Ben jerked his leg towards the open door but the spider remained stuck fast. If he touched it there was the risk that it might bite him. ‘Get off me, you ugly devil,’ he told it through clenched teeth.
Kelly’s hand waved in his face as she adjusted the stick with her left elbow.
Ben grabbed her arm and used her bandaged hand to bat the spider away. If it attacked, he figured its fangs weren’t long enough to bite through all the bandages. Kelly screamed and the spider flew out of the door, became a black blob in the bright sunshine and vanished to a pinpoint.
‘Happy landings,’ said Ben with feeling.
He let go of Kelly’s hand and reached to pull the door shut. It had swung right open and was flapping to and fro. He had to brace his hand on the door frame and lean out. His fingers caught the door, got a purchase and pulled it shut.
He sat back, catching his breath.
Kelly’s voice came through on the headset, hoarse and strained. ‘Do you mind sorting out this plane before we crash?’
As Ben took the controls, he saw that the ground looked alarmingly close: sure enough, when he checked the instruments, he found they were at 360 feet. He nudged the stick forward and swooped down a little way to get a good burst of speed, then opened the throttle and soared upwards. He watched the altimeter, kept the craft straight, and made sure they were cruising to textbook standards before relaxing and turning to Kelly.
She was sitting back in her seat and cradling her hand.
Ben winced. ‘Did I hurt you?’
‘No, I don’t think so. Those painkillers must be pretty good.’
But while Kelly didn’t mind Ben grabbing her arm too much, she did have a few other things to get off her chest. She sat up straight and fixed him with a furious glare. ‘The next time something like that happens, don’t panic like that. You do not ever start jerking your feet around in a light aeroplane. I thought you were having an epileptic fit!’
Ben was stunned. Now she was blaming him? ‘Whereas you were a picture of self-control, I suppose?’ he muttered resentfully.
Kelly didn’t seem to hear him. She had more to say; plenty more. ‘We nearly rolled over — if you do that in a microlight, you’ll snap the wing off. We were flying dangerously low and the speed we were going we could easily have crashed. That was a very immature way to react — and by the way, you never, ever, ever — under any circumstances — open the door.’
She gestured towards the door and nearly biffed him on the nose with her pristine white bandage — now marked with a big yellowy smudge.
‘You’ve — er — got a bit of something on your bandage. I think it’s spider entrails,’ Ben told her.
Bel walked along a shopping street. The windows were grimy and dark. In a clothes shop, a dummy lay across the doorway. Its hair and face had melted. At first Bel thought its body had been painted green, then realized that the clothes it was wearing had melted too.
Had she seen this dummy before? she wondered. Was this the shop near the green where she’d fallen over among all those insects? Was she going around in circles? She felt so disorientated. Wisps of smoke and steam rose from the ruined shops, as though the fires inside were not truly vanquished but sleeping, like dormant volcanoes.
The asphalt under her feet had softened in the heat. The heavy fire engine wheels had pushed it up to the edges of the kerb so that it looked like a fallen soufflé.
She was no longer wet. The heat radiating from the scorched streets had dried her clothes in no time. They felt stiff with sweat and dirt, as though they had been starched. There hardly seemed to be anyone else about. Had they all been picked up in rescue vehicles?
Approaching a junction, she noticed a burned-out car that had rammed into a lamppost. There was nothing left of its interior: the seats and controls were vaporized, leaving only bare metal — though its back window remained intact; it was covered in stickers. Although they were blackened, the lettering showed in a different texture so they were still readable. Bel recognized them because they were from environmental campaigns she had played a part in: NUCLEAR POWER, NO THANKS. AGAINST GLOBAL WARMING. The car had belonged to people like her. Maybe she even knew them. There was another sticker, less familiar to her. She looked closer and tried to trace the lettering: OZ PROTECTORS FOR A HEALTHY PLANET.
If the car had had any tyres left she would have kicked them. These were the people who had kidnapped Major Kurtis, locked her up and left her to burn. Now their car was wrecked. Well, that was poetic justice.
But then a cold feeling stole over her. The car had crashed into that lamppost. She imagined the scene: had the petrol tank gone up and consumed the occupants in flames? Had Major Kurtis been in the car too?
What a horrible way to die, to burn to death in a car. She felt sick to her stomach. She’d wanted revenge, but in some civilized way; she’d wanted them to face justice.
No, they must have got out, she decided. If they hadn’t, there would still be some human remains, surely. And the car might not belong to the same people who grabbed her. Any environmentally aware person might display stickers like that. Still, if she ever crossed paths with Oz Protectors again …
She did not know that she already had; that they had suffered only a slightly less dreadful fate, choking to death on the chemical fumes in the swimming baths.
Down a street to the left she saw a group of fire-fighters and an engine. Thank God! At last — people. She ran towards them.
They were working on the cinema. The three-storey frontage had collapsed, along with the ground floor, and blackened concrete beams spanned a big hole into the basement. Three firefighters were directing their hoses down into it. But the water wasn’t blasting out at high pressure; it was trickling out gently, as if they were cleaning something fragile. There was something very eerie about the whole scene.
Bel found her eye drawn into the hole. She saw shapes below the section of wall, a jumble of light and dark, slick with water. It reminded her of a shoreline after an oil disaster. Everything looked different after a fire had done its work. Was that a metal chair? A café table? The more she looked, the more she recognized. Water was trickling down from the hoses above, washing away some of the soot so that the bright metal of the tables and chairs showed through.
The trickling water revealed something else as well. Pale rods protruded out of the black slick. They were bones from toes. A human foot.
Before she could look away her brain made sense of more shadows — part of a leg.
‘Ma’am.’ Bel suddenly noticed a firefighter standing in front of her. A girl. Her face seemed familiar — the oriental features smeared with black stripes, the fire-fighting clothes bulking out her rangy frame, making her look like an American footballer. Had she spoken to her earlier that day? Or maybe it was shock that made her imagine that.
She pointed into the basement. ‘There’s somebody down there.’ Her voice came out in a whisper — she felt terribly shaken. She had often seen dead bodies when she visited disaster zones but it was something you never got used to; particularly when they had been burned.
Even as she said it, she realized the firefighters must already know the body was there. That’s why their hoses weren’t on full blast.
‘Ma’am,’ said the firefighter, ‘you can’t stay here. You must move on.’
Bel looked into the firefighter’s face and saw weariness. She was just a kid. She could only be a few years older than Ben. What terrible things must she have seen today? And yet she was being so calm. Disasters made people grow up so quickly. Bel felt ashamed of her own moment of weakness. She made an effort to pull herself together. She let the firefighter escort her away from the yawning pit and towards the truck. Hose lines snaked out of the back, throbbing with the water that was travelling down them. The sound of it pulsing towards the wreckage drew Bel’s gaze back there again.