by Chris Keith
Chapter 28
It came to him, he thought about it, and he realised that he would have to do something he had never done before. Something he had never dreamt he would ever have to do. Something so horrific and strength-depleting it would conceivably scar him for the rest of his life.
Sutcliffe closed his eyes as he spoke. “We’re going to have to amputate it.” He prodded softly around the inflamed foot. “If we don’t, he’ll die.”
Burch was asleep and Hennessey was cupping her hand over her mouth in anguish. The gangrene had spread with alarming speed into dangerous territory.
“How?” she said. “We don’t have the right equipment.”
“We will have to make do with what we’ve got. We have two first-aid kits. There are plenty of bandages inside and antiseptic creams.”
“What are we supposed to cut it off with?”
He pulled out the safety-knife, the one from the life-raft that he’d used for cutting the securing line.
“That isn’t going to work, Brad.”
“It’s all we have.”
“Wait a minute.”
Hennessey walked quickly to the far wall where all the clothes hung on hooks and dug her fingers into her cardigan pocket looking for her handkerchief. She found it and turned, clipping Matthews’ jacket with her elbow. It fell off the hook and dropped to the bench. She picked it up and out fell a sharp dagger. An inscription on the handle read Black Prince. She brought it over to Sutcliffe. “Look what I found.”
“Where did you get that?”
“It fell out of Simon’s jacket.”
“It’ll do the job.”
Burch awoke from an uneasy sleep and felt the skin on his scalp tighten with some nameless terror. Sweat poured down his face.
“Keith, listen to me, carefully,” said Sutcliffe, putting a hand to his shoulder. “You have gangrene in your left foot and it’s quite advanced. It’s spreading now to your leg. We’re going to have to amputate it. I’m so sorry.”
“Leave it,” he slurred. “There is…no…”
“Keith, if the infection were to permeate into the bone, there would be more complications and you will die. You just can’t risk it.”
Burch passed out.
“It’s now or never,” said Sutcliffe.
He asked Hennessey to hold Burch’s leg up so that some of the blood would drain out of the foot while he gathered the materials he needed. He took a bandage from the first-aid kit and tied it as tight as he could around the bottom of the shin to cut off circulation. He prepared two pairs of disposable gloves for him and Hennessey, all the bandages he could find, the sponges, antiseptic spray, adhesive tape and the last of the painkillers. Using the pills first, he lifted Burch’s head, opened his mouth and rinsed three down his throat with water.
“Do you know what you’re doing?” Hennessey asked.
“If you’re asking me if I’ve ever done this before, then no.”
“Are you able?”
“Do I have a choice?”
“I suppose not.”
“Well, then, put his leg down and hold it still. If he wakes up and screams, stuff something in his mouth so he has something to bite on.”
She held up the handkerchief and flapped it until he saw it.
“Put your gloves on. It’s about to get messy.”
Sutcliffe slapped on his gloves and gripped the dagger firmly in his more agile right hand. He took a few deep breaths. He was trained in first-aid, but he was not trained for amputations and feeling sick with nerves he aligned the blade beneath the bandage. Hennessey looked away. Sutcliffe quailed at the idea of cutting into Keith Burch, however necessary. He wrenched himself into some semblance of control, drew back the dagger and slashed into the skin, quickly and convincingly. Burch stirred, then yelled, and he didn’t stop, not until Hennessey filled his mouth with the hand-kerchief and even then it only muffled the sound. She glimpsed Sutcliffe sawing the limb and the blood gushing out. She turned away, but her ears could not avoid Burch’s screams.
“He’s going to need another fix,” said Hennessey. “Give him more painkillers.”
“I don’t think they’ll make much difference.”
Sutcliffe hacked through the bone and was almost through the last hunk of flesh when he gave the foot a sharp tug, detaching it from the leg. The moment it happened, he knew it had made a monumental mark on his entire life. While Hennessey struggled to keep Burch still, Sutcliffe dabbed the excessive blood using the sponges and spouted the wound with antiseptic spray, dressing it with several bandages that soaked up the remaining blood. Tying another bandage around the severing to pinch the arteries shut, he applied a final layer around the stump.
Outside the subterranean hideout, cheating the cold in his spacesuit, Sutcliffe walked to the edge of the cliff with the severed foot wrapped up in a bandage in his hand. Standing motionless on the sheer cliff staring out at the littered beach, he could scarcely make out the ruined appearance of the listing cruise ship. Repulsed and deeply ashamed of himself, having committed a barbaric act against humankind, he took one last look at Burch’s amputated foot.
“We will have to amputate, I’m sorry.” The doctor held the X-ray of his leg up to the light box on the wall.
“Surely there’s something that could be done,” said Sutcliffe, pushing back his short fringe with a nervous hand.
The doctor shook his head and Sutcliffe felt the colour ebb from his face and the beat of his heart surge with a rush of blood.
“As you can see here,” the doctor began, “the limb has been extensively traumatised from the fall and, if you look carefully, you will see that the breaks in the tibia have punctured the soft tissue. I can’t see any other option.”
Sutcliffe leaned forward. “I want a second opinion.”
“I can arrange that for you, but you should be prepared for the same analysis.”
The doctor left and Sutcliffe was overwhelmed with self-pity. An immediate flash of scenarios appeared in his head. How he would get about on one leg. How he would care for Martin. How he would ever love or be loved again. Life in a wheelchair. No life. He stared absently at the window. He’d been staring at it for so long he hadn’t noticed the arrival of night. All night it rained and all night he gazed at the rain making smudges out of the distant night lights.
That was the moment it came to him.
The sight of it could have been a twist of fate or it could have been a sign. For whatever reason, the small red balloon had floated past his window with the words Brave Boy written all over it. And he had seen it and it had given him inspiration. Having been to the casualty ward a few times for injuries Martin had sustained as a child, he knew that balloons were a reward given to help indignant children keep calm in hospital. A child leaving the casualty ward had let go of the balloon by mistake. The human blunder would change his life in ways he could never have imagined, for he had just set his heart on flying a balloon into the darkness of space.
The next day, Sutcliffe received good news from an orthopaedic trauma specialist.
“You’re looking at several operations, including reconstruction below the knee and a long spell in hospital but, yeah, I believe the leg can be saved.”
With disquiet, Sutcliffe threw the dismembered foot down to the beach. It landed among the dead rats with an explosion of black sand and dust. He’d been strong, as strong as everyone else, but now, after days of dread and defeat, it had caught up with him and he was beginning to have desperate thoughts. Suicidal thoughts. It could be over in an instant, he thought. One short step off the cliff. He began to detach the fastenings on his helmet. When it came off, he inhaled a sharp breath, the air sweet and polluted, refreshing and deadly. But in a few seconds it wouldn’t matter. It would all be over. He would be with his son in a far better place. Final thoughts went out to his crew. For his part, he had done all he could and they no longer needed him. With him gone, it meant one less mouth to feed. He took a step forward on the cl
iff, his toes flirting with the edge and a spout of gravel dislodged and tumbled down the cliff face. He sat down with his legs hanging over the edge, his knees apart, his body pitched slightly forward. He was thinking about God and that terrible uncertainty about what would be revealed on the other side. He was lurching forward when he suddenly remembered the pistol. Hennessey had made him bring it with him because she thought he might be faced with dangers. Who knew what horrors roamed the landscape. From his thigh pocket, he took it out and stuck it in his mouth. Slowly, he squeezed on the trigger. At the last second, he changed his mind and lodged it at his temple.
Goodbye world and good riddance.
He shut his eyes and pressed the trigger.
Then his eyes flung open. Something in his mind had snapped. What am I doing? he thought. There was still a lot to do and still a chance they could be rescued. Angry at himself, he put away the pistol and reattached his helmet. He stood up and hurried back to the shaft, wondering how Matthews and Faraday were going in their search for Gable. They’d been gone for ages.
He tried to patch through to them. “Simon.”
He waited. “Claris, you there?”
He tried them again. “Simon? Claris?”
Why were they not responding? Then he remembered that his extravehicular communicator had been exposed to water when he had fallen into the water on the cruise ship. Perhaps water had seeped into the electrics. That would explain why he hadn’t been able to get through to Gable the second time and why he couldn’t get through to Faraday and Matthews right then. He worried about them all, especially with the weather worsening. The frost had melted because of the rain, but there were flashes of lightning in the sky, indicating more storms on the way. Then, close to the Mission Control Base, Sutcliffe saw something that he decided to follow.
Chapter 29
Understanding that the scene before him was not at all normal, that something was very badly wrong, Matthews pulled off his helmet and stared at the caged humans. It was not the normal mechanics of a hostage situation. A grave apprehension rose within him. Though the people locked in the cage hardly constituted danger, it was who had locked them up that had him worrying. Behind the wire mesh squares, among the frightened faces, appeared a face he recognised. The beetle-browed face of Trev Gable.
“Trev!”
He was shifting his weight from one foot to the other, agitated. He looked this way and that, down at the ground for a second or two, then to each and every face around him with a blank stare.
“Trev!”
Matthews said his name again and again, but Gable did not respond. His face was a picture of panic. Matthews called his name again and finally he got a reaction.
Gable wheedled his way to the front of the cage and gripped the bars. “Get me out!” he shrieked.
“What’s going on here?”
“Get me out!”
“What is all this?”
“The Tanners,” said a voice from the back of the cage. The tone was female.
“The who?”
“Family from up the road.”
A woman slowly edged her way forward, her dirty long fingers piercing through the cage. “They’ve been terrorising the neighbour-hood for years and they’re still doing it.”
“What do they want?”
“Father and three sons. Crazy, the lot of ’em.” The woman appeared surprisingly calm and Matthews realised she was the one in all the photographs. “They want food and they don’t want to share it.”
“Get me out of here!” Gable shrieked again.
Matthews tried to open the gate to the cage and saw that a brass padlock firmly sealed it and there was no sign of a key. He asked the woman who had it and she replied one of the Tanner brothers. He skirted the room for a tool to penetrate the padlock. Beside the fireplace he spotted a pair of brass ball andirons. He collected one. It was as heavy as a hand-sized rock. Back at the cage, the prisoners stepped away from the gate watching as Matthews smashed the andiron ball down on the brass padlock.
In the meantime, Matthews had more questions. “So, what is this place?”
The woman sighed. “We are all neighbours. My house used to be above this bunker. My husband built it in the back garden years ago. He was convinced something like this would happen one day. This cage we’re in used to be stocked full of food and water, enough to last me and my family a year. Or so we thought. Our bunker was famous in the village for all the wrong reasons. Everyone used to poke fun at it. Kids used to break in and vandalise it. We were the laughing stock of the community. When the news announcement came, everyone piled down here to escape the nuclear bombs. The food went within four days. I guess nobody is poking fun at us anymore.”
Matthews digested the information, not liking what he was hearing. But it did explain how the people had survived the war and who the men with weapons were. He knew now that the men in parkas outside were foes, not friends. As he thought about her account of things, he kept at it even though his arms were growing tired. Sparks jumped off the padlock, but it showed no sign of breaking.
Then Matthews stopped trying altogether. He backed away from the cage, thinking. His eyes narrowed and his jaw tightened. One man behind the gate thought Matthews had completed the job and tried to open it, rattling the thin bars impatiently. Banging his clenched fists on the cage in a fit of anger, he swore several times, but Matthews paid no attention to him. Gable could see the wheels turning in Matthews’ head, something he had seen a few times. The vacant stare. The secretive silence while he churned things over in his mind. It gravely concerned Gable, for in the few days he had known Matthews he had been able to sum up that he was selfish and untrustworthy and dealt ruthlessly with problems.
“Why have you stopped?” Gable asked.
It had occurred to Matthews, in a moment of clarity, that the people in the cage were desperate and deprived and had wiped out the bunker’s resources, leaving the original occupants without food. If they were released, they might track him and Faraday back to the White Room and wade through the supplies Sutcliffe had acquired from the cruise ship. He weighed up the pros and cons of letting the people out and, concluding that there were no pros, decided not to take the risk. Suddenly, the Tanner brothers didn’t appear to be so villainous. Perhaps they’d been the wisest of everyone and had put an end to individual selfishness and greed. Their system was harsh and inhumane, but if it prolonged life and brought about social order in a disorderly environment, were they such bad people?
“I’m sorry.”
Gable rattled the door. “You’ve got to let us out.”
“No can do, mate.”
Gasping and snivelling emanated from the small crowd and someone got angry.
Gable’s voice rattled with terror. “Why not?”
“That’s just the world we live in now.”
Matthews heard something from the next room, voices and someone clunking about. He moved quickly to the corner of the bunker, ducked down behind the old piano and switched off his headlamps.
Standing in a room lit by the beam of a flashlight, with a bloodied carcass of something on the gurney before her, Faraday was ordered to undress. The man held a gun to her ribs and pulled his gasmask down around his neck revealing a rough face blemished with old acne scars and a squashy flat nose. He was in his late twenties, no older, Faraday surmised. The constant gun prodding was starting to frighten her. “I have friends out looking for me.”
He shoved her in the shoulder.
“Please don’t do anything to me.”
The man grunted and snatched away her spacesuit and the spandex garment, reducing her to a single t-shirt that stopped at the middle of her thighs. Faraday folded her arms against the cold and watched as the man slung her spacesuit over a wall rail. Seeing him in possession of another spacesuit made her bitter and angry and it made her worry about Gable.
“Where’s my friend?”
“Move,” he said bluntly, pointing to a second door he wa
nted her to go through. He switched the flashlight off reducing them to darkness, took her by the arm and she felt the gun spear into her ribs again. She heard the clatter of metal and the mewling breaths of other people. Then an oil lamp was lit and the room came into colour. The cage imprisoning her held other people, the smell of their deteriorating hygiene overpowering, their withdrawn faces frightening her. The young man settled into a chair he’d pulled up and sat looking over his prisoners, face dead calm and serious. He licked his palette with his tongue and kept at it. People in the cage started to cry.
Matthews was cowering in the corner of the room, squatting low, and the weight of his body was hurting his knees, legs and lower back. The detainees were becoming more and more restless too. There was something very odd about the whole situation. Confinement in small spaces made people bitter and rebellious. That wasn’t the case there. The prisoners were petrified.
Faraday fought her way to the front of the cage. “At least tell us how long we have to stay here like this?”
“Not for much longer sweetheart.”
Faraday rattled the cage bars, then turned round and filed through the array of faces in search of her cousin. But he wasn’t there and she didn’t know where he was. Then she recognised Trev Gable, though he showed no signs of knowing her.