Epilogue To Suburbia

by Jon Collins

  * * * * *

  They emerge from the terminal onto another panorama of green, only this time the vista is for real. The path down from the concrete bunker overlooks a valley that stretches for miles in each direction, flanked by the gentle contours of distant hills. Above them, the meadows have sharper outlines, remnants of the carefully tended lawns and gardens of decades before. There are no trees, of course, but there is sufficient brush and shrub to make up for their absence. Three quarters of the way up the hill, the stark ruins of a country residence are outlined against the sky.

  A has been here before, in her youth. Each movement of her head sparks a series of memories, which crystallise in front of her eyes like cinema stills. I was probably about your age, she thinks, glancing towards B. I was never as tall, never as fit… but I was here. And I was with him. Thirty years of suppressed emotion wells inside her like a geyser, restrained only by the steady stream of air she inhales through her nostrils. She faces away from B, not to hide the emotions but to give the opportunity to hold herself together. Still looking away, she waits a long, solitary moment before risking conversation.

  “What’s the Geiger reading?” she asks, her voice only slightly cracked.

  “Clear,” replies B.

  “Really?”

  “Well, no worse than some parts of Cornwall.”

  “Air Q?”

  “Clean.”

  “That’ll do for me,” says A, almost feeling herself. “How about the biochem?”

  “Too soon to tell.”

  “Oh,” says A flatly, not bothering to hide the disappointment. It means that the suits need to stay on.

  They walk up the hill towards the ruins, or more accurately towards the westerly wing, which at least has a floor still standing. A keeps up a good impression but is unable to disguise the occasional wince of pain when she puts pressure on her left ankle. The microphones don’t hide much.

  “You’re limping?” B’s voice is tempered with practicality, not sympathy.

  “So?”

  “I’d best take a look.”

  “It’s no bother.”

  “Better sort it now.”

  “It’s – No – Bother.”

  “OK.”

  The doorway is in a remarkably robust state, given the dilapidated nature of the rest of the building. It is framed by a stone archway, filaments of cable indicating where a light fitting used to be. The door itself is studded oak, an iron ring and oversized keyhole giving it additional gravitas. It is decidedly locked.

  “Can you deal with that?” asks A, still carefully controlling the bursts of recognition that seem to accompany every feature of the place.

  “Sure.” B sets down the case and opens it. From one of its many internal compartments she removes a small cylinder, about half the length of a cigarette, and inserts it into the keyhole. Both take a few steps back, using the protection of the archway as B detonates the charge. The door resists opening, its hinges seemingly resentful of the manner in which it was unlocked.

  “After y… oh,” says B.

  The body lies just inside the entrance, a crumpled heap of clothing, bones and hair. No identification is necessary: each can see for herself the trademark Che Guevara look, the de facto military greens, calf length black boots and flak jacket. For final confirmation an ancient, faded baseball cap lies a foot away from the head, upside down, but unmistakeable. That cap was the stuff of legend, a symbol of freedom and despair. They already know what it will say but A picks it up in one movement, though the suit makes her action less than graceful. Not to mention the ankle.

  The logo is there. A purses her lips and frowns slightly, flicking the cap down onto the floor while keeping her gaze carefully trained on the inanimate, non-contentious objects in the hallway: a canvas bag, another pair of boots, a roll of toilet paper. In this way, she keeps an outer appearance of control. Her gaze is drawn back to the cap: no fear, it says, without irony. The words invite closure: A feels the inner peace, knowing them to be true. Good bye, my love.

  Looking up, she sees B gesturing towards an open door.

  “Stairs,” says B. “We need to go down.”

  “Yeah…” says A, “Yeah.”

  “You sure you’re OK?”

  “Yeah. Let’s go.”

  A moves towards the door. As she walks past B, she feels she knows not what. She takes the stairs one at a time, stepping carefully on each one with both feet, a function of training rather than her injury.

  Disasters are collections of unfortunate, coincident circumstances, and this is no exception. The runner on the edge of the stair is only a few millimetres high, but that is enough to catch the edge of the bulky yellow boot. Had A not been as tired, she might have lifted her foot just a millimetre higher; had she not been distracted, she might have reacted just a microsecond sooner, before the strain on her weakened ankle became too much. Had she not been encumbered by the suit, she might have kept her balance rather than crashing down the remaining four stairs and landing in an untidy heap at the bottom. Which she does, unglamorously. It is B’s turn to mutter an expletive as she takes the stairs two at a time, keeping her balance as she arrives next to her superior officer.

  “Ow, shit. Shit.” The look in A’s eyes is akin to pleading.

  “Hurts?”

  “Yeah.”

  “A lot?”

  “Yeah.”

  She feels strangely relieved, and is not proud of this. “Sorry,” she says, resigning to the inevitable. It’s over.

  B helps A into a more appropriate position, turning her onto her side and propping her head against a box, ignoring the occasional outburst as she does so. She avoids touching A’s left leg, conscious of the impossible angle where the boot meets the suit. “It’s broken,” B says, speaking slowly to confirm the obvious and to indicate what she is about to do. She kneels in front of the open case, preparing a hypodermic syringe.

  “This might prick.” Just do it, thinks A, I don’t need the bedside manner.

  B tears back a velcro flap adjacent to A’s calf, to reveal a round circle of rubber. It is not the best place to put a needle, but it gets to the heart of the problem and it avoids unnecessary movement. The needle enters through the rubber patch. A doesn’t flinch as B pushes the fluid down through the tube and removes the syringe.

  “Sleep well.”

  “What do .. you .. m…” A’s helmeted head tips to one side, and release of breath echoes through her mike. First confirming A is comfortable, B closes the case and stands up.

  “Hello, Control.”

  “How’s A?” asks Brooke.

  “She’ll survive. Broken ankle – I’ve had to sedate her.” Though I didn’t need as high a dose as that, B thinks.

  “B, you are the new A. Consider yourself…”

  “That won’t be necessary, Control”

  “What do you mean?” B could hear the frown.

  “Brooke, this is a 3-451. I’m afraid I’m bypassing you. Thanks for listening.”

  In a temporary building just outside the exclusion zone, a number of screens flicker and go black. Brooke and his colleagues trigger escalation procedures, for all the good it will do them. B smiles as she considers their loss of signal, before reaching up and pushing a mute button on the side of her helmet.

  “Radio, I need a new frequency and an encrypted channel.” She spells out the details and watches as the information is registered on the heads up display, reflected on the inside of her visor.

  “Frequency set, channel open,” responds the helmet.

  “How are we doing?” A man’s voice, gentle and authoritative, and as clear as if it were in the next room.

  “Hey Mark, good to hear your voice.”

  “Did you miss me?”

  “Course I did. Waltzing Matilda was starting to get on my tits.”

  “Now now, you shouldn’t speak about your elders and betters like that.”

  “You haven’t been cooped up with her for the pa
st month, getting ready for this thing. I assume someone was on commission, the way they dragged it out.”

  “I’ll let you off. Did you have to make her keep the suit on?”

  “Protective measure,” she replies, “for me, not for her. What’s Brooke’s Army up to?”

  “Not a great deal. We blanked their screens and put them on radio silence the moment you said the magic words. You should have seen their faces.”

  “You were watching?”

  “Our eyes are everywhere, you should know that. Shall we get on with it? We haven’t got all day.”

  “You’re starting to sound like her. Can I lose the suit?”

  “No problem. We’ve been monitoring every readout from that box of tricks of yours, and there’s nothing. Completely clean, fresh as a new dawn.”

  “Thank Christ for that.”

  “Cam…”

  “What?”

  “Good job.”

  “Thanks.”

  Cam (to her friends and colleagues, only her mother still calls her Camellia) reaches up and clips the helmet from her suit. Her short, dark hair looks matted, and her cheeks are shiny with the moisture that the helmet’s internal airflows have been unable to wick away.

  “You have no idea,” she says, sliding her finger down the Velcro to reveal the outer protective zip, “how good it feels to be getting out of this thing.”

  “I can imagine.”

  “No, you can’t.” Soon she is free of the garb, with only the head-mounted radio remaining. “Particularly the smell. Hang on, I’ll get you back on a video feed.” Taking a pencil-like camera from the black case, she mounts it on to her headset, feeling for the socket to take the wire that is trailing from its rear.

  “How’s that?”

  “I see sky.”

  “Now?”

  “Ground.”

  “Bugger. Now?”

  “OK, it’s good. Let’s go.”

  Free from the encumberment of the suit, Cam skips down the steps, annotating vocally as she goes.

  “Heading down into the cellar now. Looks like it used to be for wine, there’s a few broken bottles here, nothing worth taking. A door to the left and one straight ahead, entering left door now. Nothing to see, an empty room.”

  The signal is coping, they’re only a single floor down.

  “Back in the wine cellar now, heading to the other exit door. It’s a corridor, but more brickwork, old I think. Smells old. Door at end, sensor lock. Mark, I’ll need to fix this.”

  “Need any help?”

  “I’ll manage.”

  Cam opens the briefcase on a brickwork alcove near the door. In the torchlight the alcove looks ancient, like the altar of an underground temple. She removes a small metal box, flicks a switch on one side, and places it on top of the lock. A small readout flicks through numbers before a satisfactory click indicates success.

  “Opening the door. This is a large room, looks like a lab of some sort. Oh.” Cam looks at the floor straight ahead of her, where something is protruding from behind a desk.

  “Yes, I can see. Feet,” says Mark.

  Cam moves closer, supporting herself on the desk with one hand as she looks around the corner.

  “White male, not young. Nasty blow to the head. He shouldn’t be here.”

  “What do you mean? You know him?”

  “No, sorry. I mean, this isn’t a twenty-year-dead body.”

  “Ah.”

  Stepping closer still. “I’d give it under a year.”

  “Oh.”

  “Let’s come back to him. Continuing to look – there’s three doors in a row, straight ahead. The middle door should be the safe room. The door is open, Mark, I’m not sure this is going to be good…”

  Cam enters and scans quickly round the safe room. It doesn’t give the impression of being very safe: several cupboards that might once have been locked stand open, their doors splintered. On the floor lies a crowbar. All of this is incidental to the main issue. Four metal table legs are concreted into the middle of the room, but there is no table top: someone has cut through the legs and removed it.

  “Damn,” comes Mark’s voice over the headset. He can see what Cam sees.

  “Indeed. Someone’s been here,” says Cam, as she does so recognising the obviousness of what she is saying. “Whatever it was, it’s gone.”

  “Try the side rooms… maybe they just shifted it.”

  “Yeah, right! OK… left first.”

  The door to the left of the safe room opens without resistance. In front of her and filling most of the small room there is a pallet, neatly stacked with boxes. She has a premonition of what they contain, quickly confirmed as she focuses on the selection of brightly coloured labels affixed to each box.

  “Sheesh… Can you see this stuff?”

  “Well enough.”

  “There’s enough here to blow up the Houses of Parliament…”

  “I wouldn’t vouch for its stability either. Cam, can I suggest a retreat?”

  “Good plan. It’ll probably be the same on the other side, I think I’ll leave that one.”

  “Don’t blame you.”

  “This little pile explains why this heap of rubble is still here,” says Cam. “I guess it wasn’t supposed to be.”

  Cam backs out towards the door, catching the back of her heel on the lintel as she passes.

  “Steady, we don’t want any more casualties,” says Mark.

  “No intention of being. Speaking of which, think I’ll leave the body for now. He’s waited this long, he can hang on another couple of days.”

  “Not sure there’s much more you can do.”

  “You’re right,” Cam says. A pause, then: “OK, you can come in. Seal this area, make this lot safe, let Control handle the transit route or they’ll only get sniffy. Oh – and bring a stretcher, get the injury out of here.”

  Job done.

  # # # #

  For more information about Jon Collins, visit https://www.joncollins.net or you can follow Jon on Twitter at https://twitter.com/jonno .