Come Back

by George Erlynne

  "Gets to you, doesn't it?" Mary's quiet voice behind me was sad. "Yeah, even me. Left California too young to remember much so all I know is here."

  Mike was asleep again, Melanee sitting with her hands folded, saying nothing but watching Mary and me as we gazed at the slowly passing coastline of Dorset, hazy in the summer sun, skimming over Portland Bill along to St. Alban's Head from where, dimly seen in the blue distance, the outline of the Isle of Wight began to creep over the horizon. What in God's name had happened all those years ago? The towns were dusty jungles, totally erased from the landscape, no sign of man left on this summer afternoon.

  The fuel gauge was showing ominous red lights as the final miles slipped by. I let the height come down slowly until we were only feet above the calm sea, the waters of the Solent glinting in front of us. Soon the red light began to blink and a warning buzzer sounded loud in the cabin. We had minutes remaining but the wooded shore of Fawley was close, the narrows where the entrance to the Harbour was were almost on us. There was no sense in running until the engines died completely so I eased us gently down until the lower hull kissed the water surface with a considerable thud, masses of spray hissing out. Shutting down the bad engine I let us coast round the old harbour head, passing where the submarine base used to be into the sheltered waters of the inner sound. The aircar wallowed gently, coasting silently as I cut the engine, the momentum taking us to the Eastern shore where we finally came to rest with the nose pushing gently against a rock wall covered in dense creeper.

  The hatch hissed with hydraulic protest when I climbed out to attach our tethering cable to the thickest piece of tree I could reach. The women climbed out with me and we all stood on the casing gazing round at the peaceful scene, thickly forested hills receding into the distance, dense scrub and taller growth coming right down to the water's edge. Look where we would, there was nothing but the eternal trees.

  "Difficult to believe." Mary muttered. "A whole navy base, I used to come down here for the Navy days, I remember my mother taking me on boat trips round the harbour."

  I didn't answer because I had nothing to say, no words of explanation or even comfort. Melanee stared round her, said little, listening to our talk but she was part of this world and we weren't, we were living fossils. I breathed the warm air, the tang of sea still strong here, and remembered Linda. Linda, who had spent a day with me sailing a small boat in the Solent before we set out for the stars, she still came to me in dreams, Melanee knew about them, held me close and cried her own tears for Linda. The sense of loss, standing in this empty place was overwhelming, but the burning need to slake my thirst for revenge remained. I thought I was beginning to understand, to comprehend, however hazily, dimly, but with ever increasing certainty what had been done to us and why and I knew who was going to pay. Mary and Melanee looked at me slightly oddly when I smiled at them but there were things which had to be put right, wrongs to be avenged and a world to be brought back to sanity even if it killed us.

  Chapter 23

  DEPRESSIONS

  We didn't need a full load of fuel, only enough to get us to Calais where we had left our reserve, always supposing the local bears hadn't eaten the fuel tanks or lightning hadn't disposed of the stuff in a puff of flame or Max of course. The whole mad enterprise was balanced on a very thin edge of viability, and if it fell off we would survive about six months, I thought, just enough to see our children born and die.

  That all seeing computer up near Inverness had provided precise co-ordinates of the supposed secret and buried emergency stores that the Navy had prudently provided for itself ten thousand years ago in case the Admiral's car ran out of gas. It had not, however, told us how to find it in a jungle of scrub and dense, spiky, undergrowth that covered what had been, we thought, the main area of Portsmouth Dockyard.

  "I wouldn't have believed it." Mike muttered, staring round him. We had laboriously hacked our way through this inhospitable vegetation, nearly falling into a deep pit that I diagnosed as one of the dry docks, but trees, big trees in full leaf grew on what, if we were right, had been flat places with massive machinery scattered about.

  "A hundred centuries, fella." Mary panted, wiping away sweat from her face. "How long is this weather going to hold up, huh?"

  Nobody answered that. The last days had been astonishingly calm and warm but I supposed that with no more rain making ceremonies like Test Matches or Wimbledon to annoy the Gods, they lost interest in turning a British summer into the usual rain sodden gloom. We had tried to follow a strict compass course from a known point to bring us to the entrance, but I felt increasing pessimism gripping me as the well nigh unrecognisable state of this, once the biggest Naval base in Europe, seeped into my consciousness. Melanee, ever inquisitive, kept grabbing the compass and squinting through the prism but she knew nothing of warships or dry docks. Here, the insect population was well established and keen. A swarm of small black things hovered round us, ready to dart in and drink the perspiration we were providing for them. Larger relatives droned around, waiting to pick up any scraps left over. Mike started grunting again and snatched the compass from Melanee.

  "Godammit! It must be there! Let's go up there." He pointed to a steeply rising eminence seen indistinctly through the close packed scrub. "We can see from the top." He watched as I commenced to scramble my way through the jungle, hacking away with the knife, a seriously depleting exercise which was running my personal battery down. Melanee raised her eyebrows at me while Mary sighed and slapped insects to death irritably, keeping a careful eye on Mike. His fine collection of injuries were not mended enough to allow for a hike in insect infested jungle but his language when this was explained to him became so violent that we had to let him come or witness self destruction on a monumental scale or so he said. Mary kept pinching her lips and helping him along despite language which I hoped Melanee could not translate. Puffing mightily, I slogged along until the ground rose sharply, covered in thorny scrub which made progress a

  blasphemous effort.

  Slashing at the brambles which always seemed to whip back and retaliate, I reflected moodily that the present state of the plant growth proved that no one had been poking their nose into this place. We were the first, pioneers no less and I hoped that the nuclear energies locked up in the submarine reactors had long since died a death. I recalled reading once about this complex. They had one of the most powerful cranes in the world here, concealed under a huge dome of concrete, designed to lift out the complete reactor assembly from a nuclear submarine in one lump. Then, I supposed, they took it to bits. There must have been a cooling pond for the rods under that dome, the thing stuck up like a slag heap from a giant coal mine, you could see it from way off in the old days. My feet suddenly stopped working and Melanee cannoned into me from behind.

  "Christ." I croaked. The flies took this for encouragement and zoomed in. "We're standing on it."

  Mike, bringing up the rear, stopped, looking startled. "My God." He breathed. "You're right. This is the submarine dock." He sat down, or more accurately, Mary eased him down, worry lines flitting across her face. Taking the now tattered paper from his pocket he smoothed it on his leg and scowled at it. Melanee slithered down the slope to gaze over his shoulder but Mary just stood there, wiping her face again, looking tired and fraught.

  "Supposed to be next to the loading bays, isn't it?" I growled. Two hours we had been swanning around in what was now blinding heat and I didn't like the look of him. If that deep cut on his thigh reopened we had big trouble.

  "Got it." He said abruptly. "See?" He ran a finger over the paper. "We must have been a few degrees off course. It's not in the docks, see, it's a specially built access ramp where the personnel buses used to line up. They must have added it on after they built it, but it's right inside the restricted area and must have had armed guards day and night. We go that way." He waved a hand to our left as we stared down the slope. "Fifty yards."

  Fifty yards proved to be a struggle
through the densest collection of thorny scrub in Europe, or so I told him somewhat snappily, wishing I had a machete instead of a long knife that continually caught itself in malicious brambles. Finally, Mike having been counting progress inch by inch, we arrived at the mysterious spot. There should have been a large 'X' on the ground to signify our triumphant success but instead there was nothing, unless you count the skeletal like roots of a respectable tree, nearly covered in thick and unsympathetic undergrowth.

  "Dig." Mary suggested, an unpopular idea. I told her so with restraint, especially as our digging tools were limited to knives.

  "We need power tools." Mike said gloomily, but grinned uneasily at me when I said nothing.

  "How much would collect over flat ground in ten millennia?" Mary mused. "It might be only a couple of feet."

  "Yes?" I eyed her coldly. "What about this damned tree?"

  They both nodded glumly. Melanee, listening to this futile conversation, fished out her own knife, calmly knelt down and began to saw the nearest root with the serrated edge. We stood and watched before Mary gave a sigh and joined her. Mike lifted an eyebrow at me but subsided onto the small cleared area, knowing that any attempt on his part to begin excavations would bring down a heap of trouble from Mary. I glanced up at the sun, wondered what had happened to all the whisky in the world and joined the mining gang.

  There was only one way of doing it logically. We cut down the low scrub for a square area, loosened the soil revealed, severed the tree roots (after a struggle that shortened my life), and heaved up the loose stuff by hand. After an hour of this we were down two feet in one spot with no sign of anything solid yet. Standing up in the heat, waves of repressed irritation flowed out of me. There had to be a better way. This was stone age stuff.

  "Hold it." I croaked. "We're getting nowhere and we're getting bloody heat stroke. I've got a better idea. Come back to the car." Sheathing the knife, I marched off, leaving them to follow in a bad-tempered group. We trudged back to the car where they all stood sullenly and watched as I peeled off my sweat stained clothes and plunged in the water. Melanee, seeing my revival, followed suit and so did Mary, while Mike glowered at us from the upper casing of the car which must have been about red hot by now after all day in that sun.

  "Well?" He demanded, as I crawled out, dripping. Melanee, alarmingly, thought it a fine opportunity to wash her remaining clothes, an idea that Mary copied with a sidelong grin at Mike's red face.

  "Come on downstairs." I told him, climbing back into the car. Settling down by the master control panel, I tapped away at the keyboard and sat back. "See?" I enquired. "We've got a thousand rounds of twenty millimetre cannon ammunition on board."

  "So?" He responded grumpily, slumping down on the passenger seat. Those injuries were hurting a lot more than he let on. "You going to fire at it from here?" He passed a cloth across his glistening face. "You can't see it."

  "All those rounds are explosive." I explained. "Say around an ounce in each. We take maybe a hundred rounds to bits, we get enough to make a big hole."

  Before he could open his mouth, the two women clattered in, virtually naked, spraying salt water everywhere, but bright eyed and full of vim. I lost my train of thought and Mike nearly had a relapse until they consented to put something on and listen to the brain wave. Melanee looked interested and slightly puzzled but Mary frowned furiously.

  "You want to take a hundred cannon shells to bits? Fused shells?" I had forgotten her knowledge of exotic armaments. "Not in here you don't."

  The cannon ammunition was in drums to feed the rotary mechanism. Extracting one was difficult but not dangerous, after all, they were supposed to be removable to rearm. Collecting the complete ammunition pack, all thousand rounds of it, out of the nose compartment was tedious but we didn't need it anyway, it was just dead weight. Taking the shells to bits was more tricky because, as Mary had succinctly pointed out, they were fused. The fuse activated on firing but removing the casing with hand tools might be construed by an indignant shell as the same as being fired. They all watched as I carted my loot to the shore, hacked away to give myself space and commenced operations. We had a couple of metal containers for water which I appropriated and carefully packed with the explosive. This was grey, putty like substance, feeling oily to the touch, a small cigarette shaped lump coming out of each shell with some difficulty, until I got the trick of shaking the business end vigorously. I heard the collective intake of breath at this novel procedure, but we would all be pensioners if I just levered the stuff out slowly.

  It took me two days. The two cans, carefully packed with high explosive, rested on the shoreline, a high bank which Mike insisted must have been part of the dock wall, where they were gingerly inspected by the others. The next problem was how to set them off while hunkering down some way away. Mike solved it, constructing an ingenious spring-loaded arrangement from the guts of one of the seat frames, the idea being that twitching a long wire would allow the spring to impact on the head of a whole fused shell, thus detonating the lot. Mary pursed her lips at this brainwave but said nothing as I carried the impromptu bomb along to the spot. There then followed a period of digging to hollow out a deep, narrow hole into which we lowered the bomb. Mike, standing over me with some difficulty due to assorted pains and aches, instructed me loudly how to set the detonator, Mary hissing rebukes from behind him. It did nothing for my concentration but we retreated at last to the end of our wire which Mary told us emphatically, was not far enough. I had filled in the hole and tamped it down and felt some doubt whether the whole Heath Robinson apparatus would work anyway. Explaining Heath Robinson to Melanee kept Mary occupied while Mike looked cunningly at me and fingered the end of our wire. We nodded at each other and he tugged it strongly.

  Mary was right. Those cannon shells had been filled with very high-powered stuff, ultra high velocity mixture, which went off with a considerable flash, plus a blast wave that tore away the surrounding shrubbery, leaving us sitting down with deafened eardrums as large chunks of earth and other things pattered down around us. Melanee was reduced to a stunned silence but Mary found her tongue and let me know things about my ancestry that I had not understood before.

  "You stupid sod!" She hissed, shaking her hair to get dirt out of it. "We could have been killed!"

  "But we're not." I replied, prodding Mike's chest to see if the wounds had reopened.

  "Go see." He muttered hoarsely. Melanee nodded briskly so I sat him up and left Mary to complete the examination, taking Melanee with me to see the body.

  We had a crater, a respectable hole in the ground, still smoking, with an area some twenty yards wide all round it cleared of vegetation. That stuff was impressive, much stronger than I had bargained for but down at the bottom of the hole, quite ten feet deep, a regular outline proclaimed artificial construction of some kind. Slithering down with Melanee at my heels, I dug away with the knife, Melanee throwing out the loose rubble, until an unmistakable doorway appeared, only the top of it at first, but Mary's arrival helped with the work and late that afternoon, with a sky darkening with the first clouds we had seen for days, we huddled together in front of a metal door or hatch or what had been one. The metal was practically reduced to oxide but a hefty boot soon revealed a gaping opening from which a cold air emerged and darkness.

  Steps led down, concrete steps that were crumbled nearly to powder and we only had the emergency searchlight from the car which we couldn't charge up because the car had no fuel. Descending into a tomb is slightly daunting especially when bones litter the way, human bones that Mary looked askance at as we picked our way down. They were brittle and turned to dust as soon as touched, but were they the remains of some dedicated guard detail that had decided to blow up the fuel reserves to prevent the enemy from getting their hands on it? Nasty thoughts like that floated around my head as we arrived at another door, this time much better preserved, a blast door, probably airtight. It was secured with locking bars which were rusted solid but
still recognisable. Peering at it, you could see the metal pitted and eroding but it must have been special stuff to have lasted all this time. The three of us lifted a large, unwieldy lump of stone handily lying where the ceiling had sagged and whacked the bars until the sweat poured off us. Hammering my knife into the seals at last produced a hissing noise which preceded the whole massive door swinging abruptly open with a screech of hinges. A strong gust of air billowed out but inside was a considerable space, shadows flitting about as I waved the light.

  "Look!" Mary hissed. "Fuel valves."

  On the floor, covered in dust, were circular metal covers, like drains, from which sprouted an array of pipes. Kneeling down, we peered at this ages-old assembly. Clearly, it was never going to work again, the metals were badly corroded, almost to the point of being welded together in some weird, time induced, embrace. Under them, however, must be the tank. Glancing at the women's tight faces, I banged down on the rust ridden cover with my boot. If what was under there had long evaporated, we were dead.

  The cover suddenly broke, smashed almost like glass, releasing a powerful puff of gas which plumed up in our faces, making us cough heavily, but I was jubilant. The stuff had been under pressure. There was fuel here!

  We sacrificed some of our precious food that night, sitting in the car which wallowed perceptibly as a strong wind whistled up Portsmouth Harbour. The roof drummed with heavy rain, a rumble of thunder echoing in the distance. The weather had broken. It had been a small miracle that the still, hot days had lasted so long because anything like this would have sunk us for sure back in the Irish Sea. Were there any Irish left? Were they still intent on blaming us for all the ills of the world? Or were they busy fighting each other?