The door banged against the jambs, and still the paint bloomed and puckered. Dalip thought he was going to die there, watching the door burst into flame, waiting for the wall of heat to ride over him, his clothes igniting, his hair turning to brief, bright lights and his turban a fiery crown. He would wear the same silent expression of sudden, violent death as the rest of the work crew had done, his mouth making momentarily a hollow circle before his flesh scorched and his muscles grew rictus tight.
He scrabbled back as far as he could go, until he realised he was against another door, and it was cold metal.
He leapt up, pulled the handle. The door opened easily and cleanly. It was dark on the other side, but that didn’t matter for the moment.
‘In here,’ he said, just as the paint blisters burst with blue fire. Stanislav pushed past, and Dalip closed the door smartly behind him.
Stanislav slumped against the wall and coughed until he vomited, turning his head at the last moment to splatter the ground with acid bile.
Dalip’s eyes burned from the fumes and the heat. His throat was raw, his head hurt, his skin was sore and he couldn’t stop shaking.
The others had died, right in front of him, lighting up and lurching around on the rail track until they fell. He felt his own stomach tighten, and he tried to swallow, but he was parched.
‘Where are we?’ he managed. He fumbled for his torch and tried to make sense of the discordant images he was seeing. Two more doors. A series of grey cases and switching gear, also grey.
‘Down Street.’ Stanislav wiped his mouth with his hand. ‘Disused station.’
‘We must have gone past it the first time.’ Dalip tried the door in the long wall; all that lay beyond was a rusted bath tub, no taps.
‘There is no one here. No one to get help from. That is why we went to Green Park.’
‘The others. They’re—’
‘Dead. Yes.’ Stanislav pulled himself upright on the painted switch-gear. ‘You saw them. They could not have lived. We must work hard not to join them.’
Dalip scrubbed at his eyes, which felt like they were full of grit. Work hard, the bullet-headed East European had said. He knew how to do that. He’d done nothing but, even though it was a different sort of work to this. He recognised that he should be curled in a little ball in the corner somewhere, mind numb, but instead, despite being out of breath, in pain, half-roasted, barely able to see or speak, he was unnaturally calm. Presumably, the shock would hit later, when he was back home, sitting at the kitchen table with his mum and dad and a cup of tea.
‘Okay,’ he said, ‘Can we get out of here?’ He put the back of his hand on the door they’d come through, and jerked it away. Too hot.
‘I believe so. We must find the exit.’ Stanislav shone his torch at the remaining door, opened it and peered through.
The next room was dominated by a tall case, also spray-painted in the same grey colour. Beyond that, another door, a narrow corridor, and suddenly the space opened out. Their torch beams picked out a broad junction, and an arrow on the wall◦– a modern one, with a stylised symbol of a running figure heading through an opening. When they investigated, they found stairs going up.
‘Up is good, right?’ Dalip stood at the bottom of the steps: at the top, the corridor appeared to turn to go back over the tracks.
‘Up is the only way, whether it is good or not. Come.’
Stanislav walked carefully up the broad stairs, torch beam scanning ahead. Dense white smoke curled in the curved roof space and reached tendrils down towards them. He crouched to keep his head out of the worst of it, and Dalip ducked down, too.
The portion of the corridor that bridged the rail track below was melting. The floor seethed and swam, and the tiles that had clung to the walls throughout the Blitz were spalling off, cracking and falling into the slurry below.
‘That way is out. It may take our weight, it may not. It may kill us anyway.’ Stanislav spat on to the ground, and it hissed. ‘Who goes first?’
Dalip wanted to nominate himself. The bridge wasn’t going to last. If he didn’t go now, he’d not do it at all.
‘Together.’
They ran through the molten bitumen, side by side, sending up splashes of black liquid. Their thick overalls helped protect them from the worst, even though the distance was something they might have jumped if they’d had clearer heads and more time.
They were out and through, and in the darkness and smoke, it was easy to miss that the corridor turned sharp left. There was suddenly a wall rearing up at them, and a moment’s confusion as they swung their torches to see which way to go.
Stanislav fell, tripping on a raised concrete plinth that jutted out into the corridor. Dalip was past him before he realised, and came back.
Words were impossible. Every breath was like being stabbed. He knew he wasn’t strong enough to drag him, let alone lift him. All he could do was tug urgently at the man’s sleeve and shine a light in his face.
Stanislav’s already flattened nose dripped blood, running over his top lip and into the corners of his mouth. He spat, and spat again, and dragged himself up. Their faces were very close together and, despite their situation, the one thing that struck Dalip at that moment was the look of utter, snarling determination on the other man’s face.
Stanislav roared at the fire, giving it his pain and anger and frustration, and it was enough to carry them both to the next door. They threw themselves through, heaving it shut behind them.
A stairwell. They were in a stairwell, with a narrow caged lift running up the middle of a metal spiral staircase. The air was thick with dust, and it was blessedly cool.
Now they were no longer running, no longer living from one heartbeat to the next, they both stopped. Dalip knelt on the ground in amongst the dirt and debris and pressed his turbaned head against the gritty floor. He could still feel the intermittent vibrations, dulled by the thickness of the cloth, and hear the drawn-out groans of tortured rock and iron.
Stanislav patted his shoulder. ‘Come. We must make a report. To someone.’
Dalip ached. Everything that wasn’t red raw was bruised. ‘Okay.’
‘You did not need to come back for me.’
‘I◦– I did. You looked after me more than I did you.’ Dalip sat up and used the end of the stairs to stand. With their torches dangling from their wrists, expressions were unreadable.
‘You are just a boy. You have the rest of your life. And I… I. Ah well. What does it matter?’ Stanislav slapped him on the back again. ‘Come. We must climb.’
‘What do you think’s happened?’
‘I do not know. It is big, whatever it is.’ He started slowly up the stairs, and Dalip’s torch caught the other man’s boots. The soles were baked black like the bottom of an oven.
3
Mary looked behind her. She could hear the metallic pinging of footsteps on the stairs they’d just climbed themselves.
‘There’s someone coming.’
There were five of them. Four left from her own group, just one stray from another. How could they have been reduced in number so quickly? The darkness and confusion and, above all, the burning heat simply seemed to have swallowed them up, one by one◦– this one falling, that one trying to pull them back up, another just faltering to a stop, exhausted, and letting the oncoming tide of destruction take them.
All they had were those little green glow sticks, those and their work-wear. Everything else had been lost. Her bag, her clothes, left back at Leicester Square, had to be nothing but ash by now.
She had no real idea of where she was, either, only that there had been emergency exit signs and that they’d seemed like the only hope of escape. Going back had been out of the question. Going on had been just as unlikely: she’d been on her last legs, and she was used to running.