CHAPTER 33
Amman, Jordan
Sally, Tallis, the doctors, the ward nurses, three janitors, and the people from the Jordanian atomic ministry were all crowded around the TV in the medics’ staffroom.
The footage from Poland was apocalyptic.
Salt sloughed from the wrecked engines of buses and cars in long streams in the wind, snaking above the ground.
There was more footage too, from what the news anchor said were cameras shielded with silver.
They showed a tornado column of light that looked like amber-violet smoke powering right up into the atmosphere, as though an invisible hydrogen bomb had detonated over the salt mine.
A voiceover was explaining that it was thought to be something called salt light, and until today, it had been recorded only at a salt mine in England.
Even low-level exposure tinted glass violet and ruined electronics, and somehow the flow of electricity halified.
There was a new word, Tallis thought numbly, that they were going to hear a lot. Halify: turn to salt.
High exposure, and people did too.
Silver blocked salt light, and you could catch it on film with a camera with a silver case and shutter. Aluminium was translucent, so it would protect electronics from very low exposure, and give you a hazier picture through a smartphone.
People in Europe were being advised to move if they were within five miles of a salt mine.
Amman was thirty-six miles from the edge of the Dead Sea. There was no word from the government about whether the city should be evacuated in case five miles wasn’t enough.
For the ninth or tenth time, she looked down at the picture of her and Sally that one of the doctors had taken. The silver-altered camera wasn’t ready yet, but they’d put aluminium over the lens of her phone.
As the report said, the picture was bad.
You could only make them out as hazy ghosts, because the aluminium blocked visible light, leaving only the salt light.
But salt light there was. You could see them both, spectre figures like the images that flickered in a dying fire.
The light clung to them, and the only dark voids in it were the silver beads in Tallis’s hair.
Nobody could say if that was enough contamination to eventually . . .
Of their own accord, her eyes dragged to the ward again, where in four beds, there were human-sized husks of halite.
Sally touched her shoulder, and she blinked twice. The news report was over. Nobody was moving.
“We’re not contaminating anything else,” he said.
They had checked. Even if they held something for a while, the light around them didn’t rub off.
It wasn’t enough to disrupt their phones.
“I don’t know about you, but if we’re going to die, I don’t want to do it on a fluorescent-lit hospital ward. I want to go home.”
Traffic in Amman was famously bad, but usually there were cabs; private ones like Tallis was used to, but also others that ferried along set routes like buses.
Now, though, none of the rideshare apps were working, and at the taxi stop close to the hospital, a crowd of people was trying to negotiate with things that weren’t money—jewellery, jackets, food.
It was cold, but when Sally looked down at her, Tallis shook her head.
She didn’t want to join a scrum, especially when she didn’t have enough Arabic to know what was going on, and when neither of them had anything to bargain with but their clothes.
“Can we walk?” she asked.
“Not to your hotel,” Sally said. “The airport is fifteen kilometers away. I live just off Rainbow Street. You’re coming home with me.”
“Rainbow Street?” said Tallis, discombobulated. It sounded like something made up for a children’s television show.
“Mm. It’s a lot closer than the airport.
Still a few kilometers, but . . .” His green eyes strayed to the road, which was a broad highway fast congealing into gridlock.
Not far away, drivers were starting to open their doors and stand up to see what was going on up ahead.
“Honestly, I think everyone will be walking soon if they want to get anywhere.”
“Will your family not mind that you’ve brought home an extra person during a national emergency?” Tallis said.
“I live by myself.”
She paused, because there were some things he wasn’t doing, and wasn’t saying. He wasn’t frantic. He wasn’t saying, My God, I need to check if my parents are all right. He wasn’t saying, I need to call my girlfriend. “Are your parents not in Amman?”
He drew a deeper breath that hitched partway, as though he was about to explain something. But then he only said, “No.”
The both watched as couple of teenagers on foot jumped into the back of a lorry and ran away with crates of flour. The driver saw and climbed out, shouting, but then stopped when more men loped up and did the same thing.
Suddenly it seemed like a stupid idea to be standing still. They set off, quickly.
The outskirts of Amman were not made for pedestrians.
Highways swept into the city in an estuary of tarmac, and now, thousands of headlights shone in the deepening twilight.
All of them were going back the way Tallis and Sally had come, out of the city.
Almost nothing was heading in. The empty lanes under the huge signs flashing meaningless speed limits were thronged with people carrying bags, pulling suitcases, towing children.
Most were leaving the city. A well-dressed lady led past three beautiful racehorses.
Tallis’s phone flashed with a text message in Arabic. It was official, and she couldn’t make it out; her Arabic was up to children’s books and restaurant menus, and not much else. She showed it to Sally.
“The government are setting up a refugee camp twenty miles east of Amman,” he said, and drew his teeth over his lower lip. “Should we be going that way?”
“No,” Tallis said, solid. “Every disaster they showed on the news, the radius of the salt was only five miles. We’re thirty six miles from the Dead Sea here even at its closest point. Amman is going to be fine. A lot more fine than a refugee camp. Have you ever seen one?”
He shook his head.
“It’s hell. Even if there’s something like a good supply chain—it’s December.
We’d be in tents in the desert, and we have nothing with us.
If there isn’t a good supply chain . . .
” She pushed her hand through her braids, feeling for salt again.
No, still nothing. “I was sent out to the States once, when they thought they were about to have a meltdown. They evacuated a town, it was only about sixteen thousand people, but sixteen thousand people out in the Minnesota winter, with no interest from Washington because they cut disaster funding—it was the Purge after three days. I think we’ve got a better chance in Amman. ”
“What if the next one is bigger than five miles?”
“What if the next one is sixty miles? They’ll be buggered at the camp too.”
He was watching the lady with the racehorses too. “No, okay. Let’s go to mine.”
“That’s good, because I’m not refugee camp material. I’m an indoors hotel person. If it hasn’t got an adorable little cocktail bar, I’d rather turn to salt, thanks.”
He looked down at her for whole seconds. It was longer than anyone had looked at her for years. Tallis looked back, not sure what was happening now. “How are you not . . . terrified?” he said.
“I don’t think it would help,” Tallis said honestly.
“Are you religious?”
“No. Are you?”
“Of course,” he said, with a laugh that wasn’t really a laugh. “How are you coping so well? I think I have a shot at Heaven, at least, but . . .”
“No, it’s just that nobody would be upset, so I don’t mind. Nobody would even notice except my cactus. My passing will hardly leave scars on the world.” She smiled, aware she sounded glib, but she hadn’t said anything so true for a long time. “I’ll leave it as I found it.”
“That is the worst thing I’ve ever heard,” Sally said.
“No, it isn’t. You’ve seen the American news.”
He let his breath out, voiced, not a laugh or a sigh, just an incredulous catch high in his chest.
“Look . . . I think it will be fine,” Tallis said, more seriously.
“The apocalypse is very dull, it’s about being arrested for sitting on a park bench and not being able to get toilet paper.
People are panicking now, but it will settle soon.
They already know what salt light is and how to detect it: that’s good.
It’s going to be fine. Maybe not today or this week, but it will. ”
“Without money. Without . . . any mechanism to do anything? How are you going to fly home, how are we going to buy dinner for tonight?” he said, quite softly.
“Probably with some difficulty,” she said. “But we both have doctorates. We should be able to work it out.” She did her best innocent face. “I promise not to sell your favours for food.”
He pushed her, but he was smiling. “You are clearly enjoying this. It’s not normal.”
He was right. She should have been worrying about all the things he was talking about, but instead, she was thinking how good it was to have a chance to spend a few more hours with him.
It wasn’t a thing she would ever say aloud, but she was glad.
It was a few more hours of this bright feeling she would probably never feel again, even if she lived through all this.
People like Sally were rare. She doubted she would come across another.
“You don’t seem worried about your family either,” he said. “You must have a husband and kids, even if you think they wouldn’t notice if . . .”
“No. I’m not married,” she said, understanding now why he had thought it was terrible. “My brother’s in prison because he’s an evil sod who punched his girlfriend, and Mum joined a cult in Bournemouth. She’s probably loving all this.”
“Is it a . . . commit-suicide kind of . . .?”