Moonseed n-3 Read online

  He was meeting her eyes. But now there was hesitation.

  What he has here is important. His work. Maybe more important than anything else. Not for me, though He is going to have to choose.

  But now Henry had turned away He was looking down.

  Then she felt it. The floor was shaking.

  It was slight at first, almost imperceptible, but within seconds it grew stronger. There was noise, a deep bass rumble, with grace notes added by the rattling of equipment on the benches and shelves of the room. Glass tinkling. As if some gigantic eighteen-wheeler were driving past, shaking the ground.

  The shaking stopped.

  Jack Dundas stood in the living room doorway. Everything was smashed to pieces The big patio doors had smashed apart. He saw his mother’s collection of CDs spilled on the floor, the player smashed beside them.

  Granddad, Ted, was lying on the floor. He was on his back, his hands over his chest. He had his eyes closed.

  “Granddad? Are you dead?”

  Jack took a step forward. Glass fragments crunched under his trainers. He looked down; it was one of his own school photos, a grinning geeky kid in a red sweater, the frame smashed.

  He went to Ted. He put his toy box down beside his grandfather. Was he dead?

  He had seen reruns of old hospital shows like Casualty and ER, so he knew what to do. He reached forward nervously, and touched Ted’s neck The skin was warm. There was a pulse.

  Ted coughed, and gasped for breath.

  “Granddad? Granddad?”

  Ted’s eyes were still closed. There was, Jack saw, blood soaking his shirt around his hands Jack reached down and took his grandfather’s wrists. They were thick and coated with wiry hair. He pulled Ted’s arms away from his chest, exposing a ripped shirt, and a bloody wound.

  The wound was grisly. There was a piece of fractured rib protruding from the chest wall, surrounded by blood. The blood was bubbling.

  Jack sat back, helpless, shocked.

  “Jack.”

  The voice was a croak, and it made the lad jump. His grandfather’s eyes were alert, on him.

  “Help me. You can do it, lad. Make me sit up.”

  Jack put down his box, crawled around behind Ted, and helped Ted to half-sit up, resting his head against his lap.

  “That’s it… now put your hand over the wound.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Do it, Jack!”

  Jack reached out and put his palm tentatively over the wound. Ted reached up and covered the lad’s hand with his own, pressing the hand into the wound. The feel of bone and broken flesh and bubbling made Jack want to heave, but his grandfather’s hand was warm and solid and steady.

  “Good lad. Now seal the wound.”

  “What?”

  “Or else my lung will collapse. Find something that won’t leak. Anything.”

  Jack looked around, scraped around in the litter on the floor. He found a clear plastic magazine envelope. New Scientist, he saw; his mother’s subscription.

  “How about this?”

  “All right. Now. I’m going to breathe out. As hard as I can. Push me forward.”

  The breath came out in a wheeze, and Jack pushed at his shoulders, trying to help.

  Ted’s words were a gasp. “Put the patch over the wound.”

  Jack slapped the plastic envelope over the hole in Ted’s chest, gratefully taking his hand away from the bloody wound.

  “Good lad. Bandages. You need bandages. In strips. Quickly. The bathroom…”

  Jack gently lowered Ted’s head to the floor — guiltily wiped his bloody hand on the rug — and went to the bathroom.

  No bandages. He’d packed them already in the car.

  He went to the front door, which had come off its hinges and was hanging drunkenly in its frame, so he had to step over it. The tarmac of the drive was cracked, but the car seemed intact. The boot was still open, and he quickly found the rolls of bandage where he’d packed them.

  He looked around the street. There were no cars on the road. All the houses were — ruined. As if stomped by a giant. One of them, where Pete McAllister lived, was on fire. But he couldn’t see any fire engines.

  He hurried back to the living room with his bandages.

  “Good lad. All right. Around my chest — fix the patch in place—”

  Jack started to wind the bandage around Ted’s chest, over the patch. Under Ted’s whispered instruction, he made sure each layer overlapped the others.

  Ted watched calmly, his head resting against a tipped-up armchair. “You’re saving my life, lad,” he said. “Don’t you ever forget that. A hell of a thing to do when you’re ten years old.”

  “Ten and three quarters.”

  “And three quarters. Don’t forget your shoebox when we leave.”

  In the lab, people were standing silently, as if hypnotized. A polystyrene coffee cup was edging its way across a bench surface, neat concentric ripples marking its surface.

  It’s unnatural, Jane thought. That’s why we’re transfixed. The floor isn’t supposed to move under us.

  “Those are harmonic tremors,” Henry said. “Magma moving.”

  Marge Case said, “It’s consistent with what we’ve been monitoring. Swarms of shallow microquakes.” She turned to Jane. “Shallow because this isn’t some deep tectonic movement, but a movement of magma close to the surface…”

  The shuddering subsided.

  “If VDAP were here they would already have called a Level D alert,” Henry said. “At least. And—”

  “If there is some kind of eruption,” Jane said, “what will it be like? Arthur’s Seat is old. Surely—”

  “It won’t do much damage?” Henry looked glum. “Jane, we don’t know what to expect. The best guess is that the old magma, broken up by the Moonseed, will be viscous, with a lot of trapped superheated steam.”

  “So very explosive,” said Case. “And—”

  There was a jolt, and a sharp crack.

  “The building frame,” said Henry.

  “I have to get home,” Jane said. “Christ, if it’s come this far—”

  She started towards the door. It was like trying to walk in a moving subway train.

  “Look,” said Marge Case softly.

  A wave was passing through the floor, through its substance, a neat sine wave a few inches high. The floor tiles buckled, or popped away from where they were glued. “Good God,” said Marge, and she giggled. “Floor surf.”

  It happened in an instant.

  The floor lurched under Jane, like a plane in turbulence, and she was thrown to her knees. She landed hard, her knees and the balls of her hands taking the impact. She felt as if she had been punched. The shock of it, the physical power, was like a violation.

  And now the floor tipped, and she was sliding. Someone screamed. She looked for Henry.

  Suddenly equipment was flying off the shelves on the walls, electronics boxes and tools and glass dishes, raining down. And the people were clinging to the floor, or skidding down the sudden slope, trying to stay on their feet.

  She saw a heavy set of weighing scales come tumbling down in a neat parabola, and hit a lab-coated man in the back of the neck, evoking a sharp, clean snap. He fell forward, arms and legs loose, and rolled down the tilted floor.

  The lights flickered. One of them exploded in its housing in the ceiling. Then they failed, and she was in darkness.

  Jane was still sliding down the floor, in pitch darkness. It was a childhood nightmare, a mundane world turned monstrous, dragging her down into some pit she couldn’t even see.

  Everyone seemed to be screaming now. More explosions from above. A crash, a stink she couldn’t recognize, and she found herself coughing. Christ alone knew what chemicals they kept in here; there had to be a danger of toxic fumes, fire.

  She scrabbled at the broken floor; her fingers closed around the lip of a dislodged floor tile, and she hung onto that. The tile ripped her nails, but she wasn’t falling
any more.

  Somebody came skidding down the floor, and hit her side. The impact was huge, uncontrolled; a thick hand scrabbled at her clothes, trying to get a grip. She knew she couldn’t hold this new weight, and her own.

  She should kick this guy away. She knew that’s what she should do.

  He didn’t get a hold. He fell away into the dark, sparing her the decision.

  Now there was a new series of deep, grinding cracks. Light from below; a throaty explosion of collapsing brickwork, the grind of tearing metal. She risked a look down. The wall beneath her had broken up, and huge chunks of it were falling away, letting in the daylight. Glimpses of the car park, maybe fifty feet below, the cars still parked in their mundane rows.

  And, silhouetted before the light, people scattered like dolls, trying not to tumble any further. Marge Case was clinging to the square leg of an analysis table, bolted to the skewed floor. One hand was bloody, and flapped at her side like a broken wing; she was holding on to the table with her other hand, one set of fingers.

  The whole building had tipped up, Jane realized. Like that movie. The Poseidon Adventure.

  A fat man lost his grip, went rolling down the floor, and fell neatly through one of the holes in the wall. He fell screaming. Jane could see him for a couple of seconds, suspended in the air, still clawing monkey-like for a grip on something, anything, before he fell out of sight.

  When he reached the car park there was a meaty punch, a sack of liquid breaking open on an unyielding surface.

  “Jane! This way!”

  Henry had climbed to the comparative sanctuary of the doorway, with the policewoman and others. Henry was reaching down to her.

  She looked up at him, calculating. She could reach a table leg no more than inches from her, push herself up on that, then half-stand on the leg to get to Henry’s hand.

  Marge Case was screaming behind her, begging for help, almost incoherently.

  Perhaps Jane could reach her. But she might fail. This is ridiculous, she thought. I don’t have time for this. I have to get to Jack.

  She thought about the unseen man she’d been prepared to kick away. Not yet, she thought. We haven’t come to that yet.

  She turned to Henry. “Help me get to her.”

  They formed a chain. Henry braced himself in the doorway and held the policewoman’s hand; she reached down and gripped Jane’s wrist, with surprising strength, Jane got a couple of footholds in the broken tiles, and reached down herself, and caught hold of Marge’s hand. Marge was sobbing, and just hung there.

  Within seconds, the weight was too much for Jane.

  “Marge, I can’t lift you. You’ll have to climb.”

  But Marge seemed frozen, and Jane had to coax her into it, step by step. “Put your foot on that table leg. There. Now push up. Good girl. Okay, grab my waist…”

  So Marge climbed to Jane, and Jane climbed to the policewoman, and they all clambered out to the corridor with Henry, where they could rest.

  There were others here, lab workers and students, mostly young, looking bewildered. Marge Case was in floods of tears, and was starting to react to the pain of an arm which looked broken. The policewoman got hold of her and started to apply some simple first aid, strapping the arm to the girl’s side.

  Henry held Jane, just for a moment.

  And all the way through, Jane couldn’t help herself thinking, over and over: I don’t have time for this.

  Ted, as a kid, had once got his ribs bruised playing football. He hadn’t been able to get out of bed for three days.

  But bed rest wasn’t an option now.

  It took him an age, and excruciating pain, just to stand up.

  Well, he was able to walk, if he leaned on his little helper. But it felt as if someone was grinding a sharp fist into the centre of his chest, over and over.

  “We should wait for mum.”

  “No. We have to go before the quakes come back. We’ll find your mum.”

  That was true; if they managed to get onto any of the A-roads, there would surely be reception centres; that was police procedure in eventualities like this. It shouldn’t be impossible to find Jane and Mike.

  Always assuming he could drive.

  Ruth Clark’s house seemed to have taken a still worse beating than his own. It looked as if the roof had simply fallen in, leaving the outer walls standing in broken spikes, delimiting the debris.

  We ought to just get in the car, he thought I have to take responsibility for the lad. And I sure as pish can’t do any heavy lifting.

  But he couldn’t just leave her.

  With Jack’s help, he stumbled up the drive to Ruth’s house. Her front door was a heap of match wood, blocking the hall.

  He limped around to one of the intact sections of wall. There was actually a window here, still unbroken, that let into the living room. He couldn’t see anything inside. He surely wasn’t going to be able to climb in there.

  There was a soft whimpering, from inside the house. Crying, like a baby’s.

  He got Jack to fetch him a towel. Ted wrapped it around his arm, turned away, and smashed open the window. Then, with the towel still in place, he pushed out the remaining shards of glass—

  A tan brown blur hurtled out of the window. Tammie. He got a single clear view of the beast, as it looked into his eyes.

  Then it dropped to the ground and was gone.

  The crying had been the cat, then.

  Jack said, “Should we chase Tammie?”

  “No. She’ll look after herself.”

  “What about Mrs Clark?”

  Ted ran over what he’d seen, in his mind, in that brief confrontation.

  The cat had blood all around its mouth. It had been chewing something. Eating into it—

  “I don’t think Mrs Clark is home, Jack. Come on.”

  He leaned on Jack again, and they limped back to the car.

  Somewhere, a siren wailed.

  The lifts were all out, and there was no light in the corridors. But they were able to push open the doors on the uppermost side of the building, and reach the fire escape. This was a red-painted staircase, bolted to the side of the building; but it was tipped now at maybe thirty or forty degrees to the vertical. Jane had to slither down the stairs and the face of the wall.

  The building continued to tilt.

  The noise was immense, cracks and grinds from the frame and brickwork as they sought to relieve the impossible tensions on them. Windows popped out of their frames, sometimes intact, sometimes in a shower of shards, glittering in the bright April sun. Once a whole section of wall simply exploded outwards, a few feet from her, a brief fountain of brickwork and concrete.

  It took an age to reach the ground. Henry was waiting for her; he grabbed her hand. “Let’s get out of here.” His palm was slick with blood.

  They ran out of the car park and into the West Mains Road.

  The road was cracked, right down the middle, as if along a neat seam. Jane could see that houses had collapsed, or fallen to pieces. Taller buildings were sometimes intact but were leaning precariously. In one place, water was gushing up from a crack in the pavement.

  The pavement was broken, rippled, in some places subsided. The Moonseed was here, she realized: right here, in the bedrock, under her. The ground could give way under her any minute, dropping her into hell.

  But there was nowhere else for her to go, nothing for her to do but run over this unsafe ground.

  They ran east, trying to reach the main road that would take her home.

  The road was packed with stationary cars, all crammed with luggage. Most of them were still occupied, drivers and families waiting patiently for a break in the jam, waiting for someone to tell them what to do. As he ran Henry shouted at them. “Get out! Get out!” But he didn’t stop running. The car passengers, many of them children, stared out bewildered at the stream of ragged and bleeding refugees running past them.

  After a hundred yards, they came to a woman trapped un
der a fallen tree. She was screaming.

  Henry and Jane hesitated. Then they bent to help.

  The tree was thick, mature, immensely heavy. Impossible to move. They tried anyhow.

  Jane looked back, towards the lab. It dominated the horizon of the street, as it had yesterday. But now it leaned impossibly, like a sinking tanker; for now it was still intact, though its upper levels were crumbling, its windows and fascia cracking and falling in great leaves, exposing its steel and concrete frame.

  There was no fire here, she realized. They had been spared that, at least. But there was a smell of burning, a pall of smoke rising from somewhere to the east. There was no sign of the emergency services. No police, no fire brigade — nobody save for the lone police constable, running with the rest of them, trying to raise her station on her lapel radio.

  And now an immense groan emanated from the falling lab building. Jane looked back. There was a crack like snapping bone, and the building exploded, lengthways, its upper levels hurling themselves forward as if trying to escape the betraying ground. But they fell, inexorably, fragmenting as they went.

  The building lost coherence and collapsed, in a cloud of billowing dust. There was a fresh explosion, a sharp, almost beautiful flower of flame, at the base of the building.

  The woman, still trapped under her tree, was no longer moving She was unconscious but probably still alive, Jane thought But how could they help her?

  “We have to keep going,” said Henry. “When these cars start going up, there’ll be a chain reaction.”

  Jane looked down at the woman. “The first we are leaving to die.”

  “She won’t be the last,” Henry said grimly. “Listen, I have to go with that cop.”

  That startled her, although she should have anticipated this.

  His face was full of doubt and anguish. “I need to get to the authorities, somehow. Yes. That’s what I have to do. She’s my best bet—”

  “No. We have to reach Jack.” She looked into his face. “You have to help me.”

  His expression was complex, unreadable. “I have to do this.”