THE RED MIST TRILOGY: The Box Set

by R T Green

  She and her alien technology were the only things on planet Earth who could locate the captives.

  He gripped the wheel a little harder, concentrated on the road ahead. All he could do was make sure the girls with all the power got to where they needed to be… in one piece.

  Fortunately, most of the route was straight. He headed west along the deserted A501 until he reached the Edgware Road, and then turned a very gentle left onto the A5 to Marble Arch.

  So far so good. The only sign of life was two army trucks, both parked at the side of the road, watching out for any signs of alien life that were impossible to see.

  They skirted the east side of Hyde Park, heading south towards the Thames, drove along the western edge of Buckingham Palace gardens, and five minutes later Vauxhall Bridge loomed out of the murk. Coop gritted his teeth. The safety rails on either side of that wouldn’t stop a heavy van careering out of control.

  Miles’s face appeared next to him. ‘Steady now, mate. Don’t fancy a cold bath.’

  ‘Tell me about it.’

  He glanced at his watch. They’d been travelling an hour and a half. Zana needed thirty minutes to prep the shuttle until it could lift off. Allowing three hours before Tiri’s radiation trail dispersed, there was an hour’s driving time left. Once over the bridge, it was just a half-mile to the power station.

  There should be plenty of time.

  He slowed almost to walking pace. The road began to rise, lifting itself up to the level of the bridge.

  And the van stopped.

  Five inches of snow was just too much. The rear wheels were turning, but they were going nowhere.

  ‘Fuck!’

  Shirl’s face appeared, squeezing next to Miles’s. ‘Gonna have to take a run at it, boss.’

  ‘Seriously?’

  ‘You want us girls to save the facking world or not?’

  He did. So he backed up fifty yards, called to the others. ‘Get yourselves as close over the rear wheels as you can. Need all the weight we’ve got.’

  ‘You calling me fat now?’

  He grinned. Even if the cockney accent didn’t give her away, there was only one person who’s gob that would have come out of. Maybe bringing Shirl along was the best thing after all.

  ‘Hold on to your extremities!’

  He eased the throttle in, the van moved forward. Then, the foot hard to the floor, it picked up speed. Onto the slight rise, it screamed its way up, the tyres biting hard into the fresh snow. And then, faster than he’d expected, it leveled out onto the bridge proper.

  The vicious crosswind didn’t help. As the van sped into the open and cleared the concrete parapets he tried to slow it down, taken by surprise at the speed of the wind blowing the snow into deep drifts.

  And as the wheels kicked to the left and headed far too fast for the safety barriers, he realised a very hard impact was inevitable, and closed his eyes so he didn’t have to see the bitter, watery end.

  Chapter 174

  ‘I said don’t bend the van, Dumb!’

  Waiting for the unavoidable sound of bodywork and barrier crumpling together, and the final impact of vehicle hitting icy water, the sound of Shirl’s curt words shocked his eyes open.

  The van was motionless, still facing the right way, fifty metres onto the bridge. He shook his head, disbelieving eyes trying to focus on his auxiliary agent’s angry face. There had been the awful sound of metal on metal, but not as loud as it should have been. Shirl’s voice was way louder.

  ‘You should have let me facking drive. I’d have done a better job.’

  For a few seconds he stared blankly at her, but couldn’t find the words to retort. Instead he wrenched open the driver’s door, struggled onto the bridge with legs that didn’t seem to want to work, and realized why they weren’t all drowning right then.

  Miles joined him as he gazed at the deep snowdrift built up against the barrier, which had for sure cushioned the impact. ‘Thank god for this bloody awful weather, hey Coop?’

  He nodded ironically. The arctic blizzard may have caused all sorts of problems, but when push came to shove it had also saved their lives.

  Shirl’s face appeared between them. ‘If you two have finished sightseeing, can we get gone please? Radiation trails don’t last forever, you know!’

  Coop grinned in a rueful and very relieved way. ‘Coming boss,’ he said meekly.

  Twenty minutes later they’d negotiated the narrower road that ran alongside the Thames, and the metal-grid security gates of the ex-Battersea power station loomed out of the whiteness.

  Coop didn’t bother stopping. Time was running out, and he didn’t have a key anyway. Security for the site was supposed to be twenty-four hour, but given the conditions he doubted anyone had stuck it out.

  The flimsy gates were no match for a black van and a driver who’d already bent it so much he was past caring. As they smashed out of the way he headed straight for the pier, brought the van to a stop feet from the quayside.

  ‘Ok, Zana, go do what you gotta do to get this thing flying. I’ll come with you. Miles, Shirl, grab as many gizmo’s as you can find among all this technology, fill a couple of cases. You never know, something might come in handy.’

  The wind tried to rip their heads off as they walked across the narrow metal bridge to the pier. Almost horizontal snowflakes whipped into them on the strengthening gale-force wind, turning them white in the two minutes it took to reach the hatch. As it opened and they virtually fell inside, he looked at Zana and blew out his cheeks.

  ‘Geez, I’ll be whiter than Miles at this rate!’

  She grinned, headed straight for the bridge and began pressing squares of light. A faint hum of background noise filled the room as the power core began its start-up sequence. Coop glanced at his watch again. ‘Been two hours fifteen minutes since Tiri lifted off, Zana. Not much time to catch that trail before it’s gone.’

  She nodded. ‘This weather won’t help either.’

  He pulled a frustrated face, grabbed the phone from his pocket. There had been no time to call Duncan Scott, bring him up to speed, but now he needed to talk to him. He looked at the screen, swore under his breath. No signal. The worst weather the UK had seen for many years had even shut down all mobile communications.

  They were on their own.

  He could feel the craft moving beneath his feet, knew it was nothing to do with the ship’s own power. Forty feet out into the open water of the Thames, the wind was doing its best to blow the shuttle into the water.

  ‘We even going to be able to take off in this?’ he called out to Zana.

  ‘Should be ok.’

  ‘You deliberately trying to scare the shit out of me?’

  Shirl and Miles stumbled through the hatch, gasping to get back the breath the wind had sucked out of them. ‘Close that bloody hatch for Christ’s sake, Coop,’ Miles just about managed to say.

  ‘Fack…’ Shirl’s manic eyes were flicking everywhere. ‘A real life alien facking spaceship…’

  She reminded Coop of his own first reaction. ‘Pretty cool, huh Shirl?’

  ‘Off the facking scale.’

  She was gone, marching to the bridge and flopping into the co-pilot’s seat. ‘Any sign of that radiation trail, Zana?’

  Despite himself, Coop couldn’t help grinning to Miles at his new agent’s proactive attitude. He followed her meekly.

  Zana was peering into a small screen built into the console wrapping around her. ‘No, but that’s not surprising. In this snow we’ll have to get to where she took off to pick it up.’

  The hum of the power core rose a few octaves. And the shuttle shook violently. Miles’s face turned a shade whiter. ‘That was either something you did Zana, or the end of the world?’

  ‘Just the wind,’ she said calmly.

  ‘Just?’

  ‘Perhaps I under-exaggerate. It might be if we don’t take off in the next five minutes we’ll end up at the bottom of the river.’

&nb
sp; ‘How can you be so friggin’ calm about that?’

  ‘Boys…’ Shirl stepped between them, put an arm around each of their shoulders. ‘I know you’re a bit too young to understand right now, but mummy won’t let the bogey man hurt you, and aunty Zana is here too, to take care of you. So please just go back to bed, and quit facking whining!’

  ‘Bloody men!’

  Shirl slumped back into the seat she’d claimed as her own, scowling ferociously. Zana looked round grinning. ‘Mummy is right boys, but if you won’t go to bed at least sit, or in sixty seconds time you’ll fall over.’

  The boys did as they were told without another word, just as the power core filled the bridge with frantic-sounding noise. ‘Hold onto your balls, this could be a bumpy ride…’ Shirl called out.

  Zana knew she couldn’t make a normal lift-off, rise gently into the air. That would very likely mean getting blown into one of the brand new chimneys of the former power station. It was going to have to be a full-on, crush-you-into-the-seat rocket launch…

  ‘Woooaaa…’

  In the five short seconds it took to climb above the clouds, it was hard to tell which one of them had actually found the breath to scream. But as the sixth second clicked by, Zana brought the shuttle to a standstill, hovering in bright moonlight a couple of hundred metres above the storm clouds.

  Coop looked like he’d just had an electric shock. Miles sat in his seat in silence, except for the sound of him sucking in short sharp breaths to get oxygen back in his lungs.

  Shirl was grinning from ear to ear. ‘Fack… they’ve gotta get one of these at Thorpe Park!’

  Zana drew in a deep breath, scanning the integrity readings. ‘That’s a relief.’

  Shirl frowned. ‘Why? Is take-off not always like that?’

  ‘Oh no. First time I’ve ever attempted it. It’s… structurally unwise.’

  Then Coop found his voice. ‘Geez Zana… you could have warned us.’

  Shirl glanced back to him, grinning again. ‘She probably didn’t want to watch the embarrassing sight of you two peeing yourselves.’

  Zana pulled up a map of London on the navigation screen. ‘Shirl, I’m not sure where Euston is. Will you navigate us there please?’

  ‘Sure thing, honey. Just get this theme-park ride moving, I’ll do the rest.’

  ‘Got it.’

  Hovering above the low clouds directly over Euston, Zana smiled. ‘It’s faint, but we’re locked on.’

  Coop matched her smile. ‘Thank fuck for that.’

  ‘Which direction are they heading?’ asked Miles.

  ‘North. But that might change as we follow it.’

  ‘I guess theoretically they could be going anywhere in the world.’

  ‘It’s possible, but I doubt they’re going outside the UK. I know my sister, the way she thinks. She knew it was getting too risky to stay in London, that she’d have to get them somewhere more remote where they wouldn’t be found. But she also knows there’s a possibility other Calandurans survived, and she won’t give up searching until she’s got them all.’

  ‘Cheer me up, why don’t you?’

  ‘But the main reason she won’t have gone far, is because she doesn’t know yet she’s got the one person she really came for.’

  ‘Madeline.’

  Coop saw her head lower, and felt his heart sink. He knelt beside her, took her hand. ‘She’s well disguised, Zana.’

  He knew his words were little consolation, and she knew it too. ‘Do you really think as soon as Tiri sets eyes on Madeline, she won’t know it’s her?’

  He couldn’t answer.

  And it would have been pointless anyway.

  Chapter 175

  They followed the invisible trail as it turned slightly north-west. Like them, Tiri had headed quickly above the clouds, giving her pursuers an easier task. If she’d stayed in the snowstorm, the radiation would have been dispersed much sooner.

  Just a half-hour had passed when Zana called out. ‘The trail is descending, guys.’

  ‘Already?’ said Shirl.

  ‘We are in a supersonic airliner, agent,’ Coop laughed.

  ‘Better hold tight, it doesn’t look like the weather has got any better in the countryside.’

  In seconds they were blind, the dark snow clouds wrapping them in a mass of dirty cotton wool.

  ‘Well, at least we won’t hit anything. Not even a bird will be flying in this.’

  The shuttle began to buck, shuddering its way through the thickest of the cloud. Lumps of white battered the windshield, the textured light and dark patches of cloud mesmerizing them as they flashed past the windows at incredible speed.

  And then they broke through, and Zana leveling out quickly as the whiteness of the ground came to meet them too fast. Less than half a mile above the surface, she brought the shuttle to a stationery hover.

  ‘Tiri’s trail is turning in a half-circle,’ she said quietly.

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘It means we are here.’

  The shuttle moved forward again, much slower this time as Zana followed the curve of the trail. The snow was still falling, but the flakes not so huge. They could see the countryside for a mile or so around them, the white ground helping to illuminate the darkness in a ghostly winter hue.

  It was hardly flat. As far as they could see, rolling hills were punctuated with areas of thick pine forest, not a road or a building anywhere to be seen. A six-inch blanket of snow covered everything, turning it into the perfect Christmas card scene.

  But Santa had long since given up jingling his way to this neck of the woods.

  ‘There’s nothing here,’ said Miles, straining to see in the faint light.

  Coop glanced to Shirl, saw the frown on her face. ‘Shirl..?’

  She pointed a little to the left. ‘Zana, head that way a bit further.’

  She did as she was asked. The shuttle cruised over the sharp peak of a high, pine-covered hill. And nestling at the bottom of the valley, surrounded on all sides by steep hills, there it was.

  Shirl let out a single, breathy word. ‘Fack…’

  ‘You got something to tell us, agent?’

  ‘Yeah. I know this place.’

  ‘How…’

  ‘In a minute. Let’s make sure first.’

  Zana flew slowly into the valley, following the drop of the hill, and as she turned in a gentle circle they could see everything. The big old manor house, built right next to a small, ice-covered lake. The tall pine trees that surrounded it on three sides, almost hiding it from view.

  The three square dents of compressed snow, where the landing feet of Tiri’s invisible shuttle had flattened it a short while ago. And the myriad of footprints running between it and the entrance to the house.

  Coop swallowed hard, coughed to try and clear the lump in his throat. ‘Zana, find somewhere close by to set us down. And then you Shirl, can tell us how the fuck you know all this.’

  Chapter 176

  Zana found a clearing in the forest on the opposite slope of one of the hills bordering the old house. The night was drawing to a close; in an hour or so it would start to get light. There was little they could do right then, not without a plan.

  And even at the best of times, mobile communications in that little part of the world were sketchy at best. In the present conditions, a call to anyone was a total impossibility.

  They were still on their own. And it was going to stay that way.

  Miles brewed coffee, Zana zapped up some food, and they sat down together at the small mess table.

  ‘Guess I should tell you all about Hartington Manor,’ said Shirl.

  ‘Maybe you should start by telling us how you know?’ said Coop in a slightly impatient way.

  ‘Told you, abandoned buildings are my hobby. And that place over there is the metropolis of ghost-hunters.’

  ‘Ghosts?’ whispered Zana.

  ‘Just tell us, Shirl,’ said Coop.

  ‘Ok.
Once upon a time…’

  ‘And quit with the amateur dramatics, please?’

  ‘Spoilsport. At the end of the seventeen-hundreds, Jeremiah Watson, a rich sugar plantation owner, came back from Jamaica… well, kinda had to come back, with the slave thing abolished and the locals driving out anyone with white skin. Unlike some though, he managed to hold on to his fortune. But some say he’d been cursed…’

  ‘Cursed?’

  ‘That’s the story. But if you ask me the whole Caribbean experience just sent him insane.’

  ‘I know how he felt,’ Miles grinned.

  ‘Anyways, when he got back to England he became reclusive, build that house in the middle of nowhere for him and his family. Twelve bedrooms plus servant’s quarters… the best of everything. Except access. The only way in is a private track through the forest, over a mile long. In the winter the place was cut off for weeks at a time.’

  ‘I can see why my sister chose it.’

  ‘So how come it was abandoned?’

  ‘You mean apart from the obvious?’ Shirl grinned. ‘The house was handed down through generation after generation… but it’s said, so was the insanity. The Watson family got themselves a bad reputation in the area, were treated like lepers when they made a rare appearance in the nearest village six miles away.’

  ‘Yeah, that makes it remote.’

  ‘Time’s changed, and so did the needs of the younger members of the family. Thirty years ago, all that was left was a middle-aged James Watson, his wife and two daughters. No servants or help anymore, no one would work for them. In virtual solitary confinement, things went from bad to worse…’

  ‘Sounds like it would make a great novel.’

  ‘You ain’t heard the best bit yet.’ She leant forward on her elbows, spoke in a hushed voice. ‘It seems one day ten years ago, some deer hunters got lost in the forest, stumbled on the house and were about to ask for directions, when…’