‘It should take us down to shelter level.’ The warm glow from the tiny flames softened Dealey’s features, but to Culver the man looked ten years older than when he had first laid eyes on him. Odd that he’d only just noticed.
Culver squeezed past Fairbank and knelt on the opposite side of the opening to Dealey. ‘How far down does the shaft go?’
‘I’m not sure. We must be fairly near.’
‘Is it safe?’
Dealey looked at him sharply.
‘Vermin, I mean,’ Culver said.
They all tensed in the silence that followed.
Finally, Dealey said, ‘There’s no way of knowing. But what other choice do we have?’
‘The usual. None at all.’
Culver went in first, exchanging his weaker lighter for Fairbank’s and wincing at the hot metal. He climbed down, holding the lighter between thumb and index finger, his other fingers curled around the upright support so that both hands were used. The shaft was circular and metallic, and the hum of machinery grew louder the lower he went, although it was still muted. He heard the others climbing into the shaft after him. It seemed a long time before he touched down in another passageway, this one wider than the one he had just left. Some of the piping and cables ran along its ceiling. There was water on the floor.
Dealey reached him, then Fairbank, followed by Kate. Ellison arrived clutching his side and breathing heavily. ‘Christ!’ he uttered when his feet became soaked.
‘Maybe this place was flooded, too,’ said Fairbank.
‘I doubt it,’ Dealey replied, touching the walls. ‘They’re not damp. Very cold, and I suppose dankish, but you’d expect that at this temperature. Not soaked, though. I think the water on the floor is just seepage, nothing to worry about.’
‘Nowadays, when a government man tells me not to worry, I worry,’ Fairbank retorted without rancour.
Culver held his light to the left, then to the right. ‘Which way?’
‘It probably doesn’t matter. These maintenance corridors skirt the headquarters; they’re part of a larger system that protects the main shelter. Either way should lead us somewhere useful.’
‘Okay, let’s take the left.’
They went on, splashing water, all of them becoming chilled with the cold. There were one or two turns in the passageway, but never right-angled, only bearing to the right, then reverting to the previous direction. Culver guessed they were still heading west, although he admitted to himself he could be entirely wrong. They passed ladders leading up into other shafts and, here and there, large junction boxes into which the cables and wires disappeared, to emerge on the other side. The flames the men carried were fading.
Fairbank’s was the first to shrink to nothing. He tossed it away and they heard the plop as it struck water.
Dealey’s was next.
Soon they were groping their way along, barely able to see, hands against the walls for guidance. The idea of trying to find their way in total darkness terrified them all. Culver heard the trickling of water just ahead, but there was not enough light to see where the sound came from. He discovered its source when the ground felt different beneath him. He crouched.
‘There’s a drain here.’ He felt with his fingers, cold air was rising from the slats. ‘Looks like quite a big one.’
‘It’ll lead down to the sewers,’ said Dealey. ‘Being so near the river, there must be a constant seepage into the tunnels.’
‘Steve, let’s keep moving while we still have light,’ Kate urged.
He straightened and they moved on.
Ellison stared miserably at his sinking flame and drew in a sharp breath when it finally went out. A little further on, Culver stopped again and cupped a hand around his lighter, the only lantern they had left.
Ellison bumped into Dealey. ‘What the hell are you doing?’
‘Shut up.’ Culver was peering ahead into the darkness. ‘I think I can see a glow.’
They crowded round him. ‘You’re right, Steve,’ said Kate. ‘I see it, too.’
‘Thank God for that,’ Ellison breathed.
Their pace quickened and soon the faint glow in the distance grew stronger, became a long sliver of pale light. As they approached, they were able to distinguish a door. It was slightly ajar, the light coming from inside. The corridor ended there.
The door was solid, made of thick metal painted green. There were flanges around its sides, like the doorway of the Kingsway exchange, to provide a tight seal when closed. Culver pushed against it, cautious for some reason. Beyond he could see dimly lit grey walls, another passageway. The heavy door resisted his push. There was something behind it.
He shoved a little harder and something moved inside.
Culver looked around at the others, then snapped the lighter shut. He put it in his pocket. Using both hands, palms flat against the smooth surface, he eased the door wider. The light illuminated their faces. When there was enough room, he slipped through.
The body – what was left of it – was slumped against the door, one hand, much of the flesh gone, still gripped tight around the six-inch bar that was the door’s handle. Culver felt himself sway a little, even though he should have been accustomed to such atrocities by now. It could once have been a man, although it was hard to tell. The corpse had been fed upon. The head was missing.
One hand holding the door open – the corpse seemed determined to push it shut – Culver quietly called the others in. ‘You first, Dealey. You next, Kate, and don’t look, just keep your eyes straight ahead.’
Of course she looked and immediately moved away, her chest heaving.
‘Oh shit,’ said Fairbank when he saw the headless body.
Ellison visibly sagged and Culver thought for a moment the engineer would crumple. Ellison leaned weakly against the wall and said, ‘They’re down here.’
Nobody disagreed.
He staggered back towards the open door. ‘We’d better get out. We can’t stay here.’
Culver caught him by the shoulder and allowed the door to close. It did not shut completely, but stayed ajar, just as they had found it. The corpse’s hand released its death grip, the arm slumping to the floor.
‘We can’t go back,’ Culver said steadily. ‘We don’t have the light. And besides, the rats may be out there.’
‘You think this . . .’ Dealey averted his gaze ‘. . . this person was trying to keep them out?’
‘I don’t know,’ Culver admitted. ‘Either that, or he was trying to escape.’ He had decided that the body was that of a man, for the tattered remnants of what looked like olive-green overalls or a uniform of some kind still clung to it.
Fairbank seemed fascinated by the spectacle. ‘The head,’ he said, ‘why’s the head gone?’ The stench was there, but it was not powerful, not cloying. The man had been dead some time, the worst of the smell long since dispersed. ‘It’s like the Underground station. Remember the bodies we found? Some with heads missing?’
‘But why?’ asked Dealey. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘Maybe the rats shrink ’em.’ Nobody appreciated Fair-bank’s macabre humour this time.
‘Can’t you tell us why?’ Culver was looking directly at Dealey.
‘I swear I know nothing more than I’ve already told you. You must believe me.’
‘Must I?’
‘There’s no point in my lying. There would be absolutely nothing to gain from it.’
Culver conceded. He looked along the corridor, noticing for the first time the blood smears that stained its length. ‘I guess that answers one question,’ he said, pointing. ‘He was trying to escape from the inside. They had him before he even reached the door. He must have crawled along as they tore him apart.’
Kate had covered her face, her head against the wall. ‘It’s never going to end. We’re not going to live through this.’
Culver went to her. ‘We’re not inside yet. The rats may have attacked and been beaten off. This place can hold hu
ndreds of people, Kate, more than enough to defend themselves. And they have the military to protect them, too.’
‘Then why him, why this one body?’
‘Maybe they didn’t know he was out here. It’s just a corridor, probably one of many. They may not have even known he’d been killed.’ An overwhelming sense of dread was building up inside him as he spoke. It had been growing since first they had smashed open the door above ground, and now it was sinking through every nerve cord, through every organ in his body, turning them to lead, filling his lower stomach with its draining heaviness.
‘There’s another door here!’ Fairbank was standing further down the passageway, pointing to a recess on his right.
Culver gently eased Kate away from the wall and took her with him, the others already making towards Fairbank. The door was similar to the one they had just left, only wider and higher. It was open.
With increasing trepidation, they stared into the interior of the government headquarters shelter.
She stirred, restless, perceiving a faraway danger.
Her obese body tried to shift in her nest of filth and powdered bones. The sound of running water was lost to her, for she did not possess ears, yet something inside could receive the high-frequency mewlings of her subject creatures. There was no light in the underground chamber, but her eyes had no optic nerves anyway. Yet she was always aware of movement around her.
The huge, swollen hump of her body moved in a deep breathing motion, swelling even more so that dark veins protruded from the whitish skin, skin so fine it seemed the network of ridges must burst through. Her jaws parted slightly as air exhaled with a high wheezing sound; the breath also came from another source, another, misshapen mouth in a stump by the side of her pointed head. There were no teeth inside this mouth and no eyes above it. A few white hairs grew from the snout, the one that enabled her to smell, but the protuberance had little other use. Her limbs no longer supported the gross weight and her claws – there were five on each paw – were brittle and cracked, grown long and curled from lack of use. Her tail was stunted, merely a scaly prominence, no more than that. The Mother Creature resembled a giant, pulsating eyeball.
A mewling sibilation escaped both snouts and she tried to thrash around in her bed of slime, but her weight was too much, her limbs too feeble. Only dust stirred, the bones ground to white powder by her soldier rats, the sleek black vermin who guarded and protected her with their own lives. Whom she now called to her.
There were other movements in the dark, cavernous chamber. They were the twitching, writhing motions of her fellow-beasts, those who resembled her in appearance, different from the servant and soldier vermin. Many had been produced from her own womb. And many had mated with her.
Like the Mother Creature, most were captive of their own malformation, debilitated by their own grotesqueness. And some were dead, others were dying.
She screeched, the sound of a screaming child. She was terribly afraid.
But she sensed her black legions were coming to her, winding their way through the flowing corridors, bringing food, the skulls into which her twisted tusks would bore holes so that the spongy flesh inside could be sucked out, swallowed.
She waited impatiently in the darkness, obscenely gross, body quivering, while her offspring, six of them and each one peculiarly shaped, like her yet unlike her, suckled at her breasts.
27
They walked through the carnage, their stomachs sickened, yet their minds somehow numbed. Perhaps their personae had already begun to adapt to such mayhem, such staggering destruction. Horror and revulsion touched, felt, insinuated itself into their consciousness, but some inner defence of the psyche, a natural yet mysterious barrier against insanity, prevented those feelings from penetrating their innermost selves.
The people of this mammoth sanctum, fugitives from the holocaust above, had been caught by surprise, unaware that another and just as deadly enemy lay within.
The first chamber that Culver and the small group of survivors found themselves in was low-ceilinged but capacious, its concrete interior dimly, though adequately, lit. It housed vehicles, many of which were strange to their eyes. Their colour, uniformly, was grey, none bearing markings of any kind. They stood in neat crammed rows, dead things like granite statues, that seemed incapable of motion. The windows of each were small affairs, mere slits in the metal bodywork, heavy-glassed and sinister. Among them were four turretless tanks of a design that none of the group had seen before. The main shells were small, unable to accommodate more than two passengers, and the long, sleek gun muzzles extended far beyond the limits of their hulls. Other vehicles resembled army scout cars, their wheels, like the tanks’, on tracks; they had few apertures and entry seemed to be through the roof. The shapes of the rest were more conventional only in that they had doors on either side and they did not run on tracks; instead, each vehicle had six extremely wide wheels.
All the vehicles (Culver had counted eighteen in all) appeared to be empty.
At the end of the long bay were two massive iron doors, both shut.
Dealey had explained there were curving ramps leading up to ground level behind the doors; there were two more sets along the way, the final pair of doors opening out into a secluded and protected courtyard. It had been Ellison’s idea to leave the shelter there and then, using the ramp and possibly taking one of the vehicles, for by that time they had discovered other bodies, corpses so savagely mutilated that they were barely recognizable as human. The group had passed between the vehicles, carefully avoiding featureless cadavers that sprawled in the gangways, making for the exit. Controls for opening the huge doors were set inside a small, glass cubicle, and the panes were smeared with dried blood. Ignoring the two bodies – though the term ‘bodies’ was hardly appropriate for the matter that lay on the cubicle floor – Fairbank tried the switches set in the wall, assuming they would open the exit doors. Nothing had happened; the mechanism was inoperative.
They went through an area marked DECONTAM UNIT, not lingering to examine the racks of silver-grey, one-piece suits, the machines that resembled metal-detecting doorways, or the gruesome things that lay on the shower floors.
It was beyond the decontamination area that Culver, Fairbank, Ellison and Kate began to gain some idea of the immense size and complexity of the government’s war headquarters. Dealey kept quiet while they expressed surprise, the horror of what lay around them momentarily lost in their astonishment.
They had found themselves in a long, sixteen-foot-wide corridor with many other passageways branching off from it. Straight coloured lines swept along its length, here and there a particular shade veering off into another corridor; they were directional colour codes and on the wall was a list of sections, all in groups and each group assigned a particular colour.
They quickly scanned the list, which ranged from CLINIC to LIBRARY, from GYMNASIUM to THEATRE, from PRINT ROOM to FIRE DEPT. There appeared to be a television and radio centre, offices with a secretarial pool, a works area (whatever that encompassed), dormitories and even a station. The latter sign puzzled them and Dealey explained it was the terminal for the railway line that connected the shelter with Heathrow Airport.
‘It’s a whole bloody city down here,’ Ellison had said in awestruck tones.
They had taken the central corridor and, as they had progressed, so corpses became more in evidence. They passed a dormitory and, out of curiosity, Kate glanced in. She immediately swung away, slamming her back against the corridor wall, closing her eyes but unable to banish the sight imprinted on her brain. The room was similar to the dormitories in the Kingsway exchange, only longer and wider, able to accommodate many more people; the bunks were three-tiered and, apart from a few stiff-backed chairs and lockers at the far end, there was little other furniture. The mass of body remains was by that far end, piled against the lockers as though those sleeping or resting had fled there, trapped by the monstrosities that had surged through the open doorway. Many
had not even managed to leave their beds.
They came upon curiously small two-seater cars, abandoned in the passageways, and which appeared to be operated electrically. There were cameras at regular intervals set high on the walls. For every hundred yards or so, there were radiation meters, alarms and push-button intercoms. Dealey tried one or two of the latter, but they were lifeless. Yet the lighting and air-conditioning appeared to be functioning normally and the muted, pastel colours of their surroundings, obviously chosen for their calming effect, belied the tragically ironic fate that had befallen the occupants of the shelter.
With each section the group passed through, their apprehension grew, hysteria beginning to rise and bore through that self-protecting emotional barrier.
The carnage was everywhere, no area, no passageway, no room unblemished. It was a journey through a nightmare, a pilgrimage into Hades. And with each step, each turn of the corridor, the atrocity grew worse, for the dead became legion.
At one stage, Kate moaned, ‘Why? Why weren’t they protected? There must have been weapons. There must have been a guard force, an army of sorts . . .’
The question was soon answered, for they had come to an inner core of the enormous complex.
They were at a T-junction, the corridor extending left and right, disappearing into a curve, suggesting that the shelter’s centre was circular. The door directly ahead was set at least five feet back into the wall and they wondered if this was an indication of the wall’s thickness. In front of the broad, metal door was a small desk mounted into the floor itself, an elaborate but compact console on its surface. There were two cameras set in the corners of the alcove and a range of various coloured push-buttons set on one side. The sliding door had been jammed open by two bodies, and from what was left of their clothing, it was obvious they had been army personnel.
Culver stopped to pick up a lightweight weapon, a snub-nosed machine gun. ‘A MAC II,’ he told the others. ‘An Ingram. I’ve seen them before.’ He pointed it back along the corridor, warning his companions to stand clear, and pulled the trigger. It clicked empty. ‘Pity,’ he sighed, and dropped the weapon to the floor.