by Rob Parker
He eventually stopped moving, and so did Grace. She turned, her eyes wild with fire dancing within. All Peter could do was nod to her.
He started after his wife and child, when a cry emerged from somewhere above them. It was a word, bellowed hard into the space. They both looked up, to see Jeff, the gatekeeper, carefully walking down the stairs. He was shouting a name. He was shouting the name ‘Simon’.
64
With howls at their backs, spiking the purest terror, the women ran into the darkness of what Grace had called ‘the exit tunnel’. Alice had the torch, and was at the front with her mother, Joyce behind. Alice was whippet fast, her young legs pumping, and Joyce lagged by just a few yards. In the darkness, that was all it took for her to trip, and, with a scream rising in her throat, fall flat on her face.
All she could think about was getting up, about moving, about escape, she’d become fully-realised prey animal and flight was all she had, but she’d botched it. Yet, as she pulled herself back up to her feet, she saw Cue Ball sprint past, completely ignoring her. Either that, or he’d just missed her. She knew what it was though. Cue Ball and the one that was dead, they’d both been arguing over Alice. And now he wasn’t going to let his trophy get away. She edged backwards until her shoulders hit the wall, and she waited quietly. She wanted to help, she wanted to chase, but the prey animal in her, the one that had emerged from nowhere, just wouldn’t let her. She was ashamed, but she was alive.
Then she heard a gurgle. Too close. She couldn’t see what it was, but she knew too well that it could only be one of them. She waited, holding her breath, not daring to even shake with the mounting terror she felt.
She smelled him. That rank stench of sweet sweat and grime, of defecation, evil and bodies that hadn’t been washed since they’d found their way into this appalling place.
It chittered and clicked. A number of times, and each time, in the tunnel’s echo chamber, it sounded different. As if he was turning his head.
He was looking for her.
As silently as she could, Joyce lowered to the floor and lay there.
When, with a hollow clunk somewhere deep within the belly of the facility, like a rumble from an unseen gut, the tunnel was suddenly bright. The abruptness caused Joyce to shield her eyes, but there was no denying it, at the worst possible moment, the lights that were strung along the tunnel ceiling blinked on, exposing her in full, as power returned to Blackstoke.
And there, only a matter of yards from her, having seen her immediately, was the little one. Runt. He had come for her.
She knew it. She knew it from before.
She was his prize.
65
Mother and daughter ran as if the hounds of hell were hot on their heels, when the tunnel suddenly burst into brightness and the torch Grace had given them was happily relegated to redundancy. The new contours of the tunnel showed more doorways, and recesses, all of which offered a boost to hope. But Cue Ball was right on them. They could smell him, his foul breath rasping against all surfaces, and seemed to come at them from every part of the tunnel, front and back, giving him the aura of the inescapable.
Pam abruptly pulled Alice into one of the side recesses, which the sudden light had shown to be a smaller tunnel branching off. It carried a slight incline. Pam’s calves burned as she ran, the sudden rise plunging lactic acid into her muscles, but she wouldn’t stop. Her daughter was just ahead of her, and if she was ahead, then Pam was the barrier between her and the beast. She knew what the monster wanted. Knew why he wanted her beautiful daughter. Women always knew, innately, when men looked at them a certain way. And even though this instance was so very different, it was still somehow just the same.
‘Go, Alice, run!’ she shouted, quietness be damned, as she knew Cue Ball was right behind them. He wasn’t going to give up. He wasn’t ever going to stop unless they killed him. She knew that.
She also knew that she was prepared to do it. She didn’t know where this tunnel went, where it came out, or what lay ahead, but if there was a moment she had to stand and fight to the death to protect her daughter, she would. She would die to protect Alice—and do so with relish.
It’s funny, what becomes important when the chips are down. The bonds that unite us, the familial chains both wanted and at times unwanted, all soar to the top of the list when the stakes are just so high. It reminded her just what they had to lose, if they didn’t get out of here. And in finally understanding the importance of such things, what they had to gain. If she got out, the four of them safe, she would do whatever it took to make sure their family thrived in happiness, and prospered in the simple gift of togetherness. Forget material trappings. Survival would be a second chance, and she would fight dearly for it.
The strip lighting of the tunnel ended abruptly with a wide metal shutter, not unlike a garage door, only somewhat more industrial. All these trollies, Pam realised, would have to have been brought down here some way and a ramp was the best bet.
‘We’re at the end,’ Alice shouted, panicked. ‘How do we get it open?’
Pam slowed as she reached her. ‘Try the panel. You’ll think of something.’
‘I think it needs a code!’ she screeched back.
‘Just think, darling.’
Pam turned round to face Cue Ball, who slowed himself when he saw there was nowhere for them to go. His mouth widened in the ugliest smile Pam had ever seen.
‘Okay you, come on,’ she said. ‘You’ve got to go through me.’
Alice caught what her mum was saying. ‘Mum, you can’t,’ she said with a quivering voice.
‘Keep working on the door, sweetheart.’
Cue Ball looked at Alice, then at Pam, and snarled. God, up close and in the light, they were horrible. His head was indeed a near perfect moon, but underneath, everything was wrong. One eye was larger than the other, with the smaller one turned downwards at the corner, like the skin of the eyelid had melted. The other was shining and wide, rendering the dark pupil a vortex of hate and animalism. This thing in front of her knew no other way to be, operating only under the remit of the species basics. Eat, shit, fuck, repeat.
His arms were too long, and they fanned out in a vast, pale, featherless wingspan, as he bared teeth and stepped forward, twisting his features into pure anger.
Pam was terrified—but she was more terrified of harm coming to Alice. So against all the warnings sounding in her head, she charged. The thing scratched at her, but Pam fought back, punching and kicking as if she’d unlocked a hidden attribute in her, finding new depths of resolve and strength to protect her baby.
Cue Ball’s arms held her tight all the way round, but she bit as hard as she could into his forearm, tugging a piece of flesh away from the sinew. It caused Cue Ball to scream and hit her on the top of the head as hard as he could, forcing her to release him. He pushed her to the ground. Pam’s vision went funny, and somewhere in her head, it felt as if something had gone pop.
The garage door started to open with a loud whirr, and purple light crawled under the widening gap beneath the door. Fresh air followed it. Pam had never smelled anything so wonderful.
‘Go Alice, sweetheart. Go!’ she shouted from the floor, her voice quieter but still with a redolence of conviction.
Alice looked at her, pained with indecision.
‘Go, baby,’ said Pam, before making a last desperate lunge for Cue Ball, who was regrouped and primed for chase. She launched herself at him, grabbing him around the waist, and he rained blows on her back, while she shouted ‘Go!’ one last time.
‘I love you,’ said Alice through suddenly streaming tears, and Alice turned and ran, sobbing, for her life.
And Pam, for the first time in a long time, smiled—like she really meant it.
66
Christian looked up to see the security guard, Jeff, coming down the steps, the sky a violet square behind him, painting him a silhouette. And he was shouting a name. Simon, it sounded like. There was nobody called Si
mon at Blackstoke.
Then behind him, he felt movement, and as he turned back into the dark space he’d found the children, he saw the man coming forward. The man he’d found in there. He was walking around the side of the pen, where the two toddlers sat looking at each other. He’d put Olivia back in when the chamber outside suddenly exploded into life again. He wasn’t going to leave them, and would do whatever he could to prevent anyone from entering the room—but he just couldn’t handle abandoning his neighbours again. When he heard Grace Milligan, alone, trying to reason with them, he had to do something.
Now two of them had run off, and two of them were still at the bottom of the stairway—and now the security guard was coming down into it, looking for a Simon.
The man behind him came to the door, a blank openness to his face, and Christian moved to let him pass. He walked into the large space, arms down at his side, mesmerised, and he looked up at the man coming down the steps.
On seeing him, Jeff’s brow folded, and his eyes soaked. His cheeks reddened and puckered with a deep smile. He spoke in a voice thick with emotion.
‘It’s me, Simon, it’s me. She wouldn’t let me see you, but I’m here now, I’ve been looking for you everywhere, I’m here son.’
Both Christian and Grace stared at each other in bemused wonder, unsure if they’d really heard what they thought they’d heard—when a roar sang from behind them all.
The bottom of the stairs.
‘Oh, Jesus,’ said Christian, as he saw the giant, it’s head unnaturally dented, claw himself to his feet. Blood sprayed as he stood and spat, his whole head a mess of bruises and cuts, and he charged at Grace. Christian could see that Grace was unarmed—she’d put her bat down. She immediately backed up, and tried to put distance between them. But the monster was too full of fire, and too far gone for reason. Anything human had been battered out of him moments earlier by Grace.
Dewey howled, but even he found the state of the behemoth just too terrifying, and hung back—only for a second, before he saw his master in danger, and bolted to her side.
Christian couldn’t watch idly, and he knew that if he didn’t intervene Grace would be dead and he’d be next. And once he was dead, that left…
He turned back into the room for just a second, and looked at his daughter, sat there, on the floor of the pen, her beautiful curls undampened by the horrors around her, her eyes wide with an innocence that told him if she could just survive this, she’d forget everything. This whole awful episode wouldn’t even be a footnote to her story.
‘Daddy loves you,’ he said—and closed the door.
67
David drove with the windows down, listening to the dog barks. The road had stopped, but he wouldn’t, so he had to drive beneath overarching boughs to follow the sounds of ruckus—which soon incorporated human voices. Shouts, both male and female.
The car was powerful in a sporty way, which was just enough for pulling through the brush trails and deeper into the forest. Above the tree tops, the sky was conjuring shades brighter with every passing moment. He just hoped he could get there in time.
He went a little wrong, the voices suddenly seeming to come from his left, and as he corrected course, he saw, to his surprise, a space beyond the trees. An empty space. Except for…
Yes. A few large piles of rubble and dirt.
The sounds were agitated. Shouts, screaming, a dog barking. Some other sound. Animal howling. He was suddenly terrified.
He pulled out into the clearing, and looked around for the source of the commotion. There, in the far corner, a fat cone of light pointed to the sky. He drove towards it, and saw a hatch embedded in the ground. Jumping out, he stood on the ledge of the opening and looked down.
He hadn’t been prepared for the sight. It pushed every boundary of logic he possessed.
A huge, clearly-injured hairless man was at the bottom of a stairwell, and it took a moment to realise that he, David, was at the top. The man was attacking, fighting ferociously, with Grace who lived across the street—and, in a realisation that squeezed his heart, his husband, Christian. Near them, somehow disconnected from the violence just yards away, a man in a security outfit appeared to be pleading with a guy who looked homeless and confused.
He was drawn to help and protect his husband, and started down the stairs.
But the giant turned and started running up them. It seemed as if Christian, Grace and her dog had managed to beat the massive foe back, but was sending him directly in David’s direction. The man really was both monstrous and monstrously injured. And he had just seen David.
The monster stopped and looked at him with such dark, blood-drenched malevolence that David was in no doubt he was looking into evil, that this thing was going to kill and kill again until its own death. It turned and looked back at his husband, Christian. David’s eyes met Christian’s, and in that split second an unspoken message of adoration was passed between them, and David’s decision was made.
He jumped back in the car, and drove to the hatch. It was just wide enough for his car to pass through, and he angled the car’s nose over the top of the steps. He had to kill this thing to protect his husband—and Olivia, his darling baby girl, wherever she was.
David touched the accelerator, not wanting to floor it until Christian and Grace had caught his intention to fly down the steps and ram the beast. The car tipped forward, everyone in the room turned to look, the giant man included, and it started lurching down the stairs. David hit the brakes once, twice, but nothing was stopping it now, and he started to think he’d made a terrible error. The giant’s eyes went wide with something close to fear, as David’s car hurtled down the stairway, and, almost exactly halfway down, poleaxed the behemoth—but the nose of the car had bounced up on the steps, and the bonnet hit the giant in the chest, momentum sending the flying car right on top of him.
The car didn’t slow, not even fractionally, but it did start to spin, and David started to tilt. The room went sideways, David saw his husband coming up too fast, and he pumped the brakes as hard as he could but nothing stop it and suddenly Christian, his wonderful husband, was right there.
For a second moment in quick succession, the men’s eyes locked to pass a message of affection—but this time, the love shared was dosed heavily with regret.
68
Joyce was on her feet before she could think of her next move, her sole overriding thought being I’m not dying here, curled up, in the foetal position, like a wretch. Although she didn’t really believe that killing her was Runt’s aim.
The lights sparking to life had brought stark geography to the corridors of the boys’ underground lair, and offered areas she simply hadn’t seen. One of these was a recessed door some ten yards away, in the brickwork of the tunnel wall. She started to run to it, but Runt was moving to block her way—so she did what she’d been taught to do to any belligerent man—something she’d oddly forgotten when Fletcher had first pursued her—and kneed the youngest creature as hard in the bollocks as she possibly could.
The Runt crumpled like plastic by a hot flame, clutching his groin, rotten saliva roiling over yellow, pointed teeth.
She’d got him good, the throb in her knee telling her as much, and she ran for the door, tried it, it opened first time, and she flung herself inside.
She shut the door, and looked for a lock, but, finding there was none, instead looked for something to arm herself with. She also needed to see if this room actually offered a way out.
Power. She remembered there was power down here now, and she fumbled for a switch. Immediately the room lit via two bulbs, one of which popped instantly, raining glass and shards, and forced Joyce to cover her head. The other struggled to offer anything resembling a solid cast of light, but valiantly held firm enough to let her see.
Joyce opened her eyes fully.
Bodies. On a bed. Stacked like firewood. Limbs tangling over one another, heads in groins, fluid leaking from one onto the next. The most und
ignified scene she’d ever witnessed.
Through the revulsion, familiarity began to strike.
The top one was almost headless, just a poking tangle of flesh jutting from over a floral smock. Wendy Fenchurch. The one below, sandwiched in the middle. His face burned to a crisp, but the singed grey patches above could only belong to her husband, Quint. Pam said they’d been killed. They had. Then brought down here.
Then the last one.
The clothes. The shape.
The hair still possessing a lustre persuaded by hours of preening and expensive products.
She knew him.
Her husband—gobby MP for North Lancashire, and scourge of liberal mindsets everywhere.
Fletcher Adams.
Her first thought was: you stupid, pig-headed bastard.
The second was: thank God.
The third was: I’m just glad the boys aren’t here.
The grief she imagined she was supposed to feel was nowhere near the shock at the viscera she was seeing first hand—shock which stopped her from fully-acknowledging the door swing open behind her. Looking at Fletcher there, she felt pity. Pity because he’d become nothing more than an addition to a pile of meat, and because she didn’t think anyone deserved that.
A pile of meat.
The thought hit into her as the door behind crashed open.
This was a meat store.
They’d been kept as food.
But as she turned away, Runt was there, and baring down on her with careful calculating steps. His arms were outstretched, as if to beckon her into them.
She looked around the space. It was just a room, simple yet congested with stuff. There was an odd chair over to the right, surrounded by machinery. Looked like a dentist’s chair, with a halo round the top.
