by Des Hunt
As the twilight went, the first-quarter moon continued to provide enough light for us to see the big birds we were protecting. Some were sitting on eggs; others were juveniles roosting for the night. They looked so helpless. In the stillness of the evening it would be impossible for them to take to the air. And running was not one of their strong points, so their only possible defence was to attack with their beaks. Even that would be useless against the misty jet from a spray-gun. Our job was to make sure that it never came to that.
Anchored offshore was the huge cruise ship that would move into the harbour in the morning. In the meantime the guests were celebrating the approaching New Year. The decks were lit with coloured lights and, with an hour to go, we could already hear that the partying was well underway. That was the only sound on the hill as the albatrosses slept in silence.
Every eighteen seconds the lighthouse would flash twice, although not in our direction. A few of the albatrosses were near the tower, and I wondered what sort of sleep they got with the light coming on so often. I suppose, like with anything repetitive, they’d get used to it after a while.
Cathy must have been thinking along similar lines. ‘You wonder why the albatrosses bother to stay here,’ she said. ‘What with the lighthouse, the ships and all the city lights, it’s so vastly different to the world they experience out at sea. They must go years without seeing anything to do with humans, and yet they come back here where we rule supreme. I wonder why?’
‘Maybe they like us,’ suggested Nick.
‘They wouldn’t be here if we harmed them in any way,’ added Dad.
‘But how would they know if we harmed them?’ asked Cathy. ‘If they got bird flu, they wouldn’t know whether it was caused by humans or not.’
‘It’s not going to happen,’ I said with determination.
‘I wouldn’t be too sure of that,’ said Dad.
We all looked at him with concern.
‘Why do you say that?’ asked Cathy.
‘From what the boys tell me, I’d say that Brio is a very cunning woman. She might be mad, but she got the disease into the country and infected the Peco birds. That took some doing. Look at the way she organized the spraying of the penguins. She had everything covered. I’m betting that she’s still got something up her sleeve here as well.’
‘Well,’ said Cathy, opening her backpack, ‘if she does start spraying here, I’m ready for her.’ She laid a respirator, protective gear, and a baton out on the grass. ‘I’m prepared for anything.’
‘You think the breathing gear is needed?’ asked Dad.
‘It’s the rules,’ said Cathy with a sigh. ‘By rights I should have a full suit on. If Colin Saxton arrives, he’ll go mad at me.’
‘I thought the disease couldn’t spread to humans?’
‘Maybe it can’t,’ said Cathy. ‘But the virus might not be quite the same as the others. And if she sprays at us, we’ll certainly get it into our lungs. That’s a whole lot worse than having contact with a dead animal. I for one am not prepared to take the risk.’
‘We should have brought the gas masks,’ I said.
‘There are some in the tunnels,’ said Nick. ‘I saw them today.’
Dad nodded. ‘There are, too. They’re the ones I gave them last year.’ He turned and called to the local security guard who was some distance away. ‘Nigel! Have you got keys for the fort?’
‘Yeah,’ replied Nigel, walking towards us. ‘Do you want them?’
‘Yes, please. We thought we’d get the gas masks out, just in case.’
Nigel sorted through his bundle of keys and disconnected a ring of four. ‘That’s all the keys for the fort.’
Dad looked at me. ‘Are you coming as well?’
I smiled at him. ‘You scared to go in by yourself?’
‘Nah!’ he replied. ‘Well, maybe a little. It might be scarier at night than in the daytime.’
I turned to Nick. ‘You coming?’
‘No!’ he said, shaking his head firmly.
‘You scared, too?’
‘No way. I’m waiting for Brio. She might come while you’re away.’
I nodded: it was a good point.
Dad saw my hesitation. ‘There’s plenty of time yet. She won’t try anything until the moon goes down.’ Then he chuckled. ‘Come on, Danny, let’s do it. You never know, we might find some of those old soldiers down there.’
CHAPTER 28
The seagull colony alongside the entrance to the fort was noisy in comparison to the albatrosses we’d just left. The albatrosses didn’t have chicks yet, whereas the seagulls did, and little squabbles were breaking out all over the slope.
Dad turned on the emergency light and we walked down the tunnel to the gate. We went inside, locking the door behind us. The feeling of claustrophobia that I’d experienced earlier in the day returned, except this time it didn’t fade as we moved further into the fort. I was very much aware that, in locking the door, Dad had just cut off any quick escape. By the tense way he was moving, I suspected he was aware of it, too.
The gas masks were up in the observation post near the model of the guy searching for enemy ships. Although the only light up there was some moonlight coming in through the windows, we were above ground and my fears receded a little.
The windows gave a great view of the cruise ship out at sea. Dad pointed to it. ‘Great view, eh?’
I nodded.
‘Did you know this place was built to shoot at Russian ships?’ he asked.
Another nod.
‘Well, some of those cruise ships are Russian. Maybe we should fire a few rounds at it just in case they’re invading?’
I laughed. ‘That would make their party go off with a bang, wouldn’t it?’
‘Too right!’
‘Even those that weren’t drinking would get bombed,’ I added, with a giggle.
Dad groaned, and yet I could see that our stupid conversation had made him a little less tense. It had certainly helped me.
But not for long.
We picked up the gas masks and made our way back down the steps to the tunnels. We were about to go back to the entrance when I heard a sound from deeper in the fort.
‘What was that?’ I asked.
‘What?’
‘There was a noise from down there. A squeaking noise.’
‘Rats?’ he suggested.
‘No!’ I said. ‘It sounded like a human.’
We listened, and this time he heard it, too. ‘We’d better take a look.’ He turned away from the entrance and started walking further underground.
I tapped his back. ‘Dad, shouldn’t you tell the others what’s happening?’
He stopped and lifted the walkie-talkie from his belt. As soon as he turned it up, I could tell there was no signal. The crackle was quite different to up on the hill. He tried anyway, but after three goes, he gave it away.
‘What about Chloe’s phone?’ asked Dad. ‘Maybe that’ll work.’
I fished Mum’s mobile out of my pocket. A glance at the screen told me there was no signal there either.
I shook my head. ‘But we might get a signal up in the observation post.’
He considered this for a moment. ‘Nah, we’ll be right, Danny. Come on.’ Then, after a pause, ‘See, I told you we might see one of those ghosts Nick was telling us about.’ He gave a little chuckle.
I was not amused.
We took the steps down to the display rooms. The sound was louder now, coming every few seconds. Dad stopped.
‘I think it’s just the sound of the gulls coming down a ventilation shaft,’ he whispered.
I said nothing. If he really believed that, then why was he whispering? I was no longer just a little scared — now, I was truly frightened.
There was nothing suspicious we could see in the display rooms, so we stood and listened for a while.
There it was again. The noise, sounding more human now that we were closer. It seemed to be coming from below us, down
in the explosives store.
I moved to the grill covering the gap where the shells were once lifted to the gun floor. Here the noise was much louder. It was coming from below, although I couldn’t see the source.
Dad moved to the trapdoor and tried to lift the cover. It was padlocked.
‘Have you got a key?’ I whispered.
Without answering, he pulled out the ring of keys and searched for one the right size. Carefully, he inserted the key in the lock and turned. The click as it opened made me jump.
‘Here goes,’ whispered Dad, giving me a thin smile which was meant to be reassuring.
It wasn’t.
After putting the padlock to one side, he began to lift the trapdoor. It had moved only a few millimetres before the hinges screeched loudly — a sound remarkably similar to the screeching gulls outside. There was nothing Dad could do to stop the noise except to lift the thing quickly. He did so, filling the tunnels with sound. As the echoes faded, we leaned forward to see what was below.
On the floor was a body. A male body with tape across the mouth. Blood was oozing from his nose and dripping to the floor. There was more tape around the wrists and ankles. Even trussed up like that he was easily recognizable as Roost.
It took us just a few seconds to get onto the ladder and start climbing down towards him: me first, with Dad following. Roost’s eyes stared up at us in horror. The squeaking noise from his mouth was now continuous.
‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘We’re not going to hurt you.’
Then I realized that he was trying to tell us something. His eyes were focused not on us climbing down the ladder, but on something higher, closer to the trapdoor.
I looked up and there was Brio, standing over the gap, glaring down at us.
‘Oh, you people are so easy,’ she sneered, shaking her head slowly. ‘Just so easy.’
Dad scrambled up the ladder towards her. But she was ready for that. With a flick of her arm, she swung the trapdoor. It shut with a deafening thud, followed an instant later by a click as the padlock was locked back in place.
We stared up at the door as the shock of what had just happened set in. Then we heard her voice again. This time it was coming from the grill. It was her little-girl voice.
‘Bye-bye,’ she sang. ‘Bye-bye to you, and bye-bye to all the birdies. Bye-ee.’
Then some papers fluttered down through the grill. There was no need for me to collect them to know what they were. Brio had just re-stocked her mouth with gum. Now she was primed and ready for action.
A moment later, the light went out and we were left to ponder our situation in darkness.
CHAPTER 29
Why did she attack you?’ I asked Roost.
He was now sitting on the floor, the tape removed, with his back to the wall the same as us. Using the light from Mum’s phone, we’d stopped his nose from bleeding and made him as comfortable as possible.
‘It was when I tried to doctor the spray mix,’ he replied. ‘I was going to add a bottle of hand-sanitizer in with the egg and water to destroy the viruses. It had worked with the penguins, and I hoped to do the same thing here. But Brio must have been suspicious, because the moment I pulled the bottle out of my pocket she was on to me. Bashed me with the stock of one of those rifles and taped me up.’
‘How did you get into the fort?’ asked Dad.
‘We took the last tour and just hid when it was time to leave,’ explained Roost. ‘It was dead easy.’
‘But we saw you driving away,’ I said.
‘Can’t have been us. We walked here. The car’s parked on a side road a couple miles back.’
‘A Toyota Corolla?’
‘Nah, Honda Civic.’
‘What was your plan?’ asked Dad.
‘Not my plan,’ said Roost with feeling. ‘It’s Brio’s! She has the spray in her backpack. At midnight, she’s going out the other tunnel to start spraying the albatrosses.’
Dad shook his head in disbelief. ‘She brought a backpack in here, and nobody was suspicious?’
‘Oh, she was asked about it. She just said that it contained her laptop and she wasn’t prepared to leave it back at the centre. They accepted that.’
I nodded. Brio was right: we were ‘so easy’. Because we weren’t used to terrorists in our country, we accepted strange behaviour as being just that.
Dad looked puzzled. ‘But what about the padlocks? How could she open them?’
Roost gave a little grunt. ‘She had that sorted, too. When we first did the tour a week ago, she asked the guide if anyone ever got locked down here by mistake. He said no, it couldn’t happen because an emergency set of keys were kept in a glass case by the gun. He even pointed them out to us. She’s pretty clever, you know.’
Yeah, I thought, we know.
‘And she’s going to start at midnight?’ asked Dad, looking at his watch.
‘Yeah. She says the start of a new year is a good time to be the start of a new era. An era without any form of factory farming.’
‘She thinks killing the albatrosses will stop factory farming?’ I asked.
He nodded.
‘But everyone will know it’s got nothing to do with the chook farm.’
‘Yeah, that’s what I tried to tell her,’ replied Roost. ‘She wouldn’t listen. I think she’s gone a little bonkers.’
‘Just a little?’ exclaimed Dad. ‘I think she’s right round the bend!’
Neither Roost nor I disagreed with that.
I glanced at the phone: ten minutes to midnight. Ten minutes before she started spraying, and there wasn’t a thing that we could do about it. But others certainly could. We’d already missed a walkie-talkie report. Surely they’d have worked out that something was wrong? Except, even if they did, it was unlikely that they’d expect someone to appear in the middle of the colony, which was where Brio would be if she used the fort’s other exit. Chances were that Nick, Cathy and all the security guards would be looking the wrong way.
Half an hour had passed. By now the spraying would be well underway. And still there was nothing we could do. The battery on the phone had crashed, and since midnight we’d been sitting silently in darkness.
However, while we might have been silent, there were sounds coming from outside the room. At first I thought we were being rescued, but as time went on I realized they were just the creaking noises caused by the ground cooling in the night air. Nevertheless they added to the tension, making the place seem even more like a dungeon.
Then the light came back on.
A couple of minutes later, we heard noises; not the noise of creaking concrete — people noises.
We began yelling. Then I climbed the ladder and bashed on the trapdoor as loudly as I could.
‘OK, OK!’ came a male voice from outside. ‘Hold off for a moment!’ I did.
The door swung up. It was Nigel, the security guard we’d been watching with earlier. Behind him was Nick.
‘Who are you?’ asked the guard staring down at Roost.
I didn’t wait for Roost’s answer. Instead, I scrambled up the ladder into the space above, and started running.
‘Danny!’ Dad called out after me, but by then I was far enough away to pretend I hadn’t heard.
I raced towards the tunnel that exited into the colony. Partway along, I heard footsteps running behind me. It was Nick!
‘Hang on!’ he called.
I didn’t, knowing that he’d catch up anyway.
The gate was locked. I shook my head in despair. Brio might think we were easy beats, but nobody could ever say the same about her.
‘Is she out there spraying?’ asked Nick.
‘Yes.’
He stared at me for a moment, before turning to go back down the tunnel. ‘We can climb the gun!’ he yelled over his shoulder. ‘That’ll be better than going the long way around.’
It would be, too. That’s if we could lift the cover over the bunker. I ran after him.
There wa
s no sign of the others as we raced past the storeroom by the magazine. I assumed they’d gone out the main entrance. They probably thought we’d gone that way, too. It could be ages before they got to the area where Brio would be spraying. Our way had to be quicker.
The lights went out as we climbed the steps up into the gun pit. Fortunately, some shafts of moonlight shone through a clear-plastic cover at the top of the steel ladder beside the gun.
Without pausing, Nick climbed up and bashed at the cover. Nothing gave. Nearby was a padlocked wooden door in the cover over the gun.
‘Try that!’ I said.
Nick swung across like a monkey and punched at the plywood. It cracked on the first hit, and moments later was splintered enough for Nick to climb through. As soon as his legs disappeared, I followed.
The sight that greeted us was amazing. The sky was full of exploding fireworks. They were shooting up from the cruise ship, one after the other. It was past midnight and they were celebrating big-time. For a moment we just stood and gaped.
Then there was a lull, and we remembered why we were there. Finding Brio was not going to be easy. The moon was now close to the horizon, with its light creating long shadows of blackness. Where it did still shine, we could see bundles of white sitting amongst the grass. They were the roosting albatrosses, seemingly unconcerned by the fireworks that once more were exploding out at sea.
‘C’mon,’ I said as our eyes were yet again attracted to the sky. ‘We’ve got to find her.’
We moved onto the slope that led down to the edge of the cliffs. At the same time a bright, multi-coloured flare burst overhead, lighting up the land in front of us.
‘There she is,’ hissed Nick
She was less than a hundred metres away. Without the light from the fireworks overhead, we would never have seen her. No longer was she wearing the coloured clothes I’d seen in the fort; now she was clothed entirely in black.
