Fanatics: Zero Tolerance (6 page)

“Don’t you call me a moron,” he said, his face darkening. “Don’t you treat me like I was nobody. I know you’d walk all over me again if I let you. Your
sort always do. You get your biggest kicks from making people like me feel small and stupid. You’re all the same - you think men are worthless except for what you can get from them. If he’s got money and a flashy car, it’s away you go, but if he’s like me, he’s good for nothing but wiping your feet on. You think you’re the centre of the universe. Even now, when you really need me, you yell and curse at me and cut me with your sarcasm and still expect me to jump when you say ‘frog’. Well, why should I? Why should I do
anything
for you if I’m not going to get something out of it?”

Rosie had no idea what she was supposed to say in reply to this outburst.

At that moment, shaking her head to flick a few stray locks of hair out of her eyes, she caught a glimpse of herself in one of the bigger fragments of the hall mirror. Blood was still falling from the tip of her nose in slow, thick drops; a paste made of blood and plaster dust was matting her hair; her nightie was torn and dirty; her knees were raw; her feet were filthy; she had never felt so unsexy in her life - and this pathetic twerp needed his ego massaged so badly that he was still ready to blackmail her for her body! She threw back her head and laughed at him; she couldn’t help herself.

Her laughter sounded to him like icicles breaking. “Shut up,” he growled at her, grinding his teeth.

She roared on as if she had been told the funniest joke in the world.

“Shut up!” he barked. “Shut up!”

But she laughed at him even more, as if he had told the joke again with an even better punchline.

*****

If a man had tried to humiliate him like this, Barry would have felt perfectly justified in swinging a fist at him. But women like Miss World here knew that, didn’t they? In fact, they counted on it; they knew that they could tear strips off you and you would be able to do nothing about it but fume impotently. If you raised a hand to them you simply offered them more ammunition: you were a coward, a woman-beater, a refugee from the stone age, or (most provoking) a “typical” male.

He could not bring himself to hit her, but having lost so much face, he felt incapable of remaining passive. He stepped forward and pushed her sharply with both hands. She fell over a broken bit of the stair-rail lying on the floor immediately behind her, and landed on her back with a thud that winded her.

Now,
he thought,
I’m going to put you in your place. I’ll fix your I’m-too-good-for-you attitude.

He began to advance on her, then froze as he heard a noise coming from somewhere out in the street. It sounded like rubble being shifted, perhaps by someone emerging from beneath it; or it might simply have been something falling over.

The girl screamed for help. The cry was short and not very loud, because she had not yet caught her breath again. Barry knew he had to stop her from making any more noise; without really thinking about what he was doing, he leapt onto her, clamping his hands around her neck.

Killing her was much more difficult than he might have expected. She fought ferociously, scratching and struggling so much that he had to take one hand away from her throat to protect his eyes. Seizing her opportunity, she threw all her strength into one mighty effort to dislodge him. He fell sideways, but she could not get out from under him; and when he righted himself again, he had a ragged, fist-sized piece of masonry in his right hand.

She saw it held above her, ready to be brought down with killing force, and stopped struggling. “Wait,” she managed to croak.

He hesitated.

“There’s something you should know,” she whispered.

His grip on her throat relaxed very slightly. He looked at her, holding his breath.

“You’re a creep,” she said. “You make my skin crawl.”

His face twisted with rage; with an ugly, animal grunt, he brought the piece of concrete down as hard as he could.

*****

Carson sat shivering, not just because he was cold,
but because he was in a state very like shellshock.

Through the open flap of the tent, he could see for quite a long way before the contours of the ground obscured his view of the rest of the landscape. This area had been protected from both flash and blast by the bulk of the Cave Hill, but almost everything he saw had been scorched lightly by the ambient glare from the fireball. Things which had been in the shadow of something else were mostly untouched, but because the objects casting the shadows were trees, the protected areas looked like bizarre green etchings in the ground. All else was ashy grey and black.

Carson had begun to feel cold quite early on in his vigil, but it was only about fifteen or twenty minutes before the moment of detonation that he finally decided to get back into his tent. The outside of it must have been very damp with dew, or it would certainly have burnt to a crisp around him during those seconds; and if the flash had lasted for any longer, he would have been roasted alive. He had no mirror, but he suspected he must look as if he had just returned from a Greek holiday. He sat wishing dully that he had closed the tent flap.

His eyes and ears had almost recovered now from the assault of the explosion, though his right eye was still telling him that a purple blotch about fifteen inches across was hovering above the ground just inside the tent, and he was not at all certain whether his ears had been deceiving him earlier on when he had heard indistinct snuffling, growling sounds and a soft, rhythmic thudding that might have been a very big animal. On reflection, he thought the animal was probably real; Belfast Zoo was not very far away from his campsite as the crow flew. (We are, of course, talking about a hypothetical crow here, since all smart crows would lately have refrained from making any unnecessary journeys.)

The wind raised wisps of the finer ash here and there, so that the green bits of land presently began to look as grey as the rest. He was surprised there was any loose ash left; the blast may not have hit this bit of land, but it had whipped up a wind that was not far short of a hurricane. Two of the tent’s guy-ropes had snapped, and Carson had been within a whisker of being carried off in a tangle of wildly flapping canvas to land who-knows-where.

Mister Fixit,
he thought. The notion was more bitter than he had imagined anything could be. If he was going to fix anything now, the only way he’d do it would be with a magic wand. There would be no shops to raid, no abandoned limousines to be driven away, no queues of customers in a thriving black market - not this close to the bomb, anyway. If a sheltered area ended up looking like this, what would things be like downtown?

The smooth loop his mind had been travelling in unexpectedly bumped over something.
Not this close to the bomb,
he had told himself. Belfast was bound to be devastated, but the rest of the Province might not be. Ballymena might be just the place for a Mister Fixit, if he got there soon enough; and if not Ballymena, maybe Antrim, maybe Coleraine, maybe Derry... He stepped out of the tent, shaking off the memory of all he had lost like some worn-out coat. Life had to go on. Why was he sitting there half-catatonic when there were opportunities to be chased?

Larne, he thought suddenly. If there was going to be a relief effort, it would have to focus on Larne; it would take shiploads of stuff to set things to rights again, and the Belfast docks would be unusable; the town was close enough to Ground Zero to be useful, but far enough away to be safe... and if the ferries were packed with supplies instead of people, pallet-loads could be redirected to the Black Market without too much difficulty or too much danger of being caught.

With a purposeful air, Carson strode across the burnt grass to meet his new future.
Opportunity knocks,
he told himself again.

Then his eye fell on the animal tracks. The paw prints looked a lot bigger than those left by any dog.

*****

Mark Lindsay, who knew a little first aid, went along to the nearest hospital - in his case, Antrim - to volunteer his services, and immediately found himself press-ganged into riding shotgun with an ambulance driver. The first task he was given was loading medical supplies into the back. Soon the boxes were stacked so high there seemed to be no room for patients. He remarked on this.

“Very observant,” said the paramedic, and kept loading.

“But how are we supposed to bring anyone back?” said Mark.

“We’re not,” said the paramedic. “If we brought back everyone who was injured, this place would be overwhelmed. Too many of the roads must be impassable anyway, because of rubble and breakdowns and refugees and what have you; but because the hospital has its own slip road from the motorway...”

“...We have to set up a field hospital that’ll draw people away from here, so they can deal with the really serious stuff without being swamped.”

“Got it in one,” said the paramedic. “Come on, let’s go.”

They drove Southwards, hoping to meet and stall the columns of refugees that must shortly be about to converge on their area, but had only to travel for a short distance - perhaps a few miles - before the ideal spot presented itself. This close to Belfast, the Northbound side of the motorway was chockablock, and pedestrians were ambling along everywhere there was room to walk. The ambulance had to slow down to a walking pace
; despite the whoops and howls of the siren, people simply would not get out of the way.

Then, ahead of them, someone in a sports car - a Po
rsche, Mark thought - crossed the central reservation and came tearing up the fast lane the wrong way. People could not get out of the way quickly enough; the inevitable happened. Mark saw the body of a young man sail through the air, flapping and spinning, then land amongst a knot of pedestrians, knocking them over like skittles. If it had not been so horrifying, he might have laughed; it was like something from a Wile E. Coyote cartoon.

The sports car came to a stop with its windscreen starred to the point of opacity, and the driver got out, looking
more angry at being delayed than apologetic.

The Paramedic pulled the ambulance over. “Okay, son,” he told Mark. “
Here we go into the fray. Stay close.”

They shoved their way through to where the injured pedestrian was. The Paramedic made the man as comfortable as he could, and dosed him with painkillers. “Is anybody with this fellow?” he called. No one responded; bystanders just gawped like dull-witted pupils
that the teacher has asked a difficult question.

Nearby, another siren whooped as a Police car nosed its way through the crowd to where the accident had happened. The Porsche driver, a middle-aged, business-suited type, began blustering even before the Policemen had opened their doors to get out.

“Shall I go and fetch the stretcher?” asked Mark.

“No,” said the Paramedic. “There’s no point bringing him back. He’s not going to make it. He’d just be wasting space.”

Mark gaped at him, shocked.

“I thought you told me you’d had all this explained to you,” said the Paramedic. “We have to be selective. We can only treat people who have a reasonable prospect of making a full recovery; we can’t afford to throw away our medical resources. They’ll be gone before you know it.”

“Excuse me,” said a woman who’d just pushed her way to the front of the throng. She was trailing a small boy by the hand. “My son’s been hurt. He needs treatment. It’s his head, you see.”

“Let’s have a look,” said the Paramedic. The child had a pretty nasty gash across his forehead, but not so deep as to need stitches. “I think we can help. Let’s go over to the ambulance.”

Mark and his colleague had hardly risen to their feet before the mob was pressing in on them, every last one, it seemed, explaining in a shout about their ailments.

“Get back! Get back! Quiet!” cried the Paramedic. “Look, I can’t deal with everyone at once! If you want to be seen to, you’ll have to form an orderly queue. Please, is there anyone here who knows some basic first aid? We could do with an extra hand or two - stop shoving, you!”

For a minute it looked as if they might actually manage to cope; the ruck subsided, and they were able to get the back doors of the ambulance open.

Mark’s first patient was a tough-looking character who had a long cut on his forearm. Mark hunted around for antiseptic swabs until
he was stopped by the Paramedic.

“Save those for the more serious cases. Water and a bandage will do for him.”

There were discontented grumblings. “But I need proper treatment,” said the tough fellow. “I’ve got my rights. I’m entitled to the use of those things.”

“I’m sorry, Sir,” said the Paramedic, “but you have to understand that our resources are very limited. If we use up stuff like that on a whole lot of wee cuts and bruises, there’ll be none left for the really urgent cases that  -”

“My taxes have gone to pay for this!” the tough guy interrupted. “Get out of my way!” He grabbed Mark by the arm and threw him away from the ambulance. Uproar broke out behind him as everyone else realised that queueing in an orderly fashion would gain them nothing.