The Dawn: Omnibus edition (box set books 1-5) Page 8

  They managed to get a few drops more into Billy’s mouth, although Zack was sure that he hadn't swallowed any of them. All tattoo application was put on hold, much to the protest of those in line. The third double bell rang and Zack was forced to return to the water treatment plant for the second shift. He still had to see what was left for Epsilon Tower. The tattoo artist, who Zack had judged to have performed well in the guise of tower doctor, told him that it was best if he left anyway. There was no point staying. Zack offered to take his card with him, get it topped up for extra rations, and the tattoo artist seemed more than happy with the arrangement. He handed over his ration card and continued to drip feed Billy.

  Zack had always thought it was pointless to bring a child in Delta. He believed that the daily life of New Omega wasn't worth sharing with future generations. What were they trying to create now? Didn't parents want the life of their child to be better than theirs? Wasn't that the point? In Delta Tower there was nothing left to offer other than a selfish dream of a time gone by. The war had made life irrelevant. Unnecessary. Hadn't it? He wondered if in a hundred years time when all those alive before the war were gone, if the few citizens left in Delta Tower or New Omega would find life here acceptable. Would it be possible to live like this, if they had never known any better?

  Holding Billy in his arms had made Zack question his beliefs. It was the first time in years that he had held a child. A living one, at least. He had felt Billy’s pulse, his breath on his skin, as faint as they both were. It was real life, unmarked by a number and still full of all the same potential that used to exist when life was free. Zack had felt that life slipping away from him as he had ran with Billy in his arms. Real life being lost. A human life of love and pain and hurt and joy and all the other confusing emotions that he had tried to avoid before the bombs had fallen. That afternoon he made his checks, added vitamin A and Zinc to the water vats as indicated and fulfilled ninety percent of the Epsilon order. Not bad. But his mind stayed elsewhere. It was on Billy. It was on Billy's parents and how they had abandoned him. It was on Samantha and the last phone call that they had shared half an hour before the bombs fell, when she had told him that he had to face the fact that she was carrying his child. His mind was stuck on how, at the moment when he had two choices, he had chosen the wrong one, and how now he was left with no choice or chance to put it right.

  When he opened the door to the sick bay after the triple bell there was a man on the couch getting a tattoo. He was gritting his teeth and Zack remembered the pain when he had been marked on the wrist. When he had been reduced to nothing more than a number.

  “How is he doing?” Zack said before he was even through the door. He held up the ration card and handed it to the tattoo artist. Zack took the normality of the environment as a good sign. The tattoo artist switched off his gun and set it down on the small wheelie table at his side. He took the card and slipped it in his pocket.

  There is a certain look on a person’s face when they are about to deliver bad news. Some would describe it as pity, others might say sorrow. There is a tightness of the lips as if they are being forced to stay shut, the eyes and jaw too, locked so as not to allow your own emotion to creep through. To stay strong. Sometimes a person's mouth gets over-active and starts to produce too much saliva, as if they are trying to digest something. In some ways of course, they are. Some people fiddle with their hands, making circles with one thumb around the base of the other, or their palms travel over their arms in search of a way to self-soothe. There are many giveaways for this kind of anguish. But by contrast, and exactly like the tattoo artist, sometimes those burdened with bad news simply don’t do or say anything. Their silence is enough.

  “What is it?” asked Zack.

  “I’m really sorry.” The tattooed first aider was standing up, pulling at the base of his T-shirt. “Really I am.” For a few moments, no words passed between them. Zack knew that Billy hadn't made it. The others in the room had no idea what was going on and they looked left and right, first at Zack, then at the would-be doctor. Zack could feel his mouth drying, his head beginning to ache as the tears formed, along with the painful blockage in his throat. In the end the man with the face of a Maori warrior, who ultimately had lost the battle, picked up the tattoo gun and set to finishing the tattoo. The others who were waiting didn't know what had happened and stared at Zack, motionless in the middle of the room, his eyes swollen and red. They were confused, because nobody here got sad anymore. There was nothing to lose in Delta that could ever hurt so much.

  Zack nodded and turned to leave the sick bay. Nobody uttered a word. Zack didn't see the tattoo artist kick his chair out from underneath him and walk into the back room to compose himself. Zack stepped into the nearest lift and pressed the button for thirtieth, but when the lift arrived he didn’t get out. Instead he waited for the doors to close on their own before pressing the button for level forty nine. He stepped out of the lift, darker now than before. He circled the floor until he found what he was looking for on the north side of the tower. A mass of broken buildings. Somewhere in the rubble that smothered the foundations, were the remains of Samantha's apartment. He thought of Samantha's hands on his skin and the smell of her hair. The memory of his mistakes blurred with the dust outside as it whipped up on the breeze from the remains of the broken life. The life he had been offered by her and which he had told her was impossible. He thought of the last words he ever said to her, and realised for the first time in his life that he finally understood how she must have felt on that day when he told her that it was unimaginable that they would go ahead with the pregnancy. That he wasn't ready for fatherhood. That they would have to find a good doctor. His eyes settled on a pile of dirt that might or might not have been the place in which she died, and reminded himself that Delta Tower was a lesson, a punishment for a crime that he had dared to commit.

  Chapter Seven

  His head hung low, propped up against a feeble hand as he hunched over the bar in NAVIMEG. Ronson set a drink down as he saw Zack walk in, and he spoke to Zack too. No doubt something chipper and amusing in his usual style. But Zack hadn’t heard it and he paid the beaker of Moonshine no attention. At one point Ronson offered him a small puckered tablet, but again Zack did nothing. The sight and smell of the Mess Room on level forty eight was still too fresh in his mind, and he didn't want to be any part of it. Zack huddled over the bar, his nose picking up the alcohol tinged scent of the drink, and he closed his sodden eyes to shut out the world.

  Behind his eyelids, ideas and images of his life played out. His university days and Samantha, her blond hair cut into a bob, a blunt fringe that in his mind always made her seem kinky, and a bit like a stripper. He thought about how she used to lie at his side without any concern for her naked body, her weight balanced on a single elbow. She would lean over him, trace her finger along the ridge of his nose whilst whispering promises that she would love him forever into the curves of his ear. Sometimes she would let her finger drop down over the ridge of his chin, trace it over his chest, but Zack could never stand it and always ended up in fits of giggles. He knew that Samantha was the woman who he could have loved even after her beauty had faded. He would have loved her just for who she was. Sometimes he still tried to imagine her, perhaps living in Zeta Tower, or Alpha Tower. Even Omega. But he knew that she wasn't there. It was impossible. She would have been in the building to the north of Delta when the bombs landed. The one that he was no longer sure that he could find. He tried to imagine her last moments, the speed of it, that she was right under a bomb when it exploded so that she wouldn’t remember a thing. But the idea of her surviving for hours or days, burnt and hungry before death finally clawed into her, was another possible reality. He had seen those bodies. He had seen their charred, dust-covered remains. He had looked for her face amongst the bodies on the one and only time that he had ventured outside. He had seen shapes that he was sure were human underneath the layers of dust. He had seen their bloated b
odies in the water filters. He was grateful that he had never found her.

  Tonight, images of Billy crept in there too. His tiny hand and skinny tattoo-free wrist. Zack hadn't been back to his room to change his clothes, and he was still covered in Billy's smell. He had considered going back to the sick bay to find out what they had done with the body, maybe to go and see it. He had never spoken to a dead body before, but he thought perhaps he needed to say sorry to Billy. He wanted to tell him that he was sorry for the life that he had lived. That it was supposed to be better, and that what had happened to him wasn’t how life was supposed to be. He wondered if he had ever been told a fairytale. If he had ever listened to a lullaby as he slept. If anybody had ever promised to protect him until they died. He wondered if sitting there next to the corpse of a small boy and reading him Jack and the Beanstalk, or a tale about Red Riding Hood might somehow make up for some of the childhood he had lost. Perhaps it would make up for some of the adult life that Zack had lost, too.

  He didn’t know how long he had been there when he felt the hand touch his upper arm. It startled him, and his eyes shot open like a bullet from a gun. The hand was clean and abutted by a white cuff. Zack turned his head to appreciate the form next to him and he was surprised to see the same girl from the night before.

  “I’m not in the mood,” he said. “Just go back to wherever you came from.” The girl seemed unfazed, and rather than moving away, she sat down on the oil barrel stool next to him. She placed an elbow on the bar, rested her head onto it, her eyes not leaving his face. “What do you want?” he asked as she picked up his untouched drink and knocked it back.

  “To say sorry.” She left the words hanging between them, waiting for him to mould them as he saw fit.

  “Sorry?” he said, raising his eyebrows. “Why are you sorry? You know my type. You know what I am. You were spot on.” Zack wasn’t in the mood for light chatter, especially not with a woman who was so quick to judge him. He didn't need anything to remind him of life in Delta right now. He just wanted to be alone with his memories and regrets.

  “That’s what I thought,” she continued, letting out a huge breath, “but I was wrong. Ronson told me so.” Zack looked at Ronson, who was trying to busy himself and appear as if he wasn’t paying attention to what was happening, even though he was listening to every word they were saying. He was still wearing the hat that Zack had given him, and Zack knew he wasn’t going to ask for it back. He had even skewed it a little on his head so it wasn’t straight, which meant that the scars were completely covered. There was an ease about the way Ronson moved tonight. It reminded Zack of freedom. But freedom was just an idea now, a word that doesn't really mean anything, and neither of them lived in a world where it existed.

  “What did he tell you?” Zack asked as he looked back to the woman.

  “He told me that I was wrong about you. That you organised to get him a water supply. Fresh water, I mean.” Zack looked down at the empty beaker, twirled it in circles on top of the bar in the gutter-like crevices of the old container panel. “He told me that the pillow was for your neighbour. Is that true?” Zack nodded. “Then, I’m sorry. I misjudged you.” The woman held out her hand, a gesture of greeting, of repentance, perhaps of friendship. Zack took it and they shook, the warmth of touch something alien. “I’m Emily.”

  “Zack.”

  “I know,” she smiled. “Ronson told me that too.” She held up her hand and nodded towards Ronson. “Another two, please.”

  “I’m surprised that you drink this stuff,” Zack said as Ronson placed another beaker in front of them and topped both up. Zack knocked back the drink, winced as it hit his throat. There was no getting used to it.

  “What else am I going to drink?” she said as she tipped her beaker back almost as fast as Ronson could pour it. She didn't seem bothered by it at all.

  “I don’t know,” he said, taking another sip. “Beer, wine, vodka. What I wouldn’t give for a glass of Merlot.”

  “What’s Merlot?” He turned and looked at her and put his beaker back down on the bar.

  “Merlot?” he asked. “You don’t remember Merlot? You don't remember the good stuff?”

  “I was fourteen when, well, when,” she stumbled, not having enough words to describe the nightmare which they had survived, but never woken up from. “Well, you know. I was fourteen.”

  “So now you must be what,” he said as he started to estimate a potential age on his grubby fingers.

  “Twenty four,” she said, before realising his surprise at her certainty and adding, “I guess. Roughly.”

  “Ten years? You think we've been in here that long?” He pulled the beaker to his lips and finished the Moonshine. He dragged his fingers through his mop of hair, brushed it away from his eyes. “So you don’t know a good Merlot. Or a Cabernet.” He closed his eyes again, and for a moment he and Samantha were sitting in a winter cabin, she holding up her glass with her feet tucked underneath her on the sofa. He was pouring wine whilst the snow fell outside. Eyes open. “You don’t know what you are missing. Especially with a good cheese.”

  She laughed, no idea what he was talking about. He felt like his grandfather trying to explain how to tune a transistor radio when Zack was a child. “And you? How old were you?”

  “You mean when the world ended?” They both smiled. “I was twenty seven.”

  “What did you do for a job?”

  “I worked here, just like everybody else. I was an engineer. There used to be a huge road near here called a motorway, which was.....” He stopped talking because she was laughing so much that he couldn't continue. For a moment, transfixed by the sound of her laughter, he forgot about the hell above ground. “What?” he asked when her giggles finally subsided.

  “I know what a motorway is. I was a kid but I remember some things.”

  “OK, well, I built it. I mean,” he clarified, “that I designed it. Anywhere it had a bridge. That was my doing.”

  “I think all the bridges fell down.”

  “Ok,” he laughed. “I didn’t exactly plan against a nuclear war. But they would have survived a lot of other things. An earthquake, for example.”

  “I wanted to be a doctor. I used to get straight As in my exams. I thought it would be really cool to be a doctor.”

  “It would have been,” Zack said, thinking again about Billy and how his life could have, should have, been so different. “But there is no such thing as a doctor anymore.”

  “What? Of course there is.”

  “You've obviously never been to the sick bay,” he said, not waiting for an answer. “Spend most of their time doing tattoos. They can’t do anything of use. They couldn't save your life or anything like that.” He tried hard to blink away the earliest tears that were pooling in his eyes, and he brought his hand up to wipe the edge of his nose. She reached into her pocket and pulled out a tissue to hand to him. He was about to ask her how she had come to be in Delta Tower when the bombs fell, but as she withdrew her hand from her pocket, she also pulled out a white headphone which fell to her side. She followed his eyes down the length of the cable, stunned as if he had seen a ghost. Something inexplicable that couldn't really be there. He reached down and pulled the cable towards him, fingered the soft end of the earphone as gently as he would a precious artefact freshly unearthed from the ground.

  “You have an iPod?” he asked, ignoring the tissue that she was holding out for him. “Or an MP4 player?”

  “No,” she said, pulling the cable from him, stuffing it back into her pocket.

  “You do. Let me see it. Please.” He was sat upright on his barrel and pleading with her, his own hands now gripping her arms. “I haven’t seen one in so long. I just want to see it. To remember it.” She waited until he let go of her arms and then she reached back into her pocket. She pulled out the iPod, the screen cracked and casing chipped, and handed him the earphones.

  “Put them in,” she said. He did as she instructed and the sounds aro
und him became muffled. She moved in close to conceal him from the others in the bar, so much so that he could feel the warmth of her body. He couldn't smell anything on her except for the faint odour of something floral. Jasmine. There was no smell of the chemicals that most people smelt of. He traced his fingers over the outside of the earphones, the vibrations magnified and resonating loud in his ears.

  “It works?” She nodded. He held out his hand for the box. He took it, drawing his finger over the crack in the screen. After staring at it for a while he pressed his finger onto the button and saw the menu light up. The screen, as broken as it was, came to life.

  “It works,” he began as a shout, but finished as a whisper. “It really works,” he said again. A piano began to play, and then a voice began to sing. It was the sweetest voice, girlish but profound and with a depth so strong that as the strings worked into the beat he could feel more tears welling in his eyes. The song was called When You’re Gone, and he knew it. It was something Samantha used to listen to, and something that he always complained about because it wasn't alternative or cool or anything that he deemed worthy of his time. He thought about her sitting on his settee, his cat on her lap because it was a fickle little bastard who always flirted with her and ignored him when she was there. How that fact had once irritated him. But that was all it was now. Just a memory. There was nothing left of that memory except for this song which he hadn't even remembered until now. He reached out, took Emily’s hand in his to know that he wasn’t dreaming. Emily waited for the song to finish, for him to remove the headphones before she reached over and switched off the iPod.

  “Music,” he said, wiping his cheeks with his fingertips, dirt smearing in stripes like camouflage. “I haven’t heard it in years.” She reached across to pull the iPod in closer to her, but he draped his fingers over hers like a cage. “Please, let me listen to it a bit more.” There were only a couple of other men in NAVIMEG, and neither of them was interested in what was happening at the bar. They were lost somewhere to a hallucinogenic, Moonshine-constructed world.