by Walker, Luke
I did not hear that.
“You okay?” Kelly asked.
“Yeah.” She had to whisper it. Anything else felt like it would take way more effort and strength than she had. Alex cleared her throat. “Just had a moment.” She waved an arm that felt like it might fall off, encompassing the warm air. “It’s hot in here.”
Rod shifted a fraction on the spot. In his wide, pleasant face, Alex saw an emotion she named immediately.
Recognition.
“What?” she said, slightly too close to a shout.
“Nothing, love.”
Whatever just happened, it’s happened to him, too.
She didn’t care. Wouldn’t care while her girls were outside and she was inside this strange, empty building.
Alex set out again, fingers trailing on the railing. With every step, leaving the mad sights and sounds of the church out in the middle of nowhere became marginally easier. She held hard to that idea as they took the last flight of stairs and approached the doors opening to the foyer. Believing it was easy.
Or so she told herself[L2].
*
Dark pools stained the pavement of Greenham Road, sliding together to form flat puddles. Although the daily temperature had yet to reach any higher than thirteen degrees at any point throughout October, the small section of land turning black was rapidly becoming its own atmosphere. In the silent heat, the puddles flowed upwards like tar. With no human eyes to witness, the first of the tar-shapes grew legs.
Chapter Eight
This is like being in a church.
For some reason, Dao found that thought unpleasant. It was like turning over a rock and watching the woodlice and centipedes scurry for darkness. While he’d been in a church only a handful of times for friends’ weddings and a couple of funerals, he knew the quiet exclusive to old buildings. It was a specific sort of hush as people gathered and sat, studying their feet on the stone floor, waiting for serious business to begin.
Up here on the tenth floor of Greenham Place, that same expectation wouldn’t leave him. In the same way, the idea of speaking at any volume higher than a whisper seemed as if it would invite stern looks and silent admonishments from other people.
What other people?
He stood at the entrance to the main corridor of the tenth floor. Unlike the others, this floor was not comprised of open-plan offices. The tenth was the money floor, the executives and the decision-makers. Up here, the big choices for the running of the city were made. Spacious offices, the doors all closed, lined the left hand side while several meeting rooms, the chairs tucked tidily under the round tables, took up the other side. Leather sofas, presumably only for decoration rather than actually sitting on, were pressed against the magnolia walls with healthy-looking plants placed between them. Dao guessed they were as fake as any of the others he’d seen on the lower floors. The corridor became a two-way junction beyond the last sofa, leading to more offices down the right hand turning. The left was nothing but plain walls that ended at a solid door with an alarm bar covering its centre. None of the executives walked to the left turning; they had no reason to. The door was always locked. The maintenance staff had the keys, and even they rarely had reason to disengage the alarm and open the doors. Occasionally, a contractor required access through to the air-conditioning units or heating systems. Otherwise, the entrance to the small room below the roof was kept locked and the hatch that opened the way was bolted shut.
As Dao crept along the corridor, fingers trailing on the smooth wall, the air inside the roof access listened to the man’s slow, careful steps. Underneath the hatch, a ladder jutted from the wall, bolts as large as a man’s fist holding it to the wall. Each of the ten rungs was cold enough to stick to skin and tear it from fingers and thumbs. Above the ladder, the hatch was a wide rectangle, smooth and sealed by three chunky bolts and a padlock hanging like a growth. The metal of the hatch was as cold to the touch as the ladder and the room. No breath fogged the air; no exhalation sent steam from a mouth or nose. Even so, the air listened.
Unaware of anything but his own barely controlled fear, Dao walked on and kept Yang’s name in his mouth instead of screaming it into the silence. The others had to be out by now, he thought. They’d get a signal or get a working phone and call for help and the police would come; ambulances, too, and they’d make sense of this strange place and this mad situation.
He reached a door, a small plaque in its centre proclaiming: Alan Letts. Head of Service.
“What do you service, Mr Letts?” Dao asked nothing and closed his mouth to keep a mad giggle inside.
Not believing the door would move, Dao pushed on the handle. The door opened, sliding over the plush carpet, revealing a desk almost the width of the room, polished white walls and a sofa deep and thick enough to sleep on. A few filing cabinets sat against walls, their drawers firmly closed, and clear windows overlooked the desk and computer. Even from the other side of the room, the view of blue sky and the tips of the surrounding buildings told Dao this was the room of someone important, someone from the upper echelons of management. Not that it mattered. If his son was anywhere near here, it wasn’t important if the office belonged to the Grand High Chief of the Council or a cleaner.
“Yang,” Dao whispered and crossed towards the window.
In the stillness of the corridors, the door to the roof access stood wide open. A wall of frozen air crept towards the junction. At the same time and several floors below, Simon was peering behind the small group and dismissing the tiny noise as imagination.
“Yang, where are you?” Dao spoke as loudly as he dared to his faint reflection in the window. It was only after asking his question that Dao realised he was just as scared of no answer as he was of hearing his boy begging for help again.
At that, Lin spoke to him, and Dao stood still, listening to his wife’s soft voice.
You didn’t hear a thing. I don’t know what’s happening where you are, but I do know Yang isn’t with you. All you have to do is accept that and leave. We’re out here. We want you home, my love.
Hot tears threatened. Dao closed his eyes, almost managing to keep the weeping trapped. A few tears fell; he inhaled a shaking breath, then another, before opening his eyes.
Lin—or whatever part of him spoke for his wife—was right. Whether or not the bomb had gone off, there was no reason that made any sense for Yang to be in Greenham Place. Of course, if the bomb had gone off, then he and the other people presumably heading for the exit were dead, so what did it matter?
“Funny,” Dao whispered. He didn’t believe the bomb had detonated. The normality of this office building and the little visible chaos beyond its walls was proof of that. He didn’t stand in the middle of a torn apart structure, its windows nothing but blackened holes and its innards of metal cooking in the fire of a nuclear attack. Willington was not a hole in the earth, and the sky was not aflame. Whatever had happened to him and to Simon, Rod and the two sisters, it was not the terrorists’ bomb blowing an RAF base, the hundreds of square miles of green around it, and this city into hell as they’d done to Los Angeles last June.
You sure about that?
“Yes.”
Refusing to ask himself any more questions, Dao took the last few steps to the window and gazed straight down to the road and pavements.
Several seconds passed before his brain registered the problem. Later, Dao would ask himself if the delay was deliberate. Perhaps his mind simply couldn’t take it and so refused to do so immediately.
Ten floors above the centre of the largest city in the county, Dao watched precisely nothing. No cars took Greenham Road to either of its ends. Nobody crossed at the lights. No buses dropped off their passengers outside Tesco or collected shoppers laden with heavy bags. Dao’s eyes darted from the shop frontages to the three pubs visible from his vantage point. No smokers near the entrances; no guys selling the Big Issue; no traffic, no bodies, no movement, no shadows, no winding down of the late afternoon a
nd no approaching evening bringing sunset an hour earlier than Sunday’s would after the clocks changed.
Nothing.
Willington had become a painting. Dao stared at a flat, lifeless landscape created by someone with enough talent to produce the idea of a city centre, but neither the skill or time to develop the image into a living, breathing canvas. The city he’d known since moving here as a child twenty years ago was an idea of a city; it needed blood and breath to turn it into a real place. It needed light and dark in contrast. As it was, it had neither. When his mind insisted there were no shadows on the pavements, that the takeaways and pubs and bus shelters outside and opposite the supermarket sent no shade over the cracks and lines in the paving slabs, it had been exactly right. The high sun, still strong even if it wasn’t summer light, might as well have been hidden behind cloud.
And what about the guy? What about the dead man, crushed by Rod’s falling chair?
Dao trotted to the end of the window and stretched to get a better view. While he faced more of the right hand side of Greenham Place than its front and the entrance, he had enough of a view to tell the squashed man wasn’t there. Neither was any mess of sprayed blood.
The sun.
“What?”
The thought muttered again.
The sun.
Dao’s mind stuttered back a few seconds to his realisation the sun cast no shadows. What about the sun? What was the problem?
It turned the blue of the sky into a dazzling white almost directly opposite from Dao’s position, the illumination strong enough to make him squint and that…
That…
Was wrong.
Dao backed away, doing all he could to take a firm hold of his racing thoughts. Unable to stop the images forming, he saw the house he and Lin bought together five years ago, their pretty garden, so well-tended by Lin; he saw the high fence bordering its end from the small woodland beyond, and the sunrise each morning turning the green of their grass and the brown of the large oak near the fence into a shining carpet.
The sun rose in the east.
Their garden faced east.
And from where he stood inside this horrible, dead building, their house was east.
So why was the sun setting in the east?
The bitter chill in the corridor a few feet from the door of the office of Alan Letts, Head of Service, caressed the floor and wall. It reached for the door.
Still backing away from the window, Dao whispered: “Yang.”
A mammoth shriek answered him, and surely no child’s lungs could power such a noise.
Daddy.
Dao whirled around. The door he’d left open slammed shut, the noise a crash of thunder blowing everything else out of the office. A crack raced along the door and the handle exploded loose.
“Yang.” Dao lunged forward.
It was like racing headfirst into a wall.
He bounced off nothing, head and chest feeling as if they’d been hit with a hammer, and collapsed. Barely able to breathe, Dao squirmed on the carpet, and tried to say his son’s name. He managed a hiss, which sent lightning bolts shooting from his stomach to his face. And outside, Yang screamed and screamed. If the boy had any words, the sheer agony in his yells swallowed them. Dao could do nothing but inch his way over the carpet and rage inside at whatever was hurting his boy.
Above his head, a shape in the air reached.
Claws sank into the skin of Dao’s forehead. Blood flowed from fine cuts. He still didn’t have the breath to make a noise, despite the pain rapidly becoming agony. His head was turned; he had no choice but to go with it while Yang’s wails rang out, non-stop, beyond awful.
Whatever held Dao’s head pushed him back towards the window, the glass looming closer as he dragged useless fingers over the carpet and wept. The forced movement took him to the window and kept going. His nose pressed into the glass, then his forehead. And still, the claws in his head wouldn’t let go. Dao’s first coherent thought in seconds was:
It’s going to crush me.
Dao’s vision rippled. For a tiny moment, even the terrible sensation in his skull lessened. Then the glass of the window parted like oily water, its surface shimmering and dancing on all sides as Dao’s head oozed through it. He couldn’t close his eyes even when the window—or whatever the window had become—pressed its cold into his pupils for a moment, then flowed to the sides, up and below.
Air found Dao’s face.
He’d been pushed through the surface of the glass as if it were fresh mud. His knees and hands remained on the carpet while his head and neck jutted from the side of the building, offering him a God’s-eye view of Willington’s centre and its new lifeless surface.
But it wasn’t totally lifeless.
The claws forced Dao to bend his neck and see what moved on the pavement ten floors below.
Skittering, black pools sliding together, growing and forming wider circles, and those circles slowly beginning to jut from the ground and form the unmistakable shape of bodies, while the same fierce white light that shone in the east rose from the pavement and the faint whiff of something meaty, something burned, reached Dao’s nose.
The stink and the shapes too awful to be called human were not the worst. Neither was the impossible horror of his head pushed through a window without any glass breaking.
The claws gripping his skull, piercing skin to send tiny lines of blood streaming down his face, had changed.
Had become the soft weight of a hand.
A child’s hand holding his skull and forcing his neck back so his staring eyes couldn’t help but see the silver of the sun shining from the wrong direction.
Chapter Nine
The memory of the people in his meeting simply winking out of sight had left Simon alone since he’d found the others. For no good reason, it returned in clear, exquisite detail as they walked into the foyer of Greenham Place, filling his head to the point of shoving aside their immediate surroundings.
Alan Letts and Patricia Macmillan stand close to the window on the other side of the meeting room, their backs to him as they gaze outside, Alan on his mobile to his wife and telling her to get the kids into the house, to get them down into the wine cellar. Behind Simon, a barrage of panic and fear and none of it makes any sense because this doesn’t happen, not in real life. It’s film stuff; it’s as pretend as a book he might have read once. Even as he throws this denial at himself, the noise of panic grows louder. More people run for the tenth floor corridor; the clatter of their high heels and the hollow snap of their smart shoes is a rat-a-tat of machine gun fire, and that mad image makes him want to laugh and cry out at the same time.
The others who sat around the circular table—Heather Aldridge, Steve Roe, Joanna Carter and Rachel Wilkinson—sprinted for the corridor a moment ago. As Simon takes a step towards Alan and Patricia, trying to think through the noise inside and outside his head, Steve dashes back into the meeting room.
“It’s happening. Just saw it on Facebook,” he screeches like an injured bird. Before Simon or the others can reply, he dashes back to the clean white walls of the hallway, legging it to join the throng of escaping people. And all at once the air is a baking ball of heat, and the light is a pulse of white that should swallow Simon’s sight but leaves him able to see Patricia and Alan turning towards him a fraction of time before they simply wink out of existence and the barrage of howling voices at his back is cut off with smooth precision.
Silence falls down around Simon and the stifling burst of heat is gone, leaving the room cool and still. And—
The pain in Simon’s hand brought him back. He’d dug his nails into his palm; relaxing his fist took a fair degree of effort. Flexing his fingers, he told himself to forget for now what had happened ten floors above and focus on the present.
That’ll be easy, he thought. Of course it will.
Out of nowhere, Simon shivered. He’d left his coat in the meeting room and wished for it in the bright light illumin
ating the floor. Although the high windows forming the building’s front acted as a greenhouse in the same way they did so on the stairs, sunset was not far away. The cold of the evening was already creeping down with the last of the sun.
“I tried the doors.” Kelly stood in the centre of the foyer, framed by two huge pillars. Another four grew from the floor and reached long arms through the open stairwell above. The glass of the lift enclosure shone; the lift itself was a glowing square, its sides unmarked.
“No joy with them?” Rod asked, a little too lightly. Simon understood. No way the old fart would want to pass the remains of the man he killed by accident. No way—
“It’s gone.” Kelly ran for the exit. Before she reached it, Simon understood.
The squashed body and whatever might be left of Rod’s chair were nowhere in sight. Same with what Simon could only imagine was a huge patch of drying blood. The pavement, clear and clean, gleamed white.
The others joined Kelly, all treading slowly as if afraid they might make too much noise. While no pedestrians passed by, the occasional car did so. People were visible on the opposite pavement, most heading away from the city centre. A few entered Edwards, the pub standing on the corner of Greenham Road and Banks Lane. Early evening drinkers were seated beside the windows, and the simple human sight made Simon want to cry out with longing.
“Where… ” Rod could barely get his voice louder than a mutter. He had to hold his stomach, convinced he would soon vomit. “Where is it?”
No need to ask what it was. Rod had killed someone; now, that action had been impossibly undone.
“Did I do it?” Rod’s wide eyes sought each of the others out in turn, beseeching them. Simon had no answer. Even as Rod lowered his head, the Welshman crying, Simon had nothing.
Alex held Rod, letting the big man weep on her shoulder. Unsure if he should move but still desperate to get out, Simon counted to ten, then joined Kelly at the doors. She pushed on them as he reached her and there was no give. While they should have opened automatically if anyone came within a few feet, they refused to yield.