Nuclear Midnight

by Cole, Robert

  While he was talking, Wayne had been searching the town through a pair of binoculars. He finally climbed out of the Land Rover and pointed to a spot a few kilometres out from the centre of town. ‘There's a fire burning. I can see people gathered around it,’ he announced, handing the binoculars to Alex.

  Alex could see four figures tending what looked to be a cooking pot.

  ‘It's a perfect opportunity to know once and for all what went on here,’ Cliff said, after taking a turn at the binoculars.

  Alex disagreed. ‘What would be the point? We know already the direction in which the population chose to go. I'm not for running risks unnecessarily. Besides,’ he continued stubbornly, ‘these people probably know the streets as well as the rats do. We wouldn't get within a kilometre of them before they disappeared.’

  But Cliff and Wayne argued forcibly that these survivors might be able to tell them whether a large community in Scotland did exist. Even Roy, who rarely offered an opinion, came in on the side of Cliff and Wayne, suggesting that if they were fully armed such a small group would not present any real threat. In the end Alex was overruled, but he insisted they all take revolvers and automatic rifles, and retreat at the first sign of trouble without offering a fight.

  An hour later, Alex squatted down next to the dying flames of the fire and picked up one of the many discarded cans lying amongst the coals. They had left the Land Rover several blocks away and travelled on foot, cautiously picking their way between the buildings, never exposing themselves for more than a few seconds in the streets, communicating by signs, but all to no avail. The people had gone and so had the pot, only the lingering smell of cooking remained. Alex nervously glanced around him. The fire had been built on the edge of a small suburban park, surrounded on all sides by shabby terraced houses. They had already searched the area and found nothing, although he was convinced the survivors were not far off. He suddenly found that thought rather disturbing, so he quickly went to join the others who had entered a large stone house on the far side of the park.

  He reached the house and gently pushed open the front door. Inside, it was surprisingly dark and cool. The curtains, he noticed, had been drawn. He called out softly, his voice echoing around the Spartan furnishings. No one answered so he tried again. They must be at the back of the house, he told himself reassuringly. If they had run into trouble he would have heard something shots, some kind of a struggle. He drew his revolver and flicked the safety catch off with his thumb. He had entered a long narrow hallway, lined with dusty paintings and antique side tables. The house was much larger than it looked from the front. It seemed to extend backwards in a series of spacious but mould blackened and musty rooms. The last one was blacker still; indeed it was pitch dark, though some light filtered round the rim of a door opposite. He paused, waiting for his eyes to adjust, then strode forward. Suddenly there was sound and movement behind him, but his reflexes were too slow. He heard the thud on his skull and felt his knees buckle underneath him. By the time he hit the floor he was unconscious...

  He was aware of arms gently lifting him onto a chair against a wall. A woman's face came into focus, anxious, concerned, framed by a tangled mop of blonde hair. He reached up and touched a large painful bump near the base of his skull, and when he looked at his hand it was covered in blood.

  The woman grimaced when she saw it. ‘They hit you too hard,’ she apologised. ‘They were only meant to disarm you, not knock you unconscious.’ She lifted a glass of water to his lips and he took a careful sip.

  Alex studied the woman more closely while he drank. She was younger than himself and tall, with thin arms and legs, deeply tanned, as though she spent much of her time outdoors. Her face had small delicate features, which were set in determined lines. In the first rush of returning consciousness he had dreaded death, but her presence comforted him somewhat.

  When he turned his head, he could see that he was in a very large room filled with desks, cupboards and filing cabinets stuffed with books and folders. There were no windows and the ceiling was criss-crossed with wooden beams. The smell of damp and mould was so strong that he had the impression he was below ground. He remembered seeing a wooden flight of stairs curling downwards when he was in the hallway, and guessed that they were probably in the cellar.

  His companions were sitting dejectedly along the wall a little further off, with their hands tied behind their backs. All were looking anxiously towards him. Three ragged men and a second woman were also watching him intently.

  ‘Still a bit dizzy, I shouldn't wonder,’ came a voice from the other side of the room. The owner of that voice, a man in his mid to late fifties crossed over to where he sat. ‘Shame about the head,’ he continued, in a rather offhand tone. ‘We got a bit nervous when you took off the safety catch on your revolver. We thought it would be safer to knock you out than risk confronting you like we did the others.’

  Alex stared up at this tall, remarkably elegant man. He had cropped hair touched with white and a neatly trimmed beard, and was formally dressed in a pair of grey trousers and a pink shirt. The shirt even looked clean and ironed. Alex was struck by the contrast of his appearance to that of the rest of their captors. The men had ragged beards and the two women long matted hair, and they all wore torn and patched clothes.

  ‘I'm Samuel Dunham,’ the man continued in a pompous tone, which Alex did not much like. ‘This is Elaine,’ he gestured toward the woman who had given him the water, ‘and Cathy, Alan, Ted and Jeremy. Our little band’ he smiled briefly. ‘Well, young man your friends have already told me much of what I want to know. You come from Wales, I understand, and are looking for a Scottish community. Is that right?’

  Alex nodded his head painfully.

  Samuel stared at him briefly, then turned and, with hands clasped behind his back, slowly walked toward the others. ‘And what will you do when you find this Scottish community?’

  ‘It does exist, then?’ Alex asked hopefully.

  ‘Oh yes,’ Samuel replied, turning on his heels and striding back. ‘Certainly. It's quite sizeable, I believe. It comprises all the remnants of the towns down here.’ He crouched down next to Alex. ‘Most of the people who once lived here are now in Scotland. They decided to flee north ahead of a typhus outbreak brought on by a rat plague. Terrible business that was, thousands must have died, possibly millions by the time it had run its course.’ He stood up and made an embracing gesture. ‘Those you see here, and a few others, who at this moment are tending crops on the outskirts of town, are all that is left of Carlisle.’

  ‘Why did you stay?’ Wayne asked.

  Samuel glanced round at him. ‘This is our home,’ he said flatly. ‘The others hoped to outrun the plague, they thought, by heading north, we chose to remain.’

  Alex thought he was beginning to get an inkling of this man's character. He was dogmatic and complacent at the same time; he had the preacher's trick of projecting words and emphasising them by subtle changes in tone and inflection. His movements, too, seemed part of a deliberate performance.

  ‘But not all the dead in the streets died as a result of the plague,’ Alex spoke up.

  Samuel turned his head and compressed his lips. ‘What makes you say that?’

  ‘I was here over a year ago,’ Alex explained. ‘I saw scores of corpses in the streets. They hadn't died of typhus, they had been shot.’

  ‘Ah! We are referring to, are we not, to some bodies in front of a tall, white office block with tinted windows?’

  Alex had some vague recollection of an office block, but he couldn't remember what the windows looked like. ‘Possibly,’ he said after a pause.

  ‘Most likely you saw the results of a massacre, then,’ Samuel continued solemnly. ‘Thirteen months ago?’ He turned toward Elaine, who was leaning against the wall next to Alex.

  ‘More like fifteen,’ she corrected.

  ‘Indeed.’ He shook his head ruefully, and walked back to Alex. ‘Fifteen months ago a dreadful battle to
ok place between the remaining population of Carlisle and the people who lived in the basement of that office block.’ He paused, ensuring he had the attention of everyone. ‘It was the first winter after the holocaust’ he continued thoughtfully. ‘Terrible weather that, really shocking. There were so many of us, you see and so few resources. We had no direct bombardment, you understand. Only minor damage here and there, you know; doors blown off, one or two fires, a collapsed roof or so.’ He paused, clasping his hand behind him again, in oratorical pose. ‘For a week or two things were not so bad. All of us being shell shocked, as it were, we failed to appreciate the gravity of the situation. But then people began to think what would happen to them. No communications, not even with the next town. Appalling weather, contamination raining from the sky, no food or water and worst of all, not a sign of any help from the government.’ He shrugged. ‘That was the end of civilisation as we knew it. People had to go out into the contaminated streets in search of food. The shops were cleaned out in the first week. Fights to the death occurred over scraps of food. Neighbour rose against neighbour. And then there was the flu epidemic. They died in their thousands. By the end of the nuclear winter only twenty or thirty thousand people were left. We were down to eating rats and wild dogs to survive.’

  ‘And the military didn't try to establish food distribution centres?’ Roy asked.

  Samuel shook his head. ‘Survivors fleeing from the south made mention of food rationing stations outside London. Some even went that way to try and find them, but no military ever reached this far north.’

  Samuel had by this time stopped pacing back and forth and was leaning on a heavily cluttered table in the centre of the room. After a pause he continued. ‘Inside this white office block there was a large metal door. Thinking it was some dusty old vault full of papers or useless money, it was ignored. But then a series of air vents on the surface were discovered. These vents were traced back to a large area behind the door. Several attempts were made to force the door, but as it was steel, embedded in a metre thick concrete wall, these efforts met with little success. We then tried to break in through the ventilating system, but found that it, too, was encased in concrete and protected by a thick steel grid. As we listened on the surface we could hear the sound of generators and even of voices coming up the ventilating shafts. Gradually we realised that we were not dealing here with a few ragged survivors who had happened to stumble across some nice cosy place to weather out the nuclear winter. This was a large, well-constructed fallout shelter encased in concrete, fitted with its own generators and air filtering systems.

  ‘In a funny sort of way,’ Samuel continued, ‘the more impregnable that shelter seemed, the more it seemed to unite the people on the surface. Finally they had something to focus their hate on. It became an obsession, a lock to pick as it were, no matter what the cost. For two months we struggled to break through the door, but it was proof even against oxy acetylene equipment; or at least we could make little impression. Then someone suggested that we seal all the ventilation shafts to deprive them of air. It took another few days before they were forced to come out.’

  He paused reflectively, his fingers clawing through the strands of his beard. ‘They must have decided that throwing themselves on our mercy would be to no avail,’ he continued softly. ‘They burst out of that door armed with machine pistols and explosives. Everyone standing near was killed. Then they ran onto the streets and massacred a large group of people cooking their evening meal. Those were the bodies you saw, young man, when you were here last,’ he said, looking across at Alex. ‘They were still in uniform.’ He shook his head slowly. ‘Maybe they thought that that would intimidate us, or perhaps they had no civilian clothes down there. In any case, there was no reasoning with them; they were out of their minds with terror. They ran through the streets shooting at anything that moved. We hunted them down, singly and in packs, and killed every last one. We were not afraid. By mid-morning the next day they lay dead, fifty five men and twelve women.’

  The recital seemed to end here, on an almost triumphant note. Alex, looking sideways, noticed the looks of mild boredom on the faces of Elaine and the other members of her group and supposed that this was not the first time they had been obliged to listen to this talk.

  Cliff asked the inevitable question. ‘Why were they down there?’

  Samuel appeared to have been waiting for this.

  ‘One look inside that shelter would have told you why. It contained a mass of computer terminals, communication equipment and defence systems. The piles of papers you see all around you,’ he gestured toward the cabinets overflowing with papers, ‘I have collected them from there in order to try and piece together what happened before the holocaust.’ He had begun his pacing again. ‘The people who were in that shelter were members of a military elite called 'the HUD'. That stands for 'Holocaust Underground Defence.’ They were all specialists in one form of high technology or another, and the shelter they occupied was called a 'Citadel’. There were at least thirty of these citadels throughout Great Britain before the war. They were linked together by fibre optic cables and connected to early warning systems, spy satellites and radar networks to all the nuclear weapons of Great Britain. In other words, the idea of these Citadels was to be able to continue a nuclear attack effectively even after the surface had been reduced to a mass of cinders and nuclear potholes. It's quite likely that the military personnel in that Citadel were responsible for conducting the final stages of the war.’

  He paused and scanned them for a reaction. When it failed to come, he frowned.

  ‘None of you seem particularly startled by what I have just said,’ he continued with a slightly raised eyebrow.

  ‘Well, I'm not, if that's what you mean.’ Alex spoke up. ‘Cliff, Roy and myself,’ he nodded towards the others, survived a military labour camp soon after the holocaust. We're all aware of what the military is capable of.’

  ‘I see.’ Samuel seemed temporarily thrown off his stroke. ‘You think you know what the military is capable of, do you?’

  Alex’s head was aching. At least the bump on his head was real, he thought sourly. He could not vouch for anything else he had heard since waking up. His friends, it appeared, were in a similar plight. Samuel continued to stand over them, as if waiting for some expression of astonishment.

  ‘So you're saying that the military continued firing nuclear missiles even after the holocaust had happened?’ Alex asked, frowning as he tried to concentrate.

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘But for what possible purpose?’ Alex queried.

  ‘The purpose?’ Samuel raised his eyebrows as though the question was almost too silly to bother answering. ‘Man's history,’ he began in a condescending voice, like a lecturer about to deliver a well-rehearsed talk on a pet subject, ‘is riddled with violent acts of murder, rape and torture. Such elements, indeed, seem to be bound up with his essential nature. It was factors like these, which he harnessed to help him build the technological world that existed before the war. But was his aggression really tamed?’ Samuel looked around at the blank faces. ‘Of course not, it was just repressed, waiting for an outlet, a way to express itself. Then the arms race started. Bigger, better, more devastating weapons.’ He threw his hands up in the air. ‘It was inevitable really. He could channel all his creative energy and intelligence, while serving his primitive urges for violence and destruction. And for a time it fulfilled its function admirably. Only, of course, complex technology and primitive urges are not really compatible. If either gets the upper hand, the world falls victim and is destroyed.’

  He was standing, towering over them, chest puffed out, his eyes alight with his own cleverness and discerning. Once again he seemed annoyed by their blank looks.

  ‘I didn't really expect you to understand,’ he went on at length, dismissing them with a wave of his hand. ‘You are too tied to the present, you can't look forward or back. How to fill your bellies, how to get through today
, tomorrow, next week, next month; that is all you are concerned about. You are like the masses before the war that obeyed blindly, the human fodder of the holocaust. And you, their leader.’ He was at Alex’s side now, a certain wild gleam in his eyes. ‘Do you ever question or think? Are you ever responsible for your actions? Why, in your opinion, did your superiors send you on this absurd mission?’

  Alex was alarmed how quickly Samuel could change the conversation, but he met his eyes firmly. ‘The purpose of our mission is simple enough. We have been ordered to establish friendly relations with any community we might find in Scotland.’

  ‘You're the first flush of a new poison,’ Samuel scoffed. ‘What are these 'friendly relations', except trying to rebuild the Old World system out of the ashes of the nuclear wasteland! Nothing has changed. Indeed no change is possible while the agents of the old order think and scheme and act according to its laws. We have suffered; we have seen our planet plunged into darkness through the folly of planners more powerful than your masters. And now that the light is beginning to return, do you think we will permit the same mistakes to be made again? An opportunity has been given to the few, the men of vision, to shape a more beautiful world. No empire builders, no emissaries of petty kingdoms struggling for dominance can be allowed to corrupt the little glimmer of hope, the purifying flame we hold cupped in our hands.’

  He rose to his full height.

  ‘You're wrong about us,’ Alex cried. ‘Things are not like that anymore. We come to establish…’

  ‘You come in peace and are armed for war,’ Samuel retorted coldly. ‘You are not the first young man who has pleaded before me for his life. Do you think the good gardener lets the nettles grow because the weeds are innocent? The taint has to be cut off at the root!’

  Alex glanced towards Elaine and the rest. He knew now why she looked so agitated. This scene had been enacted before. It was at Samuel's hands that the drivers from Wales had been killed. First he lectured them, and then he slaughtered them. He caught Elaine's eye and knew that in her answering gaze he had an ally. But even he was astonished by her next move. Instantly she was on her feet and had taken Samuel's arm.