Nervously he reached out with his left hand and scrabbled in the dust and fluff for the edge of the nearest ceiling tile. He found one, and dug at it with his fingertips until it lifted. Gently, silently, but fighting another sudden and terrible urge to sneeze, Ben laid the tile on the upper surface of one of its neighbours. Then he peered into the square of empty space it had left behind.
There was a thin line of light that Ben immediately identified as coming from the gap under a door. The light, presumably from the passageway outside, stopped at the edge of something that Ben realized could be close to his face. Heart pounding a bit, he reached through the gap and felt around with his hand. He was right: just below him was a long edge of something – a shelf, he realized.
Ben knew the room was small: he’d only just passed the last internal wall when he’d met the brick one. He craned his neck down to see if he could make out more details, and his dark-adapted eyes found the looming silhouettes of what could be more shelves.
He removed the ceiling tile that was just to the left of his knees, placing it somewhere off to his right, as before. Trying as best he could not to allow any of his body weight to press down anywhere else, he wriggled around until he was in position to feed his feet through the gap. He kept wriggling – lying crosswise on the bar now – until his legs, then his waist, could follow his feet into the room below. Of course he still couldn’t reach the floor, even with the tips of his toes: he wasn’t tall enough. He held the edge of the ceiling bar as tightly as he could, partly because as he pushed himself through the gap he was supporting more and more of his weight, but partly also because he knew that in a moment he would have to let the bar go. Once he did, there might be no way up again.
He let it go anyway.
Ben landed almost instantly, stumbling a little, but managed not to lose his balance. Turning to face the light under the door, he groped forward like a blind man until his hands met the door’s sides, feeling around for a switch. He found one. When his eyes adjusted to the sudden glare of the overhead bulb, Ben looked around.
He was in a broom cupboard.
Three of the broom cupboard’s walls were lined almost floor-to-ceiling with the shelves he had noticed before. The shelves were quite deep, and the room was so small that the ones to Ben’s left and right almost met the sides of the door. There were perhaps two square metres of floor space – which, Ben supposed grudgingly, was actually quite big for a broom cupboard. But the place was still a broom cupboard, and not much to look at, particularly after the effort he’d made to get there.
Grimly, Ben started looking around for anything that might be . . . useful.
There was a vacuum cleaner, tucked in the gap under the lowest shelf, in the cupboard’s left-hand corner from where Ben was standing. Yes, undoubtedly ‘useful’ for its purpose, but not quite what he had in mind.
The shelves were stacked with cleaning products – packets of dusters and bottles of chemicals. Ben had seen a film once in which the hero had mixed a few common household chemicals in various proportions and produced some handily powerful home-made explosives. Detailed instructions had not been provided.
There was a mop and bucket. The mop handle was made of wood, about a metre and a half long and quite solid-looking. Ben supposed that this, held quarterstaff-style, might make a useful mêleé weapon: a fabulous martial artist like Jackie Chan or Tony Jaa would have no trouble holding off a horde of bitten adults with that. But Ben was not a fabulous martial artist.
There was a toolbox. Ben opened it without much enthusiasm but was still disappointed to find that it only contained the things you usually find in a toolbox. Not even a crowbar. Just a hammer, a spirit level and an assorted bunch of ordinary screwdrivers. You might hurt someone (or something) with those, Ben supposed, but only if they were close enough to grab you already, and by then it would probably be too late.
Josh had been right. This room was worse than the security room. Ben’s idea of finding an escape route for everyone, the idea that had caused Jasmine to smile at him in that wonderful way, had turned out to be nothing more than a waste of everyone’s time. Alone, covered in dust, Ben stood in the broom cupboard and sighed.
Then Samantha stuck her head through the hole in the ceiling.
11:14 PM.
‘Wow,’ said Samantha. ‘This is your way out?’
Ben watched as her eyes flicked around the broom cupboard, taking in the details.
She smirked. ‘No offence or anything, but it’s a bit crap, isn’t it?’
‘I thought,’ said Ben, attempting to regain some control over the situation, ‘that the idea was that everyone was going to wait for my signal. What are you doing here?’
‘Fancied a change of scene,’ said Samantha blithely. Then: ‘Turn around.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I’m coming down, I’m in a skirt, and I don’t want you eyeing up my knickers. Obviously.’
‘Oh,’ said Ben, colouring slightly. ‘Right.’ He turned to face the door. He heard scuffling, wriggling, the slap of feet meeting floor, then Samantha was in the broom cupboard with him.
‘You can turn back now.’
When he did so, Samantha was smiling and looking him straight in the eye. Both legs of her black school tights were laddered, exposing bare, pale skin. Her white school blouse was smeared with dust and dirt from the ceiling cavity. Her face was grubby. Her blonde hair was tousled. As she stood there, hand on hip, Ben was uncomfortably aware that the broom cupboard, no palace to begin with, seemed to have halved in size.
‘Look at this place,’ said Samantha, still grinning. ‘Lauren’s going to freak. She’s claustrophobic, remember?’
‘Lauren’s coming too?’ asked Ben, horrified. ‘What for?’
‘Same reason as me,’ said Samantha. ‘Because we thought you’d found us a way out. Or were you maybe planning to ditch us all and go off by yourself, like your mate said?’
‘Josh isn’t my mate.’
‘Is anyone?’ asked Samantha, innocently.
Ben frowned at her. ‘I was just about to climb back up,’ he said. ‘I was going tell everyone this was a dead end.’
‘Whatever,’ said Samantha, losing interest in him and looking instead at the surrounding shelves and their contents.
‘Can’t you go tell Lauren to go back?’ he asked.
‘She’s probably halfway here by now. She’ll have had a bad enough time just getting on the bar-thing. If I tell her to go back, she’ll just freeze completely, then we’ll be stuck here. In this cupboard.’ Samantha smirked again. ‘Just the two of us.’
Ben was starting to get infuriated. Samantha was so impossible, he found himself wanting to say something – anything – to take that smirk off her face.
‘That stuff you said before,’ he began. ‘You don’t seriously think Jasmine’s got a crawler on her, do you?’
Samantha’s eyes glittered. ‘Why? D’you fancy her or something?’
‘No,’ said Ben. Then: ‘Well, that’s got nothing to do with it.’
Samantha raised an eyebrow.
‘What I mean is,’ said Ben quickly, ‘was that stuff about Jasmine being a traitor just to wind her up, or what?’
Samantha’s eyes narrowed. ‘You don’t know Jasmine,’ she said. ‘You never laid eyes on her before tonight.’
‘That’s true,’ said Ben. ‘But—’
‘I’m at school with her,’ said Samantha. ‘I tell you, she’s changed.’
Ben blinked. ‘How do you mean?’
Before she answered, Samantha looked quickly up at the hole in the false ceiling. Then she took a step closer to Ben.
‘I don’t like her,’ she said. ‘That’s no secret, you must have figured that out by now. But do you want to know why?’
‘If you like.’
‘She’s cold,’ said Samantha. She grimaced. ‘Unfriendly. Her first day at Swatham I tried to get talking to her, we all did, but she blanked us. It’s been the same ever
since. Oh, in class she’s always first with her hand up, always brown-nosing – but outside? Nothing.’ Samantha sneered. ‘Jasmine’s too good for the rest of us. She’s always kept herself to herself. Only now . . .’ She frowned.
‘What?’ said Ben.
‘Now she won’t shut up! The whole night she’s yapping – we should do this, we shouldn’t do that. Worse than your mate Josh.’
‘I told you,’ said Ben, ‘he’s not my—’
‘Listen,’ said Samantha, stepping so close to Ben now that he could feel the warm breath that came with her words. ‘Something’s definitely different about Jasmine tonight. The way she speaks, the way she’s been acting – she’s not normally like this. So watch her, that’s all I’m saying.’
Ben had heard almost the exact same words, he realized, from Jasmine herself. But he was distracted: over the last minute or so, while Samantha had been speaking, Ben had begun to hear a strange sound. It was a sort of low groaning, punctuated by moments of silence so regular that they seemed almost mechanical.
‘AWWW-huh-huh-hurr,’ it went. Then again: ‘AWWW-huh-huh-hurr.’
The sound was getting louder as it came closer. It was coming from the ceiling.
Lauren’s face, when it appeared, was already a picture of misery. Tears and snot had left trails in the dirt on her cheeks. Her red eyes rolled in their sockets like those of a frightened horse. The journey through the ceiling cavity had obviously been rough on her. But then, as Samantha had warned, Lauren caught sight of her destination. Her lips puckered, trembled, then parted, releasing a high wail that set Ben’s teeth on edge.
‘Quiet!’ he barked, in a desperate stage whisper. ‘The adults are just down the passage!’
‘Babes,’ Samantha commanded.
‘But it’s smaller than the other place!’ Lauren moaned. ‘I can’t!’
‘Come on, babes. Come down with us, you’ll be fine . . .’ Samantha began to coax Lauren through the movements she would need to make to join them in the cupboard.
Cursing inwardly, Ben turned to face the door again.
‘Where’s Jasmine?’ asked Samantha, once Lauren had dropped heavily to the floor.
‘Right here,’ said Jasmine – startling Ben again.
She slipped through the ceiling gap easily, landing neatly on both feet.
And now there were four of them in there.
11:19 PM.
Ben had two older sisters. Back when his family still went on holidays together he’d got used to spending long car journeys with them all crammed together on the back seat while their parents sat in relative comfort up front. Sharing a broom cupboard with three girls he barely knew, however, was a novel experience for him.
His brain started filling with unhelpful thoughts, mostly centred around the worry of touching someone inappropriately by accident – and exactly how mortifying that would be. Under the dust and grime his skin began to prickle. He found himself pressing his back against the door.
‘Well isn’t this cosy?’ said Samantha, grinning in his face. ‘Poor Jasmine and Ben,’ she went on, looking from one to the other. ‘You’d probably be all right if it was just the two of you in here. In fact,’ she added, ‘I think Ben here might even quite like it.’
Lauren stopped snivelling and cracked a smile. Ben flushed beetroot-red and found something to look at on the floor – not that he could see much of it with everyone standing in there. He didn’t know what Jasmine’s expression was, and didn’t dare look at her to find out.
‘Yeah, whatever, Samantha,’ he heard Jasmine say. ‘If you don’t mind, some of us are trying to concentrate on how to get us out of here. Now: I counted three rooms that we passed on the way here. Is that right?’
‘Yeah,’ said Ben gruffly. ‘That’s right.’
‘Well, do you think we’ve got far enough along the passage to get around the guards?’
‘One way to find out,’ said Samantha. Brushing against Ben’s stomach with her arm, she reached past him for the doorknob.
‘No! Wait!’
To everyone’s relief, Samantha hesitated.
‘We might only get one shot at this,’ said Jasmine quickly, ‘so let’s do it carefully. Ben, did you find anything in here that might help us?’
Ben pulled himself together. ‘I, um, didn’t see anything that exactly jumped out at me,’ he said. ‘There are some bits and pieces in the toolbox. Otherwise the closest thing we’ve got to a weapon in here is probably that mop.’ He gestured bleakly towards the corner where it stood.
‘Then you should have that,’ said Jasmine, twisting round with difficulty to reach it. Lauren was pressed up against her, but managed to pass it over.
Ben reached past Samantha, who was smiling again, and grasped the wooden shaft. It was reassuringly solid, and it did feel good in his hand, even if he didn’t have much of an idea of what to do with it.
‘Our hero,’ quipped Samantha, in a sarcastic breathy voice.
Ben scowled and said nothing.
‘Anyone want anything from the toolbox?’ asked Jasmine. ‘Lauren, you can take this hammer. Me and Samantha’ll go with these screwdrivers. Better than nothing.’
Lauren looked at the hammer in her hand, nonplussed, as if she’d never seen one before.
‘All right,’ said Jasmine. ‘Now I guess we open the door.’
‘Hold on,’ said Ben. ‘I’ve got to say it: what if we haven’t gone far enough? I mean, to be honest, before you three got here I was kind of all set to come back and tell everyone this place was a dead end.’
‘You think we should go back?’ asked Jasmine seriously.
‘Well . . . yeah,’ said Ben. He shrugged. ‘Maybe. I don’t know.’
Lauren’s knuckles whitened on the black rubber of the hammer’s grip. She sniffed again, but resolutely this time. ‘I ain’t going back,’ she said.
‘Me neither,’ said Samantha, who had finally stopped grinning. ‘I’ve had enough of that room, whatever happens to us out here.’
‘Ben?’ said Jasmine.
He blinked. ‘All right,’ he said.
‘All right,’ echoed Jasmine with a quick, tight smile. ‘We take our chances. Everyone ready?’
No one replied.
Ben turned to face the door for the last time. He put his hand on the doorknob, visions of Hugo’s last moments in the security room flashing through his mind. He took a deep breath, hefted his mop in his left hand, turned the knob gently, and pulled.
Directly outside the door, the passage was empty. He saw grey concrete walls and shiny, red, brick-shaped floor tiles that glittered faintly under the strip lights above.
Holding his breath, he peered out.
There they were – the sentries, standing frozen outside the security-room door, some twenty metres away. There were fewer of them than Ben had been expecting. They were turned inward around the door, still concentrating on that. They had their backs to him. And one of them was Hugo.
He was standing there like a statue, just like the others. Ben could see the crawler on the back of his neck.
Ben gulped. But his plan had worked. They had a chance.
‘What can you see?’ hissed Samantha in his ear, making Ben almost jump out of his skin. Infuriated, he turned and put his finger to his lips, but Samantha just raised her eyebrows and turned her palms up in a Well? gesture.
Before he spoke Ben glanced out into the passage again, taking a second to get the details straight in his head.
‘We could make it to the lifts,’ he mouthed, still not daring to breathe. ‘But we obviously can’t just press a button and then stand there waiting for one to arrive: the sentries would get us. I think we’ll have to try for the stairs.’
‘What?’ Samantha whispered back, cupping a hand around her ear.
‘I said,’ Ben hissed, ‘I think we’ll have to try for the stairs.’
The glass-sided stairwell was just a little further along the passage than the lifts, which were just a few me
tres away. The double doors that gave access to the stairs were that much closer to the sentries, but Ben figured that way lay their only chance. He supposed they would just have to tiptoe out, and hope they weren’t heard. It was a desperate plan, but it was all he’d got.
‘Eh?’ said Lauren. ‘I can’t hear you. What did you say?’
‘Heaven’s sake,’ said Ben, losing patience. ‘I . . .’ By chance, before repeating himself a second time he decided to risk a quick glance at the sentries.
It was lucky he did. They had just started to turn towards him.
‘Oh crap,’ he said. ‘Run!’
11:21 PM.
Clutching his mop, Ben launched himself out of the door just as, with the same eerie synchronicity that characterized all their movements, the sentries spun round to face him.
Ben sprinted up the corridor, the soles of his school shoes slapping on the brick-shaped tiles, his heart pounding loud in his ears. He reached the double doors to the stairs just when the sentries opened their mouths and started screaming.
He skidded to a halt, frozen in his tracks as much by the sound as by the fact he’d reached his goal. The crowd by the security-room door had obviously thinned out at some point over the course of the evening: while there had been nearly thirty people visible on the monitors earlier, now there were ‘only’ ten, plus Hugo. (Where are all the others? wondered a part of Ben’s mind dazedly.) At any rate, the remaining group, a roughly even mix of men and women, certainly made a thoroughly bloodcurdling noise.
They just stood there at first, their voices rising like sirens until each of them found the highest, most piercing note they could reach, then they held it. Heads trembled. Chins wobbled. Staring eyes threatened to pop out of sockets. Hugo was right there screaming with them. Their hands lifted from their sides. Then, still screaming, they charged.