CHAPTER TWENTY
JEFFRIES FLED THE way he had come, diving out past Chandar under a fusillade of bullets from Atkins. Seconds later, there was an explosion as he set a off a grenade bringing the entrance down and cutting off any pursuit. Clouds of dust and debris billowed into the room, mixing with the rising gas and blocking the doorway. The fires they passed had spread and the entrance they came in by was now ablaze and impassable. Everson and the others were trapped.
To Atkins it smelt just like the trenches again and he almost gagged. Shouldering his rifle, he dashed over to Edith who was on all fours, gasping for breath, a deadly green tide lapping about her hands and feet. Atkins pulled her to her feet before rifling through the pile of equipment. The Chatts must have taken a gas hood or two, but try as he might he couldn’t find one. He turned around in a panic to see her giving him a pleading look as the gas, still pouring from the cylinders, began to rise around them. There was nothing else for it. He undid the bag around his neck, took out his own gas hood and pushed the stiffened flannel into her hands.
“Mouthpiece between your teeth. Tuck it into your collar and remember, in through the nose, out through the mouth,” Atkins explained as he guided her to the wall where Lieutenant Everson lay slumped. His eyes scanned the room. The only way out was a vent hole in the wall.
The stench of chlorine began to sting his nostrils and he coughed thickly as he levered the Lieutenant to his feet.
“It’s all right, Atkins. He just got me in the shoulder,” said Everson through a grimace, a dark stain spreading over the arm of his tunic.
“Gas, sir. You need to get your hood on,” he said, unbuckling the officer’s canvas bag and pulling out the contraption. Everson pulled it over his head with his good arm.
“The air shaft looks to be our only way out,” said Atkins. Linking his fingers, he boosted Everson up to the hole. Once he was in, Atkins was about to do the same for Edith, when he noticed the state of her now torn and ripped uniform. Embarrassed at the sight of her stockings he averted his eyes and caught sight of a pair of part-worn khaki trousers that he had scattered from one of the piles. He picked them up and offered them to her. She took them and he turned away as she stepped into them and tore a strip from the remains of her dress to use as a belt. “I’m ready,” she enunciated from inside her gas hood, tapping him on the shoulder.
He boosted her up on his hands and she disappeared into the vent.
The gas was thickening rapidly now, swirling in the rising currents of heated air from the blazing chamber next door. Atkins began to cough. Christ. This was no way to die. Something sprang into his mind from his early days in training. He pulled out his handkerchief, unbuttoned his fly and fished about inside. Thank God he was scared enough. After a brief moment when he thought he couldn’t, he managed to pee on the cloth, rung it out and, blanching slightly, tied it over his nose and mouth as he went back to look for Ketch in the rapidly thickening lethal mist.
“Ketch!” he cried.
He began wafting an arm about in front of him, disturbing the gas, creating eddies that swirled sullenly apart. He spied Ketch slumped awkwardly on the floor by the chlorine cylinders, a broadening stain on his tunic, one hand clutching weakly at his throat, Atkins knelt beside him. Ketch attempted to smile when he saw him, but produced nothing more than an ugly snarl, as if it were sheer vitriol that was keeping him alive.
“Bastard’s done for me,” he gasped. “You could let me die here with our secret. Nobody else would know. But you can’t, can you? That would mean you were really were a bad person. And you’re desperate to prove yourself otherwise, aren’t you?”
“Let me help you.”
Ketch coughed again and grinned through the blood and the green foam that began to froth at the corners of his mouth. “You can’t help me now, Atkins.”
“I can! We can get out of here.” He put his arms under Ketch’s armpits and began to lift him but the corporal retched and coughed, his face beginning to blacken from exposure to the gas. “Ketch!”
The corporal clawed at his throat as the chlorine reacted with the moisture inside his lungs. His eyes widened with terror. He began to kick and thrash, reeling around the floor, gasping for a life-saving breath that would never come. It was all Atkins could do to hold him.
“Atkins…” he gurgled, “one… thing…”
“What?”
“…She’s… pregnant…”
“Who?’ he asked, before he realised. Flora.
“S’you in hlll…” gurgled Ketch, his back arching as he patted his tunic pocket and his last breath bubbled up out of him, leaving a satisfied sneer etched on his face.
“Ketch! Ketch!”
Coughing and spluttering now, his own eyes watering, Atkins shook the corporal’s body. Unbidden he felt Flora’s lips on his; insistent, soft, yielding. He could taste the salt of her tears as they lost themselves in a rising urgency that, for a moment, washed away the grief; fingers fumbling at buttons and petticoats by the light of the parlour fire. Even as he recalled the moment, he tore open Ketch’s tunic and rummaged through the pockets. Inside Ketch’s pay book, he found a letter, addressed to himself in Flora’s own hand. It had been opened. The bastard! How long had he had it? He quickly shoved it inside his own tunic. Please God, let him not have told anyone else.
He took Ketch’s gas hood from its bag and rolled it down over his head in place of the urine-sodden cloth. As he headed back to the vent, he passed the Chatt wheezing for breath in the rising chlorine. He was going to leave the disgusting thing to its fate, but overcome with grief and remorse he took pity on it, if only to prove to himself that he was a good person. He squatted down to lift it up. The creature attempted to scuttle back against the wall, hissing, its mouth palps fluttering briefly with the force of the exhalation. As he put it over his shoulder it protested weakly, like a drowsy wasp in the first chill of autumn.
The blaze from the adjacent room was beginning to spread now. The encroaching flames cast surreal shadows on the rising chlorine fog. Atkins hoisted the Chatt up and fed it into the vent above his head, then took several steps back and ran at the wall, leaping up towards the hole and catching its lip. He pulled himself up into the shaft and found himself looking at the Chatt.
“Why?” it asked.
“Because it’s the right thing to do. Because I am a good man. We’re not all like Jeffries. And because no one deserves a death like that. We have to move.”
The shaft angled down steeply and Atkins could feel a strong, cold draught blowing over him as they slid down for what seemed a long way. The Chatt in front of him suddenly dropped and Atkins found himself sliding out of the vent and falling to land heavily below.
“Steady, Atkins,” said Everson, helping him as he climbed to his feet. Atkins pulled off his gas hood to see Edith looking nervously at the Chatt, who cowered against the wall of the passage.
“Shouldn’t you shoot it?”
“No, Bell, I don’t think so,” said Everson, wincing with pain from his shoulder wound.
One of her eyes was starting to puff up and bruises were blooming on her cheeks. Her hair was in complete disarray. She looked like some kind of wild woman. Atkins felt a surge of anger at what Jeffries had done to her, immediately followed by self-recrimination. Was he really any better? Oh Flora, what had he done? His whole world had been turned upside down. Again. If she was pregnant, then it wasn’t going to be hard for anyone to work out it couldn’t be William’s child. She would have to bear the barrage of gossip, the barbed comments, the withering fire of disapproving glances and the machine gun stuttering of tutting. And she would have to bear it alone.