Fanatics: Zero Tolerance

by Ferguson, David J.

  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 l
ook 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 -”

  “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.)