Box Set - Chapter Thirty-Five

It takes me a long time to realise I'm conscious. Sound comes back to me first. Screams, a child's cry and a police siren. The flashing red and blue lights soon follow. I can taste the ground on my lips. For the moment, I don't care. My body aches, my head throbs.

 It's the flickering of flame that raises me from my reverie.

 I push on the ground with my fingers and haul myself to my feet. People are running all around me. I close my eyes and concentrate, holding my head to try and free myself of the stabbing pain behind my eyes. Instantly they appear, bright as stars, but dark with worry and terror. I'm home, but what's happened.

 'Elle!' I call.

 There's no reply. Who could hear me above the racket?

 I'm barged from behind and I go flying forwards. The culprit runs away before I can see their face. It was clearly an accident, everyone's barging into everyone else. Some people lie on the floor, holding their knees to their chests like this will stop people trampling them. It's like I've arrived in the middle of a riot.

 The ring of fire around us is the cause of alarm. The floor is black, scorched and charred, like an explosion burst out from the epicentre and then stopped a few hundred metres away. I can make out cars on their sides. Police and fire engines who are clearly with the living. We've burst back through and caused havoc. What else is new?

 I walk forward, trying to gain a steady rhythm in my stride. I feel sick and feel the urge to sit on the floor. But I've seen a child holding a broken leg. As I blink I see them light up. She's among the dead.

 I crouch beside her. She recoils from me.

 'Where's Mr Teague?' she cries through puffy lips and streams of tears.

 'He's helping other people,' I lie. 'But I can help you.' I grasp her hand and it seems to calm her a bit.

 'It hurts,' she sobs. 'I hurt my leg.'

 'I know it does,' I sympathise. 'But you know what? You're a superhero?'

 She just cries in response. I don't think she understands.

 'No, trust me, you're a superhero. You can heal yourself.'

 I smile and nod as if this would confirm it for her.

 'It hurts really badly,' she says. 'I've never done that before.'

 'Every hero finds her powers eventually,' I say. 'Close your eyes and concentrate on getting up and walking away from here.'

Before my eyes, the girl looks below her waist and sees her legs remade. She takes on the embarrassed look of a young child who reaches the end of sobbing. She sniffs and smiles at me.

‘Where do you live?’ I ask.

‘I lived in a house with my mum,’ she replies. ‘In the desert. We died in a car crash.’

‘Can you see her?’

She looks around, worried for a second. I pray to myself that her mum made it through too.

Suddenly the girl’s face lights up. She jumps to feet on her new legs and sprints off. Her mother sees her and throws her arms open. A family reunited. I can’t believe that a child didn’t know that she could heal herself. She was dead, she had no reason to stay injured, even if her human instinct told her she was.

I get to my feet and re-enter the fray enclosed by the fire. It seems to be dwindling. I remember the scorch Teague made on Graham’s basement floor. I expect that the energy dispels and burns out quickly. I wonder if it’s even fire as the living understand it.

I can’t help but notice that the crowd of people in the circle, running and screaming and helping, has somehow shrunk. Does that mean that some people were left behind. It seems like the entire complement of children have made it through. They’re the epicentre of the screams. I almost trample a couple of them as they wheel in front of me.

Where’s Elle, where’s Yates? And Teague. The culprit of this disaster.

Isn’t that you? The accusing voice rises from the murk in my mind and I’m forced to squash it down.

This is Teague’s fault not mine.

‘Easton!’ Elle comes running towards me. ‘There’s someone trapped.’

‘How?’ I ask. ‘Can’t they jump away? Travel somewhere?’

‘They’re alive,’ she replies. ‘And no one can reach her.’

Elle points and pulls at my clothes with her other hand. I follow the imaginary line and find the group of people around an upturned car.

A woman lies on the ground underneath one of the wheels. I can only imagine her leg is mangled beyond comprehension beneath it. She screams and looks around, looking for the aid standing invisible all around her.

‘We can move it,’ I say. ‘And then hopefully someone will come for her.’

‘But the car’s huge,’ Elle says.

‘We can lever it away,’ I reply. ‘And with the bunch of us pushing it’ll move easily.’

 We move back to the group and I explain my plan. Immediately people begin picking up wreckage, bars and pieces of wood. It looks like we emerged on this side and crushed some sort of hut by the side of the road. I can only hope no one else was hurt by the explosion.

The woman screams. I can’t imagine what it must look like to her, a group of bars and planks spontaneously deciding to push a car off of her leg.

I wish I could reassure her, but I know that’s impossible, so I place my hands against the cars greasy underside and push with all my strength.

We push forward collectively and the car begins to lean backwards.

‘Again!’ I cry and we band together with fresh determination. The car rolls backwards and slams against the ashphalt with an almighty crash. I look closer for a second and see that the wheels aren’t wheels like I knew, they look plastic and smooth with no tyre to speak of. I ignore it and turn to the lady on the floor.

There’s a commotion to our right and firefighters, the living arrive to tend to her.

‘It moved!’ she screams, hysterical, quite forgetting the obvious pain in her leg. ‘I don’t understand, how did it move?’

‘Come on,’ I say. ‘Have you found Yates? Or Upson?’

‘No,’ she replies, her voice grave. ‘God, Easton I hope he didn’t fall to that other place again.’

‘I don’t think…’ I begin but a hand grabs my shoulder. I’m pulled around and I find Yates behind me.

‘Thank God you made it,’ he says and buries his face in my shoulder. Elle joins us.

‘Easton, I think people got lost on the way,’ he spits like the words are unclean in his mouth and I know he’s mad with Teague.

‘Tarquin?’ I ask. ‘Upson?’

Yates shakes his head. ‘I don’t think either of them made it.’

My head falls. Brave Upson and true Tarquin. We erupted into their lives and now, apparently we’ve ruined them, ended them, left them lost in a place I’m not even sure we can still reach.

‘Where is he?’ I growl. ‘Teague, I’m going to wring his neck.’

‘I haven’t seen him. Maybe he got left behind too?’

‘I don’t think we’re that lucky,’ Elle says. ‘I’m sure he’ll go running off to find Thacker.’

I look around the area, surveying the wreckage. The fire has almost disappeared and people from the outside are approaching to help the living and find out what’s happened.

‘Is there anyone else we can help?’

The dead in the area are standing around in small groups, they huddle together in the face of this old place made new.

‘Only find them a place to go,’ Elle answers. ‘God I’m so angry with him, how can he do this to all these people? They were leading their lives so happily there and now they have to find a place to go all over again.’

The knot of guilt in my stomach twists to uncomfortable level. I’m compelled to come clean. I persuaded him to return to his old ways. My cowardice holds my tongue.

Some people are starting to look towards us. No one from the other side, not Tarquin, no Upson, Yates’s new friends he made in the square. That’s when I see Sandra making her way towards us. She places her hands on people’s shoulders, reassuring them, putting on the face that settled me when I was looking for Teague in the first place.

‘Where is he?’ she demands quietly. ‘Have you seen him?’

I shake my head. ‘Did a disappearing act as soon as we got back.’

She places her hands on her hips and bows her head. She bites her lip. I know she’s holding something back.

‘Be honest with me, all of you,’ she says, still not looking us in the eyes. ‘Did any of you have a hand in this. I know you all wanted to leave.’

‘Sandra, no I promise!’ Elle says, stepping forward. ‘This was all Teague, we were watching him from the start, we knew he was going to try something, there was just no way of moving in time to stop him.’

Sandra nods. ‘I don’t think we can get back,’ she looks on the verge of tears. ‘Our whole way of life, dead. Cut off from us.’

‘Sandra, I’m so sorry,’ I say.

‘What are you sorry for?’

I want to say it was my fault. Teague pulled the trigger but I put the bullet in the chamber.

‘Just…we brought him there,’ I reply. ‘Or he came with us.’

‘How did you get to the town? And the desert in the first place? It wasn’t by the usual means was it? You were never looking for the beyond.’

She’s clever, cleverer than anyone I met there. Rather than cruise along with the way of life, she understood this side too, and the people who wanted to return to it. It must have been written all over us that we had no intention of going anywhere near the Great Beyond.

‘We were sent there.’ I have no problem telling Sandra the truth. She deserves it. ‘There’s a woman hiding in a house in this world. She wants to control everything, life and death and the ability to travel between.’

‘So she’s like Teague.’ I don’t know how much Sandra believes about the way we travel. We found out so much before all this business started again. We’re photons we can control ourselves. We can exit the world in one place and reform ourselves as though the material of reality is a curtain. It’s not a matter of magic, or voodoo or the macabre. We’re not ghosts of gothic tales or fairy stories. Ghosts are a matter of science.

‘They worked together and now Teague wants revenge for what she did to him. He didn’t know where she was sending him either.’

Yates taps me on the shoulder. I turn around quickly, I’m surprised he interrupted at all, Yates is always one to be polite and stand and listen. But the look on his face is one of confusion, and I know whatever he has to say can’t wait.

‘Easton, something’s changed,’ he says. ‘A lot’s changed.’

I look where he is and take a moment to register it. We’re in London, I’m sure of it. We’re near the river. I can see it twinkling in the sunshine. There are roadblocks now, with traffic behind them and I’m reminded vividly of the day I died.

The cars aren’t normal. There’s no rumble from the idling engines. Everything’s silent and all we can here is the shouts and horns of the drivers behind them who don’t yet understand what’s taken place.

‘What are they? Hybrid cars?’ I ask. ‘There were never that many before.’

Before we left for the desert hybrids were popular, but by no means the most popular choice of vehicle. I look around again. I look closer at the river and I’m not greeted by the murky grey brown of the Thames water I know well. It’s clear and blue like a tropical sea.

‘What’s happened?’ Elle says, then she notices too.

‘This place certainly has changed,’ Sandra says taking everything in, ‘I’ve been there forty years, I’m not surprised really.’

There’s a quiet inquisitive wonder in her voice. I wonder has she swallowed her anger for a moment.

I see a newsstand beyond the edge of the scorchmark, there’s just a smoking line where the fire was. A small crowd has gathered around the the newspapers and magazines, but there aren’t paper magazines. The newsstand is a stall with locked cabinets and TV screens instead. I see someone purchasing what looks like a memory stick and he slides it into a tablet device.

The TV screens show the newspapers I know. The Reader and The Daily Review. I close in on one and read the date in the top right corner of one of the screens.

‘A little bit longer than forty years,’ I say.

The date reads 2074.