well.”

  “We’ll be back where we were when the disaster happened,” said Reb.

  “Yeah - but without the skills and people we had back then to survive. Don’t forget that we still had a government. Now...”

  “I don’t envy those guys in the bunker,” said Reb.

  “Well, we’ll be giving them a fighting chance. It all makes sense now.”

  “What does?” asked Alan.

  “I saw some of the cargo back there when they were loading up. Some of it seemed really odd until today. He must have known all this was coming, but I don’t think even Teague saw how bad it was going to be.”

  “No one could have predicted this,” said Reb.

  “Most of the middle east must be gone now. There must have been one hell of an exchange to cause this much shit to be thrown up. I only hope it’s settled before they come out of that bunker. Then they’ve got to face the radiation. They’ll be eating it. Breathing it. Drinking it.”

  Gary shook his head and fell into silence as their journey continued with very little to mark it. The road, strewn with stone and ash, was easily travelled in the Rhinos but occasionally they would come across scenes of particular carnage - a scavenger party caught out in the open, pulverised into bloody piles and mangled vehicles, a fallen building that blocked most of the motorway, miles of flattened forests and the trees stripped of anything green.

  But they passed on, chatting and drinking a seemingly endless supply of coffee as if the world was as it had been, as if their journey were just a road trip of friends and their destination some holiday in a far off, sunny continent. The mood never dropped and they never spoke of the end. It was all memories and jokes and stories, the basic stuff that had kept them alive through the multitude of sorrows and would keep them until the very end.

  But the end did come and it bore the face of a battered, forgotten building located in the centre of a business estate and surrounded by the remnants of a wire fence. It had suffered during the storm and a great many of the surrounding structures had collapsed in on themselves, scarring the road and making the Rhinos work hard to clamber over the debris.

  In the end they pulled up outside the entrance and saw, to their pleasure and their grief, that someone had gone to the effort of painting the words ‘THANK YOU” on the brickwork and that they’d survived in bold yellow characters in spite of the scouring rain.

  Gary, wiping his eyes as he looked at the wall, smiled.

  “I appreciate that,” he muttered, turning off the engine and settling back in his chair.

  “This is it then,” said Reb.

  “This is it.”

  They stared out at the place, perhaps with the smallest amount of hope that the doors might open to welcome them, that the rad counter would fall to a safe, background level, and that they might be given a last minute stay of execution. But it was not to be. In fact, the cackling intensified as if somehow the radiated punch line had gotten more humorous, more comical and the counter was matching it, laugh for laugh. Alan reached over and turned it off, plunging the cab into silence.

  They waited like that for half an hour. Outside the rain continued to fall and it filled up any crevice, any container and any hollow with its black, oily poison, never letting up and never halting for a second.

  “Teague gave us plenty of food and water,” said Reb.

  “He did,” replied Gary. “But that’s not for me. I’ve done what I came here to do and I’m not stretching it out any longer than I have to. That’s not my way.”

  “So we’re agreed?” she said and Alan looked at Gary, confused, until he produced a small parcel from his pocket and unwrapped it, setting two blue pills on the dashboard next to their empty cups.

  “How about one more brew for the road before we go?” he asked. Alan, cut to the heart, nodded and set the kettle boiling again. It seemed to take moments when he wanted it to take hours, days even, but before he knew it he was pouring the water out and handing it to Gary.

  “You’re not particularly religious, are you?” he asked him.

  “Not really,” replied Alan.

  “I’ve had these pills for weeks now. It started when the patrols began getting harder, more risky, and I realised that the chances of us getting captured were growing. I didn’t want to be tortured, or worse, so I managed to get these from Smythe. One pill and boom - you’re asleep and gone in minutes. When Teague told us to pack up, never to come back, I grabbed my stash and gave one to Reb, keeping one for you too. If you want it.”

  “Thanks,” he said.

  “I just wish we weren’t going to rot here for when they come out of that bunker. I can’t help but feel shame when I think of someone having to drag my corpse out of this cab and bury it.”

  They drank in silence then, each lost in their own thoughts and before they knew it, the cups were almost empty and their time was finally up.

  “It’s been an honour,” said Reb. “At least we’ve done some good with our time.”

  “That’s true,” said Gary, taking up the pill. Alan felt like he was dying already, like his heart couldn’t take any more and would simply stop beating at any minute. But he didn’t reach out for the pill. He couldn’t, not even as a gesture to Gary knowing that it wouldn’t kill him. To Alan, that pill symbolised the end of hope. If he even so much as picked it up he knew that it’d be over for him, his mind would accept defeat and break. He had to stand against everything it signified if he wanted to face the years ahead.

  Without another word, Gary swallowed the pill. He lay back in the chair, closed his eyes and left Alan’s scarred, broken world forever.

  8

  He lost track of time as he sat there, alone but for Moll, with the persistent rain beating down on the ground outside the cab of the giant, hulking Rhino. Reb and Gary were gone. There were no signs of life in the building ahead and nothing to be seen in the cameras that stared out around the vehicle in all directions. The sky continued to darken and the light began to fade even though it was only mid-afternoon and a distant roll of thunder sounded some way off to th
e north.

  It was Moll who shook him from his waking dream, pushing her cold wet nose against his face and pawing at the cab door to get out. There was no hesitation, his mind was far off somewhere, and he opened the door for her, letting her leap down to the ground and into the rain where she instantly squatted to relieve herself.

  A siren sounded inside the cab which finally brought him back to himself. Reaching over, he turned off the entire console and killed the power before unpacking his bergen onto the seat next to him.

  He never looked at Gary’s empty body once while he put on the extra clothing he’d brought with him. It was as if he’d never been there, never sat there talking to him, never died there. Hat, scarf, gloves, goggles, thick jumper, long winter overcoat, all these he put on, layer after layer until the bag was empty. Then, taking a smaller ammunition bag that he’d stuffed into the bottom of the bergen, he began to fill it with the last of the coffee rations and a single bottle of water in an aluminium container. The bag was already filled with bits and pieces he thought he might need, but there was no food, nothing useless to him, no dead weight. He was shedding the past, casting off anything associated with it and leaving it with the bodies of the dead. Even the XC10 was left behind with its heavy frame and weighty ammunition rig.

  When he was ready, he slung the satchel across his chest and finally looked at Gary through the thick lenses of his goggles, remembering what he’d said to him. He told himself that it had to start there and then, that the path was there in front of him and this was just another step. Like the pill, his future balanced on the brink. Choose one way or choose the other, but there’d be no turning back.

  He reached across the cab and, taking the collar of his jacket in both hands, dragged Gary’s remains to the open door and out into what little daylight remained.

  The road south lay before him like ribbon of broken stone that wound its way through a series of hills and valleys along to the coast to where the devastation wrought by the storm was some of the worst he’d ever seen. Entire ships had been flung, as if by an enormous hand, into the local villages, flattening whole streets and tearing through buildings that had stood there for over 100 years. Great fishing vessels lay belly-up in the ruins of a town hall and one had even managed to land vertically, its stern pointing to the sky almost plumb-line straight. All this carnage was washed in great waves that came crashing down well beyond any sea-defences, smothering the ruins in salt water as if the ocean were shedding tears for its loss.

  Alan and Moll walked steadily onwards, giving such places as wide a berth as they felt necessary and forever feeling the full weight of the rain upon them as it continued to fall in steady, rhythmic bursts. The darkness fell around them yet on they went, their way often being lit by bright flashes of lightening on the horizon and their ears being drawn to the grumbling, rolling calls of distant thunder as the compass continually pointed the way south.

  What his intention in going that way was, not even he knew, though he suspected that the pull of Fort Longsteel was there somewhere, calling to him, reminding him of what was buried there and still under his protection. What also played at the back of his mind was the hope that some of the other volunteers - people like him, might begin to drift back there, perhaps come together to work out how best to help any survivors there might be still lurking in the ruins, still alive despite the radiation.

  Days quickly turned into weeks. On and on the road went and not once did they see a single sign of any person - living or dead. It was if they’d been taken away in the night, as if there’d never been a human race and that he was perhaps the only one to have ever lived or still lived in that bleak wilderness.

  Even the landscape began to change as the temperature dropped and the poisonous ash found its way into every nook and corner, every crevice and crack until it choked the life from anything green, anything lush and verdant until only barren, brittle sticks poked up from the ground, nothing more than skeletal fingers of the half-buried remains of the earth.

  Hungry, but not starving; thirsty, but not dehydrated, Alan and Moll walked that cursed earth with such a purpose that even the suffocating horror of the world couldn’t cause them to falter in a single step or slow their pace in the slightest. The dusty, decaying ground still held a strange interest for the great dog, causing her to sprint off on hidden trails, sniffing as she went, pawing the soil for things unseen whilst her master strode on, stopping sometimes to follow paths of his own that his eyes spotted in shop windows or empty apartment blocks. All the while the black finger of the compass directed them ever onwards, pointing as it went without fatigue until suddenly, breaking the lonely silence, they heard the sound of an engine.

  The truck was coming from the west, down a narrow lane that was pock-marked and scarred and caused the large open backed vehicle to slow to a crawl as it lumbered up towards them. In the cab behind the dirty glass windscreen were three people, their faces masked behind scarfs and green welding goggles and their hands hidden in thick ski gloves against the cold. As it came to a halt a few metres from where he stood waiting, he saw more people huddled together in the back, shivering and refusing to look up from their boots even when they came to a halt.

  Alan raised his hand, thankful that he’d decided against taking the XC10 with him. As one of the passengers jumped down he saw that he was unarmed too and that there wasn’t a single weapon to be seen amongst them.

  “Where are you going?” asked the man in a hoarse voice, dry from the dust in spite of his scarf.

  “South,” replied Alan.

  “Do you want a lift?”

  “Where are you going?”

  “South.”

  They stared at each other for a moment, unable to see beyond the goggles they both wore and neither seemed willing to make the first move. It wasn’t hostility as such, but fear perhaps that kept them there.

  In the end, Alan pulled down his scarf and lifted the goggles from his eyes, suddenly blinded by the brightness he’d grown unaccustomed to. It was as near to a gesture of peace that he could think of and it seemed to work. The man did the same, revealing a blistered face and a noticeable lack of hair.

  “Alan,” he said.

  “Dave.”

  He extended his hand. They shook. Then without another word, Dave returned to the cab and Alan climbed up into the back, taking a seat at the end near the door.

  When Moll leapt up and over the low siding, the other survivors gasped in horror and began to shuffle nearer to the cab end, muttering to themselves that she was some kind of radioactive monster.

  “She was bred this way,” replied Alan. “It had nothing to do with the storm.”

  “Is she...?”

  Alan patted the great animal on the back of her neck and she slumped down onto her haunches, panting and letting her long tongue flop out of one side of her mouth. As the truck set off again, the rest of the passengers began to return to their seats, one even daring to reach out a gloved hand to touch her.

  “She won’t bite,” said Alan.

  “Are you sure?” said a young girl who was sat opposite him. “Look at those teeth!”

  “I’m sure. What’s your name?” he asked.

  “Rachel.”

  “This is Moll.” He patted her again. “And I’m Alan.”

  “Nice to meet you,” said Rachel, reaching out and running her hand down the dog’s back. Moll turned and nuzzled her masked face, making her giggle with delight.

  “How did the two of you survive the storm?” asked another of the passengers.

  “I was in an army truck designed to stop the radiation when the storm came. I waited there until it was safe enough to leave.”

  “Are you from a settlement? Are they dead?” asked one.

  “Yes, I think so.”

  “What happened to the truck?” asked another.

  “Gone now. I couldn’t continue to use it.”

  “Have you seen anyone else?”

  Alan shook his he
ad. “No. Have you?”

  “Dave and his wife, Annie, found us last week. They’ve been trying to gather as many survivors as they can find but so far we’re the only ones.”

  “Do you know what happened?” Someone asked him. “Was it a nuke? How could they do that when we were all just trying to survive the disaster? Are we ever going to recover from this now?”

  He tried to explain as much as he could but it seemed hard for them to understand; the cold was getting worse and oftentimes they would all seem to shiver in unison and huddle closer together in the hopes of getting warmer. Most days Alan had seen frost or ponds of frozen water but this was different. They were cold but they were also in shock - the effect of having gone from one disaster to another, like the aftershock of an earthquake or the return of a cancer long since believed to be defeated. There might be many more survivors, he thought, but how many could continue to survive? How many had it still in them to keep going without giving up? How many more ‘blue pills’ were out there for people to choose?

  He watched the towns and villages pass him by, all equally ravaged by the uncompromising storm, all abandoned. As Dave drove through each one he would always stop, sound the horn three times, and wait.

  “That’s how he found us,” said Rachel the first time this happened. “We nearly missed him because we had to get out from under the rubble of the house. We were in the cellar, you see, the stones and bricks had blocked us in.”

  “Were you alone?” he asked.

  “No, there were about 20 of us and we were travelling north in a bus to a settlement we’d heard about. We stopped at that town to sleep but once the storm had passed we realised that we were the only ones who’d survived.”

  She put her arm on her younger sister who’d said nothing since Alan had climbed aboard but continued to stare at Moll with small brown eyes that peaked out from between the folds of a blue silk scarf. “Some had gone to sleep in the houses, some in the bus. When Dave found us, they were all dead.”