Always dangerous to make judgements when you’d only known people for hours or days. It was the name of the game though. They may have only just met, but you made friends fast in a crisis or you didn’t have any friends at all ...and you never knew when you might need a friend.
Pearcey couldn’t shake the sensation that he’d missed his chance with Joe. A feeling that he wasn’t going to see him, or Elliot for that matter, ever again.
The gate to Black Hills slid shut, the slow motion snick of a trap closing on empty air, and Pearcey’s attention drifted away from the philosophy of friends and survival and back to immediate concerns. There were big guides on that powerful gate and a slickly engineered track planted deep in secure steel. Smooth strong mechanics.
Precision. Custom made to expensive order.
And more than that, engineering that was still powered when everything else seemed to be failing.
Whatever Black Hills was, and Pearcey knew there was more to that than he currently understood, it was still functioning.
He looked round at the others in the back of the Range Rover. Julian and Adalia smiled nervously at him.
Sault was impassive.
Pearcey gave the smallest wink to Jules and the girl and blanked Sault.
He harboured a gut dislike of that guy. To Pearcey’s thinking, Sault was the kind of man that if he crossed the road in front of you, your foot would instinctively go for the accelerator ahead of the brake. No basis for it on their short and stress-filled acquaintance, he didn’t know the guy. It was just gut reaction. During his sometimes perilous and often unpredictable life, gut instinct had generally been good enough for Pearcey.
They were ascending rapidly, a steep gradient.
Flawless road surface. Balanced camber, perfectly maintained.
No hint or evidence of Jacks.
Bare rock to the left and a view to the right that made Pearcey’s stomach flutter with vertigo. Distant suggestion of a cityscape, smoking and somehow desolate, ugly pylons marching diagonally across the picture.
The road wound upwards.
Through a killing floor chicane that clenched Pearcey like a dig in the kidneys and had his hand reflexively fingering at the gun. He forced himself to relax. He didn’t know exactly what to expect here, but lethal ambush was getting just a bit too paranoid even for his frazzled state.
He dragged a rough, damp hand over his face.
God he was tired.
So tired that saying he was tired didn’t even get close, not even near to the right ball park, let alone in it. He was just about beat. His body too filled with aches and pains to bother counting them, and his mind dulled and worn like a blunted blade.
The road flattened out and switched left, arriving at a set of double fences, each punctuated by a gate similar to that at the bottom of the hill. A fenced corridor of steel mesh that stretched away on either side of the dual gates.
As Caroline brought the vehicle to a stop, they all sat and stared for a few moments.
Once or twice, Pearcey had come across something like this, not precisely the same, perhaps not as intimidatingly complete looking, but reminiscent. It was impressive and unsettling, reminded him of a cross between a hi-tech prison and a corporate headquarters designed to scare the shit out of visitors and make the workers feel like they should be grovelling grateful to be spending time there. The set up with the fencing, and what it circled, was quietly awesome. Suggestive of influence and financial might that dwarfed normality, made wealthy men feel poor and powerful men feel weak.
Beyond two tall wire fences, a translucent block rose out of the ground like it had been accidentally dropped in the grass by an alien child. Four stories high, the building had a reflective quality that diminished its imposing size, made it almost blend with the storm-laden sky. The longer Pearcey stared at it, the bigger it became and the more it merged with the landscape and fused with the sky.
How had they built this thing? Forget about construction, simply transporting the raw materials up here would be a logistical miracle. How had they even got planning permission given the greenbelt setting?
“The cameras may pick us up, give it a minute. If the gates stay shut, I’ll get out and try the intercom,” Julian said.
The two lines of metal fencing created a barrier circuit before you could get to the centre. In places, it was interrupted by small moss stained concrete towers, the nearest one by the inner gate post. Pearcey could see another two, off in the distance on either side of the gateway, before trees and bushes cut his view. Anonymous constructions but he guessed that they’d be there for a reason other than supporting the fences.
And by the way, those fences had little nuggets on them that resembled electrical transformers to Pearcey’s tired eye. He had a suspicion that there was at least a possibility that some juicy old current could flow through the metal.
Electrified fences ...how did you get clearance for that sort of shit?
Powerful connections was how. Same as it ever was, plain and simple as that.
The first gate slid back as slickly as the one at the bottom of the hill.
“We’re going, right?” Caroline asked as she gently edged them through.
Nobody demurred.
She stopped at the second gate and they sat there as the first gate rolled shut behind them.
Trapped.
Nobody said it but the thought filled the inside of the car as strongly as the smell of sweat-damp clothing.
The wait stretched, not as long as it seemed, but long enough to shred their nerves.
If this went tits up, Pearcey didn’t have much in the way of a back-up plan. Circumstances had conspired to rob him of the energy apart from anything else. Like Joe Byrne, he’d spied the big walled houses at the end of that never-ending lane. Maybe they might offer some temporary refuge.
He’d clocked a couple of isolated dwellings along the way as well. Maybe one of those might be possible.
Maybe. Not the one with the monstrously warped baby thing in the drive though. Oh no, not on your smelly breath nelly.
In any event, they’d have to resolve this first. Be allowed in or somehow extricate themselves from the situation.
He was about to tell Julian that the pair of them needed to venture out to the gate and rattle someone’s cage when the second gate slid smoothly open.
Caroline drove through without asking for anyone’s opinion, and Pearcey thought that was just about right.
There wasn’t any choice.
She took it slow and steady and eased to a stop in front of what was presumably the main entrance. Up close the building was oddly blank, corporate in feel yet utterly anonymous.
No signage apart from a weird metallic symbol. A warped diamond shape that dribbled downwards like so much cooling solder. Almost sexual, somehow suggestive.
Nothing announcing the name of the organisation, no blurb, no slogan tagline decreeing a mission conjured by overpaid marketing professionals, designed to stick in the mind like a friendly radiation burn.
Whoever had created and ran this place didn’t have any interest in advertising or even identifying themselves in any conventional sense.
Over the last week, Pearcey had felt that he’d passed into some sort of parallel universe, an unreal horror world.
Sitting in front of the Black Hills complex, it crossed his mind that he might just have found a rabbit hole in the nightmare. Another twist in the lunacy. It wouldn’t have been any massive surprise if Alice or the Mad Hatter had come out to greet them. If that happened, it was quite possible that Pearcey might have laughed. It was probably more likely that he’d have riddled it with his last few bullets.
Then improvised an escape, because tired as he might be, he wasn’t ready to give up yet.
Not quite ready anyway.
As it was, a door opened and a young bearded man emerged and held up a cheery hand.
“Hey, we’re good, that’s Bart,” Julian said from the backseat. I
t was as cheery as Pearcey had heard him sound since they’d first met on Julian’s doorstep.
<><><>
Statistical Sanctuary.
Julian found Bart in the atrium, sitting on the steps, staring out through the front of the building. Smoking one of those vape cigarette contraptions and sipping coffee.
“’How’s it going Bart?” Julian asked as he sat down beside him.
“Hey dude, pull up a chair.”
Bart squeezed a button and puffed vapour.
“Do you know, I’ve been toking on these little variable voltage wonders for ...oh, perhaps a year now, in the hope of extending my existence beyond the rigours of the real thing, those deliciously cancerous cocktails of tobacco, paper and chemicals. I think I’m going to make it a mission to ferret out some packs of the genuine article, before they’re too stale to be great, and enjoy life a little.”
He puffed again. A three inch white metal oblong with a glass and metal extension. The ugliest cigarette holder you’d ever seen.
“Do you know something else? I had you earmarked to work here from way back. That was the real reason I went to those rather ridiculous conferences, to scope out new recruits, raw talent. Spotted you, thought you’d fit in with the whole vibe of the place, you know? Funny that you ended up here anyway, given the somewhat extraordinary circumstances.”
The hint of a sad smile played around Bart’s mouth.
Julian looked at him and then stared off through the front of the building. Momentarily nonplussed, digesting that unexpected little revelation.
Two figures moved into view outside. Both carried short rifles, snub-nosed, ending in bluntly rounded chunks of metal.
Silencers.
Julian recognised Carlton Pearcey instantly by his size and the limp. He had a vivid yet somehow dim memory of where that limp had come from, the car twisting through the air as it crashed, wondering if Carlton might be dead. That particular recollection would inhabit his dreams, cavort through them in twirling detail until the day he died.
Alongside a number of others.
The shorter, even wider man with Carlton had to be McCarthy, the sole remnant of the centre’s security staff. McCarthy had legs that were, it struck Julian whenever he encountered the man, thicker than Julian’s waist. He’d never run the tape measure to verify it, didn’t have the requisite tailoring skills or indeed any burning desire to do so, but it was definitely the impression that he’d gained.
Julian and the rest of his not so merry band of survivors had been here for, what, three weeks now? At least that surely? The weather was getting warmer if anything, June must be edging into July?
Yes, probably three weeks, possibly longer, funny how time flies. Tempus fugitting all over the damned place.
“There was another suicide this morning. The first since you guys arrived. The fourth since it all kicked off. Well, three confirmed anyway, one told me she was walking away and had no desire to continue living. I took it as the proverbial done deal.”
Bart stopped speaking, pressed a button on his shiny surrogate cigarette gizmo and disconsolately sucked vapour into his lungs, jetted a big plume of fake smoke into the vast space above them. Regarded the electronic device with mild distaste.
“I really must acquire some proper cigarettes and pop this charmless beauty back in its box.”
Julian stared at him.
Talking to Bart was always illuminating, often enjoyable, but usually disconcerting in some way. For Julian anyway. He guessed that Bart was rarely disconcerted by anything other than his own thoughts.
They were similar ages but when he talked to Bart, Julian frequently felt as though he were sitting at a benign tutor’s knee. Some wizened professor who had seen it all and imagined more, and carelessly cast pearls of wisdom at your feet when he spoke. All non sequiturs and topical jumps that disguised the flaring brilliance that filled his head.
He suspected that Bart was one of those bona fide geniuses that would go off the scale. Flick through a Mensa test like it was a coffee time crossword and ignore approval because it was irrelevant to him.
“What are you going to do? About the suicide. Who was it? How did they do it?” Julian eventually asked him.
Bart watched the two men outside and nodded in their direction before speaking again.
“Our intrepid fellows out there, or their helpers, will deal with the practicalities. Disposing of the body etc. It was Gloria, not sure if you knew her to any degree. Late fifties, came in with Khan’s party before you arrived. She’d amassed a sufficient quantity of barbiturates to make a reasonably good job of it. Still managed to spray vomit everywhere. It’s not awfully pretty.”
Julian tried to digest that and followed Bart’s gaze beyond the windows. A mutant appeared between the two fences, running at Carlton and McCarthy as they stood to the right of the main gates. It hurled itself at the inner fence and began to climb. Carlton placed a hand on the other man’s shoulder and seemed to glide forward despite the limp, moved right up to the fence. The creature was already above his head, scaling the metal with clawed hands and feet.
Carlton angled the rifle upwards, silenced barrel close to the metal, inches from the creature’s stomach. Blew the thing off the fence. Julian could see matter spray out behind the mutant as it fell backwards.
Carlton repositioned himself, rifle shouldered, scope to eye, and carefully, with great deliberation, fired again through the grilling.
“You did well finding him. He’s extremely capable,” Bart said as they watched the two men conferring.
“It was luck. Circumstance,” Julian replied, unsettled at the suggestion that he’d engineered something that he considered a genuine friendship.
“Ha. Clever people have that nasty habit of getting lucky,” Bart said he pulled on the e-cigarette.
“Not unlike the beautiful amongst us. They have a habit of being lucky as well.”
Julian glanced at him and turned his attention back outside. Carlton and McCarthy slowly slid out of view. Walking the perimeter. First light and dusk, they walked the inner perimeter, walked the tall fences.
Anything they killed would be cleared later, collected under armed guard and dumped off a sheer drop at the rear of the grounds. If the wind was right, getting up round that area was a pure nasal joy. Julian had been there and fought vertigo and nausea in equal measure.
The fence could be electrified but they were holding off on that for now.
Maybe if the situation changed.
Black Hills had various independent power supplies but they were still limited.
Wasn’t everything? Power was precious. Juicing the fences was considered a last resort.
“Are we safe here Bart?”
It was like asking your doctor how long you had left. Impossible to expect an honest or accurate answer so why ask in the first place. It was a stupid question.
But it itched at Julian’s mind.
Tickled. A light but undeniable irritation. Dried wax in his ear that he couldn’t shake out.
And there was no one better qualified at the moment to answer as far as Julian could see.
“For now I suppose we are,” Bart replied.
“We’re definitely better off than most, safer than majority of people who weren’t infected and survived.”
Julian chewed on that for a few moments and then asked what had been gnawing at him since the very beginning when he’d been underground at the CIMC bunker in London. Lifted out of his life forever and deposited in a supposedly secure place. Alongside a lot of strangers, feeling lost and confused beneath the surface of the earth.
“Do you think we’re going to make it? The human race, I mean,” Julian said.
Even to his own ears, he sounded like a little boy asking daddy if they were there yet.
“What do you think dude? You’re the number cruncher, good buddy. What’s your analysis of the situation?”
Bart looked at him fully for the first time since Julian
had sat beside him.
“I don’t have solid data, it’s estimated. Best guess stuff, you know?” Julian said.
Bart shrugged and nodded for him to continue.
“Assume ninety to ninety-five percent infection. That leaves perhaps three to six million people in the UK. From what I’ve experienced, the attrition rate in the first week on that number will be horrendous. Possibly ninety percent again. That would leave six hundred thousand at the higher estimate but possibly half that. I think it’s entirely possible that only nought point five percent of the human population has survived.”
Julian looked at Bart for his reaction.
“Yeah, that could be right.”
Bart didn’t seem to care.
“Do you know, when everything started going all dawn of the dead on us, I sent out nearly a thousand emails,” Bart said almost wistfully.
“Used up all the contact lists I had and scavenged more. Anyone I could think of.
And guess what. I received four replies, one of which was yours, and if we’re being precise, that wasn’t a true reply, you had already originated a message.”
He smiled slightly at his own pedantry.
“Is the human race going to survive? In our form, as we are now, sitting here chatting? Theoretical, hypothetical, philosophical? Thinking beings interacting in an endlessly unpredictable fashion? From the data I have, I’d classify the probability as doubtful. I think this could be an extinction level event. We’ll battle on of course, those of us that remain, give it the good old university best shot at success, but the odds are stacked against us.
The numbers of casualties are one consideration but factor in the new threat, the massive amount of mutated, and it starts looking distinctly hinky. They’re predators of an entirely different order to any that we’ve had to overcome in the course of our known evolution. That terrible attrition rate you mentioned ...I think there’s every chance that could continue. I believe it’s entirely feasible that the number of survivors could continue to fall.”
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