I spent long periods staring at the hatch, yearning to be outside in whatever hell now lay above. I imagined fluttering ash and molten rock, a heat haze on the rubble, a poisonous breeze. And yet how cool and fresh the air would feel against my face compared with the fetid atmosphere of the cellar.
Then I would stare at the pipe. The more I stared, the more I convinced myself that it was full of water. I could break it, drain it, prolong our survival, perhaps enough for...for what? A rescue party?
Or it could be a gas pipe. I could break it in the middle of the night and kill us all. Beth, Alice and Arthur would not know what had happened.
Then I got sick. High fever, headache, sore throat, aching bones. I tried to function for a day, coughing and spluttering while I brought flannels, mouthfuls of water and spoonfuls of tomato ketchup (pretty much all we had left) to Beth and Arthur and trying in vain to interest Alice in either. Then I gave up and collapsed in a heap on the floor. Beth threw me a blanket and I hugged it around myself, pressing my hot face against the cold floor.
I fell into a dream in which I was the glass within the kitchen door of our house. A hundred faces were pressed up against me, saliva drooling from their mouths and spluttering from their noses as they heaved and panicked to push through me. I stood, unable to move, my glass arms and legs stretched out as if I was on a rack. I felt my glass face bake in the sun. Then the sun became bright, overexposed light that seared and finally exploded everything around me. The faces burst and sizzled against me. Their cheeks charred and crumbled into dust, their eyeballs boiled and melted down my neck like marshmallows.
I woke up gasping, fumbling for the water bottle. I almost had it to my lips when I paused. It was our last one, less than half full. I tightened the lid and put it back As I sat back against the wall and caught my breath in my dry throat, I saw Alice’s face in the single shaft of evening light looking at me. I watched her for a while, trying to work out what she was doing. He lips were moving. She had the can in front of her mouth.
Very slowly I picked up my can and pulled it to my ear. All I could hear was Alice whispering in the corner, but then I shuffled along the wall so that the string was taut.
“Just a dream, Daddy,” she said. “Just a dream.”
My heart buckled. I put the can to my mouth and motioned for her to swap hers to her ear.
“Just a dream,” I said. “Are you thirsty?”
“Daddy?”
“Yes?”
“The lady, Daddy. The lady was sad. She was crying.”
I picked up the water bottle and crawled across the floor to Alice. She sat up with the can between her knees and I flung my arm around her neck and kissed her cheek. She buried her face into my neck and grasped my ear tightly and we both sobbed quietly into one another as Beth and Arthur snored fitfully in the corner.
Eventually I clambered around so that I was sat next to her and looked up at the ventilation shaft. There was still some light.
“Have some water,” I said. “Here.”
I opened the bottle and raised it to her lips. She brought her hands up to meet it, but in doing so she dropped the can to the floor. The loud noise made her jump and she flinched, knocking the bottle from my hands. I struggled to catch it but it flew out of my reach.
“Sorry, Daddy,” Alice cried in alarm. “Sorry! Sorry, Daddy! Sorry!”
Beth roused in her bed.
“What’s going on?” she murmured.
Arthur started to wake as well. Both still feverish. Both still thirsty.
I leaped to rescue the bottle but it was too late. Most of the water had flooded onto the floor. I stood in the middle of the cellar with my hands to my head.
“Fuck!” I screamed.
“What’s happening?” said Beth again. “It’s OK, Alice, Mummy’s here...oh Christ, Ed...what’s going on?”
“Fuck!”
Arthur was whining now, wide awake, and Alice was huddled with her knees to her chest still crying out her panicked apologies.
“Fuck!”
Everything seemed to become a dense tornado of sound around me. Alice’s desperate cries, Arthur’s bawling, Beth’s slow, croaky groans and my own growls and shouts of frustration.
Time slowed down. I looked down at the pipe, barely visible now in the dark. It held water or gas, life or death.
I strode towards it and fell down upon the floor. I began to wrench at it, pulling it back and forwards from the wall, trying to tear it from its brackets, bend it break it, burst it, furious at my own weakness, furious at my own ignorance. Eventually it tore away from the wall, but it didn’t break so easily. Alice was now squealing, Arthur wailing, Beth trying to get to her feet. I got my left arm behind the pipe and prised it away from the concrete, then pulled with my knees against the wall. Something shuddered, then another bracket burst, and then finally came the sound of pressure releasing from a point beneath the ventilation shaft. I felt a spray of cool liquid on my face. It was water.
I put my mouth around the torn metal. I tasted my own blood mixed with the cold water in my mouth. Then I filled the bottle and passed it to Beth. Then I filled another, and another before finally the flow began to stop and I fell to my knees, sobbing in either relief or grief. I don’t know to this day which. There’s a fair chance I had been hoping for gas.
I filled three bottles; barely enough for another two days.
The kids stopped crying momentarily whilst Beth gave them the water. Then Alice started whimpering again.
“It’s dark,” she said, trembling. “I want the candle...where’s the candle.”
We had been underground for barely two weeks. We had no light, no food, only a few gulps of water left. We were out of choices.
Arthur started up again, a loud, rasping cry that drowned out everything around it. I stood and stormed over to the hatch. I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t see, couldn’t hear, couldn’t think. I shouted up into the darkness. No words, just noise from my throat, a growl and a roar.
Then I heard another noise. It was coming from outside - something fast and repetitive. Thud-thud-thud...thwup-thwup-thwup-thwup-thwup.
A bright light suddenly flashed down the ventilation shaft.
“Quiet!” I shouted. Alice, Beth and Arthur carried on, but the noise beneath them got louder. Another flash of bright light came down the shaft.
The distant thudding suddenly opened up into the roar of rotor blades directly above us. A helicopter. Search lights now swept around us, illuminating the room through all of the hidden cracks and holes. Thin white shafts moved around the room like light from a glitter ball as the chopper hovered above. Then voices, shouts, a megaphone.
“DO NOT MOVE. STAY WHERE YOU ARE. DO NOT COME OUTSIDE UNTIL WE TELL YOU. DO NOT MOVE. STAY WHERE YOU ARE.”
I fell back against the wall and pulled Alice close to me. She had stopped crying and was shivering with her arms over her head.
“It’s OK,” I said. “It’s OK, we’re safe.”
I rested my head on the wall and closed my eyes against the light.
BOUNDARIES
If you’re reading this then you’re probably in a better time and place than the one I’m in right now. You probably didn’t witness the extent of the devastation. You probably don’t know how it feels to see that everything in your world has suddenly stopped, died or vanished.
I can only do so much to help. Writing is just a trick after all; you turn images into words that you hope will trigger similar images that already exist in the reader’s head. Your images are built from films and books, perhaps even stock footage of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Chernobyl, the grainy documentaries at which my nuke-obsessed 15-year-old self used to thrill. Those images - the empty streets, rubble, dust, corpses, burnt-out buildings, broken bicycles, blackened tree stumps, dark skies, charred teddy bears - they only go so far. They lack scale and time. They have boundaries: a street, a city, a country, an era, a film reel. They start and they end.
My own boundary
was the size and shape of a small, stinking cellar for a little over two weeks after the strike. It disappeared on 26th August, when soldiers from Castlelaw Barracks tore back the cellar hatch and hauled us out, expanding my boundary to the size of a city. It’s been expanding ever since.
We heard rubble being lifted and something - the woman’s body I guessed - being dragged. Then the wood broke through and our little cave flooded with noise and blue light. Alice screamed. I held her close as I peered up through the hole, shielding my eyes. As my vision adjusted, I saw a short figure in a grubby yellow biosuit crouching above us, looking down into the filth of our cellar. It held out two similar suits for me to take.
Over the deafening sound of the helicopter, the megaphone spoke:
“ONE FOR EVERY ADULT. TAKE ANY CHILDREN INSIDE WITH YOU.”
Blinking, I took the suits and began to unfold them. Beth was struggling to stand. I helped her slip her legs into the first suit and zipped it up with her arms still inside holding Arthur. I tightened the drawstrings around her hood and then dressed myself, Alice clinging to my front like a monkey, with her head poking out of the top. Four masks fell down onto the cellar floor.
“ONE MASK EACH.”
We did our best to put them on.
“CLIMB UP THE LADDER. WOMEN AND CHILDREN FIRST.”
I helped Beth climb the steps, then I followed with Alice outside.
We were hit with a rush of air from the helicopter blades. I saw nothing but dust and smoke billowing in the gale. The small figure led us to the helicopter and bundled us in through a piece of thick plastic sheeting. I sprawled headfirst onto the floor with Alice squealing beneath me. As I struggled onto the seat the door closed and the noise abated. The small figure zipped up the plastic sheet and sat down, buckling herself and then Beth and signalling for me to do the same. I fumbled with the belt, eventually clicking it into place as the helicopter started to lurch and rise up from the ground. I felt my mask being lifted from my face and looked around the aircraft, blinking in the new light and breathing in the relatively fresh air.
The small figure, now also mask-less, was a young woman. She was in her mid-twenties, face smeared with dirt and damp blonde hair tied back in a knot beneath a pair of headphones with a microphone attached. She helped Beth with her mask and suit. Arthur emerged coughing and squinting into the confusion.
“Is it safe?” I shouted, tapping the sheet, which formed a sealed cocoon inside the cabin.
“Safe enough,” she shouted back, smiling thinly. “Precaution. We don’t really know what the air’s like out there.”
There were two other passengers with us: a thin, wide-eyed woman and a boy of about seven who clutched her waist. I nodded at her, attempted a half-smile. She stared at me, mouth agape, dark rings under her eyes.
I swapped my gaze to Beth, who looked back at me with something close to relief. She rocked Arthur gently, pressing her mouth to the top of his head. Alice was still tightly wrapped around my chest, shaking. She pushed her head into my neck and I felt something sharp against my skin. I looked down and saw her clutching the two tins from the cellar.
The chopper rose from its dust cloud and I pressed the plastic sheeting against the glass so I could see outside. Dumb instinct made me expect to see houses and gardens as they had been before. Even as the empty space began to spread out beneath us, I still looked about for the missing street. Eventually I realised that the houses had disappeared. In their place were patches of scorched black earth, rubble and bent metal.
The chopper rocked forwards and sped away. Now we could see everything. Bonaly was no more. Behind us, the Pentland hills rose up into low, dark cloud. The first hill, Allermuir, had been a gentle slope of pine and lush meadows before. Fields grazed upon by sheep had risen up to stables, a golf course and then the tracks and crags that led to the summit, where you could see all of Edinburgh, the Forth and the mountains to the north. Now the hill was a brown smear of dirt. There were black patches where the forests had burned and what looked like blasts of concrete as if the suburbs beneath it had been sprayed across its face like dust.
We flew north a little and I stared down upon the levelled city. Streets had been wiped from the surface, there were countless craters, the castle was in ruins and every road was now an impassable hell of tarmac and metal. I saw two plane wrecks. One had crashed into the Newhaven docks with its nose sunk deep into the harbour wall. The sea was awash with debris and brown foam. The second plane lay in two pieces; snapped against the summit of Arthur’s seat, itself now just a black stump.
The girl leaned towards the pilot and said something into her headset. The pilot turned and made a cutting motion against his throat with one finger, then banked the chopper steeply to the right, taking us back towards the hills.
There were three military barracks to the south of Edinburgh. We passed over Redford, once a rectangular fortress of red-bricked discipline looming behind a gigantic parade square. Now most of the front and sides of it had been torn apart and only half of the one of the twin turrets at the front still stood. Four storeys of dorms and offices had been hurled backwards across the inner courtyard and now lay heaped against the rear wall as if the entire structure had been stacked without cement.
Dreghorn barracks lay further south, next to the city bypass and hidden behind forest and high wire fencing. Walking tracks had wound around it and you could occasionally get close enough to see through into the firing ranges and training yards filled with jeeps and armoured cars. Now it was just a hole full of stains.
It began to rain. We continued flying south, coasting east around the black face of Allermuir Hill and down through a rugged valley of gorse towards Glencorse reservoir where the third barracks, Castlelaw, were to be found. Castlelaw was not as grand as Redford and not as sprawling as Dreghorn. It was built on a small plane at the foot of Castlelaw hill that overlooked the water and was surrounded by a small pine wood. High walls painted military green marked the perimeter. Within these walls was a stone building surrounded by small hangars, training grounds and vehicle yards.
I saw damage everywhere. Almost all of the roofs were gone and the concrete yards were ruptured with great welts and potholes. Windows were patched with plastic sheets. Makeshift scaffolding stood against some of the more precarious looking walls and the space where the main doors had been was now covered with crude wooden replacements.
We landed on the only flat piece of tarmac left. The helicopter powered down and we re-fitted our masks, following the girl outside again. She led the dark-eyed woman and her son away from the helicopter, beckoning for us to follow. We ran across the buckled ground and into the building. Two armed guards in masks pointed ahead and we headed down some stairs. The doors closed behind us and after another flight of stairs we were in the sudden quiet of a long corridor. The ceiling was low and the dim electric lights seemed to throb. The girl walked briskly ahead of us. I followed, carrying Alice and trying to steady Beth as she tripped over the feet of her oversized radiation suit.
My mind was still catching up. Part of it was still absorbing the detail from the helicopter. Part of it was still in the cellar. A very thin shard of present consciousness was guiding me as I stumbled through the corridor. I tried to get my bearings and work out what direction we were facing.
“Excuse me,” I said. My voice was hoarse. The girl glanced back, not slowing her pace.
“Officer?” I tried.
“Private,” said the girl over her shoulder. “Private Grimes.”
“Are we underground?” I said.
“Yes, I’m taking you to the medical ward.”
“My son,” croaked the dark-eyed woman. She sounded younger than she looked. A foreign accent; Polish perhaps. “My son needs water, please.”
“It’s not far now,” said the Private.
“We had no time,” the woman whimpered. She looked round at us, eyes blinking with horror, shaking her head. “There was no time, no time at all.”
/> There were doors every few metres on either side of the corridor. Some were closed. Those that weren’t opened into small rooms. I glanced into one and saw a man sitting on a bed frame, both hands clutching the top of his head. In another a woman sat sleeping with two children on her lap.
We turned left at the end of the corridor and came to a set of double doors. Behind these was a small, makeshift hospital ward. I shielded my eyes as we entered. Bright halos of light spread out from the standing spotlights lighting up a stone floor. Fifty or sixty patients lay in as many beds. Hacking coughs, wheezes and complaint filled the air as men and women in combat fatigues circulated the room with water, pills, bandages and drips.
One of them, a girl younger than Private Grimes, took Beth and Arthur to a bed near the corner. Alice and I followed. My legs felt weak and my head was spinning.
“Daddy?”
Beth was almost out, her head lolling to one side.
“Just one second,” stammered the girl. She ran to the bed next to Beth’s where a man lay staring up at the ceiling breathing short, fast breaths. His face was shining bright pink and his arms and chest were in bandages. The girl bent down over his arm, a syringe shaking in her hand. She muttered something to herself, seemed to struggle with it. I squinted, trying to make out what was going on through my blurred vision. I heard Alice’s voice.
“Daddy?”
Private Grimes appeared again and laid a hand on the girl’s shoulder. I heard a barely audible whisper.
“It’s OK, don’t panic.” She took the needle gently from her, but I could tell she was shaking too. “It’s like this...like this I think...there.”
The girl’s head sank down and shoulders shook a little, one hand to her face.
The End of the World Running Club Page 7
