Brother in the Land (2 page)

I lay there for a long time. The freak storm had passed over but it was still raining and I heard thunder now and then in the distance. The atmosphere was still oppressive and I wondered whether it might return, as storms sometimes do.

Presently though, the distant sounds ceased. I didn't fancy riding home in the rain but it showed no sign of easing off, so I sat up. My clothes were covered with dust and my head itched. I made a half-hearted attempt to knock some of it off, then crawled to the doorway.

It was then I saw the cloud, perched like an obscene mushroom on its crooked stem, and the glow from Branford. An icy flood from my guts went up my back and spread across my scalp. I knelt, moving my head slowly from side to side as my brain rejected what my eyes were seeing.

Beyond the near horizon lay a pulsating arc of orange light. It breathed in and out like a living thing, its glow reflected on the bellies of the clouds. It was twilight, and the pall of smoke made a darker stain against the grey.

A teacher brought this book to school once, Protect and Survive or some such title. It reckoned to tell what would happen if H-bombs fell on Britain. It was pretty horrible, but it didn't tell the half of it. Not the half. It had a lot in it: the burns and the blast and the radiation and all. But there was nothing about not knowing what's happened to you; how it leaves you
useless, so that you sit staring at the ground instead of looking for food or building a shelter or something. It had bits in about helping one another, only you don't do that. Not for a long time. Other people are shadows that pass you by, or enemies after your stuff. They didn't know that. None of us did. If we had, we wouldn't have done it.

Anyway, when I saw that cloud I knew what it was. I'd seen enough pictures and read enough articles. The papers and TV had been full of stuff about deteriorating relations and red-alerts and all that, only I hadn't taken much interest. It seemed to have been like that on and off, ever since I could remember. I mean, you get used to things and they roll off you. I don't recall anybody being particularly worried round our way. One minute everything was normal, and then it was gone.

I didn't know then what had happened in Skipley. Skipley's five miles from Branford and I could see that no bomb had dropped on it. I guess I thought everybody in Skipley would be okay, as I was myself, until the fallout came that is, I knew there'd be deaths then all right. I'd read about it. That's why I decided to stay in the pillbox. If I'd looked a bit more carefully I might have seen the smoke, but I didn't. I was half-daft with the shock, I suppose. I crawled right to the back of the pillbox and curled up in a corner among the tins and bottles and bits of paper and lay there, pretending everything was all right, till the screaming started.

It was dark when I heard it. I'd been asleep: God knows how. I guess it was my mind's way of denying reality. Anyway, I woke up suddenly and there was this awful noise; a sort of moaning, and a shuffling sound outside the bunker. I lay rigid, biting my lip, something was moving about out there, something big. I heard the rattle and scrape of branches and something heavy fell to the ground. I felt the impact and dug my nails into my palms, willing the thing to go away; willing it not to find the doorway. A low moan subsided into a wet, bubbly sound that went on and on.

I couldn't move. Something hideous was lying out there in the darkness; its face, if it had one, inches from my own. The hiss of its breath penetrated the concrete and I imagined I could smell it.

I lay, damply terrified, breathing quietly through my mouth. My eyes were open. Shoals of phantom lights floated across the blackness that pressed down on them. And as I lay listening I heard other sounds, fainter and farther away. Out there in the darkness people were screaming.

I saw a film once about Pompeii: people blundering through murky streets as the ash came down. It sounded like that.

Presently, I became aware that the thing outside had gone quiet. I listened intently but there was nothing, only the Pompeiian voices far off. Perhaps it's holding its breath, I
thought, listening for me. I held myself soundless for some time but the breathing never resumed and I told myself the thing had moved off. I felt my way to the doorway and peered out.

The glow from Branford had shrunk to a thin flush but now, against the backdrop of night, I saw that Skipley was burning. The rain had stopped and a cool breeze from the moor seemed to clear my mind. I felt a rush of what I can only call normal emotion.

My family. Mum and Dad and Ben. Here I was, skulking in my bunker while God knew what had become of them. They might be dead. Maybe some of the cries I had heard were theirs.

Stricken with fright and guilt, I scrambled from the pillbox and stood up. The bike had fallen over. I picked it up and began shoving it towards the ditch. I must get home; find them. We could go away; take the van and drive north to the lakes and mountains before the fallout got us.

The fallout. As I reached the ditch it started to drizzle and something I'd read; a phrase, flashed across my mind. Black rain. After they dropped the bomb on Hiroshima it rained, and the rain brought down all the radioactive dust from the atmosphere. Thousands of people from the outskirts of the city, who'd survived the actual explosion, got rained on by this stuff and died of radiation-sickness. Afterwards, the scientists called it black rain, because it ended up killing nearly as many people as the bomb itself.

I guess I panicked. It wasn't the cold drops hitting my face, so much as the name. Black rain. It was like something filthy was falling on me out of the sky and I couldn't even see it. Anyway, I dropped the bike and ran back doubled up trying to shield my head with my arms, as if that would do any good. Inside the bunker I used the front of my tee-shirt to scrub the stuff off my hair, face and neck. My arms were spattered too, so I tore the garment off and wiped them with it. Then I screwed it up and shoved it out through the slot. I was crazy.

After that I sat propped up in a corner with my bare back to the concrete. It was fantastically cold. I crossed my arms on my chest and held onto my shoulders and sat there waiting to get
sick. I had a fantasy that I'd die like this and that someday, centuries from now maybe, somebody would find my skeleton, still hugging itself trying to get warm.

Outside, the noises never stopped. Voices, and a bang now and then, like something exploding down in the town. Sometimes a voice would come quite close, but mostly they were far away. I know it sounds rotten but I tried not to hear. The rain was falling on them and there was nothing I could do.

I dozed a bit eventually, and came to with a start to find daylight filtering through the slot. Rain was hissing onto the concrete and a line of bright droplets hung from its upper lip, falling now and then in random sequence. I sat half-paralysed with cold, watching them, trying to see the deadly motes inside. Apart from the rain it was quiet now.

I was thirsty. I was hungry too, but it was the thirst that bothered me most. I was struck by the irony of the situation. Outside, the ground was sodden. Pools were forming in every hollow and the ditch was filling up. The clouds, the earth, and the air between were laden with water yet none of it was any use to me.

I remembered that poem about the Ancient Mariner, dying of thirst with an ocean all round him. Water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink: something like that. It kept going round and round in my head as I watched the bright drips falling across the slot.

It was that which first made me understand the enormity of what had happened. Nuclear missiles had fallen on England, and if they'd fallen on England they must have fallen on a lot of other countries too. This rain, black rain, was falling now on each of them; falling into rivers and reservoirs, tanks and troughs; drifting down on sheep and cows and crops; seeping through the soil to contaminate wells and subterranean lakes.

Water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink.

I had not felt ill on waking and, I suppose, had entertained subconscious thoughts of long-term survival. Now, with a parched throat and a tongue like a warm slug in my mouth, I thrust such notions aside. Everything needs water. A person can only live a few days without it. Now all the water was
contaminated. Whatever survivors there might be would bring about their own deaths as soon as they drank.

I wondered what it felt like to die of thirst. It hurt already, and the process had scarcely begun. Nevertheless, I felt I could never bring myself to drink black rain. It would be the same as swallowing poison. I'd read some stuff about radiation sickness and it sounded horrible. Dying of thirst couldn't possibly be as bad as that. I spent some time massaging a bit of warmth into my limbs, then lay down on my side to await the end.

As I said before, sometimes I wish I'd stayed there, but I didn't. I lay all that day and all night too. I got hungrier, thirstier and colder, but no nearer to death so far as I could tell. I slept, on and off. In the end I started thinking about my family again; whether they might be alive and if they were looking for me. I got to wishing I hadn't thrown my shirt away, and I remembered that there was a bar of chocolate in my saddle-bag. I couldn't hear any rain, and with dawn a phantom in the slot, I got up.

I sat for a while, rubbing my arms and chest. My legs felt like New Zealand mutton and a monkey had slept in my mouth. I felt lousy, and wondered if this was the start of the sickness. After a while I felt better and crawled to the doorway, stiff as a board.

I didn't see much at first. Everything seemed normal. It crossed my mind that maybe I'd dreamed it all. I hadn't.

I crawled right out and stood up. A light mist hung on the still air and a glow lit the sky to the east. I started to walk round the pillbox. Water from the drenched grass struck cold through my trainers. I rounded an angle, and cried out.

He lay on his back with his mouth open. One side of his face was a mass of raw flesh. Great, puffy blisters clustered round the eye, reducing it to a slit. His elbows rested on the ground
and his forearms stood vertical, the hands hanging like wilted flowers over his chest.

I had almost walked into the raw, hairless scalp. Appalled, I backed off and stood, unable to tear my eyes away.

My first corpse: the first of many. A few weeks later I would scarcely have spared it a glance, except to note that it wore a pair of strong shoes, and to take them. For the moment, though, I stared. Without wanting to, I took in every detail of this thing that had been a man; this thing from whose mouth unhuman sounds had issued as it gasped out its life in the rain: the charred, sodden jacket; the seared flesh; the single, sightless eye.

I felt like puking, but I didn't. The first glimpse had driven into my mouth that flood of sour fluid that precedes vomiting, but instead of spitting it out I had swallowed it, easing the pain in my throat. I didn't know it then, but that's what corpses would mean to me in future; the chance to get something for nothing. A coat perhaps, or a pair of shoes. Something to ease the pain.

I don't know how long I stood there, or what it was that made me move on. It might have been the chocolate, because I remember finding that and squatting by the ditch, shoving it into my mouth. Or it could have been the cold, because I found my shirt under the slot and put it on, wet as it was. Anyway, by the time I'd eaten the chocolate I'd decided what to do.

I'd decided I might as well forget about the black rain for a kick-off. It was everywhere, including the insides of my shoes, so whatever I did now; even if I crawled right back in the bunker, I had irradiated feet. If I was going to die of radiation-sickness, then that was the way it had to be. In the meantime, I'd bike it down into town and see if I could find my family.

The chocolate had warmed me up a bit and the sun was rising. I suppose it was about five a.m. I pulled the bike out of the ditch, wiped the saddle with my shirt and began pedalling slowly up the slope, sick with apprehension as to what I'd see from the top. As it turned out, there was to be a bit more fun for me before I found out.