"Quite a view, isn't it, Donald?" he heard someone say quietly at his shoulder. He turned to see Susan in the doorway behind him.
"Susan! What are you doing here?" He reached out to her. "Get your things together and come down to the Underground Station. Everyone's sheltering there."
Susan shook her head and stepped past him into the lounge, swaying as the wind caught her. Her hair clung in a matted net around her face, gray with dust and dirt. She still wore the cocktail dress he had last seen her in. The full skirt was torn and stained, the net underskirt trailing at her heels. One of the shoulder straps had gone and the front of the dress hung down loosely, revealing her scratched dirty skin.
He caught her as she rode a gust of air that swept out through the balcony, pulled her against himself.
"Susan, for God's sake, what are you playing at? This is no time for putting on an act."
She leaned against him, smiling wanly. "I'm not, Donald," she said mildly, "believe me. I just like to watch the wind. The whole of London 's starting to fall down. Soon it'll all be blown away, Peter and you and everybody."
She looked tired and hungry. Maitland wondered whether she had eaten. Perhaps the porter had bartered a little food for a decanter of whiskey, tried to keep her going.
Maitland put his arm around her shoulders, began to draw her into the corridor. "Come on, darling. This whole building will be coming down too in a few hours. You've got to get out of here. The Underground's the only place."
She twisted away from him, revealing a sudden unexpected strength.
"Not for me, Donald," she said evenly, stepping backward into the lounge. "You go, if you want to. I'm staying here." When he reached out to her again she stepped back quickly, only nine or ten feet from the inferno raging outside the balcony, and poised there, her hair swept back off her head.
When he hesitated, she glanced at him pityingly for a moment, then turned and looked over the rooftops. "I've been frightened for too long, Donald. Of Daddy, and you and myself. Now I'm not any longer. You go and dig a hole in the ground somewhere if you want to-"
Her eyes were away from him and Maitland dived forward and seized her arm. Clenching her teeth, she kicked out at him, her slim body uncoiling like a frantic spring. They struggled silently, then Susan wrenched away and stepped back.
"Susan!" Maitland shouted at her. For a moment she stared wildly at him, then moved away. She was only a few feet from the open window. Suddenly the wind caught her. Before he could move it whirled her back off her feet against the door frame; then spun her head over heels into the open air.
Down on his knees, Maitland saw her for an instant, catapulted through the updraught rising from the street, bounce off the roof of the Embassy building and then spin away like a smashed doll into the maze of rooftops beyond. A few feet from him the air pounded at the door frame, ripping away the masonry from the exposed edge.
For five minutes he lay on the floor, head pressed to the dull parquet, the pain and violence of Susan's death stunning his mind. Then, slowly, he pulled himself backward to the door and got to his feet.
The strength of the wind had increased significantly as he retraced his steps through the Pakistan Embassy and along the tunnel to the first-aid post. Somewhere the system of emergency tunnels had been badly breached. As he stepped through the aid post something struck the ceiling above his head, splitting the concrete and sending down a shower of dust. The building began to quiver restlessly, indicating that the roof had been breached. Soon heavy sections of masonry would come toppling through the floors, knock out the central transverse supports and allow the wind to push the walls in like cardboard hoardings.
Maitland climbed into the Sloane Street tunnel. A hundred yards away a single lamp flickered dismally, illuminating the narrow corridor of leaking sandbags, the moisture exuded from the wet cement making it resemble an abandoned sewer. Head down, he hurried along to the station entrance.
He ran down the steps, then pitched forward on his knees, banging his head against the far wall. Picking up his torch, he shone it around the floor, feeling for the steps with his hands.
Halfway down the staircase, heavy steel shutters had been sealed into place, an immovable lid of three-inch plate that cut him off from the sanctuary below.
Trying not to lose his self-control, he climbed out of the staircase and re-entered the tunnel. He switched the torch off to conserve the battery and groped along the walls, his only hope to get out of the tunnel before it collapsed and find a deep basement in one of the buildings off the street that would remain intact when its upper floors gave way.
Above him, apparently far away to the left, a dim rumbling had started. He stopped and waited as it grew nearer, flicking on the torch. Then, ten yards away, in a cataract of dust and noise, an enormous section of masonry plunged straight through the roof of the tunnel, letting in a tornado of exploding brickwork that drove Maitland backward off his feet. As he pulled himself upright the entire roof of the tunnel bulged inward, then collapsed in a vast avalanche of debris that poured in around him, shutting out the light that had burst through the first aperture.
Maitland stumbled back, shielding his head from the falling rubble. Massive tremors struck the walls of the tunnel, and its floor began to tilt in awkward jerks.
Maitland waited, ready to retreat back into the entranceway, watching the dust swirl around him in the thin beam of the torch. After a few minutes he edged forward carefully. The quake had ended, the building that had collapsed across the tunnel-Harvey Nichols, one of the big department stores-had settled itself.
A few yards ahead the tunnel ended abruptly. An entire floor section had sliced through it like a guillotine, sealing it off as cleanly and absolutely as the bulkhead ten yards behind him. Maitland started to kick away the debris around the slab, then gave up and backed away from the acrid dust.
He was trapped neatly, like a rat in a pain corridor, except that here there would be no further signals. He had a runway about ten feet long, bounded at either end by impassable walls. Disturbed for half a minute, the air quickly settled, soon was completely still.
Suddenly he felt weak, and dropped to his knees. Putting his hand up to his head, he felt blood eddying from a wide wound across the back of his scalp. He sat down and started to take out his first-aid kit, then realized he was losing consciousness. He managed to switch off the torch just as his mind began to spin and fall, plunging through the surface of a deep inky well.
Around him, the rubble began to shift again.
____________________
By now the pyramid was almost complete. Its apex overtopped the steel windshields, and a subsidiary line of shields, staked to the upper slopes of the pyramid, protected the men scaling the peak. They moved slowly, strung together by long cables, forming the last cornices and lynchstones, dragged and buffeted together like blind slaves.
Below, most of the huge graders and mixers had turned away, were laying and forming the long ramparts which led into the wind from the base of the pyramid. Ten feet thick and twice as high at their deepest point, they rose from the black earth, stretching from the body of the pyramid like the recumbent forelimbs of some headless sphinx.
Watching them from his eyrie in the pyramid, the iron-faced man christened the ramparts in his mind, calling them the gateways of the whirlwind.
5 The Scavengers
"Pat."
The girl stirred, murmured something as she lay half asleep in his arms on the old mattress against the wall, then nestled closer to him.