Darkest hour aom-2

by Mark Chadbourn

  One of the stewardesses bolted from the cabin, leaving the door swinging so Fallow could see the array of instrumentation blinking away. She pushed her way up to a window, then exclaimed, "My God! He was right!"

  The whole planeload turned as one. Fallow looked passed Irvine's white, shaking face into the vast expanse of blue sky. The snowy clouds rolled and fluffed like meringue, but beyond that he could see nothing. Then, out of the corner of his eye, he noticed a shadow moving across the field of white. At first he wondered if they had narrowly avoided a collision with another plane, but the shadow seemed too long and thin; it appeared to have a life of its own. There was a sound like a jet taking off and then the colour of the clouds transformed to red and gold. A belch of black smoke was driven past the window.

  Fallow rammed Irvine back in his seat and craned his neck to search the sky. Beside and slightly below the plane, flying fast enough to pass it with apparent ease, was something which conjured images from books he had read in the nursery. Part of it resembed a bird and part a serpent: scales glinted like metal in the morning sun on a body that rippled with both power and sinuous agility, while enormous wings lazily stroked the air. Colours shimmered across its surface as the light danced: reds, golds and greens, so that it resembled some vast, brass robot imagined by a Victorian fantasist. Boned ridges and horns rimmed its skull above red eyes; one swivelled and fixed on Fallow. A second later the creature roared, its mouth wide, and belched fire; it seemed more a natural display, like a peacock's plumage, than an attack, but all the passengers drew back from the window as one. Then, with a twist that defied its size, it snaked up and over the top of the fuselage and down the other side.

  Shock and fear swept through the plane, but it dissipated at speed. Instead, everyone seemed to be holding their breath. Fallow looked around and was astonished to see that faces that had earlier been scarred with cynicism or bland with dull routine were suddenly alight; to a man or woman, they all looked like children. Even the stewardesses were smiling.

  Then the atmosphere was broken by a cry from the aft: "Look! There's another one!"

  In the distance, Fallow saw a second creature dipping in and out of the clouds as if it were skimming the surface of the sea.

  Fallow slumped back in his seat and looked at Irvine coldly. "Everything will be back to normal in a few days," he mocked in a singsong, playground voice.

  May 2, 11 a.m.; Dounreay Nuclear Power Station, Scotland:

  "I just don't know what they expect of us!" Dick McShay said frustratedly. He threw his pen at the desk, then realised how pathetic that was. At 41, he had expected a nice, easy career with BNFL, overseeing the decommissioning of the plant that would stretch long beyond his life span; a holding job, no pressures apart from preventing the media discovering information about the decades of contamination, leaks and near-disasters. Definitely no crises. He fixed his grey eyes on his second-in-command, Nelson, who looked distinctly uncomfortable. "I have no desire to shoot the messenger, William, but really, give me an answer."

  Nelson, who was four years McShay's junior, a little more stylish, but without any of his charisma, sucked on his bottom lip for a second; an irritating habit. "What they want to do," he began cautiously, "is make sure most of Scotland isn't irradiated in the next few weeks. I don't mean to sound glib," he added hastily, "but that's the bottom line. It's these power failures-"

  McShay sighed, shook his head. "Not just power, William, technology. There's no point denying it. Mechanical processes have been hit just as much. I mean, who can explain something like that? If I were superstitious…" He paused. "… I'd still have a hard time explaining it. The near-misses we've had over the last few weeks…" He didn't need to go into detail; Nelson had been there too during the crazed panics when they all thought they were going to die, the cooling system shut-downs, the fail-safe failures that were beyond anyone's comprehension; yet every time it had stopped just before the whole place had gone sky-high. He couldn't tell if they were jinxed or lucky, but it was making an old man of him.

  "So we shut down-"

  "Yes, but don't they realise it's not like flicking off a switch? That schedule is just crazy. Even cutting corners, we couldn't do it."

  "They're desperate."

  "And I don't like them being around either." He glanced aggressively through the glass walls that surrounded his office. Positioned around the room beyond were Special Forces operatives, faces masked by smoked Plexiglas visors, guns held at the ready across their chests; their immobility and impersonality made them seem inhuman, mystical statues waiting to be brought to life by sorcery. They had arrived with the dawn, slipping into the vital areas as if they knew the station intimately-which, of course, they did, although they had never been there before. For support, they said. Not, To guard. Not, To enforce.

  "All vital installations are under guard, Dick. So they say. It's all supposed to be hush-hush-"

  "Then how do you know?"

  Nelson smirked in reply. Then: "We might as well just ignore them. It's their job, all that Defence of the Realm stuff."

  "What are they going to do if we don't meet the deadline? Shoot us?"

  Nelson's expression suggested he thought this wasn't beyond the bounds of possibility.

  "I just never expected to be doing my job at gunpoint. If the powers that be don't trust us, why should we trust them?"

  "Desperate times, Dick."

  McShay looked at Nelson suspiciously. "I hope you're on our side, William."

  "There aren't any sides, are there?"

  A rotating red light suddenly began whirling in the room outside, intermittently bathing them in a hellish glow. A droning alarm pitched at an irritating level filled the complex. The Special Forces troops were instantly on the move.

  "Shit!" McShay closed his eyes in irritation; it was a breach of a security zone. "What the fuck is it now?"

  Nelson was already on the phone. As he listened, McShay watched incomprehension flicker across his face.

  "Give me the damage," McShay said wearily when Nelson replaced the phone.

  Nelson stared at him blankly for a moment before he said, "There's an intruder-"

  "I know! It's the fucking intruder alarm!"

  "— in the reactor core."

  McShay returned the blank stare and then replied, "You're insane." He picked up the phone and listened to the stuttering report before running out of the room, Nelson close behind him.

  The inherent farcical nature of a group of over-armed troops pointing their guns at the door to an area where no human could possibly survive wasn't lost on McShay, but the techies remained convinced someone was inside. He pushed his way past the troops on the perimeter to the control array where Rex Moulding looked about as uncomfortable as any man could get.

  Moulding motioned to the soldiers as McShay approached. "What are this lot doing here? This isn't a military establishment."

  McShay brushed his question aside with an irritated flap of his hand. "You're a month late for practical jokes, Rex."

  "It's no joke. Look here." Moulding pointed to the bank of monitors.

  McShay examined each screen in turn. They showed various views of the most secure and dangerous areas around the reactor. "There's nothing there," he said eventually.

  "Keep watching."

  McShay sighed and attempted to maintain his vigilance. A second later a blur flashed across one of the screens. "What's that?"

  The fogginess flickered on one of the other screens. "It's almost like the cameras can't get a lock on it," Moulding noted.

  "What do you mean?"

  There was a long pause. "I don't know what I mean."

  "Is it a glitch?"

  "No, there's definitely someone in there. You can hear the noises it makes through the walls."

  McShay's expression dared Moulding not to say the wrong thing. "It?"

  Moulding winced. "Bob Pruett claims to have seen it before it went in there-"

  "Where is he?"
McShay snapped.

  As he glanced around, a thickset man in his fifties wearing a sheepish expression pushed his way through the military.

  "Well?" McShay said uncompromisingly.

  "I saw it," Pruett replied in a thick Scots drawl. He looked at Moulding for support.

  "You better tell him," Moulding said.

  "Look, I know this sounds bloody ridiculous, but it's what I saw. It had antlers coming out like this." He spread his fingers on either side of his head; McShay looked at him as if he had gone insane. "But it was a man. I mean, it walked like a man. It looked like a man-two arms, two legs. But its face didn't look human, know what I mean? It had red eyes. And fur, or leaves-"

  "Which one?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "Fur, or leaves. Which one?"

  "Well, both. They looked like they were growing out of each other, all over its body."

  McShay searched Pruett's face, feeling uncomfortable when he saw no sign of contrition; in fact, there was shock and disbelief there, and that made him feel worse. Moulding suddenly grew tense, his gaze fixed on the monitors. "It's coming this way," he said quietly.

  Unconsciously, McShay turned towards the security door. Through it he could hear a distant sound, growing louder, like the roaring of a beast, like a wind in the high trees.

  "The temperature's rising in the reactor core," Nelson called out from the other side of the room. The second tonal emergency warning began, intermingling discordantly with the intruder alarm; McShay's head began to hurt. "The fail-safes haven't kicked in," Nelson continued. He pulled out his mobile phone and punched in a number; McShay wondered obliquely who he could be calling.

  "It's nearly here," Moulding said. McShay couldn't take his eyes off the security door; he was paralysed by incomprehension. That horrible noise was louder now, reverberating even through the shielding. He couldn't understand how the troops could remain immobile with all the confusion raging around them; their guns were still raised to the door, barrels unwavering.

  The one in charge glanced briefly at McShay, then said, "If it comes through, fire the moment you see it."

  What's the point? McShay thought. It's been in the reactor core and its still alive! He was overcome with a terrible feeling of foreboding.

  There was a sudden thundering at the door and it began to buckle like tinfoil; McShay thought he could see the imprints of hands in it. Despite their training, some of the troops took a step back. The roaring which sounded like nothing he had ever heard before was now drowning out the alarms.

  "I don't wish to state the obvious, but if that door comes down, it will take more than a shower to decontaminate us," Moulding said in a quiet voice that crackled with tension.

  McShay came out of his stupor in a flash; the thought that a security door designed to survive a direct nuclear strike might ever be breached was so impossible, his mind hadn't leapt to consider the consequences of what was happening.

  "Everybody fall back!" he yelled. "We need to seal this area off-"

  The next second the door exploded outwards. McShay had one brief instant when he glimpsed the shape that surged through and then the gunfire erupted in a storm of light and noise, and a second after that a wave of soft white light came rushing from the reactor core towards them all.

  The first person to see what had happened to Dounreay Nuclear Power Station was a farmer trundling along the coast road in his tractor. The sight was so bizarre he had to pull over to the side to check it wasn't some illusion caused by the sea haze. The familiar modernist buildings had been lost behind an impenetrable wall of vegetation; mature trees sprouted through the concrete and tarmac, ivy swathed the perimeter fences and buildings, dog roses and clematis clambered up the side of the administration block, cars were lost beneath creepers; all around squirrels, rabbits and birds skittered through the greenery. And if anyone had decided, for whatever reason, to check for radiation, they would have found none, not even in what had been the reactor core. Nor would they have found any sign of human life.

  May 2, 8 p.m.; News International: Wapping, London:

  "There's no point in us being here." The accent was pure Mockney, hiding something from the Home Counties. Lucy Manning repeatedly punched the lift button, then shifted from foot to foot with irritation as she watched the lighted numbers' soporific descent. She was in her twenties, dyed-blonde hair framing a face that had the cold hardness of a frontline soldier.

  Beside her, Kay Bliss could have been a mirror image or a copycat sister, but the look and the accent were all part of the office politics; a game they both knew how to play. "Oh, fuck it, Lucy, we're getting paid, aren't we? It's nice not to be out doorstepping some twat until the early hours for a change." Her voice had the hard vowels of a Geordie, though she could hide it when she had to.

  "There's some idiot from Downing Street permanently in the newsroom," Lucy continued, "going over every piece of copy with a fine-tooth comb. DNotice on this, D-Notice on that. We'll be like some fucking cheap local rag soon. Golden wedding stories and photos from the Rotary lunch." Lucy strode into the lift the second the doors opened, then rattled her nails anxiously on the metal wall. "Come on. Why are these things so fucking slow? All the technology we've got in this place, you'd think they'd be able to get lifts that worked quickly."

  "We're not even supposed to be using them. All those technology crashes-"

  "Like we've got time to walk up and down flights of stairs all day."

  Kay held her breath until the doors opened on the newsroom floor. She'd spent an hour stuck in it with three monkeys from the loading bay and it wasn't an episode she wanted to repeat.

  Lucy was still talking as she dodged out between the opening doors, "It started with that terrorist strike on the M4-"

  "Damon covered that." Kay looked puzzled for a second. "Terrorists?"

  "It had to be terrorists. It wasn't that long before the Martial Law announcement."

  "Someone said a Yank plane had gone down carrying nukes."

  Lucy shrugged. "And there were all those phone calls from the great unwashed claiming they'd seen some fire-breathing monster." She flung open the swing doors. "Sometimes I wish I worked for the FT."

  The newsroom was quiet now that all the dayshift had departed. The night news editor stared at the slowly scrolling Press Association newsfeed on his computer while lazily chewing on a cheese roll. One of the sports reporters whistled loudly.

  Mello, darlin'," Kay shouted back with a cheery wave.

  "It's all right for them," Lucy muttered moodily, "their Ludo tournaments never get censored."

  "You're in a right mood, aren't you?"

  They'd walked on a few paces before Lucy said, "I had the splash today and they pulled it."

  "Oh, that explains it. Bitter and twisted at not getting any front page glory. What was the story?"

  "A whole unit of Royal Marines slaughtered up in the Highlands. A hot tip from my man at Command Headquarters." She stuck out her bottom lip like a sulky child.

  "Wow. A proper story. No EastEnders stud getting bladdered in that one," Kay said with what Lucy thought was an unreasonable amount of glee. "But you didn't really expect to get it through, did you?" Lucy shrugged. Kay's expression gradually became troubled. "Slaughtered? In Scotland?"

  "Hey, it's the Barbie twins!" Kevin Smith, one of the sales managers, had been lurking around the news desk. The hacks hated him for his retro-yuppie look and his aftershave stink, but he insisted on pretending he was one of the boys.

  "Fuck off, Kevin," Kay said with a mock-sweet smile.

  "Careful you don't cut yourself with that." He patted the desk so they could both sit next to him, but they studiously went round to the other side where they could talk to the handful of freelancers doing the night shift.

  "What's up?" Lucy perched on the edge of the desk so she could tease the newbies with a flash of her thigh.

  "Don't bother the fresh meat!" the news editor barked. "Get over here!"

>   Kay was first over. "What is it, chief?"

  He tapped the screen as he spoke through a mouthful of cheese roll. "PA says the PM's making an announcement at nine. Half the cabinet is getting the boot and they're setting up a coalition with the other parties. Government of National Unity or something."

  "Good policy. Get all the losers in one place. It'll probably be as successful as their Martial Law that they haven't got enough manpower to enforce." Kevin had wandered over and was reading the newsfeed over the night news editor's shoulder.

  "I'll take that one," Lucy called out.

  "You're both working on it." The night news editor rammed his chair backwards into the sales manager's groin. Kevin exhaled sharply, but continued to force a smile.

  Kay tore off a sheet of printer paper to make notes. "Blimey. Two proper stories in one day. It's a sign-the world really is coming to an end!"

  They all stopped what they were doing as the night news editor leaned forward to peer at the screen, swearing under his breath. "Somebody must have rattled Downing Street's cage. There's a whole load of stuff coming up here. Flights grounded earlier, now we get `train services limited… No international calls… maybe extended disruption of the phone network… orders to shoot looters on sight…' What the fuck is going on?"

  A middle-aged man in a smart dark suit moved slowly from the editor's office towards the news desk. He had a nondescript haircut and bland features and he carried himself with the stiff demeanour of a civil servant.

  "When are you going to tell us what the fuck's going on?" the night news editor bellowed. "It's a fucking outrage! The people have a right to know-"

  The dark-suited man dropped a sheet of paper on the desk. "This is tomorrow's page one story. `PM Launches Battle of Britain."'

  They all looked at it, dumbfounded. "You can't do that!" Lucy could see another byline disappearing before her eyes.

  The night news editor scanned the paper, then hammered it beneath the flat of his hand. "We can't print this! It doesn't fucking say anything! Just fucking PR guff? Nobody has any idea what's going on, they don't know who the fucking enemy is! It could be a fucking coup for all anyone knows! There'll be panic in the streets-"