School's Out Forever (afterblight chronicles)

by Scott K. Andrews

  We crunched over to the fence and stood there, unsure exactly what to do.

  There was an awkward silence as we stood there facing our executioners, who looked everywhere but at us, unwilling to risk meeting our gaze.

  “Look at us,” shouted Wilkes after a minute that seemed like an hour. “Fucking look at us!”

  One by one they obeyed, and as they did so I saw their expressions harden, their faces set. These were not the kind of men to have doubts. When it came to the crunch, they were stone cold.

  “Lovely day for a shooting,” said Cooper as he strode into the yard. Jane limped behind him, her foot encased in a blue plastic cast. She looked at me and her face crumpled. I’d not seen her cry in so long. I wanted to run to her but I knew I wouldn’t get two feet.

  “Cooper, please,” she said, choking back tears. “I’m begging you, don’t do this.”

  He turned, raised his hand and slapped her hard across the face. She reeled.

  “Fucker,” I shouted, stepping forward. A stream of bullets thudded into the snow in front of me and I looked left to see one of the soldiers waving me back to the fence.

  “I’ll do anything you want,” begged Jane, trailing forlornly after the man who held our lives in his hands.

  He stopped when she said that, a terrible smile creeping across his face. He turned back to her again, slowly this time, full of menace.

  “And what, exactly, do you think I want from you, Kate?”

  She stepped forward, her red, tear-stained face contorted into a grotesque parody of pleasing. She reached out and stroked his chest.

  “I can be anything you want, Cooper,” she said. “Anything at all. Just please, don’t kill them.”

  For the first time that day I actually felt an emotion — pure, burning fury. I bit back my protest and clenched my fists, rooted to the spot.

  Cooper reached out a hand and stroked Jane’s cheek once, gently. Then he leaned forward as if to kiss her, stopped an inch from her lips and said: “Just another whore, then.”

  He stepped away, turned his back on her and barked an order to his soldiers.

  “Put her with the men.”

  “Sir?” asked the guy who seemed to be second-in-command, surprised by the order.

  Quick as lightning, Cooper drew his sidearm and shot the man twice in the chest.

  “I said, put her with the others,” he yelled as his lackey toppled backwards into the snow.

  Another of his men, eyes wide with alarm at his leader’s sudden, shocking loss of composure, stepped forward, grabbed Jane’s arm, and dragged her over to us.

  She took her place alongside me, facing the firing squad. I reached out my hand and our fingers intertwined and grasped tightly.

  She leaned over and tried to whisper something to me, but the huge bell in the tower above us began to chime.

  The soldiers began to line up.

  The first strike of eight o’clock sounded, sonorous and familiar.

  They checked their weapons.

  The second chime of the hour.

  They all flicked off their safety catches.

  Third chime.

  Cooper bent down and lifted the machine gun from the corpse of the man he’d just shot.

  Fourth chime.

  He joined the line of executioners.

  Fifth chime.

  He flicked off his safety catch.

  Sixth chime.

  He raised his weapon.

  Seventh chime.

  He shouted “Make ready!”

  I turned to Jane and embraced her, clasping her tightly to me, ready for death, eyes closed, ears ringing.

  “I love you,” I whispered as the clock struck eight.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  I BALANCE THE torch on the table then take the scalpel and carefully slice down the side of my shoe, just above the bit where it meets the foam sole. Every tiny movement sends a shock of pain through my foot, so I go slowly. I’m in a small office, sitting in a padded chair, foot up on the table in front of me.

  St Thomas’ hospital has been pretty much gutted. When The Cull hit, I was safe at St Mark’s, riding it out behind thick metal gates in the middle of the countryside. I can’t imagine what it must have been like here in a hospital. The flood of sick people, all dying, incurable, hopeless and doomed. The doctors, succumbing themselves one by one but trying to keep the service going as long as possible, filling the beds and trolleys and corridors with sufferers, all hooked up to drips. At some point they must have started euthanising people, adding extra morphine to the intravenous bags, putting people out of their misery. I imagined the final deaths, when there were no more doctors left, the last surviving patients lying here in a building strewn with corpses, feverish and delirious, dying mad and raving.

  In our hunt for medicine we came across a small supply room in which sat a skeleton. It wore a white coat and a bottle of pills lay beside its outstretched hand. A doctor or nurse, immune but broken by the horror of it all, retreating into a darkened closet and gulping down pills to make it stop.

  I looked at that skeleton and thought that could have been me, if my brother had never got involved with Spider, if I’d completed my medical training, become a doctor. I’d have been on the front line of the hopeless war against the AB virus and it would have killed me, indirectly but inevitably.

  I don’t allow myself the luxury of envying the corpse in the store room. Instead, I grab a scalpel and blade, a bottle of antiseptic, a needle and thread and some gauze bandages, then I limp across the hall to an office where I can work.

  The blood-soaked shoe drops off my foot and hits the floor with a wet slap. The sock follows suit. I’m gritting my teeth in agony as I work, but I stay focused. Lee is alive and I have to get back to him. I’m the only hope he has.

  When I heard his voice echo out of the Lords I felt a powerful rush of joy and horror. Joy that he was alive, and horror that he was surrendering to Cooper. I’ve already lost one man I loved to Cooper’s schemes. I refuse to lose another.

  In one respect being shot in the foot was a blessing. Had I been upright when I’d heard his voice I’d probably have burst into tears and run into his arms like a teenage girl in a pop video. But I was already crying in pain and I couldn’t walk, so that wasn’t really an option. I tried to play it cool, not let Cooper see how much I cared for Lee. I treated him like he was just another kid from the school. But I think Cooper knew; I think Lee’s reaction to seeing me shot gave the game away.

  I probe the small hole in the top of my foot. The bullet had passed straight through, right next to the bones that run to my big toe. Luckily it’s not hit any of them, so I’m not going to be crippled. The damage is to flesh and muscle only, so if I can sew it shut, sterilise and bind it, then it should heal all right. If I stay off it for about a month, that is.

  As I sew the wound closed I say to my guard through gritted teeth: “I’ll need a cast. Go through the store rooms, there should be some somewhere. Hard plastic shell, foam lining, velcro straps, shouldn’t be hard to spot.”

  The guard lingers, unsure.

  “Oh, for God’s sake, I’m hardly going to be running away, am I? Just fuck off and find me a cast, will you?”

  He grunts and leaves. I glance out the window.

  The moon is just starting to wane, and the snow is still coming down. We took a jeep across Waterloo Bridge to get to the hospital. The snow was so deep it was hard to drive, and I wonder if we’ll find it as easy to get back. I know I’ve got to hurry. Cooper could be torturing Lee right now.

  I splash some more antiseptic on the closed wound and stifle a cry of pain. The morphine’s beginning to wear off. No chance of finding any of that here, it will all have been cleared out long ago. I bind my foot tightly and then grit my teeth and try to stand. It feels like someone’s shoved a knife through my foot and every time I take so much as a fairy step they twist it savagely. I collapse back into the chair. No use pretending. I’m hobbled. The cas
t should help, though. Where the fuck is that squaddie?

  I hear the door swing at the end of the corridor. Thank fuck for that.

  “Did you find one?” I shout. There’s no reply, but I hear footsteps crunching in the broken glass and detritus that litters the corridor. They sound strange, as if the person is limping, and each alternate step sounds hard and heavy, like a peg leg pirate. The footsteps get closer until I see a figure come to a halt in the darkness outside the room. Whoever they are, they’re too short and slight to be the squaddie. The figure stands there, arms by their side, and I make out a knife hanging from their right hand. I feel a shock of fear. Then I shine the torch on the figure and gasp in surprise.

  “Hello, Jane,” says Jack.

  I FIRE OFF a thousand questions. How did Lee and the others survive Thetford? Where are they all now? He answers me impatiently until my enquiries are exhausted and I ask him to find me a cast for my foot.

  “Will this do?” asks the boy king as he appears at the door again a few minutes later, holding a blue foam cast.

  “Yes!” I shout, and grab it off him. I gingerly place my foot in it and pull the Velcro straps tight. Once it’s secured I stand up, waving away Jack’s offer of a helping hand. I take a step and, while it hurts like hell, it’s more bearable.

  “Thanks, Jack, that’s much better.”

  “You know,” he says with a wry smile, “you could just cut it off. I hear they can do wonders with prosthetics these days.”

  I look down at the piece of table leg and foam that he’s gaffer taped to his stump.

  “How did it break?” I ask, walking out as I talk. Together we hobble down the corridor, two cripples together, both too proud to join arms for mutual support.

  “Lee, this Ranger bloke and me, we’re climbing into Parliament, right? Up a rope, from a dinghy on the Thames,” he explains. “It’s bloody tough going for me, but I manage it. The Ranger, his name’s Ferguson, he helps me in through the window. So he turns back to help Lee climb up, and I grab the kit bag. But as I do that, two soldiers come into the room and tell us to put our hands up. Ferguson spins around, fast as you like, and he’s just a blur, right, all martial arts and stuff. But one of the guys manages to shoot me. I’m standing right in front of the window and I bring the bag up as a shield, but the bullets shatter my prosthesis, I lose my balance ’cause the bag’s so heavy, and I go flying back out the window.”

  We reach the top of the stairs and finally admit that we need help, so we link arms and begin going down the stairs sideways, like some ridiculous quadrupedal crab.

  “I swear, I thought I was dead. But dumb fucking luck, I land flat on my back in the dinghy. The bag knocks all the air out of me and I’m laying there, pinned down and legless, gasping like a guppy. And I can hear shooting from above me, right, so I reckon Lee’s gone in the window. I roll the bag off, get my breath back, and try to climb up and help. But it was hard enough when I had the prosthesis; it’s fucking hopeless with one leg.

  “Eventually the firing stops and I wait for Lee or Ferguson to call down for the bag, but they don’t. So I reckon they’re dead or captured, yeah?”

  “Captured,” I say as we pause to catch our breath on a landing. The corpse of my guard lies on the floor beside us, staring at the ceiling in surprise. My torch picks out the dark stain that marks where Jack’s knife punctured his heart. “They’re not dead yet.”

  Jack smiles. “Thank fuck for that.”

  I kneel down and rummage through the dead man’s clothes until I find the keys to the jeep. I also take his machine gun, sidearm and a nasty looking knife. Jack and I link arms again and resume our ungainly descent.

  “So I figure our mission’s a bust,” he says. “But I reckon I can still be useful, right, so I untether the dinghy and manage to row to a mooring and haul the bag up onto the embankment up these old stone steps. I figure I can flag down the others and give them the bag.”

  “Others?”

  “Yeah, Tariq, Green and this crazy girl who says she knows you.”

  “Caroline?”

  “Yeah, that’s her. They’ve got this army of kids and they’re gonna turn up at dawn, get inside the gates and then storm the place.”

  I stop dead in amazement and he topples forward, unbalanced, and slips down a few steps before he grabs the railing and manages to stop himself.

  “But that’s suicide!” I say.

  “It wouldn’t be if Lee and I had managed to pull off our little plan,” he replies, righting himself and flashing me a sour glance.

  “Which was?” I ask. “What was in the bag?”

  So he tells me what their plan was. I stare at him for upwards of a minute, running it over in my head.

  “That,” I say eventually, “is fucking genius.”

  Ten minutes later we hobble out into the snow. My feet sink in it halfway up my shins, and it’s still coming down.

  “So where did you stash the bag?” I ask as we crunch across to the jeep.

  “I was waiting halfway down Whitehall when I saw you being driven past,” says Jack. “I just buried the bag in the snow and took off after you. I followed the tyre tracks. Sorry it took me so long. I’m not as light on my feet as I used to be.”

  “You and me both.”

  I pull open the driver’s side door and clamber in. I tentatively depress the accelerator with my knackered foot. It hurts, but the cast makes it doable. Jack climbs in the other side. I turn the ignition and gun the engine. The wheels spin uselessly in the snow for a few moments and I fear we’re going nowhere, but eventually they find purchase and we slip-slide away.

  Without the orange streetlights making everything look slightly disco, London seems pristine and beautiful in the moonlit snow as I fight the wheel back to Westminster.

  “The snow is our best friend,” I say as we come down the Strand past Charing Cross station. “The guard has a little booth by the gate. He’s expecting me back, and in this weather he won’t be able to make us out properly from where he’s sitting. There’s a good chance he’ll just pop the gates and wave us through.”

  “You don’t want to wait and hook up with Tariq?”

  I turn left onto Whitehall.

  “Why should we? If we can get inside before they arrive, you can still fulfil your part of the plan. I’ll stall Cooper and keep Lee alive until things kick off, then it’s every man for himself.”

  “Here,” shouts Jack. I slam on the brakes and we spin through 360 degrees before we stop. Jack lurches out into the snow and walks to the side of the road where he digs out the kit bag and limps back.

  He tosses it in the back seat and gets back in. Another wheel spin, another moment of fear, but the four wheel drive doesn’t let us down. I turn the jeep back the right way and we head off again. As we approach Big Ben I note the time: ten past seven. There’s a faint hint of dawn across the river as we pass the road that runs to the ruins of Westminster Bridge.

  A minute later we pull up to the gate. I flash my headlights and honk the horn once.

  “Be lazy,” I mutter. “Just this once, be lazy.” I have the sidearm ready in my hand, just in case.

  The gate swings open, pushing a tide of snow away into a thick drift. I send up a prayer to numerous gods, drive through the gate and down the ramp into the underground car park.

  I pull into an empty space and switch off the engine.

  “You know where you’re going?” I ask.

  Jack nods, resolute but nervous. “I think so.”

  “You can do this, Jack,” I say. “Everything depends on you now. Go slow, go quiet, but get there. When was the attack scheduled to start?”

  “The first strike of eight o’clock.”

  “Then get moving, and remember: every year the monarch should come to the Lords to make their speech saying how things are going to be different from now on. This is your chance. Make it good.”

  He nods, grabs the bag, and climbs out. In moments he is lost to the subterranea
n darkness.

  I wait for a moment, gathering my thoughts, preparing. Then I too get out of the vehicle and walk into the Palace of Westminster, knowing there’s a good chance I will never walk out again.

  I LIMP AS fast as I can to the Speaker’s Cottage. There is no guard at the door, and all is silent when I enter. A sudden thought grabs me, so I hobble as softly as I can — not too difficult on this deep carpet — across to Cooper’s bedroom door. I take the cold brass doorknob in my hand and turn it ever so slowly. It rotates without a squeak, the door is unlocked. Careless, Cooper. Thought that since I was out of the way and guarded, that he could relax a little.

  I push the door open. The well-oiled hinges do not betray me. In the half light I can make out his bed. There, fully clothed above the covers, Cooper snores gently.

  I can’t believe it can be this easy. I glance over my shoulder, wary of sudden discovery, of a soldier who will leap out of the shadows and shout “fooled you!” But there’s nobody. I step forward, drawing the knife from my belt as I do so. Normally I would have gone for my gun, but something in my subconscious diverts my hand to the hard metal blade.

  I advance towards the bed. One strike, swift and sudden, and it will all be over. He lies on his side, his right temple presented as if offered to the knife.

  I stand above him and raise the blade but before I can strike the door to the cottage clatters open and a soldier bursts into the hallway. Cooper starts up in sudden surprise, woken from deep sleep. He registers me in the darkness. I plunge the knife down with a scream, but the moment had passed. He’s too fast for me. He spins sideways and the blade hits the eiderdown, sinking deep into feathers and mattress.

  “Freeze!” comes a voice from the doorway. I let go of the knife and slowly raise my arms.

  Cooper scrambles across the bed to the other side, where he switches on the bedside lamp. He’s genuinely shocked, the first time I’ve ever seen him on the back foot.

  I have no idea where it comes from, but I snarl at him, hissing like a cat, feral, furious and thwarted.