On Deadly Ground

‘Rick. The soil. Feel the soil.’

  I ducked down into the mist. The rifle and backpack slipped forward, dragging me face down onto the ground. I could see nothing but that damn white mist. And the smell of the soil dug into my nostrils.

  As soon as I put my hands down to the ground to push myself up I realized what Stephen had discovered. I was on my feet quicker than I thought possible.

  ‘You feel it?’ he asked quickly.

  I nodded. ‘The soil; it’s hot.’

  ‘So much for our horror-movie mist. It’s steam being driven from hot soil.’

  ‘Well,’ I said grimly. ‘We found one of the hot spots. What now?’

  ‘Get out of here fast. Whoa, everybody whoa!’ He shouted as if holding up a cattle drive. ‘Please turn back. We’re walking back the way we came.’

  ‘Oh, Jesus,’ Dean protested. ‘You can’t be serious?’

  ‘I am. Deadly serious. Now, please. Move it!’

  With sighs and grumbles they moved back. When the mist began to thin Stephen and I kept crouching down to touch the ground. As soon as we reached soil that felt cool to the touch, Stephen called on everyone to stop. Then he explained about the hot ground deeper in the wood.

  ‘What will happen when the ground gets too hot?’ Caroline asked.

  ‘I just don’t know,’ Stephen said. ‘In some cases it releases toxic gas as happened in Leeds. Also, we know it sometimes triggers explosions when inflammable gases like methane ignite underground.’

  Howard pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. ‘I don’t want to sound chicken, but is it a good idea to stand here discussing it?’

  ‘So far it’s only causing the earth to steam; check out the mist.’

  ‘But for all we know there might be a pocket of methane right beneath our feet.’

  That made everyone look down at the forest floor. And I think every man Jack of us imagined that any second the path would erupt into flame beneath our feet and we’d all die, burning and writhing there, the skin blistering, peeling off in strands.

  Stephen said decisively. ‘OK. We put some turf between us and this place.’

  ‘Do you propose that we—’ began Dean, striking an arrogant fists-on-hips pose.

  ‘We haven’t got time to debate this,’ Stephen said. ‘Look…everyone stay here. Rick and I will go on ahead. If it appears safe we’ll cut through this forest as planned.’

  ‘But we could detour round—’

  ‘I checked the map,’ I said, becoming irritated with Dean. ‘The only other way is round the reservoir to the south-east; that will take another full day’s walk. This way’s quicker.’

  ‘This way might be lethal,’ Dean chipped in.

  ‘Well, Deanie baby.’ Stephen shrugged off his pack. ‘We’re going to run the risk to see if it’s safe, so your little tootsies don’t get singed. Ready, bro?’

  I slipped off my backpack so we could move faster.

  ‘Best hang onto your rifle, bro. I’ve got my pistola. Right. See ya soon, gang.’

  I followed Stephen as he ran on into the heart of that steaming wood. We moved too quickly to take stock of what we were seeing but I could see it was turning shitty. The mist thickened to my waist again. The smell of earth became a cloying stink. The heat soaked through the soles of my trainers to warm my feet.

  I saw bushes were being killed by the heat cooking their roots; leaves drooped down like a bouquet of flowers that had been left without water. No birds flew.

  Ahead Stephen followed the zig and zag of the path, his head turned left to right, looking for any sign of danger.

  Then all of a sudden we hit a clearing.

  And I saw an awesome but terrible sight.

  Chapter 30

  We both stopped and stared.

  My eyes stung, they were stretched so wide open.

  Then there came a godawful screech and I had to slam my hands over my ears to shut out that sound before it burst my skull.

  Stephen grabbed me by the elbow and mouthed words at me. I shook my head, not understanding. He pulled my hand from an ear and yelled, ‘See if there’s another way round!’

  I nodded, then immediately put my hand back over my ear to reduce the sound to a bearable level.

  As we skirted the clearing I couldn’t take my eyes off what lay at its centre.

  Picture this: there’s a church, there’s a steeple, there’s a graveyard, there’s the lych gate, there’s a sign: St Lawrence’s Parish Church, founded 1683; Rev A. F. Foales; there’s the stone flagged path to the church door that brides and grooms and assorted congregations have trooped along for three hundred years.

  But there, screeching from the ground, were jets of blue flame. The burst of flame didn’t last more than five or six seconds. After that, it would abruptly die down to a puddle of blue fire.

  Then there would be a thump! that transmitted a shock wave through the ground to your feet, and another flame as thick as a man’s waist and ten metres high would blast from the ground into the air. Simultaneously, there came that tremendous SKK-REEEE-CH! as the flame jetted.

  They looked like gigantic Bunsen burner flames. Only the force and the fury behind those bursts of flames made your heart miss a beat.

  Stephen stopped and pointed. The ground was littered with bones. Long shin bones, thigh bones, femurs. They were blackened. Bits of meat and skin still trailed from them. Then I saw a man’s jacket lying on the ground. Sticks of rib poked through rips in the material.

  Now I identified another smell above the stink of hot soil: it was the aroma of roasting meat.

  My mouth filled with saliva; I had to swallow hard.

  Stephen turned to me. He pulled a face and held out his hands apologetically as if to say ‘Sorry to put you through this.’

  We skirted the clearing, keeping as far away as possible from the graveyard with its sudden ground bursts of fire.

  I stepped over a skull that had been stripped of all but a shred or two of skin. It was still steaming. The pale remains of its eyes stared up at me.

  We walked faster. There were more thumps; more jets of blue flame erupted from the graveyard to tear a screeching hole in the air. They blazed for a full five seconds before dwindling to become a puddle of flame around a headstone.

  From this angle I could see into the churchyard. Headstones had been pulverized. There were craters here, there, everywhere; big enough to drop a child down into. I saw more bodies. All burned. Some flash-cooked to skeletons.

  Jesus, what had happened to those poor people?

  Another thump, the ground bucked—screeeeeech! A smouldering skull hit the ground in front of me before bouncing away into the undergrowth.

  I looked back into the graveyard. A woman lay dead on the ground. One of the more recent victims, I guessed. Her clothes weren’t burnt. She looked unscorched.

  But what had brought all these people here to be incinerated where they stood?

  Some kind of lemming-like suicidal urge: ‘Quick! The graveyard’s on fire! Let’s all rush down there and cremate ourselves!’

  The world was insane. Insane from its incandescent core to its surface. And that madness was spreading to everything that walked or crawled upon it.

  Stephen caught my elbow again. He nodded to the graveyard. ‘They died like flies in there,’ he shouted above the screech of a Bunsen-like flame. ‘She must be one of the recent ones.’

  ‘I’ve seen her, poor devil.’ I looked back to where she lay flat out on a horizontal tombstone. Her thick hair spilled down to the ground.

  ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘That’s where the path starts again. It looks safe enough. There’s no steam coming off the ground there.’

  ‘If you stay here, I’ll…’ I had to pause as there was another ground-shaking thump, followed by the rocket screech of jetting gas. ‘You stay here, and I’ll go back and tell—Christ.’

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  It wasn’t the explosion that stopped me this time. I’d just notice
d one of the corpses wasn’t doing what corpses should. ‘She’s moved,’ I shouted. ‘The girl in the graveyard.’

  ‘Moved?’

  ‘I first saw her…I saw her lying on the ground.’ I had to shout above the roar of burning gas again. ‘Now she’s on the tombstone.’

  ‘She’ll be dead in the next ten seconds,’ he shouted. ‘Nothing’ll survive in there.’

  ‘We’ve got to get her out.’ Again I felt the stab of shame at leaving Caroline to her fate last Friday night.

  ‘Rick…Rick, slow down. Just give me a minute to think this through. Look, if we—Rick! Rick! Come back! Jesus…’ Stephen bellowed more in fear than fury. ‘Don’t you go into there! Don’t you dare! Damn…damn!’

  But I was away like a rabbit. I vaulted the fence, dodged around gravestones, jumped over the craters that still burnt with a puddle of flame that guttered and popped as the gas slowly gave out.

  The girl lay flat out on the stone. She lifted her hand slightly, then dropped it limply down again.

  Still alive; but if one of those gas jets erupted under her then she’d be blown to kingdom—

  Thump!

  The concussion knocked me flat, the rifle whirled out of my hand.

  Skk-reeee-ch!

  I curled into a ball. That godawful sound battered my skull so hard I thought it would burst like a dropped egg. Twenty paces away the column of flame ripped out of the ground into the air. The heat-flash singed the hairs on my arms to dust. Seconds later pieces of burning flesh and bone dropped down, along with a pair of trousers that were stained with rot.

  Christ, that was it!

  I staggered to my feet, looking round in amazement.

  That was damn well it!

  The build-up of subterranean heat was detonating the gases produced by the putrefying bodies. The force of it tore a vent up through the top soil to the surface where the gases exited in that eyeball-searing blast of flame. That rush of gas also carried the contents of the coffins with it, high into the air above the graveyard, to shower down skulls, thigh bones, knuckles, pelvic bones, smouldering spines, as well as chunks of rotted meat, lungs, skin and flaming hearts. A face landed flat on my leg. It had been torn from the skull in one piece. Brown, wet, worm-eaten: it looked like a mask made from leather.

  I glanced across the graveyard. The girl still lay unscathed.

  But for how much longer?

  I dodged round the burning gas puddles, praying a grave wouldn’t explode beneath my feet. I could see the girl more clearly now, her long red hair tumbling down towards the ground, her summer dress billowing in blasts of air so hot it made your face smart. Through the heat haze thrown up from the fires, the girl looked as if she’d been clipped from a horror movie, the hot air distorting the scene before me weirdly.

  I strained my eyes, struggling to see.

  Despite the imminent threat of the ground exploding under my feet and incinerating me instantly, my eyes locked onto her in astonishment as she flickered and blurred as if she was still in the process of morphing from demon to beautiful girl.

  Move it, Rick. Move it!

  If I wasn’t faster those mephitic gases would detonate beneath the girl’s slender body and whirl her away to eternity.

  I jumped the last pit of fire, then I was at her side. She was, I judged, no older than twenty years of age, pale-skinned, with a faint dusting of freckles across her nose. She looked serenely asleep. She seemed unhurt. But there was no way of telling what internal injuries she might have suffered.

  I simply picked her up like she was a child and ran for it.

  Thump.

  Another one.

  Skkr-reeeeee-chaaar!

  The sound was deafening. But I ran hard. I ran like angels were helping me.

  The gate emerged out of the heat haze. Distorted by hot air, it rippled softly as though it was cast from rubber.

  Then I was through it, pounding towards the wood; the girl safe in my arms.

  Chapter 31

  My name is Kate Robinson. This is our second day on Fountains Moor.

  Let me describe the camp to you. Picture a bleak moorland of heather and nothing but heather stretching away like a purple desert for seemingly ever and a day. There are no roads, no villages, no houses. Nothing. Now picture a ravine through which a stream flows. This ravine is perhaps fifteen metres deep with steep rocky sides; in some places they are as sheer as a cliff. At the bottom of the ravine it is perhaps ten metres wide. The stream is fast, shallow, and narrow enough to allow you to step easily from one bank to the other. There are trees at the bottom of the ravine and a strip of grass between the stream and the rock face. This grass strip is wide enough for us to erect our small tents in a line two-by-two.

  The evening sunlight casts the long shadows of trees across the ravine walls.

  As I sit writing here on a boulder by the stream people are settling down as best they can. They cook meals, talk, often they are crowded round the radio. The news isn’t good: more tidal waves, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions—the Greek island of Crete’s been split in two by a volcanic explosion so powerful it showered rocks down a hundred kilometres away. The death toll? Impossible to estimate. Every day another radio station goes off air. Static electricity generated by upheaval in the Earth’s crust interferes with what broadcasts there are.

  Yet here it’s strangely peaceful. Today has been sunny and warm. There was a lot of laughter when people went skinny-dipping in a pool further down the ravine. The water’s cold as ice. Mr Fullwood sits on the grass nearby. That froth of white hair of his shines like a halo. He’s eating sardines from a can and looks as happy as a three-year-old with a big bar of chocolate.

  Sue has just stepped out of the tent where Victoria is sleeping. Victoria is the girl that Rick and Stephen rescued from the burning graveyard. She’s a real mystery girl.

  How can I best describe her? Have you seen those paintings by the Pre-Raphaelites? They tended to specialize in these lush portraits of beautiful women dressed in long Ancient Roman-looking dresses; they have long luxuriant hair and wistful expressions as if thinking about absent lovers. Victoria looked as if she could have stepped out of one of those paintings. If you’ve ever seen a painting by Frederick Sandys called Helen Of Troy…well, Victoria was the spitting image of her, with thick hair down past her shoulders. It’s wavy and a deep reddish colour. Her eyes are grey. My guess is she is aged about twenty. I think there’s a spoilt-child look about her. Luckily she seemed unhurt. But all she’s done is sleep, waking only for a moment or two at a time.

  Dean Skilton tried speaking to her a few minutes ago when she left the tent to look at the stream, of all things; she crouched down for a perhaps ten seconds. Dipped her fingers into the stream. Stared at the water as if she’d never seen such a thing in her life before. When she didn’t reply to Dean asking her how she was feeling, he tapped his finger against the side of his head and said to me in a low voice so she wouldn’t hear, ‘I wonder which planet she came from?’ And as she returned to her tent, she paused briefly, standing up straight, looking at the sky. Then she turned to scrutinize one of the oak trees. Again it struck me that she appeared to find that all this was new to her; that it was the first time she’d seen the sky and sun and trees. As she stood there, still as a statue, I heard someone say, ‘Beam me up, Scottie.’ There was laughter. She didn’t notice. She slipped into the tent and went to sleep.

  Stephen looked up from where he was studying the provisions list. ‘They should leave her alone.’ He sounded annoyed. ‘After all, the poor girl’s probably in shock after what she went through.’

  Stephen had been the only one to have a brief conversation with her. He found out her name, that she was well enough to walk here (which she did lost in a kind of dream world); but he didn’t find out how she came to be in the burning graveyard wearing a summer dress which other girls have been cattily describing as ‘pretty in an old-fashioned kind of way.’

  The journey here after V
ictoria’s rescue took another forty-eight hours.

  As we walked we saw dozens of aircraft flying from west to east. There were also flocks of birds flying in the same direction as if they were all fleeing some terrible disaster.

  Later, we saw a convoy of army trucks and tanks on a road in the distance. Maybe the army is managing to organize some more help for the refugee camps. Seeing the convoy cheered people up but it made some question the need to camp out here. Couldn’t we go back to Fairburn, they wondered. With the army there the refugee camp might be well-fed and peaceful. But there’s no way of telling. We haven’t a portable two-way radio powerful enough to reach Ben Cavellero. We brought mobile telephones with us but the whole mobile telephone system is still down. We get nothing but static from them.

  One night we felt the ground moving. It was so slight we hardly noticed at first. It’s like sitting in a rowing boat on a lake, the water’s still, then along comes a small ripple. You feel a slight bobbing motion. That is all. People came out of their tents. In the distance we saw what at first seemed like lightning flashes. But the glow stayed there. A dull orange reflected on the bottom of clouds like a red sunset.

  Howard said, face glum, ‘That looks as if half of Yorkshire’s gone up in smoke.’

  Howard’s now sitting outside his tent. He’s cleaning his glasses with a cloth and he’s still got this morbid look on his face. Some of the group have gone off in pairs to scout the area. Gail and Dean are just setting out. Dean has his shotgun across his back. Rick left about twenty minutes ago with Caroline. She sticks to him like a second shadow.

  Chapter 32

  My name is Rick Kennedy.

  Caroline looked at me with those sexy brown eyes and whispered, ‘Rick. You can do anything you want to me. Anything at all. You know that, don’t you?’

  I smiled at her and kissed her forehead. ‘I can’t think of anything more imaginative that what we’re doing already.’ I laughed. ‘It’s not as if we’ve chandeliers to swing from, or kinky rubber catsuits to wear.’