School's Out Forever (afterblight chronicles)

by Scott K. Andrews

  The woman who gradually became aware of her surroundings however many hours later was a different person. Someone as yet unnamed. Someone at whose very core nestled a cold, hard knot of calm determination and resolve. Someone with only one thought in her head.

  Vengeance.

  THE WORLD CAME to the woman a piece at a time.

  First it was the faint smell of burning hops. Then the sound of her own breathing. She floated in a dark void, examining the smell and the sound for a long time before her body began to send back signals that told her she was lying on a bed. Then there was a taste of stale wine and bile. Finally, she opened her eyes.

  The world looked… different. The room was monochrome — black walls, white nurse’s outfit hanging from the white hook on the inside of the door, shiny grey buckles on the straps that adorned the sturdy black wooden cross, white trolley with black implements strewn across it — whips, dildos, clamps and catheters. But even despite the lack of colour, the woman who awoke on that bed (and was it a waking, truly? Had she been asleep or just comatose? Had she really opened her eyes or had her optic nerves instead rebooted themselves after a long shutdown?) somehow knew that even had the room been painted in fluorescent colours they would have seemed muted.

  The way she saw the world had literally changed.

  The bed springs creaked as she sat up. She had been expecting a headache, but her head was clear and her senses were sharp. There were no windows in this dark place. The only illumination came from four uplighters, one in each corner of the room.

  She stood up and checked the door, knowing it was locked but determined to be thorough. She then turned to assess the room, methodically cataloguing its contents in her mind searching for a means of attack or something she could use to defend herself.

  She noted the absence of panic, but did not think it worthy of further examination.

  The trolley offered the best hope, but there was nothing there that could be of genuine use. The cat o’ nine tails lacked the sharp stones that would have rendered it really painful, and she did not think beating a man around the head with a giant black rubber cock would do anything but provoke laughter.

  Perhaps if she pushed the trolley itself at whoever entered, it would unbalance them long enough to give her an opening. But when she tried to move it forwards the wheels squealed alarmingly and refused to move.

  She made no further progress before she heard a key turn in the lock. She stepped away from the trolley and into the only really clear area in the centre of the room. If she was going to fight, this was all the space she would have to do it in.

  The door opened and the giant stepped inside. The woman who was no longer Kate abandoned all thought of fighting.

  He closed the door behind him, not bothering to lock it. He knew there was no way she was getting past him.

  She stood there, impassive, as he removed his jacket and hung it on the hook, covering the nurse’s outfit. He then removed his shirt, revealing an acreage of tattooed chest that was twice the woman’s width from shoulder to shoulder. He hung the shirt over the jacket.

  He stepped forward and reached out his huge right hand, wrapping the fingers around her throat and lifting her off the ground with a single outstretched arm. He brought her face close to his as she choked. She felt his warm breath on her cheek as he examined her closely. Then he relaxed his grip and she collapsed in a heap at his feet, gasping for air. He turned his back on her, stepped to the door and removed a huge bayonet from the inside of his hanging jacket.

  “Stand,” he said. The woman did so.

  He stepped forward and inserted the bayonet under the bottom of her t-shirt. He ripped the blade upwards and the cloth parted before it like butter meeting a hot knife. The bayonet was so sharp, she thought, you probably wouldn’t realise you’d been stabbed until you looked down and saw the hilt sticking out.

  The blunt edge felt cold against her skin as it rushed up from her belly to her throat.

  When the t-shirt had been split from waist to neck, it fell off her. She stood in her bra, facing this enormous man, knowing exactly what he intended to do to her, and still she felt no fear.

  She remembered the dojo, she recalled the moves she’d been taught in a draughty hut in Camden, and she knew that all that training was useless. If he came at her with some momentum, she could perhaps have used it against him. But the room was too small; he had no need of speed. If he had been smaller, she could have tried to throw him from a standing start, but she hadn’t been able to throw Sanders who, big as he was, was slight in comparison.

  Her best chance, she realised, was the bayonet.

  “Rush a gun, flee a knife,” Sanders had told her. “If you run at a person who’s trying to shoot you, you force them to fire quickly and without time to aim properly. You have a better chance that they’ll miss you than if you turn and run. But a knife is different. It’s only lethal in close quarters and once you’ve got a hand to it, it can move both ways. You’d be amazed how many stab victims are killed with their own blades.”

  The woman focused all her attention on the blade. This man was too strong to wrestle with, but even so she had a slim chance of turning his weapon against him. To do that she had to know exactly where it was, how it was angled, where it was pointed at all times.

  He reached down and unbuckled her belt, pulling it out in one fluid movement, cracking it like a whip, and tossing it over his shoulder into the corner.

  He angled the knife down, inserting the point inside the waistband of her jeans, directly below her belly button.

  Then something distracted him. A distant rumble. The floor shook briefly. There was a scream somewhere far away. He glanced over his shoulder instinctively, even though the closed door and windowless walls offered no vantage.

  When he turned his attention back to the woman he noticed she had taken a step backwards. He looked down and registered that she had something in her right hand. Something long and thin. Something dripping.

  He took a step towards her and felt his centre of gravity shift in an unsettling way. There was a soft wet sound and he felt pressure on his foot. He looked down to see his entrails spooling out of his belly and falling to the floor like a coil of steaming, lumpy rope.

  Still looking at his feet in wonder he saw a hand enter his field of vision and felt it punch him on the breast. The hand withdrew and he opened his mouth in astonishment as he realised there was a black metal handle sticking out of his chest.

  How the fuck had that got there?

  He reached down and grabbed the handle, pulling it and exposing the blade of his grandfather’s bayonet. It emerged from his heart smoothly, without a sound. The room spun and he felt something hit him on the back of the head. He wasn’t conscious long enough to realise that it was the floor.

  The woman reached down and took the bayonet from twitching fingers, then stepped over the giant corpse and opened the door. Somewhere in the distance she could hear gunfire.

  She walked out of the room, blade in hand, spoiling for a fight.

  As she moved down the corridor, she could still hear occasional bursts of gunfire somewhere below and ahead of her. She didn’t know how, but Cooper and his men must have found the warehouse. This mean that time was not on her side. She had to find Spider before Cooper did.

  The corridor ran the length of the building along its external back wall. Tall metal framed windows ranged to her left, a collection of doors to her right. A quick glance outside told her that it was late evening and she was at least one floor above the lobby bar.

  The door at the far end of the corridor burst open and the man with the yellow teeth came running through with a submachine gun in his hands. Without noticing the woman, he turned and entered the first door. The woman heard a girl’s scream and then a burst of gunfire.

  She began to run. The man stepped back out of the room, the barrel of his gun smoking. He turned to walk towards the next door and then stopped in amazement as he registered a
woman in a bra running towards him with teeth bared. It took him a second to react, but he soon brought the gun to bear.

  “Rush a gun, flee a knife,” the woman muttered to herself as she barrelled forwards. The sound of the shots was deafening in the enclosed corridor, and she felt hot air stream across her right shoulder as the distance closed. Then there was a sharp sting in the same shoulder but she ignored it as she crashed into the gunman, flinging him to the floor. The bayonet clattered out of her hands as they fell. She wrestled with him for a moment and then, realising the madness of this, sat up, straddling him like a lover. Again he took a moment to react to this unexpected move, a moment in which she reached down, grabbed his gun, reversed it and used the butt to send the bones from his nose shrapnelling into his frontal lobe.

  She leaned across him, grabbed the bayonet again then stood, blade in one hand, gun in the other. She checked the gun once, recalling Sanders’ tuition, recognising the vital parts. She pointed it at the chest of Yellowteeth and squeezed the trigger. A stream of bullets thudded into him.

  The woman nodded, satisfied.

  She heard a door open behind her and she spun around, raising the weapon. A teenaged girl peered out at her, eyes wide with fear. The woman lowered the weapon.

  “You speak English?” she asked.

  The girl nodded. The woman handed her the bayonet, and the girl looked at it in wonder.

  “Take this,” said the woman. “Stick it in any man you meet who’s not wearing a uniform. Understand?”

  The girl nodded.

  “Good, now get everyone in these rooms into the dungeon at the far end. Lock the door. The keys are in the pocket of the dead man you’ll find in there. Don’t come out until the shooting stops. Can you do that?”

  Again the girl nodded. “You’ve been shot,” she whispered.

  The woman looked at her shoulder and registered a small hole at the top of her arm. She fingered it, and found the exit wound. The bullet had gone straight through and missed both bones and arteries. She didn’t feel any pain, though she knew that would not stay the case for long.

  She turned, jumped over the corpse of Yellowteeth and ran out the door. She had wasted enough time.

  She emerged onto a darkened dance floor with swing doors at the far right. She ran diagonally across it. As she reached the halfway point the doors swung open and three men ran in. All were in civvies and all carried guns.

  Their eyes took a moment to adjust to the darkness, so by the time they realised they were not alone it was too late. The woman sprayed the doorway with bullets and the men jerked and dropped. She kept running, jumped over them and flew out the swing doors, ready to fire.

  Behind her, in the corridor where she’d killed Yellowteeth, she heard shattering glass as Cooper’s men came in through the windows. So now they were ahead of her and behind her. She gritted her teeth.

  She had to get to Spider first.

  She ran down an empty staircase keeping the gun aimed at the bottom in case anyone else came running through. There was another soft explosion on the far side of the building as she reached the bottom and turned to find herself facing another corridor and another row of rooms.

  These doors were open. One, about halfway along, had a single bloodstained hand stretched across the threshold.

  The woman walked down the corridor checking each room for survivors. Despite her focus, she knew she would have to help any wounded girls she found, even if that meant letting Spider escape. But Yellowteeth had been thorough. Each room held at least one dead girl, some as many as three. No-one was to be left alive who could testify against them. No witnesses, no descriptions. The woman reached the end of the corridor with something approximating relief and pushed through into the lobby bar.

  A patch of darkness on the carpet was the only evidence that someone had been stabbed in the head here not so long ago.

  There was a burst of gunfire from somewhere close, beyond the opposite door, then heavy footsteps on the stairs behind her. She scanned the room in desperation. Had they already captured him? Had the bastard escaped her?

  Out of the corner of her eye she caught a glimpse of something that didn’t seem right, so she turned and realised that there was another door, slightly ajar, behind the bar. It was flat and featureless, disguised as part of the wall, which was why she had not seen it earlier. She ran to it and pulled it open, squeezing through and closing it firmly behind her. Cooper and his team would probably not see the door on their first pass, especially if they were still encountering resistance. If Spider had come this way, she would be the only person in pursuit for now.

  The woman smiled, but it was not like any smile Kate had ever worn.

  She scampered down the dark, narrow stairs. A small landing with another discreet door marked the ground floor, then the steps continued down into the cellars. The woman saw a glimmer of light ahead and slowed. He turned the corner at the bottom and found herself in a long, low featureless brick corridor, painted black. There was no light here, but she could make out a fading glow at the far end, betraying the presence of someone fleeing with a torch. She took off in pursuit, catching only vague impressions of rooms off to her left and right, each marked by a low, round arch and some brick steps going down into a chamber. The squalid cellar entrances smelt of blood, shit and fear.

  The woman barrelled on through the darkness, turning the corner at the far end to find a dead end and an old metal grille in the floor. It was still open, and the glow of the receding torch seeped out of it. She did not even look down into the sewers before jumping.

  She splashed into cold, lumpy water that came up to her waist. The sewer was a round tube of Victorian brick. The current was strong, swollen by the heavy rains, and the water swirled and eddied, trying to pull her feet out from under her. The floor felt slimy beneath her feet and she knew that if she lost her footing she would be in big trouble.

  She held the gun high above her head and waded forward, following the fading light around the curve of the tunnel.

  She had only progressed a few metres when she stepped into space, a breach in the sewer floor, like a pothole. She unbalanced and fell backwards, disappearing into the raging torrent and being carried forward at speed. She lost her grip on the gun. Flailing around in the darkness, she broke the surface once, twice, gasping for air as she hurtled along.

  For the first time it occurred to her that she might die down here.

  She lost all sense of orientation. Down was up, left was right. The water roared in her ears, she saw flashes behind her closed eyes and felt the dizziness of impending unconsciousness.

  Then she hit something. Something soft, which fell ahead of her, and then she and this object were tumbling together in the water. Something hard hit her on the side of the head; was that the torch or her gun? Just as she thought she was dead, the water threw her out into a void and she fell, momentarily free, drawing ragged, desperate breaths.

  She splashed down into a lake of some sort and fought to the surface. There was no light down here. The torch had gone. She floated there, treading water as it swirled around her, calming herself, listening intently, trying to filter out the sound of the waterfall that had deposited her in what she assumed was some sort of junction.

  She had not fallen down into this pit alone. The person she had collided with must be here too, somewhere in the darkness.

  “Spider,” she shouted. Her voice echoed back to her a hundred times. This chamber was big and arched. “Spider!”

  She waited, feeling the fatigue in her legs as they kicked against the tide.

  “Miss Booker, you surprise me,” came the reply at last, his too calm voice seeming to come at her from every direction.

  She turned left and right, trying to get a bearing on the bastard. It was no use; he could have been anywhere.

  “If I could see you, I would shoot you,” he said, seeming more in control. Had he made it out of the water on to some ledge? He didn’t sound like he was sw
imming any more. “But I suppose I will have to settle for leaving you here to drown. Goodbye, Kate.”

  ‘Kate,’ thought the woman. ‘Who’s Kate?’

  “I’ll find you,” she screamed. “No matter where you fucking hide, I’ll find you.”

  “No,” came the reply, fainter now, moving away. “I will find you, if you survive the day. Trust me.”

  “Spider?” she yelled. “Spider!”

  But there was no reply, only darkness and water and white noise.

  A COUNCIL WORKER found the woman later that night, unconscious, half dead, suffering from hypothermia, washed up on a brick shore half a mile under the city. Her body was swarming with rats. When he managed to wake her, she couldn’t tell him her name. Delirious, she muttered incoherently about webs as he radioed for assistance.

  TWO MONTHS LATER, a nondescript car drove through a pair of wrought iron gates and down the driveway of a minor public school in Kent. It parked behind the main building and two people, a man and a woman, got out.

  He wore a smile that spoke of familiarity and nostalgia. Her face betrayed no emotion at all.

  “This way,” he said, and walked towards the rear doors, his feet crunching on the gravel.

  She did not follow him immediately, pausing to take in her surroundings. The sports fields stretched away ahead of her, bordered on all sides by thick woods, lush green in the summer heat. The sky was blue and the air was clear and smelt of pine needles and fresh water. The only sound came from the soft rustle of the leaves in the gentle wind.

  “You coming?”

  She turned and trailed after the man, who pushed open the door and entered.

  The building was impressive and old, but not as old as some public schools. This was a Victorian edifice, imposing and solid. The inside reflected this, with dark wood panelled walls, tiled floors and portraits of illustrious benefactors with big sideburns hanging on the whitewashed walls.

  The man led her deep into the silent building, up a small back staircase once meant for servants, to a small door in the east wing. He opened the door then handed her the keys.