The Return of the Incredible Exploding Man

by Dave Hutchinson

  Wendy indicated a tub of margarine on the worktop at her side. Alex found a plate which didn’t seem to be harbouring too many lethal bacterial cultures and spread margarine on a couple of slices of bread. “What happened?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I was paying the rope out to you and all of a sudden the end of it just ran through my fingers and out the door. So I roped myself up and came looking for you.”

  He looked at her.

  “You were already here so I made sure you weren’t both going to kick on me and put you to bed.”

  “Hm.” He gave her the plate and watched her putting bacon on the bread. She topped it with the other slice and cut it in half and gave him the plate back.

  “There’s coffee,” she said. “I think it’s coffee.”

  There was a half-full jug sitting on a corner of the stove, keeping warm. He poured some into a mug and dropped a couple of sugar cubes into it, then he took everything back to the table and sat down. “Well,” he said.

  “What happened to your face?”

  He touched his nose again. “Bumped it a couple of times.”

  Wendy took some bread, made herself a bacon sandwich, and sat down opposite him.

  “Thank you,” he said. “For coming to find us.”

  “Well, don’t get too excited about it because we’re not out of the woods yet. There’s almost no food in the house; it looks as if Ralph lives mostly on takeouts. And I don’t like the sound of his breathing. I managed to find some aspirin and get those into him, but he’s running a fever. I’m worried about pneumonia.”

  He bit into his sandwich. In spite of the extreme unhygiene of the kitchen, it tasted delicious. He took a swig of coffee, looked at the mug.

  “Told you,” she said.

  He swallowed. “So,” he said. “What do we have?”

  She shrugged. “Food for today, maybe tomorrow as well. After that we’re eating the dog’s food; Ralph’s got a stack of tins taller than I am. We’re safe and warm and dry. There’s still running water. There’s no cell coverage and Ralph’s wi-fi is down but I can’t tell whether that’s because of the storm or because his router was probably first used to relay news of the Fall of Khartoum.” That made him smile, despite everything. Wendy nodded at the window, which was a rectangle of raging whiteness. “People at the Facility are going to be wondering where I am, but nobody’s going anywhere until this thing blows itself out.”

  “Any news on that?”

  She shook her head. “No television coverage, and if he’s got a radio I can’t find it.”

  He took another bite of sandwich, washed it down with another mouthful of coffee. “One of us is going to have to go back to my place and get supplies,” he said.

  “Not today.”

  “No.” He winced. “Christ, no.”

  “The whole front of the house is under a snowdrift,” she said. “Right up to the bedroom windows. But the wind funnelling between the properties stopped it getting too deep out there.” She waved at the door, which was wedged shut with a length of rope hanging from the gap.

  He remembered that from last night; it was only a foot or so deep. “Did you close my door?”

  “I pulled it shut on the rope,” she said. “It was pretty firmly wedged; you’ll be fine so long as it didn’t blow open.”

  “So at least it’s doable. We go out, we follow the rope, get some stuff, follow the rope back.” They looked at each other. “But not today.”

  They sat for a while in silence, eating and listening to the wind howling around the house. Wendy said, “The dog’s upstairs on Ralph’s bed, fast asleep. I don’t think it’s even noticed anything’s going on yet.” She wrinkled her nose. “That dog smells.”

  He looked around the kitchen. “Did you see anything last night? When you found us?”

  “Like what?”

  He shrugged. “Anything… unusual.”

  “I saw two assholes who didn’t have a quantum of common sense between them lying on the floor. There’s this, though.” She got up and went over to the corner by the door and picked up a soggy length of rope.

  It was the rope he had tied around his waist last night. He ran it through his hands until he reached the end, and, just as he remembered, it was charred. He squinted at it and turned it this way and that.

  “That looks deliberate,” said Wendy.

  He frowned. The rope had been in the basement for a while. Maybe at one point it had been stored too close to the furnace and wound up scorched. Maybe the Shanahan children, alleged dog shooters, had decided to off their parents in a climbing/caving accident. There could be any number of reasonable explanations, although he couldn’t think of any right now. “I don’t know,” he said.

  THE LIVING ROOM seemed hot and feverish. Ralph lay on the couch, under a pile of duvets and blankets and coats. His breathing did seem laboured, although considering what he’d gone through the previous night that was hardly a surprise.

  Alex sat down on the side of the couch and Ralph stirred under the blankets and slowly opened his eyes and looked at him. “He’s a threat,” he said distinctly.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “He does fret,” Ralph said again. “Homer. How is he?”

  Alex frowned at him. “He’s fine. Farting like a champ.”

  Ralph settled back in his nest. “That’s good. What happened to your face?”

  “Took a bit of a tumble. It’s nothing.”

  “Thank you for last night.”

  “It’s Wendy you should really be thanking. If it wasn’t for her we’d probably both have died on the kitchen floor.”

  Ralph closed his eyes and shook his head. “Tell me later,” he murmured.

  “Do you have a radio?”

  Eyes still closed, Ralph thought about it. “Yeah,” he said finally. “One of those wind-up things. In the closet in my bedroom. Unless I threw it away. I can’t remember.”

  “Okay.” Alex tucked the blankets around him. “You rest now. Everything’s going to be fine.”

  THEY SAT IN the kitchen listening to the radio. The whole of northern Iowa and southern Minnesota and a big chunk of Wisconsin was, officially, a disaster area. The National Guard had been called out to help FEMA in what relief efforts they were able to mount at the moment. Confirmed fatalities—

  and the newsreader emphasised these were only the confirmed ones—ran into the high three figures, the majority due to traffic accidents. No flights had been able to take off from or land—or even approach—anywhere in a huge swathe of the Midwest since the storm began. Scanning along the dial they found a station which styled itself The Home of Free Speech—never a good sign. In the space of half an hour, the presenter blamed the storm on the Democrats, the Russians, the Zionists, socialised medicine, the anti-gun lobby, chemtrails, geoengineering, Mexican immigrants, Islam, black helicopters, and the European Union.

  “That guy needs to cut down on his caffeine,” Wendy said, tuning the radio to a country rock station.

  Alex, who had long ago come to the conclusion that the United States was way too twitchy for its own good, said, “Kind of impressive, though. In its way.”

  She said back and looked at him. “So,” she said. “How did you wind up here?”

  “Here?”

  “In the US. You’re a long way from home.”

  He remembered asking Mickey Olive the same question, what seemed like a thousand years ago. “Oh. Long story.”

  “We’ve got plenty of time,” she said. “Unless you’ve found a stash of board games around here.”

  “There’s a chess set,” he suggested.

  “I don’t play.”

  He raised an eyebrow.

  “It’s not obligatory for scientists, you know,” she said. “Don’t get cute with me. I think it’s a stupid game.”

  “Why?”

  She crossed her arms and glared at him. “I asked first.”

  “Okay.” There was no arguing with that. He to
ok a few moments to arrange it all in his head. It felt, if he was going to be honest with himself, as if it was the first time he’d done it. “Well, I was still working in London back then. The Guardian. I was doing okay, and one day I got an invitation to go out to Livermore Labs. They were announcing a joint Anglo-American nanotechnology project, hands across the sea, that sort of thing. Stepping forward together into a golden future.” He scratched his head. “Anyway, they were prepared to pay my fare, my editor thought we could turn out a good piece about both sides of the project, and I’d only be gone a couple of days, so I went.”

  Wendy narrowed her eyes. “Was this JTAC?” She pronounced it ‘Jay-tack’.

  “You heard of it?”

  “I saw some of the Congressional hearings.”

  He smiled sadly. “Yes,” he said. “They were fun, weren’t they? Anyway, I went, and I got the tour and the lectures and about a hundred flash drives full of presentations and it all looked very wonderful but it was all a bit dull. There were about thirty journalists from almost everywhere except China and Russia, being herded from room to room and getting PowerPoint Rage.

  “There was this chap there, none of us could ever work out quite what he was doing. He didn’t seem to be attached to any particular project, he was just wandering about poking into things. Chap named Larry Day.” He saw her raise an eyebrow. “You’ve heard of him too.”

  She nodded slowly. “Oh yeah, I’ve heard of him,” she said with a heavy irony that she didn’t seem inclined to explain.

  “Well, I hadn’t, not back then. But we got chatting and he said it looked as if I needed a break and we wound up spending an evening going round the bars in Livermore.”

  She nodded as if she was completely familiar with the situation.

  He looked around the kitchen. “And at some point, in some bar or other, I couldn’t tell you where, I wound up chatting to this girl. Chatting for quite a long time. Larry wandered off at some point, I didn’t see him go, and this girl and I—her name was Kim—went to an all-night diner and had coffee and pancakes and bacon and we talked a lot.”

  Wendy reached out and turned the radio down a little.

  “And we kept on talking, after I came back. And one thing led to another and eventually I was flying to California to meet her parents and a few months after that we were getting married.”

  “That’s sweet.”

  “Yeah.” Except it hadn’t been quite that easy. Kim’s parents had lived in Santa Monica back then, but she’d told him to fly to San Francisco and make his way south from there by land, and she’d given him a very tight schedule within which to do it. It had seemed a harmless bit of fun back then, a bit of an adventure, but looking back it was just one of a series of tests she’d put him through during their marriage. “So I managed to get a job with the Boston Globe, we got a flat in Boston, Kim got a job teaching at a local high school. And that, constant reader, is why I’m in the United States.”

  “What happened?”

  “Beg pardon?”

  “You’re not married any more, yes?”

  “Yes, I am not married any more,” he agreed.

  “So what happened?”

  “She joined the Marines.”

  Wendy barked a single astonished laugh and almost simultaneously stifled it with both hands, her eyes wide with shock. “Sorry,” she said, taking her hands away from her mouth. “That was horrible of me.”

  Alex shrugged. “Her father was in the Corps, and her grandfather.” He thought about it. “And I seem to remember something about her great-grandfather, too. She wanted a proper career. What she thought of as a proper career, anyway. We’d sort of stopped talking to each other so much by then. I didn’t want to be an Army bride, things were going pretty well for me at the Globe. We just agreed to part amicably.”

  “That’s…” She shook her head.

  “We stayed in contact, for a while. She did a couple of tours in Afghanistan. Then we just lost touch. Last I heard, she was a colonel and she was teaching counterinsurgency techniques at a staff college somewhere down South.” He looked at her. “Sorry you asked now, aren’t you.”

  “Oh, Christ, no,” she said. “I wouldn’t have missed hearing that story for anything.”

  He smiled. “Everything else is pretty simple, really. I bumbled along for a couple of years, then I lost my job at the Globe. Then I bumbled along for another couple of years. Then Stan Clayton rode in on a multicoloured thundercloud and scooped me up and here I am, sitting in the middle of the New Ice Age.”

  “Speaking of which,” she said, getting up, “I’d better check on Ralph. You could make yourself useful by doing a proper inventory of our food, then we can work out how long we’ve got before we have to start panicking.”

  “Oh, that’s easy,” he told her. “I’ve already started.”

  THE FOLLOWING AFTERNOON, the wind dropped enough for Alex to decide it was worth risking the trip to his house. Visibility was still poor, but at least he could see the building now, and the intruder light still burning beside the door, as he plodded along holding onto the rope with one hand.

  He filled a rucksack with tins of soup and vegetables and some of the fresh produce Wendy had brought the day the storm began, bagged up some burgers and steaks and added them. On top, he stuffed some fresh clothes. There was a chunky green knapsack with a white cross on the front of it in the basement, yet another part of the Shanahan Legacy, and he grabbed that. He didn’t know what kind of medical supplies it contained, or whether any or all of them would have expired, but it couldn’t hurt to have it.

  Back upstairs, he went into the living room and stood looking about him, thinking. Then he said out loud, “Hi. I know you’ve bugged the house. I don’t know whether you’ve lost contact for the moment, but we have someone here who needs a doctor, so if you could send help sooner rather than later I’d really appreciate it. Thank you.” He stood there a few moments longer, feeling slightly ridiculous. Then he headed for the kitchen.

  He was about to open the side door when a thought struck him, and he went through the kitchen cupboards again, adding coffee and sugar and teabags. Then he went up and ransacked the bathroom cabinet and stuffed everything into his coat pockets along with a bottle of shower gel.

  “Oh bless you,” Wendy said when she saw the shower gel and the toothpaste and spare toothbrush. The subject of how Ralph managed to maintain his personal hygiene had become something of a conversation between them. There was a single rock-hard sliver of soap in the shower upstairs, and a tin of dentifrice so ancient it might have come from the kitbag of a Civil War infantryman, and that was about it. Wendy, who had got them both out of their outer clothes when she rescued them from the kitchen floor the night the storm began, was of the opinion that Ralph had reached an age where he simply absorbed any dirt. “How is it out there?”

  “It’s still snowing hard.” Alex sat on one of the kitchen chairs and unlaced his boots. “Not nearly as windy, though.” Although there had still been a couple of moments when gusts had almost knocked him off his feet.

  “We got a television signal while you were gone,” she said, starting to unpack the rucksack and arranging its contents on the table. “Scared me half to death; I hadn’t realised it was on.”

  “What was it?”

  She shook her head. “Some old science fiction movie. People screaming. It was hard to tell, there was so much interference. It only lasted a few minutes before it went down again, anyway.”

  “But it’s got to be a promising sign, right? If infrastructure’s starting to come back.”

  She pouted at a couple of tins of soup. “Could be.” She put the tins on the table. “But let’s not have a big celebratory dinner just yet, eh?”

  TWO DAYS LATER, Alex woke in his bed in one of the spare rooms and realised he couldn’t hear the wind outside. He got up and went to the window and pulled back the curtain and was almost blinded by bright sunlight.

  Downstairs, the side d
oor was open and Wendy was standing outside, knee-deep in fresh snow. “I was just coming to get you,” she said.

  He put on his coat and went out to join her. “When did it stop?”

  “I don’t know. The wind was still blowing when I went to sleep. I woke up about fifteen minutes ago, and…” She gestured at the world before them.

  Together, they crunched through the crusty snow to the front of the house and looked out at East Walden Lane. The whole world was a landscape of brilliant glittering white, the fronts of the houses hidden behind drifts that in places were roof-high. The green was a smooth dome of snow taller than a bus, and beyond it the trees were just vague shapes, almost buried. The sky was immense and clear and eye-crunchingly blue, a single lonely contrail creeping slowly across it.

  Alex looked down the curve of houses. “Maybe we should check—” He stopped and cocked his head to one side. “Do you hear that?”

  Wendy looked off to the left. “Yeah.”

  A couple of moments later, the helicopter popped up over the trees and howled across the sky at an altitude of about five hundred feet. “Shouldn’t we set off a flare or something?” Alex said, shading his eyes with his hand as he watched it fly past.

  “Do we have any flares?”

  He couldn’t, in all honesty, discount the possibility that the Shanahans hadn’t left some in the basement. “I don’t know.”

  “Let’s just do it the old-fashioned way,” said Wendy, and she waded through the snow down the slope of the lawn and out onto where the road was, waving her hands above her head. Alex joined her, and together they jumped up and down and waved while the helicopter came round for another pass, and another, while the pilot checked out the landing area. It came in to hover over the centre of the green, and snow erupted in a blinding cloud. The helicopter flew slowly back and forth for a while, blowing snow out of the way, until the pilot decided it was safe enough to land.

  Before the rotors had stopped turning, a door in the side opened and a huge figure in a bright orange snowsuit clambered down and started wading through the snow towards them.