After a few minutes of running, stopping, dodging and creeping through the fog, Ameena asked the obvious question. ‘What if the car’s not there?’
‘Then we’re probably going to die.’
‘Right. Just as long as I know.’
The dust was beginning to settle and the smoke was starting to lift. We could see throngs of the creatures through the thinning fog. So far, at least, it appeared they hadn’t seen us, but how long that would last was anyone’s guess.
We zigzagged down low until we reached the police station. There were still screechers hanging about on the roof. They were the lucky ones. The broken bodies of others lay scattered around the base of the building. We had no choice but to tiptoe through them as we headed for the car park at the back. The fog was almost completely gone, so we picked up the pace, the need for stealth replaced by an overwhelming urge to move quickly.
Ameena stifled a yelp and I spun round to check on her. A screecher lay on the ground. Or part of it did, anyway. It was a legless torso, with a string of black, poisoned intestines spilling out like spaghetti below its waist. It had both hands on Ameena’s leg. The screecher’s dark eyes sparkled as it opened its jaws wide.
Her boot crunched against the side of its head. Once. Twice. The screecher lost its grip and we hurried away from it. Out of rage, or frustration, or just plain spite, it let out a scream. The sounds of the darkness changed as everything within earshot turned and looked in our direction.
‘Run,’ I said, racing for the car park. Ameena was faster. She pushed me on as dozens of creatures of all shapes and sizes began darting and lumbering and leaping after us.
We turned the corner and I almost cried with happiness. A police 4x4 was parked there, pristine and untouched by the chaos.
Ameena reached it first. She pressed her face against the glass of the driver’s door, then let out a whoop of delight. ‘Keys!’ she cried. ‘It’s got keys!’
She hauled the door open, then leaned over and opened the passenger door too. I slid awkwardly on to the seat just as the first of the things darted into the car park.
The creature was small but fast. It bounded in frog-like leaps across the car park, closing the gap between us in three long jumps.
Ameena turned the key and the engine spluttered nervously. Then the car gave a throaty roar and lurched forward. Ameena was wrestling with the handbrake when the frog-like thing landed with a soggy splat on the bonnet. We both screamed, then she floored the accelerator. The 4x4 lurched forward, stopped, then lurched forward again, tossing me around in the seat.
‘What are you doing? Just drive!’
‘I’m trying,’ she snapped. The entrance to the car park was now swamped with things. I was panicking too much to focus on any details. All I could see was the world’s ugliest mob, and the near-certain death that awaited us at their hands. Or claws. Or whatever.
Ameena crunched down a gear and tried the pedal again. The car shot forward, the tyres leaving melting rubber on the tarmac. The thing on the windscreen clung on like a limpet as Ameena aimed for the exit.
‘Smaller ones, smaller ones, look for the smaller ones.’
‘There,’ I said, pointing towards something that looked a little like an angry Ewok. Ameena hauled the wheel to the right. The Ewok blinked in the glare of the headlights, and then it vanished beneath the wheels with a meaty crunch.
‘There!’ I pointed again, this time to another of the frog-like things. It burst with a pop beneath the front tyres. Ameena shuddered, the wheels slipped, but then we were out of the car park and skidding on to the main road.
My head thumped against the side window and I quickly clipped on my seat belt. ‘Can you even drive?’ I asked, and my voice betrayed my terror.
‘Yeah. That time when Mumbles was after us.’
‘That was for, like, fifteen seconds!’
‘Yeah, but it was a police car, so I reckon this is more or less the same.’
She dodged round some burning debris, then powered through a group of dog-like creatures, scattering them. The 4x4 rounded another few corners, tore down one monster-infested straight, and then we were out of the village and heading for the town.
We sat there, not speaking, just staring straight ahead through the windscreen. Neither one of us dared to look back. Ameena eventually broke the silence.
‘He’s quite off-putting, isn’t he?’
I nodded. The frog-thing was still clinging to the windscreen with its sucker-like fingertips. Its bulging eyes flicked back and forth between us.
‘Yeah. He is a bit.’ I knocked on the glass. ‘Oi, mate. Hop it.’
‘You sure you can’t just magic him away?’
I shook my head. ‘I’m powerless now.’
‘Yeah, but are you sure? This isn’t—’
‘I can’t do it, OK?’ I snapped, and that seemed to be the end of it.
‘Oh, wait,’ Ameena said. She felt around the sides of the steering wheel, then flicked a lever. There was a clicking and a light on the dashboard began to flash. ‘No, that’s indicators,’ she muttered.
She moved another lever. The windscreen wipers arced up, taking the frog-thing by surprise. It lifted its hands and leaned back. Ameena slammed on the brakes and the creature rolled off the bonnet. It turned in time to see the 4x4 take off towards it.
It tried to jump out of the car’s path, but Ameena threw open her door. It connected with the monster mid-leap, sending it rolling messily across the road. She swerved the car. There was another pop, then she pulled back over to the left side of the road and drove on.
‘You could’ve just left it,’ I said.
‘Had a bad experience with one of those once,’ she replied, her eyes fixed on the road ahead. ‘Tried to kiss me.’
‘Really?’
‘Or maybe eat me. It’s hard to tell.’
I looked round into the back seat, then down at the dashboard, searching for anything that might be useful. There was a police radio in the car, but it had been switched off. I flicked the switch to turn it on and the 4x4 was filled with screaming and sobbing and the crackle of radio static. A dozen signals all tried to push through at once.
‘Help us. Too many of them. Too many to—’
‘—happening? What the Hell’s happening? Someone—’
‘—dead. All dead. Please help me! Something’s coming. God, someone help me—’
I turned the radio off again and we continued down the road in silence for a long time.
‘We could just keep driving, you know?’
I turned to Ameena. ‘What?’
‘Just follow the road, see where it takes us. We could make a go of it. Find somewhere we could, I don’t know, survive.’
‘Survive?’ I said. ‘With all those things around?’
‘People have. People do,’ she shrugged. ‘I did.’
‘You had my dad to look after you,’ I said coldly.
‘And now I’ve got you. And you’d have me.’
I stared ahead. ‘We go save Billy, then we go find my dad.’
Ameena nodded and we both fell silent again. There was an envelope sitting in a hollow above the glove box. I picked it up and read the name on the front. Then I read it again, just to be sure.
‘This is for me,’ I said.
Ameena glanced down at the square envelope. ‘Open it then.’
The flap wasn’t stuck down. I pulled out a handwritten note. ‘“Enjoy the car,”’ I read. ‘“One final parting gift. Joseph.”’
I stuck the note back in the envelope. Even from beyond the grave, Joseph, the mystery man, was still somehow helping me out.
‘He must’ve left it for us. That’s why the keys were in it,’ I realised.
‘That was nice of him.’
I looked long and hard at her. ‘Do you know who he was?’
‘Not a clue,’ she shrugged. ‘I know he was starting to get on your dad’s nerves a bit, the way he kept interfering, but he didn’t have a c
lue who the guy was. No one did.’
‘He was the policeman back at Christmas, remember?’
‘Yeah, course I remember.’
‘I thought he was an idiot, going on about me pulling his cracker with him, but even then he was helping us. First the message in the cracker itself, then the car parked out back. I bet he planned all of that.’
Ameena drew in a sharp breath and I turned to follow her gaze.
‘Whoa.’
The village had been bad, but the town was worse. Fire was spreading through houses and shops. It spread through gardens. It licked across the ground. Even inside the car, we could feel the heat of it on our faces.
Off to my right I could see my school. All the windows were lit up with orange and yellow. I’d dreamed of seeing it burn to the ground since first setting foot in the place, but the sight of it left me hollow. Every last part of my old life was gone.
Ameena slowed the car, but didn’t quite stop. Twisted, malformed shapes filled these streets too. They danced around the flames, delighting in the sheer spectacle of it all.
The hospital was on the edge of town, raised up on the hillside. We could only see part of the building, but from here it didn’t look like it was burning. Yet.
The 4x4 dipped to one side as Ameena steered it off the road. ‘Direct route,’ she explained as the car began to climb the slippery slope.
It was an uncomfortable trip. The hill was grassy and uneven, and the car bounced and rolled its way up towards the low, squat hospital building. We were a hundred or more metres away, but could see the whole place was in darkness.
A thought suddenly occurred to me. ‘There’ll still be people inside. Won’t there? Normal people, I mean.’
Ameena’s hands tightened on the wheel. ‘Maybe. But if Doc’s there…’ She didn’t finish the sentence. She didn’t have to.
I’d seen up close what Doc Mortis could do to people. Even those who were equipped to fight back had felt the sting of his surgical tools. I didn’t dare imagine how a hospital full of the sick and injured would fare against him.
‘It’s a big risk,’ Ameena said as the hill began to level off and we approached the rear of the hospital. ‘We don’t know what’s going to be in here.’
‘Billy, hopefully,’ I said. ‘We rescue him, then we can move on to phase two of the plan. Finding my dad.’
She nodded slowly and brought the car to a stop beside the hospital’s low boundary wall. ‘And what then?’
‘Then? Then I’ll kill him.’
Ameena’s eyes narrowed and her lips went thin.
‘You got a problem with that?’
She shook her head. ‘No. No problem. If that’s what you want.’
‘That’s what I want,’ I said. ‘Now kill the lights and let’s check the boot.’
‘For what?’
‘For weapons,’ I told her. I looked up at the darkened hospital standing before us. ‘If Doc’s really in there, we’re going to need them.’
We’d been hoping for shotguns. We found batons.
They were the telescopic kind that extended out to about fifty centimetres and folded down to about twenty. We picked them up and swished them a few times, getting used to the weight.
‘He could’ve left us some hand grenades or something,’ Ameena grumbled. ‘If he was so keen on helping us.’
‘I’m sure he had his reasons,’ I shrugged, pulling the boot closed as quietly as I could manage.
‘Or a bazooka, maybe.’
I moved towards the wall, keeping low. There was no movement at any of the windows, and I couldn’t see anything moving around in the hospital grounds. It was dark, though, and I was all too aware that anything could be hiding in the shadows.
‘Door’s over there,’ Ameena whispered. I followed her finger until I found the main entrance.
‘Too obvious. There’s another door round the side. We’ll go that way.’
‘OK. Want me to wait here?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Why would I?’
‘No reason.’ She looked up at the hospital and shivered. ‘Just hoping.’
‘If you don’t want to come, you don’t have to,’ I told her.
‘Hey, trusty sidekick, remember?’ she said, and she made a passable attempt to grin. ‘I’ve got your back.’ Her smile faded and her face became solemn. ‘Promise.’
‘Right then,’ I said. ‘Stick close together. Let’s go.’
We jumped over the low wall, then discovered it was substantially further to fall on the other side. I landed badly and almost screamed as pain popped in my kneecap. It took a few moments of deep breathing before I could trust myself to open my mouth.
‘Forgot about the drop,’ I muttered, and we began limping and running towards the main part of the building.
We pressed ourselves against the wall. The windows were a metre above us, too high to see through. But the rooms beyond them were silent and dark.
Keeping my head down, I moved round the building towards the side door. A few moments ago the baton had felt reassuringly solid, but now it slipped in my sweaty hand, and I couldn’t imagine it being of any use whatsoever. I gripped it tighter all the same.
‘I don’t know if these will stop a porter,’ I whispered.
‘Aim for the legs,’ Ameena said. ‘They’re the weak spots.’
‘Oh yeah, I forgot. You’re all best friends, aren’t you?’ I said. It was partly meant as a joke, but it didn’t come out that way.
‘No. I’ve never met one, not up close. But anyone living near Doc Mortis learns the best way to deal with a porter.’
She was on the defensive now. ‘And it’s not like we all just hung about, you know? I grew up terrified of Mortis, hearing all these stories about him. Hearing about what he did to people. I didn’t even know him and your dad had some kind of truce figured out until today. I didn’t know they were working together. It’s not like I was ever kept in the loop.’
I shrugged, but didn’t risk replying in case it came out sounding petty or angry. We were nearly at the side door. There was a sensor mounted above it, and it should have slid open at our approach. It didn’t move, though, and it occurred to me that the door would probably be locked.
I stopped and studied the toughened glass. The room on the other side was too dark to see into.
‘Should we smash it?’ I asked.
Ameena elbowed me aside. ‘No; stand back. Watch this. You’re not the only one with magic powers, you know.’
She clapped her hands once and rubbed them together. Then she pressed her palms flat against the glass. I held my breath and took another step back. Ameena moved her hands to the right, manually sliding the unlocked door out of our way.
She looked back over her shoulder at me and smirked. ‘I call that power “common sense”.’
‘Very funny,’ I grunted. I reached above her and held the door open. ‘For that, you get to go first.’
‘Lucky me,’ she said, stepping inside. She glanced in both directions along the corridor, then relaxed. ‘There. See? Nothing to worry about.’
A fast-moving shape blurred into her, whisking her away. One second she was there in front of me, the next she wasn’t. I dived inside the hospital and heard her muffled screams disappearing along the corridor to my left.
‘Ameena!’ I called.
Big mistake.
The darkness behind me rustled as something came alive in it. I ran without looking, ignoring my injured knee as I lumbered along the corridor after Ameena, panic acting as the ultimate painkiller.
From up ahead I heard a loud crack and the squeal of something less than human. Ameena gasped as she drew in a breath, then I became aware of her in the dark just ahead of me.
‘Watch your feet,’ she warned, and I realised the porter was on the floor, thrashing around. ‘What did I tell you? Go for the legs.’
We could make out a door in the gloom. She pulled it open and dragged me inside, just as the thing back along the
corridor began to pick up speed.
‘In here.’
‘What is it?’ I asked. ‘Where does it go?’
‘How should I know? Away from them.’
She shoved me forward and I bumped against a shelf. Reaching up, I felt around through the blackness. Yep, there was that horrible sinking feeling again.
‘It’s a cupboard,’ I sighed as she pulled the door closed. ‘You’ve led us into a cupboard.’
I heard her hesitate. ‘Well, yeah. I mean obviously it’s a cupboard.’
We jumped as something began to tap slowly on the door. Tap-tap-tap. Tap-tap-tap. It wasn’t fast or hard or frenzied. It was the slow, deliberate knock of something that knew we had no way of escaping. It was in no rush.
Tap-tap-tap, it went. Tap-tap-tap, like a cat batting at a mouse it held pinned and helpless beneath its paws. Ameena fumbled around with the handle. There was a reassuring clunk as she turned the lock.
‘That should keep it out for a while.’
‘Great. That’ll buy us more time to be stuck in a cupboard.’
‘Wait,’ Ameena whispered. ‘Isn’t there always a hatch in the ceiling in these things?’
‘That’s in a lift,’ I said, but she climbed up the shelves and felt around, anyway.
‘Nothing,’ she groaned.
‘See? Told you. Lifts.’
‘They really should start to put hatches in the ceilings in cupboards too. We should write to someone.’
‘Good idea. Got a pen on you?’
Tap-tap-tap. Tap-tap-tap.
‘What are we going to do?’ I asked.
‘The way I see it, we’ve got two choices,’ Ameena replied. ‘We stay here and hope it gets bored and wanders off.’
‘Unlikely.’
‘Yeah, so that brings us to the second option. We kick the door open and run away.’
Tap-tap-tap.
‘I hurt my knee jumping the wall. I can’t run very fast.’
‘I’m counting on it,’ Ameena said. ‘If it catches you that’ll buy me more time to escape.’
Tap-tap-tap.
‘That was a joke, by the way. Too soon?’
‘Way too soon.’
Tap-tap-THUNK!
The door shook as something slammed against it from the other side. It hit high above head height, and we both instinctively ducked at the sound.
The Darkest Corners Page 8
