Chapter 88: War

Odile

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There were several things that could have killed Odile. So much devastation was happening at more or less the same precise moment in time that there was an embarrassingly rich choice of lethal candidates. But whichever it was, it happened far too suddenly and with absolutely no warning for Odile to take evasive action, not that there was much she'd have been able to do anyway.

The intense blistering heat alone was more than enough to kill Odile even though the explosion's epicentre was over a kilometre away. But if it hadn't been that or the searing temperature, then the abrupt onrush of air into the suddenly opened vacuum would have dashed the life out of her as her charred body was smashed doll-like against the walls of houses that had suddenly buckled into ruins from the same unimaginable force.

It could have been the intense heat, sudden impact or even the lethal radiation that killed Odile. Like a marionette with strings cut, Odile and her freshly broken limbs were thrown back and forth against buildings and lamp-posts: a fresh spurt of blood breaking forth after each collision. If by some miracle there was still a breath of life in her this was surely extinguished when the walls of a house propelled across the street along which she'd a moment ago been walking crushed her shattered body against the walls of another and she was buried under several tons of rubble. Her skull was crushed and an arm visible through the rubble was bent into several impossible angles.

Odile didn't even see the mushroom cloud or hear the explosion. The searing heat and radiant light that instantly burnt out her retinas reached her before any associated sound. Her lover Edith was somewhat further from the epicentre of the explosion which was detonated more by navigational error than design in Lancaster's outermost suburbs where it could have been of no conceivable strategic advantage to whichever of the Americans, Scots, French or Irish military command that had launched the nuclear-tipped device towards the by-now obliterated Republic of England. But Edith's further term of life was barely a moment longer than Odile's.

Her attention was instantly drawn towards the window of the room where she'd been sitting through which burst a blinding flash of light. There was also a weird whistling that wasn't quite what she might have believed would herald the end of everything in the world that either she or Odile had ever known. Edith's eyes were scorched but as she wasn't immediately blinded, she could glimpse the rising column of smoke and dust four or five kilometres away. For Edith her the heat was more painful than terminally lethal. Her flesh wasn't so much roasted as severely singed. But Edith's demise and that of everyone else in the Lancaster town centre happened when seconds later she was caught in a maelstrom of tumbling buildings and other unexpectedly mobile street furniture from which she couldn't possibly flee as the winds rushed inwards towards the source of the explosion and flung her repeatedly and mercilessly against whatever hard object there was until, like Odile, there was no life remaining in a body that was crushed, battered, bleeding, scalded and in severe shock.

Neither Edith nor Odile ever believed it would end this way.

Probably nobody did, including the military officers who'd unleashed humanity's nuclear arsenal in one final pyrotechnic display that lit up the surface of the moon and was more than enough to bring a brightly-lit end to all that was left of human culture and civilisation. There were no doubt shelters in China, Siberia, New Zealand and the Pacific Ocean where the last remnants of the human species might survive a little while longer, but not necessarily for many more years.

It was without doubt the end for the Republic of England and for everything associated with it. There would be no more English art and culture. No more rural retreats. Those who survived were as equal as any other in their wretchedness with only ill-health and the prospect of slow death from radiation to look forward to. Their brief future history would be plagued with endless recrimination and mutual blame during which the last remnants of civilised values such as sexual and racial equality would be very much forgotten. There was no prospect of help and salvation from a scientific community that had unwittingly brought about its own destruction and that of everyone else. Perhaps survivors with a conscience such as Roland might strive to help the desperate millions, but with what resources? The future was a desperate one in which human dignity was lost forever and where the distribution of food, shelter and clothing, however compromised by disease and radiation, would be determined more by luck and bloody combat than any concept of desert or fairness.

It was strictly incorrect to say that the apocalypse had arrived without warning, although there had been a significant failure in the early-warning systems that were meant to sound moments before the weapons of mass destruction arrived. But what real use would they have been as thousands upon thousands of lethal missiles were launched all over the globe and, as an afterthought, over England? But as so few resources had been allocated to civil defence it was likely that the alarms would never have worked anyway. So much of the government's limited resources had been set aside for war-readiness, famine-relief, quarantine against plague, blighted crops, rising sea-levels, violent weather events and the impossible-to-satiate demands of the rich and powerful.

In any case, whatever mistake it was that had triggered the international exchange of every ounce of thermonuclear destructiveness the world's governments had stored over the last century and a half was almost certainly not the conscious and deliberate choice of a political or military leader. The legacy of creaky software systems and over-complicated administrative procedures was just not able to cope with a modern world that was increasingly beleaguered by mediaeval blight and where most people now lived in pre-industrial ignorance. And those who might survive now faced a future that would resemble more a prehistoric than a mediaeval past. This was the return to an age in which the human being was only one of several species of animal struggling to survive by chewing carrion and dodging predators.

This desperate future was the ultimate outcome of the fantasies of those who held the belief that humanity was somehow uniquely blessed. Perhaps they had faith in the divine providence of an elevated being with a remarkable physical likeness to the hominid male with a grand plan so obscure that no one really understood it, least of all those who most unquestioningly believed in it.