by Ryan Casey
But then he saw something.
Gina turned. She looked right into his eyes. And for the first time since what’d gone down at the medical centre, she actually had a look of emotion about her.
“I’m just… I guess I’m just missing my family. I’m just—just missing the way things were. And I…”
She stopped, then. Looked like she’d closed off again, just a little.
But she’d opened up. She’d let something off her chest. That was progress.
Mike just smiled back at her. Put a hand on her shoulder.
Then he walked back towards Alison.
“Seems like whatever you said did something,” Alison said.
“It’s hard,” he said. “For anyone. But that girl… She’s been through hell already.”
“And the hell will keep on going on. But we’re almost there now. We’re almost where we need to be.”
The town of Garstang emerged up ahead. It seemed just like Longridge, except the looting and the chaos here seemed to be well and truly done with. There was nobody on the streets. Everywhere was silent. Everything was…
“Do you hear that?” Alison asked.
Mike stopped. Because at first, even though he’d thought it was silent, he did hear it. He heard it clearly.
A mumbling.
A mumbling, just ahead.
He took a few cautious steps forward onto the deserted-looking street. “Keep close. We want to make it through here as quickly as we can. The sooner we can get to the other side of town, the better.”
“Are you sure walking through town’s a good idea?” Kumal asked.
Mike turned. “Well, no. I kind of made that pretty clear when we set off.”
“It’s just… I dunno. That mumbling. I don’t like the sound of it.”
Mike didn’t like the sound of it either. But he knew what the alternative was. “It’s either this way or loop around the main street, but even then we’ll end up in the suburbs, which’ll be just as busy. The fields around here are filled with farmers, too, who I doubt’ll be too happy to see us. This is the best option of a bad bunch.”
Nobody looked certain. Hell, he was pretty sure even he didn’t look certain.
But it’d have to do.
It’d have to suffice.
He kept walking. The further he walked, the more that murmuring grew, the closer it got.
“I think it’s coming from over there,” Richard said, pointing to the left.
“We keep going.”
“I… I think it’s…”
That’s when Mike saw it.
Right down the street on the left.
A mass of people. The biggest mass he’d seen since the start of this whole mess.
They were fighting.
Protesting.
Standing up to what looked like a riot squad as they tried to cling to order and power.
Mike staggered back. “We need to get away from here.”
“It’s already too late,” Alison said.
He didn’t know what she meant. Not until he looked around and saw the street behind him.
It was already filling with people. People running towards them. People running towards the crowd. Angry people. People holding weapons.
There was no mistaking what was happening.
A full-scale riot was going down.
And Mike and his people were trapped in the middle of it.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Mike stared at the mass of rioting people and wished he was anywhere but here.
Darkness was setting in as evening slowly gave way to night. There was a chill to the air, as rain began to fall, as another day came to a close.
And maybe that’s what it was. Maybe that’s what sparked this madness. Maybe that’s what was sparking this chaos. The seventh night was coming to a close, and still people were getting no answers; getting no help. The small pockets of police remaining were no doubt rationing out bare minimal supplies—if they weren’t gathering the supplies for themselves, or if they hadn’t ditched their duties for their family right now.
Whatever it was, these people were mad. And there was a lot of people. A whole range of them. Women dressed in suit jackets and trousers. Homeless men. All of them scrapping, all of their collective anger spilling out.
None of them really sure why they were fighting. But that unavoidable human instinct to fight for its life kicking in all the same.
Mike just knew one thing for certain.
“We need to get away from here. We… we need to hide.”
He grabbed Holly’s hand, Alison’s hand. Together, they walked over to the left side of the street. The people and the police were pushing against one another. The police looked like they were panicked; like they were on the verge of open firing. That couldn’t happen. That wouldn’t settle matters. It’d just make the whole situation even more dire. It’d set up that “us vs them” mentality that was already bubbling over. Shooting at this crowd was literally the last thing the police needed to do right now.
And yet… they needed to do something.
“The shopping centre,” Kumal said.
Mike frowned. Looked around. Saw Kumal was pointing up ahead.
“If we can get in through one of those windows, we can cross over the bridge between the buildings. And if we do that—”
“We can get the hell off these streets,” Richard said.
Mike studied the route ahead. There were two sets of high rise buildings either side of the road, with a passageway leading between the buildings, making up part of a shopping centre. It looked pretty quiet in there, aside from a few people studying the chaos below. He didn’t like the idea of going into any building where he wasn’t aware of what was inside. Especially not after the close-call back at the medical centre.
Because that thought kept niggling him. That fear. What if that group—whoever they were—were just a smaller pocket of a much larger force?
What if they were just the pieces of a much bigger puzzle?
But then he heard glass bottles being smashed. He saw people being pushed to the ground, kicked, blood splattering everywhere.
He watched, and he knew if he stuck around, he’d be bandied in with this crowd. Because there was no doubt about it, looking at it now.
“They’re rounding them up,” Holly said, echoing Mike’s thoughts. “They… they’re trying to contain them. To trap them.”
Mike tasted bitterness in his mouth. As much as he didn’t doubt the police were doing what they were doing with good intentions in mind, he knew equally that they would do whatever they thought necessary to keep order; to keep things under control.
And he knew just as well from his time in the military that it only took one moment of hot-headedness for this entire ugly situation to turn even uglier…
“Kumal’s right,” Mike said. “We make a move for the shopping centre. We keep our guard up. Cross over the footway. And we do whatever we can to lay low while this crap goes down.”
They ran down the path. Every now and then, another person emerged. Some of them looked starving. Others were holding up screaming kids, lifting them in the air.
“Where’s the aid?” a mother shouted. “Why are you abandoning our children?”
Mike pressed on, leading the group. He could see a doorway to the shopping centre on the left. If they could get in there, they could get inside and make their way up towards the footway that crossed between the buildings.
But then there was a chance that shit was going down inside, too. That things were even worse inside.
No. He had to banish those fears from his mind. He had to do whatever he could.
He went to turn through the doorway when he saw someone to his right. There was a man lying there. He was old, bearded. Holding out a desperate, shaky hand.
“Please,” he said, holding his chest. “P… please.”
Mike saw the people he’d let down in the past. He saw the people he’d turned his back on, w
alked away from. He saw all the times he’d had an opportunity to help, then failed.
And he stepped towards the man.
Almost immediately, he knew it was a bad idea.
The man lunged to his feet. He was holding a knife.
“Gimme your stuff,” he said, eyes deranged, expression maniacal.
Mike staggered back, into the doorway.
The man kept on coming, kept on walking. “Gimme your stuff. Gimme your stuff. Gimme your—”
He didn’t finish.
Because Mike slammed his fist as hard as he could into the guy’s face, knocking him off his feet.
“Now we get up the stairs,” he said, feeling no remorse but plenty in the way of stinging knuckles. “And we get out of this place. Quick.”
The group ran down the corridor. Mike passed women holding babies. He passed the lowered shutters in different shops, terrified faces peering out. He passed so many signs of the horror of this new world—so many smells of death and misery—and all he could do was keep on going.
He reached the escalators, which had naturally come to a halt. Helped his people up them, climbing past fallen bodies and starving faces. Then when he got to the second floor of the shopping centre, knowing he only had one more floor to go while the chaos went on outside, he heard something.
Two things, actually.
First… he heard gunfire.
The gunfire was followed by screams. And he didn’t need to look outside to know. He didn’t need to see outside to see.
He heard the shouting become more desperate. The cries become more desperate.
And he found himself looking around at his people, their empty eyes, the distress on their faces.
“Come on,” he said, not wanting to get caught up in the horror of this whole situation. “We should—”
That’s when he heard the second sound.
Behind the lift door, which was jammed shut.
Scratching.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Mike heard the scratching inside the lift and he felt a wave of horror crash through his body.
The shouting outside had faded into the background. Even the gunshots and the cries seemed to wane in their impact compared to the horror of what he was hearing right now.
Scratching. Behind this lift door.
“There’s somebody inside there,” Kumal said.
Hearing Kumal confirm what Mike had heard just made it all the more real, all the more terrifying. Because the thought that somebody had been trapped in here all this time… no idea of what was going on outside… it was nightmarish.
But they were alive.
They were still alive in there.
So they had to do something.
“Kumal, Richard, give me a hand.”
Mike rushed over to the lift door. Stuck his fingers inside it, tried to pull. And as he started to move it, he heard the scratching getting more intense. Like a dead person had been sealed into a coffin and was finally realising there was somebody out there; that somebody had found them.
Excitement built up inside Mike as he pulled as hard as he could against the jammed door. Kumal, Richard, and even Alison and Holly were helping now, too, as all of them tried to wedge this door open.
“It’s okay,” Mike said. “Just… just hang on in there. We’re going to get you out of here.”
They pulled some more. But the more Mike tried, the more his hope waned.
“We’re not going to get this open,” Alison said.
“We have to.”
“But—”
“We have to, okay?”
Mike kept on pulling. He was pulling so hard he felt like his fingers were going to yank off. But he kept his focus; he kept his determination. He had to. It was all he had.
He felt like he’d let so many people down. He felt like he’d turned his back on people.
He didn’t want to fail anyone else.
Whoever was inside the lift, scratching to be released, he was going to get to them.
“Mike.”
He felt a hand on his arm. And when he heard the voice, he stopped pulling.
He looked around. Saw it was Alison. At the other side of the lift, the scratching continued.
Alison looked at Mike, fear in her eyes. “We have to get out of here. You said it yourself. It’s… it’s time to go.”
A lump filled Mike’s throat. He knew Alison was right. He knew they had to get away from here—and the quicker the better. The last thing any of them wanted was for the riot on the streets to spread upstairs into the shops.
But then he looked back at the lift door. He thought about when he’d said goodbye to Caitlin. He thought about when he’d given up on his friends back in the military.
He thought about all these things, and he found himself taking a deep breath, seeing only one option before him.
“No,” he said.
He pulled again. Harder this time. So hard he felt the ends of his fingers splitting.
But he didn’t care. It didn’t matter. Because he was getting into this lift. He was getting whoever was in there out.
It was a miracle they’d made it this long. He owed it to them to give them a shot of living a little longer.
He felt the lift door shifting, just a little, even if he was at full pelt now. And he kept on pulling further. He kept on straining himself. His arms felt like they were going to fall off. His head felt like it was going to explode.
But he was doing this.
He was doing this.
He thought of the pain he’d seen in Holly’s eyes when Harriet had fallen. He thought of the pain he’d seen in so many eyes.
And he didn’t want any of that. Not anymore.
He was sick of loss.
For once, he wanted a win.
He wanted a—
The lift door creaked open.
He fell back. Hit the wall. Got up right away, still not quite sure what had happened.
It was only when he stood that he realised.
The lift door was ajar.
He’d done it.
They’d all done it.
He rushed over to the door. Pulled it further open.
And when he did, the first thing that hit him was the smell.
He heaved. There were all kinds of things in this lift. Feces. Urine. All of it, the smell seeping out onto the corridor.
But when he opened the lift further, he saw exactly why.
And when he did… part of him wished he’d never opened these doors at all.
There was a woman. She was sitting in a puddle of blood with a baby in her arms.
The baby was dead.
The woman had long, greasy dark hair. She looked totally emaciated, with cracked lips and tear-soaked eyes. She stretched out a hand to Mike, and he didn’t even want to touch it for fear he’d do damage, she was in such a fragile state.
She was moving her lips. Whispering something.
He crawled over to her side. He wanted to move the baby from her arms, but no. He couldn’t. No matter what, she believed she had a child. She had to hold on to that belief.
“It’s okay,” Mike said. “We… we’ll get you out of here. We’ll get you safe.”
The woman looked into Mike’s eyes. She put a hand against his face. “The… the Devil,” she said.
Mike frowned. The woman’s words made the hairs on his arms stand on end. “It’s okay. You don’t have to—”
“The Devil,” she said.
And then she did something Mike wasn’t expecting.
She picked something up. Something from her side.
It took Mike a few seconds to realise it was a bullet.
It was then that it clicked—that everything clicked. This woman hadn’t been stuck in this lift all this time. Someone had been here.
And they’d shot her baby.
They’d shot her baby then slammed the doors shut again.
That was how he’d been able to open them.
The
y weren’t properly shut.
“The… the Devil,” the woman said, eyes rolling, consciousness waning. “He’s coming. He’s coming for everyone.”
“Just hold on,” Mike said. “Just hold on.”
But it was too late.
The woman let out a raspy sigh.
Baby in her arms, she passed away.
Mike stepped out of the lift, back into the corridor, back into reality.
Alison touched his arm. “Come on,” she said. “It’s… it’s time we got out of here.”
Mike knew Alison was right. He turned away from the lift, turned away from the awful scene, and he moved towards the crossing between the buildings.
But all that time, he heard that woman’s voice spinning around his mind.
The Devil. He’s coming. He’s coming for everyone…
Chapter Twenty-Seven
When Mike and the rest of the group made it across the walkway between the shopping centre, they found a small shop with the shutters partly up, so decided to pull them down and take a breather.
Because if they didn’t… well. Mike knew for certain that there were things that needed to be discussed. Things that needed to be addressed. The things the woman in the lift had said. The Devil. He’s coming. He’s coming for everyone.
He didn’t know what it meant. But he had a feeling, deep in his gut, with everything that they’d witnessed and everything that had gone down.
It was Kumal who aired his suspicions first.
“So I’m starting to think perhaps there could be some kind of invasion going on here.”
The second he spoke the words, the rest of the group turned to him. Even Arya looked at him, panting, as if she’d mistaken “invasion” for some kind of food. Raisin? Dogs weren’t supposed to eat grapes; Mike knew that much.
Alison frowned when Kumal spoke. “What do you mean?”
Kumal scratched his arms as they sat there in the empty fragrance shop. Mike could hear the cries outside still, but they’d mostly died down now. The gunshots had stopped, too. Whatever had happened out there, they weren’t on its doorstep anymore. They were out of the line of fire.