by Frank Tayell
At first, he took the stairs slowly, but each creaking step seemed louder than the previous one, so he took the last six two-at-a-time, reaching a landing just as a bass beat blared from further above. The music was silenced, and he waited to hear footsteps, voices, but none came. Someone had put headphones on. They’d found a phone or a CD player, something with batteries, and were now enjoying a few minutes of music. He’d done that himself, more often than he could remember.
“Music,” he signed. He couldn’t remember the sign to say that it was silent now, so settled for pointing upwards. She motioned he should hurry.
The stairs led to a first-storey landing much like the ground floor. Two doors led to the right, while the stairs continued up. Except here, facing the stairs, was another door. Two apartments on the ground floor, three on this landing. Had there been four storeys, or three? Or five? He couldn’t remember, but there had been twelve letterboxes by the front door. It was no great leap to assume the apartments at the top of the building would be larger, and that it was there these people had gone. He climbed up. The second storey had three doors, the third storey had two. He paused at the base of the stairs leading upward to what had to be the top floor of the building. Again he listened, and now he was sure he could hear something. Movement? He could imagine it as feet tapping in time with the music.
He gave up trying to remember sign language, so pantomimed someone listening to headphones instead. Tuck nodded, and they climbed the last flight of stairs.
It was the top floor. Oddly, there were three doors: one by the stairs, one off the corridor, and one at the front of the building, directly above the ground-floor letterboxes. That one, unlike the other two, didn’t have a number, but a printed sign. He couldn’t read it from where he stood, but he saw the muddy footprints. Some led to the apartment at the front of the building, some led to that other door.
Tuck pointed upward.
“Roof access?” Chester mouthed.
Tuck shrugged. She pointed at herself, the numberless door, then at the ceiling. She pointed at him, at the apartment door, then pantomimed knocking. “Wait two minutes,” she signed, holding up two fingers to make sure he understood.
He held up two fingers to show he did. Except he didn’t. As she moved soft-footed to the front of the building and to the roof-access door, he wondered what she planned to do next.
He stopped worrying about that and listened instead. Feet, yes. Tapping in time with a song. He grasped the assumption Tuck had made. Two sets of prints had come into this building. If one of them was listening to music, it was safe to assume they were alone while the other had gone up to the roof, presumably searching for a better vantage point from which to keep watch.
How long had it been? Long enough, he decided.
He marshalled his thoughts, and knocked at the door.
“Hello? Courageous?” he said. Except if the guy was listening to headphones, he’d not have heard that. He reached for the door handle, pushing it inwards.
He’d misheard.
Tuck had miscounted.
They’d both miscalculated.
There were two people in the apartment. One, a man, sat on a two-seater, headphones on, feet up on a glass coffee table in the middle of the spacious lounge. The other, a woman, had been standing by the floor-to-ceiling windows just beyond the new-built kitchenette. At the sound of the knocking, she must have turned towards the door, and was already reaching for the Kalashnikov laid on the counter.
“Courageous!” Chester said. But it was the wrong thing to say. The woman grabbed the rifle, pulling the trigger before she had time to aim.
Chester sprawled to the ground as bullets flew through the open door, then through the thin apartment wall opposite.
“You’re cartel, then?” he called out. “You work with Cavalie?”
The woman didn’t answer, but barked a few words in French. A different gun roared. A shotgun shell tore a fist-sized hole through the thin wall. Chester crawled back along the corridor away from the apartment door, raising the pistol.
The woman had been puzzled when he’d opened the door, not afraid. She’d been wondering why someone would knock. Someone friendly to them. Someone who must be up on the roof. There were three of them, which meant he’d get no help from Tuck anytime soon. Besides, she wouldn’t have heard the gunshots.
He pulled himself up into a crouch. A second slug tore another hole through the wall, this time lower, this time another metre closer to where he squatted.
The Colt .45 was an unfamiliar weapon to his hands, if not his eyes. Could a round penetrate a plastered wall? What about through the ceiling if he went to the apartment below? But Tuck was on the roof, and if he gave these people a chance to escape the apartment, it was fifty-fifty whether they’d flee up or down.
Another half-magazine ripped through the wall, raising a cloud of dust as the bullets slammed into the plaster above the stairwell.
Now was the time to act, so he moved to attack, managing two steps forward before he saw the shadows shift. There was light ahead of him, from the window above the front door, but more light came through the windows of the apartment, and so now through the open door and the bullet holes in the wall. Someone was sidling, close to the wall, and towards the door.
The shadows changed again, but he had his gun raised as the man with the shotgun swung outside, weapon held level with his hip. The gangster had guessed where Chester was, but Chester’s hand was already raised, his finger already curling around the trigger. He fired, two shots, his first taking the gangster in the stomach, his second in the neck. The man staggered, pulling the trigger as he fell. The slug ripped through the stairwell banister, spraying Chester with splinters, but the man was down.
Chester kept moving, only slowing when he reached the large shotgun hole in the wall. He fired two shots blindly through, then ducked to the door, fired another shot, grabbed the shotgun. One-handed, he pumped the chamber, flipping the gun to grip it by the stock. With that in his left hand, the pistol in his right, he took a breath and… and realised no shots had come from the Kalashnikov.
He eased himself upright, so he was flush against the frame, then spun across the doorway, stumbling over the corpse to reach the far side. No shots had come, and he’d not seen the woman inside.
He aimed the shotgun around the door, then, holding it steady in that position a metre above the ground, he crouched down, peering around the door below it. He couldn’t see anyone. He rolled into the room, taking cover behind the kitchen counter. Still no shots had come, and now he was certain the woman had fled. Presumably down a fire escape. He stood, intending to follow her, and saw her body, lying near the now broken floor-to-ceiling windows. Beyond, on the balcony, though standing with her back against the thick exterior wall, was Tuck.
“Clear?” she signed.
“Clear,” Chester said. He laid the shotgun down on the counter.
“One on the roof,” Tuck signed.
“Dundalk!” came a shout from below. It was Locke’s voice.
“Clear. We’re clear,” Chester called back. He stepped out onto the balcony. “Clear!” he called again.
Locke moved out of a doorway, Nilda and Jay appeared from the edge of the alley a little further back. Chester retreated inside, and to the small sofa the man had been sitting on when he’d opened the door. There was a phone on the floor, a pair of headphones still attached. He tapped the screen. The song had been paused halfway through. The track had the ominously appropriate title ‘Death Lives Below’.
Chapter 23 - Bellow Death, Below
Nieuwpoort, Belgium
“No, it’s not Death lives below,” Jay said. “It’s bellow, as in shout. During the concerts, they’d get the audience to shout, you see.”
“To shout ‘death lives’?” Chester asked, glancing over at Jay from the corpse he was searching.
“Yeah, but not like that,” Jay said as he laid the contents of the killer’s bags on the table. �
�It’s kinda uplifting. It’s like, death is everywhere and you can’t escape it.”
“You’re meant to embrace it instead?” Chester asked as he pulled the sleeve back from the gangster’s arm. There was a tattoo, crude and relatively recent, of a three-leafed branch with a distorted circle behind it.
“Yeah, no. Not embrace it,” Jay said. “Just accept it, then get on with your day. Like you’re meant to live life, enjoy it. It’ll make more sense if you just listen to the song.”
“In a bit,” Chester said. He re-crossed the threshold, back into the apartment. “Speaking of which, maybe you should leave that to me, go keep watch downstairs.”
“Away from the bodies? One corpse is much like another, Chester, and I’ve seen plenty.”
“I guess you have,” he said. “That bloke’s got a Rosewood tattoo. Let’s see about the lass.”
“They’re members of the cartel, then?” Jay asked.
“They are now,” Chester said. “His tattoo is recent. Ah, and she’s not got one.”
“Maybe she was a new recruit,” Jay said.
“Or too important to need one,” Chester said. “She’s not dressed in white, but this is an AK-74, like those they carried in Calais. What have you found?”
“Not much,” Jay said. “An unopened bottle of wine. A couple of tins without labels. A few phones. Some spare headphones. A few loose rounds. A penknife, a screwdriver with a sharpened point. Basically nothing much and nothing unusual.”
“Keep looking while I take a gander in the other rooms.”
Locke and Nilda had gone up to the roof with Tuck, but Chester doubted they’d find much up there, and he found nothing in the rest of the apartment. It took up one half of the top floor, with the master-bedroom taking up one corner, smaller bedrooms taking up the side. Where the master-bed was unmade, the sheets thrown back, the two smaller bedrooms hadn’t been slept in. The sheets were slightly slippery to the touch, betraying an edge of damp turning to mould, but they were cleaner than most he’d slept in since the outbreak.
“Find anything?” Jay asked as he returned to the open-plan living room.
“Nope,” Chester said, sitting down on the sofa. “Only the master-bed was slept in, and I don’t think it was recently. If these three had been here a while, they would have used one of the other two bedrooms. Any indication that more than three people were here?”
“Don’t think so,” Jay said. “There’re only three bags. No fire, either.” He picked up the phone. “You want to listen?”
“Knock yourself out,” Chester said. “Wait, check the photos. Are any recent?”
“No.”
“Oh, shame. I thought we might get lucky.”
Jay took out the headphones, switched the phone off, then pocketed it. “Why did they come here? It’s for the Courageous, isn’t it?”
“Probably,” Chester said. He heard footsteps, but lowered his gun when Nilda walked through the door, Locke behind her. Tuck stayed outside, her gun aimed down the stairs.
“The sentry on the roof was cartel,” Nilda said. “What about the other two?”
“Bloke in the doorway has a tattoo,” Chester said. “The woman doesn’t. No sign of a sniper rifle.”
“You took a photo to show Captain Fielding?” Nilda asked.
“Done it,” Jay said.
“Good,” Nilda said.
“We found this on the man on the roof,” Locke said. She placed a walkie-talkie on the table.
“What kind of range does it have?” Chester asked.
“A few miles,” Locke said.
“So they’re not alone,” Chester said.
“I take it you found no radio or handset?” Locke asked.
“Nope,” Chester said. “The master bed is unmade, but I think it’s been that way for months. The other two beds are unused. There’s no fire pit, no bundles of discarded clothes. I’d say they arrived this morning.”
“And there were three of them?” Locke said. “That’s three shifts. One on the roof, one on guard, and one off duty. And if they arrived this morning, we’d have had at least until dawn tomorrow. But now we only have until someone calls to ask why they haven’t radioed in. That could be any time.”
“We have to make some assumptions,” Nilda said. “Tuck thinks there are another five or six of the enemy nearby, but no more than ten, or more would have been stationed here. They’re no more than a couple of miles away, and probably southeast. It’s not a great leap to assume that one of them was the person who shot at us from the roof in Calais. The timeline fits, if we assume that they drove here. We can also assume they are in radio contact with the rest of the people who escaped from Calais, the people with the tanks. And so we must assume those tanks are coming here. But they won’t arrive until tonight, maybe tomorrow, and by then, we’ll be gone. Jay, you and Sorcha are going back to the ship. She’ll persuade them we have to leave. If Leon hasn’t returned with the diesel, that means leaving without the Courageous. Jay, I want you to take this radio back. Give it to Captain Fielding and… what’s the name of that woman? Mirabelle. Her and those programmers, see if they can do anything with it. The display is digital, so maybe that means the frequencies are programmed in. It’d be nice to listen to what they’re saying. Take the ammo, and these guns, too. Is there anything else we’re leaving behind?”
“Those label-less tins,” Jay said. “What do I do if someone calls on the radio?”
“The people in this room spoke French to each other,” Chester said. “That’s the language the people on the other end will expect to hear.”
“And that, Jay, is why you should have paid attention in Mrs Colby’s class,” Nilda said. “But if someone calls, don’t answer. Let someone aboard the ship who knows the language do that.”
“And you want me to get the ships to go out to sea?” Jay asked.
“Sorcha will,” Nilda said. “Let’s go.”
Outside, Jay and Sorcha went north. Chester, Nilda, and Tuck turned south.
“Do you think she’ll be able to persuade them to leave?” Chester asked.
“It’s Captain Fielding who’ll need persuading,” Nilda said. “Persuading that her ship has to be abandoned. If Sorcha can’t do that, no one else will be able to.”
Tuck gestured they should follow her.
“I can’t say I’m happy about this,” Chester said.
“You mean that I’m here with you?” Nilda said. “We can have a nice row about it later, but for now, focus, yes?”
The overnight storm had melted most of the lingering ice, leaving a blank canvas in the mud, which, in turn, left them an easy trail to follow. They advanced together, but the debris around the looted shop-fronts prevented them hugging the walls. Left, then right, heading south then east, then east, then south. A road. An alley. The shops became houses. The shadows of towering apartments were replaced by the spindly shade of bare-branched trees. The harbour town wasn’t large, and even taking into account their erratically criss-cross route, they were approaching its edge. The houses became shops again, though this time servicing local residents rather than tourists.
Nilda raised a warning hand, then tapped Tuck’s arm to get her attention. “Listen,” she signed.
All Chester heard were the sounds of the town slowly giving in to decay.
“Voices,” Nilda signed. She pointed due north, waving her hand back and forth a few degrees. “Somewhere there. French.”
They had two more buildings to pass before they reached the next junction, where a bank occupied one corner, a bar the opposite.
“Where?” Tuck signed as they huddled behind the cover of the bank’s thick wall.
“Red door,” Nilda signed. “Two voices. French.”
Tuck peered briefly around the corner. “You mean the red gates?” she signed. “Red gates in a high fence?”
Nilda nodded.
Tuck took a vanity-mirror from her pocket, using that to spy on the gates while remaining in cover. She fi
nally nodded satisfaction and handed the mirror to Chester.
The gates were nearly two metres high, brightly painted, though unadorned. The fencing was the same. The buildings on either side were both retail, both two-storey, as were most of the other houses in the row. Some had retail units on the ground floor, some were houses. None were tall; this far from the harbour, there would be nothing to see even from the roof of a five-storey dwelling. Yet these buildings were nestled close together, betraying that they were still near enough to the seafront for land to be valuable.
The shop to the left of the gates was a bakery. If this were London, he’d assume the gates led to an outdoor seating area, but they were too close to the beach for anyone to pick this as their spot to consume pastries. A parking area for delivery vehicles? Perhaps. He handed the mirror to Nilda who took a brief look, then handed it back to Tuck. She gave the buildings another reflected inspection before nodding to herself and putting the mirror away.
“Two voices?” the soldier signed.
Nilda nodded.
“What are they saying?” Tuck signed.
Nilda shrugged. “It’s French,” she signed.
“There are no sentries in the upper-floor windows either side,” Tuck signed. “The roofs slope too steeply for anyone to be up there. Two people talking loudly. Agitatedly? Scared? Anxious?”
“Maybe,” Nilda signed.
“They heard the gunshots,” Tuck signed. “No one is answering the radio. They’re scared.”
“Probably,” Nilda signed. She pointed at Tuck’s pack. “Use those?”
Tuck shook her head. “Prisoners,” she signed. She tapped a finger against her submachine gun. “We go in fast, together. I go first. Chester, head left, Nilda to the right.”
Nilda raised a hand. “The gate.”
Tuck fished out the mirror, lining it up, took one brief glance, nodding to herself. “One man, outside,” she signed. “Looking up and down the street. Shotgun. Listen.”
Chester could hear little, but Nilda heard more. “Gone inside,” she signed.
Tuck nodded, checked with the mirror, then put it away. “Now,” she mouthed, and jogged across the street.