by Walker, Luke
Pretending she believed her own encouragement all the way down, Alex studied the foyer for something they might have missed. It didn’t take long for her forced hope to wilt and die.
Nothing here. No way out here.
Tears came. Furious, she blinked until they ceased and wondered what her daughters were doing in the world outside Greenham Place.
Still staring outside, Kelly scanned the fronts of the shops opposite the office block and pictured the wall of people from the day before with their faces and bodies scorched into so much destroyed skin, all the open wounds, all turned into something inhuman. The memory flooded her inner eye; she saw them pressed on the other side of the doors and windows, their mouths distending like glue and the voice turned into a Voice.
We are burning.
Kelly shivered. The reek of all that burned flesh stung her nose, the smell as much a memory as the sight of the people on the pavement.
Forget about it. They’re gone.
Hoping that when she opened her mouth, she’d say something that Alex wouldn’t jump on, Kelly turned from the window.
The stink hit her first.
Then the sight.
Between her and Dao, beside the useless entrance and Alex and Simon, a wall of burned people, a wall of dead people, stood. The choking stink of flesh turned into cooked meat clamped down on Kelly’s mouth and nose. The bodies at the rear of the main group, three men with their eyes turned into lines by the melted skin of their foreheads, turned towards her and Dao.
Cold logic cut fear off. Kelly’s sensory perception exploded and sight and smell merged into one force. In a second, she took in the damage done to each body; she inhaled the sweet aroma of flesh cooked in an oven, and the ice of the logic in her head said there was no need for fear because the people could not possibly be real. They were simply images in the same way Alex’s dad had been an image on the stairs. Horrible, frightening, but not solid.
Not tangible.
Then a hand, stripped down to blackened bone, found her face. Hot fingers gripped the skin of her cheek; jagged nails tore that skin and began to pull her into the oven.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Dao shoved forwards, yelling, aware of nothing but the command inside that said run away. Three hands struck his head, pushing him backwards. He stumbled and twisted around. The creatures a matter of feet away became a blurred reflection—bodies too damaged to possibly stand, let alone walk. The hands pushed again, shoving his face to the glass while he bellowed his horror.
The outside had vanished. In its place, a great wall of flame threw itself from the ground to the top of the sky, the fire making no sound and generating no heat. It was like looking at a TV screen that filled every inch of his vision. The force pushing on his head and back increased in pressure, squashing Dao’s nose to the hard surface of the glass, and he flashed back to the moments up on the tenth floor when the same thing had happened before the glass parted like water.
That wasn’t happening here.
The pressure remained steady. The dead people wanted to break his face on the door and smear his blood all over it while the silent fire cooked the world beyond Greenham Place. Breathing was next to impossible. Dao’s vision began to bleed a deep shade of red. Red like all the skin at his back. Red like the flames barely two feet away.
Help me, Dao shouted at his wife. She said nothing. He was on his own and that shouldn’t have been any surprise. He’d been on his own since he sprinted to this building while the entire city tried to run from the bomb.
The pain was a growing beast. Soon, it would eat all of his sight and all that remained would be the thick blood-red of his eyes, forced from their sockets by the pressure on his head before his skull cracked open like a broken egg.
I am sorry, Yang. I am so sorry. Be safe. Be happy.
“Dao.” Kelly’s cry broke through to Dao. He reached blindly and found the good, clear weight of her fingers. She tugged.
Dao pulled away from the glass, the force loosening for a second. He sucked in a mighty breath and threw a punch without looking. He struck the remains of a man’s face. Skin sloughed off, coating Dao’s hand, then splattered to the floor. He shrieked. The twisted scar of the man’s mouth opened, tore the wound open and stretched further.
He was trying to smile.
We burn, the man said. You burn.
Outrage detonated inside Dao. Its force shoved him forward, made him punch without looking. Shrieking, Kelly did the same. Her small fists sunk into scarred flesh, pulled it from the bodies and punched again. Her horror and panic, even the cloying stink of her own sweat, were buried beneath the desperate need to get the burned people away from her. A tall woman loomed above, the dangling tissue of her neck making her head hang as if it were on a spring. The darkened stubs of what had been her teeth snapped together in a blur and Kelly heard a metallic clang at the same time.
It’s the lift, she thought without hearing it. It’s laughing at us.
The woman closed in. Kelly voiced her fury and swung a fist. The woman’s teeth missed Kelly’s fingers by less than an inch before fist met cheek and pulled. Caught in Kelly’s nails, scar tissue shredded, Now horror-struck, Kelly punched again. A knuckle caught the woman’s eye. For a second, Kelly came close to simply letting go of her sanity.
Her knuckle poked through the woman’s eye. Hot fluid coated it, then something else. The terrible heat of a never-ending fire.
Kelly yanked her hand free and shoved the woman back as hard as she could. Four of them went down. At the same time, agony claimed her hip.
A child, no older than five, clung to Kelly’s side, fastened there like a leech. The boy pulled his mouth from her skin. Blood stained the raw meat of his lips. Her blood, she saw with an eye turned dispassionate by the weight of her horror. Trying to smile, the boy bit her again, face burrowing like a rat with a piece of meat.
“Motherfucker.”
Grabbing the child, Kelly yanked him free from her bleeding hip and flung him. His head collided with a pillar. Even with the storm of shrieks and yells almost deafening her, Kelly caught the wet thud of skull on marble, saw the boy’s skull shunted forward by the impact. She slapped a hand against the wound in her hip, utterly convinced she was infected with the building’s disease.
An elderly man, his clothes turned into little more than rags by the fire, got hold of Dao’s shoulders and pushed him back towards the entrance. Dao kept hold of the man’s forearms; skin slid off. Dao spun on the spot and launched the man. He struck the doors, bounced and looked up at Dao.
Even though his features weren’t much more than cooked meat, Dao saw enough to know the man was Chinese and to know the man had come for him on purpose. Or had been sent by whatever controlled the building. Sent to mock. Sent to remind Dao of his roots and the long dead but still clear misery of his early years in England, when all he knew at school was the looks from the other kids, the causal racism and the desperate desire to be home in a world of friends and family he recognized, rather than the cold, grey tedium of England.
Misery dead since he left his childhood behind, dead since meeting Lin and starting a new life beyond growing up in China and then travelling thousands of miles and years away from all he understood. But now misery reflected in the old man’s twisting mouth and what remained of his eyes.
Shouting and shrieking were forgotten. Dao grabbed the back of the man’s head and smashed it against the glass in the centre of the door. Again. Again.
Again.
Bone split. More skin fell free. Gore coated Dao’s forearm up to his elbow. He bounced the man’s head off the glass again. Skull stained red and black broke through rents in the man’s forehead, then snapped into fragments when Dao put all of his strength into another blow.
Glass cracked.
An awful mixture of joy and fear flowed through Dao.
“Kelly.” He hit the door again.
The crack spread in a spiderweb thin line. Dao threw the man
who no longer had a face to the floor and booted at the crack. A chunk of glass fell out to the pavement. At once, a burst of boiling heat streamed in through the hole. Dao jerked backwards. The space around the entrance was becoming its own mini-sun. The dead people pulled away from Dao and Kelly; Dao’s vision teared, and his saliva dried, leaving his tongue and the insides of his cheeks like parched rags.
Staggering, Kelly reached for Dao. His flailing hand caught her on the cheek. Pain and dizziness came at the same instant. Through a mouth made numb by his blow, she shouted: “Run.”
Half a dozen of the burned people moved on her and Dao, all speaking without opening what remained of their mouths while the air grew insufferably hot.
We burn. You burn. Burn with us.
Kelly shoved Dao. They ran to their left, skidding over pieces of reddened and blackened skin, and Dao struck one of the pillars. He groaned, not hearing it over Alex’s voice from the other side of the massing bodies.
“Kelly. Where are you?”
“Run, Alex. Both of you, run,” Dao yelled, taking Kelly’s arm as she made a move towards the centre of the floor. While at least twenty feet from the invisible fire at the doors, both could still barely breathe in the heat.
“Let go of me.” Kelly tried to pull free from Dao. Her hip and leg felt like fire. Her whole body was one giant throb. Dao held her firm and jabbed a finger at the door to the cash office.
“We have to go. They’ll tear you apart.”
Ignoring Dao, Kelly stretched for the milling burned people, convinced that if she saw Alex through any gap in the bodies, she could keep her safe and undo all the wrong things. Four men, none with anything recognisable as a face, advanced on her, arms up and their fingers fused into overdone meat.
Burn with us.
“Alex!” Kelly screamed.
At the main doors, more glass broke.
On the outside, a man smashed his fists into the small hole, widening it, reaching through and catching his fingers on a jagged shard. Enough of the charred people parted for Kelly to see not a single drop of blood fell from the long gash in the man’s torn skin, then to see his face, leering at her as he lifted a naked leg to kick in more of the hole while streaks of flame burned the air outside.
Carl.
Her brother-in-law smiled.
Kelly ran for the cash office, Dao a step behind. She struck the door a second before him, aware she was sobbing, aware Alex was calling her name over and over from the far side of the ground floor and not giving a shit about either.
Carl was here. Carl had come for her.
Dao struck the handle. “Open the fucking door.”
Nothing happened. No power in the building and all the fob accesses dead, which meant every single door should be open to them. But this one was not.
“Fuck.” Kelly booted the handle with the toe of her boot. It shook, but that was all.
She looked back and immediately wished she hadn’t.
Carl pulled himself through the hole. While it was barely big enough for a child (Dao’s boy, her mind whispered), the naked shape of Carl was still coming. Shards dug deeply into the thick muscles of his arms and hips. In terrifying detail, Kelly saw rents open in his skin. The flesh parted to reveal nothing. Black stared out of the wounds in Carl’s body, and the uneven cuts flapped in hanging chunks.
He was still coming.
Dao shoved on the handle again. It did no good. He looked around, eyes huge. There was no way through the bodies. To get to Alex and Simon, they’d either have to run back to the scorching air and the naked man coming through the door, or try to fight their way through the barrier of the burned. He readied himself to tell Kelly that they had to fight when she dashed straight at the nearest figure. An old lady, wizened, dried to a husk by the fire.
Kelly ran with the woman, head on her hand. She propelled her straight at the small pane of glass in the centre of the cash office door. Dao threw himself to the floor. The woman’s face struck the glass, breaking both. Kelly shoved the woman aside. What remained of her face slid down to her narrow chest like wet meat. The outer layers of it stuck to the broken glass. Banishing all thought but the need to escape, Kelly punched through the wrecked pane and reached.
“He’s coming, Kelly,” Dao whispered.
She didn’t hear him and didn’t need to. Carl was here for her.
Kelly’s dancing fingers found a handle. She shoved hard and yanked her arm free as the door opened. More shards cut her wrist and a faraway pain sang.
She was first through, Dao right behind. He shoved a few office chairs to the door.
They ran.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
When the screaming began, Simon was facing away from the others, his attention on the lift doors and his mind on the image of them blown through the fire exit to be blown out of the lift, as if the two were connected.
Blown away by a hurricane with your mum watching, he thought, and the world turned into a volley of cries, all sharp and bright like broken glass.
Simon whirled as Alex dashed from the reception desk. For a second or two, Simon couldn’t process what he saw. A crowd had come from nowhere to fill the main area of the ground floor. They flowed between the pillars, men and women and children all dressed in torn and shredded clothes. Not shredded, he realised. Burned. Burned like their skin.
Simon backed up, trying to speak, failing. He reached the smooth wall beside the lift, conscious mind unable to process the sight of fifty or sixty people, all clearly dead, almost in touching distance.
Unconcerned about Simon, Alex dashed from the reception desk. She could run. She knew that. Despite being out of shape, she knew she could move. She stayed where she was, though. Door to the stairs off to her right; a clear path between her and it, and a wall of scorched bodies between her and Kelly.
“Kelly,” Alex whispered.
It was as if her quiet voice was a trigger for chaos.
A great chorus of voices, babbling together, exploded from all sides; men and women screeching they were burning, children crying for their parents to stop the hurting, to put out the fire. Alex’s lone cry was drowned out by dozens of others. The nearest people came for her, their melted hands trying to reach and unable to grip because they had no fingers. Nauseated, Alex lashed out, knocked a man to the side and punched again. Her fist collided with a woman’s hot face and the woman’s teeth snapped together. A tooth caught on the tip of Alex’s finger. A bright flare of agony raced up Alex’s hand into her arm along with a mental shriek of horror
(oh god I’m infected she’s infected me with fire)
and blood pattered down to the floor as Alex swung her arm back. The air burned her lungs as she drew breath. It was like inhaling the raw heat from an open oven. The skin of her face tightened and the fine hairs on her forearms curled over, turned crispy. Coughing, Alex skidded backwards, desperate to be away from the invisible fire.
The burned people kept coming.
“Get away from me!” Alex bellowed, searching around for help. Simon stood against the wall beside the lift, mouth hanging open. No help there. No sign of Kelly or Dao, only Kelly’s screams from somewhere on the other side of the horrible crowd.
“Get the fuck away from me.”
Clang.
The church bell boomed above, mocking her, ready to bring all the endings there could be, eager to take her life—her family and love—away and give her a world of aching loss in a dead field while the sunset burned the sky with cold fire.
No, I will not. I will not. My girls. I am going back to my girls.
Terror powered by unthinking rage sent Alex running forward, raising her solid fists, despite the horrible pain radiating from her injured finger. She collided with the nearest of the burned flesh, sent two of them to the floor and landed a blow on a man’s nose already spread across his face like butter. It squidged below her fist; she felt it slide over his destroyed features, and swallowed vomit. She sank her fingers into an arm wi
th no idea if it belonged to a man or woman, and yanked it down from the elbow as hard as she could. While it didn’t break, it hung at a horrible angle. The wounds in the skin split further as burns tore open. Blood, shockingly bright crimson, spurted from each gaping hole. It sprayed Alex’s chest and hands, then rained down on the white floor. Gagging, Alex jumped backwards. A staggering figure loomed from her right—a teenage boy with no face, only a swirling mass of blisters and burns—inches away. She managed to let out a single nonsense noise before his fingers clamped over her mouth and she could smell him, smell him cooking. What might have been his mouth, but was now just a slit in the ruins, split a little wider.
He was smiling at her.
Another hand found one of Alex’s arms and grasped. It pulled hard. Sickening agony bolted through her and she shrieked against the stink of the cooking meat.
The boy, his fingers turned into three lumps rather than digits, lifted his free hand and brought it down to her breast. Alex’s horror juddered, rising to a level she understood was as close to insanity as she could go without falling into the dark and never finding her way out. Mocking her, the lift doors opened, then banged together before opening again. They snapped like gnashing teeth, slamming and jerking open a second later while the great tunnel of darkness stretched from its mouth to the far end of everything. And the only sound was the steady drip of dirty water.
Mummy, come home.
Whether the voice was real or simply existed in her head, Alex had no idea. All that mattered was Charlotte speaking to her; Charlotte, afraid and confused.
Instead of pushing—she understood that would do no good—Alex pulled back as hard as possible, feet propelling her and the boy over the floor. She struck the wall, bouncing an inch off it upon impact. The hold over her mouth loosened. Alex lifted her one good hand and smacked the boy’s arm away. It swung as if it made of goo. He gazed at it, then turned back to her.
Unable to verbalise her sheer horror and disgust, Alex threw her fist into the boy’s face. Skin split. She did it again, not giving a thought to the pain from each blow, stopping only when the boy’s face dented and bone split. He fell, just so much dead flesh brought to life by this horrible place.