by Andy Graham
“Thinking’s not allowed in this country anymore. Thought you’d have realised that by now. What would happen if you thunk the wrong think?” She trailed the knife tip along Emily’s collarbone. It left a thin red line behind it.
A flash of colours streaked past the window, the fisher gull shrieking with laughter. A gust of wind slammed the window shut. The banging noise brought Ray out in a rash of gooseflesh.
“Damn those birds,” the woman said, glancing at the window. And as she did, Emily sank her teeth into the woman’s wrist. She screamed and Emily pulled free. The men’s concentration broke for a second. Ray’s fingers closed around the steel edge of the table and drove it into the nearest Unsung. The man staggered, tripped, grabbed at the rusting door handle as he fell. It snapped off in his hands. The connecting bolt between handles tumbled after it, leaving the door to the comms room the only exit.
“Get the girl!” the Unsung captain and Ray screamed at the same time.
In the tight space, hampered by the bunk beds and the bodies of their colleagues, the Unsung were struggling to find a position to fire from.
The broken handle rattled. “Open the door!” someone yelled from the other side. The door shuddered. “Let us in!”
“Let us out!” yelled the two living members of the Resistance Council. They sprinted for the narrow corridor to the comms room. Renn’s head hit the ground, his sightless eyes staring at the darkening sky outside.
Emily careened into Ray. He scooped her off her feet. Emily screamed and buried her head in his shoulder, face wet with tears and snot. “Run!” he yelled.
“Emily!” Stella forced herself past the fleeing Council members.
A hand grabbed his shoulder, yanked him backwards, spun him round. The butt of a revolver glanced across his forehead. Blood gushed into his eyes.
“Emily,” Stella screamed, getting closer.
“Kill the fuckers.”
“Shoot them. All of them.”
Ray was blind with blood and deaf from Emily’s sobs and the shouts and screams. Thick in the chaos of a fight where survival was as much dependent on luck as skill. Someone tugged at Emily. Ray clutched her tight. Something thudded into his ribs, driving the wind out of him. Glass crunched under his knees as he fell. The girl’s forehead thumped into his. A crack of blue gleamed from slitted eyes that were smeared in someone’s blood, his, hers, or theirs, he had no idea.
“Mummy! Daddy! Help!” Emily was wrenched from his grasp and bundled over Legionnaire Young’s shoulder, kicking and screaming. Ray scrabbled to his feet as the acne-scarred Unsung tackled him to the ground.
“Emily!” Stella’s voice lost in a rattle of gunfire.
Ray’s assailant danced in jagged lines as the bullets ripped holes in his back. He coughed blood. Wheezed. His grip went limp, disbelief writ large across his pimple-ravaged face at being shot by his own men. The fisher gull’s maniacal cackle was joined by a screaming chorus from the rest of its flock as they assembled on the window ledge. The feathers of more than one were matted together in red clumps.
“We’ve got the girl. Fall back.”
“Em!” Through the haze of blood Ray saw Stella Swann trying to force herself through the door that was partly wedged shut by Renn’s fresh corpse. Ears ringing. Ribs splitting. Ray forced the dead man off him and rolled to all fours. Legionnaire Young fled to his colleagues as Emily hammered tiny fists into his back. And over the shouting and screaming and cawing, a noise shook the towers from the foundations buried deep in the sea bed all the way to the rivets marching across the ceiling. A roar, bestial and primal. One of pain and anger and vengeance that scattered the fisher gulls.
“What the—” the captain said.
The door to the one-person corridor exploded open, knocking Stella to her knees. Dan hurtled into the dorm. His stamping feet narrowly missed the prostrate figure of his wife. His face was contorted into inhuman lines, red tears dripping from eyes that blazed purple.
“What the—” a legionnaire exclaimed, echoing his captain.
“Shoot him!”
A shot crashed through the air. It slammed into Dan’s shoulder, spinning him but not stopping him. Corded bands of muscle bunched under his shirt. He crashed through a stack of chairs, teeth bared, fingernails reaching.
“I said kill him!” The officer’s panicked voice cut through the bestial snarling, through Stella’s howls for her husband and Emily’s cry for help.
Another shot.
A third.
Dan ran on. An unstoppable storm of hate with one thing on its mind.
“Fuck!” The legionnaire holding the sobbing girl realised what Dan wanted. Young tried to offload Emily. Dan’s fingers closed around his neck. Dan’s head slammed into the other man’s face again and again and again, smashing the nose and eye socket and the jaw to pulp.
“Stop him!” Young screeched. His voice was muffled as Dan’s mouth closed over his throat. There was a ripping of cartilage and flesh and Young collapsed to the floor, convulsing, hands grasping at his shredded throat.
The captain had her knife out. Dan picked his daughter out of the bloody mess that had been her captor. He stiffened as the captain’s blade slid into his chest and backhanded the woman. She staggered. Knocked the aim of her colleague off. Bullets ricocheted around the room, sparking off the metal walls and thudding into mattresses. Feathers and foam and dust clouded air thick with fear.
“Dan!” Stella. Full of panic.
Her husband was cradling their daughter in his arms as the remaining Unsung lashed and stabbed with knives and bayonets. As gouts of blood, curses and vitriol sprayed across the room Dan lay Emily on the steel table Ray had used as a battering ram. And amongst the carnage, there was a pause, a moment where a single second was crammed with a lifetime of love and devotion. The red mist lifted. Dan’s face softened and the back of a scarred knuckled stroked his daughter’s cheek. “I kept my promise, Em. I didn’t hurt you.”
“Kill that thing!” the captain shouted and time snapped back into place.
Dan shunted the table across the room. It skidded to a halt in front of Ray and Stella. Ray scooped the shivering girl into his arms. Dan was staring at him. “Save her. Save them.”
Ray wasn’t sure if Dan had said the words or if the two men had realised what the solution was at the same time. Ray grabbed Stella’s arm and dragged her towards the door. Ray, Stella and Emily crashed into the narrow corridor where their sweaty, desperate flesh was crammed up too tight.
On the other side of the doorway, Dan lashed about with a chair, wrapped in a dying man’s fury, splintering bone, ripping flesh and denting metal. But, even with the madness the drugs had given him, the legionnaires outnumbered Dan. They were armed with rifles and knives and Danniel Swann was losing.
A shot hissed past Ray’s head. One of the legionnaires had recovered his rifle.
“Hold her,” Ray forced Emily into her mother’s arms and ran back into the room.
The legionnaire aimed down the throat of the corridor.
“No!” Dan grabbed the table. Body low, legs pumping, he drove the table across the room, pushing Ray with it.
“Dan. Stop. Let me—”
The door slammed shut, shuddered. The handle lurched and hung limply. Ray rattled it. Useless.
Dan was sealed in from both sides.
The shots and roars from the far side of the door blended with the blood thrashing through Ray’s ears and with Emily’s sobbing. It competed with Stella’s shrieks and the thudding of her fists on the sealed door. Ray pulled Stella out of the way. Slammed his shoulder into the door, again and again and again and again until his hand went numb. Someone howled on the other side, the sound of an animal dying.
“Dan!” Stella clawed at Ray.
The retort of a revolver cut Dan’s wounded cries off for ever.
A silence settled over the corridor. It lasted for three heartbeats before it was replaced by the keening wail of a wife who had just lost
her husband and the sobs of a daughter who had just lost her father.
20
Regroup. Return. Rebel
Moon shadows embraced the bedraggled group. A legionnaire led them, head swivelling from side to side, stolen rifle ready. Following him was a man and three women. The man was snivelling. One of the women was hunched and twitchy. The second was straight-backed and elegant, her black coat hung heavy around her. The last woman clutched a bag of rags to her chest as if that were all she had left in the world. Bringing up the rear was a man with a crutch.
A building loomed over them. It cut a jagged hole out of the sky. It had been various things: an asylum, a rehabilitation centre for soldiers, a seminary before religion had been banned, a home for troubled children. It had even had a brief stint as a team-building centre for companies looking for a reason to boost staff morale that didn’t involve paying people more. Then the money had dried up. The doctors and nurses had moved out. As had the patients, nuns, monks, kids and, crucially, the maintenance teams and cleaners, the people who contribute more to society in their own way than those who push numbers and words around on a page. Nature had done to the house what it always does when humankind stops interfering: reclaimed its own.
How do I know this? She stumbled, feet catching on nothing. Hands reached for her. She yelped. The hands withdrew. I know because the old man with silver hair told me. He saved us. Rescued us from the towers in the South Sea. He’s gone. He’s good. He’d flown away in what the bad man called the ‘bird’.
The group walked under windows that had been stripped of glass and lead, through rooms where the floorboards had been ripped up to get at the wood underneath. Huge beams of oak and wolf-bark lay exposed yet proud.
The crunch of feet on dirt became the soft sucking noise of boots in mud. The legionnaire, the bad man, leading the group stopped at the edge of a lake. Mist curled across its surface, along the tree-choked shore. A boat lay half-submerged. It had a hole that looked like it had been chewed by an elephant-sized rat. “This it?” the legionnaire asked.
The twitchy woman nodded. The snivelling man snivelled some more.
They’re from the Resistance, she remembered. They didn’t look as if they could resist much more than a breeze.
“This is it?” the straight-backed woman asked, surprised. “You kept this well hidden.”
The limping man joined them by the water’s edge. The end of his crutch disappeared into the mud. “This is it.”
“What are we looking for?” the legionnaire asked.
“That.” The man with a crutch pointed. His crutch slid out of the mire with a squelch.
This man has a name. Something like Martin. ‘Tiny’ to his friends. That’s almost right. I can trust him. Just him.
Just above the water was a dull orange glow that was smudged by the mist. If she strained her eyes, she could just about make out a second one in the distance.
“And how do we follow the lights? Not sure any of us can walk on water. Not even you.” The legionnaire directed the last comment at the woman in the black coat. She ignored him, one hand worrying a mole on her nose.
The urge to slap that hand was overwhelming. Her fist uncurled. The bundle of rags in her arms shifted. The urge to hurt was subsumed in a different need. “Shhhh,” she whispered into a sweaty mess of blonde hair, blood and tears. “It’s going to be OK,” she lied.
“We go under it,” the man with the crutch said. “There’s a tunnel under the lake. It’s got a concealed entrance.”
What is his name? Martino? It isn’t Dan. That much she was sure of. Would have bet her life on.
The woman in the coat: “Of course there’s a tunnel. Why didn’t I think of that?” She chuckled. “Clever, Rose.”
The legionnaire: “And how do we find a secret entrance in the dark when it’s foggy?”
The man with the crutch: “Line up the lights. They’re a safety risk but we only use them in an emergency.”
Martinez. His name’s Martinez. He can be trusted.
“Guess this qualifies.” The legionnaire glanced over at her. It was the type of look that she wasn’t meant to see. That annoyed her but she knew full well it would have annoyed her even more if she hadn’t seen it. She snorted. And now I’m thinking nonsense. Sounds like the pseudo-scientific crap that is dragging progress backwards. It’s impossible, as impossible as . . . Her brain floundered for a comparison. As impossible as someone who’s always been alive now being dead. That’s impossible. If you love someone, they can’t die. They—
—were running towards her. All of them. Faces concerned, irritated, worried. The legionnaire was scanning the trees, weapon gripped hard to his chest.
I used to like him. Not any more. Where’s the helicopter pilot, the good man? He brought us here. What’s his name? Senior? He rescued us from those steel coffins out at sea. Clever. We left someone behind, though. Someone important. Not so clever. Apart from that, Senior’s clever. He stole a chopper from the bad legionnaires and destroyed his older one so the Unsung couldn’t follow. Senior’s very clever. Like Dan. Dependable. Dan could do with some new clothes, though. Never met a man with a such a pathological aversion to shopping. Claimed it was ‘a sickness nurtured by the elite to foster insecurity and debt in the masses’. That’s the only thing that gets him riled. Got him riled. He’s dead. Was dead? No. That’s impossible. I love him. He can’t be dead. He’s got children. We have children. Why are these people looking at me?
“Are you OK?” That was the woman with the mole.
Why doesn’t she just cut the bloody thing off?
“Of course, I’m OK. Why wouldn’t I be?”
“You were shouting—”
“Keep her quiet. She’ll get us all killed,” hissed the sniveller.
“What was I screaming?”
The gaze of the man with the crutch slid sideways. The older woman’s eyes didn’t waver, as blue and hard as ice on Midwinter’s night. “He’s dead.”
Silence. But for the hissing of wind through leaves, the gentle lapping of water, the sound of a child whimpering and a woman screaming.
She hit the ground with a thud. Damp soaked through her trousers, chilling her knees. Hands reached for her. Comforting. Consoling. She was rocking back and forth, clutching her child to her chest. Holding Emily. Holding her as she would never hold Dan again. The man who slept under the bed to prove to the kids that there were no monsters there. The man who had loved the headstrong woman who refused to play the role of the meek wife. The husband she had drawn into her games. The father who had died to save his children.
She was screaming.
Stella Swann was screaming.
The damp wood squealed as Martinez shunted the door closed with his hip. “How is she?”
“Not good,” Ray replied.
“Sure?”
Stella’s hunched shadow flickered across the blotchy stone wall behind her. It stretched across a low ceiling, soaking up the dull glow of the lantern. “I’m sure,” he said, and the smell of rotting wood and slime curdled on his tongue. That was the worst thing here: the smell. The grotty room-under-a-lake stank like a place where time had stood still. It reeked of people who were forgotten long before they died. Hell, Ray thought. We’re in a corner of hell tucked away under a lake. Maybe the room where the demonic cleaners nip out for a quick cigarette.
A twist of smoke curled up from a candle near Stella. It stood on a sheaf of yellowing papers, which in turn sat on a bed of straw on a wax-stained book. The book was called Lessons Learnt from the Great Conflagrations of Our Time. “A fire hazard in a room under a lake,” he muttered. There was a predictable, cartoon-like irony to that, which was the hallmark of Rose’s failing resistance.
The curl of smoke over Stella’s head twisted into a grey halo. Once luxuriant curls now hung limp and straggly across her face. They swung as she rocked back and forth. Emily was still clutched in her hands, asleep. The curtain of hair parted as Stella glared at Ra
y. She hissed at him, teeth bared.
“Really not good,” he muttered.
Martinez squeezed his friend’s shoulder. “You did what you could, man.”
“Yeah, just never seems to be enough.”
“Stella’ll come round. She’s smart that one, almost as smart as—”
“Nascimento?”
Martinez stifled a laugh. “He wishes. I was going to say Vena.”
As one, the ex-legionnaires looked down the tunnel that led from the lake shore to this room. Vena’s oil-black hair gleamed in the dull yellow from the bunker lights. She was studying the supports, heavy wooden beams that held up slabs of stone and brick.
“Here.” The nervous whispers of a twitchy young Resistance fighter slid down the corridor. He pointed. “We push the pond lights up through these tubes when we need the signal on. The tubes act as air vents, too. Get frogs caught in them sometimes. Got to pull their legs off to get the buggers out. No good to eat. Even if you cook them.” His tittering laugh turned into an embarrassed cough as Vena stared at him. “This tunnel was built decades before we found it, centuries even, reckon—”
“Vena’s gonna turn the kid into a frog if he doesn’t shut up soon,” Martinez said. Ray didn’t reply, his gaze fixed on the old woman. “What?” Martinez said. “C’mon, Fervent Franklin, I know that look, what’s going on in that brain of yours?”
“Doesn’t Vena seem different to you? Less flouncy, not quite as bumbling, more ruthless?”
“What’re you saying?”
This close Ray fancied he could see a twisted reflection of his own face in the scarred skin of Martinez’s. “Not sure, Tino.”
“Vena’s sister was murdered twenty-four hours ago, I’d be a little less ‘flouncy’ than normal, too. You’re starting to sound like your mother. She could see a conspiracy theory—”
“In a boiled egg.” Ray laughed, low and regretful.
“Sorry. Didn’t mean to bring her up so soon.”
“Not talking about her won’t bring her back.”