'Leave the money on the counter,' he called back to the
motorist who had left his car and was holding the pump nozzle, studying it as though not sure of its function.
Howard looked right and left. Any building would do, anything with a basement. Wasn't that what they told you? Get downstairs. Paint your windows white, barricade yourself in with sandbags, get into the cellar, build a shelter, stock yourself up with food and water and stay down there until the all-clear sounded. All in the matter of four or five minutes. Oh Christ, if he only had the paint!
He reached a pub doorway. That would do, they had a big cellar, had to store the beer. He pushed at the door, but it did not budge. Bloody hell, they couldn't close, it wasn't calling-time yet! He tried the public bar and banged at the glass in frustration when he found this door, too, was locked tight.
'Bastards!' he screamed, then turned to look back at his garage. The motorist seemed to have found out how to work the pump.
Howard cursed himself for having wasted time emptying the till. Edie was always calling him tight-bloody- fisted; maybe she was right. He should have been tucked away in some nice little basement by now. Still, it could be a false alarm. Nothing had happened yet. Yeah, that was it, he reassured himself. They'd made a mistake, bloody idiots. If anything was going to happen, it would have before now. He checked his watch and shook it. Couldn't have stopped, could it? Seemed a long time since the sirens had started. He grinned. What a mug! He'd acted like everyone else, running, panicking, telling God he was sorry. He tried to chuckle, but it came out as a choking sound.
Well, I'll tell you what, matey, you're gonna pay for that petrol. Howard began to walk back towards his garage, his little empire, shaking his head in resigned bemusement at the people rushing by. His two attendants, who had fled without his authority as soon as they had heard the sirens, were in for a rollicking when they returned. Huh! He could just see their sheep's faces now.
The motorist was climbing back into his car.
'Hold up, Chief!' Howard called. ‘You owe me ...'
The blinding flash stopped his words. His legs felt suddenly weak and his bowels very watery. 'Oh no
...' he began to moan as he realized it actually was the real thing, there had been no mistake; then he, his garage, and the motorist, were scorched by the heat. The petrol tanks, even though they were below street level, blew instantly and Howard's and the motorist's bodies - as well as the bodies of everyone around them - were seared to the bones.
And even those hurled through the air began to burn.
Jeanette (real name Brenda) stared out from the eighth-floor window of the London Hilton, her gaze upon the vast expanse of greenery below. She casually lit the cigarette dangling from a corner of her lipstick-smeared lips while the Arab and his two younger male companions scrabbled around the suite for their clothes - the older man for his pure white robes, the other two for their sharply-cut European suits.
The buggers deserve to panic, she thought without too much rancour, a stream of cigarette smoke escaping her clenched lips. According to the newspapers, they were the cause of all this, holding the world to ransom with their bloody precious oil, sulking at the merest diplomatic slight, doling or not doling out the stuff as the mood took them. Acting like a spoilt kid in whose house the party was going on: you can have a cake, Amanda, but you can't, Clara, 'cos I don't like you this week. Well now they'd all paid the price. The party was over.
She studied the scurrying people in the street below, the riders spurring their horses along Rotten Row, the lovers running hand-in-hand through the park. There were some, resigned like her, who were just lying down in the grass, waiting for whatever was on its way. Jeanette flinched when a pedestrian trying to cross the traffic-filled Park Lane was tossed over a car bonnet. The person - no telling whether it was a man or woman from that height - lay by the roadside, not moving and with nobody bothering to help.
At least he or she was out of it.
Behind her the Arabs were screaming at one another, pulling on trousers, shirts, the old, fat man the first to look decent because he only had his long frock to wriggle into. He was already heading for the door, the other two hopping half-undressed behind him. Fools. By the time the lift came up it would be all over. And they wouldn't get far down the stairs.
At least the sirens had stopped. They were more frightening than the thought of the oblivion to come.
Jeanette drew in on the cigarette and enjoyed the smoke filling her lungs. Forty a day and it wasn't going to kill her. Her laugh was short, sharp and almost silent. And her looks would never fade. She glanced around the empty hotel room and shook her head in disgust. They lived like pigs and they copulated like pigs. How would they die? No prizes.
Still, she'd met a few on her Park Lane beat who were real gentlemen, who treated her with respect and a certain amount of gentleness. They were a bonus. These days she had learned to be less choosy.
Her best years, although they hadn't fulfilled the ambition, were what she termed the 'up-and-down years'. It had worked for a celebrated but unrated actress acquaintance of hers, a woman only famous for being famous, for being recognized because of the big wheelers she slept with. The strategy had landed that particular lady with a millionaire husband, who had soon divorced her, making the venture highly profitable. Countless pop stars and name photographers had added to her notoriety and bank balance. The technique was simple, although it could prove expensive.
The hotel Jeanette had used (as had her 'actress' friend) was further along Park Lane, its flavour more English than the Hilton. She had booked into the cheapest room possible (which wasn't cheap) and spent most afternoons and evenings riding the elevators. Down the guest lift (from the top) through the huge reception area or lounge, a short walk round the block to the service lifts, up to the top again, then back down via the guest lift.
She nearly always scored when just one man, or maybe two, occupied the elevator with her. A small, shy smile from them, a word about the weather, an invitation to take tea, or a drink in the bar, perhaps dinner, and that was it. She was home and dry. Of course it didn't take long for the hotel staff to cotton on, but any such establishment, no matter how high-class, allowed a certain amount of licence in such things. So long as there was no trouble, the hookers weren't obvious, no money went missing, the management turned a blind (yet watchful) eye. Jeanette had never got the live one, though. Plenty of almosts, but never the McCoy. Now it was just a little bit too late; her looks were not as fresh, the bait not as succulent. Hence the Park Lane/Mayfair 'beat'. Assignments were often made by phone, but nowadays it paid to pound the pavement. She could do without these sessions with three or more participants, though; they were a little too exhausting.
She turned back to the window, pressing her forehead against the cool glass. The cries from those below drifted up and her eyes began to moisten. Is this all it amounted to? Is this where it all led? Eight floors up in a hotel bedroom, naked as the day I was born, sore from the abuse to every orifice in my body by the three clients. Some climax, some joke.
Jeanette pushed herself off the window pane, stubbing out the cigarette on the glass. Maybe there was something better waiting. Maybe there was nothing. Well, even that was better.
She tried to blink when the world became a white flash, but her retinas had already shrivelled to nothing. And her body and the glass had fused into one as the building fell backwards.
As the heat wave spread out from the rising fireball, everything flammable and any lightweight material burst into flame. The scorching heat tore through the streets, melting solids, incinerating people or charring them to black crisps, killing every exposed living thing within a radius of three miles. Within seconds, the blast wave, travelling at the speed of sound and accompanied by winds of up to two hundred miles an hour, followed.
Buildings crumbled, the debris released as deadly missiles. Glass flowed with the winds in millions of slicing shards. Vehicles - cars, buses, anything not secured to the ground - were tossed into the air like windblown leaves, falling to crush and maim. People were luted from their feet and thrown into the sides of collapsing buildings. Intense
blast pressure ruptured lungs, eardrums and internal organs. Lamp standards became javelins of concrete or metal. Broken electricity cables became dancing snakes of death. Water mains burst and became fountains of bubbling steam. Gas mains became part of the overall explosion. Everything became part of the unleashed
