Nuclear Midnight

by Cole, Robert

  Near the limits of the troposphere the millions of tonnes of soot and debris thrown up by the nuclear detonations had cooled and formed the nucleus of raindrops. As these raindrops condensed they turned into black, billowing clouds. These clouds quickly climbed into the stratosphere and as the mushroom clouds of the holocaust dispersed, erupted in a deluge of black tarry rain. The rains fell all night, violently at first, as the winds drove them against the earth, but then with steadier insistence. The land grew cooler, but soon another wind, from the cooling land masses of Europe, was sweeping in and rising in intensity. By morning the gentle breeze had freshened into a gale and had whipped up enormous seas in the Channel, fretting and flooding the low lying dead lands of the south east.

  Alex, waking early, lay listening to the rain. He still felt sore, but his appetite had returned and his headache was gone. He also had a raging thirst, which the rain only made worse. He pulled off his blanket and sat up. Most people were still asleep, but the sound of coughing and someone being sick was audible across the shelter. The windows had been reinforced with plastic while he slept, but otherwise nothing had changed, except that maybe the air smelt more of sweat and antiseptic. Tucking his shirt in his trousers, he climbed to his feet and started picking his way in the direction of the door.

  A short time later he found Katie in the corner of the shelter, talking with two other people.

  ‘Feeling better, I see?’ She greeted him with a warm smile.

  Alex thought she looked terrible. There were deepening rings of exhaustion around her eyes and her cheeks, pinkish a day before, had drained to a pale grey.

  ‘Would you like something to eat or drink?’ she asked.

  ‘Some water, if you have it,’ he replied, still watching her closely.

  She filled up a glass from a plastic water container. ‘I don't blame you for not feeling much like eating,’ she said, flashing him a reassuring smile. ‘No one, including myself, has eaten much since this whole ghastly business started.’ The smile had vanished again almost before she completed the sentence. ‘I'm sorry I can’t offer you more water,’ she continued, watching Alex drain the glass greedily, ‘but until we are more aware of the situation outside we have to be very careful with our supplies.’

  Alex nodded, for the first time noticing the men Katie had been talking to.

  ‘Oh, I am rude,’ she said. ‘This is Kenneth Ward.’ She gestured towards a thin, sour looking man on her right, who nodded stiffly at Alex. ‘And this is Jim Harrison, our local doctor.’ A man, about Alex’s height, and wearing a pair of steel rimmed glasses with one of the lenses cracked, shook Alex's hand.

  ‘Kenneth is this area's civil defence organiser. He's responsible for organising emergency help and food supplies in case of a disaster,’ Katie continued.

  Alex detected a note of sarcasm in her voice, but Kenneth, it appeared, either didn't care or couldn't be bothered to react to the taunt. He fixed his cold gaze on Alex.

  ‘Katie has told me you want to leave for the hospital as soon as possible.’

  ‘As soon as the radiation count drops,’ Alex corrected.

  ‘Ah.’ Kenneth looked at him thoughtfully. ‘But the radiation count will not be dropping for some time, you understand.’

  ‘How long?’

  ‘I cannot give you a precise answer to that question,’ came the reply. ‘But until I say you can leave, you are not to go out of that door. Is that clear?’

  Alex nodded, frowning as he did so. This man had an arrogant, rasping voice and his manner would have been offensive, under normal circumstance, but Alex sensed he was near the end of his tether.

  ‘You see those people over there,’ Kenneth continued, pointing towards a group huddled in the corner opposite them. ‘Against my better judgement we let them in late yesterday afternoon. I doubt if any of they will survive for more than a few days. They are already running high fevers and vomiting continuously.’

  ‘But some will live,’ the doctor interrupted. ‘People vary immensely in their abilities to tolerate radiation. We have no idea how much these people may have absorbed, or those that are still locked out on the other side of that door.’

  He jabbed a finger toward a large wooden door a few metres away, and Alex felt the tension between the two men suddenly rise.

  ‘You have no right,’ the doctor continued in a raised voice. ‘No right at all to deny people this shelter. I have a duty…’

  ‘Don't start talking about your duty again,’ Kenneth said acidly. ‘I'm not going to let people in who have absolutely no chance of survival. They'll only deprive us of valuable food and water before they die.’

  ‘They had a chance for survival late yesterday when they first started knocking on the door. We should have let them in then. They may still have a chance now, if only you would unbolt the door.’

  ‘It's too late!’ Kenneth growled. The finality in his voice seemed temporarily to silence the doctor.

  Suddenly, as if to reinforce the doctor’s plea, the door shook under repeated blows as if boulders or wooden beams were being hurled against it.

  Under the violence of the assault it creaked and groaned, but the large metal latch and reinforcing sandbags showed no signs of weakening.

  ‘What happens when they start using axes?’ the doctor groaned.

  ‘If they had axes they would have already used them,’ Kenneth replied harshly.

  The group fell quiet, listening. Alex wondered how many times already they had reached this same impasse during the night. Finally, when the doctor could bear it no longer, he stormed off towards the other end of the shelter, shaking his head as he went. Soon after the pounding stopped, faint cries and sobbing could be heard next, until they too ceased and there were no more sounds.

  ‘Let them in,’ Alex pleaded with Kenneth. ‘At least they will die in the warmth and not alone.’

  The sour faced man glared at him, but he seemed beyond arguing the point any further. He turned away without comment.

  Alex was left with Katie. When she looked up at him her eyes were moist. ‘Yesterday we should have let them in, that was wrong of us,’ she admitted. ‘But now it's too late, unless you want to watch people die slowly in front of you without being able to do a thing to help them.’ Then she too, walked off abruptly.

  Alex stared at the door for a long time. His conscience told him to cross the short distance towards it to draw back the bolt and fling it wide open. That would have been the humane and proper thing; but he, no more than Katie or the doctor, could do it. At length, shamefacedly, he shuffled back to his mattress and crawled in under his blanket again.

  Over the next few days the temperature over Europe began to plunge, reaching temperatures below50C in the Baltic States. Only the moderating effect of the North Atlantic drift current tempered the advance of nuclear winter over Great Britain. But the temperature had still dropped far below zero by the third day, turning the intermittent rain into snow showers and blizzards.

  Clothes and blankets became a much treasured and sought after commodity in the shelter. Arguments as to the owner-ship of these precious items began to flare; there were cases of theft and even of stand-up fights. Finally, when the temperature fell to below15C, Kenneth reluctantly authorised the use of several gas burners for warmth.

  These were set up in the centre of the shelter, which immediately became the focal point of activity.

  As the days wore on, a routine of a sort began to emerge. Twice a day a small ration of beans and rice was dished out in plastic bowls. Between meal times, the occupants of the shelter huddled close to the fires and would only leave to collect their ration, or to relieve themselves in the latrine, a small hole through the floor. Alex did the same, at the same time picking up what information he could by talking to people. This was how he learned that the chamber was actually the crypt of a fourteenth century church. While he had been unconscious the roof of the church had caved in, but the massively built crypt had escaped with n
o more than shattered windows and a few cracked ceiling joists. He was delighted, too, to find several people who had had friends or relatives taken to the same hospital as Jason. It was located twelve kilometres east, on the other side of the village. Together they all agreed to set off in that direction, as soon as it was safe to do so.

  By the fifth day radiation counters poked through small holes in the boards covering the windows showed that the radioactivity had fallen to a third of its level on the night of the holocaust. When Alex asked Kenneth about leaving, however, he merely pointed, in his curt fashion, toward the group of people who had been let in on the first afternoon. ‘Do you want to become like the others?’ he would say and that argument seemed unanswerable.

  For, of the sixteen people admitted on that occasion, ten were seriously ill and three had already died. Alex, like many of his companions, found himself irresistibly drawn to this wretched group. He was totally unaccustomed to death, or even serious illness. In fact he had never even been to a funeral or suffered anything more serious than a broken bone in his life. But now, like a spectator at the scene of a grisly road accident, he watched in horror and fascination as the sickness withered and decayed their living bodies. Each individual seemed to be affected differently. The three who died in the first few days rapidly progressed through vomiting and diarrhoea, to cold sweats and severe stomach cramps, which made them clutch their stomachs and scream in agony. Katie did her best to sedate these patients with pills, but they could not keep the medication down. When the morphine ran out, their screams echoed through the shelter for days. Then, almost thankfully, they went into shock and began to twitch, their breathing became irregular and they slipped into a coma and died. But the others hung on for much longer. They reached the vomiting stage and then seemed to improve. Their fevers broke and they managed to take a little of the broth that Katie had prepared, but their bodies still continued to decay. Their hair started dropping out by the handful, purple blotches appeared all over their skin and perpetual diarrhoea withered them into skeletal forms, too weak even to move out of their own excreta. Many times their helpers tried to clean them up, but they only made more mess and contaminated valuable blankets and clothing. Finally, six days after they had been let in, their fevers returned and they quickly succumbed. After a week, eleven out of the original sixteen had died. More floorboards were torn up and their bodies were lowered in, along with any clothing they had worn.

  The unfolding misery of these people had a profound and sobering effect on the rest of the shelter. Alex couldn't imagine a more painful, lingering death. The pitiful creatures they degenerated into had lost most of their resemblance to humanity. They were hairless, shrivelled, and blotched over every centimetre of their skin. Their suffering, more than anything else, made him realise the immensity of what the bombs had inflicted.

  On the night of the tenth day, Kenneth to was able to announce that the outside radiation level had reached a point that was tolerable. However, he warned that anyone venturing out shouldn't expose themselves to the elements for more than a few hours at a time.

  The next morning Alex and eight others assembled in front of the door. Their leader was Hugh Trent, a local villager who had been separated from his parents in the confusion immediately following the first attack. He would guide them as far as the hospital before leaving to search for his parents. The group carried no provisions except for a medical kit, several torches and two litres of water. They were each kitted out in the shelter's limited supply of wet weather gear, leather boots and balaclavas. These had been supplied to them on condition that they scavenge for food, water and warm clothing for the shelter. Kenneth had given them a number of hessian bags and water containers, which they could fill with supplies as they passed through the centre of the village.

  When all the preparations were complete, Alex and several other men removed the sandbags and unbolted the door. The assault on the door had not lasted beyond the morning of the third day. Alex had no illusions about the fate of the people outside, he only hoped they had crawled into a nearby house to die. To everyone's relief they found no bodies on the stairs. The steps were covered in half a metre of black snow and ice. Although it was nine o'clock on a summer’s morning, there was hardly any light coming from the surface.

  The members of the party pulled on their balaclavas and gloves and began making their way upward one at a time. All around were wooden beams used in the abortive attempt to break down the door. At the top of the stairs a small hole had been forced through the debris, but even here, there was no sign of recent footprints. They emerged and followed their leader into what had until recently been the vestry of the church. The room was now open to the sky and covered with nearly a metre of snow. A large section of the roof had collapsed over one of the standing walls, making an alcove of sorts. Hugh shone his torch in there, while the rest of the party continued on; he beckoned to Alex to join him.

  As Alex had feared, Hugh had found the bodies of the people who had been locked out. Most were huddled in tight bundles at the very back of the alcove. One of the bodies was that of an elderly man. He must have died before the rest because his body had been stripped and pushed away from the others.

  Another corpse was a youth about Alex’s age. Most of his hair had gone, except for parts of a red beard, which still clung, in ragged patches to his chin. His face was expressionless, his right fist full of hair, as though one of his last acts had been to pull all his hair from his head. Large ice crystals dangled from his nose and the remains of his beard, giving him a glassy, almost waxy appearance, like a figure in a museum. Alex couldn’t tell much about the other figures, except that amongst them, there was a woman and a child, frozen together like some bizarre ice sculpture.

  There were also a number of tins of food, all unopened. The large amount of human excreta and of vomit explained why they had remained untouched. Alex had expected to feel shocked, but he found he was only saddened. Already he was adjusting his pre-war concepts of normal and abnormal to fit this new reality. He realised he had expected to find them in this exact condition; no other outcome would have been possible after their exposure to such high levels of radiation. Both men returned to the party without mentioning what they had seen.

  They left the church and were met at once by the full blast of an oncoming blizzard. Stinging pellets of snow, driven by the wind, slowed them down to a crawl. To Alex it felt as if he was experiencing the final burial of his world. The lush, green countryside he had marvelled at only ten days earlier had vanished under a poisonous sheet of snow. Trees, many defoliated, hung over them like giant broken skeletons in the gloom. Their branches, dangling like many broken limbs, swinging and pivoting wildly as the wind. Only the houses remained intact - lifeless, shadowy lumps of brick and wood.

  Soon the party stretched out into a long line. The wind velocity increased further, forcing them to bend nearly double to make headway. Hugh forced the pace, stretching his lead over the others until he was only a faint blur against the fury of the blizzard. But the party could only travel as fast as its slowest member, and soon he had to pause to allow the others to catch up. It took nearly two hours to cover the four kilometres to the village centre, and by then many of the party were nearly spent. Several times in the last hour they had to stop to allow the stragglers to catch up. Once, a large woman in her forties collapsed and Alex and another man found themselves supporting her for the rest of the way. Only a lull in the storm and an easing off of the wind enabled them to reach the village.

  Hugh finally called a halt in a former bakery shop. The rest of the party struggled in and collapsed unceremoniously on the floor. Outside, another blizzard was converging on the village. Within minutes the greyness was complete. Even the few lights coming from the second and third storey shop windows across the street had vanished. Alex took off his gloves and tried to warm his fingers by breathing on them. He had lost all feeling in his fingers and his toes about half an hour before. His face h
ad also gone numb, making him think seriously about the possibility of getting frostbite. Having spent most of his life in Australia he had very dim memories of this type of cold. In London, as a small boy, he remembered playing in the lights of the street lamps after dark until his feet and hands had become completely numb. But then he could always run inside and warm up; now he felt he could never be warm again.

  After they had rested a little, Hugh got to his feet and addressed them. ‘I know it means carrying heavy packs to the hospital and back,’ he said, studying their exhausted faces, ‘but I think we should collect our supplies now.’

  His words brought an immediate and angry protest. Most vocal was a short stout man, named Ted Richards, of whom Alex had already formed a very poor impression. For the last hour at least he had been complaining bitterly, and he had flatly refused to help any of the weaker members of their group when they got into difficulties.

  ‘Why can't we pick up the supplies on the way back?’ Ted asked arrogantly.

  ‘Because it may be several days before we can return,’ Hugh replied. ‘All the shops may have been ransacked by then. We must be sure of collecting the supplies we came for.’

  ‘But no one's going to go out in this.’ Ted waved his arm in the direction of the blizzard, which was now blowing directly through the broken shop window.

  Hugh said quietly; ‘It's been eleven days since the holocaust. If everyone has done what the government has told them and only stored two weeks of food, then their supplies will already be running low. When they realise there is no help coming, they will start to panic.’ He gave Ted a cold look. ‘I'll wager a lot of the food has already been taken from these shops.’