Crawlers

  Where were the girls? Had they gone on ahead? Why was everything so quiet all of a sudden? Ben took his tie from his mouth.

  ‘Jasmine?’ he croaked. ‘Samantha? Lauren?’ Then he waited, uncomfortably aware that he had just given away his position in the fog to anyone else who might be able to hear him.

  ‘Ben?’

  His heart jumped. ‘Jasmine?’

  ‘Ben? Are you OK?’

  ‘I’m fine!’ said Ben, absurdly relieved. ‘Where are you?’

  Three figures holding ties over their faces materialized around him.

  ‘I heard you fall,’ said Jasmine. ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘Tripped,’ said Ben. ‘A real face-plant. But they didn’t get me.’

  ‘That’s what you’d say if they did get you,’ said Samantha. ‘What?’ she added, when everyone looked at her. ‘We lost sight of him. Anything could’ve happened.’

  ‘I . . . don’t know why it didn’t,’ said Ben frankly. ‘They were right behind me, but then they just . . . stopped.’

  ‘Whatever,’ said Samantha. ‘Jasmine, now we’ve waited for your boyfriend, can we please get out of here?’

  Ben looked at Jasmine. It was true, then: leaving aside Samantha’s crack about his being her ‘boyfriend’ for a moment, Jasmine had come back for him. He felt a blaze of warmth towards her that, for a moment, made him forget their surroundings. Then:

  ‘Get down on the floor!’ shouted a voice from the whiteness up ahead. ‘Get down now or we open fire!’

  The voice was strange – muffled-sounding, with a rasping, robotic edge to it. For a couple of seconds Ben and the girls just stood there, looking in the direction the voice had come from.

  BADABLAM!

  Ben had never heard gunfire in real life before, let alone at close range, but the numbing, dazzling, brutal effect of the sound provoked an immediate and instinctive reaction. He dropped flat on his face before he was even conscious of moving.

  ‘Get down on the floor and stay down or we WILL shoot you!’ roared the robotic voice.

  Very, very slowly, Ben lifted his eyes from his second close-up view of the Barbican’s carpet. The girls, like him, had obeyed the voice’s instructions. To his left, Lauren was muttering hysterically: ‘Oh Jesus, oh Jesus, oh Jesus . . .’

  ‘Don’t shoot!’ shouted Jasmine. ‘Don’t shoot! Help us! We’re . . . just . . . kids!’ She had taken her tie off her mouth for extra volume, so this was as far as she got before being overcome by racking coughs.

  There was a long pause.

  ‘Stay face down on the ground,’ said the robot voice. ‘Keep your hands where we can see them: if you move, we shoot. We’re coming to meet you now.’

  Ben waited, his school tie still pressed firmly to his face. There was no way he was going to take his hands away – his lungs were hurting badly enough already.

  He began to see movement in the fog – little flashing lines of something red and fast-moving. For a second he wondered whether this was some trick his eyes were playing due to the prolonged lack of clean air to breathe, but the lines came closer. They scythed through the fog. A red dot slithered across the Barbican carpet at the edge of Ben’s peripheral vision. Then he realized what the lines were. They came from laser sights.

  Shadows loomed out of the mist ahead.

  The emerging figures were dressed in grey all-in-one protection suits. While they did have a slightly puffy appearance, the figures inside them seemed to move rapidly and easily. They all had guns. The guns were pointed at him and the girls. But what Ben found most frightening in what was already a pretty frightening situation was the figures’ faces.

  Instead of mouths they had neat, round cylinders. Instead of eyes, they had two black metal stalks, like snail-horns protruding from the front of their heads. Gas masks and goggles, Ben told himself consolingly. That’s all they are: gas masks and goggles. But his brain didn’t seem to want to listen. None of the bitten adults had guns (or not as far as he knew) so Ben supposed these people were meant to be rescuing them at last. After everything he and the others had been through, he should have been pleased to see them – but he wasn’t. To Ben the figures looked as alien and monstrous and horrifying as anything else he’d seen that night.

  ‘Put your hands where I can see them,’ rasped the nearest figure. ‘Hands,’ it repeated, lifting its gun and taking aim at Ben’s head, just as he realized belatedly that it was talking to him. ‘Now!’

  Ben released his tie. He put his hands out flat on the carpeted floor, closed his eyes, and tried not to breathe.

  ‘Who are you?’ the voice grated. ‘What’s your name? Answer me!’

  Ben heard a ratcheting click. ‘Please!’ he gasped. ‘Don’t shoot! I’m B-Ben. This is Samantha, and Jasmine, and Lauren. There are more of us trapped upstairs. We were here on a school trip. We need help. You have to let us out!’

  It was desperately frustrating not being able to explain things any better, but now the urge to cough had claimed him too.

  ‘What do you think, Sarge?’ said the robot voice, as Ben hacked and spluttered.

  Ben opened his eyes – and stared at the red laser dot on the carpet just centimetres from his face. The grey-suited figure had lowered his aim a little while waiting for his superior to answer, but his black snail-horn eyes had not stopped looking at Ben. The gun in his hands was still up and ready to fire. The slightest flick would plant that dot back on Ben’s head, for death to follow it.

  ‘Help us,’ Ben heard Jasmine croak into the silence. ‘You’ve got to help us!’

  ‘. . . All right,’ said the voice at last.

  The figure put his gun down to his side, on its strap. Bending stiffly to one knee, it held out its black gloved hands.

  ‘Come on,’ it said. ‘Come to me. You’re coming with us.’

  ‘Oh thank you,’ blurted Lauren. ‘Oh thank you, thank you, thank you!’

  Ben too was so relieved and happy that, oddly, he had a sudden urge to laugh. Eyes streaming, lungs raw, grinning like an idiot, he wriggled onto all fours and retrieved his tie, pressing it back up against his face before preparing to follow the grey-suited figures to freedom.

  That was when he heard the sound.

  It was quiet at first, like the hiss of air escaping. But Ben knew what the sound really was even before it grew louder: it was screaming. A thousand voices, screaming.

  Their pursuers had not given up on them. They had been lying in wait, using Ben and the girls as bait to lure the soldiers – more recruits to swell their numbers.

  ‘Ambush!’ roared robot-voice, coming to his feet again and bringing his gun to bear all in one fluid movement. ‘Rawson to all units: it’s a trap! These kids are just another trap!’

  11:31 PM.

  No, thought Ben. No, no, NO—! He dropped flat: his face greeted the Barbican carpet a third time. His consciousness, his whole being, was focused on the red laser dot that right then must have been settling, fatally, on the back of his skull.

  The soldiers thought they’d been tricked: they thought that he and the girls were part of it! To die now, by mistake, so close to getting help – not just for the four of them but for Robert, Josh and Lisa too – it just didn’t seem fair. Now the soldiers would see them as a threat. The nearest figure’s finger would be tightening on the trigger. Ben squeezed his eyes shut, awaiting annihilation. But at the same time the screams of the charging horde were getting closer. He heard the drumming of approaching feet. They were right behind him—

  And now they attacked.

  Abandoning his school tie, Ben threw his hands up over his head and drew in his legs until he was a ball: he wanted to be smaller; he wanted to make himself disappear as hundreds of pounding feet stormed past, threatening to trample him. Gunfire; screaming; choking smoke; thundering footsteps; roaring voices – it all came to Ben in flashes. He could make sense of none of it. He just wanted it to end.

  Eventually the trampling feet passed. Now someone was shak
ing him. He flinched and slapped the hands away. Then he opened his eyes.

  Jasmine was crouching over him. ‘Come on, Ben!’ she shouted. ‘Get up! Quick, while they’re fighting by the doors!’

  As he got to his knees Ben turned to look. He couldn’t help himself.

  The noise and movement of the battle had dispersed some of the gas. Ben could see a little of what was going on. In the background he saw the main body of the horde of parasitized adults. From where he was standing they were a row of backs swarming against the doors of the main entrance, hurling and battering themselves at the glass. Obviously there was no way out there. But at that moment Ben’s attention was mostly on what was happening in the foreground, only a few metres away.

  Four adults were bent over, wrestling with something on the ground. Catching a flash of grey movement between them, Ben stared: one of the men in protection suits – possibly Rawson himself – was down, and struggling furiously. As Ben watched, the attackers were just getting the upper hand: while a fat red-faced man in a pinstriped suit immobilized their victim’s legs by sitting on them, two snarling old ladies trapped his arms. The fourth member of the group, a young woman in a smart grey jacket and matching trousers, pulled a crawler from her handbag. With her free hand she ripped off her victim’s hood, mask and goggles, then brought the eager, grasping creature down on the back of the man’s head.

  The young woman was the girls’ teacher, Ms Gresham.

  Ben gulped and looked quickly back at Jasmine, deciding not to tell her. ‘Wh-what about the others?’ he asked instead.

  ‘Lauren ran off,’ said Jasmine. ‘Samantha went after her. We’ve got to follow them, quick, or we’ll get separated.’ She tugged on his arm again. ‘Ben!’

  ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Right. Yes.’ Everything was happening so fast, his brain was having trouble keeping up. He retrieved his school tie and got to his feet. ‘Um, which way did they go?’

  Jasmine held out a hand. ‘Come on!’

  To Ben’s right lay the stairs he’d found earlier. Jasmine took them two at a time. It was a short flight leading down to a small mezzanine floor from which more stairs led off to the left, these ones flanked by concrete pillars.

  Hold on, thought Ben as he passed the pillars and reached the bottom. He’d been this way before . . .

  ‘Let me out!’ wailed a familiar voice from Ben’s left. ‘I’ve got to get out of here! LET ME OUT!’

  At least Lauren hadn’t proved too hard to find: when Jasmine and Ben reached her, she was pounding on one of the glass panel exit doors which, from this level, led out towards the Barbican’s underground car park. Neither Lauren’s pounding nor her yelling was doing the least bit of good: the doors had been locked for nearly four hours now. But Samantha’s efforts to stop her were proving just as fruitless.

  ‘Babes, you’ve got to calm down.’

  ‘No! I’ve had it! I can’t take this any more! Let me out!’

  ‘Please be quiet,’ said Ben hopelessly. ‘We don’t know if we’re alone down here.’

  ‘We should get out of sight,’ agreed Jasmine. ‘At least until this fighting stops. Is there – I don’t know – maybe somewhere we can hide and get our breath back, work out our next move?’

  ‘Oh, sure,’ said Samantha, rounding on her, ‘because everything turned out so well the last time you had that idea.’

  ‘Well what do you suggest, Samantha?’ Jasmine snapped back.

  ‘We could try the theatre,’ said Ben. He pointed at another set of double doors off to their left. ‘It’s just through there.’

  The doors he was indicating were the same ones he’d used at the start of the evening. They led to the stalls of the Barbican’s Main Theatre, where his tutor group’s seats had been for the play.

  All three girls looked at him – even, Ben was surprised to notice, Lauren.

  ‘But it’s dark,’ she said indignantly, frowning at him.

  Lauren’s point might be random but it was also true: beyond the glass panels, the blackness was total. Still, Ben couldn’t help wondering whether the boys of the group would also have picked this minute to have an argument.

  BLAM! BADABLAM! More shots momentarily drowned out the screams upstairs.

  ‘At least we won’t be in the middle of a battle,’ Ben pointed out.

  11:34 PM.

  The glass doors were designed to be soundproof: the noise of the fight in the Barbican foyer was cut off as they closed, plunging the four of them into silence. In the limited light that came through from the foyer behind them, Jasmine looked at the others.

  Ben’s, Samantha’s and Lauren’s reddened eyes were wide, and they were all breathing hard – gulping greedily at what was the closest to clean air they’d had to breathe in what had felt like for ever. Wide eyes; fast breathing, Jasmine thought: classic panic symptoms. But she was starting to feel something else. The night’s pattern of constant, gnawing dread interspersed with blind terror had pushed Jasmine beyond basic fear now, into strange new territory. She felt a kind of hyper-awareness, dreamlike but intense. She was walking an emotional knife-edge from which she could fall in any direction: part of her felt like screaming or crying, sure, but another part worryingly felt like . . . laughing. It was exhausting, but also weirdly, dangerously exhilarating.

  Samantha was fiddling with her phone again.

  ‘Got a signal yet?’ asked Ben.

  ‘No, but I have got this.’ She showed him the phone’s screen. She had turned on the backlight: the screen was lit up white, as bright as she could get it. ‘It’s not a torch, but . . .’

  ‘That’s good thinking,’ said Jasmine.

  Samantha sniffed. ‘Don’t sound so surprised.’

  ‘Why didn’t you think of this before?’ asked Ben. ‘I could’ve used that getting out of the security room.’

  ‘What?’ Samantha snorted. ‘I was supposed to give you my phone?’ She waited while Lauren tinkered with hers. Once that was lit too, she said: ‘OK. Everyone follow me.’

  There was a short carpeted landing, then a flight of wide steps that curved gently to the left. At the end of each of those steps, touched by the dim glow of the phones, was a row of empty seats.

  Someone must have turned the lights off after the evacuation: deserted and dark, the theatre auditorium was very different to how Ben remembered it from the start of the evening. In the dark he felt the emptiness, like the silence, seem to swell around him – as if the room was alive, breathing. The theatre was much warmer than he remembered too, almost like a hothouse.

  Why’s there nobody here? Ben wondered. Of course it was a relief not being attacked or chased, but he felt an immediate and definite sense that coming into the theatre might have been a mistake.

  The steps finished almost at the stage itself. ‘All right!’ said Samantha, immediately scrambling up onto it. ‘Check me out!’ She turned to face the darkness, and bowed. ‘Thank you!’ she said, acknowledging thunderous imaginary applause. ‘You’ve been a beautiful audience! I love you all! Goodnight! God bless!’

  There, thought Jasmine, gaping at her in astonishment. That’s why Samantha’s the way she is. Her mind flashed to the conversation on the bus, all the way back at the start of the evening: like Jasmine, Samantha hadn’t answered Ms Gresham’s question about what she wanted to be. But unlike Jasmine, who simply didn’t like talking about her plans in front of others, Samantha hadn’t answered because she’d presumed it was obvious: she wanted to be famous. Even in the middle of everything that was happening, Samantha lived her whole life like it was a performance. And she couldn’t stand to be ignored.

  ‘You’re a star, babes,’ said Lauren, standing at Samantha’s feet. ‘The world may not know it yet, but you’re going to be a real celebrity, I’m telling you.’

  Her face lit eerily from below by her phone, Samantha smiled.

  ‘What’s that?’ asked Ben, pointing.

  ‘What’s what?’ said Samantha, annoyed that Ben had spoiled her mome
nt.

  At the back of the stage something had caught his eye. The light of Samantha’s phone didn’t travel far, but its glow had passed over several strange, pale shapes that loomed out of the darkness behind her.

  Ben climbed up onto the stage and pointed again. ‘Back there. I saw something that wasn’t there before. Something . . . weird.’

  Jasmine and Lauren clambered up to join him and Samantha. The four of them looked at each other in the phone-light.

  ‘Should we check it out?’ asked Ben.

  ‘Do we have to?’ asked Lauren.

  ‘Stay here if you want,’ said Jasmine. ‘We won’t go far.’

  The production design for the play had been sparse and minimal, with no onstage furniture or props other than what the actors brought on with them: the stage was an empty space except for its backdrop, which was a large, wide expanse of plain, dark wood panelling that seemed to stretch up all the way to the Main Theatre’s two-storey-high ceiling. But the backdrop wasn’t plain or dark any more.

  Some odd-looking, long, white objects had been stuck upright in rows against the wood. They were all of a similar size – around two metres tall and just less than a metre wide, rounded at the top and bottom. There were perhaps twenty of them in the row at stage level, and another twenty above that. But as Ben approached and the light from the girls’ phones got stronger, he saw that there were twenty more above those, then another twenty, and so on, carrying on upwards further than the light could reach.

  The white objects were bulbous and lumpish, and made of some opaque, resinous substance. The texture on the nearest was rope-like, yet also somehow dribbly or melted-looking. Its uneven surface twinkled stickily.

  Samantha grimaced. ‘Well, Professor?’ she said, cocking her head at Jasmine. ‘Got another theory to dazzle us all?’