Black smoke rolled across the ceiling and hung like a curtain, sinking steadily towards him in dense folds. Within a few minutes, the smoke layer was only four feet from the floor. Carbon monoxide was a narcotic gas. Two or three lungfuls of that smoke would kill them.
But the smoke and toxic gases were being forced right through the building. They needed a secondary escape route.
"Stay low. Stay low, where you can breathe."
In the corridor, the floor was scorched where the carpet had singed through, but the pa.s.sage itself was clear of fire. Cooper peered through the smoke, trying to remember the way out from the back of the pub.
Blazing curtains fell on to furniture as their rails burned through, gla.s.s shattered as picture cords snapped and frames crashed to the floor. When the flames reached the ceiling, they would get flashover. It could reach five hundred degrees Fahrenheit in here.
The boarded-up windows were alight now, reflecting the glow of the inferno inside the pub. The fire was mirrored on to itself, doubling the size of the blaze until it looked like a vast furnace every way he turned.
The heat was becoming too intense to bear. Cooper could feel the exposed skin of his hands roasting as if he was a joint of meat in an oven. The smoke was pungent and choking, full of lethal particles from burning plastic and fibres.
He looked round to make sure that Liz was still wearing her mask too. And with an awful lurch in his heart, he saw that she was gone.
Fry and Hurst were close to the Roman road when they saw the smoke rising from Oxlow Moor. Hurst spotted it first, pointing it out with a cry of surprise.
"Another?" said Fry. "It"s not possible."
"No, it isn"t possible. Not like that."
"Call in and find out, will you?"
Fry put her foot down harder on the accelerator, forgetting for a moment her nervousness of the narrow lanes and the stone walls that always seemed to crowd in and try to trap her car. A bit of music began to play over and over in her mind. It was if Annie Lennox was still there, inside her head, though the CD player was turned off. She was still singing that acoustic version of "Dark Road". Something about all the fires of destruction. All the fires of destruction.
"No, they say it"s the Light House," said Hurst in an odd, strained voice.
Fry stared straight ahead at the road as they drove towards the first tendrils of smoke drifting overhead.
"And?" she said.
"Persons reported."
Swerving to avoid a car coming the other way on a bend, Fry cursed under her breath. Persons reported. It was a bit of fire-service jargon, but she recognised its meaning. There were people trapped in the fire.
Cooper flinched in pain as something dripped on to his face. It was hot and scalding, like melted wax. He brushed the blob from his cheek and saw a smear of molten green plastic on his fingers.
Shielding his eyes, he looked up at the ceiling. The light fittings were melting. They had once been shaped like candles, but now they were drooping, slowly dissolving into liquid that spattered his scene suit and landed in his hair.
He pulled his jacket over his head, conscious as he did it how futile a gesture it was. The protection wouldn"t last long once the flames touched him. He had to keep moving.
He turned back towards the bar. Glowing embers faced him. Before he could move, a shelf bearing a line of optics tore away from the ceiling with a shriek and crashed to the floor. Gla.s.s flew in all directions, shattering into fragments, glittering in the flames like a shower of meteorites.
He pulled open the blackened door, keeping his body behind it in case of a back blast caused by a rush of air. The door handle was almost too hot to touch. Cooper looked at his hands, and saw that his fingers were red and blistering. The pain hadn"t hit him yet, but it would.
He glimpsed something red on the wall by the door. A fire extinguisher. He grabbed it from its bracket, thumped the handle and sprayed foam towards the heart of the blaze. It subsided a little, and he kept spraying until the extinguisher was empty. Immediately, the fire flickered and sprang back to life.
"Liz! Where are you?" he called desperately.
But his voice was hoa.r.s.e, and he burst into a spasm of painful coughing.
In the bar, smoke travelling across the ceiling hit a wall and rolled down to floor level. His mouth was parched, his throat sore from the smoke penetrating his mask. His eyes streamed with tears so that he could barely see, even if the smoke hadn"t plunged the pub into unfathomable darkness.
He fumbled blindly along the wall, found a steel bar under his fingers and a door behind it. The fire exit. At first the bar wouldn"t move. Crying out in frustration, he banged at it with his fists, kicked out at it, thumped it again. Finally, he spun round and grabbed the empty fire extinguisher, swung it hard against the bar and felt it give way.
But he must have inhaled too much smoke. He was getting confused. He didn"t know where right or left was, didn"t know where the doors were, felt as though he couldn"t breathe at all.
Irritants. .h.i.t his eyes and the back of his throat. He could barely open his eyelids. He retched and took a deep breath, in involuntary reaction. The smoke he inhaled was disorientating, dizzying. He went down on his knees. He knew he was giving way to the carbon monoxide, but he was unable to fight.
Now he saw shadows in the smoke, flickering and shimmering, dancing and shuddering, fading in and out. Was that a figure outlined against the flames? The smoke was black and thick and choking. Boards over the windows were burning.
Gla.s.s shattered, and a blast of air exploded the flames into a great roaring blaze, a wild beast devouring the furniture, ripping up the floor, stripping paper from the walls. A sheet of fire rolled across the ceiling and engulfed the room.
"Liz!"
His voice came as a feeble croak, and there was no answer.
Cooper thought he glimpsed a movement near him in the smoke. He reached out for an indistinct shape like a hand, but grasped at empty s.p.a.ce and found himself falling forwards into darkness, until his face hit the floor and his mind swam into swirling oblivion as he lost those last shreds of consciousness.
All around him was shouting and screaming, a m.u.f.fled roaring noise. The crash of falling stone. And the screaming.
Then silence.
Arriving at the Light House, Fry and Hurst jumped out of the car, but within a few yards they were driven back by the smoke and heat.
Almost choking, her eyes running with tears, Fry saw that two fire appliances were already on the scene and were tackling the fire at the back of the pub. Clouds of steam rose from the jets of water they were directing on to the ground floor, trying to suppress the flames for a team in breathing apparatus who were entering through the rear door.
The lights of the two appliances and the arriving ambulances bounced off the columns of black smoke pouring from the building. Flames erupted from another window higher up. The first floor was well alight by now, and smoke was beginning to trickle from between the tiles of the roof.
At last Fry saw two figures stumble out of the smoke. Firefighters ran towards them to support them, and she couldn"t see who it was from the bodies in the way.
"Becky, who ...?"
"I don"t know. No, wait a minute a Diane, one of them is a woman. And the other is Eliot Wharton."
"Oh G.o.d."
A fireman in a respirator emerged from the building, stepped over the hoses and pulled off his mask. He shook his head wearily at the incident commander and mouthed something. Fry couldn"t hear what he was saying. She strained her eyes, wishing she could lip-read.
It wasn"t until the commander turned to look at her, and she saw his despairing expression, that hope began to die.
32.
Ben Cooper came round slowly, becoming gradually aware of a buzzing in his ears, a scorched smell in his nostrils, a strange light stinging his eyes. He was being bounced around violently, and his head swam with dizziness and a thumping pain. His stomach lurched, and he rolled over to vomit, vaguely conscious of someone there on the edge of the light, waiting for him to do exactly that.
Some time later, he became conscious again. He had no idea how much later it was. Only a few minutes might have pa.s.sed, but it could have been days. He was in a different place now. It was completely still, no sense of movement except for the dizzy swirling in his head, the residue of some shadowy, distorted dreams.
He listened cautiously to the noises around him, all of them unfamiliar. The smells were sharp and antiseptic. He couldn"t figure out the sensations all over his body. His limbs seemed to be either too numb or too painful, and sometimes both at once.
He opened his eyes, and saw a brightly lit ceiling. He turned his head a fraction and saw someone standing over him, a looming shape, a face frowning with anxiety. He expected to see Liz. She"d been so much in his head, walking through those murky, half-conscious dreams, that for a moment he thought he was actually seeing her by his bed, and she was smiling that familiar smile that told him how glad she was to see him.
But his eyes came more into focus, and he realised the shape was his brother. It seemed so odd to be looking up at Matt against a starkwhite ceiling that he almost laughed, but found that he couldn"t.
When he spoke, Matt"s voice came from an immense distance in s.p.a.ce and time. It was so faint and remote that it seemed to echo from way, way back in his childhood. Ben was carried away to an age when he was too small to look after himself, when he looked up to his big brother with adoration as his guardian and protector. Yes, Matt"s voice came from that past. Its distance in time was created by the tone of his words.
"You"re going to be okay, Ben. Just relax. Don"t try to talk or anything."
"What is it? I don"t ... Matt?"
"Yes, I"m here. Take it easy."
Ben felt his head hit the pillow, as if his neck muscles had given up the effort to hold it upright. He was completely exhausted, his body drained of energy, sucked of its contents like an empty plastic bag. His hands felt wrong, and his feet too. Most of all, his head wasn"t as it should be. His skin was too tight to his skull, too untouched by the air to feel natural.
"I don"t remember ..." he said.
"No. Well, it"s probably best if you don"t."
There was some kind of message in the words. No, not the words, but the significance behind them. An unspoken message, coming to him directly in the way that he and Matt had always communicated, the way they used to talk without the need for speech. A total understanding. He"d thought it was gone in these past few years, but in this moment it had all come back.
Then he was shocked to hear his own voice, changed to the faint, scared sound of a child.
"What"s wrong, Matt? Matty?"
But his mind was filled with hazy memories a images of himself flickering and shimmering, dancing and shuddering, fading in and out as if he"d become just one more shadow in the smoke.
And then there was another image. A figure in front of him, outlined against the flames. The smoke between them black and thick and choking. Boards over the windows were burning. He heard gla.s.s shattering, a blast of air exploding the flames into a great roaring blaze, a wild beast devouring the furniture, ripping up the floor, stripping paper from the walls. A sheet of fire rolled across the ceiling, and engulfed the room.
And then the figure was gone. In Ben"s memory, he could see nothing but the smoke, feel nothing but the crash of falling stone. He could hear only the screaming.
Then, incredibly, a deafening absence of sound. And that silence was the most frightening thing of all.
"Liz?" he said, his voice croaking with fear.
But there was no answer in the room now. Matt was utterly quiet. Ben listened to that hush, recognising what it meant, remembering all the times that he and his brother had used such silences to share the most difficult things, a thought or emotion impossible to put into words.
It was strange the way a silence could say so much. It could tell the truth far more effectively than any plat.i.tude or cliche, or the most eloquent of speeches. This was a silence that came straight from the heart, and Ben understood it perfectly.
"Liz," he said. "Is she ... gone?"
Finally Matt spoke.
"I"m sorry, Ben," he said. "I"m really, really sorry."
Among sharp antiseptic smells, in a brightly lit room with a white ceiling, that was the moment. The exact moment when Ben Cooper"s world came to an end.
Also by Stephen Booth.
Black Dog.
Dancing With the Virgins.
Blood on the Tongue Blind to the Bones.
One Last Breath The Dead Place Scared to Live.
Dying to Sin The Kill Call.
Lost River.
The Devil"s Edge.