The Fallen Read online

  Tim could see that the copper wasn’t doing these boys much good, except clogging their lungs and snaring them with the potent leaf. It was the same the world over: there were the owners, the boss men and there were the workers who did the dirty work and got very little. He was no Marxist, he understood that if people risked their money and time to invest in something, there should be a return. His politics were Social Democrat; high taxes for those who could afford them, to pay for the welfare of society as a whole, governed by the people, for the people. No super fat cats, but many slender ones and even more mice, trickle-down be damned. No taxes here were going towards social safety nets or democracy, just bureaucrats and the patronage networks that kept them in place, swinging precariously on their gilded threads over a chasm of anarchy. Mahmood was right about one thing though, there was a lot of copper here and they were standing inside a potential fortune. The tragedy was Mahmood himself was probably just scraping by, a hair above the rest. Sure the Chinese would turn this place around.

  “Mahmood”, Tim asked, “How much does the mine earn?”

  “Oh not much, Mister Tim. I can pay the men on my shift and what’s left I give to the Sheik who owns this land; he is an old man but kind, he cares little for business matters, what I have for myself I feed for my family and give for the mosque.”

  Tim believed half of that, but by Mahmood’s manner he doubted much money went past Mahmood once he had paid off those he had to; he was the kind of Muslim who went home from Friday prayers via the brothel.

  As they descended further into the gloom an unknown fear began to claw at the back of his mind.

  Chapter 13

  A mild panic set in around the conference table; scientists and political aids talking, shouting and taking out their phones.

  The Senator spoke. “Gentlemen, please put your phones away.”

  “My wife is about to get on a plane to Europe goddamnit!” shouted a man.

  “Nobody tells anybody about this,” said the Senator, “As your man said, this could be nothing and if it is nothing, a global panic is the last thing we want to incite.”

  “And if it is something?” asked Marius in his usual composed manner.

  “Then a global panic is the last thing we need. Sir, call your wife now, in front of us, tell her to not board her plane and tell her anything but the truth. The rest of you may do the same for your loved ones.”

  The man raised his phone and dialled. “Honey? Hi yes, yes I was trying to call you a minute ago, yes sorry – are you on the plane yet?” He paused. “Well have they closed the doors yet?” Another pause. “Look please just listen to me, I want you to get up from your seat and… no wait!” He looked up at nobody as the blood drained from his face. “She said that she had to go, she said that they were telling her to switch off her phone...She had to go.”

  The room descended into a frenzy of phone calls.

  Brian turned to Marius. “You came on your bike right? How quickly can you get to the Shasta Medical Centre in Redding?”

  “About an hour and forty-five, why?” said Marius, looking puzzled but intrigued.

  “It’s just a hunch, I’ll explain on route, but we have to go, now.”

  Together they slipped out of the maelstrom and ran to Marius’ bike, a comically large 1940’s vintage Indian motorcycle with brown leather bucket seats.

  “Only the one helmet I’m afraid,” said Marius.

  “Then I’m taking it,” said Brian. “Drive fast but get us there alive, this may not be the end of the world you know.”

  Marius started up the bike. “What’s in the hospital that’s so fucking vital?”

  “The MRI scanner!”

  “What?”

  “The MRI!” Brian said again, but his voice was drowned by the engine. “Just drive!”

  They sped through the darkness along California 299, the tree-lined highway that ran from the Hat Creek Radio Observatory to Redding, the nearest town of any size. Brian noticed that everything illuminated by the headlight and the full moon seemed suddenly visceral, the way it always should have been but wasn’t. He rationally put it down to the impending doom but tried to take in as much as he could, smelling the air and looking up at the sky. The calm before the storm and with it a freedom from the trivial things that dominated daily life. None of them mattered anymore, all that mattered in that moment was making it to the hospital as quickly as possible.

  An hour and forty minutes later they arrived outside Shasta Regional Medical Centre. Marius took out his chain to lock up the bike but Brian grabbed him by the collar and dragged him towards the door. “No time, let’s go!”

  People in the half-empty waiting room looked up as the two grown men fell though the door and jogged across the lobby.

  The stern receptionist looked up at them, thrusting a piece of paper at Brian as he neared the desk. “Sir – you’ll have to fill this in and wait…” They pretended not to hear her.

  “My mutti – my mother is very sick, very sick indeed, excuse us!” shouted Marius as they ran past.

  As they got to the stairs, Brian scanned the board. “It’s got to be here somewhere, MRI, MRI, MRI…come on!”

  “You mean ‘Magnetic Resonance Imaging Room’ – third floor, look,” said Marius, “Also look behind us, run.”

  The receptionist was now pointing at them and speaking to two out of shape, yet hefty security guards who turned to look at the two men who had dared to refuse to check in.

  Brian threw open the fire-door and bolted up the stairs, Marius following. As they reached the third floor of the stairwell they could hear heavy footsteps pounding the steps a floor-and-a-half behind them.

  “Left or Right?” said Brian

  “Shit it doesn’t say,” said Marius scanning the hall and spying a pretty nurse. “Excuse me miss,” he said in his best unruffled British accent, “Could you point us in the direction of the Magnetic Resonance Imaging Room?”

  The nightshift nurse couldn’t help but smile, “Sure, it’s just down the hall on your right.”

  “Thanks!” said Marius with a slightly awkward wink and then ran with Brian at full pelt down the hall.

  “Hey!” shouted the nurse but they weren’t listening. She turned to see security burst through the stairwell door and pointed like an angry mother at the two figures disappearing around the corner. “They went that way.”

  Brian and Marius reached the MRI room; outside a doctor and nurse sat at a desk looking at a computer screen. Without stopping they ran past and into the chamber, slamming the door behind them, Brian holding tightly onto the handle. The doctor was already trying to force his way inside, demanding they open up and Brian could see the two security men coming up the hall behind him.

  “Grab that chair!” said Brian pointing to the only object in the immaculate white space, besides the scanner itself, “Stick it under the door handle!”

  “Not until you tell me what the hell we are doing in here.”

  “Just fucking do it Marius and I’ll explain!”

  Marius put the chair under the handle, preventing it from being turned and sat down on it with his back to the medical staff, who were pounding furiously on the door. He crossed his legs in his peculiar European way and calmly looked up at Brian. “Well?” he said.

  “Well, I don’t know much about MRI scanners, but one thing I do know is that they are built in rooms that are specifically designed as a heavy duty Faraday cage.”

  “Ah, I did not know that – but I see your reasoning – if this swathe is a powerful band of electro-magnetic radiation, you think this will protect us…?’

  “Yes the cage should direct any radiation around the outside of this room, leaving us protected,” said Brian.

  “ – But I see three problems with your plan Brian: One, that we are organic and the EMP should not effect us; Two, that you should unplug that scanner just in case; Three how long are we going to be able to stay here before the two gorillas outside break down this door
and throw us to the ground?”

  “You forgot four.”

  “Four?” asked Marius

  “Yes, there is also the problem of the girl inside the scanner.”

  Marius noticed the small feet sticking out of the white cylinder at the heart of the device. “Ah, yes, there is that.”

  “Open this door at once!” Shouted the doctor, who was now joined by a distraught looking mother in addition to the nurse and security guards.

  The mother was screaming. “Please, just let my daughter go!”

  “This is great,” said Marius, “If nothing happens with the swathe, at least we can guarantee our world is fucked yah? Goodbye S.E.T.I., hallo Redding County Correctional Facility.”

  “Marius, if I am wrong, I am truly, truly sorry; and if I am right, well we’ll all be sorry - just make sure that chair stays under that handle; if the door opens the cage won’t work.”

  Marius looked unconvinced. “Yah, for sure - hey Doctor, please can you stop trying to break the door, it looks expensive and we will be coming out shortly anyway, we will not do anything naughty I promise.”

  The Doctor paused for a moment, then rattled the handle with renewed fury, glowering at Marius through the copper lattice in the small glass window.

  “Some people will just not listen to reason you know? I wish for their own safety we could let them in here too, but I think they might not believe your story,” said Marius.

  Brian was pacing back and forward in the scanning room, looking anxiously at his watch. How could Marius be so damned calm and cocky even in this situation? It didn’t make him feel better; which he was sure would be Marius’ falsely altruistic justification for his obtuse manner. The truth was that Marius was a sociopath, something he openly admitted and revelled in, saying it explained his intelligence, charm and general distaste for most other human beings; most of whom inexplicably liked him in return. Brian unplugged the scanner just in case it fried and a scream came from inside the machine.

  “Ahhhhhh! It’s dark in here!” yelled a girl’s voice. “Get me out! Get me out!”

  “Great,” said Marius, “That’s all you Brian. I really should stay on this chair.”

  Brian grabbed the girl’s ankles and dragged her out of the tube. “Sorry about that.”

  “Who are you?” she demanded, “You’re not allowed to touch me! Where is mom and Dr Stevens? Mom? Mom?”

  “Fuck,” said Brian, as the woman outside began to get hysterical, “Maybe we could, you know, pass her out somehow?”

  Marius raised his eyebrows, “You were the one who said if we opened that door the cage would not work, yah?”

  Brian paced the room. “Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

  “Besides,” said Marius, “I am not sure we can trust those lovely people not to, you know, rush us?”

  “Well we can’t stay in here for much longer, I don’t know why but I thought this would be easier?” Brian turned to the girl, “Look can you be good and just sit and wait there for a minute, OK? We just need to, uhh, make sure the big machine is working, OK?”

  Then it happened. The banging on the door stopped, the light bulb exploded, sparks shot out of the wall plug and it briefly burst into flame before melting into a smoking blob. The room was plunged into darkness, compounded by the white-noise screaming of the now terrified girl. Marius took out his Zippo and snapped a flame to life. The faces at the window had gone.

  “Jesus Christ!” Marius was wild-eyed and manic, “You were right, Jesus Brian, you were right!”

  Brian stood speechless as the smell of melted plastic filled his nose and the high-pitched screams pierced his mind. He was right. He was in shock.

  Chapter 14

  “Hey who turned out the lights!” said Asefa laughing.

  Mahmood cursed through his sugar-burned teeth. “Allahh! They have steeling my generator fuel again. Somebody will lose his hand!”

  Asefa pulled out his pocket flashlight and Tim put on his headtorch. Never leave home without your head-torch or your Leatherman; and not the crappy kind that takes one-hundred-and-twenty-seven hours to cut your arm off with.

  “I’m sure if we wait here for a couple of minutes, someone will figure it out,” said Tim.

  Mahmood was shaking his head. “I think you are forgetting where you are Mister Tim, my workers need the whip to motivate them.”

  Tim wasn’t sure Mahmood was being metaphorical about the whip but he resolved to wait to see if the problem somehow fixed itself.

  They had been down the mine for what seemed like hours, the darkness musty around them. He looked at his watch; it had only been forty-five minutes – but the last five or ten of those by torchlight had been quite unbearable. “Shall we try and make our way back to the lift Mahmood?”

  Mahmood looked nervous. “Mister Tim, it is dangerous to walk in the mine without the good light, there are many ways and many of the… big holes.”

  If Mahmood considered it dangerous, it probably was highly dangerous by Tim’s standards, but he also didn’t like the idea of staying in the mine any longer than was necessary, especially without a canary. He looked at Asefa, who gave him a nod as if to say he agreed on the need for action.

  “Sorry Mahmood,” said Tim, “I think we should carefully try and make our way back to the lift; here look can’t we follow this wire, all the lights are linked to it?” He panned down the tunnel with his headtorch, highlighting the wire running between the lamps back up the way they had come.

  The three of them, Mahmood in the middle, made their way back along the maze of shafts, trying to follow the way with the most wires if they came to a junction. Eventually the air became warmer and the tunnel started climbing more steeply upwards. The passage came to an abrupt stop where the lift had been. Old iron rungs protruded from the rock face but Tim couldn’t see if they went all the way to the top. In any case the climb looked daunting and then there was the small problem of the lift blocking the shaft at the top. But Tim could see daylight coming through a decent size gap, he guessed between the lift and the entrance.

  “Hello! Hello?!” he yelled as hard as he could. He waited for an answer but couldn’t hear anything.

  Mahmood, whose courage had returned, was yelling insults up at his absent workers and growing increasingly incensed. “I will make them pay for this, I am sorry my guests. I do not know what has happen, maybe army has come for my mine. Yes army, you came too late my friends to save us, army is here with Chinese, I know it to be true. Allah!”

  Tim tried to calm the man. “Let’s not jump to conclusions. I’m sure there’s just a problem with the generator and they are trying to fix it.”

  “All of them?” said Mahmood, “I think not, they should be back from prayers by now and the mine guard he is never far from the entrance. Allah be Merciful, some evil has befallen us.”

  “Hello!” Tim shouted. Nothing.

  Without saying a word Asefa started climbing up the iron rungs.

  Tim grabbed him by the belt. “Asefa are you mad, those look like they were put in by the British a hundred years ago.”

  “Exactly why I trust them,” Asefa laughed and disappeared up the shaft.

  Mahmood waved his hand, “Let the African go.”

  Tim knew what he meant and hated it; nowhere was racism stronger than Africa, where your degree of blackness determined your worth; the blacker you were the lower your status, or vice versa if the ruling class happened to be dark. Under the circumstances he refrained from making the sort of cutting remark he normally would to chastise such parochial attitudes. He squinted up into the blackness of the lift shaft, but could not see his friend.

  Chapter 15

  “Jesus Marius.” Brian could feel himself sweating and his mouth was dry. “What the fuck happened?”

  “I think you already know, or we wouldn’t be in a room protected by three-hundred and sixty degrees of copper wire,” Marius replied, getting up from the chair and peering down through the copper laced glass in
the door.

  Brian felt his scientific rationality slowly returning. “Well at least we weren’t incinerated.”

  Marius was staring at something that had had transfixed him behind the glass. “You may still live to wish we were.” Brian joined him at the window; through the gloom he saw five bodies lying motionless on the floor, hands resting limply by their heads.

  Before he could stop him, Marius said, “OK, let’s do this, yah?” and opened the door.

  “Wait, fuck Marius how did you know it’s safe yet?”

  “I don’t, but I can smell burning so we should leave, now. Jesus just look at this.” Brian examined the door; the contacts of the conductive cage embedded in the frame were blackened and the wood around them was smouldering gently.

  The girl who had been sitting, crying on the edge of the MRI scanner, ran to the half-open door and squeezed through into the dim corridor. “Mom! Mom!” She ran to her mother’s body and cried, “What have you done, what’s wrong with Mom? Mom! Mom! She’s dead!”

  Marius bent down next to the mother and felt for a pulse. “No not dead, just sleeping,” he said to the girl, then quietly to Brian, who was checking the doctor, “They’re unconscious, I think we should leave here before they wake up.”

  “We can’t just leave them Marius, who knows how long it will be before they wake up.”

  “You are right – who knows? The whole fucking world could be like this, what do you plan to do, take turns kneeling by each of their fucking bedsides?”

  The smell of burning was getting stronger and Brian thought he could see the far end of the corridor getting hazy with smoke. “What about the girl?”

  The girl was screaming at them. “You gotta help my mom! You gotta help mom!”

  Brian had never liked kids and he knew Marius hated them; ‘Lions eat other Lions kids’ was the sort of thing he would say, only half joking. This kid was already annoying.