Cloud Cuckoo Land Page 29

The sergeant raised his eyebrows.

  ‘It’s simple: one tag, two people. You’ve got five minutes to say your farewells. Get on with it.’

  They led Adeline around the front of the Land Rover. She pleaded with the sergeant.

  ‘But he had a tag.’

  ‘You’re not going to be difficult, are you?’

  She stood next to Leonard who was still down on the ground. He reached up for her hand, he couldn’t remember if he had ever held her like this. Her nerve endings were raw because she flinched when they made contact; this was perhaps their most intimate moment.

  The soldiers moved in, pulled her away and marched her downhill. Her face, when she looked back over her shoulder, was loaded with guilt. Yet the logic of what had happened was sound, the conspiracy between them had become strong.

  Leonard braced himself against the side of the Land Rover and got to his feet. He wanted to keep his composure, to at least be upright for her last glance. Two thoughts vied for importance: they’d taken Adeline by force, yet he couldn’t believe they hadn’t killed him. He was in pain but he felt kind of OK, he didn’t feel the need to tell anyone he’d been heroic. That he had done it was enough.

  He opened the door and climbed into the seat. He ripped a rag in two and pressed one half against his lip to staunch the blood-flow. He wrapped the other half around his hand and smashed what was left of the windscreen out onto the road.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Tony unfolded the letter. This was the last correspondence from Adeline’s mother and these were her last instructions. Tony held the sheet out in front and tried to focus his tired eyes. He read out loud, to himself.

  ‘Now stand back and take a good look. All human intelligence, whether we like it or not, is brought to bear on the single goal of survival, of food, shelter and reproduction. We are low-life on the long road to revelation.

  ‘All the ways and means, all the evaluations of science, the reluctances of art and philosophy, pale beside this sole purpose: that we must continue.

  ‘You may be praying for survival but remember this, you are alone, no one, no thing can help you now. Do not, in the final hours, give yourself to legend, to manmade belief: nothing is preordained. This world is an accident; it pieced itself together, invented itself out of what was lying around. As for gods and guidance, don’t hold your breath. I’m sorry to disappoint, but it’s not the word of the Lord that you will hear when the time comes, it is your own voice coming back off the wall. Chose your words carefully, certain formulae may well save you.’

  Tony went through it a few times but he still had no idea what the mad old bag was on about. The note was supposed to be a morale booster for when the shelter was finished. For when all that was left to do was to put himself inside and wait it out. Maybe he was missing something, maybe if she’d given him more to go on… And what was that about the right formulae?

  Anyway, he’d lifted all the supplies up into the structure and he was pleased with himself. The construction was sound, an egg-like oval locked into the branches of the big ash, positioned twenty feet above the ground. It was comfortable inside; the spiral mesh of willow branches was pleasing to the eye, and one thing more: he had to admit that he felt safe inside.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Leonard had driven for a hundred miles or so, into the small hours, and he’d only taken a couple of rest stops. He was dehydrated, his eye sockets were sore, his mouth dry. But as long as he still had diesel in the tank, he’d keep on going. He didn’t have much of a plan, just to get there and chance his arm.

  He still had the metallic taste of blood in his mouth. The lip had swollen up; it had been throbbing like mad, ever since it happened. The pain had brought on one long headache, which was messing with his vision. If he forgot and made the wrong facial gesture, his lip cracked open and bled again. He hadn’t tried to speak, there wasn’t much point anyway, there being no one there to listen. He tried humming a tune to keep himself company, but any extension of the jaw was just too painful.

  The landscape was featureless outside the range of the headlights. His field of vision consisted of a white line, the worn tarmac and the roadside bushes.

  He picked up a flask and sucked some cool water in through a narrow gap in his lips. He swallowed repeatedly and the pain eased.

  He turned uphill and after a short climb he crossed over the ridge and began the descent down into the next valley. The valley floor though was lit up like a county fare and buzzing with activity.

  This was it: he’d found them and he’d been lucky because they’d moved the final, impact-ready position. Hundreds of survival pods were lying along the valley floor; it looked like they were being overlaid with steel cabling.

  ◊

  They strapped Beryl into her survival pod and she took a last look out at the starry night. She could see Lena moving along the queue for her turn. She wasn’t far, but she was on her own. She looked too small to be out there by herself, too vulnerable. Beryl waved and when she had her attention, she blew her a kiss.

  The ground crew were taking people out one by one. Adeline held her arms across her chest as she walked, her limb movements restricted by the network of climate control tubes sewn into her nylon flight-suit.

  Every couple of minutes, a series of what sounded like rifle shots echoed around the valley. These were the explosive bolts, forty of them, detonating around the circumference of a pod as the two halves of titanium were sealed.

  Adeline was ready now, now that she was being ushered forward. She had convinced herself that she was doing the right thing and that she had a good chance of making it into the future.

  A crewmember helped her climb into her pod, checked her into the harness and was reassuring about how well designed the machine was. He explained how to check the carbon dioxide levels by monitoring the toxicity indicator. If it crept over a certain mark she would have to replace the lithium hydroxide canisters manually.

  He gave her the thumbs up and Adeline reached up for the locking mechanism. She pulled it towards her and that was that: the bolts fired and she was safe inside. She looked up at the instrument readings and waited for the levels to settle.

  The world was now hanging, as predicted, by a thread. All around the perimeter of the valley, a restraining net of steel cables had been bolted into the bedrock. It was like a huge envelope, designed to hold the survival pods in the same area.

  Inside, Adeline was exhausted with the twin urges - to hate herself for taking Leonard’s place and to reconcile the events and say that there was nothing else she could do.

  She tightened the restraining harness and tried to stop thinking. She tried to lose herself in checking and rechecking the instruments. The only saving grace was the faint acknowledgment that the new life in her was Leonard’s, too.

  She pulled in the thick foam pads that had been designed to cradle her skull, and would stop her from being jarred and broken. She had to lie still now, like some fragile thing in its precious case, like a bulb made of glass, containing a precious, fluorescent element.

  ◊

  Leonard left the Land Rover higher up-slope; he was on foot now, with his boots digging into the mud. He felt self-conscious, felt like James Bond arriving for the final scene, with the set laid out below and the world hanging in the balance.

  He heard something off to his right, a snap or a crack, a dry piece of wood or maybe a knee joint settling. He lay flat out and didn’t budge. There was movement ahead; he couldn’t believe it, a group of people were stealing, very quietly down-slope just ahead. When the moonlight brightened Leonard could make out that they were a band of lightly armed men and women, wearing a kind of ragged civilian camouflage. They reached the fence, which was a four-metre high perimeter of barbed wire. They paused there and cut their way through.

  The dogs sounded the alarm; as soon as they began howling the shooting started. The security teams on the ground figured out what was happening and returned fire.
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br />   Leonard had his diversion; he moved down behind the wave of intruders and lined himself up in their wake. A mortar fired and smoke canisters detonated, then a van drove through the fence at high speed. It accelerated before security fired, then it veered out of control and crashed into the nearest line of survival pods.

  The intruders were overrunning the area. When they reached the ground crews, they shot on sight and started to haul people out of the pods and take their places.

  All the security teams could do was retreat and keep at least one part of the loading area secured.

  Leonard hugged the terrain; he stayed low and used the smoke screen to cover his movements as he ran into the chaos. The pods that were already sealed were locked off, they were out of the game. The intruders knew this and didn’t waste time, but ran on to the loading. Leonard broke away from the main thrust of the attack, made his way to the fence and tried to get ahead of the main exchanges of fire. Hand to hand fighting allowed him to pass, so he ran on and that was when he saw Lena. A technician was trying to help her into her seat, but as he strapped her in, he was shot in the back. The intruder turned his firearm on her and Lena closed her eyes.

  Leonard hit him with his full force, which knocked the man forward into the hinge space in between the two halves of the survival pod.

  The man turned and aimed his pistol but before he could shoot, Leonard threw the switch, which fired the door closing mechanism. The explosive bolts detonated, smashing the man’s spine.

  Lena screamed out and Leonard took her in his arms.

  ‘It’s alright, you’ll be alright now. There’s no time but don’t worry, we’ll see each other again, OK?’

  She smiled and nodded that it was OK. He closed the pod and Lena fired the locking bolts.

  Leonard took stock of the situation. With the last pods sealed, the fighting had dropped to sporadic gunfire. A few intruders, evicted survivors and wounded security men dragged themselves off to find solace.

  Leonard had seen some fuel cans stacked near the gate, so he headed off in that direction. There was nothing more to do but retreat and take his chances on the long road South.

  ◊

  Adeline activated the onboard camera, which gave her a video image of the exterior. The picture was noisy and green for night vision, but she could see all too well what had happened outside. She panned the camera across a battlefield, the kind of periodical carnage that has always punctuated the history of the human race. She avoided an urge to count the bodies lying on the ground outside. They looked so similar like this, the innocent and the guilty, holding the same, lifeless gestures.

  Survival is of the highest importance, yes, it is. But not at all costs, not like this. Adeline eased the restraining straps and took the weight of her head in her hands. It was not everything to survive and survival at all costs cursed the ones who lived to a haunted future. It’s the way you protect your life and whether you care enough about the lives of anybody else, that matters.

  Adeline kept panning; she swept the perimeter and then further afield to where a man carried something, maybe it was a fuel container. She knew this movement, this body. She could see that it was Leonard and he was climbing out of the valley away from her. Adeline felt sure then that his was the one life that mattered even more than her own.

  ◊

  Leonard unscrewed the fuel tank and started to pour diesel into the reserve. A mechanical clatter below sent an echo around the hills. Back on the valley floor a survival pod had been cracked open and bright light now spilled from it. He couldn’t quite believe his eyes: Adeline was climbing out of her survival pod. She looked in his direction and waved, she shouted his name and started to run from the site. Fighting resumed behind her as several people bludgeoned one another over the rights to the abandoned pod.

  Leonard jumped in, fired up the engine and took off downhill.

  When he reached her he could not believe the beauty of the scene: her outline in the predawn and the valley floor smouldering behind her. She was suited up for space-flight and she seemed so much larger than life. She was a mythical, archetypal woman, a divine creature.

  She jumped into the Land Rover and they held on to each other. She had not committed a foolhardy act; she was not the suicidal type. She asked him a straightforward question about the state of play.

  ‘How much time do we have?’

  ‘Just a few hours before we’re smashed to bits.’

  ‘D’you think we can make it to the shelter?’

  ‘Of course we can. And when we get there I’ll scream down the ventilation stack and they’ll open up for us! I know they will, I can see Barry’s face now, full of panic and triumph. They’ll drag us inside and make a huge fuss!’

  The eastern horizon lit up and Leonard stamped on the accelerator. The first rays of daylight shone in, low and hard through the trees. High winds swept debris across the road. Strobed lightning coloured in the northern skyline and rolling thunder discharged overhead.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Warden still had plenty of hate left in him and he hated looking out at the action through the limited angle of the narrow basement window. It was the same as when you looked in at the television set and couldn’t see past the edge of the screen. On his last legs then, he scrambled up the stairs to street level and out of the basement, to watch the fireworks. He wasn’t disappointed because the horizon was rolling in like a huge, black, tidal wave. He managed to resist the urge to curl up into a foetal mass. Instead, he lifted up his arms in a gesture of welcome and screamed at the top of his voice, wild as a warmonger riding the nose of a missile.

  ◊

  The air whistling through the gaps in the wickerwork carried with it a smell like hammered flint. Tony’s nostrils were burning and his ears hurt too; he had a needling pain in his eardrums because the air pressure was fluctuating. He stayed low, curled up in the corner of the nest, and tried to conjure up the strongest prayer he could think of.

  He felt charged with electricity, a tangible magnetic field was pressing against his temples. The enormous mass of the Ice Moon was tumbling ever closer now, in vacuum charged free-fall, at great speed, towards an attractive object.

  Tony knelt up and looked to the East. Ahead of the approaching pressure wave, micrometeoroids whipped through the air. Tony’s skin felt like it was being sandblasted with diamond dust.

  A high-pitched thunder discharged overhead, then the roof of the shelter disappeared. Tony trembled as he lay on his back, he looked up at the sky and it unzipped from its zenith in a vertical line. He felt a vibrating sensation in the centre of his stomach, in that place called the pit. That place where pain is absorbed and where joy is felt. The last thing in the world that his mind recorded was the azimuth leaking flames and the sky splitting open like a smashed focus-finder.

  ◊

  The Land Rover howled as Leonard gunned the engine. He looked down at the oil temperature gauge and said a quiet prayer. He had to push it; there was no way of knowing how long they had before the first shockwaves would hit them. Leonard looked out at the lovely, undulating line of the hills. All these landscapes would go, in one fell swoop, all the contours, all the lanes and rivers would be screwed up into raw clay again and all the maps would be wiped clean.

  Adeline couldn’t do much in the passenger seat, her hands were clasped across her stomach and she looked straight ahead. She tried not to look to the eastern horizon, but she knew the skies were darker than they should be. She knew the winds were gusting gale force and that the flickering bursts of lightening were more and more frequent. She tried to relax, to breathe evenly; it wasn’t good for the baby, none of this was any good for the baby. Their baby.

  Leonard felt the ground tremors as they rumbled up through the steering column. It wasn’t just the Land Rover’s bone-shaking suspension; it was the earth beginning to move, for all the wrong reasons. For a moment the vibration became so intense he could barely see the road ahead, the fields and trees
would not stay still enough. His eyes in their sockets could not believe what they were seeing. Debris, rolling in, house-sized rocks flying through the sky and clouds of dust drawing a cloak over the sun.

  ‘Leonard!’

  Adeline dug her fingers into Leonard’s arm.

  Leonard turned off into a gully, where they were in the lee of the airborne debris. Day had become night and the road had become a soot-covered track. It had begun to rain hard and the only glimmer of hope was a slight brightness low in the southern sky. The engine kept running and the wheels kept turning. The tremor eased off and they willed their way out from under the cloak of darkness. They picked up speed going downhill, until they were hurtling along an exposed stretch of ‘B’ road. Leonard breathed evenly; in his minds-eye he could see the flatlands, the reeds and marshes.