by Chris Keith
“I guess time will tell.”
Hennessey put a hand on her stomach. “I guess so.”
Feeling guilty, Faraday took Hennessey’s hand in hers. “Listen, whatever happens, I’ll be there for you and we’ll get through it together.”
Having support put Hennessey’s mind slightly at ease, but she couldn’t help thinking she was heading into a solitary nightmare.
“Do you want to say something to the camera?” Hennessy said, holding it up.
“I don’t know. I have never felt that comfortable speaking into cameras.”
“You did it in front of over a hundred reporters last month at the conference. You’re a pro. I’m sure you can do it in front of me.”
“I knew what to say then. It’s different when there’s nothing in particular to talk about and you have to be spontaneous.”
“Okay, tell me about the balloon flight. How you felt it went, what you enjoyed most. Summarise the experience.”
Faraday started speaking. Hennessey interrupted her. “Just a moment. The tape has finished. I need to rewind it.” She smirked. “That’ll give you a moment to think about what you want to say.”
She hit the rewind button, listening as the cogs spun the plastic film round and round. When the tape clicked stop, she peeled open the small screen and tapped her finger on play to check what she was about to record over. To her surprise, the screen filled with the Fable-1 balloon. “Hey, look at this. Someone recorded our flight. We’re about to launch.”
Faraday leaned over. The sound was tinny, but the picture was perfect. The pickets were being pulled by ground technicians. There was no commentary on it, just lots of crowd noise. She saw one of the balloonists give a wave to the camera moments before the balloon confidently lumbered up into the sky. The camera stayed on the balloon for a while until it disappeared in a haze of blue. Then the screen went dark.
“Okay, ready?”
“No, but…”
Hennessey was about to press the record button when a fresh image appeared. The cameraman was walking through the crowd and the screen filled with hundreds of different coloured shoes and random bare feet. It was still rolling when the cameraman entered the F1 Mission Control Base, using an electronic key-card to enter the gate and again for the two sliding doors at the main entrance. They heard the cameraman say hello to the receptionist. She said hello back. Another pair of feet came into the lens wearing big, black boots, like those worn by soldiers, and they were deep in water. “You can’t go in there,” the anonymous voice of a young man said. “The bathroom’s flooded.”
“Can I go in?” the cameraman said with the voice of a young boy.
The man in the black boots got angry. “No, I just said no!”
“But I’m busting.”
There was a moment of no conversation, just a phone going in the background.
“Alright, follow me.”
The camera continued to roll, capturing the steps of the stair-case leading into the workshop. The pair crossed the workshop and stepped into the elevator, where they dropped one floor. The shaky camera was now pointing at the unmistakable floor tiles in the White Room. “Straight ahead,” the man in the black boots said, followed by, “I’ll leave you to it, just shut the main door behind you when you’re done.”
Inside the White Room, the young boy realised the camera was still filming. The picture shuddered as he twisted the camera round and shut it down and that was the end of that. As soon as the screen went black, Faraday and Hennessey heard that scraping sound again. It was coming from the toilet; the one with the jammed door. The two women looked at each other, puzzled and frightened. There was someone in there.
Chapter 21
Standing in the middle of the White Room, looking at the toilet door, trying to remain calm to figure out what was happening, wishing Sutcliffe and Matthews were there, Hennessey cringed as she heard another sound, that one coming from the entrance to the White Room. Someone had knocked on the front door. Someone kept knocking on the front door. There were noises from all directions now; the toilet, the entrance, Faraday behind her shrilling in despair. “Don’t answer it,” she was saying.
Hennessey was not flustered by the noise, rather headstrong and defiant. But it did occur to her that if Sutcliffe and Matthews had returned, they should have no trouble letting themselves in the main door. So who the hell was knocking on it?
She crept towards the entrance and put her ear to the door. “Who is it?”
No reply.
She raised her voice. “Who’s there?”
And then there came the sound of multiple fists banging on the door, followed by a muffled voice.
“It’s us, open up.”
Finally, finally the boys had come back. She pushed open the door and stepped back. Matthews and Sutcliffe were carrying Keith Burch between them. His large forehead glistened with perspiration and he was shaking fiercely. Hennessey had seen her fair share of colleagues ill at the merciless routines of flight training. They always looked pale, sweaty, disorientated or had escaped the ill-effects altogether and had passed out. But none of them looked as ill as Keith Burch.
Wearing only a black T-shirt and socks, Sutcliffe and Matthews all but dragged him into the room and set him down on the floor. Sutcliffe explained that Burch had abandoned his spacesuit when his oxygen ran out because of its weight and because it had been burnt severely around the legs creating holes.
“Where did you find him?” Hennessey asked.
“Actually, he found us.”
“Did he say anything about where he’s been?”
“From what we gather, he fell off the balloon and blacked out after his parachute opened. He mumbled something about going to church, but we think he is delusional. He’s very dehydrated and suffering from extreme exhaustion. God knows how he managed to make his way here.”
“I’ll get him some champagne.”
The comment threw him. “What?”
“I found a crate in the utility room.”
He smirked. “Mike. I should’ve known.”
She handed an opened bottle to Sutcliffe. He took a large swig first before tilting the bottle for Burch to drink. He quietly uttered a thank you and glanced down at his half-naked body, surprised to find only a few scratches on his legs and a small discoloration on his shin where he’d knocked it on a piece of metal protruding from the ground.
“Brad, we have another problem,” Hennessey said. She was removing Burch’s socks while she spoke.
“What’s up?” asked Sutcliffe.
“The toilet, I think –”
Burch flinched, his whole body jolting, and when Hennessey looked at his left foot, she saw why. His foot was dangerously inflamed and maroon around a rather deep score on his sole. Burch complained about the pain and tried to explain that he’d trodden on something sharp.
Sutcliffe was concerned. “Keith, that doesn’t look good.”
He was panting heavily. “I just…rest.”
“Get him some painkillers,” said Sutcliffe. “While you’re there, get him a sleeping pill.”
Hennessey marched off and returned with a handful of pills. Sutcliffe popped two painkillers and one sleeping pill in Burch’s mouth and gave him some champagne to help sink them. Burch coughed. “I’ll get you some herbal tea, Mum,” he said. Then his eyes closed.
Clearly Burch needed rest, needing all the energy he could muster to mend his broken body, so Sutcliffe made him comfortable, placing a bag under his head, dressing him in his jeans and his black hand-knit jumper to keep him warm.
There was an almighty pop. It sounded like another gunshot. With their hearts up in their mouths, they turned to see Matthews gripping the throat of a champagne bottle. “Anyone for a glass of Perrier?”
“Yeah,” said Sutcliffe. “But go easy, that’s all we have.”
Blatantly ignoring Sutcliffe, Matthews necked the champagne. It went straight to his head and straight to his mouth. “God bless the fi
rst man who trod on a fucking grape.” He said it with an air of drunken bravado.
Sutcliffe snatched the bottle out of his hand and held it up to the headlamps. “You’ve polished off half the bottle.”
“Yeah,” he replied, grinning. “Tastes pretty shit though.”
“Anything that is consumable must be rationed. Right now, Simon, this is all we have to drink. Have some consideration.”
“Have a drink.” His tone was disdainful. “Lighten up.”
Sutcliffe let that one pass. Everyone was emotional right now. Tempers were volatile. He passed the bottle to Hennessey, noticing a small video camera on the bench. “Where did you get that?”
“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about,” she said. “I think whoever owns this camera is in that toilet over there. In fact, I’m certain of it.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Someone filmed our flight into space and… maybe you should just watch the video for yourself and see what you think. Me and Claris are convinced we have been hearing noises coming from the toilet, the one that’s jammed shut.”
He looked at her disbelievingly.
“Just watch it, Brad.”
He rewound the tape a fraction and then pressed play, instantly recognising the staircase at Mission Control Base, the workshop, the elevator, the lobby and the White Room. He heard a voice on the recording and recognised that too. I’ll leave you to it, just shut the main door behind you when you’re done, Trev Gable said. And, belatedly, he recognised the brand of camera; a JVC, the same model his son had stolen five weeks earlier. Dropping the camera onto the bench, he ran to the toilet. The crew couldn’t see him in the shadows of the room, but they could hear him beating mercilessly on the toilet door.
“Martin!”
Matthews twisted the helmet and pointed the EVA headlamps towards the toilet where Sutcliffe continued to pound on the door. “Martin!”
He beat it so hard and so relentlessly that the hinge buckled and the door burst open. But something was blocking it – a leg. It moved.
Then followed a faint gruff voice, “…a moment.”
“Martin!” Sutcliffe turned to the crew. “My son, he’s inside.” He tried to force the door open. “Martin, open up the door! Martin! Martin, open up, it’s your Dad!”
Slowly, the door opened and a silhouette appeared framed in the door. Hennessey and Faraday had been right and now the thought that someone had been there the whole time freaked them out. Sutcliffe sidestepped out of the light to get a better look at his son. He saw a puffy-eyed boy with dark pupils squinting into the bright light, his elbow moving up to his eyes to block it out. He had a well-tended head of blond hair and was incongruously dressed in black trousers and a white shirt with the top buttons undone. The twenty-three-year-old was Trev Gable.
“Trev?”
“Huh,” he replied absently.
Stomach cramping up, Sutcliffe made a sighing sound cut with disappointment. “Trev! What…do you know what’s happened? Do you know what happened to my son, Martin?”
Gable brushed his hand through his hair. He didn’t have the answers to such foreign questions.
Sutcliffe’s mood was irritated and madly impatient. He grabbed a fistful of Gable’s shirt and shook him aggressively. “Where’s my son?”
Matthews was about to intervene when Sutcliffe released the young man and apologised, but his voice remained raised. “Think, Trev. You brought him here to use the toilet before the bombs went off. Where did he go?”
Gable tried to think back to the moment…what had happened? All those faces were looking at him, their mouths asking difficult questions. He thought, Where am I? What is this room and who are these people? Everywhere was so dark except for two glaring lights burning his pupils like blowtorches. “Bombs?”
“You mean you don’t know?”
Sutcliffe saw a large bruise on Gable’s temple and a spot of dry blood. “Trev, listen to me…” His words trailed off, aware now that he was wasting breath. “Alright, alright. We’ll talk later.”
Trev Gable slept for exactly thirteen hours, during which time he didn’t wake once. Finally, his eyes opened. His arms were pinioned behind his back where he’d rolled on them in the night and dribble stuck to his cheek. Sutcliffe realised a few things he already knew. Gable’s presence explained why the elevator had survived the nuclear bombs – it had been underground at the time of the explosions. It explained why the toilet door had been jammed – Gable had locked it from the inside, which also explained why the main door had been jammed on their arrival and why the bolt was oddly broken. Furthermore, it explained the noises Faraday and Hennessey said they’d heard, because on their first night in the White Room, now that he thought about it, he’d heard them too, waking him up once or twice. At the time, he had put it down to creaking walls, bad weather, or both.
Everyone had questions for Trev Gable, but none more so than Sutcliffe. The boy had hardly got to his feet when he was asked the first one. “Remember anything yet?”
Gable took ages to respond, scratching his head, to his surprise locating a large lump on his temple. “I…all I remember is coming down here to use the toilet. The one upstairs had flooded. I heard a really loud rumble, like an earthquake or something. From…it was coming from outside, while I was in the toilet…and I must have slipped and hit my head. That’s all I remember.”
Gable saw Faraday drinking some champagne. “You found the champagne, then?”
No one answered, they just stared at Gable.
“The toilets flooded the corridor and the kitchen so I had to turn off the fridge. I brought the champagne down here and put it in the utility room to keep it cool for you. I brought the margarine as well. It was the only thing in the fridge. Did you see the balloon I attached to the champagne?”
Sutcliffe tapped Gable on the shoulder to regain his attention. Gable turned.
“What about my son, Trev?”
He seemed confused, though more lucid than the last round of questioning. “Something bad happened, didn’t it?”
“There’s been a nuclear war.”
Gable put his hands over his mouth. “You’re jofting.”
“Would we be down here living like this if we were joking?” said Matthews, sitting down on the bench to calm his irritation. “Who is this idiot?”
“Go easy, Simon,” said Hennessey. “The boy’s been through a lot.”
Matthews pointed to Gable’s feet. “What’s that sticking out of your boot?”
Gable glanced down and saw coloured paper spilling out of his heel. He pulled it out and lifted it to his face. “A fifty-pound note.”
“What’s it doing in your boot?”
“I don’t own a wallet.”
Sutcliffe returned the focus to the war and his missing son. He was divulging the hazy details of what they had learnt so far when Matthews jumped to his feet. He’d been distracted by something he thought he’d heard coming from the lobby. The sound was weak, so weak he doubted there had been any sound at all. He put his ear to the door a moment, then pushed down on the handle. No sooner had the door opened than he slammed it shut, startling everyone in the room. The rim of the door crashed into the metal frame so hard it sent an echoing shockwave through the White Room, interrupting the conversation Sutcliffe and Gable were having.
“What did you do that for?” asked Faraday.
“Rats,” he said. “Millions of them.”
Chapter 22
The water in the lobby was alive. Big rat bodies jumping about chaotically, ugly heads scarcely above the water in a competitive struggle for space. A colony of them spreading disease and misery. Furthermore, they had bathed in the water and had polluted it. Removing the impurities would be impossible. As for removing the rats, the route they’d taken to get there was one-way.
It struck a deep chord in Sutcliffe’s mind. Closing the door, he put the palm of his hand to his forehead, tapping it repeatedly. “We forgot to close t
he hatch when we brought Keith back with us.”
Gable, in the corner of the room, shrieked, then jumped up onto the bench. “There’s one in here,” he yelled.
The last thing they needed at that moment was a rat invasion, Sutcliffe thought. He played the headlamp beam across the floor, doing a sideways sweep of the room. A dark shadow burst across the light, but it was too quick for him to catch. Swinging the light round, he stopped it on Burch where he saw a rat the size of a shoe, its nose and eyes shuddering in its quest for food.
“Shit, it’s on Keith.”
Faraday screamed. “There’s another one back here.”
“Don’t touch them.”
“What are we supposed to do?” she hollered.
Sutcliffe held the helmet close to his side, cutting out the light momentarily. Darkness enclosed the room and a solemn quiet partnered it. Sutcliffe cast the light over the floor, passing over various items in the room; a scattered cardigan, a can of paint, the broken mop head, two empty champagne bottles, Keith Burch.
“Maybe we could explode an oxygen tank over them,” Gable suggested.
Matthews grunted. “And how do you propose we do that?”
“I’ve seen it before in movies.”
“This ain’t a fucking movie. Jesus Christ.”
Sutcliffe expressed his own opinion. “We can’t risk damaging the shaft. The rubble above the elevator is unstable enough as it is.”
Matthews snarled at Gable. “Does anyone have any practical suggestions?”
Faraday retrieved a lighter from the bench and lit the flame. “Why don’t we burn them?”
“Jesus! Are you lot on something? The last thing we need is a fire when we don’t have the means to put one out,” said Matthews. “Think carefully people.”
“And quickly,” added Hennessey. “Rats can carry typhoid and leptospirosis. Whatever you do, don’t touch them.”
Sutcliffe pulled the lights back on Burch and the rat nibbling the air. With a theatrical kick, hurting his bad leg, Sutcliffe scared the rat away. Luckily, Burch was sleeping. It did occur to him that Burch couldn’t be any more infected with death than he already was. And that thought led him to an idea. They had given Burch a sleeping pill to help him relax. They didn’t necessarily need to kill the rats. They just had to make them still so they could be expelled from the White Room and lobby. He bolted to the bathroom, returning with the bottle of sleeping pills in his hand and was unscrewing the cap when Matthews asked him what he was doing.