Bleeker Hill

by Russell Mardell

  ‘Let’s go.’

  There was nothing else to say and nowhere else to go. Turtle fixed his eyes to the concrete building beyond the black heart of Bleeker Hill and slowly began to edge the plough forward, cutting into the snow carpet and pushing it apart, breaking a path for the others to follow. One by one they did, again falling into their single file, following the man in front.

  6

  Their path rounded the south side of what remained of the great house. No one could look at it as they passed; catching the black shape in the corners of their eyes they had to look away, look to their feet or to the man before them, anywhere but at the defeated ruins to their left. They could smell the ash on the air, every now and again the wind would blow up and break little clouds, and some of it came down on them with the snowflakes. To a man they focused on the concrete building, or the empty pen at its side, sometimes they would look up at the sky or down at the snow path the plough had cut for them, but no one looked left, no one wanted to look at the house, to acknowledge the warning it represented, or the horror it had seen.

  Turtle turned the plough around the last remaining wall of the house and pushed on towards the concrete building, Bergan close behind, his eyes roaming every inch of the building, assessing and searching. From this close distance it looked so much bigger; the angled route they were taking revealing a much longer building than at first sight. Metal casing on the roof twinkled lightly and Bergan could see the top of what looked like a turret poking up from the back wall, a thin metal tube just cresting the top of the roof and running back down into the building. The structure was low and wide and gave the impression that it would go on forever if you carried on around. Each foot forward the plough moved, the more building that fell into sight. But more than being wide, it seemed deep. To Bergan it gave the impression that somehow what they were seeing there in the snow was merely the start, the entrance to something greater than any of them knew. “Man could get lost down there” he had heard Kendrick say many months ago, alluding perhaps to the workers who never completed their job, or to the violence that Schaeffer had perpetuated there, and as Turtle moved the plough along, cutting them a path parallel to the pen, Bergan could quite believe it.

  Distracted and dwelling on a hundred thoughts, Bergan was taken by surprise as the snowplough suddenly jittered and rocked underneath Turtle, flipping out of his control momentarily and then thudding into the snow wall it had built up. Turtle was looking around him and then down both sides of the plough and across to the front. It took them all a moment to register what had happened. At first it didn’t look real. An arm was flopped over the blade at the front of the plough, and next to it a man’s head was squashed between the blade and the built up snow, his legs somewhere underneath the blade and the tyres, blocking the plough from moving on. His face was half sky blue, half a treacly black, the dried blood from a head wound covering one side, running down to his throat and wrapping itself around his neck like a thin scarf.

  Turtle screamed and rolled out of the seat, his legs and arms manically moving below and above him like he was a dancing marionette. He landed on the freshly cut path, scrabbling on his backside away from the snowplough, gibbering stupidly and jabbing a finger at the plough in short stabbing motions.

  Most of the group came to a stop behind him, looking on in a stunned and repulsed silence, but Bergan didn’t even break stride. Walking over Turtle and then gliding to the front of the plough, he bent down to the bloodied face in the snow and then nodded back to Davenport.

  ‘Connor,’ Davenport said with a timid shake of the head.

  Bergan moved Connor’s head to him and cradled his face, gazing down into his eyes, eyes that even in his current condition seemed to carry more life than Bergan’s own. With the fingers on the other hand he started smoothing over the head wound, absently picking away at the ice that had built around it. Bergan felt himself back on the valley road, and back in the truck where he had held the dying Kleinman. They had gathered around him then, just as they were doing now, staring at him in mute stupidity. He had wanted to scream at them back then, to rage and to roar at them all and give them out the pain he had been feeling, to let them taste it and to know. Now, looking down at the second corpse from the point team, the over-enthusiastic and once chatty Connor, he could feel nothing but irritation. There was no pity, no grief and no respect to the life lying in frozen death in front of him. Connor wasn’t a corpse, not once a human, a colleague or a friend; he was merely one more thing in the way.

  ‘Let’s go.’

  Bergan dropped Connor’s head back to the plough, stood tall, taller than all of them, and started to trudge through the snow towards the building. Each footstep was hard and firm, the snow working its way up to his kneecap, trying its best to shackle him and topple him, but he powered on, and would not allow it. He didn’t look back to the others until he reached the door to the building; he didn’t need to, he knew they were following, that there was nothing else for them to do but follow, picking their way to him through his own giant footprints.

  He slumped down to the snow and leant his weary body against the door to the building, watching the others come to him, stumbling in his wake. The door was a steel wall, a great thick slab of metal, activated by a confusing looking panel built into one side of the building. Bergan had seen such things before; he was used to any official building being impenetrable without codes, or cards, or pressing the right buttons, and it made him feel old. This particular panel had a retina scan underneath its many buttons. He had only ever seen one before and that had been in his last weeks at Party HQ, just before they were overrun. Kendrick had gone to great lengths to explain it to him and assure him of its security values. When they had come, massing in their numbers at the door to the building, they had come with hostages, Party plod that had been patrolling the streets and the alleys. The ones that fought had their eyeballs gouged out, the ones that didn’t were simply shot after pressing their eyes to the screen. In the end they got to someone important enough after twenty had been killed before him. They got in eventually, they always did. It didn’t matter how many buttons or codes you had, or if you secured your building with a million locks, the fact was, they always got in, in the end. Bergan had lived his life with the gun and the fist and he needed no greater sense of security. Beyond the bullet all you needed was the will to fight longer and harder than the next man.

  He saw them gather at the panel on the wall, one by one they came to him and they didn’t seem real. They were there but somehow they were many miles away too. The sharp winter wind was against his ankles and his legs, tickling him like long roving fingers, working its way up his body to his face, and then the force was against his head, it was in his nose and his ears and seeping into his eyes. He looked at the others, those corrupted figures, and they seemed to blur in the snowfall; the white flecks growing in definition, as the figures shimmied out to shapes he struggled to place. He saw someone lean down to the panel – Davenport, it was definitely Davenport – and then he heard a loud alarm and saw something flash red on the panel, and then Kendrick was pushing him aside and leaning his own face to the panel. There was another sound, a small beeping, and then the same thing that flashed red, flashed green and then the door was opening behind him. They were all staring at it, looking into the deep blackness beyond and then they were looking at him.

  There was screaming from somewhere and then they all looked around at Maddox and Mia. He looked too, narrowing those black eyes against the dancing snowflakes, but he saw nothing but shapes, mounds and lumps in the snow, moving against each other. He heard her voice, recognised her screams, but he couldn’t stand, couldn’t fight the force that was holding him to the snow.

  ‘No!’ she was screaming, over and over. ‘No! No! Not there…’

  Kendrick was moving Turtle into the blackness ahead of them, and he was signalling to the others. Davenport was following them in. Was it Davenport? He was sure it was.

 
; ‘Please! Help! Help me!’ She was batting at the snow, trying to wedge her hands into the ground to stop him from dragging her and she was failing. ‘No! You don’t know what you’re doing! You don’t know what’s in there!’

  Maddox’s shape, unmistakably Maddox, was pulling her by the legs and then the last figure – Sullivan, it had to be Sullivan – was bending down to her, trying to calm them all and then she was screaming even louder. The three shapes came together, moving and fighting, blurring and blooming in his eyes, and then slowly they broke apart again. Her screams were sobs and he was dragging her to the door now without resistance. Then there was Sullivan and he was standing there in the doorway, the blackness seeming to radiate off him, just watching, looking and waiting.

  ‘Let’s go,’ Sullivan was saying.

  Bergan stood and the force that had held him seemed to fall off his body like thick water, crashing on to his feet and disappearing into the snow. He once more felt the tightness at his throat as he turned to Sullivan and the opening behind him. The blackness there seemed to rush at him like the shadow of an enemy that had been in hiding, waiting to strike, lurching up at him and then wrapping over him, sucking him in and moving him on.

  He stood in the doorway of the building, Sullivan to his side, and the door began to close, sliding slowly back into place and then stopping with a clank and a thud. His corpse eyes looked on and the darkness began shifting in front of him. His eyes were adjusting; definition was forming, the way ahead becoming clearer as his eyes started eating up the blackness.

  Shelter

  1

  At first there was a square landing, a continuation from the metal staircase that led down to their left. To the other side was a cage lift built into a narrow chute adjacent to the landing with two simple buttons built into the top to move the lift back and forth. Beneath the landing was a long corridor, closed doors to unseen rooms on both sides. Some lights worked but most didn’t, and this made the shadows creep and hug. It was impossible to see the end of the corridor from the start. There was a smell of damp and decay in the walls and in the floor, infested and immovable. Walking along the corridor, moving into the shadows, the first room they came to was decked out with communications equipment; radios, transmitters, computers and nothing much seemed to work. There were cobwebs everywhere; of course there were cobwebs. A panel was smashed, gauges broken; buttons and switches were rusted into the metal. New technology smothered by an age that had no right to be there. They wandered the room, poking and prodding, flicking switches and tapping buttons. A microphone built into the centre panel emitted a small crackle of noise, a voice came and went from the other end, and then there was nothing. Someone turned on a spotlight above a long panel of equipment. They looked again hoping to see more in the light. No one said anything. They moved out as one, moved on, back into the shadows.

  The second room they came to was a meeting room of some sort; chairs positioned around in a semi circle opposite a white board with things written on it that made no sense. There was a musty smell, something emanating from the floor, a thin carpet gave the impression of being wet and there was a light slapping sound as they pressed their boots down. Someone coughed, trying to shift the smell. Next was a bedroom – two low beds were on either side of the room, a small table with a bedside light in the middle. Across one bed were loose straps and on the other bed the straps had been cut free. There were marks just visible in the wall; in the half-light they were thin grooves like scratches from long fingernails. Things crunched underfoot, blessedly out of sight and impossible to place.

  Outside the bedroom and beyond, the shadows grew thicker, more impenetrable, and ominous. The floor seemed to have disappeared from underneath them and each step forward was taken on trust. A few more yards along and the floor came out above another staircase, here, barely visible, the staircase ran down to another landing before splitting out into two separate staircases, one leading left and the other right. Kendrick stepped forward, wordlessly breaking from the group, and began to descend the left hand staircase, his footsteps echoing out around the landing, coming back at them from the ceiling and making him sound as if he were twice the size he was. Davenport followed him down, and one at a time the others did the same.

  Ahead of them a narrow corridor ran under a curved roof. At the far end a deep orange light shone out from the wall, casting a circular amber patch on the floor. Kendrick led them on, his neat and compact frame bustling, and the scuffed heels of his shoes clicking a steady dull rhythm for the others to follow. He turned at the orange light and they all followed him around a sharp corner, coming out on yet another dimly lit and impossibly long corridor. He walked on with purpose and confidence, striding along a good few yards ahead of the others. At the very end of the corridor a small red light was visible, tiny and bright, it seemed to be floating in the gloom and winking out of the shadows like the bloodied eye of a creature waiting to attack. Kendrick quickened his pace.

  Wedged under one of Maddox’s huge arms, Mia was shaking nervously, Wallace’s cut off fatigues jittering against her narrow body. She tried to dig her heels into the floor and started to wriggle and fight against Maddox’s hold but he afforded her no room, tightening at every jerk of her body. Sullivan could hear her shallow breathing as he walked at their backs. He watched her body try and shrink in Maddox’s hold, her arms beat against his chest and his back and then, as she turned to the side, refusing to look ahead, not allowing herself to see what was looming out of the shadows in front of them, he caught a delicate tear stained eye, and as he did the eye seemed to glaze over, and then to flare, filling with hatred.

  A door rose out of the darkness ahead of them, the red light showing itself to be housed in a small panel built into the side, above a series of buttons. Kendrick came to a stop and for a moment he didn’t move. Another corridor was intersecting where they now stood, and as he paused at the door, his hand hovering over the buttons, he glanced slowly left and then slowly right. He seemed to be listening for something, waiting for something to happen, and as he fell into that stance so the others seemed to mimic him, each man gazing along the corridors, looking into the shadows and the darkness, breaching the cradling gloom with their eyes, trying to see beyond it, second guessing what it would reveal. To Sullivan both ends of the corridor felt like nests, as if something lived and breathed just beyond them out of sight, and that to enter the darkness would be like invading someone’s home, and that whatever lived there in those shadows would surely attack. They were weak and defenceless against whatever was there, and whatever was there knew it, revelled in it, and would tease them, play with them, and then swallow them whole.

  Kendrick coughed loudly, sharply, and then began punching away at the buttons on the door panel. The thought quickly clattered out of Sullivan’s mind like a barely remembered dream and he laughed to himself, at himself, at his stupidity and paranoia and fitful imagination.

  The door in front of them clanked and then pushed forward slightly before swinging out on its hinges. They gathered together as Kendrick stepped in and a few seconds later threw the light switch, bathing the room in a brilliantly bright, and clinical whiteness that made spots break across their vision.

  At first Sullivan thought the blood was more shadows. It streaked up the wall in long tentacles and across the floor in a wide circle, so prominent against the harsh light. His first instinct was to question what object could cast such grotesque shadows and shapes, and that it surely couldn’t be anything human, and then, as his eyes readjusted to the truth, the sight crept up and oozed over him and he felt goose bumps break on his arms. The room looked like an operating theatre; there were two long beds and a gurney visible through the door. A row of medical equipment, knives and scalpels and other dangerous looking implements that he couldn’t name, were positioned on a small metal trolley next to the gurney. There was a machine against the back wall, more switches and buttons, and unlike the neglected technology rotting away in the first roo
m they had entered these looked clean and new. Kendrick was standing in the blood circle in the middle of the room, his eyes ahead at a sight unseen. Davenport was following him in, his delicate footsteps almost tiptoes as he crossed the bloody pool to join his second in command.

  Mia was starting to claw at Maddox, her body writhing and thrashing against him as he tried to edge her into the doorway. Her eyes were scrunched up so as not to look into the room, her legs pulled up from the ground, as if touching the floor would hurt her. She wedged her feet either side of the doorframe, pushing against it, leaning back into Maddox, not allowing him to force her into the room. He started hitting at her legs playfully, laughing into the back of her head and jigging her body in his grip like she was a toddler needing amusing. But the amusement was Maddox’s alone.

  ‘You’re a sorry son of a bitch aren’t you, Maddox?’ Sullivan was at his side, a hand grabbing one of Maddox’s beefy forearms. ‘Why don’t you leave the girl alone?’

  ‘This isn’t your business, killer. How about you take your limp mitt off me before I snap it off and bitch slap you with it?’

  ‘Can’t do that, let her go.’

  Maddox turned to Sullivan, bringing Mia with him. ‘What’s that you say, killer? Sure you can, you just turn around and walk away. That’s how you do it.’

  ‘Would you be so good as to bring Mia in here, please?’ Kendrick’s disembodied voice was low and controlled, magnified by the room; he sounded like a headmaster summoning a pupil to his study.

  ‘You’re wanted, nice to be wanted isn’t it, darling?’ Maddox said into her face, lightly licking her neck.

  ‘Let her go, Maddox.’

  ‘We got an impasse here, killer, because you are going to have to make me if you want that. How much do you want it?’

  ‘Bring Mia to me, now!’ Kendrick’s voice was faltering, losing its composure.