Lifers

by M. A. Griffin

  They caught a five a.m. news bulletin. It was Wednesday, Preston realized as they listened—three days since his first night-walk on Sunday—he’d been BTV for just twenty-four hours. Shade’s deadline had passed, he realized. Alice and the others were trapped in the squalor and stink with no way out. They had to get the valves open again.

  Suddenly, his attention sharpened. “The search is intensifying for a group of missing Manchester schoolchildren,” said the announcer in the grave voice reserved for stories that might end badly. “Police have declined to make any further comment about a number of leads they are following in their attempts to ascertain the whereabouts of four teenagers, all of whom attend the same school in the Millennium Quarter.”

  “We’re famous,” Ryan said, deadpan. They were passing under a flyover now, and there were signs of life on the streets: a group of students making their unsteady way back to their dorms on Oxford Road, a couple of guys at a taxi rank laughing and punching each other’s arms, a cop car that made the blood freeze up until it drifted off at the next set of lights.

  “Justice Secretary Christopher Armstrong has caused controversy among politicians and supporters of the New Conservative Party,” the announcer continued, “following his failure to rule himself out of a leadership challenge when directly questioned at a press conference in Manchester yesterday.” Preston raised a hand and hissed everyone quiet. “Speculation is mounting that Mr. Armstrong will use the party conference, which begins in Manchester later today, to announce his candidacy, a move that commentators say will divide the party. Mr. Armstrong, whose strident views on law and order have gained him support from far-right pressure groups, is set to announce bold proposals to strengthen the UK’s criminal justice system in his keynote speech this evening.”

  “This evening,” Preston repeated as the announcer covered another story. He’d forgotten all the party conference preparations his dad had been involved in. Politicians and aides, reporters, TV camera crews; it was all building up to the keynote speeches. And that was tonight.

  “Armstrong,” Ryan said. “Is that the guy who Chloe thinks is … ?”

  “Yeah,” said Preston, cradling her head on his knees. “The man who killed her dad.”

  The wipers squeaked and the engine grumbled as they idled at a set of lights. Mace said, “But what can we do? I mean, just us?”

  Preston bit his thumb, thinking.

  One way or another, it all had to end tonight. He just needed to figure out how.

  “We saw it in the news,” Mace explained to Ryan as they drove. “There was this story about Jacob Ellwood—Ellwood’s dad—being killed in a car crash, and Armstrong helping the cops with their inquiries … ”

  Preston took over. “But she knows it wasn’t an accident. And Armstrong sent her BTV when she found out.”

  “So now we’ve got her back … ” Ryan started.

  “We have a weapon,” Preston finished. “And she’s still alive, just. So if we can somehow get her fit and well … ”

  Ryan carried on, nodding, “… we can use her as proof that this guy Armstrong is a nasty bastard.”

  “Exactly.”

  “So let’s get her to a hospital. We get her to Salford Royal. Or Manchester Royal Infirmary.” Ryan was checking the side mirrors, planning a route. “Then I get some of these bands you were talking about, and I go back for Alice.”

  “Wait, though,” Preston said. There was no easy answer. Everything was a gamble. “They’ll recognize her, won’t they?”

  Mace placed a hand across his forehead, realizing. “Ellwood’s a missing person. It’s been in all the papers.” Mace knew more than anyone else how the story had been covered. He’d obsessed about it enough in the days and weeks after she went missing—bored the hell out of everyone in the cafeteria with it. “She’s been on TV bulletins and stuff. What if the hospital staff recognize her?”

  “Yeah. And the cops come roaring in. We’ll lose her for good.” Preston watched Ellwood. Her eyelids had started a sequence of weird flickers. She was still with them, at least for now. But how long had they got? “And then we can’t get back at Armstrong,” he finished. He thought about Ellwood the night she’d told him everything. That unquenchable fire in her—the passion for revenge. Could he just deny her that? Leave her at the hospital and hope she was okay? Or by delaying, was he killing her?

  “C’mon, boys,” Ryan said. “I haven’t got long. I need to go back for Alice. Give me a decision here. Which way do I go?” They were approaching the city center now. The sky was pale and clearing. A bus labored past them, its interior lights illuminating a sealed bubble of commuters, heads bowed, checking phones. The van drifted to a halt at the lights halfway down Cross Street. A bakery was opening for the day. In the damp shadows of a bookstore doorway, a man shifted in his sleeping bag. Preston checked Ellwood’s pulse. There it was: weak, but steady. Anxiety squeezed his chest shut. What would Ellwood want?

  “C’mon,” Ryan urged. The lights were changing. “I haven’t got long.”

  “M.I.S.T. is left here,” Preston said, leaning forward, indicating a turnoff.

  “What about the hospital?” Mace said.

  “We can’t risk Ellwood being recognized. She’s hanging on for now,” said Preston. “First, we need to find Shade.”

  Ryan eased the van, its engine coughing, onto Back Half Moon. The walls either side were close and high, washed in yellow headlamp light as they made their way forward. The echo of the vehicle made Preston nervous. Getting caught now would be a disaster. Ryan rounded the corner in the alleyway, pulled right into a tight space, and when the van stalled again, decided against restarting the engine and yanked the handbrake up.

  And there was M.I.S.T., white-faced in the predawn glow of the garden’s uplighters. It was weird to see the place again. He had only walked down Back Half Moon Street for the first time three days ago. And in that short time, his whole world—not just his world, actually, the entire world—had become a different place. And there was no undoing that short walk.

  “That’s where we went in,” Mace said, pointing at the basement doors and the valve beyond. It seemed a pointless observation but at the same time, something utterly confounding and strange.

  Ryan said, “Me too. I saw these kids in lines.” He pushed his hair out of his eyes and leaned forward across the steering wheel.

  “We need to find Shade,” Preston said, cradling Ellwood’s shoulders.

  Preston knew something was wrong before they got out of the van. The fact they’d come out up on the moors at the dormant valve—that, he knew, was a bad sign. It meant that Armstrong had finished running shutdown and that the valves at M.I.S.T. were already dead. But Preston didn’t expect what he found when he padded carefully through the gate and up to the doors where, just a few nights before, Shade had first ushered him into the world of the nightwardens.

  For a start, the door was open and banging idly. Inside, the elevator was dormant. They struggled up the stairs with Ellwood. She felt heavier, sagging between them, hard to carry. Mace checked her pulse again, but couldn’t find it, and after a flurry of panic, Preston had to lean close and put his ear against her lips before he caught a breath. At the top of the stairs they shouldered open the swinging doors and Preston moved in to the space backward, his muscles weak with fatigue.

  The warehouse was an empty shell.

  Mace, who had Ellwood’s feet, almost dropped her as he made his way through. In the end, it took everything they had to lower Ellwood gently.

  Preston stayed on his knees for a long time.

  “There was a whole office here … ” Mace was saying as he walked in slow small circles, waving his goggles at the emptiness. “There were chairs over here, a table here. Where’s the vending machine? Where’s the TVs?”

  No one talked for a long time. The grimy panes of the warehouse windows glowed with the cold dawn. There were rectangles of discolored concrete where the furniture had been. He’d skippe
d the hospital and instead brought a grievously sick girl to a stripped-out goods warehouse with nothing in it. The computers were gone; the TVs, workstations, and cabinets. The databands were gone. Ellwood was going to die here in this pointless space, and Alice was trapped BTV.

  It took everything he had not to roar with anger or dissolve into tears.

  Ryan was on his knees, head down, hands splayed in the dust on the floor. He raised his head, blew the bangs from his eyes. “So where are these bands, then? How do I get Alice out now? She’ll die in there, Faulkner. Alice will die.” He wiped the tiredness from his eyes, smearing his face with grime.

  Preston knew if he didn’t grab this thing now, no one would. They’d fight each other, they’d blame each other; they’d rage and fume and then the anger would wane and they’d just drift. They’d call their parents, the police—there’d be tearful family reunions and press conferences.

  It couldn’t end like that. On a godforsaken island somewhere, there was Alice, Chowdhury, Gedge, the others. There was a whole crew of kids running out of food and breathing each other’s disease while somewhere else Armstrong would be shredding documents, burning folders, scrapping hard drives, and emptying offices to make sure no one ever found out about his little experiment. Would Ryan talk to the press? Would Mace tell his story? Preston grimaced. It wouldn’t much matter if they did. They had no proof. The nightwardens were gone. The prisoners were never making their journey back home. Who would believe them?

  And if they were to talk, Preston thought, maybe Armstrong could make something horrible happen.

  The thought was like an icicle. Armstrong would come and find them and finish them. Preston watched the gentle flicker of Ellwood’s eyelids and wondered if she was dreaming; his fingers pressed the skin of her neck, finding the soft pulse of life there. What would Ellwood say if she could? She, more than anyone, would know what the man was capable of making happen. Some faceless team of hired guys in black suits and gloves was surely coming to wipe them out.

  Very soon—in a couple of days maybe—Ryan would be found dead, his broken body splayed in the shadow of some apartment building he’d planned to climb. Urban exploration craze gets out of hand. Unfortunate teenager killed in tragic fall. Mace might be a traffic accident. And him?

  Preston’s mind was made up. If they didn’t act now, they were just waiting to die.

  “Listen,” he said. “We can still fix this. It isn’t over.”

  Mace said, “It is, Press. Look around you. Let’s just go home.”

  “No.” Preston forced himself to his feet. “We can’t do that. Once Armstrong knows we’re out, he’ll come and find us.”

  Mace looked up at the ceiling and let out a long breath. “We’re 404,” he said. He looked as if he’d been tipped up and emptied out. There was nothing behind his eyes except fear and despair.

  “C’mon, Mace,” Preston urged. “What did the radio say? About Armstrong.”

  Ryan gave them a bleak look. “There’s the party conference,” he said. “Armstrong’s giving a speech there.” He closed his eyes. “Doesn’t help Alice, does it?”

  “What are you thinking?” said Mace. “That we get Ellwood there?”

  Preston shrugged. Was it possible? He touched Ellwood’s wrist, then lowered his face toward hers, so close he could have kissed her. He felt her shallow breath on his lips. If they sat around, there was no way she’d recover in time. “First, we need a doctor,” he said. “Anyone know any doctors?” He looked at the people around him. The answer was obvious.

  Mace spat, wiped his eyes. “We’ve got no one,” he said.

  Then everything changed.

  “Not quite true,” said a voice like sandpaper from somewhere behind them. They all turned. Preston knew that voice. He felt his heart fill. There were footsteps.

  A figure was crossing the dusty space toward them. A stooped figure. A tired one.

  It was Jonathan Shade.

  Preston thought he was going to cry.

  His throat tightened and his eyes itched. Shade leaned over Ellwood, checking her pulse and listening to her breathing. Once he was satisfied he looked at the others, his hollow face dark with sadness and regret.

  “I knew about the Ellwood girl,” he said. Preston wondered if it were true that the nightwarden didn’t sleep at all—how he must feel as he closed his eyes. The burden of everything must be too heavy to bear. Innocent kids had killed themselves trying to escape his prison. Now the ones left would starve slowly to death.

  “Shade. Why didn’t you give us more bands?” said Preston. “We could’ve got everyone out! Three bands? What good is three?”

  Shade couldn’t look up. He seemed to be addressing the floor, flexing his fingers, occasionally checking the empty place around him as if he was still amazed to find it stripped. “I didn’t know I could trust you,” he said. “And anyway, this is my mess, not yours, kid. My responsibility.” He grimaced. “I never meant this to happen,” he continued. “I didn’t wake up one day and think—I’ll be a prison warden. That’s not how life is. Most people you see every day—those people you see coming into town on buses—they didn’t want to be doing what they’re doing. They’re trapped too.” He stopped, took a breath. “Some people might have a bigger cell than others, but we’re all still in prison.” Shade was talking about choices, not spaces, Preston realized. There had been this series of choices in front of him over the last week—and he’d made all the wrong ones, bad choice after bad choice. The text message started it and they all came tumbling after that one: the lies to the police, the arguments with Mace, the valve, the databands. Ellwood half-dead, Alice trapped. Choices, not spaces.

  Shade started up again. “And in this game,” he went on, “you can’t travel backward. Whatever it is you’ve done”—he gave a shrug, his eyes cold—“is done. All I can do now is try and fix my mistakes.”

  That was it, thought Preston. Life was turning out to be a whole bunch of mistakes you tried to fix. He cleared his throat. “Shade. We need your help,” he said, “fixing some other mistakes.”

  Shade’s eyes shone as he blinked away his sadness. Then he laughed a dry, tired laugh. “I’m in,” he said. “There’s a lot we have to try and repair.” He extended a hand then, fixing Preston with that magnetic gaze of his. “Let’s shake on it.”

  For a second, remembering that first time, Preston had to check the nightwarden wasn’t wearing gloves. He wasn’t.

  They shook, and Preston gripped the older man’s hand confidently. They were all on the same side now, no matter what had come between them before this moment.

  “I need databands,” Ryan said. “And I need to go back through.”

  “It’ll take some time,” said Shade, “but I can help there. More than you think.”

  “And we need to help Ellwood,” said Preston. Shade listened intently as they recounted the accident, his face clouding, then clearing. “I was thinking of all the medical stuff you’ve got in the stockrooms upstairs,” Preston explained as the tale drew to a close. “I figured you’d have some idea of what … ” He trailed off, his heart thumping fearfully.

  Shade rubbed his chin, thinking. “Most of the stuff—the drugs and meds—they’re gone. There’s a couple of hundred databands still in storage up there, ten boxes of goggles, and a bit of Sleeptight. But that’s it. I’ve managed to keep the Blackstone Edge valve open. We haven’t much time, but if I can bust it all out of storage, there’s enough gear to get you back BTV. Though that’s not going to help your young friend here.” He walked to the window and stood with his back to the room, his hands clasped behind him. Then he turned, face set, his decision made. “The Royal Infirmary used to supply the whole project,” he said. “All our stuff was made up by drug companies and dropped at the hospital. Armstrong didn’t want any awkward questions being asked of M.I.S.T., so it was all delivered there. No one could make the connection.”

  “Is there someone there you could contact?” Preston
felt a gleam of hope.

  Shade scowled. “Armstrong will have closed all that off now the project is on shutdown,” he said. “He’ll be destroying the evidence trail.” He thought for a second. “I know which part of the hospital we need to get the meds, though.”

  “Where?”

  Shade was remembering, staring into the middle distance. “I went with Esther once when our supplies ran out,” he said. “There’s painkillers, antibiotics, statins. If we could get someone in … ” He patted his pockets, pulling out a pen and paper, and began writing. “The Ellwood girl needs this,” he growled, holding up a scribbled list.

  “Aren’t you going to get it?” Preston felt the fear tighten like a fist in his chest.

  Shade shook his head. “No,” he said. “That bit I’ll leave to you.”

  “Shade,” said Preston, cradling Ellwood. “C’mon. You’ve got to help us. We might get the wrong stuff. You know where to look.”

  “There’s more than one problem to deal with. There’s your man here,” Shade said, indicating Ryan, “and his databands. That’s something I need to put right too. I’ve enough in stock to clear out the whole of Axle Six but it’ll take a few hours to unpack it all and get it ready. If I can get up to the moors this afternoon, I can get BTV before Armstrong realizes we’ve kept it open. I can get everyone out. I have to try.” He checked his watch. “Morning shifts have started. Take the hospital first. Follow the instructions on the paper. Find a way in. Steal the meds. Get it all back here and treat her. I’ll be here to help for a while at least. But for now,” he finished, “there are things I have to fix.”

  “I’ll come with you,” said Ryan.