Nuclear Midnight (21 page)

Samuel pounced. ‘Stop it, stop it!’ he yelled, reaching for her neck.

Ted stepped between them, rifle up to fend him away. For an instant the opening was there. Alex was forgotten. He sprang to his feet and in one movement ripped the rifle from Cathy, sending her sprawling across the floor. Before Alan could respond he found himself staring down the barrel of Alex’s rifle. Immediately Ted and Jeremy turned their weapons on Alex's companions. Everyone in the room stood suspended, frozen at the moment before carnage.

Samuel flexed his fingers and let his arms fall. He was back in control, the smile had returned. ‘This is foolish,’ he said smoothly in his normal voice. ‘Put down your rifle before someone gets hurt.’

Alex watched this transformation in amazement. How could someone change that quickly, from murderous rage to calm reassurance?

‘We have no intention of harming you,’ his voice went on. ‘This is all completely unnecessary.’

Alex looked past Samuel at the two rifles levelled at his friends. Ted was hesitant and unsure; Jeremy was impassive, watchful, ready to carry out any order from Samuel.

‘Ted!’ Elaine called frantically. ‘Put the rifle down!’

Alex could see that Ted was faltering, his eyes shifting swiftly between Elaine and Samuel. He made his decision, lowering his rifle towards the floor.

Jeremy gave him a murderous glare.

‘Drop your rifle!’ Alex screamed at Alan.

Alan stared at him and slowly he, too, began lowering his rifle.

Immediately Samuel placed his hand over Alan's arm.

‘NO!’ he roared. That same insane glint of rage was back. All Alex's uncertainty was swept away at that moment. He slipped his finger onto the trigger of his rifle. With one sustained burst he cut down Alan and Samuel. As they fell he dived to his right, swinging his rifle around toward the two guards. But already the other side of the room had erupted.

Jeremy had turned and shot Ted. Then he turned wildly and began spraying the room, vainly searching for Alex. Someone pushed him from behind and he slipped. Falling, he swung to fire on his attacker. Alex saw Wayne dance briefly, then crumple, leaving the wall spattered with blood.

Coldly, dispassionately, Alex lined Jeremy up in his sights. As the gunman turned back he let him have it; his chest exploded, his arms flew up in the air and he fell back on the body of Wayne. Blood quickly pooled on the floor from the gaping holes of the wounded. None lived more than a few seconds.

Alex suddenly felt very dizzy. The floor quickly became covered in blood from the gaping holes of the dead. He fell forward onto the floor, then lapsed back into unconsciousness.

CHAPTER 9

Alex woke up hours later. It was dark and he was in the back of the Land Rover, which was in motion, his head resting on Elaine's lap. As soon as she saw his eyes open, she lifted him into a sitting position.

‘It seemed the best way to stop your head from bumping around,’ she said shyly, pushing away some hair from her eyes.

Roy was at the wheel, with Cliff beside him. They were driving fast along a two-lane highway between sparsely tufted slopes with just the occasional stunted tree or bush to vary the landscape.

Wayne was not with them and Alex suddenly remembered why. His thoughts all ran together in his head. A confused tangle of quick desperate movements, strange expressions, frightened and confused faces. But the last few seconds before the killings were crystal clear. Not the events so much as the face of Samuel, his look of total self-righteousness, the cold, widening intensity of his eyes. Then blood, shots, flesh, screams - silence. He couldn’t remember how he had ended up in the Land Rover.

‘How's your head?’ Elaine bent closer.

‘A lot better, I think,’ Alex answered, raising his hand to the bump and finding a wad of bandage there.

‘I thought a bandage might stop any infection from getting in,’ she explained.

Alex watched her thoughtfully, for the first time really taking note of her appearance. She was more attractive than he had realized; her hair, sun bleached and tangled, hung loosely past her shoulders. In the shadows of the Land Rover, he could also see the soft curves of her body and delicate features of her face more clearly.

Cliff turned in his seat. ‘I wish we’d taken your advice, guv.’

Alex nodded, but found nothing comforting to say.

‘We had to leave your dead companion in the cellar with the others,’ Elaine said. ‘There are other members of my group who would have heard the shots and come to investigate. If they had caught us…’ She shook her head, leaving the sentence unfinished.

‘And the other woman, Cathy?’ Alex asked.

‘She didn't want to come,’ Elaine replied. ‘She and Alan, you know...’ She shrugged.

Several hours of driving later, Roy pulled off the road in front of a pub in a small deserted village. They were somewhere north of Dunfries; it didn't seem to matter where exactly. Roy and Cliff carried out a brief search, then helped Elaine unload the stores for the night. Alex collected a lantern from the Land Rover, and gingerly made his way up to one of the bedrooms on the second floor.

The room was rather large and drab, with the familiar smell of rotting wood and damp. Two single beds stood under a window on the far wall. They were dusty and had been stripped of sheeting and blankets, but he found a pillow in a cupboard and an old bedspread. Quickly pulling off his clothes, he wrapped himself up in the bedspread and climbed into one of them.

Below he could hear the sounds of a fire being lit and food prepared. He was not tired, just filled with emptiness. He leaned over and blew out the light. He thought of Wayne, a bundle of nervous life, lying dead in a cellar. It was hard to lose a friend; it would be harder for Roy, though the big man would never show what that death had meant to him. But he and Wayne had complimented each other perfectly; each contributing what was missing in the other's personality. Now Roy would regress into his old state; reclusive, silent, confiding in no one. It was so terrible to lose a good man, and Wayne would still be alive if he hadn’t persuaded him to come on this trip.

Alex rolled onto his side and stared dully into the comforting blankness of the night, but his mind remained active, ploughing through the memories. Soon all track of time was lost. Wayne suddenly appeared on the doorstep of the pub, Roy and Cliff greeting him excitedly, but he was furious, having walked most of the night to try and catch up with the Land Rover. He had three bullet holes cut diagonally across his shirt, blood completely saturating his shirt and trousers, but he didn't seem at all concerned about his injuries. He just kept accusing Roy and Cliff of leaving him to die in the cellar. Then he noticed Alex in the background and he began screaming a horrible frenzied scream, full of hate and impotent rage. His eyes burned like Samuels. Terrified, Alex backed away. But Wayne came after him, babbling wildly and accusing Alex of trying to murder him. There was a sound at the door. Samuel appeared ... Alex woke up suddenly in a cold sweat. Someone was tapping on the door.

‘Hello, Alex.’ The door opened tentatively and Elaine's tall figure stood there. ‘I'm sorry to wake you,’ she said gently, ‘but I thought you might be cold so I brought you up some blankets.’

She came forward, closing the door behind her. She was carrying a lantern in one hand and a large bundle of sheets and blankets in the other. Alex noticed she had washed and changed. She looked fresh and revived, as though the events of the day had already been washed off and discarded with her clothes. She had on a large woollen jumper and a pair of baggy jeans several sizes too large for her, which were held up with a cord tied in a bow around her waist. She looked formless and comical, like a little girl who had dressed up in her father's clothes.

‘I found them in one of the other rooms,’ she said, looking down rather self-consciously. ‘Not much of a fit, I'm afraid.’ She deposited the blankets and the lamp and came to sit on the end of the bed.

‘Are you hot,’ she asked, frowning at him.

‘I had a bad dream,’ Alex explained, looking at the bedspread he had thrown on the floor.

‘Oh! Were you having the dream when I knocked on the door?’

‘For a moment I thought you were Samuel,’ Alex said, smiling briefly.

‘Samuel?’

‘Just a silly dream,’ Alex shrugged.

They stared at each other uncomfortably for a moment, then she lowered her eyes pretending to examine her fingernails.

‘No one felt like eating much. Still a bit shocked, I suppose.’ She flicked some of her hair away from her face as she raised her head to look at him, in what Alex was beginning to realise was a nervous gesture.

He nodded. ‘Yes, I imagine they were.’

Again the conversation petered out. ‘Well, maybe I'd better leave.’ She began to get to her feet.

‘NO! ... I mean, don't go,’ Alex said quickly. ‘I'm sorry. Please!’

She hesitated, then sat down again. Watching him, she asked, ‘Did you know Wayne well?’

‘No, not really, he was Roy’s friend.’ Alex sighed and pulled himself up to a sitting position. ‘And you…did you know Samuel and those others very well?’

‘I thought I did,’ she said softly. ‘I lost most of my friends and family in the plague. Samuel and his followers were all that was left.’

‘Why didn't you go north with the rest of them?’

‘I…’ she began. ‘It just didn't work out like that,’ giving up on an explanation.

‘Do you want to talk about it?’

Her head went down and he thought he had trespassed too far, when out of the silence she began to speak.

‘I worked in the pathology lab before the war. I was actually in the lab when the first shock waves hit the town. I remember it all so clearly, the shaking, the noise, glassware and chemicals crashing down all around me. I didn't think of the bombs at first, I imagined it must be an earthquake of some sort. Then it passed and everything went so quiet, not a murmur, not even a child crying. I thought, vaguely, I must be the only one left alive, but of course it was just shock. The other workers suddenly started yelling and screaming all around me; like me, many of them had cuts and bruises, mostly from flying glass, none were badly hurt.’ Her right hand went up to her neck as she spoke and she fingered the line of a scar there, which stood out like a welt several centimetres long.

‘The hospital basement was several stories underground so as soon as we realised what had happened we went straight down; over a hundred people crammed in three poky rooms. No one could sleep; there was no proper sanitation provided and no food and water after the third day. After a few days, I left and went home. My mother and brother were still there, my father had been, but he had gone out the previous day after food and not returned. Jack was killed the same way a month later, in a fight over food.’ She paused reflectively. ‘So my mother and I were left alone. Things were pretty desperate, I can tell you. Almost nothing to eat. We had to chop up the furniture to keep a fire alight.’

‘Is that when Samuel appeared?’

She nodded. ‘It was marvellous what he did. In those early days he was the one person who seemed to be in control. He organised scavenging parties, pooled resources. Cared for the sick. He was like a father to us. He took us under his wing, not only my mother and me, I mean everybody who was lost and frightened. And that was just about the whole population at that time. Of course, he also had his own elite followers, his right arm so to speak, who enforced the law. Somebody had to do it, there were such brutes of men, you wouldn't credit it, men who thought only of raping and killing. Somebody had to take charge.’

‘You admired him for it,’ Alex said simply.

Elaine raised her head sharply and searched his face, as though trying to fathom if this were meant as an accusation. ‘Yes, I did,’ she said softly. ‘Truly, I believed in him. He seemed to know exactly what was best for us. We were carried along by him, by his vision; he gave us hope for the future, purpose where none had been.’ She paused. ‘You would have had to live through those times.’

‘She sighed. But then things started to go wrong.’

‘People started dying of typhus. Samuel was at his height of power and making some of his most inspired speeches. He talked of the plague as a test of our commitment to staying, as a trial sent down from heaven. He even quoted verses from the Book of Revelation about terrible plagues and famines. He said he was building a new society, where love and respect would be all that would count, not like in the old days of greed and selfishness. He dreamed such wonderful dreams, and he said he wanted us to share in them. We were going to start again, he said. And who knows what he might not have achieved, only the times were against him.’

‘Why, what do you mean?’

She frowned, turning over painful thoughts. ‘He should not have insisted that we stay during the plague. It obsessed him. He called the survivors the 'chosen'. He said that a true believer in him would not fall sick or die. Thousands did, and no amount of lies could hide that fact. Thousands of people staged a kind of revolt and they headed north.’

Alex nodded. They had been driving amongst their skeletons on the motorway all the afternoon.

‘I stayed because my mother would not leave Samuel. She trusted him and nothing would shake her devotion to him.’

Alex sensed from her hesitancy that there was more to follow.

‘Mother died from typhus about a month later,’ she continued after a pause. ‘Since then I have watched Samuel deteriorate into a babbling, irrational fool, striking out left and right, and ordering executions for even the slightest disloyalty, as he called it. He killed foreigners, too, you know.’ She looked up at Alex. ‘Six men from your community.’

Alex nodded his head slowly. ‘I thought as much,’ he said.

‘I should have stopped him when he killed those drivers,’ she went on bitterly. ‘I shouldn't have waited all this time. Oh, but it's hard to break away from someone you've believed in, knowing the world has nothing else to offer. I was weak, I saw through him, but I didn’t do anything about it.’

Alex, seeing her close to tears, reached across and took both her hands in his. ‘You've done nothing wrong,’ he said, almost in a whisper. ‘You are like everyone else. You've been swept along by events you could not hope to control. Each of us does what he can. That's all anyone can ask.’

Suddenly, for no reason, he had an image of Tina, and he nearly groaned out loud. But instead, he squeezed Elaine's hands more tightly for comfort and he could see some of the sadness lift from her face. He shook his head, scattering his guilty thoughts.

‘And you,’ Elaine said, more warmly. ‘You know everything about me, but I know nothing about you.’ She tilted her head to one side, inquisitive, half-smiling.

Alex leaned back against the rail of the bed head and studied her thoughtfully. He took in all the curves of her body, the way her hair hung in loose tangled spirals over her face and the lovely formation of her eyes, nose and lips. He imagined how he would have responded to that invitation in the old days; the careless, flirting talk, the dinner date at his favourite restaurant, watching the late movie together, chance meetings, renewed affection, laughter and happiness; it all seemed so far away now. Today, every conversation was serious and tinged with sadness, and carefree smiles were only on the faces of madmen.

‘My story may take some time and it's equally as miserable as yours,’ he replied.

‘Whose isn't?’ She dropped her legs to the floor, stood up and walked over to the other bed and pushed it next to his. ‘You don't mind if I listen in bed? I'm freezing.’

‘Please do,’ Alex smiled.

She took some sheets from under the pile of blankets she had brought in and quickly made the bed, giving one of the blankets to Alex. ‘I couldn't have spent the night alone,’ she said earnestly. ‘Not after what happened today.’ She dragged off her jumper and jeans and clambered between the sheets, rolling over to bring her face near to his.