One of the workers took off his tin hat and wiped the dirty sweat from his brow as he made his way back over to Beth and her father.
“You're a helpful one, aren't you?” he said to Beth. The man smiled, nodded, and walked away.
“Well done,” said Bill.
Beth quickly smiled and then walked off to find another survivor.
* * *
The scale of the devastation never escaped Beth. The site was so vast that by midday she and her father had barely covered half the area. They weaved their way between hubs of activity, checking the places where no one else was looking. From their first find, they made their way in a rough diagonal line over to Royston Street and had since meandered back to Gawber Street.
Beth stood on top of a mound of bricks, smashed timber and twisted iron. On one side, the mound sloped down like a small hill, into the front parlor of the last damaged house on Gawber Street. Behind her, over the uneven field of destroyed houses and through collapsed walls, one of the Heavy Rescue trucks was still parked outside her house. A man walked past it with his wife and their grubby child, hauling behind him a small wooden cart filled with what was left of their lives. It had been a common sight that morning.
Beth's stomach rumbled. She'd had no breakfast, and she felt a little relieved that her hunger was mostly for good old-fashioned food. But this little breather of hers had already lasted too long; she needed to get back to work. Looking down at herself, her dress was almost black with dirt and her hands were white from dust. Dark lines ran through her palms where the sweat had dampened the powdered bricks and mortar. After lending physical help as well as her keen senses, she'd picked up new scratches, cuts and bruises, too.
Twelve people had now been dug out alive owing to her efforts. Only she and Bill knew this; finds were cleverly divided between herself, her father, and other helpers following strong but subtle hints. Her father had taken care of that, and it was amazing—and frightening—how good he seemed to be at manipulating people. Along with those twelve were another three who wrenched Beth's heart upon discovering they'd already departed. They couldn't have been dead long, and that made their discovery harder to bear. Two of those dead bodies were the most recent discoveries and Beth realized that chances of finding survivors were dwindling. It was a horrible thought, that under this expansive site were people who were still alive, but wouldn't be for much longer.
Beth turned and started to make her way down into the open-air parlor of the last felled house. She made a rare mistake and her foot slipped on a loose brick. Her momentum carried her forward, an instant surge of adrenaline woke her up, and she managed to hop from brick to brick until her feet landed on a solid, carpeted floor.
What am I doing here? There was no rubble under which people could be buried. But it was novel, and eerie, to stand inside a house … outside. The wall in front of her used to be the dividing wall between two houses, but now it was the external wall of one. Wallpaper still covered it, torn in places and flapping in the breeze, and it was another peculiar sight. About seven feet up from the ground, the jagged edge of the ceiling jutted out, with joists and floorboards that were splintered at the ends. The same was repeated another seven feet above that—the upstairs ceiling—and the remains of the triangular roof rose to a point just beyond.
A thin cloud crept over the midday sun, dimming the day, and a breeze ruffled Beth's hair. A tile fell from the unstable remains of the roof, smashing harmlessly on the floor, but it called attention to the barren feel of the place. Beth was alone here, with other workers and helpers somewhere over the mound that acted as a kind of fence. Even her father was nowhere to be seen and the desolation was unnerving.
Most of the houses around here had been built in similar ways; the house in which Beth stood looked a lot like her own. She was standing in the front sitting room. Here, a small table had been turned into a ramp with two of its legs missing, and flapped the corners of yesterday's newspaper upon it, its bulk pinned down by fallen debris. Behind it on the floor was a wireless, now nothing more than a mass of wires and splintered wood. Its tuning dial lay half a yard from it, alone. Amazingly a clock still hung on the wall, though the hands refused to go any further than eighteen minutes past eleven.
Beth stepped over the low remains of a wall into the second parlor. The rubble covered some of the floor, but most of it was covered with the fallen ceilings. Up that new external wall ran a zigzag of lines where the staircase used to be, which was now smashed wood that lay all around her. The force of the blast must have been fierce, to have blown away the house and scattered the ruins like this.
The mound of rubble began in the kitchen, sloping up to leave the scullery buried. She could see the mess was darker over there, and damp. No doubt it was from broken pipes, but the water to the affected streets would have been turned off first thing that morning.
Beth got a whiff of something and sniffed the air, almost gagging on the odor. She thought she'd smelled the worst of it over the last few hours, but this was something else. She stepped further into the second parlor, stopping suddenly. The floor under her feet felt like it was bowing, giving way. She should have gotten out of there, but a morbid curiosity demanded to know what was causing such a foul stench. It seemed to be coming from beneath the space where the stairs used to be.
Beth cautiously picked her footing and tried to get nearer, but with every small step the floor grew less appreciative of her presence, bowing and creaking under her weight. She moved to the edge of the room, following the remains of the partitioning wall for stability.
Above her, the cloud that covered the sun grew thicker, and the jagged shadows around her disappeared as she reached the corner. She was now convinced that something was under the fallen ceiling. Minding the rusty nails, she started to pull the mass of wood and plaster away from the wall, heaving it further into the sitting room.
There was an uproar of creaks and cracks, followed by an echoing crash. Beth stumbled back as the load she pulled suddenly got lighter. Most of it had broken off. A cloud of dust rose up from a pit that was hidden beneath it all. The smell grew worse. Beth's curiosity intensified. She shuffled up to the edge of the big hole in the floor and saw a set of rough concrete steps leading down from the opposite side of the room. It was a makeshift basement, dug out under the house. It looked to be the same size as the secondary parlor above it, but only half of it was still covered by the floor on which Beth stood. The rest had caved in.
The dust began to settle, and she could now make out some household items amongst the plaster and wooden boards of the two floors that should've been above her. She first noticed a metal bed frame, upside down with the steel legs dangerously pointing to the sky. Then the dust cleared the bottom of the steps, and Beth saw what it was that made her pinch her nose.
He was on his back. Rubble covered his upper legs and all of his right leg, while his left foot emerged from the debris and rested on one of the bottom steps. A few broken bricks and bits of wood had landed on his torso. His arms were outstretched, and his head hung back with his sunken eyes widened in surprise. By the looks of it, he'd tried to run up and out of his homemade bunker, but the blast must have blown him back down. In a sick twist of fate, he landed on an upturned leg of his own bed. It had skewered him right through the chest.
Beth squinted at the luckless scene. Her frown dropped as she noticed an oddity. The metal bed leg had impaled the man, there was no doubt about that, but where was the blood? The metal leg should've been covered in it, but it was clean. That was strange.
“Dad?”
Beth had now seen her fair share of the recently departed, and what she was looking at hadn't departed recently. From the sunken skin, the color of his flesh and the rancid smell, he'd been dead for a lot longer than the twelve hours since the bomb had struck.
“Dad?”
It begged questions: how did he get into that position, and how did yesterday's paper get into the man's sitting room?
Beth stood frozen at the edge of the pit while her father slowly and carefully came over the rubble, taking time to place his crutches. “Lower the volume, Elizabeth. You'll bring the whole bloody parish running over. What is it, have you found another?” He got to solid ground and limped up to Beth's side, marveling at the homemade cellar. Sniffing the air, he expressed a discomfort but it clearly wasn't as powerful to him as it was for Beth. Then he looked down. “Oh.”
“Look at the bed leg,” said Beth.
“Ah.”
“And it looks like he's been there for ages, but look—there's half a dirty plate over there, and yesterday's paper is in the sitting room.”
“Huh. That's quite some detective work.”
“So what's happened? This was the first hit around here in quite a while. How did he die? Do you think someone murdered him?”
“No, no. I think it died last night.” Her father shook his head. “What're the chances,” he muttered under his breath.
It? “Dad? What's going on?”
“That there is about a month's worth of decomposition,” her father said in a lecturing tone.
“But you just said he died last night.”
Around them, shadows began to appear and the air warmed up. The cloud that had covered the sun thinned out. Within a few seconds, Beth and her father were bathed in sunlight that shone down into the pit before them. The sun still hadn't traveled across the sky far enough to reach the corners of the basement. The steps that led down into it and most of the body were kept in the shadow cast by the house that still stood beside them. The man's right hand was the only part of him that stretched far enough out of the shadow and into the sun.
A faint whisper of smoke, almost invisible like steam, began to rise from the corpse's hand. Judging from his purple-patched face, the man had been as white as the Wade's bloodline, but his hand seemed to darken by the second. Then a charred flake of skin rose up, disintegrating into powder as it climbed on a warm updraft. There was soon another, following the first up into the air.
The sight was disgusting, worrying, but somehow mesmerizing. The hand began to glisten and Beth realized that the skin had all but charred and evaporated. The moist flesh was next to succumb to what she could only describe as burning, but without fire. The process was slow. As minutes passed, the hand was disintegrating away into thin air.
“Dad?” Beth's voice was quiet and filled with uncertainty and fear. “What's happening?”
The first hint of bone structure appeared at the tip of the index finger and then one of the long bones in the hand showed through the palm, thinly covered with the blackening flesh. Beth's father hung his head down and sighed, like he'd been caught out in the midst of a secret. “It's decomposing. At an accelerated rate. We think it's the ultraviolet radiation in the sun's rays, acting as a catalyst and accelerating the process even more than usual.”
Beth felt a little woozy at her father's implications. She closed her eyes. “He's a vampire. Isn't he?”
“Yes, and we have to get rid of it before anyone else finds it. God knows we're lucky we got to it first.”
Her father began to limp around the edge, toward the kitchen, but stopped and inched back from the unstable edge. He looked over at the steps that led down from the kitchen wall, but with the rubble there was no way of getting to them easily, if at all.
Beth watched all this without paying attention. There's more like me. Here. I'm not alone. Her confusion simply grew. “I don't understand. Why do we have to get rid of him? And how? He's dead already.”
Her father hobbled back to her. “This must be hard for you, and very confusing. It's a lot to take in, I know. But Elizabeth, believe me when I say we have to get rid of this body.”
“But why?”
Bill paused and his expression grew even more serious. “The existence of your kind can never be revealed.”
“But—”
“Why?” her father finished for her. “Possible scenarios? The revelation would spark a war between religions. There'd be civil unrest and innocent people would be killed for suspicion. We'd end up back in the dark ages. It would be the witch trials all over again. And then there are the vampires, who would no longer have any reason to stay in the shadows, and of whose numbers we cannot be sure. It's impossible to say for certain what would happen, but bloodshed is guaranteed, and a lot of it. It's the kind of thing that would change the world.
“I don't expect you to understand, Elizabeth. It's all politics really, but trust me when I say it's better for everyone—you included—that you and your kind are kept hidden.”
It had been a flurry of information. Beth felt like she'd been given a condensed history lesson. She couldn't keep up with the questions that rushed through her mind, but the claustrophobic world in which she'd been living for the past three weeks had suddenly grown massively, and she felt lost in it.
Beth looked back down at the vampire. The flesh of his hand was half-gone, and a hole had appeared between two of the long bones in the centre of his palm, allowing Beth to see through it. A part of the bone briefly looked ivory-colored after the flesh had been completely singed off, but then it darkened too, burning silently. Meanwhile, her father could still find no way down into the pit.
“Won't it just burn away?” asked a deflated Beth.
“It's too risky,” came his brisk reply. “Without sunlight it'll take around twenty hours to fully decompose, bones and all. With sunlight it'll be gone in under half an hour; but only what's exposed. Clothing limits the exposure, and most of this one is in the shade, anyway.”
“So what are we supposed to do?”
Her father looked at her without a shred of emotion. “We burn it.”
Beth felt frozen to the spot. The man—or vampire—was already dead, what harm would burning the body do? But her father's response had shocked her. This wasn't the first time she'd noticed his complacency. He came across as being unsurprised by it all, as if this was normal for him.
“How long will it take?” she asked unsteadily, trying to compose herself.
“The sun's a good catalyst, but fire's the best. Once it catches it'll be nothing but ash in a couple of minutes.” He reached into the pocket of his trousers and pulled out his crumpled box of cigarettes, his lighter, and then a box of matches. He looked at the cigarettes, took a deep breath and threw them into the pit. Then he looked at the lighter, rubbed the face of it and put it back in his pocket. Taking a match out of the box, he struck it and cupped the flame in his hands, allowing it to consume the wood and grow. Then he flicked it down into the pit. It landed on the vampire's chest near a piece of wood, and not far from the ripped cloth of his shirt. The match stayed lit, but by the time it spent its fuel the flame hadn't ignited anything else around it.
He lit another and tried again. The match landed in the nape of the corpse's discolored, wrinkled neck and singed the collar of his shirt, but again the flame died before it took. “Damn it!”
The vampire's hand was now nothing but charred bone. Fingertips broke off and fell, collapsing in a tiny cloud of fine ash upon hitting the rubble.
Beth stared at the silent spectacle. Suddenly she conjured up a scene in her mind's eye of a witch being chased by people with pitchforks in their hands. She couldn't get it out of her head and it felt so familiar. The witch was innocent.
The witch was her.
She held out a trembling hand.
“What is it, Elizabeth?”
“Give me the matches.”
“You're not going down there, it's too dangerous.”
“People are coming.” It was an uncharacteristic lie.
“How are you going to get down?”
Forgetting the matches for now, Beth inched up to the wall of the neighboring house. About half a yard from the edge of the pit, a broken-off joist jutted out. She crouched down, putting one hand on the edge of the floor and leant over, looking like she was about to fall in. Her fa
ther flinched, but her free hand landed on the joist and she swung her legs down. Dangling above the bottom of the steps that were half covered in loose debris, she let go and fell down, landing confidently with one foot on a step and the other on what must've been the only stable block of rubble down there. She looked up at Bill and cupped her hands out in front of her, ready to catch the box of matches.
After a moment's hesitation, Bill put the box back in his pocket, took out the lighter and threw that down instead. “Don't lose it.”
“What should I light?”
“Try the trousers. As soon as they catch, they'll ignite the body.”
Crouching down, she flipped the lid. The scent of petrol rose up, and she took a second to appreciate it. Flicking the wheel created the sparks that created the flame, and she held it under the hem of a trouser leg, the one that wasn't buried.
“As soon as it takes you'll need to get back up here quickly. When these things burn, they really burn.”
The cloth started to smoke. Almost invisibly, a flame grew and started to burn away the fabric. Beneath it was blue-ish flesh that darkened quickly, turning black before it began to glow. Then a separate flame seemed to ignite. The heat intensified quickly and within seconds the whole leg was on fire. Beth sprang up, surprised from the burst of flames, and threw the lighter up to her father. She hopped up a step, spun around, jumped and grabbed the joist, then pulled herself up as Bill limped over to offer his hand. Beth ignored it. Putting one knee on the joist and then balancing with the opposite foot, she hopped over to the floor and looked back down. The whole body was now a mass of flames, and the stench seemed to radiate with ferocity. Smoke bellowed from under the rubble, beneath which the vampire's other leg was buried.
Suddenly a shout echoed on the air. “Hey! Hey! Fire!”
Beth froze. Already she was a part of the secret. She silently panicked about what she would say.
No Shelter from Darkness Page 18