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by Chris Keith


  “Point taken.”

  At twenty feet, there was still no sign of the elevator. Sutcliffe wondered if Matthews had a point. Maybe the weight of the rubble had crushed the elevator.

  “Are you sure the elevator’s even still here?” said Matthews.

  “No. Just keep digging.”

  Fifteen minutes later, they were still digging through the rubble and their hope was diminishing with every breath. Hennessey and Faraday were growing restless, drawing on the last of their oxygen. Sutcliffe lifted a large piece of concrete and it revealed a flat metal surface. He got on his knees and knocked on the metal with the flat of his hand. An echo.

  “It’s hollow.”

  They hurried to clear a space and came across a square hatch. Peeling back the hatch, they peered into its black void. It was just about big enough for a human to fit through. Matthews went in first. Dropping inside, he found it hard to move his legs, as though he’d jumped into a swamp. He switched on his EVA headlamps and steered the light with his head, investigating the elevator, noticing that he was standing in two feet of water. The elevator doors were sealed shut. He worried that, without electricity, they wouldn’t open.

  Sutcliffe told Faraday and Hennessey to be careful on their way down the funnel-shaped hole because the rubble was unstable. With vigilant footsteps, picking their way, they descended and some concrete dislodged and rattled down the slope. At the base of the shaft, Faraday planted her boots on either side of the square hatch. Moving light could be seen coming from inside the elevator with what she presumed was the ripple of water. Matthews appeared beneath the hatch with his arms stretched out in front of him.

  “I’ve got you, Claris. Just let yourself fall through.”

  “I can manage,” she said.

  She dropped into the elevator with ease and landed with a big splash. Hennessey came after Faraday. Sutcliffe last. Huddled inside the elevator, the crew observed the conditions as Matthews put his fingers in the vertical line where the elevator doors met, but his gloves were too thick and he couldn’t establish a grip.

  “I’m going to have to take my gloves off,” he said.

  Detaching the aluminium couplings, he pulled off his gloves and, like a pianist, flexed his fingers, enjoying the movement. He gained a firm grip on the doors and forced them apart. The doors began to open fractionally and the water slowly started to recede. One final thrust and the doors cracked open a few inches, enough to push an arm through. The water gushed out around them, flooding the lobby outside the White Room. While Matthews pushed one door, Hennessey pushed the other, all the while thinking that Matthews was not such a bad guy after all, even admitting that she was beginning to like him.

  Following the light of the headlamps, they stepped into the lobby through the water, now six inches deep. The large steel door of the White Room opened via a steel handle, but when Sutcliffe tried it, the door wouldn’t budge.

  “It’s stuck,” he said.

  “Let me try,” said Matthews. “I should be able to grip it better.” He pulled on the door handle as hard as he could, then kicked it in frustration. “Fuck!”

  “The frame might have buckled in the explosions,” Sutcliffe said.

  Faraday made a gasping sound. “My oxygen!”

  Sutcliffe frantically tried the handle again. Matthews bolted into the elevator and reached his arm up through the hatch and retrieved a steel bar jutting out from the wreckage, six feet long. He’d spotted it on the way in. Pulling back his arm, he whipped the hatch down and ran back to the door. He lodged the bar between the door’s edge and the metal frame.

  “You all pull, I’ll push,” he instructed.

  In unison, they gripped and worked the handle, the steel bar slowly prising the door away from its frame and it opened with a snap. They stood staring inside the black hollow room in nervous silence. The darkness was imposing, as if something dreadful would suddenly jump out and attack them. Sutcliffe closed the White Room door, went to the elevator and pulled the doors shut. He began doffing his helmet and gloves and urged everyone else to do the same. He explained that their spacesuits were contaminated with invisible radiation particles and they didn’t want to transfer the contamination to the one place free of it. Faraday had already taken her helmet off and she was sucking in large breaths when everyone began to shed their suits. Hennessey further added that it would be wise to rinse the suits off in the water at their feet even though it wouldn’t fully rid the garments of radiation. In doing so, they could use items from the spacesuits inside the White Room such as the helmet’s EVA headlamps, the diaper collection device and the backpack with the communication equipment in case Burch tried to make contact with them.

  Hennessey peeled out of her spacesuit and allowed it to fall into the water. Matthews observed her lean body and calculated that it was exactly as he’d imagined. He stared fixedly at the shape of her hips, her thighs and her small breasts hidden beneath the one-piece spandex mesh suit. She went to unzip the front entry but stopped when she saw him looking over her with invading eyes. “Do you mind?” she said.

  He smiled. “Not if you don’t.”

  “Well, I do.”

  Faraday, still in shock from her encounter with suffocation, felt frightened to enter the White Room. Into that false sense of security, she sensed something not right, that if the White Room was going to be unliveable, they would have nowhere else to go.

  Standing on the threshold of darkness, they entered the White Room, their antler-like headlamps guiding the way. Sutcliffe ran his lights about the dark room. They had been there twenty eight hours earlier, but it felt like an entirely different place. The room no longer had an air of possibility about it. It looked to have come through the bombing unscathed, though he couldn’t see everything inside yet and therefore couldn’t be certain. Aside from its isolated position, the thick, impenetrable walls prevented the radiation from seeping in, except for the tiny traces clinging to their clothes, like bacteria. And apart from a few fractures in the wall and some dust on the floor from vibrations in the ceiling, the White Room had survived the blasts.

  The tired Fable-1 crew sat down on the benches while Sutcliffe finished his inspection of the place, accidentally bumping into the stepladder in the middle of the room and knocking over a can of paint with his foot. On a hook on the wall, his freshly pressed suit hung like a piece of museum art. He studied the room in a quest for useful resources. Already, he had discovered a few important facts. The security bolt at the top of the White Room door had broken away from its mount. He would fix that later. One of the toilet doors had jammed tightly shut, probably the frame had buckled in the blast, like the main door, so only one toilet operated for now. He hadn’t tried the flush because he knew it might work a few times while the water pressure was still good, but because the pumps wouldn’t be powered with electricity, the toilet wouldn’t refill the cistern with water. A mop and bucket was tucked behind the toilet and that meant the cistern could be filled manually with seawater using the bucket down at the beach.

  Matthews opened the flask he had found in the wrecked car. Inside was a dark liquid that smelt much like tea, about two-thirds full, a cup for everyone. He drank some, then gestured with it to Hennessey, who turned it down.

  “I’m not sure I want to risk it. It could be contaminated,” she said.

  “Impossible. It’s an insulation flask,” Matthews replied.

  “I don’t want to risk it.”

  “Fine, I’ll drink yours.”

  Sutcliffe and Faraday shared the tea. It made Sutcliffe realise how hungry and thirsty he was and why he was feeling so under the weather. A glass of orange juice, two cups of coffee, the contents of his in-suit drink bag and a splash of cold tea were all that he had consumed since Sunday. Scrambled egg on brown toast and grilled tomatoes was the last meal he had eaten. That had been almost thirty hours ago. Where would his next meal come from? Being somewhere safe, somewhere they could relax, lifted a huge weight off their
shoulders, but from now on things would get tougher. He thought of his family, the first time he’d dared to. Everyone he knew and loved was probably dead. His father. Old friends. Good friends. Ground crew. His old friend Mike Townsend, his remains dispersed somewhere above the White Room. And his son. Martin had had his problems growing up. But he’d been a good child to father. Sutcliffe couldn’t help being filled with a thousand regrets. He fought back the overwhelming urge to cry. Anger was what he felt, a deep sense of hatred for the people responsible for killing his family, his friends, his countrymen and his world. Conceivably, the instigators of the nuclear attack had died in the same despicable way, but that did not serve as justice or retribution.

  Faraday went over to her bag and retrieved her mobile phone. She knew it wouldn’t be working because the walls were reinforced concrete, eight inches thick and she was thirty feet beneath the ground. Besides, the network had probably been destroyed, but that didn’t stop her trying redial. The last number she’d called belonged to Nick Parsons. Her heart sank when the dial tone flat-lined. It was so loud that Matthews on the other side of the room could hear it. From the glow of the mobile screen, he could also make out the disappointed expression on her face.

  At his own bag, Matthews fished out his last two amphetamine pills, the ones he’d been saving for the grand celebration after their ballooning triumph. When no one was looking, he popped them in his mouth and swallowed, hoping that this nightmare would all go away and that he would wake up in a few days and find it had all been a bad drug experience. With his wallet in his hand, he sat on the bench and played catch with it for a while. He opened it up to have a look inside, each compartment, one by one. He took out all his bank cards and credentials. He raked through the contents and peeped inside the note compartment. No money. Strange, he thought, convinced there had been two twenties in there the day before. He tipped the change into his palm, added it up in his head, then in a rage tossed the coins to the floor, as though feeding a fleet of pigeons. The bouncing coins twinkled and made a tune as they rolled in pointless circles. Then he tossed the whole wallet on the floor.

  “What now?” he moaned.

  “We just wait,” said Hennessey.

  “Wait for what? To be rescued? To die?”

  “The air outside is thick with tiny particles of radiation that will eat away at your immune system. Gamma ray radiation is fatal within the first hour of exposure, but after about eight or nine hours it weakens to about one-tenth. After a couple of days, it weakens even further to about one-hundredth, which is still lethal. Right now, we wait it out. In a few days, we can figure out a survival plan. In the meantime, we just wait. And we have to be patient.”

  “I apologise. It’s just…never mind.”

  Sutcliffe walked across the room and sat beside his worn-out crewmates, allowing his head to fall back against the wall. He didn’t care about the success of the space flight, or that Fable-1 had been destroyed – not now, maybe not ever. He could not understand why he was thinking so much about the people he had seen that morning when he had made his way to the F1 Mission Control Base; the annoying neighbour running his car engine twenty minutes before he’d climbed into it to drive to work, the man starting his dayshift at the petrol station with a piece of bloody tissue stuck to a shaving cut, the mother pushing her son in a pushchair at an intersection in St. Ives, the couple kissing up against the gate of the Mission Control Base as families arrived at the launch site. Then his mind switched back to his dead son and he inconspicuously started to cry.

  The crew switched off the EVA headlamps on their helmets to conserve battery power, condemning them to the cold, dark interior of the White Room. Exhausted and in shock, they sat in silence. Nobody dared to utter another word and nothing more was said that day.

  Chapter 17

  It had been a very long, cold night. But the Fable-1 crew had slept surprisingly well. Dressed in their spandex suits, they had made pillows from their shoes and bags and had used items of clothing as blankets.

  Sutcliffe awoke to an uncommon darkness. Impenetrable. It hid every detail of the room. The images of Sunday’s tragedy reformed in his head and he felt the shock of it all over again. He wondered whether it had been a cruel dream. The darkness around him served to remind otherwise. He quickly became aware of his aching joints, his feet frozen to the bone and a sharp band of pain across his chest. His spine hurt too from the unsympathetic tiles on the floor. He stretched each limb individually, giving extra care to his left leg, folding it in half, gripping the knee with both hands and pulling it to his chest, then kicking it out straight to loosen the knots. He had been exercising it everyday since the accident. It was no longer a discipline, more a necessity. Everyday it ached. That day it ached more than usual.

  It was Tuesday morning and he could imagine people leaving their houses to go to work, morning rush-hour traffic, the transport system overrun with business people, children in uniform mucking around on their way to school, truck drivers doing their deliveries, construction and tearing down of buildings, the chugging of large machinery and the ringing of telephones. A regular day in a regular month with people doing things in their regular lives.

  “What’s for breakfast?” said Matthews, coming awake slowly, stretching and yawning.

  The room was too dark to see so he flicked on his headlamps and the far corner of the room came to life. He trained the helmet’s light around the room to find his friends. Sutcliffe was performing leg exercises. Faraday had dropped back off to sleep as quickly as she had woken up. She looked at peace. Hennessey had her eyes closed, but she was awake lying on the bench. That first night, she had woken up in a panic, falling to sleep and waking again all night long, reliving the nightmare of Sunday through her dreams.

  “How’s everyone feeling this morning?” asked Sutcliffe.

  “Hungry, but otherwise not too bad,” said Hennessey.

  “Yeah, I could eat a horse,” Matthews added.

  Sutcliffe finished his exercises and turned to his crew. “I think we should pool all our resources together and see what we’ve got between us, when we’re all up.”

  Outside in the lobby, Sutcliffe checked on their spacesuits, which hung out of the water on the flat metal bar they had used to force open the main door and now functioned as a clothes support rail suspended between the lengths of the walls. Several cigarette butts littered the surface of the water. They belonged to Keith Burch. He had smoked three or four on Sunday morning alone. He wondered about his missing crewmate and hoped he was still alive. Idiot, he should have jumped at the same time as everyone else. Maybe he had.

  It wasn’t until he was back in the White Room that something began to bother him. The atmosphere had started to press down on him filling him with subdued depression. Or was it something else? The thought that they were all going to die down there. If they were to avoid that likely fate, they would have to be smarter, stronger, more resourceful and optimistic, he thought. The ingredients for survival.

  Over by the bench, the crew was emptying the pockets of their coats, trousers and bags, retrieving their personal belongings and Sutcliffe joined them, locating his suit jacket.

  “That’s not mine,” he said pulling a metallic blue mobile phone from his pocket.

  “That’s mine!” Matthews barked. “Why’ve you got it?” There was accusation in his voice.

  “I don’t know, but my wallet is missing,” he replied.

  “Is this it?” said Hennessey, holding up a leather wallet, which she’d retrieved from her trouser pocket.

  “Yeah, how strange.”

  “Tell me about it,” said Faraday. “I can’t find my rings.”

  While the crew claimed their scattered belongings, pondering over how they could have become so muddled up, Sutcliffe took his possessions to the middle of the room and made a small pile where the crew joined him, adding items to it. Sitting, they circled the pile, like some kind of meditative ritual. Included in the collection was
a packet of cigarettes, two lighters, a newspaper, a laptop computer, a variety of basic medicines from the cabinet in the toilet, a Jane Austin novel, a health bar snack, an inhaler stick, a bottle of water, four sets of keys, four mobile phones, sunglasses, chewing gum, an opened roll of peppermints, a bottle of sleeping pills, a flick-knife and a handkerchief.

  “Not much to get excited about,” said Matthews.

  “I wouldn’t say that,” said Sutcliffe. “The mobile phones will give us extra light for a while and we can share the health bar and the water. If anyone fancies a smoke, go for your life. Cigarettes lessen appetites. We have two sources of reading material. We have some medicine and if anyone has trouble sleeping, we have pills. It’s better than nothing I suppose.”

  Hennessey considered having a cigarette, but thought better of it. Things were not quite that desperate. Instead, she divided up the health bar into equal pieces and handed them out while Sutcliffe took his laptop equipped with two-way satellite broadband over to the bench. If the autonomous space stations in orbit equipped with specialised wireless transceivers could make a connection through the congested sky, it might still work. He waited for the computer to load, concerned to see the battery display icon only a fifth full of colour. The screen was bright enough to light up most of the room, so Matthews killed the EVA headlamps to preserve power. Sutcliffe moved the mouse and double-clicked on an icon he wanted to open. The words Page Expired appeared above a list of plausible reasons on his screen.

  Sutcliffe sighed. “So the myth about the Internet surviving a nuclear war was just that, a bloody myth.”

  Faraday came over and shook her head. “Maybe you just can’t get a signal from a satellite transmitter yet.”

  “Which suggests the electromagnetic pulse reached them.”

  “I doubt it. Broadband satellites orbit hundreds of miles above the Earth. Just give it time. It might still pick up a frequency.”

 

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