SHE STARED AT ME as though I’d finally flipped and I guess my grim smile confirmed her suspicions.
‘We’re trapped,’ she said incredulously between hard-fought breaths.
‘So are they,’ I remarked, nodding towards the small army of Blackshirts, which was now beginning to slow down to a stroll as they realized our predicament.
S’far as I could tell, most of them were on the walkway now – a few were probably still climbing, but they’d be here soon – and their unhealthy faces were filled with weary triumph. Some were unsteady on their feet, others were being helped along by their buddies; one or two were holding on to the iron girders for support and sucking in great lungfuls of the high fresh air. They filled the footbridge, a shabby band of sick bigots and hopeful (and hopeless) parasites, stealing forward, coming to a halt when they saw the gun in my hand. Weapons were raised towards me.
I waved the Browning in the direction of Muriel and said, ‘She’ll be no good to you dead. And neither will I.’
Even the dullest of them got the message. They stopped shuffling forward.
‘Don’t shoot.’
I recognized the feeble, high-pitched voice easily enough, but wondered if Hubble was talking to me or his rabble army.
‘We have them now, they can’t escape.’
The crowd moved aside as he was helped through from the back, McGruder and another Blackshirt supporting him by the elbows. That pleased me a whole lot. Hubble had made it, and that had been my main concern.
Muriel had come away from the locked doors to stand closer to me and Hubble frowned at her.
‘Keep away from him, Miss Drake,’ he warned, fixing her with those fanatical eyes of his, the dark tints around them making him look like the villain in one of those old silent movies. He tried to straighten his body, an effort that was only partially successful, as if to assert his former power. ‘This man is a savage, but he won’t harm you. That’s right, isn’t it, Mr Hoke? You wouldn’t shoot such a fine young lady.’
‘I guess not,’ I replied, and pointed the gun at his forehead.
His unwholesome smile withered and he lost his grand pose: his body sagged to its old lines. He glared at me.
‘You can’t kill us all, fool,’ he hissed through his grimace. ‘One shot and my men will tear you to pieces.’ His eyes sought Muriel again. ‘Step away from him. Join us again, your friends, your true kind. I was desperate before, otherwise I would never…’ he left it unsaid, still smart enough not to spell it out for Muriel. ‘We have this one now, we…I…can use his blood…’
Unbelievably, Muriel took a step towards this degenerate. But she looked around at me before going any further, confused and uncertain.
‘Go ahead,’ I said, weary of the game. ‘Join them if that’s what you want to do. But he’ll bleed you, Muriel, he’ll steal your blood and leave you dry.’
‘But what else can I do, Hoke? How else can I survive?’ She looked beaten, her strength gone, her breathing still unsteady. ‘They’ll kill us right here if we don’t go with them.’
‘My dear Muriel, of course we wouldn’t do that.’ Hubble had dropped the ‘Miss Drake’ in favour of a more paternal address, and there was something obscene in the wheedling tone he mistook for charm. ‘We’re the same, you and I, and your father was a valued friend. Whatever your decision, I promise you’ll not be harmed in any way.’
And if you believe that, Muriel, I thought to myself, you deserve all the hell you’ll get from this ghoul. But the banter was okay, all this talk was giving the stragglers time to reach the walkway. Raising my head, I looked past those in front and saw two Blackshirts stumbling through the doors at the far end. They had to be the last of the pack judging by the numbers here. Okay. Time for the finale.
I lifted the canvas bag from my neck and flipped it open. Four steps took me to the girders on the inner side of the footbridge and, using a diagonal strut for support, I pulled myself up onto the handrail that ran along its length. Over their heads I could see a shadowy figure beyond the glass half of the distant doors. Good. Cissie had left her hiding place and was sliding an iron bar through the handles on the other side of the double doors, locking them good and tight. She wouldn’t have done it unless the stairs were empty, so I silently wished her God speed on her journey down.
The Blackshirts were watching me uneasily, unsure of what I was up to and waiting for their chance to rush me; I kept the pistol levelled at Hubble, hoping that would hold them back.
‘You got a choice, Muriel,’ I said, much calmer than I felt and keeping an eye on the crowd rather than looking at her. ‘Come with me, or stay with this vermin and die.’
That confused her even more, but there was no time for explanations. McGruder let go of Hubble to take a couple of steps towards me; the gun redirected at his head gave him second thoughts.
‘It’d give me great pleasure,’ I let him know, and his agitation settled. He was still too close for comfort though, and I decided it was now or never. But it was my turn to be surprised when Hubble began to make odd gagging noises, as though something was stuck in his throat
He clutched at his neck, his black fingers shivering, pulling open his shirt, his body starting to convulse. His eyes looked as though they were about to pop from their sockets, and they were bleeding from the corners; blood was pouring from his ears also, and then from his open mouth. He stooped even more as McGruder reached for him, and then began to squeal, an awful drawn-out sound that was more animal than human. His hands grabbed at his chest, then his stomach, then a shoulder, his body contorting as he tried to touch the pain. His black pants were drenched as liquid poured from his lower orifices, and I knew it was blood that was soaking them, that blocked arteries inside him were bursting, discharging their dammed-up load; soon other, smaller veins were breaking, discharging their flow, and we could see the darkness spreading beneath his sallow skin. His muscles cramped, major organs began to falter, then fail. The moment he had dreaded and had known was approaching fast was finally here. It was time for Hubble to die.
His squealing became a high, keening scream that ended when a fierce gusher of blood exploded from his mouth to splatter the floor and those close to him. His dying was violent and it was horrific, and we watched as if mesmerized. That is, we watched until I decided that no person, no matter how twisted, how evil, deserved such an agonizing death. I shot him between those leaking eyes and he dropped without another murmur.
Everything happened fast then, and I moved like a jack rabbit to keep ahead of it all. A howl went up from the crowd and McGruder went down on his knees beside Hubble’s blood-oozing body. Others hurled themselves at me and by the gleam in their eyes I could tell they wanted to drag me down and tear me to pieces with their bare hands. I lashed out with my foot, kicking one in the jaw – that same, healthy-looking guy whose face I’d slammed the door against downstairs – sending him reeling back into the mob and giving me time to pull something from the canvas bag hanging loose from my shoulder. Holding it in my left hand, I took careful aim along the walkway with my right, my elbow looped around the iron strut, the extra height on the rail giving me the angle I needed. I pumped three rapid shots into the blue-uniformed corpse on the chair surrounded by covered boxes.
Those shots did two things at once: the noise stunned the Blackshirts enough to paralyse them momentarily, and the corpse tumbled over sideways onto the floor, releasing the lever of the hand grenade it had been sitting on – I’d carefully pulled the pin earlier that morning, y’see. I had a few seconds to get off the walkway before the grenade exploded and set off the dynamite inside those covered boxes.
One more thing to do before I left the scene: I dropped the pistol, shrugged off the bag on my shoulder, drew the pin of the grenade in my left hand and tossed it into the crowd, close to the disguised explosives on the other side of the walkway. Then I was gone.
Dizziness hit me as soon as I’d squeezed through those struts and was on the outside of the footbridge. The river and south pier below seemed to leap up at me, the sudden vast emptiness around me nearly making me lose balance. But I fought against it and quickly slipped down through the gap between the walkway floor and outer ornamental rail, my foot finding the top edge of the raised bridge just below. Those few seconds I’d needed to escape had passed and I wondered if the grenades were going to blow – there was no way of knowing what those years in storage had done to their mechanisms – and I had time to look up and see Muriel’s white, frightened face peering down at me through the girders, then someone scrambling past her before I ducked under the footbridge.
The explosions came and the world around me erupted, the first boom mingling with the second. I clung to the great bascule as it shuddered beneath me, and the air thundered with the blasts, the roof above my head juddering wildly, threatening to collapse on top of me, now another blast joining the first two, the sound alone almost sending me reeling into the waters so far below. Flames shot out from the footbridge, only the thick concrete a few feet above my head protecting me, and huge balls of fire rolled into the sky. I screamed against the noise and my own horror, aware that Muriel’s body had been carried ahead of those flames, narrowly missing the opposite walkway to fall away through the air, only one arm outstretched, the other one missing, her clothes torn from her but her skin burning. It was a fleeting glimpse, but one that was fused into my brain, a sight I knew even then would never fade – if I lived through this. I shut my eyes, but the image was even stronger.
I began to slip, the trembling of iron and concrete beneath me increasing, so that I had to open my eyes again to find ridges, projections, anything I could cling to. Debris of all sorts – bits of wood, fragments of iron, pieces of bodies, whole bodies – was flying outwards, tumbling almost leisurely to the river below, and smoke, fire, and dust billowed into the air. The top of the bascule was wide enough for me to lay on, and metal ridges and holes containing bolts that locked both sides together when the bridge was lowered helped me cling there while the entire structure shook and groaned. I was afraid the whole bloody thing would come down because when I’d hidden the dynamite along the walkway in the twilight hours of dawn, Cissie helping me haul it all up those tower stairs, I’d no idea how powerful it was or how unstable. Like the grenades, it’d been in storage a long time, so it was unpredictable. Well, now I was finding out, and I was scared as hell.
Massive black smoke-clouds darkened the sky and the bascule continued to vibrate like a vast tuning fork. I began to pull myself towards the other side of the span, only too aware of the long drop on either side and soon I was at the rail that ran by the roadside, the thick, ornamental balustrade that would serve as a ladder to the pier below. And as I lowered myself over the edge, biting into my lip, terrified I was gonna lose my grip and fall, I looked up to see McGruder, his face black and scorched, hair burned off his blistered scalp, crawling towards me along the top of the bascule. I just had time to remember the figure I’d seen climbing past Muriel through the girders, when the world lurched away from me once more.
Both of us slipped, McGruder managing to fling an arm over the wall that was the vertical roadway, me linking an arm through the decorative end of the rail as I slid down. We held on to the bridge as it began its rumbling downward journey. But it abruptly juddered to a halt and I was almost thrown off again. My legs swung free and I clawed desperately with my other hand as the arm through the hole was nearly wrenched from its socket. I grabbed another part of the patterned rail and my feet found a hold further down. Still deafened by the noise of the explosions, the world a strangely silent place around me, I hung on for my life, happy to stay where I was ‘til my nerve came back.
But there was a further movement A trembling ran through the ironwork, and I realized the bridge hadn’t stopped at all, that it was slowly, ponderously, continuing its descent. The machinery controlling its operation had been disturbed by the blasts, cogwheels and pressure points released so that the bascule’s own weight was bringing it down. A quick glance across the river to the opposite bascule told me only this side seemed to be affected – the other bridge didn’t appear to be moving at all. I wasn’t sure how it was possible – the big engine room that controlled Tower Bridge was on the Thames’s south side, far away from the explosions – but guessed it was the levers or braking system inside the control cabin on the south pier that had been disturbed, along with the bascule itself, the balance shifted, with nothing to hold it in check. The cogwheels could only control the fall.
I pulled myself tight against the rail, prepared to ride it all the way, hoping the bridge wouldn’t level out with too much of a jolt. I might have even enjoyed the trip, knowing my game plan had panned out, I’d fought the battle and won, if a black-stained, raw-scalped, red-eyed head hadn’t appeared above me. McGruder hadn’t been thrown off when the bascule had shifted – hell no, he’d hung on and then crawled along the apex to get to me. And now he was a spit away, gaping down at me with hate in his eyes and murder in the sick thing he called his heart.
His clenched fist struck my forehead, almost dislodging me. He tried again, reaching over as far as he could, but this time I dodged. With his next lunge, he’d grabbed my hair and was hauling me up. Tears blurring my vision, I gripped his wrist and forced his hand away, some of my hair going with it My feet slid from their holes in the rail and I was hanging by one hand, my legs kicking empty space while he took full advantage, clambering down the other side of the rail, using its openings and decorative swirls as a crude ladder as I had. Then he was leaning round, trying to break my grip on the rail, pushing at my shoulder, tugging at my other arm, all the while the bridge continuing its sluggish, lumbering descent My ears suddenly cleared and I could hear the straining of metal against metal, the groaning of rusted machinery forced into motion after years of suspension. And I could hear McGruder’s frustrated grunts too as he tried to tear me loose.
I swung out over the river, the bascule at least a third of the way down by now, and dizziness nearly overcame me again as the river spun beneath my feet From that height, I knew hitting the water would be like striking concrete.
A searing pain shot up my arm, the one poking through the rail’s fancy ironwork, and I yelled hard and loud, my neck stretched as I tried to see the cause. On the other side of the rail McGruder had his teeth sunk into my bare flesh.
I swung my leg, managing to get a toehold on a metal lip above a line of rivets, then, with the added support, I began to hoist myself back up. Ignoring the pain, I made sure I was secure before pulling the arm that was under attack from McGruder’s teeth out of the hole. Blood – that precious ABneg stuff those leeches cared so much about – streamed from the deep wound and somehow the sight of it renewed that old rage. I guess I’d spent so long protecting my own life’s liquid that the thought of this bloodsucker gorging himself on it – yeah, I know, he was only trying to make me lose my grip, but I wasn’t exactly rational by then – while I was busy doing other things sent me a little crazy myself. Scarcely realizing my own actions, I was suddenly hauling myself over the rail, that anger stirring up whatever last reserves of strength I had (yeah, more last reserves). I jumped down onto the steep road on the other side and pounded McGruder’s upturned face with my fist.
Keeping an arm linked around the top of the thick rail, my feet braced against the slope, I slugged him again and again, showing no mercy, giving him no chance to strike back. His body slid under me, only one of his hands maintaining a hold on the ironwork, his back against the stone slabs of the tilted kerbside and for a moment – just one fleeting moment – I thought I had him licked. But he came up with all the power I’d known he had, sickness or no sickness, almost defying gravity for a split second by lifting his back from the stone and shoving me away from him with both hands. I swivelled round, my spine striking the rail with a jarring thud, almost losing my grip, and as he began to slip down the incline, he wrapped his arms around my lower legs, checking his descent, his weight weakening my own grip. And he was chuckling, he was holding on and twisting and tugging to make me let go of the rail, and goddamn chuckling while he did it. I brought my free fist down on his head and neck, but it seemed to have no effect on him, none at all. He only laughed all the more, grinning up at me so that I could witness the full extent of his madness. And then he did something even more peculiar: he twisted his neck and deliberately looked down the slope, the movement so exaggerated I knew he wanted me to follow his gaze.
I did. And I understood his intention.
At the bottom of the ever-decreasing hill, where the bascule joined the tower’s approach span, was a long dark trench stretching across the road. Inside there, inside the pier itself, were the cogwheels – the quadrants, I think they were called – that helped raise and lower the bridge on this side of the river. I had no idea what other machinery was inside the black hole, but knew McGruder wanted to take us both sliding down into it What the hell, he didn’t mind a quick death, so much better than a slow one. I hit him harder, turning my own body to shake him off, but it was no good, it was as if he didn’t feel the blows. Without warning, one of his hands shot up and grasped my wrist, the one holding on to the rail, and he started to tug at it, trying to pull it away. My fingers began to open, the strain on them too great; soon only the tips were around the ironwork.
My other hand found his throat, and I squeezed, my thumb pressing into his windpipe. His grin only broadened as my boots began to slip on the concrete. My hold on the rail was almost broken, my fingers almost straightened.
And then I remembered the knife.
Letting go of his throat I reached round to my back and drew the dark blade from its sheath. It slid out smooth and easy, and I plunged it down hard between McGruder’s shoulder blades, just beside his spine.
His eyes bugged in shock, their tiny veins almost embossed on the whites. Whether it was because of the sudden pain, or it was intentional, his arm clamped even more tightly around my legs, causing me to jerk upright, my hand releasing the knife. But he lost his grip on my other wrist and his grin vanished, his eyes took on a distant look. The pressure on my legs slowly lessened, and then he was slipping away from me, his fingers clawing their way down my leg.
But when his hand had almost reached my feet, the fingers suddenly wrapped themselves around my ankle, jerking it from under me, so that I fell flat on my back. Sheer reaction made me grab a lower part of the rail again as I started to slide, but it took all the strength I had left – and there wasn’t much – to hold myself there as my body stretched, dragged down by McGruder’s weight.
My arm trembling with the strain, my back flat against the stone, my spine feeling the vibrations rumbling through the groaning bridge, I raised my head to look down at McGruder. He was on his stomach, the knife angled into his back, and both of his hands were now clenched round my ankle as he tried to drag himself back up the incline. There was no expression on that blackened face now, even though his eyes still stared into mine.
He pulled himself upwards, using my leg as a rope, his shoulders quivering with the effort. And as his head drew level with my knee, that sick, lunatic’s grin returned. Oh the eyes were still distant, kind of glazed over as if his mind was off in some faraway place, but those blistered and cracked lips were spread wide, the blood-smeared teeth bared in a grin that was just for me. I raised my other foot and smashed the heel of my boot into his nose.
Blood – bad blood, diseased, coagulated blood – burst from his nostrils like lanced poison, and his hold on me relaxed. Then he was falling away from me, slithering towards that long black narrowing gap at the bottom of the slope, his last gaze fixed on me all the way. I turned over and scrambled upwards, reaching for the top edge of the bascule, dragging myself up onto the apex. I slumped there, riding the summit, one leg and arm roadside, the other half of me over the edge, and I watched McGruder as his fingers raked the roadway and his legs slid into the thinning gap.
His chest rose from the concrete and I realized the bottom of the bascule was angled to join the underside slope of the roadway itself when the bridge was level. The rest of his body was too bulky to go through.
It was terrible, but I couldn’t turn away, I couldn’t close my eyes to the horror. McGruder screamed and screamed as hundreds of tons of concrete, iron and lead crushed his hips and legs, the sound abruptly cut off by the thick explosion of blood that squeezed through his body to erupt from every opening in his head.
The gap closed completely and the bridge was down. And I was falling, shaken off my perch by the sudden fierce bump as the roadway levelled, tumbling over and over ‘til I hit the cool waters thirty feet below.