Stubbins and I stayed with Hilary for some hours, feeding her sips of water from our shells. Periodically Stubbins set off on little circular tours of the forest, calling boldly to attract the attention of more survivors. We tried to ease Hilary’s wounds with Stubbins’s medical kit; but the contents of the kit – intended to treat bruises and cuts and the like – were quite inadequate to cope with burns of the extent and severity of Hilary’s.
Hilary was weakened, but she was quite coherent, and she was able to give me a sensible account of what she had seen of the Bombing.
After she had left me on the beach, she had plunged through the forest as fast as she could. Even so, she was no closer than a mile to the camp when the Messerschmitt came.
‘I saw the Bomb falling through the air,’ she whispered. ‘I knew it was Carolinum from the way it burned – I’ve not seen it before, but I’ve heard accounts – and I thought I was done for. I froze like a rabbit – or like a fool – and by the time I’d got my wits back, I knew I didn’t have time to get to the ground, or duck behind the trees. I threw my arms before my face …’
The flash had been inhumanly bright. ‘The light burned at my flesh … it was like the doors of Hell opening … I could feel my cheeks melting; and when I looked I could see the tip of my nose burning – like a little candle … it was the most extraordinary …’ She collapsed into coughing.
Then the concussion came – ‘like a great wind’ – and she was knocked backwards. She had tumbled across the forest floor, until she had collided with a hard surface – presumably a tree trunk – and, for a spell, knew no more.
When she came to, that pillar of crimson and purple flame was rising like a daemon out of the forest, with its attendant familiars of melted earth and steam. Around her the trees were smashed and scorched, although – by chance – she was far enough from the epicentre to have avoided the worst of the damage, and she hadn’t been further injured by falling branches or the like.
She had reached up to touch her nose; and she remembered only a dull curiosity as a great piece of it came away in her hand. ‘But I felt no pain – it is very odd … although,’ she added grimly, ‘I was compensated for that soon enough …’
I listened to this in a morbid silence, and vivid in my mind’s eye was the slim, rather awkward girl with whom I had hunted bivalves, mere hours before this terrible experience.
Hilary thought she slept. When she came to her senses, the forest was a good deal darker – the first flames had subsided – and, for some reason, her pain was reduced. She wondered if her very nerves had been destroyed.
With a huge effort, for she was by now greatly weakened by thirst, she pulled herself to her feet and approached the epicentre of the blast.
‘I remember the glow of the continuing Carolinum explosion, that unearthly purple, brightening as I moved through the trees … The heat increased, and I wondered how close I would be able to come, before I would be forced back.’
She had reached the fringe of the open space around the parked Juggernauts.
‘I could barely see, so bright was the glare of the Carolinum fire-pit, and there was a roar, like rushing water,’ she said. ‘The Bomb had landed slap in the centre of our camp – that German was a good marksman – it was like a toy volcano, with smoke and flame pouring up out of it.
‘Our camp is flattened and burned, most of our belongings destroyed. Even the ’Nauts are smashed to bits: of the four, only one has retained its shape, and that is gutted; the others are burst open, toppled like toys, burned and exploded. I saw no people,’ she said. ‘I think I had expected …’ She hesitated. ‘Horrors: I expected horrors. But there was nothing – nothing left of them. Oh – save for one thing – the strangest thing.’ She laid a hand on my arm; it was reduced by flame to a claw. ‘On the skin of that ’Naut, most of the paint was blistered away – except in one place, where there was a shaped patch … It was like a shadow, of a crouching man.’ She looked up at me, her eyes gleaming from her ruined face. ‘Do you understand? It was a shadow – of a soldier, I don’t know who – caught in that moment of a blast so intense that his flesh was evaporated, his bones scattered. And yet the shadow in the paint remained.’ Her voice remained level, dispassionate, but her eyes were full of tears. ‘Isn’t that strange?’
Hilary had stumbled about the rim of the encampment for a while. Convinced by now she would not find people alive there, she had a vague idea of seeking out supplies. But, she said, her thoughts were scattered and confused, and her residual pain so intense it threatened to overwhelm her; and, with her damaged hands, she found it impossible to grub through the charred remnants of the camp with any semblance of system.
So she had come away, with the intention of trying to reach the Sea.
After that, she could barely remember anything of her stumble through the forest; it had lasted all night, and yet she had come such a short distance from the explosion site that I surmised she must have been blundering in circles, until Stubbins and I found her.