A light whiter than snow filled both windows, a thunderclap pushing the rictus of agony back into Daniel’s head. Pebbled glass swirled like shrapnel, and waves of force travelled along snowdrifts to hit the pantechnicon rear-end on, lifting the wheels so that the heavier front sent vibrations backwards like a dog shaking off water. Daniel, nothing to reach for, fell into the vortex of his screams.
The mattresses were yanked away and, as if with a life of their own, came back and tried to smother them. All three heard shouts of panic and shock, wondering where they came from, and what they had done to deserve whatever was happening, as pots and lamps and the stove flew. They rolled and collided within the doors that had stayed bolted, and Bill found himself clutching the stove, hoping to God it wouldn’t ignite as paraffin squirted over his arm.
The receding echo held more terror than the great bang, a malice implying the threat of returning to finish the job. Charlie held the frying pan but was curious as to how it came into his hand, as if he had been placed on guard should anyone try to get in or out. He ran a finger down his cheek and saw blood. ‘What the hell was that, then?’
Paul’s laugh was as if from a parrot which had just reached out and torn into someone’s finger. He took a card from the scattered deck which turned out to be a middle grade nonentity, squinting because the other eye wouldn’t open, and trembling that it might stay shut for the rest of his life. ‘It sounds like the fucking atom bomb went off.’
They looked at him while the wind, as if awed by the explosion, stayed quiet. Charlie released the frying pan for fear he would hurl it at Paul. ‘God took umbrage, and quite rightly so, at your cock-eyed scheme. Corpses! We was nearly able to begin on ourselves.’
‘Look at the mess.’ Bill smiled at finding he could stand. ‘We’d better get some sacks and nail ’em at the windows. If we hadn’t been dug into the snow the van would have gone like matchwood. Maybe it was a tanker carrying chemicals.’
A mattress had burst, foam rubber like imitation shards of dark steel scattered among the tea chests. ‘I thought it was what’s-his-name up there’ — Charlie wiped a gritty tear from his cheek — ‘but he’s down here now, and he’s dead.’ They looked at the face, and the tortured body. ‘I reckon he’s better off. Now we can tip him outside.’
‘He had a long way to fall, and that’s a fact,’ Bill said. ‘He’s broken every bone in his stupid fucking body, by the look of it. Some people just shouldn’t come out in the snow.’
Fred whistled, shoes crunching bricks and glass in what was left of the lounge. Another one away, and that was for sure, over the sticks, up the slope, and off to the happy hunting grounds. Them as dies will be the lucky ones, as he’d read somewhere. Maybe more than Keith had caught a packet, because Wayne and Lance hadn’t been able to leave their dead mate, due to loyalty and friendship, which wasn’t as old-fashioned as he had thought. In their peril they were not provided with the heartless wherewithal to leap for safety, or the sense to drag him after them. God knows, he weighed little enough after losing all his blood. And as for that young tart running out into the blizzard, she must have taken much of the blast when it came. I don’t suppose she looks very pretty now, so if I don’t see her again I can burn that envelope he left me with.
‘That’s it, then.’ Enid smoothed her headscarf and the borrowed coat. ‘That’s it at last. Now we can relax again.’
‘I’ll need a week or two to get used to it.’ Alfred, the lower parts of his eyes like saucers filled with blood, needed three matches to light his cigar. ‘We’re all right, but what about the others?’
The wall was cold at Aaron’s back, dust and rubble around his feet. A beam had fallen in the opposite corner, where luckily no one had sheltered. ‘I’ll take a look.’ He stood up to go after Fred.
‘At least it’s daylight,’ Enid said, arms tight across her chest. ‘I want to get home and tell everybody I’m all right. They’ll be worried to death, I hope.’
‘You’d better not leave too soon after the authorities get through,’ Alfred said, ‘or you won’t be on television. You might even get a film contract if you primp your lovely self up a bit.’
‘Fuck off, you sarky old bastard.’
‘If my daughter Joan had said half as much to me I’d give her a bloody good hiding. But she’s well behaved, and I’ll have a house built for her as well one day. She went to the High School, she did.’
Fred called from a gap in the walclass="underline" ‘I can’t get through to the bikers. But they’re swearing worse than my old parrot, so come and give me a hand.’
‘It might be a farm,’ said Charlie. ‘Somebody else have a look.’
Bill put his spade down, and focused the field glasses. ‘The roof’s off. It’s derelict.’
Paul took them. ‘It’s a hotel. Or it was. I can see a sign. It must have killed everybody. There’s bits of a motor car. Or it might have been a van. We ought to get over there now it’s not blowing so much.’
‘It’s a good half-mile away,’ Charlie said, ‘though I suppose it might be better than staying in this truck for the next three days. It must have been a hundred tons of gas. I once read about a whole caravan park being wiped out from one bottle.’
‘It’d be more sensible,’ Bill said, ‘to get our engine started, then have another go at the radio. It’s got a two-year guarantee, so there can’t be all that much wrong with it. If you give me the flashlight I’ll try and get a word through to Smokey.’
Charlie put the binoculars back in their case. He loved his binoculars. They made him feel like General Montgomery. ‘Let’s go inside. We can cook our breakfast and think about it. If we have to trek through the snow we’ll need our bellies full.’
‘The first thing to do is get that corpse out. I can’t stand the smell.’ Paul cleared more snow from the top of the van. ‘If he stays much longer he might bring us bad luck, and we’ve had enough of that already.’
‘It’s changing, though,’ Charlie announced. ‘I swear blind it’s got a bit warmer since we came out. Anyway, let’s eat, then Marconi can bodge up that wireless and give the world a bit of Heavy Metal from the tape recorder.’
‘Are you hurt?’ Jenny said. ‘Can you stand up?’ Lips at her ears to beat the blizzard’s muffle. No blood, and the lion-headed stone pillar by the gate had kept her safe, a lucky chance in her rackety life. She had come out to find her, even before looking for Lance, because she knew he had to be all right. It had to be women and girls together, because no man would make it his first thought to help them. And Fred had gone to look out for the bikers.
The breasts and bellies of snow were pure to one side, but out towards the fields, along where the road was supposed to be, were twisted wheels, black ripped-out pieces of chassis, a door buckled beyond use, a steering wheel like a plastic toy some child had stamped on with disappointment, broken items she could not recognize, pieces of flesh she sought not to, odd bits of tubing like sections of dead snake, a sleeve with an arm still in it, blue striated with red, couldn’t not see, scarves of blood, grey guts, a butcher’s shambles: bits of cardboard, coils of wire, the half page of a road atlas splashed with red like Chinese writing, spinning over and over in the wind, chasing a scalp, odd crimson rags and half a head.
‘Don’t go.’ Jenny used all her strength to bring her face against her chest. Then she closed her own eyes and said: ‘Let’s not look,’ before being more sick than she could ever remember.
THIRTY-SIX
The place that had seemed so staid a refuge in the blizzard, plugged into the earth and beyond all notions of destruction and, what’s more, eternally welcoming with warm punch and womb-like shelter, had in fact been rotten with woodworm, rising damp and deathwatch beetle, as if reinforced only by the faith of those who were stranded under its roof.