How does it feel to burn? He wondered. Had he actually said it aloud? Or was it one of those others sharing his head now?
Sirens went up. Shouts.
Amid the chaos out there hovering on the fringe of touching distance, Johnny was a controlled ocean of calm, waiting to explode. He felt the successive impulses deep in the pleasure centers of his brain, shuddering with the perfection of the street carnival ripping up the village. He watched the police swarm out of their hive and into the inferno, wind fanning the flames that threatened to undo them all. He heard and savored the screams of flesh. Johnny stayed where he was, hidden in the over-shadowed recess. His eyes streamed as the smoke bit at them. He had no need of protection from the heat. None of them did.
Innocents began staggering out of their homes, into the street, stunned and confused. Johnny smirked.
Moving quickly along the side of the public house where the rain drizzled off the guttering with a sound indistinguishable from the fire across the street, Johnny peered through a frosted fly-window into the gloomy interior of the unlit ladies toilet. He didn’t have any sort of weapon to hand, so, waiting for the right sort of background noise, he clenched his fist and put it through the glass transom. The sound of it shattering was almost unnoticeable amid the screaming, laughing and shouting of the riot all around him. He used the heel of his hand to tap out the broken fragments still left in the frame, and then picked out the splinters embedded in his fist.
Johnny reached in through the window and popped the arm lock of the half-window beneath the fly. He perched himself on the sill, swung his legs around, eased himself down and to the floor inside The Railway House.
The toilet was lit by the fireworks of the carnival. He stood for almost a minute, listening intently.
He heard signs of life outside; nothing he could say for sure originating from the inside. The pub was eerily quiet; a vacuum where the sounds from outside were sucked up and swallowed.
He wiped the rain out of his face, ran half-knuckled fingers through his hair, brushing it out of his eyes.
When he moved his trainers made wet squelching sounds. He kicked them off, then peeled off his socks and walked barefoot into the snug.
A light shone through the small window of the gents toilet. Seeing it, Johnny’s smile burned with such intensity the flickering fire-shadow paled against it. By the sounds coming from outside more of the caravans had gone up. Johnny could feel the sudden change in temperature as fresh explosions ripped through the pub.
A Molotov cocktail of petrol and methylated spirits mixed in a thin Becks Beer bottle smashed through the window of the main lounge, igniting the carpet, the veering wind funneling in through the gaping window, fanning and carrying the flames toward the optics behind the bar. The flames took hold with dizzying speed. The heat was nearly unbearable, beating at Johnny’s back as he moved confidently toward the gents toilet, cooking his skin through the flimsy cotton of his tee-shirt. With one cock-eyed glance back over his shoulder, he pushed through the heavy smoke door and walked in, throwing more oxygen into the inferno behind him. Small fires followed him.
Jim Beckett was standing up against the porcelain trough, trying to put a stop to the steady stream of piss splashing his shoes. He appeared to be reading the latest line of graffiti, but Johnny knew he was too busy listening to the pandemonium outside and pissing himself. That made Johnny feel superior to scum like Beckett. He wasn’t pissing himself at the first sign of trouble.
“Well, well,” Johnny said flatly. He thought he sounded casual, dangerous. He liked the idea of sounding dangerous. Enjoyed the buzz it gave him. The rush of the hit.
Beckett had his hand clamped on his testicles, trying vainly to clamp the flow of urine that way. It wasn’t working. The pungent yellow liquid was dribbling out through his fingers.
“Jesus Christ,” his eyes were open impossibly wide, his pupils dilated. The barman was struggling not to look terrified. Instead, he looked like he was in the grip of a massive coronary.
Johnny walked up behind him, a silent stalker with his bare feet on the warming tiles. He took a hold of a hank of hair, tangling it around his fist and whispered in his ear: “You really shouldn’t have fucked with me, Beckett.”
“Oh God, I didn’t,” Beckett shrieked, letting go of his testicles. Tears streamed down his cheeks.
Johnny yanked his hand back and slammed Jim Beckett’s head into the same line of writing Jim had been occupying himself with, yanked it back and slammed it into the wall again, bursting the barman’s nose with a sound like nothing else. The cartilage ruptured, the bone driven back into his brain. Laughing softly, Johnny Lisker took the weight as Beckett slumped, and slammed his head into the wall again, lower down this time but still above the porcelain trough, and then again. He let Beckett slump, then kicked at his head over and over again. He did not let up until it had molded into the shape of the bowl at the base of the urinal and the heat from the fire in the adjacent room was unbearable even through the smoke doors.
Johnny checked for a way out back the way he had come, but the snug was rapidly being devoured by the blaze. Bench seats and seat pads on the wooden chairs were ablaze. The carpet was burning, lines of fire shooting across the floor like burning sulphur. It was another world through those doors. Johnny watched, frozen to the spot by burning curiosity, as large velvet curtains came crashing down and the bar erupted into a roaring furnace, bottles shooting corks, imploding, spraying alcohol in golden and clear rain-fireworks.
Johnny was mesmerized by the inferno behind the glass, privileged to have this first hand glimpse of Hell. But both curiosity and mesmerism burned out when the glass porthole shattered, showering his face and neck with molten fragments of fire.
Then it became a question of getting out before the conflagration added him to its growing list of victims.
The gents had a small window, much the same as the ladies, jammed shut by over-painting. Johnny hammered it out, using the heel of his bloody hand to knock out the jagged pieces of glass around the edge of the frame. With the blaze ripping through the Formica surfaces of the cubicles Johnny crawled through to find himself in the dim passageway that led to the car-park. There was smoke pouring from all sides of the building as he swaggered barefoot across the cindered car-park.
Chemicals buzzed through his system, and all Johnny could think was: this shit’s hotter than H.
And that wry little observation kept him laughing all the way to the big house on Mulberry Lane.
- 69 -
Ben Shelton’s legs tied up on him. He heard the Kid Pack roaring on his heels, the explosions going up on all sides as Molotov cocktails detonated; thought fleetingly of the woman called Kristy who, although she was standing beside him, he was never going to see again . . . and waited for the impact of the car as it punched into him.
The irony that he had hoped a similar scene with a young girl in his place would relaunch his writing career wasn’t lost on him. For one terrible moment, Ben thought he was going to die cursing God’s lack of humor, and then impossibly, the car stopped. Its rear end fish-tailed dangerously on the slick road.
He stood there like an idiot, realizing he was wrong, God did have a sense of humor, and right now he was about to prove it by snatching his death from the jaws of salvation.
“Either get in the car or get out of the way!” Barney Doyle yelled, gunning the engine to keep it turning over. Ben didn’t need telling twice. He started to run for the side door. A cocktail of oil and fire exploded between him and the car. Doyle slammed the car into reverse and backed up ten feet, yelling: “For the love of God, come on!” as he shouldered the passenger door open for him.
Ben threw himself into the passenger seat, slamming the door hard. Kristy was still fifteen feet away. He popped the button and cranked the handle to open the rear door, while Doyle threw the white squad car into first and floored the accelerator. They were already bulleting forward in a rubber-burning wheelspin as Kristy clung on
to the doorframe and dived in.
She expected to see Jason in the driving seat. Not this time.
Doyle was wheezing, sucking air with high, whiny gasps. He stood hard on the accelerator, harrowing for the centre of the rearing pack of kids. He hammered the horn, but they weren’t about to give up their quarry that easily. He kept seeing Evie, down at the restaurant by herself when the bastards arrived, and that in turn kept his foot hard on the gas.
The kid with the baseball bat did not try to dodge like the others, he met the police car head on, swinging the bat straight overhead with both hands as if he thought one good swing could stop the car in its tracks. It slammed into the bonnet, and then his legs crumpled as the momentum of the car flipped him up head first into the windscreen. The impact smashed his forehead. Teeth and blood as well as part of his tongue broke from his screaming mouth. Hungry eyes stared in at them, and then the body was up and over the roof.
It hit the floor, neck broken, but still somehow managed to drag itself to unsteady feet, head lolling.
Ben watched the kid, a boy he recognized now from a house across on the other side of his own street, lurch three steps with the baseball bat held high before his broken limbs succumbed and he collapsed in a broken jointed sprawl. Then the pack fell on him too, fingers shredding through the few layers to get at his skin.
“What the hell’s happening, Ben?” Doyle hissed, having to wrench his eyes from the sickening display of savagery through the rearview mirror before he ended up putting the police car into a wall.
“What the hell’s happening here?”
- 70 -
“Holy fucking Christ,” Andy McKenna yelled into the turmoil of the Operations Room – suddenly all he could see was the writing on the wall; the map of Westbrooke gridded down to scales for the hillside search, the circle of faces, Lisker, Slater, Sanders, Kenyon, Richards, Kelso and back around to Lisker. The sparks of fire scribbled across the ceiling insulation. That last image was in his head but he could not convince himself that it wasn’t going to happen just the way he imagined it.
The computers had gone down with the first lights out. He’d lost his grip on things as soon as the lights died. Everything was coming down around his ears. He felt okay until he tried to move against the flow. People were doing what he would have bid them, without him having to tell them, which made it easier. He stood at the epicenter of the police hut-cum-headquarters ushering his men and women into Christ alone knew what. Sandy Peterson had appeared clutching his face, the skin burned and blistering, still alight as the cocktail of white spirit and snowflake detergent was absorbed into his flesh, almost as soon as he’d pushed through the door into the playground. The caravans out there were all blazing wrecks. Jack Kemp had carried him through to the interview room trying to calm him. Mckenna didn’t have a clue what had happened to either of them. Kemp could quite easily have been out there facing down the hurled bottles, flaming cocktails, stones and bricks.
If he stood still it didn’t hurt too much; he could handle it if he didn’t move. It felt as if he’d been bound up with barbed wire. Each slight movement tore him up.
McKenna exhaled slowly into the dark, his heart hammering.
So he stood there, listening to his men doing his job while he stared at the spot where his own hands ought to be, imagining he saw the heads of one hundred back ants crawling through the skin of his palms. If there was one thing Mckenna hated more than any other, it was black ants.
“Shield!” someone yelled above the chaos.
McKenna snatched onto something that made sense: “Get the shields! Don’t go out there without visors.”
From behind him, “We’ve got the generator going, Skip.”
“Generator, great. Give me some lights will you?”
The lights flicked, threatened not to make it back, and then blossomed. A ragged cheer came from a few of the men, but most were preoccupied strapping their visors and riot shields on.
“Power to the terminals. We’re back online!”
“Are the radios working?”
“Charging up now,” the constable replied.
“I want a message out to Hexham and Newcastle: riot, full Status Code 1. Got that?”
“Sir.”
“Oh, Jesus,” someone moaned.
Now the lights were back Andy McKenna felt more than a little foolish about his panic attack, and against all of his better judgment excited in a way that he hadn’t been since joining the Force.
“He’s not going to help us any more than Buddha or Mahatma. Now give me a shield.”
That was what they needed, to see him take the initiative away from them. Confidence is a strange beast at the best of times. “We’re going to go outside, and we’re going to use anything we have to teach these kids some respect.”
- 71 -
Alfie Meecham made himself a comfortable nest amid the heaps of worn-out coats and dirty blankets he had dragged out onto the footboard of his favorite single-decker bus.
The storm was kicking up mighty fierce, scaring the worms up out of the ground.
A host of winged scavengers had taken shelter up on the banks of the Bus Graveyard. Alfie could make out their little black bodies coming down off the banks as the critters made their occasional forays into the muddy pan of the quarry.
He scraped a spoon around the inside of his battered cooking pot, slopping up one last spoonful of cold beans to chew over. The beans ended up being spat into the dirt at his feet. His small fire was struggling against the rain, but it hadn’t died. The old man snuffled in a noseful of air, hawked, then spat again. The wad of phlegm sat yellow against the mud beside the guttering fire.
The posse was playing silly buggers, and Alfie had just about had enough. Nosy was living the exact opposite of his name, curled up and quivering in the mound of blankets beside Alfie. Nipper, Felix and Rosie were pacing the perimeter of the Graveyard. Nuke and Hopper, though, were behaving strangest of all; in the last few hours, the big shaggy white dog had taken to standing guard over Sasha’s cross, posturing and protecting both at once. Twice now shivers had wracked Hopper, like tiny aftershocks starting way down in his hind legs, pumping up and out in the form of sickness. Alfie was plenty worried about his little gang of Heinzers. The old man tried to listen to whatever it was the mutts were trying to tell him but today he was just as deaf as any other day. Their barking was a mystery of sounds.
He was scared. That was hard to admit after living for so long with nothing left to hurt him.
Nuke loped away from the wooden cross. The dog reached the base of the banks, turned there at the edge of the junkyard and started howling into the sky, hackles high. The first of the explosions detonated less than a mile away.
“Jesus mother Mary of Christ,” the old man muttered, not caring what kind of familial relationship he had just created for the Savior. He wanted out of this place and he wanted out now. “Nuke! Nuke! Get back here you sonovabastard buggerin’ dog! Nuke!”
But Nuke wasn’t about to stop. His powerful legs took him bounding up the slope in an eighth of the time it would have taken Alfie to follow. The sound of the shaggy white crossbreed’s flight was awful to hear. Nuke bayed one low lingering syllable after another. Alfie watched as the pack leader disappeared into the darkness beyond the rise of the Graveyard wall, knowing it was only a matter of seconds before the rest of his peculiar family abandoned him for the excitement of the blaze.
All except Nosy, who matched Nuke with his own low keening cry without leaving the cocoon of blanket and coat he had nested down in.
Alfie took a shallow swig from his bottle of cheap wine and then hurled the still half full bottle into the small fire. His own explosion of shattered glass and flame flared as the fire was fuelled by the alcohol in the wine.
Cursing, tears streaming down his cheeks, Alfie Meecham gathered a few coats together and wriggled into them. He kicked out the last remnants of the fire, scuffing dirt over the twigs.
Cr
adling Nosy in his arms he started climbing the slope Nuke had so easily negotiated minutes before. It was hard work for the old man. “Someone’s gotta bring the mutts back home,” he muttered into Nosy’s flat ear. A plume of fire lanced heavenward like a rocket on Guy Fawkes night.
- 72 -
Daniel Tanner pushed his way through the screaming children, strong, immune to their fury, untouched as windows in the houses along the street shattered and new fires started. A lot of screaming was down to the police. He turned on the spot, and threw his hands in the air. A passerby might have seen a man offering benediction, but Daniel was firing himself up on the raw electricity, fire, of the night around him. He charged himself up with all of the anger, the hatred, and the hunger out there on the streets already. He was strong. It surged through his blood.
Back on the corner of Brewer Street and the High Street, children – three of whom he recognized distantly from his daughter Ellen’s class at school – brought down the tall figure of a screaming policeman. The small bodies swelled forward wildly. He felt their hunger. He felt the policeman’s fear. He fed off both.
Daniel turned his back on the children’s feast. Whistling the old Marvin Gaye tune, he headed home. Kathleen had pulled the curtains. He walked up the path to the front door. He pressed his face up to the glass peephole. Through it he could see the bulk of the settee wedged across the door. He crouched down. “Not going to keep daddy out in the rain are you, sweetie?” he called through the letter box.
Daniel gave them until he counted to twenty-five, ample time for them to come to their senses and stop playing Little Pig. When they didn’t answer, he put his foot to the door, balanced himself, and kicked hard. Kicked hard again. Three times more, driving each kick hard, shattering the lockbed in the frame. The door gave six inches. “Open the fucking door, baby girl!” he screamed through the crack. “Before I kick the fucking thing off its hinges! One! Two! I’m waiting! Three! Suit your fucking self then, sweetie, but I am coming in if it means killing all of you to do it! You’re pissing me off, woman, now open the fucking door!” Daniel made it halfway through a count of ten.
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