Lifers

by M. A. Griffin

  Then Ryan and Gedge and—there she was—Ellwood were pushed into the ring and the Axle Six gang were all trapped together, breathing hard, wiping sweat and water from their faces, eyeing each other warily, part triumphant for having tried, mostly drained and defeated.

  Preston noticed, as he looked around, the other kids were all looking at him for something. Alice was imploring him silently. Ryan too.

  Weirdly, his memory chose that moment to kindle a little flame.

  He remembered what Alice had told him—way back before the madness, right at the start of it all. Lift your eyes.

  So he looked up. Big iron beams spanned the space above them, and farther beyond them was that curved roof—iron and steel inlaid with glass.

  Ellwood was next to him now. She was breathing hard from the run. She licked her lips and looked up, following his gaze. “What?” she whispered. Preston was looking at the clouds underlit by city lights through the grid of fogged ceiling windows. It was dark and shifting up there, amorphous black and sodium yellow.

  There was nothing to see except the rain, hammering against the panes, streaking in downward lines of gray diamond. Out there it’d be sending people running, Preston thought—running from bars to cabs home, running to restaurants or running for shelter.

  Ellwood rubbed her neck and looked at him. “Faulkner,” she whispered. “We’re gonna get arrested. Why are we watching the rain?”

  Preston stared upward so hard his neck cricked.

  If it could rain inside, he thought, he could get everyone’s attention. Get them running. It’d be like cleaning everything up …

  The stupid joy of the idea must have been painted across his face because Ellwood, looking half-worried, half-fascinated, whispered, “Why are you smiling?”

  Preston checked the white walls of the space—eyes darting quickly, thinking, searching.

  There was one. Of course there was. But it was suicide to go for it. There were guns with live ammo. This was for real. They’d shoot him.

  Ellwood nudged him, eyes urgent and blazing, above a big wide smile.

  She’d figured it out too.

  “I’m going for it,” she said slowly, mouthing the words so he could read her lips. One of the guards in the circle around them was barking orders now. They were closing in. Time was running out.

  Preston widened his eyes, imploring her. Crazy talk. “No way,” he mouthed back.

  She held his gaze, fierce and totally crazy. Then she moved, sudden and quick—spun away from him and started running.

  It took a moment for him to react. She was really doing it. She was going to get Armstrong or die trying.

  Slipping and sliding, turning back into the group, shouldering her way at first, then she started running as hard as she could. The kids from Axle Six parted ahead of her, mostly in fear and shock. Preston took a breath. Then he followed. Ryan sloshed backward as they pushed their way past, but then Preston heard Ryan’s steps as he followed. Now there were three of them. Then Alice gave a high “Hey!” and joined them too.

  Someone was shouting commands; the net of guards was breaking and shifting. “Stop!” someone yelled, all brutal and hard and frightening. “Stand still now!” bawled another. “Now!”

  Ahead, Ellwood was flying. She was lithe and strong and fast, a gazelle. Preston reached the dry flooring beyond the spill, and like Ellwood a moment earlier, felt his feet grip at last. Ellwood was running for the pale gray of the wall, and he followed, his heart like an exploding drum. He was aware as they broke from the group that there were figures converging on them. But Ellwood was out in the open now. Somewhere off to his left, he was aware of noise and lights too. A film crew were shouldering their way in. Someone’s camera was rapid-fire clicking and flashing.

  He could see a couple of the security guys planting their feet wide, holding up weapons, steadying themselves. This was a colossal gamble. These people wouldn’t shoot an unarmed girl, right? Especially an unarmed girl who looked as if she was heading nowhere—running toward a wall. Not with TV news and journalists massing. Instead, Preston guessed, they’d go for some sort of hyperpainful takedown, piling into her like three-hundred-pound linebackers, breaking her bones, pounding her flat.

  He just needed her to reach the fire alarm first.

  He ran hard, lungs tight and needling, eyes on the girl ahead, and beyond, the little button in the glass-fronted box—shoulder height, slightly recessed, darker against the pale wall. Everything else was peripheral—a streak and a blur. But there were security at a sprint now, weapons down—thank God—but closing in, cutting her off, hammering hard and shouting as they went. They were converging on the same point. Ellwood was closer to the target by the look of it, but these guys either side of her, pincering in, were sprinting faster and stronger. She wasn’t going to make it.

  “Stop!” someone roared again, but Ellwood didn’t. More camera flashes. From somewhere behind them, it sounded like a cheer was going up.

  The guards reached Ellwood. She was clattered down hard, two guys bundling her over into a sliding pile.

  But that left him free. Preston hit the wall so hard he nearly struck himself senseless. He punched the glass of the alarm with a closed fist and his knuckles stung but the glass didn’t shift. It smashed on his second attempt and then a figure to his right made contact and he was bundled down in some hard-ass approximation of a rugby tackle and he hit his head on the wall, then he was sprawling on his back on the floor near Ellwood. The breath was forced out of him and he was crushed under some wide-shouldered guy. He couldn’t breathe.

  For a second, it seemed like nothing had happened. Then he realized he couldn’t hear because his head was ringing. Must have been a concussion or something; his vision had started shuddering with stars and his ears were full of a high whine. Maybe the fire alarm was going, maybe it wasn’t.

  The reason he knew it was, in the end, was the water on his face. High up on those beams, the sprinklers were sending great wide fans of rain out in all directions and they were breaking up and falling, misting the huge exhibition space as they fell, beading on the lenses of his goggles, soaking eager journalists and camera crews.

  The guard on top of him had him up now, grunting with the exertion of it, yelling something in his face, hauling him up to standing, and Preston could see Ellwood next to him, swatting an arm at a guy dragging her by the hair, shouting. Ryan and Alice had reached them too, and Mace was still running.

  And behind Mace, the Axle Six gang. It was like seeing what prison had done to them for the first time. Together, they looked phenomenally frightening. They’d all put on their goggles: gaunt, skeletal kids with sharp cheekbones, washed-out expressions, and big glittering fly-eyes. They were standing shoulder to shoulder, dressed in the wringing-wet clothes they’d been bundled BTV in, all dirty, untucked, and tired. The sprinklers were pouring down over them and their hair was flattening and their torn clothes were darkening. And they were all illuminated in stuttering flashes of camera light.

  Security was swarming now and men and women with cameras and microphones were being pushed back. Someone was shouting in his ear, gripping his wrists, but all he could hear was high feedback.

  Then a journalist with a camera was through security and suddenly close to Ellwood, stuttering off a rapid-fire sequence of shots, and Ellwood’s guard was screaming, “Put that down. No pictures! No pictures!”

  Then came the rest of the madness.

  Delegates began flooding the hall from the adjoining meeting rooms and auditoriums, all running, hunched, from the sprinklers. There were umbrellas up out at the edge of his eye line, Preston realized. There were lines of suits, groups breaking away and hurrying to the foyer.

  The crowds of delegates were caught in a perfect storm as they emerged. The explosions of camera flashes and shoulder-held video cameras bobbing were one thing; the mess of security guards fighting back journalists and kids was another. But the thing those people would never forget was
the sight of the emaciated prisoners in horrible goggles; kids who looked like soaked and starving chimney sweeps, silent in rags all gathered in a gang in the rain.

  And at the front now, dragged by a stone-faced security guard, goggles up on her forehead, was a black girl with torn clothes and a face they recognized from the papers.

  Then Armstrong emerged from the crowd in a chalk-stripe suit with a blue tie, laughing with a colleague, making light of it all. Until he saw the children. Preston had, just for a second, the sweet sight of the politician’s face draining as he saw who’d come back.

  Ellwood saw him first and turned.

  Whoever had been gripping Preston by the wrists had suddenly let him go, but he couldn’t move. All around him it was crazy—cameras, microphones, questions. Eventually Mace looped an arm under his and the two friends began half carrying each other. Preston pushed his goggles up, blinking through the water. There was a mighty crush of press pushing into the foyer, microphones held up, cameras rolling, heading for Ellwood.

  And Shade was there too.

  He was giving an interview—passionate, wild-eyed, a kind of ranting spokesman for the prisoners just in shot behind him. What Preston hadn’t dared believe was possible looked as if it was true.

  The news was out.

  It didn’t matter a damn what Armstrong had said in his speech earlier. This was going to be the front-page story in the papers tomorrow.

  A month had passed since the events at Manchester Central during election season. Preston had been in police custody at first—his dad waiting awkwardly out in the offices or taking extra shifts to avoid the tension—and of course the cops had kept the Axle Six lot apart and they’d collapsed, shattered, in separate interview rooms and told their stories over and over again. Weeks had passed like that: hour after hour in stuffy rooms, nights on hard bunks in spartan cells. When Preston’s mum heard, she came back up to Manchester and stayed at the flat for a week, and she cried a lot when he told her the story. Once, Mum persuaded Dad to come too and they sat together in an interview room drinking vending-machine coffee—it felt very strange, seeing the two of them like that—and when he told them both again they exchanged glances. Preston knew what those looks meant: They were unspoken conversations with unspoken words in them like breakdown or psychosis or therapy.

  Three weeks in to the investigation, the cops lifted Mace’s voice memos from his phone and had them analyzed. Forensic audio experts had the sound stretched and boosted and flattened and whatever else. They were particularly interested in a conversation that seemed to have been recorded at some distance—it turned out to be from beneath a table—that clearly featured the voice of a certain Christopher Armstrong, MP, saying, “If any of you here were to go missing again, your families would be devastated. And, of course, if you went missing this time … You would be missing and alone.” After that, things went suddenly silent. All it took was a directive from the leadership of the New Conservatives, and voices fell silent. The next day, the journalists vanished; questions stopped being asked, interviews were concluded.

  After that phase came another: the one where Preston was sent back to school. For the first week he only had to go part-time. They’d given Alice separate days so the two of them couldn’t talk. It was something about normalizing, whatever that meant; they didn’t realize that he couldn’t talk to her anymore anyway—that he’d broken the friendship the evening the whole night-walking thing had started.

  Classes seemed pretty safe and normal, and very dull without Mace—his mum and dad had sent him to another school to give him a fresh start. A clean break was the phrase Mace had used, rolling his eyes on the bus home once. They’d bought him a tablet as compensation. He was putting together a dossier on Opus Dei.

  Once that term, Preston had met Ryan. It was November. There was a World War One fund-raising thing going on in the cafeteria and the grades got mixed up for a session on sacrifice which Preston had dreamt his way through.

  “Faulkner.” He was lining up for coffee. The bell had just gone for break. Mock exams were coming up so there were a bunch of Year Elevens shuffling cue cards, pissing about with gel pens. Some older kids were watching YouTube videos on a shared phone. Conversation with Ryan was difficult. They talked about Alice a bit—she and Ryan were going out together again—they had a stilted exchange about the Jupiter Hand. Ryan was all twitchy and distracted.

  In the end he said, “Ever think about Axle Six?”

  Preston tried a smile. All the damn time. But he shook his head.

  Ryan sipped his coffee. “I do,” he said. He pushed his hair back. “All the damn time.” Preston knew him well enough now to guess what was happening. He needed to get beyond those glass doors in the foyer and out into the rain-swept night to explore the shore of that black sea beyond.

  The funerals were later that month.

  There was only a small crowd gathered at the cemetery. It was a private thing, so the gates were closed as soon as the cars pulled in. There was a thin frost on the gravestones. The trees were empty cages and the last of their leaves spun in idle circles on the paths between the graves.

  His dad kept a respectful distance so Preston could catch up with his friends. There were six graves, one for each of the boys who’d died coming through the valves. The holes were fringed with what looked like green baize: a frame around six dark mouths like trapdoors dropping down into the dark. When Mace, Alice, and Preston converged at the graveside, it felt all weird and dislocated. Preston swallowed a couple of times, struggling for words.

  Mace talked secret societies for a few minutes, filling space.

  Then Alice gave Preston a halfhearted smile. “How was it with Chloe?” she asked.

  Difficult. He’d seen her once before she went back to London just after the last of the police interviews, in the foyer of the station.

  She’d been in a weird mood, waiting in reception, her mum out in the car. “I’m going home,” she’d said by way of explanation. “Couldn’t leave Manchester without saying a final good-bye to my wingman.” He’d tried to brush the comment off with a grin, but it crushed him. She’d smiled conspiratorially, said something like, “Don’t we get prison tattoos now? Like lifers have? Spiderwebs.”

  Preston hadn’t known what to say. “Can I maybe give you a call?” he’d stammered.

  Ellwood had raised an eyebrow. She was wearing a cashmere sweater, dark jeans, high-tops. She had little silver studs in her ears. It made him ache. “Sure,” she said. It seemed like a way forward for a second, but when she’d handed the number over, she’d added, “Journalists keep getting hold of it. I change it a lot. If there’s no answer, you’ll know why.”

  He memorized it; called her three days later, hands jumping stupidly as he punched in the digits.

  There’d been no answer.

  “Fine, I think,” Preston said.

  After that, Mace held the newspaper between them and they read silently about Armstrong’s trial. Sentencing wasn’t expected until the new year. Special arrangements had been made so witnesses could testify by video link. All of that was to come.

  At the gravesides, each of them paid their respects. Holes like the mouths of valves, doorways into darkness. Alice had brought flowers. They started with the boy from the Castlefield valve, the poor kid whom Esther Klein had carried into the warehouse the night shutdown started. No one knew his name and they didn’t want to ask. They didn’t visit the others. This one boy would stand for all of them.

  The sky was dark gray like iron. Alice had a taxi waiting for her. “I have to go,” she said eventually. “We should meet up some time.”

  Press smiled. Mace nodded. Both knew it wasn’t going to happen. Just as she turned to go, Preston said, “Alice.” She turned. She didn’t look young anymore. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  She nodded, slowly.

  Then she walked across the frosted grass to the waiting taxi.

  Ryan pushed his way through the hatch and haul
ed himself up into the silent white corridor.

  Ahead was the door that would take him back through to Axle Six. Beyond, he could hear the dark sea thunder. He leaned back through the hatch to give Chowdhury a hand, lifting him until they collapsed against the corridor wall together. Below, he could hear Shade grunting with exertion. Soon, the nightwarden’s face appeared, his forehead beaded in sweat.

  The three of them spent a couple of seconds gathering themselves, wiping plaster dust from their hands, and steadying their breathing. Ryan waited, hands on knees, then, when the others were ready, gave a nod. They headed for the door.

  Beyond, the escalators freewheeled pointlessly, creaking and hissing in the generator light. There was no talk. There was nothing to say. They rode them upward.

  At the top, Ryan crossed the lobby and cupped his hands against his temples, leaning into the blackness of the glass doors. He watched the never-ending storm rage in silence on the other side, listening to the heartbeat thud of water on rock.

  Next to him, Chowdhury whispered, “This is where he lives.”

  “How do you know?” the nightwarden asked.

  Chowdhury stood back from the glass and cocked his head. He fanned his hands as usual and intoned slowly, “I saw it all in a vision.”

  Shade looked at Ryan, his face saying, Is this kid for real?

  Ryan gave an apologetic shrug. “Jesus, Chowdhury,” he said.

  Shade said, “But you’re certain, right?”

  “As certain as I’ve ever been about anything,” said Chowdhury dreamily, his nose against the glass. “This is where he lives.”

  “An old guy. With a beard. Out here on this side of the valve.” Shade waited for confirmation, biting his lip.

  Chowdhury nodded, forehead pressed to the glass as he did so. There was a long and tetchy silence.

  Eventually it happened. Something out there in the darkness moved. And it wasn’t the bobbing of plants and trees in the teeth of the wind. It was a service hatch.

  Ryan hadn’t noticed it before. Out beyond the glistening helipad, off to the left near the high chain-link fence, beyond the valves where Hoyle had vanished, there was a circular lid—the plug of a manhole. And as Ryan and Shade and Chowdhury watched, the trapdoor shifted. It was being pushed from below, lifted. A figure emerged, moving with swift confidence. Something in his actions suggested a routine, practiced and repeated.