by Walker, Luke
Discomfort poked at his chest and throat.
Simon undid the top button of his shirt, loosened his tie, and welcomed what little air there was as it circulated inside his clothing. At the railing, Dao lowered his head, no longer crying.
“Nobody out there,” he said, more to himself than Simon. After breaking through the door to see this stranger and not his boy, he was apparently close to dismissing Simon as utterly unimportant.
Unsure if he’d caught Dao’s words properly, Simon inched closer. “What?”
Dao nodded to the glass. “There’s nobody out there. No traffic. No people. Nothing.”
Simon again inhaled the slightly stale remnants of the wind from above. It was like the last breath of a huge beast, pieces of flesh from its most recent meals already rotting in its hundreds of teeth. And that’s what he breathed in along with his fear and sweat, and Dao’s panic over his son.
He walked towards where Dao stood, both men freezing when a woman called out: “Neither of you move.”
In the uppermost floors of Greenham Place, an awareness not human and not animal heard the woman’s shrill voice, and it relished the sound.
Dao tried to turn. His centre of balance spun; sunlight smacked his eyes and he clung to a surety—a welcome surety—that all this was the result of a fever.
“I said, don’t move,” the woman screamed and Dao came back to himself.
She stood at the bottom of the next flight of stairs, the points of a set of keys jutting from one hand, her eyes huge and staring. Sweat marked her white blouse, turning it grey in places. Tiny droplets of perspiration coated her upper lip; she licked at it repeatedly. The lanyard around her neck swung a little as her hand wavered and the tremor worked its way up her meaty arm.
“It’s okay,” Simon said, keeping his voice low. “We’re not dangerous. Just put the keys down.” He tried a smile that felt thick and greasy. But then, it usually did. “Or just away. Either’s good for me.”
“Who are you?” The keys remained a dull silver and gold in the smooth black of the woman’s hand.
“My name’s Simon. This is Dao. We’re… ” He stopped. Whatever came after his introduction, he had no idea. Confused? In trouble? Totally fucking clueless about what was going on?
All of the above.
“Where is everyone?” She lowered her hand slightly.
“I don’t know. You two are the only people I’ve seen since… since all the panic and that.”
He wanted to laugh. Summing up a panicked melee of dozens of people all running for the lift and stairs because a nuclear bomb was set to detonate within minutes as a panic had to be one of the weakest things he’d ever said.
“Alex,” the woman said. “My name’s Alex Herron.”
Dao left the railing beside the window and eyed her. “Have you seen anyone else?” he asked, doing all he could to keep calm.
She shook her head. Dao swore, the word almost lost under his breath.
“No boy? No kid? Six years old? Small? Chinese? My son?”
“No. Sorry.”
“Fuck,” Dao said with no energy or anger, only resignation. He sat on the top step, hands limp between his knees. Simon saw the question form on Alex’s face.
“He heard his son. Somewhere round here while I was coming down the stairs. But I didn’t see anyone.”
“He can’t be here.” Dao spoke to the floor and the square of sunlight stretched out there. With each passing moment, he grew more convinced Simon and Alex were no help to him. “My sister-in-law would have picked him up from school an hour ago. They’re in her house. My wife’s here. She works here and there’s no way Yang is here.”
“I work here, too. What’s your wife’s name?” Alex asked.
“Lin. Qian. She works in the council tax department.” Dao looked at Alex, hoping his thought about the two strangers from a moment before would prove false. “Do you know her?”
“No. Sorry. I’m in Children’s Services. It’s a big place, though. A lot of people here.”
“Yeah.”
Silence, heavier than the quiet between Dao and Simon, landed on all sides. Some of the tension between the three eased, although enough remained for Alex to keep a firm hold of her keys and for the men to keep their distance from her. She eyed them without making a sound and did all she could to get a hold on the mad race of her thoughts. Nothing of the last few moments was under her control, and that was as terrible as it was new.
The constant warmth coating the stairs and corridors lessened a degree although nobody felt the slight change, yet. Dusk was a little way off; sunset would turn the sky blood-red, and the night would be as fresh as any from recent weeks. With the clocks changing the next day, summer seemed to belong to a long-ago past, although 6/13 was never more than a moment away from anyone’s thoughts. For now, the two men and the woman stood or sat in the greenhouse effect of Greenham Place, smelling the sharp tang of their fear and confusion.
“What’s your story?” Alex asked, making Simon jump a little.
“Not a lot.” He shrugged. “I’m from an insurance company in Oxford. Here to talk to your Council about maybe moving our head office this way. I was upstairs on the ninth floor when it, whatever it was, happened. The panic and everyone legging it. Then… ” He shrugged again, the movement awkward and not buying him anywhere near enough time to think of a way to explain what he’d seen. Or heard.
“They vanished,” he said simply.
“What?” Dao whispered.
“They vanished. I was in a room with five people and loads out in the other offices. Someone started screaming; they were online. The news or Facebook or something. They’d seen a clip of a guy out there.” Simon pointed to the bright squares of the windows. “You’ve got an RAF base what—forty odd miles away, yeah? Turns out the guy was out that way, crying and saying he was sorry. He said they’d got a bomb and he didn’t want it to go off but he couldn’t stop it. He said his group bombed LA last June and they were going for London today, but he managed to get the bomb from the others. And there he was, eighty miles from blowing up London and he couldn’t stop it. He was screaming like a kid by then. Said to get out of the city.” Simon tried not to shiver. “That’s when everyone legged it. I got shoved out the door of the main offices and everything flashed white, really quickly. Like that.” He clicked his fingers. “And something shoved at my back, knocking me over. And all the people, they vanished right in front of me.”
“That’s bullshit,” Dao said. For a few moments during the man’s story, his attention had managed to shift away from the raw panic of not knowing where Yang was. With his brief judgement of what Simon told him and the woman, Dao’s focus fell back on to Yang. Inside, he heard the boy crying out for his father again and again, and it was all Dao could do to stop his terror from boiling over.
“No.” Simon shivered. He couldn’t tell them what else had happened after those horrible few seconds. He couldn’t think of it.
“I was by myself. If anyone vanished, I didn’t see it,” Alex muttered.
Anger needled Simon. While Alex didn’t sound as if she disbelieved him, he heard the doubt in the woman’s voice. It made her sound like she was addressing a naughty kid.
“If they didn’t all disappear, then where are they?” he asked her. Sliding his iPhone free, he waved it in the air. “And why isn’t my phone working?”
“Neither’s mine,” Dao muttered.
“I have no idea about either. And to be honest, I’m not thinking about it. I’m thinking about going downstairs, getting outside and calling my husband. Anything else… ” Alex finally lowered the keys to her leg. “Anything else isn’t my concern.”
She turned to walk to the next flight of stairs and Simon called after her.
“There’s someone else here.”
At once, Alex froze. For no good reason, a nameless fear with many legs crept up and down her back.
“Who?” Dao shouted. “Yang?”
“I don’t know about your son, okay?” Simon told him and Alex turned.
“Who?”
“I don’t know, but I saw what they did.” Simon glanced at the windows, unable to stop the horrible moment from replaying in his head. In the same way, he couldn’t stop the memory of what happened on the ninth floor from creeping in. The sensation was like smoke sliding under a door, black and choking. It swallowed the scene outside the window and the man on the pavement, chewing that image with eager teeth.
“I saw them throw a chair out of a window,” he told Alex and Dao, and instead of that falling chair, he saw the ninth floor.
He saw everyone disappearing.
Chapter Three
The scream is in Simon’s mouth and if he parts his lips, it’ll come out and he doesn’t think it’ll ever stop. He’ll shriek like a little kid because this isn’t just mad; it’s wrong. It’s nothing that makes any sense, and that doesn’t change a thing.
He’s still the only person in the office, a breath after dozens of running, terrified people filled the space, knocking chairs over, barrelling for the doors, shouting into their phones for their husbands and wives and children to get out of Willington, to get away before it was too late.
All that gone in the time it took a flash of white light to burn behind his eyes like someone taking a photo up close in the dark. All that turned into crushing silence while a wall of wind kicked him in the back and sent him crashing over a table and knocking the keyboard to the floor.
On his feet, Simon keeps perfectly still. Maybe he’s gone deaf. That would explain the silence. Groaning, he tries to think and can’t manage it. Disorientation turns his senses into a wave and all he can seize upon is the sensation of time having passed in a jump rather than a smooth motion.
Nauseated, he runs for the windows, the city laid out in a carpet of roads and streets towards green in the distance, the view from up here on the ninth floor impressive. Willington is exposed and clear on a sunny day, and that sun is a hot ball of white so many miles above. Below, people pass by Greenham Place, not one paying the building any attention; people going about their business as the day winds down and the weekend comes closer and closer. A bus, two taxis behind it, then a Transit van coming from the junction of Greenham Road and Allen Way, the van slowing to let a couple of old boys cross from outside a pub, and movement directly under his line of sight.
There’s time to see it all in exquisite detail: shards of broken glass booming from the hole in the side of the building, each piece spinning, turning over and over as they rain towards the pavement. The air takes them just as it takes the office chair, and that chair is a falling boulder cutting the daylight in half as it speeds down, dropping with an impossibly increasing weight each second, passing window after window, spinning, turning, wheels pointing straight up, then dropping to the side, then bearing down on the pavement, and the shattered pieces of window fall with the chair that has become a blur and he doesn’t have time to even think of a warning let alone yell one before the chair collides with the guy outside, turning his head and chest into a crushed mess of flying gore and snapping bone.
Nine floors above, he watches the remains of the man fall into a destroyed pile that is not even close to human. The chair grows from the mid-section as if it has sprouted legs from its wheels, and the sprays of blood paint the pavement red in a wide circle. What might be an arm reaches from the crushed body, and nine floors distance is too much to see the wrist and hand turned completely around from the rest of the arm, too far to see the split in the skin that exposes blood-smeared bone from forearm to bicep. Or the small bubbles of white light slipping free from miniscule cracks in the ground to play over the exposed bone and meat of the man’s body and form small heat bubbles in the blood.
High above the mess, Simon staggers away from the window, eyes closed until he feels that he has at least a modicum of self-control. And in the darkness of his sealed vision, he asks himself why no cars stopped, why nobody ran to the accident. Why everyone on their way home from work or to the Tesco or going for an evening pint didn’t go fucking nuts after a man was hit by a falling fucking chair?
Every single phone in the office—from the landlines to mobiles still sitting on tables beside monitors—comes to life. The noise, a mad mix of ringtones, snatches of songs and noises, hammers at his ears, banishing all coherent thought. He runs for the nearest desk and grabs the phone, yelling hello before it’s at his ear.
The phones fall silent as if they’ve all been answered. From the one he holds a faint but steady breath can be heard. It’s a breeze on a summer day, too weak to dispel the heat, and too faint to do more than touch sweat on his face, let alone dry it.
He says hello again although, for some reason, his throat and mouth are abruptly dry and the word falls out as a croak. In reply, the gentle breeze grows stronger, becoming a wind, and the wind is full of a terrible, ancient stink: the breath of a monster, the dying exhalation of a huge animal brought down by a disease that rotted its insides centuries ago. And it is centuries since the breath came to the air. He’s listening to the sound of countless years in the past, countless millennia. This is the wind pre-dating anything the world knows now as normal and everyday. He could travel back in time to before dinosaurs, before the earth as a boiling rock floating through a new galaxy, and he’d still be nowhere near reaching the epoch of the dead thing blowing the wind of its last breath to him.
His tie flaps, then dances over his shoulder. Sweat on his forehead turns cold, and the wind gusts out of the phone he’s dropped to the table, doesn’t remember dropping. He still hears it, though. It’s right beside his head; it’s all over this empty office, scattering loose sheets of paper beside the printer, knocking over a bin, then bashing into monitors. One slides over a desk, reaches the edge and drops with a mighty thud of snapping plastic and cracking glass. He can’t do a thing while the air shakes. Running is out of the question; he’s lucky to still be standing thanks to his now useless legs. All he can do is grip the back of a chair, sink his fingers into its spongy support and try not to take in the rotten stench of a monster’s breath.
It’s gone as quickly as it came. The fluttering papers and bits of debris from the bin fall still. Overturned mugs roll to a stop, and chairs sent spinning by the gale creak as they slow. From the phone he answered, the exhausted murmur of a single word reaches him, even though there’s no way he can possibly hear it.
Simon.
And that’s when Simon is finally able to run from the empty office and the view of Willington, from the horror of the squashed man down on the pavement and from the dead wind gusting his name again and again.
Chapter Four
“Rod? Are you here?”
Rod Moore’s useless mobile fell from his fingers and bounced off his shoe. The sensation of the impact and the soft thud didn’t register.
“Rod? I can’t find you.”
For a terrible few seconds, a conviction he was about to wet himself gripped Rod. His bladder had become a bursting balloon even though he’d drunk no more than normal at lunch with his brother. Fire burned at his groin and piss was going to spray like a fountain down the front of his trousers.
Wetting himself like a little boy. Like the boy he’d been more than fifty years ago.
He squatted and crawled for the nearest desk, the horrible sensation inside his middle easing a fraction. As he reached the underside of the desk and tried to squeeze his bulk into its comforting closeness, the voice coming from the corridor of the fourth floor raged.
“Rod, where the fuck are you, you little bastard? Don’t make me hurt you. Little fucker. Little shit. You fucking shit. Where are you?”
Rod covered his mouth and nose, inhaling tiny snatches of hot air from his palm while, beyond the door on the other side of the room, empty save for Rod, the echo of the last yell rang around, bouncing from the floor of the landing to the high ceiling and back again, living out in the corridor and unheard by
anyone. In the daylight unmarked by shadow, nothing moved or breathed.
Help me, Joan. Get me out of here.
If his wife could offer any help, it was no good to him here, more than two hundred miles from their home in Cardiff. All he could do was hold on to the image of her face, so kind and smooth compared to the deep lines around his mouth and eyes.
“Where are you? Little shitting bastard. I’ll find you, Rod. Don’t think I won’t. I know you’re here somewhere. Give me time and I’ll track you down if I have to kick in every door.”
It was no good; the scream would escape and he’d go mad because surely nobody could take this level of fear without losing their head over it. Surely not.
Wedged into the underside of the desk, Rod rocked back and forth, the pressure of his body easing and flexing on the carpet, creating a tiny whisper that seemed too loud. Even so, he couldn’t stop. If the man out in the corridor, yelling threats and obscenities, tracked him down because of the little sound, then that’s what would happen. He could not stop the movement. Not without going insane.
Something laughed, the sound as soft as a strand of spiderweb on his face.
“We’ve got time. Don’t worry about that.”
Abrupt silence closed in, the sudden absence of sound pregnant with dark possibilities. Rod focused all of his energy on listening for the slightest noise, the smallest breath, beyond the office door.
He was alone. The man who in no way on God’s green earth could have shouted such horrible things had gone.
Rod told himself if he really believed that, then all he had to do was stand up and try the door handle. Do that and take a look to the stairs he’d run up, fighting for every breath, sure the unfamiliar exertion would give him a heart attack long before he tracked down his brother, Clive. That hadn’t happened, and maybe he should be grateful for it. He wasn’t quite sure. Being stuck in what felt like a totally empty building minutes after a nuclear bomb might or might not have gone off, then hearing the voice of a man dead for forty decades, had done things to his head.