“If she is, get out of there. Get back here so we can close the door.”
Adalia keyed the radio that she carried like a rosary, and spoke into it without waiting for Attis to reply.
“Ranj? Ranj, are you there? I think she’s waking up. Get down here man, we need you. I don’t know what’s gonna happen.”
<><><>
Ranj stood in the doorway of the balcony watching Philip Sault as he in turn crouched by the rail and watched the street below.
Sault turned his head and glanced back at him
“Got any plans, Ranj?”
Paired with a hyena smile.
Ranj shrugged.
“I don’t know. Staying alive I suppose. It’s all too much ...I can’t really get to grips with the whole thing. What about you?”
Ranj suppressed an urge to recoil from that smile and did his best to dismiss the feeling that Sault was somehow mocking him, mocking them all. Feeling like that wasn’t going to help him, or the group as a whole, in any way that he could think of.
Before Sault could reply, the radio squawked in Ranj’s pocket and he retreated from the window. Listened with a sinking heart and told Adalia that he’d come down.
He didn’t want to go down there. Not at all, not if that old woman was going to get up, all claws and biting teeth.
“Philip? It looks like she’s waking up. That woman. I better get down there. Are you coming?”
Sault slid the balcony door closed and nodded.
Jogged after Ranj in a manner that somehow managed to make it appear as if he were out for a leisurely stroll.
“Oh, I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”
Muttered under his breath, too low for Ranj to hear.
<><><>
Attis had finally withdrawn to the doorway, standing, transfixed as the figure on the floor moaned and growled.
“Close the fucking door Attis. Lock her in.”
For Adalia, the situation had taken on the syrupy consistency of nightmare. One of those nightmares where you run sweating from some barely glimpsed terror and never seem to get away. Never seem to lose the sense of imminent disaster.
Attis might be okay, a decent person, she had a feeling that he was. Probably more than okay, probably that remarkably rare thing ...a truly nice guy. But right now he was displaying all the characteristics of a Westboro Baptist Church nutjob. Standing in the face of the fucking obvious with some misguided sense of something or other.
Standing there like that was right next to plain madness. Standing there like he was, crammed in the doorway like some outsized weightlifter in pale blue ... well, to Adalia’s way of thinking, he was past crazy. He was looking back at crazy in the rearview mirror and waving it a cheery goodbye.
Clutching the radio in her hand so tightly that her knuckles shone white and bare, she turned away.
Caroline stood further down the corridor, clasping a crow bar as if it were a talisman that would ward off evil. Looking scared and confused.
“We cannot close the door and ignore it. We need to ...monitor her, see what happens,” Attis said.
Spoke over his shoulder. Quietly and with assurance, absorbed in his observation of the woman.
Adalia took a step towards Caroline, panic burning in her mouth like hot thick soup, and the two women stared at each other without speaking.
This was messed up and getting more messed up by the second and they both knew it. Adalia saw the alarm in Caroline’s eyes, before she heard Attis gasp and the inhuman growl behind her.
She whirled in time to see him stagger back from the door and slam into the wall opposite as a snarling creature leapt at him. She got the impression that the wall actually shook under the weight of the impact. Fancied that she saw plaster dust shimmer from above and drift lazily down on the two figures. She might have imagined it, but she didn’t think so. Attis was big and strong, no doubt there, it was plain as plain could be. The strength was probably all that prevented the mutated woman from instantly overcoming him, from simply ripping him apart.
The thing was dressed in the remnants of the elderly woman’s clothing but there wasn’t much of the elderly woman left other than that. Sprigs of dead hair still clung to its head like limp twigs after a roll in the grass. There may have been a residue of the old lady there, but the essence was gone. Distilled and warped, utilised in the formation of something new. Something simpler and more fundamental.
Attis held her at bay, his hands gripping her upper arms as her taloned fingers sank into his shoulders. Wet red stains began to bloom on his tunic, claws sinking into his flesh through the fabric.
With a titanic effort he hurled it away from him, his clothing tattered and bloody where claws were ripped free. Its spine crashed into the frame of the door, hard enough to shred the flesh and break the bone of a normal person, but with only a fleeting effect on this thing. As Attis panted and reeled back, it launched again. Springing with a hunger that defied his strength. As he crashed into the corridor wall for a second time, his head rocked back and dented poor grade commercial plasterboard hard enough to stun him.
His right hand shot up to grasp its neck but too late to prevent teeth piercing his cheek and ripping flesh. He desperately twisted away from that mouth, heels sliding and losing grip.
Head dragging down the wall, impacted-freed dust mixing with his blood.
They fell to the floor. The creature over him, slashing and lunging as he tried to strangle it with one hand and fend off its claws with the other.
Adalia felt more than saw Caroline move up on her left.
Felt her move and then stop.
Flicked her head away from the horror before her and saw the weapon in Caroline’s hands clutched at chest level, thrust out like a useless defence. If Caroline was going to use it, wade into the fray and turn the tide, it would have been then, at that moment. But she’d stopped. For whatever reason, she’d stopped and stood alongside Adalia, and Adalia was wasn’t about to snatch that long lump of sharp metal from Caroline’s seized hands.
If Caroline was paralyzed with shock or indecision, Adalia was just as powerless to intervene. She wanted to run and hide, lock doors behind her, scream and cry. She really didn’t want to grab that weapon and start battering at that thing.
And then any decision was removed from her control.
She felt herself roughly shoved into the wall, propelled by an iron grip on her left shoulder. The forgotten gun was pulled so forcefully from her that the already torn pocket was almost ripped from the garment, left hanging by a few tenacious threads of cotton.
Philip Sault didn’t speak or explain, merely took what he deemed necessary and pushed her aside, swept past them and kneeled within six feet of the two struggling figures.
His outstretched hand holding the gun.
The creature snapped its mouth at Attis’s free arm and latched on, snagged it like a dog catching a slippery frisbee, dipped and ripped flesh as the man’s grip on its neck faltered. The thing reared back, tearing tissue and muscle in a spray of blood.
Before it could plunge again, Sault shot it.
Shot it point blank in the torso. Throwing it off the man, hissing and keening, an unearthly sound lost in the concussive aftershocks of the gun being discharged.
Sault remained stock still as this thing, his former companion, this poor old woman, rose again, damaged and furious, mouth agape, spitting oblivion at him.
He shot it again, between the eyes.
Adalia watched in stunned silence as parts of its head exploded against the wall and it jerked backwards to lie dead on the floor.
For endless seconds, Sault remained with the gun trained on the thing and then slowly rose and stood. Inspecting the thing he’d killed as it lay prone and twitching.
Talking, perhaps to himself, perhaps to the others, but loud enough for them to hear after the shock of the gunshots.
“They shut off the trauma, virtually no bleeding. Like their bodies isolate damaged areas
and start repairing instantly. The head wounds work if they’re violent enough. Knock out the control centre and Bob’s your uncle.”
He turned to Attis, the gun at his side.
The Greek had pushed himself to a sitting position against the wall, gulping air and attempting to stem the bleeding from his arm, hand clamped over the wound. The blood from his face dripped unchecked, relentlessly staining his shirt.
The two men’s eyes met for a long moment and if there was any communication, it was unspoken.
Sault came to some internal decision and directed his attention to the gun, messing with it, studying it, unloading and reloading.
Finished, he turned to Adalia and presented it to her, barrel pointed to the ground and handle horizontal.
“There you go. Three bullets left. It’s a piece of crap. Lucky it didn’t blow up in my hand.”
He walked away, brushing past Caroline, and paused by the lifts, listening to the thumping on the glass at entrance to the building.
“We need to get upstairs, as quickly and quietly as possible. The noise has alerted some of them. I think they may go away if they don’t get any further encouragement ...or they get distracted by something else.”
He moved towards the stairwell door and only stopped when Caroline ran to him and grabbed his arm, spinning him back to face them all.
“What do you do? What the fuck are you?”
She was breathing in tiny gasps, breathless from a few steps. Breathless at having to touch his shoulder, to swing him round.
“What am I?”
His face was coldly quizzical.
“A doctor? Lawyer? Fucking street cleaner? Tinker, tailor, beggar man, thief?”
Sault radiated barely contained contempt.
“It doesn’t matter now. None of that matters. What I was, what you were, it’s gone. Look around you.”
He indicated the dead thing by the open office door and the injured man slumped against the wall and looked at them all, not just Caroline.
“Listen to what’s outside. That matters. What we were, whatever mundane little job we had, is irrelevant. We just happened to not get whatever it is. We survived. And if you want to keep surviving, you better get a clear grasp on that concept.”
He stopped speaking and stared at them as the thuds and bangs from the front of the building filled the silence, an ambient accompaniment to his words.
As their eyes fearfully flicked between him and the foyer, he shook his head in dismissal and turned on his heel, heading for the upper level.
Adalia watched the man leave and tried to get her brain to work, tried to get past the shock of the last few minutes. She didn’t like Sault, something instinctive, some visceral reaction that defied logic, but she couldn’t deny the sense of what the man had just said.
All the rules were gone. Everything that could have been taken for granted was gone. Monsters stalked the streets. If they, the few of them that had somehow escaped the disease, didn’t adjust to the new reality of life, however insane it might be, they’d end up like the old woman lying on the floor there. Dead or changed into something inhuman.
The vulnerability of the situation suddenly hit home, struck her in way that made her legs feel weak and her bowels watery. Right at that moment, a scant few millimetres of glass were all that separated them from creatures that would slaughter them. If those things broke in, they didn’t stand a chance. It was a death-trap, the foyer and this corridor would just become a killing floor.
“You need to get upstairs,” Ranj said to the two woman.
“But we need to know if they get in. I’ll stay here and help Attis. If they come through, I’ll come up and lock the staircase behind me. Come on, go, but do it quietly. No noise.”
They nodded dumbly. Adalia went to him before she followed Caroline into the stairwell.
“Be careful,” she said, voice pitched low.
“He’s been bitten,” she indicated Attis. “What if he turns into one of them?”
Ranj grimaced and shook his head.
“I don’t know. I don’t have any answers, I really don’t. Let’s worry about that if it happens yeah? Just get yourself upstairs. Use the radio if you need me.”
She touched his arm and then went to the stairwell door. Lingered there for a moment before fleeing to the uncertain sanctuary of the sixth floor.
Ranj falteringly went to Attis, as if his legs weren’t up to it. Fetched the first aid supplies and tentatively assisted the man as he dressed his own wounds. Careful not to touch the blood and all the time glancing over his shoulder at the sounds of activity outside.
Adalia heard him speak.
“I have to check the front. After that, we’ll get you to the stairs so we’re ready to run if we have to?”
He left Attis and crept back to the foyer, positioning himself by the doors.
He sat alone, huddled like a little boy, a silent sentry at an unlikely gateway.
It took Adalia a moment to realise that he was crying. Uncontrollable tears noiselessly rolling down his face.
She wasn’t sure that Ranj himself was aware of them.
<><><>
Upstairs, the women sat apart from Sault.
Like Ranj below her, Adalia wept. Caroline took the girl in her arms and offered what comfort she could as she too shed tears of despair.
Some pills are bitter through and through, beyond any sweetening. The women talked between sobs, their fear and confusion marginally alleviated by the sharing.
Finding little in the way of real hope, they nevertheless arrived at some immediate conclusions.
Neither of them liked or trusted Philip Sault.
And neither felt any safety in their current circumstances.
They needed to leave this place and find somewhere else, somewhere more secure.
<><><>
The remainder of that day folded in itself. Hours lost in dull numbness and whispered conversations, heavy with fear and further blank introspection.
None of them need have been overly concerned about when they’d leave the dubious safety of the office.
Soon enough the decision would be taken out of their hands.
Chapter 4.
Carlton and Julian on the Road.
Carlton Pearcey led them out of the ministry building above the CIMC and Julian Holloway was once again grateful to the big man. Pearcey was muttering about jacks and fog but Julian didn’t give a shit about the muttering. Pearcey was a survivor and he could mutter his arse off as far as Julian was concerned.
Leaving the comparative safety of the office was awful after escaping the unreal horror of the underground shelter. Everything about the shelter had been bad or worse. Bad accommodation, bad chairs, bad showers and a seriously bad cafeteria. That, oh that cafeteria, that had quite literally, gone to hell.
And it was all buried underneath the earth.
How shit can you get?
Getting out of there had been an enormous relief. Up top though ...that wasn’t what Julian would have hoped for. Looking out at a London that seemed to be drowning in smoke and full of monsters, full of jacks and shrivs as Pearcey so quaintly put it, was slightly more than a disappointment.
It was cataclysmic.
Julian liked to think that he was self-aware, knew his own strengths and weaknesses. He’d certainly spent a fair amount of time considering his personal comfort zones, when he was centred nicely in the middle of one, when he was drifting towards an outer limit. It appeared that his understanding wasn’t quite as complete as he’d thought. The last few days had opened up whole new vistas of discomfort for him.
When Pearcey led them outside, Julian discovered that there were depths of discomfort still to be plumbed, aspects of anxiety still to be explored and intensely disliked.
Not that there was any choice. Julian could feel the old world crumbling around him as he sat in the MOD office, fancied he could feel the earth reclaiming the building as humanity faded. Had sensed the monster-
filled underground boiling with unnatural movement below him. He couldn’t sit there as claws and teeth rattled at doors that, however strong, would inevitably fail.
So he willingly followed Pearcey. Easier to move when sitting still wasn’t an option. In any event, Pearcey was going whether Julian followed or not. He was bailing out, no discussion, no debate, Pearcey was on his bike. Off into the smokily wild blue yonder. Julian had a feeling that Pearcey was totally accustomed to movement as required, wasn’t one to linger if the ground beneath his feet was shifting. Especially if the ground was shifting with movement that was beyond comprehension.
As they exited the building, the smoke became more real than it had been inside. Denser, a breath defying pall that floated like gauze in their faces. Behind them, they could see flames flickering at the end of the road. Pearcey moved with a caution that set Julian’s nerves jangling. They were moving more slowly than he wanted. They should have been running. They should be making a mad dash for the car, a dash for the relative safety of doors that closed and locked. Being on the street, out in the open after being wrapped in the claustrophobic confines of the bunker and the deserted mundanity of the office above it, left Julian feeling more vulnerable than he had anticipated.
Exposed, as if he’d gone out and forgotten to get dressed, resplendent in his Marks and Sparks pyjamas.
The roiling smoke and the reduced visibility was a blessing and a curse. It cloaked them to some extent and simultaneously held veiled threat, the constantly shifting possibility of danger.
With an abruptness that rattled Julian’s teeth, Pearcey slammed his left arm backwards across his chest and flattened him into a doorway. Ahead of them, Julian glimpsed three of those things skitter past in a hunched predatory half-run.
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