Down: Trilogy Box Set

by Glenn Cooper

  With every step she took forward, Woodbourne took one backward until he was pressed against the wall. She kept coming until she was inches away. Looking up into his horrified face she pushed the knife handle into his palm.

  “Do it. I don’t care if it hurts.”

  He stared at the knife. “It won’t hurt.”

  “You promise?”

  “I promise.”

  “You promise you come with me?”

  “I promise.”

  He’d always been a blade man. He knew how to kill a victim slow and he knew how to kill one fast. His hand moved so quickly she never saw it coming. The carotid blood hit him in the chest and then the face when bent over to catch her falling body. He felt her go limp and slowly lowered her to the floor.

  He hadn’t cried since he was five or six but his chest began to shudder. He caught himself. There wasn’t time for grief. She’d be there, scared, waiting for him. Who knew what scum might be wandering about London, set to pounce on a new arrival to Hell. He took the knife, red with her blood and smoothly slit his own throat, ear-to-ear.

  Ben and his security detail pulled up in front of Benona’s flat. The red car Woodbourne had taken from the hospital was still running at the curb. His agents insisted Ben stay downstairs while they made entry. He’d interviewed Benona there two months before after Woodbourne released mother and daughter and fled the scene, after he’d been caught and sent back to Hell. While Ben waited, he wondered why Woodbourne had returned and why he’d rushed to the hospital? He had so many questions. A pair of agents had been dispatched to the Homerton Hospital after calls to the place went unanswered.

  An agent came down to get Ben.

  “They’re all dead,” he said.

  Ben ran up the stairs and stumbled through the small flat taking it all in.

  The agent said, “It looks like he killed the girl, maybe suffocated her. Then he killed the woman and committed suicide.”

  “I’m not so sure,” Ben said.

  His mobile rang. It was one of his people calling from the hospital. He listened and rang off.

  “No, it didn’t go down like that,” Ben told the agent. “What happened here was something entirely different.”

  Del and Willie pushed the cafeteria doors open a few inches at a time and were relieved they didn’t creak or squeal. Once inside they closed them just as carefully.

  The lobby of the cafeteria housed the administration offices and a lounge where residents congregated before entering the dining area. The only light came from the glowing fire exit signs. The swinging double doors to the dining room were closed.

  Del cradled the fire-extinguisher thermite bomb in his arms, his pistol stuck in his waistband. Willie had the remote-control unit.

  Willie whispered to him, “I’ll push the right door open and you slide it in. Don’t roll it. It’ll knock the battery off.”

  “I know, I know,” Del whispered back. “I’m not stupid.”

  Willie tiptoed up to the doors and put his hand on the right one. Del was a pace behind.

  He mouthed the words, one, two, three, and pushed hard.

  Del took a step forward and blinked into the faintly lit space. There was no sign of the sleeping Hellers he had spied through the window.

  “Why aren’t you tossing it?” Willie whispered urgently.

  “’Cause I can’t see no one,” Del replied. “Maybe they footed it. I’m going in.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah, I think they’re gone.”

  Del went in first and Willie followed. The cafeteria floor was a mess of discarded food containers but it was empty.

  “I’ll get the lights,” Willie said.

  “We should check the kitchen first,” Del said, but it was too late. Willie hit the switches.

  Heath and a large bunch of Hellers barged in from the kitchen. Willie and Del turned to flee but their way out of the swinging doors was blocked by Monk and another rover. Both men had been hiding in the lobby.

  “Toss it!” Willie yelled.

  In his high anxiety, Del forgot to slide it. Instead he rolled it like a cylindrical bowling ball and it clattered and bumped along stopping a couple of yards short of Heath.

  “Set it off!” Del screamed.

  “We’re too close!” Willie shouted.

  “Set it off!” Del repeated.

  Willie pushed the detonator button.

  Nothing happened.

  Willie pushed it again and again. Shouting that the wire must’ve gotten detached he ran toward the bomb only to be met by Heath who punched him in the gut with a kitchen knife, bringing Willie to his knees.

  “You trying to do us harm, old man?” Heath said with a maniacal look on his face.

  “Shoot it,” Willie croaked as loudly as he could.

  “Get him, he’s got a gun,” Heath shouted to Monk.

  Del had his revolver in his hand. He turned and shot Monk in the chest, the other rover in the face.

  “Shoot it,” Willie groaned one more time before Heath slashed his throat.

  Del took a step forward and aimed his pistol with both hands at the red fire extinguisher.

  He fired.

  The shot missed and slammed into the tiles. All the rovers except for Heath scattered around the cafeteria.

  “You’re dead, old man,” Heath said, calmly walking toward him, “but not before I skin you alive.”

  “Two left,” Del said, his hands shaking.

  “What’s that, old man?” Heath said.

  Del fired again. A spray of tile fragments flew into the air but the bomb didn’t budge.

  “One left,” Del said.

  Heath was no longer walking. He began to close the distance between him and Del at a run.

  Del held his ground and squeezed the trigger one last time.

  The bullet caught the cylinder on its end, piercing the skin.

  The thermite exploded in a flash of pure yellow.

  The fireball consumed Heath a fraction of a second before it reached Del and the rest of the Hellers, vaporizing everyone and sending the rovers back to Hell.

  26

  Campbell Bates probably wouldn’t admit it but there were times he actually seemed to be enjoying himself. Seated at a makeshift drafting table set up in a grassy area outside the Richmond forge he found himself humming Gilbert and Sullivan while he transferred drawings from the blast furnace book to sheets of parchment. He hadn’t done drafting since his days as a mechanical engineering student and though he hadn’t thought about it in years, there were certainly times at law school when he wished he’d remained an engineer.

  After studying the design of William’s forge Bates had decided to attempt to modify its design rather than building a new furnace from scratch. When he showed his first design to the group of Earthers camping out at the forge, Leroy Bitterman had said, “There’s not much I have to offer, Campbell. I’m not even sure why I’m here. I should be back in London with the others.”

  They had split roughly into two groups. The male scientists plus Trotter had been sent to the forge and the female scientists and non-scientists like Karen Smithwick, Stuart Binford, and George Lawrence remained at Whitehall Palace. It was Cromwell’s opinion that the women would be too vulnerable staying at the forge, surrounded by lecherous forge workers and soldiers. But the women were just as frightened to be left behind at the place where the lecherous Suffolk had assaulted Brenda Mitchell. It was left to Karen Smithwick to demand an audience with Cromwell to seek his assurances the women would be safe. Cromwell would later tell one of his ministers that this woman had more steel in her spine than Suffolk ever did. He had promised Smithwick upon his honor that the womenfolk would be free from assault.

  The men at the forge had shared Bitterman’s opinion about their utility. Particle physicists, computational scientists, and electrical engineers were hardly suited, they claimed, to the task of designing and building nineteenth-century blast furnaces. But Cromwell had not
been persuaded and all of them had been mustered into service.

  Bates had tried to rally them to the cause. “Look,” he had said, “Hopefully the cavalry is going to arrive in the form of the SAS and automatic rifles. But until they do, we’ve got to show some progress or Cromwell and Suffolk might just decide to have one or more of us killed as an example. None of us know what we’re doing but we’ve got this book with schematics and we’ve got some world-class mathematicians among us. So what I need is for you to work out the temperature, pressure, and thermodynamics of modifying this forge’s chimney stack to get as close as possible to the examples in the book.”

  “We’ll do the best we can,” Henry Quint had said and Bates had shaken his hand in appreciation.

  Bates had not tried to convince Anthony Trotter of that man’s usefulness because he didn’t think he had any. Trotter resented that he’d been dragged out of London, much preferring his comfortable rooms and decent food at the palace, but now that he had been sent here, he tried to work out the angles of escape versus cooperation. If a rescue attempt were going to be in the cards then he’d have to make sure that none of his fellow captives would bad-mouth him and sabotage his career upon his return to Earth. But was that even possible now? They all hated him for seeking special privileges and some harbored suspicions he’d had a role in Brenda Mitchell’s death. If they were stuck here for good, he would need to earn his keep with Cromwell. He would need to become invaluable. While the others worked he napped upon the grass or walked, deep in thought around the perimeter of the forge, watched all the while by Cromwell’s soldiers ringing the site.

  The time came to start dismantling the brickwork of the now-cooled chimneystack. It pained William to destroy his precious forge even for the sake of building a better one. He complained that his men were iron-makers, not bricklayers, but work began nevertheless. He sent his younger men scrambling up ladders with hammers to remove bricks and toss them down to the grass to be stacked and re-used. Others began shoveling and carting river mud to be mixed with straw and laid into wooden molds to make new bricks. When William saw Trotter sitting idly by, he approached him.

  “So, Master Trotter, will you be involved with taking down the chimney or fashioning new bricks?”

  Trotter frowned at him. “Neither. Go away.”

  William spit on the ground. “Do you know that you’re a worthless sort of man?”

  “William, you’re the sort of lout who thinks that only manual labor is useful. I do my work in my head. I’m a thinking man, something you probably never understood during your miserable life and now that you’re dead, I’m sure you are quite beyond learning. Off you go. Flex your muscles and go shift something heavy. I’ve got some serious thinking to do.”

  Captain Greene’s D Group had fallen into a rhythm of patrols in their defense of the Upminster hot zone. They had cleared the initial crowds of Hellers streaming into the zone with minimal bloodshed and expenditure of ammunition. As the days wore on they were aware of a continuing presence of Hellers in the surrounding woods but there were only sporadic challenges to their dominance, mostly from poorly armed men desperate for a second chance at life. Their mission, however, had not been without dramatic turns.

  Early on, Greene had ordered a squad of three troopers to go on a game hunt. One of his men had built a rudimentary smokehouse of branches and leaves and Greene decided to build up a stockpile of smoked meat. While stalking a deer, a trooper named Finch had fired at what he thought was a deer obscured by undergrowth.

  The pleading voice of a woman had called out, “Stop, don’t shoot!”

  The other soldiers had closed on the spot and Finch had yelled, “Show yourself and show your hands.”

  Another female voice had said, “You’ve shot her. She can’t raise her arms.”

  “Come out slowly, the both of you,” Finch ordered.

  “Please don’t hurt us.”

  Both women were only partially clad, missing various articles of clothing. One was in her forties, the other, bleeding from the upper arm was twenty years younger. They had both appeared petrified and weak.

  “Walk this way,” another trooper had ordered. “Keep your hands where we can see them.”

  The older woman had stared at their uniforms.

  “Who are you?” she asked.

  “We’re SAS,” Finch said.

  “Our SAS? From home? From England?”

  “Jesus,” a trooper exclaimed to his mates. “They’re not Hellers.”

  “Come closer,” Finch had said. “Need to give you the sniff test, luv.”

  The two women had worked in a seamstress and alteration shop in Upminster and were among the first wave shuttled across when the hot zone opened up. They had congregated with a few hundred of their fellow travelers, wandering about dazed and utterly confused on the outskirts of a small medieval-looking village until Hellers from the village descended on them. At first the villagers had thought these were the recent dead, worth a pretty penny to the sweepers who’d be along on their regular rounds. When they descended on them, the Earthers had scattered into the nearby woods, screaming in terror. Most of them had been rounded up quickly enough. But very soon the Hellers had realized these people were not dead. And then one village man said he had witnessed another villager who was tramping through the high grass looking for new arrivals, disappearing into thin air. Some of the wiser men connected the events and surmised that a miracle had occurred, a passageway had opened, and soon the braver ones were launching themselves into the hot zone because almost anything was better than their grim existence.

  The two seamstresses, the owner and her employee, had made it into the woods where they had been hiding since their arrival, sustaining themselves on brook water, mushrooms, and grubs. They had heard the shouts of other Earthers when they had been captured and worse—cries of pain and anguish one night, when unbeknownst to them, a band of rovers had found some Earthers hiding in the vicinity. They had also heard the gunshots of the SAS when C Group established their perimeter but they had feared it was just more brutes after them.

  “Yeah, you’re one of us,” Finch had declared. “You’re safe now. We’re the good guys. Let’s have a look at your arm, luv. Looks like a flesh wound. We’ll patch you up quick enough.”

  “But where are we?” the older woman had said, trying to protect her modesty with the few pieces of non-synthetic fabric she was wearing. “We don’t know what’s happening. It’s been a nightmare.”

  “Come with us,” Finch had said. “The captain will explain everything and then we’ll be sending you home, I expect.”

  “Home?” the younger woman had said. “Really?”

  Greene had given the women a bare-bones explanation of the situation while his medic bandaged the young woman’s arm. He hadn’t been too sure if the shell-shocked woman had understood what he was saying but it hardly mattered.

  He had pointed toward the center of the large field his men were encircling. “Look, I want you ladies to walk that direction. We can’t go with you. One instant you’ll be here, the next you’ll be back where you belong in Upminster. As far as we understand it, you won’t be flung back here but I wouldn’t take any chances. Run as fast as you can away from town. The army will be surrounding the area. Identify yourself as victims. Tell them you’ve just spoken to Captain Greene, 22 SAS Regiment. Tell them our mission is progressing well and that we are armed with AK-47s. Do you think you can remember that?”

  And then the soldiers had watched the women walking into the hot zone, helping them along with shouts of encouragement, and cheering when they had disappeared.

  Some days later, the group had experienced another incident. A pair of troopers had been patroling the perimeter of the zone in the eastern quadrant when one of them, a trooper named Kendrick, took a step and disappeared, leaving behind his rifle, a spare magazine, and a knife.

  Greene had been summoned and came running to the scene shouting orders for everyone at the
perimeter to withdraw a hundred yards. Then he had subjected Kendrick’s partner to a harsh interrogation.

  Had Kendrick gone AWOL? Had he talked about abandoning the mission? Had he given any hint of instability?

  But Kendrick was a gung ho squaddie, not a man to bail on his mates and Greene had concluded that an expanding hot zone had snared him. He widened the perimeter further and had ordered Kendrick’s rifle be abandoned where it lay.

  On this misty morning Greene was awoken by shouts from one of the perimeter guards.

  It was Trooper Finch yelling, “Captain, come here. You’re not going to believe it.”

  Greene ran through the mist and pulled up laughing at the sight of Trooper Kendrick coming toward him, waving his retrieved AK-47.

  “Did you miss me, Captain?” Kendrick said with a shit-eating grin.

  “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” Greene said. “Tell me what happened.”

  “I bring you greetings from the bloody prime minister,” Kendrick said. “That’s right. Hazel Kendrick’s son, little Kenny Kendrick, was drinking cups of tea yesterday with Prime Minister Lester, the defense secretary, and a room full of generals, explaining everything what’s happened since we got here. They wanted to send me up to Balmoral to see the bloody queen but I said, no way, I wanted to rejoin my unit ’cause I miss eating horrible, stringy venison.”

  Finch shook his head. “I always thought you were a complete wanker, Kenny. Turns out I was right.”

  Greene was about to ask Kendrick for a full debrief when there were distant shouts from the northern quadrant and then a single AK rifle shot, their signal of an attack. The captain ordered Kendrick to follow him in a clockwise route around the perimeter and Finch and the other soldier to travel counterclockwise, sweeping up the other patrols along the way.

  When Greene and Kendrick got closer to the north quadrant the mist had lifted enough to see the nature of the threat.