‘You close these as soon as I’m through,’ Heather tells them. ‘And don’t open them again until I’m on the steps. No sooner. Got it?’
‘Got it, miss. Just remember, you pump to reload. And don’t forget to turn off the safety.’
Heather checks the weapon again, resting her thumb against the catch now in case she can’t see it so well outside.
‘On go,’ she says. ‘Three, two, one, GO!’
Adnan and Radar each push the unlocking bar on their doors, Heather rushing through between them.
‘Now fucking close it again,’ growls Jason, grabbing one of the net-stands. Adnan and Radar grip the handles above the unlocking bars and pull the doors back into place.
Heather runs towards the barn, shouting to get the demons’ attention. One of them is already looking her way, having heard the doors opening. The others immediately turn away from Cameron. There is no question but that Gillian and Jason were right. All that remains to be resolved is whether Heather could make the risk worth it.
The first demon begins marching towards her, the other two taking up flanking positions. Smart tactics if she was carrying anything other than a gun. She steadies herself, holds it at waist height and pulls the trigger.
Heather is immediately knocked backwards by the recoil, losing grip on the gun as she falls. The demon flinches in fright and surprise, but is otherwise unscathed. She scrambles to her feet and picks up the weapon again, this time holding the stock against her shoulder and bracing herself for the kick. She pulls the trigger. Nothing happens. The demon resumes its approach. She pulls the trigger again: no resistance; it’s just sliding freely back and forth.
Then she remembers: pump to reload. She pumps the slide. The action is stiffer than she anticipates, and it takes a second attempt, by which time the demon is yards away, its fellows also closing in. She feels the trigger lock forward, knows the shell is primed. She blasts again. Once more the demon flinches; once more the sound and the flash are the only things to impact.
‘Oh Jesus fucking Christ.’
She pumps it again, by which time the demon is now running towards her. The gun reports once more, but in this instance not even the bang halts the demon’s charge. A second later it is upon her, the last thing she sees a gnarled claw sweeping towards her face.
‘What the fuck?’ asks Radar.
Adnan just keeps staring through the window, watching as Heather is dragged by her feet towards the barn. Her arms start to thrash. She’s coming around, dazed but not unconscious. They’re going to nail her up now too.
Jason lifts the second net-stand and prepares to thread it between the handles, content that the ill-advised rescue mission is over.
Adnan puts a hand on one of the metal shafts and prevents its progress.
‘Open it again.’
‘Are you suicidal?’
‘They left the gun. They don’t know what it is. I can get it.’
‘They left it because it’s no threat,’ Jason argues, almost yelling. ‘Jesus Christ, were you not watching? Guns don’t fucking work on them. What the fuck is that all about? How can that be?’
‘Because they’re not of this world,’ says Gillian.
Sendak is opening drawers and slapping knives and cleavers down on an island worktop in the centre of the kitchen. The toppled fridge is doing its job, but the door frame is already giving warning that it will eventually come away from the wall. He tucks a knife into his belt and picks up his baseball bat again in one fist.
‘Arm yourselves with anything you can carry. If you can’t find something that stabs or slashes, just grab something you can hit the fuckers with, long as it won’t slow you down.’
‘How about a rolled-up dish-towel?’ asks Beansy. ‘My mammy always said you could take somebody’s eye out with one of them.’
Sendak sighs, trades a look with Kane. Kane can tell they’re both grateful for anything that might lift morale.
‘Well, there’s a Cuisinart too,’ Sendak tells him. ‘You think you could get one of them to stick its hand in there out of curiosity?’
‘Maybe just stick with a meat cleaver,’ Beansy replies.
‘Yeah. That’d be my call too.’
Sendak moves to the door, beckoning Kane forward with him. Kane lifts a long, metal-handled kitchen knife and does as he is bid.
‘Gonna check the coast is clear. Need you standing by to close this thing again if there’s any surprises in store.’
‘You got it.’
Sendak turns the handle and pulls the door ajar, Kane resting a foot against it, ready to drive it home if required. Sendak sticks his head out and looks left and right down the corridor.
‘We’re good to go,’ he reports, pulling the door all the way open. ‘Here’s how it’s gonna be. You go first, I’ll be holding the rear. You take a right out of the door, first left, then it’s a straight run to the games hall. You don’t stop, you don’t look back, no matter what you hear behind you. Your job is to get the folks in there to open the doors at the other end and be ready to close them again once everybody is through.’
‘You go first’ to run the demon-infested gauntlet doesn’t sound like the best offer Kane ever heard, but he wouldn’t trade it for what Sendak’s dealt himself: closest to any pursuers, able to move at no greater pace than the slowest of the group. Yeah, he’d settle for ‘you go first’.
‘Any questions?’ Sendak asks him.
‘Just one,’ he replies. ‘What is it you’re not telling us? There’s something you know, isn’t there. Or at least suspect.’
Sendak acknowledges the question with a look that gives nothing away.
‘The compass going crazy out on the hike. Everybody’s watches stopping. It’s all connect—’
Kane is cut off as an arm appears above him, snatches the knife from his hand and drives it into his throat.
He staggers backwards into the kitchen, blood spraying the walls as it jets from the wound. Sendak hurls a blade towards the attacker, suspended from the corridor ceiling, staring upside down at what it has wrought. It dodges, leaping to cling to the wall as the knife embeds itself to the hilt in the roof tiles. It keeps its eyes on Sendak throughout, then sets itself to spring. He kicks the door closed a fraction of a second before the creature slams into the wood, then slides the island unit in front.
Blake is cradling Kane’s head as blood continues to gush from his neck. He’s got a dish-towel pressed to it but it may as well be a paper hanky.
‘I can’t stem it,’ he says, though he doesn’t know to whom; may as well be talking about his own precipitate grief. ‘There’s just too much.’
‘Fucker was on the ceiling,’ Sendak says, dismayed and apologetic. ‘I checked left and right. I didn’t look up. I didn’t look up.’
Through his forming tears, Blake can see that Kane’s eyes are losing their thousand-yard stare of shock and confusion. There’s weakness in them, but an attempt to focus. He’s looking up at Blake. They both know he’s dying.
‘Don’t . . .’ Kane says, his speech a faltering hollow whisper. ‘Don’t dare . . . try and give me . . . last rites.’
Blake shakes with a sob: laughter and grief, released by the pain of glimpsing all that he’s going to miss.
He sniffs back his tears, has to hold it together for Kane, the last, the only thing he can still do for him.
‘What about Pascal’s Wager?’ Blake asks, forcing a smile through his tears.
Kane’s head shakes, just enough for Blake to feel it in his hands.
‘How the bookies . . . get rich. Shitey odds . . . not worth . . . the stake.’
With these words, Kane dies and Blake collapses inside, clutching his friend’s head in his lap while the blood seeps into his trousers from the cold kitchen floor.
XXV
Tullian is looking left and right along the maintenance tunnel, referring back and forth to a square of paper with a rough schematic etched out upon it.
‘If you�
��re trying to get your bearings,’ Merrick tells him, ‘the bad news is that the shortest route to the surface is back the way we came.’
Tullian satisfies himself regarding his orientation and leads off in the opposite direction.
‘No, we really, really don’t want to head for the surface,’ Tullian says. ‘I have a grave fear that Elvis may have left the building. We’re probably safer down here than above ground. We need to secure ourselves and wait for the military to send in their emergency lockdown team.’
‘Well, there’s bad news on that front too, Cardinal. No alarms were raised. I tried myself, but the systems had been disabled. Sabotaged, I have to assume.’
‘Sabotaged? By whom?’
‘Steinmeyer.’
Tullian sighs regretfully. ‘I had my fears,’ he says.
‘The guy’s been slowly losing it for weeks, and when the military said they were taking his toys away, it pushed him over the edge. That said, I have to ask what could possess him to do something as catastrophic as this.’
The Cardinal grimaces.
‘Unfortunately, I rather think you may have answered your own question, Doctor. What indeed could possess him?’
Merrick didn’t think he could feel more scared, more ill, but he does now. It makes sense, in ways that have consequences too horrible to dwell upon right now. He has to stay focused on the immediate.
‘The bottom line is, nobody along the military command chain knows anything has gone wrong here. The cavalry aren’t coming.’
‘Then we have to alter that,’ Tullian declares. ‘We will make for Security Control. If the damage isn’t irreversible, then that’s where we can get the systems back online. We can raise the alarm and perhaps reactivate the mag-locks.’
‘There are CCTV feeds in there too,’ Merrick adds. ‘We can spot where the demons are and maybe isolate them. At the very least we can relay their positions to the lockdown team so that the demons don’t get the drop on them.’
‘We’ll be their guardian angels, watching from above,’ the Cardinal states drily, picking up the pace.
Tullian stops to examine a sign on the wall, next to an access hatch leading to the accelerator chase. Merrick estimates they’ve travelled about half a kilometre along the duct. They haven’t heard anything for a few minutes: no gunfire, no screams, no slap-slap of approaching feet.
‘The next ladder,’ Tullian indicates. ‘That should take us to the coolant monitoring chamber. Security Control is up one level after that.’
Merrick glances reluctantly down the passage towards their goal.
‘I’m still recovering from the last ladder,’ he says.
‘Don’t worry, I’ll go first,’ Tullian is assuring him, when an access hatch further back along the duct explodes open, almost unhinged by the force behind it.
Merrick’s reluctance to approach the ladder is thoroughly dispelled. He overtakes Tullian as they sprint towards it, the Cardinal encumbered by a stiffness to his gait perhaps resultant of his robes. Merrick scales the ladder like a spider monkey on PCP and finds the overhead hatch to be in mercifully smoother working order than the one where Havelock met his doom. He twists the release and flips it open, barely thinking about what might be waiting for him above it as he hauls himself through the gap. Without pausing to check his new surroundings, he twists himself around and leans through the gap to assist the ascending Tullian. He can hear the slap-slap approaching as he reaches an arm down, and can’t resist a glance to check the distance. There’s time yet, so stay calm: more haste, less hurry.
Then he hears a clattering sound as Tullian’s hand stretches up and clasps his own. Once Tullian has cleared the hatch, he can see what it was: his iPhone, with the AV files stored on it. It’s at the foot of the ladder, apparently intact; even if it’s damaged, the data should be recoverable.
The demon still has ground to cover. He can make it. Those files represent everything he has done here, as well as the sacrifice of everyone who has been lost. He has to make it.
‘What are you doing?’ Tullian asks in breathless disbelief as Merrick climbs back into the hatch and slides, fireman style, down the outsides of the vertical poles. He grasps at the iPhone, his nervous fingers scraping the concrete and failing to grip it properly. It spills again, slides a couple of feet. The slap-slap is becoming pound-pound, the weight of the approaching creature palpable as it shakes the floor of the duct. Merrick reaches for the iPhone again and gets hold of it this time, then throws an arm towards the ladder. The demon is yards away, gaining pace, preparing to hurl itself. Merrick’s foot slips on the second rung in his panic. The slap-slap has ceased, the demon in mid-air. He closes his eyes and grips the shaft.
Merrick hears a squealing, grinding, radio-static pulse that stings his eardrums and makes every filling in his head feel like it’s been connected to the mains. A wave of dust buffets him, strong as the wind behind a juggernaut lorry, and he senses a tiny precipitation on his skin. He can taste blood and metal, like licking a battery, a tingling in his sinuses too as the wind fills his nose.
He opens his eyes and looks up. Tullian is staring back at him through the hatch, along the barrel of a decoherence rifle.
‘I guess that’s why you were walking funny,’ Merrick says, by way of acknowledgment.
‘How do you think I stayed alive long enough to save you back there?’ Tullian responds, offering him a hand up.
‘Couldn’t you have used it a bit sooner?’
‘Limited charge. I’m only using it when I absolutely have to.’
‘Where did you get it? I thought the cabinet locks had been sabotaged too.’
‘Not all of them, presumably, though I had to prise it from the proverbial cold, dead hand of a fallen soldier. The poor soul must have been overwhelmed before he could use the thing. Now, are you going to tell me what is so important about that phone that you were prepared to risk both our lives to retrieve it?’
XXVI
The demon dragging Miss Ross has almost reached the stable wall.
‘I can see the gun,’ Adnan says, calmly and quietly. ‘I can reach it before they reach me.’
‘Fuck, would you forget about the gun?’ Jason tells him. ‘You’re always on about empirical evidence, Adnan, well trust the evidence of your own eyes: Miss Ross shot that thing three times from close range and it barely batted an eyelid. Gillian’s right: we’re dealing with supernatural beings. The normal rules don’t apply.’
Adnan turns to Radar.
‘One word: parsimony.’
Radar nods, understanding. He barges Jason aside and grabs the net-stand.
‘Radar, you open that door and you’re as good as killing him,’ Jason argues.
‘You definitely up for this?’ Radar asks.
‘It’s my funeral,’ comes the reply.
Deborah steps up and mans the other door, her hands on the unlocking bar.
‘Same deal as before,’ Adnan advises. ‘Close it immediately. Don’t risk opening it for a second longer than you have to. On three. One . . . two . . .’
‘No!’ shouts Gillian, rushing to stop them, but Adnan completes his count and disappears through the doors.
‘Why did you do that?’ Gillian asks, tearful and uncomprehending as she stares at the pair of them. ‘Why did you let him do that?’
‘Faith,’ Radar replies blankly.
Adnan feels the fear slowing his legs as soon as he hears the doors closing behind him. As the cold air hits his face, so does the stark realisation that he may have just made a fatal mistake. From inside, it looked different, felt different. There was this irrepressible compulsion within him to take action, partly driven by the desire to save his friends, and partly by the simple belief that he could. Knowing he could help seemed to relegate all other considerations. He wasn’t a brave person, though he tried to be a selfless one, but the thought that he could make the difference had somehow muted the sense of danger. It’s been bloody well turned up to eleven now he’s
outside, though.
He can’t see the gun: lost it when he had to take his eye off the windows as the doors were pulled open. He thinks he knows roughly where Miss Ross was standing, and is heading that way, but if he doesn’t spot the weapon again, he’s fucked.
He comes close, he comes really close to turning on his heel, racing back and hammering contritely on the doors to be let back inside. Then he sees it: a dark sheen of metal catching the light differently from the frosted grass.
One of the demons has heard the doors open and begins moving towards him. The others turn briefly but are not diverted from their task, content that their comrade will deal with the situation as before. They proceed with hauling the scared and struggling Miss Ross to her feet and preparing to nail her to the wall. Cameron they have temporarily given up on, and he remains where he fell, curled up in a shivering pile on the ground.
Everything is simple now. No decisions to be weighed, no morality to consider: only instinct, only survival. A race, in which second prize is death.
Unlike Miss Ross, he doesn’t stalk his way steadily towards his enemies. He’s sprinting, low to the ground, arrow-like, and he’s going to make it. The demon facing him is in no greater hurry than the one that took down his teacher, failing to comprehend what is at stake should he reach the strange black stick that flashed and banged. Perhaps they think it’s a totem, some witch doctor’s charm that wields power over the human credulous and devout, but holds for them no fear.
Miss Ross shot that thing three times from close range and it barely batted an eyelid.
There is a reason why the demon wasn’t injured, and he’s betting his life that it isn’t the one Gillian suggested.
Adnan reaches the shotgun with the demon half a dozen yards away. He’s never fired one before, but he’s watched Miss Ross make all his mistakes for him, so he knows what not to do. He pumps the slide, chambering the next shell, and raises the gun to his shoulder as the demon lets out a vicious roar and prepares to lunge.
The roar is cut off as the demon’s head flies apart in an explosion of black blood and splattering tissue.
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