by Andy Ritchie
A hand on my shoulder...
Without thinking I turned, fist already clenched, punch already flying, ready to go down with as much of a fight as I could muster...
Tukaal blocked my desperate ‘haymaker’ with disappointing ease and waved away my apology.
Then, rather incongruously, he said:
‘Take the Researcher down that corridor to the toilets.’
My expression must have been such that he felt compelled to explain further:
‘There’s an emergency exit down there. I’ll buy you some time here.’
I did not know what he meant by ‘buy you some time’, but I had learnt enough over the last 48 hours to understand that Tukaal had a lot more chance of buying time than I did. So I grabbed the Researcher by the arm and began to run with him along the corridor to the right of the entrance to the restaurant.
But no sooner had I started than I stopped.
Why?
Simple really.
In an unexpected moment of clear, lucid thought, my otherwise panicking mind was able to plant the smallest seed of an idea which desperation quickly nurtured into a stonking English oak of a plan,
Clearly the odds were heavily stacked in favour of the dark-suits. They were quietly in control and would be able to use their weight of numbers to shepherd the three of us to where they wanted us to be, no doubt planning to apprehend us somewhere within the building where it would be least noticed, where it would cause the minimum of fuss.
What we needed to do, therefore, was try to tip the balance a little bit more in our favour, and one of the ways of doing that was to make the situation less predictable, more fluid.
That meant creating chaos. As much chaos as possible.
My very first thought was to shout ‘BOMB!!!!’ at the top of my voice, based on the premise that in a busy department store in a large city in Britain, fear of an explosion would certainly be enough to get people screaming and panicking...and I was about to do just that when something caught my eye which I instinctively knew would elicit a more instant response from the shoppers and the staff, one that would affect the whole building rather than just the third floor.
So I smashed the fire alarm button with my elbow...and then all hell broke loose.
Almost immediately I could hear indiscernible shouting, drowned as it was by the ringing of alarm bells. Somewhere on the third floor I heard a woman scream, and one or two children had begun to cry.
I, however, paid none of this any heed as I and the Researcher ran to the door that led both to the toilets and to the emergency exit.
As we reached the door and the Researcher hurried through, I glanced back and saw Tukaal through a throng of almost-panicking people scrambling in my direction, blocking the path of the two dark-suits who had emerged from the lift.
Just before the tide of former diners and shoppers swept me through the emergency exit door and onto the staircase, I saw Tukaal effortlessly swat away one of the dark-suits who had placed a hand on his shoulder. I also saw him block two attempted blows from the other dark-suit before, in what to me seemed like a blur of movement, he had dispatched the second dark-suit with what seemed a very passable impression of hefty left uppercut.
But that was all I saw. Caught in the unstoppable tide of human bodies, I found myself on the emergency staircase, clinging a little desperately to the handrail as body after body barged past me, young man, middle-aged woman, another young man with a screaming child of about six in his arms, even an elderly couple.
I prayed to God that none of these people got hurt in what was on the verge of becoming a stampede as our descent was joined by equally frightened and equally anxious shoppers and staff from the second floor, and then from the first floor.
I had wanted chaos and, by Christ, I had gotten it.
One flight of stairs below me I could see the Researcher, hemmed in somewhat by a couple of immensely large women who, in spite of their bulk, were moving with surprising nimbleness and speed in their eagerness to get down the stairs. As he turned the corner to descend the final set of stairs to the ground floor, he snatched a glance in my direction, and my frantic wave was acknowledged with a look of fear and alarm.
I was worried that, once on the ground floor, he would be swept along by this human tsunami straight into the waiting arms of the dark-suits who would almost certainly know which exit we were heading for. But such was momentum of the crowd, there seemed little either of us could do to influence where we went or how fast we got there.
As the heaving mass of bodies reached the ground floor and swept towards the emergency exit which was halfway between Market Street and Bridgewater Place, I saw the Researcher force his way out of the main stream of people and through a door which led back to the perfume department through which I had originally entered the store. Clearly, he too was worried that the dark-suits would be waiting for us just outside the emergency exit.
As I myself reached the ground level, I roughly pushed and shoved my way past a tall middle-aged man, a silver-haired old lady (sorry!) and a group of teenagers who seemed to find the whole thing a hoot, and followed the Researcher into the perfume department which was still busy with the thronging masses of those eager to get themselves, their children and their shopping out into the safety of the street.
I briefly lost sight of the Researcher as he stumbled through the exit at the corner of Market Street and High Street, falling over the wheels of a double buggy which a woman was desperately trying to force through the doorway.
I moved as fast as I could through the crowd (which unfortunately was not very fast), pushing and shoving in a manner which prompted a variety of disapproving tuts and angry outbursts from those whose toes I stood on, whose ribs I elbowed or whose shoulders I barged past. And yet, in spite of my efforts, by the time I found myself
outside, the Researcher was already flanked by a group of dark-suits who were easing him away through the large and excited mass of people who had gathered onto High Street to see what all the fuss was about.
With a deep, juddering breath, I began battling my way once more through the crowd, vainly trying to reach the Researcher and his would-be captors though with absolutely no idea of what I was going to do if and when I reached them...
Then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw Tukaal, moving through the throng of bodies with seemingly effortless pace, his eyes fixed on the Researcher and the four goons who were with him.
He ploughed into them like a bowling ball into pins at a bowling alley, knocking all five of them to the ground.
People screamed, others stumbled and several toppled over the six bodies that had crashed onto the wet pavement and, for a moment, I lost sight of them all.
Then the Researcher popped up into view, a cut visible above his eye, his expression one of confusion and panic.
Tukaal was nowhere to be seen.
I hesitated momentarily, desperate to see him rise from the clutches of the dark-suits...and that was when it all went so very, very wrong.
When I turned back round, the Researcher was standing about ten feet away from me. His eyes were wide with fear, sweat and blood evident upon his brow, chest heaving breathlessly.
Then his eyes widened further as, from the direction of Bridgewater Place, came another of the dark-suited men, then another...and, before I could even think, he was off and running.
‘Wait!’ I shouted, desperate not to lose him in the crowds of excited onlookers drawn to the store by the screams of panic and wail of alarms, and the mass of former shoppers who continued to mill around in the street in a state of relieved bemusement. But the Researcher paid me no heed. Instead he ran with ragged, stumbling strides towards Market Street, bumping roughly into passers-by, pushing others out of his way, his thoughts clearly focused on simply getting away from that place...
And it was then that I saw it.
It was emerging from Fountain Street, hurrying a little, perhaps to beat the traffic lights. It was ‘Sorry�
�� because it was ‘Out of Service’. It was driven by a well-built lady in her late forties with close-cropped black hair, dressed in a light-blue shirt whom I remember particularly well because of the look of shock and horror on her face as the Researcher ran blindly out in front of her bus.
The screech of brakes, followed by the sound of the impact, were so loud that they could easily be heard above the cacophony of noise that continued to emanate from both inside and outside of Debenhams.
The Researcher was hit full, square and very, very hard. His head slammed into the bottom portion of the windscreen so violently that the glass shattered. The bus slammed into the rest of him so savagely that he was thrown far out into the road like a rag-doll tossed aside by a bored child, arms and legs flailing, eventually landing with a fearful noise and then bouncing along the tarmac before eventually coming to rest in a twisted, crumpled heap.
I’m sure, in the sudden, shocked silence that befell the gathered masses, I heard the sound of bones cracking, like pistol shots, and the truly awful sound of his head hitting the ground again and again and again, like coconuts being clunked together.
The sight of it and the sound of it made me want to puke.
Then the screaming started.
A woman by the side of the street, pushing a brightly coloured pram, had one hand over her mouth whilst the other pointed at the twitching, bloodied shape in the middle of the road. Men and women stood around with mouths wide open in shock, others simply shook their heads, whilst other covered the eyes of children...but none of them went to help.
Shock. Indifference. Fear of being involved.
Probably for most of them it was a combination of all three which left them rooted to the spot.
I, however, was already rushing over to him.
I had no idea what to expect (though I was dreading what I would see) and I had no idea what I was going to be able to do to help.
When I reached him, however, I immediately realised he was beyond help.
He was lying on his back, breaths rattling out of a mouth that was spitting and spluttering blood everywhere. His right leg was bent under him at an impossible angle, almost as if it had snapped at the hip. What looked like the bone of his left forearm was clearly visible through a tear in his shirt. Blood was weeping liberally from wounds on his chest and his shoulders and his knees where his bouncing, tumbling body had come off second best to the hard, unyielding road.
But the worse sight was his face and his head.
His face was simply a mess. The force of the initial impact with the bus had, I guess, simply splattered his nose across his face. The subsequent first impact of his head against the tarmac appeared to have caved in the back of his skull; it was possible to see broken pieces of it in the areas where the abrasion of the road had stripped skin away from bone.
There was blood everywhere.
I’ve never seen so much fucking blood.
And with every passing moment, more blood oozed onto the tarmac as the Researcher’s breaths rattled and wheezed from within his broken chest, mixing with the falling rain to form a ridiculously large lake of vivid red.
Then I caught his eye. It was his right eye because his left was totally obscured by blood and a flap of skin that hung down from his temple. It looked at me pleadingly. His jaw was moving. I had no idea whether it was even attached anymore. But it was moving. Then his right hand moved and it seemed to be beckoning me closer.
I hurried to where he lay, knelt down close to him. I felt his right arm upon my left shoulder.
I knew what was going to happen next. I’d seen it in countless films and in countless TV drama episodes. The dying man’s last words. The whispered secret. The final utterance of the doomed which casts light on the shadows of mystery.
I leaned forward, placing my ear close to his lips, able to feel his hot breath and the sticky droplets of exhaled blood upon my cheek. The chaos of the world around me seemed to fade into the background. I could hear breaths rattling deep within him as I waited expectantly for a word...but nothing came.
Instead, it was me who spoke...and the words I came out with were:
‘Ow! Fucking Hell!’
I can only describe the pain behind my left ear as agonisingly intense. It was as if someone had shoved a blunt, searingly-hot needle into the flesh, just below the skull. That was followed almost immediately by the slightly less painful but singularly more unpleasant sensation of something ice-cold being injected into me.
My instinctive reaction was to pull away...but I couldn’t. The Researcher’s right arm held my shoulder in a vice-like grip which was as much of a shock as being stabbed by something I couldn’t see.
I’m not sure how long I was held for. It felt like hours but it was probably only seconds, but all the time I could feel this really horrible sensation of cold spreading across the back of my neck, forward past my ear and into my left cheek and down into my shoulder.
And suddenly I was very, very frightened. The sensation was one of something alien in my body, something that was not supposed to be there, something that did not belong.
A lot of strange, shitty things have happened to me in the last couple of days, all of which have made me scared, but feeling something odd oozing into you, spreading out beneath your skin, that is the strangest.
I started to panic, to struggle wildly to break free from his vice-like grip.
With hindsight, I guess this must have looked truly bizarre to those dozens of shocked onlookers; the supposed saviour struggling to get away from the badly-injured victim. But I didn’t care. Something truly fucking weird was happening here, to me, and I didn’t want it to carry on...
Suddenly the arm went limp.
I felt it slide off my shoulder and heard it flop onto the ground.
I also heard a final, rattling breath crawl chillingly from the Researcher’s shattered body, peppering my cheek with blood and saliva one last time.
Then an eerie silence fell.
I straightened up and looked at what was left of the Researcher’s face. The eye that only seconds before had looked at me so pleadingly was now blank and lifeless, staring vacantly up at the mournful grey clouds.
The Researcher was dead.
Once more, as it had when I had waited for him to speak, time seemed to slow right down. I’m not really sure how long I knelt there, staring into that single, lifeless, unseeing eye, unsure of what to think, unsure of what to feel. But then, all of a sudden, the world and all its torments came crashing back into my consciousness with a vengeance.
Firstly, there was the...sensation in the back of my neck, still cold, still spreading, like a sore and painful muscle...I now had difficulty in turning my head to the left without it feeling tight and sore.
Then there were the screams, louder and more piercing now that people had realised that the victim of the accident was dead.
Finally there were the rough hands upon me, lots of hands, hauling me back onto the floor, pulling at my arms and my legs and my neck.
I looked up around at the owners of the hands and saw the neat haircuts, dark sunglasses, white shirt collars and dark suits of THEM.
As they roughly pinned me to the wet, bloody road, I saw one of them reach inside his dark suit jacket. I caught a glimpse of a hypodermic needle...and that’s when I got angry!
After all, it had been a really freaky couple of days. I’d seen spacemen arrive, I’d had my house bugged, I’d seen my ordinary life turned totally inside out, I’d probably seen my home for the last time, I’d seen a man get smashed by a bus, I’d had something injected into my neck and now I had three arseholes trying to fire more shit into my bloodstream.
I’d had enough!!!
‘Get the fuck off me!!’ I screamed, fighting against them with a sudden ferocity that clearly took them all by surprise.
I know I punched one of them full in the face as I wrenched my arm free of his grasp; I felt a lens of his sunglasses crack beneath my knuckle. Another f
ell groaning to the ground as my knee caught him heavily just under his ribs. The third screamed like a girl as I grabbed his hair and slammed his head against the road just as hard as I bloody well could.
With arms and legs flailing wildly, I planted several more kicks and blows on my would-be captors, my efforts sufficiently violent to break away from their hold and clamber to my feet.
As I did so, I took in what was a truly bizarre scene.
Firstly, there was the body of the Researcher, still and silent, the shattered, barely recognisable head surrounded by a rich, red halo of blood. About ten feet away from the body, further up the road, was the bus, engine still running, cracked front window now filled with gawping faces, all craning their necks to get a look at what was the cause of the commotion. Also inside the bus, her eyes streaming tears, her face a ghastly shade of white, was the bus driver, visibly shaking from the shock of what had happened.
On the floor near the body were the three of THEM, their dark suits now slightly soiled, their neat hair-styles slightly ruffled. They were moaning in pain and were trying to pull themselves together after my wildman attack upon them.
And all around were people, probably hundreds of them by now, some quiet, some crying, some whispering to each other and pointing at this and at that. Bizarrely, at the back of the crowd back up towards Debenhams, I could hear a group of four or five teenage boys, their voices unnaturally loud:
‘Hey, Bozza, sumfins goin on ere.’
‘Looks like some dickhead argued wiv a bus.’
Laughter.
‘Fuckin ell, look at all that fuckin blood!’
Disapproving glances from many who were gathered around, the occasional tut and shake of the head. I’m sure I even heard one elderly woman say ‘Have they no respect?’
I think I took all that in in about a second, because no sooner was I on my feet than I was running, running into the crowd outside Primark, pushing my way roughly through them, intent (like the Researcher before me) simply on getting as far away from this place as quickly as possible.