Fanatics: Zero Tolerance (5 page)

“Okay,” said the crippled man unsteadily, “what can we do?"

There was an expectant pause; the others were obviously waiting for Morris to say something. He had no clear idea of what to do next, however, and was a little surprised to find himself being looked to as a leader. “Right,” he said, trying to think of something, “right. Okay. Is there anyone here who can see yet?” There were a few negative murmurs. “Hold on a minute. How many of us are there down here anyway? Call out your names.”

Several people spoke at once.

“One at a time!” said Morris. “Start again.”

“Jimmy,” said the crippled man.

“Jean,” said the woman.

“Mairead,” said someone else, a young woman’s voice.

“Patricia,” said another. “Listen, there was a man near me when - when it happened. I don’t know where he is now. He might be unconscious, or buried under something.”

“Okay,” said Morris, “it’s only a matter of time before help comes. If we just wait a little longer we’ll be able to see enough to assess the situation -”

“How will anyone know we’re here?” said Jean.

“Maybe we should keep quiet for a few moments and see if we can hear anyone digging for us,” suggested Jimmy.

“Yeah,” said Morris, gratefully seizing on the idea, “let’s do that.” They all sat and listened.

He could hear nothing in particular; though he was not surprised by that. It had nothing to do with the battered condition of his eardrums; the first thing to happen after any explosion would be that the traffic was stopped. Emergency services couldn’t move in immediately without a reasonable degree of certainty that they were not going to be the victims of a further explosion. He wondered for a moment why he could not hear any sirens, then decided it was probably because there was no need for them - the Police were already very close, in one direction at the Courthouse, opposite the bus station; and in the other (if his memory did not deceive him) hanging about what seemed to be a favourite spot of theirs for watching traffic, the Queen’s Bridge.

Panic touched him again as another thought came to him. What if the checkpoint on the bridge or the Courthouse had been the target? If a really big bomb had been centred elsewhere,
no-one might realise that the subway had collapsed. It was quite long; it might appear perfectly undamaged to someone passing the top of the steps. And with the area cordoned off as it probably would be soon, how long would it be before someone tried to use the subway again? 

Beginning to feel very warm, Morris moved his hands to loosen his tie, and as they brushed against his throat he felt moistness. He supposed his knuckles were bleeding. But the moisture made him think about something else. The subway ran alongside the river Lagan. Was there a danger they would drown before they could get out? Was the tunnel below the water level or not? He began listening for running water.

Someone suddenly exclaimed wordlessly.

“What is it? What’s wrong?” said Jean.

“Everything,” said Mairead in a despairing voice. “Everything.” She stood up, and Morris found he could see her faintly by the illumination that a tiny crack in the rubble offered. She moved towards the crack and began clearing the earth and stones away in careless handfuls. “Please, God, let me be wrong. Let me be wrong.”

“Here!” said Morris. “What are you doing? You’ll bring it all down on us!” He leapt up beside Mairead and tried to restrain her. “We’re going to get out, woman! Don’t panic! We just have to be patient and wait for help!"

Mairead shook Morris’s hands off. “There’s not going to be any help!"

“Of course there is!” said Morris. “Now calm down -”

“The tingling we felt when the flash hit us! Don’t you know what that means? You can still feel it now, can’t you?"

Morris realised it was true. “Well, so what? What does it mean?"

“It means we’re as good as dead already,” said Mairead flatly. She turned to the rubble again. “Help me with this.”

“Wait!” cried Jimmy suddenly. “I can’t move! Don’t leave me here!"

“Nobody’s going to leave you,” said Morris in the most soothing voice he could manage. He hovered by the girl indecisively; it was plain enough there was no stopping her without a major struggle.

“Don’t leave me!” yelled Jimmy again, and Jean began sobbing an accompaniment:

“We’re going to be buried alive, buried alive, buried -”

“Shut up!”
snapped Morris. “I mean, calm down! We’re just going to make a way out of here for all of us as safely as we can. No-one’s going to be left behind or buried.” He turned to Mairead, and grabbing her arm, hissed angrily at her: “Look, I’ll help you, but let’s do this properly, okay? There’s no sense bringing the roof down on ourselves when a bit of caution can get us all out safely.”

Breaking out didn’t seem to take half as long as Morris had anticipated. As light began to come through, Morris could see his companion’s face more clearly: under the dirt, it was an angry red, as if she had spent far too long under a sun lamp. He assumed he looked the same.

They broke through into an undamaged part of the subway with the steps only a few metres ahead of them. They were dusty and rubble-strewn; and, apparently, quite hot. The soles of Morris’s shoes seemed to melt slightly and stick to each step. The couple, apprehensive as to what scene might meet their eyes when they reached road level, ascended the steps as if in solemn procession. Behind them, Jean and Patricia crept out of the hole in the rubble.

Plumes of mist wafting from the direction of the river, as fine as
mist from the spout of a boiling kettle, obscured their view that way, though they could plainly see that the Queen’s Bridge was no more. They turned around slowly.

To their right, the Waterfront Concert Hall - and beyond it, the Hilton - had been
levelled.

On the road, rubble from collapsed buildings was scattered unevenly for as far as they could see; the exposed patches of asphalt were melted and a few still bubbled. The few vehicles left on the road looked like beetles crushed under the foot of a careless giant; rent open at the back when the flash had made the fuel tank explode, they were flame-blackened yet spotted with leprous patches of cement dust, with runnels of fused glass where windscreens used to be. For a few moments Morris watched a Volvo slowly tilting as it sank a couple of inches into the road surface, almost hypnotised by the smoke rising languidly from lumps of its tyres which had not completely melted off. Then a piece of masonry slid off its roof with a sound like fingernails screeching on a slate, tearing away the creeping sense of numbness which had begun to cushion the impact of all this.

He turned a few more degrees and saw the remains of the Courthouse; then the heap that had been Fire Brigade Headquarters; then, opposite the river, the few courses of bricks which were all that was left of Oxford Street’s other buildings; and beyond them, the smashed brick and warped steel of street after street right up to the base of the smoky pillar standing at the heart of it all.

Mairead moaned incoherently and fell to her knees, careless that the heat of the concrete was scorching them. Morris, unable to take any of this in, craned his head back to look at the mushroom-shaped cloud towering over
them which the wind was already beginning to dissipate.

*****

It was, of course, at roughly this point that Gerry Marshall’s TV set stopped giving a decent picture.

In the Land Of Nod, some rather nice images he was watching were also spoiled; he began hearing a deep, threatening rumble as thunderheads built up on the dream-horizon.

*****

The SWAT teams were far too close to Ground Zero to feel disappointment at being too late. In the time it would have taken a human brain to register the event, the materials which composed their bodies were blown away like wisps of vapour and scattered over several miles.

*****

Jun Min, who at the last moment had decided that staying unflappably at his post in his Stormont Castle office was in fact more unintelligent than unflappable, was over the Irish Sea in an Army helicopter only
two miles out of Belfast when the blast wave hit him.

One moment he was sweating and biting his nails, worrying about a million things at once - what was to be done if the worst came to the worst, how he could wriggle out of responsibility, how the Province was to get even halfway back on its feet with its principal hospitals gone - then he wa
s throwing his hands up against an unpleasant glare that seemed to come from every direction at once. Already half-deafened by the roar of the helicopter engines, he was unaware of the blast until the vehicle shuddered and pitched forward. The rotor blades, the tail, and one of the skids were ripped off - he could see the rotors warping and spinning off into the distance - and the cabin tumbled end over end for quite a long way with loose objects inside rattling about like peanuts in a shell too big before it began to lose momentum and dropped towards the sea. Jun Min did not live long enough to feel the impact; even if a flying pair of scissors from the first aid box had not gouged a four inch wound in his chest, penetrating his heart, the small box of rifle ammunition that cracked smartly against the side of his head would have been quite enough to finish him off.

PART 3: Post-nuke

Immediately upon awakening, Rosie tried to sit up. That was a mistake; her head began pounding right away. She supposed she must have had a whale of a time last night to wake up with a hangover like this one. She could remember nothing about getting drunk, but in view of how she felt, that was no surprise.

She lay back again, vaguely aware of feeling something gritty against her face, as if little bits of ash had been sprinkled over the pillow.

Something was wrong about all of this, she thought. She was pretty certain she and Annie had had a quiet night in, watching TV. Or was that the night before? It was hard to think clearly past the rhythmic stabs of pain. If only she’d managed a good night’s sleep instead of all that being-unsettled nonsense, what with dreams about thunder and lightning and someone shaking her...

She changed position, and the ashy stuff scratched her cheek. What was it? She opened her eyes for the first time and sat up slowly, trying to resist the growing sense of alarm that was accelerating her heartbeat.

Dawn was pushing its way sluggishly through the clouds lumped on the horizon. Normally she would not be able to see this, but today there was no problem; the Venetian blinds had fallen away from where they were anchored to the wall, and the only thing that distorted Rosie’s view was the crack running across the windowpane.

She looked around the rest of the room. It looked for
all the world as if it had been turned over by a particularly destructive burglar. But how, wondered Rosie, could she have been unaware of all this happening? Why, she must have been a whisker away from being murdered in her bed -

She turned suddenly to look at her pillow. A dark red stain covered a large patch of it to one side; bits of something like chalk were peppered over it. She gawped at it for a moment,
then raised a hand to the left side of her head. Her fingertips touched something moist: blood. On the floor beside the bed lay a big chunk of plaster; above the headboard was the gap it had come from.

She couldn’t imagine how all this had happened, and didn’t want to try. All she wanted was for her headache to go away and for someone to make everything all right again.

In the meantime, where was Annie? Something that caused plaster to fall from the wall in great lumps, cracked the window, and generally made the room look as if it had been searched by the Drug Squad, could hardly have failed to cause a lot of noise (even if Rosie herself may not have heard it). Why hadn’t that thoughtless cow come running to see whether she was alright? After all, she was only in the next room-

Rosie’s mind suddenly shifted gear, and though she still could not make sense of what had happened, all at once she was able to respond sensibly to it. She threw back the covers and jumped out of bed, yelping briefly as her feet came down on pebble-sized bits of plaster, and dashed for Annie’s room.

She flung her own door open and threw herself at Annie’s, heedless of whether it swung right back and hit the inner wall with a crash, but it didn’t budge; her momentum carried her right into the door and she ricocheted from it with her nose bleeding.

When the bright burst of pain had eased up a little, she tried putting her shoulder to the door and shoving. But that was no more profitable than running against it had been, and hurt nearly as much; she was using the point of her shoulder instead of rounding it. Then, to crown it all, as she leant into the door, the carpet she stood on began to slip; it
caught for a few instants on rough flooring, then gave way before she could regain her balance. Her knees came down hard on the edge of the door saddle.

Trying not to let the accumulated physical pain overwhelm her, she looked at the door helplessly, her vision becoming blurred by tears, and struggled to figure out what her options were.
It must have been an earthquake,
she thought,
or something like it.
The wall above the doorframe had presumably settled, jamming the door firmly shut. An earthquake in Ireland sounded ridiculous, but what else could have happened?

“Annie!” she bawled. “Are you all -” She cut off her sentence, listening hard; as she was crying out, she had an irresistible conviction that some kind of noise had come from inside the room, and she had all but drowned it out. It had not been Annie’s voice, but something that might have been Annie stirring weakly under a pile of rubble.

“Annie!” Rosie shouted again. “If you can hear me,
please
make a noise!
Any
noise!” She listened again, but heard only the sound of her own pulse throbbing in time with her headache.

She’s dead,
an unwelcome little
let’s-call-a-spade-a-spade
inner voice said.
She must be dead.

For a few moments, Rosie began to believe it, and her self-control was reduced to the condition of some old, delicate piece of glasswork all threaded through with a fine network of cracks, ready to crumble into a cloud of crystalline dust at the least blow. “Annie!” she screamed, banging her fists on the door ineffectually.

She stopped after about half a minute. The brief break in her rational functioning seemed to have been cathartic; she was able to gather herself more easily than an outside observer might have supposed possible. The glass had not been struck quite hard enough, though it had been set ringing loudly.

Outside,
she thought.
There’s bound to be someone around.

There was a drop of about a metre between the landing and the top stair; she negotiated it warily, expecting the stairs to crash to the floor below like a badly propped-up ladder. As the first stair took her weight, the whole flight creaked mightily, but it held up. She
continued the rest of the way with the same breathless caution, and finally stepped onto the stone floor of the lodging-house’s hallway.

The
dock of the cordless phone lay upside-down in a crack in the concrete floor, and the handset had finished up tucked under the bit of carpet the landlady had thrown down in a vain effort to make the place look more homely. Rosie lifted the phone and punched three nines, then the green button. Nothing happened; it was as dead as a doornail.
Surprise, surprise.
She thought suddenly of her mobile phone, sitting uselessly on her bedside table, then looked at the stairs again and cursed herself for being stupid. As she listened, though, she realised she could hear virtually nothing coming from the direction of the front door. Surely she wasn’t the only person left on the block? Other survivors should be making a lot of noise, scrabbling about in the rubble for their loved ones. The trapped and the injured should be yelling for all their lungs were worth. Somebody out there must have a mobile. But where were the sirens of the emergency vehicles?
Just how long was I unconscious? Did they overlook me and move on?

Through the few panes left in the front door, she spotted movement. Someone seemed to be grubbing about in the wreckage of the little shop opposite, making absurd efforts, by the looks of it, to tidy things up by putting magazines back onto the top shelf - or was he taking them down? Never mind; whoever he was, whatever he was doing could wait.

“Hey!” shouted Rosie. “Over here!” The person in the shop jumped guiltily, dropping the magazines, and moved quickly to the window to peer in her direction. It was a young man; Rosie thought absently that he looked familiar.

She shoved open the front door and then had to dodge as it fell off its hinges and landed at an awkward angle. She managed to negotiate a route past it into the open before she had frightened the stranger off. “Help me, please!” she called. “My friend’s hurt and I can’t get to her!”

He gawped at her for a few moments as if he could not decide whether she was a raving lunatic or just a practical joker, then stepped out onto the street and gawped some more. Her mind slipped briefly into a familiar groove, and she assumed she knew what that kind of stare meant; she had been on the receiving end of something like it often enough, and always took it as no less than her due. Then she dismissed the thought. She must be a very long way from being at her most alluring! Besides, nobody could be pervy enough to start flirting in a situation like this. Her subconscious was probably trying to put a band-aid on her injured dignity.

At last the young man apparently got around to thinking that perhaps he should investigate things further; he approached Rosie, stopping about fifteen feet away, and looked her up and down yet again. She had an embarrassingly self-conscious moment in which she began to suspect just exactly how dreadful she must look, then she thought:
Catch a grip, Rosie. Nobody gets dressed up for disasters. If he thinks you look like something that’s been dragged through a rubbish tip backwards, that’s his problem.

“I think my friend has been hurt very badly,” she told him in a deliberately businesslike tone, “but her door’s jammed shut. I can’t get to her. Do you have a mobile?”

“You can’t call anybody,” he said quickly.

“What?”

“I mean, I would, but all the networks are down, you see. Nobody’s mobile works.” He came a little closer. “Where did you say your friend was?”

“This way,” said Rosie, turning to climb back over the front door. Just before she turned away from him, she remembered where she’d seen him before.
It’s the dork from the pub.

*****

It was a fantasy come true, a scene straight from a disaster movie: the young, unassuming hero, neither looking for nor expecting romance, comes across a helpless, gorgeous, and (of course) scantily-clad woman who just happens to have no-one else to turn to...

Barry
McCandless was vaguely aware that he was not off to a confident start in the role of hero, and that he must in fact be striking her as being a little odd in his manner. Over in the shop he had been leafing through certain very interesting magazines (he had never quite worked up the courage to actually buy the ones on the top shelf) for just under an hour, and presented now with a real, live, nearly-naked girl (however dirty and tousled-looking), he was finding it very difficult to shift back to the mental state which enabled him to relate to her as an entity with an immediate interest in something other than being stared at and fondled.

As the girl negotiated her way once more over the remains of the door, she lost her balance for an instant. She was not able to shift her footing - that would have meant some nasty cuts on her inner thighs from the splintered edge of the door - so she had to bend at the waist and stretch out for the inner wall to steady
herself. The movement made her nightie ride up over her hips a little.

It was all the invitation he needed. He stared for a moment; then, in a curiously abstracted manner, he reached out to touch her.

*****

Rosie gasped and turned her head to him sharply, unable on account of her awkward posture to either jump away from him or swat his hand away. She was no shrinking violet; when men crossed a certain line without her consent she was not shy of giving them an earful of profanity and, if at all possible, a swift punch where it was most likely to do good. But coming at such a moment as this, from the only help available in a life-and-death situation,
she was shocked more than she had thought she could be shocked, and she could only utter a ridiculously demure little: “What on Earth do you think you’re doing?”

He seemed oblivious to the fact that he was being spoken to.

Rosie struggled back upright and scrambled over the door, intent on putting a few metres between them; but the dork held on to his handful of her flesh until he almost fell over the door nose-first.

Rosie gathered her composure, and in tones icy enough to leave frost on his clothes, said: “My friend is upstairs, probably very seriously injured, possibly even dying. If you could recover yourself enough to master your apparent overdose of testosterone, I would appreciate your assistance. Otherwise you can go and -”

“Hey,” he said, his eyes unglazing a little, “all right, all right!” He began to step slowly over the door. “I’m ready to help. I’m here, aren’t I? I think you might be a bit more grateful.”

“Grateful?” said Rosie, angry rather than frightened. “Grateful? And what exactly is your idea of grateful, as if I couldn’t already tell?”

One corner of his mouth curled into a grin, but there was no mirth in it. “So we understand each other, then. Good.”

She stared at him, hardly able to believe that this was not some kind of profoundly tasteless and ill-timed joke.
Don’t lose it, Rosie,
she told herself.
Whether you like it or not, you need this guy’s help.
She shook her head and started again. “Look, I’m sorry. Maybe I haven’t made it clear to you just how urgent things are. If -”

“Oh, I know just how urgent things are, believe me,” he said, that grin turning into a fully-fledged leer.

She hesitated; then, catching his meaning, swore at him in exasperation. “You pathetic, over-sexed moron! Don’t you understand that this isn’t the time or the place? If you’re really that desperate, you can practice charming me into bed afterwards, okay? In the meantime, I -”