Adam Roberts by Adam Roberts

Author:Adam Roberts [Roberts, Adam]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Roads Were Burning
Publisher: Adam Roberts
Published: 2013-07-10T16:00:00+00:00

Six

They went down to the deserted, car-strewn streets and made their way on foot, Justine stepping sprightly and assured, Jonathan walking more slowly and occasionally having to insert camp little skips into his steps to keep pace.

Justine walked as if she were a practised fellwalker, which perhaps she was. Jon never walked anywhere unless he absolutely had to. “How did it start?” Jonathan asked.

“You mean who started it?” said Justine. “I don’t know. How should I know?”

“But,” said Jonathan. He couldn’t see how to finish this sentence. He didn’t say anything for a while.

They reached Fulham Palace Road. To the west and north the sky was dark with what looked like storm clouds, except the clouds were blushed cherry-colour nearer the ground. “It’s like the Blitz,” said Jonathan. “It’s incredible.”

They turned south, down Fulham Palace road towards Putney. The sky in that direction looked clearer. It wasn’t blue, but was at least not black: a sort of whisky colour, more promising. Both lanes of the road were blocked with discarded cars, like the two strings of a giant metal rosary. They saw nobody else. Not one other person. The whole of London had a dreamlike silence to it. There was no birdsong, no car alarms, no car stereos sharing thudding music through open windows, no yelling, no honking, no sirens. There was nothing at all. The great tidal rushing continuum of traffic, that mighty noise, so familiar as to become like silence to Londoners, was gone altogether; although, maybe, in some conch-like turn of Jonathan’s inner ear, its ghost remained—because Jonathan could almost hear the noise of traffic, far away in the distance. It occurred to him only as they passed the grounds of Fulham Palace that this noise in his ears was real, but that it wasn’t cars, it was the massed crackling of flames in the distance. Not a roaring, but a steady, staccato, rattling noise.

He stepped more briskly, panting now. Unused to the exercise.

“I supposed,” said Justine, unprompted, as they approached the bridge, “that it was terrorists.”

“The burning?”

“You asked who started it,” she said, stopping beside a roadside bench to get her breath. Jon, glad of the break, settled beside her and tried to control his breathing. “I suppose it was terrorists,” she said again. “On the radio they were saying that perhaps somebody had treated the roads up in South Yorkshire—driven over and round the road network spraying, or dribbling, or somehow depositing a chemical upon them. Tar is pretty inert, usually. It takes a high heat to make it combust. This is what radiofour said. But maybe if it were treated, the tar, then it would burn more easily. The tar, this mystery chemical, water—that’s oxygen, isn’t it? That’s hydrogen? Isn’t it odd that water is used to put out fires when it’s made of two such combustible things? They thought the rainfall would put it out, but it seems to have made it worse. Now all the roads are burning. Some of the motorways are concrete, but even they have tarmac hard-shoulders.

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