by Simon Morden
‘That way is out. It may take our weight, it may not. It may kill us anyway.’ Stanislav spat on to the ground, and it hissed. ‘Who goes first?’
Dalip wanted to nominate himself. The bridge wasn’t going to last. If he didn’t go now, he’d not do it at all.
‘Together.’
They ran through the molten bitumen, side by side, sending up splashes of black liquid. Their thick overalls helped protect them from the worst, even though the distance was something they might have jumped if they’d had clearer heads and more time.
They were out and through, and in the darkness and smoke, it was easy to miss that the corridor turned sharp left. There was suddenly a wall rearing up at them, and a moment’s confusion as they swung their torches to see which way to go.
Stanislav fell, tripping on a raised concrete plinth that jutted out into the corridor. Dalip was past him before he realised, and came back.
Words were impossible. Every breath was like being stabbed. He knew he wasn’t strong enough to drag him, let alone lift him. All he could do was tug urgently at the man’s sleeve and shine a light in his face.
Stanislav’s already flattened nose dripped blood, running over his top lip and into the corners of his mouth. He spat, and spat again, and dragged himself up. Their faces were very close together and, despite their situation, the one thing that struck Dalip at that moment was the look of utter, snarling determination on the other man’s face.
Stanislav roared at the fire, giving it his pain and anger and frustration, and it was enough to carry them both to the next door. They threw themselves through, heaving it shut behind them.
A stairwell. They were in a stairwell, with a narrow caged lift running up the middle of a metal spiral staircase. The air was thick with dust, and it was blessedly cool.
Now they were no longer running, no longer living from one heartbeat to the next, they both stopped. Dalip knelt on the ground in amongst the dirt and debris and pressed his turbaned head against the gritty floor. He could still feel the intermittent vibrations, dulled by the thickness of the cloth, and hear the drawn-out groans of tortured rock and iron.
Stanislav patted his shoulder. ‘Come. We must make a report. To someone.’
Dalip ached. Everything that wasn’t red raw was bruised. ‘Okay.’
‘You did not need to come back for me.’
‘I – I did. You looked after me more than I did you.’ Dalip sat up and used the end of the stairs to stand. With their torches dangling from their wrists, expressions were unreadable.
‘You are just a boy. You have the rest of your life. And I … I. Ah well. What does it matter?’ Stanislav slapped him on the back again. ‘Come. We must climb.’
‘What do you think’s happened?’
‘I do not know. It is big, whatever it is.’ He started slowly up the stairs, and Dalip’s torch caught the other man’s boots. The soles were baked black like the bottom of an oven.
3
Mary looked behind her. She could hear the metallic pinging of footsteps on the stairs they’d just climbed themselves.
‘There’s someone coming.’
There were five of them. Four left from her own group, just one stray from another. How could they have been reduced in number so quickly? The darkness and confusion and, above all, the burning heat simply seemed to have swallowed them up, one by one – this one falling, that one trying to pull them back up, another just faltering to a stop, exhausted, and letting the oncoming tide of destruction take them.
All they had were those little green glow sticks, those and their work-wear. Everything else had been lost. Her bag, her clothes, left back at Leicester Square, had to be nothing but ash by now.
She had no real idea of where she was, either, only that there had been emergency exit signs and that they’d seemed like the only hope of escape. Going back had been out of the question. Going on had been just as unlikely: she’d been on her last legs, and she was used to running.
She hadn’t had to persuade the others to follow her. They’d just piled in behind her, fewer than she’d expected, and blundered around in the dark until someone had found the way up.
It had been almost too late: the naked metal grille they’d had to pass, which led back out to the tunnels, had been glowing cherry red, and the heat had been almost too great to bear.
She couldn’t remember if there’d been more than five of them at that point. Perhaps they’d lost someone else between then and now, too frightened, too tired to carry on.
There were five. And shortly there’d be more.
She moved to the back of the group, holding her glow stick high. There was a little door in the wall at the end of the short corridor where they were huddling, and just as she reached it, it opened at her.
She shrieked, and that brought a cry of shock from the other side. A bright white light struck her full in the face, and she raised a hand to shield her eyes.
‘Point it somewhere else, you fucking idiot.’
‘Sorry.’
The torches turned their aim toward the ground: the damage was done, though. Night sight ruined, Mary couldn’t see anything.
‘How many of you are there?’
‘Two. There’s two of us.’ The voice that spoke seemed very proper, very English, despite the hoarseness. ‘How many are you?’
‘Five.’ There’d been twenty of them when they’d started. How could there be only five left? ‘What’s happening? Why is everything on fucking fire?’
‘Do I look like I know?’
She couldn’t tell what he looked like, but someone with that accent ought to know.
‘Well, do you?’
A voice behind the first man spoke. ‘Miss? Please move out of the way. We would like to come in.’
She shuffled to one side, and two dark shapes edged past. They headed towards the remains of the cleaning crew, leaving her with the door. Noises – bad noises – echoed from below, grinding and groaning and booming, as if a monster was loose in the tunnels.
Perhaps there was a monster loose in the tunnels. It made as much sense as anything.
She pushed the door shut, and leaned on it for a moment’s rest. Then she realised that the men would try and leave through the emergency door to street level, and she hurried to stop them.
‘Wait, wait.’
Her sight was returning slowly. One of the men, the shorter, wider one, had already turned his torch off, and was indicating to his taller companion that he ought to do the same.
With the bright lights extinguished, and only the steady green glow from the sticks, it became easier to see.
Easier also to tell that the way out, the door that led to the pavement outside, was outlined in an inconstant red.
Stepping over the legs of the other women, the three of them stopped at the heavy fire door with its push-bar mechanism. Bolts secured the door top and bottom, but there was a slight gap at the edge of the frame.
‘We can’t go this way, and there’s no other way out,’ she said. ‘The whole street’s on fire. I mean, where’s the fucking fire brigade when you need it?’
The taller man – he had something on his head, a bandage of sorts, that made him look taller – risked putting his eye to the crack and peering out.
‘It’s burning. Everything’s burning.’ His shoulders slumped. ‘I thought we were—’
The other man checked for himself, taking his time. ‘We cannot stay here. All we can do is choose when we leave.’
Mary reached forward and poked the man. ‘Oi. We can’t go out in that.’
Even in the gloom, she could feel his ire, and she drew her hand back.
‘Listen,’ he said, and she prepared herself for a lecture.
But he said nothing, and she decided that she would listen.
Over the close-by panti
ng and soft moans, behind the more distant, tortured noises rising up from beneath, she could hear a dull roar, like a static hiss. That was new. And it was getting louder.
When she’d had her fill, she asked him, ‘What is that?’
‘I do not know,’ he said. ‘but I do not want to be here, in this tiny corridor, when it finds us. Also, the building above us will be on fire. At some point it will collapse. We have to leave before it falls on us.’
She looked around. Everyone was watching them.
‘Do you want to die here?’ he growled.
‘I don’t want to die out there.’ She realised that she might not have a choice. ‘There must be someone coming for us?’
‘London is on fire! If we are going to live, we have to save ourselves, as we already have done, as we will do again.’ He spoke past her, to the others. ‘On your feet! Up! We must be ready.’
He didn’t wait. Before Mary could stop him, he brought up his foot and landed it squarely on the push-bar. The bolts banged back, the door swung open.
The narrow street was burning. Fire poured from the shattered windows in the building opposite. A line of cars, wreathed in thick orange flame and black smoke, were parked along the kerb, sitting on their steel rims, reduced to metal shells. The twisted shapes merging into the molten river of tarmac could only be bodies.
As the wall of heat drove them back, the taller man reached out, straining for the push-bar, to drag the door shut again. Instead, he fell into it, and it began to swing out wide.
The air itself seemed to tear in two.
Instead of fire, there was water.
A wave slapped through the open doorway, and a gust of wind blew into the smoke-filled corridor, dragging a spiral of soot outwards and away. It curled into a blue sky studded with clouds shaped like torn sheets, and a bird – a seagull – darted by at head-height. It wheeled back for a second look, before flapping once and soaring towards a tall headland of jagged black rocks.
The bottom of the cliff was strewn with boulders that extended out in a line as far as the door, and the sea washed over them, hissing and foaming, then drawing down with a rattling gurgle.
The light was bright and clean.
Another wave spilled across the threshold, and the tall man – not wearing a bandage, but a turban – struggled back in from where he’d fallen, half in and half out the door. The lower half of his orange boilersuit was already soaked and dark.
Mary looked behind her. It was the same corridor, the same smell of heat and burning, the same taste of smoke and ash, the same sound of failing steel and masonry. The same people she’d cheated death with, filthy, dirty, wild-eyed and desperate.
Then she tried to take in what was beyond the door: the land, the sea, the sky.
‘What the fuck have you done with London?’
She pulled the guy with the turban behind her, and hung out of the doorway, fingers clinging to the frame.
She felt the wind and the waves against her face. The spray was cold, a sudden shock after the heat, and she wiped her sleeve against her cheek. It came away wet.
Mary was afraid. The fire, the burning buildings, the cindered bodies: she’d been expecting that, had steeled herself to see it. But not this, this wide-open vista, nothing recognisable, no sign of brick or glass or plank or metal or dressed stone.
‘Mama? Mama, can you see this?’
Mama roused herself enough to sit up. She’d fared badly. Her feet and hands were raw and, where not raw, blistered.
‘Mary, girl. I see it. I see it.’
‘What do we do?’
From below them, a boom sounded, rattling the walls, shaking the ceiling. Tiles and brickwork cracked and flew, tiny pieces of shrapnel that cut and stung.
The man with the shaven head and broad bouncer’s shoulders stared out at the line of rocks that pointed towards the shore. His face was set, his body tensed.
Then he turned and spoke to them all: ‘Nothing has changed. Either we die here, or we take our chances out there. I know which I choose.’
With that, he stepped over into the sea. The water closed around his ankles, lapped up his shins. He bent over to steady himself, one hand against the wet, barnacled boulder, and took another step. His foot slipped slightly, and he had to use both hands to stay upright. When he glanced back, he was smiling, his teeth white against his soot-streaked skin.
The roaring from inside the station was too loud to ignore now. It sounded like an oncoming train, but overwhelming and inexorable. Everything was shaking, and this, surely, was the end. The stray, the Chinese-looking woman who’d joined them in the tunnels, didn’t hesitate. She jumped out and over, and didn’t look back.
‘Up, Mama, up!’ Mary dipped down and dragged at Mama’s arms. ‘Everybody up.’
Mama responded slowly, uncertainly, and Mary rounded on the man in the turban. ‘You. You’ve got to help.’
He did. He got behind Mama, pushed her towards the open door. Behind him, the red glow started to build.
‘Hurry. Out. Out.’ He reached out for the other two women and they climbed up him, almost pulling him over in the process.
Mama was still in the doorway, blocking it, feet against the jamb, hands braced against the uprights. Mary wasn’t gentle. She put her hand in Mama’s back and heaved her into the sea, letting the others jump past her and pick her up.
Then it was her and the turbaned man – boy, he was just a kid, like her – facing each other across the width of the open door.
‘This. This is fucking nuts, right?’
‘Where are we?’ His brown eyes were wide and wild, struggling to take any of the impossible view in.
‘We’re in London.’ She looked over her shoulder. The narrow door that led from the staircase to the corridor creaked, and jets of flame bored through the gaps. She watched Mama struggle and wail as a wave caught her full on, and heard the others shriek at the cold. She put one foot into the sea, felt the water rise up, fill her boot. The rest of her was burning. There was no choice, really. ‘And now we’re not.’
She pulled on the door, ready to swing it back shut, and the boy, already wet to his waist, jumped in again to help her wrestle it home. Neither of them gave any thought as to what the door might be attached to.
There was an order to it. The bar inside had to be raised again and the metal latch caught before it would close. They got it wrong the first time, and the second time too until the boy held the door to reach up and set the mechanism up right.
The corridor was on fire. Mary heaved as hard as she could, and felt the bolts catch. She staggered back, and caught her first sight of the façade of a glazed red-brick tube station entrance embedded in a lone stack of rock, the endless ocean behind it.
She fell on her backside. The sea rushed in quickly, so that it didn’t matter how nimble she was at standing again. The moving water dragged at her, and she had to hold on to the black boulder, studded with sharp white shells, to stop herself from being swept away.
She looked up again at the lintel, where the weathered letters were picked out in cream: Down Street. Above that was the hint of an arch, where it seemed to merge into the natural rock. The door was still there, surrounded by bricks. Painted grey, with a blue sign fixed to it.
Even as she read the writing on it, it faded and grew more indistinct. Now she couldn’t tell if there had been a door or not, whether the bricks were simply jointing in the rock, whether the letters over the door were just a trick of the light.
Then it was gone. No more than a slab of wet rock, imprinted with a vague impression of a door. If the light changed, or she looked away, even that would be lost.
A string of orange boilersuited figures stretched from the lone stack in the sea, along the half-covered blocks, to the rocky foreshore.
The boy’s turban was deep blue, dirty and scorched in pl
aces, wet with spray. He had a sort-of beard, one she’d mistaken for soot stains. He was staring back at the place the door had been, and he, like her, couldn’t quite believe anything anymore.
‘Are we dead?’ he asked her, even as the water washed up his back and made him shiver. ‘We should be dead, right?’
A wave caught her, making her body rise and she lost her grip. As she scrabbled at the rough rock for another handhold, she grazed her palm on a jagged edge, and her skin split. Blood bloomed in red beads along the cut, and when she was able to get her feet down again and brace herself against the pull of the sea, she inspected the damage.
It wasn’t deep, but the salt water stung. She turned her hand palm out as evidence.
‘You might be dead. I’m not.’
The first of them, the man the boy had arrived with, had reached the shore, and was climbing out of the surf. The others straggled behind him. Mary wiped her hand on her thigh and started after them, clambering over the rocks when the waves went down, stopping and holding on when they came up again and tried to wash her off.
She’d gone only a little way when she looked back. The turbaned kid hadn’t moved, still fixated on the blank slab they’d all emerged from. He reached out and put his hand against it, pushing at it and seeing if it was real.
‘Leave it,’ she called. ‘Leave it, okay?’
‘Where are we?’ he shouted back at her, repeating his earlier question. ‘Where?’
‘We’re not being burnt to death in some disused station corridor, that’s where.’ She turned her face to avoid a direct hit from a wave. ‘Did you want to stay there?’
‘No.’ He didn’t sound certain.
‘Then get your fucking arse in gear and get moving. The water’s getting higher and I’m not fucking drowning for you.’ She couldn’t swim. Float maybe, but not swim. If she got swept away, that’d be that, and it wouldn’t matter that she’d escaped the heat of the Underground that had claimed almost everyone else. So she moved faster, took more risks, received more knocks and scrapes, got everything wet.
