A Million More Tomorrows

Chapter 17

Part V:

One Day Left

CHAPTER 17

He slept painfully but fully, arms tucked straight down along the length of his sides, body arced towards the tilt of the row of train chairs. He was limp and useless there – like a fish on a muddy bank, drowning in oxygen. It was far too warm and he wondered if the end of the world had arrived early. He half hoped that he'd slept a day too long but the thought soon quietened, dissipating at the same rate that a low humming became louder. He opened his eyes. Tiny ghosts danced through red air above him, eased around the luggage rack by the whims of an abnormal heat pulsing against the side of the train. The warmth had roused him from an embryonic sleep in which he had not suffered a single dream, and as the slumber ebbed away a greater sense of awareness crept in. Something was on fire.

Paul sat up and stared at the film of light covering the windows until everything became terrifyingly clear. The platform's narrow stretch of concrete and the train's outer chassis were acting as the only buffer between him and the white-hot husk of Clapham Junction station; it was completely ablaze. A crown of fire engulfed the entire building, so close that a quivering wall of orange masked every window on the train, as if they had been painted that way. Fiery spears popped and exploded out of cracks in the station roof, over doors and through now windowless walls. Paul brought himself to his feet in a hurry, squinting through the smell of melting iron and steel which hung thick and gluey at eye-level. One side of his face was ready to melt off the bone.

The carriage's casing was absorbing the heat, distributing it quickly and evenly around the entire room like lit filament. Some 15 feet away a small clap of fire burst free from the body of flame and splayed itself over newly exposed wires in a fusebox on the station's outer wall. The resulting bang rocked the train on its arches. Paul grabbed hold of the handles on a nearby chair, stumbled to the doors and yanked open the furthest one from the inferno. He sat himself down on the floor of the carriage, remarking at how much faster he had managed to do so than on the platform at High Barnet three days prior, and thrust his body down onto the tracks. Then he moved with primal force, as quickly as his heart would allow, until he was far enough away that the heat from the fire no longer curled and singed the hairs on his neck.

It was only once the air felt naturally cool again that he brought himself to a stop to look at the damage he had narrowly escaped from. Nothing of the station could be seen through the fire now; it was dissolving somewhere within a tube of waving gold, under a nebula of black smog that rose so high it jostled for a place in the clouds. Something about its dancing looked strangely familiar, but he could not remember what or why. Beyond this plume of ink the outside world appeared unusually bright. Each of the last few days had been kept pristine under a slightly whiter sky than the day before, until today's culmination in which no trace of blueness bothered to blot any corner of the horizon. It was as if the sky had yet to be projected upon its screen. It narrowed Paul's pupils.

Now on the track, he faced what he believed to be south and hoped blindly that the curve of the line would take him somewhere near where he needed to be, and that there would then be some way to get off and onto the road. Once again he found himself stumbling through and along the gaps between the railway sleepers, pushing the end of his prosthesis into the gravel on repeat, wondering how he had made such a simple journey so complicated. The final dregs of his adrenaline beat around the lines beneath his skin and, though he had no crutch to steady his stride, he sheared the yards away quickly, the rumble of fire still drumming in the distance behind him. Within half an hour he had reached a series of three road bridges. They crossed over the recessed group of tracks like the rusted prongs of a bent fork, each bridge nestling into the top of a grassy bank on either side – hills that climbed from track level to meet the road above. It was the third and furthest of these which provided Paul with a way up and out. He limped to the far side of the bridge's left bank, and, to his relief, saw a gate at the top of the hill that would grant access to the world at street level.