by Hill, David
Contents
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Historical Note
My Brother’s War
Brave Company
See Ya, Simon
Coming Back
Follow Penguin
PUFFIN BOOKS
THE DEADLY SKY
David Hill is an award-winning writer who lives in New Plymouth. His novels, stories and plays for young adults have been published in eight different countries.
For Katie Haworth, splendid editor
ONE
There were about ten ships. No, more than that. Twelve, fifteen, nearly twenty of them. Black silhouettes on the sea, too far away for Darryl to see properly, but he could pick the long guns of a battleship, the high sides and flat decks of aircraft carriers. Others lay around them, completely still, facing in all directions. A second battleship, more smaller ones – destroyers or frigates or something. A whole fleet, ready to hurl fire and steel at the enemy.
Nothing moved. If he squinted hard, Darryl could just make out anchor chains angling down into the water from bows and sterns, holding the ships in position. No sign of life on the decks. He couldn’t have seen it, anyway: they were all too far away. But he knew there would never be life on those warships again.
The sea lay flat. A single thin cloud hung unmoving above the silent fleet. Darryl leaned forward. His eyes were fixed on the long black shapes; his heart had begun to beat faster; he could hear his breath coming, quick and shallow.
Funnels and gun turrets, masts and superstructure showed sharp and dark against the sky. Now he could make out the vessels’ shadows stretched across the surface of the water. Must be early morning. When—
The ocean jumped. A pulse seemed to radiate outwards, flashing under the water, almost too fast for Darryl to see. The whole sea jerked upwards. The air above it blurred, shuddered.
Then the ocean split apart, and a great white pillar tore upwards, hurtling into the sky. Darryl jerked backwards, mouth dropping open. Inside a second, the churning column of water, foam, smoke – he couldn’t tell which – stood ten times as high as the warships, storming upwards, rushing outwards as it rose. Already it was wider than a football stadium, wider than a mountain. The ships were like cut-out toys at its base.
Fire glinted and glared inside the white column. The top was spreading out, thickening like the top of a monstrous mushroom as it soared into the sky. Vast masses of water slumped back down, crashing onto the surface of the sea far below.
Another shock of some sort ripped across the top of the water, towards Darryl. He ducked, even though he knew he was safe. The ships bucked sideways; some swung wildly over, about to capsize. Away on the left, he glimpsed palm trees straining backwards as a hurricane of wind struck them. Branches tore free. Trunks snapped and vanished.
He gasped again as he saw the wave coming. It raged out from the base of the enormous pillar that still stormed into the sky, top turning black, now wider even than the circle of warships.
The wave charged towards those ships. A tumult of crashing white, four times as high as the tallest aircraft carrier, surging out in all directions, raging across the ocean faster than a plane could fly.
Two seconds, maybe three, and it reached the nearest vessels. A couple of frigates or destroyers and one of the battleships. It rose above them, dwarfing them, then smashed down on them. The smaller ones vanished instantly. The battleship reeled sideways and toppled, funnels and masts swinging in a wild arc until they pointed straight at Darryl for a moment, then disappeared.
He fought to believe what he was seeing. A battleship like that weighed 40,000 tons, he’d read. Forty thousand tons, and it had capsized like a plastic toy. In front of him, the titanic wall of water raged on. The great column of white wasn’t white any longer. It hung in the sky, foul and swollen, darkening as he watched. Firestorms still blazed through its spreading top. The ships had all gone.
Now a voice was speaking, and a city appeared in front of him. The wreck of a city. A few walls stood, but a great bulldozer appeared to have smashed its way backwards and forward, destroying houses, turning buildings into piles of smoking wood and brick. The remains of burned trees poked upwards, black and dead. An office block tilted crazily sideways, every window blown out. Buckled bicycles, a lorry with its tyres melted, a train carriage – no, a tram – that was now a mangled mass of metal.
Again, nothing moved. Like the sea with its warships before that colossal column came boiling upwards, the scene was empty and still: a vast, abandoned rubbish dump.
Darryl tried to concentrate on what the voice was saying. ‘The bomb detonated 1700 feet above a hospital, near the centre of the city. The temperature at the point of explosion was over 1 million degrees Celsius, two hundred times hotter than the surface of the sun. The howl of the bomber’s engines made many people look up; its captain had put his B-29 Superfortress into a steep turning dive, to get it away as fast as possible. A lot of townsfolk kept staring upwards, puzzled at the sight of an object dropping towards them beneath a white parachute. When the bomb went off, its heat was so great that the air for half a mile around turned white-hot. Inside a second, thousands of people were burning.’
A face was in front of Darryl. He couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman. The hair had all gone, leaving a black crisp on the skull. Cheeks, forehead, nose, neck were blistered raw flesh. The eyes were slits; the mouth hung open. Darryl felt his own lips draw back. ‘Aw, yuk!’
The face vanished. For a moment. Darryl couldn’t tell what he was looking at, then he realised they were bodies, twisted and half-naked, clothes hanging in charred strips. ‘For up to three miles from the explosion, almost everyone caught in the open was burned to death,’ the voice said. ‘Those immediately below the bomb, or within a few hundred yards, vanished completely. Their bodies were vapourised by the heat.’
Another strange picture. A bridge or something, metal and concrete rails broken and bent. Across the ground lay faint shadows, human-shaped, as if adults and children were standing somewhere nearby. ‘Five people were walking here at the moment the flash came,’ Darryl heard. ‘Nothing was left of them, but the outlines of their bodies made paler silhouettes on the blackened road.’
The ruined city slid past again. The voice kept speaking. ‘The blast wave struck buildings, trees and people as a 500-miles-per-hour wind. The few who saw it and survived described a black wall of air hurtling at them. Bodies were flung for a hundred yards. Windows shattered, spraying glass. Walls and roofs fell, crushing those inside. Thirty seconds after the bomb burst, 50,000 people – as many as the whole population of Hamilton – were dead. Meanwhile, the pillar of smoke and fire kept rolling upwards, spreading and growing as it rose.’
‘Wow!’ breathed Darryl. The same shape that had filled the sky above the doomed warships a few minutes ago was swelling in front of him again, thicker than a dozen city
blocks, storms of smoke and fire swirling at its edges and inside the mushroom-shaped top. ‘Inside two minutes, the explosion cloud was higher than Mount Everest,’ the voice continued. ‘The co-pilot of the fleeing plane described it as a bubbling mass, purple-black in colour, shot through with bursts of flame.’
Darryl kept staring as the pillar drove its way higher still, rolling up out of sight. ‘Incredible!’ he muttered. The voice had gone silent for a few seconds, then it spoke again. ‘As it rose, the explosion cloud dragged dust, plus scraps of burning wood and clothing into the air with it, like a gigantic vacuum cleaner. Over the next hours, these floated or fell back to Earth, carrying with them the deadly radioactivity created in the split-second of the flash.’
The ruined city again. Now there were people, some lying twisted on the roads, some sitting and staring at him from burned, torn faces. A few limped or staggered among the smashed buildings, burned clothes hanging from their bodies. No. Darryl’s breath hissed as he understood. Not clothes, but skin.
‘Over the next days, thousands more died from their injuries,’ the voice went on. ‘And then, after a week or so, many of those who had suffered only minor injuries began to fall sick. They lost all energy; they began bleeding from their gums and nostrils. Their hair started to fall out.’ More shocked, staring faces; Darryl screwed up his own mouth. ‘They were the first of those who would die from radiation sickness.’
The voice was joined by a figure. A man sitting at a desk, looking straight at Darryl. ‘Nobody knows for sure how many died in Hiroshima, on the bright summer morning of 6 August 1945. Some estimates say 140,000. Others put the death toll at closer to 200,000. Another 70,000 are thought to have been killed when American aircraft dropped a second atomic bomb on Nagasaki, three days later. A quarter of a century on, people in both of these Japanese cities are still dying from radiation or injuries received in the blasts.’
The ruined city once more. Then the warships, with the terrifying wave storming towards them. ‘And today, in the 1970s, the atomic bombs that ended World War II, along with the nuclear tests that have followed in the Pacific, continue to cause protest and anger.’
Darryl yawned. ‘Wish we had colour TV,’ he mumbled to himself. He glanced at his watch: 4.25. His mother should be home soon; she always tried to get away from her school no later than 4.30.
A different face was on the screen now. A dark-skinned man, angry and tense. Behind him, palm trees like the ones from the explosion under the ocean stood tall against a quiet sea.
The man’s lips were moving, but it was the announcer’s voice that kept coming. ‘Since the French began testing nuclear weapons in the Pacific, over eight years ago in 1966, marches and demonstrations have been held in Tahiti, New Caledonia, other islands …’
Tahiti? Darryl listened harder. That was one of the places his mother kept talking about, wasn’t it? There were girls from Tahiti and other Pacific Islands (Darryl couldn’t be bothered remembering their names) who came to New Zealand to finish their education, and his mum was the person at the local girls’ high who organised things for them.
He concentrated again on the announcer. ‘Some authorities point out that nuclear weapons actually stop nations from going to war. They say communist countries like China and the Soviet Union, with their armies of millions’ – a shot of rows and rows of tanks, all with red stars painted on their sides, rolling across a city square – ‘hold back from invading other nations only because they fear nuclear warheads will crash down on them in retaliation.’
The announcer gazed at the camera, spread his hands. ‘But in many parts of the Pacific, people feel differently.’
Now the other guy on the screen could be heard. He was wild, all right. ‘Since the French start exploding bombs at Mururoa, we’re told not to eat fish, in case they carry radioactivity. What are the people on our islands supposed to do for food? We’re warned to wash down our houses if the wind blows from Mururoa, in case radioactive dust reaches us. Those who live closer to the test sites say that the soil won’t grow crops properly. Our people are frightened and angry. We—’
A crowd of figures were marching along a street. Thirty or forty of them, all brown-skinned. Men, women in bright dresses, a couple of girls with long, dark hair. Some carried signs. Darryl couldn’t read them; they were in French or something.
He yawned again. Come on, Mum! I’m hungry. And bored. The house felt empty suddenly. Empty and sad and angry somehow. It was like that sometimes, now there was only his mother and him. He stared at the TV, where the marchers filed along a street. Some people watched and clapped. Others stared.
Darryl stood up; started to turn off the TV. Then – at last! – he heard the front door open and his mother come in.
TWO
‘You home, love?’ Mrs Davis called out.
‘In here.’ Darryl was still standing in front of the television. On the screen, another giant mushroom cloud poured upwards, its column and spreading head a boiling mass of dark and white blotches. Once again, he wished they had colour TV like some of his friends had.
His mother appeared in the living-room doorway. She looked tired, like she often did these days. For some reason, that made Darryl feel annoyed, too. ‘I thought I asked you to light the fire when you got home?’ she said. Darryl grunted. The TV announcer had started speaking again. ‘Now, almost three decades after Hiroshima, over 200 nuclear weapons tests have been carried out across the world. The—’
‘What are you watching?’ Mrs Davis asked.
Darryl didn’t look at her. ‘The TV.’
His mother sighed, but said nothing. She stood watching also, as another group of protestors appeared. Hundreds – thousands – of them this time, filling a huge square with high buildings around it, and a big statue in the middle. ‘That’s London,’ she said after a minute. ‘They’ve had Ban The Bomb marches there for years.’
A man and woman were shown in close-up. They held signs with shapes like an upside-down Y on them, and the words CAMPAIGN FOR NUCLEAR DISARMAMENT. Darryl sniffed. ‘D’you think anyone’s going to take notice of them?’
His mother was silent again. After a moment, he heard himself say, ‘I might take School Certificate History next year. They do World War II.’ Still his mum said nothing. When Darryl glanced at her, she was gazing at the screen, but he could tell her mind was off somewhere else. She was often like that these days, too.
When he’d got the fire going and they were sitting in the kitchen, his mother asked, ‘Which nuclear things did they show?’
‘Hiroshima. And that other Japanese place. One test under the sea where they had a whole lot of warships and this enormous wave capsized them – that was amazing! And a few of the ones the French are doing. An island called Morri or Murri something. Some weird name.’
‘Mururoa,’ nodded his mother, as she began bustling around, getting potatoes and carrots out of the vegetable bin. Bustling was another thing she did a lot of since Darryl’s father had gone. ‘It used to be a really beautiful coral atoll around a big lagoon. Palm trees and sand. Now the trees and a lot of the coral have vanished in the explosions, and the fish are too radioactive to eat.’
The Island guy on TV had been talking about stuff like that, Darryl remembered. But how did his mother …
Mrs Davis saw the startled look on her son’s face, and laughed. ‘Most of our overseas girls come from the Pacific Islands, remember? They talk about the nuclear tests. None of them likes what’s going on.’
‘Is it any use having all those marches against it, though?’ Darryl went again.
His mother pulled a packet of chops out of the freezer compartment, sniffed them, then dropped them into a frying pan. ‘What do you think?’
‘Why would anyone take notice of them? And …’ Darryl felt himself struggling to think of reasons, and that made him annoyed again. Then he remembered what the TV announcer had been saying. ‘We need a weapon that’ll stop communist countries like the Soviet Uni
on and China from attacking us. And you know what Dad says – said. How dropping those bombs on Japan ended World War II and kept Grandad Davis alive. Plus it meant all those other soldiers didn’t have to take part in an invasion. It saved so many lives.’
‘There have been protests in Tahiti and other islands this past month,’ Mrs Davis said. ‘A few of our overseas girls had friends or families taking part. They held a prayer meeting for them in the boarders’ hostel. They are very churchy, most of the Polynesian kids. One girl prayed that her mum wouldn’t whack any policemen with her sign.’
Mrs Davis laughed. Darryl didn’t. Those protestors are just wasting their time, he told himself.
Rain began thrumming on the roof as they ate. Darryl felt glad he’d got the fire going. ‘Ugh, I hate August!’ his mother said. It was the first time she’d spoken since they sat down. Once again, her mind seemed to be somewhere else.
At least it’s only three weeks until the holidays, Darryl thought. The second term was the longest: fourteen weeks this year.
‘Put a tape on, love,’ his mother said. ‘Something cheerful.’ Darryl got up and slipped a cassette into the player. Abba: he’d seen a programme about them (on a colour TV) at his friend’s place. They’d both said they liked the guys’ flared pants. They hadn’t said they liked the two girl singers, but they’d thought it. ‘That OK?’ he asked his mum.
‘What?’ Mrs Davis looked blank, then, ‘Oh, yes. Fine, thanks, love.’ She fell silent again, then seemed to yank her mind back to the kitchen. ‘So how was school today?’
Darryl shrugged. ‘OK.’ His mother was gazing into the distance once more. She was acting really weird; he felt fed up with it. ‘So how was your school today?’ he went.
His mum smiled, but she still seemed off in a world of her own. Darryl stopped feeling fed up and started feeling worried. Was she OK? Was there some trouble with his father that she didn’t want to tell him about?
There hadn’t been any mail from his dad since a postcard to Darryl nearly a fortnight ago. He checked the mailbox every day. Sometimes he felt wild at his father when he opened the box and found it empty. Sometimes he just felt heavy and tired. The postcards that had arrived were in his top drawer, under his handkerchiefs.