by Jake Cross
Not the end of the world, but then Ramirez had spoken Brad’s name, and now the police wanted to talk to him. Ian thought Brad was out of the crime game and was actively seeking legit employment back in the construction trade, so that was going to cause tension, even if Mick came up with a plan to clear Brad as a possible suspect. A day in and already two kicks in the teeth. What else might go wrong over the next hundred and fifty days that Brad was forced to remain in the danger zone?
But, as Benjamin Franklin had claimed, there were no gains without pains. So, he told himself to stop moaning. To be a cup half-full guy and get back to the job in hand.
The street was a mix of residential and commercial properties and backed onto Memorial Recreation Ground. Just before the entrance to the park, where the road turned left and became Springfield Road, was a building housing three shops with brick walls painted white and bay windows with black frames and fake antique signs hanging from brackets. Over the fourth doorway hung a small sign saying The Apocalypse. Underneath the white paint above the entrance, Brad could see the faint remains of a relief naming the previous establishment: BAL. So, Mick had been right.
* * *
There was an intercom with a camera, so he buzzed in. A cockney female voice returned within seconds, telling him they were closed.
‘I see that, ma’am.’ He flashed his fake warrant card at the camera. Just long enough for someone to see it was police identification, but not to register the name or get a good look at the photo. He regretted donning jeans and the Varsity jacket, but then how was he supposed to know Mick’s latest plan would involve pretending to be a cop? ‘Detective Sergeant Smith, Metropolitan Police. I need a word with the manager. Inside, if you don’t mind.’
She didn’t mind at all. She’d been waiting to give her version of the story, and he was buzzed right in.
He walked into a short corridor. Just two doors here: another vault-like iron door in the left wall, shut, and a closed wooden door facing it. Beyond both was a thick black curtain pulled across the corridor, and he quickly peeked through. More doors, only one open, with a toilet inside, so cramped it looked as if you could barely shut the door behind you. Dead ahead, at the end of the corridor, was another curtain, pinned to a length of wood nailed at door height.
The big iron door buzzed. His cue to enter The Apocalypse.
It was a long, thin room. The tables and chairs were wrapped in canvas, as if they’d freshly exited storage. Shelves were loaded with tinned food and dry cereals, all dusty, and water jugs stood against walls with gas masks and biohazard suits hanging above. A large standing menu didn’t say menu but ‘emergency rations’. Bowls on the bar held military-style ration packs. There was an ancient CRT TV in a corner. Framed posters displayed mushroom clouds, savaged cities and lists for the perfect ‘Disaster Supply Kit’. This place was kitted out like a bomb shelter. He got it. Apocalypse. A themed bar.
There were two women behind one of the bar tills fiddling with paperwork. One wore a tight long black skirt and tight white shirt. Brad decided to approach the lady in casual clothing. But first he flicked off the lights using a switch by the door.
‘Hey, what are you doing?’
He stopped ten feet away. In the light cast by the fridges, he could still make out their faces, and they his. The name on the warrant card was invented, but he could imagine her sitting with real police and jabbing out his mugshot.
‘I’ll explain. You the manager?’
She said she was and gave her name, Carla. Owner of that cockney voice, which was an unusual mix with her Chinese appearance. She started to absolve herself of any blame in a bar fight last night, until Brad cut her off.
‘This isn’t about a fight. I’m investigating a separate crime, and I need your help.’
Carla’s cold front thawed instantly. She worked her way around the bar, all smiles, eager to help. And she stood too close, which he didn’t like because she got a good look at him. Brad took a step back.
‘So what’s this about? And why do the lights need to be off?’ she asked.
Brad spun her a tale about bank robbers believed to have frequented this bar. Told her he needed to take fingerprints. He spotted a thin door in an end wall. It had a window, though all was black beyond and he swore he could feel a breeze coming from it.
‘That lead outside?’
‘Sure does. Did you hear about those murders last night? Some country cottage in London. Four dead. The killers raped a woman and took her body away. What do you know?’
Newspaper bullshit, that was what he knew. He repeated his line about fingerprints, then added the portion he wasn’t looking forward to: ‘I need to be alone when I do it. Body heat affects the chemical. As does heat from lights. I kindly need you both to leave, and I need the lights off.’
The women looked at each other. If either of them was a fan of detective fiction, they’d sniff his bullshit and his guise would come undone.
‘Oh, okay. That makes sense, I guess. But can I not help?’
Carla took a little more convincing, locking the till before she left. He was surprised his trick had worked so easily, but work it had. The women were soon gone, and he was alone.
He approached the end door, lit only by the fridge, feeling his adrenaline rising.
Thirty-Three
Karl
The rumbling hadn’t increased, which meant it wasn’t a train coming their way after all. A silly thought made in panic, Karl realised. But the rumbling sound persisted, and they moved onwards slowly, fearful of what might lie ahead.
They turned a corner, and stopped dead at what they saw ahead. Liz grabbed his arm.
‘My God, you’re right. A train. There must be a way out.’
He didn’t share her glee. The train was just an outline in the dark, with nothing to illuminate it. No headlights, no dashboard dials or switches. It sat there dark and dead, and Karl soon realised why. It was a carriage, not a locomotive. Nothing to power it, although he could still hear that soft rumbling coming from somewhere. There were a number of short, cylindrical shapes arranged before it. They’d stumbled across an abandoned carriage, and it blocked their way ahead.
‘Oh my god, it’s a station. We can get out.’
She released his arm and stumbled ahead. To the left side of the carriage, his eyes made out the edge of the seemingly endless wall on their left, and then a void beside the train. As they inspected their surroundings, Karl realised that the station was nothing but a widening of the tunnel. The platform was simply a stone shelf. No old vending machines, no ticket booth, no turnstiles. The roof was higher; the walls were flat rather than curved. He couldn’t see a doorway. He started to lose pace. Something wasn’t right here. And the rumbling continued.
‘Come on,’ she called back, getting further ahead. ‘We’ll be free soon.’
‘Stop,’ he shouted. She ignored him.
But Karl’s jog became a walk as his eyes started to make out shapes on the platform. Small poles rising up to platforms. Chairs and tables. And some kind of underground chain-link fence, blocking their path.
Seeing it too, Liz halted. He stopped by her side, and she clutched his arm.
‘What’s going on?’ she said, her tone one of dashed hope.
‘I heard about this place,’ Karl replied, turning away from the fence to inspect the dark shapes before them. Beer barrels, attached by pipes to pumps – the source of the rumbling noise – on the side of the train. ‘We’re going to get out, Liz. This is Banker Avenue Line train station. It’s now an underground bar. The Apocalypse.’
He started walking, but felt resistance on his arm. Liz hadn’t budged.
‘Why are there no lights?’ she said. ‘Maybe it used to be a bar and it’s abandoned as well.’
He walked on and, although her grip on his arm was lost, he heard her feet on the stones behind him. They threaded their way between empty barrels and stopped just feet from the end of the carriage. There was a set of wooden
steps leading to a door. Karl went up and put his face to the glass. He’d already decided that it would be easier to bust the door than to fight past the chain-link fence.
‘Fridge lights are on. God, I could do with a beer right now.’
‘Is it open? Quick!’
He turned the handle and pushed, and, beautifully, the door swung inwards. Immediately, Liz was up against him, pushing, desperate to get in.
‘Liz, Jesus, slow d—’ He was halfway to his feet when he heard a series of thumps in the bar, getting closer and closer. In the blackness he couldn’t fathom the direction, so he turned to where his back had been facing because that was his vulnerable side, and held up his arms to protect himself.
A moment later a train smashed into him.
Best guess: suspension in the encoding process of his frontal lobe, or however it worked. He’d spent so long immersed in the underground railway that a strange noise in the dark had fired-up a connection to trains. But he was no longer in the tunnel. And it was a disused railway. So, a half second before he was slammed into a wall, logic reassessed what had slammed into him: not a train, but a person.
The proof came in the next instant: ‘Going nowhere, arsehole.’
He felt a knee jam into his stomach. As he doubled over in pain, his brain thought, double-leg takedown. Just another memory association, but this time a helpful one, based on his love of watching combat sports. You wrapped your arms around the opponent’s hips, lifted, twisted, and dumped him hard onto his back. But academic knowledge was a far cry from pulling the moves in reality.
He jerked, but the big mass in his grip didn’t move more than an inch off the ground.
He felt something hard ram into his backbone, probably the guy’s elbow. A twelve-six elbow strike, highly illegal in combat sports. Pain spread like cracking ice throughout his body, sending his left arm numb. He still couldn’t get his breath from the knee strike.
A heavier blow landed, not as sharp this time. Two fists crashing down on his shoulders, accompanied by a grunt of exertion. The next pain was in his forearms, elbows and wrists as he was driven down, hard, onto the floor. He rolled, curling into a ball to protect his cramping stomach from further injury, one arm tucked against his abdomen and the other against his exposed head in case the guy’s next tactic was to drive down a boot. Illegal as heck, but the rules weren’t in play here.
Instead, he heard pattering footsteps. Then there was the sound of a scuffle, body on body, and a second later a screech of pain.
‘Karl!’
A hand hit his head, but just a soft blow. Someone feeling about in the dark. Then it was back, touching his hair, latching onto his collar and pulling him up.
Liz, he realised. The man, nearby, was still yelling. Karl got to his feet, grabbing hold of Liz’s hand. He stumbled towards a thin vertical line of light that he hoped was a way out.
Thirty-Four
Brad
Brad rubbed his sleeves over his eyes to clear the blood running down his face. He saw a thick oblong of light from beyond the open door, and knew he was alone down here.
He got up and rushed through the doorway into the wide stairway he’d come down. As he arrived and cast his gaze upwards, he saw the heavy door at the top swinging shut.
He was soon in the ground-level corridor. He stopped and wiped blood from his eyes again. His vision cleared enough to show him the bar women staring at him from an office dead ahead, both scared by what they had just witnessed. They were the only ones here: Seabury and Grafton’s wife must have already made the street.
Carla had a cordless phone in her hand. Brad leaned into the office and slapped it out of her grip.
‘No fucking cops,’ he yelled, then rushed for the exit.
The street was busy with cars and pedestrians and his hopes of catching Seabury and Liz Grafton fell away. He wiped his eyes again and scanned left and right, but they were gone. Lost in the crowd. People were giving him a wide berth, just as you’d expect of a guy with blood flowing down his face. Another reason to regret the Varsity jacket, because it had white arms, and the blood smeared on both sleeves almost glowed.
But it gave him an idea.
He concentrated on the bloated pavements. Left, in the direction of West Ham Station. Then right, towards Springfield Lane. If a guy dripping blood unnerved the crowds of shoppers keeping to themselves then so would a couple running frantically, blackened by dirt.
But the crowd wasn’t parted or scattered, as if avoiding the path of a rampaging tiger. Seabury and the woman had gone. He cleared away the blood from his eyes again, but more immediately trickled from the gashes above his eyebrows. He was lucky his eyes hadn’t popped like egg yolks when the woman, after cracking him with a tin of whatever she had found, leaped onto his back like a damn monkey and dug her expensive nails into his face. He scanned the street again. They were nowhere to be seen. But then he noticed something.
Everyone sauntered along without a care, eyes on the pavement or mobiles or shop windows. But Seabury and the woman were dirtied and running and oozing panic, and they would have caused a commotion in the crowd. But there were no pointing fingers or excited chatter.
They hadn’t made the street at all. Instinct told him where they had headed.
He turned around and rushed back into the bar. In the corridor, Carla was in the office doorway with her phone in her hand again, so he slapped it out of her grip for a second time as he rushed past. He swatted aside the black curtain. Four doors, three of them shut. Brad was reaching for the first handle when a gut feeling told him they would rather run than hide. They would want distance, not camouflage. So, he ignored the doors and ran to the curtain on the back wall, and tugged it down.
Here, a doorless doorway into a kitchen as narrow as the downstairs bar. Like the train carriage, it had a door at the far end which was open to expose 197 million square miles of hiding places beyond.
As he hurtled through the kitchen, he passed a table with a local newspaper lying next to a pair of hair straighteners. The screaming headline was enough for a two-second pause. Out back was a bare garden, with a gate in the back wall. He rushed through and found himself on a road. No sign of them left or right, and on the other side of the road was a chain-link fence.
The fence was too high to climb, so he focused on a pair of vehicles a hundred feet down the road. A big beast with curtains pulled in the cab so the driver could sleep. It provided the only cover, so Brad ran to it, and along the side, and stopped at the back. The rear doors were wide open to show thieves that there was nothing worth stealing. And that there was nowhere for a fleeing couple to hide. He bent and peered under the vehicle, just in case.
He cursed and wiped his forehead again.
With his phone in his hand and no joy at the prospect of calling Mick with the bad news, he walked down the short corridor between the truck and the fence. He killed the call after one ring. Because this wasn’t over yet.
As he walked along the fence, he spotted two concrete posts just two feet apart, like a doorless passageway. If they’d slipped through the gap, they were gone. Beyond the fence: muddy, thick scrubland for 160 feet and then woods.
He pulled his phone out again, but slotted it away almost instantly as he heard something: moving water. He slipped through the gap and, after thirty feet, he was standing before a river at the bottom of steep banks.
And a rickety wooden beam bridge.
A bad sign. If they’d gone across, into the woods, they were gone for good. He cursed and reached into his pocket.
But the call could wait ten seconds. If he told Mick about the bridge, Mick would ask if he’d checked under it. So, he would do that first and then he was out of here.
Thirty-Five
Karl
Yesterday, in the van, he had thrown her across him with ease, but now he had trouble lifting her to her feet. Yesterday: fear and confusion because she didn’t know what had happened to her husband. Today: numbing shock because sh
e knew he was dead.
‘We have to move, Liz.’
He got her on her feet, unsteady as a day-old fawn. Her eyes were open but he had to lead her, and it was like drawing a large kite against heavy wind. Free arm loose and flapping, feet ungainly, but she came. Dead weight at first, but moving. Her grip on his hand was weak, but there.
They had exited the kitchen and it was behind them for good. But not for Liz. It was where she had seen the newspaper headline: BEXLEY COTTAGE CARNAGE – THREE SLAUGHTERED – COPS CONFUSED
And it would exist in HD behind her eyelids for ever. Now, they were under a bridge on wasteland, cramped together, shoulders kissing, heads touching wood. Minutes seemed to have passed. Maybe the guy was out on the street, a mile away and heading the wrong way. Maybe he was still in the cellar, howling like a lunatic in a bedlam. Maybe he had worked out exactly where— The latter of the three, Karl realised, as he heard the slop of feet in mud, dangerously close. He held his breath, and wanted to clamp a hand over Liz’s mouth because she was breathing heavily. But she seemed oblivious to his worry. Her knees were up to her chest, forehead bent forward to rest on her forearms, hair all over the place. Still in shock.
Karl froze as, barely six feet to his right, he saw a pair of feet appear on the sloped bank, level with his head. This was it. The guy was going to check under the bridge. He would bend, and look, and smile like it was Christmas. No darkness this time to allow Liz to ambush him. No fight left in Liz anyway. He would kill them both, and slip their bodies into the river’s current. It was just seconds away.
‘Jesus!’ the guy yelled. A slip. He landed on his arse, and now all but his head was visible.