Nuclear Midnight (25 page)

The corporal grabbed Alex by the collar and lifted him back onto the chair. The Major's calm, faintly amused face appeared again.

‘Each of us has his line of work, you know, and the corporal here is no exception. He's very very good at this,’ the Major said dryly. ‘He knows how to prolong pain, what the body can bear and what it cannot. Now, before he starts bending and breaking things, I want to give you another chance. I need your help, you see. I want as much detailed information as possible on the size of your forces, the amount of weaponry and ammunition you have, how well the colony is defended and so on. The precise location of those defences will also be very helpful.’

‘Why? Why do you want such detailed information?’ Alex asked, hoping to stall so that he could have time to think.

The Major flicked his eyes up at the corporal and a pair of muscular hands closed round Alex's throat. As the pressure increased, his face turned red and his nose erupted in a fresh stream of blood.

‘Just answer my questions, young man,’ the Major growled.

Alex tried in vain to loosen the hands around his throat, vaguely aware that Elaine was digging her finger nails into the corporal's face. The pressure eased for a second. Alex broke free and dived across the desk at the Major, his right fist smacking into the Major's face, knocking him onto the floor with Alex on top of him. Dizzy and gasping for breath, Alex fought to pull himself to his knees. He turned, only to find the shiny black barrel of a revolver hovering centimetres from his head. The Major's flushed and enraged face glared from behind it, a trickle of blood ebbing down his chin from a split lip.

‘Get up!’ he snarled. ‘Get up before I kill you!’

Alex rose slowly to his feet. Major Collins rammed the revolver into his nose, making him wince in pain.

‘Corporal, bring the girl here!’ he yelled.

The Major’s face was so close that Alex could feel his breath. ‘That's the very last trick you'll ever play with me, mutant!’ he growled.

Two figures edged into Alex’s view. The corporal, dragging Elaine, forced her onto the chair Alex had been sitting in. His face had deep bloody scratch marks stretching diagonally from his right forehead to his left cheek. He pulled Elaine's head back as if to display what he had done to her in return. Alex drew a sharp breath when he saw her. The right side of her face was already black and swollen; the corporal must have struck her there repeatedly. Blood was still pouring freely from her nose and cut lips and her cheek had swollen till her eye was no larger than a slit.

The Major grinned when he saw the horrified look on Alex’s face. ‘No one does that to the corporal and gets away with it.’ He jerked the gun further into Alex’s nose. ‘Now, corporal, I want you to continue working on the girl.’

The corporal started twisting Elaine's arm around her back. She began to cry out, a horrible, high pitched squeal that only stopped long enough for her to fill her lungs again.

‘Stop it!’ Alex screamed. ‘It's not necessary! I'll talk!’

The Major signalled to the corporal and the terrible squealing stopped.

‘Now, I want some answers,’ the Major said coldly.

‘Just one lie, one mistake, one answer that doesn't tally with what we already know and your girlfriend pays for it. Do you understand?’

Alex nodded obediently.

Over the next few minutes Alex spilled out everything he could remember about the mine's defences, armaments and military strength, only marginally understating the true figures - the fear of seeing Elaine torn apart foremost in his mind.

The Major sat at his desk, taking detailed notes. Indeed, he continued writing long after Alex had finished. When he finally looked up, his face had resumed that earlier mask of calm. He told Alex to sit down next to Elaine and began reading through his notes.

Elaine sobbed in Alex's arms like a child, her battered face turning more bulbous and deformed by the minute. The corporal stood by, at ease.

‘Well,’ said the Major, walking around to sit on the desk in front of Alex. ‘All things considered, this has been a very successful session, although a bit more traumatic than I had anticipated.’ He pulled out a handkerchief and dabbed at his chin.

Alex didn't take his eyes off him.

The Major seemed to take a sadistic delight in the hate in Alex's eyes. ‘You asked before why we wanted information on your colony's defences,’ he continued. ‘If you haven't already guessed, we want to destroy you, as well as the Scottish colony and any other minor ones that may exist in Great Britain. No one is to be left. The cleaning will be thorough, the extermination complete. The land will be set free, ready for our people to stream forth upon it. All the disease and sickness left by the bomb will be wiped out when the last mutant dies.’

He stared triumphantly at Alex.

Elaine had stopped sobbing and was listening intently.

‘You must be wondering who we are,’ the Major went on in an almost jocular tone, as he savoured the moment to the full. ‘I may have deceived you when I told you that we were the government. The government ceased to exist on the first day of the war when a ground burst detonated directly on top of the Whitehall complex. So much for central planning.’ The Major paused, a faint smile lifting the corners of his mouth. ‘We're the military, my dear young friends. You don't seem particularly surprised?’ he added, when he saw no reaction from them.

Alex was not surprised at all. Only a totalitarian force like the military could attempt something this monstrous. ‘Is the whole city full of troops?’ he asked.

‘We have an armed force of forty thousand soldiers, and a civilian population of sixty thousand men, women and children.’

‘And do they approve of the slaughter of all life on the surface?’

‘They are prepared to be guided by wiser counsels than their own.’

‘How diplomatic!’ Alex spat. ‘In other words they either don't approve, or they don't know.’

‘What an angry young man you are. Surely you must have learnt these are not times for qualms or moral judgements about right or wrong,’ the Major replied.

‘But why?’ Elaine interrupted. ‘I don't understand. Why do you have to wipe out all the survivors?’

The Major's face softened slightly. ‘To turn the argument on its head, young lady, why not? Look at you both; skinny, diseased, your bones probably laden with radioactive strontium, and your tissues filled with radioactive caesium. Anyone who lived through the first year of the war must have accumulated lethal doses of these isotopes. I guarantee that not one survivor in the whole of Great Britain wouldn't have developed some radiation-related sickness within the next ten to twenty years. You're riddled with it. All that awaits you is a painful, lingering death.’

‘After all that we have suffered,’ Alex cried.

‘Oh, don't get so self-righteous,’ the Major scoffed. ‘You're infinitely expendable.’ He waved his revolver in a dismissive gesture. ‘What can't be cured must be killed. You have no place in the world we are going to create.’

‘We fought to survive in a world you have destroyed. You've no right to say that we have no place! YOU HAVE NO PLACE!’ Alex was screaming now. He tried to rise from his seat, but the corporal slammed him back down. ‘YOU CAUSED THE WAR!’ he ranted. ‘YOU SHOULD BE HELPING US, NOT TRYING TO DESTROY US!’

‘Tut, tut, tut,’ the Major shook his head. ‘Losing your temper isn't going to get you anywhere.’

‘Actually to address your last comment,’ the Major continued mildly. ‘We did not cause the war. From what our intelligence can gather it was a computer malfunction. ‘Yes,’ he continued in a whimsical, faintly amused fashion. ‘You see after the end of the cold war all those computer-based early warning systems in Europe were just left decaying. No money to maintain them you see. Well it was inevitable really. One of the computers must have malfunctioned, someone panicked, maybe a computer accidentally sent off a few nuclear missiles. Who knows? The rest, as they say, is history. Once the first real nuclear missile was launched.’ He paused as though reciting a well-loved and highly amusing story. ‘The cascade affect must have been amazing. All the countries that had nuclear arsenals just started popping them off until the planet was thick with flying missiles and mushroom plumes’

Alex glared at him for some time before lowering his head. Somehow this revelation made the holocaust now even more hideous. He shook his head. The whole human race annihilating itself accidentally.

When he spoke again his voice was subdued, but it had lost none of its underlying intensity. ‘What will be so different about the world you will create?’ he asked. ‘You'll still have to face the same problems, and you'll have to adopt some of the same solutions if you want to survive.’

The Major shook his head. ‘That's where you're wrong. There is a fundamental difference. You mutants are now at subsistence level, barely producing enough food to fill your own stomachs. You exist from day to day, totally dependent on the elements for survival. The few pieces of machinery you have salvaged will be of no more use when the parts wear out or the fuel dries up. And when the last survivors die from cancer, the land will be inherited by your noxious, ignorant children. Civilisation will be thrown back thousands of years. Man will have to begin again, think of that! Have to relive all his mistakes! Disease will be rampant, war, famine, fire, flood. Civilisation put back in the nursery and having to crawl and drag itself up to maturity.’

He paused, but as Alex said nothing, he resumed.

‘We don't want to have to go through all that. Down here we have some of the best minds in Britain; doctors, surgeons, lawyers, administrators, scientists, have been down here for years. And knowledge is not only banked in the human brain, we have marvellous libraries and huge computer databases on virtually everything. We have been patient, and now we are ready to start afresh. There will be no more bombs in the new world, none of the vices that ruined the old; no social problems; every man will have his own piece of land and we'll make a golden age once again.’

Alex continued to glare at him but said nothing.

‘You find my arguments unanswerable, don't you?’ he went on with a smile. ‘You're thinking how logical your eradication sounds. As indeed it is. In six weeks our forces will surface and advance in all directions, wiping out all degenerate human life in their path. The operation will be completed within three months and sweetness and light shall reign.’

‘Aren't you forgetting the rest of the world in your calculations?’ Alex said. ‘What happens when other nations start arriving here? When your crime is made known they will destroy you utterly.’

The Major shrugged. ‘You obviously have no knowledge of the extent of the war. There are no countries left. It's no use you looking out there for your protection. We shall have a free hand, never fear. And if there should be other civilisations like us that have survived I cannot imagine that they would condemn our actions.’

‘What about the radiation in the cities?’ Alex suddenly remembered. ‘We’ve tested it and the levels are so high they're uninhabitable.’

‘Oh, but we know all about that. We contaminated the cities ourselves by spraying them every six months with radioactive isotopes.’

‘You?’ Alex stared at him dumbly. ‘You contaminated them? Why?’

‘Because we didn't want any large colonies of survivors living in the cities. We don't want to have to level whole blocks or put industrial complexes to the torch to drive out the mutants. We prefer them out in the open where we can keep an eye on them.’

‘But you’re making your own cities uninhabitable?’

‘No we're not, the half-lives of the isotopes we use are very short. That's why we have to keep re spraying. By the time we want to re activate these complexes, the radiation will be minimal.’

‘You bastard!’ Elaine could bear no more of it. ‘You want us herded into the country like cattle so that you can slaughter us.’

‘These things just evolved like that, it wasn't planned exactly,’ he said almost casually. ‘The surface was supposed to be cleared of people well over a year ago, but we under-estimated the resourcefulness of the survivors. We thought that by initiating the typhus plague we’d have swept the place clean.’

‘You did that?’ Alex rose to his feet beside Elaine, causing the corporal to move a pace nearer.

Major Collins paused, watching their faces with obvious enjoyment.

‘As I recall,’ he continued, ‘the land was almost overrun with rats at that time. We felt sure that if we contaminated some rats and released them in populated areas, they would spread the disease pretty well everywhere. But we underestimated the lengths to which the survivors would go to escape the rats, and the natural resistance of the population. Still, we did manage to wipe out many of you…’

His words were cut short by an ear splitting scream from Elaine as she flung herself at the corporal. He knocked her away with one long powerful sweep of his arm, but the distraction was enough. The corporal's attention had faltered. Alex sprang past him at the Major, bringing his knee up sharply into his groin, and at the same time turning his gun hand. But the corporal was only moments behind. A split second before he arrived, Alex jumped onto the desk and leapt high, smashing the fluorescent globe with his fist. At the same instant he took one last look around the room. Elaine was crumpled up in the corner where the corporal had thrown her. The Major was bent double beside the desk, and the corporal was lunging at his feet.