The Brink (20 page)

“Get John here and you’ll see him vouch for me. We’ve known each other for quite a while now.”

“Means nothing to me,” returned the guard. “Maybe John’s a spy too.”

“That’s enough,” came a voice from behind and, turning on the spot, Alan’s new friend backed away, suddenly very shy and apologetic. “Let him through.”

The voice belonged to a man of average height, thin, with wispy tufts of grey hair that stuck to his shining scalp like passing clouds that had latched on for a free ride and decided to stay. He wore a shabby looking black suit which had a hole in one knee and a tear down one side, a white shirt and a neatly arranged red tie that seemed to be protesting the poor condition of the entire ensemble. He had a warm smile on his middle-aged face and as he approached Alan he held out a slightly trembling hand that was cool to the touch. They shook and the guard dismissed himself.

“They call me Doc around here,” he said, guiding Alan inside. “When they’re not harassing survivors, these two are actually quite nice gentlemen.” The guard who’d been sat at the hockey table had risen to his feet at the sight of Doc and offered an apologetic nod as the two walked further inside the complex. “You must be Alan Harding?”

“I am,” he replied. “I haven’t been I.D’d since I was sixteen when I tried to buy a bottle of vodka from a corner shop.”

“I can only apologise. They take their job very seriously and they’re very distrustful of new faces. We’ve had some... bad experiences of late.”

“Scavengers?”

“Yes. It’s interesting how the new world has come to be clearly divided with those two words. Survivor or Scavenger. The ‘scavengers’ come in pairs normally, often appearing as lost survivors in need of help. Then they settle here for a few days before being caught trying to open the front gates for their friends.”

“How many times has this happened?” asked Alan.

“It’s been happening on and off since we established our camp here. I lose track of precise numbers.”

Alan followed Doc as he led the way through the dead arcade, past the long line of people collecting their food rations and through a fire door into the administration side of the complex. The walls had been stripped of the comical cartoons and irrelevant rotas and anything else that bore a resemblance to the past. Instead, the corridors were lined with boxes and crates of equipment, reams of paper and ink, stacks of bottled water and electrical parts. Desks had been dragged into the rooms, departments setup and labelled with hand written signs stapled to door frames and long wiring looms ran along the skirting; organised chaos in its noisy form.

He saw the other side of the reception desk, the frantic running to and fro, the sound of rustling papers echoing down the halls to those deaf to it. He heard radio chatter from one room, the clicking of computer keyboards and the distant cries of someone in pain.

“It’s all a bit mad in here,” said Doc, dancing between those who ran from one room to the next waving papers like men possessed, shouting inaudible words from a language only they knew. “But it’s efficient in its own special way.”

“So I’ve been told,” replied Alan, trying to take it all in.

“This way, if you please. My office-” He said the word as if it were anything but an office. “Is this way and a little bit quieter.”

They turned off from one hallway, down another to where the screaming became more audible.

“A troubled patient. The radiation is having some queer effects on people. There’s just so little we can do with the amount of exposure out there and the lack of good equipment and medicines.”

“I don’t mean to be rude, but can I assume ‘Doc’ isn’t just a nickname then?”

The man grinned.

“No. I was a GP for quite some time before the disaster. I did my share in the local A & E department before ‘retiring’ to a small practice just outside of Devon. When that grim year of darkness came I found I was very much needed.”

“That doesn’t surprise me.”

Doc led him into a small office, perhaps only 12 feet square with two chairs and a desk cluttered with stacks of paper and empty coffee cups. There was the faint odour of stale sweat mixed with a double shot of alcohol which was coming from the dregs of a number of the white mugs and rose up into his nostrils like a spectre from the past.

“Can I get you a drink?” asked Doc, opening a drawer.

“Tough work?” he replied, nodding.

“More than you know. I left the A & E department because of the stress. Then I found that working in a little well-to-do area populated by octogenarians was almost as stressful. The same people coming in, day after day, bringing some of the strangest complaints to me just to enjoy the company of another human being. Then this happened-” He gestured around him with a broad sweep of his hand. “And now I find even more to work to put me into an early grave.”

He poured two generous helpings of single malt into a couple of Styrofoam cups he’d taken from a long tube behind his desk, pilfered from the water cooler just outside his office, and handed one to Alan.

“To the future,” he toasted. Alan raised his cup and inclined his head before draining the liquor in one gulp, then watched Doc do the same. There was a disturbing familiarity between him and the bottle. Old friends, well acquainted.

“You’re a mate of John’s, right?” he asked.

“That’s correct.”

Business
. The interrogation had begun back at the front of the complex and Alan was on his guard. The single malt was meant to lower it but there was no risk of that. Tim, again, had been on the money and already Alan was starting to feel the same suspicion that he’d felt so much sooner.

“Friends before the disaster?” he asked.

“No,” replied Alan. “After.”

“Where?”

“In the south.” Doc nodded, pouring another generous round, perhaps more freely than before, only stopping short of filling the cups.

“How were you reunited?”

“We met earlier today in a town not far from here. We were passing through on our way south-”

“Where were you going?” Doc’s attitude was cooling quickly and in another question or two he suspected that all friendliness would be gone until the interview was over. Maybe, if his answers didn’t satisfy, it might be gone forever.

“South.”

“Specifically?”

“Anywhere that wasn’t north.”

“Because of the radiation?”

“Because of the weather. I like the sun.”

“You’re being evasive.”

“You’re being intrusive.”

“Can you understand my reasons?” he asked. Alan shrugged.

Doc drummed his thin fingers on the desktop in perfect rhythm, looking past Alan and at a blank space on the wall behind him, perhaps wondering just how far he could push him. Alan was content to sit there, sipping the second cup and staring right at him until it made his eyes sore.

Eventually the old man turned back and met his gaze, perhaps looking a little more haggard, a little more tired than before and when he pinched the bridge of his nose and closed his eyes, Alan could see that he wasn’t far from breaking point.

“I apologise,” he said without looking up. “Day and night I work. The lines of people never end, never diminish. Hair loss. Bleeding. Teeth falling out. Babies dying at their mother’s breast. I heard the north was hit badly.”

“It was.”

“I’m tired, Alan. I’m tired and what I want to know, and what I should just ask is, did you come from the north?”

“Yes.”

“Did you ever meet any of Teague’s men? Did you go near his settlement?”

“I worked with them for quite some time. Yes.”

Doc’s shoulders slumped and his eyes filled.

“My daughter... A woman by the name of Janet. Did you perhaps...?”

“Was she a soldier?” Doc nodded. “The Janet I knew had been based in Manchester during the disaster. She was one of the original members of Teague’s unit. Hair the colour of cider. Full of fun. Bubbly.”

“That’s her, God bless her. Oh my,” he cried, burying his head in his hands. “She’s gone, isn’t she?”

“I don’t know,” said Alan, honestly. “Teague knew that the radiation cloud was coming but it was too late to do anything. Whether they survived the storm or not, I don’t know. I’m sorry I can’t tell you any more than that.”

There was a long stretch of silence while Doc rubbed his temples, trying to massage the truth into his mind like a lotion that might soothe the anguish he felt. Alan sat with his cup in his hand, slowly working away at the whisky, taking small sips to try and fill the awkward void between them.

“You were gone before the storm arrived?” he suddenly asked, looking up. Alan felt his stomach tighten.

“Yes. Teague had sent me out on a mission. When the storm came I knew it was too late to go back.”

“So you ran?”

“I didn’t run,” he protested. “I finished what I’d started and turned south. The radiation was too much to go back.”

“You must have been in some kind of vehicle? Something to shield you from the effects of the radiation? Where is it?”

“We were in Rhinos, military-”

“We?”

“There were two others. They died on the journey.”

“Where are they now?”

“I buried them.”

“What about the Rhinos?”

“I left them behind. They were part of the mission; I wasn’t able to keep them.”

“Where are they? We could use them!” he said, suddenly staring at him with a wild look in his eyes. “We could use them to find Janet, see if they survived. They might need our help. You must tell me where they-”

“No.”

“No?”

“I said no. I won’t lead you to them.”

“Why on earth not? Don’t you care, man?”

Alan saw the frantic look of hope fade on the old man’s face as he realised that he wasn’t going to give him what he wanted. It wasn’t a new expression to him. He’d seen it on all the faces of those who were now nothing more than unmarked graves and names written in blue ink in the book he carried. The only hope left was to record the facts, to pass them on to the next generation, but for what purpose? Alan had seen that history was condemned to repeat itself, remembered or forgotten. That was the final word on it, the path of all things, and there seemed no way of changing its course. The lessons of a great world war were lost before the next one. Korea led to Vietnam, Vietnam to Iraq, Iraq to the Panic, and the Panic to the disaster. There was blame to be found in all of them and, in spite of that and what was done to prevent it happening again, people continued to die and would die until the world’s end. How many more would Alan see, he wondered. How many more would his curse make him an unwilling witness to?

Eventually, Doc nodded to himself as if finally coming to an agreement with some kind of internal debate that’d raged for half a cup of single malt.

“I’m sorry for this old man’s foolishness,” he mumbled. “It was rude of me.”

Alan said nothing. He drained his cup and set it next to all the others before rising from his chair.

“If that’s all?” he asked softly. Doc nodded and Alan left the office and the broken man to the increased wailings of the troublesome patient down the hall.

The club wasn’t too hard to find. He asked one of those tending to the sick and she pointed him down the hall and across two more before he’d find it. The stench of death clung to her patched uniform like smoke from a fire.

With a heavy heart he walked, passing all those who now took on the aspect of the sick and dying. Even in the south the rads were high enough to inflict misery, and in the weak, death. Tim had seen the worst of it and lived, but he was young and healthy. The people he saw were feeble creatures, wasted by poverty and famished for lack of hope to dine on. Their days were numbered and they knew it. Everyone knew it.

For this reason John’s face was weighed down with grief; care-worn and troubled when Alan entered the bar area without him realising it. When he did, his countenance changed at once to his former optimism.

“Hey!” he called when he saw him walking towards him. “Did you get settled okay?”

“How bad is it?” asked Alan without answering him. “You need to be honest with me.”

His face, robbed of the concealing lie, drooped to its morose state once more.

“Bad, Alan,” he said. “Very bad.”

At a gesture from John, the man working behind the bar placed two empty glasses onto the false wooden top and filled them with vodka, leaving two cans of coke beside each one. Alan saw it and thought of Reb for an instant, seeing her lying dead in the cab. At peace.

“How bad, John? Everywhere I look people are dying. I thought you said-”

“Fuck what I said,” he hissed, trying to keep his voice low enough that the family in the corner didn’t hear him. “How bad is bad? Even the healthiest are dying. We’re not scientists - we don’t know how this works and Doc is neither use nor ornament when it comes to dealing with radiation. Give him a cut or a broken bone and he’s a bloody medicine man, working miracles, but give him toothless gums and a bald head and he cracks up.”