‘I’m not so sure this is a good idea,’ she said, her mind flipping through all the possible titillating ways a character could die while walking through a sub-sea tunnel during an outbreak of a pernicious virus that turned animals into deadly fiends.
Terry was eyeing the tunnel mouth as though he expected it to sprout a set of fangs and start gnashing. ‘Oh, it’s a terrible idea. Who suggested it?’
‘That would be you,’ Lesley replied.
‘Somebody should have told me I was being a moron.’
James also clicked on his torch, which cast a far more virile and determined beam than Lesley’s. ‘Too late for second thoughts, folks.’
‘It’s never too late for second thoughts, especially when that second thought is: “I think we’re about to be suffocated, drowned, electrocuted, shot and/or eaten alive”,’ Lesley retorted. ‘I’d rather swim to France than go in there.’
‘Good luck with that,’ James said.
His face expressionless, he walked into the tunnel. Everyone stayed put while he quickly became nothing more than a bobbing light. Lesley braced herself for the sound of snapping jaws and for the light to be dragged off into the void at great speed. Nothing happened.
‘Bugger it,’ she said, and followed, the others keeping step.
Torchlight danced skittishly across the blank walls and floor of the tunnel as they advanced at a brisk pace to catch up with James, who had stopped to wait for them. When his face loomed out of the darkness, he was wearing a small smile.
‘If I get killed, I’m so going to haunt you for suggesting this,’ Lesley told Terry. ‘Floating teacups, underpants in the blender, toothbrush up your bum while you’re asleep. All that poltergeist bollocks.’
Terry squeezed her hand. ‘You’re not going to die. At least, not until you’ve published your book and written a will leaving all your money to me. Then you might have a wee accident.’
A cry of pain echoed down the tunnel as Lesley pinched Terry, hard.
They crept forward, wary of losing their footing on the rails, alternating their beams between the track, the walls and the darkness ahead of them. Lesley glanced back longingly at the circle of light a few times, until the tunnel curved and there was nothing left of the outside world to see. Before very long, they came to a recessed doorway in the tunnel’s left-hand wall, perched at the top of a short flight of metal stairs. A green sign showing a stick figure following an arrow through the door was affixed to the wall.
‘What’s that?’ Terry asked.
‘It’s a service tunnel,’ Mary said. Everyone turned to look at her. ‘People used it to escape during the Chunnel fire, remember?’
‘Let me check it out,’ James suggested. ‘It might be better than walking on the tracks.’
James mounted the stairs, each clanking footstep drawing a cringe from Lesley. She strained to hear if the racket was attracting the attention of any lurking animals. In particular she was worried about rats, which tended to enjoy hanging around dark, damp tunnels. She thought she heard a scuffing sound from somewhere behind them. In the silence that followed James disappearing through the door, she convinced herself it was just her imagination.
A few tense minutes later, James returned. ‘It looks good. Let’s go.’
The others clunked up the stairs and shuffled through the walkway in single file, emerging into a passageway slightly smaller than the train tunnel. It was as dark as the main tunnel, but at least the floor was smooth, reducing the risk of a sprained ankle.
‘How far is it to France, then?’ Geldof asked.
‘Good question,’ Terry said. ‘Anyone know?’
In normal circumstances, smart phones would have been whipped out in a frantic rush to be the first to Google the factoid. Instead, there was silence.
‘In that case, we should only have one torch on at a time,’ James said. ‘Save on batteries. We don’t want to run out halfway across.’
Lesley could see the logic in the argument, yet as the torches snapped off one by one, she grew increasingly fretful. One torch was enough to illuminate little more than a few metres ahead. Outside the cone of light was darkness so profound it made her head swim. It lay deep and blank ahead and flowed around the torchlight, like water around the prow of a boat, closing in again behind them. The thought of creeping through a pitch-black tube with only one puny light source brought a tightness to her chest she had not felt since she had outgrown her teenage asthma.
Every tiny noise they made – footsteps, the whisper of fabric, a rasp of breath – echoed along the tunnel. The sounds came back to Lesley’s ears as the fast and furtive footsteps of somebody creeping along behind them, the rustle of ratty backs brushing the walls, the hungry pant of a hulking bull. She quickened her step, crowding into James’s back. Her foot clipped his ankle.
‘Ow!’
‘Sorry. I’m just a bit nervous.’
‘Just nervous? I’m bricking it,’ Terry said.
Lesley tried to laugh. It came out as a wheeze.
They tramped on, gradually descending. The service tunnel began to smell of damp rock with an undercurrent of fungus, even though the walls of the tube were fashioned from moulded concrete. Lesley thought she could sense the great body of water bearing down on them. As a girl, she had always hated being driven through the Clyde Tunnel, fearfully eyeing the trickles of water that ran down the walls. She assumed they were an advance party whose job was to find sneaky ways down from the riverbed, slowly nibbling at the structure until it was compromised enough for the river to come roaring through and drown the wide-eyed girl clutching the back of the driver’s seat. And the Clyde Tunnel was only a few hundred metres long, small potatoes compared with this behemoth.
Lesley wasn’t really a babbler, but in this situation she felt any kind of conversation was better than listening to her own internal prophecies of doom.
‘You know, this is pretty ironic,’ she said in a slightly squeaky voice. ‘We’re trying to sneak through from Britain to France, but it’s always been the other way round.’
‘What do you mean?’ Terry asked.
‘You used to get loads of immigrants trying to walk through, until security was tightened. The odd one still tries to make it.’
‘Do any of them get through?’
‘No. Actually, I think one of them got hit by a train or something last year.’
‘Well, that’s encouraging,’ Geldof said. ‘I don’t suppose the others were eaten alive by zombie animals, were they? I’m sure hearing that would really help keep our spirits up.’
Lesley fell silent.
On they marched, the sway of James’s torch across the blank tunnel walls lulling Lesley into a trance-like state that dulled her fears down to an acceptable background level. She completely lost track of time, so had no idea how far they had come when James, who was walking several paces ahead of the rest of the group, stopped abruptly.
‘What is it?’ Geldof whispered.
The beam of light, which had faded from strong white to golden yellow, played over something partially blocking the tunnel. It looked like a cross between a lorry and a subway carriage, exactly the kind of vehicle an evil mastermind would use to ferry minions around his underground lair. The door to the driver’s cabin lay ajar.
‘Probably a service vehicle,’ James replied.
James edged forward, the others huddled up behind him. When they reached the front of the vehicle, he shone his torch into the cabin. The following pack shrieked in unison when the light picked out a skeletal corpse lying askew in the driver’s seat. He or she was dressed in a brown overall that had been ripped to shreds, revealing the off-white glimmer of bone. The key sat in the ignition.
‘What happened?’ Geldof asked.
James leaned into the cabin and looked closely at the bones. ‘Rats. You can see the teeth marks on the bones. Don’t worry, though: this guy’s been here for a few weeks. The rats have long gone.’
He hauled out the sk
eleton with one hand, sending dislodged scraps of skin and flesh pattering onto his shoes, and propped it against the side of the vehicle, where it slid into a seated position, head dangling to one side in a parody of repose.
‘Looks like we’re in luck, we can drive out,’ James said, looking at the fuel gauge. He turned back to smile at his son. ‘The first burger’s on me when we get to—’
James stopped talking as a chunk of his head transferred itself to Lesley’s face in soggy clumps and the report of a gunshot, shockingly loud in the confines of the tunnel, rent the air. The torch slipped from James’s fingers, spinning as it fell. It shone briefly on his face from beneath, revealing a twitching mouth and a ragged hole the size of a ten-pence piece in his forehead. The torch turned off when it hit the ground. In the darkness that followed, James’s body thudded to the concrete.
‘Dad!’ Geldof wailed.
Lesley could hear him scrambling towards his father. The boy butted up against her and scrabbled to get past. She grabbed him – it was the first time she had laid hands on him and she was amazed by his slightness – and put her hand over his mouth.
‘Be quiet, or we’re all dead,’ she hissed into his ear.
She pulled him to the ground and lay flat, hoping Terry was smart enough to do the same. Something gloopy slid down the side of her face. She ignored it. A sticky wetness was spreading across the ground, moulding itself around her leg. She ignored that too. To think about it would be to run screaming into the darkness, either straight into a wall or into the gunman, who had to be Brown. There was nobody else.
The strange thing was that after all the fretting and worrying as they crept through the tunnel, she felt clear and focused in the absolute darkness. She had known there would be one last hurdle to clear. At least now she knew what it was.
‘Hiding isn’t going to save you,’ Brown said.
His voice was thick, and his breath ragged. The injuries sustained in the fall from the helicopter had clearly taken their toll, but somehow he had managed to keep up with them. Lesley was almost impressed. It was impossible to tell how close he was. Certainly close enough to shoot James. At that point Lesley wondered where Brown had got the gun. She reached into her jacket pocket and found it empty. The gun must have fallen out during the crash.
A sneeze ricocheted out of the darkness.
‘Aren’t you going to say Gesundheit?’ Brown asked.
He does have the virus, Lesley thought. That spelled stupendously gigantic trouble for Britain and maybe the rest of the world. But she was too fixed on the immediate threat to dwell on the full consequences.
‘It’s a funny thing, this virus,’ Brown said quietly. ‘I feel entirely like myself, except I have this urge to fuck somebody and tear their throat out.’
‘If you lay a finger on her I’ll kill you,’ Terry said.
Brown cackled. ‘Who says I want your little girlfriend? I’ve got my eye on you, Terry. I would have loved to pay you a visit in your cell. You have such cute little buttocks, like juicy little apples. I wanted to bite them. But that would have been unprofessional. Now I have a delicious urge to ride you senseless and then munch those little apples right up. I can’t resist. I don’t want to resist.’
There was a pause, during which Brown hauled in a deep, snuffling breath.
‘Feel free to defend my honour now,’ Terry said across to Lesley.
‘If you lay a finger on him, I’ll kill you,’ Lesley yelled.
‘Oh, I’m going to lay more than a finger on him.’ Brown giggled, a low, unpleasant sound.
Lesley could hear cautious footsteps as Brown crept closer. Somehow he was ignoring the imperatives of the virus coursing through his veins enough to be careful, which demonstrated an iron will on his part. Either that or the virus had yet to fully take over his system.
Something brushed her hand, and she had to stifle a scream.
‘It’s me,’ Terry whispered. ‘What are we going to do?’
‘Kill him.’
Lesley braced herself for the unpleasant task to follow. She dipped her fingers into the river of blood and followed it back to the source, up in the highlands of James’s body, which was still twitching. The gun was in his inside jacket pocket. She pulled it out and sat back up. Brown was advancing, his footsteps soft scrapes. Lesley groped around until she found Terry’s face. She followed her hands to his ear and pressed her lips against it.
‘I want you, Geldof and Mary to get under that bus,’ she said in a whisper so soft the words barely made it out of her lips. ‘When I say, stick your torch out and turn it on.’
Terry’s lips moved against her ear. ‘What are you going to do?’
‘When he shoots at the torch, I’ll shoot at him.’
‘So I’m bait.’
‘I’m afraid so.’
Terry turned his face, stubble rasping against her cheek, and planted a kiss in the general area of her lips.
‘I can hear you whispering away over there,’ Brown said.
Even though she could see nothing, Lesley sensed Terry’s face had moved away. Geldof bumped her with his elbows as he too slipped under the carriage. Lesley rose into a crouch. The metal side of the vehicle was cool as she put her hand on it to orient herself, then she backed away until she was butted up against the wall on the other side of the tunnel. She turned left, facing back the way they had come, and lay down. The footsteps sounded closer now. Lesley clicked off the safety as gently as possible, and, supporting her wrist with her other hand, pointed the gun down the tunnel.
There came another sneeze and Lesley took her chance.
‘Now!’ she shouted.
The torch flicked on. Instead of revealing Brown, as had been the plan, it spotlighted Lesley like a convict trying to crawl across the prison yard. The torch began to swing immediately, but it was too late. Brown must have seen her.
I’m dead, she thought.
She saw the muzzle flash, heard the crack and was even sure she could feel the bullet as it bullied the air aside on its deadly trajectory towards her brain. But it was the skeleton, also caught in the beam of light, that took the force of the bullet. Shards of bone spun through the air as the light swivelled onto Brown, who was down on one knee, the gun held out before him in both hands. He saw Lesley and began to swing his arm across, but her muzzle was already pointing at him. She tried to recall her shooting lessons as best she could, squeezing the trigger rather than snatching and keeping her arm steady. As her first shot rang out, Brown dived to the side. Lesley followed his trajectory, pulling the trigger repeatedly until the gun clicked empty.
The torch still shone on the spot where Brown had been. It was now vacant tunnel. Motes of dust spun in the torchlight as Lesley waited for Brown to reappear, gun in hand. He didn’t. Lesley tentatively got to her feet and walked forward. She picked up the torch and shone it under the vehicle. Three petrified faces peered out at her.
‘Did you get him?’ Terry asked.
A hacking cough answered the question. Lesley spun round and there, seated against the tunnel wall, was Brown. The left side of his face had been tenderized into a bloody mulch by the blunt impact of his fall from the helicopter. His eye might have been missing, or just lost within the battered mess, it was impossible to tell. However, his right eye remained and was focused on the gun, which lay just out of reach of his groping hand. Whatever little blood he had left in his body after the crash was pouring from his mouth.
Brown switched his gaze to Lesley.
‘Come closer,’ he gurgled. ‘I’ve got something to tell you. For your story.’
‘That’ll be right,’ Lesley said, keeping her distance.
Brown puffed out air in what could have been a laugh, and then opened his mouth wide. He spat out a thick rope of blood in Lesley’s direction. It failed to clear his splayed feet.
‘It was worth a try,’ he said softly.
The glitter faded from his eye and his head fell back.
‘He’s dea
d!’ Lesley called out in a voice that sounded like an eighty-year-old version of her own.
Her legs didn’t so much wobble as morph into strawberry laces, with all the attendant weight-bearing capacity. Terry was at her back in a few seconds, hugging her. She dropped the gun between her legs and allowed herself to fall back into his chest, which was heaving just as hard as hers.
‘Are you OK?’ he asked.
‘I’ve just killed a man,’ she whispered.
She buried her face in Terry’s bulging upper arm.
‘Hey, it’s OK,’ he said, turning her round. ‘It was either that or he was going to have his wicked way with me.’
Lesley let out a hiccupping laugh, and some of the strength came back into her body. ‘I wasn’t going to let him anywhere near that cute little arse. It’s mine.’
Strong thumbs brushed her cheeks, wiping away trickles of tears and sticky clumps of brain. She suddenly remembered to whom the brains belonged and, fighting off the urge to gag as Terry picked flecks of goo off her cheek and tossed them into the shadows, she turned to look at Geldof. The kid was on the margins of the torchlight, an indistinct shape hunched over the body of his father. She had lost nobody; in fact she would come out of this whole sorry mess ahead if things worked out with Terry. Geldof, on the other hand, had been deprived of both his parents. She pushed herself off Terry’s chest to walk over and offer him some words of comfort, or just a hug. Mary got there first, wrapping his head in her arms and cooing softly into his ear. Lesley let Terry fold her in his arms and squeeze the air – and the hurt, pain and trauma of the last weeks – out of her body.
The service vehicle trundled through the tunnel, its headlights splashing a reassuringly full glow ahead of them. Terry was keeping the speed down in case there were any more surprises up ahead, but the closeness of the walls helped give the illusion they were rushing towards France and an end to the saga that had claimed the lives of over half their group.
Apocalypse Cow Page 27