Omega

by Stewart Farrar

  Betty said 'Yes' while Philip was still gathering his wits. 'I'd feel safer not leaving you behind, just in case you're lying. Get your respirator, money, anything else you need that'll go in your pocket. But no luggage. Come on, then -there's no time to hang around.'

  Philip could hardly remember, afterwards, the rest of the climb. All that remained vividly in his mind was the three of them – himself, his wife, and the American stranger -standing at last beside the concealed air intake on the roof of a Stoke Newington factory, breathing the fresh air and gazing out dumbly at the London dawn.

  14

  'Why are there no buses – or queues at the stops?' Philip wondered when they had made their way out into the main road. 'There should be, even this early.'

  'Don't you know?' Tonia replied. 'They called a strike, late last night. They're demanding Dust respirators for all bus crews.'

  Philip halted in his tracks and stared at her. 'Dust respirators? But how did they know?'

  'Holy Moses! Didn't you get the Prime Minister's TV statement?'

  'We didn't watch TV at all last night, or turn on the radio. We were too busy getting ready.'

  'I guess you would be, yes… Eight-thirty, it was. He gave a warning about this Dust that might come up out of the ground if there were any more tremors. Said you could protect yourself against it by breathing through gauze soaked in vinegar… Walter Jennings, the TUC man, spoke after him. He called on the unions to cooperate -several factories are going over to producing proper respirators on a crash programme. Meanwhile there's enough to equip the essential services… That's what the bus strike's all about. They found they weren't on the essential services list.'

  They started walking again, towards the Walthamstow Marshes. The Summers' home lay in Leyton, on the other side, and they planned to pick up and stock their car before getting out of London. Tonia, planless after her unpremeditated escape from Beehive, asked if she could go along along with them till she had thought out what to do next.

  'Stick with us till you're out of London anyway,' Philip advised her. 'You don't want to be caught in town if there is a Dust outbreak… Did the Premier say what the Dust did?'

  'Only that it was poisonous.'

  'That's putting it mildly. I think I'm one of the few hundred who do know, because of my job… Get the Dust in your lungs and it drives you incurably insane.'

  'Jesus!'

  'Thank God they have given the warning. At least people can get their hands on vinegar and gauze now… If there'd been a Dust outbreak before that, in somewhere like London – within three days, it'd be a city of homicidal maniacs… The Government's known about the vinegar-mask thing for a couple of months. I never could understand why they sat on it.'

  'If you ask me,' Tonia said, 'Big Chief Harley was still sitting on it. He was away from Beehive last night. I wanted an interview with him for AP – he's been very polite to us, so far – and I managed to waylay him when he got back around midnight. He bit my head off and pushed past me, with a face like the wrath of God… D'you know what? I think Jennings talked the Prime Minister into making his broadcast while Harley's back was turned. Only a guess, but it figures.'

  'Do you notice something?' Betty said suddenly. 'People don't like these uniforms. They resent us.'

  She was right. The steadily thickening early-morning crowds, walking to work through the busless streets, were eyeing them as they passed and the hostility could not be mistaken. Beehive was no longer a secret, that was plain – and somehow Beehive uniforms were recognized.

  'I think,' Philip said, 'it would be a good idea if we tried some quieter back-streets. Everyone must know what these respirator haversacks are. We could easily be mugged for them.'

  They cut across towards Mount Pleasant Hill. Philip knew there was a footbridge over the River Lea at the bottom of it which would enable them to cross the Marshes without using the Lea Bridge Road bottleneck. One other thing they had noticed; queues were already forming outside shops which would not be open for another hour or two. 'By the middle of the morning, there won't be a bottle of vinegar in any of them,' Philip predicted. 'And after that I wonder what the black-market price will be?'

  As they climbed the footbridge over the Lea, they could see Lea Bridge Road a couple of hundred metres to their right. At this time of the morning, the bulk of the traffic should have been westwards towards Central London, but it was unmistakably eastwards. Lea Bridge Road was one of the principal arteries leading out to Epping Forest and the open country of East Anglia. If the eastward flow was building up already, at just after seven in the morning -then the exodus had started. Not a panic as yet, because the flow was moving steadily at a good forty to fifty kilometres per hour. But what would happen when the jam was nose-to-tail, alternately stopping and crawling? How long would tempers stand the strain?…Philip was glad they lived on the other side of the two-kilometre-long bottleneck, which was the only road across the Marshes for at least three kilometres north and south. On the Leyton side there were dozens of quiet side-roads which could be taken towards the Forest and Philip knew them like the palm of his hand.

  Visiting home, even long enough to fetch and park the car, was dangerous enough, though he doubted if there could be a police call out for him and Betty yet. Staying there (quite apart from their determination to be out of town as soon as possible) would be out of the question; Beehive, he knew, took very prompt action against defectors and by this afternoon at the latest the local police would be alerted.

  'Which way now?' Betty asked. 'We can't cross the Canal. It's either Lea Bridge Road or the railway.'

  The Canal ran parallel to the Lea river, two or three hundred metres ahead. Crossing it by the road bridge would be almost direct but Philip thought it was better to avoid it. They swung north across the playing fields towards the railway bridge a kilometre away.

  After a minute or so, Tonia stopped, her head on one side. 'Did you hear that?'

  'Hear what?'

  'And feel it. A sort of rumble.' 'Train coming, perhaps?' 'No-I…'

  Even as she spoke, the great shock-wave threw them off their feet. If they all screamed, the sound was lost immediately in a vast thunder of noise. A fissure suddenly appeared in the ground beside them, widening and shooting out lengthwise as they scrambled away from it. 'Keep together, for God's sake!' Philip yelled. They were still on all fours, unable to stand on the jerking, groaning earth. How long it lasted, they never knew; ten seconds, half a minute… They were too overwhelmed with impressions -the railway bridge ahead of them twisting and tilting like soft wax, the crash of falling buildings on each skyline, the terrible metallic clatter of endless multiple pilc-ups on Lea Bridge Road… the deadly grey mist seeping up through the nearby fissure and Tonia crying out 'Respirators -quick!'…

  They fumbled with the black rubber muzzles, holding their breath while they pulled them over their mouths. Now we're marked game, Philip thought dizzily – the law of the jungle.

  They gazed at each other, stunned by what had happened. It was some seconds before they realized that the world around them was, briefly, almost silent.

  And after the silence the screams began. Screams mounting and multiplying from the carnage on the roads; screams, more distant, from the shattered bricks and concrete ahead and behind, where the still-living were trapped and maimed, and the lucky (lucky?) uninjured struggling to free them. In three days they'll be mad… Philip thrust the thought away in horror.

  'The river-look!'

  The two women turned at his mask-muffled voice and looked. Behind them, surging and tumbling, the River Lea had burst its banks and was rising inexorably towards them.

  They took to their heels, watching for fissures as they ran. Philip led them obliquely northwards, in a race to reach the twisted railway bridge before the flood did. They made it with water lapping about their ankles and scrambled to immediate safety among the ruined girders. Below them, by some freak, the Canal bed had drained dry. A giant, Dust-spewing fis
sure diagonally across it was a possible reason but already the floodwaters were cascading over the wall as though trying to refill it. They whole thing was a Titan's beach-game, transforming in minutes a landscape that had been familiar to Philip since he was a boy.

  He tore his eyes away from it and examined their position as coolly as he could.

  The bridge was an X-shaped one on two levels, the Clapton-Walthamstow line crossing above the Tottenham-Stratford one and at right angles to it, each at forty-five degrees to the Canal. Both were now a single mass of wreckage, but the south-easterly line, towards Lea Bridge station and Stratford, looked walkable, and protected by the Canal bed from the floods; the water still seemed to be disappearing into the great fissure. It lay in the direction they wanted to go, so they climbed over the wreckage and followed it.

  On the way, they kept their eyes open for weapons. They found a solid iron bar, the rusting front fork from a bicycle and a heavy shovel; with these in their hands, they felt safer. Philip worried about the bridge at Lea Bridge station, where the line passed under the crowded holocaust of a road; would they still be able to get through? The station itself was a relic, long closed down, but…

  The bridge, when they reached it, had collapsed, but there was still a jagged tunnel of daylight to one side. They approached it carefully, hiding in the empty station, for there were people shouting and running above and still the wails of pain and helpless terror from the injured and the trapped. Once through the gap they ran – not merely to escape the crowds but because to their immediate left the gasworks were burning fiercely and there might be more explosions at any moment.

  Their house was in Church Lane, a few hundred metres away across Leyton Marshes recreation ground and through Marsh Lane. It was not until they were in Marsh Lane itself that they came face to face with trouble.

  Four youths saw them and one yelled out: 'Bloody Beehivers! Get'em! Get their masks!'

  The four rushed them together – the leader holding a knife as though he knew how to use it. Philip did not wait but made straight for the leader, swinging his iron bar, to put the women behind him. The leader slashed, jabbed, and dodged and once nearly reached him; then a full swing from Philip's bar caught his arm, probably breaking it. He fell to his knees, squealing, and Philip swung the bar again, down on to the youth's skull, feeling the bone shatter.

  Philip spun round; Betty had already half-blinded one attacker with a jab from her bicycle-fork and Tonia was wielding her shovel like a battle-axe, holding the other two at bay. Philip disabled one with a blow to the knee and the survivor backed away, wild-eyed.

  Philip shouted, 'That's enough – run!' The survivor made no attempt to follow.

  Five minutes later they were inside their house, changing hurriedly into civilian clothes – including what Betty could find to fit Tonia. The back wall of the house had fallen away, bringing half the first floor with it, and there was not a window left unbroken. Fortunately the car was still in the lock-up shed round the back and undamaged. They loaded clothes, bedding, tinned food, tools into the car with little time for careful selection and within half an hour they were away, picking a hazardous route along ruined back-streets, eyes open for fissures, back-tracking often, the smell of burning houses in their nostrils, and all the time the crying and wailing, now mostly pitiful rather than terrified. They saw many people but were mainly ignored now that they were out of uniform. They had wrapped scarves round their heads to hide the official respirators – which did not look strange, because everyone who had been able to get hold of vinegar, and many who had not, had muffled their faces in one way or another.

  Nobody mentioned the fight in Marsh Lane until they had been travelling a couple of hours and were well out into the Forest near Theydon Bois. Then Philip said dully, through the muffle of his respirator: 'I killed one of them, you know.'

  'If you hadn't,' Betty said, 'they'd probably have got our respirators, and then we'd all seven have gone mad. Because it was too late for them – they'd already breathed it. Don't brood on it, darling. I put an eye out, too – and killing him would have been kinder, in the long run.'

  'And we may have to again,' Tonia put in. 'I don't like it, either – I've never killed anyone, though I damn nearly did back there. But we didn't set this up – and if we're going to survive, there may be other times when it's them or us. Especially when God knows how many people start going crazy. Because if one in ten was ready with a vinegar mask by this morning, I'm a Dutchman.'

  Philip nodded and then asked: 'Well, girls – we got out, somehow, and just in time. What do we do now?'

  'Find somewhere lonely, fast,' Betty said. 'In less than three days. Then hide, hide, hide.'

  The thunder of the mountains was majestic, terrifying.

  Moira and Dan were on breakfast duty that morning. Dan had put up the trestle table in the middle of the laager, with the camp-chairs around it, and was laying out mugs, plates and cutlery. Moira, having brewed tea in the huge canteen pot Greg had picked up on one of his shopping sorties, was boiling eggs and toasting bread, at the canvas-screened cooker. She was thinking that before September was out they would have to devise a more sheltered kitchen area. Diana, beside her, was carefully unwrapping a half-kilo of butter, talking to it as she did so. Moira could hear

  Rosemary singing in her tent as she got dressed and Greg teasing her. Angie and Eileen, in the open door of their caravan, were listening to the tail end of the seven o'clock radio news; it was Angle's news-monitoring day and Eileen always listened anyway – though since the Premier's announcement last night, she need not listen so anxiously. Thank heaven that worry's over, Moira thought; now all Britain knows about the vinegar masks… Then the first tremor came and she gasped dropping an egg – Diana had felt it, too, and asked 'Mummy?' anxiously. Moira snatched her up, instinctively moving away from the cooker. It was just as well she did because a second later there was another, worse tremor, which tumbled the boiling pan of water on to the ground where they had been standing.

  Eileen called out: 'Respirators, everybody! Respirators!'

  Moira ran to their tent, carrying Diana; Dan arrived a pace behind. Moira was saying hurriedly to Diana: 'Now, darling, this is the time we talked about. We'll all be all right but we all have to wear our respirators till Eileen says we can take them off…'

  'I remember, Mummy. Because the air might make us sick.'

  ‘Very sick, darling. So we'll keep them on and be safe -right?'

  Dan was soaking the vinegar-pads with quick, pre-measured amounts and securing them into the masks. They put Diana's on together and had just donned their own when the real quake came.

  They clung together, gasping, for what seemed like many seconds while the earth shook beneath them, again and again, and the mountains roared in pain.

  Then the shaking was over and the earth was still. But the thunder of the mountains went on, monstrous echoes flung back and forth' as though the Gods bellowed their anger. Diana was crying, the little sound strange and piteous in the rubber mask, while they hugged and rocked her.

  At last, into the horizons of infinity, the echoes faded and died.

  Cautiously, they stood up, and walked outside.

  Nothing in the immediate neighbourhood seemed to have been damaged. The mountains, the trees, the cliff, the waterfall – all looked as they had before, even the tents still stood. Only a few things like the boiling saucepan, two of the camp-chairs and some crockery from the table, had been disrupted. On the meadow the five goats – a billy and four nannies – which New Dyfnant had presented to them tugged and called, careering round on the ends of their tethering-ropes. Of Ginger Lad there was no sign. Every bird in the forest was clamouring and flocks of them wheeled and zigzagged above the valley as if they no longer trusted the earth.

  The radio had gone dead. With remarkable calmness -having assured herself that everyone was all right – Angie explored the tuning dial. Nothing on any British, Irish, or French wavelength, all of
which she could normally pick up; a Spanish broadcast broke off even as she listened to it; and one German station was babbling away a stream of words which she did not understand but which sounded hysterical. Here and there the clicking whistle of Morse, otherwise nothing.

  My God, Angie thought – it's big. Bloody big.

  The seven of them gathered together, instinctively well out in the open. They had only just begun to talk, to get their breath back, when Peter's Land-Rover shot round the corner and across the grass to join them, with Peter at the wheel and Father Byrne beside him, both wearing their respirators.

  'We're all right but there's damage further down,' Peter told them. 'A big landslide from the Moel Achles ridge -and there's a fissure right down one side of it, with the Dust pouring out. And the wind's this way. We'd better keep these things on till the air in the fissure's clear… Look, do you mind if I tow the trailer round later and we join your camp? I think we'd better be all together.'

  They all agreed, of course. While they were talking about it, Peter suddenly cocked his head, listening. They all fell silent. Above the sound of the river they could pick out a deeper, more distant roar.

  Rosemary said: 'Oh, please, no – not more earthquakes!'

  Peter shook his head. 'No, not a steady noise like that… I'm afraid there's only one thing it can be. Billions of tonnes of water rushing down the Vyrnwy valley – and taking Llanwddyn with it. The dam must have gone.'

  It had been a dreadful morning in New Dyfnant. About a quarter of the houses were uninhabitable and few of the rest had escaped some sort of damage; six people were dead, and twenty or thirty – Dr Owen had lost count -sufficiently injured to be incapacitated. The doctor had got around as best he could (a Y-shaped fissure had divided the village into three areas between which cars could not cross) and Dai Forest Inn had turned his saloon bar into a field hospital. Fortunately, everybody seemed to have got his vinegar mask on in time, the uninjured helping the injured, but the Dust had hit the village within minutes and only time would tell if anyone had breathed it. There was one grim exception: Tom Jenkins, an isolated smallholder who had been scornful of Eileen's warning until last night's official announcement and had run-white-faced to the village in search of vinegar twenty minutes after the earthquake struck. Bronwen had supplied him and had summoned Dai Police urgently. Dai had promptly locked Tom up; there seemed nothing else to do. He had promised Tom to send the doctor to him but Tom's terrified acquiescence had shown he had little faith in anything that could be done for him now.