James Herbert: ‘48

Those shots did two things at once: the noise stunned the Blackshirts enough to paralyse them momentarily, and the corpse tumbled over sideways onto the floor, releasing the lever of the hand grenade it had been sitting on – I’d carefully pulled the pin earlier that morning, y’see. I had a few seconds to get off the walkway before the grenade exploded and set off the dynamite inside those covered boxes.

One more thing to do before I left the scene: I dropped the pistol, shrugged off the bag on my shoulder, drew the pin of the grenade in my left hand and tossed it into the crowd, close to the disguised explosives on the other side of the walkway. Then I was gone.

Dizziness hit me as soon as I’d squeezed through those struts and was on the outside of the footbridge. The river and south pier below seemed to leap up at me, the sudden vast emptiness around me nearly making me lose balance. But I fought against it and quickly slipped down through the gap between the walkway floor and outer ornamental rail, my foot finding the top edge of the raised bridge just below. Those few seconds I’d needed to escape had passed and I wondered if the grenades were going to blow – there was no way of knowing what those years in storage had done to their mechanisms – and I had time to look up and see Muriel’s white, frightened face peering down at me through the girders, then someone scrambling past her before I ducked under the footbridge.

The explosions came and the world around me erupted, the first boom mingling with the second. I clung to the great bascule as it shuddered beneath me, and the air thundered with the blasts, the roof above my head juddering wildly, threatening to collapse on top of me, now another blast joining the first two, the sound alone almost sending me reeling into the waters so far below. Flames shot out from the footbridge, only the thick concrete a few feet above my head protecting me, and huge balls of fire rolled into the sky. I screamed against the noise and my own horror, aware that Muriel’s body had been carried ahead of those flames, narrowly missing the opposite walkway to fall away through the air, only one arm outstretched, the other one missing, her clothes torn from her but her skin burning. It was a fleeting glimpse, but one that was fused into my brain, a sight I knew even then would never fade – if I lived through this. I shut my eyes, but the image was even stronger.

I began to slip, the trembling of iron and concrete beneath me increasing, so that I had to open my eyes again to find ridges, projections, anything I could cling to. Debris of all sorts – bits of wood, fragments of iron, pieces of bodies, whole bodies – was flying outwards, tumbling almost leisurely to the river below, and smoke, fire, and dust billowed into the air. The top of the bascule was wide enough for me to lay on, and metal ridges and holes containing bolts that locked both sides together when the bridge was lowered helped me cling there while the entire structure shook and groaned. I was afraid the whole bloody thing would come down because when I’d hidden the dynamite along the walkway in the twilight hours of dawn, Cissie helping me haul it all up those tower stairs, I’d no idea how powerful it was or how unstable. Like the grenades, it’d been in storage a long time, so it was unpredictable. Well, now I was finding out, and I was scared as hell.

Massive black smoke-clouds darkened the sky and the bascule continued to vibrate like a vast tuning fork. I began to pull myself towards the other side of the span, only too aware of the long drop on either side and soon I was at the rail that ran by the roadside, the thick, ornamental balustrade that would serve as a ladder to the pier below. And as I lowered myself over the edge, biting into my lip, terrified I was gonna lose my grip and fall, I looked up to see McGruder, his face black and scorched, hair burned off his blistered scalp, crawling towards me along the top of the bascule. I just had time to remember the figure I’d seen climbing past Muriel through the girders, when the world lurched away from me once more.

Both of us slipped, McGruder managing to fling an arm over the wall that was the vertical roadway, me linking an arm through the decorative end of the rail as I slid down. We held on to the bridge as it began its rumbling downward journey. But it abruptly juddered to a halt and I was almost thrown off again. My legs swung free and I clawed desperately with my other hand as the arm through the hole was nearly wrenched from its socket. I grabbed another part of the patterned rail and my feet found a hold further down. Still deafened by the noise of the explosions, the world a strangely silent place around me, I hung on for my life, happy to stay where I was ‘til my nerve came back.

But there was a further movement A trembling ran through the ironwork, and I realized the bridge hadn’t stopped at all, that it was slowly, ponderously, continuing its descent. The machinery controlling its operation had been disturbed by the blasts, cogwheels and pressure points released so that the bascule’s own weight was bringing it down. A quick glance across the river to the opposite bascule told me only this side seemed to be affected – the other bridge didn’t appear to be moving at all. I wasn’t sure how it was possible – the big engine room that controlled Tower Bridge was on the Thames’s south side, far away from the explosions – but guessed it was the levers or braking system inside the control cabin on the south pier that had been disturbed, along with the bascule itself, the balance shifted, with nothing to hold it in check. The cogwheels could only control the fall.

I pulled myself tight against the rail, prepared to ride it all the way, hoping the bridge wouldn’t level out with too much of a jolt. I might have even enjoyed the trip, knowing my game plan had panned out, I’d fought the battle and won, if a black-stained, raw-scalped, red-eyed head hadn’t appeared above me. McGruder hadn’t been thrown off when the bascule had shifted – hell no, he’d hung on and then crawled along the apex to get to me. And now he was a spit away, gaping down at me with hate in his eyes and murder in the sick thing he called his heart.

His clenched fist struck my forehead, almost dislodging me. He tried again, reaching over as far as he could, but this time I dodged. With his next lunge, he’d grabbed my hair and was hauling me up. Tears blurring my vision, I gripped his wrist and forced his hand away, some of my hair going with it My feet slid from their holes in the rail and I was hanging by one hand, my legs kicking empty space while he took full advantage, clambering down the other side of the rail, using its openings and decorative swirls as a crude ladder as I had. Then he was leaning round, trying to break my grip on the rail, pushing at my shoulder, tugging at my other arm, all the while the bridge continuing its sluggish, lumbering descent My ears suddenly cleared and I could hear the straining of metal against metal, the groaning of rusted machinery forced into motion after years of suspension. And I could hear McGruder’s frustrated grunts too as he tried to tear me loose.

I swung out over the river, the bascule at least a third of the way down by now, and dizziness nearly overcame me again as the river spun beneath my feet From that height, I knew hitting the water would be like striking concrete.

A searing pain shot up my arm, the one poking through the rail’s fancy ironwork, and I yelled hard and loud, my neck stretched as I tried to see the cause. On the other side of the rail McGruder had his teeth sunk into my bare flesh.

I swung my leg, managing to get a toehold on a metal lip above a line of rivets, then, with the added support, I began to hoist myself back up. Ignoring the pain, I made sure I was secure before pulling the arm that was under attack from McGruder’s teeth out of the hole. Blood – that precious ABneg stuff those leeches cared so much about – streamed from the deep wound and somehow the sight of it renewed that old rage. I guess I’d spent so long protecting my own life’s liquid that the thought of this bloodsucker gorging himself on it – yeah, I know, he was only trying to make me lose my grip, but I wasn’t exactly rational by then – while I was busy doing other things sent me a little crazy myself. Scarcely realizing my own actions, I was suddenly hauling myself over the rail, that anger stirring up whatever last reserves of strength I had (yeah, more last reserves). I jumped down onto the steep road on the other side and pounded McGruder’s upturned face with my fist.