Chasm

by Stephen Laws

  “You keep talking about the rescue services,” replied Wayne. “But they should be here already, shouldn’t they?”

  “They’re coming. Don’t worry.” His face was far from reassuring. “Now what’s this lad’s name, please…?”

  And that’s when I heard the commotion. A door slammed close by, and a woman yelled something like: “Christ, help us. It’s behind us…and it’s COMING!”

  I twisted to see what was going on, but suddenly the yell had let loose all the fear that I could sense among everyone in the community hall. Maybe everyone had just been waiting for something even worse to happen, and here it came. The room was suddenly full of people jostling each other and trying to get out. Someone collided with the blue-shirt and he all but fell across me. Another blue-shirt was shouldering his way angrily through the crowd to where the commotion was taking place, yelling for people to be calm, but he might as well have saved his breath because now some other guy was yelling: “It’s right behind us. A tidal wave. Water or oil or sewage or…SOMETHING!”

  Then I saw this man and woman, both of them wild-eyed and looking terrified out of their wits, pushing through the people who were surging towards the front door. The paramedic caught the man by the arm and tried to haul him around, shouting something. I suppose he was trying to find out what it was that had scared these two so much before they’d burst in through the front doors. But he could get no sense out of them and there was no way that anyone was going to stop the people in this room from getting out into the street. Even if the worst thing in the world was right behind those two and headed this way, the crowd in here weren’t just going to stay and wait for it to arrive. Wayne and Damon tried to shove through and join them, but now they’d both been snagged between the paramedic and the wild-eyed man. In a knotted tangle, the whole lot fell across me. I covered my head as feet came down on top of me. My head was hurting bad as I squirmed my way on elbows and knees through the tangled bodies and thrashing legs. After everything I’d been through, it seemed like I was going to be buried alive again under a clawing mass of bodies.

  Suddenly I was clear. Lights were spangling in my eyes and I felt as if I might throw up at any moment. But if I was right about having been in this place before, I knew that there was another way out that no one else seemed to know about, or had forgotten about in the mad rush to get away. When I looked up, I could see the fire exit double doors in the back wall with the security bar across them. If they were locked…well, there wasn’t time to think about that. Someone fell across my legs. The pain and the anger seemed to dissolve the lights and the next moment I was staggering to my feet and heading fast towards the fire exit. Right next to it was a young guy with a guitar. He was just sitting there, guitar cradled across his lap, gawping in sheer amazement at what was happening. Two middle-aged women were dragging a kid with a white face away from the panic. When the man and the woman who’d burst in here and caused the panic stumbled in front of me, I yelled at them to get the hell out of my way and yanked the woman aside. The guy tried to fist me, but I shoved him back hard and then I’d hit the security bar with both hands and the doors slapped open hard into the night.

  There was an open grassed space behind the community centre; terraced houses stretching away on either side. I had a brief glimpse of the smoke-fog wall, or whatever the hell it was, and then I was on my knees again, looking back at the community centre. The people I’d seen when I broke away from the crowd had followed me. The guy and his wife, the kid with the guitar and the two women and their white-faced kid. Even as I looked, Wayne and Damon suddenly came sprinting out of the doorway. Just as they cleared it, I saw something happen inside the community centre that shocked me rigid.

  In one brief moment, I could see the people still crowding away, clawing over each other towards the main door. A bloody great twisted knot of arms and legs. No one seemed to have looked back to see that a back entrance was open. Then the white-faced kid started to scream right next to me, one of the women pinned him down and tried to hush him up, I tried to yell back at the people inside…and then…and then…

  And then just before the faint light in the community hall was snuffed out, I saw the windows beside the front door, and the one I could see on the left-hand side suddenly implode like a bomb had gone off out there and blown in the glass. There was a roaring sound, not exactly like a bomb, more like…well, more like some animal roaring…or a tornado suddenly exploding inside, or maybe a dam bursting open. Something came in through the windows then, with the broken glass. It was just a split second, but it looked like…well, it looked like gushing black water, or maybe oil the way it was glistening black.

  Then there was only darkness. And the brief sounds of screaming beneath that roaring, thundering noise. But there was something wrong about what was happening. I mean, it sounded like people were being drowned or torn apart or something inside the building. When I rolled and flinched and looked back, I knew that it couldn’t be a tidal wave, or water, or oil. Because the back entrance doors were wide open, and nothing was coming out. There should have been a great gushing black wave or something foaming out of the fire exit towards us. But there was only complete blackness, and the sounds of the thundering that had almost, but not quite, drowned out the screaming.

  I looked at the woman who was trying to quiet the kid. He was silent now; eyes closed, lips quivering like he had pneumonia or something. She was looking back at the community centre, and I saw her mouth “Oh my God”…when the next really bad thing happened…

  Chapter Eleven

  Inferno

  The calor gas heater in the basement of the cellar had been placed there only two days previously. The first tremor had tipped it on its side, and it had rolled sharply against the nearest concrete wall. The impact there had hurled it to the other wall, where the container had been fractured. The second tremor had repeated the manoeuvre, making for a slow leak. And then, when the windows imploded and the Darkness came in, the temperature in the community centre dropped by 120 degrees in three seconds. Enough to penetrate instantly through the wooden floor to the basement, where the calor gas container still rocked gently from side to side. The canister ruptured and a jet of flame erupted in the basement, igniting the slow leaks in the gas mains that had also been caused by the second tremor. Although severed to east and west by the fog-mist barrier, and with the gas trapped in that section of the mains in ways that would never be known, the pipe exploded like a bomb, blasting up through the floor. Just as the windows had imploded to admit the Darkness, orange-yellow flames exploded through the same shattered windows, the front door and the exit, turning the community centre into a huge fireball. The fireball erupted through the roof, throwing burning debris high into the air with a shuddering roar. Lisa and Annie sheltered the boy, now quietened, his eyes wide and staring at the fire-filled sky. As Damon and Wayne rolled and scrabbled towards the others, the roaring subsided, but it seemed that the screaming had returned.

  But this surely could not be the screaming of the people inside.

  This was more like some gigantic animal, suddenly trapped inside a furnace. The hideous shrieking filled the air as sparks and burning splinters fell around them. Jay slapped at a smouldering piece of fabric which almost fell directly on his head, kicked it away and finally began to retch.

  Candy clutched her hands to her ears to deafen the hideous screaming sound. Alex could only look at the raging furnace that had once been a community hall. There were…shapes in there. No longer moving; burning, huddled bundles wreathed in intense flame. Stunned, he looked away, falling to his knees when he realised that only seconds ago he and Candy had been caught up in there, in the mad crush. First the thundering tidal wave that had never arrived, and now this hideous fire. Alex bent double to control nausea, slapped his hands on his thighs angrily, hoping that he would wake up. When he looked back at Candy, she had taken her hands from her ears. Wide-eyed, she was staring at the fire and the sparks flying in the ni
ght. Then she stared at Alex, as if he should have all the answers to what had happened and what was happening. But there were no answers for that hideous black tidal wave. No answers for how a dead man could walk and talk and somehow see right into their souls. No answers for how he could give birth to that terrifying black flood. No answers for how an entire city could somehow fall apart and be hemmed in by this impossible wall of smoke. No answers for this horrifying explosion and the death of all inside.

  “Alex,” said Candy, turning to look back at the burning community centre. He looked at her for a long time before she spoke again. “I want to wake up now.”

  He could find nothing to say. Instead, he turned to look at the others.

  They were all staring into the fire, and saying nothing.

  Chapter Twelve

  The Edge

  They spent the night where they were, beside the blazing pyre of the community centre. Despite the horror of what had happened close by and the knowledge that forty or fifty people had burned to death in there (or had they been dead before the fire erupted?); despite knowing that those bodies were still burning somewhere within that inferno, they remained at a safe distance throughout the long night. It was an instinctive refusal to leave the fire: a primal instinct that told them perhaps the flames were keeping the terror that had descended on the city at bay. Drawn to the flames of the community centre by their primal need for protection, they were simultaneously repelled by what those hellish flames had done—were still doing. When sleep came, it was the sleep of utter exhaustion; an aftermath of the shock that each had endured. For each, it was a troubled sleep, filled with stark playback nightmares. When the roof of the community centre finally collapsed in a roaring cloud of sparks, each of the survivors woke in alarm, but quickly returned to their fear-drugged sleep.

  Lisa woke to find the boy cradled in her arms. The sloping bank on which they lay was grassed and relatively comfortable, but her joints ached badly. Her neck was cricked, but—worse—there was a wretched hollowness inside that gave her no false comfort that everything might have resolved itself during the night and that everything they’d experienced was no more than a bad dream. She shifted, sitting upright. The boy moaned and clung tight. Not far away, she could see the sole survivors of last night’s horror, also lying on the grass and still sleeping: a young man with a guitar gripped tightly across his waist, just as protectively as Lisa was holding the boy. Behind and above him, a man and a woman, lying—curiously—back to back. Down below, two teenagers, perhaps sixteen or seventeen years old; one of them curled up in a foetal position. And the young man who had broken open the rear exit and saved them all.

  The community centre had all but burned to the ground. Now there was only a pile of black-and-white timbers, almost burned to nothing but still with glowing orange embers; a skeletal tangle in mounds of grey ash and fused debris. Clouds of grey-black smoke plumed up from the wreckage. Lisa followed the smoke up into the immensity of a blank grey sky.

  And then she realised that the undulating cloud barrier that had hemmed them in was gone.

  She snapped alert, the boy moaning again and clinging tighter. When she looked around, she could see the terraced houses ahead with their cracked walls and shattered windows, great patches of slate missing from the roofs of houses that were still standing. On either side, a ragged outline of buildings and tilted trees. But no smoke barrier, if smoke was what it had been. Could this mean that the nightmare was over? Even now, were ambulances and fire crew on their way at last? She turned to Annie…and saw that she wasn’t lying at her side, as she’d imagined.

  “Annie…”

  Fear stabbed in her stomach. The boy must have felt it, because he started to wake, groaning but keeping his face buried against her chest. Had something happened to Annie in the night? The sound of Lisa’s anxious voice was waking the others now. But when she twisted around to look behind her, she saw with vast relief that Annie was still alive. She was about fifty feet away, walking slowly back towards them, head down. Had she woken and gone for a walk? Strange that she hadn’t woken her. And now the relief was tinged with anxiety again. There was something about the way Annie was walking. Too slow, head down as if preoccupied with bad thoughts.

  “Annie!”

  This time when she called the others were well awake. But Annie still didn’t look up as she walked on. When she was still ten feet away, she lifted her head.

  “What is it, Annie? What’s wrong?”

  “I think…” Annie looked slowly behind her, as if still trying to work something out in her mind. Something that was troubling her badly. “I think everyone had better come and see for themselves.”

  “The smoke,” said Candy, standing up and looking around. “The clouds, the smoke. Whatever it was. It’s gone.”

  “Thank Christ,” said Alex.

  “I wouldn’t thank anyone for anything,” said Annie. “Until you’ve seen what I’ve seen.”

  Lisa stood up creakily. The boy clung tight to her hand, and when they walked up to Annie he also took Annie’s hand when she proffered it.

  “So what’s the big mystery?” shouted Wayne.

  Annie didn’t answer.

  “What?”

  She turned back to look at Wayne and Damon, seemed about to say something; but it was as if she couldn’t find the words.

  “Just come,” she said simply. “You’ll see.”

  Candy and Alex were already following. Gordon slung the guitar over his shoulder but seemed unsure.

  “If that smoke-thing’s gone,” said Wayne, “then it means we can get home again. My folks’ll be going spare.”

  “And mine,” said Damon. “Look…I’m getting back. I’ve got to see if they’re all right. My sister and her kids…”

  Annie didn’t turn back.

  Wayne and Damon turned and headed in the opposite direction. They gave the smouldering ruin of the community centre a wide berth as they made their way through an alley between the crumbling terraced houses that led back to the main street.

  Gordon tried to say: “My aunt. The ceiling came down. I’ve got to find out if she’s all right…” But nothing would come out of his mouth. Even as he struggled to find the words, he knew that he was only fooling himself. He had clawed through those ruins before giving up hopelessly. His aunt could never have survived that fall of rubble. But he had nowhere else to go. It wasn’t right that her body should be buried under there, and no one knew about it. Someone had to come and dig her out. He watched Damon and Wayne heading off, and took a step in their direction. Then he saw that the other guy was standing up at last and dusting himself down. They exchanged a look, and then Jay began to follow Annie and the others.

  “My…” Only one word would come. Enough to make Jay look back at him. But when nothing else came out, he ignored him and followed the others across the parkland. Gordon hung his head, fury and grief smouldering inside. And then he realised what seemed so strange about this new morning. Not that the sky was a dull grey with no sign of clouds, not the smouldering ruins. But surely someone else would be out on the streets this morning? Now that the smoke barrier had gone, surely the emergency services should already be there. Where were the people from the surrounding houses? Were they all really still crouched inside their ruined homes, too frightened to come out? Where were the siren sounds of fire engines and ambulances? It seemed as if they were the only people left in this part of the city. He looked again at the smouldering ruins of the community centre and seemed to see something like a ribcage underneath a smoking timber. Quickly, he looked away…and then strode angrily after the others. When he looked back for the two other youths, they were gone.

  They’d covered about half of the grassed parkland when Jay suddenly stopped. The others ahead of him kept walking. When Gordon drew level with him, he stopped and saw the look of puzzlement on Jay’s face.

  “There’s something wrong,” said Jay, without turning to look at him. “I know this park. Pla
yed here lots of times when I was a kid. Walked here every other weekend when I wanted to get my head together. Place hasn’t changed in years.”

  “What?” Gordon wanted to say, but could only grunt.

  Jay looked at him, trying to weigh him up; then said: “Don’t you live round here, then? Haven’t you been to this park before?”

  Gordon looked around and saw nothing out of place.

  “Up ahead,” said Jay, pointing. “Where they’re all going.”

  Gordon looked at the group.

  “The park should be bigger than this.”

  And now Gordon knew what Jay meant, wondered why he hadn’t noticed it for himself.

  The others were walking towards the place where the smoke barrier had once been. There was a mound there now. A churned-up ridge of soil, stretching right across the park as far as he could see. The ragged barrier went right up to the corner of a crumbled pub on the left, cut right across the park’s playing field in an erratic gash to disappear into trees to the right. Some of the trees had toppled and were hanging at weird angles over the edge of the gash. It was as if an army of bulldozers and earth-moving machines had been at work, ploughing up the ground just ahead on all sides and ramming the earth up into this irregular barrier. But there was no man-made straightness of line here. The mound of soil and grass was jagged and cracked on all sides.

  “That pile of soil and stuff,” continued Jay. “It cuts across the mid-point of the field. But it’s like…like there’s nothing beyond that ridge. There were houses there. Kinwright Street, and the Hotspur bar at the end. You should be able to see them all from here. That ridge isn’t big enough to hide them. Christ, don’t tell me everything’s been flattened past that point. You should be able to see for miles and miles…”

  Jay continued on, Gordon close behind. He began to run to catch the others, and Gordon began to trot along too. There was only one thought in Jay’s mind now.