TWENTY-FOUR
Rachel, Suzy and Pete, held each other as the impact hit the side of the prefabricated building, the structure shifted violently but not as much as the massive light explosion outside had suggested. It was like being cocooned from the blast of a nuclear explosion. It had all of the light, a hint of the heat but almost none of the devastation.
Rachel slowly lifted her head and at first she thought it was snowing, images of post-nuclear fall-out came to her but then she realised it was in fact flakes of plaster raining down from the cracked though amazingly intact ceiling.
“I think it’s over,” she said tentatively. The light from outside was beginning to fade until the room was in near darkness again.
“We’re alive?” Pete said as he stiffly got to his feet.
“Looks that way,” Suzy said brushing plaster out of her hair. She moved to take a look out of the window but the Perspex glass was melted and had the consistency of toffee. “Christ.”
There was a strong sense of residual power in the night air when the three of them came outside. They could each hear the wind and rain, but it had not yet breached the area again which gave the scene an unreal quality to it. The paint had been stripped from the whole side of the building but other than that the structure was relatively intact.
There was an almost perfect circle of burnt ground where the eight had stood. They were gone but at its very centre laid the charred remains of a body. Rachel instinctively began to walk across the open area and over to it. She needed to see for herself that the bastard was indeed dead and that there was no way he could come back from this. She would stomp his ashes into the still dry ground herself if needs be.
She heard a cry of anguish as she approached and turn to see Suzy lent over the body of P.C Williams. She felt a flash of shame, in all the excitement she had completely forgotten the killer’s last victim. Suzy cradled her dead colleague in her arms and began sobbing.
Pete was still standing numbly by the office building he seemed to be trying to take it all in. Good luck with that Rachel thought bitterly. She couldn’t even imagine how they would all process what had happened here tonight, but that was a problem for another time.
Finally she reached the charred body, it was curled up in the foetal position and put Rachel in mind of one of the victims of the Pompeii volcano eruption you saw on TV it was so shriveled and desiccated. Hardy recognizable as the man it had once been.
She could have been standing there for a second of an hour for all she knew when the rain began falling once more. Tentatively at first, just a drop here and there as if it were testing that the natural order of physics once more ruled the area. Rachel felt it first on her face as it drifted in on a light breeze.
A smattering hit the corpse and it flew into a thousand fragments of still burning embers.
The storm seemed to take courage from his and swept back in with a vengeance until what was left of Harrold Carrick was washed away into the night.
Doctor Rachel Patten turned her face up to the night sky and let the rain cool her face. It felt good because it felt real.