Ascent

by Walker, Luke

  The sick taste of nervous laughter bubbled up; a giggle escaped before he silenced himself. Rod kept his gaze on the patch of purely blue sky visible through the clear windows and let his self-defence systems take over, not quite aware of it on any conscious level and happy as much as he could be to be so oblivious.

  No way I actually heard the man, Rod’s mind whispered in a soft, calming voice. It was the sort of tone a policeman might use to calm an aggressive drunk before resorting to force. Something mad had happened here; that was for sure. It was possible he’d had a heart attack and all this was a dream. A bad dream taking place while paramedics fought to save the life of a man who should have taken better care of himself instead of living the good life of too many fried breakfasts, too many big lunches and too many pints with the boys after his retirement. For all he knew, the real world was just beyond this dream and would come crashing back down once his overworked heart got its bloody act together.

  The thought was almost comforting, and more than welcome. It was essential for Rod to eventually slide from under the desk twenty minutes (which felt more like an hour) after the last of the terrible yells ceased. He rose too quickly and had to steady himself as the blood rushed to his head. The dizziness eased and he spoke in a mutter.

  “What’s going on, Joan?”

  If Joan knew, she wasn’t saying.

  “Where the hell is everyone, Clive?”

  Clive was keeping quiet, too.

  All right. Think. You’re walking through the town and everything’s normal. You’ve got an hour or so by yourself while Clive comes into the office to do some work; he says go for another pint and he’ll meet you by four. Only at ten to four, he calls to say make it half past and you knew that would happen but you don’t fancy another pint on your tod, right? So you take a walk through this town and you think about it in comparison to Cardiff and you think, actually, Willington is a nice place, as it goes. Clive’s all right here with Julie and the kids. The boy’s happy enough. You’re thinking that and you see people stopped right on the pavements, not giving a monkey’s about others who want to get past them. They’re looking at their phones, staring at them and you reach for them when the screaming starts and, before you know it, you’re running like a kid to this place and you’re shouting Clive’s name as soon as you’re through the doors. That’s what happened and let’s face it, man. You’re not in good shape. All that running, all that stress and then all the legging it up the stairs instead of taking the lift. What was it? Four floors? Five? Bloody hell, you’re lucky to have made it past the second set of stairs. So keep yourself together here. You’re in an ambulance; you’re breathing from one of those tanks and you’ll come to when they wheel you into the hospital. Sounds fair, right? Makes sense?

  It all made perfect sense. Even without the cool, slow manner in which his head spoke to him, it made sense. Problem was, it didn’t really help. That was why he grabbed for the nearest phone as soon as the interior voice fell quiet.

  Before he put the phone to his ear, he knew it would be no good. Nothing on the display. While Rod’s experience with new handsets didn’t go much beyond the basic one Joan bought from Argos year before last, he knew a piece of useless machinery when he saw it.

  The lack of dial tone confirmed it.

  “Shit.”

  Rod placed the phone down, took his mobile from the inside pocket of his jacket, and pressed on the screen. Nothing happened.

  “Shit,” he said again, sweating freely. Panic, held in check for a few moments, was coming closer. Soon, he’d be buried in it, and what would happen then? More shouts from the corridors? More memories given voice here? The air seemed to drop ten degrees at the thought, pushing his exposed skin ahead into winter instead of autumn.

  “Get it together,” he said too loudly and cringed, eyes on the doors at the far end of the office. He’d bashed through those as they swung shut from a man legging it to the pavement and road. Coming from the stairs like a big, fat boulder, Rod didn’t have enough breath to speak his brother’s name, so he’d just pounded past the silly fake plants and knocked his shoulders into the milling, panicked storm of office workers.

  Through the doors to a pulse of white light, a shove in his back and complete silence, apart from his own struggling gasps.

  The landing and stairs were out there. Out where a dead man had screamed his hateful abuse.

  Hand almost too damp to hold the phone, Rod grabbed hold of another one. It was as useless as the first, as obsolete as his mobile. Same with the next. And the next. He ran through the office, only managing to get every other phone to his ear, the others spilling from his sweaty fingers. Running out of desks, he came to a stop by a wall plastered with statistics and figures that meant nothing to him, then slammed an open palm on the nearest keyboard. The screen fluttered as if a connection had come loose. It flared into life in a brilliant white flash. The image lasted no longer than a couple of seconds, but that was still long enough. Plenty long enough.

  Rod backed away, fist against his mouth as the screen eased to a soft black. Staring at nothing, he saw the memory of the display—the window at his back showing not the sky a few floors above the streets of the city centre, but instead giving him flames streaking down from the top of the world in colossal fingers of red, bearing down on the building, ready to turn it into boiling ash.

  Didn’t see that. Did not. I’m in a hospital bed right now and Clive’s with me. He’s called Joan and she’s with the neighbours. Clive’s with me and that’s good; that’s all I can ask for right now, even if he’s his own man with his own family that’s not really anything to do with me because he’s got his life here that’s miles away from Wales and the past and the farm you think of sometimes in the middle of the night when Joan’s asleep and you can’t because your head’s full of too much beer and you watch the moonlight against the curtains and you think of being nine, again. You think of that, don’t you, Rod? Don’t you? Don’t you, you little shit, you—

  Rod whirled, reaching at the same time and digging his fingers into the soft padding of an office chair. It lifted from the floor as if it weighed no more than a kitten; the long muscles in his arms flexed in a way they’d had no call to in years, and the strain in his back and chest belonged to someone else.

  “Shut up.”

  He let the chair go at the same time as his bellow. It flew much further than it had any right to, passing over desks and chairs and no people because there were no people here, nobody but him and the voice that wormed its way into his head like a disease.

  The chair smashed into one of the wide windows. Glass coughed outwards; a wheel came free and hit the carpet with a thud as the chair passed through the jagged hole it created. It dropped.

  His heart pounded as it had during his mad dash through Willington’s streets and into the building where he’d yelled for his brother. Rod sped towards the window, reaching it at exactly the right moment to see the thrown chair collide with a figure standing directly outside the main entrance to Greenham Place.

  A breath later, that figure was a fountain spraying silent waves of red.

  With nothing but white noise inside his head, Rod ran[L1].

  *

  A huge crash as the running, crying man struck the double doors connecting the fourth floor landing with the offices for Adult Social Care; a thud as one of the doors hit the wall, chipping the smooth white of the paint; a stain on the ground as the shadow of the door met the dark cast by the man’s bulk, and lastly, the man himself bent almost double as he raced for the stairs, finding the railing by accident rather than judgement and descending as fast he could.

  Unfelt and unnoticed, something watched the man race down to the ground floor where he would meet the first woman.

  Something saw it all.

  Something pleased.

  Chapter Five

  Once again, Simon spoke in the tone that was already beginning to irritate Dao, despite the argument barely registerin
g.

  “We need to find the other people.”

  “No.” That was Alex. Dao tuned her out a second too late to miss her next words. “We need to get out.”

  Dao had walked away from them moments before. He stood now as close to the windows as possible, back to them, doing his best to think through the noise filling his mind. Finding Yang: everything came down to that. While Dao knew there was no good reason for his boy to be here, that didn’t change what he’d heard in those horrible, awful moments after all the sounds of the terror-struck people had vanished.

  For a few moments, he was powerless to stop his mind playing back the time on the other side of the doors, the evidence of his panicked, terrified assault on them still clear in the throbbing of his fingers and in the chipped paint of the wall where the handles had impacted.

  He’d been running through the open-plan offices on the fifth floor, checking as many faces as he could for a sign of Lin. Her door came up on his left, closed and no sign of movement beyond the frosted glass. The second he’d reached for it, the entire building seemed to shake, dropping him to his knees. Up again a second later, he’d registered the sudden lack of noise and still moved for Lin’s office before the dreamlike realisation of everyone having vanished hit him.

  Not a soul in sight. Not a sound left in the air.

  Moving on a sort of auto-pilot, Dao eased the office door open, exposing the room, empty apart from his wife’s desk, chair and other pieces of furniture. In memory, it seemed there’d been no gap between the surreal lack of anything and what came after it, but he knew that wasn’t true. He’d had a good few minutes of calling Lin’s name, trying the dead phones and tapping at her keyboard in a pointless attempt to get online. Then a brief moment of wandering around the open office, listening for anyone else on the same floor if not in the same room, and finally standing at the windows overlooking the left side of the building. Below, everything appeared normal. Cars and people and buses and the day winding down before sunset. He could even see the top of Willow Lane in the distance, the narrow side-street where his restaurant did good business every night of the week. The horrible dash from there to Greenham Place, usually a walk of no more than five minutes, came back as he surveyed Willington from the fifth floor. It seemed everyone in the city had been trying to run from the city, and he’d knocked more than a few to the pavement and road without looking back as he ran for the Council offices. Dao knew he was not a big man; he’d never been muscly, but that no longer mattered when the panic about a bomb just down the road began.

  That’s probably when the screaming—the other screaming—started, coming as if cued by his thoughts of the fright outside.

  From the landing and blocked from him by doors that no longer opened, his son cried for help, then squealed wordless noises of pain and terror. Unable to stop the sounds echoing around his head while Simon and Alex argued about what was best to do, Dao wondered if he’d gone a bit mad while Yang sobbed and shrieked. Either he had actually lost it or his surroundings really had vanished, leaving him with a void filled with nothing but the awful noise that went on and on no matter how hard he beat and kicked on the doors he no longer saw or how much his hands sang the hurt he didn’t feel until something snapped in the handles, and then there was no sign or sound of Yang, and all Dao had was a confused looking guy frozen in mid-move up the next flight of stairs.

  That, and the question coming fast, coming like an out of control train, and he managed to jump out of its path in time to not have to answer it.

  You sure that was Yang?

  Almost drowning in the awful possibilities the question threw up, he’d yelled at the guy on the stairs and he knew even as he spoke that Yang being here made zero sense. Pretty much as there was zero chance of him joining any hunt for others; not when he had his boy to find.

  “Do what you like,” Dao said, and crossed to the stairs heading up.

  “What?” Simon replied, wanting to reach for Dao and not daring to. “Where are you going?”

  “To find my son.”

  “Wait.” Keeping her voice deliberately low and calm, Alex drew closer. She had the air of a loving mother, come to cheer up a child. An image, disconcerting in its suddenness, hit Dao: Alex in a church, surrounded by people all hot, sweaty and dressed in their best while they sang gospel songs, and Alex clapped but she wasn’t smiling as she praised the Lord. And in the distance, a soft murmur of a lone bell, ringing to bring mourners, not the joyful, to the church.

  Dao’s vision greyed for a moment. He reached blindly, found the stair rail and held tight until his eyes cleared.

  “You can’t go alone,” Alex said.

  “Are you coming with me?” he asked, honestly curious.

  She glanced at Simon, who in turn studied the floor. Even though the no lived and breathed between them, they were spared the embarrassment of answering Dao by the careful approach of someone coming up from the floors below.

  “Hello?” A bloke. Older than Dao or Simon by the sound of it. And not English. He had a slight accent Dao couldn’t place from single word.

  “You up there? We need help.”

  Welsh, Dao thought.

  “We’re in trouble. The doors are locked.”

  However many people were down there, they were still coming. Despite the almost overwhelming urge to begin his search for Yang at the top of the quiet building, Dao joined Alex and Simon. Alex held her keys high again, and Simon’s fists hung by his thighs, the pose unconscious.

  “We need help,” a woman called. She sounded younger than the Welsh guy. “You have to help us.”

  Frowning, Alex took a step closer to the stairs that led down. Confusion merged with the background fear, non-stop since the first of the disbelieving murmurs about the bomb rose. It couldn’t be her. Couldn’t be Kelly.

  “Something’s happened; we can’t get the doors open downstairs and—”

  “Kelly?” Alex said weakly.

  Two people came into view at the curve of the floor below—a big man, easily in his sixties, dressed in smart blue jeans and a light jacket. Beside him, a woman who wasn’t much more than a girl. Dao’s quick eye took in their clothing and appearance in a glance; the big guy’s gut; the girl’s small stature, her face pretty, her skin black like Alex’s.

  “Alex?”

  Both women ran at the same time, Alex dropping her keys and descending as the girl called Kelly dashed up the stairs. They collided, both talking over each other, babbling, and Alex wiping at her eyes.

  The other one’s not crying, is she?

  Dao looked behind as if someone had spoken the thought. Above, not a thing moved. Even the dust motes—visible in the sunshine if you looked hard enough—were still.

  “You know each other?” Simon asked.

  “This is Kelly. My little sister,” Alex said. On the stairs, the women parted and the Welshman ascended, keeping his distance from Alex and offering a smile.

  “Hello. I’m Rod.”

  “Alex.” She finished wiping her eyes and spoke to Kelly. “Are you okay? Are you hurt?”

  “No. I fell over earlier, but it’s all right. I—”

  Kelly broke off. Dao sensed Simon looking at him, as if to ask what was happening. Ignoring the other man, Dao took a few steps down.

  “Something’s happened outside. Or in here. I don’t know. There’s nobody anywhere. I ran in here, looking for you when it all went off outside, but I only just made it inside when. . .something happened.” Kelly looked as if she wanted to say more but fell silent.

  “I know. The phones don’t work and the computers are off.”

  Simon interrupted Alex. “So are the lights. And the heating.” He raised a hand in a little wave. ”I’m Simon.”

  Dao glanced above, noting for the first time the dark bulbs. In the dazzling sunshine, the lack of fake light hadn’t registered. With the trapped warmth, neither had the failure of the building’s heating.

  “Did you see anyone else?�
�� Alex asked.

  “I… ” Kelly glanced at Rod.

  “I think I killed someone,” he said quietly. “I panicked when everyone… vanished and when I… Jesus.” He turned away, shoulders jerking. “I panicked, okay? I lost it and threw a chair. It went through a window and killed someone outside.”

  Alex placed her hand softly on Rod’s shoulder and his sobbing, close to inaudible, eased.

  “Nobody came, Ali,” Kelly whispered. “Out there when the guy and the chair, nobody came. They just walked by.”

  Like they didn’t see him. The voice spoke again from behind Dao. He resisted the urge to turn.

  They don’t look that happy to see each other, do they?

  The slightly snide tone was unlike his usual thoughts but, even so, there was some truth to it. Kelly and Alex now stood a few steps from each other, their embrace seemingly forgotten.

  “Okay.” Alex sounded as if she’d taken charge without considering it. The same thought occurred to Kelly as Dao. “We go downstairs and we get out.”

  “I tried the doors.” Kelly pointed to Rod. “We both did when Rod got down there. They’re locked.”

  “Then we find other doors or a window. I don’t care what. We smash it if we have to.”

  There was no need for any thought or voice to point out the undercurrent of something not quite in control floating below Alex’s words. They all heard it clearly.

  As Simon passed Dao, nodding a greeting to Rod and offering the man his hand, Dao backed up. He’d meant to move without making a sound; his trainer squeaked on the polished floor and the others turned.

  “I’m going upstairs.” He kept moving. “Got to find my son.”

  “What?” Rod asked, frowning. He searched the others’ faces for clarification.