I touched at the metal door tentatively. If it had been hot, I could have expected raging fire behind it. The door was icy cold, so I used a key from the bulky work key ring I carried, and opened the barrier.

​

The area beyond the door looked completely normal. Like the two other Sections, Section 1 was a small city of storage, three hundred yards wide and over two hundred from front to back. It was laid out in the same way as a supermarket, with aisles of back-to-back shelving units running from left to right. However, everything here was on a grander scale than a supermarket. The shelving units reared over sixty feet tall and were skeletal metal frames; I often thought of them as the creation of some crazy Meccano enthusiast. Each shelving unit was ten-foot deep and a hundred feet long. There were seven pairs of back-to-back units to each row of shelves, and ten such rows from the front to the back of the chamber. Corridors separating the rows were thirty feet wide, while gaps between the ends of the paired sets of shelving units were twenty feet wide. All this space allowed ample forklift access.

​

Aisles and cross-routes in the labyrinth were well-lit by fluorescent light-strips hanging from girders under the roof. The illumination allowed you to see right through areas of shelving that were not completely filled with crates, boxes or loaded pallets – often, you could see through several rows together. Other than the containers and the yellow floor-markings, almost everything was in shades of grey: the concrete floor being painted pale grey; the metal shelving, slate grey; the great space high above, fading from dark grey to charcoal-black at the roof’s peak.

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Number-labels and bar-codes provided specific locations for the shelves, which supposedly matched data on the warehouse’s computers. As a night watchman, I knew less about the storage system than the ass-end of the moon and cared even less.

​

A faint smell of smoke was the only evidence of the disaster unfolding elsewhere in the warehouse. The odour wasn’t even as bad as it had been outside, and that was certainly as odd as it was good news.

​

In terms of sound, the damn siren was blaring insanely inside. It reduced the roaring calamity of the fire to a background noise, and also blotted-out whatever sirens were wailing in front of the building.

​

Realisation hit me as I stepped back into the warehouse that finding Bill would be no easy job – even for a team of firemen. Just checking every aisle would take a lot of time. And if Bill was moving around the warehouse too – perhaps looking to rescue me – that might make it harder still. Or if he was unconscious and perhaps hidden amongst some crates...

​

Another possibility dawned on me. Bill could be out front, safe and sound, telling the fire crews to look for me. Wouldn’t that be an irony?

​

The door had brought me into Section 1 behind one of the banks of shelves closest to the side of the building. From my mental map of the warehouse, I knew that if I went left past two shelving units and then straight forward to the front wall, I’d reach one of the emergency Fire Exits. I didn’t waste another second – I started running.

​

A look further left, towards the middle Section of the warehouse, revealed no initial signs of fire or smoke. There were interior walls running either side of Section 2, with six equally-spaced wide openings in them for the forklifts. I could see the nearest arched opening and there was no fire beyond it... Evidently, the fire was right at the back of Section 2 – it hadn’t spread as much as I had feared. Before I turned into the aisle, I looked upwards to the top of the wall. Each interior wall reached up only as high as the bottom of the roof, and you could look through the roof’s metal support framework and see over the wall. Above this wall, I could see a great convulsing mass of flame. I reckoned it had grown up the back wall and then rushed into the roof. Certainly, flames were filling the high space below the apex of the roof. Large drops of flame, pieces of charred debris and drifts of ash hazed down amongst the flickering glare.

​

My view of the fire vanished behind rows of shelved crates as I ran on. It wasn’t a view I wanted to see again ever.

​

Far ahead of me, however, was a much better view. In the front wall, the high row of windows was lit by swirls of bright colour from outside. These could only be from the lights of emergency vehicles. The strange display was all the assurance I needed to confirm that help was out there.

I sprinted two-thirds the way to my destination before coming to a dead stop.

​

I’d found something far more disturbing and frightening than the fire I had seen.

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At a crossroads between forklift routes there was blood.

 

*     *     *

 

You see a lot of blood spilled in movies. It explodes and geysers, and you’re pretty desensitised to it.

​

Real blood splatter is different. You smell its grim, metallic odour. You know it means injury or death to a real human being. It’s a shock, even if you’ve seen it before. And that’s the way it should be – if real blood doesn’t affect you, you’ve lost part of your humanity.

​

What lay in the crossroads wasn’t a spray or pool of blood, it was as if a great bag of blood had been emptied there. I’d seen men shot, stabbed and blown up. None of the blood evidence left behind resembled this. And there were small lumps in the metre-wide zone of splatter. Congealed blood? Pieces of bone or flesh..?

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“What the hell?” I hissed. The exclamation was drowned-out by the fire alarm.

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I turned my head leftward and saw more evidence. There were drips and streaks of blood leading towards Section 2. And there were scars in the concrete floor too. It looked like someone had whacked a pickaxe into the floor and dragged it back over eighteen inches – again and again. Many of the scars were crisscrossed, a mixed-up jumble. In more open areas, the scars were in groups of three parallel lines.

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In my scared and panicked state, a stupid thought came to my mind. It was so stupid that I actually grinned – standing right next to all that blood.

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Godzilla’s in my warehouse.

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“Yeah dumbass,” I snapped back to myself, “and King Kong’s coming to save you.”

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I glanced at the blood again. Could whoever had bled that much still be alive? More importantly, could that be Bill’s blood?

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I grimaced and turned from the direction of my escape. I started following the patterns of blood and floor-scarring...

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Towards Section 2.

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