The Brink (12 page)

Reb moved off first, heading directly for the open gates at a slow crawl. The lumbering machine, now made even heavier by its cargo, rocked on its wheels as she passed over the speed humps. Gary, cursing the thing as he tried to force the gearstick into first, finally managed to set off in her wake, his face set in a cold determination that never wavered as they drove on. It never altered when the guards smiled and waved at them. It remained fixed as if it were a carved image of its owner up until the camp disappeared from the rear view cameras and into memory. Then the stone visage cracked and crumbled and sobbed to itself in silence, never moving and never ceasing to drive onwards towards its final destination.

By mid-morning the sky had turned to a purple bruise that spread across the horizon and blackened the sun. It seemed to swirl and eddy as it hung there and as Alan watched it gather through the screen, Gary broke the hours of silence with a hoarse whisper.

“I was right, wasn’t I?”

The shattered fragments of silence held true for a moment more. Then Alan spoke.

“Sort of.”

“What does ‘sort of’ mean?”

“There was an exchange. Korea. Some others. The dust cloud-” Here he gestured to the spreading wound above. “Is on its way. Teague said he ran out of time.”

“So what the hell are we doing out here then?” It was Reb this time, listening in to the conversation through the open-mike system installed in the cabs.

“We’re to take the trucks to this other settlement and leave them there.”

“Leave them? Why?”

“Because this settlement is underground and it’s sealed shut now. They won’t let us in because of the radiation.”

“So what the hell are the trucks...?” Reb’s voice faltered. “Oh Jesus...”

“He’s sent us out here to deliver our supplies to this other settlement but we’re not going to be allowed in? What the fuck?” cried Gary. “What the hell are we supposed to do after that?”

“Die,” muttered Reb.

“That’s it!” roared Gary, stopping the truck and crunching the gearbox until he found reverse. “We’re going back.”

Alan reached over very slowly, placed his hand on Gary’s arm and shook his head. It was nothing. A small, insignificant gesture, but it stopped the hulking mass of steel and electronics in the middle of the road, dead.

For a moment they stared at each other - Gary with hot, molten rage, Alan with compassion but a steel determination to do what he was asked to do. Neither spoke but a million words passed silently between them.

“Guys - look!” said Reb.

Gary turned first, breaking the connection and stared at the screen and the horrors that’d materialised upon it. The clouds had finally burst, spilling forth small stones and ash and dust in a torrent that swept towards them, smashing down upon the cab like thousands of hammer blows, like breakers upon the shore until all sound was drowned out by the cacophony. Moll cowered in the foot well as the barrage continued. The cab swayed and the lights dimmed but worse perhaps than all this was the siren. It issued from the console and the glaring trefoil that appeared in the centre of the screen flashed continually as if to finally break their minds with the horrible truth they’d known all along. The wailing gave way to the monotone cackle of the Geiger counter as it mocked them in their tiny prisons, rising to lifeless fever pitch that condemned them where they sat.

Gary, his head in his hands, rested his body on the steering wheel and wept. Alan had nothing left. It was as if that decision had finally been made for him. The old life was gone. The self-sufficient gardener who’d volunteered for a medical test was no more. He’d died at the camp along with all the others and his remains, like theirs, was now pounded into mulch and consumed by radiation.

What was he now? He wondered as the nuclear storm raged around him. The answer to that lay years ahead of him, staring back at him from an unknown place in the future that his longevity had now put well out of his reach.

Finally, as the storm began to settle into a rhythmic tapping of smaller fragments on the cab, he believed he could begin to find out.

An hour or so later and they found the courage to drive on. Meanwhile, the sky above them continued to roll through constant shades of grey and black and purple as the ash cloud broiled and rolled beneath this violent, inverted ocean. It was as if the world were in agony, burned and still burning, and terrible blisters had formed on its surface, splitting open and spewing forth vile black fluid.

The ash and stone showers gave way to driving rain. Thick dirty globules pelted the ground and formed murky puddles. It filled the depressions made by the hail, attempting to smooth over the rough hammer marks it’d left behind like the earth were one great piece of wrought metal that had been worked on an anvil of its own making.

Moll slept through the worst of it, tucked into as small a shape as she could manage in the foot well beneath Alan’s feet. The Rhino had borne the brunt of it and now continued to trundle along at an even pace, grinding over stone and rock with its enormous wheels and steering smoothly around the wrecks of cars now made almost unrecognisable by the hail. Glass and metal alike had been crushed and smashed and pulverised into mounds of scrap and Alan wondered if it were possible that anyone would have survived it.

“I almost envy her,” said Gary, subdued and cold. “I wish I could just sleep through it and wake up on the other side.”

Alan said nothing. His thoughts were trying to drag him back to the camp, the shopping precinct which by now would have been razed to the ground. People dead. Women. Children. Friends. Anyone left alive would now be irradiated beyond any hope of living.

But he resisted. If he was to make it then he had to value his sanity more than life itself. His body would heal - it’d proven this time and again, but what about his mind? If he broke, if he gave in to the depression and the grief, would that heal as easily? If the next step was to be taken, how could he safeguard his mind?

He thought about this as he popped open a compartment and withdrew a kettle, looking for something, anything, to distract himself with for the time being.

“At least we can have a brew,” he said, plugging it into the dash and filling it with his own water.

“There’s always a plus side, eh?” said Gary.

He made two cups and handed one to him.

“Thanks,” said Gary.

“Least I can do. You’re the driver.”

“Speaking of which...” He leaned over and took an envelope from the glove box, passing it to him. “You’d better open it. They’re the co-ordinates I think.”

Alan looked at the neatly printed lettering on the front of the cheap, brown envelope before tearing open one side, taking out a slip of white paper and passing it to Gary. It was Teague’s delicate script and he looked at it for a moment before discarding it.

“Okay?” asked Alan.

“Yeah. I know where we’re going.”

“You do?”

“Yeah. Should take us about 6 hours at this speed. It’s near my Uncle’s place; he lived in a village not far from there. I know the way.”

“Do you want to take the lead?” asked Reb.

“Yeah, it’ll be easier now I think I’ve got my head around this shit-heap.”

When the road widened, Gary overtook and slowed down to allow her to resume her place in the line. As they passed each other, she toasted them with her coffee cup.

“At least you can smile,” said Gary.

“We have to, mate. Otherwise we won’t get there. We’ll turn around or do something crazy.”

“Like what? If anyone survived that storm then they won’t have much longer left to live anyway. Did you see the rad counter? It was almost off the scale.”

“Look,” she began. “The way I see it, we have coffee, plenty of food, an open road and a good 6 hour drive until we’re finished. We might as well enjoy our last day on earth.”

“I guess so,” he replied.

“In 6 hours I intend to do my duty and go and join my family. At least we can decide that much for ourselves, it’s more than the rest of the world got. There are a heck of a lot of people who woke up this morning and didn’t know it would be their last day on earth.”

“That’s true,” said Alan.

“It just feels like we never got a break, you know?” said Gary. “We barely survived the Panic, a single Russian scientist prevented a world-wide plague and now, just as the human race gets back on its feet, the sun decides to take a holiday and cripple the entire planet. It’s like we’re always being tested, you know? Like there’s some celestial gym instructor up in the sky, telling us to do another set before giving us a break.”

“Wow,” laughed Reb. “That’s almost spiritual, pal.”

“I know,” he replied. “Call me bloody Ghandi.”

“What happens now though?” asked Alan. “Is there any hope for these people we’re leaving the supplies for?”

Gary shrugged. “It’s all theory but I remember studying this in basic. Nuclear winter, effects of fallout, that sort of thing. Other than small examples like Nagasaki and Hiroshima, we’ve never come close to understanding what a global conflict might do to the planet.”

He took a sip from his coffee and settled in to talk about something he knew, something he was happy to share with him if it meant he didn’t have to focus on the next few hours. Alan was happy to listen - more than Gary could know.

“What will happen now - in theory - is that there’ll be some serious temperature changes around the world. I don’t know the exact science, but the dust the explosions have thrown up, plus any firestorms that have added to it, will reduce the amount of heat we’re getting from the sun. This could last up to a year or so, maybe longer. Crops will suffer, obviously and growing stuff in irradiated soil isn’t going to go so well.”

“We’ll be back where we were when the disaster happened,” said Reb.

“Yeah - but without the skills and people we had back then to survive. Don’t forget that we still had a government. Now...”

“I don’t envy those guys in the bunker,” said Reb.

“Well, we’ll be giving them a fighting chance. It all makes sense now.”

“What does?” asked Alan.

“I saw some of the cargo back there when they were loading up. Some of it seemed really odd until today. He must have known all this was coming, but I don’t think even Teague saw how bad it was going to be.”

“No one could have predicted this,” said Reb.

“Most of the middle east must be gone now. There must have been one hell of an exchange to cause this much shit to be thrown up. I only hope it’s settled before they come out of that bunker. Then they’ve got to face the radiation. They’ll be eating it. Breathing it. Drinking it.”

Gary shook his head and fell into silence as their journey continued with very little to mark it. The road, strewn with stone and ash, was easily travelled in the Rhinos but occasionally they would come across scenes of particular carnage - a scavenger party caught out in the open, pulverised into bloody piles and mangled vehicles, a fallen building that blocked most of the motorway, miles of flattened forests and the trees stripped of anything green.

But they passed on, chatting and drinking a seemingly endless supply of coffee as if the world was as it had been, as if their journey were just a road trip of friends and their destination some holiday in a far off, sunny continent. The mood never dropped and they never spoke of the end. It was all memories and jokes and stories, the basic stuff that had kept them alive through the multitude of sorrows and would keep them until the very end.

But the end did come and it bore the face of a battered, forgotten building located in the centre of a business estate and surrounded by the remnants of a wire fence. It had suffered during the storm and a great many of the surrounding structures had collapsed in on themselves, scarring the road and making the Rhinos work hard to clamber over the debris.

In the end they pulled up outside the entrance and saw, to their pleasure and their grief, that someone had gone to the effort of painting the words ‘THANK YOU” on the brickwork and that they’d survived in bold yellow characters in spite of the scouring rain.

Gary, wiping his eyes as he looked at the wall, smiled.

“I appreciate that,” he muttered, turning off the engine and settling back in his chair.

“This is it then,” said Reb.

“This is it.”

They stared out at the place, perhaps with the smallest amount of hope that the doors might open to welcome them, that the rad counter would fall to a safe, background level, and that they might be given a last minute stay of execution. But it was not to be. In fact, the cackling intensified as if somehow the radiated punch line had gotten more humorous, more comical and the counter was matching it, laugh for laugh. Alan reached over and turned it off, plunging the cab into silence.

They waited like that for half an hour. Outside the rain continued to fall and it filled up any crevice, any container and any hollow with its black, oily poison, never letting up and never halting for a second.

“Teague gave us plenty of food and water,” said Reb.

“He did,” replied Gary. “But that’s not for me. I’ve done what I came here to do and I’m not stretching it out any longer than I have to. That’s not my way.”