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77 lines
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<h2>35</h2>
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<p><em>The whole world exploded</em>.</p>
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<p>The detonation was so vast, so colossal, that there was no sound, not at first. The narrow gorge erupted in a sea of blinding light that turned everything white and burned dark and cracking lines into the backs of their eyes. The very air slammed up at them, turned solid by the enormity of the explosion, catching them in a stunning body blow that threw them right off their feet and into the air.</p>
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<p>It was worse than they had imagined, more apocalyptic than anything they <em>could </em> have imagined. The whole earth leapt upwards under their feet at the same time as the searing, hardened air came punching up from downslope.</p>
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<p>In the first split second, there was no noise at all because the quality of the very air had changed in the instant of the explosion. The earth came up at them, shucked them off and the blast carried them away. A monstrous hand reached up and snatched at Doug who was lower down the slope, nearer the sharp edge toward which the man had been climbing. The hot hand grabbed at him, pressing against every inch of his skin and squeezed so hard he felt his eyes popping outwards. The hand lifted and threw him and he went sailing through the blinding sky, arms and legs flailing.</p>
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<p>Danny and Corky, lying in a tangle beside the tree were thrown up, along with the ledge of turf on which they sprawled, in a sudden reverse of gravity. They went rolling straight up the hill one over the other in a tangle. Tom was slammed against Billy so hard that his nose burst against Billy's ribs and the two of them were punched over the low rise and dumped onto the thick heather.</p>
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<p>The noise came then.</p>
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<p>It was louder than anything they'd heard, louder than the explosions up in Drumbeck Quarry, or close thunder in a summer storm beating its way up the firth. It made the shotgun blast pale to a whisper. It was louder than anything in the world. It blasted into their heads in a sudden, excruciating blare that drove out all thought in a stunning, catastrophic concussion.</p>
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<p>It was nothing like the movies at all. It was no fireworks. The earth itself simply exploded.</p>
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<p>The blast wave drove under the roots of the hawthorn tree which had catapulted the bomb into the air and ripped it, roots and all, from where it clung to the edge of the gorge, lifted it straight into the air. Corky was tumbling upwards, landing on his shoulder, crashing onto his backside. His teeth crunched together and up at the back, one of them cracked in a soundless, painless crunch. The sky was white and the noise was crackling inside his head now, for he had gone deaf once more. All he could hear was the concussion and the glassy crackle inside the bones of his skull. There was no time to breathe, no time to yell and every nerve in his body was slammed numb. He saw the hawthorn tree fly upwards like a jagged rocket, tumbling as it flew, the one trunk ripping away from the other, scattering leaves and twigs. He landed on the heather with a thud which might have knocked his breath out, but he couldn't tell. Danny landed half on top of him, on his backside. His eyes were wide and unblinking and his pupils seemed to have disappeared so that only blue showed.</p>
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<p>The blast went on and on, rocking through them, while the earth danced and jumped as if it was alive and it seemed as if the explosion would never end. Corky managed to turn, found his breath, sucked in air that was hot and burning. The world smelt as if it was on fire.</p>
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<p>Doug had landed over to the left, feet up, head down, flipped by the explosion up to the same level, but out from the protection of the heathery gradient. He was rolling back, trying to get a grip on the shale surface, sliding downwards as he did so, slipping straight towards the sheer drop.</p>
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<p>"Doug!" Corky bellowed, but no sound at all came out, although he knew he had shouted. Doug didn't hear him. Danny was rolling over now, eyes trying to focus, a trickle of blood dripping from a burst lip. He saw Doug start to slide, saw the shale crumble under him. The lip was now closer than it had been before. Beyond it was the drop to the corrie below and the cauldron of white where the bomb had cracked the world.</p>
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<p>Corky crawled over, forcing his numbed limbs to move. Danny scrambled past, mouth working violently as if he too was screeching. Danny got a hand to Doug's ankle. Corky grabbed his other leg and Doug stopped slipping. He rolled quickly, grabbed Danny's shoulder and spun onto the relative safety of the turf.</p>
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<p>All of this happened in bare seconds. The noise was still ripping inside their heads, and they were entirely unaware that each of them was bawling. Up the slope, Tom and Billy, further away from the blast and less concussed, had landed together on the low rise at the highest vantage over the main valley and all the runnels which fed it. They were both winded and numb.</p>
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<p>The tree went sailing upwards, even higher than where they sprawled. It was spinning and twirling and scattering its confetti of leaves and pieces of thorn in a spectacular ballet into the white.</p>
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<p>Rocks and pieces of mudstone blasted upwards, some of them trailing dust or smoke, up and out, in a spectacular eruption, mixed in with red-hot pieces of metal which burned through the sky like meteors in reverse. The rocks went up in a fountain and came back down as black hail.</p>
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<p>Below the edge of the gorge, the face they had crawled up in panic, where Danny had slung the curved stick to knock the man off his feet, the whole slope shivered, shuddered, then all of it peeled away in an avalanche of rock and shale. The edge where Danny and Corky had sprawled slowly slipped away with a huge roar and Tom was surprised that he could hear it. It was not as loud as the percussion of the bomb, but the earth shivered even more violently. Corky and Danny held on to Doug as the ground began to slide from under them. They could feel the rumble of it moving, the bucking dance of ground in motion. Doug turned, crawled upwards, making his feet move faster than the sliding surface. Corky hauled on his collar.</p>
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<p>From their vantage point, Tom and Billy could see the narrow ridge shatter and crack on the far side, the thin shoulder that separated this gorge from the next, where they had discovered the backed-up lake. The whole top end, a hump of volcanic basalt rock maybe some twelve feet high and six wide, was pushed outward by the enormity of the blast.</p>
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<p>The three others scrabbled desperately to avoid being dragged down in the avalanche into the corrie below them. They got to solid earth, pushed themselves up onto the bracken, kept coming. Tom could hear them yelling frantically, but his eyes were fixed on the far side. Beside him Billy stood like stone, legs braced, eyes wide, mouth even wider.</p>
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<p>Corky reached them, his face grey with shale dust. He had Doug still by the collar as if he was unable to let it go. Blood was trickling from Danny's mouth. Tom's burst nose gave him no pain yet.</p>
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<p>They all turned.</p>
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<p>Down below, where the lip had started to slip and side, the whole side of this gorge bulged outwards, undercut by the blast. The ringing in Corky's ears stopped suddenly. He saw Danny push his palms against his own ears as if trying to clear the pressure. For an instant there was an absolute silence and then something popped and Corky heard the bass rumbling thunder.</p>
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<p>The slope bulged, swelled as if a gigantic bubble were inflating underneath the ground. The lip where they'd been sliding just dropped from sight. Jagged, horizontal cracks, more or less parallel, appeared in steps above that and almost instantly, in a jagged succession, they fell away in slices. The ground bucked again , almost hard enough to throw them off their feet.</p>
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<p>"Back!" Tom bleated and everybody heard him this time except Doug, but Corky still had a hand to his collar and he simply dragged him further up into the heather.</p>
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<p>Over on the far side of the defile, another series of horizontal cracks appeared, broken by vertical fissures that suddenly raced up the opposite face towards the ridge. The great boulder at the top shuddered and then rocked, not slowly, but surprisingly fast, twisting as it did.</p>
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<p>Streamers of debris and shrapnel were falling down around them and there was no cover. The hawthorn tree was tumbling through the air, both trunks in pirouette around each other. Rocks hit all around them. Further up the slope, behind them so they did not see it yet, a blazing piece of metal had set the dry summer couch grass alight. It would eventually burn eastwards and blacken miles of the moorland. The five of them stood there, transfixed once more. Tom pulled a numb Billy down beside him. By a miracle, the outsplash hit none of then, though all around them it was rapping and thudding on the grass in a deadly hail, like shot from the gun.</p>
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<p>On the far side, the rock shoulder slumped. A series of mudstone boulders shot out like squeezed pips in a cannonade powerful enough to spit them across the gorge to smack into the other side which was now a full-blown avalanche. The noise of grinding, rolling rock was unbelievable.</p>
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<p>The ridge twisted under its own weight, then fell away, slowly at first, then falling into the next gully. Sharp cracks of broken stone came out like grenades and then the ridge just fell from sight.</p>
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<p>"<em>Christ on a bike!</em>," Doug bawled, and his words were almost strangled by the death grip Corky had on his collar. Danny was speechless.</p>
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<p>Below them the rockface slumped down into the corrie with a huge grinding. Over on the opposite side, the rock ridge toppled out of sight and slammed against something with such force that they felt the shock of it tremble under their feet from almost eighty yards away.</p>
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<p>The shiver caused more of the ground on this side to slip. Danny pulled Corky who dragged Doug without any ceremony. Tom and Billy followed on. They scurried, stiff, sore and numb, but miraculously alive, along the edge of the heather, gaining height on the curve of land which connected the twin, narrow gorges. From that distance they could turn and see what was happening.</p>
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<p>"Look at that," Danny yelled. Corky held a hand up to his ear.</p>
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<p>"What?"</p>
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<p>Danny pointed and everybody looked. The side of the valley, the one they had scrambled up in panic and fear, was sliding down in one huge sheet of shale and mudstone. Small pieces of rock were shooting out to tumble down to the little rivulet beyond the basin of the corrie.</p>
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<p>Over on the other side of the ravine, they could now see from the vantage point of the high ground, the great rock on the ridge shoulder had rolled down to crash against the basalt walls which virtually bisected the valley. Behind them, Lonesome Lake stretched blackly, pocked by falling pieces of stone and twigs. The immense block of stone had rolled close to the top end of the wall where it bedded into the side of the valley, and now it was rocking massively back and forth.</p>
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<p>"It's going to.....," Corky bawled.</p>
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<p>The huge stone swung forward, back, teetered and then seemed to reach a point of equilibrium. Underneath its weight, the layer of mudstone began to crumble. Shards spat outwards on puffs of pulverised dust. The rock jarred, swung and then rolled. It all seemed to go in ponderous slow motion, but it took only a couple of seconds for it to tumble down the steep slope.</p>
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<p>It hit the wall where the trees and twigs and muddy peat had formed the natural dam, hit it with such a colossal jarring blow that the basalt dyke shivered under the impact. One side of it, a foot back from the water-worn crevice that had been cut by thousands of years of tumbling water, cracked and splintered, sending fissures growing up it like instant black branches. A squirt of fine water hosed out from the blockage, maybe ten feet up from the base. Lower down, where the new cracks spiderwebbed the rock wall a fine spray hissed, almost invisible. Another spurted out, black and dirty, arcing out into the narrow gully. The edge of the wall bulged the way the side of the face had done. It seemed to breathe, stop, breath again. Behind it millions of gallons pushed with irresistible pressure. The cracks on the weakened wall close to the plug of twigs and branches, feathered out, flaked. There was a heartbeat of a pause when nothing happened.</p>
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<p>Then the dam burst.</p>
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<p>It exploded outwards, taking the barrier of logs and everything else with it. The thick trunk that had formed the main blockage went tumbling out like a caber, end over end. It smacked into a rock fifty feet down the gorge and snapped like a dead twig.</p>
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<p>The water came out behind it in a roar that sounded somehow alive and ferocious. The wall of water came pushing out in a foaming cascade, taking rocks and sticks and everything with it. It shot straight out, hit the right hand bend in the gully where it turned to empty into the valley, and the bounding debris simply carved its own way through. Pieces of quartz and old red sandstone rolled along in blocks six feet high, carried by the enormous bore of water. The noise was cataclysmic.</p>
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<p>The five of them watched, stunned once more to silence as the dam burst and the huge front of water went rushing down the defile. The two halves of the jagged trunk which had blasted out were picked up again and thrown into the air, tumbling again. One thick section speared the shale on the far side, embedded into the ground before the water caught it again, plucked it free, and dragged it down onto the valley. The avalanche of water, stone and silty mud came crashing out into the main valley of Blackwood Glen in a vast torrent that unleashed all the pent-up weight and power that had been the deeps of Lonesome Lake. Down there, they could see the little ridge where the hawthorn trees grew in a line, the place where the four of them had sat out the long night while Corky gnawed grimly at the wire. The front hit the hawthorns and simply swept them sway. They could see the branches and the roots wave violently as they tumbled before it, then tumbled inside it. The next second, the flood swept over the campsite, a wall of brown and white that was ten feet deep, surging with foam, the colour of mud. The tent flipped up. An enamel plate spun into their air like a frisbee. In a split second the campsite was gone. The circle of stones was scattered like billiard balls. The torrent smacked against the alders and hawthorns on the far side, splintering trunks and uprooting the ferns. A whole section of turf simply slid down, undercut by the sharp stones which were dragged and scraped along like a rasp-file.</p>
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<p>The rampart of water reached the turn where Corky has been ambushed by the raggedy man, flinging stones ahead of it to embed themselves in the opposite slope, then the flood hit the trees, snapping the first ones like matchwood, great spruce trees, tall and straight, that had stood a hundred years and more, sending up a fusillade of gunshot over the roar of the devastation. The gully they had followed to reach the dam which held the backed up lake was changed forever, two of the turns, left and right, had simply been ground away to form a straight gash.</p>
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<p>The camp site was gone, taking with it the ruined tent and their old haversacks and the deer's rotted head, the gun, every shred of evidence that they had ever been there.</p>
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<p>Over on the gorge to the left, where they had climbed the face, pursued by the madman, the geography had utterly changed.</p>
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<p>The steep slope was no longer there. It had peeled and slid, taking with it the lip where the hawthorn tree had clung, and where Doug and Danny and Corky had fallen and tumbled before clambering for their lives after the blast. There was no slope, only a new, sheer face where the lines of mudstone sandwiched the thicker layers of gravel from the last ice age. It dropped almost a hundred feet into what once had been the little basin of the corrie that they'd reached after the scrambling, desperate climb up the shale slope.</p>
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<p>The corrie was gone.</p>
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<p>In its place, a huge mound of rubble and stone and gravel remained, hundreds, maybe thousands of tons of rock, still steaming and smoking and billowing dust. Trickles of rocks and stones ran down the flanks in miniature avalanches as the slip shuddered and settled under its own weight.</p>
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<p>Above them, a vast cloud of smoke was roiling in the once blue, once white sky, turning it black, shrouding them in its shadow.</p>
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<p>Below them, where the corrie basin had been, was a vast spoil heap of rock and shale, altered forever from what it had been in the nightmare chase, the panicked, desperate dash for freedom.</p>
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<p>The man with the twitchy eyes was underneath it. He was buried under this new hill.</p>
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<p>For a long time they stood there, listening to the crackling in their ears, listening to the scouring roar of Lonesome Lake as it drained away, scraping the valley clean of everything that had been there, alive or dead, carrying it all down in a cataclysmic swathe of destruction through the forest downstream. In the distance, they could see the tops of the trees whipping back and forth as the torrent shook them to their roots.</p>
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<p>After a while, the noise began to subside and the flow began to lessen. They still stood there, frozen, numb, rooted, hardly able to breathe, while around them the dust billowed and the smell of burning was hot on the air.</p>
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<p>The grey, bare mound that now covered the corrie drew their eyes towards it like a magnet. They had buried him.</p>
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<p>Far off, way down the slope on the other side, in the direction of Blackwood farm, a cock crew. Closer in, but still some distance away, a big grey bird flapped into the sky above the trees, gaining height, obviously startled by the rushing torrent of water. Danny Gillan thought he could hear the hoarse cry of a heron.</p>
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<p>Down in the depths, where the campsite had been, there was nothing to show that anybody had been there, neither boys nor madman.</p>
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<p>After a long time, as one, the boys of them turned to head for home. For an even longer time, nobody said a word.</p>
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