Chapter Text
They were in Jo’s office when the blast came, an earsplitting bang followed by a deep, thunderous roar that filled every molecule of the air. Danny, in the midst of passing a document across the desk to show her, didn't notice as it fell from his hand. The floor rose up and lurched to one side as if a huge carpet had been yanked from underneath the entire building, knocking him over and throwing Jo out of her chair.
“Danny!”
Jo’s voice was muffled, but the part of his brain that was programmed to respond to her picked it up anyway, and acted automatically. On hands and knees, he scrambled around to the other side of the desk, and she grabbed him by the sleeve and pulled him next to her in the open space underneath. Dust and grit rained down less than an arm’s length away, stinging exposed skin and infiltrating their lungs. He turned Jo’s face against his shoulder to shield her from it, then hunched over her in an attempt to protect himself as well. There was nothing else they could do except wait.
He was braced for the possibility of at least a partial collapse—the ceiling caving in and burying them under rubble, the concrete slab underneath the building crumbling and dropping them into Westminster tube station—but after twenty or so very long seconds, the rumbling and shaking stopped, with a few smaller booms and a final shower of tiles and insulation from the ceiling. The overhead light panel and Jo’s desk lamp both went dead, followed almost at once by the bluish-white emergency lights coming on.
“All right, Jo?”
“I’m fine.” Jo held onto him for a moment longer and then pushed herself away, turning to cough into the crook of her elbow. “What about you?”
“I’m OK. What the hell was that?”
“Some sort of explosion,” Jo said. “I saw flames reflected in the window before you got to me. They’re gone now, but they were there.”
“Bombing? Or something else?”
“I don’t know. We’ve got to get out of here and find out.”
She crawled out from underneath the desk, and Danny followed her. The office was more in disarray than badly damaged; there were books scattered everywhere, pictures had fallen from the walls, and the window glass had a long crack running from midpoint to upper right corner, but the walls were still standing and the gaps where the ceiling tiles had fallen looked stable enough. Danny laid his hand flat on the closed door, remembering Scott’s warnings about fires, and then opened it onto a similar scene in the outer office, where his filing cabinet had tipped over and spewed a snowstorm of paper across the floor.
“It’s so quiet,” Jo said. Her face was sickly pale and strained in the emergency light. “What's happened to the fire alarm? And we ought to be hearing people out in the corridor.”
He looked at his watch. “It’s late, there probably aren’t many people left. Do you want to wait here for someone to come? There’ll be rescue crews on their way; even if the alarm system hasn't kicked in, no one could have missed that blast.”
“No, I want to go. We can always come back if we need to.”
“All right. I’ll get my laptop—“
“Leave it,” Jo said. “It’ll only get in the way. I don’t think anyone’s out to steal your research notes at the moment.”
They went out into the corridor, full of smashed tiles and fallen oil paintings, and along to the lifts, which they found stopped and empty, one at floor level and one below, with its doors half-open. Inside the lower car, just visible through the gap between the floor and the top of the doors, was a single high-heeled shoe, which made Danny look nervously at Jo.
She shook her head. “It’s not what you’re thinking. Look, even in this light you can see it’s clean in there—no blood or blast marks or anything. Whoever that shoe belongs to lost it, that’s all, trying to get out in a hurry.”
“Okay,” Danny said, “but we’re not getting in.”
“Obviously not,” Jo said, and then paused. “Do you smell that?”
He sniffed the air and caught a distinct whiff of something hot and chemical, like melting plastic or smouldering insulation. “Yeah. I think you’re right and we need to go now. Stairs?”
“Stairs.” She coughed again, not even trying to stifle it this time. “I’m all right. It’s only the dust. Come on.”
The stairwell was just around the corner from the lifts, and when they got there, they found its door twisted and hanging askew from the upper hinge. Danny nudged it farther open and peered in.
“Oh shit.”
“What?”
“The stairs are gone.”
“Let me see.”
Jo pushed in next to him, and they both stared down at a tangled mess of splintered wood and concrete rubble, with a cloud of unidentified particulate matter slowly settling around it. The emergency light just inside the stairwell door was still burning, but with a sputtering flicker that didn’t bode well for its future. The light at the next landing was shattered and useless. A black, jagged hole led from the remains of the landing into an echoing abyss.
Danny looked over at Jo, who had the lapel of her blazer pulled across her mouth and nose as an impromptu dust mask. “Now what?”
“Dial 999,” she said, muffled. “We can at least let them know where to look for us.”
He fumbled his phone out of his pocket and flipped it open. “No service. Can you?”
“No service on mine either. Let’s try a landline.”
They backtracked along the corridor to their office suite, the smell of overheated chemicals getting stronger as they went. Danny checked the phone on his desk and then the one on Jo’s, finding both of them silent and dead. As he set down the second receiver, they heard a faint wail of sirens outside, almost too distant to be audible. At the same moment, a delicate wisp of smoke curled out through the nearest metal grille. Jo started to cough again, in ugly, racking paroxysms that came from somewhere deep in her chest.
He touched her shoulder, tentatively. “Are you sure you’re all right?”
“Yes,” Jo said between coughs. Her eyes were streaming with involuntary tears, and Danny could feel his own lungs starting to burn with whatever toxic mixture of substances was being drawn through the building’s passive ventilation system. “But not for much longer. It’s worse here. We’ve got to go back to the stairs to wait.”
The corridor was hazy, but not choked with smoke yet, and they were able to return to the smashed stairwell door easily enough. Danny looked at it, looked at Jo, still wheezing from her coughing spasm, and pushed his way inside.
“What do you think you're doing?” Jo grabbed his upper arm with an iron grip. “It’s not even a little bit safe in there.”
“I just want to look. I’ll be careful.”
He advanced cautiously onto the landing, testing his weight against its strength with every step, as Jo watched him from the open doorway. The vertical column of the stairwell rose above his head, black as a chimney, and he thought about how many times he’d run up and down it during the day, when the building was bustling and humming and alive with busy people, all worrying over their next meeting or the project they’d just been handed. Now it felt like a graveyard, which made him wonder, with a shudder, if there were any bodies lying limp and broken on the floors above or below. Surely there weren’t, though. He and Jo had stayed late, and even they had been about to call it a night and head home.
“That’s enough, Danny.” Jo was trying for the tone of command she used when she wanted instant compliance from him, but in the dark it just sounded shaky and scared. “Come back before you fall and break your neck.”
“I’m all right.” He frowned at the wreck of the stairs heading up to the next level, and then inched forward and inspected the hole. “Jo, the steps underneath us? The ones that lead down from three to two? I think they’re still there.”
“So? Even if they are, there’s no way to reach them.”
“There might be. Let me see your phone; it’s got a brighter light than mine has.”
He reached back without looking, and Jo pressed her iPhone into his hand, her fingers icy cold against his. “Thanks.”
“Can you see anything?”
Danny strained his eyes, searching the depths. “Yeah. The first two or three steps are blocked, but the ones below those look fine. Is there something I can toss in to check?”
Jo ventured a bit farther onto the landing and dug around in the rubble, then handed him a chunk of wood that looked as if it had once been part of a handrail. He dropped it into the hole, and they both listened as it clattered its way down the next flight of stairs.
“Seems all right.” He glanced at Jo, who was white-faced but still hanging on to her composure, and swallowed hard. “Okay, we can do this. I’ll go first and then you come down after. It’s not that far.”
“How do you know the stairs are still strong enough to support us? We both weigh more than a piece of scrap wood.”
“They’ll have to be,” Danny said. “My chest’s starting to hurt and so is my head. I don’t know what’s burning, but it can’t be good for us. Here—” He gave her phone back to her. “Give me some light so I can see where I’m going.”
He held onto the rim of the hole, digging his fingers into soft plaster and insulation and wires, and slowly lowered himself until he could drop to the first undamaged step. It was farther than he’d thought, looking at it from up high, and he lost his balance as he landed and fell hard on one knee, with a crunch that felt like bare bone on concrete and sent a red-hot flare of pain all the way up to his hip. He didn’t want to yell and upset Jo, but he couldn’t stop a groan that he hoped she wouldn’t hear from escaping through his clenched teeth.
“It’s all right,” he called up when he thought he could keep his voice even. “Hang on the way I did and lower yourself down as far as you can, and I’ll help with the last part.”
“I don’t like heights,” Jo said faintly from above. She edged just close enough to the hole for him to see the top half of her face, with dark, liquid eyes and a smudge of something black across her forehead. “I get dizzy.”
Danny thought back to a flight they’d taken together to Canada, when she’d refused to let him open the window shade as they were passing over Greenland. “Okay, I get that, Jo, but I don’t think you’ve got a choice. The air’s lots better down here, for one thing. And I can’t come back up again, so you’ve got to join me unless you want to leave me on my own. You don’t want to do that, do you?”
“Of course not, but if I fall—”
“I’d throw myself off the top of the building before I’d let you fall.” Somewhere high over their heads, there was a creak and then an echoing crash, as if some precariously attached bit of masonry had just let go. His knee stopped stinging and started to throb as if it was thinking about swelling up. “Please come down. I swear I’ll catch you.”
“All right.”
He heard rustling sounds, and then Jo sat down and wriggled forward until her legs were dangling through the hole. She turned herself around, gripped its rim in the same place where he’d held on, and stopped for a moment, head bowed.
“What’s the matter?”
“Nothing. I thought I needed to cough again. Are you ready?”
“Ready,” Danny said, and she slid over the edge. Her skirt caught on it and slid up nearly to the tops of her thighs, which under other circumstances might have embarrassed him, but he was so focused on the task at hand he barely noticed. Once she’d begun, she came slithering down fast, and he caught her around the middle and lowered her to the step beside him.
“See? Easy peasy.”
“Easy for you, maybe.” Jo’s whole body was stiff and unyielding with tension under his hands, but she seemed in no hurry to be released. At last she shuddered all over and drew away from him. “I don’t want to have to do that again. I hope you’re right about the stairs.”
“Me too. How’s your battery?”
She pressed a button and the iPhone lit up, casting gruesome shadows that hollowed out her eyes and threw the lines round her mouth into sharp relief. “Forty-two percent. The torch app drains it fast, though.”
“Maybe we won’t need it all the way there,” Danny said. He didn’t want to think about what would happen if the light went out for good when they were halfway down an unstable stairway covered in rubble, but the thought was there in his head nevertheless. He was already beginning to regret convincing Jo to come down here with him, but given that the alternative had been both of them choking to death on smoke and chemical fumes, it hadn’t been much of a choice.
“Well, there’s only one way to find out,” Jo said.
She switched on the LED light and shone it ahead of them, revealing a line of stair treads disappearing into the dark on their way to the floor below. One or two were broken, and all were thick with dust and strewn with shattered fragments of ceiling tiles and wood panelling, but they looked as solid up close as they had from above. Danny took a step towards them and grunted as the pain in his knee flared.
“What’s the matter?”
“Landed the wrong way when I dropped.”
“Your ankle?”
“Knee. It’s all right.”
“It doesn’t sound as if it’s all right.” Jo swung the light around, aimed it low. “Let me look.”
Obediently, Danny turned up his trouser leg and showed her the red, abraded skin that would blossom into a crop of blue and purple bruises in a day or two. The idea that he might not live long enough for that to happen—that neither of them might—crossed his mind, but he kept it to himself.
“It’s bleeding a bit.” She knelt down and, lacking anything else, pressed the edge of her sleeve to the injury, making him yelp. “And swelling. Can you walk on it?”
“Could we stay here even if I couldn’t?”
Jo pointed the flash at the opening they’d come through, where a pall of smoke was now lazily drifting in to fill the gap. “I don’t think so. Remember that report we read on building fires? In a shaft like this, there’s nothing stopping smoke from coming down as well as going up, and if the sprinklers have done their job in whichever zone the fire's in, it'll only make things smokier. We’ve got to try to get out—” A cough caught her off guard, and she thrust the iPhone at Danny to hold while she got it under control. “Out onto this floor and hope there’s better reception there. Fire and rescue have got to be somewhere in the building by now.”
Danny wasn’t so certain about that—it had only been a few minutes since they’d heard the first sirens—but he trained the light on the door that led into the warren of corridors comprising the third-floor offices, and Jo touched it gingerly to test for heat before pushing the panic bar. The bar retracted as usual, with a clash of metal on metal that echoed up and down the stairwell, but the door itself didn’t budge; either it was stuck, or something was blocking it from the other side. He thought of bodies again, piled up where they’d fallen on top of each other while trying to escape, and shivered. Not that. Please.
“Oh come on.” Jo banged the bar hard with the heels of both hands, then half-turned and drove her hip into it. “Fuck. Help me, Danny.”
“Hang on.” He slipped the phone into his breast pocket with the LED facing out before coming over to join her. The door rattled a little in its fittings as they both strained against it, but stayed shut.
“Brilliant.” Jo pushed her hair out of her face, smearing the black smudge farther across her forehead. Damp strands of hair were stuck to her temples, and he realised he was perspiring as well; they’d exerted themselves with the door, but the air around them was also heating up, slowly but steadily. “Absolutely splendid. Remind me to file a complaint with someone in charge of building codes as soon as we’re out of here.”
“Consider it filed.”
“Christ, what a mess,” Jo said wearily, and stopped again to cough, one hand pressed to her lower right ribs. “Is your knee still hurting?”
“Yeah.”
“We’ve got to keep going anyway.”
“I know,” Danny said. “And fast. Battery’s down to thirty-one percent.”
“Already?” She grimaced. “All right, let’s go. You can lean on me if you need to.”
“How’re you going to hold me up?”
“I’ll find a way,” Jo said. “You wouldn’t leave me behind. I won’t leave you either.”
Scared and exhausted and injured as he was, this simple declaration still touched him. Jo formed alliances and exchanged favours on the daily in pursuit of her goals, and she was as good as her word, but it was rare for her to give her real, personal loyalty to anyone. He’d always assumed he had it, as she had his, but hearing her say so was enough to warm him while they made their way down the first two steps in the next staircase.
As they reached the third step, there was a rushing, crackling noise above, and a shower of debris came down, knocking them both off balance and sending them half tumbling, half sliding down the next several steps. Grabbing at anything to stop the fall was out of the question; all he could do was hope he wouldn’t reach the next landing headfirst and fracture his skull or his neck.
Before he got there, the edge of a stair tread slammed into his damaged knee, lighting up the traumatised nerve endings like fireworks. He screamed with pain and twisted around involuntarily, which turned out to be just enough to stop his downward trajectory. An instant later, Jo fetched up hard against him. She was a slightly built woman, but momentum gave her the force of a backhoe loaded with bricks, and for a terrible moment he thought they were going to go the rest of the way down in a tangle of arms and legs. He braced himself and managed to hold on until she groaned and sat up.
“Danny?” Jo was out of breath, but not too much for him to hear the rising panic in her voice. She scrabbled around for her iPhone, found it on the step below, pointed the light at him with shaking hands that turned it into a strobe. “Are you hurt?”
“I smashed my knee again, but other than that I’m alright. You?”
“Same, I think.” She turned the light on herself to show him. Her hair was caked with dust and a long scratch ran along one side of her face, from just below her left eye to the angle of her jaw, but the rest of her looked whole.
“I think so too.” Danny straightened his legs out in front of him and immediately paid the price with a wave of pain rolling up from his knee. He’d played youth league football until he was fifteen and knew the difference between a serious injury and one you could walk off, and that repeat blow had clearly bumped this one up to the first category. It frightened him, but not as much as the thin streamers of smoke he could see swirling in the LED. “It could have been worse. At least whatever fell on us wasn’t actually on fire.”
“Nothing like optimism, hey?” Jo shone the light's beam downward. “We’ve still got to make it to the next level. If you can’t stand up, go down sitting. That’s what Clem—” Her voice wavered. “That’s what he did before he could climb.”
“If it worked for him, it’ll work for me," Danny said. "Can you clear off the steps? I don’t want an arse full of slivers and nails.”
Jo went down the remaining steps ahead of him, sweeping broken boards and rubble out of the way, and then he braced himself on his arms and bumped along until he reached the landing. When he got there, Jo hooked her hands underneath his armpits and pulled, and he added to her efforts by pushing off from the floor with his good foot. With that assistance, she dragged him the short distance to the nearest wall, where she turned up his trouser leg again and crouched down to inspect his knee.
“It feels three times the size it ought to be—Jesus, be careful!” Danny flinched as she touched the swelling, with fingertips that were somehow cool even though she and he were now both sweating buckets. It felt hotter than the rest of his body, pulsating like some sort of horrible poison-bloated alien egg sac in a sci-fi film.
“I am being careful, and it’s not that swollen. Not yet, anyway." She took her hand away and sat back on her heels. "I wonder if we can wrap it in something to stop it swelling any more, and to stabilise it a bit.”
“Too bad this isn’t a hundred years ago,” Danny said. “You could tear strips off your petticoat like Florence Nightingale.”
“Unless you've got a time machine I don't know about, Daniel, I think we're stuck with what's on hand. Or on foot, in this case.” Jo put the iPhone down on its face, light pointing up, and started undoing one of his shoelaces. “If we’re going to complain about each other’s sartorial choices, it’s a shame you’re not wearing some nice long football socks.”
“They’re festering at the bottom of my wardrobe as we speak. Here, you do the one on the bad side, I’ll do the other one.”
He stripped off his socks, and Jo tied them together with a square knot, creating a makeshift bandage that was long enough to wrap round his knee twice before tying it again. The strapping didn’t take the pain away, but it stopped the steady, sinister ballooning sensation, and after he’d put his shoes back on bare feet, he found he could stand again, at least temporarily. His head was pounding, and there was a strong possibility he might be sick soon, but he could keep going and that was all that mattered for the moment.
“Better?” Jo asked, watching him.
“Yeah." She looked as bad as he felt, he thought. He wanted them both away from here and in a clean, safe hospital where she could have oxygen and fluids and nurses to look after her, and where he could mainline some opioids.
“Good. Come on before the smoke gets any worse. We'll try the door again at the next landing.”
"Have we still got battery left?"
Jo checked it. "Twenty-seven percent. It'll be all right if we hurry."