Omega (32 page)

Their house was in Church Lane, a few hundred metres away across Leyton Marshes recreation ground and through Marsh Lane. It was not until they were in Marsh Lane itself that they came face to face with trouble.

Four youths saw them
and one yelled out: 'Bloody Bee
hivers! Get'em! Get their masks!'

The four rushed them together - the leader holding a knife as though he knew how to use it. Philip did not wait but made straight for the leader, swinging his iron bar, to put the women behind him. The leader slashed, jabbed, and dodged and once nearly reached him; then a full swing from Philip's bar caught his arm, probably breaking it. He fell to his knees, squealing, and Philip swung the bar again, down on to the youth's skull, feeling the bone shatter.

Philip spun round; Betty had already half-blinded one attacker with a jab from her bicycle-fork and Tonia was wielding her shovel like a battle-axe, holding the other two at bay. Philip disabled one with a blow to the knee and the survivor backed away, wild-eyed.

Philip shouted, 'That's enough - run!' The survivor made no attempt to follow.

Five minutes later they were inside their house, changing hurriedly into civilian clothes - including what Betty could find to fit Tonia. The back wall of the house had fallen away, bringing half the first floor with it, and there was not a window left unbroken. Fortunately the car was still in the lock-up shed round the back and undamaged. They loaded clothes, bedding, tinned food, tools into the car with little time for careful selection and within half an hour they were away, picking a hazardous route along ruined back-streets, eyes open for fissures, back-tracking often, the smell of burning houses in their nostrils, and all the time the crying and wailing, now mostly pitiful rather than terrified. They saw many people but were mainly ignored now that they were out of uniform. They had wrapped scarves round their heads to hide the official respirators - which did not look strange, because everyone who had been able to get hold of vinegar, and many who had not, had muffled their faces in one way or another.

Nobody mentioned the fight in Marsh Lane until they had been travelling a couple of hours and were well out into the Forest near Theydon Bois. Then Philip said dully, through the muffle of his respirator: 'I killed one of them, you know.'

'If you hadn't,' Betty said, 'they'd probably have got our respirators, and then we'd
all seven
have gone mad. Because it was too late for them - they'd already breathed it. Don't brood on it, darling. I put an eye out, too - and killing him would have been kinder, in the long run.'

'And we may have to again,' Tonia put in. 'I don't like it, either - I've never killed anyone, though I damn nearly did back there. But we didn't set this up - and if we're going to survive, there may be other times when it's them or us. Especially when God knows how many people start going crazy. Because if one in ten was ready with a vinegar mask by this morning, I'm a Dutchman.'

Philip nodded and then asked: 'Well, girls - we got out, somehow, and just in time. What do we do now?'

'Find somewhere lonely, fast,' Betty said. 'In
less
than three days. Then hide, hide, hide.'

The thunder of the mountains was majestic, terrifying.

Moira and Dan were on breakfast duty that morning. Dan had put up the trestle table in the middle of the laager, with the camp-chairs around it, and was laying out mugs, plates and cutlery. Moira, having brewed tea in the huge canteen pot Greg had picked up on one of his shopping sorties, was boiling eggs and toasting bread, at the canvas-screened cooker. She was thinking that before September was out they would have to devise a more sheltered kitchen area. Diana, beside her, was carefully unwrapping a half-kilo of butter, talking to it as she did so. Moira could hear

Rosemary singing in her tent as she got dressed and Greg teasing her. Angie and Eileen, in the open door of their caravan, were listening to the tail end of the seven o'clock radio news; it was Angle's news-monitoring day and Eileen always listened anyway - though since the Premier's announcement last night, she need not listen so anxiously. Thank heaven
that
worry's over, Moira thought; now all Britain knows about the vinegar masks
...
Then the first tremor
came and she gasped dropping an
egg
-
Diana had felt it, too, and asked 'Mummy?' anxiously. Moira snatched her up, instinctively moving away from the cooker. It was just as well she did because a second later there was another, worse tremor, which tumbled the boiling pan of water on to the ground where they had been standing.

Eileen called out: 'Respirators, everybody! Respirators!'

Moira ran to their tent, carrying Diana; Dan arrived a pace behind. Moira was saying hurriedly to Diana: 'Now, darling, this is the time we talked about. We'll all be all right but we
all
have to wear our respirators till Eileen says we can take them off...'

'I remember, Mummy. Because the air might make us sick.'

‘
Very sick, darling. So we'll keep them on and be safe -right?'

Dan was soaking the vinegar-pads with quick, pre-measured amounts and securing them into the masks. They put Diana's on together and had just donned their own when the real quake came.

They clung together, gasping, for what seemed like many seconds while the earth shook beneath them, again and again, and the mountains roared in pain.

Then the shaking was over and the earth was still. But the thunder of the mountains went on, monstrous echoes flung back and forth' as though the Gods bellowed their anger. Diana was crying, the little sound strange and piteous in the rubber mask, while they hugged and rocked her.

At last, into the horizons of infinity, the echoes faded and died.

Cautiously, they stood up, and walked outside.

Nothing in the immediate neighbourhood seemed to have been damaged. The mountains, the trees, the cliff, the waterfall - all looked as they had before, even the tents still stood. Only a few things like the boiling saucepan, two of the camp-chairs and some crockery from the table, had been disrupted. On the meadow the five goats - a billy and four nannies - which New Dyfnant had presented to them tugged and called, careering round on the ends of their tethering-ropes. Of Ginger Lad there was no sign. Every bird in the forest was clamouring and flocks of them wheeled and zigzagged above the valley as if they no longer trusted the earth.

The radio had gone dead. With remarkable calmness -having assured herself that everyone was all right - Angie explored the tuning dial. Nothing on any British, Irish, or French wavelength, all of which she could normally pick up; a Spanish broadcast broke off even as she listened to it; and one German station was babbling away a stream of words which she did not understand but which sounded hysterical. Here and there the clicking whistle of Morse, otherwise nothing.

My God, Angie thought - it's big. Bloody big.

The seven of them gathered together, instinctively well out in the open. They had only just begun to talk, to get their breath back, when Peter's Land-Rover shot round the corner and across the grass to join them, with Peter at the wheel and Father Byrne beside him, both wearing their respirators.

'We're all right but there's damage further down,' Peter told them. 'A big landslide from the Moel Achles ridge -and there's a fissure right down one side of it, with the Dust pouring out. And the wind's this way. We'd better keep these things on till the air in the fissure's clear. . . . Look, do you mind if I tow the trailer round later and we join your camp ? I think we'd better be all together.'

They all agreed, of course. While they were talking about it, Peter suddenly cocked his head, listening. They all fell silent. Above the sound of the river they could pick out a deeper, more distant roar.

Rosemary said: 'Oh, please, no - not more earthquakes!'

Peter shook his head. 'No, not a steady noise like that. . . . I'm afraid there's only one thing it can be. Billions of tonnes of water rushing down the Vyrnwy valley - and taking Llanwddyn with it. The dam must have gone.'

It had been a dreadful morning in New Dyfnant. About a quarter of the houses were uninhabitable and few of the rest had escaped some sort of damage; six people were dead, and twenty or thirty - Dr
Owen had lost count -sufficientl
y injured to be incapacitated. The doctor had got around as best he could (a Y-shaped fissure had divided the village into three areas between which cars could not cross) and Dai Forest Inn had turned his saloon bar into a field hospital. Fortunately, everybody seemed to have got his vinegar mask on in time, the uninjured helping the injured, but the Dust had hit the village within minutes and only time would tell if anyone had breathed it. There was one grim exception: Tom Jenkins, an isolated smallholder who had been scornful of Eileen's warning until last night's official announcement and had run-white-faced to the village in search of vinegar twenty minutes after the earthquake struck. Bronwen had supplied him and had summoned Dai
Police urgently. Dai had promptl
y locked Tom up; there seemed nothing else to do. He had promised Tom to send the doctor to him but Tom's terrified acquiescence had shown he had little faith in anything that could be done for him now.

Bronwen's shop, by some miracle, had suffered no more damage than broken windows. She had opened up immediately after the quake, pausing only to mask little Trevor and herself, and had served everybody who came whether or not they had money with them. She imposed her own hastily devised rationing system, having no idea when, or if, she would be able to re-stock. Some things, such as gas cylinders and kerosene, she refused to part with at all; the rationing of those might well have to be organized on a community basis. Jack Llewellyn, who ran the garage, was following a similar principle, allowing petrol only to the doctor, Dai Police, the minister and anyone else he decided was obliged to be mobile in the public interest. Electricity had failed immediately, of course, so Jack had to pump manually. He wondered if he would come to regret that his grandfather had changed the Llewellyns' hereditary craft from blacksmith to mechanic.

In all the frenzied activity, the vinegar masks were a great nuisance, hampering movement and producing sore mouths and noses after the first half-hour, but there was no alternative. The Dust was still visible till about ten o'clock, after which a quick reconnaissance showed no trace of it, either from the village fissures or from the bigger one on nearby Moel Achles. Remembering Eileen's two-hour safety margin, Dai Police extended it to two and a half, and passed the word round that the chapel bell would be rung as an all-clear when the masks could be put aside. The

Council had, years ago, installed a siren to give warning of forest fires, the village being surrounded by timber plantations on three sides; it had never had to be used but now it would serve as an alarm if the Dust reappeared.

Overshadowing all New Dyfnant's self-help was the terrible knowledge of what had happened to Llanwddyn. The Vyrnwy river valley, only a kilometre or two downhill from New Dyfnant, was a roaring torrent, full of tumbling wreckage, uprooted trees, dead cattle, smashed cars and the occasional human body. By about ten o'clock, a widening fringe of littered mud showed that the first unimaginable rush from the burst dam was abating. The people of New Dyfnant, almost to a man, had relatives or friends in Llanwddyn or in houses scattered along the valley but there was no way of discovering their fate until the flood was a great deal lower which might be several days. Most of them, if they had survived at all and had been able to reach their vinegar masks, would have escaped the effect of the Dust, for New Dyfnant had spread the word as best they could to their neighbours. But the valley homes had been decimated and the survivors must be tragically few.

With telephones dead and roads flooded or fissured, New Dyfnant still had one almost bizarre point of contact with a few voices in the outside world. Geraint Lloyd, the schoolmaster, was an enthusiastic radio ham, and by common consent he was delegated to stay with his battery-powered equipment and find out what he could. It was little enough. National broadcasting systems throughout Europe seemed to have ceased altogether; Geraint picked up a whisper or two from farther afield but nothing comprehensible - the ether was wild with static beyond his experience. Some police and fire services were still on the air but were obviously doing whatever they could on a strictly local basis. National coordination, for the time being at least, seemed paralysed. Nowhere - at least within the limited range of police-car and similar transmitters - had escaped the disaster, that was clear. Those voices which spoke through respirators were unmistakable and sounded helpless, those without were understandably preoccupied with reporting and avoiding Dust outbreaks.

When he had gathered all he could from these frequencies (he made no attempt to speak to them - what was the point?), Geraint turned his attention to his fellow-hams. He managed Morse contact with three British, two Irish, a Pole, two Frenchmen, a Romanian and a Moroccan - and briefly, during a lull in the static, with a ham in New Jersey. Quite a list in the circumstances, but all of them were obviously doing what he himself was - using their suddenly precious hobby to build up as wide a picture as possible. So their exchanges were brief before they passed on to look for
another piece in the jigsaw puz
zle.