On Deadly Ground

  I looked at the others. My brother Stephen, stone-faced. Tesco and Freak Boy, eyes fixed on the erupting geyser, their silk strips snapping and cracking straight out in the slipstream. Kate watched me, her face grim but calm. I looked back at Cowboy; his hat had blown off to swing by its cord from his neck.

  ‘Hold on tight,’ he shouted. ‘It’s not over yet.’ He jerked his thumb back over his shoulder. ‘Here comes the tidal wave.’

  Chapter 84

  The tidal wave rolled toward us in a wall of the purest white.

  I could hear the roar of the thing above the outboard motor.

  I called, ‘Can we outrun it?’

  ‘We have to!’ Cowboy yelled. ‘It’ll smash the boat to fuck.’

  He powered the boat on, weaving around the larger bits of debris. The smaller pieces of flotsam he rode straight over. You felt the concussion as they hit the bottom of the boat. The jolt slammed up through the fibreglass hull, then up through the soles of your feet.

  Suddenly that hull looked as flimsy as eggshell. One heavy crate or roof spar…it would tear a hole right through the bottom of the boat.

  ‘Faster,’ Stephen shouted. ‘It’s gaining on us.’

  ‘Gonna get wet,’ cried Freak Boy. ‘Gonna get wet!’

  Kate looked up at me, her eyes wide with fear, her hair blowing out straight in the rush of air.

  ‘Hold on tight,’ Cowboy yelled.

  The boat hit one of the cars as it rose. Like a water skier’s ramp it lifted us clean out of the water.

  For a couple of boat-lengths we were airborne. I mean the damned thing actually flew.

  Then the boat hit down again with a tremendous slap, splashing water into the air; it rained back down on us in huge spattering drops that stung.

  ‘Christ,’ Tesco shouted. ‘It’s cracked the bottom of the boat!’

  The girl we’d rescued screamed. ‘I can’t swim. I can’t swim!’

  ‘Cowboy, you better…Cowboy!’

  I looked back.

  Cowboy had gone.

  As simply as that. One second he’d been there, Stetson hat flapping madly. The next…

  An empty seat; no one at the steering bar. The boat veered out of control towards a shop front; waves bucked us, knocking the breath from our bodies. The engine howled.

  The shop’s sign just above the water-line filled my vision as we hurtled toward it.

  I watched in horror. I could see the top of the slimed green plate glass window, saw the flotsam bobbing behind it.

  Then, with another savage change of direction, the boat swerved away.

  Now we were heading straight towards the tidal wave as it tore along the street, standing higher than me, moving with the speed of an express train.

  I looked back to see Stephen sprawling face down on the bottom of the boat. He’d thrown out one hand, grabbed the steering bar. He lifted his head to see where we were going.

  I yelled, ‘We’re going towards the tidal wave…towards it!’

  Freak Boy slapped the top of his head with his palms, screaming non-stop.

  ‘Oh God,’ gasped Kate.

  She held out her hand to clasp mine. I gripped it tight.

  The tidal wave still roared towards us.

  The force of it burst windows, tore out shop fronts; whole buildings sagged down at either side of the street, walls splitting, facades falling into flood waters with a sound like thunder.

  I found myself watching this in a detached way. Some part of my mind coolly noted what happened: Waterstone’s book shop hit by a surge of water. A thousand books gush through the windows like fish escaping from a massive tank. Building fronts fall away. Remember dolls’ houses? You could open up the hinged front to reveal the rooms? This is the same. The facades fell into the flood water. You could see into abandoned rooms. You saw the beds, tables, chairs, sofas, flapping curtains, carpets, TVs, cookers, pans still resting on the hobs as if waiting for the owners to cook dinner—the possessions of the long dead or long gone population of London.

  Ahead, the tidal wave rolled to meet us. A wall of shining water that would hit us with the force of a runaway train, smashing the boat to fragments, then sweeping us away to crush us and drown us in that shit-stinking lake.

  Food for the rats.

  That was our destiny.

  Maybe in fifty million years geologists would chip away at the rock the sediment had become to find our fossilized bones, still with the details of our shoes, watches, rings picked out in fossil patterns in the surrounding shale.

  Behind me Stephen had inched closer to the stern. Now he kneeled up in the bottom of the boat in about three centimetres of water that sloshed from side to side whenever he pulled or pushed the steering lever.

  The boat bucked over the smaller waves running in advance of the tidal wave.

  The tidal wave itself was perhaps two hundred metres away. We were still running straight at it. I saw cars being rolled over in the twist of surf.

  Freak Boy crouched in the front of the boat, screaming his head off, his massive fists clamped around the sides.

  I tried to shout back to Stephen, but the buffeting, as the boat bumped from wave to wave, jolted the breath from my lungs.

  The motor roared.

  I looked ahead. Watching with dreadful fascination. The tidal wave rushed straight at us, ripping the fronts of buildings, sweeping away everything in its path.

  The next swerve nearly hurled me from the boat.

  Stephen steered the boat hard to the left. It skimmed across the water, the boat almost standing on its stern, it moved with such speed.

  The next second we were in a side street. The tops of lamp posts whipped by my elbows.

  ‘Move!’ Stephen yelled. ‘Get away from the sides. Onto the floor of the boat!’

  Tesco and I joined Kate and the girl in the bottom of the boat.

  Then suddenly it went dark.

  The engine cut out.

  No other sound but water rushing by.

  Then the boat hit with a crunch. I don’t know what. But we stopped dead.

  There was a scream.

  Chapter 85

  The tidal wave passed us by, still tearing up Charing Cross Road in the direction of Oxford Street.

  When my eyes adjusted to the gloom I saw that the boat had come to rest inside a music shop. The height of the water level meant my head was pressed to the ceiling when I sat up, even though my backside was still firmly on the bottom of the boat.

  Guitars floated on the water. Along with hundreds of pages of sheet music.

  A poster of the band Pulp floated to the surface. I watched, still dazed by the nightmare white-knuckle ride, as the face of the lead singer, Jarvis Cocker, surfaced eerily through the waters, rendered smoky-looking by the gloom and the sediment. The face of Cocker floated there for a moment, his eyes staring eerily up into mine. Then his face dissolved, the paper becoming mush in the water.

  Numb, I reached out and pulled a beautiful blue Fender Jaguar from the water. I’d have killed for a guitar like that once. Now all those material possessions were for the taking, and not one was worth, literally, a row of beans.

  At that moment I was close to cracking up. I wanted to laugh out loud. I felt it bubbling up in my throat to try and squeeze out through my lips.

  Tesco examined the crack in the hull. Water dribbled in.

  ‘Tesco, how’s it look?’ Stephen asked.

  ‘Not bad. It’ll get us home.’

  ‘What’s wrong with Freak Boy?’

  ‘It’s me finger,’ he said thickly. ‘Me bloody finger.’

  He held up his right hand. When the boat had slammed in through the front of the shop it had scraped along the edge of the window frame.

  Shards of glass jutted out from the timber.

  Freak Boy must have still been holding onto the sides of the boat when we crashed through.

  ‘It’s me finger,’ he repeated. ‘Me fucking finger.’

  Where his middle fi
nger had been there was only a raw hole. Blood pumped freely, running down the back of his hand.

  There, in the bottom of the boat, where the water sloshed from side to side with every swell of the floodwaters, was the middle finger. It floated with the next swell of flood water to rest against my foot. I saw the creases in the skin at the joints. The fingernail, bitten down so ruthlessly scabs had formed along the sides. I couldn’t take my eyes off it. Or the strings of meat floating out from the severed end.

  The big man crouching there in the front of the boat began to sob softly. ‘Me finger. I hurt me finger…oh, Mum…Mum, I hurt me finger.’

  Chapter 86

  The airlift moved in fits and starts. There’d be a good day when the planes would make two return flights. Then clouds would close in and there’d be no flights because it was impossible for Howard and Cindy to actually see from the air the landmarks that enabled them to navigate from Fountains Moor to London. Of course, the Gremlins worked overtime, too. Fuel lines would clog, an aircraft tyre would puncture; control cables would fray; fuel consumption would exceed supply. Then a day would be wasted with the planes grounded for repairs or while teams headed out to backpack in more fuel in for the thirsty motors.

  The pilots were exhausted from the endless flying. We knew both were doing the odd line of coke, as well as hitting the bottle hard, too. Their faces were lined; their eyes so dark and pouched they looked as if they’d been punched. But still they kept their machines in the air; they didn’t complain; and day after day they took their lives in their hands.

  As the days passed it looked at last as if we’d turned a corner.

  The population of Jesus’s Paradise Island dwindled. Whereas before there was always noise—Jesus’s people shouting, laughing, rowdy games of football always being played in the street, children shouting, or people gleefully singing, ‘It’s the end of the world as I know it, and I feel fine’—suddenly it was eerily quiet. One by one, the houses Jesus’s community had occupied were deserted as their occupants flew north.

  At the other end of the line at Fountains Moor I wondered what our people made of the new arrivals. With their tattooed faces, wild hairstyles, and their taste for tying strips of orange and yellow silk to their arms and legs, they must have resembled some bizarre Amazon tribe.

  I wondered, too, when the novelty would wear off and the friction between the two distinct cultures of Jesus’s tribe and Stephen’s middle-class community would begin. Of course the pressure was on: more mouths to feed; more tents to find. And of course Jesus’s tribe’s reaction to the disaster was different from ours. We saw it as the end of civilization, the death of our dreams and ambitions. These people saw the disaster as an opportunity for a new life; a far better life than the one they’d endured before, sleeping in shop doorways and living on stale bread thrown out by supermarkets.

  I’d often lay awake at night, Kate curled tightly into my back. One of the many thoughts that had haunted me into wakefulness would be: Jesus’s people had done a better job of finding food, shelter, even happiness. Were they better equipped to survive in this hostile new world than we were?

  Chapter 87

  We’d still make forays into central London for supplies. It didn’t matter how many trips I made into the flooded city, I never did get used to what I found there.

  We’d set out early when the mist still lay on the flood waters. Church steeples, street lamps, the upper storeys of houses, museums, art galleries, office blocks—they all reared eerie and deserted above the silent waters. From any number of windows would gaze decomposing skulls. The crows, like the rats, were the only creatures to prosper. They grew fat on carrion. Everywhere there were signs that survivors trapped by flood waters in offices had eaten the flesh of their colleagues before they too had been killed for meat by stronger rivals.

  Sometimes you could cut the outboard motors and drift along in that deep, deep silence. Then all you’d hear would be the lap of the ripples against walls, sounding like wet kisses. There was no longer much evidence of human life continuing in the flooded city. Once, when the motor was cut, I did hear sobbing coming from a fifteen-storey office block. Sheathed entirely in glass, it rose from the flood waters like a crystal tombstone. The sobbing continued. Even when we shouted and fired shots into the air.

  They were the kind of sobs I can hear still. Especially when I lie awake in the middle of the night. The sob of someone dying brokenhearted. Alone.

  Just so we’d be in no doubt that the Earth had undergone some pretty crucial changes of temperature in its crust, we’d be treated sometimes to vivid evidence of the metamorphosis.

  In Trafalgar Square, Nelson’s Column now lay in broken segments like a series of stone cylinders. The statue of Nelson itself had shattered into fragments no larger than your fist—so Jesus’s people had said. The water was so deep there that the massive bronze lions lay buried far underwater.

  Tesco nudged me. ‘See the ship?’

  A cargo ship, carried by the flood waters, had rammed into the front of the National Gallery. It lay tilted to one side, a crow perched on its yellow funnel.

  The prow of the ship had penetrated deeply into the gallery’s stone facade, causing stone building and steel ship to remain forever mated like a work of modern art.

  Over by South Africa House, fires burned on the surface of the water.

  ‘It’s been like it for weeks,’ Tesco explained. ‘Methane gas is leaking up through the old sewer system. Somehow it ignited. It’s been burning ever since.’

  The boats eased slowly by the pools of flame that burned on the water. They burned with a puttering sound as bubbles of methane gas reached the surface and ignited; the flame of that bubble igniting the subsequent bubbles in a continuous process. I was reminded of the day Stephen and I found Victoria in the graveyard. How the subterranean heat had detonated the pockets of gas trapped in the graves. I thought of the huge crater that now yawned out of the centre of the town of Grantham. There a subterranean pocket of natural gas had been large enough to blow the town to Kingdom Come. It might happen here, I realized. The whole world was a time bomb waiting to explode. Would we be safe even on a tropical island far away in the South Seas? Who was to say it wasn’t the same there? The ground growing hotter and hotter beneath your feet. The vegetation burnt black. Streams hot enough to boil an egg.

  Who was to say the whole world wasn’t going to go up in flames?

  Chapter 88

  Foreign embassies are rich in firearms. It’s common knowledge that weapons of all kinds—from handguns to grenades to heavy machine guns—were smuggled through airports by the packing case, protected from Customs scrutiny by the diplomatic seal.

  It was in such an embassy down near The Strand where the flood waters were so high they almost reached the third floor that I encountered the Grey Man again.

  I’d gone up to the top floor alone. The others in the scavenging team were concentrating on the lower floors where they’d found a couple of thousand rounds of 9mm ammo. In this terrible new man-eat-man world a loaded gun was far more valuable than gold.

  I moved along the corridors, sawn-off shotgun in one hand, the dusty green carpet still deeply luxurious beneath my feet, portraits of long-dead heads of state hanging on the walls. Scattered on the floor were pearls: they were fat and a pure white and must have cost what would amount to a year’s salary for most people. In the rush to escape the flood the necklace had snapped, scattering the pearls like widows’ tears.

  I’d checked a couple of rooms. They were mainly offices for the clerical staff, with utilitarian desks, chairs, then row upon row of filing cabinets.

  The next room whose door I pushed open with the muzzle of the shotgun contained something else.

  My skin prickled, my eyes snapped wide.

  I froze, my arms hanging down at my sides, locked into a twenty past eight position by the shock; pure shock at seeing the figure.

  He was back.

  He was ugly.
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  He radiated menace.

  I knew it had to be this way. I had known ever since my last encounter with the Grey Man that night back on Fountains Moor that he would find me again.

  And right then I realized he’d never been away. I could imagine with no effort whatsoever that he was always there, watching over me like a dreadful angel—an angel with grey skin, eyes as red as blood, a strip of coarse black hair that followed a bony crest on the top of his skull, a crest that ran from the forehead to the back of the neck. The skin was studded here and there with buttons of raised skin. They could have been wart-like growths. But they could as easily have been nipples where these creatures suckled their demonic young.

  I could not move. I sensed his—its—monstrous power. That alone was sufficient to paralyse me. I knew it could reach forward and snap my arms like twigs. It could probably dig its finger into my stomach to scoop out my intestines as easily as I could scoop a handful of loose rice from a sack.

  I tried to shout out. To warn the others. I couldn’t.

  I tried to raise my hand that gripped the shotgun.

  If I could lift it just a few centimetres, then just apply enough pressure to the trigger I could blast the thing in the legs.

  I would have one of the Greys as captive. Stephen would have no choice but to believe me.

  Raise the shotgun.

  Just that little bit.

  Squeeze the trigger.

  Pepper that grey hide with shot.

  Easy…easy, Rick, come on.

  Christ…

  I couldn’t.

  I couldn’t move.

  And the creature knew it.

  It looked at me. It tilted its head to one side. There was no expression on its face, but I sensed its curiosity. It had seen something that interested it.

  Me.

  ‘What do you want?’

  I was surprised I could speak, even though my voice barely rose above a whisper.