The Storm by Alexander Gordon Smith

but to do and die,’ he went on, louder now. ‘Ours is not to reason why, ours is but to do and die,’ again and again, like a chant, like a prayer, as the front of the chopper began to come apart, breaking into pieces like a kit model. Then Marshall, his arms and legs and head coming loose, hanging there against a backdrop of boiling black skies. Harry looked down, realising that he was no longer inside the helicopter. Pieces of it floated beside him, suspended in the turbulence a mile above the vanishing ground. He’d dreamed of this as a child, night after night, of being able to fly. That memory blew out the fear, and even though he could see his own flesh begin to unravel, layers of pink then red then white trailing outwards, he found himself smiling.
    ‘Ours is not to reason why,’ he said through crumbling lips. Then his mind ruptured into white noise and black light, and everything that was Harry Botham was pulled into the abyss.

Graham
    London, 9.24 a.m.
    The worst thing was the noise. It was deafening, literally – he couldn’t hear the people screaming, couldn’t hear the revving engines or the wailing car alarms or the crash of metal as it folded into metal at the intersections, not even the explosions. There was only the storm, an endless roar that made the streets tremble, as if the city was a living thing quaking in terror. It was so loud that Graham hadn’t seen more than a handful of windows still intact on his way across town, glass ripped from frames by the immense, rolling sonic pulse that pounded the streets. It was doing the same to his skull, as though the sound was a solid, living thing seeking the right frequency to split open the bone and let his brains slop out on to the pavement.
    He pushed past a crowd of tourists fleeing in the opposite direction, then turned on to Millbank. For a second it appeared in the gap between buildings, a vast, churning mass of matter that curled and spiralled around a core of darkness. From here, ten miles away, it looked halfway between the cloud from an atom bomb and a storm, the sky impossibly dark, as though a section of night had fallen loose, dropped on to London. But in the gaps between the debris, between the flotsam and jetsam of his city, he saw something worse than darkness. He saw the places where the world had been rubbed away.
    Something was happening up there, soft explosions detonating in the middle of the storm. There were jets in the sky, choppers too, being pulled into the hole like toys in a stream. Graham wrenched his head forward, focused on where he was going. It had taken him – how long? – nearly four hours to get from his house to Millbank. He’d had to walk. The city was clogged with people trying to escape, nobody going in the same direction. All the main roads were frozen solid by accidents, the trains and the Tube were shut down, which meant everybody was on foot. He felt as if he had battled past each and every one of London’s eight million inhabitants just to get to Thames House. He’d headed over to Whitehall first, to the counterterrorism unit, but Erika Pierce hadn’t been lying, the place had been deserted. MI5 was the next logical destination, but he had the awful feeling that he’d get there to find its rooms empty too.
    They’ve all fled, and you should too, because it will eat you, that storm, it will devour you . And he knew that was the truth, knew that he should turn tail and run. He’d called David three hours ago, told him to go, to head south, get out of the country if he could. With any luck he’d have reached the coast by now, could head over the Channel into France. Or maybe he went the other way, maybe he got caught up, carried towards the storm. Maybe now he’s circling the pit, or lost inside it. And the thought of him pulled into nothingness, snuffed out like a flame, the very essence of him extinguished, made Graham want to die. He could go, call him on the way, meet him in Calais and just