Silver

by Chris Wooding

  He glanced up at the overhead fluorescents. At least they had light. Fear spread easily without it. In their cold, institutional glare, things seemed a little less desperate. That was something to be thankful for.

  But just like the doors, he knew it wouldn’t last forever.

  Like many remote institutions, Mortingham Boarding Academy had its own electricity supply in case it was cut off from the grid. Unfortunately, that supply came from an ancient, petrol-powered system of generators. When the Infected had cut the power — and considering how well the attack was timed, Mr. Sutton was in no doubt that they’d been responsible — the generators had taken a little time to power up and grind into life. They hadn’t been needed for years, and Mr. Sutton hadn’t even been sure they’d work. But they did, thankfully, because this place would have burned down around them if they hadn’t.

  There was only one problem. The generators were housed in the basement of the school building, in locked rooms near the school’s vast boiler, and there was no telling how much fuel was in the tanks. No telling how long it would last, or whether the Infected would get to the generators and sabotage them first. If they could make it till dawn, he’d count them lucky. Being realistic, he figured they had a few hours at most. The system was only supposed to cover a short outage, and Mortingham was a big place. Across the campus, most of the lights had been left on, even in those buildings where not a single person remained.

  And they were about to start draining it even more.

  The doors creaked as the Infected surged against them like a tide. They were gathered there at the top of the stairwell. Their buzz-saw moans drifted through into the corridor — so near to their prey, and yet so far.

  Mark knelt on the floor, busy at his new device. Something to do with resistors and transformers and a dangerous amount of electricity. Mr. Sutton didn’t understand it exactly, but Mark assured him that they needed it for what they wanted to do. Otherwise they’d short out the whole building.

  The device was a large metal box that Mark had taken from one of the DT labs, with some parts stripped out and others put in. A thick cable trailed away from it, stripped to bare wire at the end and tied around the metal handles of the door. Nearby was a plug, waiting to be put into a socket.

  Mark’s idea. They were going to electrify the doors.

  All his instincts as a teacher and a responsible adult told him that he should be stopping this. But those instincts belonged to a different world now. The rules had changed. Health and safety regulations were a thing of the past. Survival was all that mattered.

  Mr. Sutton felt useless. Impotent. He was supposed to be protecting the children, but the children were protecting themselves. The old way of things was breaking down. Without structure, without order or rules, the kids were asserting themselves, finding new ways to fit into the world. He marveled at how adaptable they were. He wondered if adults would have managed quite so well.

  A pair of students came hurrying from a classroom, carrying tables to be broken up and used for planks. Paul had already set the children to barricading the windows of the upper floor, had posted lookouts on the roof, and set a couple of boys to making a crude mast for the radio antenna. Good. Keeping them busy was the best way to stop them from thinking. Everyone was on edge, still distressed after the last attack. At least this way they were doing something.

  I should have been leading them, thought Mr. Sutton. But part of him was glad that the responsibility was being taken from his shoulders. Because, deep down, he didn’t think he could guide them through this. He didn’t see any way out.

  Mr. Sutton had no wife and no children to worry about. The students had always been his family, an endless supply of new faces to teach and inspire and send on their way. But now he despaired, because after all these years, he believed the end was upon them. And no lesson he’d taught them would help them avoid it.

  “Ready?” said Mark. It stirred him from his dark thoughts. The redheaded boy was looking up at him eagerly. Mark hadn’t given up. Mark still thought they could make it. So Mr. Sutton put on his best encouraging face and stepped back behind the barriers that they’d set up to stop anyone from accidentally touching the barricade.

  “Ready,” he said.

  Mark plugged in the machine and pressed the switch. The lights dimmed. There was a chorus of shrieks from the other side of the door, a frantic scrabbling of metal bodies, and then silence. Mark turned it off, and the lights brightened again.

  “That ought to make them think twice about trying that door again.” Mark grinned. “We should get someone to stay here and give them a shock every time they touch it.”

  “I’ll find somebody,” said Mr. Sutton. “Good work, Mark.”

  Mark got to his feet. “Well, better make one of these for the other door, too. They’re pretty easy to put together. Once we’ve got that done, we should be able to hold them off till help comes, right?”

  The hope in the boy’s eyes was heartbreaking. “Yes,” said Mr. Sutton. “I’m sure help is already on the way.”

  “… is Radio 4, with Kate Chegwell and the evening mix …”

  “…vy showers, clearing by morning, while in the west there are …”

  “… expressed their disappointment at what they have called ‘a travesty of justice’ …”

  Mark moved the pencil by a hair. As its tip slid across the metal surface of the razor blade, the station changed again.

  “Find another news show,” Erika urged.

  “I’m trying,” said Mark waspishly. “It’s not exactly a precision instrument, you know.”

  The radio didn’t look much like a radio at all. It was little more than a wooden board with several paper clips attached to it by thumbtacks. Thin wires ran from the paper clips to various components on the board. At one end was a cardboard tube from a roll of toilet paper, with red copper wire wrapped tightly around it. In the center was a rectangular razor blade, the old kind that people used to shave, which were only used nowadays by art students, and prisoners looking for something to slash their enemies with. Touching it was a small pencil, broken off to the length of an inch, with a kinked paper clip coming out of the butt end and attached to a thumbtack. It hovered over the razor like the stylus on a record player, and when Mark touched it to the metal, tinny voices came through a little speaker cone that sat on the table nearby.

  Once, Caitlyn would have found it fascinating that Mark could spirit these voices out of the air with a few twists of wire, and without so much as a power supply. Now she was too scared to care.

  She didn’t show it, of course. She couldn’t. She kept things hidden: That was her way. So she sat on the edge of a desk and watched the others huddling around the radio in the flat laboratory light. The only person paying attention to her was Adam. He kept glancing over at her with a suspicious look in his eyes.

  What are you looking at? she thought. But she knew what he was thinking. She hadn’t forgotten his outburst when she’d been brought in with a scratch on her forearm.

  They were all here: Mark and Erika and Adam and Paul. Mr. Sutton, too. The inner circle. One teacher and the five eldest pupils, who’d somehow become the heads of the pack, whether they wanted to or not. The younger kids were busy building barricades or dealing with shock and grief in their own way. Since Mark had worked out how to electrify the doors, the Infected had learned to stay away from them, and everything had gone quiet. The students were taking advantage of the respite to gather themselves a little.

  “… been found dead in Haringey, a district of London, in what seems to be a …”

  “Hold it there,” said Paul. The sound of his voice roused a brief flicker of interest in Caitlyn, but he wasn’t talking to her.

  “… other news, the Prime Minister today answered questions about his policy on immigration reform, which an opposition MP recently described as …”

  They listened. A suicide in London. Political point-scoring in Westminster. Knife crime rising.
Stock markets falling.

  It was the same barrage of stories that Caitlyn had heard all her life. She’d often wondered what the point of the news was at all. As far as she could see, its only function was to make people feel frightened and helpless.

  And she’d never felt so frightened and helpless as now.

  “They’re not saying anything,” said Mark. “It’s not even on the news!”

  “Maybe …,” Mr. Sutton began. “Maybe they just don’t know yet.”

  Caitlyn felt a fresh layer of unreality settle on the room. It seemed fundamentally wrong that something so dreadful could be happening to so many people, and yet the wider world wasn’t even aware of it. In this day and age, it was incredible.

  “How long has it been since it started?” asked Erika. “Since it spread across the academy, I mean. Three hours? If that?”

  Shut up. No one wants to listen to you. Shut up.

  Caitlyn knew she was being bitter and petty, but she couldn’t help it. It was hard to even be in the same room as Erika now. In the heat of the moment, things had been said and done that couldn’t be taken back by either of them. But she couldn’t bear to be excluded, so she sat in on the group and kept a resentful silence.

  “Remember they took that boy home?” said Erika. “He was bitten by a beetle. Let’s say he changed at the same time as his friend. Say he started infecting people then.”

  “Someone would have called the police pretty quick,” said Mark. “But it’d probably take them a while to get to where he was. Depending on where he lived.”

  “The nurse said he got picked up by his parents,” Paul told them. “So they must be nearby.”

  “Places around here are pretty remote,” said Erika. “Maybe they have a constable or something, but I’d guess forty-five minutes for the real police to arrive.”

  “And longer, for anyone important to get wind of it,” said Paul.

  “That’s assuming the Infected didn’t cut them off first,” said Erika. “They did it to us, remember?”

  Silence fell at the chilling implications of that. Maybe the Infected animals had cut the phone lines into the nearby towns. All it would take was a bunch of rats to climb some telephone poles, gnaw through some cables.

  The rats. Caitlyn felt herself shiver as she remembered the monstrous thing they’d seen in the tunnels. She began rubbing at her arm where she’d been scratched. Then she saw Adam staring at her, and she stopped.

  “I see two possibilities,” said Mr. Sutton in his slow, considered manner. “Either nobody has managed to raise the alarm to a sufficient degree to make the national media pay attention. Or somebody has, and nobody’s reporting it.”

  “That’d be right,” said Paul. “They’d suppress the information. Can’t risk a national panic. They’d make sure the media either doesn’t find out or doesn’t tell anyone.”

  “Who’s they?” asked Adam with a note of scornful disbelief in his voice. “The FBI or something?”

  “The FBI are American, thick-arse,” Paul replied. “We’ve got MI5.”

  Adam told him where he could stick his MI5.

  “Boys,” said Mr. Sutton warningly.

  “Look, let’s not get into conspiracy theories yet,” said Mark. He’d been uncharacteristically assertive since he discovered that his skill with electronics made him useful. “Whether it’s on the news or not, someone, somewhere is going to know about this pretty soon, right? The army, the police, someone’s going to come. We just have to hang on till then.”

  “Yes, that’s right,” said Mr. Sutton, a little too quickly and eagerly.

  “You alright there?” Adam asked suddenly.

  When nobody replied, Caitlyn raised her head and saw that they were looking at her. She realized she was rubbing her forearm through her sleeve again, and let her hand drop away.

  “I said, are you alright?” Adam asked again. His tone was nasty. He wasn’t asking after her health. He was letting her know he didn’t trust her. Anything you want to tell us, Caitlyn? Anything you’re hiding?

  “Half the school’s turned into bloodthirsty metal psychos and the world doesn’t even know it’s happened,” she sneered. “Yeah, I’m fine. How about you?”

  She jumped down from the desk and stalked out. Erika called after her, but Erika was the last person she wanted to talk to now.

  She headed for the roof. It was hard to breathe, all of a sudden. She needed fresh air.

  Adam. Bloody scumbag thug.

  She was angry now. It was better than being terrified. Her emotions were all over the place. How was she supposed to deal with this?

  She came out onto the roof, chest tight, head light. She took a deep breath of the chilly air, which was still damp and charged in the aftermath of the storm. The clouds were breaking up now. Stars shone through the gashes, and the moon peeped out now and then.

  There were lookouts up here, but she ignored them. She went to the edge of the roof, unconsciously rubbing her arm again. She couldn’t get it warm.

  The lights were back on across the campus, and the moist grass shone in the yellow glow. There were only a few Infected in sight. She wondered where they’d all gone. Inside the buildings? She didn’t know. It didn’t seem important. Nothing seemed important now.

  She checked that no lookouts were nearby, then pulled up her sleeve.

  Her forearm was covered in silver tendrils.

  She let out a shuddering sigh at the sight. It had grown since she last looked. Just a little, but it had grown.

  Mark’s treatment hadn’t killed the silver tendrils, just delayed them. Adam was right to be suspicious of her.

  She was infected.

  She hadn’t known terror could be this way. Usually it came in sharp jags, quickly over. But this … this was the terror of the inevitable. This was what it must feel like finding out that you have terminal cancer. Except that with cancer, you at least knew there would be an ending. This … this …

  What’s going to happen to me? Will I feel it when I change? Will I still be me, trapped in a body I don’t control? Will there be something else in my head, something growing there, taking me over?

  She couldn’t tell anyone. What could they do? She’d seen how Adam looked at her; she couldn’t bear that look from Paul. They’d either throw her out of the science block for their own safety, or try to amputate her arm without anesthetic. Both were too awful to contemplate.

  It all overwhelmed her at once then, crashing in on her so hard that she teetered. And suddenly it came to her that she was standing on the edge of a roof, and that maybe there was a solution in that. She realized what she was contemplating and stepped away, shocked at herself. Madness beat its wings all around her.

  No. Not wings. Blades.

  The lookouts were shouting and pointing. She followed their gaze. Headlights in the sky, and a red point behind where the tail rotor was. It was coming up the valley, heading toward them, its blades thumping at the air.

  A helicopter.

  Something was wrong.

  Paul could hear it in the sound of the engines and see it in the way the helicopter tilted and wobbled. The wind from the mountains shoved it this way and that. Judging by the direction, it must have come from the weather station on the ridge, or from the town beyond. Either way, he was amazed it had made it this far.

  “Get back to your posts!” Adam roared at the kids who were cramming through the roof access door, drawn by news of the chopper. “You want those silver freaks creeping up on us while we’re all staring at the sky?”

  The kids in front hesitated, further jamming up the doorway. They were caught between fear of Adam and hope of rescue. But this was no rescue, Paul realized with a sinking heart. The pilot was in as much trouble as they were.

  “Hey! Hey! Down here!” It was Pudge, calling to the chopper, waving his flashlight around. Freckles took up the cry, and soon the whole roof was waving frantically and flashing their lights. Paul scanned the campus, checking the dor
m halls and department buildings. If there were other survivors, surely they’d have been drawn out, too, and they’d be making a similar racket.

  He saw nothing. The school building blocked his view of the west side of the campus, but in all other directions there were no signs of life. Only the yellow stillness of the electric lights and the buzzing shrieks of the Infected.

  Are we the only ones left?

  The helicopter dropped suddenly, its engines rising to a high whine. A gasp went up from the roof. Everyone’s excitement faded as they saw what Paul had seen: The helicopter looked to be crashing more than landing. Furthermore, it looked a lot like it was going to be crashing on them. Some of the kids were reconsidering the wisdom of being up on the roof, and began to shuffle back toward the access door.

  “Everybody get back! Make space!” said Mr. Sutton, catching on at last. “Go downstairs, you’ll do no good standing here gawking.”

  “Go on, get moving!” Adam bellowed, glad to act as the enforcer once more. This time the kids listened.

  Paul kept his eyes on the helicopter. He could make out its shape now, lit by the moon above and the campus below. It was medium size, with sliding side doors, the kind of craft used for mountain rescue missions or troop drops in a jungle. How many of them could a chopper like that carry? Six? Eight at most?

  Six or eight, it wouldn’t matter how many, if the pilot couldn’t bring her down safely.

  The helicopter dropped again, and slid sideways as it was pushed by the wind. A cry of alarm went up from the kids still on the roof. It was losing height too fast. It wasn’t going to make it to them.

  Then it veered, and Paul saw the pilot’s intention. They weren’t going to try to land it on the science block. Instead they were heading for the wide, smooth expanse of the sports hall roof.

  The helicopter swung in the air, caught in a crosswind, its tail sweeping around. Paul held his breath as it dropped lower, the pilot wrestling with the clumsy craft. He found himself willing them down, and was surprised by how much he suddenly cared about the plight of the unseen stranger — or strangers — inside.