The Brink (11 page)

Maybe, he thought as he said his goodbyes and led Moll away; it was this kind of action that would ultimately keep mankind alive in spite of the odds. A word here and there. A note passed on. A friendly face to guide the way. Security and safety where none was to be found.

He slept fitfully that night and a number of times he was startled awake by a cold wet nose pressed against his as Moll got up from her bed to see what was wrong. He didn’t know why, but rather than lie there thinking about it he sat up and, with a head torch, picked up his book again and continued reading.

“Can’t sleep?” asked Gary from the darkness. “Me neither.”

“I’ve been like this for a while,” he replied, realising that it‘d started not long after he left Longsteel. “I manage a few hours and don’t feel that bad about it the following day. I don’t know why.”

“I think you know why I can’t.”

“Yeah, I figured that out. Reb seems to be sleeping okay though.”

“I wouldn’t count on that,” she said, sitting up. “I’ve not managed a wink.”

The other bunks were empty so Gary got up and turned on the main light. “Might as well all be awake together. The meeting isn’t for another couple of hours.”

“I wonder what we’ll be doing today. I tell you something, if it’s a trip to get a HAZMAT suit, I quit.”

“Glad you can laugh about it,” said Gary, taking up his comic book again. “I reckon we’ll be sent for the trucks to carry the survivors in. Watch this space.”

“You’re being optimistic again,” she replied. “I think we’ll be sent for marshmallows for the nuclear fire we’ll be melting in. Nothing like a glowing ‘mallow on the bonfire.”

“That’s not even funny,” he said. “And I never suggested we’d be bombed, did I?”

“Well no, but-”

No one saw the guard at the door. He rapped his knuckles on the frame three times and said, “The meeting’s been brought forward. Teague sent me to wake you but it looks like you’re ready to go. He’s in his room.”

When the guard had gone, Alan felt his stomach drop into his boots and it was clear the other two felt the same. Reb’s face had paled and she jumped out of bed, buckling her trousers and stepping into her boots in silence. Gary did the same and Alan had no choice but to follow.

7

It was a cold walk up to Teague’s rooms and none of them said anything along the way. Something had changed. New Intel. A fresh report. The timescale had moved forward and for some reason Alan found himself believing Gary’s theory more and more as the black and white tiling passed beneath their feet and the poorly lit corridor came to an end outside the lavish board room.

The guard had already seen them and had opened the wide double doors for them to go straight through. Teague was there and he looked washed out and his eyes were puffy as though he hadn’t slept for days.

“My apologies for waking you, chaps, but we have to move on this new information quickly and I don’t have time to observe our usual pleasantries. Please take what I can offer though in the form of coffee, fresh today.”

Nervously they all took a cup and filled it from the filter machine if only out of politeness to their Captain. Gary poured another and offered it to him which he took with a quick nod.

When they were sat at the table, Teague began pacing the room near the window, looking out at nothing more than their reflections in the glass, his hands clasped behind his back like a sea-going Captain walking his quarterdeck.

“I told you before that I intended to play my cards close to my chest,” he began. “That position hasn’t changed. I tell you this because once this meeting has concluded you three, including your dog, Alan, will go directly to the Rhinos that are waiting outside and drive them 275 miles north from here until you reach a set of co-ordinates that I will furnish you with once you have left this compound. Under no circumstances are you to turn back or return. You will take enough food and ammunition for the trip. You will proceed directly from this room to the bunks, under close guard, gather your things and depart immediately. Is this understood?”

There was nothing but stunned silence in the room. Teague still stood at the window but the pacing had stopped. He stared beyond the reflections into the inky black outside seeing something none of them could begin to imagine. Alan felt nothing but dread. It was as if Gary’s prediction had come true, that it would only take a word from Teague to condemn the entire camp as if he held the keys to death itself. Only Reb had found her tongue and she managed a few words before she was cut off with a terrifying cry from Teague.

“IS THAT UNDERSTOOD?”

“Yes sir,” they all said in unison like scolded children in the class room, too eager to win back the love they’d lost in some small school criminal act.

“Dismissed.”

Gary and Reb got up and made for the door, muted by the shock, but Alan stood and waited. When he saw him there, unmoved, Teague repeated his command.

“I don’t work for you,” said Alan with restrained fury. It frothed and foamed beneath his skin and the thin layer of flesh could only hold it there for a little while longer before it erupted.

Gary and Reb stood at the door but a glare from Teague sent them hurrying out along with the guard who closed the door behind him.

They stared at each other, neither moving, neither daring to look away before the other did. In the end, maybe through his fatigue, the weary Captain broke and sat down at the nearest chair with his head in his hands.

“What the hell is going on?” asked Alan. “Is it really this bad?”

“Bad?” he cried, looking up with a jolt. “Bad? We’re finished, Harding. It’s over.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean we’re fucking dead! Are you deaf?”

“Explain,” he demanded.

“Have you ever in your life respected a single chain of command?”

“No.”

“No?”

“No.”

“That’s right. Harding could always do a better job I bet. Harding is the man. Harding will get you through.” Teague went off down a rabbit warren of ideas, babbling to the point of losing coherency but never losing that southern accent or form of speech that had set him apart from everyone else, that he felt made him more of a man than lesser mortals. Alan let him go, let him wander in the dark until it was time to come back and when he did the tears were falling so freely that they made a glittering puddle of spent emotion on the polished surface of the table.

He sat back in the chair and gathered the bits of himself together before speaking again. When he did it was a hollow noise that came out of his mouth. Lifeless. Void.

“There was an exchange. North Korea into South Korea. I don’t know the full story; I only got the reports the other day from a fragment of data we picked up on some of the older equipment. Other countries were involved and it looks like the scale of the nuclear battle rapidly escalated.”

“How bad?” he asked.

“It wasn’t global annihilation but it was a jolly good ruckus by all accounts.”

Silence again. An all pervading silence. The implications had taken a seat in the board room and were smiling at them from across the table. They were the majority shareholders in the fate of the world and it began to look like they’d come to a decision.

“How long?” he asked.

“Less than 24 hours until the first of the dust cloud arrives. After that, no one knows. It’s never really happened before. Nuclear Winter? I don’t have the answers for you, Harding, not a single one. All I do know is that by tomorrow anyone not in shelter will be covered in radioactive particles. It’ll be in the water, the food, everything you touch. Then it’s illness and ultimately death.”

“How long have you known?”

“A few days. Before you say it-” He held up his hand. “Not enough time to do anything other than what I’ve done.”

“So the move? The plan to ship the supplies?”

“True. That was the plan, to join with another settlement. But we ran out of time.”

“Why?”

“Because that settlement is underground and has sealed itself shut now. There’s no hope of them letting us in. Protocol forbids it.”

“Protocol? Fuck protocol - they have to!” he cried, outraged. Teague sighed and offered him a pathetic smile, the same gesture you might offer an idiot.

“Harding - it’s too late. Sooner or later you have to come to terms with the fact that you cannot save the world. It’s too big a task for any one man, any group of people, perhaps even a Government.”

“You’re not even going to try?”

“We did, remember? No one saw the change in the wind. No one predicted the weather variables that brought that cloud here ahead of time. If I’d sent you out for the trucks, if we’d loaded them up with the survivors and driven there, you’d have exposed them to so much radiation that they’d have been dead before you arrived.”

“There has to be a way!”

“Don’t you think that I’ve thought of that? Don’t you see that I’ve been through every possible option right down to hand-picking the healthiest survivors and loading them up into the Rhinos to try? Do you see how desperate I am for a solution?”

“So why are we going? Why are you sending us out in the trucks?”

Here Teague paused and took a long, deep breath. He was at his end, Alan could see that. The man was broken and he had little left before he knew that death must come. He’d seen it before. In Longsteel. In the dark.

“You’re going to take all our supplies, all our personal notes and drive right up to that settlement and leave them there, outside their doors.”

“What?”

“Major Bryant managed to stock the bunker with enough equipment, supplies and fresh water to last him a good few years but when they finally emerge they’ll need the things only we have here. I agreed, given the hopelessness of our situation, to have those two Rhinos parked there, ready, for that day. It might just give them a fighting chance.”

Alan felt himself falling. It was a kind of free-fall of emotion that defied even his own mind to try and understand but left him with the only option a poor, fragile human being has when faced with insurmountable grief. Turning away from Teague he buried his face in his hands and wept. Not for himself. He knew there and then that the radiation wouldn’t kill him. It would kill those he loved instead. Take away everything he’d known and leave him with nothing. They were both selfless and selfish, contradictory tears that paved wet roads down his cheeks and lost themselves in his thick black beard.

“I saw a list once,” said Teague suddenly. “A list of 27 names.
Volunteers
.”

Alan looked up through unfocused eyes. That number cut through his grief with such precision that he couldn’t speak. “When Reb told me what she’d seen you do, it confirmed what I knew about Longsteel. Of course, I’d heard rumours through the ranks, but after the disaster we just assumed the place had been buried in rubble. Then Alan Harding shows up in camp without a scratch on him, a giant dog at his side and I made several connections.”

“You knew,” he managed to say. Teague gave a slow, sad nod.

“Yes I did. Is it true? You cannot die?”

“It’s true, as far as I’m aware.”

He smiled - this time it was real and filled with hope.

“The others?”

“After the disaster we stayed at Longsteel and held off against raiders. We couldn’t risk leaving so much equipment unguarded that we felt we had a duty to protect it. In the end we were starting to be overrun and so sealed the place shut. That’s when anyone left in the south came north to escape the wasteland.”

“Where are they now?”

Alan shrugged. “I don’t know. Most fled after that and I’ve not seen them since.”

“But you stayed.”

“Yes. I did.”

“Why?”

“It’s my home,” he lied. “It’s where I belong.” The real reason still lay in the laboratories in a small container - his last bit of hope that he clung to with all his strength, glad that he’d volunteered to be its protector.

Teague stood and looked out of the long black window again. Dawn was coming and both he and Alan knew that it would be his last. It charged the room with a despondent energy and etched itself in Alan’s mind for years to come, still seeing the brave relic of a man stood there; looking out with his hands clasped behind his back and dried tear tracks on those rough cheeks.

“You’ll do what I ask?” he said.

“Yes,” replied Alan. “I’ll get the trucks there.”

“Then what will you do?”

“I don’t know. Maybe the radiation will be the thing to finish me.”

“You don’t believe that and neither do I,” said Teague, laughing. “May I make a suggestion?”

“Go on.”

“If we survive this - and by ‘we’ I mean the royal ‘we’. If mankind can hold on then I don’t want what happened here to be forgotten. I want people to know that we made a stand. Some of us rose above the mediocre existence offered to us and tried to live for something bigger, tried to make a difference and laid down our lives for it. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” said Alan. “I think I do.”

There were no fond farewells that morning. There were no words. The three of them were escorted to the bunk house by two guards who stood over them like silent sentinels as they packed away their belongings into bergens and took apart the only home they’d known since the disaster. The little shrines were sealed in plastic bags. The beds were folded up. Posters and trinkets were either left or taken down.

Neither Reb nor Gary realised that in the solitude of their private preparations that Alan took very little. His books, his little pieces of himself he left behind as they were. It was as if he was breaking away from one life in readiness for the next and he could take none of his former self with him. Indeed, as he looked at what he’d been carrying; a stained coffee mug, a little plastic toy of a monkey a survivor’s child had given him, some paperback books and the key to his flat, he felt that the time was right to make up his mind, one way or the other.

What Gary might have noticed, however, was the amount of warm clothing Alan packed into his bergen at the expense of two of his three water bottles. Extra shirts, extra jumpers, a coarse blanket, a bivvy bag, all wrapped in plastic and buried deep in his pack. He’d even taken out a large number of his foil packed ‘meals ready to eat’ and scattered the remnants across the bed.

Alan noticed him watching from across the bunk house and he softly shook his head, telling him that now was not the time for words or explanations.

The guards hurried them along as the sun crept up towards its ever shifting place in the sky. Thick, fat clouds of grey and black began to gather overhead and the scent of a storm, that odour of moisture that precipitated heavy rain, stung their noses as they walked boldly through the camp towards the waiting Rhinos.

No one spoke. Not even the camp stirred. There were people moving around the tents and shacks but when they saw the grim procession they just stood staring, saying nothing, silenced by the stony faces and the cold expressions of the guards. Rumours would begin an hour or so afterwards but by then the three of them would be far down the road and deaf to their whisperings. A short while later and the camp would be silenced forever.

Reb climbed into the same truck she’d brought back from the outpost and an unspoken precedent seemed to overpower them and cause Alan to resume his place with Gary in the other. Still not a single word passed their lips and as the guards stepped back to let them pass, the humming engine and the fan of the heater were the only sounds to be heard in the hot, stifling cabs.