by CT Grey
“Sheesh,” she hissed at me. “I know I’m not Professor Hawking, but there’s no way in hell we can get into that fucking room below us from here.”
“Really?” I glanced at the tall windows. “Are you absolutely sure?”
“What?” She scowled. “Are you fucking blind? There’s no stairs, no lift of any description. So pardon me if I can’t see a way off this floor, except going back through those fuckers.”
“Yeah,” I said while I tried to gauge the strength of curtains. “Then what else can we do?”
“Try the other doors?”
“I wouldn’t do that.” I walked to the window, opened it and popped my head out to see if the window below aligned with this one. “When we have a much better option.”
I started tearing down the curtains.
“Oh no,” Jaq said. “You’re not going to do that.”
“Watch me,” I said as I tied one end of the curtain to a radiator and threw the other end out of the window to see it coming up short just above the window frame below us. I hauled it back in and a minute later, we had a makeshift rope that was long enough to dangle under the next window still. Satisfied with the result I went outside.
“Oh no,” Jaq eyed the flimsy-looking rope. “I’m not going to do that.” She disappeared inside just as I heard a cacophony of screams coming from the hallway. And I was about go back in when Jaq ran back to window with fear in her eyes. Whether it was because of the screamer or her vertigo, I didn’t know, but I didn’t allow her time to waffle around as I extended my hand. “Come on. Trust me.”
Even though she took it, she said, “God, I don’t know.”
“Well I do.” I grasped her hand and helped her to climb out. She squeezed the rope as if it was her lifeline, when she set her boots against the wall and we started moving down slower than a slug crossing a street. Two steps later, her boot slipped.
Jaq screamed like a proper girl, sliding around uncontrollably. I quickly scaled down and helped her to gain her footing against the wall. She panted heavily, looked up towards the window and said, “I… I don’t think I can do this.”
“Yes you can,” I said. “You either do this, or you go back and find a way to follow me to the room below. Is that clear?”
“Okay,” she said. “Help me back up then.”
“No,” I said vehemently. “I’m not going to do that. But what I’m going to do is to help you with that rope. Wrap your legs around it and slide down.”
“Slide down,” she snapped at me. “Are you mad?”
“Do I look mad?”
“Well yeah,” Jaq answered. “Daft as a bat.”
I tried not to smile, and then shinned down a bit to help her to wrap her legs around the rope. “You can come down just an inch to reach the first knot.”
“What knot?”
“The one I tied there when I joined these two together.”
“Oh,” she said just as her feet touched the knot. Jaq looked up and as her eyes expanding in horror, I followed her gaze and saw a screamer salivating at the window. His hands swung wildly in the air. It was almost as if that screamer were trying to reach us. And who was I to deny such request? I grabbed his hand and pulled him out. The abomination squealed like a pig as he flew through the air and smacked on the street.
Then there was another one, and behind him, I could see the others; all lining up to get a piece of the meat that was dangling from the window. And I quickly knew there was no way I could pull them all out to meet their makers, without risking Jaq or myself being dislodged. “It’s now or never,” I said to Jaq. “Get in that room.”
The order seemed to work wonders, as she lined her boot against the wall, almost as if she was member of a SWAT team and, with one swing crashed through the window below. I followed her in and saw the reasons the screamers had been banging at those double doors.
The room was full of survivors. All of them had wild eyes, and all of them were in shock. It was as if they couldn’t understand why we of all people had ended in their place. Maybe they even thought this wasn’t real; that what was going outside their windows was only supposed to be possible in the movies.
“Who are you?” A woman in a tight red dress stepped forward.
“Who do you think we are, Batman and the fucking boy-wonder Robin, yeah?” Jaq said, with her usual charm.
“Jaq.” I touched her arm, looked the woman and asked: “Is Alison here?”
“Alison who?”
I didn’t even have time to answer as Jaq went ballistic. But I knew. I didn’t need to even look around to know that she wasn’t there. Not among these people. And to be honest, at that moment I thought there was no point in going forward to try and rescue her. We couldn’t clear this place and find her alive. From this point on, we’d have to think her as one of them. One of the walkers. Doomed to walk the face of the earth, feeling hungrier than ever before, until someone put her down.
*** Henrik ***
Even though my mind demanded to push the envelope, I didn’t. I daren’t do that, at least not in the way I suspected they wanted me to do it and I said: “That was it? All you did was in vain. You never found her?”
As Jane gathered her thoughts I looked at Sergeant Red, reaching for his ear, while his eyes stared at something in the distance. And when Jane began to say, “I…” I raised my hand and stopped her. “Just hold on to that thought for a moment, please.”
Sergeant Red turned towards me. “Sir.”
“What is it?”
“Nothing,” he answered, still holding a hand over his ear.
“Really,” I glanced at Jane, while waiting for << continue>> to flash onto my screen. When it never arrived, the look on Jane’s face said as much as I had suspected. There was something going on and I was kept out from the loop deliberately. “This is not normal, is it?”
Red’s eyes jolted between me and Jane before he agreed: “It’s not.”
“Please,” Jane said. “Don’t insult his intelligence.”
Interesting. “Indeed Sergeant, don’t think I’m so daft and blind that—”
“It’s not that sir,” Sergeant Red said. “It’s just—”
“That I’m not privy to that piece of knowledge,” I said.
Jane’s frowned. She flicked her gaze to Red and then back to me: “Why?”
“I’m afraid—”
She waved her hand and said, “I don’t care. Red told me—”
“He told you what?”
Jane’s mouth snapped close and she remained silent while I shifted my gaze from her to Sergeant Red, as I understood that I was being played by all parties. None of them really trusted my judgement, and none of them were exactly willing to let me into their circles. Some could have claimed I was the one standing on the outside looking in, without even knowing what was really going on. But what I could gather was that this wasn’t a small interrupt, as it whatever the glitch was, it wouldn’t have taken the Tank completely off-line.
Then again, I didn’t want to disconnect and have to try my luck with that Russian gorilla that was most probably still standing outside my office. Not because I had before my eyes not one conspiracy but two, and who knows what would happen, if I disconnected and was never allowed to return?
No, I thought, I’ll have to pin this down with perseverance.
“If you’re going to tell me that,” I said. “Then perhaps you can tell us what happened to Alison, as it sounds as if you were letting her off too easily.”
Jane shifted in her chair to a more relaxed position and said, “I wasn’t. It absolutely wasn’t a bad thing to find so many humans huddling together. Think about it.”
“Think about what?” I said even though I knew she was right, because when we’d given the order for the last members to abandon Thames House, I never dreamed so many of them would have survived the onslaught. The screamers were devastating, even if Jane managed to slaughter them easily. Then again, I realised she’d been fighting for her li
fe over six and half centuries – way more years than the combined careers of all our guards. But when she didn’t answer, I looked down at my notes and said: “You thought that you would not be able to clear the whole of Thames House, even though you had, what? Thirty, forty people there.”
“That is correct.”
I crossed my fingers and looked her into eyes. “So can you explain to me why it wasn’t a bad thing, when from my point of view, it was just a matter of the time before the zombies broke into the room and started consuming the rest of the people.”
“Well…”
“I haven’t finished.” I extended one of my crossed fingers. “And even if that didn’t happen, I find it hard to believe that they could’ve survived longer than a few hours in that hell. And to be absolutely frank, we both know Whitehall and Westminster were completely overrun by the undead.”
“Indeed,” she said.
*** Jane ***
Looking out from the window we had crashed through, I could see exactly the same thing and had the same thoughts in my mind. These people weren’t going to survive out there and I couldn’t believe that anybody would come to help them. So, really, it was up to us to provide the needs for many; in a place that’d never been designed as a permanent residence. Certainly not in the way it had stood there since the 1930’s.
Back in those days I knew it had been two separate merchant buildings before the government bought them in the 1990’s and decided to build that famous archway. And of the two major intelligence services, I reckoned the one on south side of the Thames had better chances of standing against a full-blown infestation. Maybe they’d even foreseen that one day there would be hordes of people raving on the outside. I realised the people in here weren’t going to survive. Not without proper weapons. I didn’t want to add any more to the numbers of undead. And that meant doing business I didn’t want to do.
They deserved better. Something that would give them hope to fight against the reality facing them, and realise a future could lie ahead. Part of me questioned that, but I pushed it to one side. Jaq was still raving. “How can you not know where she is? This place is a fucking intelligence service, isn’t it? And you—”
“Are not helping at the moment,” I said loudly.
Jaq turned towards me. “Even so, Jane… Even so, they should keep better track of their people,” she said, bitterly. “And I bet if it weren’t for this bloody blackout, they could tell in a second who is where, and what they’re doing, at this precise moment.”
“Yeah but…” one plump office worker said. “We’re in this shit now, and from what I know, there’s no way we can go back to the normality.”
“Well.” I folded arms over my chest. “We can certainly do something about that, can’t we?” The people shifted their gazes to me, looking for a leader, and I liked that. I liked their attention and wanted to see their determination to turn this fiasco on its head. But there was a lot of fear in those eyes, too. “We can win this day, this battle, but there’s no way you can go back to your homes and live your lives as if it’s business as usual.”
“And why’s that?” The woman in the red dress asked. I could see from her posture, the way she acted and spoke, that she was one of the senior managers. “Is there something you know, that we don’t?”
“Yeah,” I nodded. “Are you in charge?”
She looked around and then nodded. “I may as well be.”
“Excellent,” I said. “Then you can probably tell me if any of you have any weapons … or are they all as useless as this empty submachine gun?”
They looked at each other, uncertain, but some started showing what weapons they did have. Jaq whispered in my ear: “Could I have a word, please?”
“Of course, Jaq dear,” I said, but before I gave her my full attention, I returned my gaze to the bossy-looking woman. “If you want my help, I strongly advise you to gather all your weapons in one place, okay?”
I turned to Jaq, laid a hand on her shoulder and turned her towards the window, away from prying ears. I could sense sadness creeping into her. It was a feeling which they all probably had in their hearts, thinking about the lost souls of the security guards, or friends who’d been taken by the Walkers. There was nothing we could do to help them. The world had changed. Forever.
“We have to look for Alison,” Jaq said intensely, on the verge of tears.
“And we will,” I said softly. “I know it’s hard, but we have to be prepared for the possibility she might be one of them, by now.”
She took a step away from me and shouted: “How can you say that? Who gave you the right?”
“Jaq,” I said. “I…”
“You’ve done nothing to help her. Nothing!”
“That’s not true,” I said sternly. “I’ve done everything in my power. Everything. And I’ll continue to do more, but we have to start facing reality.”
“Lies,” she shouted so loud that most of the heads turned our way. “She’s alive. I know. I know that in my heart.” She thumped her chest, while tears ran down her cheeks. “But you… you don’t even have a heart because you’re just a bloody vampire!”
“Shush…” I raised a finger over my lips.
“Don’t you shush me,” Jaq said, but she calmed a little. She wiped her nose on the back of her hand. “You don’t have that right. You’re not my mother.”
I shook my head and turned from her to look outside. Sad and bitter emotions ran through me as I heard echoes of her words in my mind. They hurt me. Badly. I’d done everything to make sure my friends were happy in their mortal lives. Lives, which I couldn’t ever have. And, in one way, I felt I’d been a mother to them. Not a biological one, but at the very least a surrogate one. And now she dared to say I had done nothing, when in fact, I had done everything I could.
“Jane,” Jaq said, but I didn’t listen. I grabbed a packet of smokes that were sitting on a table near me, and lit one. And just like that, her words disappeared from my mind as I dragged smoke into my lungs. As the filter burned my fingers I flicked it out of the window and turned around with one intention in mind. I had to get these people moving. Not just because they needed me, but because I needed their help.
Desperately. I needed their help to win back Jaq. And I didn’t care what it might cost along the way. I didn’t even care how they looked at me, when I walked towards their leader standing next to a long table, where they were stacking all sorts of weapons.
“Is this all you have?”
“At the moment yes,” she answered.
“I see,” I said as I stared at a few pistols and even fewer rounds. They were the only real weapons in among the stuff they’d fashioned from office supplies. “It’s not really much, but it has to do.”
“To do what exactly?” she asked. “You aren’t thinking about going back out there and taking our weapons with you, are you?”
“Well…” I picked up a paper guillotine in my hand. It wasn’t properly balanced, but it was a far better weapon than any other they’d managed to manufacture. “I was thinking about clearing this floor, and then heading downstairs to turn on the generators.”
“What generators?” She raised her eyebrows.
The plump officer stepped forward. “I think she means the ones that have been undergoing annual maintenance this week. You know, the massive ones in the corner of the car park.”
I snapped my fingers and said, “Exactly. Thank you sir.”
He blushed and looked down as the woman in red dress fixed him with a murderous glare. “How do we go about doing all of that? We can’t fight them all.”
“Maybe you can’t,” I said. “But I can. And to be honest—”
“You’re not going out there on your own,” Jaq said, behind me. “I’m coming with you, whether you want me to or not.”
*** Henrik ***
“You really don’t know what’s going on…” she asked suddenly and drew me back into the holo-drone from checking, who those people migh
t actually have been, “...do you?”
“Excuse me?”
“Have you been listening to me at all?”
I glanced the transcript and said, “Of course I have.”
Jane slammed a palm on the table and said, “Then can you tell me what the hell is going on with you guys?”
“With us?” I frowned. “What do you mean?”
“This.” She waved her hand. “You keeping me in here as if I’m some sort of prisoner, even though I came here voluntarily. I’ve given you a great deal information, and deserve to be treated much better than I am currently.”
“Yes.” I nodded. “And we are very grateful for—”
“I haven’t finished.” Jane scowled at me murderously.
“Apologies Mrs—”
“Henrik,” she said. “All I want to know, is what is going on…“
I shrugged my shoulders and said, “Honestly, I don’t know.”
“Sheesh,” she hissed. “What a useless person you ended up.” She glanced at Sergeant Red, who also shrugged his shoulders. “You too.” Then she flicked her fingers to Sergeant Red and said, “Give me another smoke, will you?”
“Ma’am.” Sergeant Red acknowledged, rummaging through his pockets. I sighed and moved looked the transcripts to see if there was anything to provoke her into releasing more information.
“Jaq,” I said.
Jane tilted her head as if she was bored. “Yes. What about her?”
“Was she really that thick?”
“Thick?” She frowned. “What are you talking about?”
I gulped as I realised what I’d said, but it didn’t make her angry, “Go on,” she said. “Say what you meant to say.”
I lowered my voice and said, “Even though it was obvious she wasn’t using her brain...”
Jane sullenly shook her head as she reached to get the packet of smokes she’d acquired from Red earlier, before she said calmly: “How dare you even think that sort of thing Mister Jackson? Jaq had done nothing wrong. She was in love. Believe me…”