by Will Hill
“Say again, sir?” he shouted, over the din of the siren. “You want me to do what?”
“Drive up there,” yelled the voice on the other end of the phone. “Go and see what the hell is going on. We’re sending units out to set up the roadblocks, but we can call them back if this is a false alarm.”
“What are they saying up on the hill?” shouted Andy.
“No answer,” replied the officer. “We think their system’s crashed, or gone daft, or something. Get up there, talk to the duty nurse, then radio in and tell us what’s happening. Clear?”
“Yes, sir,” shouted Andy Myers, and hung up the phone.
He swore heartily, the way that had always made Glenda widen her eyes at him in warning, and grabbed the Ford’s keys from the hook above the desk. He locked up the station, climbed into the car, and pulled out of the car park. As he reached the edge of Crowthorne, he flicked on the lights and the siren, even though it would be impossible to hear over the blare of the alarms. Then he pressed down on the accelerator and pointed the little Ford along the same road that Ben Dawson’s Range Rover had taken, less than five minutes earlier.
Charlie Walsh fiddled with the radio as Ben drove, flicking from one station to the next until Ben gave him a sharp sideways look and he turned it off. They drove on in silence, climbing the wide, shallow hill that dominated the countryside for miles around, until the Range Rover sped smoothly round the final bend and Broadmoor lay before them.
It had been opened in 1863 as Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum, terminology long since considered offensive. In the modern era it had been expanded to the size of a small village, a sprawl of low concrete buildings and trailers, of metal sheds and covered walkways. But the main buildings, where the inmates were housed and treated, were the same now as they had been more than a hundred and fifty years earlier: squat, Gothic structures of orange-red brick and grey tiled roofs that revealed their original purpose. The buildings looked, in every way, like those of a prison.
Ben slowed the car as they approached the outer fence. The tall metal mesh, easily seven metres high, topped with razor wire and electrified along its entire length, marked the edge of the exclusion zone that surrounded the hospital; inside it, tall brick walls, security patrols, deadlock doors and barred windows were designed to make sure that no inmate got anywhere near the fence. If they did, there was a sharp, unpleasant shock waiting for them.
The gate in the middle of the fence was standing open.
It ran on wheels, dividing in the middle, powered by an automated system operated from the security control room. There was a small box beside the gate containing a telephone, but it was rarely needed; very few people arrived at Broadmoor unannounced.
Ben pointed the Range Rover between the open gates and drove slowly forward.
“I don’t like this,” said Charlie Walsh. “We should go back. Let’s let the police deal with it.”
“We’re here now,” said Ben. “We might as well take a look.”
Beyond the electrical fence the road rose slightly to the main entrance of the hospital. The gatehouse resembled a medieval keep: two towers flanking a vast black gate, above which was set a severe-looking clock, fashioned in black and gold. The outer buildings of the hospital extended away from the gatehouse on both sides, merging into the looming ward buildings and the towering inner wall. The gatehouse gave the impression of being impregnable.
Unless the gate was open, as it was now.
Ben drove slowly through it, unease crawling in his stomach. The gates to Broadmoor were never open, and even if there had been a malfunction in the electric fence, they should never have been able to get this close to the gatehouse without being intercepted. That both gates should be standing open was unthinkable. And Ben noticed something else. He pressed the button on the door handle that lowered his window, felt the mild night air flood into the car, and listened.
The siren screamed into the car, rising and falling. But beyond it, in the gaps, there was no sound.
The hospital was usually a hive of activity and noise, even this early in the morning. There should have been the sounds of footsteps, the barking of the security guards’ dogs, the chatter of the nightshift employees.
But there was nothing.
“What are you listening to?” shouted Charlie Walsh, making himself heard over the alarm. “What can you hear?”
“Nothing,” shouted Ben. “Nothing at all.”
He wound the window back up and gently pressed the accelerator. The big car crept through the gate; beyond it were two small guard posts, plastic boxes like the kind that stand at the entrance to toll roads. He peered into the one on his side as the car rolled slowly past. It was empty. There was no sign of movement, although there was a dark shape on the rear wall, like a tin of paint had been thrown against it.
“What about your side?” he asked. “Anyone there?”
“No one,” replied Charlie and, for the first time, Ben heard the fear in his neighbour’s voice. “There’s no one here, Ben. Where the hell are they all?”
“I don’t know.”
They drove silently into the courtyard beyond the gatehouse. Modern administrative units stood on either side, but rising in front of them was the original Broadmoor building, a towering, imposing structure of dark orange bricks. There was a wide set of steps leading up to an ornate front door, and it was on these steps that Ben saw something out of place.
He stamped on the brakes of the Range Rover, throwing Charlie Walsh forward against his seat belt, causing him to yell out in alarm.
“What the hell—”
“Quiet,” interrupted Ben. He flicked the car’s headlights to full beam, illuminating the courtyard.
Lying on the stone steps was a man wearing a white hospital gown, much of which was soaked crimson.
“Oh God,” whispered Charlie. “Oh God, Ben, I don’t want to be here any more. Let’s get out of here.”
Ben didn’t reply. He was leaning towards the windscreen, craning his neck upwards, awfully sure of what he was going to see. He heard his muscles creak, then saw it.
On the fourth floor, directly above where the man was lying, one of the windows was open to the night, its reinforced glass missing.
“He jumped,” whispered Ben. “You can see the broken window. He jumped out.”
Walsh leant forward, but his shoulders and neck were too wide to see where Ben was pointing. He slumped back in his seat, breathing hard.
“He’s dead, Ben,” he said, his voice wavering. “There’s nothing we can do for him. We go home and we call the police and they can send an ambulance up here. Please, Ben, let’s go. Please.”
“Why is he just lying there?” wondered Ben aloud. “Why didn’t anyone try to help him? Where are all the nurses?”
“I don’t know!” screeched Charlie. “I want to go home, Ben, I want to go right now!”
Ben looked at his neighbour. The man appeared to be on the verge of a panic attack, his chest heaving, his eyes wide and bulging. And he was right, there was nothing they could do for the man: the puddle of blood beneath him was shockingly large. But everything about the hospital felt wrong to Ben. It wasn’t just the open gates; it was too quiet, too empty, and now one of its patients was lying dead in the courtyard and no one seemed to have even noticed.
He unfastened his seat belt, reached out, and opened the door beside him.
Charlie let out a yelp. “What are you doing?” he shouted, over the deafening siren.
Ben ignored him. He stepped out of the car in something close to a trance, his mind racing with what he was seeing all around him, turning it over and over like a puzzle whose solution was dancing just out of reach. Distantly, he heard the passenger door open and Charlie Walsh step nervously on to the cobblestones.
“Get back in the car, Ben,” he yelled. “Please.”
The pleading in the man’s voice brought Ben to his senses and he shook his head, as if to clear it.
�
��OK,” he shouted, and saw Charlie Walsh’s face crumple with relief. “Sorry, mate. Let’s go.”
He climbed back into the driver’s seat and was pulling the door shut when the dead body stood up and looked at them.
It was a man in his late twenties or early thirties. His gown looked as though it had been dipped in dark red paint, and his left arm was pointing away from his body at an unnatural angle, but his face wore a wide, hungry smile and his eyes glowed the colour of lava.
Charlie Walsh let out a high, trembling scream, and pressed his hands against the dashboard as though trying to push himself backwards, away from the nightmare thing before him. Ben just stared, his eyes bulging, unable to comprehend what he was seeing. Then the blood-soaked figure ran forward, leapt on to the bonnet of the Range Rover, and smashed its fist through the glass of the windscreen.
Ben’s paralysis broke as Walsh screamed again. The noise of the siren burst into the car through the broken windscreen, deafening them both. The man with the red eyes shoved his arm through the glass, tearing his skin to ribbons; blood splashed into the air as the man’s fingers slid across Ben’s throat, then lunged for Walsh’s face. The man was yelling so loudly that he was audible over the din of the alarm, shouting words that were unintelligible to Ben’s ears, his mouth working furiously, spit and blood pattering down on to the glass as he fought to reach the two men inside the car.
Then his grasping, searching fingers closed on Charlie Walsh’s lower lip. With a primal roar, the crimson, glowing monstrosity tore it from the man’s face with a sound like ripping paper. Blood burst from the wound, spraying on to the dashboard and windscreen, and Walsh’s screams reached a terrible new pitch.
Ben shoved the Range Rover’s gear stick into reverse and floored the accelerator. Walsh was thrown forward in his seat and for a terrible second the patient’s fingers closed on his throat. Then momentum hauled him back, and he fell heavily on to the cobblestones of the courtyard. He was on his feet again instantly, bathed in the blinding gleam of the car’s headlights as it hurtled backwards. Ben looked over his shoulder and saw the open gate approaching, dangerously fast. There was no time to correct their course; he could only hope that he had not turned the steering wheel since driving them into this terrible place.
There was a screech of metal as the car shot between the gateposts and a huge shower of sparks on the passenger’s side as the panels tore along the brick wall. Charlie Walsh, who was sobbing between screams, wearing the look of a man who expects to wake up from a nightmare at any moment, leapt in his seat and almost fell on to Ben, who shoved him roughly back. Then the screeching stopped, and they were through the gate. Ben slammed on the brakes and hauled the steering wheel around. The tyres smoked and squealed, until the big car was facing the right way down the road they had driven up, only minutes earlier. There was a thud behind them, and Ben glanced into the rear-view mirror as he shoved the car back into drive and floored the accelerator again.
The blood-soaked patient, who had torn Ben’s neighbour’s lip from his face as though it was nothing, had run headlong into the back of the car. There was a bright spray of blood across the rear window at the point of impact. The car leapt forward and Ben saw the man lying in the road; he seemed to have knocked himself out. But, as he looked at the fallen patient, he caught sight of something else that almost stopped his heart.
Dark shapes were dropping steadily into the courtyard, before moving quickly towards the gate. Ben pressed the window’s button again and, over the howl of the siren, he could hear, very faintly, the crunch of breaking glass and a low, swelling roar, like the noise made by a pack of animals. He was still looking in the rear-view mirror as the car accelerated through the outer gate and down the hill; as a result, he didn’t see the glow of blue and red emerging from around the sharp bend in front of them.
Andy Myers gritted his teeth and pressed his foot down more firmly on the accelerator. The siren was deafening, even from inside the car; the old vehicle’s windows and doors were not as airtight as they had once been, and the sound was so loud the windows might as well have been rolled down. He was looking forward to finding out from the duty nurse exactly what was going on, radioing it in, and getting back to bed. There was a cricket match at noon and he was already glumly aware that very few of the club’s players were going to be rested and at their best.
He turned the wheel gently, sending the car neatly round the bend that would take him on to the final approach to the hospital. Then everything in front of him was blinding light, and he had the briefest of moments to wonder where it was coming from before the Range Rover slammed into his car head-on.
“Look out!” screamed Charlie Walsh, the words mangled by his missing lower lip.
Ben dragged his gaze away from the rear-view mirror, aware that something had moved at the edges of his vision. Then red and blue light filled the windscreen, there was a sickening crunch of metal, and everything went black.
Ben emerged into a world of chaos.
His eyes flickered open and pain shot through his head as the siren pounded into it. Slowly, ever so slowly, he turned to look at Charlie Walsh.
His neighbour hung in his seat belt, his head lowered, his eyes closed. His face was covered in blood and a ridge of swelling was already beginning to rise across his forehead. As Ben watched, a small bubble of blood inflated and popped in Charlie’s ruined mouth, followed by a second, and a third.
He’s alive, he thought. Thank God.
Ben looked down at himself and felt relief wash over him; the big car’s roll cage had held. There was a bulge behind the pedals where the engine block had been forced back by the collision, but it had not broken through; it would have crushed the lower half of his body to jelly if it had. Blood was falling steadily from his nose and he could see the dent in the dashboard where he must have been thrown against it. His head thumped with pain and he found he couldn’t think straight; he tried, but the thoughts drifted away from him, as insubstantial as smoke on the wind. He reached out with a shaking hand and opened the car door. He made to get out, but a sheet of agony bloomed up from his left ankle, and he screamed. Ben looked down, and saw that his foot was twisted almost ninety degrees to one side. The sight was so alien, so terrible, that he vomited into his lap, unable to stop himself.
Ben fumbled his mobile phone out of his pocket and dialled Maggie’s number. He knew he should phone the police, but for some reason he felt unwilling to do so. Something had happened before the crash, although he wasn’t sure what it was. Had there been another car? Had he hit another car? He held the phone to his ear as he peered through the broken windscreen. There were pieces of metal strewn across the road. He leant further forward, dimly aware that the car seemed to be higher than usual, that his view of the road was different, and saw a twisted hunk of metal lying beneath his front wheels. Ben stared at it blankly, until his eyes picked out a smashed pair of lights sticking out of the wreckage, one red, one blue, and everything flooded back to him.
The hospital, the man, Charlie Walsh’s lip, the police car and—
He froze.
Oh God. The patients. The breaking glass. Behind me.
The siren screamed and roared, and he could hear Maggie’s voice shouting down the phone, but could not make his mouth work to answer her. He forced himself to look into the rear-view mirror and saw a red glow descending the hill towards him, a pulsing, shifting mass of crimson that seemed to originate from a hundred pairs of glowing points of light.
“Run,” he croaked into the phone. “Take Isla and run.”
52 DAYS TILL ZERO HOUR
1
THE NEXT GENERATION
Jamie Carpenter was so focused on the violence playing out before him that he didn’t notice his console’s message tone until the third beep.
“Take five,” he called, pulling the metal rectangle from its loop on his belt, and heard two simultaneous groans of relief. Jamie thumbed READ on the console’s touch screen, and read t
he short message that appeared.
NS303-67-J/LIVE_BRIEFING/OR/ASAP
The message was simple, but it still caused Jamie a momentary pang of sorrow. It was an order for him to immediately attend a briefing in the Ops Room, similar to dozens of other orders that had appeared on his console’s screen in the months since he had arrived in the Loop, the classified base that was the heart of Department 19. But this one had been sent only to him; his Operator number was there on the screen in black and white. The previous orders had almost all been sent with the prefix G-17, the Operational Squad that he had led until a month or so ago, the squad that had comprised himself, Larissa Kinley and Kate Randall.
Their squad had been disbanded in the aftermath of Valeri Rusmanov’s attack on the Loop, so that their combined experience could be put to wider use helping the Department heal and rebuild. It had been one of Interim Director Cal Holmwood’s first commands, and although it was one that Jamie understood, it had still felt like the three of them were being punished for being good at what they did. Holmwood had assured them that that was not the case, but how they felt was ultimately of little importance: it was an order and they would follow it.
“Sir?”
The voice trembled, and Jamie looked up from his console. He was sitting on a bench at the edge of the Playground, the wide circular room on Level F of the Loop in which generations of Operators had been trained, sweating and bleeding on its hard shiny floor. For the last fifteen years or so, the room had been the domain of Terry, the tall, barrel-chested instructor who was standing in the middle of the gleaming floor with his hands folded across his chest. But it was not he who had spoken; the voice belonged to John Morton, who was slumped on the ground and looking over at Jamie with wide eyes.