by John Barlow
But then, half way up, Ben suddenly stopped. There were footsteps. Coming down. A lot of footsteps.
The two of them flattened themselves against the wall. Ben held the gun ready, staring at the corner of the stairs as the footsteps got louder and louder.
Four boys appeared, all about Ben’s age. In their hands were DVDs, a playstation, a small plasma screen... Anything that they could carry from Sullivan’s apartment.
They saw Ben. They saw the gun. They saw Jason. Jason Sullivan.
They turned, all at once, to go back up.
“Stop!” Ben yelled. “Stop! Get out. Go down! Just get out of here.”
They gaped at Ben and Jason, open-mouthed with incomprehension.
“Move!” Ben shouted. “Go on! Go down!”
Slowly, but then more quickly, they carried on down the stairs, past Ben and Jason, watching the gun in Ben’s hands as they disappeared downwards.
“One more floor,” Ben said to Jason. “Are you all right?”
Jason nodded, although he was so weak that he didn’t know whether he could go on. He was petrified. But he followed.
They made it to the fifth floor. The corridor here was strewn with lumps of concrete from the disintegrating walls, and above them electric cables hung down in sparking, tangled clumps where the ceiling had collapsed. Most of the light bulbs along the corridor had smashed, their red-hot filaments buzzing in the dusty air like furious wasps.
They crept along the corridor, treading between the debris, and shielding their heads from falling concrete and live, sparking cables.
They got to the control room. The heat inside the room slammed into them like a scalding punch in the face. TV monitors flickered, whilst others were already dead. The control desk was a sea of flashing buttons, and two or three different warning alarms were beeping.
“Is there anything we can do?” he said to Jason. “Can we stop this?”
Jason’s mouth hung open, and he shook his head. “I don’t know how,” he said, hypnotized by the flashing lights, the red and yellow reflected in his startled, wide-open eyes.
“All right,” said Ben. “Show me how to open it.”
He looked at the big, yellow door at the back of the room:
DANGER: HIGH VOLTAGE. DO NOT ENTER
Beneath the warning was a black cross.
“Don’t go through there,” Jason said, shaking visibly. “The power plant... Don’t, Ben. The last boy who went through there...”
“He found dad, Jase. Then he came to tell me. I’ve got to go...”
Jason paused. “Ben,” he said, almost too softly to hear, “thanks for what you did. You know, with Worse, the gun... my dad.”
“It’s okay,” said Ben. “Just open the door.”
With that Jason walked heavily across to the big yellow door, every step loaded with dread and foreboding. And with each of those steps he glanced at Ben, as if asking him again and again if he really wanted to go through with this.
On the control desk near the door was a panel of buttons. Jason pressed three of them. Then he flipped open a cover just below the panel. There was a small yellow lever. After taking a long breath and closing his eyes, he pulled the lever.
Turning to Ben, with a horrified expression, he said: “There. It’s open. We can go in.”
“No, not we,” Ben said, as around them the building groaned and creaked, huge cracks now opening up across the ceiling above them. “Go back, Jason. You’ve done enough.”
“But, you can’t...” Jason began.
A sudden explosion rocked the floor. Jason spun, his legs gave way, and he staggered to stay on his feet, arms flying out to steady himself.
“Go on,” Ben shouted, as the din around them became unbearable, the noise of more explosions almost drowning out his voice. “Get out!”
Jason knew he had to go. He shuffled slowly backwards, his hands groping behind him. Then, as he felt the handle of the door in his hands, he stopped and looked at Ben Brewer, whose hair was matted with sweat and thick, gray dust, his whole body shaking as the building itself shook. In his eyes there was a hard determination, a fury, something close to madness.
Then Jason was gone. He ran back along the corridor as fast as he could, and threw himself down the stairs, taking them four, five at a time, his shins jarring with pain. But he didn’t care. In a minute he was on the bottom floor, making his way out into the fun-fair.
As he emerged into the open, his ears were filled again with the roar of destruction. But he was out. And safe.
Chapter Forty-Five
The door was a bright, shining yellow. It rattled with the vibrations that were now shaking the whole building. DANGER, the large, black letters said. From the ceiling a huge lump of concrete crashed down onto the control desk before bouncing onto the floor, leaving a mess of exposed wires and broken buttons in its wake. Smoke rose from the control desk, its lights flickering, then going out completely.
Another lump of ceiling smashed down onto the floor, missing Ben’s shoulders by inches. Then a third chunk fell, leaving a dark, gaping hole in the ceiling. And now, suddenly, he realized that even if he wanted to go back, he couldn’t. The control room was about to collapse. There was no other way. He had to go through the door. Seizing the handle he pulled.
A new and more intense heat blasted into him, like a wave of flat pain slamming into the flesh of his face and roasting his skin. Screwing up his eyes, and almost choking on the scorching air that rushed into his nostrils, he walked through the door. His throat was dry, caked with dust, and his breath rattled and scraped inside his chest.
He opened his eyes. He was on a narrow steel platform, with a handrail in front of him. Looking down over the handrail he saw that he was at the top of an enormous chamber, a sort of artificial cave, almost black, with only the odd point of faint light here and there. It was the interior of the Control Tower. He recognized its dimensions, that huge, square building with hardly any windows.
Below him, right in front of his feet, was a long drop. At the bottom were strange metal objects, boxes, transformers, a system of cabling running across the floor. From high up it looked like the mother board of a computer, each component connected to the next, everything laid out neat, a vast system of electrical equipment that now hissed and buzzed and malfunctioned, sending waves of electric heat upwards.
There was no one about, not a single worker, and as Ben peered into the depths of the dark chasm beneath his feet, he noticed that at the other side several red warning lights were flashing above another yellow door.
In the background he heard alarms, but they were almost drowned out by the immense noise coming from further off, from out through the far side, out in the power plant itself, where the four great chimneys and the immense coal-fed furnaces beneath them were on the verge of self-destruction.
Then he saw it. Hardly visible in the murky light, there was a kind of metal cage. It stretched out into the dark void ahead of him. It was a walkway, made of a metal mesh on all four sides, just big enough to stand up inside. It was suspended right the way across the chasm, but sloping downwards, until far in the distance, at the other side, it reached the ground.
That was it. The way of getting to the power plant, to the four chimneys. The way to the center of everything. To where he was sure his father was. He looked around, searching for an alternative. Through his legs he felt the platform where he stood vibrate dangerously, forcing him to catch hold of the handrail which separated him from a long, dark drop. He looked, and looked. There was no other way.
He edged along the platform, towards the caged walkway. Even as he placed a foot onto it, he felt it sway in the air. Out there, in the black expanse of the cavernous chamber, the long metal cage whipped one way then the other, like a suspension bridge in a hurricane.
Behind him the doorway of the control room was throwing out a thick barrage of dirt and suffocating dust, and he saw now that the room was piled high with concrete and rubble as t
he walls tumbled in on themselves.
He turned again, and touched the wire mesh of the walkway, sticking the fingers of one hand through the holes, whilst holding the shotgun close to his chest with the other. What would Bad ’n Worse do? he asked himself, feeling his legs trembling uncontrollably. What would Silver do? Come on! What?
He urged himself forwards. Through his fingers he felt the steel mesh jangle as the whole walkway twisted in the air. What would Coby do? Come on, Ben! He couldn’t. He couldn’t move. What would Coby do now?
That’s it. Coby would run! He’d run as fast as he could, not looking down, with that scared, determined look on his face.
So, with the shotgun clamped under his arm he rushed forwards, feet clanging on the metal mesh beneath him. He willed himself not to look down as he pushed on, feeling the slope now as he started out down the long pathway into the vast darkness, bumping left and right as the whole cage jerked one way then the other.
Come on! he growled, forcing himself on, step after step, hoping there were no gaps in the mesh, not daring look at where his feet were landing.
Waves of stifling heat rose up, his skin prickling and screaming with pain. On he went. Just like Coby would have done. On and on without thinking, without stopping, dizzy and weak, hardly feeling his legs at all.
He was halfway across. On all sides there was nothing but dark, unknown space.
Then, suddenly, he felt his body being yanked savagely to one side. The cage spun and buckled, the shriek of grinding metal high and piercing in his ears. Fighting to keep hold of the gun, he fumbled against the sides of the cage with one panicking hand. He stumbled, sprawling face down on the mesh as the walkway swung dangerously in the boiling hot air.
Closing his eyes, as if to block out the fear, he scrambled forwards again, his fingers scraping against the metal as if it were his last chance, his nails snarling and splitting as he scratched like an injured animal fighting for its life.
His knees ached, smashed again and again into the walkway. Yet he willed himself on. Another push, another gasping, petrified scramble forwards, and all the time the swing of the walkway was getting more extreme.
Then there was a weird, harrowing noise of snapping, buckling metal. The walkway was breaking up, coming away from its mooring at the top. Ben threw himself forwards, tumbling helplessly, his arms and legs smashing against metal again and again. The walkway behind him groaned one last time. Then, all at once, it collapsed.
He felt himself fall, the cage plummeting down through the air. His body was slammed hard into the mesh. A moment later, with a searing pain extending right down his spine and spreading to every muscle of his body, he flopped forwards onto his face, immobile, whimpering with agony. The gun had disappeared. But he was still alive, lying there, trapped inside a twisted metal cage, within a power station that was about to blow.
The cage shook and rattled. He looked up. Above him the roof of the Control Tower was being shaken to bits, and now, as he regained his senses, he saw that around him, on the ground, concrete from a hundred feet above was dropping down in massive lumps. Cables and the electrical equipment were bursting into flames, smoke spiraling upwards, a sea of white sparks washing over everything, including him.
Squirming to avoid the sparks, he edged along the twisted, collapsed cage, until he got right to the end, near to the yellow door. There was the gun. He took hold of it, then threw it through the small opening that was all that remained of the walkway’s original entrance, the metal walls of the cage now crushed and mangled.
There was hardly space for a dog to squeeze through. But with more and more sparks landing on him, singing his hair with their little pin-prinks of intense heat, he forced himself, his body jerking and twisting desperately, knowing there was no other way out.
His shoulders wouldn’t go. He struggled to get one shoulder through, then the other, ripping a sleeve of his bomber jacket clean off. His hands worked furiously on the metal mesh, trying to pull it even a fraction further apart. His hands were bleeding.
He got as far as the hips. But then his body jammed fast. He couldn’t move either way. His head and shoulders hung down, helpless, with the rest of him trapped inside. He couldn’t get his arms up behind him to do anything about it. He was stuck.
Then, an ear-splitting explosion behind him lifted the whole mangled walkway high into the air. It twisted like the tail of an enormous metallic dinosaur in the very last, desperate throes of life. He felt himself rise up into the hot dark air, and then, as the walkway dropped to the ground again, his torn, exhausted body fell to the floor, thrown free of the cage.
He lay there, dazed and weak, hardly able to breathe. In front of him was the door. A second later there was a great howl of noise, louder than anything else, enough to force the very air from his lungs. The roof of the Control Tower was caving in.
Covered in a thick blanket of dust and debris, and now in pitch darkness, he felt around for the shotgun. He grabbed it, then strained to move forwards, feeling in front of him with a single, trembling hand. Flat on his belly, every part of him aching with pain, he crawled to the door and pushed.
It swung open, and he somehow managed to pull his quivering body through, just in time to hear the Control Tower collapse behind him.
Chapter Forty-Six
He lay there, just outside the door. His mouth was full of grit, and his body shook with exhaustion. The heat was different out here. Gusts of wind cooled his face. But in between these gusts was a more powerful hotness, a wall of burning air. He sprawled flat on the ground. His shoulder throbbed, his hands were bleeding, and inside his chest he could hear the heavy wheezing of his lungs, battling to function despite the temperature and the dirty, choking air that filled them.
Lying next to him was the gun. He ran his fingers across it, confused. Why was he here? He couldn’t remember. His eyelids were fluttering now, refusing to stay open. He was losing consciousness. Where was he...? Why was he... the Island... his mum...?
Around him the deafening sounds of the power plant were like thunderous echoes inside his head. Thoughts spun helplessly in his wavering mind, making no sense at all, falling away from each other. Who was Sullivan? A shotgun...? A shotgun?
The temperature was intense. He squirmed about on the ground, trying to avoid the insistent waves of heat that spilled over him. Where was he? He tried to concentrate. Who was he? No, he didn’t even remember that. Who was he?
Panic flooded his body. He scrambled to his feet, breathing so fast that he was almost too dizzy to stand. Instinctively he searched his pockets. His eyes were hardly open at all, as he cowered in the doorway, searching for a clue. What was going on? Where was he?
His shaking, weakened hands found a magnifying glass. Thinking, thinking... he stared down at the small, circular piece of glass. A boat... a red boat. And some people in it...? He was beginning to remember. To remember something. Coby getting out of the water...? Coby?
Pushing the glass back into his pocket, he felt something else, a piece of paper. Taking it out, he unfolded it. A large cross was drawn on it in pencil.
“Dad,” he said, looking up at the four enormous chimneys before him.
He took a couple of deep breaths, almost gagging on the hot, sulfurous air, and scanned the scene: each of the four massive chimneys was belching out thick, yellow-black smoke, and licks of flame could be seen at the top of the nearest chimney. They had been overfed, the furnaces crammed full with coal, and cracks had now began to appear on their sides where the heat was just too much.
Ben knew that the real problem lay below. He could feel it, as the ground shook and rumbled beneath him. The generators beneath each chimney had been set to self-destruct. The whole power plant would overwork until it exploded. He knew he didn’t have much time.
There was no one left. Everyone had escaped by now. He was the only one. But, he wasn’t alone. Somewhere in here, he was sure, was his dad.
Slowly, forcing himself forwards
into the incredible heat, he walked. Where would he be? he asked himself, as he approached the vast base of the nearest chimney. Where? Where? Cautiously, he skirted the chimney, shielding his eyes from the intense heat that came from its concrete walls. Where would Sullivan have put him?
He wanted to cry out, to scream and shout until his dad heard him. But it was no use. The noise around him drowned everything, so loud that as he walked he wondered whether his ears really worked at all.
He came to the space between one chimney and the next. Through the gap he saw the other two chimneys, further off. The four of them were arranged in a square, all exactly the same, although the one furthest away seemed to be in a worse state now; a huge part of its rim had fallen off, and flames poured over the jagged edge.
In between the four chimneys was a kind of no man’s land, a scattering of low, ramshackle buildings in the middle. Something about them caught his eye. What was it? Gradually, in spite of the suffocating heat, he opened his mouth.
“That’s it!” he said, taking the paper from his pocket and staring at it, then looking back up at the four chimneys. “That’s it. ‘X’ marks the spot.”
Now he was snarling with anger.
“He did it out of spite! Sullivan put dad there, right at the center of everything, at the heart of the Complex... a prisoner!”
Already he was running, sprinting forwards, gasping against the hot air:
“Dad! Dad!”
With the gun in his hands, he ran as fast as he could. The ground beneath him was rocking so violently that with each step he stumbled, losing his footing on its uneven surface, which was beginning to break up, cracks and holes opening up everywhere. The low buildings in the middle looked like old storehouses, made of wood, and long since abandoned. That’s where he headed now.
One of two of them had no roofs, and as the whole power plant shook and juddered, they were falling apart. Gasping for air, his legs weak and wobbly beneath him, he looked quickly from one shack to another. Their walls were vibrating, coming loose, one or two doors swinging open. In the very center was the smallest shack. It looked odd, too small to be a building. And it was right in the middle of everything. At the very center.
