by Mark Dunn
In her own little cell, Carrie covered her mouth and nose with her hand.
But even in that intermediary moment between sleep and wakefulness, she recognized and registered the acrid tang of smoke.
She was the first to smell it. And she was the one to wake and alert her sisters and Jane’s brother Lyle to the frightening reality of it, situated as they were upon surplus army cots in the basement storeroom of Sister Lydia’s new tabernacle.
Quickly did they all wake and just as quickly did they spring to their feet. It was Lyle who stated the obvious: “The building’s on fire. We have to get out.”
There was a little window in one corner of the room, but it was too high and seemed far too small for even Molly, the most petite of the six, to squeeze through it.
Jane was at the door now and pulling it open, only to be knocked backward upon her heels by a blast of smoke from the outside corridor. All began coughing and choking, each struggling for breath as the room became quickly filled with a thick fog of particulates and soot and ash. Each knew that survival meant leaving this room, for closing the door would only postpone the unthinkable. And so into the smoke they went, hands and handkerchiefs and pillowcases covering gasping mouths, each with one hand left free to grab the hand of another. Heads tucked and eyes half-closed, the six shouldered their way into the darkness—commending themselves into the waiting arms of either death or salvation, their fate dependent on how extensive had spread the electrical fire which only a few minutes earlier had been but a tiny spark, though now was something large and menacing and ravenous for the very oxygen We Six required to execute their escape.
In the midst of the darkness each of the six could hear the frightened cries and frantic, desperate shouts of those fellow shelter dwellers who had also been cast into a state of utter blindness by the blast. It was a 1,400-kilo semi-armour piercing bomb that had deeply penetrated the ground beneath Balham High Road just north of the Balham Northern line station. It exploded upon impact with the cross passageway between the two platforms and immediately unleashed a terrific volume of water from severed mains and shattered sewer pipes—the water gushing directly into the stygian subterranean tube station.
We Six could hear the sound of the cascading water as it quickly began to flood the Balham tube. It was Molly who first noted the wetness about her ankles as the gathering stream coursed past.
“Maggie! Maggie, where are you?” she called. Maggie, who was standing no more than two or three feet away, swung her arms about until she made contact with Molly in the blackness and latched a hand upon her arm.
Nearby, but seemingly miles away down the platform, its cowl of darkness being pricked by little pinpoints of light from the engagement of matches and little candles and cigarette lighters, were Ruth and Jane, who had also found one another and each of whom now clung to her sister in cold, silent terror. Carrie and Lyle hadn’t similar good fortune. Separated by the panicked thrashings and flailings of those who were rising from their sleeping spots, now sacrificed to that growing river of water and mud and sludge that was once the southbound platform of Balham Station, Carrie and Lyle could only call to one another, though it was difficult to be heard over the frightened screams and the roar of the surging torrent.
The sound rose and now became nearly deafening in its volume. The wind that was its source was fast whipping itself into a maddening circle about the barn. Yet Lyle continued to call out for Carrie to come to him, as he, in turn, tried to make his way to her. As the sideboards of the barn flew off and away, the entire structure became a skeleton-like vestige of what had only a moment earlier been wholly intact—a deceptively safe refuge for the five young women and one young man who had sought shelter there.
Ruth and Jane locked arms around each other’s hips as they hooked their other arms around a wooden post set into the corner of a horse stall, each debating whether they should flee the doomed structure altogether and take their chances in the open.
Molly and Maggie were considering the same, having watched the horses and the one frightened cow do that very thing without thought in their bestial brains for what might be the consequences. In the end, the two struggled through the churning wind and flying debris toward a large tractor which sat heavy and solid and unmoving in the middle of what was left of the dismantling barn.
As Molly took her few steps in this direction, putting herself upon the doorstep of her cousin’s house, she felt something hard and heavy strike her head and down she went. As she sank into unconsciousness, Molly looked briefly into the eyes of the madman now staring down at her with crazed, lascivious eyes. In that next moment Maggie sprang upon the man and began pounding his chest with angry fists for what he’d done, only to be flung to the ground by his companion. As the brace of men moved to make lecherous assault upon their two victims, their advance was halted by Jemma’s father, who had at that moment swung open his front door and aimed a gun at them with the threat that he would use it if they did not vacate his property on the instant.
Other men of the town were running wildly and riotously about, smashing windows and tumbling things with hysterical fury. There were women tearing at their hair and their clothes, for it was now believed by many of those abroad that the multi-hued skies had opened special portals through which the righteous had already been uplifted into the loving embrace of the Almighty, and those who were left behind could only presume rejection, denunciation, and damnation from on high. And so they would act upon their unbridled rage over this unfortunate turn of fortune through ravagings and mindless violence and all other acts of brutish depravity, doomed as they now were.
There were still others who saw nothing apocalyptic or eschatological in the goings-on, but were nonetheless motivated to commit theft and sundry acts of mischief as means to survival in a lunatic world now suddenly made captive to mankind’s most base instincts.
Reginald Prowse stood at the window next to Jane and Ruth, who had been hurried into the house. Mirabella Prowse brought a salve for his hands. They had been burnt only moments earlier by sparks that had flown from the telegraph instrument and by the small fire the sparks had ignited upon his desk and which he had fumblingly smothered out with a blanket. “It’s a geomagnetic storm from the sun, is all it is,” he said. “That’s what has caused this. Nothing else. But I cannot explain why a scientific phenomenon, easily explained, should have thrown this town into such a state of madness. Here is a phenomenon that absolutely beggars comprehension.”
“They think it’s the end of the wo—” Jane wasn’t given leave by circumstance to finish her sentence before a brick came crashing through the window and struck her in the shoulder.
She fell backward as another brick and then another shook themselves from the wall. Ruth had only a moment to pull her sister away from the wall before the whole thing came crashing down before them. Outside the little opium room, out in the dining room of the teahouse, the gas-jetted chandelier finally snapped loose from the ceiling, leaving a large and jagged hole in the wooden floor beneath it—or what was left of the floor, for Ruth felt certain it was about to give away entirely beneath their feet.
In Molly and Maggie’s room, the two had finally succeeded in wrenching open the obstinate door that had been imprisoning them. Meanwhile, Carrie, having placed herself in her room’s doorway (as one is told to do during earthquakes) continued to call out for Lyle, who was still trapped beneath his heavy wooden burden, though he was conscious and making good progress in wriggling himself out from under it.
Lyle answered Carrie.
His voice could be heard above the sound of the crackling, licking flames which now lighted his passage down the tabernacle’s burning basement corridor. Carrie’s hand, which had earlier slipped away from his, must now be found and drawn back to him. “Where are you, Carrie?” he hacked and sputtered. “Goddamnit! Where the hell are you?”
She heard him and tried to answer, but the smoke was too thick for her to open her mouth.
Maggie could feel Molly now slumped next to her, lying in the raging water, its level having risen well above her ankles and fast moving up her calves. It was becoming harder and harder to stand, and yet with all her might, she pulled Molly to her feet, slapping at her to fully revive her. “Molly! Molly!”
“I’m here. I’m here, Maggie,” said Molly.
Ruth and Jane were walking. They were walking, sloshing through the water, headed in the direction of the flow. Others had been moving in the opposite direction toward the stairs, but these two—indeed, Molly and Maggie as well, thought it best to move with the water, believing that once it rose high enough, it might carry them down to the next station.
Carrie was alone. Lyle could not find her. Lyle called her name in the darkness. She heard him—or she thought she heard him. “Sing to me, Carrie!” he called out. “Sing to me so I can find you!”
And Carrie began to sing. She sang out the song that came first into her head, the hymn that was her mother’s favorite and was sung several days earlier at her funeral, “Dear Lord and Father of Mankind”:
Breathe through the heats of our desire
Thy coolness and Thy balm;
Let sense be dumb, let flesh retire;
Speak through the earthquake, wind, and fire,
O still, small voice of calm.
She sang out in her strongest, loudest (and least calming) voice, and there were some in the Balham Station who thought the girl mad. But it didn’t matter, for Lyle was following the sound of the belting, boisterous voice. And he was getting closer and closer.
And now he was there, finding her hand…
Putting her hand in his.
Together they crawled through the storm of flying straw and splintered pieces of spinning airborne wood and other bits and slices and chunks of piercing, clawing, stabbing debris, their eyes shut tight, their heads bowed, in the direction of the tractor that wobbled but did not move—the tractor where Ruth and Jane were waiting for them, and toward which Maggie was dragging an unconscious Molly, who had been struck by a flying bucket, and they were all coming together in that one place where they felt they had the best chance of mutual survival.
Each of the six, now converging upon it—converging upon the emporium, where they had run through the madness and the chaos of this human-driven calamity of marauding mayhem, away from the Spalding House, which had been set afire, and the Prowse house, where men had entered set upon ripping it apart—running, tripping, falling, rising, running again from this phenomenon of aberrant behaviour that turned men into wild beasts who burned and smashed and pillaged and fought one another with fists over loaves of bread from the baker’s raided shelves, actions that could not be understood as one can never understand those things which periodically imperil human survival upon a fragile planet—wars and inexplicable institutional cruelties and all the natural assaults upon human body and spirit: the quaking, shuddering ground; the raging, consuming fire; the cataracts of water that flood and drown; and betrayal by the very air we must breathe to live, which will at times gather itself into the greatest concentrated force of nature known upon the planet.
The tornado moved on, taking most of the barn with it, leaving behind a tractor and the six frightened young Mississippians who lay beneath it, either clutching at its belly like Romulus and Remus with their surrogate she-wolf mother, or body-clinging to its over-sized rear tires.
Bouncing, stumbling, bobbing by turns like bathtub playtoys, We Six were swept down the Underground tunnel to the next tube station where there was light and safety and life.
The fire had been confined, at least at its outset, to the tabernacle’s basement, and reaching the top of the stairs that led to the ground floor the six emerged from the worst of the spitting flames and the choking smoke, and staggered outside the building just as the fire trucks were pulling up and there still remained hope the structure, so dear to Sister Lydia’s heart, might be saved.
The ground, after nearly a minute of violent convulsions, settled itself into still and stationary complaisance, the rumbling silenced, replaced now by the sounds of human misery upon a very large scale, expressed by those who had been battered by falling things, had lost loved ones to collapsed chimneys and toppled oriental sculptures and architectural appurtenances that now rubbled the cobbles of Dupont Street. The teahouse was still aright, though it seemed none too safe to remain inside, and so the six hastily removed themselves from it and stepped out into the gloaming that preceded the dawn to find a city that no longer resembled itself and which would soon be further ravaged by a fire of epic proportions.
In Tulleford, the citizenry calmed itself and came ruefully to their senses and were abashed and repentant over everything that had transpired in the preceding hour of madding pandemonium—an hour that certainly gave God Himself pause to wonder why He created man without any thought to the potential flaws in the human machine.
Epilogue
G Station, 4th Quadrant, Tesla Terranium, Ante-Equinoctial, 2177 CE
If only the Exto Carapace Air Lock had been breached, We Six would have had seven and one half minutes to evacuate the chamber and move into one of the unbreached adjacents. But instead, the storm had delivered to Chamber 17 a double punch—two different meteoric strikes, both of which had penetrated both the Exto and Inner Carapace Air Locks which, upon emergency engagement of the manual Aeropositer, left only a scant one minute and sixteen seconds of chamber equipressurization before the cell functionality was permanently compromised and any remaining occupants permanently de-extanted.
In other words, We Six were very lucky to have gotten themselves out of the chamber in which they were hiding, with their lives intact.
But there was consequence to be borne, and it was the fact that Lyle was now exposed to the human interveillance of the Office of Incident Investigation. Because in the course of learning, consequent to the meteor storm which had struck the Tesla Terranium, that a chamber which had been registered as unoccupantal did indeed have human occupants hiding therein (who were awaiting stowage on a Parenthian merchant ship as an extralegal means to departure), the O.I.I. discovered that one of those occupants was none other than a prime suspect in the murder of a Crewer’s Mate by the name of Tom Cates, who had been intentionally de-extanted six diurnals earlier in the sanitroom of his living quarters.
As Lyle was being escorted to the transport ship that would take him to a cell in the Tesla Penal Holding Center, where he was to await trial, there was a tearful exchange between Carrie and her new lover to which all were witness (including two android processitors whose emoticapacitors had been freshly re-actualized following complaints from human analogues that the processitors had been too bureaucratically impassive in their dealings).
In other words, the robots cried just as much as Carrie and her sisters did.
And in a most amazounding turn of events, something very nearly identical took place three quadrants removed in the First Quadrant in which Maggie’s mother and Molly’s father had been hiding and awaiting similar breakflight: their chamber was identically breached and it was likewise discovered that the chamber’s unauthorized occupants included a man who was also suspect in a recent murder. This one involved the gruesome shrusting of one Pat Harrison, also a Crewer’s Mate, down the G Station Rubbish Chute from which no human had ever emerged unscissored and unserrated and not in a de-extanted state of unrecognizable man-shreddage.
A freak accident, to be sure, since to fall all the way down the chute to the tooth wheel, Crewer Harrison would have had to plummet down the chute at precisely the
moment all three of the upper mesh gates had been retracted, which by tragic coincidence all three had.
In other words, Crewer Harrison died because three different top-level residents of the G Station dormitower chose to shrust their garbage at the very same time.
Molly would not learn of her father’s capture for two diurnals. A most difficult time lay ahead for her, due not only to the reality of his incarceration and likely conviction, but also to the guilt of her earlier feelings that he deserved whatever punition was dealt to him.
Carrie sat for a moment after Lyle’s wrist-clipped departure and wiped away the last remnant of lachtrickle from her cheeks. She took a deep breath and raised her eyes to look at her four sisters, who smiled the smiles of the well-intended, and gathered about her, Jane sitting the closest in sisterly communion, for Lyle was her brother, and she’d always loved him, but never more so than now, for he had come of late to be the upwardman she’d always hoped he would one day be, only now to find himself whisped off to live the rest of his human analogue life behind transparabars.
“Well, I really see no need at this junxten for us to go to my Uncle Whit’s planetoid, do you?” asked Maggie with a brave smile. Though the statement was made in black jest, her companions nonetheless nodded agreement. “So what happens to us now?”
“Colthurst will take us back,” said Ruth. “It’s too soon for her to have replaced us.”
“There may be charges filed against us,” said Jane, standing at the observaportal and watching Ramses as it began its final eclipse of Cleopta for that diurnal, the two satellites orbiting one another like dancing dervishons. Jane turned around. “But I think we can convince the judge advocate that it would be a waste to lock us all away when we can be more useful in civic service. Lieutenant Colthurst knows the judge advocate, and can probably put in a good word for us. She’ll also remind him that We Five are perhaps the best cooks in the Fourth Quadrant.”