Paper Children

by James Fahy

  “I’ve lost enough team members,” Cloves snapped.

  “Leave now,” Allesandro said, banging on the glass to shift her attention from me to him. She stared at him.

  “Get out,” he said. “We’ll find another way. Send someone back down for us, once the gas clears. We’ll stay alive. I’ll find somewhere for us to hide, somewhere airtight.”

  She stared back at me, her face flashing in and out of focus in the strobing red darkness through the glass.

  I was director-level blacklisted. I was as good as dead up on the surface anyway. At least if Cloves and Chase got out, there would be someone to tell what happened down here. What Coldwater had been doing.

  She swallowed, and nodded, her hard face glaring at me angrily. She finally lowered the gun, looking shell-shocked. “I’ll get them out,” she said. “You’re impossible to kill, Harkness. God knows, people have tried enough times. It’s almost fucking impressive. Don’t disappoint me now. If you die here… I’ll be furious. You owe me a new fucking car.”

  She turned and ran for the elevator, ducking under Chase’s arm and into the darkness beyond.

  The door had slammed behind her before she’d even had time to turn and swear at me one last time.

  We were alone. In the compound that had become our tomb.

  I turned to look hopelessly at Allesandro as a series of further deep bangs reverberated through the facility. I imagined they were other barriers like this one. Blast doors sealing off levels from one another. They sounded like cannon shots. My heart was pounding with adrenalin. He stared back at me grimly, his face flashing in and out of view in the strobing red light.

  I knew he was lying about finding another way out of this place. He knew that I knew. Cloves and Chase no doubt did as well. But it had been a kind lie. It had made them leave when they’d had to… Right now the elevator was speeding them, and the girls we had rescued, up and out of this horrible place. Back towards the fresh October night air. To a sky I knew I was never going to see again. There was nowhere safe the two of us could get to in less than three minutes. And there would be no safe pocket of clean air tucked away where we could escape the nerve gas. The system was obviously rigged to purge the whole facility. There were vents all along the ceiling in the corridor we stood. Small and circular, like flattened microphone heads. I’d seen them in every room we’d passed too.

  We were in a grave, already dead but still breathing. It was over.

  “They won’t be able to stop Dove’s massacre,” Allesandro said quietly. I nodded, my hair falling in my face in a lank and sweaty mess. I knew this was true. Dove’s mind-rolled vampires were going to tear the crowds apart. It would be a feeding frenzy. And the only person capable of stopping him at all was trapped down here with me.

  It was unfair. My vision blurred a little as unbidden tears suddenly welled, and I wiped them away angrily on my sleeve. My heart jolted and my chest heaved as for one horrible panicked moment I imagined the gas had already been released and was working its way into my lungs. But it was just a surge of emotion, a wracking, silent pull, like a fishhook in my chest, and I forced myself to swallow it down, my hands slowly coming away from the impenetrable barrier between us and safety, between us and life.

  I let them fall to my sides. I didn’t want to die here. I didn’t want Allesandro to die here either.

  He had pulled me to him before I’d seen his arm move. His arms wrapped around me protectively, one hand cupping the back of my head. I buried my face in his chest, fists bunched in his shirt. The skin of his throat was cold against my hot forehead as I squeezed my eyes shut.

  We stood there a moment, wrapped around one another in hopelessness, and somewhere, buried deep inside the knot of fear and despair which howled through me like an icy wind, there was a warm, quiet spot, like the calm eye of a storm, in which the two of us met. His blood coursed through my veins, and mine now through his. I felt him swallow hard, as we both waited for the bomb to drop.

  “Decontamination in two minutes,” the calm, utterly emotionless voice echoed along the corridors. The uncaring voice of God announcing our death sentence.

  The red, pulsing lights, which had been flaring and dimming ever since Dove’s ghoul had cut the power, suddenly steadied, and became still, painting us and our surroundings in the flat, calm, maroon glow of a dying sun.

  That made sense. All the exits were sealed now. Presumably any staff who might once have worked down here, developing bio-chemicals or whatever the hell should have been out by now. If not… bad luck. No more need for urgency, no further call for panic, not when the outcome was now determined.

  In the sudden silence and stillness, I looked up at him. “Are you scared?” I asked.

  He nodded, looking back at me. I put my arms around him, clasping my fingers together and trying to stop my treacherous brain from counting seconds down. A small and desperate part of me was working up the courage to ask him to snap my neck. Would he? If I asked him to? It would be quick. It would be less painful than nerve gas, choking on blood and vomit as my lungs scoured. But where would that leave him? Alone with my corpse in his own final moments?

  He glanced over my shoulder and I felt him tense.

  “Phoebe,”

  I broke away from him and turned to see what he was staring at.

  With the barrier before us closing off the elevator, the crossroads of corridors had become a T-junction. The way behind us was clear, leading back into the darkness and blood-coloured shadows we had tried so hard to escape, but to our left, and, I now saw, behind Allesandro as well on the right, we had company. A lot of it.

  The Pale had congregated. Behind the vampire, many figures filled the tunnel, almost wall to wall. The same in the other direction. There must have been fifty of them, maybe more. All having worked their way up from the lower levels. Following the scent of prey.

  They were rushing towards us from both sides, clambering over one another as they barrelled down the long corridors, knocking each other to the floor like a true zombie hoard in their eagerness and hunger. They trampled the fallen into the ground, and more rose up behind to take their place. In the red wash, the tide of grey skin looked uniformly blood-drenched, a swarm of crimson demons. Bald heads, long thin limbs. Sunken stomachs and protruding ribcages. Their many lipless faces wild, gnashing rictus grins and blind wide eyes like lampreys, countless pinpoints in the dark.

  They were mindless of course. They had no way to know that in less than two minutes, they would be thrashing around on the ground, dying in agony, no different from us. They didn’t know anything. They were just angry, and hungry. A sea of rage flowing towards us from both directions.

  Allesandro grabbed me by the wrist. I stared at him silently as they closed in on us fast. Without speaking, I knew what he was asking, his eyes searching mine. Do we run? Is there any point? The only clear route was back down the corridor deeper into the gloom, back into hell and even further away from the painfully out-of-reach exit. It was the bleakest of choices. Die by gas, or die by dismemberment? What difference did it make, ultimately? How did we want to spend our last two minutes of life?

  But instinct is too strong to ignore. It’s almost impossible to place your hand in a fire, knowing it will burn. The human desire to live, even if only for a few seconds more, is overwhelming. Drowning people will gasp for air, even deep underwater. Filling their lungs with brine. The body wants to live. Even though we both knew we were dead either way, we just couldn’t stand and greet it with open arms. I squeezed his hand and we ran. Together we sprinted back into the darkness and the horde of Pale, converging on our spot seconds later like two crashing tides from either direction, followed us, a screaming wave.

  We dragged each other along at a sprint. Both he and I knew there was nowhere to go. We were only running from death into death, but mentally I heard myself screaming fuck it. I wasn’t going to die easy. I wasn’t going to lie down at the end. I had no intention of ending up like Coldwater
and Dove’s monstrous ghoul, broken on the floor beneath a mass of swarming, hungry mouths, tearing me apart and chewing on my insides in my final moments. Fuck that, I wouldn’t give the monsters the satisfaction.

  But for all our determination, the Pale were faster than us. Much faster. They were closing the gap behind, and quickly, descending on our heels in a roaring tangle of anger.

  Allesandro skidded to a halt at the first door in the corridor we came to. It seemed locked, but these were only admin offices once up here on this level. No fancy mechanisms. He slammed his weight against it, and it buckled in the frame.

  I glanced back. They were almost upon us.

  The vampire threw himself against the door again, hard, ramming his shoulder with a grunt, his dark hair tumbling over his eyes. Still, it didn’t open. Today, I thought bleakly, was not a day in which the universe was giving us a break.

  All the despair and hopelessness at our situation, all the fear and panic flooding through me in our final minutes… suddenly left. They were swallowed up by a rising geyser deep inside me of pure anger. Of fury at the sheer unfairness of it. I could feel the Pale virus, dormant in my cells, coming to the fore, rising like a fireball inside me to take me over as it fought, like a desperate cornered animal, to do the only instinctive thing it knew to do. To survive.

  I turned away from the vampire and his efforts, barely aware of my movements. I was filled with nothing but rage, white and powerful as the heart of a star. It blazed, invisible through every fibre of me. I thrust out my arm at the onrushing army of Pale, filling the corridor wall to wall with their withered, feral bodies as they bore down on us.

  “Stop!” I screamed.

  My voice was so forceful and angry it felt like I was tearing my throat.

  Against all reason, and to the astonishment of both myself and Allesandro… they did.

  Every single one of the abominations filling the corridor, now only steps from me, stumbled to a dead halt, not five paces from us. They visibly staggered, as if hit by a blow, those further back crashing into those in front like a motorway pile up. The flow of the Pale slowed and stopped. The screams and growls died out and then ceased altogether. The chattering of teeth and gnashing of jaws, all froze.

  From my peripheral vision, I could see that Allesandro had frozen in shock as well. He was staring past me to the suddenly silent and perfectly still creatures in disbelief.

  They were utterly motionless, every single pair of hungry, milk-blind eyes trained on me. Several dozen grinning, ruined faces, withered hollowed cheeks, noseless bat-like visages. A rogue’s gallery of grotesques, drooling and gurning with contorted and devolved faces. They looked as surreal and stationary as a terracotta army, standing in the ruby glow of the silent corridor.

  My arm was still held out before me, as though warding them off. It was shaking with concentration… with effort. There was an immense pressure inside my head, as though someone was squeezing my temples in a vice, pushing a golf ball slowly into my skull through my forehead, and it was building and building. But I didn’t feel weak. My legs were firmly planted, my ribcage felt as though it was filled with fire, as I gasped for breath.

  “Phoebe…” I heard the vampire whisper, sounding uncharacteristically astonished, “…are you doing this?”

  Not a single eye of the Pale strayed to him. They were all fixed on me as I held them in thrall. I was doing it, though I had no idea how. It was taking every ounce I had to give. I felt warm wetness on my top lip, my nose had started to bleed, and there was a rising high keen deep in my ears, getting louder and more urgent. It felt as though my brain itself was about to explode.

  I could… feel them. Inside my head. Every one of the fuckers. Overlapping whispering voices, a haunted susurrus of primal need and inarticulate fury, and somehow, with sheer concentration and anger, I was drowning them out. Every one of them howled inside my skull, but I was louder. Louder than their anger and hunger. I was all they could hear, and they were paralysed by it.

  “One minute until total decontamination,” the tannoy announced flatly. It was the only noise in the corridor.

  I felt my left knee buckle a little. It was as though someone has suddenly increased gravity in the corridor tenfold, and I was trying to hold up a mountain with my bare hands. A few of the Pale twitched, their long claws clacking together like serrated knives, as they tried to fight against their paralysis. The control I held felt thinner than a razor’s edge, and it was wobbling.

  “Hurry,” I managed to hiss through gritted teeth. “I don’t know how long I can-”

  Allesandro slammed once more into the door, and it flew open as he tumbled inside.

  With a ragged breath, which seemed to drain all the strength out of me as surely as if my throat had been slit, I dropped my arm and followed, stumbling in through the door. I felt instantly cold, as though all the blood really had left my body. I almost fell, my vision darkening at the edges as I staggered, dizzy and filled with nausea, the Pale virus within me sinking down and away into deep black water, out of sight all at once.

  He caught me as I crumpled to my knees, overwhelmed with fatigue both physical and mental. Allesandro spun me into the room and turning back, slammed the door.

  I knelt on the floor in this dimly lit room on my hands and knees, head down, feeling everything spinning around me. I was light-headed, dizzy, but I was myself again. I was dimly aware that he had picked something up, a piece of furniture, a desk perhaps, or table, I couldn’t see exactly. It was something too heavy for any human to have lifted with such ease, but he thrust it wedged in front of the door, blocking it tight, just as the masses of Pale, freed from their curious hypnosis, fell upon it from the other side en-masse. The door buckled and shook alarmingly as he fell back, scooting over to me across the floor.

  “Phoebe.” He grabbed me by the shoulders, kneeling in front of me, as I raised my head to look at him, shaking it as though I could clear my thoughts, I felt cobwebby. “How did-”

  “I don’t know,” I managed. Less than a minute. “It doesn’t matter now.”

  Time was up. I forced myself to stand, unsteadily, pulling him up with me. My one clear thought was that here at the end, I was damned if I was going to die on my knees. We would die standing.

  “There’s no time,” I said thickly.

  A quick glance around the room showed no other exit. It was a small windowless office, a few empty tables. A long-deserted filing cabinet. No other way out. Not that there was anywhere we could have gotten to anyway, even if there had been.

  The door shook and rattled as though battered by a hurricane as the creatures clawed desperately to get in at us. Their furious screams pierced the walls.

  Allesandro has still not let go of my shoulders. My eyes met his, and I was surprised to see he was smirking.

  “What?” I said incredulously.

  He shrugged. “It just came to me,” he glanced around the room. “This is the biggest coffin I’ve ever been inside.”

  He looked so healthy and vital, standing here before me, it was hard to reconcile him with the tortured, shrunken corpse-like thing I had found. The thing I had tried to rescue.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered in our final moments, the seconds ticking silently in the air around us like a deadly pendulum. “I came to try and save you. I should have come sooner.”

  He shook his head. “You came for me.”

  Never once, since I’d met this vampire, had I ever known his true motives, his true intentions. Every situation we had ever ended up in seemed to result in him getting what he wanted from me. I’d tasted his blood, allowing him into my mind. I’d refused to repeat the process, until circumstances had forced me to drink from him again or devolve myself, and therefore the bond was strengthened. Again, he had got his way. I had sworn he would never drink from me. I had promised myself I wouldn’t let my guard down and deepen that bond. And yet I had. To save his life. And now we were dead. He didn’t come out of this particular
meeting smug and satisfied, and I died never knowing.

  The vampire leaned in and took my face in his hands, his lips on mine. I closed my eyes. Maybe twenty seconds until the world ends. Why waste it on pointless what ifs?

  I kissed him back deeply. The Pale at the door forgotten. The wicked tomb around us forgotten. There was only the two of us, here at the end. My hands wrapped around his back protectively.

  Deep in the kiss of this vampire who I had decided to care about, entwined in shadows as deep as spilled blood, I waited to die.

  Chapter 37

  “Eww… gross.”

  Allesandro and I flew apart, surprised. The voice had come from right next to us. Someone was in here?

  I stared in disbelief. Standing right beside us, where a second earlier there had been nothing, was a figure. A girl.

  Her long blond hair was matted and tucked behind her ears. She was wearing a battered-looking old jacket over a stained and dirty hospital gown, and she had her arms folded. She was staring at us both with the kind of awkward discomfort any teenager is overwhelmed with when faced with romance. She looked around thirteen.

  “Are you guys going to make out, or get out?” she asked, cocking her head to one side and staring at our astonished faces. “Ugh… old people kissing are yuk.”

  It was Melodie Cunningham Bowls. I recognised her instantly from the photographs of our investigation. She was gaunter, with dark circles under her eyes, and her skin was as pale as chalk, but it was her. Coldwater’s one success. The missing fugitive who had escaped this place, and who had been popping in and out of existence all over the city ever since. The Seraph.

  There was a loud klaxon blare through the tannoy system, and then, from above us, a hiss. The sound of a thousand pythons released into the air. The nerve gas was pumping. In seconds, it would fill every nook and cranny of this place.

  There was something wrong with the girl’s eyes. Melodie Cunningham Bowls had blue eyes. She was… changed. Her eyes were dark, the pupils far too big. They obliterated the iris, making her eyes seem to be filled with deep rich ink.