‘Bloody mess, isn’t it?’ a sudden and unexpected voice said from close behind him. Jack quickly turned around to see that it was Bernard Heath. He’d noticed that Heath seemed to have a real problem with being on his own. He could often be seen walking around the building in search of someone to be with.
‘Sorry, Jack,’ Heath continued, ‘I didn’t mean to disturb you. It’s just that I saw you standing here and I thought I’d check that you were…’
‘I’m fine,’ Jack said quietly, anticipating his concerns and truncating his sentence.
Heath took a few steps forward and peered down into the rotting crowd.
‘I reckon this lot will start to disappear sooner or later,’ he said with a tone of unexpected optimism in his voice. ‘As soon as something happens somewhere else to attract their attention, they’ll be off.’
‘Like what?’ Jack asked. ‘There’s not really very much going on out there, is there?’
Heath
didn’t
answer.
‘I’ll tell you what’s getting to me,’ he said instead, his voice quiet and tired and unexpectedly candid, ‘it’s how slowly everything seems to happen around here. I mean, I’m sitting downstairs with the rest of them and no-one says a word. I look up at the clock and get distracted. Next time I look at the clock it feels like ages later but only a couple of minutes have gone by…’
‘That’s why I’m out here,’Jack mumbled, still staring into the dark crowd below. ‘I was just sitting in my room staring at the walls and going out of my bloody mind.’
‘Have you tried reading?’
‘No,
have
you?’
‘I did,’ he said, scratching the side of his bearded face. ‘I used to lecture here. I went back to my office a couple of days ago and picked up a few books. Brought them back with me and sat down to read one but…’
‘But
what?’
‘Couldn’t do it.’
‘Why?’
He shrugged his shoulders and rubbed his eyes. For a moment Jack looked up from the bodies and stared into the other man’s drawn and weary face.
‘Don’t know,’ he answered slowly. ‘I just couldn’t do it. I started to read a novel. I got through a few pages before I had to stop. All it did was remind me of what’s happened and what I’ve lost and…’
He stopped talking, feeling suddenly awkward and somewhat embarrassed that he was letting his feelings show so readily again.
‘So what happens next then?’ wondered Jack, sensing Heath’s pain and making a conscious effort to change the focus of the conversation from dwelling on what had gone to trying to look forward.
Heath went through the motions of thinking carefully for a few moments. It was pointless really - he’d spent most of the last week pondering endless variations on the question he’d just been asked and in all that time he hadn’t managed to find any answers.
‘Sit and wait,’ he said eventually.
‘Is that it?’
‘I can’t see that there’s anything else we can do.’
For a while the two men stood side by side in silence and looked out over the remains of the diseased, battered world.
Several minutes later Heath walked away, soon followed by Jack who dejectedly made his way back to his room. He lay down on the bed and tried to sleep. Sleep was just about the only way he knew to block out the nightmare for a while.
Part II
20
In the desolate, dead and diseased shell that the city had become very little changed from day to day. Thousands of corpses continued to shuffle endlessly through the shadows, their bodies gradually decaying but their mental strength and control somehow continuing to slowly return. Although the survivors remained quiet and largely out of sight, the absence of other sounds and distractions throughout the surrounding area continued to draw unwanted crowds of ragged, stumbling figures towards the university. Inside their shelter the frightened, desperate people sat and watched and waited for something -
anything - to happen. For two painfully long and drawn out weeks nothing changed.
Without any warning the precarious equilibrium was upset.
On a cold, grey and wet Sunday morning some nineteen days after everything had begun, something finally happened.
Thirty miles west of the city where the survivors sheltered, in a bleak and nondescript field, lay the concealed entrance to a military bunker. Waiting underground inside the dark and grey building, shielded and protected from the dead world outside by thick, concrete walls and industrial strength air purification systems, were almost three hundred soldiers. As tired, frightened and disorientated as the bewildered survivors left out in the open above ground, they too had struggled to cope with the uncertainty of each passing hour. Inside the bunker no-one knew what had happened. From the most senior officer in the base down to the lowest in the ranks, no-one had anything more than a few scraps of unconfirmed information to go on. They had been acting on hurriedly given orders when they’d been scrambled on the first morning. There were many rumours about disease, weapons of mass destruction, germ warfare and contagion but no concrete facts to substantiate or confirm the hearsay. The men and women in the bunker didn’t need to know the details of what had happened and neither, for that matter, did the officers in charge of the base. All they knew - all they needed to know - was that sooner or later they would be sent up to the surface to try and take control of whatever was left.
The orders had finally been given by the base commander.
Today was the day the first troops would go up to the surface.
21
Cooper
Nineteen days we’d been underground.
More than four hundred and fifty hours without seeing daylight or being told what was happening or why we were there.
There had been little to do in the bunker from virtually the moment we had arrived. Once our equipment had been unpacked, stored and checked our general duties were done save for occasional mundane domestic tasks. No-one left the base so there was nothing to get ready or repair. We ate, cleaned, exercised and slept but other than that we did little else. Time and time again I had thought about the moment when the orders would finally come and, occasionally, I had actually looked forward to it happening. In many ways it seemed preferable to just sitting there and waiting. No-one talked much about what might have happened above ground. Whether anyone actually knew or not I wasn’t sure. There was a small part of me that didn’t want to know because there seemed to be some bizarre safety and comfort in ignorance. I tried not to think about my family and friends that were left out there but with nothing else to do it was difficult not to remember them. The not-knowing made me question my priorities - I had joined the forces to protect people and yet there we were, tucked up safely underground while the rest of the population - and everyone that had ever meant anything to me - endured whatever it was that was happening to the world. Good or bad (and we all knew in our hearts that what was happening was a million times worse than just bad) we all needed some answers. I might even have deserted if I’d been able to get outside.
When the orders finally came I didn’t want to move. It had been rumoured that the first party was about to leave the base but I hadn’t expected to be among them. The hours between being told I was going and the moment we left the bunker disappeared with incredible speed.
The briefing before we went above ground answered a handful of questions, but it also left me asking countless more.