Blood Of Angels (49 page)

He felt… not good at all.

He fumbled around the door with both hands, trying to find some way of opening it. Found a handle and turned it, but it didn't seem to do anything. It must have been locked on the other side.

He banged against it with his fists for a while but the impacts seemed to reverberate up through his arms and into his head, turning it into a dark sea of crashing waves that made no sound.

There was no response from outside.

He reeled back from the door, intending to stand still for a moment, to stand and breathe deeply and let his head get back together. Instead he found himself slumping down to land heavily on the floor, mainly on his ass, partly on his side.

It was better down there, if the truth be told. He wasn't going to be getting out until someone came to fetch him. So he might as well sit. They would come, sooner or later. Paul would turn up. He'd notice Lee wasn't outside the school and he'd come see what the problem was. Or Lee's dad might, maybe. Not his mother. That didn't seem likely. She had always been slightly out of reach: had always, now he considered it, seemed to be thinking about something else. But maybe his dad would. His dad had liked him. Or Brad, maybe. Yeah, Brad. He was solid. He was Lee's friend, always had been. If everything else failed, Lee knew Brad would make it here sooner or later, unlock the door, come find him and take him somewhere else. Go and get a burger. Go and watch the sea.

Until that happened he'd just sit here and wait. It was warm. It was a small room, and held you close.

There were worse places to be.

===OO=OOO=OO===

I stood back from the car door. I'd made Nina mouth it one more time to be sure. Paul had wired the car so any attempt to open the doors would detonate the bomb.

But Nina was inside.

I put my hand up against the window. She did not put hers there to meet it, which confirmed she must be tied. But she did rest her head against it, getting as close as she could to where my fingers were splayed. Were it not for the glass, I would have been able to touch her hair.

I knew nothing about bombs. Nothing about how you wired anything or defused anything. Any of the children in the playground above would have been in as strong a position as me to disarm the car. If they'd listened in physics class, probably stronger. An explosion could be due to go off within seconds. In the very next second. In each new second that was born, the world could go white.

But Nina was inside the car.

The only way I could open the trunk would be by shooting out the lock. I'd have to stand far enough away not to take a ricochet, which would put me directly in the line of fire of the guy down the end. Putting a bullet into a trunk full of explosives was also a very high-risk strategy.

I stood as far back from the side as I could, looked at the car, willing it to tell me something I could believe in, and tell me fast.

There were four doors I had been warned not to trust. There was a trunk I couldn't access, containing devices I did not know how to disable. There was unlikely to be much time. If Paul had left the vehicle, it meant it was armed and ready to go.

I realized it came down to this:

Did the door triggers work on electrical contact or motion detection? Did a connection have to be broken, or were they also geared to detect sudden physical jolts to the vehicle as a whole?

There was no way to find out. True, the impact of Nina's head against the window had not triggered anything. But she'd done it as softly as she could. What I had to do would not be gentle.

I just had to hope it was electrical. The idea was true or false. Our future was long or infinitesimally short. I had no option but to put it in someone else's hands.

I went back to the window. Put my face up against it again, found Nina's eyes in the murk inside. Told her that I loved her, and then gestured with my hands to get as far back in the seat as she could, away from the windshield, and as far down, while staying as close as possible to this door. She didn't question me. Just held my eyes, then disappeared into tinted gloom.

I stood back. Swallowed. Walked up to the front of the car. Held my gun in both hands and aimed it at the middle of the other side of the windshield.

Fired.

===OO=OOO=OO===

John Zandt carefully traced his way into the darkness, through a basement that felt like everywhere he had been in the last three years. There were bays in this section too but they were smaller and full of the lost and forgotten and not-needed-anymore. It was quiet and damp and cold and neglected and felt more like a forest than anything man had made.

He stopped in the centre of the aisle. Forty yards away he could see a dim, milky light, filtering down from some dirty glass pane. Presumably there was a way out there, an emergency-access stairway to the outside world. If so, it was possible Paul had already made his way up it. But John did not think so. He could feel him nearby. He had always known it would come to this, known since the day the Upright Man had taken his daughter from him and destroyed everything he had considered to be his life. He had known that, unless someone took him down first, it would end this way. That the two of them would meet, and leave only one. Or maybe none.

And so he did not feel afraid, or unhappy, or as if anything worthwhile was about to end. Sometimes a death is the only viable answer to a question you never actually heard. You just have to hope it is the death of someone else, and not your own.

It was going to have to be trial and error, and the time was now. He heard Ward shooting in the other section and the sound of a strange impact. Time was getting on.

So he walked up to the first bay and fired into it.

===OO=OOO=OO===

The windshield took a lot of punishment. It took several shots to get beyond its first bulletproof shatter and make a hole.

But the bomb did not go off.

I heard the sound of shooting from down in the darkness. John sounded like he was methodically making some kind of progress deeper into the basement.

And so I climbed up onto the hood and pulled off my coat and started shoving at the glass with my hands, using the fabric to protect me. I pulled until there was a big enough hole to lower myself through and I went straight in, slashing myself on every side rather than take the risk of landing with an impact. But Nina was there, in the back, and I got through to her and kissed her once, hard, in case that was all we had — and then I untied her hands and feet and started pulling her out back the way I had come. She was vague and very pale and moving awkwardly from being in twisted positions for too long, and every moment was backlit with the knowledge that it could be the one that the question of how the locks were wired became irrelevant as someone, somewhere, pressed a button. It didn't matter. I hauled Nina through the windshield and out over the hood and cut myself all over again. I tried to keep her from the sharp edges but the shards got her too. We slid together off the car and fell onto the ground and still the car didn't go off.

I got to my feet and pulled her up with me.

'John?'

'I don't know,' I said. 'Is the bomb on a timer?'

'Paul's got the trigger.'

'Then Nina, we've got to go.'

'Okay,' she said.

I reached in the pockets of the remains of my coat and found another gun. Loaded it. Gave it to her.

'Can you run?'

'I can try.'

'Then let's move.'

I wrapped my arm around her back so I would be between her and the gunman and then pulled us into a run straight across the central aisle. The guy down the end fired at us but I fired back and then we were in the opposite bay.

I helped Nina to the back of it and opened the door and ran straight into the passageway and right down to the end — as quickly as I could, in the hope we'd get there before the shooter decided to run across and be in the bay when we arrived. I kicked open the door Zandt and I had come through and into that first bay. I made sure we were flush against the left wall, cutting out his angle. Waited a second for Nina to get back her breath.

'Okay,' I said. 'This is where we just have to do it.'

She smiled. 'Always is.'

And we ran out shooting.

===OO=OOO=OO===

When he was well over halfway down, John heard a sound from the last bay on the left. Something like a desk or chair, scraping along a concrete floor, accidentally bumped by someone refining his position in the dark. Paul knew what John was doing. He knew he was on the way, working through the bays one by one, emptying half a clip into each. He knew that John would not be turning back. Paul was getting ready for him.

John wondered whether the man felt any fear at all, and suspected probably not. If he did, he might make a break for that ladder, might try to get out of this place and back into the air. In that case, John would nail him. If Paul was without fear, and waiting until the very end, then it was in the hands of whatever negligent spirits nodded and dozed at the tiller of this world. Spirits that had let Karen die but which had also let John find the Upright Man again. Spirits who either didn't care, or were obsessive about never playing favourites.

John reloaded once more. He closed his eyes for a second, and thought of certain people and places and times. In the background he heard the sound of Ward firing his own weapon, a long and sustained burst of shots which sounded further away than before, and he hoped that this would turn out to be a good thing.

Then he walked on to the last bay.

'Hey, John,' said a voice in the darkness. 'Got your daughter in here with me.'

And after that it was just guns talking.

===OO=OOO=OO===

Nina got the shooter, I think. One of us did, anyhow. I saw him spin and fall before I realized there was nothing flying past us any more.

Nina stumbled and nearly fell and I got a better hold on her and dragged her faster towards the sloping access ramp. Though it was uphill the light seemed to pull us, as if we were falling up a waterfall.

When we came into the open air and the area behind the school I started shouting and waving my free arm. It took a moment before anyone understood what I was trying to say — but then it passed through them quickly and everyone broke out of their fire-drill formation and went running out the gates at either side. It was like watching a wall of glass shatter sideways. Slow, and then very, very fast.

As soon as I knew they were going, all of them, and quickly, I concentrated on getting Nina out the nearest gate. She was moving better already and I saw her glance across at all the other people and wonder if she shouldn't be doing something, as if this was her responsibility, and so I put my hand in the small of her back and shoved her. We ran out through the gate and into the street, across it and into a road on the other side.

We turned then and looked back at the school. Kids and teachers were still streaming across the road but there was no one left in the area on the other side of the fence. The buildings looked to me like balloons, expanded to the limits of their endurance.

'We don't know,' Nina said. 'John could have…'

Then it went off.

It was as if the whole world shook, like someone kicked the planet against a wall.

There seemed to be two explosions, one a fraction of a second after the other. The area at the back of the school erupted straight up into the air, at the same time as every window in the school was blown out. The glass had just started to fly when the roof and upper floors collapsed and blew out at the same time, destruction in all directions at once.

People who had still been running in the street behind us turned to stare and then started to back up again, and turn and run, as brick and wood and glass and earth and fire began to rain down. I pushed myself up against the wall of a building with Nina, trying to get shelter, and realized she was shouting something at me.

'Phone,' she was saying. 'Give me your phone.'

I handed it to her as the earth seemed to shake again. The school's tower dropped like a slow and irrevocable hammer, adding to a huge plume of smoke that had started to rise into the sky over the shrouded and collapsing remains of the school buildings, coalescing as if with dark intent, as if it was forming into a face. People were still running past us in the street, white-faced except where the blood of fresh injuries had started to run. The world sounded like thunder laced with screams.

'I can't get anything,' Nina said. She jabbed at a series of buttons, tried again.

'Who are you calling?'

She just grabbed my arm and pulled me back up the street towards the school. I ran with her against the flow of crying children. Fires had burst into twenty-foot waves across the whole school, new ones following them into life effortlessly, leaping out from nothing as if touched into being by somebody's hand. It was scorching from a hundred feet away.

'Where's your car?'

I pointed left and we ran along the back of the school, dodging piles of burning debris. Dust and hot ash had started to snow down. We made it to the end of the block and ran up the street past the side of the school. The trees that surrounded it were all on fire. There was a long, squealing groan as some other part of the building collapsed. I couldn't understand why the earth still seemed to shudder unless the movement was in my own head.

We ran past the big old church to the top of the street, to the road that ran over the hill and past the front of the school down into Thornton, and we stopped. Our steps faltered, and finally we were still.

We turned around, slowly, looking down over the town, and I understood why it felt as if the explosion was still going on. It was.

The whole town was on fire.

Columns of smoke rose on all sides and in every direction. I ran down the street until I could see past the curve. The police station was gone. The historic district was in flames. When I turned in the other direction I saw a huge spilling thundercloud pouring up from the direction of the Holiday Inn.

I saw Nina still trying to get a call through to someone, somewhere, trying to talk to authorities who were no longer there to talk to. I kept turning, not knowing when to stop, and saw a huge field of fire joining the sky from the direction of Raynor's Wood.