After the fires

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.