Strangers in the Night (2 page)

But, as his father went about serving out the eggs for Mitts and himself, knocking off the excess with a pair of
clangs
of the metal serving spoon against the side of the pan, Mitts couldn’t help catching a pre-taste of that delicious, buttery mixture in his mouth.

Mitts hadn’t been able to sleep since that stench of disinfectant had woken him, and so he’d really built up a ravenous hunger.

Every time he moved on his stool, it seemed, his stomach groaned in protest.

Back on the stove, Mitts watched the steam curl up from the metal jug of coffee.

Although he loved the smell of coffee, he couldn’t stand the taste.

Once, during his first days here, at the Compound, when everything had been so different, it had seemed like a time for trying new things. And when his father had offered him some coffee, he had accepted.

But it’d tasted like ash in his mouth.

His father sat down beside him at the enormous, stainless-steel table.

He immediately tucked into his eggs with obvious appetite.

Mitts studied his father for a few moments before turning his attention onto his own breakfast. As he forked his way through his eggs, as he popped each mouthful in through his lips, he thought about how the Compound had changed everything.

How, back when they’d lived at home, it’d been his mother who’d always cooked breakfast.

She’d always been the one who cleaned up after them, too.

Now, though, those roles had become reversed.

It was a rarity to see his mother out of bed before midday.

And still with dark circles clinging to her eye sockets.

Mitts had got about halfway through his scrambled eggs, and they were really helping to send his hunger packing, when he heard the uneven gait of Heinmein.

Plod.

Sweep.

Plod.

Sweep.

The way that Heinmein walked reminded Mitts of Igor, at least the Igor from the cartoons he’d seen; Doctor Frankenstein’s assistant. How Igor would drag his crippled leg behind him.

Although there were plenty of crutches, and other mobility apparatus, scattered through the Compound, Heinmein didn’t seem bothered with using a single one of them.

At first, Mitts had thought that it might be pride which prevented Heinmein from using something to help him walk upright, but, in the end, he decided that it was all about obsession.

Namely that Heinmein was so deep down in those experiments he spent his days and
nights
on that he was rendered absentminded to pretty much all mundane, routine tasks:

Feeding himself.

Washing.

Walking
upright
.

Mitts eyed Heinmein as he
plod-swept
his way into the kitchen.

With a muttered greeting to Mitts and his father, Heinmein approached the large saucepan filled with scrambled eggs.

Mitts felt a slight tightening sensation in his chest. Although he knew he should be thankful, that Heinmein had been the one to warn them of the impending disaster, that he had been the one to bring them
here
when all others were evacuating the Compound, he couldn’t quite extend that gratitude to
liking
the man.

Perhaps it was his unkempt, too-long, greying black hair that stuck up in tufts, looking as if Heinmein had a bush sprouting from his scalp.

Or maybe it was how he constantly wore the same tattered lab coat—
day and night
—with some withered shirt underneath, all covered with holes, unironed.

His left shoe had a large hole where his sweaty, socked toes peeped through.

He was—at least to Mitts’s mind—pretty much the stereotype of the mad professor.

Even just having his father be in the same room as Heinmein, to see his father’s towering two-metre-high stature against the doctor’s diminutive just-about one-sixty-five, seemed a touch unfair.

Whenever Heinmein wanted to look Mitts’s father in the eye, he had to tilt his head back and squint slightly through his thick-framed—well-dented, well-
cracked
—glasses.

After having scooped a helping of scrambled eggs onto one of the metal plates, and sticking a fork into them for good measure, Heinmein
plod-swept
his way back out of the kitchen, leaving Mitts and his father alone.

Like always, Mitts had finished up his breakfast first. And so he watched his father chewing away, patiently, on his scrambled eggs, a cup of coffee smoking away before him.

Mitts breathed in those strong waves and found them a little dizzying.

“Dad?” Mitts said.

“Mm,” his father replied, in such a way that, Mitts was sure, had their roles been reversed, his father would’ve scolded him for having his mouth full.

“Last night, did you, I dunno, smell anything . . . anything
weird?
”

His father reached out and took a swig of his coffee. As he replaced the cup on the steel surface, he swallowed down his mouthful and then said, “What’d you mean?”

“Well, there was this . . . strange smell coming through my ventilation hatch.”

“Did you tell Doctor Heinmein?”

Mitts felt his blood run hot as he anticipated the scolding.

There was no need for Mitts to reply to his father’s question.

His father knew him well enough to interpret the answer.

“Mitts,” his father said, with a slight sigh, “you know the procedure, any changes in environment—any change to the temperature, any odd smells, anything like that, and you’re to go to Doctor Heinmein.”

Mitts’s father hoiked himself up off his stool. He grasped for Mitts’s empty plate—not so much as a
scrap
of scrambled egg still stuck to it—and, stacking it on top of his own, headed back over to the kitchen area where he deposited both in the sink with a loud
clunk
.

He glanced back over his shoulder at Mitts.

His expression was sober.

“Come on,” he said, “let’s go tell him, okay?”

Although Mitts would rather have stayed sat on his stool in the kitchen all day—with all the boredom that particular decision might entail—he resigned himself to doing his duty.

What had to be done.

In the name of survival.

* * *

“Doctor?” Mitts’s father said, rapping his knuckles against the partially opened door.

The scurrying sound of human knuckles against the metal door sent a quiver through Mitts’s stomach. He would never get used to
that
sound either.

Although Mitts tried his best to limit his interactions with Heinmein to a bare minimum, he always noticed, when he reluctantly had to come to Doctor Heinmein’s office for whatever reason, that the air smelled of stale oranges and cheesy feet.

It brought the scrambled eggs up to the back of his throat in the same way that smelling the disinfectant wafting through his ventilation hatch early that morning had brought along a reminder of that tomato sauce his father had cooked the night before.

Heinmein had his back to them. As always, his office was a cluttered mess. He had papers piled up all around him. His head blocked the radiation-white light of the CRT computer screen before him:

A model from the
last
century.

Beside Heinmein, at his elbow, Mitts observed the emptied plate of scrambled eggs.

There was no sign of cutlery.

Mitts wondered if Heinmein had used any at all.

Mitts casually slipped a glance up to the door, saw the name engraved on the metal tag there:

DR H HEINMEIN.

It was something of a wonder to Mitts that, in all of the Compound, Heinmein remained in what had previously been his office.

For one, Heinmein’s office was absolutely tiny. There were
tonnes
of rooms which would’ve made better offices than Heinmein’s. It wasn’t anything more than a broom cupboard, really.

When Mitts glanced down to the laminate flooring, he saw that there was a thin mattress all bundled up into the corner of the room. There was no blanket. Nothing else. And Mitts supposed that Heinmein simply slept in the clothes he wore during the day.

That would explain an awful lot, thinking about it . . .

“Mm?” Heinmein said, not turning around, or shifting his attention away from the computer screen.

Mitts’s father looked to him, arching an eyebrow.

No matter how much Mitts wanted to get away from Heinmein—and his
office
—he took a deep breath and blurted it out.

“This morning,” Mitts said, “I smelled this, I dunno,
disinfectant
-like smell wafting in through my ventilation hatch.”

Heinmein didn’t respond.

As was completely normal.

On other occasions, when Mitts had been forced into some sort of interaction with him, Heinmein hadn’t responded until several hours later, resuming the conversation as if they’d spoken only seconds before.

Heinmein tapped away at his computer keyboard, just a whole bunch of clicking of spring-loaded plastic.

Mitts wondered if he should repeat himself, but he knew, even from the few weeks they’d been living in the Compound, that it was really not worthwhile.

He would get no reply from Heinmein.

As if to tell his father ‘I told you so’, Mitts turned back to him and gave him an eye-roll, coupled with a shrug of his shoulders.

Mitts’s father gave him a scolding glare then turned to face Heinmein himself. Or, at least, to face the back of Heinmein’s head.

“Doctor, did you hear? There might be some sort of a malfunction in the cooling system.”

Heinmein tapped out something rapid-fire on his computer keyboard. Then he stopped.

Still with his back to them, he tilted his head to one side, as if one of the many papers which littered his desk had caught his attention.

Mitts took the opportunity to examine Heinmein’s computer screen. But it was somewhat disappointing. He had somehow built up, in his mind, that despite all of Heinmein’s personal-hygiene failings, he would be working on something so stunning—so absolutely
brilliant
—that his detachment from reality would all be understandable.

But all Mitts saw on the screen was a series of charts: coloured statistics, the kind which he might get asked to produce in his second or third year of
primary
school.

That was the thing about older people, they seemed so out-of-kilter with technology.

So unable to help themselves.

Mitts had gone about the Compound some days, through all the areas he was permitted to travel through. In almost every one of the dozens of rooms there were many computers.

Whenever he tried to fire them up, though, whenever he jabbed the power switch on their monitors, they were totally dead. And they had seemed like
far
newer systems than the one which Heinmein was currently using.

Mitts supposed that Heinmein had done something to disable them.

Oh, Mitts knew that, even if the internet still existed, there was no one left out there to communicate with, but, still, he couldn’t help wanting to put his hands back on a touchscreen . . . a
keyboard
if he really had to make do.

It was strange to think, before he and his family had arrived to the Compound, he had hardly gone a day without laying his hands on some form of computer.

For the longest time, Mitts was certain Heinmein—his head still tilted to one side; his back to them—would respond to what he had said, that he would relieve the pressure which’d built up in the little, broom-cupboard office.

But, no . . .

Without any sort of acknowledgement that he had heard either Mitts or his father, Heinmein resumed his typing on that ancient computer. When Mitts listened in carefully, he could hear Heinmein muttering something to himself, under his breath.

Mitts felt his father squeeze his shoulder.

And, with a knowing glance, his father steered him away from Heinmein’s office.

Mitts could
breathe
again . . .

* * *

Mitts pressed his ear up against the cool metal door of his bedroom.

He listened for footsteps.

For the faintest sound of breathing.

Could hear nothing.

But it was best to be sure.

Soon after he and his father had returned from Heinmein’s office, his father had gone off to wash up in the kitchen. It was then that Mitts had ventured into one of the unfrequently visited maintenance cupboards which was located right at the very edge of the Restricted Area:

The area within the Compound where Mitts and his family—Doctor Heinmein—all lived.

At the end of the corridor, Mitts had been confronted with the sign on the inside of the blast door. The no-nonsense, high-vis, red-and-yellow stripes behind it.

RESTRICTED AREA

And then, a little below, a notice in white lettering with a black background which read:

For emergency lock-release, push button
.

Apparently having been briefed by Heinmein, the very first thing Mitts’s mother and father had sworn him against doing was pressing that button.

Like a naughty toddler, Mitts had felt that tingle down in the base of his gut.

His eyes had traced the wall, the red button, covered by a breakable, glass box, and he had wondered what would happen if he
did
punch it.

Would a toxic, sulphur-smelling, smog billow in through the opening?

Suffocating them all?

Killing
them all?

Mitts recalled when they’d been back home, when his parents had made a similar threat to him.

That time, though, they had implored him
not
to put his hand down the hole in the kitchen sink, that, because of the garbage-disposal blades nestled within, he could do himself terrible harm.

But that had been different.

Then Mitts would’ve lost a few fingers.

If he pressed that button now he would—in all likelihood—bring an end to humanity.

Mitts brought his ear away from his bedroom door. His ear ached a little, and he realised that he’d been pressing it a little too hard against the metal. That was the thing about the Compound, everything was built so that it might perform some no-frills purpose.