On Deadly Ground

  Instinct. That’s all it was. I jumped forward and pushed Stephen away from the sink so hard he fell flat on his face on the floor.

  ‘Rick! What the hell are you playing at, you—’

  The rest of what he shouted was drowned by a head-battering roar. One second water streamed from the tap. Then, with a burst of spray, it turned to steam.

  I moved back, but not before I took some scalding drops of water on my arm. Stephen was on his feet in a second. He watched in disbelief as clouds of steam came out of the tap with a terrific scree—eeech.

  He shouted something. I couldn’t hear a word above the god-awful noise. Soon the room was full of steam so thick you could hardly see beyond the tip of your nose. Blindly we made it through the door, through the gauntlet stink of rotting food. Then we were out in sunlight.

  Stephen shook his head. ‘Of all the kitchen sinks I could have chosen I had to pick the one plumbed in by son of Basil Fawlty. I mean, did you see that mother? You could have cleaned truck engines with a steam jet like that.’

  ‘Are you OK?’

  He grinned. ‘I’m fine. Probably cleaner than I’ve been for a day or two…but fine.’ As I climbed onto my bike he slapped my arm. ‘Say, quick thinking, Kid K. If you hadn’t shoved me that steam spray would have taken my face clean off.’

  The thing had shaken me, but I forced a smile. ‘That’s what brothers are for. Come on, let’s go home.’

  With the backpacks on our shoulders clunking with cans of baby food we eased the bikes forward, down that road of spilled clothes and discarded baby buggies.

  ‘I know a short cut,’ I shouted to Stephen. ‘Take the next left.’

  It was short cut all right. But not to Fairburn. It was a short cut straight to the shit-stinking heart of Hell itself.

  Chapter 13

  Hell is a street in Leeds.

  How do you know you’ve just ridden a motorbike straight to Hell? This is how:

  ONE: THE SMELL

  The stench rolling down that tree-lined residential street suggested the sewers had backed up to overflowing. Now the summer sun was baking up a rich stew of what, a few days ago, four hundred thousand people had been flushing away down their lavatories.

  TWO: DEAD BIRDS

  Sparrows, pigeons, starlings, blackbirds; they littered the streets in little balls of fluff and feathers. We tried to avoid them, but occasionally one would go pop beneath our tyres.

  THREE: THE DEAD MAN

  Stephen signalled me to stop. ‘Rick. Did you see that back there?’

  ‘No. What?’

  ‘Well, you’d best not look, then.’

  I saw a reflection of my puzzled face in his sunglasses. ‘What’re you talking about?’

  ‘Back there.’ He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. ‘There’s a guy lying dead under a blanket at the side of the road.’

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘I saw his legs poking out from under the blanket.’

  ‘I mean, are you sure he’s dead?’

  ‘Good point.’ Stephen wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘Wait here. I’ll check.’

  I climbed off the bike, pulled it back on to its stand, ready to follow.

  ‘Hey, whoa, whoa. Where do you think you’re going, Rick?’

  ‘I’ll come with you.’

  ‘No, sunshine. You stay put here.’

  ‘You can’t pull the big brother trick on me, Stephen. I’m nineteen, in case it’s slipped your mind.’

  He took a couple of steps towards me, putting his body between me and whatever lay under the red blanket about thirty metres along the street. ‘Rick…’ He took off the shades and fixed me with the blue eyes. ‘Have you ever seen a corpse that’s been lying out in the sun for three days?’

  ‘Have you?’

  ‘No…but last year I called on an old pool-hall buddy of mine who’d decided that life on Earth wasn’t for him. I walked into his apartment just ten minutes after he’d taken his head off with a shotgun. So, Rick, if you are really, really itching to look a dead man in the face, walk this way. Only I do not recommend the experience. OK, you coming?’ Grim-faced, he held out an arm as if he was going to lead me there by the hand.

  I gave a shake of my head and turned my back on the thing beneath the blanket.

  Sure. Believe me. I was curious to see what a dead person looked like. I’d never seen one before. In fact, people go through their whole lives without ever seeing a single corpse. In the cold flesh, that is; we’ve all seen them on TV. Society buries its dead. But what you don’t really realize is that society buries its dead at the moment of death. Hey presto! They disappear behind hospital screens, or are zipped from sight in body bags, or are hidden in mortuaries and chapels of rest until they’re nailed down into coffins ready for the funeral.

  I glanced back over my shoulder at Stephen crouching down ten paces from the body to give it the once-over. And I found myself resenting the way he’d treated me like some oh-so-sensitive little child who’d sob over a squashed butterfly.

  An airliner passed overhead, no doubt waiting for air traffic control to give it the green light to land. There was a surge of noise from the jet engines as it rode through the dazzling blue sky, then out of sight once more over the rooftops.

  I shrugged my shoulders to reposition the straps of the backpack to make it more comfortable.

  Then I saw one of those weird things that always seem to pop up to juxtapose grim tragedy (in this case, the guy being left to chill beneath his blanket) with the bizarre.

  I’m looking up a driveway, right? To a three-storey building with ceiling-to-floor windows on the ground floor. A sign says: SOVEREIGN PLACE. RETIREMENT HOME. And there, slap in the middle of that driveway, was a glass fish tank. The size of a portable TV, it was still full of water. Needing something to take my attention from what Stephen would soon be examining down the street, I sauntered across to it.

  I wrinkled my nose. The smell was worse. Though I couldn’t pin all the blame onto that fish tank even though the water had turned green and two goldfish lay belly-up in all that slime.

  I looked back to where Stephen crouched, one hand clamping a handkerchief to his nostrils, the other holding a stick which he used to lift the blanket.

  Thankfully, from this distance, I couldn’t see what lay beneath the blanket.

  I turned away, glad to look at the old folks’ home that still wore a look of near normality with—

  ‘Uhhh…Chrr—rist…’

  I locked my eyes onto the old folks’ home. That’s just it. The place shouldn’t have looked as normal as that. Not with white-haired old ladies behind the day-room windows, snoozing the morning away in their Shackleton high chairs until lunch.

  It was completely involuntary. If I’d stopped right then, counted to ten, I wouldn’t have done it. But I ran straight up to the windows. And took a long hard look inside.

  ‘Stephen!’

  There, sitting in the chairs, were ten or more old women. One old man in pyjamas lay on the settee.

  If they’d looked as if they were asleep it wouldn’t have been as bad as that brutal sight that hit me straight in the eye.

  Most still wore their day clothes. All were dead.

  But it was the look of sheer bloody agony on their faces. They hadn’t died peacefully in their sleep. Their mouths yawned so wide I’d swear some of the jaws had dislocated. Eyes stared wide open. Their faces still blasted out a picture of sheer dismay, sheer agony, sheer terror. They had died slowly, knowing full well they could not breathe that lung-scalding gas that had filled their home.

  Now, in the stifling heat behind those greenhouse-like windows, the agonized faces were inflating with liquid as internal organs rotted and melted, turning faces black.

  I backed away, a bad taste rising. I swallowed it down. Then turned, intending to walk back to tell Stephen what I’d found.

  Then I saw what had been hidden by the hedge.

  I tried to walk steadily by it.
I tried to shut out of my mind what I saw. I tried to turn my head so I couldn’t see them.

  I tried. And failed.

  Chapter 14

  Grotesque. There’s no other description for it: grotesque, grotesque, GROTESQUE. I remember feeling anger as well as horror. Perhaps, like we all do, we pretend old people die calmly, with dignity. These, through no fault of their own, had not.

  I walked down the drive toward the bike, the backpack full of baby food swinging against my back. ‘Stephen.’

  The more mobile of the old men and women from the home had tried to escape the gas. Maybe some had made it.

  These had not.

  They had tried to reach the cars parked at the side of the home. One car — and it was so perverse some little splinter of gallows humour inside of me wanted to laugh out loud—well, listen to this, one car was actually a hearse. Big, black and sleek, it stood there with all the doors open, including the big coffin hatch-door at the back.

  A fat old boy sat on the ground, his back to one of its tyres. Frozen to his face, that look of terror as he’d suffocated. He wore what must have been the first item of clothing he could put his hands on in the panic—a woman’s pink dressing gown trimmed with white lace at the hem and sleeves. It had rucked up around his waist to show his shitty underpants.

  Half in and half out of the back of the hearse, where the undertakers slide the coffin, was a naked woman. All of ninety years of age, she lay face down in the back with her bare arse hanging out in the not-so-fresh air. A couple more old dears lay near-naked or stark naked on the grass, mouths and eyes wide open, their bellies nine months pregnant-looking from the gas brewing in their guts.

  ‘Stephen.’

  Some of the corpses had shat. One or two bled from their mouths, leaving heads haloed by a pool as black and as sticky as tar. The meat flies buzzed. One old woman, dressed in a daffodil-yellow frock, lay on the grass. Fanned out in her fingers, like she was holding a hand of playing cards, were photographs. They showed her sitting happily beside her grandson at his birthday party as she helped him blow out the candles.

  The expression on her face now made you imagine she’d been forced to dance barefoot on broken glass. Her dentures had slipped out of her mouth with the rush of puke that, now dried, glued her hair to the lawn.

  For no real reason I heard a voice in my head whisper:

  God is great,

  God is good.

  I walked toward the entrance gates. My eyesight had gone to shit. I couldn’t breathe. I nearly tripped over the corpse of a naked woman. That’s when I felt a hand grab my shoulder.

  ‘Christ, the bastards…’ It was Stephen’s voice, filled with disgust. The bastards. When the gas came they left the poor devils to die.’ He looked down at the naked woman laid flat out by our feet. ‘Something’s started feeding on them. Rats or foxes. Uh…just look at the mess they’ve made of her fanny.’

  ‘Fanny!’ I remember shouting. ‘Fanny? What’re you talking? Yankee or English?’

  I ran. Was I laughing? Yanked to the brink of madness. Or was I crying? Shit knows. All I did know was that there was a strange sound working up through my belly to stutter out through my lips.

  I made it as far as the bushes at the far side of the road. A branch snagged the backpack; it stopped me from running any further.

  There I puked my breakfast up. No, I didn’t, I puked my whole bagful of guts up—and probably a fair chunk of my heart, too.

  At last I stopped. Dazed, I looked down where I’d vomited.

  And I saw I’d vomited onto the bare legs of two little children who lay dead on the grass beneath the bushes, their arms tightly around one another in one last post mortem cuddle.

  I turned away. And although there was nothing left in my stomach, I vomited again.

  ‘You sure you’re OK now?’ I opened my eyes. Stephen was tipping Perrier over my head and rubbing the back of my neck. Concern filled his blue eyes.

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘Can you stand?’

  ‘Shit. I thought I was standing.’

  ‘Rick. I don’t want to hang around here. There’s no sign of life—birds, cats dogs, anything. I think the gas must have settled here. The place is in a dip between two hills. We should get—hey, hey, kid. Take it easy. Don’t spark out on me again, OK?’

  ‘Give me a drink. I’ll be fine.’

  ‘You’re not fine. We’ll take this nice and easy, OK?’ I made it back to the motorbike, legs switching between jelly and elastic. After a couple more minutes of managing both to shiver and sweat buckets at the same time I nodded to Stephen and started the engine. Overhead the jetliner, cutting a note of normality through the sky, made another pass.

  Stephen anxiously scanned my face, trying to gauge how fit I was to ride. ‘Rick. You’ve had a hell of a shock. Why don’t we grab a car and I’ll drive you back home?’

  ‘No.’ Call it pride but I was determined to ride the bike back. ‘Believe me, Stephen. I’m all right.’

  All right as long as you can forget the old woman lying bare arsed and rotting in the hearse; all right if you can forget the two little children dead in the grass. All right if you forget everything, full damn stop.

  I rocked the bike forward off its stand. Stephen slipped the sunglasses back onto his face, nodded grimly and slowly accelerated away.

  We soon saw signs of recent activity—human activity, that is.

  We slowed the bikes as we passed a parade of shops. ‘Looters,’ said Stephen matter-of-factly.

  Some of the shop windows had been smashed. Booze and tobacco had been stripped from supermarket shelves. Computer and video stores were picked clean.

  As we cruised on, the slipstream tumbled banknotes along in the gutter. Perhaps people already realized that money was worthless now.

  Stephen slowed to a crawl, feet out at either side of the bike, almost walking it along. He glanced at me and nodded at a car that had run up onto the pavement and into someone’s garden wall, the force of the impact scattering bricks across the lawn. The car was stuffed with computers and TVs. Two men sat in the front seats, heads tilted savagely backward, their mouths and eyes wide open.

  My first thought was that this pair of looters had been shot as they tried to escape with their haul, but the bodies appeared to be unmarked. I shivered. The gas had got them, too.

  ‘Rick,’ Stephen called back over his shoulder to me. ‘Whatever this gas is, it keeps coming back. We best get away from Leeds pronto. OK?’

  ‘Suits me. I’ve got no reason to hang round here.’

  ‘We best warn the others as well.’ He jerked his head back at the gassed looters. ‘It’s obviously still taking some people by surprise.’

  We upped the speed now, weaving round abandoned cars, gassed cats and dogs, a guy with jailbird tattoos kneeling in the road, his head resting on a stolen TV like he was grabbing forty winks. But one look at the blood that oozed through his lips from his gas-scorched lungs told us he’d be sleeping until dear old Gabriel blew his horn.

  We pushed the bikes faster, the tick of the engines becoming a full-blooded roar. We were both eager to reach the high ground where, we hoped, the gas wouldn’t reach us even if it did ooze back into the low-lying areas.

  At the top of the hill we paused to look back. We’d left the houses behind now. Fairburn was a ten-minute ride away along a pleasant rural road.

  ‘It looks almost normal now, doesn’t it?’ Stephen nodded at the rooftops of houses with their satellite dishes, TV aerials all gleaming in the summer sun. In the distance the office blocks shone like slabs of crystal. If we hadn’t seen what was down there…even so, it didn’t look much different from the place I’d known for the last ten years.

  Overhead the jetliner made its pass, the engines moaning as the pilot slowed the big plane ready for another circuit of the city. We watched it glide by, probably two thousand metres above our heads. Then, high over the city, it seemed to hover, unmoving, looking like a silver crucif
ix against the blue.

  In the plane the passengers might have been reading a book or listening to Streisand on a Walkman, unaware of the tragedy that had hit Leeds. Those bothering to look out of the windows would only see Toytown-sized houses and factories and the occasional flash of sunlight reflected from windows far below.

  As I watched, that was when the note of the engine changed. The airliner seemed to rotate slowly in the air and hang there, still looking like a silver crucifix nailed to the clear blue sky.

  Then it dropped.

  Nose first, the plane came down in a vertical dive.

  It fell a good three kilometres away from where we sat on the bikes. A ball of white smoke mushroomed into the air. I found myself waiting for the flames. I saw none. And the sound of the impact seemed to take forever to arrive.

  At last it did, a low thundering roar that rolled up the hillside.

  I looked at Stephen. For a moment he seemed to be hunting through his vocabulary for the right words to say. Then he shrugged. There was nothing he could say. Same with me. All I could manage was a shake of the head.

  In just seventy-two hours the city of Leeds had become a Hell on Earth. Fairburn lay a few minutes’ ride away. Although it surely was no Heaven it should have been better than those corpse-strewn roads we’d left behind us. It wasn’t.

  It was worse.

  Chapter 15

  The instant I saw the woman sitting on the wall in Trueman Way I knew what she was going to do. I’d never seen her before, nor the teenage girl sitting beside her, but I knew as sure as night follows day that she was going to speak to me.

  And I knew I wasn’t going to be comfortable with what she’d say.

  She locked her eyes on mine in a way that suggested she was determined to follow through with some plan she’d made come Hell or high water.

  ‘You live in a house on Trueman Way.’