An enormous boom shook the parked ambulance.
“Oh, my God,” Fairchild said. “That was nearly on top of us.” She leaned forward to turn the ignition and start the ambulance’s bells. “You don’t think it hit the ambulance post, do you?”
“No, it was nearer than that.”
It was. The rocket had fallen just off the high street they’d driven through only minutes before, smashing shops and stores. At the near end, an estate agent’s was still recognizable, and at the other the marquee of a cinema stood at an awkward angle. Fires burned here and there among the wreckage.
Good, Mary thought. At least we’ll have light to see by. She wished she’d worn her coveralls and boots instead of her skirted uniform, since it looked like they were the first ones here and were going to have to clamber over the wreckage looking for victims.
Fairchild drove the ambulance as close to the wreckage as she could and parked, and they scrambled out. “At least we’ve plenty of bandages,” she said. “I’ll go find a telephone and ring the post.”
“Good, though I should imagine the post heard the explosion.” Mary put on her helmet and fastened the strap. “I’ll go see if there are casualties in the cinema.”
“It doesn’t show films on Wednesday,” Fairchild said. “I know because Reed and I came down to see Random Harvest Wednesday last, and it was shut. And none of these shops would have been open at this time of night, so perhaps there won’t have been any casualties.” She ran off to find a phone box, and Mary pulled on her gumboots and started through the wreckage, hoping Fairchild was right.
Halfway down the street she thought she heard a voice. She stopped, listening, but she couldn’t hear anything for Fairchild’s hurrying back toward her, dislodging bricks and chunks of mortar as she came. “I notified Croydon,” she reported. “Have you found any—?”
“Shh. I thought I heard something.”
They listened.
“Jeppers!” Mary heard a man’s voice call from somewhere at the other end of the destroyed area.
“It came from over there,” Fairchild said, pointing, and began picking her way through the rubble.
Mary followed, stopping every few feet to look about her. She’d been wrong about the fires. They gave off only enough light to maneuver by, not enough to see the hazards in her way or to make out more than silhouettes, and the flickering flames made her think she saw movement where there wasn’t any.
Midway across, Mary thought she heard the man again. She stopped, listening, and then called, “Where are you?”
“Over here.” The voice was so faint she could scarcely hear it.
“Keep talking.”
“Over …” He went off into a spasm of coughing.
Which she could hear. “Fairchild, he’s this way!” she called, and set off toward the sound, picking her way over the tangle of bricks and broken wood.
The coughing stopped. “Where are you?” she called again.
“Here he is!” Fairchild called from several yards off, and then, as Mary clambered over to her, “I found him.”
She was bending over a dark form, but she straightened as Mary reached her. “He’s dead.”
“Are you certain?” Mary said. It was so dark, Fairchild might have made a mistake. She squatted down next to the body.
Not body. Half a body. The man had been sliced in two. Which meant he couldn’t have been the one coughing. “There’s another one here somewhere,” she told Fairchild. “You take that area over there, and I’ll look over here.” She walked back the way she’d come, calling, “Where are you? If you can hear us, make a sound,”
and then waiting, listening for the slightest sound before moving on again.
She stepped carefully over a broken window. A large black object lay on its side next to it. What is that? Mary wondered. A piano? No, it was far too large, and there was paper tangled in it and lying in drifts all round it. It’s a printing press, she thought. This must have been a newspaper office, and saw an arm.
Let’s hope it isn’t only an arm, she thought, scrambling over to it. Or that the rest of him isn’t under that printing press.
It wasn’t. The man lay next to it, and the reason she hadn’t been able to see him was that he was covered in newspapers, and his face was so white and so spattered with blood—which looked black in the orange light from the fires—that it was barely recognizable as a face.
He’s dead as well, she thought, squatting down next to him, but his chest was rising and falling. And as she bent closer, she saw that the white was from plaster dust, which he was caked with. “Are you all right?” she asked, but he didn’t respond. “You mustn’t worry. We’ll get you out of here straightaway. Fairchild!” she called into the darkness. “Over here!”
She tried to see what the blood was from, wishing she had her pocket torch. She could scarcely see him in the reddish firelight. But she could see the blood. It was all over his coat and the newspapers covering him. “I need a light!” she shouted, and began brushing the newspapers aside, looking for the wound that had to be there.
She opened his coat. There was no blood on his shirt.
It’s someone else’s blood, she thought, and then remembered the printing press. She touched the black on his coat and then brought her fingers up to her nose. Ink.
It must have splattered on him when the V-1 hit.
But even if it wasn’t blood, he was clearly injured. Perhaps the blast only knocked him unconscious, she thought
