Dead And Buried

The heat was becoming too intense to bear. Cooper could feel the exposed skin of his hands roasting as if he was a joint of meat in an oven. The smoke was pungent and choking, full of lethal particles from burning plastic and fibres.

He looked round to make sure that Liz was still wearing her mask too. And with an awful lurch in his heart, he saw that she was gone.

Fry and Hurst were close to the Roman road when they saw the smoke rising from Oxlow Moor. Hurst spotted it first, pointing it out with a cry of surprise.

‘Another?’ said Fry. ‘It’s not possible.’

‘No, it isn’t possible. Not like that.’

‘Call in and find out, will you?’

Fry put her foot down harder on the accelerator, forgetting for a moment her nervousness of the narrow lanes and the stone walls that always seemed to crowd in and try to trap her car. A bit of music began to play over and over in her mind. It was if Annie Lennox was still there, inside her head, though the CD player was turned off. She was still singing that acoustic version of ‘Dark Road’. Something about all the fires of destruction. All the fires of destruction.

‘No, they say it’s the Light House,’ said Hurst in an odd, strained voice.

Fry stared straight ahead at the road as they drove towards the first tendrils of smoke drifting overhead.

‘And?’ she said.

‘Persons reported.’

Swerving to avoid a car coming the other way on a bend, Fry cursed under her breath. Persons reported. It was a bit of fire-service jargon, but she recognised its meaning. There were people trapped in the fire.

Cooper flinched in pain as something dripped on to his face. It was hot and scalding, like melted wax. He brushed the blob from his cheek and saw a smear of molten green plastic on his fingers.

Shielding his eyes, he looked up at the ceiling. The light fittings were melting. They had once been shaped like candles, but now they were drooping, slowly dissolving into liquid that spattered his scene suit and landed in his hair.

He pulled his jacket over his head, conscious as he did it how futile a gesture it was. The protection wouldn’t last long once the flames touched him. He had to keep moving.

He turned back towards the bar. Glowing embers faced him. Before he could move, a shelf bearing a line of optics tore away from the ceiling with a shriek and crashed to the floor. Glass flew in all directions, shattering into fragments, glittering in the flames like a shower of meteorites.

He pulled open the blackened door, keeping his body behind it in case of a back blast caused by a rush of air. The door handle was almost too hot to touch. Cooper looked at his hands, and saw that his fingers were red and blistering. The pain hadn’t hit him yet, but it would.

He glimpsed something red on the wall by the door. A fire extinguisher. He grabbed it from its bracket, thumped the handle and sprayed foam towards the heart of the blaze. It subsided a little, and he kept spraying until the extinguisher was empty. Immediately, the fire flickered and sprang back to life.

‘Liz! Where are you?’ he called desperately.

But his voice was hoarse, and he burst into a spasm of painful coughing.

In the bar, smoke travelling across the ceiling hit a wall and rolled down to floor level. His mouth was parched, his throat sore from the smoke penetrating his mask. His eyes streamed with tears so that he could barely see, even if the smoke hadn’t plunged the pub into unfathomable darkness.

He fumbled blindly along the wall, found a steel bar under his fingers and a door behind it. The fire exit. At first the bar wouldn’t move. Crying out in frustration, he banged at it with his fists, kicked out at it, thumped it again. Finally, he spun round and grabbed the empty fire extinguisher, swung it hard against the bar and felt it give way.

But he must have inhaled too much smoke. He was getting confused. He didn’t know where right or left was, didn’t know where the doors were, felt as though he couldn’t breathe at all.

Irritants hit his eyes and the back of his throat. He could barely open his eyelids. He retched and took a deep breath, in involuntary reaction. The smoke he inhaled was disorientating, dizzying. He went down on his knees. He knew he was giving way to the carbon monoxide, but he was unable to fight.

Now he saw shadows in the smoke, flickering and shimmering, dancing and shuddering, fading in and out. Was that a figure outlined against the flames? The smoke was black and thick and choking. Boards over the windows were burning.

Glass shattered, and a blast of air exploded the flames into a great roaring blaze, a wild beast devouring the furniture, ripping up the floor, stripping paper from the walls. A sheet of fire rolled across the ceiling and engulfed the room.

‘Liz!’

His voice came as a feeble croak, and there was no answer.