The Fog - James Herbert [2]
‘Well, see you tomorrow, Jessie. Must be off.’
‘Yes. Bye, Tom.’ She unfolded the thin blue writing paper and began to read the letter, a smile spreading across her face as Andy’s natural boisterousness shone through the written words.
Suddenly she felt giddy and lurched against the counter. She put her hand to her forehead, alarmed at the strange stomach-rising feeling. Then she heard a deep rumbling noise, a sound that came from below, under her feet. The floor began to quiver causing her to clutch at the counter again; the quiver became a trembling. Jars began to rattle on their shelves, cans began to tumble. The rumbling grew louder, deeper. It began to fill her head. She dropped her letter and clapped both hands to her ears. The ground shook. She lost her balance and fell to her knees. The whole shop seemed to be moving. The large glass window cracked and then fell in. Shelves collapsed. The noise became deafening. Jessie screamed and stumbled towards the doorway; every time she tried to rise she was thrown to her knees. She crawled to the entrance, terror of the building collapsing in on her forcing her on. Vibrations ran through her body, at times the shaking almost making her lose contact with the floor.
She reached the door, and looked out at the road that ran through the village. She couldn’t believe what her eyes told her.
The postman stood in the middle of the road holding on to his bike. A huge crack appeared at his feet and suddenly, as the ground opened up, he disappeared. The crack snaked along the length of the street to where young Freddy and Sara stood transfixed, clutching one another, and on towards Mrs Thackery who had been making her way to Jessie’s shop. Suddenly it seemed as though the whole village had been wrenched apart. The road disappeared as the ground opened up like a gigantic yawning mouth.
Jessie looked across the road and just caught sight of the terrified face of Mr Papworth as he and the whole row of shops and houses on his side were swallowed up by the earth.
2
John Holman wearily changed gear to take the car around the bend in the narrow country road. He was unshaven and his clothes were still damp from the morning dew. He’d spent half the night trying to sleep inside a thicket out of sight of the army patrols that practised their manoeuvres on a large but secluded part of Salisbury Plain. The area was owned by the Ministry of Defence and trespassers were severely dealt with if caught. The grounds could never be entered by accident; high fences and many warning notices took care of that. The fences travelled many miles around the territory’s perimeter and a heavy screen of trees and undergrowth successfully concealed what lay beyond.
Holman shook his head in disgust at the danger and discomfort he’d had to go through to maintain secrecy when he himself worked for the same government. It was idiotic that the two departments, the Ministry of Defence and the Department of the Environment, couldn’t work hand in hand, but held back information, guarded against intrusion, as if they were two different countries. He had been recruited into a new office specially formed by the Department of the Environment, to investigate anything from polluted rivers to outbreaks of disease. It was a special unit because nearly all the investigations were carried out secretly. If a company was suspected of illegally dumping dangerous waste product, be it into the sea, into a river, or on to a tip, but no proof could be found by direct methods, then Holman was sent in to probe further.
He usually worked alone and often under a cover, more than once he’d taken on manual labour to get inside a factory to find the information needed. Hospitals, a mental home – even an experimental home-range factory farm; he’d worked in many places and, often as not, in government institutions to get at the source of suspected malpractice. His one big frustration was that the transgressions he unearthed were not always acted upon. When politics – business or governmental – became involved, he knew the