by Adam Steel
The Pier went first.
The wave of fire sprayed the fun rides; drenching the rollercoaster in flames. The people that were hanging from the Big Dipper were falling into the water on fire; squealing and thrashing around in agony. The wind carried the smell of aviation fuel and burning flesh up the beach to where Ellie and Irene were now running flat out in a stampede with the other holiday makers. They turned to watch only when they had reached the safety of the upper promenade. The whole pier was alight and collapsing into the sea, taking with it hundreds of people. The wave accelerated up the beach from the direction of the pier taking with it hundreds of bodies and drenching everything in its path in burning fuel. The sea was a hellish boiling cauldron of charred bodies and wreckage that swirled around before disappearing below the burning waves.
Irene sank to her knees in a state of shock as she stared at the hundreds of panic stricken people left on the beach. The black wave of fire made a searing noise as it burned its way through the scattering crowds like a speeding lava flow. Ellie watched with an expression of naked horror as the man with the two little dogs was swept over by the wave. He was holding one of the dogs and squealing a terrible, high pitched scream. The yellow disk popped and melted and the other dog whimpered as its fur was caught alight by the fuel. It paddled hopelessly for a second or two before disappearing into the deathly wave.
The wave had swept up deckchairs, towels, tents, picnic sets and the people who were on the lower shore before they had chance to escape. Children that had been swimming in the water earlier, disappeared beneath the black depths of the deadly, fuel-soaked water. Yellow armbands hissed and popped where once they had carried the little swimmers. Hysterical parents jumped into the sea to rescue their toddlers and they were also set alight by the film of burning fuel that topped the wave.
Ellie watched, dumbstruck, as a fat woman struggled to run up the beach. She was on fire. Her clothes were burning and falling from her pink and charred body. The skin fell in chunks from her in oversized legs as she collapsed in a heap, writhing in agony. A young girl and her boyfriend (who had been dancing to music just minutes earlier) were running for all they were worth to escape the racing wave of fire. The girl tripped and fell face first on the wet sand. He left her to die when the wave drenched her body. She screamed a gurgled scream after him, but in his panic he carried on running. Her blonde hair turned black. The wave hit the rocks at the end of the beach, opposite the pier, and lapped back to turn and sweep for a second lap; its oily slick resembling a gigantic black snake. It curled around the young man and carried him screaming out to sea.
The noise from the pier was deafening as the wooden trusses collapsed taking the rest of the structure and the burning fairground into the sea. The screams from the children disappeared under the sea amongst a horrible, gurgling noise. The stench of aviation fuel filled the air and a man standing next to Ellie bent over double and vomited. Irene had gone deathly pale as she kneeled motionless alongside the crowds of people that had gathered with them to watch the scene of unbelievable carnage. The moments that they stood and witnessed the total destruction of the beach seemed to last forever.
A pregnant woman was standing next to them with her husband. She was sobbing and calling out her child’s name repeatedly while her distraught husband tried to comfort her. Onlookers stood transfixed, gaping in shock at the disaster. They were watching the pier as it finally disintegrated; leaving nothing but a floating pile of wood that formed a black mat on top of the swirling sea.
The air was becoming thicker with choking smoke and they were finding it hard to breathe. Ellie was coughing. She grabbed at Irene’s arm and turned away from the awful scene. She sat down on the side of the road with her head in her hands. Irene fell down next to her and they put their arms around each other. Time lost meaning for the two young women as they sat among the chaos. Around them stunned crowds moved, whispering and crying: lost in their own nightmares.
Above the screams and whimpers of the terrified people a voice rang out terror stricken.
‘Christ. Look at that!’
Ellie dared to look up. Her eyes were stinging from the smoke and tears.
A thickly built man was pointing frantically behind them. His face was contorted in horror. Some of the people turned to look in the direction that he was pointing, others were too afraid to imagine what new terror could have eclipsed the slaughter down on the beach.
‘Oh my God…Where’s it coming from?’ one of them asked.
‘London…that’s London…’ the man replied in a tremulous voice.
Ellie caught the word “LONDON” and glancing at Irene with an expression of confusion and renewed fear, she stood up and turned to look in the direction in which the survivors were now staring wide eyed and shocked.
Irene gasped and held her hands to her mouth.
Ellie felt the fear shoot through her numbed body reviving every stunned nerve. The scene on the beach paled into insignificance at the idea in Ellie’s mind at what had happened to London. From fifty miles away she could see the towers of smoke that could only come from an immense fire. It covered the whole sky above London. Jesus…The whole of London must be on fire. My mum…dad…they’re working in London today. Why did they have to volunteer for overtime? Why today? Why? Why? WHY?! she thought, despairingly.
Ellie looked at the terrified faces of the survivors who were watching the growing smoke over the horizon. I’ve got to get back…My mum and dad are there. Please don’t let them be dead. Panic bolts shot through her body. In her head she knew the truth. That everyone in London, who was near that fire, was most likely dead; including her parents. In her heart she wanted to believe, that by some miracle, they were still alive. Her mind told her differently. She tried to ignore it.
Two elderly men were standing in the middle of the street shouting something about “Terrorists and Nukes.”
Other people were agreeing with them and starting to assign blame for the catastrophe. Assigning blame seemed to have eclipsed the need to survive for some.
People were standing in the road which minutes before had been bustling with cars and buses and the traffic had come to a grinding halt. Several of the vehicles had come off the road when their systems failed and were scattered up the road at crazy angles, some of them embedded in parked cars. A double decker bus full of tourists was stuck in the middle of the road and the driver was desperately trying to get the doors open. The passengers were looking out of the top window at the carnage on the beach. Some were crying, others hysterical to get out of the doors which had jammed shut.
Irene’s mouth trembled as the shock began to abate a little. She tried to speak but it came out strained and high pitched.
‘A Nuclear bomb? D-D-Do you think that’s what this is?’ she stammered, looking at the ominous black tornados that swirled over the distant sky.
Ellie shook her head. ‘No. Nuclear weapons don’t do that,’ she said, with as much conviction as she could muster. Having to think helped her a little, it took her mind off the sights of burning people and better yet the smell.
Irene looked at her with the tiniest glimmer of hope, hoping that she was right.
‘A – Are you sure? I mean how – how do you know?’
Ellie nodded. She had not been lying. During her studies on plastic surgery, she had read several books on the burn victims of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. She knew what an atomic bomb could and would do. This cataclysmic disaster was caused by something else, something new, terrifying and unknown. It made it worse than an atomic bomb. She threw the thoughts from her mind. Irene would see the cold fear there. It would make things worse.
She reached down and scooped up someone’s beach bag that was lying nearby. She threw it at Irene who nearly dropped it in surprise. Their own bags had been abandoned somewhere down in the wreckage and Ellie reasoned that the owner of this one had considered their life more valuable than their spare clothes.
‘Put something on. We’re l
eaving. NOW,’ she said, with all the authority she could muster, but inside, she was falling to pieces.
‘Where are we going?’ Irene stuttered as she rummaged in the bag for some clothes that might fit.
‘London,’ Ellie said, as she pulled out a pair of jeans and a top. ‘We have to get back to London.’ Or whatever’s left of it, she thought.
The enraged smoke pillars in the distance did not give her hope.
Irene struggled to do the buttons on the oversized shirt, but her hands were shaking so much she could only manage one.
They left the stunned survivors and staggered away with other loose groups of shaken survivors. Some were gibbering uncontrollably, others soaked through with tears.
No emergency services came and the fires on the beach burned unchecked, creating a huge funeral pyre.
They were glad to escape the stench of death but when they got to the railway station, it was in absolute chaos. None of the trains were running. They had all ground to a halt along with the cars. Hordes of people shouted and argued: fighting for space: attention and information.
Nobody could get a phone working and they hung from their wires like gutted eels as dead as the tourists down on the beach.
Ellie knew then, that they were going to have to walk back because there weren’t going to be any trains. Something seemed to have affected all forms of transport. Ellie wondered if the plane that they had witnessed falling out of the sky was the only plane to have come down in that way and what disaster could have caused such a catastrophic event. Absurdly, she realised that she had left her book back on the beach, and it occurred to her that it did not matter anymore, because if London was burnt to the ground, there wouldn’t be a medical school left to take any exams.
She thought about her mother who was a paediatric consultant in the children’s hospital in London and her father who was a history professor at Kings College. He had taken the post when he had been promoted to professor and they had all left their old house by the river in Devon to move to London so that her parents could pursue their careers. Ellie had protested at first. She had not wanted to leave her little red fishing boat and her friends and the home in which she had grown up, but they persuaded her it was, after all, for the best. She had always been destined to follow in her mother’s footsteps and go to medical school once she had finished university. The only positive aspect in moving to London (as far as Ellie was concerned) was that Irene would be going to medical school with her. Now Irene trailed alongside Ellie, her footsteps dragging. She had been silent since the railway station and looked so pale as though she might vomit at any moment. Her stunning red hair was matted against her scared face.
The two women walked out of town lost in their own dark thoughts.
Ellie was thinking that it was definitely not for the best to be living in London.
They passed bewildered groups of people as they made their way along the ring road that led to London. Some families were sitting stunned in their cars waiting to be rescued. The reality of the situation had not sunk in for them. Others had abandoned their immobilised cars and started walking towards the town of Brighton. Clusters of people were gathering around the variety of cars, coaches, and other vehicles that were strewn along the road. Some vehicles had crashed, but still no police or fire engines attended.
Ellie and Irene staggered towards the growing black smoke clouds that had spread steadily across the sky in front of them. They had walked a few miles outside from Brighton, when Ellie heard the ‘chugging’ noise of an engine behind them on the highway. It was the first sound of a mechanical vehicle they had heard since the beach. The sound seemed almost comforting: the world eerily quiet without it. She turned to see a tractor towing a sheep trailer moving slowly up the road towards them.
Ellie flagged the tractor down, while Irene merely stumbled to turn and face it.
Irene looked exhausted.
The farmer driving the tractor was elderly. He wore a flat cap under which his untidy grey hair stuck out and rested on the collar of his yellow, checked shirt. The tractor stopped in front of them and the old man shouted out over the noise of the engine.
‘Best get off the road girls. There’s a lot of bad stuff ‘appnin down there, near the coast. They tried to steal my Martha, but I put ‘em off with this,’ he said, putting his hand on an ancient, twelve bore shotgun.
Ellie glanced at the heavy worn shotgun that was wedged against his seat. She what’s sure what he meant. They? Who are ‘They’?
‘Needin’ a lift?’ he offered, before she had time to respond. ‘Art. Names Art. Yer welcome to get in the trailer – ain’t much but saves you walkin’ miles. I’m headin’ that way,’ he nodded. His voice croaked from the years of smoking tobacco. ‘Hop in. I’ll take you so far and then it’ll be up to you,’ he croaked, settling back into the vibrating tractor seat. He scratched his head with his grubby fingers whilst holding his cap.
‘Wait!’ Ellie said loudly over the engine noise.
Art flipped his cap back onto his head.
‘How come your tractor is running and all these other cars have stopped?’ she asked, pointing to a jack-knifed car and caravan in a nearby ditch.
Art looked at her thoughtfully. He rubbed the back of his neck with one hand and replied. ‘Guess it’s ‘cause she’s old type see. Martha, that’s her name. Had her donkey’s years. No ‘lectrics to ruin – see. Not like them modern vee-hickles. Now. You getting in or not?’ he said, staring hard at Ellie.
‘Yes. Thanks,’ Ellie replied, pushing Irene up into the back of the trailer.
Ellie followed hastily and they huddled together in the trailer.
The tractor chugged on up the road. For miles they looked out of the back of the trailer as the tractor weaved its way in and out of the stranded vehicles. At one point a convoy of army vehicles roared past them at speed towards London. The rows of soldiers lined up in the back of the trucks looked back at the pair of them sitting amongst the straw and sheep dung. Ellie was feeling that the whole day was somehow surreal and that she must be having a really terrifying nightmare from which she would wake up at any minute, but the minutes turned into hours. Still she did not wake up and still the nightmare did not end. They had been in the trailer for hours when Art stopped the tractor.
They appeared to be on the outskirts of a village.
Art jumped down from the cab and appeared at the back of the trailer.
‘This is as far as I go girlies. I ain’t goin near no towns, not with the mood I seen some of these people in. They tried to steal my Martha.’
He had repeated his fear of having his tractor stolen as though it was the worst thing that had happened that day.
Ellie and Irene inched out of the cramped trailer (and stretching themselves after the uncomfortable journey) they thanked Art for helping them.
‘Good luck,’ he said, jumping back into the cab.
They waved him “goodbye” and watched as the tractor chugged off down a side road until they could no longer hear or see it.
They looked at each other for a second. Irene’s face was pale and delicate. The shine had vanished from her eyes.
The black clouds of smoke in the distance grew closer. They were dark and menacing and underneath there seemed to be an orange glow.
‘We have to keep moving Irene,’ Ellie coaxed gently.
Her voice sounded numb and detached as though she was saying the words and they had somehow bypassed her brain.
Irene nodded and stared at the long road ahead.
The Village
It was early evening by the time they arrived at the small village which was situated about eighteen miles from Brighton.
In the distance the growing orange hue over London was smothered by menacing black smog that rose up in tunnels and looked like inverted tornados.
The street lights were off and the village was at a standstill.
Irene walked cautiously by an off-licence that had already been looted
bare. The alarm was silent as dead as all the machines around it. The door had been kicked in and a trail of broken glass littered the path outside of the once popular village shop.
Candles flickered in the windows of some houses and they heard crying and shouting in the distance. They heard the sound of smashing glass and ‘whooping; noises, followed by what sounded like several people running. Minutes later two teenage lads ran past them carrying a large flat screen television.
Ellie and Irene turned to each other.
‘What’s happening to everyone? Have they lost their minds? Irene said.
‘There’s no police around. Come on…hurry. We need to find somewhere safe,’ Ellie said in a worried voice.
‘Do you think there is anywhere safe?’ Irene queried.
Ellie did not reply. At least Irene was talking again, although Ellie was almost wishing that she was still silent. She had no answers for her difficult questions.
They came to a pub in the centre of the village. It was very old and had tiny red tiles on the roof with a white, beamed frontage. The windows were shuttered and looked locked. The main door was closed but they could hear a lot of voices inside.
Ellie rapped on the door and pleaded for someone to open it. They heard the door locks clunking and it opened slightly.
A man appeared at the door holding a rifle.
Irene jumped back and gasped.
‘Please help us…please!’ Ellie begged.
The man behind the door looked them over and held it open a little more to let them in. He looked out over their heads as they went inside to see if anyone was following them. Once inside he bolted the door again and they looked around to see a large crowd of terrified villagers. It was dark inside except for the candles burning behind the counter and a few torches here and there. The man appeared to be the owner of the pub. He was a big man in his fifties, with a mass of black wavy hair.
‘Colin,’ he said, holding out a hand. ‘I’m the owner. Been here forty years in this pub,’ he added proudly.