Silence settled the, again accompanied by the cold calculating stare.
Julian stared back at him for a long moment.
“OK, understood. If we’re being totally straight, I better tell you a few things about myself as well. You may not be the dark knight, no offence ...I didn’t mean you know ...being black and all that. I’m cool with that. But compared to me you’re a gladiator.
I’m your original nerd. This thing is my world.”
Julian indicated the bag at his hip, the laptop.
“It’s probably broken.”
He sounded dejected and seemed to get momentarily lost in introspection before continuing.
“I do a bit of cycling and I used to like table tennis and that more or less encapsulates my physical prowess. I don’t think I’ve ever hit anyone in my whole life and this entire thing just about scares me senseless.”
Pink spots had risen on Julian’s cheeks as he spoke.
Flustered for obvious reasons but it was more than that. Not just action and exertion, panic and threat.
This was some sort of fulcrum. The big man standing opposite was beyond his realm of understanding, but Julian instinctively knew that he had to come to some arrangement, establish a relationship with him, if he was to have even a slim chance of surviving this situation.
Pearcey had already effectively saved his life several times. Julian knew he wouldn’t have made it this far without his help and didn’t imagine that whatever was outside would be any better.
The large man’s face remained non-committal but there might have been the slightest hint of a softening. A fractional relaxation.
Pearcey nodded.
“Alright ...got you. Always liked table tennis myself.”
He nearly smiled but the expression didn’t quite make it.
He gestured at the door with the handgun.
“Have a go at that one. We’re at the top now. Beyond that is a steel door that leads into a surface building. Foreign office, administrative stuff. It’s possible some of those things may be in there if someone else opened it after I was last there.”
He paused, took a deep breath. A boxer waiting for the bell.
“I’m gonna be further back here. I need a clear view. A clear field of fire.”
He held up the gun and waggled it playfully. Except, as far as playful gestures went, it was like Pearcey’s attempt at a smile. It didn’t quite make it.
”If I tell to you close it again, don’t fuck around, please don’t make me tell you twice, just get it done.”
Julian grasped the wheel with both hands and twisted it with more determination than his previous attempt, hard enough to feel pain in his wrists and shoulders. There was a technique to this which was obviously eluding him but he intended giving it a better shot on this occasion.
The wheel gave an intimation of movement and began to turn. He ignored the pain in his arms and hands, persevered and heard the click of disengagement that signalled unlock.
Pulled.
Inched back with the ponderous swing of the door.
Readied himself to reverse the motion and push if the reversal was ordered.
“Clear, going through,” Pearcey breathed as he brushed past him.
Julian followed.
They faced another door at the end of a long thin room, cluttered and constricted by boxes against each wall.
Pearcey produced the keys yet again. Sorted and picked one out. Handed it to Julian, the rest of the ring a pendulum weight below it.
“Same again, unlock, open quickly and get out of the way. Close it just as quickly if I tell you.”
They initially emerged into another storeroom. This one full of document boxes. Not visibly moulding but indisputably dusty. The suite of offices beyond that room turned out to be empty.
An old building, updated for modern use but retaining an air of antiquity. Locking doors behind him, Pearcey led then to the front of the building and they stood bathed in what was blessed light after their ordeal underground. The daylight of a world that was very different to that which Julian had left a few days earlier.
Smoke roiled along a street strewn with detritus. Rumpled heaps of garbage could be glimpsed between the thick clouds of smoke.
It was only as the wind periodically blew clear pockets in the haze that they were able to see the bundles of rubbish were actually bodies. Or rather, the remains of bodies.
As they stood and watched, figures sporadically passed their viewpoint.
Hairless, hard looking things.
New and horribly changed people. Sometimes naked, rarely fully clothed. Sometimes running. Sometimes almost seeming to prowl. Something ...skulking in the way they moved. Predacious wraiths glimpsed between breaks in the leaden air.
Julian stood in mute dismay.
Even Pearcey appeared deflated, to have temporarily lost his seemingly relentless capacity to deal with whatever was placed in his path.
“Carlton, can we just take a break before we continue? Do you think it’s safe? To stay here for a little while.”
Julian asked him because he hoped Pearcey would know. Julian didn’t feel like he knew anything anymore.
“I need to get myself together and I don’t think it would do us any harm to discuss whatever’s next on the agenda. You got us out of there, and I’m grateful for that, more than I’ll ever be able to tell you, but ...”
Julian trailed off.
Pearcey sighed.
“Yeah, it’d make sense. I’ve just about had it as well to be honest. I could do with a sit down and a think. Hang on here. I’ll double check everything’s secure.”
Pearcey disappeared back into the offices and Julian slumped on a chair, staring outside. Hypnotised by the snippet of world he could see from the window.
The immensity of what was happening had periodically hit him during the last few days. He’d shied away from contemplating it too deeply simply because he didn’t think he could handle it. It struck him again now like a hammer.
All of this could end.
Could end?
All of this was ending. He slowly looked around the interior. Old and ornate. Decorative ceiling cornices and intricate plasterwork. Probably original. Incongruities such as electronics and office furniture crammed in as usage adapted to era.
Who was going to maintain this? Repair it. Would he and Carlton be the last people to ever set foot in here? Would it all simply sit here accumulating dust as damp infiltrated the structure, flora and fauna began their insidious invasion and brick decayed to powder?
That not only seemed likely but probable when he considered the sheer number of people who had been infected. The sheer number of people who were no longer human in any real sense of the term.
Those things were animals. Bestial. The percentages were staggering in their implication. The uninfected, the unchanged, the survivors, if you wanted to think of it in that way, were a tiny minority. A speck compared to the vast mass of inhuman beasts that now stalked the earth.
Shrivs Carlton had called them and that was as good as word any. Whatever humanity remained within them had shrivelled as surely as the skin had tightened and toughened on their bodies.
The brutal truth was that no one was coming back here. A truth that applied to most buildings everywhere. Cities would lie in dust before there was any hope of man regaining them. If there was any hope of that at all.
Would some future-distant archaeologist find enigmatic concentrates of refinement? Unimaginably compressed, mysteriously mingled material that marked the passing of some unknown age, an era ended in circumstance masked by the passage of time.
Or were such explorers in time already a thing of the past? Such curious minds consigned to oblivion, surpassed by something infinitely simpler and more savage?
Pearcey interrupted his introspection, shoving a can of coke into his limp hand.
“We should be okay for now. Not for too long though. The fucking monsters are enough to worry ab
out as it is, but that smoke is coming from somewhere and I don’t think whatever’s on fire will have been called in to the fire brigade. Better stay back from the windows and try to keep the noise down as well. We don’t want to attract any passing trade, do we now?”
Julian thought Pearcey might have been attempting humour but didn’t reply.
They settled in swivel chairs, swigged coke and surveyed the surreal scene outside the windows. Sat in dazed silence.
“You mentioned your family. Do you have anyone you have to find ...anyone to go to, help or ...whatever, you know?” Julian asked him after a while. Asked him diffidently, cautiously.
The man took his time answering.
“My ex-wife and kid, daughter. They’re probably the only ones I suppose,” Pearcey said, voice weary.
“We haven’t kept in touch. I don’t even have a current phone number for them. Got an address somewhere in my stuff but that may be out of date anyway. They’re up north.”
A vague wave of his hand.
The conversation wasn’t one that Pearcey wanted to continue. The truth was, he thought, that whatever had happened to his wife and daughter, they were beyond his help now. If they’d been infected ...well, they were gone. If they hadn’t been infected, and from what he’d seen, the odds of that were as slim as slim, slim shady, he’d never be able to track them down.
It wasn’t any too likely that they’d be sitting in their pretty semi in the suburbs of Newcastle waiting for him to come rolling up like Sir Lancelot in a Subaru.
No, if he was going to dash halfway across the country to try and be at their side, he should have done it at the start of the crisis. Instead, he’d obeyed orders and gone to the shelter.
“What about you?” he said, to change the subject as much as anything else.
“Parents and brother are abroad. I think my parents ...I think they were infected. Not much family left here in the UK. I don’t have that many friends. And I’m ...well ...between girlfriends, I guess you’d say. Been a few months since I was in relationship. So, no. Not really. There isn’t anybody.”
Julian sounded pathetic even to himself.
God alone knew what the gruffly competent man sitting next to him must think. The few months since a relationship came out as two years when translated into true speak. Even then, it had been a mostly unhappy and unsatisfactory six months of disagreement followed by drunken coupling. Being in a relationship with Carly had been an endless cycle of mystifying extremes. Torture sessions followed by shots of morphine.
When it got to the point where even the feverish sex wasn’t sufficient to bridge the fundamental gaps between them, even for an hour or two, she’d drifted painlessly out of his life. He’d felt little more than a sense of relief and a vague gratitude that it was finished. He’d missed the sex but not enough to persist with the pressure suit constriction of intimacy with her.
Pearcey didn’t comment on the emptiness of his life and Julian was grateful for that.
“Carlton, you seem to know a lot about the complex, the CIMC. Was it part of your ...duties? You know, before the ...collapse?” Julian asked.
“Kind of. I’d been there a few times. Going over drills. Emergency scenarios. That type of thing. I’d gotten to know Sonny, Sonny Gallagher. The engineer that was in there?”
Julian nodded and Pearcey continued.
“When this kicked off, before it went absolutely fucking mental, we had a chat, Sonny and I. He gave me the nod about exits, that sort of stuff. He’s been involved with the CIMC for years, probably knows it as well as anyone.”
Pearcey paused and a troubled look passed over his face like a cloud across the moon.
“Hope he made it out. He’s a good bloke. Tried calling him when it looked like we’d been breached but the network was gone.”
He got his smartphone from a pocket and activated it, weary dismissal displacing the concern on his face as he slipped the device away again.
“Even if the network’s still working, I’m pretty sure that the local base stations have got fucked up with whatever’s burning out there.”
Silence fell over them, introspection blanketing further conversation.
After a moment, Pearcey produced the pistol and began to check it. Deftly removed the magazine and replaced it with another that appeared from one of the numerous pockets in his dust covered jacket. Julian watched him tinker with the weapon.
“How did you get into ...whatever it is that you do? You know, working for the government and all of that. Carrying guns. What is that by the way?” Julian asked.
“Gosh Jules, you ask a lot of fucking questions for a man who’s s’posed to come up with all the answers. It’s like being on through the fucking keyhole without the jokes.”
There wasn’t any animosity in the statement. More mildly vexed amusement.
“Sorry. I guess it’s what I do really. Ask questions, that is. Ascertain facts.”
Pearcey squinted at the gun in his hand and slid it back inside his jacket. Then clasped his hands between his knees as if in thought, leaning forward, looking up and sideways as he replied.
“Glock nine mil. Seventeen rounds. Better than the Browning.”
He pursed his lips as he looked at Julian.
“No mystery. No fascination. It’s just a tool that you learn how to use. Like your laptop there, or a plumber’s pipeslice.”
The irritation in his voice that Julian had heard in previous conversations had mellowed now to a resigned tiredness.
Julian nodded to signal that he understood, and for Carlton to continue.
“Spent most of my early life in the army. Did well. Progression and promotion and all that happy crappy. I was good at it and on the whole I suppose I enjoyed it. But ...as they so very rightly say, nothing lasts forever. I was happily soldiering around when the government decided cutbacks were the order of the day. The day after that, some deskbound chinless wonder stopped bashing the bishop long enough to come up with the bright idea of getting rid of the older blokes.
Get rid of the ones that have been knocking around a while. The veterans. Make them redundant and we’ll save loads a money. And let’s face it, the battle-scarred old fuckers must be getting tired anyway. We’ll be doing them a favour. They’ll be like flies round shit trying to sign up and ship out.”
Pearcey laughed slightly and shook his head. As much at himself as at what he was saying.
“Anyway, ancient fucking history. I could tell which way the wind was blowing and I’d made plenty of friends over the years. One of the influential friends happened to be connected at Whitehall and I ended up landing a nice little job, wet nursing officials and dignitaries. Generally making sure the important people felt safe and secure. A nasty looking black nanny with a glock.”
He squinted at Julian and half smiled.
”It’s not as glamourous, or as dangerous, as it sounds.”
His face turned serious and the humour was gone like the ghost of Christmas past.
“Not as dangerous as this shit for sure.”
Julian placed his empty coke can on the desk and let his gaze drift from the man to the window. The smoke seemed denser than when they’d arrived.
“Carlton, have you given any thought to where we should go?” He said.
The man shook his head, also gazing out of the window. “Wherever it is, we ought to go soon. Before this place gets all towering inferno on us. The smoke’s getting thicker.”
His chin tilted up at the window.
“That smoke may not be so great from the being fried alive perspective, but at least it’ll give us some cover getting to the car.”
Julian nodded again before speaking.
“I have an idea.”
“I’m all ears Julie baby,” Pearcey replied.
“Before everything went haywire at the shelter, I managed to make contact with an acquaintance of mine at an institution in the midlands. A place called Black Hills. The Black Hills Research Institute
.
The friend, he invited me there if I needed somewhere to go. Mailed me some details. It’s a quasi-governmental place. All a bit cloak and dagger but pretty well provisioned and protected from what I know about it.”
“What makes you think it’ll be any better than the CIMC? That it won’t be overrun when we rock up, all ready for a hot bath and a full English?” Pearcey said.
“It’s not like the CIMC. Not governed by government so as to speak ...more of an organisation with ...governmental associations. Private enterprise with state endorsement and support.
Modern. State of the art. Only built a few years ago. And Bart, that’s my friend there, he seemed to understand the enormity of what was happening. I may be wrong about that, but you have to read between the lines sometimes.”
Pearcey considered Julian with raised eyebrows.
“Alright professor, it’s more of a plan than I’ve got at the minute. I’m going to take a wazz and then we’ll go get the motor.”
Pearcey got to his feet with a grunt of effort.
As he walked to the nearest wash room, he glanced out of a window at the churning smoke.
Absently spoke to himself.
“Although, I better warn you, it’s a real pea-souper out there. Proper Victorian shit. And I think there’s more than one Jack running round in this smog.”
Chapter 6.
Caroline and Adalia at the Office.
Caroline Denning’s hands were bleeding, palms skinned on the ground as she’d thrown herself beneath the rapidly lowering gate. A nail was torn at the quick. She felt her knee and found fresh blood as she inspected her fingers. Felt her eyes prickle with tears and fought them back as she rolled onto her back and considered how much worse it could have been.
The roller-shuttered entrance was besieged by attackers. Five, six, and then too many to count.
She could see claws gripping the perforated sections of the metal security shutter. One or two of the creatures were actually biting at it. Another couple of them scrabbled at the base where it met the ground. Smart enough to understand that it could be opened.
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