Nuclear Midnight

by Cole, Robert

  Early in the afternoon they came across a sign which read AMMANFORD. This meant they had travelled about twenty kilometres inland from the coast. The huge dark forms rising into the clouds on their right were the foothills of the Welsh hills. Ahead, the first ridges of Black Mountain formed a long tapering wall, like the back of some huge prehistoric monster. Tina was looking very tired and beginning to lag behind, but Cliff and Roy wanted to push ahead until Alex put his foot down and refused to drag her any further. She had not complained, but Alex knew she was walking way beyond her strength.

  They took shelter for the night in a small hamlet, close to a river. Tina fell asleep straight after dinner in front of the fire, leaving the men to discuss the best route north. Eventually they decided to avoid the interior of Wales and travel along the coast. This would mean a detour, but it would at least lead them through some of the more populated areas. If some type of organised community had drawn in the population from the south, they would most likely find it on the coast, since that region possessed no obvious military target. If nothing else, it would make easier going than the mountainous interior.

  The next day they started out at first light. Snow had fallen during the night, but the increase in temperature it brought more than compensated for the heavier going. They made excellent progress all that morning. Tina seemed to be back to her old self; enthusiastic, talkative, even jovial at times, but by early afternoon she was beginning to lag behind again. By mid-afternoon she was all in and they had to stop for the day. Alex felt that she was growing weaker again and he urged her to take some dinner. Eventually she ate half of her meal, but unlike the previous night she slept only fitfully. Alex lay beside her, also not sleeping, coming awake every time she moved and watching her uneasily.

  The following day Tina seemed exhausted from the very outset. She dropped back and began complaining of dizziness and fatigue. By early afternoon they had barely covered five kilometres. Again Alex called a halt. They had reached a small coastal village. After a brief inspection they plumped for a small brick house with a large chimney stack and a steeply sloping slate roof. They chose it because it was completely intact, as though its occupants had just walked out and left it. Many of the houses they had passed that day were in a similar condition. Blast effects in this area appeared to be minimal. The inhabitants, it would seem, had moved away more from lack of food, than threat of attack from other survivors.

  Alex led Tina straight to one of the bedrooms and made her lie down. Feeling her forehead a little earlier, he had found she had a fever again. She also now admitted to having a sore throat and a feeling of giddiness. He put her to bed almost in a rage, frustrated beyond words at her for not confiding her symptoms to him.

  Tina watched his stiff, angry movements with a hint of amusement, as he rummaged through the cupboards and threw piles of blankets on the bed for her. ‘Oh Alex, don't be ridiculous,’ she said finally, when she could take no more of it.

  He stopped sorting out the pile of blankets and glared fretfully at her. ‘Why is it,’ he said, ‘that I can never strike any sort of harmonious relationship with you? You either make me feel wonderful, or throw me into a rage with your behaviour.’

  ‘I think you're a very sensitive person, Alex,’ she said softly. ‘You read meanings into my actions that are not there.’

  ‘But I expect you to tell me when you're sick! I thought that at least we had that much understanding.’

  She pursed her lips and gazed thoughtfully at him. ‘I think we have a lot of understanding,’ she said. ‘Much more than is ever spoken between us. But there can't be plain sailing all the time in any relationship, especially if the people are deeply involved with one another.’

  It was the first time either of them had actually put their feelings for each other into words, and Alex was deeply moved. He came over and sat beside her. ‘I just can't lose you,’ he said sadly. ‘Not now, not ever. I couldn't even begin to imagine going through all this,’ he gestured toward the window, ‘without you.’

  Tina saw the agony in his face and she reached out and pulled him towards her.

  He kissed her, then climbed into bed.

  ‘We've got to get to a working community soon,’ she said softly. ‘Otherwise our food will be gone and we'll all be stranded. So, you see I have to push myself.’

  ‘But to the point of your own death?’ Alex pleaded.

  She was quiet for a moment. ‘I should have told you sooner,’ she conceded grimly.

  The next day, Cliff found Alex alone sitting dejectedly on a bed in one of the spare rooms. His was staring through the window and neither moved, nor altered his expression, when he entered. The older man knew the cause of his distraction. Poor Tina had had a terrible night. The sickness had swept in upon her almost without warning; severe headache, fever, aching muscles and glands that had swollen to the size of small grapes on the sides of her throat. Alex had gone almost crazy with worry. He had pumped all his remaining antibiotics and Panadol into her and rushed around the house searching for more pills, in vain.

  By early morning, when the medication had worn off, she was visibly worse. The search had been renewed and he and Roy had joined in, but all to no avail. The people who lived here must have had plenty of time to collect their belongings, before leaving. He doubted there was any medication within kilometres. Now all anyone could do was to wait and hope. But it seemed that there could not be much hope left. With every hour her condition deteriorated. There were a number of secondary infections; acute diarrhoea, vomiting, pains in her abdomen and a rash no one could identify, as if every disease in the country had suddenly decided to take up residence within her. They had all seen similar versions of her symptoms back in the work camp.

  Cliff knew attempting to console Alex with words would be useless; indeed, they had far too much respect for each other for such foolish talk. But an idea had occurred to him, and it was significant enough to be worth breaking in on his pain. So he walked round in front of Alex, blocking his view of the window. ‘How is she?’

  Alex shook his head mournfully. ‘No better, but at least she's sleeping now. That may help, a little.’

  Cliff nodded. ‘Did she sleep at all last night?’

  A slow shaking of the young man's head was his only answer.

  ‘Look guv,’ Cliff went on, ‘it seems to me that Tina is getting worse. She needs a lot more help than we can give her.’

  Alex shifted his gaze to Cliff's face.

  ‘Now, I'm not trying to be funny,’ Cliff put in quickly. ‘But we have been looking at the map and think we can reach the Blaenau mine in three days and be back in under a week. If there's a community up there, then maybe we'll be able to get some medicines. If not,’ he shrugged, ‘well, at least we saved Tina the trip. And we can always look for medicines on the way there and back.’

  Alex sighed deeply and slumped back on the bed. ‘Why didn't I think of that?’ he mumbled, half to himself.

  Cliff suddenly became very serious and intense. ‘You didn't think of it because you're too involved, Alex. You can't think or act objectively any more. Your mind's blinded by your feelings.’

  Alex frowned, as if he failed to gather the import of this.

  ‘She's bloody contagious, Alex,’ Cliff blurted. ‘If you get too close you'll end up the same as her.’

  ‘What are you trying to say?’ Alex’s tone was suddenly sharp and resentful.

  ‘Just don't get too close.’

  ‘I don't care…I don't care,’ Alex repeated, and he sounded as if he meant it.

  ‘Well, you should. The last thing Tina wants is for you to give up. You're no good to anyone if you're as sick as she is.’

  ‘Don't tell me what Tina wants!’ Alex suddenly exploded. ‘Don't you think I know better than anybody what she wants?’

  ‘Then you'll know I'm right,’ Cliff retorted. ‘She's concerned about you. She wants you to live.’

  Alex was too choked to respond to this, so he said
nothing.

  ‘I just don't want you coming down with the flu, that's all,’ Cliff persisted more softly.

  ‘You don't expect her to recover, do you?’ Alex asked, throwing it down like a challenge.

  But Cliff said simply: ‘She's a fighter. If anyone will pull through this it'll be Tina.’

  And with this he turned and left the room.

  When he was gone, Alex turned back to the window. The grief rose within him like physical pain, tears welled at his eyes and dropped onto his shirt.

  Cliff and Roy left later that morning, carrying only four days' supply between them. This was partly to enable them to move more quickly, but their main reason was because they felt that Tina would need the remaining food if she was to have any chance of surviving. As it was, they were both reasonably fit and healthy and could take advantage of any opportunities that came their way. Alex, on the other hand, would be too tied up caring for Tina to scavenge for food. He would have to survive exclusively on the supplies they had left him.

  From the start they set a rapid pace. By mid-afternoon they were already moving up the Dovey Valley. They found their first signs of recent human activity in this valley, with many sets of footprints in the snow, and they heard the occasional distant shout, too. Once they even saw a house burning and many figures silhouetted in its flames, watching it burn. As the day wore on they passed the blackened, shells of more houses, as though the demoralised population had taken to burning them down just for warmth. These were not encouraging signs. Here, too, it seemed, the mob ruled. By nightfall their worst fears were confirmed by the discovery of two massacres. These were not old battles, like those they had stumbled on earlier. No snow lay on these bodies, the skin was still elastic and supple.

  They spent the night in a small cottage somewhere along the banks of the Dovey. They had covered an enormous distance in only eight hours and both were very near exhaustion. Roy started a small fire and they heated up beans and ate them with some of the unleavened bread that Alex had baked a few days previously. They spoke little while they ate, each content to review in his own mind the meaning of what they had seen that day. Roy, with his large, coarse features, chewed away with that massive deliberation so characteristic of him, as if all night would not be long enough for the task he had on hand. Cliff, in contrast, picked at his food nervously, his face constantly registering his thoughts in a series of curious grimaces and deepening frowns. When the meal was over he boiled some water and they added one or two stock cubes for flavour.

  ‘I hope we've done the right thing,’ he ventured finally, sipping cautiously at his drink.

  Roy glanced over at him. ‘Seems logical to me.’

  ‘Logical, yes,’ Cliff agreed. ‘But suppose Tina dies while we're away? Alex is very involved so he could easily do something stupid.’

  ‘You think she's going to die?’

  Cliff looked across at Roy; realising this was not an option that the big man had previously considered. ‘Can you remember any people in the camp who recovered from the flu?’ he asked.

  ‘Can't say I can, off hand,’ he responded in his slow deliberate way. ‘But they were all taken to the sick bay before they got too sick.’

  ‘I visited people who were taken ill a few days after we arrived. They were all dead within two or three days.’

  ‘But they were already weak,’ Roy replied.

  ‘Not before they were taken ill, they weren't. Anyway, none of us are in particularly good shape.’

  ‘But not all Tina’s symptoms are the same as the ones we saw back at the camp,’ argued Roy.

  ‘It's the flu all right,’ Cliff replied flatly. ‘Her other symptoms just indicate that she has a secondary infection of some kind as well as radiation poisoning.’

  Roy's mouth opened slightly and his eyebrows knitted together into a single line across his forehead, but he said nothing. He seemed to be digesting this new information with all the caution and patience he had shown in eating his food. He sipped his drink briefly, then turned back to the fire. But Cliff knew his old friend; he did not need to be told what he was thinking. That added pinch of sadness in his expression, that forlornness that wasn't there before, said it all.

  By first light they were moving north again, Roy striding ahead with a pace which ate up the kilometres. By mid-afternoon they had climbed through most of the pass separating the mountains of Cader Idris and Dinas Mawddwy. Although they had come on the occasional corpse, the mountains seemed devoid of human life. But when they descended into the next valley it was a very different story. Some enormous battle seemed to have been staged there. Villages were burnt out, bridges torn up and thrown into the gullies they had once spanned. And worst of all, they found evidence of another massacre: bodies, thousands of them, strewing the ground, as though the whole welsh population had travelled north to perish in this exact location.

  Their first thought was to turn back, and find another way around the area, but the questions posed by this scene seemed to draw them on relentlessly. They reached the valley floor and Cliff dug through the snow and exhumed a number of corpses. Although some had been beaten or knifed, most bore shrapnel or bullet wounds. But there were no military personnel amongst the dead. The story told of a complete slaughter. These civilians appeared not to have been able to kill any of their attackers. Cliff swore wildly when he realised this fact, while Roy just shook his head in disbelief.

  They walked on cautiously and found the remains of more recent massacres. But here, a new element seemed to have entered, and a very sinister one! The sheer barbarity and sadism of these later acts left both men shaken. At first Cliff had thought that the mutilations of these bodies must have been caused by packs of wild dogs, until they came on the corpses of about a dozen victims no more than a few hours old. The men had been physically beaten until their whole bodies were smashed to pulp, every bone broken, every bit of flesh bruised, their faces featureless, as if the attackers had set about them in an uncontrollable frenzy. The women, before death, old and young alike, had been stripped and raped. Some many times from the amount of blood lost from their groins. But several human torsos in this ghastly scene, both young males and young females, had had their arms and legs roughly hacked off for a different purpose. The realisation of what they were looking at horrified both men. Neither had any doubt that these were the victims of human cannibalism.

  They immediately retreated into the shadows of the closest houses, where they debated their options heatedly. After nearly turning around again, they finally decided to press on; hoping the mountains which lay directly to the north would be as deserted as the ones they had just left. They could not help being frightened; reacting to even the smallest sound, for it had become obvious that regardless of what had happened in the valley before, it was now ruled entirely by mobs in the lowest state of degeneracy, who preyed on each other for food.

  All that afternoon, they narrowly avoided contact with large gangs. The individuals they glimpsed were heavily armed with an assortment of kitchen knives and crudely carved spears; but they were also marked with what looked like white paint across their foreheads. Many of the bodies they came across later also had this same curious symbol on their foreheads.

  By dark they had climbed the steep, winding road out of the valley and had penetrated several kilometres into the mountains. Happily they had met with no more gangs, and the smooth surface of the snow bore no human footprints. They continued their ascent till it was completely dark, when they stumbled into a house by the roadside. It seemed too risky to light a fire so they ate the remaining supply of bread and then curled up to sleep for the night.

  The next day they pushed on as soon as it was light. The mine lay only a dozen kilometres to the north and, providing there were no more surprises, they expected to reach it by late afternoon. They travelled all that morning through a narrow, U shaped valley, which, even before the war, must have been a very barren and formidable place. For there were no trees, not even
the shattered stumps of them, and no houses. Only the wind seemed to frequent this valley, where it howled and shrieked like some caged predator, bouncing off the sheer cliffs and whipping up powerful eddies which at times engulfed them in whirlpools of biting snow. Along the top of the cliffs huge ice fields hung, and now and then they would fall with thunderous detonations to the valley floor below. The fine, powdery snow from these avalanches swept right across the valley in a fine particle mist, creating white out conditions where they could see no more than a few metres in front of them for many minutes at a time.

  By late morning they had traversed the most dangerous section and the cliffs had fallen back and dwindled. But now, if anything, the scenery took on an even more savage appearance as they moved deeper into the rich slate mining area of Northern Wales. The high content of slate in the rock had reduced the cliffs to blackened scree slopes, which climbed into the clouds like huge rock piles, broken and shattered as though thrown up by chain gangs of giants.

  Further up, the valley broadened itself and left space for an iced up lake to form, with a number of houses clustered by its shore. They approached in full view, for there was no cover, and before long they were aware that the settlement was occupied and that their progress was being carefully watched. Soon they could see men at the windows with rifles apparently trained on them, but by this time it was too late to turn back. Other signs of habitation, smoke rising from a chimney, a Land Rover obviously still in use, at least consoled them that they weren’t dealing with the mindless, butchering mobs who lorded it over the valley. There was a measured caution about this group, a sense of purpose and calculation in the way they waited. But Cliff and Roy were not about to offer themselves up at point blank range. A short distance from the nearest house, they drew to a halt and prepared to await developments.