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The screeching, heard clearly over the background roar, was caused by the concrete slab tearing deep score marks in the supporting wall.

His torso was out and he curled up his knees, bringing his feet clear as the coffin lid all but closed.

He scrambled to his feet, pulling his companion with him, hurrying on, making for the wide doorway that was the entrance to the office block. The big glass double doors they had thrown themselves through only minutes earlier had been completely shattered by the blast; walls on either side of the hallway were beginning to crack.

They staggered out into the shattered, devastated world. Culver did not take time to look around; he wanted to be as far away as possible from the collapsing building. The blind man was limping, clinging to him, as though afraid he would be left behind.

Vehicles - buses, cars, lorries, taxis - lay scattered, disarranged before them. Some were overturned, some just wildly angled; many rested on the roofs or bonnets of others. Culver quickly found a path through the tangled metal, climbing between locked bumpers, sliding over bonnets, dragging his companion with him. They finally collapsed behind a black taxi, half the driver's still body thrusting through the shattered windscreen.

They gulped in mouthfuls of dust and smoke-filled air, shoulders and chests heaving, bodies battered and bleeding, their clothes torn and grimed with dirt. They heard the crumpling falling sound of the building they had just left, and it mingled with the noise of other office blocks in similar death throes. The very ground seemed to vibrate as they tumbled, their structures no more than concrete playing-cards.

As the two men began to recover from their ordeal, they became aware of the other, human, sounds all around them, a clamour that was the discordant outcry of the wounded and the dying.

The other man was looking around him as though he could see. Forcing himself to ignore anything else, Culver quickly appraised him. Although it was impossible to be sure, because of the white powdered dust that covered his clothes, he looked to be somewhere in his late forties or early fifties; his suit, dishevelled and torn though it was, indicated he was perhaps a businessman or clerk of some kind -

certainly an office worker.

Thanks for the helping hand back there.' Culver had to raise his voice to be heard.

The man turned towards him. The thanks are mutual.'

Culver could not manage a smile. 'I guess we need each other.' He spat dust from his throat. 'Let's get to this safe place you mentioned. Time's running out.'

The blind man grabbed his arm as Culver began to rise. ‘You must understand we cannot help anyone else. If we're going to survive, nothing can hinder us.'

Culver leaned heavily against the side of the taxi, flinching when he saw the jumbled corpses of its occupants. There was a child in there, a little boy no more than five or six years old, his head resting against a shoulder at an impossible angle; a woman's arm, presumably his mother's, was flung protectively across his tiny chest. A fun day out shopping? A trip across town to the cinema, a show? Perhaps even to see Daddy in his great big office. Their day had ended when the cab had been picked up and thrown through the air like some kid's toy, its weight nothing to the forces that had lifted it.

For the first time he took in the devastation and his eyes widened with the horror of it all.

The familiar London landscape, with its tall buildings both old and new, its skyscraper towers, the ancient church steeples, its old, instantly recognizable landmarks, no longer existed. Fires raged everywhere. Ironically, he realized, the whole city could have been one vast conflagration had not the blast itself extinguished many of the blazes caused by the heat wave and fireball. The skies overhead were black, a vast turbulent cloud hanging low over the city. A spiralling column, the hated symbol of the holocaust, climbed into the cloud, a white stem full of unnatural forces. He looked around and for the first time understood that more than one bomb

had fallen: two rising towers to the west - one well beyond the column he had been watching - one to the north, another to the north-east, and the last to the south. Five in all. Dear God, five!

He lowered his gaze from the horizons and slammed the flat of his hand against the taxi's roof. He had witnessed the stark face of ultimate evil, the carnage of man's own sickness! The destructive force that was centuries old and inherent in every man, woman and child! God forgive us all.

People began to emerge from buildings, torn and bloody creatures, white from shock, the look of death already on their faces. They crawled, staggered, dragged themselves from their shattered refuges, some silent, some pleading, some in hysterics, but nearly all separate islands, numbed into withdrawal from others, their minds only able to cope with their own individual hurt, their own personal fate.

He closed his eyes and fought back the rage, the screaming despair. A hand tugged at his trouser leg and he looked down to see the grimy face of the sightless man.

What... what can you see?'

Culver sank to a squatting position. ‘You really don't want to know,' he said quietly.

'No, I mean the dust - is it settling?'

He silently studied the blind man for a few moments before replying. There's dust everywhere. And smoke.'

His companion rubbed at his eyelids as though they were causing him pain. 'Is it falling from above?' he asked almost impatiently.

Culver looked up and frowned. ‘Yeah, it's coming. I can see darker patches where the air is thick with it. It's drifting slow, taking its time.'

The other man scrambled to his feet. 'No time to lose, then. We must get to the shelter.'

Culver stood with him. 'What is this shelter? And who the hell are you?'

‘You'll see when - if - we get there. And my name is Alex Dealey, not that it's important at this particular point in time.'

'How do you know about this place?'

'Not now, for God's sake, man! Don't you realize the danger we're in?'

Culver shook his head, almost laughing. 'Okay, which direction?'

'East. Towards the Daily Mirror building.'

Culver looked to the east. The Mirror isn't there any more. At least, not much of it is.'

The announcement had no visible effect on Dealey. 'Just go in that direction, past the Underground station towards Holborn Circus. And we keep to the right-hand side. Are all the buildings down?'

'Not all. But most are badly damaged. All the roofs and top floors have been skimmed off. What are we looking for?'

'Let's just move; I'll tell you as we go.'

Culver took his arm and guided him through the jungle of smashed metal. A red double-decker bus lay on its side, crushing the cars beneath it. Figures were emerging from the shattered windows, faces and hands smeared with blood. Culver tried not to hear their whimpered groans.

An elderly man staggered in front of them, his mouth and eyes wide with shock. As he fell, Culver saw the whole of his back was a pincushion of glass shards.

Bodies, mostly still, lay strewn everywhere. Many were charred black. He turned his eyes away from limbs that protruded from heaped rubble and beneath overturned vehicles. His foot kicked something and he almost retched when he saw a woman's head and part of one shoulder lying there, the rest of her nowhere in sight.

Shattered glass crunched under their feet and even in the false dusk it glittered everywhere like spilled jewels. The two men skirted around a burning lorry, shielding their faces from the heat. Something fell no more than thirty yards away from them and from the squelching thump they knew it had to be a body; whether the person had jumped or accidentally fallen from a high window of one of the more intact office blocks, they did not know, nor did they care to know. They had a goal to reach, something to aim for, and neither man wanted to be distracted from their purpose. It was their only defence against the horror.