School's Out Forever (The Afterblight Chronicles: The St Mark's Books)

by Scott K. Andrews

  “They’re not stupid,” muttered Caroline. “They’re just kids.”

  “True. But how old are you?”

  “Fuck off.” She took another swig.

  “Not old enough to be drinking that, that’s for sure.”

  “Touch my bottle and I’ll slice your fucking hand off.”

  “Wouldn’t dare,” he said. “Your deputy told me where you’re making for.”

  “Then he’s a blabbermouth twat who deserves everything he gets.”

  “You kiss your mother with that mouth?”

  She looked up, open mouthed, then she threw the bottle at his head. He swatted it away.

  “Sorry,” he said, seemingly genuine. “It’s just something you say, isn’t it?”

  “Not any more,” she growled through gritted teeth.

  “No, I s’pose not.”

  There was a long awkward silence before Caroline said: “What do you fucking want, anyway?”

  “This school you’re heading for, St Mark’s.”

  “What about it?”

  “Luke says their matron was with you. Is that right?”

  “Like you don’t already know,” she muttered darkly.

  “Is what he told me correct – did she go to the centre to kill Spider?”

  Caroline glowered at him then eventually nodded once.

  “And you used to know her? You were at the school?”

  Again she nodded.

  “Right. Well that’s good, because you see I met some of their people. Three guys – Lee, John and Tariq. Do you know them?”

  “I knew Lee for a while. Never met his dad or the other one. They’re dead, anyway. The snatchers killed them when they captured her.”

  Ferguson shook his head. “No, they didn’t. I was there that day. I was in the other lorry, the one you didn’t manage to liberate – good job, by the way. We faked their deaths so I could get inside Spider’s organisation.”

  Caroline shook her head. “No, don’t believe you.”

  “They’re still free. By now they should have got word to my boss. We’re going to bring these bastards down, Caroline. And you can help us.”

  “No, Matron said they were dead. She said she knew they were dead.”

  Ferguson paused, slightly thrown by her insistence. Caroline heard the edge of panic in her voice and tried to damp it down without success.

  “I promise you, Caroline, they’re alive. The school is safe, and my boss will be sending help. I’ve been in Westminster for two days. I’ve mapped the layout, the disposition of their forces, their timetables. Everything. I need to get this information to my people so we can mount an assault...”

  “What did he look like?”

  “Sorry?”

  “John. Lee’s Dad. What did he look like?”

  “Um, medium height, brown hair and eyes. Strong chin. I dunno, I didn’t study him. Why?”

  Caroline felt like wetting herself. She tried to rationalise it, to tell herself that no, she had been right, the man she’d killed had definitely been an imposter. But she knew.

  Oh, God, she thought. What have I done?

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  BY THE TIME we reached Hemel Hempstead my arse hurt like hell. I’d done plenty of horse riding after The Cull, but not so much since Salisbury. I had shooting pains in both my legs, souvenirs of the times they really were shot, and chafing in places that, thank God, had managed to avoid being shot so far.

  I got down from my horse feeling like an old man, walking bow legged and grunting the way oldsters do when they get up from an armchair.

  “Behold, the mighty warrior,” laughed Jack as I hobbled towards him.

  I let my horse loose to graze on the patch of grass by the car park of what used to be the West Herts College.

  “Tease me again and I’ll shoot you in both legs,” I snapped. “See how you like horse riding then.”

  He patted his steed on the flank and it trotted off to graze alongside its fellows.

  The sun was setting. It had been a cold, rain-drenched ride and although the downpour had finally ended, the evening temperature was dropping fast.

  “Is it open?” I asked, indicating the double doors that led into the main college building.

  Jack nodded.

  “We’ll sweep it first. Just in case.” This was Wilkes, leader of the six Rangers that Hood had gifted us.

  Tall and solid, he was a no-nonsense Yorkshireman with ruddy cheeks and jet black hair. He’d hardly spoken to me since we’d been introduced, except to make clear that he and his men were here to help, but they’d do so on their terms and wouldn’t be taking any orders from me. I didn’t argue. I figured once they met Dad they’d fall into line, recognising the value of having a trained soldier in command.

  The five men with him talked and joked amongst themselves, but gave me a wide berth. At least they weren’t openly resentful, like the ones who’d ridden with me up from Thetford, so I supposed that was progress of a sort.

  I stepped back and let them enter first, with swords drawn. Jack and I stood outside feeling foolish and cold. Five minutes later the door swung open again and one of them ushered us inside.

  The college had been trashed, but there was still plenty of wooden furniture for us to chop up for firewood. Within the hour we had a big bonfire in the car park. We gathered round it for warmth and shoved foil-wrapped potatoes into the flames to roast.

  No one came to investigate the fire. If there were people still living in the vicinity, they stayed away.

  “I thought they’d be here by now,” I said as I watched the flames consume a pile of old lab tables. “The snatchers were due to attack the kids in Hammersmith yesterday. If Dad got them out in time, they should be here.”

  “You think they might be having to fight their way out?” asked Jack.

  “Could be,” I replied.

  “So how long do we wait?”

  “We go at dawn, I reckon. If they’re besieged, they’ll need us.”

  “Oh, yeah, you eight guys are a hell of a rescue force.”

  I spun around, startled by this new voice. Tariq stepped into the firelight, gun in hand, smiling broadly.

  “Don’t move!” came a yell from the other side of the bonfire.

  “Relax,” I shouted as I got to my feet. “He’s with us.”

  “What happened?” asked Jack, as anxious as I was at seeing Tariq here. “Did they attack the school already?”

  Tariq shook his head, then indicated behind him with his hook. I stared into the darkness and realised that he was not alone. About forty children I recognised stepped forward into the orange light. They all wore their camo gear, their faces streaked with shoe polish, their hands full of hardware.

  “We decided,” said a boy I was shocked to realise was Green, “to bring the fight to them.”

  “THAT FUCKER SHOT me. Shove a knife in his throat, would you, Nine Lives?”

  I ignored the voice in my head as I approached Green, who sat on his own at the point where the fire’s warmth ceased to give protection against the frost that was settling on the hard ground.

  “Hi,” I said. “You mind?” I indicated that I’d like to join him, and he waved me forward. I sat down next to him, watching the crowd mingling around the fire.

  “You want to know what made me change my mind. Why I picked up a gun again and joined the team,” he said. It wasn’t a question. “Honestly, I don’t know.” There was a long pause as he considered.

  “Partly it’s because I feel like a grown up now,” he said. “I know I’m strong enough that no-one could make me do the kind of things Mac made me do when I was part of his team.”

  “That was what you were afraid of?” I didn’t know whether to be insulted or not. Did he really think that Jane or I would ask him to do something he didn’t feel okay with?

  “You don’t know what it was like,” he said, staring off into the distance. “You always played things your way, but I liked being a followe
r. It made me feel safe. It’s attractive, you know? Allowing something else to make all the decisions, ceding your free will to someone else.”

  It wasn’t attractive to me. In fact it was baffling. But I’d seen enough cults and armies to know that what Green was describing was more than simply common.

  “If you do that,” he continued, “then the person who’s in control can make you do anything, anything at all, and you never think about the morality of it. You rationalise it away and say that it’s their fault. You’re just following orders. No blame attaches. It insulates you.”

  “But you did question it,” I pointed out. “You turned on Mac. You shot him dead, mate.”

  “Not soon enough.” He sighed. “But afterwards, when he and the school were gone and we’d relocated, I decided to treat it like a drug. I though I had to go cold turkey. No guns. No power to give orders. No clique or gang. I would be completely independent. That way no-one could ever get their hooks in me again. I couldn’t fall off the wagon, be seduced into letting someone else tell me what to do.”

  “So it wasn’t fighting you were afraid of, it was following orders?”

  He nodded.

  “And you don’t feel that way any more?”

  “No. I trust you and your Dad, and Jane and Tariq. You’re good people. Plus, I know now that it wasn’t a drug. I won’t have a relapse because I changed when I shot Mac. It’s taken me a while to realise it, but I’m a different person now. There’s nothing left of the boy I was. His vices aren’t mine. His weaknesses, either.”

  He turned his head and looked me in the eye. “Think back, Lee,” he said. “To who you were before The Cull. Is there anything about that person that you recognise when you look in the mirror?”

  I shook my head. “No.”

  “Me neither. I’m a man now,” said Green, turning back to the fire. “I know my mind and I know I’m capable of choosing for myself. And right now, I choose to fight. I owe it to Matron, and to all the kids I teach.”

  “No, really, just stab him would you?” said the voice. “Pious little shit.”

  “Thank you,” I told Green, pretending I didn’t hear a dead man whispering in my ear. “I won’t betray your trust.”

  Green smiled into space. “You’d better not,” he said.

  EVENTUALLY EVERYONE ELSE left to spend the night in the beds at the nearby hospital. I stayed put and watched the fire burn. I knew I should try to sleep, that going into battle tired is suicide. But there was no point even closing my eyes. Ferguson hadn’t made contact, Dad was missing and Jane was captured.

  I didn’t know what to worry about most – my Dad fighting off a besieging army, Jane being tortured by a monster who treated people like dirt on his shoes, or our chances of getting cut to ribbons by landmines and gun towers sometime around teatime the next day. Whichever way I turned, things looked bleak.

  As the sun rose I heard the distant engine of a lorry. I grabbed my gun and ran to the main road, careful to stay out of sight as the noise grew louder. A minute or two later a removal lorry, huge and unwieldy, rolled down the road. As it passed I caught a glimpse of the driver and ran out, waving my arms and shouting. He must have seen me in the rear view mirror because the lorry pulled up and Ferguson jumped down from the cab.

  I ran to met him.

  “Is my Dad with you?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “I found the kids, though.”

  “The ones in Hammersmith?”

  He nodded. A girl jumped down from the other side of the cab. Short and stocky, with an eye patch and long red hair, there was something vaguely familiar about her.

  “Hi Lee,” she said as she walked to Ferguson’s side. My face must have betrayed my confusion, because she added: “Caroline.”

  “Bloody hell,” I said, astonished. “We looked for you everywhere.”

  “I know. Matron told me.”

  “What?”

  “Lee, did you get to Nottingham?” asked Ferguson.

  “Um, yeah, there are some of your mates in the hospital. Just down the road on the right.” He took off past me to compare notes with his colleagues. Caroline walked to the back doors of the lorry and opened them, revealing a small army of children huddled in the back.

  “Caroline,” I asked. “Have you seen Jane?”

  She nodded, and something about the way the blood drained from her face told me that she did not have good news for me.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  “I MEANT TO ask,” says Cooper as we walk the corridors of power. “Were your people responsible for taking the plane at Heathrow last week?”

  “Someone took a plane?”

  He examines my face closely to see if my surprise is genuine. He decides it is, and he nods.

  “Yeah, a bloody 747, no less. A woman and a bloke killed a bunch of my guys and flew to New York, leaving me with four months’ worth of children backed up at the airport.”

  “I came here to kill you,” I suddenly blurt out, frustrated by small talk.

  “No, you came here to kill the man who killed your brother. Your surprise prevented you from killing me. And now I’ve answered all your questions, you have all the facts at your fingertips. So you have a choice.”

  “Which is?”

  “Join me or die,” he says slowly, rolling his eyes, as if explaining something very simple to an idiot.

  “But why offer me that choice? Why not just kill me? What makes you think I won’t pretend to join up in order to save my life until I can find a way to betray you?”

  He sighs and looks up at the ceiling, shaking his head at my obstinacy. “I like you, Kate. Always did. You’ve got, what do they call it? Pluck, spunk, guts.”

  “God, you really are a public school boy, aren’t you.”

  “Plus, you know, you’re not bad-looking, all told.”

  “Oh, thanks,” I say, then a thought occurs to me. “Christ, you’re not saying you want to go steady?”

  “Don’t be silly. I’d wake up with a knife in my heart.”

  “Trust me, it wouldn’t get that far.”

  “Pity,” he says with a wink, as he walks away. I trail after him as he promenades through his echoing palace, confounded. I just can’t work out why I’m still alive.

  “This is the central lobby,” he says as we enter a huge chamber with four corridors running off it at each point of the compass. A massive chandelier hangs above our heads and statues regard us gnomically from the shadows. “Directly above us is a big tower and in it there’s this huge metal contraption, like an engine,” says Cooper. “No-one has any idea what it is. You see, when they were building this place they gave the contract for the central heating to a guy who said he had a revolutionary new system that he would install. Once he was done all they had to do was switch it on and voila, nice warm Palace. But when they opened it for use they switched it on and nothing happened. So they called for the guy to come explain and he’d gone. Legged it with the money! So no-one knows if this machine above is a real central heating system that turned out not to work, or a huge fake thingy put there to make the con look good!”

  As he talks I realise he’s enjoying himself, holding court, having an audience. And then it dawns on me that I haven’t seen him speak to anyone since I arrived. He’s barked orders, taken reports, had brief conversations about logistical issues, all with his fellow ex-SAS inner circle or the newly recruited chancers and religios. But I’ve picked up no sense of camaraderie, no friendship, just cold business.

  “Jesus fucking Christ,” I say as it hits. He turns to look at me.

  “What?” he asks.

  “You’re lonely. That’s it, isn’t it? It’s lonely at the top for the poor slave trader. You don’t have any friends, only subordinates and acolytes. You don’t want a girlfriend, necessarily. You just want someone to talk to.”

  He says nothing, but the smile has gone from his face, the mask has dropped and there’s a warning in his eyes. He doesn’t try to deny it, though
.

  “So you think I’ll just hang out with you while you tell me top Parliament facts, and bitch about how hard it is pimping for a vampire? You think we’ll end up buddies? That I’ll gradually come to understand, to empathise and commiserate? And how do you see this ending, huh? Will I fall into your arms and soothe away your ennui, finally won over by your dignity and...”

  A single, shocking slap to the face silences me. But only for a moment.

  “You are fucking deluded, you know that? Look at where we are. Look at what you do. You’re the fucking king, Cooper. You don’t get to have friends. You get to have subjects. You don’t get understanding. If you’re lucky, at best you get loyalty, at worst obedience through fear and then betrayal. That’s the job, your majesty. Fucking live with it.”

  I fall silent, breathing hard, furious and defiant.

  He waits for a moment, although whether he’s waiting for me or him to calm down, I’m not sure.

  “You just demonstrated exactly why I want you around, Kate,” he says softly, his face full of something like admiration.

  “What, ’cause I think you’re pitiful?”

  “No. Because you kept talking even after I slapped you.” He turns on his heels and walks away briskly. “Try anything clever and you’ll be shot,” he says over his shoulder. “See you at seven sharp for dinner.”

  SO HERE I am, given the run of the Houses of Parliament. I’m not alone, though. I’ve got a shadow; a bored looking soldier who lurks around corners and watches from a distance in case I try and scale the barbed wire fences, stroll through the minefields or jump into the river... actually, that’s not a bad thought.

  I gaze out of a first floor window, considering the current of the Thames. I can see it swirl and roil beneath me, strong, tidal and deadly. Freezing cold, too. I dismiss the idea. It would be suicide. I glance at the ornate cornices that decorate the outside, wondering if maybe I could climb down at low tide. But no. Again, suicide.