Chapter Seven

The Ordeal of Juliet DeLore

Juliet recoiled from the brink, arms thrust behind her and grabbing for anything solid. Her eyes remained fixed on the yawning chasm before her.

She’d fled across the supermarket carpark, swerving around parked cars, her leather-jeaned hip smacking against the hood of one vehicle but the pain meaning nothing at all in her flight. She worked out at a local gym once a week, tried to keep in shape, but never could have believed that she was capable of such speed. She’d been freed from a nightmare; now she was in another kind of dream altogether. Like a low-flying bird she was streaking across the carpark, blond hair streaming behind her.

Nothing could stop her now.

In a moment, she’d see people; maybe dazed or disorientated by the earth tremor or the bomb blast, or whatever had happened. In a second, she’d be surrounded by crowds of protective people. Maybe there’d even be a policeman, or a fireman, in the milling crowd. She was free and she was safe and…she staggered to a halt when she saw what lay ahead.

The carpark had suddenly ended in a ragged cliff-edge.

She could see the estate agent’s office across the way on Laburnum Street, could see the Chinese takeaway and the telephone kiosk outside. Nothing could have prepared her for the fact that everything from that point to what had once been the middle of this supermarket carpark had vanished for ever into a bottomless pit; including one hundred and twenty square yards of tarmac, the twenty-two vehicles that had been parked there, a main road, a taxi rank and the one hundred and fifty-three men, women and children who had fled the supermarket when the first tremor had hit Edmonville.

Juliet teetered on the edge, saw the vast space yawning before her—and then fell back, breathless, to the cracked tarmac.

Disorientated, panicking, she scrabbled back further on elbows and heels.

This couldn’t be right.

Now she was on her feet again; crouched and running around the cliff-edge, looking for the point at which she could cross to safety. Okay, something terrible had happened. There’d been an earthquake. Impossible and unheard of in this country. But it had happened. She could handle it. But first, she had to get away from that bloody supermarket and find where the people had gone and…

There was no one here.

No one behind her when she whirled to look (and, thank Christ, no sign of Trevor loping across the carpark in her direction), and no one over on the other side of the huge fissure. That couldn’t be right. There had to be people. She just had to keep following this cliff-edge, and she’d see somebody. Fire-fighters, maybe. Or men in bright yellow oversuits, directing people to the nearest emergency station, or…

Juliet was still running, now in an arc around the supermarket, following the cliff-edge, and looking out over the two-hundred-foot fissure that separated her from the other side, and it was just going on…and on…and on.

And where, for Christ’s sake, were all the people?

Now the ragged edge seemed to be taking her back towards the main supermarket building, which was the last place in the world she wanted to see again.

She was panicking now. She knew it.

She stopped. Bent double, hands on thighs, she drew deep, sobbing breaths.

This didn’t make sense. She had to get control. Had to sort herself out.

Looking back again, she saw at last what had happened to the supermarket.

It really had been shorn in half.

The missing half had fallen away over the cliff-edge into the chasm. She tried to think what had been there. A furniture franchise. An electricals section. A music department. All gone over the edge into that terrible rift. She could see now where the roof had slumped and torn, ragged brickwork and shattered timbers marking the split. Rubble and detritus marking the interior of the supermarket and the irregular cliff-edge on which it now stood.

And now, picking his way over the broken glass that had once been the front windows of the supermarket, she could see a familiar figure with a mask of blood for a face.

She froze as he spotted her and put one hand up over his empty eye socket as if this could somehow focus the vision in his one remaining eye.

Could she see him grinning, even from this distance?

“Juli-ettttttttt!” he called. “I’m…coming!”

Ducking behind a ruined wall, Juliet ran frantically along the cliff-edge, looking for a way across. Deep inside, some hopeless and lost part of her was weeping; telling her that the supermarket and the surrounding buildings were stranded on this one pinnacle of rock less than four hundred yards square and with a bottomless pit on all sides.

No, that was impossible.

She must find somebody who could help.

…somebody…

“Juli-ettt!”

Trevor’s voice seemed somehow to be echoing from all around.

“You can’t run, my darling! I’m coming to find YOOOOOOOUUU!”