The Last Gasp, page 62
Buchan was waiting nervously by the periscope control box mounted on the wall. ‘Beats me what the fuck they want.’ He gestured vaguely. ‘None of this scientific stuff can be of any use. What are they after?’
‘Perhaps it’s the idea of people hiding underground they don’t like,’ Chase said. ‘Makes them feel insecure. Vulnerable. And when things get really bad out there they’ll want somewhere safe to run to. This is it.’
‘How bad are things gonna get, sir?’ Buchan asked. He was sweating profusely.
‘Don’t you listen to the news bulletins?’
‘What, you mean all that stuff in Africa and India and those places? I thought that was a plague of some kind, spread by bad drinking water. Nothin’ to do with the climate.’
‘We don’t know for sure what caused it,’ Chase said. ‘If anybody does they’re keeping quiet.’ He was about to go on and then found he couldn’t. All of a sudden he felt very weary, and it had nothing to do with being hauled from his bed in the early hours of the morning. His fatigue was rooted in every fibre of his being, much like the effect of for ever climbing a slippery slope that got steeper and slipperier, and however hard you struggled you kept sliding down into unimaginable depths. In the absence of Cheryl and Dan, his one, tenuous lifeline was somewhere out in the Pacific. But if the trials failed and the lifeline broke, the slope would become a vertical plunge into oblivion for himself and all mankind.
‘Five minutes,’ Drew said, swivelling his black-haired wrist to look at his watch. ‘Want to take a gander topside?’ he asked Chase.
Buchan cleared his throat explosively and blurted out to Drew, ‘Sir, I gotta tell you: there’s two of our guys out there somewhere – Rubiera and Monteith.’ He gulped, staring at the floor with stricken eyes. ‘They went up before the alarm, hunting for fresh meat. The guys do that, pick up a rabbit or a prairie fox and get the cook to put it in the pot. I mean I know it’s against regulations . . .’ His hoarse voice died miserably.
Drew was standing rigidly, fists bunched at his sides, the cords on his neck sticking out. ‘The stupid bastards! Did you see either of them when you looked through the scope? Was there any sign of them?’
‘Like I told you before, there were shapes but that was all. It was too dark. Maybe they came in through another entrance?’ Buchan said hopefully. ‘They might have seen the attack coming and couldn’t make it back there—’
‘All access points are sealed,’ Drew told him harshly. ‘Nobody has entered the complex. Nobody. If Rubiera and Monteith went out, they’re still out!’
Chase stepped forward, pointing to the control box. ‘Hit it!’
Buchan pressed the green button with the heel of his hand and the periscope slid upwards, accompanied by the whine of hydraulics. Buchan flipped down the ribbed rubber handgrips, then stood aside for Chase to look through the moulded rubber eye-piece. He adjusted the focus. There was nothing much to see at first except a thin grey mist. Against the flat colourless backdrop he could just make out a group of shadowy figures. Chase turned the calibrated setting to greater magnification and faces loomed in close-up. The skin on the back of his neck crawled. He swallowed a nasty taste in his throat.
There were eight or nine of the O-zoes, as near as he could tell. Pitted and scarred like lepers, dressed in rags, they were huddled around a pathetic fire from which a thin trickle of smoke ascended into the whitening sky. He hadn’t expected this; hadn’t been prepared for kids. The oldest couldn’t have been more than thirteen. Some of the others were aged nine or ten, maybe, and one of them, a girl, was possibly younger still.
It was too late to look away; his eye had taken in too much detail. A head with the flesh hanging off it like strips of yellow tissue paper. A boy with milky-white eyeballs staring emptily into the distance. A girl with scabrous patches of raw flesh on her back and buttocks. Some had a black fungal growth obliterating their face. At least four that he could see had fingers or hands or complete limbs missing, leaving only raw stumps through which the pale bone gleamed.
And in every eye – even the blind boy – was a kind of bloodlust dementia that made Chase break out in a cold sweat and caused his testicles to shrivel.
The bloodlust was actual, not his imagination. Near the fire lay two corpses, crudely dismembered. They still had heads, but the tatters of their brown tunics swathed shoulders without arms, and the empty legless trousers were torn wide open. The children had divided the spoils; they held their portions on pointed sticks to the smoky flames, crunching and chewing with rapt concentration and ravenous enjoyment.
Chase turned away and leaned weakly against the wall. Pearls of sweat covered his face and neck. He didn’t say anything, merely shook his head as Drew gripped the handles and looked into the eyepiece.
5
The three men in the concrete cubicle with its garish contorting nudes stood without moving. Distantly, like snapping twigs, they heard the spasmodic stutter of automatic weapons, followed by the fading reverberations across the flat landscape. They heard the screams, too; muffled by the steel and concrete surrounding them, they reminded Chase of seagulls whooping and crying in a parody of human pain. Then the screams were not muffled but loud – much louder – as the guards in the corridor slid open the heavy steel door and charged up the sand-blown steps, rifles and machine-pistols spitting death.
No one in the cubicle wanted to witness the carnage thirty feet above his head. Imagining it was as bad, perhaps worse. Chase and Drew still felt sickened by the images of those grotesque children, which Buchan had refused to look upon.
Moments later the firing ceased.
Chase wiped his face and neck with his wadded handkerchief. Would he have experienced less guilt, less responsibility, if they had been adults and not children, common looters or a drunken mob?
But there were no comfortable or comforting rules any more, no genteel morality. The only rules, the only morality, concerned survival at all costs. The freakish children had lost their claim to humanity when the sulphur dioxide had corroded their tissues and the needles of ultraviolet radiation had lanced through the depleted ozone layer into their brains, corrupting each cell with cancerous madness. Given the chance, Chase knew, the children would have ravaged everyone they encountered, and the Tomb would have lived up to its name.
He followed Drew into the corridor and up the concrete steps. The air was cool and would have been refreshing, had it not been for the heavy taint of roasting flesh.
‘Where do you suppose they came from?’ Drew asked in a low voice. He was pale, his thick eyebrows like an unbroken dark bar.
Chase shrugged. ‘No idea. Down south somewhere. You can’t trust government reports any more. They say the official Devastated Areas don’t extend north of Little Rock, but for all we know they could be twenty miles away, right on our doorstep.’
Behind him, Buchan said gloomily, ‘You hear of them mobs all the time on Highway 15. Most of ’em are stoned out of their skulls on all kinds of shit. They don’t have a notion which planet—’
Buchan turned his head suddenly, catching a whiff of roasting meat as he emerged above the concrete emplacement. His face contorted into a series of horizontal lines, as if the muscles were attached to drawstrings that had been suddenly yanked taut. Then he clutched himself and bent over, moaning, and brought up the contents of his stomach.
6
Two days later Prothero called again from New York. He wanted to know the word on Hanamura. Chase said it was too early to expect a result, encouraging or otherwise. ‘I’ll get through to you as soon as I hear anything,’ he added.
‘You may not have to.’ Prothero’s face was grey, the pouches underneath his eyes a livid purple. ‘They’re evacuating the city. It isn’t official yet, and when it is there’ll be a wholesale panic. I’m leaving right away. Is there room for one more in the Tomb?’ he asked with gallows humour.
They’d often discussed the possibility – indeed the certainty – that one day New York would be evacuated, but now that it was actually here it still came as a blow. Another nail in the coffin. ‘What about Ingrid?’ asked Chase.
‘She’s gone back to Sweden. Her parents are there and she wants to be with them.’
‘When are you planning to leave?’ Prothero’s wife had left him four years ago, Chase recalled, and his sons were married.
‘Day after tomorrow.’
‘I want you to do me a favour,’ Chase said. ‘I have a friend in New York, Dr Ruth Brosnan, who works at Manhattan Emergency on East 68th Street. Will you tell her what’s happening, Pro? I wouldn’t like to think of her being trapped there when they blow the whistle.’
‘Sure, I’ll tell her.’
‘If she decides to come with you, can you arrange transportation?’
‘Sure. There’s a convoy of trucks and buses leaving at midnight on Thursday. I’ll find her a place if she wants to leave.’ He looked old and haggard. ‘She’d be wise to, Gavin. One week from today this town will go berserk.’
7
The deteriorating conditions that had made Ken Prothero realise the game was finally up extended far beyond New York. The blight had affected a huge swathe of the eastern states, causing widespread panic and mass migration from the densely populated urban areas. Washington, DC had largely been abandoned, except for the poorest of the poor who hadn’t the wherewithal to flee and no place to flee to.
Chesney Poulton, among the first to leave, had found refuge in the nearest of his three vacation homes, in the small fishing port of Engelhard, North Carolina, overlooking Pamlico Sound. The gated community had the reassuring presence of armed militia, funded by local residents, which had been reinforced by the deployment of National Guards to make the area ultra-secure. Poulton’s pine lodge right on the water also had the advantage of being a short boat-ride away from Roanoke Island where his yacht, MV Icarus, was berthed.
Poulton had taken only one brief ocean trip so far this year. For three days he had cruised the Diamond Shoals off Cape Hatteras. It hadn’t been a pleasant or relaxing outing. The air at sea was good, but the storms sweeping down from Greenland across the North Atlantic had brought ice blizzards (in May, for chrissakes!), plunging the temperature below zero.
There had been no lounging on the after-deck with his young companions of the moment. How far, he wondered, would he have to voyage to find decent weather? Poulton was badly in need of a few balmy weeks with the sun on his back while he sipped a chilled margarita and contemplated a slender toned physique. A couple of the Guardsmen on dock-patrol had caught his eye. He might suggest they accompany him, as his security detail, on his next trip. Two days’ sail away was Bermuda, where hitherto he’d always enjoyed fantastic weather; the more he thought about it, the more enticing it sounded.
3
1
Cy Sprote lay spread-eagled in the warm liquid darkness with the woman kneeling over him, her hair brushing the insides of his thighs. His right hand moved across the soft swell of her buttocks and he heard her tremulous moan of rapture to the stealthy infiltration of his fingers. Sprote was himself in rapture. Never had he desired a woman so much in his life, and never had he received such pleasure from one.
Sprote had never rated so much as a second glance before. This had never surprised him. His unprepossessing appearance – a pale skin that the sun brought out in blotches, narrow chest, thin arms and spindly legs and his drooping, heavy-lidded eyes were not attractive features. Knowing the feeble figure he presented to the world had made him retire inside himself, obeying a natural impulse to protect himself.
He wasn’t appealing to the opposite sex, and that was that.
Then from out of nowhere this magical experience had grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and tossed him over the moon, and Cy Sprote was still reeling from it.
She had been at Starbuck for several weeks before they struck up an acquaintance. He’d noticed her of course (there wasn’t a man on the base who hadn’t), but she’d been so utterly out of reach that he hadn’t even fantasised about her, as he often did with desirable women seen at a distance. Sprote didn’t even know her name; only that she was one of the scientific observers sent by the Russians as part of the reciprocal inspection pact. They were granted access to the research in Zone Two, while a team of American observers was allowed the same freedom at the Russian research centre in Kazakhstan.
Not himself employed in Zone Two, Sprote only chanced upon her in off-duty hours when he and his colleagues went across the lagoon to the clubhouse in the main complex. He wasn’t a heavy drinker but liked to sit nursing a weak gin and tonic and watching the spectacular green and purple sunset while the conversation ebbed and flowed around him. Sometimes he might play pool or, if pressed, sit in on a poker game. But that particular evening he happened to be alone (the others had gone off to the squash court) and his thoughts were several thousand miles away in Portland, Maine, where his childhood still existed, it seemed to him, intact, untouched. Nothing could have been further from his mind than what, by a wonderful coincidence, then took place.
2
It started with a jammed cigarette machine.
Sprote was on his way back from the restroom when he saw the woman thumping and glaring at it with the kind of baffled, impotent rage that human beings reserve for machines that stubbornly refuse to perform the function for which they were designed. Sprote paused in the corridor. He would have carried on if the woman hadn’t happened to catch his eye and thrown up her hands in a gesture of defeat. Even then he was reluctant to go to her aid, mainly because he was intimidated by a vision of beauty that seemed to him then, and still did, sheer perfection. She was tall for a woman – in low heels about the same height as he – and Sprote gazed into her green-flecked eyes for a full five seconds, mesmerised, before nervously touching the thinning patch on the crown of his head and performing an awkward shuffling dance of indecision.
Her first words to him were, ‘These machines must have been invented by someone with a sadistic sense of humour. Or someone who wishes to destroy Russian-American relations, don’t you think?’
‘I’m afraid I don’t smoke,’ Sprote responded, immediately struck by the irrelevance of the remark. He moved hesitantly forward. ‘Have you tried the coin refund?’
She shook her head, dark polished ringlets bouncing against the white sweep of her neck. ‘I wanted cigarettes, not my own money back.’ Her English was faultless, with only the trace of an accent that her low, husky voice made infinitely seductive to Sprote’s burning ears.
He yanked the lever and coins clattered into the metal cup. One of the quarters was old and worn smooth, and after exchanging it for one of his own, he reinserted the money and asked her to try again. This time a pack of menthol Kools plopped into the tray. Sprote handed it to her, feeling ridiculously pleased, and she leaned forward and impetuously kissed his cheek.
If he’d been teetering on the brink before, Sprote now fell head over heels in love.
They drank and talked the rest of the evening, Sprote doing his fair share without any of his usual blushing, tongue-tied embarrassment. He was quietly amazed at himself. He’d never been so forthcoming, so relaxed, so witty. Natassya laughed at his jokes and became rapt when he spoke of his childhood and thoughtful whenever he ventured an opinion. His confidence grew. It was as if his personality, until now bound tightly in a straitjacket, had been miraculously released, and he experienced a giddy starburst of freedom that was as intoxicating as champagne.
As for Natassya, she staggered him by confessing that she was lonely. She’d been at Starbuck for six weeks, and apart from her Russian colleagues, she had no real friends. And as for male company – her wide sensuous mouth was pulled down at the corners – well, they turned out to be either boring scientists without any topics of conversation outside of their specialised fields or service personnel with but a single thought in their tiny grubby minds. Sprote would never believe, Natassya told him, how clumsy and boorish they could be in their sexual advances. One drink, a bit of chat and they expected her to fall into bed. Not only was it insulting but also extremely immature.
Sprote sympathised totally, almost vehemently, shaking his head at such oafish behaviour. Secretly he resolved to be a paragon of all the opposite virtues: polite, caring, interesting, amusing, sophisticated and above all, not too pushy.
Maybe he had taken this to extremes, because eight days later, while strolling along the beach in the tropical twilight, Natassya had enquired why he didn’t find her physically attractive.
Sprote was struck dumb. He gaped at her in the mellow golden light, stricken by an unbearable and overpowering yearning. Minutes later they were in each other’s arms and Natassya was smothering his thin face in kisses and whispering endearments in husky Russian. Minutes after that they were making love on a bed of ferns beneath the dry, rustling fronds of a palm tree, the gentle lisp of the waves synchronised to their movements, a tempo they soon left behind . . .
They had made love every night since that first night two weeks ago. It was dangerous, and they had to be careful. As scientific liaison officer for Zone Four, Sprote had been expressly warned against becoming involved with any member of the Russian team, male or female. At a conservative reckoning, about a quarter of the so-called Russian scientists would be working for the Federal Russian Security Bureau. For the American personnel attached to Zone Four, the cover story was that they were engaged in research into the long-term effects of TCDD using human guinea pigs and that this was too hazardous to allow the Russians free access. In the early days some of the Russian military brass had been taken on a conducted tour, but everything they had been shown had been rigged, stage-managed. The real research into genetic manipulation and breeding experiments had been out of sight behind locked doors.
