A woman was standing behind her. Tears made clean tracks down her soot-smudged face. ‘I’m the landlady,’ she said. I live two doors down. The tenant who lives here is blind. You’ve got to find him.’
Wanasri nodded. ‘Ma’am,’ she replied, ‘it’s not safe for you to be here. There are a lot of unstable structures. You just stay there, and we’ll look for your tenant, right?’
The woman looked so bewildered; maybe she just wanted to be told what to do.
Andy and Darren had their pike poles hooked into the corners of the roof. They started to push, lifting the roof away from the door so that they could get inside. Smoke gushed out — it was like taking the lid off a boiling saucepan; then hot embers, starved of oxygen when the roof fell on them, began to stir into flame again. Petra followed the others with a hose line and shot water at the flames until they disappeared.
Wanasri stepped carefully across the blackened debris to join the others. It was slippery, like crossing rocks at low tide. She steadied herself with her pike pole. The smoke and steam were clearing and the debris began to take shape. She identified the frame of a sofa, all the upholstery gone.
Now that she had met the landlady, she wanted more than ever to find the blind man safe and well. Hoping against hope, she began to think of reasons why he might be all right. The people who died in house fires were often simply disorientated by the smoke and couldn’t find their way out, even if they’d lived in the same place for twenty years. But perhaps someone who was used to finding his way around with senses other than sight would have a better chance.
She reached Andy and helped him lift up a beam. Andy looked under it, then stopped.
Wanasri knew that expression; even the most seasoned firefighters couldn’t help but react when they found a body. She caught a glimpse of teeth glinting white in the smoking black wreckage and looked away quickly. ‘Is that him?’
Andy shook his head. ‘It’s not human. It must be the guide dog.’
He didn’t have to say any more. Animals usually managed to get out more easily than humans did; they were faster and smaller. If the dog hadn’t got out, the owner definitely hadn’t. The body was definitely here somewhere.
Wanasri felt a lump rising in her throat. She had a dog. She’d had him for just a few months and already they were devoted to each other. She couldn’t bear to think of such a horrible death befalling such a trusting companion. How could this day get any worse?
The landlady had seen them and was walking shakily over the wreckage towards them. ‘Go and head her off,’ said Andy. ‘She doesn’t need to see this.’
Bel was walking through a blackened, smoky, steaming hell. She was in a paved precinct. She didn’t know where she was going, she just wanted to find a safe place to stop. There were shops on either side but they were burned out. Their blackened signs dripped with water. The paving slabs were cracked where heavy fire trucks had driven along them. Sun umbrellas lay on the ground like felled trees, the fabric burned away; café tables and chairs were flattened. It looked like the fire brigade had swept in, blasted the whole lot and swept away all the people with it too. Was she completely alone?
She passed a shop and realized that the strange shape standing in the window was vaguely human. As Bel went closer, the heat suddenly shattered the plate-glass window. It cobwebbed with cracks and then exploded out into the street, showering her with glass. Smoke billowed out, blinding and choking her.
In the midst of the smoke stood the human figure. It had its arms up towards her. And it was melting …
That tripped a switch in her brain. She screamed and ran towards a square of parched grass beyond the precinct. Here she fell to her knees: she couldn’t run any further. Her lungs were burning and she couldn’t get any oxygen. She stayed there on her hands and knees, gasping. Gradually, common sense began to return. The melting figure must have been a mannequin. All this smoke and heat must be playing tricks with her head. She would give anything to breathe some cool, clear air.
She looked down. Her eyes were watering, blurring her vision, but she couldn’t make sense of what she was seeing. She had assumed she was kneeling on grass, but instead it seemed to be a mass of strange shapes and colours: browns and blacks and reds. Was she in the middle of a flowerbed? She blinked several times, trying to work out what it was.
As her vision settled, she saw that the blobs were moving.
She felt something run over her hand. Looking down, she saw a grey blob of hair. Long furry legs stretched out from the blob and a tiny pair of pinpoint eyes looked out over a pair of pulsing mandibles.
It was a huntsman spider — the legs were longer than her fingers. And it had company. Those other strange shapes around her were more spiders, cockroaches, giant caterpillars and other huge insects … and rats.
The entire square of grass was covered in these creatures. Driven from the surrounding buildings and sewers by the heat, they’d all ended up on this one patch of damp grass.
Bel screamed and jumped to her feet. The spider fell off her hand; she didn’t see where it landed. She stepped backwards, felt something crunch under her feet, then caught a glimpse of yellow innards under the toe of her sandal and leaped back in disgust.
Something was tickling her bare leg. A caterpillar, nearly as long as her hand, was rippling over her ankle. It had green stripes and black hair and was twice as thick as the strap of her shoe. She shook her leg violently, then froze as she remembered the caterpillars were just as likely to be poisonous as the spiders. The caterpillar tumbled to the ground.
She started to pick her way back to the pavement. Every step she took, she felt feelers and legs and bristles. Her strappy sandals gave no protection — she might as well not have been wearing shoes at all. There was a lawnmower standing on the patch of grass, and the caterpillars and spiders were swarming all over it. She nearly tripped and her heart turned a complete somersault. She imagined herself sprawled on the ground, the creatures crawling all over her. Bel had a strong stomach, but this much poisonous antipodean wildlife was enough to unsettle even her.
A deafening noise in the sky made her look up. The silver underbelly of an airliner flashed above the rooftops. It was close enough for her to see the red and white lights on its wings, and the winged insignia of the Royal Australian Air Force. Why was it flying so low? And in such difficult conditions? It must be at barely five hundred feet.
Her flyer’s instinct told her that the plane was in trouble. No pilot would bring a big plane like that in so low, particularly near buildings.
If the airliner came down on the town, the destruction would be terrible. All that aviation fuel would be like spraying a bonfire with gasoline.
A hatch opened in the plane’s underbelly. Were people baling out?
Suddenly a wall of water slammed into her: it was as if several inches of rainfall had all come down in a split second. She was knocked off her feet. When she got up again, the smoky air had turned to steam and she was soaked to the skin.
She looked up. The water was such a relief in the heat. All around her, the pavements and the buildings were hissing. Even better, Bel realized the grass around her was clear. The water had driven all those dreadful creatures away. She imagined them swept into the gutters, their furry legs and feelers twitching helplessly. Her heart suddenly leaped. Was it a tropical storm? Was this nightmare ending at last? A storm would do the trick. She turned her face up to the skies, expecting to feel rain on her skin.
But there was no rain. There was only the plane, climbing now into the dark sky, disappearing into the clouds of smoke.
Bel understood. The pilot’s reckless flight pattern made sense now. The plane had dropped the water — the equivalent of the contents of a small plunge pool. Now the plane was climbing again, soaring away into the smoky black sky. Moments later she heard another gigantic splash followed by a hiss as it dropped another load.