by R T Green
But then the nausea came. Real, full-on nausea this time. I felt my stomach tighten, and then my throat gag. I did everything I could to stop the inevitable, but I was helpless. My captor looked across in horror as I slid the passenger window down, and gasped out, ‘I’m going to throw up…’
I threw up. Like my life depended on it. Hanging out of the window, retching and heaving, I deposited the entire contents of my stomach into a disgusting trail of vomit stretching away behind us.
He didn’t stop. As my car-sickness ended and I closed the window, I just about saw the fist coming at me before it cracked into my head, and my world went black.
‘Arghhh!’
Shirl’s scream reverberated around the confines of the back of the van.
‘Get it away from me!’
Miles moved quickly as Coop, in the driver’s seat, glanced back. ‘What the fuck…’
The sandy-haired Englishman put an arm around their quaking visitor, and grinned. ‘I think Shirl’s just experienced her first close encounter!’
Zana held out a hand. ‘Hello Shirl. I’m Zana.’
Shirl backed away, not that there was very far to go in a moving eight-foot metal room. ‘Huh?’
‘I’m not here to harm you. Quite the opposite.’
‘Huh?’
‘Will someone please explain?’ said Coop from the front seat.
Miles, still grinning, and enjoying the fact someone else was just as gob-smacked as he was when he first met an alien, did as his partner asked. ‘Zana is our friendly alien, Shirl. She’s here to help us.’
‘Huh?’ Wild eyes, still flicking from side to side.
‘And Zana… Zana was the one who destroyed the spaceship six weeks ago.’
‘But… but… the news said you’d died…’
‘I did.’
‘Huh?’
Miles wrapped a hand around Shirl’s. ‘We all thought she’d died, even Zana herself, but back at HQ she came to life. But to protect her from retribution by those who would never understand, we let everyone think she’d stayed dead. And now she’s helping us again.’
‘Fack.’ A whisper.
Zana held out a hand again, this time Shirl took it. A little hesitantly. ‘And your new friend, Madeline… she was the one who helped me do it. The one who made it happen, actually.’
‘Fack!’
Shirl leant forward, gazing into Zana’s eyes. ‘Are you two..?’
‘Yes.’
‘Fa…’
‘Can we please concentrate on the job in hand?’ Coop interrupted Shirl’s rapid initiation into the privileged ranks of the few who knew the truth. ‘Could really do with a little navigation here… the car is too far ahead for a visual in this friggin’ weather.’
Shirl handed the crumpled notepaper to Miles. ‘Ere… that’s the reg. Tell the cops or the squaddies or something, get them to… intercept. Is that the right word?’
Miles took the note. ‘Thanks for your quick thinking, Shirl. But right now we don’t want that to happen. Madeline has a tracker… see this map on the screen here, that green dot is her. We need her to lead us to where the others are hiding out, then we can call the cops, save the girls.’
‘You’d better, or I’ll have something to say!’
And then Coop let out a cry. Miles glanced up, saw him wrestling with the wheel. The world through the windshield started to spin, and nothing outside was quite where it should be.
The van wasn’t going fast, but the un-gritted streets and ever-deepening snow were making driving treacherous. Coop managed to stop the spin, but he couldn’t avert the slow-motion impact. He braced himself as the front nearside wheel hit the kerbstone side-on, heard the bang as the tyre deflated.
Miles’s face appeared between the front seats. ‘Bloody hell Coop, haven’t they taught you how to drive in the winter yet?’
‘Hey, I’m Jamaican ok?’
Chapter 167
Kayla forced the tears to stop, turned onto her back. Her misted eyes gazed unseeing at the dirty, decaying ceiling, the droplets of damp glistening in the dim light of the bedside lamp. They looked almost like the stars she would never see again.
She sat up, rubbed her eyes, so hard it made them hurt. She was angry, but this time not with him. The tears she had shed for the last hour were different this time, not there because of anything he did.
She was angry at herself.
But in a strange kind of way, it had given her the resolve to take the final step.
She lifted one of the chains, held it in her hand, told herself she wasn’t a quitter. In the daylight hours she’d done exactly the same thing, three times, ready to make the move that would end the torture.
She’d thought.
The anger welled inside her again, a desperate gut-wrenching recall that her own cowardice had let her down. Three times she’d picked up the chain, and three times she’d dropped it again, the spirit battered out of her so totally she’d been unable even to find the strength to end the pain.
But then as darkness fell, he’d come again. Violated her, injected her with whatever it was in the syringe, and then an hour later brought her a pizza from Papa John’s.
Always the same.
But he’d abused her for the last time. Already angry at what she saw as her own weakness, his rape had turned the anger into a desolate kind of determination.
She’d cried her tears for the last time, waiting it out until later in the night when the sounds of people moving around had died to nothing.
She knew it wouldn’t be an instant death. Strangling herself with her own chains would take a few minutes until she drew her last heartbreaking breath.
It wouldn’t do for someone to hear, stop the inevitable.
All was quiet. The time to say goodbye had come.
She reached into her bag, pulled out the hairbrush and lippy they’d let her keep. Gently she slipped the pink brush through her hair, enjoying the feel of the stiff bristles against her scalp one last time. And then she turned the base of the lippy, did the best she could to make her full lips as pretty as she could without a mirror to see the results.
She was a dirty, defiled mess. But when he found her body, he would see she’d done her best to defy him, and know for sure he’d not completely broken her.
She struggled to her feet, standing high on the damp mattress, her legs heavy, telling her to stop the insanity. But this time she ignored their cries, and closed her eyes to shut away her vision.
All she could do then was hear and feel… and as she looped the chain around her neck the cold of the metal made her shudder, and the links chinking together became the ghostly and final sound of a soul that had lost every shred of hope.
Chapter 168
‘Grab the spare Miles, I’ll get the jack.’
Coop threw a disgusted look at the flat nearside tyre, and then stuck his head through the rear door. ‘Keep your eyes on that screen girls, tell me if anything changes.’
They set to work, pumping up the van and ripping off the useless wheel as the relentless snow turned their green parkas ever more white.
There wasn’t a soul around. London had shut down for the night. It was hardly surprising; vengeful aliens on the loose and a blanket of snow getting close to four inches thick seemed to be deterring even the hardiest from taking a late night stroll.
They’d just tightened the last nut when Zana called out. ‘The tracker has stopped moving, about a mile ahead.’
Miles joined the girls in the back. ‘How long since it stopped?’
‘Three minutes.’
As the van pulled off, a little slower this time, he grabbed a small hand-held device. Shirl grinned, starting to enjoy her new role as an auxiliary MI6 agent. ‘Ooh, what’s that?’
‘This does the same job as the GPS tracker.’ He pointed to the screen. ‘But that’s only accurate to a hundred yards or so, this pinpoints it exactly.’
Zana was watching the screen. ‘Getting close now
, Coop… four hundred yards ahead.’
He slowed the van, peered through the white murk. ‘Can’t see a damn thing yet.’
‘Two hundred.’
‘You sure?’
‘I’m not an idiot. Are you questioning my intelligence?’
He grinned. ‘Not at all. It just doesn’t seem right.’
The four-lane road was no different to what it was a mile back. A main road lined with small shops, equally small apartments above them. Nothing else. And no Mazda.
‘We’re here.’
He frowned, brought the van to a stop, fifty yards from a set of traffic lights. ‘This ain’t right, folks.’
‘Could be a bigger building behind these shops, Coop. Come on, time for a walk.’
Miles clambered out of the van, and panned the scanner round to find the direction of the tracker. Coop joined him. ‘Not liking this, Miles,’ he said.
‘You might have good reason. According to this, the horse pill is fifty yards behind us … somewhere in the road.’
‘Fuck.’
They retraced the van’s tyre tracks, the beep of the scanner getting faster as they walked. And then it was a constant wail. Miles looked down to the road, a few feet from the kerb.
‘Well, it’s there somewhere.’
Coop leant over, brushed away the freshly-fallen snow. ‘Oh geez…’
He picked up the tiny tracker, brushed a foot into the snow a few feet around it, and looked at his partner with desolate eyes. ‘Guess he must have drugged her or something, and she had a reaction.’
Miles nodded. ‘Not much doubt about that, mate.’
Zana covered her face with her hands, Miles pulled her close and held her as she cried it out. Shirl lowered her head, whispered, ‘Fack,’ under her breath. Coop could feel his eyes misting up too, turned away from the others so they wouldn’t see.
Madeline had no way to communicate. And by now she could be anywhere. And there was no way to know where anywhere was.
‘What do we do now?’ Shirl’s cry was fuelled by anger and fear.
She got her answer. Dead silence. It wasn’t the response she needed. ‘Fack me… you people are supposed to be clever? Keeping us ordinary folks safe? What you gonna do about this?’
‘Shirl, without the tracker…’
‘Jesus facking Christ… think, Dumb and Dumber.’ She threw her hands in the air, almost swiped Coop in the face. ‘Oh sorry, Dumb.’
‘We’ve got the reg, Coop,’ said Miles. ‘We can alert the Met, but in this weather…’
Zana wiped away the tears. ‘I think by now they will have got to wherever they’re going.’
Coop nodded. ‘I agree. Wherever the fuckers are holed up, it won’t be too far away from Shirl’s… patch.’
Shirl slapped him on the thigh. ‘Right then, so let’s work it out. Process of elimination. We know the direction he’s going… how many girls they got now?’
Coop rubbed his thigh, and then held out uncertain hands. ‘We don’t really know. They’ve likely picked up homeless girls as well as… women of the night…’
‘Oh for Christ’s sake, just say hookers, Coop…’
‘Hookers, so we could be looking at ten, twelve… maybe more.’
‘So they need somewhere quite big… hidden away, secure… and ideally, from what you’ve told me the little shit’s calling in life is, maybe with beds or something?’
‘That’s pretty much it, Shirl.’
‘So maybe an abandoned hospital, clinic… orphanage?’
‘If they were lucky enough to find one, that would be ideal. But the Met have already searched most of those kind of places, thinking the same.’
‘Facking cops next to useless anyway. Let me think…’
She closed her eyes, and Coop glanced to Miles, who shook his head, and then to Zana, who made a how-the-hell-should-I-know kind of face.
But Shirl, still with closed eyes, was talking away… to herself. ‘St. Lukes, Muswell Hill… no, that’s apartments now… Cane Hill Asylum… nah… too far away… Chiswick Maternity… wrong direction…’
‘Shirl..?’
‘Quiet, I’m thinking… London Temperance hospital… ah!’
‘Ah?’
‘Yes, ah. Hmm… they’ve just demolished the main building, but…’
Silence. Just the sound of cogs churning. For a full minute. Then…
‘I know where they are!’
Coop looked dumbfounded. ‘How can you possibly know that? How do you know all this?’
‘You getting that engine started, Dumb? Just trust me. It’s a hobby of mine… most days I get out, exploring and snapping abandoned buildings. Especially creepy old hospitals. Bit sad I know, but I’m not the only one! The Temperance Hospital was demolished a few months ago…’
‘So why would they be there, if it’s gone?’
‘I was there three weeks ago. The site is shut down, like everything else since those alien shits arrived… sorry, Zana… but they’ve not got round to demolishing the really spooky part of it.’
Zana’s face turned white. Quite an achievement when you’ve got smoky-pink skin. ‘What do you mean, really spooky?’
Shirl’s eyes narrowed, and she spoke in hushed tones. ‘Just over a hundred years ago, the good Victorian folks who built the hospital for the poor, they opened a new wing. It wasn’t in the main building, they built it partly underground, just the other side of the old cemetery, and accessed by a damp, dimly-lit tunnel from the main hospital. They needed it to be a… secure facility.’
‘Um… why?’
‘It was a lunatic asylum… for those they’d tried to help but were too far gone. Basically, a prison for the totally insane.’
‘Oh, I see.’ Somehow Coop needed to whisper the words, matching the dark mood in the van.
Shirl shook her head, disappointed in herself. ‘You know the really facked-up part of this? I broke into the site three weeks ago, stood a hundred yards away looking at that prison. It was pretty much covered with brambles and undergrowth, surrounded by flaky old gravestones. I really wanted to try and get inside, see what it was like, but the sun was setting and it was so facking spooky… so I chickened out and went home.’
She wiped away a tear. Miles wrapped a hand around hers. ‘Probably a good idea you didn’t, Shirl. They wouldn’t have let you go. And you weren’t to know.’
She looked up and smiled, a steely glint in her eye. ‘But I do now! We going or not, Dumb?’
Shaking his head, Coop fired the engine, an ironic disbelieving smile on his face that he was obeying the instructions of a middle-aged tart-with-a-heart he’d only met an hour ago. But then, she was the only one who seemed to have a clue what to do. ‘Where are we going, Shirl?’
‘Hampstead Road, right next to Euston Station. And step on it!’
‘What, in this weather?’
‘You know what I mean. Just don’t bend the facking van this time.’
Chapter 169
The blackness turned to grey. I forced eyes that really didn’t want to see to open, tried to focus on my surroundings. It wasn’t easy, a throbbing pain in my jaw from a punch Tyson Fury would have been proud of making it even harder to think clearly.
Through the windshield I could see my sparring partner pushing open a big section of blue hoarding, the kind that closes off building sites. Then he was back in the car, driving us into a huge open space at least a quarter-mile square, negotiating a path through piles of old bricks and roof tiles.
Still the snow hammered down, making it almost impossible for my already-foggy eyes to work out where we were. But then I didn’t get any more time; the car came to a stop and he was wrenching open the passenger door and dragging me out.
And then Spiderman was there. But this version wasn’t intent on being my superhero, he just grabbed my other arm and led me roughly to an open hatch that seemed to be built into the ground.
It’s ok, alien. You don’t need to hide your pink face and h
ands from me.
I know exactly what you look like.
They shoved me down a set of old crumbling stone steps. We were in some kind of tunnel. I tried to see ahead, but it didn’t exactly fill me with joy. As far as I could see in front of me, there was nothing but dimly-lit tunnel.
Where the hell was I?
Putrid smells filled my nose. Old decaying lime plaster, musty damp bricks, ridden with black mould, brown-stained water dripping onto my head from the semi-circular brick roof a few feet above my head.
It was the most terrifying of time capsules. A long-forgotten underground passageway that must have seen thousands of long-forgotten souls dragged along it since the Victorians first built it.
Any second now I’ll be passing Jack the Ripper’s cell.
Jack didn’t make an appearance. After what seemed like forever the tunnel opened out into a room that resembled the entrance to the dungeons at the Tower of London.
That’s ironic. Two days ago I’d thought they were going to throw me into the real Tower. Now here I was very likely heading for something trying very hard to pretend it was.
Spiderman Two appeared, took charge of my left arm. I tried to wave goodbye to my human-looking abductor standing watching in the corner, but they’d got both my arms in a vice. I was led through a black iron door, along another corridor with more iron doors punctuating each wall.
My vision was clearing. The passageway was lit just enough to see by, but what was in front of my eyes didn’t make easy viewing. The damp walls glistened with droplets of dirty foul-smelling water, the old plaster that had once been painted brown and cream mostly crumbled to the floor, compressed by the passing of alien and human feet into a sodden carpet of musty mud.
I tried to see through the tiny windows in the doors as we passed by, but my hosts weren’t hanging about and it was impossible to make out anything much.
Not that I needed to. I knew what this horrific place must once have been, a secure facility likely built at the end of the eighteen-hundreds, to imprison those who were judged by their Victorian masters to be insane and a threat to society.