The Human Condition

dropped or was it shock? He'd run this route many times before and he knew he was more than capable of completing the distance, but now he was beginning to doubt himself. And all the time the plane's engines were getting louder.

    At the side of the road a twisting mountain stream tumbled down the hillside, disappeared under the road and trickled into the lake. That was Harry's two mile mark. If he pushed hard he knew that he could be home in less than fifteen minutes now, but it would take just about every last scrap of energy he had to do it. His legs were hurting. Christ, that plane was getting low and close...

    When the noise from the plane became deafening and was so loud that he could feel it through the ground beneath his feet like an earthquake, Harry stopped running again. This plane sounded different. Apart from the sheer volume of the noise it was making, this didn't sound like one of the military jets that often flew down the valley or even one of the smaller civilian aircraft that frequently passed over. The aircraft was moving in the same direction as he was, coming from behind him and flying along the length of the lake towards the village. He could see it above the trees now and it was flying lower than any plane he'd seen around here before. The slope of the bank down to the lake was relatively gentle here. Breathing heavily he jogged down to the water's edge to watch.

    The plane passed alongside him. It could have been no more than fifty meters from the surface of the lake and it was falling rapidly. As Harry watched in stunned disbelief its nose and starboard wing dropped slightly. The inevitable seemed to take an eternity to happen. Its rapid descent continued until the tip of the wing eventually clipped the water and somersaulted the plane forwards, flipping it over and over in mid-air and breaking it into several huge pieces which landed in the lake with a series of massive splashes, sending vast plumes of water shooting high into the air.

    Harry didn't connect the two crashes he'd seen until he found a third. He discovered Kenneth Brent, the local postman, dead in the middle of the road next to his motor-scooter. Letters were blowing casually across the silent scene like leaves on the breeze.

    By the time he arrived back at the village � exhausted, bewildered and terrified � he knew that something of vast and disastrous proportions had happened.

    By the time he arrived back at the village the wreck of the plane had disappeared beneath the surface of the lake, leaving the water appearing calm and deceptively normal. By the time he arrived back at the village everyone else was dead.

JACOB FLYNN Part i

    Jacob Flynn is serving a prison sentence for manslaughter. Like pretty much every other inmate, he will protest his innocence relentlessly to anyone who will listen. The fact of the matter is, however, that Flynn caused the death of a seventy-three year old gentleman through reckless driving. He will tell you that the old man was at fault as much as he was. He will give you any number of entirely plausible reasons why he feels his case was handled badly, and why the judge had something against him, and why his solicitor let him down, and how if it hadn't have been for the fact that he'd caught his lying bitch of a girlfriend in bed with his best friend then he wouldn't have been driving at almost twice the legal speed limit down a narrow residential road at just after two-thirty on a quiet Thursday afternoon in late November last year.

    Whatever Flynn might tell you, the fact remains that he lost control of his car around a tight bend, mounted the pavement and mowed down Mr Eddie McDermott as he walked back to his house after a lunchtime drink with friends. The fact remains that his driving was the sole cause of Mr McDermott's untimely death, and in the eyes of the law he is being punished accordingly.

    Flynn shares his small, rectangular cell with two other men, Suli Salman (minor drug trafficking offences and assault) and Roger Bewsey (corporate fraud). According to his own mental records, he has now been locked up for five months, three weeks and a day. It is just after eight o'clock in the morning and he has been awake for three hours.

    I hate this place more with every second I have to spend here. I don't know how the rest of them can handle it in here. I still don't know how I'm going to handle it. Every morning I wake up and wish that I hadn't got into the car that day. Every