by Sam Enthoven
Josh’s shout seemed to echo in the tiny space of the room. His handsome face was creased with misery. His cheeks were red. He was blinking back tears. For another long second he just stood there. Then, to Ben’s astonishment, he ran into the monitor room, banging the door shut behind him.
The end of Josh’s leadership should, Ben supposed, have made him happy. But it didn’t – he just felt sick and empty inside. They’d lost Hugo; Lisa still lay unconscious on the floor where she’d been left; now Josh had gone to pieces. Samantha was right: who was going to be next?
‘My arm,’ said Robert. ‘I . . . I think it’s broken.’
‘You’re kidding,’ said Samantha in disbelief.
Robert looked at her. ‘No,’ he said heavily, ‘I’m not. And I don’t know why you’re so surprised. After all, it was you who kept slamming it in the door.’
He had sat up on the floor, cradling his left arm with his right. Slowly, grimacing, Robert took his right hand away, revealing the sleeve of his white school uniform shirt, now red with blood. ‘I can’t move my fingers,’ he said.
Ben could see why. They were swollen and they had gone a strange grey colour too.
‘Oh my God!’ said Lauren helpfully, pointing.
‘Well, does anyone know first aid?’ asked Jasmine.
‘Anyone else, you mean,’ corrected Ben.
Jasmine fell silent, as did the rest of the room, again, as they thought about Hugo. He had known first aid. And this probably wasn’t going to be the last time that his skills or his strength were going to be missed.
‘Well,’ said Jasmine, forcing her thoughts back to practicalities, ‘I guess first of all we need to clean the wound. Then we’ll need bandages of some kind, and, um, splints?’ She did her best to give Robert a sympathetic smile. ‘I don’t know first aid, but some sort of sling might help at least—’
‘Yeah, there you go again,’ said Samantha bitterly. ‘And just out of interest, where’s all that stuff supposed to come from? We’re trapped, stupid!’
‘OK, that’s it,’ said Jasmine, standing up. ‘I’ve heard enough from you, Samantha, and I think the rest of us have too. If you had something constructive or helpful to say then fine, I’d be happy to listen. But you don’t, do you? All you can do is stand there fussing.’
‘Is that right?’
‘Prove me wrong,’ said Jasmine. ‘Go on, say something useful. You can’t – can you? You haven’t got a practical thought in your head!’
‘Just one,’ said Samantha. ‘A question. How come you fixed the cameras so we couldn’t see what was going on out in the passageway?’
Jasmine blinked. ‘What? That wasn’t deliberate. I just wanted to—’
‘Hugo walked into a trap’ – Samantha stepped closer to her – ‘because of you. And we’re stuck in this room, because of . . . who? Oh yeah: you.’
Jasmine crossed her arms. ‘What’s your point, Samantha?’
‘My point,’ said Samantha, ‘is that Lisa had a crawler on her the whole time she was in here with us – right? My point,’ she repeated, getting right up in Jasmine’s face, ‘is, what if she wasn’t the only one?’
‘Wait a second,’ said Jasmine. ‘You’re telling me that because I chose for us to come in here, and now the screw-up with the cameras, I’m . . . what, Samantha? What are you saying, exactly?’
‘Maybe another of us here isn’t what they seem,’ said Samantha. Having got the rise she wanted out of Jasmine, she was grinning now, triumphant again. ‘Maybe there’s another traitor in the group. Because the only one of us we can be sure wasn’t bitten,’ she finished, looking around the room, ‘was Hugo.’
10:57 PM.
Without warning the pit was flooded with light.
Mr Miller, the young man whom Steadman had first brought to me, had been in the dark for nearly five hours. His eyes were slow to adjust: I winced at the glare. When I recovered I saw a figure silhouetted on the lip of the pit, looking down.
‘What is it, Steadman?’ I asked. ‘Why are you out of your office?’
In answer, Steadman pointed with his right arm. He was holding something: I only realized what when I heard the shot.
BLAM. Mr Miller went limp: darkness fell for me once more behind his eyes as he died. Then there was a whine of machinery.
I knew that sound. I waited, listening as, slowly, unstoppably, the reinforced glass panel slid back into place above me. Steadman had given me my freedom. Now he was taking it away: he was sealing the pit.
‘I am so disappointed in you,’ he said, his voice sounding strangely small without the speakers. ‘All these hundreds of years of the Corporation keeping you captive down here; all these fantastically expensive precautions because we believed you were as powerful as you claimed. And all along you were lying to us.’
I did not reply – which, since Steadman had just killed my nearest mouthpiece, was not surprising. Not possessing, myself, the anatomical extravagance that is a human voice box, I had no way to talk back.
‘You know what I think?’ Steadman asked. ‘I think that in sixteen sixty-six you were lucky. Perhaps you got as far as you did because nobody noticed. London did still have the Great Plague to contend with, after all. But now? Today? In this century?’ He sniffed. ‘You never stood a chance.
‘It’s been almost five hours since I released you,’ he reminded me. ‘What have you achieved? You told me you could take over the world, yet so far you’ve barely managed to take over this building. I mean, really: did you even have a plan? Or were you just going to stay here and hope that everyone on the planet suddenly decided to visit the Barbican? This is a farce. And I’m putting a stop to it.’
I heard footsteps, then an echoing hiss and the rumble of heavy hydraulics.
‘I’m opening the door to the sewers,’ Steadman announced. ‘I’m leaving. If you’d been as good as your word, you could have been coming with me. I thought we could do great things together. With your help, I thought we could put the world to rights – run it properly at last, in an orderly manner, with everyone doing as they’re told. Well, your majesty, you’ve wasted enough of my time.
‘In just over an hour this building and everything in it will be destroyed. The media will report the explosion as a “terrorist atrocity”. I shall be on the other side of the city enjoying a cast-iron alibi and, quite possibly, a splendid dinner. Make no mistake,’ Steadman finished, ‘I will rule the world. But I see that I shall have to do it the only way that counts: with money. Goodbye, my Queen.’
That was when we took him.
For almost three hundred and fifty years I had kept certain aspects of my life cycle secret from Steadman and his predecessors. While he’d been talking, two of my new drones had been stalking him.
I had allowed maturation to begin as soon as Steadman had released me. Now, after four hours and forty-something minutes, the drones were almost full-grown. When they dropped from the ceiling above him their weight knocked Steadman to the ground easily. The air rang with the hard, puncturing thunks of their ovipositors.
Steadman screamed once. Then, at long last, he shut up.
You see? I did have a plan. It was coming along nicely.
11:01 PM.
For a long time there had been silence. Jasmine and Samantha glared at each other. Robert nursed his arm and grimaced. Ben looked around the room.
Behind him was the door to the monitor room, where Josh was still freaking out in private. To Ben’s left was the door through which Hugo had been snatched by the adults standing sentry outside it. To Ben’s right lay Lisa, still unconscious.
Ben found himself looking up at the ceiling.
It was made of white plastic tiles, each one about thirty centimetres square. As Ben stared up at them an idea started to form in his mind.
He got up from his spot on the floor and went over to the chair that Hugo had been using, which was now empty. He pushed it along until its back was against the room’s third and last set of locker
s, which were still standing against the wall. He stood on the seat, put one foot on the top of the chair’s back, and straightened his knee. With a certain amount of very uncool scrambling and twisting, he managed to pull himself up.
Now he was lying on top of the lockers, on his back.
‘Mind telling me what you think you’re doing?’ asked Samantha, hand on hip.
‘Give me a second,’ said Ben. ‘I want to try something.’
Reaching his hand up to the nearest of the square plastic ceiling tiles, he pushed at it experimentally.
It lifted. It moved so easily that Ben’s entire arm went in with it. The tile tipped from his fingers and fell lightly on top of one of its neighbours.
The space behind it was empty.
Ben blinked. Then, to the ominous creaking of the lockers underneath him, he wriggled and scooted until his head and shoulders lined up with the square hole he’d just created. He took a deep breath, then stuck his head through.
His hunch had turned out to be right. The room’s tiled ceiling wasn’t its true ceiling at all: the tiles were held up by a grid of some kind of light metal, probably aluminium, behind which there was a gap of another half a metre or so before the concrete underside of the next storey above.
It was dark in there. The light of the room below coming up around his shoulders didn’t penetrate far. In the second or two it took Ben’s eyes to adjust he found himself hoping strongly that there was nothing waiting for him in the surrounding shadows. If he was attacked by crawlers now, with his shoulders trapped, he wouldn’t stand a chance.
‘What’s up there? What can you see?’ he heard Jasmine ask.
‘Shhhhh,’ Ben hissed back, making ‘keep it down’ gestures with his hands, which were still below him in the room. Now he was starting to be able to make out the details he’d been hoping for. To his right, if he turned his head that way, the light from the security room below was now visible to him as a series of faint intersecting lines – the glow escaping weakly around the sides of the ceiling tiles. And to his left . . .
To his left – back towards the lifts – was darkness. The lower half of Ben’s body was still lying on top of the lockers: his left arm was pressed against that wall. But up here, above the ceiling tiles, the wall stopped. There was a sort of lip of woolly-looking insulation material sandwiched between two layers of plasterboard, then another grid of ceiling tiles – this one belonging, of course, to the room next door.
He gulped. Then he sneezed. It was disgustingly dusty up there. But the fact remained:
‘I . . .’ he said, hardly believing it. ‘I think I’ve found a way out.’
‘What?’
There was a chorus of enquiry and celebration from the room below, and in that second Ben wished he hadn’t spoken so soon. Because now, of course, he could see that his ‘way out’ had major problems. So they could get into the next-door room if they wanted: so what? There were so many sentries outside, the chances were that the door of that room was blocked too. But it was a start.
‘Quiet down there,’ he told them. ‘Let me think.’
After some more wriggling, and a nasty moment when the aluminium frame around him felt like it was cutting into his shoulders and back, he managed to force his arms through the gap so they were up there with him. He pushed down on the tiles to either side of himself – and that was when his suspicions about those were confirmed for him. There was a soft creak, then a crunch: the tiles popped out under his weight and fell to the floor below, provoking a squeal of alarm from Lauren. They obviously weren’t much stronger if you pushed down on them than if you pushed up – certainly not strong enough to take anyone’s full body weight.
Ben paused, thinking, as the sudden uprush of light through the new gap sent purple splashes across his dark-adapted retinas.
Light, he thought. Some part of the ceiling grid had to be stronger than the rest, to support the room’s lighting. Craning, wriggling, the frame biting into his back, Ben turned, looking around in the dusty, dark ceiling cavity, searching for what he wanted.
And he found it.
11:04 PM.
‘It’s a false ceiling,’ Ben was explaining. ‘There’s a gap behind it for wiring and stuff, about this wide.’ He held his now somewhat grubby hands apart to demonstrate. ‘Most of the ceiling’s just made out of these tiles,’ he added, pointing at the one on the floor. ‘They’re not strong enough. But there’s this bar thing in the centre that looks much more solid. It goes right through to the next room, maybe even further. And if we can somehow crawl along that, then . . .’
‘What?’ asked a red-eyed Josh, who had come out of the monitor room to see what was going on.
‘Then maybe,’ said Jasmine, ‘we can work our way far enough along to get away from the sentries outside.’ She beamed. ‘Nice one, Ben!’
‘Thanks,’ said Ben. At Jasmine’s smile his ears felt very warm all of a sudden. He almost blushed, but—
‘No,’ said Josh.
‘What?’ said Ben.
‘No,’ Josh repeated, shaking his head. ‘That’s a stupid plan. In fact it’s so stupid I don’t even think it qualifies as a plan.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because you don’t know how far you’ll get! You might get trapped in another room just like this one. More to the point, you might get trapped in one that’s not as good as this one – not as safe, or as easy to fortify.’
‘It hasn’t been all that “safe” so far,’ muttered Robert – to Ben’s surprise.
‘Besides,’ Josh went on quickly, ‘even if you did get past the sentries, where exactly do you think you’d go after that? How far do you think you’re going to get with the whole building riddled with crawlers or people who’ve been bitten by them? What exactly do you think you’re going to achieve,’ he added, ‘by abandoning us like this?’
‘What?’ said Ben again. ‘But . . . what do you mean?’
‘Hello?’ said Josh. ‘Have you thought this through at all?’ He pointed at Lisa. ‘She’s in no shape to come climbing through ceilings with you – and I don’t think poor Robert here is, either, do you?’
Pale-faced, Robert cradled his arm and scowled.
‘We have to stay with them,’ said Josh, with an expression of injured nobility. ‘We’re going to stay here and wait for help to arrive. That’s all there is to it.’
‘You can stay,’ said Samantha, standing up. ‘I’m getting out of here.’
‘Works for me,’ said Lauren.
‘If we make it, we’ll tell everyone you’re up here,’ promised Jasmine.
‘Well,’ scoffed Josh, momentarily disconcerted, ‘I should’ve guessed you people would have no qualms about leaving your schoolmates behind. It’s everyone for themselves with you lot, isn’t it? But, Ben,’ he added, turning, ‘I’d thought better of you. I thought perhaps that loyalty to your school might mean something more to you. Clearly I was wrong.’
‘Josh,’ said Robert firmly and exasperatedly, ‘just shut up.’
Ben stared at him. Robert’s days of crawling for Josh’s favour were gone, it seemed. Stunned by this mutiny from the last of his supporters, Josh blinked several times then fell silent.
‘All right,’ said Samantha, turning to Ben. ‘How’re we going to do this?’
Ben made a face. ‘It was my idea: I guess I ought to go first, just in case it turns out to be as stupid as Josh says. If I hit a dead end too soon, I’ll turn around and come back. If I get anywhere useful, I’ll try to signal you somehow. And if you don’t hear from me and, er, I don’t come back . . .’
‘Good luck, Ben,’ said Jasmine. ‘We’ll be waiting.’
‘I don’t suppose anyone’s got something like a torch I could borrow, by any chance?’ Ben asked.
Jasmine gave him a sympathetic look, but no one answered.
Ben pursed his lips. Fair enough: he didn’t exactly tend to carry torches around with him at all times just in case, either. Well, there was nothing m
ore to be said. The lockers squeaked ominously as he climbed back on top of them. He pushed out the square tile that was nearest to the thick bar in the ceiling. Then, after a lot of wriggling and struggling that he was certain would thoroughly undermine anything heroic about his exit, Ben climbed through the gap.
11:07 PM.
The bar in the ceiling was maybe twenty centimetres wide. Ben realized he was going to have to lie on his chest, using his arms and legs to push himself along through the darkness. His school shirt and trousers scraped along the surface of the bar with a gritty, grating sound. Before the receding light from the security room behind him got too faint, he stopped to look at his right hand: his pale skin was already charcoal-grey with the dust of decades. It was filthy up there. His eyes and nose itched abominably.
Ben pushed on. The dark around him deepened, and he began to imagine things.
He thought about the storey above: if he lifted himself off the ceiling bar even a little he could feel it against his back – concrete, rough and unforgiving. He imagined its solidity, its weight. He imagined it sinking, the gap getting narrower until he was trapped, squashed flat, or just stuck there for ever. Then he imagined the contents of the darkness to either side of him – armies of crawlers keeping silent pace with him, biding their time, watching how far he’d get, while in the rooms below ranks of enslaved adults waited, still as statues. Bolts, screws and other protrusions from the bar kept stubbing his fingers or scraping his belly, but Ben didn’t mind. These things were better than what was in his head.
Then – whump – his head hit something.
The ceiling cavity was so dark by now that he hadn’t seen anything coming. He flinched so violently he almost fell off the bar, and had to hold on tight for a moment.
When he’d got himself together he reached forward with his right hand. He felt bricks and mortar, blocking the way ahead up to the ceiling and stretching away to either side.
Ben had crawled past three internal plasterboard walls since the first one he’d left behind. The room beneath him was therefore the fourth along the passage from the security room. He had no idea how far he’d travelled in terms of actual distance but he hoped it was enough to get a head-start on the sentries. Because this, he realized, was as far along as he or anyone else in the group was going to get.
