Tunnels 06 - Terminal

carefully stacked the bowls one on top of the other, then went to the front door and simply slung them outside, where they landed on the paved yard with a crash.
    ‘There – that’s all done,’ she said, rubbing her hands together.
    ‘That was great, Martha. Thank you,’ Chester said, slightly surprised at what she’d just done, but not about to comment on her very peculiar form of domestication.
    ‘Yes, thank you,’ Stephanie said.
    Martha, who hadn’t once looked in the girl’s direction, during or after the meal, was gawping at Chester with her usual wide grin on her face.
    ‘I’d better fetch some more wood so we can keep the fire stoked up,’ Martha said. ‘Want to keep it nice and snug for you in here.’
    Chester gave her a grateful nod, and as Martha went outside, he moved to the window where he could see her, and leant on the windowsill. Although she was around thirty feet away, she was aware that he was there and kept glancing at him and giving him that odd little wave.
    Chester pretended to scratch his nose to hide the fact that he was talking. ‘Stay on the other side of the room,’ he told Stephanie. ‘You don’t know how close Martha came to killing you. What the hell were you thinking when you followed me? Anything can set Martha off. She can turn into a right nut job.’
    ‘I don’t understand – why did you go off with her, then?’ Stephanie asked.
    ‘Because I didn’t care. I don’t care and, anyway, it’s better than hanging around Parry with his stinking lies.’
    ‘He didn’t know what Danforth was planning at the time,’ Stephanie countered.
    ‘But he did afterwards, and he was too much of a coward to tell me. That’s what hurts,’ Chester said. Although he was full of anger, he managed to grin at Martha as she gave him another wave. ‘Better if we stop talking now. She might get suspicious.’
    ‘First tell me what you said to her,’ Stephanie demanded.
    Chester sighed. ‘I had to come up with something quick. It wasn’t easy for me to say it, but I told her that she was my mother now my real mother was dead. And I also told her the only reason you and I were friends was because you reminded me so much of my sister.’ He took a breath. ‘You know that she was knocked down and killed by some idiot in a stolen car when I was young?’
    ‘I didn’t know that,’ Stephanie said quietly. ‘Is that true? Do I remind you of your sister?’
    ‘Nah,’ Chester replied. ‘You’re nothing like her. She was shy and sort of dumpy and short. But I had to give Martha a good reason or she would have assumed you were my girlfriend, and it would have been lights out for you.’
    ‘So am I your girlfriend?’ Stephanie asked after a moment, searching out Chester’s eyes with her own.
    Chester tried to suppress a small smile, not least because Martha was heading back to the farmhouse with an armful of firewood. ‘I suppose you are. If both of us live long enough for that to mean anything.’

    Werner was far enough away from the Kübelwagen that Karl couldn’t hear him muttering and cursing after he’d finished the conversation with his brother over the radio.
    If it wasn’t enough that they’d endured a hailstorm of rock and half the jungle seemed to have been dropped around them, Werner was finding what his brother had to say very difficult to believe. Something about a new tower in which Jürgen had seen views of the Earth from outer space. Had his brother completely lost it, or had he been drinking? ‘ Gott im Himmel ,’ Werner spat, kicking a chunk of stone lying on the track, then wishing he hadn’t as he discovered it was heavier than he’d anticipated.
    Hobbling the remaining distance to the vehicle, he got Karl ready, and they set off on foot. The trail, now littered with debris, was impassable in the small-wheeled Kübelwagen . So their options were either to fetch the half-track from where Jürgen had left it and try to bulldoze their way back down the trail and return to the city, or to walk all the way to where Jürgen was.
    And Werner was in turns concerned for his brother and curious about what the usually level-headed anthropological scientist had been babbling about over the radio. But the evidence was all around him that something significant had taken place, and Werner wanted to get to the bottom of it for himself.
    However, the journey turned out to be far more of a challenge than he’d anticipated; once he and Karl had left the main