Strangers. Rosie Thomas

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СКАЧАТЬ half on top of her, like a shield.

      Even the dust had stopped whispering now. The silence came again, long seconds, and nothing stirred. Then, up in the light, above the smoking rubble where tinsel and fragments of pretty glass were mixed with torn girders and other, terrible things, and where the snowflakes drifted and settled impartially, the first siren began to wail.

      Annie couldn’t hear it. Her head thundered with the echo of the explosion and her eyes burned with the white flash of light. She closed her eyes, opened them again, but the glare was undimmed. Where had the dark gone? Her own, private darkness, how could that have been taken away? Were her eyes open or shut?

      She lay without moving for a long time, she didn’t know how long. The roaring in her ears dropped in pitch, became muffled. The white blaze turned egg-yellow with a brassy point at the centre. The first bodily sensation to return was a wave of nausea. Annie tried instinctively to turn her head in order to be sick, but a sharp pain that seemed to be inside her head cut short the movement. She lay still again, staring up into the middle of the yellow glow. Slowly, like a fist unclenching, the nausea released its grip, and the light dwindled to a little point. Her eyes were opening and closing, she was sure of that now. It dawned on her that the light was inside her own head, and she could see nothing else because she was in utter darkness.

      Annie’s tongue moved, finding her lips. They were coated with dust, except for one corner that was clogged with sticky moisture. There was the brackish taste of her own blood. She was suddenly possessed by panic, more powerful than the nausea. She tried to roll sideways, to draw her knees up into the foetal position, and found that she could not. She was hurt, badly hurt, and she was trapped in total blackness.

      Annie could hear screaming, a scream that went on and on, up and then down again as the sufferer gasped for breath. When it stopped she wondered if the screams could have been her own.

      Where was she? What had happened?

      Oh God, please help me.

      The screams had been hers. She could feel another one, the voice of pure terror, rising inside her. She clenched her teeth, and felt the grit crunch between them. She tried to swallow it, to clear her mouth, focusing on the smallest thing to keep the fear at bay. She could feel it all around her, like a living thing.

      Think. Try to work out what had happened.

      Slowly this time, she tried to move. Her right side, arm and shoulder right across to her breastbone, and her hip and thigh, wouldn’t do anything. She was pinned down by something smooth, sloping upwards at an angle. She discovered it by feeling cautiously upwards with her left hand. On her left side, higher up, there was something jagged that felt both hard and crumbling at the same time. She gave up her useless search and let her arm drop to her side again. Legs. Where were her legs? She could feel nothing at all in the lower part of them. It was as if her body was clay that had been crumpled up and crudely remodelled, stopping short at the knees.

      And her head, the pain in her head. She rolled it, just a little, to one side and then the other. There was perhaps an inch or two of play before the pain gripped her. Suddenly Annie realized that her hair was caught underneath something. She had taken her knitted hat off – how long ago? – inside the doors of the shop. Now something very heavy was resting on her spread-out hair, and the pain she felt was the roots of it tearing her scalp. So even if there had been nothing else touching her she would still be trapped here by her hair, forced to lie staring upwards, into – into what?

      There was only the pitch dark, not a sound except the threatening patter of falling fragments when she moved her arm. The fingers of her left hand fluttered, feeling the rough brick, splintered wood.

      She was shuddering now, fully conscious, cold to her bones.

      What would happen to her?

      Annie screamed again as the fear lurched close and threatened to smother her. When the sound of it died away a voice said, very close to her, ‘Stop. Stop screaming.’

      It wasn’t her own voice, she knew that. It was a man’s. A stranger’s.

      At the sound of it, she remembered. Before the noise came, before even the silent wind and the shock that had spun her round into a rain of splintering glass balls, there had been a man. That was it. When she had still been Annie, walking calmly to the exit with a carrier bag of Christmas tree decorations, a man had come up behind her and pushed open the door. Out of the corner of her eye, in that last instant, she had seen his hand and arm.

      Fear moved right inside her now. Where was the man, how close to her? Annie struggled to make her thoughts fit together.

      He must have done this, whatever it was. And if he could do something so cataclysmic what else would there be, when he reached her? To stop the shuddering Annie bit her lips, and tasted salt blood again. She must keep still, or he would hear her. She lay with her head turned as far as it would go towards where the voice had come from, staring wildly into the impenetrable dark.

      ‘Where are you?’ he asked. ‘I don’t think I can reach you, but …’

      ‘If you come near me …’ Annie had wanted to scream at him, but her words were a gasp. ‘If you come near me, I’ll kill you.’

      There was a long moment’s quiet.

      Then the man said softly, ‘It’s all right. Listen, can you hear the sirens? They’ll reach us. They’ll get us out.’

      A solitary policewoman had been standing on the opposite pavement, checking the number plate of a grey van parked on the double yellow lines. The side of it had sheltered her from the blast, and she crouched in the gutter for an instant with her cheek against the cold metal. She heard screaming, and the traffic skidding wildly in the roadway, and the crash of breaking glass. Slowly, sliding her hand up the van’s side, she stood up. Under a cloud of black smoke she saw the front of the store. The roof had been blown open to the sky and she could see the inside where the floors hung, pathetically exposed, tipping downwards. Chunks of brick were still falling. In the roadway people were running, some of them away from the falling bricks, others towards them. There were other people lying on the pavement.

      The policewoman left the shelter of the grey van and made herself walk across the road. The broken glass crunched under her polished black shoes. She held up one black-gloved hand to stop the traffic, as she had been trained to do. Her other hand reached inside her coat for the pocket transmitter, to call for help.

      The first squad car came, weaving up the street between the slewed cars and buses, its lights blazing. The policewoman was kneeling beside a man whose blood seeped through the clenched fist pressed to his cheek. There was suddenly an eerie quiet, and she thought how loud the siren sounded.

      Two policemen leapt out of the car as it skidded to the kerbside. One of them carried a loudhailer, and he lifted it to his mouth.

      ‘Get back. Get back and stay back.’

      One by one the people who had been milling on the pavement began to move slowly backwards, a step at a time. They were looking up at the ruined façade of the store where the smoke still drifted in black coils.

      ‘There may be a further explosion. Please leave the area at once.’

      They moved a little further, leaving the injured and those who were helping them, bewildered groups on the littered pavement.

      Down in the darkness the man’s voice repeated, insistent, ‘Can’t СКАЧАТЬ