Recovery. (1) This story is in no way related to the London bombings, and was written many months before hand. Thankyou. The day the bombs hit England was a sharp November evening bitter with the threat of frost, and the day Helena and I took our first train to London. We were independently going to meet her father at Kings Cross station at nine pm that night. Helena shifted her cheek on my shoulder and stirred as a fighter jet fly low overhead. Through the grimy carriage window I saw the crisp silhouette against the bleak cityscape horizon, turning its wing down as it veered towards the capital city. “We must be near Heathrow.” Helena mumbled and fell back into a light doze. I nodded and sighed, refusing to waste time thinking about an aircraft. It had been a long hard day of travelling and changeovers and I hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast at five that morning. Unlike Helena I was a very light sleeper. Helena groaned something inaudible and hugged my chest. The short man who had been sat opposite us for fifty minutes gave her an uncomfortable look and adjusted his newspaper so he could no longer see us. I barely moved, except for a small twitch of a smile at the corners of my mouth. He was just one more person in a long list of strangers who I never had to see again after I stepped off this train, so I didn’t care. Another fighter jet flew over the track again, but I only heard a dull rumble before all light disappeared from the city lights along side us as we entered a tunnel. In the dark, I tried to close my eyes, blocking out the artificial lights of the carriage, but to no prevail. The vibrations from the track were too much to let me settle as easily as Helena had. “I don’t think we’re near Heathrow,” I said reluctantly, bringing my feet up onto the seat beside me and hugging my knees. “I thought we were coming from the wrong side.” “No idea.” She said drowsily. I got the impression she didn’t really care either and was more interested in using me for a headrest. The rattling lessened and for a moment I thought I was eventually drifting off to sleep. Harsh reality struck me and I came to my full senses as the train began to shudder and jerk and I sat bolt upright as the breaks squealed. I nudged Helena and she woke up just in time to feel the carriage come to a halt. “What’s happening?” she asked, rubbing the sleep from her eyes. “Why have we stopped?” she detached herself from me and peered out the window. All we could see was the brick tunnel wall gently lit up from the carriage lights. “I don’t know,” I whispered. I was almost afraid to speak. The train was so eerily silent, even the air con had been turned off. The lights flickered and failed, leaving us in complete and swallowing darkness. I groped for Helena in the dark, grabbed her wrist and pulled her towards me. Before either of us could say any more, the man opposite us startled me by putting his hand on my shoulder. He held up a small cigarette lighter and looked out the window with us. “Are you girls alright?” he asked. We nodded in the flickering flame light. “What happened?” I repeated. “Must have been a power failure,” he explained. “Just sit tight and the power should come back on in a---“ I was on the floor before I knew what happened. The carriage rocked violently and there was a muffled rumble from the outside world. I tried to get back up but the carriage shook again, harsher this time, and I fell back down, bringing Helena with me. The side of the train hit the tunnel wall and the window crunched into splinters of fine glass, suspended like a spiders web against the wall. Our only light source, the lighter, slipped from the mans grasp as his head hit the table as he fell to the floor from the second shock. I felt for him in the dark but he made no sound as I grasped his hand. Roughly, I shook him, but he didn’t respond, and I had no idea where the lighter had been thrown. Helena grabbed my shoulders and hugged me tightly around the neck as I collapsed on the floor next to her. “Do you think we’re in an earthquake?” she said. I could feel her soft sobs against my shoulder as she clung onto me like a child. She had always been tense under pressure. Then I thought, the planes. The two that had passed over us only minutes before. “It didn’t feel like an earthquake,” I whispered. I didn’t want to disturb the silence again. It was far too quiet to be natural. “I think someone might bombing us.” I said sombrely. “Why?” Helena asked. “We’re not at war with anyone.” “Perhaps it’s a terrorist attack.” I blinked and tried to keep the tears at bay. I hated the idea of being stuck in the middle of some political offence, and I had seen the aftermaths of attacks on the news: horrific images of full grown men sobbing and people in bloodstained bandages and the dead being carried away on stretchers. My eyes were slowly adjusting to the darkness and I could just make out the surrounding cabin and Helena’s tear stricken face. “What do you think we should do?” I said. It was easier to speak than to think. My mind was already clogged with lack of sleep and the crash had just added more to the wreckage. “Is he alive?” Helena asked. I knew she meant the man lying beside me. I felt her shift to try and reach him but I was lying in the way. He didn’t feel alive, so heavy next to me. “I…don’t know,” I managed. Releasing Helena’s grasp I rolled over and felt for his neck. “He has a pulse, but he’s unconscious.” I said shaking. “I think we should see if there’s anyone else on the train. Can we leave him here?” “I don’t think we should. What if he wakes up?” Helena asked. I shrugged in the cold, not really knowing what to do. All I wanted to do was sleep, and I had hit my wrist on the way down. It felt warm and the joint was throbbing. “You stay, I’ll go see.” I volunteered. I hated that idea. I hated leaving Helena alone and I hated being by myself in a cold dark train with no power and trapped in a tunnel. Before I could slide open the carriage door a light appeared through the dappled glass of the window. I lunged for the door, shouting, and desperately trying to find the catch to push the door aside. I heard brief muffled conversation, and the sliding door was wrenched open. Two men with a torch sighed and reached out their hands to us. I gladly received one and let him help me up. “Anyone hurt?” one of them asked. I shook my head. “We’re not badly, but he is.” I jerked my finger towards the man lying lifeless on the muddy plastic tiled floor. “He’s unconscious, but still alive.” The words seemed stupid to me. Of course he was alive. We weren’t important enough to be caught up in such a dramatic scene of aerial attack and war. All that nonsense about planes and political plots seemed to vanish and I came to a realization. We were simply stuck in a power outage, and we would be back on the move within minutes. Helena hadn’t seemed to reach the same conclusion I had. She had collapsed against one of the men’s shirts, gripping at his clothes until her knuckles went white. I smiled sheepishly at him and took her shivering body from him and hugged her close. “It’s okay,” I soothed. “We’re okay.” She sniffed and let go, looking slightly embarrassed. “When are we setting off?” she asked. Then the bombs started dropping again. * * * I didn’t remember waking up until I realised I was crying. I was curled up like a child, shivering from the cold and my own sense of hollow loss. Helena was beside me, unconscious and paler than any makeup she had ever applied to her papery skin could make her. I lifted my head and shoulders to peer beyond Helena’s dark form but the lights still weren’t on. There was no movement from the train or the men around me. Slowly, my body began to register the effects the shock had given me. My head was throbbing, like someone was continually hitting it from the inside out. I was aching all over, and my back felt sore. My wrist felt sticky with a fluid that could only be blood. I lowered myself slowly to the floor and lay there, staring up into the darkness where the ceiling should have been and cried. The darkness was suffocating. I rolled over onto my side and shifted my shoulders. My entire left leg felt numb and I didn’t feel it hit the man at my feet, knocking the dead flashlight out of his hands. It rolled across the floor and clattered to a stop against the wall. I paused for a second, relieving the cramp in my back before reaching across the gritty floor to grab the flashlight. I enthusiastically flicked the switch, desperate for light again, but nothing happened. I collapsed back onto the rough carpet floor and sobbed. * * * Somewhere between me falling asleep and waking up again, Helena had woken and had somehow fixed the torch, the dull dying bulb directed towards me. I wiped my head with my sleeve and looked at her, squinting in the dark at her staring into space with the precious light clutched to her chest and tears falling down her cheeks. “Lena?” I asked, forcing my eyes to stay open. “You fixed it.” She choked back a scream and gasped, grabbing me by the shoulders and hugging me. “You’re alive,” she said quietly, “you’re alive!” I hugged onto her and buried my face in her dirty blonde hair. After a while, I voiced the only logical thought in my mind, “how did you fix it?” “Fix what?” Helena asked, pulling back slightly so her back was straight up against the wall. “The torch. How did you fix it?” She looked the thing over, trying to remember what she had done. “I took the batteries from my CD player,” she said slowly, as if she herself were experiencing the memory for the first time. "But I...." I waited patiently for her to continue, but she seemed too troubled to finish. "Lena?" I prompted. "Speak to me?" Like talking to a child. Helena vacantly looked at me; her mouth slightly parted and tears brimming over her eyelids. "Nobodies alive, Faith." she whispered, choking on her own words. "I checked. I thought...I thought you were too, but I just couldn't...I couldn't check. I just kept waiting and waiting for someone to wake and no one ever did because they're all dead. And then you woke, and now I just don't...." I took the torch from her hands and pointed it towards the back end of the carriage and out the window. I saw the track pressed up against the shattered glass. I was lying on the wall and the train had been knocked over. The entire back end of the train had been blown away, and I saw rubble from the collapsed tunnel on the floor, but no sunlight. I slipped my freezing arms around her shoulders and held her close. "Shh," I soothed, "it's okay now. Everything’s going to be okay." The words felt hard in my mouth, solid like bricks that I couldn’t quite wrap my tongue around. "How can it, Faith? How can everything be okay?" I shook my head, blinking rapidly in the dark and fighting back the burning sensation beneath my eyelids. "I...don't know. But, we have to get out of here." She nodded, crying as well. She grasped my hand, pulled me up with her and hugged me around the waist, setting her head on my shivering shoulder and rubbed her hand across my back in concentric circles to relieve the bruises and tension. I felt the floor move, or it could have been my balance shifting, and I toppled against her, one hand braced against the wall. My consciousness drifted, and the world went black. * * * I woke up in what I immediately thought was a hospital. The cool sheets against my skin soothed and relaxed my tired body, but when I opened my eyes I saw a rough brick ceiling, blackened with smoke damage and age. I raised a weak and aching hand to my forehead and felt the soft padding of medical gauze covering a particularly sensitive gash on my forehead. I groaned tried to raise my body onto an elbow. “Don’t try and sit up. You’ll make yourself nauseous.” Startled, I turned quickly to the left in time to see a blonde haired young man next to my bed before I vomited harshly over the side of the mattress, my stomach acids burning the back of my already tender throat. I felt a kind hand on the small of my back, holding me there and supporting me all the same. A bottle of water was pressed into my hand and I washed my mouth out into a bucket the boy held for me. He helped to ease me back onto the lumpy mattress and tucked the sheets tight around my legs and chest, smiling gently with sympathetic eyes. When my head stopped spinning, I managed to lift my head enough to take a proper look at my nursemaid. He was older than I was, with dirty blond hair just shorter than his dark eyebrows. He had blue eyes, grey around the edges of the iris, and pale spotless but grubby skin. He hadn’t shaved in what looked like a few days. “Do you have any chicken soup?” I asked on impulse. That’s it, I thought. I’ve got a concussion. I must have really hit my head in that crash. He laughed loudly and shook his head. “We have some in the store. Anything else? Aspirin?” I shook my head. “Chicken soup,” I insisted. “Just, I really really want some chicken soup. “ it was amazing what a good hard knock to the head could give you cravings for. He laughed, smiled brilliantly, and left, shaking his head in what seemed to be an uncontrollable fit of laughter as he left the room. When he left, I wrenched myself up on the stacked pillows behind my head and leant against the headboard. For the first time since I woke up I examined my surroundings completely. The walls were painted with a flaking cream colour that may have once been white. The ceiling and the wall behind my head were part of a filled in fireplace, further evidence of a fire once existing in the room. There was no carpet on the floor, but a tired old rug wrinkled over a worn oak floor. There was a window next to the door, facing opposite my bed, where the sunlight spilled into the room, the light almost blinding my tired eyes. The branches of a tree rapped against the windows as a soft wind blew outside and from the ruined houses I could see, it was clear I was in the less fortunate part of a city. He entered the room holding a tray with a bowl and a small bottle. He smiled weakly, and set the tray on the mattress next to me. The smell of chicken and noodles was enough to make my stomach rumble in anticipation, and I reached eagerly for the bowl and spoon, cradling it between my lifted knees as a wave of hunger hit me. He watched me for a few seconds, and extended his hands. “Alexander,” he announced. I stared at his hand for some time. I took it with a sheepish smile and replied, “I’m Faith. Where am I?” concerning my situation, I thought I was acting fairly calm. The truth was that I was finding it hard to remember anything right now. My own name seemed foreign. “I know,” Alexander said, holding firmly onto my left hand and not letting go. “Helena told me.” Something jumped inside of me. “Helena’s here? Is she okay?” my voice was hoarse and rough. Words hurt. Alexander held my hand a little tighter and caressed it with the fingers of his left hand. His fingers were rough; the tips thicker skinned than the rest from what I presumed must be year’s worth of playing guitar. “She’s out right now. I found her crying by your body. I helped her carry you out of there.” I was speechless, as everything, - the crash, my small awakening, - came flooding back to me. I felt I needed to cry, that I should show some sort of emotion to suit the occasion, but I merely looked on in interest as a bizarre feeling crossed over me that I wasn’t really there. I was an onlooker watching it happening to someone else. Anyone else. “What happened?” I voiced. “We brought you here…” “No. I mean what happened? With the train?” Alexander looked solemnly at the sheets piled at my feet. "We don't know. There was some sort of power failure, and then an explosion ---" "You were on the train too?" "Yeah, I was in the cheap seats." he picked up the sheets and proceeded to tuck one around my legs protectively. "Helena and I managed to get you out, and everything..." he swallowed a sob and continued. "The entire city is destroyed. There are massive craters all over the place. We were lucky to be in the tunnel, or we would be dead." "That’s it? We’re all that’s left?" I cried. "Not quite," he answered, a grim smile set on his unfamiliar face. "We found several other people, wandering the streets, just like us who had somehow survived the blast." He said it with a sort of excited look in his eyes that reminded me of when Helena and I used to play adventure games in the garden at home. He was living his childhood all over again. Part of me wanted to scream at him that this was serious and his reaction wasn't adult enough. How could he possibly laugh and act so immature when we were in such a dire situation? He seemed to spot the look on my face and composed himself a little better, shuffling his shoulders and muttering "Sorry, I think I need to set my priorities straight. I should go." "Wait!" I commanded. "I still have plenty of questions. Where am I?" "You are in the eighth bedroom of a Victorian house in the centre of London." He said quickly. "With twelve other kids." "How…?" "I told you, they were wandering the streets. There are still more out there. Helena is out there right now looking for them with a few others." At my look Alexander added, "She's perfectly safe. I wouldn't worry about her if I were you." "Why were the streets bombed?" "That, we have no idea. Things just kind of…happened." It was a lame excuse but I accepted it, resting on the fact that he probably didn't know a lot more than I did. I nodded my head and looked at my arms. There were scratches leading up from my wrists to my elbows, clotted with blood and cleaning fluid. "We had to drag you part of the way, "Alexander explained. “We're very sorry about that." "I have bigger problems." I looked down at my hands, a sudden realisation as to what I'd said. I did have bigger problems. The whole country seemed to have bigger problems. "What about other cities?" I whispered. "What about all the people there?" "We don't know. The phone lines are all broken, and the radios give us only static." He looked out of the window at a large tree leaning over the grubby wall around the house. "We have no way of contacting anyone else, and there's no way we can be contacted ourselves. We're trying to fix up some sort of transport so that some of us can do a nationwide search. Two groups have already left for Birmingham and Newcastle." "This is terrible. How will we survive if we don’t have any food or water being delivered to us?" "We have over twenty boxes of canned goods that we raided from shops, that should last us a while." "But there's no way it can last forever."
Copyright © 2005 Megan A Hennessey |