by Stephen Laws
And in the three years since the opening of their store, no one had openly challenged them on the sexual implications of their thriving little business. Lisa felt that it was an in-joke; Annie was more open in her stance that it was a Big Statement.
They had been together now for five years. Annie had never married; had always known where she was coming from, and had had only two lovers prior to meeting Lisa. Lisa had found her true self six years into an abusive marriage. There were two children—both boys—whom she never saw after her ex-husband had successfully used her new-found relationship with Annie to convince the anti-gay judge at the court proceedings that raising two boys in that kind of relationship was unhealthy and didn’t provide adequate role models. Somehow the loss of the boys was something that neither woman discussed any more. There had been a lot of pain.
On Monday, 22 April, at 12:15 p.m., the hardware store suddenly came alive.
Annie had been in the back room, making coffee. Trade was slow but average for a this time of day. Lisa was taking stock and trying to work out where the hell she’d put the brass doorknobs. At first it seemed that the rumbling noise was being caused by a heavy lorry passing outside. Lisa absently looked up through the shop window, but nothing passed, so she returned to her search.
The rumbling continued.
And then the shelves began to shake.
Lisa watched in astonishment as the jars standing on the shelf before her started to rattle and judder. The cardboard packets of screws and nails began to dance crazily on their hangers. From all over the store came the sounds of jangling and clattering. When she turned in bewilderment to look, it seemed that the entire contents of the store had suddenly acquired life.
“Lisa?” Annie came through the rattling plastic-bead curtain, with two cups of coffee steaming in her hand. Their eyes locked, still not understanding.
And then the front window of the store cracked, making them both cry out aloud in fright. The two cups fell from Annie’s hands and shattered on the floor. She hopped and skipped as the hot coffee burned her feet. Another crack. And Lisa suddenly had a vivid childhood memory. Winter, in the park behind her grandmother’s house. An icy Sunday morning, walking over the frozen puddles on the tarmac playing area. Listening to the ice crack and craze under her feet. Now, as she and Annie held each other close in a frightened embrace, she saw jagged, frozen lightning streak from bottom left to top right of the window. The building was still shaking and juddering, the tins and the bottles and the cans still clattering in a mad dance on their shelves. Yet another crack. And this time the entire window disintegrated, falling out of its frame into the street beyond with a great crash. Now the ceiling was juddering and shaking.
Annie suddenly had a vision: it was an aeroplane, crashing out of the sky. It was almost directly above them, and it was no use trying to hide beneath one of the tables, because even if it didn’t plough straight into their store, she knew that its gas tanks would rupture, just like they had at Lockerbie, and they would be engulfed in a fiery hell. They had to get out of the store and run. Grabbing Lisa’s arm, she ran for the front door.
The door was jammed in its frame. No matter how hard she yanked and tugged, it would not open. There was only one way out before the entire store collapsed. Through the shattered front window. Lisa was already stepping over the jagged rim and holding back her hand for Annie. The ground was alive beneath their feet; shards of glass skittering and dancing around their ankles. Behind them something fell from overhead, and just before she clambered out on to the littered street with Lisa, Annie looked back to see that the strip light was swaying wildly and chunks of plaster were crashing from the ceiling.
“Come on!”
Hand in hand, they ran from the storefront into the street.
Someone screamed, and as they turned in alarm they realised that it was not only their store that was being affected. A young couple were tottering along the pavement opposite, moving hand over hand along a tottering brick wall as if they were blind. Other people had dashed out of their homes, and from the grocery store further down the road; were staggering into the middle of the street, just as Annie and Lisa had done. It was a surreal sight; people milling about, looking back at the houses or the store from which they’d just staggered. As if they’d been ejected by the buildings themselves.
“This isn’t happening…” said Lisa, in a voice that was too low for Annie to hear, buried by the enveloping sounds of grumbling and shuddering. Glass seemed to be breaking inside every building on the street. Even as Annie turned to look, the grocery store window split and showered its on-street customers in a glittering spray. Instinctively, she started forward to help—and then the ground seemed to wobble beneath her feet, as if all solidity had been lost in the concrete and tile tarmac; as if she were suddenly standing on a trampoline. She staggered, grabbing at Lisa.
And from the far end of the street came a grinding detonation. As if lightning had suddenly struck the tarmac. But there was no zigzag lightning in the sky, no thunderous rolling in the clouds. The detonation became a steady roar; a tearing assault on the ears. The sound grew louder and nearer.
And neither Lisa nor Annie could believe their eyes when the road surface at the far end of the street began to open. There was no gradual disintegration, no warning of what was about to happen. The very fabric of the road was suddenly split apart, right down the middle, in a crack that widened as it moved with terrifying speed towards them. Concrete crumbled and fell into the ten-foot-wide crevasse that raced down the centre of the street in their direction. Water sprayed from broken mains underground, steam gushing from the ground as it was torn open. Pipework squealed, shrieked and erupted from tarmac. And now the shrieking was the sound of human voices as two elderly ladies, unable to believe what was even now bearing down upon them, were unable to get out of the way. Their attempt to avoid falling was horrifying in its very ordinariness. They didn’t flail at the lip of the crumbling ravine, didn’t try to run. Unbelieving, they stooped and held out their hands as if this were something they could stop with a casual and loving gesture, as if they were trying to gently subdue grandchildren rampaging too loudly in a suburban living room. The split widened; they tottered on the disintegrating tarmac, and were gone. The pavement on the far side of the street tilted and fell, taking fifteen people with it; almost too fast to register. There one moment; suddenly, with no ground beneath their feet, gone from sight without a sound into the roaring abyss that had been the town’s main street.
The tarmac and concrete buckled and crumpled not ten feet from where Annie and Lisa stood, arms around each other. Terror immobilised them. They could only watch the approaching fissure. But suddenly the rumbling and tearing ceased; now there was only the sound of faraway thunder, like a storm vanishing over the horizon or an express train on its way into the distance. The crevasse had stopped. Steam hissed and rose from the depths. A drizzle of rain from fractured pipes began to soak them as they stood there, staring into the fissure.
Beyond the ragged edge, they could see layers of soil and clay in the crevasse before all details were lost in the murky chasm below. Like the layers of some gigantic, surreal cake.
Something shrieked on the street behind them, shattering their inertia.
Annie pulled Lisa back from the ragged edge, towards their crumbling storefront.
And then a car came around the corner, tyres shrieking as it hurtled down the street towards them. Lisa had sight of a white and terrified face behind the driver’s wheel; whether male or female she couldn’t tell in that one split second. The car accelerated down the street, engine roaring.
It was heading directly towards the fissure in the middle of the road.
“Oh God…” Lisa could only mumble. “It’s not going to stop.”
“STOP!” yelled Annie, staggering over the fractured pavement and waving her arms.
Behind the wheel, the shocked face saw the figure waving and stumbling towards the car. There wa
s no reason, no real sanity in that face now. Terror had descended, and perhaps the driver thought that it was all to do with the waving figure. Lisa saw the driver tug the wheel, winced as the car swerved in the street, as if to avoid her—and kept straight on for the fissure.
“NO!”
The front and rear wheels on the right side of the car slewed into the crevasse, the entire frame tilting and wedging itself into the fissure. But the impetus of the car’s flight carried it on down the street in that position, wedged sideways into the gaping crack. Sparks flew from the bodywork as it scraped and slithered ahead, the roof crumpling and ripping under the strain. The car was too wide, even at that angle, to fall into the abyss. At most, the crevasse was four feet across there, before widening to the ten-foot gap where they had seen the people fall. But the power of the engine rammed it on ahead, and down. Lisa shrank back as the rear left wheel spun crazily in the air, not twenty feet from where she stood. There was a horrifying inevitability about the way the car was forcing itself into that great crack, as if the vehicle had fallen or been pushed into a working junk-yard compressor.
No one seemed inclined to go near the car when it finally shuddered to a halt, wedged in the crevasse; smoke and steam rising around the crumpled bodywork. People on the far side of the street milled in confusion; looking first at the car then at the sky and back at the buildings from which they’d escaped, as if waiting for the next development.
“Someone must come…” began Lisa. “I mean, it’s all over. Someone will come…”
“Telephone for the police!” shouted Annie to the people on the other side, as she edged along the fractured pavement nearer to the car. “Go on! Someone! Find a phone!”
Lisa reluctantly moved forward with her, their attention fixed on the car.
And then, only feet from the rear of the vehicle, both women suddenly recoiled in alarm as two spectral white hands suddenly slapped against the interior of the rear window. A young boy’s face suddenly appeared in the cracked glass; eyes wide in shock and fear, hair straggling over his forehead. He began to yell, hammering the flats of his hands against the window, looking back over his shoulder in the direction of the front seat, and then turning to yell in greater distress at what he could see there. But whatever he was yelling, his voice was muffled inside the car. Lisa hurried to the rear window. Leaning down to try to make eye contact with the young boy. He was perhaps eight or nine years old.
“It’s all right, honey,” she said, aware that she was lying and didn’t know what to do. “Just stay calm. We’ll get you out…”
And then the car juddered again, emitting a squeal of metal.
The boy fell from sight.
The car pitched sideways, the bodywork sliding further down into the crevasse.
“Oh no!”
The boy reappeared in the rear window, screaming in terror, smacking his hands desperately against the glass. The car continued to slide into the crevasse, inch by inch. Soon it would keel over completely on its side and drop into the yawning pit.
Lisa staggered around the side of the car, bent down and seized the passenger door handle. She began to yank at it. It opened, but the door was wedged tight against the top rim of the crevasse. There was only a couple of inches’ space. Suddenly the boy’s fingers were touching her own as he scrabbled at the gap, trying to push his hands through. Now she could hear his agonised pleas:
“Please! Please get us out! My mam and dad are hurt! Please!”
“Watch your fingers, love! Sit back…oh Christ!”
The car lurched again, and the boy was gone once more; flung back down across the seat as the entire vehicle groaned and resumed its slide.
“Watch out, Lisa!”
Lisa pulled away from the door, and saw that Annie was wielding something over one shoulder as she ran towards the back of the car. In an instant she understood what Annie had done. While she had been trying to open the door, Annie had scrambled back through the shattered store window and grabbed a pair of heavy-duty wire-cutters. They were the first thing she’d been able to lay her hands on, and now she was wielding this four-foot-long metal tool, bringing it down heavily against the rear window. The entire pane disintegrated like frosted sugar. Discarding the wire-cutters, she lunged across the glittering boot and thrust both hands through the shattered window.
“Come on, son! Take my hands!”
Further shocked by the violence of Annie’s sudden action, Lisa rallied and hurried around to her companion, bracing one hand on the boot and hooking a hand through Annie’s belt in an attempt to stop her falling forward. The car juddered and squealed again. Lisa cried out, the downward twist of motion throwing her off balance. But she hung on tight to the belt as she fell on the edge of the crevasse.
Screeching, the car turned completely sideways.
Like a living thing in tortured agony, it dropped away from sight; down into the smoking depths of the abyss. Straight to hell.
“Oh no, Annie! No, no, no…”
“Shut up, woman, and help me!”
Lisa twisted to see that Annie was still hanging over the edge of the crevasse, was even now struggling to pull herself back from the edge. Lisa clung tight to the belt, felt something tear and knew that Annie was wrongly balanced and would surely follow the car down. But now Annie was heaving herself back, and as Lisa lurched forward to grab her shoulders, she could see why she was having so much difficulty retrieving herself.
She was hanging on to the boy with one hand.
Just below the edge of the chasm, the boy had both of his hands fastened on her fist. Her other hand braced on the crumbling edge, Annie was trying to haul him up.
Quickly, Lisa thrust herself forward, reached down over the edge and seized the boy’s collar to ease the strain on Annie’s arm. His shirt began to tear, but she kept on hauling, praying aloud as the edge of the crevasse continued to crumble beneath them.
“We’ve got you,” she sobbed, in a voice that knew he must fall.
“Pull hard, Lisa!” shouted Annie. “For God’s sake, we’re going to lose him.”
And suddenly, impossibly, they were back on the splintered pavement.
Both women breathing heavily and lying flat on their backs; the boy crumpled between them, curled up like a foetus and with both hands clasped over his face as if he wanted everything to go away and everything to be better again.
The nightmare was far from over.
Suddenly the ground beneath them began to shudder. There was a great subterranean roar, as if something deep below was reacting in rage to the intrusion of the shattered car which had dropped into its depths. Both women rolled over instinctively, grabbing at the ground, hugging it tight. Lisa put an arm across the boy, grabbing Annie’s shoulder. She began to pray then; convinced that the fissure edge would crumble, that the abyss would suddenly yawn wider and that they would all slide down into Hell. As the roaring thundered on, she looked back over her shoulder, to the other side of the street.
The buildings over there were shuddering. The remaining windows were exploding and cascading down into the fractured street, on top of the figures who screamed and ran in confusion; terrified of the fissure before them, but equally terrified of running back into the buildings which were, even now, shaking themselves apart. Plaster dust and debris exploded through the frontages as if bombs had gone off behind them. Lisa cried out when she saw a knot of terrified people, maybe five or six, huddling together at the rim of the crevasse. The edge crumbled, their arms pin-wheeled. She could see the look of terror on their faces as they seemed to hang in mid-air. And then they were gone, tumbling into the darkness like dolls, vanishing from sight.
When she saw what happened next, she could not utter a sound; could not give vent to the utter terror that had overcome her.
It was just like one of those horrible newsreel shots she’d seen as a child. The shots of the first atomic explosion sites, where houses and stores had been built close to the test site and cameras
set up to observe the effects of the blast. She remembered all too vividly the sight of those houses first swaying on their foundations, as reeds and water plants might sway underwater in the current. And then, with a second ripple, the houses blew apart, disintegrated instantly and were blown away in gigantic clouds of debris.
It happened now.
The houses, the greengrocer’s store, the car franchise. Everything within sight on the other side of the road beyond the crevasse suddenly rocked as the great roaring continued. And then, before her eyes, the entire street imploded, disintegrating into fragments as if a great wind had suddenly descended on it. But somehow—impossibly—there was no wind. Lisa, Annie and the boy were not sucked into the yawning ravine. They lay there in terror as a great cloud of black dust erupted from the crevasse, sucked itself back, and then surged upward with renewed ferocity to obliterate the utter destruction that had been wreaked on the other side of the street.
Annie felt the boy moan in terror and put an arm over his shoulders. Her hand connected with Lisa’s, and they held each other tight over the boy.
Both women wept, and waited for the end to come.
Chapter Seven
The Journal of Jay O’Connor:
Frying Pan and Fire
The school had ceased to exist.
I was sitting on a pile of rubble; all around me, more piles of rubble. It was like…well, I was in a different place altogether. As if I’d been buried alive, crawled underground for miles, then managed to come out through a hole in some different world. Smoke was rising from some of the rubble. Then I saw something that made me realise I was still in the same place. About a hundred feet away was the blockhouse the school cleaning gear was stored in. It had been untouched. Running behind it, and around the rubble piles, was the iron school fence. Parts of it had been twisted and torn where rubble and masonry had fallen over it and scattered in the street. I recognised the houses and buildings over there. Most of the roofs had caved in and the streets were cracked and filled with more rubble.