Part one here: http://swanindustries.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/on-retreat.html
By Jack Swan
After showering and scrubbing, we slipped hurriedly into the
new clothes Ethel had brought us. She was looking absolutely mortified, her
eyes bulging and her voice like a gnat’s whisper. Unfortunately now was not the
time for quiet words of comfort; we were racing against the clock, and quite
possibly a nuke. This was not how normal teenage camping trips were meant to go
and we knew it. Then again, nothing
had been truly normal since the Werm War.
At least Ethel didn’t have the burden of carrying her tent –
it was damaged beyond repair. She waited silently while the rest of us took our
tents, stuffed them into our backpacks, and pooled together whatever equipment
we could use to navigate – all the while skirting around the ripped flesh and
pungent secretions of the werm, not to mention the broken glass. Both the pairs
of socks I had been wearing were ruined, so Logan had leant me his spares. They
were tight, but better than nothing, and at least I had my own trainers to walk
in. They weren’t my hiking boots but I wasn’t going to complain.
At 4:03am everything was packed away and we convened for our
four-man war council.
Logan opened the meeting. “Okay. So where do we go?”
“Home.” Trace’s reply was simple and agreeable. “As fast as possible.”
“How, though?” I asked. “Train, car, bus... walking?”
“Let’s go for train,” Logan decided. “It’ll be quickest. I
bet we could get all the way back home by this evening if we do that.”
“If the trains are
running,” I pointed out. “There’s an invasion going on over there!”
“Whatever we do, bringing us closer to a station will bring
us nearer to a town, which means more chance of finding some way to go home.” Logan’s point was logical; I shrugged in
agreement.
“So... which town?”
“Ipswich?” I suggested. It’s close and it –”
“No. Definitely not.” Logan stared at me with pure iron in
his eyes. “The first thing the werms will do is attack a large source of
biomass – dad always told me so. Turn ‘em all into Suelo, create their weird
defensive structures, and make a safe place to breed. I dunno how big Ipswich
but it must have what, one hundred, two hundred thousand people?” He pointed at
the trail of werm flyers that were still being disgorged from the armoured
werm-infested ship. “They’ll be heading straight for Ipswich and they’re gonna
make it their number one priority to seize it. Going the same way will just be suicide.”
“Yeah, good point actually,” Trace said. She had whipped out
a cigarette and took a deep pull, releasing ashen air into our faces. In all
fairness, it smelt a darn sight nicer than the werm ever did. “Where else has a
station?”
We all paused for thought, trying to draw mental maps of
this unknown corner of the country. Of course, those efforts were hampered by
the fact that one and all of us were sick with frantic panic that every second
we wasted could well be a second closer to death by werm, or death by nuke.
Then I remembered: dad had made me pack an Ordnance Survey map before I left – he
had insisted that I give orienteering a go. I had naturally made an empty
promise but now I was glad for my dad’s insistence – and, luckily, I had always
had a knack for reading OS maps in geography. I flung off my backpack and
scrambled inside for the map (this time, naturally, taking awkwardly long).
When I extracted it I flipped open its confusing folds, flicked my torch up,
and examined our corner. I scanned, then smiled.
“Manningtree,” I said, stabbing the paper with a spare
finger from my torch hand. “Look, here. It’s tiny but it has a station, and if
anything it’s closer than Ipswich!”
“Manningtree, then. Can you get us there?”
I gave a plucky grin. “Reading these maps was the one thing
that I could actually do without getting confused in geography. It looks like
about... twenty five kilometres, give or take, so about fifteen miles. As long
as we cut across fields that is, and then join this B-road here... I dunno,
five hours, perhaps?”
“Make it seven,” Logan decided. “Counting breaks. But we’ll
have to move fast. Any other questions or things to discuss? No?”
“Nothing that can't be asked on the move,” said Trace. We all
looked at Ethel. She gave a meek nod of approval.
“Right then,” Logan said. “Let’s go.”
So we set out. Our feet were soft on the dew-laden grass.
The summer air was cool, and a gentle breeze wafted damp air into our faces. By
the time we had set our pace, though, the cooling air was a godsend as we began
to work up sweats from the walking.
Overhead the sky was beginning to brighten, slowly crawling
from black to blue. It was deathly quiet. Logan and I were silent; we were too alert, on the lookout for
dangerous shadows, to risk diverting our attention through conversation. I was
at the back, checking our course and keeping an eye out, and Logan was keeping
his eyes on a swivel for danger while at the front. Trace was talking with
Ethel, trying to cheer up. Ethel was mostly unresponsive, so Trace mostly ended
up in a monologue as she tried to coax her out of shock. Her grating Essex
accent was the only sound in the dark morning.
We were rounding an old, wizened oak into another field when
Logan held his hand up and sharply ordered us to stop. We did, looking at him.
Logan stared up into the fading stars, eyes prowling the light before dawn. I
could hear what he was after: a growing growl, coming from somewhere high to
the northwest. I looked for where the sound came from: then, as I looked ahead of the sound, I caught it. Far
above the horizon a tiny silver blip slipped through the brightening sky,
riding a shockwave of sound. Behind it trailed the roar of its engines: the
sound of screaming air, as if the atmosphere itself was howling in pain as it
was dragged into a dark hole. Since the sound came from far behind the jet, I
realised the fighter must have been moving incredibly fast – nearly a thousand
kilometres, skirting the sound barrier. The tiny orange flares of its
afterburners traced across the sky like racing stars.
It disappeared behind the gnarled silhouette of the oak.
When it re-emerged, its engines were joined by a third yellow dot: a single
missile, streaking even faster across the sky on a white column of smoke. I
puzzled at the development: what did the pilot hope to achieve by firing just
one missile?
“Oh god...” I heard Logan murmur, but I didn’t pay much
attention. “Guys, get down. Get down now.”
“Why?” I said, turning to face him. But Logan had
disappeared, and I scanned until I saw a Logan-shaped impression in the field
of wheat, with Logan himself burying his face into the ground.
Then night turned to day, the brightest day I had ever seen,
and I watched my own shadow stretch a hundred metres across the field.
The rightmost edge of my vision suddenly was filled with a
pure, heavenly white, devoid of any detail except the imprints of the blood
vessels in my eyes tattooed upon my field of vision. At exactly the same moment
I felt like someone had passed an electric heater millimetres from my skin; seconds
later, the skin on the right side of my body began to twitch, itch and tingle.
My face stung as I cupped my hand to my eye to obscure the brightness; as the
initial burst of brightness faded to a more manageable intensity I turned to
look back. There, over Felixstowe, a tiny star was soaring into the morning.
The nuclear fireball was almost beautiful as it cast its amber glow over the
countryside. Beneath it a spire of grey was beginning to rise from the
flattened, devastated port and entered the bottom of the churning fireball;
soon, misty grey ash began to gently roll down from the top of the atomic sun
and down its flanks.
All this, of course, was in perfect silence: I was watching
the lightning, waiting for the thunder to catch up. And when the sound did roll
over us, it was indeed thunder – but more so. I can’t really think how to
describe it to you if you haven’t experienced a nuclear blast (and here’s to
hoping you won’t). If you really want to imagine it, try thinking of putting
your head right besides where two lorries have a head-on collision, and then
increase the volume of that by about three times. That’s more or less what it’s
like. My ears rang like church bells and I half-expected to be thrown off my
feet by the raw wall of sound.
Just as the cacophony in my ears faded to a more steady
rumble, I noticed something bizarre in the copse of trees to my left, against
which Trace was silhouetted. One by one, they all bent back, like a massive
team game of limbo, throwing off leaves and twigs in the process. One second
too late I realised what was happening and began to brace myself: this was the
blast wave.
The blast genuinely did
knock me off my feet this time. I was punched in the face by wind and flung
backwards and twisting, while my stomach lurched along after me. I crashed,
heavily, onto my right hand side, and received a taster session of acupuncture
as coarse stalks of wheat stabbed my nuclear sunburn. The pain was brief but
breathtaking, and as grain and leaves and twigs from the oak peppered the field
I winced at it.
But then it was over.
Stunned by the twenty seconds of chaos, it took me a while
to find my feet. The air around me rumbled, transmitting the growl of the
distant nuclear inferno within the fireball. Already it had dimmed to a faint
red pall of smoke, but it was well over a mile high by now, the column of ash
and debris sucked into a churning mushroom that resembled the texture of a
brain: pitted, covered in valleys.
A mushroom cloud is an awe-inspiring sight, but I would not recommend getting front row seats to
see one grow.
I took a deep breath of the earth-scented air and looked
around. Logan was noisily scrambling to his feet, not bothering in the
slightest to trample on the crops. He looked more or less unscathed, but his
eyes were wide, and filled with something like – like dreadful comprehension,
as if he had finally understood the true nature of a nuclear bomb.
“Everyone alright?” I tried to say, but choked – my throat,
I discovered, was parched. I swallowed painfully and scrabbled for my water
bottle. It had already warmed up in the heat wave of the bomb but it quenched
my thirst and felt cool enough on my dry lips. I asked again.
“I’m fine,” Logan said.
“Y-yeah,” Ethel said too, quietly. There was a silence of
nothing but the nuclear rumble.
“Trace?”
“Er... yeah,” I heard her say, in an unusually shaky tone.
“Guys, I can’t see anything out of my left eye.”
Logan swore and waded through the crops towards her. He took
her by the shoulders and peered closely at her mole-dotted face. She blinked
back at him, testing one eye, then the other. Logan held up his torch; in its
light, it was clear that the left side of her face was a vivid pink, compared
to more normal vanilla on the other side. As she closed each eye he moved the
torch around. With the right eye she followed it fine – but with the left, she
was clearly haphazardly guessing.
“Were you looking at the explosion?”
“Um...”
Logan shook her. “Were you looking at the explosion with
your left eye?!”
“Er, um, yeah, I guess... I was sort of looking, like,
side-on to it, and it was really bright in both eyes, but definitely more in
the left, I think...”
Logan bucked his head as if he were swallowing a great
injustice upon his honour, then stepped backwards.
“What?” Trace asked, panicky. Logan sighed.
“You’ve definitely gone blind in that eye. You must’ve
burned the retina or something – ask Eth.”
“Oh god,” she whispered, wide-eyed, and took a step back
herself. “Is it permanent?”
“I’m...” he sighed and shrugged. “I’m not sure. Hopefully
not. Dad’s friend looked straight at a blast with both eyes and recovered, but
I dunno what the circumstances were and how they’re different here. It should get better.”
But Trace’s lip was quivering with worry. I decided it would
be best if we gave her something to do to take her mind off of the problem:
walking.
“We should get moving,” I suggested. “Some werms might be
alive, and there’ll be fallout and stuff.” I looked at Logan; he nodded at me,
then took Trace by the wrist and led her. Ethel followed.
We trudged eastward, into the rising wind and in the
direction of the rising sun. The irony was not lost on me as we walked away
from one fireball, and towards another.
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