by Seth Patrick
He looked back down the tunnel. The dark tunnel, and the dark cavern beyond.
If the locks weren’t secure after all, if something had got inside and locked the door again after . . .
‘We need to wake everyone,’ he said. ‘Right now.’
By the time they reached the cavern, more flashlights were on. Annabel and Never were both there, as was Petro, and they’d placed some of the lantern-style lights around on the floor. Jonah’s eyes were darting to every dark corner, his adrenaline high enough to make him feel sick. He picked up one of the lanterns.
‘Get everyone awake,’ Sly ordered. ‘Try not to alarm the kids. Jonah thinks something might have been at the entrance.’
‘No alarms went off,’ said Annabel. ‘Why do you think something was there?’
Jonah shook his head. ‘A feeling.’
‘We can’t risk panic, just for a feeling,’ said Annabel.
‘The door might have been opened,’ said Jonah. ‘I can’t be certain. But the power didn’t go off on its own, that’s for damn sure.’
‘Actually, that’s entirely possible,’ said Never. Jonah saw that he was looking around uneasily too. ‘It’s possible the main circuit breaker in the house tripped.’
Jonah pointed his flashlight right in his face. ‘Clutching at straws, don’t you think?’
‘I mean it,’ said Never. ‘It’s new kit up there, and, um, maybe I got something wrong. I mean, that’s rare but it happens.’
‘And the door, Jonah?’ said Annabel. ‘Why do you think it was opened?’
‘The latches were only halfway over,’ said Jonah. ‘Like it had been locked in a hurry. I made damn sure I pulled those levers all the way.’ Saying it aloud made him certain that he wasn’t being crazy.
‘Couldn’t one of the kids have wandered in the night?’ said Never. ‘Opened it by mistake?’ Jonah shook his head. ‘OK, OK. Straws.’
‘We need to check on everyone,’ said Jonah. ‘Make sure nobody’s acting strangely. Then we’ll look around.’
Annabel stared at him. ‘You don’t think . . .’
‘God forbid,’ said Jonah.
‘But if something managed to get inside,’ said Annabel, ‘you’d be able to sense it, yes? See it, if it was—’ She paused, searching for a way to phrase it. ‘If any of us was in trouble?’
‘I think so.’
Annabel woke Cathy, and got her help in waking Sara, Armel and Remy, before moving on to Jansin, Mark and their two boys. Everyone was a little shaken, which made it hard to tell if anybody was too shaken: shaken enough to suggest that something dark was trying to attach itself.
To burrow inside.
They spread out and walked the cavern, using their flashlights to search. There was no sign of movement, but there were plenty of nooks and crannies where something dark could hide.
‘This is not good,’ whispered Never.
Annabel frowned. ‘Shouldn’t the shelter battery feed these lights with the power off?’ she said.
Jonah’s mouth dropped open. He’d forgotten all about turning off the feed to the shelter batteries. It went both ways. ‘Fuck,’ he said. ‘I switched it off.’
‘Why?’ said Annabel.
‘So it wouldn’t drain the power coming from the solar panels.’ He turned to the tunnel that led down to the lower cavern and the shelter. That was where he’d need to go, to switch the lights back on. If it hadn’t been put out of commission already. He took a deep breath. ‘OK. Who’s coming with me?’
‘Down there?’ said Never, warily looking at the dark entrance to the lower tunnels.
‘I’ll come,’ said Sly.
Jonah looked at her. She still seemed groggy. ‘You should stay here,’ he said. ‘Petro? Stay with Sly and the others, OK? Annabel? Never? You two come with me.’
‘Cheers,’ said Never. ‘Remind me to stop being your friend.’
16
Jonah had been down this tunnel many times in the past year. The shelter, with its stash of notebooks that he’d hidden from Annabel as if it was porn, had been his place to go and think, certainly in the early months. Think was perhaps a kind way to put it, of course; obsess was probably more accurate.
It was an entirely different tunnel now.
The thin cable of lighting had been able to turn a dark, cool stone passageway into an extension of his home. With the lights out, the eerie shadow play of the flashlight beams made it an alien place to be, a hostile place.
He had confronted shadow-creatures before, but those had been the vast, powerful parasites that had skulked on the shoulders of Michael Andreas’s immediate circle of acolytes, his most trusted followers. When those creatures separated from their hosts, they had considerable power, something he couldn’t hope to stand against. Yet when one had attempted to latch onto Kendrick, he’d been able to wrench it from his flesh before it took hold, and Jonah had sensed how the thing feared him, lashing out but finding that Jonah was poison to it.
The things that had swamped DC the night before were vastly weaker, he thought. He hoped.
‘Nothing’s down here, right?’ whispered Never. ‘If something did get in, why the hell would it hide down here?’
‘The important thing is that none of us are on our own,’ said Jonah. ‘When a shadow tries to attach itself to someone, I think the victim is terrified. That’s why we had to wake everyone. We’ll be able to tell.’
‘Right,’ said Never, sounding anxious. ‘So there’s nothing down here. No chance.’
‘Let’s just get the lights on,’ said Annabel.
They walked in silence down the gentle slope of the tunnel. At last, they entered the lower cavern, smaller than the first, and saw the shelter at the far side. There was a faint red glow from within, giving the whole cavern a slight red tint. An allusion to Hell that was about as unwelcome as anything could have been.
Jonah tripped, startling himself and the others, but they soon reached the shelter. Jonah put his hand on the switch that linked the shelter batteries to the mains, half expecting that nothing would happen.
The lights came on.
Annabel and Never laughed quietly with relief.
‘How long will the lights last?’ said Annabel.
‘They’ll last until dawn,’ said Jonah. ‘But we’re not here just to put the lights on. We’re here to search.’
‘Oh,’ said Never, his eyes widening.
‘There’s probably nothing there,’ said Jonah. ‘Keep your eyes open all the same.’
*
They spread out and cast their flashlights around the cavern and started to make their way back to the others. They saw nothing as they entered the tunnel.
When they reached everyone else, the return of the lights had been enough to calm nerves. The children, Jonah was glad to see, seemed to get back to normal quickly and settled down to sleep. The adults were more shaken, but none of them gave any sign of the outright fear Jonah was watching for.
When morning came, the shelter batteries were running low. Jonah got everyone together at the cavern entrance.
‘Wait here with your flashlights on,’ he said. ‘We’re going to get the shutters open, it might take the last of the power.’ He took Petro and Annabel with him along the tunnel to the basement door and used the security remote to open the shutters up top. Then he positioned the sunlamps facing the doorway. He looked at Annabel. ‘When I say, turn these on.’
‘You think there are things out there?’ said Petro.
‘Sunlight hurts them,’ said Jonah. ‘So if there are any, these should at least let us know.’
He unlocked the door. The sunlamps took what was left in the shelter batteries, but it gave them a brief burst of light. It was all they were going to get, but Jonah was just playing safe, because he didn’t think anything had been there overnight.
An idea had come to him, and he didn’t like it. He was eager to take another look at the footage Never had captured the day before.
Every
one was relieved to get out into the sunshine, the tension of the night palpably dissipating. Jonah followed Never as he hurried to find the reason for the power failure. It didn’t take long to identify, and it wasn’t a tripped circuit. Four of the six solar panels had been trashed, a single brick on the ground nearby the likely weapon. The batteries, those glorious pieces of tech-porn that Never had found so appealing, were charred ruins.
‘Single nail,’ said Never, poking through the debris. ‘Hammered into them. That would’ve created one hell of an arc, then an impressive fire. Brief, but impressive.’
‘What about those two panels?’ asked Jonah, nodding to the ones that seemed undamaged. They’d been tossed to one side, but they’d not had the brick hurled into them to shatter the sensitive photovoltaics.
Kneeling down, Never gave them a quick check. ‘They might be OK,’ he said. ‘That one’s cracked at the edge, but it could still work.’ He pointed across to the batteries. ‘The problem is that the power inverter unit was beside the fire. It’s toast. I’d have to run a separate cable down to the batteries in the shelter to charge them, and without the inverter the current loss would be huge.’
‘So we spend the rest of the day getting the generator fixed.’
‘My thoughts exactly. How much fuel do we have for it?’
‘Some,’ said Jonah. ‘Plus whatever we can get out of the vehicles.’
Annabel came out, wincing when she saw the damage. ‘No power, then?’
‘We need to repair the shelter’s generator,’ said Never. ‘The bigger question is, who or what did this?’
‘The people you saw acting strangely out there,’ said Annabel. ‘Maybe they’ve been spreading out, sabotaging survivors. But we have another problem.’ Jonah and Never looked at her. ‘Sly’s been freaking out. She’s told people what they’re up against. In detail. And that we have no hope of surviving it.’
‘Shit,’ said Never. ‘Has Doctor Phil taken another look at her?’
She nodded. ‘Fear response after an accident; he says it’s common enough with minor concussion. Just fucking unfortunate.’
Jonah shook his head. ‘Fear response? Philip has no idea what kind of fear Sly is used to.’
‘I’m not so sure,’ said Annabel. ‘Kendrick’s death might be the catalyst. Her mentor, or whatever the hell he was to her. Whatever the reason, she’s got everyone spooked that something nasty is still down in the cavern, and the kids are terrified. Nobody wants to go back into those tunnels, let alone spend another night down there. Right now, the discussion is about whether everyone should even stay here, or move on.’
‘Where the hell are they going to go?’ said Never.
‘Sly’s talking about safe houses she knows,’ said Annabel. ‘I think we’d be wise to get Sly to lie down for a few hours. Away from everyone.’
Jonah sighed. ‘All right. Here’s our to-do list. Annabel, convince Sly to get some rest. I’ll suggest to everyone that we spend tonight in the basement with some sunlamps set up, while Never takes a look at the generator.’ He looked at Never. ‘Maybe ask if anyone has much mechanical expertise to offer, to help you. If they’d be brave enough to venture into the depths.’
*
Jonah went to his office. He had a backup power supply for his PC that gave four hours of use, and he planned on using some of that right now. He powered it up and waited.
He wanted to look at the footage again.
Annabel’s question, about whether he would see one of the shadows if it was trying to attach itself to someone, had struck a chord with him. When Kendrick roped him into trying to look for a shadow-infested host after Winnerden Flats, Jonah was the only person who had been able to see them while they were attached, and even that had needed a specific state of mind, a kind of honed fear, which he’d found relatively easy to conjure up.
The truth was, Jonah hadn’t wanted to find a shadow. Could that simply have led him to overlook things? To miss clues that he should have spotted? Back when he’d been able to see them, the shadows had had no reason to think that they were vulnerable; now that they knew they could be seen, surely they would have been more cautious?
A specific thought had been brewing in his mind. There were things he needed to check before he talked to Annabel.
The footage Never had captured. The final frames, where the Beast itself had been caught on screen. He opened the file and found the position, then did something he’d not done before. As the camera fell away from the shot of the horizon, he kept playing it, until Sly came into view – unconscious, and vulnerable.
He played it again, one frame at a time.
Looking.
When he saw it, he closed his eyes. It was the only thing that made sense, really, but that didn’t stop the feeling of defeat.
He opened his eyes again and looked at the image, blurred by the motion of the camera. Captured just before the van doors closed, a darkness was visible in the gap. It was easy to miss, caught against the backdrop of dim-lit road, but he could see its shape, the darkness within the vehicle.
The wave of creatures in the background hadn’t been the first of them, after all. Some must have got slightly ahead of the front line.
And one of them had made it inside before Never closed the doors.
*
He went to speak to Philip, first. There was something very specific he needed to know, and even though Philip was wary to begin with, the answer eventually came. Next, he went to see Annabel. She listened to him with a grim expression, but she agreed with what he was saying.
He found Never with Petro, working on the generator in a ring of flashlights down by the shelter.
Petro was visibly jittery. ‘Hey, Jonah,’ he said. ‘It was not hard to fix. Not as bad as you thought, yes? You needed to clean it up, mostly!’
Jonah realized that Petro’s hands were filthy, while Never’s were basically clean.
‘So was Petro much help to you?’ Jonah asked him.
Petro gave a hearty laugh, and Never scowled.
‘Look, uh,’ said Jonah, reluctant. ‘I need to talk to you, Never. Once the generator’s working.’
‘OK,’ said Never. ‘How long d’ya reckon, Petro?’
‘We’ll not be long,’ said Petro. ‘We switch it on now, right? Then tune a little and tidy up.’
Jonah waited.
When Petro kicked the generator on, he laughed loud enough to create an echo as the tunnel and cavern lighting came on. Beside him, Jonah saw, was one of the sunlamps from the basement, and it now burned bright. ‘I finish up here,’ said Petro. ‘You go. Now I feel safer. Also, more tanned!’
Jonah led Never away, down the tunnel that, lit, felt like part of his home once more.
‘What’s up?’ said Never.
‘I’ve got news, and you’re not going to like it.’
‘OK. That sounds ominous.’
Jonah stopped walking. ‘I was looking over the footage from the van, when the shadows reached you. One of them got inside, Never.’
Slowly, Never’s face fell as the implications sank in. ‘No.’
‘Sly was unconscious,’ said Jonah. ‘And she’s not been herself. We’ve all noticed it.’
‘No way,’ said Never. ‘You’re saying she did all that? She trashed the power?’
‘More than that. She’s been stirring up a desire for us to get out of here, to some random safe house that may not even exist. She gave us a threat, she made us scared to be down here.’
‘I don’t believe it,’ said Never. ‘I thought you said these things had to fight to take you? She’d not give in so easily.’
‘I was thinking about Lucas Silva again, and his son. His wife. I didn’t think they knew those things were on them, Never. Maybe that’s the alternative. If it can’t take you fast enough, maybe it doesn’t need to. Maybe it nudges you one way or the other, whispers to you. Maybe you don’t even know you’re doing it.’
‘Shit,’ said Never. ‘So what the hell do
we do?’
‘I asked Philip. The medical supplies have some intravenous sedatives, enough to knock her out for a few hours. You’ll have to help me. You know her, and I think she trusts you more than anyone else here.’
‘I’m not sure she’d agree,’ said Never. ‘But I’ll do my best. Then what? Can you remove it, the way you did for Kendrick?’
Jonah shook his head. ‘I don’t know. When the shadow tried to take Kendrick, it was just starting to burrow into him. This has had plenty of time, and we know it has some level of control over her, even if it’s only like a form of sleepwalking. We just have to hope.’
‘She’s going to hate me for this,’ whispered Never.
‘We’re going to say that she needs rest, OK?’ said Jonah. ‘She’s sleepy, but if she overreacts, we’ll have to hold her down.’
‘No shit,’ said Never.
‘You’ll have to hold her arm secure either way, understand?’ said Jonah. ‘The others will help too. You ready?’
They walked through to the lower basement, then upstairs, and Jonah could see Never’s anxiety written all over his face.
Sly was lying down on one of the couches. Annabel, Philip, Armel and Mark were all there, Philip kneeling next to Sly’s arm with the two men ready to hold down her legs.
‘Sly,’ said Philip. ‘You’re going to need plenty of rest, all right?’ He was ready with a syringe. ‘This will help.’
‘Hey, Sly,’ said Never. He got down next to Philip. Her eyes were already closed. ‘Everything’s going to be fine.’ He looked from Sly to Jonah, who nodded, so Never took hold of her arm and held it tight. ‘Quick,’ he said. ‘I think she’s exhausted anyway, but hurry the—’
That was when Philip put the needle in his arm.
‘But . . .’ started Never. He didn’t get to the next word.
17
When he opened his eyes again, Never’s head hurt like hell. So did his wrists. And, when it came down to it, his arse wasn’t exactly comfortable, either.
He was in the nuclear shelter. The bunk beds had been removed – he could see where the bolts had been undone, leaving rusty circles and a line of old paint. The table and chairs (comfortable chairs, he seemed to remember) had gone too. The shelter’s main room was twenty feet by thirty, and all it contained was the small basin area near the door, and the bank of control switches currently half covered by a sheet of opaque yellow plastic. The video camera he’d used in DC was on a tripod just in front of it. It was recording.