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The Fire Baby

Детективы и Триллеры / Детективы 18+

East of Ely, above the bone-dry peatfields, a great red dust storm drifts across the moon, throwing an amber shadow on the old cathedral. Overhead a single, winking plane crosses the star-spangled sky. Flight MH336, just airborne from the US military base at Mildenhall, flies into the tumbling cauldron of dust.

The diamond-hard sand begins to shred the turning turbines and the dislodged blades scythe each other like spinning knives. The fuselage dips as the engine suffocates, and begins a descent of such violence that the passengers float, despite their seatbelts, in a weightless fall towards their deaths.

At precisely 11.08 pm, according to the pilot’s watch recovered at the scene, the fuselage buries itself in the soft earth. The distant cathedral tower shudders with the impact and the crows, roosting on the Octagon Tower, rise in a single cloud. Heads turn ten miles away at Littleport with the earthy thud of the crash, followed by the crackling combustion of the airfuel.

A fireball marks the point of impact at Black Bank Farm. Here there is too much sound to hear. At the heart of the fire a cold white eye burns where 50,000 gallons of kerosene turns to gas in a single second. Then the flames come, licking the stars.

At the foot of the vast white pillar of rising smoke the air crackles with the heat. And in the ashes of what had been Black Bank Farm she stands alone. Her, and the baby.

They are the only ones alive. Her, and the baby.

The family died at the table: her mother caught in the act of drowning in a flame, her father’s blackened arm still stretched towards his throat. His last words will stay with her to her deathbed: ‘The cellar, Maggie. A celebration.’ She’d gone to get the bottle, leaving Matty in his cot by the empty fireplace. Celebration: a family christening to come, now that Matty had a father.

In the dry damp of the stone cellar she heard it coming. Machines, like people, can pretend to scream. But the pretence was gone in the final wail of the failing engines, the ripping metal, and the blow of the impact.

Sometimes she wished she had died then, as she should have.

Instead she saw the light and heard the sound that was the fire, the dripping fire, falling through the floorboards. The liquid fuel from the tanks, the quicksilver light that saved her life. So she found the stairs and climbed up to count the dead, hung, like game, from the burning rafters. Then the real horror, in the tiny swaddled bundle with the blackened limbs.