are you hiding in here?’
It was completely silent.
‘I really don’t think she’s here,’ he said. ‘I’ll just take a quick look in the fermenting room. You lot stay there, please.’
He stepped across to the doorway leading to the next room. Jenny could hear Leona’s trembling breath. Knowing what she was thinking; they were wasting precious time down here, she could be anywhere on the rigs, perhaps having tripped over the lip of a bulkhead, or fallen off the edge of a Portakabin and broken a bone on the deck below. A myriad of unforgiving hard and rusty metal edges for a child to come to grief on.
Jenny didn’t want to even consider the most horrifying possibility; that she’d simply slipped over the side, despite the many railings and catch-nets and grids they’d built over the years for the benefit of the young ones; there were still gaps to be found.
Slipped over the side and gone for ever. Jenny shuddered and could only hope her daughter was not entertaining the same possibility just yet.
Walter emerged from the fermenting room; a quick shake of his jowly face told Jenny there was no sign of her. Then he stopped in his tracks. He aimed the torch beam at the generator.
Jenny took an involuntary step forward into the room and out of the passageway. ‘What? Walter?’
He looked up at her, his face frozen.
‘Walter?’
‘Not another bloody step!’ he hissed.
Behind her Jenny heard Leona cry. ‘What is it?! Is she there? Hannah!’
Jenny ignored him and pushed forward through the doorway and into the generator room.
‘No!!’ Walter barked. ‘Out!! Everyone stay the fuck out!!’
‘Walter, is she there?’
‘Get out!! Get out!!’ he bellowed, stepping cautiously towards the doorway, plugged with Jenny’s form, Leona trying to push her way in behind, the others craning their necks in the passageway.
‘The feed pipe’s been detached! It’s on the floor!!’ He reached Jenny and pushed her roughly back. ‘Out, everyone out! No one goes in. I need to ventilate the room right now. There’s gas everywhere!’
‘But is she there?’ asked Jenny.
He looked at her quickly and nodded.
Oh, God.
Leona spotted the subtle gesture, intended only for Jenny. She suddenly screamed and pushed her mother out of the way to get through the narrow door and into the room.
‘NO!’ Walter grabbed her arm and wrestled her back out through the door into the passage. ‘Somebody help me!’
Several pairs of hands restrained her as she struggled and screamed and kicked. ‘No!! Let me SEE HER!!’
‘Everyone get out! GET OUT!’ yelled Walter. ‘A spark could set the lot off!’ He flapped his hands furiously at them, ushering them back down the passage. He expected Jenny to fall in beside him and assist in urging them towards the stairs at the end. Instead she slipped past him, wrenched the flashlight out of his hand and stepped into the room.
‘Jenny! NO!’ he barked. ‘Get out!!’
She swung the light towards the generator and immediately spotted one of Hannah’s bare feet protruding from behind the metal casing; a single sandal on the floor a few inches away.
Instinct overcame her and she rushed forward into the darkness to retrieve her granddaughter, not for one moment considering the risk of a spark of static, or the potential sudden disaster of anything metal hitting or scraping anything else metal; nor for one moment considering the foolishness of pumping the trigger on her wind-up torch to see her way inside as the bulb finally began to fade.
A tiny glimmer from the hand-held dynamo; a glow of light from the bulb, just enough for her to see the glassy-eyed face of her granddaughter lying amidst the cables and pipes of the generator. And just enough time for Jenny to scream as she scooped up Hannah’s lifeless body, once more triggering the dynamo in her torch to look into the pale face for any possible sign of life.
Then things flashed white. That’s all she remembered.
Chapter 20
Crash Day + 2 weeks
O2 Arena - ‘Safety Zone 4’, London
This has to stop right now.
Alan Maxwell looked up from the numbers he’d been scribbling on the dull pink cover of the back of the emergency protocol manual. He looked out of the window of his temporary base of operations - a small office above the Starbucks, overlooking the dome’s main entrance plaza. The floor was thick with lines of cots, most of them occupied. Hundreds of them. And there were hundreds more of them out of view, in the open area of the London Piazza, further round the dome’s circumference.
We