Another bomb. He was waiting for the blast to hurl him sideways but it never came and he stood, frozen, staring into the sleet-thickened darkness. Surely it was there, before the noise, that the blue and white lights had been reflected under the store front? He couldn’t see them now. A pall of thick, coiling dust hid everything.
Martin began to run.
There had been no warning.
The police commander had been standing with a group of bomb squad officers close to the trailer. He felt the gust of wind and looked up in alarm. As he watched, the broken edge of the façade trembled and swayed inwards. He opened his mouth to shout a command and heard the sharp rain of falling chunks of brick.
‘Back,’ he yelled. ‘Get back.’
There was a scrambling rush of men, scattering away over the pavement to the shelter of the vehicles. He glimpsed a fireman rooted to the spot, and from the tilt of his helmet knew that he was staring upwards.
And then there was a deafening roar as the height of the façade crumpled inwards, seeming to hang unsupported in mid-air for an instant, and then fell into the wrecked centre of the store. The dust billowed outwards, thick with the acrid smell of pulverized brick. Choking, with his hands up to cover his nose and mouth, the commander stared into the clouds of it.
The blue tarpaulins had been torn down. The shelter of planks and scaffolding was buried, and half in and half out of what had once been one of the festive display windows a fireman was lying face-down, his legs twisted beneath him.
In the darkness the noise was another explosion, the first terror renewing itself. It took hold of them, eating them up as it swelled louder so that their bodies shook with the vibration and their lungs filled with the smell of it.
‘Steve.’
He heard Annie scream his name, just once, and then the scream was extinguished and the roaring went on. The sensation was like falling again, but it was more terrible because there was nowhere to fall to. Instead, everything else was falling. Steve turned his head until his neck wrenched, hunching his shoulder as if that could shelter him. There was a pounding rain of red-hot rocks all around him and he knew that he would drown in this solid sea of noise and grinding stone.
There was no pain then, except the agony of terror. On and on.
Still the noise, but muffled now. An angry, diminished roar.
The solid rain was still falling, but it was finer now. It had washed away all the air.
The air.
Steve choked as the filth swept into his lungs. Gasps for breath convulsed his body and he writhed until the pain in his leg swept back again. He would have screamed but there was no breath. There was no breath to cough, no air to breathe.
The blackness grew heavier, pressing its pain all around him.
Steve closed his eyes and then there was nothing, oblivion as sweet and comfortable as a child’s sleep.
He didn’t want them to come back again, the pain and the smell and the air that lay like a mask over his face. But they came anyway, dragging him back into consciousness. Each breath tore his chest and yet wouldn’t fill his lungs.
He lay in the silence, moaning. The silence. The noise was over now. The thing, whatever it was, had come and gone and left him alone again. Then something else pecked at his unwelcome consciousness. He groped after it in the fog of agony and remembered, not alone. He made his mind work outwards, to the limits of his body. His shoulder and arm were still part of him, his arm outstretched. His fingers were still there, and he was still holding the girl’s hand.
‘Annie.’
The word was no more than a croak, but it left him gasping. The hand in his felt limp and cold as ice. He lay for a moment, trying to gather his strength, and then called her name again.
‘Annie.’
The silence was hideous now. There was something different. Steve slid his hand from hers and found her wrist, thin and bare. His fingers moved up her arm, meeting the rough edge of her coat sleeve, and a woollen cuff underneath it.
Something different. What was it?
His fingers moved again, scraping the gritty cloth.
Cloth.
His head hurt so that each thought took a separate, punishing effort. Before, surely, there had been only her hand? His shoulder still ached from stretching out to reach it. Yet now he could feel her arm, all the way up to the elbow, slightly crooked. In the silence Steve could hear his heart’s terrified drumming. He opened his mouth to try to pull more oxygen out of the thickened air.
He was capable of only one thought, and it gripped him for long, shivering seconds. He was holding her arm, but it was no longer part of her. Something had severed it. Fear and nausea swelled inside him and he crouched within a shell of pain, longing for unconsciousness again. But his head defied him and the thought clarified, until it was certainty, and he knew that he must confront it.
He took his lower lip between his teeth and bit into it, to stop himself screaming when the discovery came. Then he slid his hand down once more to clasp the fingers in his. Slowly, he pulled their linked hands towards him.
The arm moved, not easily because the coat sleeve snagged on the roughness beneath it. But it moved, and he drew it closer until his fingers could crawl up again to the elbow and beyond, inch by inch, his lip held beneath his teeth to help him to bear the discovery of sticky flesh and bone.
But there was only the reassuring weave of the cloth, and then the rounded hump of the shoulder.
Suddenly, as though his consciousness could only dole out one at a time, another thought came to him. Her pulse. He could feel for her pulse. His fingers slid back again and fumbled under the woollen cuff. He turned her hand so that it lay wrist upwards and touched his forefinger to the vulnerable skin. Nothing, and nothing, and then he found the place. A little beat quivered, tick, tick.
Steve breathed out, a long sigh that stirred the stench of brick dust again. She was still alive. This was Annie’s arm, her hand still touching his. He held on to it like a lifeline.
Think again, then. What had happened? He must work it out, establish a thread of hope for Annie again …
He tried to remember the noise and then the avalanche that had followed it. They hadn’t fallen, but everything else had fallen around them. Steve had the sudden conviction that the limits of their black world had redefined themselves. As the weight fell something had shifted.
He had heard Annie scream his name, and then what? Had one of them rolled sideways, involuntarily, to escape the avalanche? If that had happened, something had moved to release one of them from the weight that had pinned them down. Steve tried to move now, willing his leg to follow the jerky spasm of his other muscles. The pain intensified, shooting across his stomach, but he found that he could lift his hips and drag himself to the right by an inch or two. His left leg slithered uselessly with him. He could reach out and touch Annie’s side now. His fingers explored the folds of her coat and then moved upwards, vertically. He found a button, and then another alongside it, and he knew that he was right. The discovery comforted him like a shot of painkiller.
Annie had rolled towards
