All those not killed by the blast would be dead of radiation poisoning within hours.
Were we dead already? How long would be a fatal exposure? I didn't know, but I couldn't just stop, couldn't just quit. Easy to do so; easy to stop and spend the last of my time railing at the sky and the mad, sick bastards who'd done this to us. The politicians on both sides…
I'd grown up in the shadow of the Cold War; when it'd ended, I'd been in my teens, but I knew enough by then to have felt some of the dread that my parents-who would also be dead now-must've spent most of their adulthood under. And a weight had lifted. One less worry. Or so I'd thought.
Now…
Beside the Delph was a shed, belonging to the local boating club. We smashed the doors down. Inside, boats. Dinghies and open-topped canoes. And paddles. We took what we needed.
And torches, too. We were lucky. There were half a dozen, and a box or two of batteries. We took them as well, and then scrabbled over the fences, lifting boats and children, and headed down into the Delph.
"Delph" simply means a delved place. Delved; dug. An old sandstone quarry, half-filled with orangey-coloured water. The canals round Worsley are full of it-iron oxides from all the heavy industry.
If you go into the Delph, you'll find a hole, a tunnel entrance. Gated up. We forced the lock-me, Jean and Frank Emerson, chest-deep in that water. And then we climbed into the boats and paddled through, into the dark.
You see, the Delph is an entrance, to one of the biggest engineering feats of the Industrial Revolution.
I said the whole area had been a big coalfield. The coal had to be transported. And what was the main means of transport in those days?
Canals.
Entered, via the Delph, are forty-six miles of underground canal. Extending down on four levels, deep and deep and deep. To the galleries of the mines.
That was where we were headed. Deep underground, the one safe place I could think of.
If you're so clever, tell me where else we could have gone.
I knew the Delph had been closed off because of carbon monoxide seeping up from the old mines. I could only hope it'd dispersed by now. But even if it hadn't, it beat radiation sickness. Carbon monoxide, you got groggy, disorientated, queasy, yes, but in the end you just drifted off. That had to be better than the alternative.
And so we paddled, and soon the light died and we used one of the torches to destroy a tiny portion of the dark ahead, so we could see where the hell we were going.
I tried looking at my watch a moment ago. Blank. Of course. It was a digital. EMP: electromagnetic pulse from the blast. Wiped it out. Thank God the Geiger counter still works. I wonder if anyone here has an analogue watch. Only chance of keeping track. Mobile phones might have clocks but they'll have likely gone the same way as the digital watches.
There's no way of gauging the time. The same unending tunnel, after the brief variation of the fork, in unending repetition. It just goes on. Perhaps it'll be like this forever. Perhaps we're all already dead. Perhaps we died in the school, or on the way to the Delph, or at some point on this journey and this is all the last hallucinatory moment of dying, stretching on out forever…
No good thinking that way. I force myself to keep paddling. My hands are numb. The damp chill of the air, a nip at first, but like a swarm of soldier ants eating through to the bone bite by tiny bite.
The air is stale and foul. An olfactory memory skitters across my nerves; the summer just gone, walking in a meadow, the smell of fresh-cut grass, flowers breathing perfume into air, soft, clean, clear air.
Treasure that memory, Paul. You aren't likely to have another like it.
Cold. The air stinks. My teeth have begun to chatter. What it must be like for the children, back in the smaller boats, I don't like to think. Is Frank Emerson alright back there? I ought to shout at him but I can't seem to. My jaw won't let me, refuses to let me waste the energy.
"Paul?" It's Jean. She's been crying. So have I, silently. I can feel the burn of the dried salt on my cheeks. Anya.
I'm wandering, vague, keep greying out. Radiation sickness? Or carbon monoxide? Or just going cold and tired? Be ironic that, if it's hypothermia and exhaustion that finishes the job. Maybe a kind of bleak triumph there, a bitter laugh at the death that thought it'd've have us.
"Paul?" Jean again. Her voice is cracked. She's been thinking about her husband, must've been with all this time on our hands, just paddling-well, the endless tunnel can sort of hypnotise you. Better if it does, in a way. If not, your mind begins to wander. I'd've been thinking about Anya so so much if not for that lucky effect. But Jean-
I met her husband once. A small, quiet man, balding and moustached. Bespectacled. Smoked a pipe. Scottish, like her. Glaswegian, or was he from Edinburgh? Sipped a Britvic orange in the pub at the staff do last Christmas while Jean got tipsy on Dubonnet. Did he work? From home, I think she said. What was he? An accountant, I think. They lived in the village. His-their-house was-
Can't remember. Burned to ashes anyway. Doubt he'd've had a chance. But at least, with Anya, I can be sure she's dead. Horrible, how easy you can accept that, the fact that the person you love the most in the world is gone. Oh, my heart's been ripped out of my chest. Well, there it is. There you go. Never mind.
Except I do mind, but what to do? It's keep going or stop and die. Some instinct or drive, something in me, won't just let me lie down and quit. It's not the responsibility for the kids that keeps me going. That's getting it backwards. That's why I seized control when the sirens went. It was my excuse for living. Anya would have approved.
"Just because I'm dead, Paul, doesn't mean you can give up."
No ma'am. I know that, darling.
"Keep going. We'll be together again one day."
Yeah, right. Now I know that's my imagination. Anya would never have said anything so trite, so twee, not even to motivate me. She'd been raised a Catholic, but lapsed long ago.
She was the most honest person I knew.
When you're dead, she'd told me bluntly, once, you're dead, that's it. You're a match that flares in the dark. You burn a few seconds and then you go out. A little poetic, but it was the small hours of one morning and we'd been smashed on bisongrass vodka and a couple of joints. In vodka veritas. You have seconds in the dark. Out of the dark and back into it. You have to use it while you can. Don't waste it.
It would be nice to think of my survival as my tribute to Anya, that I'm doing it for her, but-
"Paul?"
God damnit. I turn to Jean. "What?" My voice is gravel.
Her teeth are chattering too. Hard to tell in the gloomy backspill of light from the torch, but I think her lips are bluing from the cold.
"We can't keep going much longer," she whispers. "Look at us. We're nearly all in. The kids must be finished. I don't know how they keep going."
"Yeah. I know."
"We're gonna have to stop soon."
"I know." But where? That's the big question, isn't it?
I'm about to confess I have nothing left, no ideas, when I become aware of something. A current in the sluggish water, pulling the boat sideways.
"What-"
I flash the torch. There's a sound too, a new one-I've missed it from being so lulled by the repetitive journey. It's water, rushing. I flick the torch-beam ahead. It skates along the wall on the left, and then plunges through into darkness.
"What's th-"
Something's punched a hole in the tunnel wall, or it's caved in. What could do that? I don't know. But water's draining through the hole, pouring through.
We draw level, and I use an oar to brace us, stop us sliding through till I know.
I shine the torch through the hole.
Water slides down in a low black gleaming slope, into a deep pool-no, not a pool, a small lake, on the floor of a great big fucking cavern.