He stood there paralysed, sightless and screaming inwardly, waiting for the inevitable.
The thundrous, ear-splitting roar came, but the inevitable did not. Instead he felt rough hands grab him and his body being propelled backwards. His shoulder crashed against something that gave way and he was being dragged along. He felt himself falling, something, perhaps someone, falling with him. The earth was shaking, the noise deafening, the walls collapsing.
And then there was no longer burning white pain in his eyes, just the cool darkness of unconsciousness.
The initial nuclear explosions – there were five on and around the London area – lasted only a few minutes. The black mushroom clouds rose high above the devastated city, joining to form a thick layer of turbulent smoke that made the day seem as night.
It wasn’t long before the gathered dust and fine debris began its leisurely return to earth. But now it was no longer just dust and powder. Now it was a further, more sinister, harbinger of death.
2
He kicked out at the debris that had covered his legs and was relieved to find nothing solid had pinned them down. He coughed, spitting dust from his lungs, then wiped a hand across his eyes to clear them. There was still some light filtering through into the basement corridor; Culver groaned when he saw smoke filtering through with the light.
He turned towards the man he had dragged in from the street, hoping he hadn’t killed him in the fall down the stairway. The man was moving, his hands feebly reaching for his face; there was debris and a fine layer of dust over his body, but nothing too heavy seemed to have landed on him. He began to splutter, choking on the fine powder he had swallowed.
Culver reached towards him, groaning at the sudden pain that touched his own body. He quickly checked himself, making sure nothing important was fractured or sprained; no, everything felt okay, although he knew he would be stiff with bruises the next day – if there was a next day.
He tugged at the other man’s shoulder. ‘You all right?’ he asked, twice attempting the question because it had come out as a croak the first time.
A low moan was the only reply.
Culver looked towards the broken staircase and was puzzled by the sound he heard. As more dust and smoke swirled into the openings he realized he could hear a wind. He recalled reading somewhere that winds of up to two hundred miles an hour would follow a nuclear blast, creating an aftermath of more death and destruction. He felt the building shifting around him and curled himself into a tight ball when masonry began to fall once again.
Pieces struck his brown leather jacket, one large enough to cause his body to jerk in pain. A huge concrete slab that half covered the staircase started to move, sliding further down the wall its bulk leaned against. Culver grabbed the other man’s shoulders, ready to pull him away from the advancing segment. Fortunately, the concrete settled once more with a grinding screech.
There was not much to see through the gaping holes of the ceiling above and Culver guessed that the upper floors of the building – he couldn’t recall how many storeys the office block had, but most of the buildings in that area were high – had collapsed. They had been lucky; he was sure they had fallen close to the central concrete service column, the strongest part of any modern structure, which had protected them from the worst of the demolition. How long it would hold was another matter. And the choking smoke meant another problem was on its way.
Culver tugged at the shoulder nearby. ‘Hey.’ He repeated his original question. ‘You okay?’
The man twisted his body and pushed himself up on one elbow. He mumbled something. Then he moaned long and loud, his body rocking to and fro. ‘Oh, no, the stupid idiots really did it. The stupid, stupid . . .’
‘Yeah, they did it,’ Culver replied in a low voice, ‘but there are other things to worry about right now.’
‘Where are we? What is this place?’ The man began to scrabble around, kicking at the rubble, trying to get to his feet.
‘Take it easy.’ Culver placed a hand around the man’s upper arm and gripped tightly. ‘Just listen.’
Both men lay there in the gloom.
‘I . . . I can’t hear anything,’ the man said after a while.
‘That’s just it. The wind’s stopped. It’s passed by.’ Culver gingerly rose to his knees, examining the wreckage above and around them. It had seemed silent at first, then the rending of twisted metal, the grinding and crashing of concrete, came to their ears. It was followed by the whimpers and soon the screams of the injured or those who were in shock. Something metallic clattered down from above and Culver winced as it landed a few feet away.
‘We’ve got to get out of here,’ he told his companion. ‘The whole lot’s going to come down soon.’ He moved closer so that his face was only inches away from the other man. It was difficult to distinguish his features in the gloom.
‘If only we could see a way out,’ the man said. ‘We could be buried alive down here.’
Culver was puzzled. He stared into the other’s eyes. ‘Can’t you see anything?’
‘It’s too dark . . . oh no, . . . not that!’
‘When I grabbed you out on the street you were looking straight into the flash. I thought you were just shocked . . . I didn’t realize . . .’
The man was rubbing at his eyes with his fingers. ‘Oh, God, I’m blind!’
‘It may be only temporary.’
The injured man seemed to take little comfort in the words. His body was shaking uncontrollably.
The smell of burning was strong now and Culver could see a flickering glow from above.
He slumped back against the wall. ‘Either way we’re beat,’ he said, almost to himself. ‘If we go outside we’ll be hit by fallout, if we stay here we’ll be fried or crushed to death. Great choice.’ The side of his clenched fist thumped the floor.
He felt hands scrabbling at the lapels of his jacket. ‘No, not yet. There’s still a chance. If you could just get me there, there’d be a chance.’
‘Get you where?’ Culver grabbed the man’s wrists and pulled them from him. ‘The world’s just a flat ruin up there. Don’t you understand? There’s nothing left! And the air will be thick with radioactive dust.’
‘Not yet. It will take at least twenty to thirty minutes for the fallout to settle to the ground. How long have we been down here?’
‘I’m not sure. It could be ten minutes, it could be an hour – I may have blacked out. No, wait – we heard the winds caused by the blast; they would have followed soon after the explosion.’
‘Then there’s a chance. If we hurry!’
‘Where to? There’s no place to go.’
‘I know somewhere where we’ll be safe.’
‘You mean the Underground station? The tunnels?’
‘Safer than that.’
‘What the hell are you talking about? Where?’
‘I can direct you.’
‘Just tell me where.’
The man was silent. Then he repeated: ‘I can direct you.’
Culver sighed wearily. ‘Don’t worry, I’m not going to leave you here. You sure about the fallout?’
‘I’m certain. But we’ll have to move fast.’ The man’s panic appeared to be over for the moment, although his movements were still agitated.
Something overhead began a rending shift. Both men tensed.
‘I think the decision is about to be made for us.’
Culver grabbed the other man below his shoulder and began to pull him towards the dimly lit staircase. The huge slab of concrete lying at an angle across the broken stairs began to move again.
‘We haven’t got much time!’ Culver shouted. ‘The whole bloody building’s about to cave in!’
As if to confirm his statement, a deep rumbling sound came from the floor above. The building itself began to shake.
‘Move! It’s coming down!’
The rumbling became a roaring and the roaring an explosion of crashing timber, bricks and concrete.
The wide basement corridor was a confusion of swirling dust and deafening noise. Culver saw the right-angled gap between tilted slab and staircase narrowing.
‘Come on, up the stairs!’ He pushed, shoved, heaved the stumbling man before him, lifting him when he tripped over rubble, almost carrying him up the first few steps. ‘Get down! Now crawl, crawl up those bloody stairs for your life! And keep your head low!’
Culver wondered if the man would have followed out his instructions had he seen what was happening.
The side of the stairway was collapsing, its metal handrail already twisted and torn from its mounting; the blast-caused sloping roof over the stairs was slowly descending, slipping inch by inch down the supporting wall. Culver could just see the murky grey daylight creeping in from the streets faintly tingeing the top steps. He quickly ducked and followed the blind man’s scrambling body, unceremoniously pushing at his ample buttocks. The man suddenly flattened as part of the concrete stairs fell inwards.
‘Keep going!’ Culver shouted over the noise. ‘You’re okay, just keep going!’
The descending ceiling was brushing against the top of his head now and Culver considered pulling out, going back. But the situation was even worse behind: the downfall had become an avalanche and he knew that most of the floors in the building must be collapsing inwards. He pushed onwards with renewed vigour, not bothering to shout encouragement that could not be heard anyway, just heaving and shoving, forcing his way through the narrowing tunnel. He was soon flat on his stomach and beginning to give up hope; the edges of each step were scraping against his chest.
Then the obstruction in front was clear: the blind man had made it to the top and was rising to his knees and turning, realizing he was free, one hand waving in front of Culver’s face to help him. Culver grabbed the hand and suddenly he was being yanked upwards, the blind man shrieking with the effort, his mouth wide open, eyes shut tight. Culver’s toecaps dug into the stairs, pushing, the elbow of his free arm used as a lever to heave himself up. The screeching, heard clearly over the background roar, was caused by the concrete slab tearing deep score marks in the supporting wall.
His torso was out and he curled up his knees, bringing his feet clear as the coffin lid all but closed.
He scrambled to his feet, pulling his companion with him, hurrying on, making for the wide doorway that was the entrance to the office block. The big glass double doors they had thrown themselves through only minutes earlier had been completely shattered by the blast; walls on either side of the hallway were beginning to crack.
They staggered out into the shattered, devastated world. Culver did not take time to look around; he wanted to be as far away as possible from the collapsing building. The blind man was limping, clinging to him, as though afraid he would be left behind.
Vehicles – buses, cars, lorries, taxis – lay scattered, disarranged before them. Some were overturned, some just wildly angled; many rested on the roofs or bonnets of others. Culver quickly found a path through the tangled metal, climbing between locked bumpers, sliding over bonnets, dragging his companion with him. They finally collapsed behind a black taxi, half the driver’s still body thrusting through the shattered windscreen.
They gulped in mouthfuls of dust and smoke-filled air, shoulders and chests heaving, bodies battered and bleeding, their clothes torn and grimed with dirt. They heard the crumpling falling sound of the building they had just left, and it mingled with the noise of other office blocks in similar death throes. The very ground seemed to vibrate as they tumbled, their structures no more than concrete playing-cards.
As the two men began to recover from their ordeal, they became aware of the other, human, sounds all around them, a clamour that was the discordant outcry of the wounded and the dying.
The other man was looking around him as though he could see. Forcing himself to ignore anything else, Culver quickly appraised him. Although it was impossible to be sure, because of the white powdered dust that covered his clothes, he looked to be somewhere in his late forties or early fifties; his suit, dishevelled and torn though it was, indicated he was perhaps a businessman or clerk of some kind – certainly an office worker.
‘Thanks for the helping hand back there.’ Culver had to raise his voice to be heard.
The man turned towards him. ‘The thanks are mutual.’
Culver could not manage a smile. ‘I guess we need each other.’ He spat dust from his throat. ‘Let’s get to this safe place you mentioned. Time’s running out.’
The blind man grabbed his arm as Culver began to rise. ‘You must understand we cannot help anyone else. If we’re going to survive, nothing can hinder us.’
Culver leaned heavily against the side of the taxi, flinching when he saw the jumbled corpses of its occupants. There was a child in there, a little boy no more than five or six years old, his head resting against a shoulder at an impossible angle; a woman’s arm, presumably his mother’s, was flung protectively across his tiny chest. A fun day out shopping? A trip across town to the cinema, a show? Perhaps even to see Daddy in his great big office. Their day had ended when the cab had been picked up and thrown through the air like some kid’s toy, its weight nothing to the forces that had lifted it.
For the first time he took in the devastation and his eyes widened with the horror of it all.
The familiar London landscape, with its tall buildings both old and new, its skyscraper towers, the ancient church steeples, its old, instantly recognizable landmarks, no longer existed. Fires raged everywhere. Ironically, he realized, the whole city could have been one vast conflagration had not the blast itself extinguished many of the blazes caused by the heat wave and fireball. The skies overhead were black, a vast turbulent cloud hanging low over the city. A spiralling column, the hated symbol of the holocaust, climbed into the cloud, a white stem full of unnatural forces. He looked around and for the first time understood that more than one bomb had fallen: two rising towers to the west – one well beyond the column he had been watching – one to the north, another to the north-east, and the last to the south. Five in all. Dear God, five!
He lowered his gaze from the horizons and slammed the flat of his hand against the taxi’s roof. He had witnessed the stark face of ultimate evil, the carnage of man’s own sickness! The destructive force that was centuries old and inherent in every man, woman and child! God forgive us all.
People began to emerge from buildings, torn and bloody creatures, white from shock, the look of death already on their faces. They crawled, staggered, dragged themselves from their shattered refuges, some silent, some pleading, some in hysterics, but nearly all separate islands, numbed into withdrawal from others, their minds only able to cope with their own individual hurt, their own personal fate.
He closed his eyes and fought back the rage, the screaming despair. A hand tugged at his trouser leg and he looked down to see the grimy face of the sightless man.
‘What . . . what can you see?’
Culver sank to a squatting position. ‘You really don’t want to know,’ he said quietly.
‘No, I mean the dust – is it settling?’
He silently studied the blind man for a few moments before replying. ‘There’s dust everywhere. And smoke.’
His companion rubbed at his eyelids as though they were causing him pain. ‘Is it falling from above?’ he asked almost impatiently.
Culver looked up and frowned. ‘Yeah, it’s coming. I can see darker patches where the air is thick with it. It’s drifting slow, taking its time.’
The other man scrambled to his feet. ‘No time to lose, then. We must get to the shelter.’
Culver stood with him. ‘What is this shelter? And who the hell are you?’
‘You’ll see when – if – we get there. And my name is Alex Dealey, not that it’s important at this particular point in time.’
‘How do you know about this place?’
‘Not now, for God’s sake, man! Don’t you realize the danger we’re in
?’
Culver shook his head, almost laughing. ‘Okay, which direction?’
‘East. Towards the Daily Mirror building.’
Culver looked to the east. ‘The Mirror isn’t there any more. At least, not much of it is.’
The announcement had no visible effect on Dealey. ‘Just go in that direction, past the Underground station towards Holborn Circus. And we keep to the right-hand side. Are all the buildings down?’
‘Not all. But most are badly damaged. All the roofs and top floors have been skimmed off. What are we looking for?’
‘Let’s just move; I’ll tell you as we go.’
Culver took his arm and guided him through the jungle of smashed metal. A red double-decker bus lay on its side, crushing the cars beneath it. Figures were emerging from the shattered windows, faces and hands smeared with blood. Culver tried not to hear their whimpered groans.
An elderly man staggered in front of them, his mouth and eyes wide with shock. As he fell, Culver saw the whole of his back was a pincushion of glass shards.
Bodies, mostly still, lay strewn everywhere. Many were charred black. He turned his eyes away from limbs that protruded from heaped rubble and beneath overturned vehicles. His foot kicked something and he almost retched when he saw a woman’s head and part of one shoulder lying there, the rest of her nowhere in sight.
Shattered glass crunched under their feet and even in the false dusk it glittered everywhere like spilled jewels. The two men skirted around a burning lorry, shielding their faces from the heat. Something fell no more than thirty yards away from them and from the squelching thump they knew it had to be a body; whether the person had jumped or accidentally fallen from a high window of one of the more intact office blocks, they did not know, nor did they care to know. They had a goal to reach, something to aim for, and neither man wanted to be distracted from their purpose. It was their only defence against the horror.
Another building on the opposite side of the road collapsed completely, sending up billows of dust and smoke, engulfing the two men in thick clouds. An explosion nearby rocked the ground and they fell to their knees. Coughing, choking, Culver hauled Dealey to his feet once more and they stumbled on, a cold determination keeping them moving, awareness of the sinking poison their driving force. Others were moving in their direction. Now many were helping the injured, leading them towards the only place they felt could be safe. Groups carried those unable to walk, while those who could crawl were left to make their own way.