The Wind From Nowhere

by J. G. Ballard

  The flight sergeant bridled, wondering whether to pull his rank on the corporal, then thought better of it.

  “What do we do now, mate?” he asked.

  The driver kicked the suitcases out of the way, shouted scornfully, “Walk, what else? I’m bloody well not going to carry you back!”

  He unlocked the rear doors, pushed them open. The Centurion switched on its rear lights, flooding the interior of the carrier. To the left on the pavement above, Maitland could see the gray humped back of a pedestrian tunnel. Part of it had collapsed into the ditch, affording a convenient access point. The driver pointed to it.

  “Take that back to Knightsbridge Underground,” he barked at them. “Follow the Piccadilly Line to Hammersmith and you’ll be picked up there. Got it?”

  Maitland hesitated, then began to crawl along the bottom of the ditch toward the aperture in the tunnel. The wind drove overhead like an express train, sucking at the low-pressure space in the road, and he clung to the damp soil like a limpet. Reaching the tunnel, he pulled himself in, then helped the others who came after him.

  When they were all inside they saw the Centurion roar into life and move sharply away from the ditch, its lights flashing, then swing round and drive off down the street.

  The tunnel had originally been six feet high, but the wind pressure and the successive shells of reinforcing materials added during the past week had lowered the ceiling to little more than five feet off the ground. Here and there, at 50-yard intervals, a storm lantern cast a fitful glow over the dripping bags.

  Crouching down, they moved forward, Maitland in the lead. It was only half a mile back to Knightsbridge, and luckily the tunnel was unbreached at any other point. A few people lay about in makeshift sleeping bags by the storm lights—claustrophobes, Maitland assumed, who were more terrified of their basements and the Underground than of the wind, and who preferred the surface tunnels with their long corridors and spaced lights. Tripping over abandoned clothing and cooking utensils, they reached the station in five minutes. The entranceway had been heavily fortified with reinforced concrete by the army. Two armed policemen in black wind suits checked their passes, then directed them to the signals unit set up in the ticket booth.

  After the deserted, darkened streets, the station was a blaze of lights, packed with thousands of people huddled about on the upper level with their bundles of luggage, walling off crude cubicles with blankets and raincoats, cooking over primus stoves, queuing endlessly at the latrines. Sleeping figures and parcels of luggage crowded the floor. They picked their way over the outstretched limbs, trying not to disturb the fretfully sleeping children and older people, till they located the two signalers operating the radio transmitter.

  After five minutes they contacted the Hammersmith control point and confirmed the driver’s arrangement that a carrier from Brandon Hall would pick them up in a couple of hours’ time.

  People were sitting all the way down the stationary escalators, huddled against each other’s knees, blankets wrapped around them, plastic bags at their feet containing gnawed loaves of bread, a few meagre cans and battered thermoses. Stepping past them, Maitland’s group made their way down to the lower platforms, where some semblance of order had been enforced. Women and children had been allocated the westbound platform, while the men and service units occupied the eastbound. Wooden partitions had been erected and police patrolled the exits and entrances.

  They were steered onto the platform, jumped down between the rails and began to walk along to the next station, South Kensington. Electric bulbs strung along the tunnel shone down onto the track. On the platform above them a throng of soldiers and other men lay in their sleeping packs, most of them asleep, a few watching impassively, their eyes dull.

  They had nearly reached the end of the platform when someone ahead sat up and waved to Maitland. He turned around, recognized the hall porter from the apartment block.

  “Dr. Maitland! Spare a minute, will you, Doctor?”

  He was sitting back against a large expensive suitcase to which Maitland guessed he had helped himself in one of the deserted apartments.

  “Doctor, I wanted to tell you. Mrs. Maitland’s still up there.”

  Maitland stiffened. “What? Are you sure?” When the porter nodded, he clenched his fists involuntarily. He had overestimated Susan’s resourcefulness. “Crazy fool! Couldn’t you make her come down here?”

  “I told her, Doctor, believe me. She was there only yesterday. Said she wanted to stay and watch the houses falling.”

  “Watch them? Where is she? In the basement?”

  The porter shook his head. “Up in your flat, Doctor. The windows are all smashed and she’s living in the lift now. It’s stuck on the sixth floor.”

  Maitland hesitated, looking over his shoulder. His two companions were just disappearing around the first bend in the tunnel. They would reach Hammersmith in 45 minutes, probably have more than an hour to wait before Brandon Hall got around to picking them up.

  “Can I still get to Lowndes Square?” he asked the porter. “The tunnels are standing?”

  The porter nodded. “Follow the one down Sloane Street, then cut through the Pakistan Embassy garage. Takes you straight into the block. Watch it though, Doctor. There’s big stuff coming down all the time.”

  Maitland jumped onto the platform and retraced his steps up the escalator. He reached the entranceway and pressed through the late arrivals pushing in from the tunnel, even less well equipped than those already there. Many of them were without bedding or food, holding a milk bottle full of water as their sole rations for the next few weeks. Maitland checked each one of them carefully in case Susan had decided to take shelter, then crouched down and entered the tunnel.

  Crude signposts had been put up at junction points within the tunnel system. Turning right into Sloane Street, he ran with his head down, feeling his way along the irregular corridor of bursting sandbags. A few cracks of light added to the scanty illumination provided by the storm lanterns. Gusts of air poured in, spuming white cement dust like escape valves blowing off steam.

  Two hundred yards down Sloane Street the tunnel ended in a short flight of steps into a small fortified basement below one of the office blocks. This had recently been used as a temporary first-aid post. Two or three cubicles stood against one wall, behind a boiler. There was a tin desk littered with forms and empty dried-milk cartons.

  Crossing the basement, he kicked back a door into the garbage-disposal unit and climbed another staircase into a fortified passageway, where pit props were placed at two-yard intervals. This branched left and right when it reached Lowndes Square. The lefthand section ended abruptly in a heap of rubble where one of the older houses had collapsed into the road. The other ran in the direction of the apartment house, and Maitland climbed through a breach in the wall into the basement garage of the Pakistan Embassy.

  In the ramp outside, a long black Cadillac limousine sagged back on a broken rear axle, tires flat, windows shattered, a collection of half-packed suitcases abandoned by the open trunk. Protecting his face from the stones and tiles ricocheting between the high walls, Maitland dived through into the service doorway of the apartment house.

  All the apartments had been abandoned, and air whirled around the stairway, changing its direction every few seconds, driving clouds of dust and rubble up and down the steps.

  Maitland pulled himself up to the sixth floor and looked into the elevator. A small leather armchair stood inside it, two dirty cushions and a screwed-up blanket revealing the outline of some small figure.

  Maitland raced up the next three floors to his own apartment, pushed back the door. The hall was in darkness; air swirled through from the lounge, dragging at the litter of old newspapers and magazines. He ran through, steadying himself as he reached the door. The French windows had been torn out and the steel frames quivered as the wind rushed past the end of the building, an enormous turbulent vortex bursting explosively around the ragged stone
work. The outside balcony had been ripped off and all the furniture in the room had been sucked out by the vortex and carried away over the roof of the Embassy below.

  For a moment he felt that he was standing over the propellors of some gigantic aircraft carrier, gazing out at the writhing wake as the vessel plunged through boiling seas, shielded from the sky by the overhanging flight deck. He was looking westward across the city, the storm-driven rooftops stretching to the horizon like huge ragged waves, obscured by a spray of dust and grit.

  “Quite a view, isn’t it, Donald?” he heard someone say quietly at his shoulder. He turned to see Susan in the doorway behind him.

  “Susan! What are you doing here?” He reached out to her. “Get your things together and come down to the Underground Station. Everyone’s sheltering there.”

  Susan shook her head and stepped past him into the lounge, swaying as the wind caught her. Her hair clung in a matted net around her face, gray with dust and dirt. She still wore the cocktail dress he had last seen her in. The full skirt was torn and stained, the net underskirt trailing at her heels. One of the shoulder straps had gone and the front of the dress hung down loosely, revealing her scratched dirty skin.

  He caught her as she rode a gust of air that swept out through the balcony, pulled her against himself.

  “Susan, for God’s sake, what are you playing at? This is no time for putting on an act.”

  She leaned against him, smiling wanly. “I’m not, Donald,” she said mildly, “believe me. I just like to watch the wind. The whole of London’s starting to fall down. Soon it’ll all be blown away, Peter and you and everybody.”

  She looked tired and hungry. Maitland wondered whether she had eaten. Perhaps the porter had bartered a little food for a decanter of whiskey, tried to keep her going.

  Maitland put his arm around her shoulders, began to draw her into the corridor. “Come on, darling. This whole building will be coming down too in a few hours. You’ve got to get out of here. The Underground’s the only place.”

  She twisted away from him, revealing a sudden unexpected strength.

  “Not for me, Donald,” she said evenly, stepping backward into the lounge. “You go, if you want to. I’m staying here.” When he reached out to her again she stepped back quickly, only nine or ten feet from the inferno raging outside the balcony, and poised there, her hair swept back off her head.

  When he hesitated, she glanced at him pityingly for a moment, then turned and looked over the rooftops. “I’ve been frightened for too long, Donald. Of Daddy, and you and myself. Now I’m not any longer. You go and dig a hole in the ground somewhere if you want to—”

  Her eyes were away from him and Maitland dived forward and seized her arm. Clenching her teeth, she kicked out at him, her slim body uncoiling like a frantic spring. They struggled silently, then Susan wrenched away and stepped back.

  “Susan!” Maitland shouted at her. For a moment she stared wildly at him, then moved away. She was only a few feet from the open window. Suddenly the wind caught her. Before he could move it whirled her back off her feet against the door frame; then spun her head over heels into the open air.

  Down on his knees, Maitland saw her for an instant, catapulted through the updraught rising from the street, bounce off the roof of the Embassy building and then spin away like a smashed doll into the maze of rooftops beyond. A few feet from him the air pounded at the door frame, ripping away the masonry from the exposed edge.

  For five minutes he lay on the floor, head pressed to the dull parquet, the pain and violence of Susan’s death stunning his mind. Then, slowly, he pulled himself backward to the door and got to his feet.

  The strength of the wind had increased significantly as he retraced his steps through the Pakistan Embassy and along the tunnel to the first-aid post. Somewhere the system of emergency tunnels had been badly breached. As he stepped through the aid post something struck the ceiling above his head, splitting the concrete and sending down a shower of dust. The building began to quiver restlessly, indicating that the roof had been breached. Soon heavy sections of masonry would come toppling through the floors, knock out the central transverse supports and allow the wind to push the walls in like cardboard hoardings.

  Maitland climbed into the Sloane Street tunnel. A hundred yards away a single lamp flickered dismally, illuminating the narrow corridor of leaking sandbags, the moisture exuded from the wet cement making it resemble an abandoned sewer. Head down, he hurried along to the station entrance.

  He ran down the steps, then pitched forward on his knees, banging his head against the far wall. Picking up his torch, he shone it around the floor, feeling for the steps with his hands.

  Halfway down the staircase, heavy steel shutters had been sealed into place, an immovable lid of three-inch plate that cut him off from the sanctuary below.

  Trying not to lose his self-control, he climbed out of the staircase and re-entered the tunnel. He switched the torch off to conserve the battery and groped along the walls, his only hope to get out of the tunnel before it collapsed and find a deep basement in one of the buildings off the street that would remain intact when its upper floors gave way.

  Above him, apparently far away to the left, a dim rumbling had started. He stopped and waited as it grew nearer, flicking on the torch. Then, ten yards away, in a cataract of dust and noise, an enormous section of masonry plunged straight through the roof of the tunnel, letting in a tornado of exploding brickwork that drove Maitland backward off his feet. As he pulled himself upright the entire roof of the tunnel bulged inward, then collapsed in a vast avalanche of debris that poured in around him, shutting out the light that had burst through the first aperture.

  Maitland stumbled back, shielding his head from the falling rubble. Massive tremors struck the walls of the tunnel, and its floor began to tilt in awkward jerks.

  Maitland waited, ready to retreat back into the entranceway, watching the dust swirl around him in the thin beam of the torch. After a few minutes he edged forward carefully. The quake had ended, the building that had collapsed across the tunnel—Harvey Nichols, one of the big department stores—had settled itself.

  A few yards ahead the tunnel ended abruptly. An entire floor section had sliced through it like a guillotine, sealing it off as cleanly and absolutely as the bulkhead ten yards behind him. Maitland started to kick away the debris around the slab, then gave up and backed away from the acrid dust.

  He was trapped neatly, like a rat in a pain corridor, except that here there would be no further signals. He had a runway about ten feet long, bounded at either end by impassable walls. Disturbed for half a minute, the air quickly settled, soon was completely still.

  Suddenly he felt weak, and dropped to his knees. Putting his hand up to his head, he felt blood eddying from a wide wound across the back of his scalp. He sat down and started to take out his first-aid kit, then realized he was losing consciousness. He managed to switch off the torch just as his mind began to spin and fall, plunging through the surface of a deep inky well.

  Around him, the rubble began to shift again.

  ♦

  By now the pyramid was almost complete. Its apex overtopped the steel windshields, and a subsidiary line of shields, staked to the upper slopes of the pyramid, protected the men scaling the peak. They moved slowly, strung together by long cables, forming the last cornices and lynchstones, dragged and buffeted together like blind slaves.

  Below, most of the huge graders and mixers had turned away, were laying and forming the long ramparts which led into the wind from the base of the pyramid. Ten feet thick and twice as high at their deepest point, they rose from the black earth, stretching from the body of the pyramid like the recumbent forelimbs of some headless sphinx.

  Watching them from his eyrie in the pyramid, the iron-faced man christened the ramparts in his mind, calling them the gateways of the whirlwind.

  FIVE

  The Scavengers

  “Pat.”


  The girl stirred, murmured something as she lay half asleep in his arms on the old mattress against the wall, then nestled closer to him.

  With his free hand Lanyon stroked her blonde hair, sweeping it back gently over her small neat ears, then kissed her carefully on the forehead, trying to keep his four-day stubble away from her skin. Pressed against him, she felt warm and comfortable, wearing his leather jacket around her shoulders while her own coat covered their legs, buttoned up around them.

  Lanyon looked down and watched her face, her eyelids moving occasionally as she reached toward the surface of consciousness, her full lips slightly parted in a relaxed smile, wide smooth cheekbones still unblemished by the duststorms. She breathed steadily, then slowly raised her head and slipped his left arm from beneath it.

  “Steve?” She stirred, opened her eyes sleepily as he disengaged his legs from the coat.

  He bent down and kissed her mouth gently. “It’s O.K., darling. You sleep. I’m just going to smell the air.”

  He covered her carefully, then stood up and stepped across her to the other end of the pillbox, head stooped to avoid the roof. Outside, the air whistled past interminably, the turbulence around the hill face making it difficult to assess its velocity.

  Lanyon searched his pockets, found a packet of Caporals he had discovered in a cupboard at the airfield, lit one carefully and went over to the gun slit. They had blocked it with a heap of bricks and stones. Pulling a few of them away, Lanyon carefully dislodged a brick in the center of the pile and slowly slid it back.

  From his watch he noted it was 7:35 A.M. Outside, through the narrow gun slit, he could see across the ruined dam down the valley to Genoa and the sea. Clouds of dust and vapor lowered the ceiling to little more than two or three hundred yards, and visibility to half a mile.

  The pillbox had been built into the mouth of one of the caves in the cliff face overlooking the east side of the dam. Shielded by the 300-foot bluff above and recessed ten feet back into the cave mouth, it provided an excellent vantage point from which to survey the valley below. Lanyon noticed that the dam had almost completely vanished by now, a thin ragged rim of concrete four or five feet high all that remained of the original 100-foot wall. The reservoir behind it had been drained, the bed eaten smooth by the air passing overhead, strewn now with countless boulders and rock fragments blown in from the hills.