by Mark Morris
"Cold?" he asked.
"Not really. It's just that creepy lightning. It gives me the shudders."
He set his chair opposite hers, wiping the seat with his sleeve. "Yeah, I know what you mean. It's like an omen or something, isn't it? But the bad thing's already been and gone."
"Maybe there's worse to come."
"Now there's a cheery thought." Steve took a pull on his cigarette. "Do you smoke?"
"No."
"Don't blame you. Disgusting habit." He dropped the stub and stamped on it. "So, I'm guessing you couldn't sleep?"
"I've done enough sleeping recently. I've already missed a lot of the fun."
"Yeah, it's been a riot." He smiled at her and she smiled back. "So, what did you do before you got shipwrecked?" he asked.
"I was a primary school teacher in Canterbury. You?"
"Retail baron slash rock star," he said, and grinned at her skeptical expression. "I owned a record shop in Peckham and played in a band."
"Did you sell your own records?"
"Sell is stretching it a bit. Stocked would be more accurate."
She laughed again, uncrossing her arms and moving her hands up and down her denim-clad thighs.
"I love your laugh," Steve said, then held up a hand in apology. "Sorry, that sounded like a cheap chat-up line. I just meant it's nice to hear someone laugh again. There hasn't been enough of it recently."
"So, what's your story?" Libby asked. "I know you and Abby are hoping to find your wife-"
"Ex-wife."
"Ex-wife and son in Scotland. But how did you survive in the first place?"
Steve told her. It had been only five days since he, Abby and the Beamishes had set out on their journey but the three days they had spent trapped with water swirling around them already seemed like ancient history.
"How did you get together with this boyfriend of yours, if you don't mind inc asking?" Steve said. "I mean, where do you meet dot-cone millionaires? And are there any female ones you can introduce nze to?"
Another laugh. Steve was loving the fact that this gorgeous woman was finding him so amusing.
"We were both members of the same gynm," she said. "Our eyes met across the elliptical trainers."
"Painful," said Steve. "Had you been going out for a while?"
"No. This was only our second date. I usually take things a bit slower, but it's not every day a bloke asks you to spend a few days on his luxury yacht." Suddenly she looked down at her hands and her voice grew quieter. "Poor Toni."
Steve wondered whether he should reach out to her. In the end he simply said, "Shall we talk about something else?"
She gave him a watery smile. "It's okay. It's not like Toni and I were really close. He was just... a nice guy, you know. Not really my type, if truth be told, but nice all the sane."
He knew it was crass, but Steve wanted to ask, So, what is your type? And he wanted her to reply, Well, if I'm honest, some-one like you. And then he would lean forward and kiss her softly on the lips....
"So, what are your plans?" he asked. "Long-temp, I mean?"
She shrugged. "I haven't thought that far ahead."
"Any family you want to track down?"
"My dad died when I was five and my mum died four years ago. They were elderly parents. My mum was forty-four when she had me. I was a mistake."
"A welcome one, I'nm sure."
She smiled a little wistfully. "Yes."
Steve was about to speak again when someone screeched, "Help! Help me!"
"That's Mrs. B," Steve said, jumping up so quickly that his chair clattered against the wall. He grabbed his torch from the windowsill and raced across the room, followed by Libby.
Mabel was standing outside the door of the classroom she was sharing with George. Her hair was a frizzy halo in the torchlight and her fists were clenched. She winced beneath the light and called in a quivering voice, "Who's that?"
"It's Steve, Mrs. B." He turned the torch round and shone it on himself. "What's up?"
"George woke up with chest pains," she said, "and then he just collapsed."
"Get Greg," Steve said to Libby. She nodded and hurried away. Steve ran past Mabel and into the classroom. His torch beam swept across the empty wheelchair, the metal frame of which reflected light in slick white flashes. He heard George before he saw him, his breath liquid and tortuous, as though he were gargling mud. The old man was lying on a mound of crumpled bedding atop a plastic sheet on the floor, and he did not look good. His face was reddish blue and his lips a livid purple, as though he were being throttled.
Steve's mind was racing. He thrust his torch at Mabel, who was hovering behind his left shoulder, and tried to sound calm. "Could you point this down at George so that I can see what I'm doing, Mrs. B?"
She nodded and took the torch, but seemed to fumble it, as if her hands were numb with cold. For a moment Steve was terrified she would drop it and that it would break, forcing him to try and resuscitate George in the dark. Then she got a grip on it, pinning her ailing husband in the spotlight. Steve tried to remember the basics of the first-aid course he had taken ten, twelve years ago. First check the mouth for obstructions, make sure the patient hasn't swallowed his tongue....
He dropped to his knees, peering into the old man's mouth, smelling the smoky sourness of his breath.
"Could you shine the torch down here, Mrs. B?" he said. "I want to check that George's air passages are clear."
The light became whiter, more concentrated. Under its harsh scrutiny the old man's purpling flesh looked ghastly, as though veins and vessels were erupting everywhere, suffusing the paper-thin sack of his skin with escaping blood. The light turned his mouth into a frothing red wound. Steve tried to blank his mind, then clamped his mouth to that of the old man's. He pinched George's nostrils shut with his left hand and tugged the man's lower jaw wider with his right. He blew air into the old man's mouth, trying to ignore the foulness of George's breath and George's foamy, curdled saliva mingling with his own.
The couple of minutes before help arrived seemed like an eternity. Steve was wondering whether to attempt heart massage (remembering his instructor's comment that you couldn't be halfhearted, that sometimes you had to go about it with enough force to crack ribs) when Libby, Max and Greg entered the room.
"How is he?" Greg asked, lowering himself gingerly to his knees.
"Not good," Steve said. "I've given him mouth to mouth, but he doesn't seem to be responding."
He moved aside to allow Greg access. After a quick examination, Greg said, "He's arrested." He glanced at Mabel. "Mabel, has George had his medication today?"
She nodded, her face fearful. "Yes. He's been taking it reli giously. I make sure of that." She hesitated. "Is he going to be all right?"
Greg glanced at Steve and said, "We're doing all we can, Mabel, but I'm afraid George is very ill."
"Oh dear," she moaned.
"Look, Mrs. B, why don't you give the torch to Libby?" Steve said. "Max, will you get the stove going, make Mabel a nice cuppa?"
"Sure," Max said.
"I want to stay," said Mabel.
Greg had tilted George's head back and had already started artificial respiration.
"I don't think that's a good idea, Mrs. B," Steve said. "You might find it upsetting."
"I want to stay" she said more firmly.
Steve shrugged. He certainly wasn't about to argue with an old lady in front of her dying husband. He sat back on his haunches and watched Greg working on George, feeling dismal and helpless.
"There's no response," Greg said finally. "Steve, can you give me a hand here?"
"Sure. What do you want me to do?"
"Can you move round to the other side and keep going with the artificial respiration while I start with the chest compressions?"
"No problem."
"Keep it as regular as you can. One breath every four seconds."
They kept going for the next ten minutes, until Steve was feeling
breathless and dizzy and Greg was dripping with sweat. Finally, exhausted, Greg straightened up, head rolling back on his shoulders. "It's no good," he gasped. "He's gone."
"Oh no!" Mabel wailed.
"Ain't there nothing you can do?" Max asked bleakly.
"Not unless you've got a defibrillator and a source to power it with," muttered Greg.
"Shit, man," Max said.
Steve rubbed his hands over his face, then looked around bleakly. At some stage Abby had entered the room and was now trying to console a sobbing Mabel, even though she herself was weeping. The torch was drooping in Libby's hand. Behind her stood Sue and Max. All three wore expressions of abject despair. The only member of the group who was not present was Marco, who-Steve thought with a sudden surge of anger-was no doubt still curled up in his sleeping bag, warm and cosy and lost in his dreams.
Nobody felt like sleeping. At first light they wrapped George in the duvet he'd died on and buried him at the edge of the football pitch round the back of the school.
It was a dismal day. A light rain was falling from a cement gray sky-the first since the flood nine days earlier. Steve and Marco dug the hole, using shovels they found in the caretaker's lockup. The ground was marshy, but ironically this made the digging tougher than it would have been had the earth been baked hard. Each time they removed a spadeful of muddy soil, the hole immediately filled up again with filthy water.
But at last they were done. Everyone filed out as they lay George to rest. Steve said a few words (like it or not, it seemed the position of leader-or at least spokesman-of the group had been foisted upon him almost by default); then they filed away, leaving Mabel to say her private goodbyes to the man with whom she had shared the past fiftytwo years of her life.
Not that he wanted to make an issue of it today of all days, but since Marco had crawled from his sleeping bag that morning, Steve had been monitoring his behavior closely. And so far he had been impeccable. He had seemed shocked, albeit in a subdued way, when informed of George's death.
"I was dead to the world. Someone should have woke me up," he mumbled.
"You wouldn't have been able to do anything," Sue said.
"Even so..." He glanced at Mabel. "Sorry about George," he said. "And sorry for what I said yesterday an' all."
It was a subdued party that set out later that morning on the next leg of their journey They left the wheelchair behind, of course, but took one of the shovels with them.
It was around midday when they heard the strange clattering that at first none of them could identify.
"What the hell's that?" Max said, swinging his gun from his shoulder, as if he believed the sound was the prelude to some fomn of attack.
The rest of them had stopped and were looking around too. "Sounds like a motor," said Sue.
"There, look!" Abby was pointing at the murky sky, excitement in her voice. At first Steve saw nothing but birds, wheeling high like flecks of ash. Then he saw the glint of light on metal.
"It's a helicopter," Libby breathed. There was wonder on her face. She glanced at Steve in gleeful hope. "Does this mean we're saved?"
"I don't know," Steve said.
"I would advise caution," Greg muttered.
"What makes you think he might be hostile?" asked Sue. Steve noticed that her fingers were resting idly on the butt of the Glock in her belt.
"I didn't say that. I just meant perhaps we oughtn't to get our hopes up," Greg said.
"It's not an official aircraft," said Sue. "Looks like a Robinson Raven, or a Raven Two. R44, I'd say."
"What does that mean?" asked Steve.
"R44, as opposed to an R22. Four-seater, not a two-seater. Like a family saloon."
"You know a lot about helicopters," Max said.
Sue shrugged. "Not a lot, but I know Robinson is an American company, and I'm pretty sure UK emergency services don't have any-but I might be wrong. We're more likely to use McDonnells or Eurocopters."
"So that helicopter might have come from America?" said Abby.
Sue smiled. "Not unless it was able to refuel somewhere over the ocean. No, I'd guess it's a business helicopter, privately owned. Is it the same one you and Abby saw, Steve?"
Steve shrugged. "It looks about the same size. And it was white."
As the helicopter drew closer, shedding rain and scattering birds, Abby, Libby and Max began leaping up and down, shouting and waving their arms. Sue and Steve waved too, though more sedately. Greg, Mabel and an uncharacteristically quiet Marco simply stood and watched the machine approach.
It was obvious the pilot had seen them. Not only did he circle them several tines, but at one point-although he was little more than a silhouette-he distinctly raised an arm.
"He waved to us! Did you see that?" Abby cried, her face shining with rain and excitement.
"Do you think he's looking for somewhere to land?" asked Max.
But after circling them several more tines, the helicopter began to move away.
"Hey!" Max shouted. "Hey!" Hampered by his rucksack and by the MP5 over his shoulder, he began to run after the helicopter, only realizing how pointless it was when he slipped and went down on one knee. "Shit," he said.
"Looks like he was on reconnaissance only," said Sue. "He would never have been able to take us all anyway"
"Do you think he'll come back?" Libby asked.
"I wouldn't count on it," said Steve.
They plodded on, and by early afternoon they reached the tangle of roads where the A5 passed under the A406 North Circular and the M1 began. Steve hoped that once they were on the motorway progress would be quicker. He was hoping, in fact, that they could up their mileage to a still-comfortable ten a day-though that would depend on whether the older members of the party could sustain such a schedule. He was hoping too that there wouldn't be too much debris on the road because of how light the traffic would have been at the time of the flood-though who knew how far and wide the country's snatched-up flotsam and jetsam might have been carried before being dumped back down like the accumulated crap from God's garbage can?
There was a danger, naturally, that the farther they walked the slower they would get, due to people picking up injuries en route-muscular stresses and strains, cuts and blisters. Also supplies might be harder to come by as they moved out of the city, and then of course there was the good old British weather.
So many factors to take into account, so many imponderables, so much that could go wrong. When it came right down to it, Steve thought, all they could really do was plow on and hope for the best.
Although they no longer had George's wheelchair to cope with, it was, ironically, because of George that progress had been slower than usual that day. Unsurprisingly, the death of her husband had hit Mabel hard and she had been shuffling along as though hauling a huge burden behind her. Of course no one had pilloried her about it, and in fact they were all tired, borne down by sleeplessness and grief. It had taken the appearance of the helicopter to raise the level of conversation above more than the occasional murmured comment.
As Steve had hoped, the motorway, with its wide lanes, was much easier to negotiate than the congested London streets. There was still a huge amount of debris, but it was scattered over a wider area and therefore easier to weave in and out of. As they started up the long road towards Scotland, Steve sensed a definite lifting of spirits and a willingness to pick up the pace. Hoping that Mabel wouldn't find it a struggle keeping up, he dropped back to keep her company.
"How you doing, Mrs. B?" he asked.
She looked up and gave him a watery smile. "Oh, pretty awful, to tell you the truth. In fact, I've just been wondering why I'm even bothering to go on."
Steve wasn't sure how to respond at first. Then he said, "Well, I suppose we go on because there's no other alternative."
"You know what I've been thinking?" she said as if he hadn't spoken. "I've been thinking what difference would it make if I sat down here and never got up again. Because my life's ove
r now, Steve. It's as over as the lives of these other poor souls." She indicated the dead bodies decomposing among the silt and debris.
"I can understand why-" Steve began, but Mabel interrupted him.
"Our lives, mine and George's, were over the minute that bloody wave came along. This world's not for the likes of us old codgers. You and Abby and Max and the rest of you... you're young, you might make a decent go of it. But I don't want this, Steve. I don't want to have to struggle at my age. And I don't want to be a burden either."
"You're not a burden, Mabel," Steve said, "and you never will be."
It was only when she smiled again that he realized how much she had aged even in the past week. "It's sweet of you to say so, dear," she said, "but I know you're all having to go slowly because of me, and that's not right."
"I don't think anyone's got much energy today," Steve said. "We're all upset about George."
"I know, dear." Her voice broke on the last word and she began to sob, her shoulders shaking uncontrollably. Steve wrapped his arms around her and held her until her tears subsided a little. Then he kissed her tenderly on the forehead.
"I never had a grandma," he said. "My dad's mum was killed by a bomb in the war and my mum's mum died of septicemia the year before I was born, so I never knew either of them. But if I had had a gran, I'd have loved her to have been like you."
Mabel thumped him lightly on the chest. "Go on, you daft beggar. Save that silver tongue of yours for young Libby."
"It's true," Steve said. "You're one of the reasons why this bloody world is still worth living in."
Mabel was silent for a moment, then said, "We'd better get walking again, or the others will be leaving us behind."
"I don't think we'll lose them," said Steve. "It's straight on till morning from here."
They resumed their interminable trudge. The layer of silt on the road stretched as far as the eye could see.
"You and young Libby seem to be getting chummy," Mabel said.
Steve blushed. "I like her. She's a nice girl."
"She's a lovely girl," Mabel said. "And she likes you too."
"You think so?" Steve felt a wriggle of pleasure in his belly. "I know so."
