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At the start of the fifth week, Roberts was growing weary. His face was
drawn with tiredness and dirt lined the thick creases in his skin. The
tunnel was vast now, and the sound of the pumps keeping it dry echoed
in the huge space. We were all tired, but I was getting worried about
him.
How different we had felt two months before when we'd first got
funding. The caretaker government didn't have much money but it was
clear that the cost of driving around Vanessa Feltz was crippling the already fragile post-war economy. A tunnel seemed somehow both obvious and audacious.
No-one had tunnelled through flesh before. A rag-tag assortment of
engineers, surgeons and body piercers put together a plan surprisingly
quickly.
There were some that doubted she was dead. Maybe the radiation that had
made her grow could keep her alive. We were all just guessing. The war
had taken its toll on everyone's spirit, but in recent weeks a new
optimism had been gathering strength. Maybe this was an opportunity.
The Old World had burned, and more and more people were seeing that
that was a good thing. We could start again - draw a line under our
mistakes. The weapons America had used had balanced the climate, a real
grassroots socialism had flourished in the rubble and people were keen
to co-operate.
At times it felt like we were playing. It almost felt like fun. That was until the screaming started.
It happened as soon as we broke through the first dermal layer. It
didn't come from her mouth, but somehow from inside our own heads. A
haunting, pitiful sound. Familiar, yet alien. The death rattle of
someone already dead. The despair of the forgotten. After three days it
stopped, and the tunnelling stepped up, boring through fat, muscle and
bone. It was a shame that her vagina lay just too far out of the way of
the road - it could have just been propped open and would have saved us
weeks.
The rest of the body was coated in a thick plasticised glue. The
radiation had preserved her outer layer, but we could tell from the
smell that the inside was beginning to decay. It had been decided that
this was to be a monument. A monument to the past - the Old World's
ignorance personified, and a monument to the future - an elegant
solution to an immense problem.
In a funny way, Vanessa Feltz helped forge the New World.
05:57
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