“This is crazy,” Carla murmured. “Rocks don’t just drop out of the sky.”
“One of the Hairies was bending Dad’s ear the other day about…well, rocks dropping out of the sky,” Tully said in a conversational voice he hoped sounded comforting. “Volcanic stuff raining down on a village in the Vosges. That was weird enough, but even weirder, it was hot! As if it had just been blown out of a volcano.”
He recalled the scene, whiskey bottle and glasses on the table, cat picking her way along the edge of the sink to see if anything interesting was lurking in the bottom. Then his eyes widened as details of the conversation came back to him—the red, thickly bearded face, the heavy red fist slamming down on the table making the glasses jump, the cat falling into the sink.
“Jesus! If he was right, things are going to get a bit bumpy around here.”
For years the hairy, homespun friends of his father’s from the Community had been predicting the end of the world. Their only point of disagreement was which of the many disaster scenarios would hit first.
Carla grabbed Tully’s arm. “The communications room, come on! The satellite pictures will show us what’s going on.”
“Yeah. I wouldn’t mind having a look at the sports channel either.”
Carla stared at him.
“If they didn’t get the covers on the pitch in time, Dad can chuck away those tickets for the match tonight.” Tully realized it sounded as though he was turning everything into a joke, as usual, but if he didn’t laugh, he’d panic. He knew what was causing the squirming, oppressive feeling in the pit of his stomach. At least, his gut knew. His head just refused to accept it.
* * * *
Students were packing into the communications room. Inside the relative safety of the main building, the shock dissipated and spirits calmed. There was even a feeble attempt to raise a few laughs. All the monitors were on, satellite eyes fixed on different parts of the globe as they had been for months now.
“Remember when I asked in the geography class why we were monitoring all these places?” Carla said, looking from one screen to another as realization dawned.
Tully nodded. “Madame Rossignol said they were suspected terrorist flashpoints. I thought it sounded pretty far-fetched.”
“Terrorist attacks in Iceland? Who did she think she was kidding?” Carla’s eyes were wide now with horror. “This is why, Tully. They knew. Look.”
“Putain! Iceland was a waste of space anyway,” some joker quipped inanely as one of the screens showed a chain reaction of volcanic explosions all over the island, increasing in magnitude until the screen became just an orange blur before it went dead.
“There! Look at that! Not bad for a dead volcano, hey?”
Mount Kilimanjaro, long since deprived of its snowy cap by rising global temperatures, trembled and rumbled. A handful of wild elephants and zebras careered across the grassland in panic. Fissures appeared on the mountain flanks before gas and vapor obscured them. The roomful of students jumped when a gas cloud spurted from the summit lit by a hellish glare, and Kilimanjaro exploded in a fountain of flame and magma.
Teachers edged in, white-faced, to stand at the back of the room, staring in silence at the monitors. One by one, they crept back outside, phones in hand, calling crèche, home or office. Some of them watched news broadcasts on their phones, as if the tiny screen could squeeze the horror into more manageable portions.
Students gathered around an excited geography teacher, listening in fascination to his commentary as he pointed from one screen to another. But quickly, quicker than anyone could have imagined, the scenes of eruptions, explosions, earth tremors and tidal waves became not just scattered incidents affecting far-flung corners of the globe. The whistles and applause grew more sporadic, the silences longer, as the eruptions and flooding came closer to home. By the time Stromboli, Etna and Vesuvius had obliterated the Italian coast, a deathly hush had fallen. But Tricastin was the signal.
“Oh, mon Dieu! C’est chez nous, ça,” a girl screamed and covered her mouth with her hands. Dozens of students pushed and shoved to watch the monitor that showed the Rhone valley, the nuclear power station at Tricastin. One minute they were looking at a huge sprawling site with smoking cooling towers—the next it was just a mass of flames and thick black smoke.
“They said they were safe, all those fucking things,” a boy whispered. “My gran lives down there. They swore they were safe.” He turned to the transfixed geography teacher. “Monsieur? Will they be okay, the people down there? Because my gran…” The boy didn’t finish his question, didn’t expect an answer. He just choked back a sob of rage and pushed his way out of the room.
Tricastin was the signal. Suddenly the mood changed. Suddenly even the jokers felt the cold touch of fear. Suddenly the horror was in their back yard. As long as the satellites continued sending pictures, the monitors showed catastrophe on a global scale. Coastlines were submerged, islands disappeared, mountain chains exploded, fault lines opened and swallowed cities in a cascade of flames, plumes of smoke miles high, and the black dust and ash of the end of the world. The Aswan dam burst, the earth split from the Rockies down through the Andes, Denmark and the Netherlands were plunged into a chaos of swirling floodwaters. But Tricastin was the signal. Tricastin was chez nous. And, like the rest of the planet, the communications room erupted in a terrified panic.
Carla, prone to claustrophobia, had been aware of the room filling up and, despite the scenes of Armageddon on the monitors, had gradually been edging her way back to the door and out into the corridor, tugging a reluctant Tully with her. Now she ran, Tully close on her heels. Behind them, the door flew open, and a wave of terrified students burst through, trampling and pushing in the crush to get out.
With the explosion of the Tricastin reactor, all the cell phones in the school went off at once, terrified parents screaming to their offspring to get out, get away, get home! As if home would ever be a sanctuary again.
They reached the quadrangle as Carla’s phone went off. She fumbled in her bag, the opening bars of the theme music to Gone With the Wind straining against the cacophony that filled the quadrangle.
“Babbo? Dove sei?”
The voice of Carla’s father was urgent, the words rattling out staccato, racing against time. Carla listened with her entire body, gripping the phone as if she could squeeze her father’s presence out of it, but after a final verbal flurry, the voice ceased, the signal died. She stared at the phone in disbelief then punched out a number, her breath coming out in short bursts.
“Carla, what’s up?”
She looked at Tully her eyes wide but not seeing. “My dad… When he… I just called my mother. I can’t get through. It’s started, Tully. Babbo always said it would,” she whispered.
The chimes of Big Ben rang out from Tully’s phone.
Well, you had to finish milking the goats, didn’t you? Even if it is the end of the bloody world.
He tried to pretend he was irritated, but had to gulp back a sob of relief at hearing his father’s voice at last. He strained to catch what his dad was saying through the hubbub of strident voices and isolated screaming. Jack seemed uncharacteristically calm and concise. That alone was enough to make Tully feel truly scared.
“Dad says I’m to get over to the Community. Walk, if necessary. And I’m to bring you, too. He says the Hairies were right. Christ, Carla! All their predictions about extinct volcanoes surging back to life, rift valleys and fault lines and god-knows-what-else heaving about… It’s all happening.” Tully’s eyes widened with horror as the implications of what his father’s wholefood, freaky friends spent endless hours discussing, began to sink in. “Your dad was at the Whole Earth Summit. He must have an idea what’s going on. What did he say?”
Carla struggled with the twitching of her lip, holding back tears. “He was on a plane from Venezuela. He said to get out of Paris, away from the river and the city. He was just saying something about Mamma and… Oh, Tully, I
think the plane blew up!” Her face crumpled and her shoulders quivered.
“You can’t know that. Probably the phone just—”
“I heard it, Tully, the crash, as if they’d hit turbulence or something, shouting—”
Carla’s voice broke into a scream at the sound of an explosion right overhead. An instant before, it had been a plane, now it was just a ball of orange flame wreathed in clouds of black smoke. Then the storm broke in earnest, in a bombardment of thunder and sheet lightning.
Tully grabbed Carla to him and stroked her hair while he held her tight, just as he would a frightened animal, to calm her violent shivering.
“I’m cold,” she whispered.
“Shhh, just breathe deeply. We’re getting out of here. Now.”
As if to signal the grand finale, the fighter planes still crisscrossing the darkening sky appeared like phantoms as they broke through into the lower cloud cover, the tumult of the storm covering their lesser droning. It also covered the explosions, when all over the sky lightning struck each one, and a scummy yellow glow marked the place where each had been.
Chapter Two
Tully felt numb. How did you comfort someone who thought she’d just heard her father being blown to bits and had fears that her mother was probably buried inside a collapsed Buddhist temple along with the wall paintings she was restoring? Carla’s happiness had always seemed so fragile to him. He had tried his best to make a place for her in his arms, in his heart. What if he was all she had left? Carla always maintained she was even more of an orphan than Tully. What was the use of a mother, she said, who was either up a pyramid, in a Tibetan grotto or poking about among the frescos of a crumbling Maltese church? Her father, an Italian diplomat, had been for years not much more tangible than the ethereal voice in a cell phone. And now they were both gone, blown away. Apart from Tully, the only figure who represented home was Gabriella, the big, black-haired housekeeper from Calabria, the one constant, loving figure in her existence.
They both watched the quadrangle disappear beneath a jagged covering of dirty brown ice, cooling rocks and broken glass. Someone panicked and ran out into the storm. He made it about ten paces before he stumbled, raising a hand to his head. Two of his friends, holding backpacks over their heads dashed out and dragged him back into the cloister, his white T-shirt striped with red. A group of girls were urging one another into hysteria. Boys were shouting in fearful, too-loud voices. The beginning of a fight was breaking out.
Then, as suddenly as it had started, the hail and rockfall stopped, and the rumble of thunder was joined by the deafening mechanical clamor of thousands of vehicles on blocked roads. Tully took Carla’s hand. The wind picked up eddies of abandoned books and lunch refuse. Heavier objects—bags and folding chairs—hopped jerkily like injured pigeons across the quadrangle. Tree branches were cracking and thrashing about. The gale was gaining in force.
“Come on,” Tully shouted. “We’ll have to walk. We can’t count on catching the bus.” He glanced at Carla. She wasn’t smiling. “Not that you ever could.” She still wasn’t smiling. “And when it does turn up, it’s always packed.” Carla had turned her head away and he could see the glitter of tears through the damp strands of hair sticking to her cheek. “Hey!” Tully took her in his arms and held her tight. He spoke close to her ear beneath the howl of the wind. “We’ll call by your apartment to get Gabriella, and pick up some warmer clothes.”
“And Tattoo.” Carla’s voice was flat and colorless.
“Yeah, Tattoo. I just hope he’s not on walkabout. We can’t afford to hang about looking for him.”
Carla shot him a furious look. Next to her parents, Tully and Gabriella, she probably loved her cat more than anything in the world.
Tully blushed in confusion. “Sorry,” he muttered. “Of course, we’ll have a good look for him first.”
Carla hugged her jacket closer and made off in the direction of the main gates, her hair bobbing, her bag bouncing on her thigh. Tully ran to catch up, his canvas shoes, flimsily inadequate against the damp and the cold, kept slipping on the jagged lumps of ice. He was just about to garble more useless words of excuse when the alarm bell sounded, drowning the sounds of panic rising from the boulevard beyond the gates.
From the porter’s lodge, a small neat figure emerged, walking with military briskness toward the gates, which he promptly pushed to and locked. The siren stopped and the voice of the school principal came over the Tannoy.
“All students to assemble on the quadrangle. Do not attempt to leave the premises. The streets are unsafe and you are requested to cooperate to avoid a movement of panic.”
If the principal said anything else, it was drowned out by the wail of the city’s air raid siren.
“Bollocks,” Carla shouted and ran to the iron railings. Dozens of other students had the same idea. She threw herself at the railings, trying to grab the top rail.
“Here! Want a leg up?”
A tall Indian boy was bending down with his hands together. His black hair was plastered back by the wind, his white shirt bellied out like a sail behind him. She put her foot onto the proffered ladder. The boy heaved, and Carla reached as high as she could. Another younger boy—could have been his brother—balanced between the spikes at the top grabbed her hand and pulled her over.
“Thanks.” Her facial muscles were frozen by grief and shock and refused to break into a grateful smile. “Here, Tully!”
She reached out her hand but Tully was already swinging his leg over the railing, carefully avoiding the spikes. The boy let Carla drop down next to Tully, and turned back to his friend—or perhaps his big brother—laughing at some joke, the sound of it ragged as the wind plucked half the words away.
“Who’s next?” the younger boy shouted as he pulled another student over the railings and dropped him onto the pavement beyond.
Tully shook his head in astonishment. “Talk about slap-happy. Don’t those two realize what’s going on?” He looked back for the last time at the graceful school buildings, the tormented trees of the quadrangle, and beyond to the now motionless building site. Motionless until the earth gave a shudder that sent him staggering to his knees. Suddenly, Tully had a feeling of déjà vu.
“Get down off of there,” he yelled at the grinning boys hanging like monkeys from the top of the railings. They couldn’t hear. Tully waved his arms frantically and pointed. “The crane, it’s falling!”
The grins faded and heads turned, wasting time to look.
“Get down!” Tully swiped the air in a helpless, angry gesture.
The crane jolted and slumped to one side then oscillated in the rising wind, a yellow dragon, its head sweeping back and forth and screeching with the strain placed on the metal struts. The boys jerked to life, scrambling, catching pockets and sleeves on the pointed railings. Tully grabbed Carla’s hand and ran. The dragon’s screeching turned to the roar of a crumpling mass of metal and the rush of wind as it raced earthward.
A shrill scream went up from those in its path, and Tully and Carla ran, stopping their ears to the sound of pure terror. Carla turned, hesitated. Tully knew she wanted to go back but he pulled her on, trying to outrun his shame at not staying to help. They ran down the street between the school grounds and Saint Roch’s church. They let the mechanical movement of their leg muscles carry them onward, feeling nothing but a blind panic, numbed by the suffering they had left behind, and the horror they felt in the air all around them.
They left the wreckage of the school grounds and the menacing baroque façade of Saint Roch’s behind, and dashed into the rue Saint Honoré. Cars blocked the street, slewed about crazily, some smashed through the plate glass of shop fronts. Masonry tumbled from fissured buildings and hundreds of people poured into the street, scrambling over the smashed vehicles, making their way anywhere, blindly, struck by a sudden terror of the towering city buildings.
The din was unbearable, the screams of the injured, jammed car horns and above it all
, the city’s air raid siren that shrieked like a wolf in a trap. Carla stopped dead, dragging Tully to a halt. She was trembling. He glanced at the bedlam that stretched before them and understood her panic.
“We’ll never get through this way,” he said gently. “Let’s cross over to the Louvre and through the gardens. It has to be easier going than this.”
Carla looked at him gratefully and gave his hand a squeeze, a lifeline in a turbulent sea. They ran across the street and down onto the rue de Rivoli. Opposite, across the broad street, equally blocked and vociferating with anger and terror, opened the spacious grounds and majestic buildings of the Louvre. Except that the buildings were no longer majestic, the grounds no longer tranquil gardens full of strolling visitors.
Smoke from the tumbled ruins hung heavy in the air, masking some of the devastation, but not the crowds of frantic, screaming tourists pouring out of every fissure in the sections left standing, like ants from a disturbed anthill. The wind snatched at the wreaths of smoke and pulled them apart. The apex of the pyramid glittered briefly, the earth moved beneath it, and with a sigh followed by a deafening crash, it shattered and was gone.
Tully shivered in his cotton shirt as roof slates crashed at his feet. Loose window shutters slammed and crashed overhead, and panic-stricken people jostled and barged their way past. Tully could not move, more horrified by the devastation at the other side of the rue de Rivoli than of anything else he had witnessed. If the Louvre had gone, what was left of the heart of the city? His eyes pricked and he shook his head, aware of the increased pressure of Carla’s hand.
“We’ll go through the gardens,” she said quietly.
Abomination (The Pathfinders Book 1) Page 2