Skittering away into the darkness. A heavy pebble into a black well that seemed to swell and ripple. A bumping, bouncing progress that was incredibly loud in the enclosed space.
Above her she thought.
The crash, the noise, had been above her and that thought filled her chest with warm panic, and her legs with liquid weakness.
That couldn’t be right.
Outside.
It had to be outside. The acoustics were weird in the stairwell and it was messing with her head.
That was all.
It was messing with her head.
Just weird acoustics in a strange place and strangely quiet world.
Acoustics or not, Adalia threw herself down the stairs. Fear of falling trumped by fear of the unknown. Hand skimming over the handrail, barely touching it.
Stumbling and running. Forward momentum and legs powered by the reactions of youth were all that saved her. Kept her in one piece rather than a jumble of broken bones at the foot of the stairway.
She still might have broken her nose if Ranj hadn’t opened the stairwell doorway as she was about to blindly crash into it. Instead, she slammed into his chest, which, in itself, didn’t do her sinuses any favours, and carried them both out into the hallway.
“Wow. What happened?” He said in a heavy whisper.
Holding her shoulders at arm’s length after they’d picked themselves off the floor and he’d managed to catch her before she continued racing hysterically round the building.
Adalia breathed deeply as if she’d just run a race.
Uttered a panicky little laugh.
“I came down to see if you were okay. Thought I heard a noise.”
She gestured in the direction of the stairwell.
“Dark in there. Spooked me. Sorry. Dropped my radio.”
“It’s okay, it’s okay. It was tricky when I came down earlier, last couple of flights are pitch black. Your radio, that must have been what I heard, that’s why I went to the door. We’ll get it later, yeah?
He awkwardly hugged her, led her to the end of the corridor. Away from the main entrance and old woman lying on the floor, the big man slumped against the wall opposite her.
They sat, leaning against the wall, arms touching.
“Are you okay?” Ranj asked her.
“Yeah, yeah. Think I twisted my knee maybe.”
She massaged her knee and flexed her leg.
“This is all so fucked up man.”
She gave him an embarrassed smile, the voice ghosting in her head.
Babychild, I hope you like the taste of that new soap in the bathroom. Because believe me, anymore of that language and you will be washing your mouth out with it.
“Yeah, and it’s getting more fucked up all the time,” Ranj replied.
She couldn’t see much of his face in the dimness but what she could see looked worried. His voice was low and sombre.
“Attis, the guy, he’s a nurse. He’s okay, trying to look after that woman. Doing his thing, you know. He fell asleep about an hour ago. I’d ...well, you know, pretty much left him to it. He’s a nurse right? I don’t have a clue with that stuff. Anyways, I went over a few minutes ago to kind of ...you know, check on her.”
Ranj hesitated and now Adalia could see the worry without any trouble at all. Writ large in his soft brown eyes and broad brown face.
“She’s ...not right. Injured. Unconsciousness. Bitten. Torn up. All that shit. But that’s not what I mean. She looks ...wrong. She’s changing.”
<><><>
Adalia stood over the woman and wished she had more light. Wondered why she hadn’t grabbed one of the row of flashlights in the security office. Not that she would have shone it now. Not in the old woman’s face. Not right by the glass frontage that opened straight on the street.
It was frustrating to not be able to see clearly. True, this woman looked wrong, but she couldn’t see detail. She leaned down and looked closer at some of the wounds. Delicately peeled back some of the bandages. The wounds were filmed.
Those terrible wounds. Not raw or scabbed. Filmed over. Skinned over with a skin unlike anything she’d ever seen. Tough opaque skin. Healed in an unnatural way.
She leaned closer to the woman’s face.
That was wrong too. Not exactly old anymore. Not like any age of person anymore. More like someone had sucked all the fat out of her. Old ...and ageless ...and wrong.
The face of the old woman seemed to undulate and move. The old woman’s body convulsed and rippled at the same time. She moaned and grunted. A pleading guttural sound that was so creepy that it kicked creepy out of stadium.
Adalia jerked back.
Afraid and repulsed.
“Oh shit, I don’t like this.”
She pushed Ranj back to the end of the corridor, as far as she could, away from Attis and the woman.
If she’d been scared in the stairwell, this was fear of another sort. Looking at that poor old woman made her feel sick and want to run away, and at that the same time strike out and be cruel.
When she was younger, playing by the communal bins of her block, she remembered finding a huge long tailed rat gnawing at a dead cat. She’d been sickly fascinated. Old Mr Ratty was chowing down on Mr Catty and thinking all was well with the world. She’d wanted to run and scream then as well.
Instead, she’d crept away and found half a house brick. Crept back and weakly tossed the brick at the rat.
Mr Ratty had simply stopped eating and eyed her with a terrifying insouciance. Then she had screamed. Screamed and screamed, until the rat had vanished like smoke in a breeze.
She wanted to scream now but screaming wouldn’t get Mr Ratty to back off this time, it would bring Mr Ratty’s big brothers streaming to their fragile glass doors.
“What are we gonna do Ranj? I think she’s turning into one of those things. Was she already infected and ...or is it that she got bit? Man, I can’t get my brain round any of this shit. What about him?”
She indicated Attis.
“Should we wake him up?”
Ranj ran his hands through his short hair and chewed his lip.
“Let’s just stay cool.”
He looked tired.
“Can’t leave her alone.”
Thinking out loud. Thoughts escaping his mind in murmurs through his mouth.
“He’s the nurse. Qualified. He bought her in.”
Ranj looked aside at the weighty improvised weapon that he’d dropped by the door. Adalia noticed that his hands were shaking very slightly. Nerves escaping his body in involuntary movements.
“You go on back upstairs. I’ll wake Attis and talk to him.”
Voice whispery and disembodied in the darkness. A rumour of bad news.
“What are you going to do Ranj?”
“What can we do? Drag her out on the street and leave her? Lock her in an office? Beat her brains out before she wakes up in case might be ...turned? One of them.
We’ll have to watch her ...and be ready.”
His voice had lost the grimness. He just sounded scared now.
Outside, a long way off, they heard pop-pop-pop sounds. It could have been stuff exploding in fire, or gunshots, or fireworks celebrating something that was worth celebrating.
Unknown craziness when craziness had achieved new dimensions.
Outside and in.
No escape.
Adalia made him accompany her to the security office and equipped them both with torches before she left him to it. The torch made the journey back up the staircase fractionally less terrifying.
It didn’t help her sleep.
<><><>
Ranj woke her. Not that she was deeply asleep. He was on one knee, a charmless prince at the bedside of a sleepless beauty. He proffered a tentative touch to her shoulder, a barely discernible weight that was still sufficient to make her open her eyes with a start and search for the wrench at the side of the cushion.
She must have slept, there was
natural light filling the huge room, but it hadn’t been in any way restful or restorative. Adalia dragged herself into a sitting position on the sofa and tried to remember what day it was. She couldn’t. Ridiculously she didn’t know what day it was. Maybe Thursday?
“You okay?” Ranj asked quietly.
She made a face that conveyed more than her voice ever could have.
“I told Caroline and Philip about last night. I let you sleep for a while. We’re going down to see how she is now and I thought you wouldn’t want to just wake up alone.”
Ranj shrugged and Adalia could have hugged him.
She didn’t, she just nodded.
<><><>
The four of them stood at the end of the corridor, away from the windows because they were afraid of being seen from outside, and away from the injured woman because she’d also become a source of fear.
Whatever change was taking place had progressed since Adalia had seen her a few hours earlier. It was hard now to deny the fact that the old woman was changing into something different and frightening. Something very like the savage things that roamed the streets outside.
Attis had been awake when they arrived in the foyer and Ranj had shown him upstairs to freshen up and eat. The big Greek had been bleary-eyed from poor sleep and grim faced from the grim prospect of the woman. When Ranj returned, the four of them stood loosely grouped by the stairwell door as if ready to bolt at any sign of waking from the unconscious figure.
“She’s turning into one of them isn’t she?”
Adalia couldn’t help but voice the question even though the answer was as obvious to her as everyone else.
“What are we gonna do?”
Philip Sault eventually broke the silence.
“Put her outside.”
The statement was blunt and without inflection and triggered another period of silence.
“Seriously? Put her out there? Throw her to the ...”
Adalia trailed off. She wasn’t vehement, just subdued and disbelieving, and she didn’t want to finish that sentence because it was too ...right.
Too apt. Throwing her to the wolves was too real and horrible and too close to the unreal reality that was out there. There were wolves now, monster alien wolves that used to be people, but wolves nonetheless.
Philip Sault looked at her with the suggestion of a smile.
A little smile that twitched the corners of his mouth and gave up long before it had time to reach his eyes.
“I’m open to a better proposition. We’ve all seen what these things can do and Old Mother Hubbard there is definitely beginning to look like one of them. If she wakes up and starts attacking people are you going to stop her? Sit here, watch her. Stop that from happening? She’s on the turn fo’ sure darlin’. I don’t know if the bites infected her or if she’s just a late developer.
I think the bites probably did it. But either way, are you willing to take the chance? Take the chance for all of us? Just a little nip might do it you know. A little nip on yo’ arm and ya might be losing ya hair and growing bigger teeth. At least you’d never need to polish your nails again.”
The smile ghosted around Sault’s lips again and fled as quickly as before. Jokily chilling and chillingly serious.
He stopped talking and his eyes roamed over her. Sceptical, appraising a cut of meat in the supermarket, unsure of the quality and provenance. Beef or horse, lean or riddled with gristle, take your pick and enjoy the taste, it’s all good stuff and I’ll chew it up and swallow it down whatever the outcome, thank you very much.
Caroline was first to reply with the kind of look she’d have given someone suggesting free takeaway for those working after midnight.
“No, that’s too much, too far. No. Adalia is right, we can’t do that. She might get better, might not turn into one of those things. We can’t just dump her outside and hope she’ll be alright.”
The stairwell door opened before further conversation and Attis reappeared. Hulking and awkward as he nearly walked into them.
Ranj spoke up before anyone else.
“How about we move her? We could do that now. To one of the offices. In the foyer is bad anyway, right there in view of the windows. Attis, we could do that now right? She’s messed up anyway man, you can’t look after her in the hallway right?”
Attis looked tired and unready for questions.
“I do not think I can do anything for her. Moving her will not matter. She is very like the people who were infected in the hospital. She is changing I think. We must be ...prepared. It may be that she will wake and be ...dangerous to us.”
They discussed it for another ten minutes and then decided on an office in a corridor to the left of the lifts, opposite the entrance to the stairs.
<><><>
The office was close to the dining room. The smell from there was beginning to pervade the air in the corridor. A darkly cloying odour that spoke of spoil and ruin. Ranj had warned them not to enter that space but the smell had overtaken his warning. The smell was warning enough now.
Caroline wondered how long it would be before that smell leaked outside. How long before it filled the building from top to bottom and blossomed out onto the street like the fragrance from a sickly enticing flower. If, in extremis, she’d thought this place was a haven, it was already beginning to take on the aspect a tomb. Shadowy and perilous, filled with the unexpected and surrounded by sinuous death. An isolated island, an anachronism in a world turned to nightmare.
She’d fled from what had once been her partner, saved a girl she didn’t know, and in turn been saved by an unfamiliar employee. Ending up in a place that she thought might be safe from the insanity outside, a place where she used to be narrowly important. It struck her that she no longer held any influence here, the illusion of power had developed fault lines with the collapse and shattered in what ensued. In tandem with that, the place had lost any sense of solidity, was liquefying around her.
Staying here now was beginning to seem like madness in itself.
Attis volunteered to carry the old woman and none of them argued. Neither Caroline, Adalia nor Ranj wanted to touch her. They didn’t say it aloud, just let Attis take her. They wanted to help, to do what they thought was right, but the old lady was taking on an alien aspect. She had become a dormant threat. However civilised their intentions, they didn’t really want to be near her, let alone lay hands on her increasingly rigid body.
Philip Sault was less guarded about his feelings. As Attis carefully laid her on the floor in the room and rejoined them in the doorway, Sault looked at Caroline.
“Do you have a key for this room?”
She nodded.
“Well I’d keep it to hand and use it if I were you. Especially if no one is watching her. You may be willing to risk your lives but I only gamble when the odds are in my favour.”
He stared at Caroline, holding her eyes with his gaze.
Cold and uncompromising, all trace of that questionable humour vanished like the memory of dirty snow. Then he left them, saying he was going upstairs.
Attis and Ranj volunteered to stay and the two women promised to swap with them in two hours. Caroline got the key for the door, rummaged through the ring she carried and detached it, eventually inserting it in the lock. She turned to Attis but spoke to them all.
“I’m not sure I like Philip ...or trust him for that matter. But he’s got a point. I don’t know if what we’re doing makes a lot of sense but I can’t think of what else to do.”
<><><>
And so the day progressed. A Thursday unlike any other. A day out of time and beyond comprehension in any comprehensible terms. The ordinary world gone and yet still there, something viewed through a smoked glass.
Philip Sault distant and roving. Exploring locked floors with a determination that bordered on adventure, yet was always more purposeful than that word allowed for.
Attis Moraitis stationed obsessively at the side of an injured old lady. A good man i
n an unfamiliar land, a place made lethally cruel by an event beyond imagining.
Ranjit Basuta calm and introverted. Attending to those around him with a humanity that could have been mistaken for servility.
Adalia Baker quiet and restless. Floating between a woman who had saved her life and a man who, in turn, had saved both her and her saviour. Troubled by voices from the past and intuitions about the present.
And Caroline Denning detached and pensive. Thinking about the unthinkable future and questioning the inadequacy of the past.
<><><>
The old woman woke up while Caroline and Adalia were there.
Attis was also present of course, the good nurse, caring when it wasn’t his turn to care. Feeling responsible when the responsibility lay elsewhere.
They’d positioned themselves in the corridor with the doorway to the office open, allowing them a view of the woman whilst retaining the option to slam the door shut if she began to exhibit signs of immediate threat. A doubtful safeguard given that they felt compelled to continually enter the room and inspect her.
Part of it was simple human compassion mixed with a sense of obligation. Part of it was fear swirled with fascination at the process that was taking place before their very eyes. The fact that the woman was becoming like the things that roamed the streets outside was inescapable. The three of them were skirting around this inevitability when she growled more loudly and began to shudder and twitch, her breathing stertorous yet strong. Rasping and noisy.
Attis went to her, kneeled at her side for a moment, and then backed away a few feet.
“Is she waking up? Attis, what the fuck, is she coming round?” Adalia asked.
He seemed to be torn between retreating further and the urge to witness first hand whatever would ensue. Adalia kind of got that, kind of got him. It was what he did. Looked after people and almost liked the sickness, embraced the details of the illness. You had to be into all that illness shit, the symptoms, progress of the disease, all of that not-so-good stuff, if you were going to be around it day in day out. And there was something sickly entrancing about watching the old lady change. It had cast a spell over Adalia, she was unwillingly fascinated by the ripples and undulations that she’d seen course through the poor woman’s body. Appalled and mesmerised by its profound nature, the raw unquestionable power and the staggering implications of it.
Ferine Apocalypse (Book 1): Collapse Page 39