by Lee, Frazer
“Child lock,” Tom muttered.
Dieter looked at him quizzically and Tom indicated the master window switch mounted on the driver’s door.
“Oh.” Dieter hit the switch, opening Tom’s window.
As the glass descended, cool polluted air wafted in from outside. Tom inhaled it, enjoying its metallic artificiality as it chilled his nostrils and throat. Carried on the air, the unified voices of the crowd, shouting as one, “No way, no way, no new runway!”
“What are they chanting?” asked Dieter, his own window remaining resolutely shut.
“Environmental protest,” Tom answered. “Airport wants to expand, looks like these guys don’t want that to happen.”
“Can’t stop progress.”
“No, but they’re having a damn good go at it.”
The rows of bodies nearest them were being held back by a single line of police officers who had formed a human chain, arms linked together at the roadside. Every now and then a ripple passed through the scores of protesters like a Mexican wave at a sports stadium. Each undulating swell of bodies tightened Tom’s throat. He could see the police were finding it difficult to keep their chain from snapping, clinging to one another for dear life like passengers atop the deck of a ship on a stormy sea.
Dieter joined the line of traffic crawling through the tumult of human bodies and noise. The red braking lights of the hatchback upfront flashed in warning as the vehicle’s driver slammed on the brakes. Dieter put the pedal down too and they halted with another whiplash-inducing lurch. Something was happening up ahead. The sound of the crowd had changed somehow, going from a unified chant to a colossal, defragmented roar in the space of milliseconds. Tom peered over the dash but all he could see was the red glow of the car lights in front, and a confusion of bodies beyond.
The roar grew and Tom glanced left to see the human chain of police officers buckle suddenly, their linked arms disentangling to let the tidal wave of protesters come crashing through. Within seconds they were upon the rental car, placards crashing against the windshield, feet slamming against the hood as people climbed up onto the roof to avoid being crushed in the stampede. The chanting continued amidst the animalistic roar and spread to the protesters standing atop the cars. They began to stamp their feet along with the chanting and Tom was alarmed to hear the metal canopy, under which he and Dieter sat, buckle with each tribal footfall.
“We have to get out of here,” Tom said, his voice loaded with alarm.
Dieter glanced around and then his eyes met Tom’s. Bodies were pressed up against and around the car. They had nowhere to go. Even if they could manage to force their doors open, climbing out now would place them in the crush of the crowd. Trapped inside the car, they watched as yet another mighty surge of bodies pushed more protesters into their path.
This surge was different though; whereas the previous movement had felt like it was driven by some kindred purpose, this one seemed to be the result of blind panic. The protest was changing shape, taking on the aspect of a struggle for survival rather than a righteous stand. The chanting turned to frightened screams and howls of aguish as protesters were knocked against each other. Some fell beneath the torrent of human limbs, crushed underfoot by their fellows. Others were wedged up against the line of vehicles, gasping for air and unable to free themselves as they were pinioned by the sheer dead weight of bodies behind them. The tidal wave hit Tom’s side door and the car rocked and tipped in Dieter’s direction. For a breathless moment, Tom thought the car might topple over, but as the protesters on the roof held on for dear life, the vehicle righted itself.
A cold stinging sensation exploded across Tom’s left eye as a hand penetrated the inside of the car. In shock, it took Tom a few seconds to realize his window was still open. A protester had gotten wedged up against the car so tightly that he had tried to protect himself by putting a hand out to steady himself against the car, managing to strike Tom’s face in the process. Tom looked up at the protester, who was struggling to free himself like a bear in a trap, snarling and cursing as yet more insufferable pressure was visited upon his limbs from the press of bodies behind him. Their eyes met, a strange meeting through the dark frame of the car window. Tom saw just how young the protester looked, he couldn’t be more than twenty years old. The boy’s hair was a tangled mess of dreadlocks barely restrained by a colorful knitted Alice band. Tom felt a tightening against his chest and saw that the protester’s arm had become ensnared in his seat belt. The kid’s eyes were almond shaped and a deep hazel color, giving his face the aspect of a frightened rabbit’s as he struggled to free himself from the seat belt. The more the boy struggled, the tighter the belt pulled against Tom’s chest, squeezing the very air from him. He glanced out the windscreen and saw a blur of bodies as his vision turned misty. Gasping for breath, he felt he might pass out any second. He clawed at the seat belt, trying to force a thumb under it to pry it away but it was squeezing him tighter than a boa constrictor and he couldn’t get a purchase on it. Tom felt a warm, sticky trickle creeping down from his eye socket to his cheek. He touched the warm spot and studied his fingers. He was bleeding from the blow through the window. Tom turned to Dieter, who was sat absolutely still in the driver’s seat, knuckles as white as snow as he gripped the wheel in abject terror.
“Drive,” Tom gasped.
Dieter looked at him, mouth agape.
“Just drive.” Tom’s voice was no more than a pained whisper.
Dieter gunned the engine.
Chapter Seven
“What the fuck are you doing?! Stop, you crazy Yank bastard, stop!”
The protester was still entangled in Tom’s seat belt and found himself being dragged along by the suddenly moving car. Inside, Tom had managed to twist his upper torso to face the door, and was gripping the seat belt and trying to wrench it free from the kid’s forearm. The mad scene was underscored by the panicked wails of protesters as they struggled to escape the path of the oncoming rental car. Dieter’s teeth were locked in a grim rictus as he accelerated through the morass of human bodies.
Now the crowd’s shock at the car’s movement turned to rage and they started lashing out at the vehicle as it crawled past them. Blows from placards and fists rained down on the metal skin of the car like hailstones. The sound was deafening and, as he struggled on with the seat belt, Tom imagined this was what a war zone must feel like to a soldier. He and Dieter had become idiot infantry, lumbering through some foreign land in the perceived safety of their vehicle while all and sundry took a pop at them. The protest had turned from peaceful banner waving to a free-for-all brawl within a matter of minutes. The ensuing atmosphere had begun to feel palpably nasty to Tom.
Fear gripped him like paralysis. If they had to stop, they surely would be dragged from their car by the people they had, in essence, tried to mow down. Violent images of him and Dieter being beaten to death by the angry placard-wielding mob flashed before his eyes and he put all of his fear into removing the seat belt from the young guy’s arm. Using his right arm, he managed to locate the catch holding the buckle in place. It took several attempts to press the little red button down with his thumb, and then he got to work on the problem area of the belt with his left arm. Pleas and obscenities gushed from the kid’s mouth as Tom wrenched and pulled at flesh and belt in equal measure. Tom used his right hand to twist the kid’s arm as far back as it would go, and his left to pull at the belt with all his might. The protester howled with pain as pinpricks of blood blossomed across his forearm. The edge of the seat belt was flaying his skin, shearing off downy little hairs as it went. Tom continued pulling with one hand and pushing against the protester’s chest with the other. Then the kid screamed and fell backwards into the braying crowd.
The crushing discomfort of the seat belt left Tom’s chest instantly. He breathed deeply, but found little respite in the air that filled his lungs. It smelled of fear—of all the rank sweat and ripe breath coming from the crowds of protesters all around t
hem. Their numbers closed around them, blocking out the already faint daylight. Dieter was forced to take his foot off the gas as the sheer weight of numbers made their current escape route and velocity impossible. The engine dipped as the crowd seemed to let out a collective sigh and, for a moment, Tom felt stillness. It was as though he had passed through into the world reflected in his wing mirror; the image distorted and slightly off-kilter—soundless, and out of time. Then a sound, like that of a colossal wave crashing onto the asphalt, shook the car windows.
Tom looked on, awestruck, as a torrent of water slammed into the crowd of protesters beyond the windscreen. The blast knocked them away from the car, scattering them like they were rag dolls, their screams swallowed up by an artificial ocean wave. It was like something from a disaster movie. Tom looked to the right, across Dieter, and saw the source of the rapids. A row of police vehicles was advancing on the protesters’ flanks, a huge water cannon taking center stage. Riot police officers marched either side of the vehicles, each one decked out with protective helmet and clear reinforced plastic shield. The riot cops fanned out around the perimeter of the crowd to capture the stragglers as they ran to escape the Niagara jet of the water cannon. Tom watched as bodies skated past, unable to withstand the power of the blast. Road signs and advertising hoardings buckled. Young trees, some only saplings that were still encased in clear plastic tubing, were uprooted from the concrete sidewalk. A woman slipped and fell facedown on the tarmac. She lifted her head and Tom saw blood dribbling from her nose. Yet more riot police waded in and lifted her to her feet, dragging her away. Tom peered out the side window to see where they were taking her. A group of police vans had assembled at the edge of the car park entrance. Scores of protesters were being treated there for minor injuries sustained in the stampede. Some of their fellows were in mid-argument with the police, shouting at them in protest at the use of the water cannon. Others had already made the mistake of getting physical and Tom watched as a couple of the more irate offenders were dragged away to the police vans by a half-dozen or more riot cops.
Tom stroked the tender flesh above his solar plexus where the seat belt had done its worst and glanced back at the airport terminal. They had traveled approximately a half-mile toward their destination and, already, he felt like getting on the next available flight back home. A sudden violent rapping on Dieter’s side window put Tom’s heart into his mouth. They glanced at each other, then at the motorcycle cop out the window—it was the same guy who had pulled them over during Tom’s unfortunate attack of the giggles. He gestured to Dieter to back up, then to kill the engine. The officer had placed them in a row of cars containing other travelers who had become caught in the waves of protesters. Dieter did exactly as instructed then he and Tom waited their turn to be processed and questioned by the police. It was going to be a long evening.
The impromptu Q&A session at the police force’s pleasure kept Tom and Dieter sitting around for a total of four hours. They both repeated their stories a total of three times, to three different officers, in three different interview rooms, the last of which was a barely heated portacabin. The biting cold coupled with lack of sleep had made Tom irritable and he couldn’t help but snap a couple of times during what had, by that point, begun to feel like an interrogation.
“Are you going to keep me here indefinitely?” he’d said, answering a question with another question rather than give the stock answer he’d already learned from the two previous interviews.
“Just as long as it takes,” the rotund police officer had replied.
The officer, a fellow called Travis, had had an unlikable face and demeanor; all red cheeks and puffy eyes. He’d wheezed between sentences and had often coughed before finishing them, adding to the torturous delay. During one such coughing fit, Tom had fixated on the man’s temple, where a thick vein protruded from his receding hairline. It looked like a huge earthworm had burrowed under his skin and was wriggling to get free. Tom had looked away from the rasping man’s reddening features and wondered if the vein might burst.
Maybe if it does, he’d thought, I can get out of here sooner rather than later.
No such luck.
The cop had rasped a request for a plastic cup filled with water from a junior officer and, gulping it down noisily, had continued questioning Tom for another half hour. By that time, Tom had to admit defeat and dutifully reeled off his blow-by-blow recollection of events from the moment they left the terminal to the arrival of the cavalry and its water cannon. He’d left nothing out; hoping his attention to detail might curry favor with the pen-pushing jobsworth who sat opposite him. Nothing that was, except for the part about the motorcycle cop and Tom’s embarrassing fit of the giggles. That minor detail had been on a “need to know basis” only—and he had decided the fat man certainly did not need to know. The chubby officer had scribbled notes in a little flip pad furiously as Tom recounted the moment where the young, dreadlocked protester had struck him through the window and gotten trapped in the seat belt. The officer had asked him if he wanted to press charges, but to Tom the incident had already become a thing of the past, an unfortunate accident. Officer Travis had looked a little disappointed with Tom’s reply and remained silent as he circled something in his notepad with his well-chewed pencil.
Over at last, the interview was rounded off with a request for Tom to provide contact details in case the police needed any further information, so Tom dug out the address of the guest accommodation in Douglass from his hand luggage. The fat guy raised an eyebrow when Tom admitted he was unable to confirm exactly how long he’d be staying there, so he also gave him The Consortium H.Q. address in California.
“Enjoy your stay in the United Kingdom,” Travis said without much enthusiasm; adding, “and try to stay out of police custody.”
Tom bit his lip at the fat man’s glib parting shot and chuckled inwardly.
Yeah, you’d crap yourself if you ever met one of San Francisco’s finest, thought Tom as he recalled his one and only brush with the law on his home turf following a minor parking violation. He glanced at the cop and realized what was perhaps the starkest difference between the U.K. police and the ones back home—no guns. Even the riot police he and Dieter had seen earlier, charging into the crowds with Perspex shields raised, had not been equipped with a single sidearm between them. Instead of obvious firepower, this land was one of harsh words hidden behind seeming civility; the past four hours had been testament to that.
Tom popped the address of the guest accommodation back into his bag, closed the zipper and headed for the door. Glad his detention at Her Majesty’s pleasure was over; he now had the joy of an airport hotel room to look forward to. He was keeping his fingers crossed there would be a bathtub. Only a long, hot soak could save him now.
Tom stepped out of the stifling chill of the prefabricated cabin into the tactile, freezing cold of night and found Dieter leaning up against the gunmetal hulk of the Ford Focus like the captain of a ship. There was no way on God’s green earth he and Dieter would be driving through the night to get to Douglass, thought Tom, he was completely wiped and they’d be better off starting afresh in the morning. Dieter had been waiting twenty minutes for Tom and it turned out they were on the same page, as corporate speak would have it. Arriving at the same conclusion, Dieter had used the wait time to get on his smart phone and book rooms at the nearest available hotel to the airport. Both too tired to speak, they drove the short distance to the hotel parking lot in silence across the urban landscape that had become a battlefield just a few hours earlier. The only indication that there had even been a violent protest was the occasional crunch of a placard as it was crushed beneath the blackly indifferent tires of their rental car.
The hotel was a redbrick budget affair two lanes of tarmac away from the entrance to the airport parking lot. As they drove into a bay near to the main entrance, Tom glanced up and saw the hotel crouching over them on its concrete stilts, looking like some weird cubist nightmare agai
nst the evening sky. Purple floodlights helped exaggerate the building’s sheer size and ugliness. Backlit advertising displays announced All you can eat breakfast deals and free wi-fi access (for twenty minutes, hourly charge thereafter).
Dieter caught Tom’s look and his hand hesitated at the ignition, engine still running.
“Like me to try somewhere else? This was the nearest that still had rooms.”
“No, no,” Tom replied. “It’s perfect.”
“Want to check in then regroup? Grab a bite to eat?”
Dieter was eyeing the golden arches reflected in the rear-view mirror. Tom glanced at them too and bristled at the thought of gulping down a Big Mac and fries with a side order of uncomfortable silence. Besides, he found it vaguely distasteful to have flown halfway across the globe to Europe only to pay a visit to the monolithic giant of American fast food. He glanced, instead, at the illuminated advertising boards punctuating the dead concrete space between the rental car and the hotel. The image of a giant pepperoni pizza floated in the night, that staple of European foodstuffs. At least he would be sampling local cuisine, in however tenuous a form.
“I’ll get room service,” Tom mumbled quietly, marveling at the almost three-dimensional way the pepperoni slices had been rendered on the advertisement, making them look bigger than the average hotel pizza ever turned out to be. Tom had eaten lousy pizza in lousy hotels many times on his travels. The experience always provided him with a kind of reliable disappointment—a taste of home.
Dieter killed the engine and they heaved their luggage out of the trunk and headed inside to check in. As soon as his key card was in his hand and he’d confirmed the room had a bathtub, Tom made his excuses and left Dieter at reception, heading for the elevators. The big man looked almost grateful to have been given the chance to chat up the receptionist, a pretty brunette with Lucy emblazoned on her name badge. She was a big girl, positively curvaceous in fact; she could fend for herself. Tom had already forgotten which room number Lucy had told him was his. He glanced at the room number scribbled on the branded keycard holder. The glossy paper holder bore a reminder; Don’t forget to hand your key back at Reception on check out. His room number was 507. Fifth floor. He swiped the card in the elevator keycard reader, hit the UP button and waited to ascend.
