Chapter Seven

The Journal of Jay O’Connor:

Frying Pan and Fire

The school had ceased to exist.

I was sitting on a pile of rubble; all around me, more piles of rubble. It was like…well, I was in a different place altogether. As if I’d been buried alive, crawled underground for miles, then managed to come out through a hole in some different world. Smoke was rising from some of the rubble. Then I saw something that made me realise I was still in the same place. About a hundred feet away was the blockhouse the school cleaning gear was stored in. It had been untouched. Running behind it, and around the rubble piles, was the iron school fence. Parts of it had been twisted and torn where rubble and masonry had fallen over it and scattered in the street. I recognised the houses and buildings over there. Most of the roofs had caved in and the streets were cracked and filled with more rubble.

I couldn’t get my head around it all. It didn’t seem real.

Then I saw a couple of kids lying a little way off, half buried in broken bricks. They were holding hands, heads together; as if they were playing some kind of game. Maybe blindman’s-buff. They were lying like that, face down, covering their eyes and counting while all the other kids in the school were hiding. There was a big, dark stain around their heads that stopped me from calling out or going down to them. I turned away.

And that’s when I knew that all this couldn’t be happening.

What I was seeing now wasn’t real.

Not ten yards from where I sat was a great wall of spinning dust. It was a gigantic, spinning, twisting whirlwind. All gushing and turning in on itself, like when you see clouds on the television, clouds that’ve been speeded up. Imagine that, all black and brown and reaching up so high you couldn’t see the sky. But that wasn’t the worst of it.

The worst of it was—there was no noise.

The way that dust cloud was moving about there should have been a noise like a whirlwind. But there was no noise, no rushing wind, no storm sounds. Just dead, dead quiet. When I looked again properly, things just became more unreal.

The dust cloud was all around me.

I followed the great cloud down to the street, where the school fence vanished into it. There was parkland just beyond the blockhouse, where kids used to play football. Just grass and a few straggling bushes. It was going to be developed as a factory, someone had told me. But about five hundred yards out in the middle of that “field” the dust cloud had formed a great barrier all the way round, curving in towards the housing estate. Following the line of this impossible, swirling cloud, I could see about eight or nine hundred yards of council houses; maybe three streets. Some of the roofs had caved in, but all of the windows were blown out. There were people down there in the streets, but I couldn’t see what they were doing. The cloud barrier seemed to go right along Irskine Street—you couldn’t see anything beyond, except the gigantic wall of black-brown stuff. Then the dust cloud swirled up into the shopping complex. I could only see half of the shopping centre. It seemed as if there were buildings missing. Great big spaces between offices and shops that weren’t there before. But I couldn’t be sure.

Crazy, but I reckoned that the cloud, the silent whirlwind—whatever—had hemmed us in a quarter-mile all around; so that I couldn’t see anything beyond it.

At first, when I tried to stand, my legs just wouldn’t do what I wanted. Shock, maybe. I stood still for a minute, and then began to pick my way through the rubble, waiting for my strength to come back. Then I saw what was half buried just before me, and I froze.

It was half a body, the lower half of an adult.

I guessed that it was one of the teachers, but I had no idea who it might have been. I supposed it was a man—anyway, it was wearing trousers. But the upper half was buried under rubble. Whoever he was, he was very, very dead. I dry-heaved, but I felt as if I’d swallowed a large stone. I started to move down past the body, trying not to look. Rubble and dust began to slide under my feet, and for a moment it seemed I might lose my balance. I dug in my heels, clouds of dust rising around me, and the cracked brickwork that had been covering the upper half of the body—and its face—fell away.

That’s when I was sick, bending at the waist and retching; trying not to see what I’d already seen.

It was Stafford—what was left of him.

His smashed spectacles were still on his face; his eyes wide and staring, his mouth open as if he was in the middle of delivering another lecture. The back of his head…well, the hell with telling you that. You know what I mean. I had cause to hate him, but he didn’t deserve what had happened to him.

Moaning, I hurried on past him, trying to give the body a wide berth. Then I heard someone calling my name.

“Jay! Jay O’Connor!”

For a moment I froze. Was it him? Calling me back, telling me what else I’d done wrong? Then I realised it was a younger voice and looked back to see that Damon, Wayne and Paulie had managed to scramble out of the same hole as me. They’d started a mini-landslide of rubble down towards me. I yelled at them, but I was glad when some of the debris covered the corpse and hid it from sight.

“Follow me,” I called, as I turned and headed out across the fractured remains of the school yard. About fifty feet away was the huge cloud of whirling dust. I remembered what one of the kids had said about the school yard just opening up, realising that the cloud must be coming out of the big “crack” they said had appeared there. It was almost hypnotic, watching the twirling, churning smoke. It wasn’t real. The fact that it was all around, like some kind of cage. It made me feel small, and when I looked up into it I felt as if everything was upside down and I might fall. Fall right up into the sky.

“What are we going to do?” asked a voice to my rear. When I turned, I saw that Damon and Wayne were right behind me. Their clothes were torn, their faces dirty. I guess I didn’t look too much of a picture myself. The boy called Paulie was a little way behind them. His head hung like a kid getting a telling-off. As I watched, he just slumped into a cross-legged squat. Like a naughty boy, waiting to be told what to do.

“What’s happened?” Damon gestured hopelessly back at the mounds of rubble and shattered brickwork.

“An earthquake, judging by the looks of those other houses down there,” I said flatly.

“So what do we do?” asked Wayne.

“Find the emergency services,” I said. “Get help for anyone else trapped in there.”

“Why…why hasn’t someone come?” asked Damon. “Where’s the fire brigade, and the ambulances? Christ, the place fell apart and we were left in there…and no one came!”

He was right. There was an eerie silence out there. Where were the sounds of fire klaxons and ambulance sirens?

Paulie made a noise behind us; a noise like he’d been hit over the head with something. Then he made a high-pitched sort of keening noise and began to sob. The two other kids turned on him, yelling abuse. I didn’t like the noise he was making. It was too distressed.

“Leave him alone!” I snapped.

Damon and Wayne kept on yelling at him to stop. Now they were picking up stones and throwing them at him.

“I said leave him alone!”

I moved forward to stop them, but suddenly I couldn’t walk straight. My legs felt strange. Like I was floating. Suddenly Wayne, Damon and the crying kid were no longer there. I had to get away, back to the real world. I was reeling. The school gate was right in front of me. When I reached for the bars, I felt sure they’d feel as if they were made out of rubber. But they were cold and hard, and when I took my hands away, they were covered with red rust.

That’s not rust, said a little voice inside. That’s dried blood.

I dry-heaved then. Folded up double on the shattered concrete, hugged my guts and tried to get the nightmare out of me. Nothing would come, because there was nothing inside. But my eyes felt as if they might swell and pop out of their sockets with every convulsion. Next thing I remember, I was staggering down the main street away from the school. The ground beneath me was cracked and rutted, just like a ploughed field. Somewhere behind me, I could hear Damon and Wayne yelling at Paulie.

Then I was falling.

At the last, just before everything went black, I felt sure that I’d run straight off the edge of the world. Straight into one of those bloody great cracks in the ground.

I was falling for ever.

Third time dead?

This time I didn’t seem to care.