Flash Flood (14 page)

How absurd, thought Ben. Criminals might be roaming the streets of London, Big Ben might have stopped, but BBC Radio was thinking about an orderly future, with
The Archers
and
The Chart Show
.

He needed a longer run-up. He turned round, put his right shoulder against the wall and felt his
way down the stairs very cautiously. One, two, three.

There was something on the fourth step; he tripped and lost his balance, stumbling into the dark. Horrible images flashed through his head – stories about people falling to their deaths down cellar steps. He crashed onto his shoulder and rolled on down. Instinct made him tuck his head in, protect it at all costs.

He was suddenly engulfed in freezing water. He cried out and his mouth filled with that same foul taste he’d choked out earlier that day. He flailed around, as if trying to wake from a nightmare. Then his feet found solid ground.

He stood up and started for where he thought the stairs were, but then realized he hadn’t a clue what direction to take.

Deep breaths
, he told himself.
Panicking will definitely get you drowned
.

The water was up past his waist here. It chilled him to the bone. Where had it all come from?

This street wasn’t underwater – the flood started at least a street away – it must be seeping through the ground, through the basement levels. Perhaps through
a drain or an underground river. He forced himself to be calm. He needed to be able to see where he was going. In a moment his eyes would adjust.

Ben’s patience paid off. He saw a gleam of light and waded over to it.

He came up against a wall, but at his eye level there was a hole. When he looked through, he saw a crawl space under the floor above, and daylight.

So the cellar didn’t go the full length of the building. He saw a bank of bare earth and foundations like rough brick pillars resting on them. There was light coming through – enough for him to see the wood grain of the floorboards of the ground floor above. It smelled dank and rotten. There seemed to be debris in there too – crisp packets and polystyrene burger boxes – but that was a good sign: it must have blown in from the outside. And that definitely meant a hole. The space itself looked tight, but he reckoned he could crawl through.

Ben realized that, in the time he’d been standing there, the water level in the cellar had risen. It was now nearly up to his armpits.

No time to waste, then. He put his hands on the
rough brick sill of the crawl space and hoisted himself up. With so much buoyancy from the water it was easy, like vaulting out of a swimming pool. He wriggled into the space on his stomach, then pulled himself along on his elbows. It was cramped, like crawling under a bed, but not too bad if you kept your eyes on the light.

A squeaking, skittering sound made him start in alarm. He recoiled and banged the back of his head on wooden floorboards.

Something was in there with him.

Suddenly Ben could see small points of light, like sequins. They flashed at him, then moved away.

What were they?

Something brushed past his arm and he heard the squeaking again. This time he saw more sequins of light, some of them blinking at him. Then he saw torpedo shapes running about, then stopping abruptly. Tails flicked in the gloom.

The crawl space was full of rats.

Ben went cold all over. What was this under his hands? It felt like earth, but was it rat droppings?

He felt bile rising in his throat. He wanted to turn
round and go back there and then. But this was the only way out of the cellar.

All at once Ben felt a sense of hopelessness rising in him. He cursed Bel, wished she could see what he was having to go through because she’d mucked him about. He’d certainly give her all the horrid details. No, that would be pointless. She would probably say she’d had to do worse before her press conference after the tsunami in Phuket, or something similarly unsympathetic.

Ben realized he’d already battled against worse today, when he slipped off the raft into the water. This wasn’t nearly as hard; just disgusting. He had to just pick a goal and work towards it.

The opening had a pattern over it, like some kind of mesh. More importantly, it was ten metres – four brick pillars – away. He kept his eyes on that light, and pulled himself along with his elbows.

Tiny squeaks and squeals flitted at the corner of his consciousness. Clawed feet ran across his bare hands. Scaly tails lashed his face. They touched his lips and he spat them out, swearing, trying not to think what would happen if the rats bit him.

He passed one brick pillar. Good. That was a landmark.

A furry body brushed against his nose, filling his senses with the smell of wet rodent. Despite his resolve, he almost turned round, only there wasn’t room.

That was when he started to realize how tiny the space was. The floorboards above, the pillars of brick to the side, the earth under his belly. He might get stuck here and die. Die, and be food for the rats.

He passed another brick pillar. The ground was getting wetter, slimier. Obviously the rain was coming in, but that was a good sign: it meant he was getting closer to outside.

The tiny eyes watched him as the rats skittered to and fro across his path.
Look all you want
, he thought.
Soon I’m going to be out of here
.

Slowly Ben passed the third pillar. Daylight was just a few metres away. Unfortunately, in front of him he saw a mass of small brown bodies. They stopped and looked at him: tails, ears, rodent faces. For some reason these rats didn’t run away. It was like they knew they didn’t have to be afraid of him: he was in
their underworld and was vastly outnumbered. He saw their teeth and had a vision of them swarming towards him, to pick his bones clean.

Well, they’d have to get through his jeans first. And a rather expensive Burberry mac.

Then suddenly, as Ben focused on the opening ahead, he saw what it was, and all the fight went out of him.

It was merely a row of air bricks, designed to ventilate the underside of the building. From a distance it looked like a big hole with a mesh like a radiator cover, but up close it was solid bricks with a honeycomb pattern. There was no big hole.

The rats scurried around him, squeaking. Two of them sniffed at his hands. He struggled not to shake them off in case they bit him. Claws danced across his legs, his back.

Now what could he do? He was stuck under a building, in a stinking den of rats.

He’d have to go back.

With difficulty he turned round, squirming like a snake, the rats finally scattering out of his way. He’d
have to try the cellar door again, he thought, before the water level got any higher. Before the water level rose so high that it flooded the crawl space too.

Painfully Ben pulled himself back towards the cellar. He was heading into the dark, and now his night vision had been bleached away by the glimpse of daylight. He hoped his eyes would adjust by the time he got back to the cellar.

Long before he had expected to, his hand found the cellar wall. Oh well, that had gone much more quickly than the outward journey. He put his hands out, still unable to see. Where was the hole?

He felt along the wall. Where was it? He shifted his body to try and let the light from the airbricks past. A tail swished in front of his face. Where was the hole?

He saw more light over to the right-hand side. That wasn’t the cellar but it was better than nothing. Maybe it was more airbricks.

He pulled himself over to them.

The ground was becoming slimy again. He stopped and thought for a moment. He’d gone round in a circle. It was the same airbricks he’d found before. There was the same damp patch with the marks where
he’d turned round. Now he was losing his sense of direction.

The rain pattered on outside, mocking him, as if to say,
It’s all out here, you just have to work out how to reach it.

He let his head sink onto his forearms. What could he do now?

He might have stayed there and given up if the smell hadn’t been so disgusting. He lifted his head again.
Think
, he told himself.
You’ve had a panic, but that’s over now. There must be a way to get out.

In the light from the airbricks Ben could see that his hands and the sleeves of the Burberry were caked in mud. Wet slimy mud and drier earth from the area nearer the cellar.

That set a spark off inside his head. The ground near the front of the building was wet. Near the back, the cellar entrance, it was dry. He could get back to the cellar wall if he kept feeling for dry ground.

He squirmed round again. He felt a rat’s whiskers tickling his cheek, its body solid, like a furry tennis ball. He tried to ignore it and concentrate on the task at hand.

He would do this systematically. He would pull himself forwards on his elbows, then check the ground. One pull, then he checked. Yes, it was drier. Another pull forwards. A burger wrapper stuck to his hands. He shook it off and scrunched it into a ball, then felt the ground. Dry. He was going in the right direction. Now he was using his brains: he was going to beat this.

It was then that Ben noticed the light coming from the right-hand side. It was fainter than the light from the air brick at the front, which was probably why he hadn’t seen it before now.

He weighed up the options. Light was more promising than no light. He squirmed over to it.

It was a hole – a round tunnel of some kind like a sewage pipe, with a smooth inner surface, but big enough to get his shoulders into. Which meant the rest of him would go in too. The light wasn’t directly ahead but reflecting off the wet inner surface of the tunnel. Several rats came down it, their claws skittering on the surface. He waved his arms and they turned and shot away, back the way they came.

Why hadn’t he thought about that before? The rats
must have found a way in somehow, and they couldn’t have come through the airbricks.

He squeezed into the space. A purple cable ran along one side. After the dank squalor of the crawl space the purple plastic was a reassuring connection with the civilized world. The light was dim but definite, and such a relief.

Ben noticed that the bottom of the pipe was covered in a thin sheen of mud. More rats came along and sniffed at his fingers and then his face. He didn’t want to open his mouth with them so close so he blew out through his teeth at them and made a strange humming noise to scare them away.

His elbows began to feel tighter against his sides. His shoulders too. He had to hunch his head down more.

The space seemed to be getting smaller, or was it his imagination? Would it get too small for him? Would he get stuck in the tunnel?

Maybe he should have gone out through the cellar. Now he might not be able to get back at all.

Suddenly a breeze of fresh air stirred Ben’s hair. Water was trickling down the tunnel, making a
pattern in the silt along the bottom. It must be coming from outside. And it was definitely lighter or he wouldn’t have been able to see that. He must be nearly out.

He felt air move above his head again. Cautiously he looking up, fearful of banging into the roof.

Then he realized there
was
no roof. Above his head was rain and air. He could see the sky and scaffolding. He was in a building site.

But it wasn’t a way out. The hole in the tunnel was only about twenty centimetres long, not nearly big enough to get through. The tunnel was composed of half-cylinder sections and one of them had been lifted so that the cables could be fed in.

Ben pushed at the other segments but they were securely cemented in place and he couldn’t get enough leverage to move them. He called out. His cries rang around the walls but no one came. All he could do was look at the big empty space above him and feel the rain on his face, as if he was stuck in a bizarre open coffin.

The policeman was on his way back to the entrance of St Paul’s Cathedral, carrying cups of tea for himself and Canon Victor Dibben. Out in the streets, car alarms and burglar alarms sang. A double-decker bus stood at the top of Ludgate Hill, abandoned. A few metres away, the river lapped at the bottom steps. St Paul’s was on a hill and had just escaped the flooding. Now it was full of people taking refuge inside.

As the policeman rounded the corner and started up the steps, he saw that the Canon was speaking to a man outside the entrance.

‘Come inside,’ he was urging him. ‘It’s warm.’

‘I don’t need to come in,’ said the man in a Spanish accent. ‘I just need to get to Charing Cross Station. Where is it, please?’

It was more than an hour since Rebro had shut down and the policeman’s radio was no longer functioning. The CCTV cameras in the area would have lost power long ago. Moreover, he’d lost his partner. He felt very alone.

Especially now – for he suddenly realized that there was something very strange about that man asking Canon Dibben for directions.

His hands were thrust deep into the pockets of his checked coat, and he looked as if he must have been walking for a long time: his black hair was plastered against his head, his clothes soaked.