'Hoke, come on, tell us what we should do.' Cissie was tugging at my jacket.
I mentally cursed them for coining into my life, even though they'd saved it 'We could wait them out,' I said finally, 'or we could go into the tunnels.'
'No!' Muriel's reaction had a lick of hysteria to it 'We can't go any further. I won't. The platforms...'
We all knew what she meant
'I'm with her,' Cissie agreed. 'God, this is bad enough, but what else could be in there?' She indicated the platform entrance.
Only plenty more of the same, I was about to say when something happened that took away any choice.
From a distance, up the stairs and back along the passageway, there came the sound of breaking glass instantly followed by a kind of muffled whoomph. Then another same sound, smashed glass followed by that shushed explosion of air. As soon as a bright orange glow lit up the top of the stairs I knew what those sounds were.
'They're using gasoline bombs,' I said almost to myself.
The Blackshirts had tried to flush me out before with these home-made bombs of bottles filled with fuel, a rag stuck into the neck, then set alight, but I'd always been lucky - and too fast. They'd either made them quickly, scavenging bottles from the street or shops, syphoning off gasoline from fuel tanks of vehicles, or they'd brought the cocktails ready-made with them. I thought I heard their taunts, their voices carrying easily down the funnel of the stairway, but the fire had already taken on its own life, passing from one dried husk-like body to the next, incinerating each one as it went along, its muffled roar coming our way. Popping sounds reached us, sharp, explosive reports, as bones cracked and gases ignited. The fire had an abundance of fuel to feed on, a trail of kindling that led directly to us.
'Okay, there's your answer,' I told them. 'We can't stay here.'
'But where can we go?' Cissie wasn't fooling anybody -we all knew where.
'Like I said, into the tunnels.'
I turned away, tired of the argument It was their decision now.
A huge billow of black smoke swept down the stairs towards us and as I glanced up I saw the flames were not far behind. Reflections flickered on the walls and waves of heat washed over us. Almost as an afterthought I checked the big enamel route map at our backs, the flashlight hardly necessary, and it told me what I needed to know. The girls began coughing as more smoke spilled down the stairway, rolling off the ceiling and curling down the walls.
'Put your masks back on,' I ordered, and they did as they were told, following me as I backed out onto the platform. But the German had dropped his mask on the stairs and instead of finding another - there were plenty of masked corpses around us - he went back to retrieve it. A few strides took him halfway up the stairs, and as he grabbed it the first real flames appeared above him. Bodies around him appeared to twitch and flinch in the unstable light as if the advancing firestorm was making them uneasy. An illusion, though; macabre, and scary, but no more than a trick of the light. Their clothes began to smoulder.
I gave Stern a warning shout, but it was already too late. As he straightened, pulling on the gas mask as he did so, there was an explosion of fire behind him, trapped gases and flammable material joining forces to give the inferno a special boost. I'm not sure if the German jumped instinctively, or the blast of scorching air threw him forward, but suddenly he was airborne, arms outstretched, back arched.
He was lucky - the flames never got the chance to engulf him completely. He landed on the floor, his jacket alight, and I rushed forward to roll him over, pinning him against the tiles and smothering the flames. Stern didn't struggle; he seemed to know exactly what I was doing. If he hadn't been a Kraut, I might have admired his nerve.
The heat from the stairs was unbearable as I dragged him over bodies out onto the platform, the flames above us spreading under the roof, rolling down like a raging river of fire, the ceiling its bed, its torrent of boiling yellows and reds and blacks fierce enough to scorch the eyeballs. It had a kind of terrifying beauty as it hit the wall at the bottom of the stairs and curled to the floor, devouring the dead things lying there before rearing up again in a huge fireball that ballooned outwards.
'Get back! ' I yelled, and we all hit the deck together as the flames poured out at us.
I felt my hair crackle as I sprawled among the corpses filling the platform. Smoke created its own menace, blinding and choking, billowing from the opening as the flames retreated for the moment, falling back to consolidate, to feed before progressing. Now it was Stern helping me, pulling me up and away from the worst of the smoke, his mask giving him the advantage. I was retching, lungs filled with the black stuff, eyes streaming, and I felt other hands grab me.
A gas mask was tugged over my head and, although still coughing smoke dust, I caught the faint whiff of old disinfectant under the stink of rubber. I blinked my eyes rapidly and saw the blurred image of Cissie standing in front of me. She was pointing down the platform, her other hand on my arm, and I nodded in an exaggerated way, bowing my shoulders as well as my head. We moved off awkwardly, me still limping, going as fast as we could, like survivors of a subterranean battlefield, the conflict long over, only smoke and the dead left behind. We passed by cots pushed close to the curved platform wall, and bedding laid out on the concrete floor itself. Among those rumpled rags, filling every space, was all kinds of domestic stuff: kettles, fold-away chairs, suitcases, books, even a wind-up gramophone. A small wooden clotheshorse still stood, its hanging rags once a screen for some modest family and probably, like other carefully placed items along the platform, a marker for regular users of the shelter, a sign of territorial claim. A kid's doll, eyes wide as if still terrorized by the carnage around it. A crushed bowler hat a single boot lying on its side, a pair of spectacles, lenses still intact. There were even one or two tiny portable gas or paraffin cookers, the kind used for 'brew-ups' or warming babies' bottles, smuggled in by families who enjoyed their home comforts. An accordion propped up against a cot bed, a baby's gas mask, oversized and ugly, like a deep-sea diver's helmet, lying empty on a blanket next to it.
Newspapers strewn across huddled bodies, faded headlines as irrelevant as the advertisements for gin or Brylcreem they shared the page with.
And the corpses. Avoiding them, stumbling over them, pulling them aside when they blocked our way.
Thousands of them it seemed, there in the flickering light. Empty shells that had once been living beings, most of these people fleeing here when the rockets fell from the skies and others around them - in the streets, the cafes, the offices, the buses and trams and cars - started dying before their eyes. A good many had probably neither seen nor heard the vengeance weapons fell, but the Blitz had conditioned them to seek shelter whenever the sirens sounded. Yet when they did, when they sought refuge in the street shelters, the park trenches, and even deep down in the subways, the Blood Death had followed, hunted them out, touching every one and poisoning their life's flow so that it hardened, congealed, became like concrete in their veins.
Only a special few escaping. Others living on, but for a limited time; succumbing, just taking longer to do so.
We hurried through all this, each of us holding on to our emotions, following the dim white safety lines painted along the platforms, four feet and eight feet from the edge, all of us observing but cold to the horror, more than just panic overriding our compassion. Skull faces, eyes long since liquefied, the skin tight and dark like stretched parchment, torn in places - we saw it all, but quickly learned to focus on nothing.