The Best Horror of the Year – Volume One

"Paul! Paul, wake up!"

Anya was shaking me. I must've slept through the alarm. But she'd be the one ru

"Paul!" Desperation, terror. I smelt smoke. Not the alarm. A fire. The house was burning.

"Paul!" Not Anya's voice. Who was she? The bomb'd set the house on fire.

The Bomb. And I remembered where I was, and Anya-

"Paul!"

"Alright!" I sat up. My brain seemed to slosh around in my skull, water in a bowl. Fingers gripped my shoulders. Jean.

I could see light through the ceiling. The sky glowed. Sunset already? No, a fire.

Fire.

The school was gone. And the ceiling with it. Well, mostly. Some had blown away. The rest had fallen into the basement. And was burning. I was lucky; I'd been under the bit that'd blown away.

The air was full of screams. Kids and staff, trapped and burning.

And the sky-

I knew if I looked, I'd see the mushroom cloud, over the city, full of ashes and dust. Some of those ashes would be Anya's. And in a few minutes, she'd rain down on me.

And she'd be bringing the bomb with her.

"Everybody out!" I shouted. Things cracked and crackled all around me. And screamed.

We got up the stairs. Byerscough stopped at the top, then turned back, starting back down.

"Alf!" I shouted. "What're you-"

He turned wild eyes on me. "There's kids still down there, man!"

And he ran back down, even though the smoke was billowing and choking.

He stumbled back up, a few seconds later, smoke-grimed, red-eyed, coughing and choking, one of the girls in his arms. He set her down, ran back into the smoke. He never came back out.

Jean knelt by the little girl. When she looked up, she was crying. She shook her head.

"What do we do?" she said. "Oh God, what do we do now?"

Three of the staff were still alive: me, Jean and Frank Emerson, the Physics teacher. About a dozen kids. They were all looking at me.

"I've got an idea," I said.

The tu

Have to choose. Which way now? Have to pick. But what leads where? Where does each go? Which is better? Safer? Is there meaning to either word now?

"That way," I say, pointing right.

So we veer to the right. It only occurs to me later that veering to the right was what got us into this mess in the first place.

Minutes pass. I haven't looked at my watch in-not since before the bomb fell. Does it have any meaning anymore, anyway?

Then one of the kids screams.

"What is it?" I shout, trying to keep panic out of my own voice.

It's one of the boys, one of the younger ones. "A man," he shouts. "A man in the water."

I flick the torch-beam over the black surface. "There's no one there."

"He was there, Mr Forrester, sir. He was."

"What'd he look like?" A drowned miner? But no one's been down here in years. There'd only be bones by now.

"White," the boy sobs. "White."

A chill up my back, and it's not just being down here. The boy's hallucinating. Who can blame him? I'm surprised I'm not. Will I sleep later? And will I dream? God, please not.

"Let's keep going," I say.

We stumbled through the remains of the school. Passed what was left of Mr Rutter on the way. "Don't look," I told the kids. Bile crept into my throat. The smell of roast, charred pork.

To get where we were going, we had to pass the Physics lab. It was, for God knows what reason, the only part of the building left more or less intact. Frank Emerson let out a shout. "Wait up!" he yelled, and dashed into the lab.

"Frank!" I yelled. "We haven't time-"

"Trust me." He forced the store room door open and came out again seconds later, clutching what looked like a metal box with a microphone attached.

"What-"

He clicked the "microphone" on and there was a soft crackling, ticking sound. "Geiger counter," he said.

I was about to ask where that'd come from-not exactly standard-issue in schools these days-but it didn't matter. Never look a gift horse in the mouth and so on. "You're a genius," I said. "Come on."

Worsley village-now it's a posh, desirable residence sort of place (was, then; past tense once more, Mr Forrester) but in the Industrial Revolution it'd've been anything but. The Bridgewater and Liverpool/Manchester canals all met here, and the whole area was a big coalfield, bringing up about 10,000 tons of coal a day.

Why do I mention this?

Because of the Delph, where we were heading.

There was next to nothing left above ground. The houses were gone, and where most of them had been there was only fire. There was nowhere to hide from the dust that would soon be falling.

It might already be too late, of course. I'd been to the Imperial War Museum up at the Quays the year before; one of the exhibits had been an atom bomb. Deactivated, I presumed. Beside it had been a diagram, a sequence of concentric circles marking out distances from the blast, and a table showing what would happen within them.

Nothing would be left for a mile or so around the blast site. Anya was dust, again. But where Worsley was:

All those not killed by the blast would be dead of radiation poisoning within hours.

Were we dead already? How long would be a fatal exposure? I didn't know, but I couldn't just stop, couldn't just quit. Easy to do so; easy to stop and spend the last of my time railing at the sky and the mad, sick bastards who'd done this to us. The politicians on both sides…

I'd grown up in the shadow of the Cold War; when it'd ended, I'd been in my teens, but I knew enough by then to have felt some of the dread that my parents-who would also be dead now-must've spent most of their adulthood under. And a weight had lifted. One less worry. Or so I'd thought.

Now…

Beside the Delph was a shed, belonging to the local boating club. We smashed the doors down. Inside, boats. Dinghies and open-topped canoes. And paddles. We took what we needed.

And torches, too. We were lucky. There were half a dozen, and a box or two of batteries. We took them as well, and then scrabbled over the fences, lifting boats and children, and headed down into the Delph.

"Delph" simply means a delved place. Delved; dug. An old sandstone quarry, half-filled with orangey-coloured water. The canals round Worsley are full of it-iron oxides from all the heavy industry.

If you go into the Delph, you'll find a hole, a tu

You see, the Delph is an entrance, to one of the biggest engineering feats of the Industrial Revolution.

I said the whole area had been a big coalfield. The coal had to be transported. And what was the main means of transport in those days?

Canals.

Entered, via the Delph, are forty-six miles of underground canal. Extending down on four levels, deep and deep and deep. To the galleries of the mines.

That was where we were headed. Deep underground, the one safe place I could think of.

If you're so clever, tell me where else we could have gone.

I knew the Delph had been closed off because of carbon monoxide seeping up from the old mines. I could only hope it'd dispersed by now. But even if it hadn't, it beat radiation sickness. Carbon monoxide, you got groggy, disorientated, queasy, yes, but in the end you just drifted off. That had to be better than the alternative.