Conrad Williams - Decay Inevitable

He sprinted across the bridge to the South Bank, trying his best to dodge the liquid flames that dripped from the metalwork above him. He was just over half-way across when he heard the jet impact. He felt it through his feet as the bridge shuddered. He hurried down the stairs and followed the Queen’s Walk east. A false sunrise had come to the city. It lit up the south-facing sides of the Houses of Parliament and Banqueting House. It turned the water furious orange. Fire surrounded the London Eye, which was tilting precariously over the river. The smell of aviation fuel was mixed with scorched dust and a terrible stench that was like burnt hair. As he approached, the heat already drawing the skin tight across his face, the Millennium Wheel gave up the ghost and toppled into the Thames. A huge tidal wave took off up the river, competing with the roar of the fire. Unable to get any closer, Will cast about for some sign, frantic that he was missing something.

Arc lights stitched the night over the city: scrambled rescue helicopters coming in fast and low to circle the accident site. Will saw Lambeth Bridge in front of him and Waterloo Bridge behind become clogged with emergency vehicles, but their sirens were no match for this roast’s clamour. The snout of the jumbo had pitched up against what remained of Westminster Bridge, a jagged grin having torn the undercarriage away from the part that housed the cockpit. It resembled the head of a shark coming up to attack. Bodies flung from the aircraft lay naked and glazed in impossible positions. Across the water, on Victoria Embankment, a great swathe of people had materialised, appalled and mesmerised by the inferno.

Will’s tears evaporated as soon as they fell. He retreated from the intense heat when he realised his jumper was smoking. He was about to turn away from the broken jet – firemen were pouring onto Jubilee Gardens – when he caught sight of a dimpled sheet of molten metal that emerged from the twisting columns of black smoke at the heart of the fire. It was perfectly square, and upright. It looked to Will like a large mirror, but its reflecting surface was a rilling, fluid riot. He remembered seeing something like this on the motorway, when he had carried Elisabeth away from their wrecked car. Then, as now, he was tickled by the conviction that he had been allowed a glimpse behind the complexity of death and understood what it meant, what it signified. But it was like waking from a vivid dream and finding it unwilling to resolve itself in the mind. Out of reach, on the tip of his tongue: a black thing in a dark room, and Will was hunting for it wearing sunglasses.

The dimpled sheet faded from his view, perhaps as the shattered hearts around it gave up their pulses and their last pints of blood. He couldn’t have approached this thing and touched it, as he would have liked, or looked upon its surface to view what might have been written upon it, and hoped to survive. He’d have been dead as soon as he came within fifty feet of it.

It was only as he hurried back along the Queen’s Walk, bitterly enjoying the fresh bite of cold air, that he realised, after all, that might be the point.

CHAPTER THIRTY: IN COUNTRY

“HE’S DEAD. LEAVE him.”

“But Sean, we can’t just–”

“We can. We’re going to. Now.”

Sean was moving as best he could, collecting his clothes under one arm and shooing Emma towards the door with the other. He caught sight of a slender woman in a black cocktail dress moving through the front door with all the padded stealth of a panther.

“Who’s there?” he asked. For his pains, he got an eyeful of timber as the doorway flew apart. Emma yelped and scrambled into the kitchen, trying to pull on her skirt.

“Fire escape,” Sean said, grabbing the Walther from Marshall’s fist. He was moving backwards slowly into the kitchen, dressed only in a pair of boxer shorts, when she leaned her head around the doorway. The eyes were shifting around the flat, taking it in, the body constantly moving, like the seep of oil. Sean squeezed off a round and watched the bullet pass straight through the flesh of the woman’s forehead. The wound rippled and closed itself up. The woman might have frowned. That’s all.

“Right,” he said. “Fine.”

Emma was on the fire escape by now, clanking down it as fast as she could. Sean followed close behind, again moving backwards, his gun cocked and ready, for all the good it would do them. They struck off across the wasteland at the back of the tower block, aiming for the canal and the numerous neighbouring streets, which they hoped were gloomy and narrow enough to allow them to lose their pursuer.

Sean kept checking back and was rewarded with the sight of a black figure, moving impossibly fast on the other side of the wasteland, seemingly intent on blocking off their progress. They got to the canal, where Sean lost sight of their attacker among the long reeds that fringed the bank.

“Come on,” he cajoled. “Across the bridge.”

They scuttled over the wooden walkway, Sean peering into the distance but seeing nothing. He eased up on the opposite bank and, keeping his gaze fastened on the only access point across the canal, pulled on his trousers and shoes.

“Who is it?” Emma demanded, breathlessly.

“I don’t know, but Will, remember Will told us about that crippled thing that was chasing him? I think that’s her. I think. Maybe.”

“Fuck,” Emma said. She seemed impressed. “She, she...” Emma waggled her hands, trying to put it into words. “...she moved .”

“I know. Come on.”

The thick nest of terraces were formed like a maze. Darkness helped them move through it, sucking them into the core of green at the centre of confused streets and pathways. Few of the streetlamps were functional. Around half of those that did work spat and fizzled chancy orange light, a poor man’s disco. It did strange things to colour, this sodium pulse. It turned the skin into a dappled, beaten armoury of greys. Twenty minutes of rat-runs saw them hunkering down behind a squad of wheelie bins by a creosoted fence. The house at their rear was still awake. The sounds of laughter and glasses chinking. A smell of curried food. Beyond that, the night was silent but pregnant with something that felt like anticipation. It prickled the skin.

“How long do you think we’ve been waiting?” Emma asked after another twenty minutes had expired. “I’m cold.”

“Oh, not long enough,” he replied, drawing her under his arm.

“How long before we can go? How much longer do we have to wait?”

“Bit longer,” he said, and turned to smile at her. “Helpful, aren’t I?”

“Marshall’s dead, isn’t he? We couldn’t have saved him?”

“I don’t think so. He had lost a lot of blood. He was coming to warn us, remember that. He wasn’t coming to us for help. He saved our lives.”

“What do we do now?”

Sean squeezed her arm. He felt better. The wounds were knitting together quickly now. He could feel the fizz of repair coursing through his body.

He remembered something from his childhood. His mother leaning over him with a wad of cotton wool dipped in TCP.

“Where does it hurt, love?” she had asked him. “Show Mummy.” And he remembered laughing and trying to pull the cotton wool out of her hand. What had he done? Tripped on the road and grazed his knee? But in the time she had pulled his trousers down to sterilise his cuts, the wound had healed. A quick healer, they had said about him. It’s because he’s got good blood. He’s a strong lad, that one. On the football pitch, hoofed into the air by reckless defenders, he had picked himself up and plodded on. Tin legs, they had nicknamed him. Sean had believed it all. If you weren’t used to injuring yourself every time you fell over, you didn’t question your lack of bumps, bruises, breaks.