Not the End of the World (27 page)

However, this one didn’t, not to Steff. Because bombs only go bang when you’re a hundred yards away.

He remembered the pool cleaner coming through the door, carrying a bundle of tubes and brushes in both arms. She stopped to hold the door open because someone was coming up behind her. Maddy was holding on to the steel ladders at the corner of the pool, Steff kneeling down and getting ready for another shot. He looked up and saw a young woman walking urgently towards where he was crouched, a gold‐
metal staff badge on her blouse.

‘Excuse me, I’ve a message for Miss Witherson,’ she called out, halfway between him and the door from which she had emerged. He pulled the camera away from his face and gestured to the pool.

Steff felt like he was suddenly surrounded by loudness, a white noise, screaming, creaking, bending, tearing, crunching, cracking, all at once, and all amid a massive sense of force and movement. It was so total, so engulfing that he could not tell what parts he was hearing and what parts he was feeling, sounds in his ears and vibrations through his body indistinguishable. He was knocked on to his back by the jolt as the ground seemed to rear up at him, then the entire floor began to tip in the direction of the stairwell door. Except there was no stairwell door, and no stairwell either. That entire corner had disappeared, and with it gone, the rest of the rooftop terrace was now sloping into the gap. The pool cleaner, who had been assembling equipment in that area, was gone. Clouded by the dust Steff could just make out the messenger, prostrate and bloody, at the far end of the pool. Maddy had been knocked back into the middle of the water and was spluttering and wheezing as she struggled, having gone under and swallowed when the blast hit.

Then there was another shriek of surrendering metal and the floor felt like it had fallen away from beneath Steff. Another support had given at the north‐
east corner, and the terrace suddenly tipped sharply further towards it. The water in the pool rushed that way too, whipping Maddy along like she was on a rope, and spilling over the side in a voluminous wave. Maddy was flung hard against the wall but remained in the pool as the water cascaded towards the crevice, where it hit the messenger like a bulldozer, scattering her over the edge along with the sun beds and trestle tables.

Steff lay on his back, digging his heels into the plastic turf to stop himself rolling. Shock, disbelief, terror, pain, all the things that were supposed to occupy his mind failed to register. Or rather, he was aware of them, but it was as though they were going through the mind of someone else, like a TV show on a different channel in the room through the wall. He knew the show was being videotaped, and he’d be forced to view it later, at least once a night for the rest of his life, but right now he couldn’t afford to watch.

Maddy was still floating, languidly flapping an arm. The water had levelled out at an absurd angle across the pool, lapping against the bottom of the shallow end like it was a glass shore. She wasn’t going to be able to climb out of there herself.

Steff climbed up on to his knees and began to manoeuvre carefully around towards where the water was spilling over the edge, as that would be the easiest place to pull her out. There was another slight jolt, but this time the force seemed to be pushing straight downwards rather than towards the corner again. Then he heard another breaking sound.

‘Aw, in the name of fuck, this is not happening.’

There was a crack visible in the glass under the water, snaking across all the way from one side to the other and even up the walls. The entire pool was ready to split in half, and when it did, the end Steff was moving towards was going to collapse into the crevice. The contents, of course, were going to fall out like the inside of a neatly cracked egg.

Steff scrambled back around the edge of the pool and unhooked from around his waist the bum‐
bag he kept his used films in, pressing a button on the buckle and playing out the strap’s slack as far as it would go. He descended the metal ladder at the shallow end into where the water should have been, then edged down the slope. Through the glass he could see that water was pouring out of the crack on the left‐
hand side, spraying down into the lobby. He caught a glimpse of the scene below and closed his eyes, then looked straight ahead when he reopened them. He couldn’t afford to look down there, couldn’t afford to let what he had seen register.

He inched nearer the edge of the water then let his feet slip out from under him. He landed with a thump and slid into the first few inches of the chlorinated liquid.

‘Maddy,’ he shouted. ‘Grab this.’

Steff got to his feet again, waded further in and threw the bag out towards her, keeping tight hold of the strap. He was glad to have bought a bum‐
bag with a Pavarotti setting, but it still seemed an agonising distance Maddy needed to cover to reach it, striking out as she did in a dazed and feeble splashing. She got hold of the bag with one hand and pulled herself near enough to grip it with both. Then Steff began to back up, dragging her to where she could put a foot down and get enough of her body out of the water for her own weight and her wet clothes not to drag her back in. He got his hands under her armpits and pulled her backwards up the incline towards the ladder. Her eyes were half closed, unfocused, her mouth trying to form words but just dribbling pool water and emitting moans and coughs. He helped her to her feet and she grabbed the silver tubes of the ladder with either hand. Steff lifted her so that she could get a foot on the lowest rung, then got his shoulder under her bottom and nudged her upwards until she spilled her torso over the side. He lifted her legs level with the sloping floor, then she crawled clear of the edge and rolled on to her back.

Steff had just taken hold of the ladder himself when the egg cracked. There was a high‐
pitched, prolonged shattering sound, then the water was sucked down and out as the far side of the pool and what was left of the terrace swung backwards and away like a trapdoor. The resultant shudder swung Steff around on the ladder and twisted his wrists out of their grip. He spilled to the tilted and slippery floor, at the end of which there was now only a jagged edge and a sheer drop into the carnage of the lobby. He dug his heels against the slick tiles, Doc Marten Airware his only ally in a fight to the death with gravity. In the underpant‐
saving moment of relief when he became sure that he was no longer sliding nearer to the precipice, he noticed that what was left of the glass bottom was starting to dislocate from the remains of the pool’s walls.

Steff lifted one heel closer to his body and dug down with it, pushing himself back up the slope and repeating the move with the other as quickly and steadily as his panicking mind could manage, given the screeching aural accompaniment of cracking glass. Turning on to his front, he slung the bum‐
bag over the first rung of the ladder and grabbed it, pouch in left hand, strap in right, one frantic breath before the bottom of the pool fell away from the two side walls as if hinged at the near end. He felt the weight go from his feet and transfer to his hands in a sickening drop, his shoulders wrenched painfully by the sudden jerk. Steff’s body was swung inwards against the torn seam where the pool’s floor had detached from the walls, a glass wedge finding its way easily into his right arm and breaking off.

The giant glass slab, formerly the bottom of the swimming pool, had swung slowly backwards until it was almost plumb with the only wall it remained attached to. Then it dropped off completely. There was a reverberating crash from below as it hit the concourse. Short of another bomb, it was about the only sound loud enough to drown the screaming.

Steff could handle the agony in his upper arm as long as he didn’t look at it, but he could feel his grip weakening, and stoicism wouldn’t be able to compensate for that. He braced himself for the pain then took hold of both ends of his lifeline with his right hand for the moment required to stretch upwards and sling his left arm over the plastic rung. He gripped his left wrist with his right hand until he was steady, then freed up his right hand again to loop the bum‐
bag over the next rung and fasten it like a harness.

Suspended there, catching his breath, he could finally see the extent of the damage. In those first confused moments, given his location his initial thoughts had been of an earthquake, but if he needed any confirmation of what had really happened, it was horrifyingly apparent. The hotel’s landmark canopy was crippled around the north‐
east corner, its vast panes disintegrated and its steel spokes buckled and broken. The remains of the other part of the swimming pool and terrace still dangled on the far side of the hole, folded over like the lid of a cardboard box pushed in on itself.

While below.

Blood ran off Steff’s elbow and splashed on to his shoes as they hung in the air above the carnage. Drops in the ocean. He was a hundred feet above but he could still make out the red. Not even the deluge from the shattered pool could wash away that much blood.

Explosives, glass and gravity. A crowded concourse.

‘There is a God,’ he muttered, some deeply sick synaptic sub‐
station in his brain throwing in some sarcasm, like the situation wasn’t quite bad enough. Or maybe it was trying to cheer him up.

There is a God. Fucking stupid expression. People always said it when their wishes were granted, when all went well, an egotistical notion that their overseeing deity had recognised their desires and smiled specifically upon them. Funny, nobody ever said it when something went wrong, nobody ever took the corresponding view that their overseeing deity had recognised what a prick they were and reached, smiling, for the thunderbolts. Nobody ever looked at the cinders of their razed house, or stood over the grave of their dead relative, and said: ‘There is a God. I’ve been a selfish wanker recently, and I thoroughly deserved that.’

Nobody ever dangled precariously by one hand, fuck knew how high, over a blood‐
drenched scene of carnage and destruction, racked with pain, fear and shock, and said: ‘There is a God.’ Not until today, anyway, and that didn’t count because the bloke concerned didn’t mean it.

He twisted the strap in his right hand and tried to tug his body upwards, but the limb just wasn’t up to it, and he succeeded only in spinning himself around 180 degrees. He could see Maddy again now, and this time she had an unfocused eye open. She coughed and wiped some blood‐
matted hair from her face, then seemed to remember where she was and who he was.

‘Stephen,’ she mouthed hoarsely, then began crawling towards the edge. Time for her to return the compliment.

Steff felt the earliest stirrings of relief. It left a tiny space in his furiously cluttered mind for thoughts unrelated to gravity and the vast distance between his feet and the floor. The first was of her face, and the now shortened odds that he was on for at least a wee snog once they were through this. The next was that it would have to wait until he had found and thoroughly leathered whoever was responsible for the bomb.

Larry recoiled from the earpiece as a sound like a massively amplified static crackle pierced the right half of his skull. A couple of seconds later there was a bang from outside that passed through his internal organs like a shock wave.

He put out the emergency call himself, telling every ambulance and paramedic in the area to get down to the Pacific Vista stat, appending a warning to the news crews who would be monitoring the police bands that ‘if anyone sees one of your vans in front or in the way of an ambulance, you’ll be goin’ home in one’.

Bannon strode confidently into the centre of the station, silencing the hubbub, dispensing orders. Cops only panic when they’ve got time to panic, he’d once told Larry. Keep ’em busy and you’ll keep ’em calm.

‘Freeman,’ he said, ‘your job is to locate the girl and bring her in before the media get wise to what the real story is here. Zabriski, you get down there and organise the cordons. I want the streets blocked off to traffic between the Vista and St Mark’s to the north, SM Mercy to the East. I want clear corridors for those ambulances and I don’t care who gets pissed off in the process. Baker, I want you to liaise with the bomb squad, get them in there looking for whatever’s left of the device, I don’t care if the building’s still on fire …’

By that point Larry was walking swiftly out of the main doors.

Maddy took hold of the strap and helped Steff climb out on to the terrace, then they made their way to where the slope levelled out near the opposite corner. They sat down shakily, side by side on a sun lounger.

Steff said nothing, just stared into space. He could feel now how buggered up his system was. He didn’t know whether he was about to shit, puke, faint or spontaneously combust. The screaming below had given way to shouting and sirens, and it was all starting to sound further and further away. He could see the yawning gash in the roof, the jagged bite taken out of the building, the twisted and broken girders jutting accusingly at the sky.

The motion stilled, the dust blown away on the breeze, the roof was starting to look like it had always been that way, as though the pair of them might have climbed up here to see this radical piece of architectural sculpture. That was when he knew it was over; whatever it had been, it was over.

Steff looked at his watch but didn’t know why. He didn’t need to know the time; maybe he needed to know that time was still passing. That it was still the same day, that the world was still turning, that two blocks away there were people in an office who heard a distant bang, looked up from their computers for two seconds, then got back to work.

‘The pool cleaner? That woman?’ Maddy said croakily.

Steff shook his head.

‘Jesus.’

‘You all right?’ he enquired.

‘Yeah. Got a bit groggy for a while after I hit the side of the pool. I think I’m okay. I’m gonna have nightmares for the whole rest of my life, but other than that I’m cool.’

Maddy got up and walked to a low table nearby, next to which her bag still sat where she had left it. One of Steff’s cameras lay on the ground a few feet away. She retrieved that too and handed it to him as she sat back down. The object looked irrelevant in his hand for a few moments. Then he remembered what it was for – what he was for – and pointed it at the damage, but the film had run out. It had auto‐
repeated until the roll was finished. He rewound it and popped it into his pocket for safekeeping. It was either going to win him a mantelpiece full of awards or there’d be twenty‐
odd shots of a blurred floor‐
tile. Probably the latter.