On Deadly Ground

  Wearily, she moved her leg out straight from under the pink bedspread. I saw her leg was bare to her groin. She was probably stark naked under that sheet; her clothes would be strewn somewhere across the fields.

  Christ. I hated myself right then. There I was, a conceited little twat, carrying in my hand the only thing I valued in life. An electric guitar that you could buy in any musical instrument shop in the whole frigging world.

  I should have done something when I saw the mob carrying the woman away to batter her tits to buggery and split her cunt to shreds. Even if the mob had beaten me stupid. I should have done something. I should have tried.

  And what had happened to the daughter?

  ‘Come on, kid.’ Stephen took my arm and guided me past her as I stared at her, feeling that revulsion and self-disgust coming at me in vicious waves. I could have helped. I should have taken them into our house when they asked. Caroline must have been almost twenty years older than me, but she had such fine features and pretty hair…I could have cared for her…maybe even fallen in love and—

  ‘Rick. Come on, buddy. We can’t save the whole world single-handed.’

  ‘She needs help.’

  ‘So do forty thousand others.’

  ‘No. I’m not leaving her here.’

  ‘Rick. It’s nearly ten. Ben wanted us—’

  ‘I’m not leaving her sitting in shit.’

  ‘Rick, I—’

  At that moment I could have punched my brother’s teeth down his throat. ‘Listen. Twice I could have helped this woman. Twice I’ve let her down.’

  ‘Rick—’

  ‘Go on ahead to Ben’s. I’ll follow.’

  Stephen locked his blue eyes onto mine. ‘It’s OK, Rick. I’m with you on this. We’ll help her.’

  I walked slowly up to the woman, then said as gently as I could, ‘Caroline…Caroline Lucas?’

  Dazed, she lifted that bruised face. Her brown eyes looked into mine.

  ‘Caroline. Remember me?’

  I saw her swallow hard, give a little nod.

  ‘Caroline. Nice and easy does it. I want you to…no. No, I don’t want that. Cover yourself up. Please cover yourself up. I wasn’t one of those who attacked you.’

  Stephen helped arrange the bedspread over her battered body, his voice a low soothing purr. ‘Come on there, honey. Trust us. We won’t hurt you.’

  He shot me a look. ‘You know this lady?’

  ‘In a way.’

  ‘In a way?’

  ‘I’ll tell you later, Stephen. Let’s get her to Ben’s.’

  Meekly, like a sleepy child being led to bed, the woman in the pink bedspread allowed us to lead her out of the wood.

  Chapter 19

  At Ben’s house Stenno’s wife Sue, a nurse with Jimmy’s Hospital in Leeds, took charge of Caroline, leading her away to the bathroom.

  Me? I wouldn’t have taken much goading to grab one of Ben’s shotguns and hunt down the bastards that did this to her. The only good thing, as far as we could learn from Caroline, was that the daughter appeared to be safe. She’d hooked up with a guy who lived in the village.

  Ben appeared as we stood waiting in the entrance hall. His face was serious. ‘Glad you could make it,’ he said, shaking us both by the hand. ‘The others are in the library. Now you’re here we can make a start.’

  ‘Make a start?’ Stephen asked.

  ‘Yeah, Ben,’ I said, ‘why all the cloak and dagger?’

  He gave a smile. But it was the grimmest one I’d ever seen on anyone’s face. ‘I’d rather show you than tell you. This way, please.’

  He opened the heavy oak door into the library which was large enough to accommodate a full-sized bus. The walls were lined floor to ceiling with books. ‘It’s a bit of squeeze,’ he said, ‘and stuffy. I’ll make it as quick as I can.’

  I was astonished to see the library packed with people. Most of them I knew. There was Stenno, Howard, Dean. They all wore serious expressions as if we’d been summoned there to be told about the death of an old friend.

  There was no room left to sit on the rows of chairs so Stephen and I parked our butts on a table by the door,

  Ben Cavellero walked across to a TV that had been wheeled to one end of the library.

  Ben didn’t beat about the bush. ‘I wish we were all meeting in happier circumstances. But, to be blunt, we’re in one hell of a mess. Not just here in Leeds, but everywhere…the entire planet.’

  Somebody started to ask a question but Ben held up a hand. ‘I’ll do my best to answer questions later. But first I think there’s something you all should see. Then I’m going to ask you to do something. It might sound strange; many of you won’t be happy about it. But when you’ve seen this I think you’ll at least treat my request seriously.’ He switched on the TV which showed a large green ‘O’ in the top right hand corner. Then he pointed the remote at the VCR. ‘Oh, and in case you’re wondering. The power hasn’t been restored. I’ve begged a portable generator from a fanner in the valley.’

  I saw Stephen catch my eye and shrug. Clearly he was completely mystified. Me, too. But I had a bad, bad feeling about all this.

  The screen flickered as Ben touched the play button on the remote. ‘I taped this last night. What you’ll see is taken from satellite TV news programmes such as CNN, Spain’s Galavision and the German news channel N-TV. As far as we know all the terrestrial TV broadcasters are off air ... Now, please watch very carefully.’

  There was no theme tune or station logo. The filmed news report began with a few words spoken in Spanish. I didn’t understand the language. I didn’t need to, because the pictures pumped out a grim message that was plain enough to everyone.

  First up, a shot of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. But it was unlike any shot I’d seen of it before. Rolling through the archway was an advancing wall of smouldering ash. It all happened slowly, no faster than the minute hand of a watch. But slowly, surely, inexorably, the stone archway was being engulfed. Abandoned cars ignited in a flash of flame as hot ash touched fuel tanks.

  The camera panned away to deserted Parisian buildings. The ash there had fallen like black snow to cover the boulevards and walkways in a carpet of funereal black. All the trees were dead.

  There was a shot of the white-haired reporter carrying a microphone. As he trudged along the street he sank knee-deep into the powdery ash.

  Those streets were empty of people. Apart from the camera crew the only other sign of life was a small dog. Impossible to tell whether its fur was naturally black or blackened by the ash, it struggled alone through that grim desert. The dog looked as if it almost had to swim to keep its head above the suffocating dust: the tongue hung loosely from its mouth; the eyes rolled in its head, flashing the whites. You could sense the animal’s sheer effort as it battled on through the ash, searching, perhaps, for its lost owner. You realized, too, the effort would soon become too great to bear and it would sink down into the ash, too exhausted to continue.

  Perhaps seeing a whole city struck down by disaster is too great to comprehend. What had happened to its citizens? Where had they all gone? Instead of asking those questions, the dog, for us, somehow became a metaphor for all those millions of men, women and children facing a life-or-death struggle. We found ourselves willing the reporter to rescue the dog. Absurdly, it became important to us. We so desperately wanted to see the white-haired man lift the little dog, shivering and exhausted from the choking dust. But (to disappointed sighs from those in the room) the scene abruptly cut to that of the Eiffel Tower. It lay on its side, its weblike tracery of girders twisted like the skeleton of some mutant dinosaur.

  Crudely edited together came more jerking shots of cities from around the world. The Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco had lost its central span in a clean break that left the two halves sloping down into the sea.

  Next, a shot of a Zodiac inflatable dinghy nosing through debris on a lake. The camera zoomed in: the debris was made up of floating corpses.
The body of a girl in a white wedding dress drifted by. Smoothly the camera panned upward. There was a gasp from the people in the room.

  We were looking at the Houses of Parliament. The huge building now stood like a strange stone ship anchored in the middle of a lake. The clock in the tower of Big Ben was frozen at ten to two. Seconds later the dinghy nosed by a red oblong slab, sticking just above the surface of the flood waters. It was the roof of a red London double-decker bus. Eels must have wound their sinuous bodies across the passenger seats by now.

  Again came a terse comment in Spanish that I didn’t understand. The voice was robbed of emotion. As if the reporter had seen so much death and destruction he was incapable of feeling any more horror.

  More shots: Nelson’s Column, a shattered stump rising out of the waters that covered Trafalgar Square. A silent journey along Charing Cross Road. The wake from the boat caused drowned heads in the water to bob, and splashed against shop signs—Murder One, Pizza Hut, Foyles, Waterstones, Boots.

  Cut to:

  Wellington. Fires raged across the city. But it wasn’t the buildings that were burning. The flames vented from great gashes in the earth. As if a row of rocket motors had been upended in the ground, then ignited, sending jets of blue flame a hundred metres into the air with a screeching sound that overwhelmed the TV crew’s microphone, distorting the sound into a Daffy Duck warble that might have sounded comic in other circumstances.

  Cut to:

  Madrid. Volcanic ash choked the streets. The Avenida de America that links the city with the airport was shoulder-deep in sooty black dust. Oeste Park resembled the surface of the Moon, pitted with dozens of craters. Against an evening sky, the Royal Palace burned brightly. Vivid red flames burst from windows to writhe like fiery demons across the face of the building.

  Cut to:

  Johannesburg. Poison gas had crept through the city at night. Thousands of corpses, most in nightclothes, formed a death mat across many roads—Commissioner Street, Klein Street, Twist Street. In some places they lay four or five deep, arms and legs stretched stiffly out. Hundreds had sought sanctuary in the Anglican Cathedral on Bree Street. Corpses formed gruesome clots of rotting flesh in the cathedral doorways where the dying had tried to climb over the dead. Then they, too, had fallen to the poisonous gas. In Klein Street looters had tried to steal paintings from the art gallery. Now they lay dead on the pavement, framed paintings in their hands, blood from gas-seared lungs oozing from open mouths. Their lifeless faces still locked in an expression of horror and shock.

  Cut to:

  Sydney. More flooding. The opera house looked as if a pissed giant had stomped on it, caving in the once beautiful roofscape. Everywhere there were bodies.

  Then the image flickered and snowstormed while whoever had recorded the tape searched out a fresh news channel. The CNN logo appeared in the corner of the screen.

  ‘…extensive rioting in the refugee camps in Palermo, Italy, while the situation in the hundred-thousand-strong camp in Richmond, Virginia is now grave. Medical experts say that the typhus outbreak is unstoppable, resulting in hundreds of deaths a day. And in Baltimore US marines are still attempting to restore order after refugees massacred National Guard forces on Thursday night.’

  Accompanying the litany of chaos were more scenes of refugee camps, of rioting, of looting, of thousands of people streaming towards the camera and away from an erupting volcano five kilometres away in the background. The White House in Washington had been seared to nothing more than a blackened shell; a massive hole gaped in the once famous milk-white dome.

  Cut to: exhausted people with soot-streaked faces from which terrified eyes glittered in a chilling stare—these people had seen the coming of Armageddon. Zombie-like, they trudged by a looted KFC. Its uniformed staff, their mouths still yawning open in their final agony-driven scream, lay on a bed of KFC cardboard buckets, polystyrene clams, paper napkins, paper cups, plastic forks. They’d been stomped to death. Their blood, still flowing from broken faces, mingled with Coke streaming unchecked from the cold drinks dispenser to form a black-red pool on the floor.

  More shots of men and women of all races and backgrounds carrying away food from a supermarket. By the door, a pair of middle-aged men were kicking a man in a National Guard uniform. He lay on the floor clutching his face.

  The anchorman continued, ‘Scientists convening in Denver have so far ascertained that most of the geological disturbance is occurring east of ninety degrees longitude in the United States where there has been widespread destruction. That is roughly the easternmost third of the country, containing the states of Alabama, Georgia, Florida, North and South Carolina, Virginia, Kentucky…’ The list continued. We sat there in the library and watched for another forty-five minutes.

  When it was over, the screen went blank. We sat in silence until Ben switched off the TV and said, ‘there you have it.’ Ben looked around the audience. He looked like a doctor about to tell a patient they only had months left to live. He took a deep breath and launched in. ‘You’ve seen a fraction of what I’ve taped. There’s a couple more hours of that if anyone wants…needs to see it later. But what you’ve seen gives you a clear enough picture of what has happened in the last week or so. That we have a global disaster on our hands. Probably the biggest most single devastating event to hit our planet since the last ice age twenty thousand years ago.’ He smiled grimly. ‘I suppose you could call this the start of a Hot Age…or Fire Age.’

  Dean Skilton held up a hand. ‘But what’s causing this?’

  Ben shrugged. ‘What caused it? From what I have seen on the television it seems that the Earth’s core has actually been increasing in temperature over the last few years. Geologists knew this was happening but…’

  ‘But the truth was kept from the public,’ Stephen said heavily.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Figures. Another government cover-up.’

  ‘In the last few years there’s been a dramatic increase in volcanic activity, killing more than twenty-five thousand people. And these eruptions, despite what scientists told us, are unpredictable. A few years ago two European satellites, ERS-1 and ERS-2, were launched into orbit to monitor certain volcanoes that were near to centres of human habitation. These show that the volcanoes, although dormant, were showing signs that they would erupt within a matter of months.’

  Stephen said, ‘But we saw film of Paris. That was volcanic ash in the streets. There are no active volcanoes in France.’

  ‘There are now.’

  ‘That’s incredible.’

  ‘That’s a fact. In 1994 there were five hundred and fifty active volcanoes in the world. A year later there were eight hundred and sixty. In 1997 there were almost two thousand. Now the scientists have lost count.’

  ‘But all that destruction wasn’t purely caused by volcanic activity,’ I said.

  ‘True. In fact the real problem, which is far more serious, is that the Earth’s whole crust is becoming warmer.’ Ben glanced down at the carpeted floor on which he stood. ‘Basically the ground on which we stand is heating up.’

  ‘You expect us to believe that?’ said a teenage girl in a voice harshened by fear more than disbelief. ‘What proof have you got?’

  ‘What proof do you need?’

  ‘Why… scientific evidence. Temperature readings. Seismic surveys.’

  ‘Believe me, Gina, I’m telling you the truth.’ Ben’s voice was as gentle as ever. ‘If you want proof just walk into Fairburn. You’ll see forty thousand clues to what is happening camped out there.’

  ‘The gas?’

  He nodded. ‘That gas. We thought at first it was a toxic spill from a factory. But the ground on which Leeds stands is warming up. The gas is carbon monoxide. That, with a fair bit of sulphur dioxide mixed in with it. Last Saturday night the pressure of these natural gas pockets became so great it began venting through thousands of small cracks to the surface. That gas is poisonous, but not inflammable. But last night subterra
nean pockets of inflammable methane gas did explode. You might have seen flashes of light from the explosions coming from the far side of Leeds. You might also have felt the shock-wave running through the ground.’

  I remembered that eerie rise and fall of the ground beneath me as I’d sat out on the hillside the night before. Sheer distance had dampened down the Earth’s convulsions before they reached me.

  ‘We’ve had reports of craters the size of football fields being torn in the ground. And if you want more evidence you can take a ride into Leeds where there are deep wells. Lower a bucket into them and you’ll pull up water that’s warm enough to bathe a baby. You might also have seen that last week the River Tawn suddenly turned red; as if a crimson dye had been dumped into it. That was because one of the springs that feeds it became polluted with a red oxide mineral from geological disturbances beneath Fairburn.’

  ‘So we’re not safe here?’

  ‘I’m coming to that,’ Ben said softly. ‘I am coming to that.’

  The girl chipped in again. ‘You’re not going to tell us that a volcano is going to erupt here in Leeds?’

  ‘I’d like to believe that is extremely unlikely…we don’t think it will happen.’

  ‘But it’s no longer safe here?’

  The girl started to ask if we were at risk from the poison gas but Stenno said, in a voice so charged with tension she shut her mouth in mid-sentence, ‘It’s those Grey Men. They’re here, aren’t they?’

  Ben frowned. ‘Grey Men? Sorry, I don’t understand.’

  Stenno’s face turned white, his ears crimson, and I wondered if he’d flash into that weird rage that had gripped him in the garage. The Grey Men,’ he said, half angry, half embarrassed. ‘You’ve heard of the Grey Men?’

  Ben shook his head. There’ve been so many strange rumours flying about that I suppose—’

  ‘The Grey Men. At first I thought it was me. That thump on the head had sent me stupid. That I’d imagined I’d seen them, and…and what they did to me.’