by Walker, Luke
ASCENT
Luke Walker writes horror and fantasy fiction. His novel Hometown is published by Caffeine Nights, and the novella Mirror of the Nameless is published by DarkFuse. His collection of short horror, Die Laughing, is also available. More of Luke’s short fiction has been published online at various sites and in print. You can follow Luke on Twitter @lukewalkerbooks.
ASCENT
LUKE WALKER
Copyright © 2017 Luke Walker
This Edition Published 2017 by Crowded
Quarantine Publications
The moral right of the author has been asserted
All characters in this publication are fictitious
and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead,
is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any
form or by any means without the prior
permission in writing of the publisher, nor be
otherwise circulated in any form of binding or
cover other than that in which it is published
and without a similar condition including this
condition being imposed on the subsequent purchase.
A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978-0-9954537-7-7
Crowded Quarantine Publications
34 Cheviot Road
Wolverhampton
West Midlands
WV2 2HD
This one is for my parents.
Chapter One
Kelly Brown crashed to the polished floor, the impact shoving all the breath from her lungs and turning her vision into a white noise of pain for a moment. Unable to cry out, she slid to a stop against a stone pillar. Directly above, the open space of the stairwell glared down. A great stream of sunlight shining through the wall of windows at the building’s front made the reception of Greenham Place feel like a sauna. Kelly lay utterly still, staring at the lift doors, incapable of breathing in more than tiny puffs of air, praying she hadn’t broken any bones.
A voice inside that could have spoken from an old memory said: the bomb went off.
At once, denial gave a furious argument back. If the bomb had detonated, she wouldn’t be here. The building wouldn’t be here. The whole city of Willington and the surrounding countryside would be nothing but a burned hole in the earth along with the open spaces and towns of the entire county. She was on solid ground; she could see the lift doors and she was all too aware of the hurt from the impact on the rock-hard floor. Therefore, the bomb hadn’t exploded and she wasn’t dead.
Kelly took a shuddering breath and a weak laugh fell out of her mouth. When you struggled to convince yourself you really were still alive, things couldn’t get any more messed up.
If the bomb didn’t go off, then what the hell was that light and what sent you flying through the air?
Ignoring the questions, Kelly eased herself into a sitting position. While her body, from feet to forehead, was nothing but aches, she was pretty sure no bones had broken or been sprained. Biting back a groan, she stood and turned in a slow circle. The foyer of Greenham Place was deserted. Silence crushed her ears—the silence of an empty building sleeping in the middle of the night, even though darkness was still a little way off.
She craned her neck. Although plenty of sunlight lit the ground floor, a subtle gloom lurked in the corners and around the massive reception desk to the side of the entrance. The murk couldn’t be called shadows. Not yet. But something wasn’t right; something—
“No lights,” Kelly whispered as she scanned the ceiling that opened for the stairwell. All the lights were off. So was the heating. The constant soft breath of the warm air circulating back and forth should have been audible, since there were no voices or the tap of heels to cover it. Listening harder didn’t help because there was simply nothing to hear.
What pushed you through the air? The voice asked it again, and again, Kelly blanked the question. She rested a hand on the pillar, doing all she could to breathe slowly. Sweat worked its way down her back; she’d been wearing her fleece while at work in the library a few minutes’ walk from Greenham Place—the building cool thanks to the October afternoon and an old heating system. Now, in the unbroken stream of sunlight cooking the floor and entrance, Kelly’s body temperature had risen to uncomfortable levels. She told herself it came from the trapped heat, and not from any fear or panic over what had happened only moments ago—the fire alarm braying into life, the panicked shouts from her colleagues all standing around a computer to watch the video uploaded to Facebook seconds before. On screen, the lone Korean man stood by a van out in the countryside while a high fence, topped with barbed wire, ran into the distance. And the man’s tearful, ranting confession in broken English of the horrendous events he and several others had set into motion.
I sorry, so sorry. Not meant this, I not meant this. Clear your army. Run your city. The bomb goes off. Run. Run. Please run.
Then the man’s terrified shrieks as another van sped towards him, bearing down as he ran, the view spinning, dancing as his arms waved madly. Immediately after, a hollow pop of small explosions chased him before the view spun over and over to offer a quick shot of the lifeless miles of fields and woodland around the base.
RAF Lakenheath. The road encircling it, and the huge sky, grey through most of the autumn; trees beginning to bloom, hedgerows full of spiky bushes, all the green and brown of the land caught in the view of the phone in the seconds before the screaming man had somehow managed to upload the clip while he sprinted from the approaching van and what could only be gunshots.
Remembering, Kelly wiped at her damp face and crossed towards the automatic doors that opened to the pavement. Whatever had been going on out near Lakenheath, it had either been some joke or stunt aimed at going viral, or the police and army had dealt with it. No way had it actually happened. No way.
No way. This isn’t what happened in Los Angeles. This isn’t last June.
Last June on the other side of the world. Kelly shivered, thoughts of the previous summer similar in feel to the memory of being at school and seeing the images of New York that seemed dated to her childish eye, the impact of the second plane and the explosion like something out of a film. The memory and those images taken to new, impossible levels last summer. 6/13, they’d called it. The end of the world by any other name, only four months later, the world didn’t realise it had ended and was still shuffling along while a global stalemate and the frantic efforts of the diplomats and an American President with her finger hovering over the button (and not hammering on it) were the only reason everyone in the world remained alive.
Most of these thoughts lost in the immediacy of her confusion and fear, Kelly reached the doors. Her foot, still moving, struck the glass. The doors remained closed.
“What?”
She tapped the entrance before waving a hand—still sore from the crash to the hard floor—at the sensor above the doors. It stared back, black and blind.
Faraway but coming closer fast, realisation bore down on Kelly. At the last second, her mind tried to shove up a wall, blocking it. The awareness landed and came with only a dull fear.
Not one single person walked on the pavement outside Greenham Place and not one vehicle drove along the main road that cut through the centre of Willington. Separated by the thick glass and the motionless doors, Kelly gazed at the road she’d sprinted over minutes before while the world was filled with screams and the thunder of people fleeing from the shops and businesses as if the buildings were on fire or had already been claimed by the bomb. And hadn’t she wondered, in a broken, confused manner, abou
t the lack of sirens? Hadn’t she legged it from the back of the library, dashed down the alley between the old building and restaurant at its side, hit a great throng of milling people, and wondered why there was no terrible wail of a siren like there always was in films featuring nuclear attacks? Had she done that or had it all been outside her head? Had—
Kelly came back to herself. She’d been tapping on the window for at least a minute without hearing or feeling the warm glass on her too hot hand. And still, Greenham Road was completely empty of people or traffic. Four thirty on a Friday afternoon and this section of Willington, filled with shops, takeaways, a fucking Tesco fifty feet away, looked like Christmas Night when even the pubs had closed, turning Willington’s centre into a sleeping animal.
Kelly’s fear, blanketed by confusion since she’d felt the massive shove at her back a second after she’d sprinted to the entrance, pushed its way back to full life. It claimed her body as the pain from crashing to the floor had. From toes to skull, she grew as cold as stepping from her warm car to the bright but frozen sun of a January morning.
It wasn’t right. Nothing was right.
A gentle ding brushed the air.
Already naming the cause of the sound, Kelly turned to face the now open lift. The mirrors around its sides, the wall of buttons marking each of the ten floors, the gleam of the metal railing encircling the lift’s interior, were all invisible. Black swallowed them, and looking into the lift was like staring into a hole in the earth, peering straight down into a secret space where daylight never reached.
Kelly told herself to not say a word, to not move or make a sound. The heat of the glass warmed her back, head and neck, and it took another second for her to realise she’d backed up, stepping as far from the mouth of the lift as she could.
A faint whisper of anger brushed by and Kelly seized on it. What the hell was this shit? Scared of an open lift and the lack of light inside it? There were no lights on anywhere so why the hell would the lift be any different?
Before she could stop herself, Kelly pushed away from the glass of the main doors, took three quick steps forwards, and spoke as loudly as she dared.
“Hello?”
At once, the lift doors slammed closed. They didn’t glide shut. Impossibly, they snapped together as if weighted down.
Her body a spinning wave of hot and cold, Kelly threw herself back to the doors,
(the doors they closed like a mouth like a fucking mouth)
smashed her head on the glass, and did not register the impact because of the noise.
Noise right behind her.
Kelly spun to see the main road through Willington’s centre no longer empty but as full of life as it should be on a normal day. And her sprinting thoughts couldn’t come close to making sense of the outside being deserted one moment and populated the next.
Afterwards, she’d play it all back and see and hear more than she would have thought her mind had any chance of taking in over those few seconds. She’d see the glint of sunlight as it fell upon the side window of a passing white van, the long shadow cast by four businesses—a jewellers, a recruitment office, a travel agent and an empty unit last used as a takeaway—staining the centre of Greenham Road, because the sun shone from exactly the right angle to cast that shadow; the group of schoolkids, still in their red blazers, walking close together towards the bus stop outside the Tesco; the cast to the late afternoon light that came only in the few weeks before the clocks changed and the days were abruptly much shorter.
All that taken in over no more than two seconds. All that and the growl of an approaching bus, the steady throb of traffic stuck at the lights further down Greenham Road where it met Park Road; the occasional gust of cool wind skittering along the streets, dancing through litter and over all the walking bodies.
All that and the man barely five feet from the doors to Willington’s main Council offices, standing there on the pavement, mobile to his ear. His face, kind of good-looking in an older guy way, in profile to Kelly, and the spinning black shape raining towards him, screaming like a missile towards the man’s head.
The falling office chair struck his skull. Blood exploded, turning the window between his falling, crushed body and Kelly into a shower of red; red littered with chunks and lumps of head.
That’s his brain, oh Jesus, oh my God.
Hand over her mouth, Kelly sprinted from the entrance, running without thought to the left of the lifts. She passed through a set of open doors and another reception desk, fumbled for the smooth surface and missed.
Kelly dropped to the soft carpet.
A few moments later, a door to the right of the lift eased open. Beyond, a short corridor led to stairs and a curving wall of windows letting clear sunlight inside which turned the steps into smooth, white stone.
Unseen and unheard, a man crept out into Greenham Place’s silent reception.
Chapter Two
At the foot of the stairs, the non-stop pounding and thuds crashed out. Standing immobile, Simon Law stared behind. The empty set of steps leading to the sixth floor and beyond mocked him. No safety there, and the only other way was straight down to whoever was kicking the hell out of the door. He’d heard them—a man—shouting for the last minute, the words more or less lost but the fear and mad panic totally clear. And now here he stood, no way past the noise and nowhere to hide.
On the next floor, the attack on the double doors increased in pace and ferocity. Wood splintered; the little glass panel in the door’s centre shattered and a man’s voice broke through to the sun-lit air.
“Yang. Where are you?”
No way past, Simon thought. And definitely no way back.
At the battered doors, a few small pieces of glass rained down, the sound of their impact on the hard floor lost beneath the man’s frantic yells. Another yell of a name—Yang—and one half of the doors broke free. At the same time, Simon lunged for the small table sitting between a large sofa and a fake pot plant. He booted the table over; its glass top shattered. Grabbing a wickedly sharp chunk, he held it as carefully as he could, and ran halfway down to the next landing. A man dashed across the corridor and jerked to a stop. Their eyes met. It took all of Simon’s strength to remain where he stood. The man below was not physically intimidating. Too thin and his face tired and strained, his desperation and raw panic wafted off his skin in a stench. He’d been made dangerous by both, and Simon knew he had to tread carefully. Even more carefully, his mind amended. Whatever the hell had happened to everyone upstairs would have to wait while he dealt with this new man.
“Hi,” he said. “I’m Simon.”
The bloke stared up and spoke in a voice that sounded like his throat hurt. With all the yelling, that was probably the case. In one limp hand, he held the remnants of a shattered chair, the furniture destroyed from his attack on the door.
“I’m Dao. . .my son.” He stumbled backwards, hit a wall and quite clearly came within seconds of sliding down it. He let go of the chair, which broke into more pieces at his feet. “My son’s here. Have you seen him?”
“No.” Something more was needed. All Simon found was a simple apology. “Sorry.”
“You must have seen him. He was right here. I heard him. You’re up there.” Dao laughed, the sound pregnant with tears. “You must have seen him.”
Dao rubbed his hands together, palms and wrists red and bleeding from his assault on the doors. “Please,” he whispered.
Walking with exaggerated care, Simon descended. He glanced at his hand and the shard of glass as he reached level ground. “Dao. Listen. Do I need this? I mean, there’s some weird stuff going on, but are you. . .”
Silence slid between the men, a quiet full of a threat neither could identify. Swallowing, Simon gave a slight wave of the glass. Dao stared at the shard, seemingly unable to find any concern for it as a weapon or much concern for anything at all. The effort of doing so seemed ridiculous when put against what he’d heard.
“Suppos
e not.” Simon dropped the makeshift blade and nudged it away from his feet.
Blowing from several floors above, a whisper of a breeze rolled down, coating empty corridors, tracing its way over fake plants and expensive leather sofas sitting in the corridors with equal disinterest. That is, until the moving air reached the turning of corridor to the steps dropping to the fifth floor. There, the faint breath slid over each stair without a sound, flowing further down to end at Simon’s feet. Its fading stink reached his mouth and he closed his eyes for what felt to be long seconds but was only a brief moment. The wind died away, leaving the suggestion of its aroma and the memory of what happened up on the ninth floor.
“Dao.” Simon opened his eyes as he spoke. The other man wept silently, then jabbed a trembling finger towards the doors he’d bashed in.
“My son. My boy. He was there. I heard him.” Dao’s throat worked and it seemed impossible that the shout he let out came from his narrow chest. “I heard him screaming. He’s only six and I heard him screaming.”
There was nobody there, Dao. I stood up on the next floor, shitting myself while you kicked the crap out of that door and I didn’t see anyone.
The thought refused to come to Simon’s mouth. Given Dao’s state, that could only be a good thing.
Dao wept. His fingers shook as he wiped at his eyes and nose. The tears smeared over his cheeks, and fresh ones fell. “Yang,” he muttered.
He staggered to the railing separating the landing from the high wall of windows and leaned on the pole. Outside, the afternoon sun streamed directly into the stairway, and Simon had to marvel at the warmth. Probably no more than ten degrees today, but the design of this place turned exposed areas into a sun-trap.
Have to tell them that back home.
He caught the thought and wanted to laugh at himself. Until he found out what was going on and where the people on the ninth floor—not to mention the rest of the building—had gone, telling his office in Oxford about Greenham Place and Willington wasn’t even close to being an issue.