Fugitives

by Alexander Gordon Smith

  At the top of the platform steps we followed a winding trail of black blood all the way down the passage to the escalators. The dark line continued up one of the three moving staircases, a macabre signpost showing us the way out of Twofields station. I stepped onto the other upward escalator, not wanting to go anywhere near the mess even though I knew it was nectar, the same filth that was fuelling my muscles, powering my heart.

  ‘Anyone know where we’ll come out?’ Simon asked as we travelled slowly towards the level above.

  ‘Twofields,’ Zee said unhelpfully. He noticed we were all looking at him and added: ‘Um, it’s in the financial district, I think. By the banks and all that. I’ve never been round here, sorry.’

  ‘It’s the cathedral, not the bank,’ Lucy said. I hopped off the escalator, scanning the hall ahead to see no sign of life apart from the same bloody trail. Simon followed, then Zee, and Lucy was still talking as she stepped gingerly onto the tiled floor. ‘St Martin’s, you know? Banks are over the river, Morgan Heath and Central. Why, you thinking of robbing one?’

  ‘I told you—’ Zee started, but he didn’t get a chance to finish.

  ‘I know, I know,’ Lucy said, holding up her hands. ‘You’re all innocents, you’d never dream of robbing a bank.’

  ‘Well, apart from Simon,’ Zee added, almost apologetically. ‘He used to rob stuff.’

  ‘Gee, thanks for sharing that,’ Simon muttered as we set off across the hall. It was deserted here too, although there was more evidence of violence – crimson streaks splashed up against a pillar, decorating a map of the underground. As we passed it I couldn’t help but think that it looked like the whole city was drenched in blood. It bled freely onto the floor, dripping like an open wound, which meant it was fresh. I held my finger to my lips to keep everybody quiet as we walked up a small flight of steps onto the main concourse.

  ‘Jeez Louise,’ Zee said when the station foyer came into view. ‘What the hell happened here?’

  Twofields station looked like it had been hit with a cruise missile. The various pillars scattered between us and the main doors had crumbled into dust, the ceiling drooping like a canvas tent. Every single bench had been overturned, and one was embedded in the glass door of a Marks and Spencer’s. The strip lights in the ceiling had been daubed red, casting the entire scene in a weird, muddy glow that reminded me of the infirmary back in Furnace.

  ‘Oh God,’ Lucy moaned, wiping her mouth. ‘Oh God, what’s going on? What’s wrong with you people?’

  Zee started to defend us again, attempting to rest his hand reassuringly on Lucy’s shoulder only to have it shrugged away. I left them to it, treading carefully across the sticky tiles, through the open ticket gates and round a corner. There was a noise here, the faintest whisper, and flickering too, like somebody was fidgeting manically in the shadows. I raised my hands, praying I wouldn’t come across the berserker that had caused so much destruction.

  To my relief, the source of the noise and light was a television. It hung precariously off its wall mounting, a string of something red and wet drooping over the screen and looking like the only thing keeping it from toppling to the floor. The volume was almost muted, but I didn’t need it. The images told their story effortlessly as they flashed on and off behind a pale-faced newsreader.

  ‘That looks bad,’ said Simon from behind me. ‘Is it real?’

  I thought it was a stupid question, but I could see why Simon had asked it. I’d seen this city attacked a hundred times – blown up in films, invaded in computer games, blazing on the cinema screen – so it was easy to believe what was taking place in front of me was make-believe, nothing but special effects and acting. Except that wasn’t how the news worked.

  No, those images were real. They were happening right now, and right outside the doors of this station. The shot of a building on fire – a residential block, by the looks of things, smoke-blackened faces screaming from windows twenty storeys above the ground; the footage of street blockades on every major route out of the city, bridges sealed off with police vans and … had that been a tank? Fleeting, blurry video of a huge, muscular creature scaling a wall like King Kong, vanishing through a window with a flash of silver eyes and a lunatic grin; aerial shots of the city that looked too close to my hallucination – pillars of smoke rising from three or four major fires, smudging the blue sky; CCTV feed of gangs of inmates running wild; and the vision I knew would become iconic, the one that we’d be seeing everywhere – a girl, maybe five or six, sobbing into a wide-eyed corpse that had probably been her mother while an inferno raged behind her, camouflage-clad soldiers trying to drag her to safety.

  JAILBREAK THREATENS CITY, ran the headline beneath the anchorwoman, an understatement if ever I’d seen one. Below that the rolling text bar ran its relentless course, telling people outside the city limits to get the hell away from town, and everybody inside the circular to lock their doors and start praying. POLICE WARN OF A NEW ‘WINTER OF SLAUGHTER’. And the thing that was more ominous than anything else, a flashing warning stating ALL EMERGENCY LINES HAVE BEEN SUSPENDED. DO NOT CALL 999.

  When the emergency services stop working, you know you’re in serious trouble.

  ‘No way,’ Lucy sobbed. She had a hand to her mouth, looking both ten years older and ten years younger than when I’d first seen her. She buried her head into Zee’s shoulder and this time she didn’t protest when he rested his arm around her. He had tears in his eyes too. They rolled down his cheeks leaving meandering trails in the layers of dirt that had accumulated there. ‘This can’t be happening,’ Lucy’s muffled protests were the perfect accompaniment to the images on screen, a soundtrack of misery and disbelief that bled into our ears as we watched the reports file in, the body count rising by the second as the unknown threat surged through the city. And then the picture changed.

  ‘There’s the bastard,’ Simon said, his voice low and menacing. On screen was a motorway, army trucks rumbling down it and flooding into the city. There was a police barricade at the junction and the barrier was open, the trucks passing through it under the scrutiny of several more camouflaged soldiers and …

  My heart almost stopped.

  It was him. The warden.

  He stood surrounded by hulking blacksuits, his grey suit as smart as ever, his hair parted neatly. There was no sign of the injuries that he’d suffered during our escape. He could have been anyone, a middle-aged man who had turned up to watch the show. Only even from here, halfway across the city, even as a tiny figure on a TV screen, it was clear that he radiated power. His posture made the soldiers around him hunch their backs, lower their eyes, and his leathery face – so much like a rotting mask pulled tight over a skull – seemed to dominate the entire picture.

  ‘Arrest him, you idiots,’ Simon yelled. ‘Go on, you want to know who’s behind this, he’s right in front of your stupid eyes!’

  But the police and the soldiers showed no sign of doing so. Instead they were talking to him, and from the looks of it they were hanging on his every word. He waved a long, thin arm and three uniformed men vanished out of the shot, running.

  The camera began to zoom in as more vehicles crossed the bridge, this time something that looked like a cross between a truck and a tank, its caterpillar tracks tearing up the tarmac. The warden slid closer to the edge of the screen, looking like he was about to climb right through the glass and into the station. Before I even knew what I was doing I had taken a couple of steps back. We may have beaten him, we may have escaped his prison, but that man still scared the crap out of me.

  I braced myself, studying his expression. He looked deadly serious as he addressed the men and women around him; furious, even. But just before he fell out of shot, in the instant before he vanished, he turned his crooked face to the camera and smiled, a wicked glint that was gone before I could even be positive it had been there. But it had been there, it was scored into my retinas, his face like a Punch doll carved in bone, flashing up in negative eve
ry time I blinked.

  ‘Come on,’ I said, desperate to get away. ‘The longer we leave it, the less likely we are to get out alive.’

  We all turned our backs on the television and shuffled towards the exit. One last flight of steps took us up to the main doors, thrown into shadow by the smoke that billowed and blustered beyond. It was so dark out there that for one terrifying moment I imagined the entire city had been plunged beneath the ground, a chamber of solid rock growing overhead and sealing us in this tomb forever. I had to close my eyes and literally shake the image from my head, stepping from the door to see slivers of blue sky through the relentless smog.

  ‘Looks clear,’ said Zee between coughs. I don’t know how he could tell, as visibility was reduced to maybe thirty metres. The street outside was lined with cars which all looked empty. Some still had their doors open and their engines running. The buildings here were all shops and offices, and the fire was coming from one further up the road. It was engulfed, flames licking from the doors and windows as if jeering at the fact that there was nobody there to put them out. Walls exploded, raining lethal shards of glass and masonry down into the street. Several alarms were going off in shops and cars alike, rising like some demented morning chorus.

  I pulled my hoodie up over my mouth to keep the smoke out, but still I felt dirty fingers stretch down into my lungs. It was like being back in the incinerator in Furnace Penitentiary, and I coughed so hard I thought I was going to puke.

  ‘Which way?’ I wheezed.

  ‘Away from that,’ Zee replied, pointing at the burning building.

  We’d taken three steps from the station doors when a cop sprinted out from behind an abandoned truck. He saw us straight away, raising his pistol and pointing it at us with shaky hands. It was impossible to gauge his reaction because a gas mask covered his face, only a pair of wide eyes visible beneath. I raised my hands above my head instinctively, hoping he wouldn’t notice the writhing muscles and tendons in my right arm. Zee and Simon lifted theirs too, but Lucy started running towards him.

  ‘Thank God,’ I heard her say as she bounded across the street. The cop saw her coming and angled the weapon towards her.

  ‘Stop,’ he shouted. Lucy slowed to a walk, holding her hands in front of her.

  ‘Officer, I’m not one of them, I’m innocent, a civilian; I need help.’

  The cop flicked his eyes at us but kept the gun pointing at Lucy. Beside me I could feel Simon tense up, knew that as soon as he saw a chance he’d be across the street, fists at the ready.

  ‘I said don’t move,’ the policeman barked at Lucy. ‘I’m warning you, take another step and …’

  He trailed off. Beneath the mask his eyes were blinking furiously and I thought I recognised the expression. He was in shock.

  ‘Lucy,’ I said. ‘Back off, he can’t help you.’

  Lucy ignored me, taking another couple of steps towards the policeman. I could hear her pleading, asking him to take her with him, to arrest us, just to get her off the streets. But he was paying no attention, looking at us like a rabbit about to get hit by a truck. I could hear muffled sounds and I realised he was talking, a stream of words blurred by his gas mask. From here, it sounded like a prayer.

  ‘Come on,’ Zee whispered. ‘Let’s go.’

  We started to move down the street, keeping our steps small and slow so we wouldn’t alarm the cop. He swung his weapon towards us, his mumbles ending abruptly.

  ‘I can’t let you go,’ was all he said, his gun shaking.

  Lucy was crying now, holding her hands out to him, fingers clasped together. Somewhere nearby a siren welled up, barely audible over the sobs and the constant roar of the fire. And there was something else, too, the patter of feet running this way, getting louder, faster, accompanied by hoarse breathing. I risked a look up the street but I couldn’t see anything past the smoke.

  Somebody cried out, a noise that might have been a yelp of pain or a whoop of excitement. The cop turned towards it, his eyes blinking even more furiously behind the sheen of his visor, as if by opening and closing, opening and closing they might erase the madness from sight. He lifted the gun, pointed it in the direction of the sounds, but there was nothing there but a wall of smoke backlit by shades of orange and red. That call came again, echoed by another, and this time there was no doubting that they were shouts of delight, like monkey screams.

  The cop looked at Lucy, his eyes lifting into a sad smile, a look so full of warmth and sympathy that it almost broke my heart.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘May God help you.’

  Then he swung the gun up to his own head and pulled the trigger. The shot echoed between the buildings, then was engulfed by the smoke, and before the cop could hit the ground two shapes bounded from the shroud of darkness, black eyes bloodshot, swollen and full of rage as they tore towards us.

  Old Friends

  At first I thought they were berserkers, their bodies muscle-bound and misshapen, as if they had been sculpted from clay by a child. Nectar dripped from their eyes and lips – just like the kid back in the station – making them look like those weird mimes you get on street corners, face-painted to look like they’re crying. Only these things weren’t crying. Their mouths were twisted up into grins, teeth bared and fat, black-veined tongues slopping away at the mess that dribbled down their chins. And in the soulless depths of those inkwell eyes I saw nothing but glee.

  But they weren’t berserkers. How could they be? They were wearing prison overalls, torn around their bulging chests and limbs and stained with fresh and drying blood, but unmistakable. Their faces, although swollen, had no mark of the scalpel, no stitches or scars. No, they couldn’t be berserkers, because they were prisoners like us who had just escaped.

  They couldn’t be berserkers because I knew one of them. He was called Bodie. I’d talked to him no more than a few hours ago, just before we’d made our bid for freedom up the elevator shaft. He’d been a boy then, not a wild, slavering beast hammering across the hot tarmac too fast for a human, hands like claws held out to our throats, eyes promising not just violence but a painful and bloody death.

  I didn’t have time to call out his name before he leapt onto a car bonnet and soared through the smoky air. He thumped into me, sending us both rolling over the pavement into the wall, him on top, his claws raking my skin, slashing, scratching. His head lunged forward, his teeth snapping shut, and I realised he was trying to bite me. Nectar swept through my system, making me act without thinking. I lashed out, my fist catching Bodie on the head. It snapped away but he didn’t seem to feel the pain, lurching forward for another attack.

  Of course he didn’t feel the pain. Judging by the amount of nectar that was flowing from his ears, his nostrils, squeezed from his pores, he was pumped full of the stuff. I managed to get an arm between him and me, pushing him back just before his teeth could get purchase.

  ‘Bodie!’ I called out, shoving him away. He toppled but found purchase, leaping back onto me. There was no white left in his eyes, those black pits like a demon’s, feral and full of something that wasn’t quite rage, wasn’t quite delight, but some sick hybrid of the two. Nectar dripped from his open mouth, and as it splashed onto my skin I noticed that it was flecked with red, the specks glinting like molten lava. He was almost vomiting the stuff, so much of it that my clothes were drenched, a sparkling black pool spreading out beneath us.

  He leant back in and this time I snapped my head forward, butting him right on the nose. It broke with a crack but he didn’t even register it. I did it again, bright lights bursting in my vision, then again, harder this time, knocking him backwards. I sat forward, grabbing his head in both my hands and holding it as steady as I could. He jerked and trembled in my grip, his body epileptic.

  ‘Bodie,’ I said. ‘Bodie, stop it. It’s me, Alex.’

  I caught movement behind Bodie’s head, noticed that Simon and Zee were both wrestling with the other inmate. There was no sign of Lucy. Bodie raked
his nails across my throat, his jaws snapping like a piranha’s, that fat slug of a tongue darting out and licking his lips between each attempted bite. I could feel the adrenaline kicking in, bringing the nectar with it, clouding my thoughts and my senses. If I didn’t end this quickly then I’d be pulled under again, and there was no guarantee I’d be able to find my way back to the surface.

  ‘Last chance,’ I said, my heart in my throat, pumping hard enough to explode. ‘Bodie, if you’re in there then you better let me know.’

  He rocked hard enough to dislodge one of my hands, throwing himself at me. I grabbed him again, then, as the emotion boiled up from my stomach, bursting from my mouth in a wail of grief and anger, I twisted as hard as I could. His head almost turned through a hundred and eighty degrees, but he didn’t stop fighting. His hands thrashed, his hooked fingers like the blades of a combine harvester, reaching for my throat even though he couldn’t see me.

  I backed away and watched for what must have been half a minute as he scrabbled on the street, his body a broken machine driven by the nectar inside him, the poison refusing to give up control even as the vessel cooled and stiffened. Eventually it ground to a halt, the eyes clearing as though a storm cloud was passing. Bodie stared sightlessly at the smoke that whirled above him, those slivers of daylight lodged in the glassy sheen of his gaze.

  I remembered Zee and Simon, looked across to the opposite pavement to see them both sitting on the other inmate, kicking and punching at his body even though he showed no sign of moving. Zee slid off onto the concrete, rolling away onto his feet. His knuckles were black. He looked at me, an expression of utter desperation.

  From further down the street came a muffled scream, followed by the honk of a horn. I wiped the tears from my eyes – tears that weren’t caused just by the smoke – and got to my feet, pulling Simon up as I passed him and jogging away from the burning building.