Adrift 2: Sundown (20 page)

Conny only rolled out from beneath the train when Remy finally began to struggle. She released her grip on him, and he scampered out into the tunnel. It was the best indication she could get that it was truly safe for her to move.

She hauled herself to her feet, a little unnerved at how shaky her legs felt beneath her.

Remy was busy peeing. He glanced at her apologetically, and Conny almost laughed. She had damn-near pissed
herself
beneath the train. Under the circumstances, she thought he’d done pretty well to hold it in.

She left her flashlight switched off, seeing only by the soft glow of the train’s emergency lights. Twisting her head left and right, trying not to look at Robert Nelson’s body and failing miserably, she saw only darkness in either direction.

“Which way, Rem?”

Remy finished his business and trotted toward her, turning to face the left. The opposite direction to the one the monsters had taken. He looked up at her, tongue lolling out, and seemed relatively like himself for the first time in a couple of hours.

“Left it is,” Conny said quietly, and smiled.

She detached Remy’s chain leash from his collar, afraid of the noise it might make. She would travel in complete darkness, she decided, sticking to one tunnel and using her light only occasionally, if she needed to get her bearings. Ideally, she wanted to travel completely silently, too. She placed the chain gently on the ground, and Remy gave it a look of disdain.

“Now, stick by my side, right, Rem? No running off and leaving me down here, okay?”

Remy tilted his head and sighed indignantly.

Conny shot a final, despairing glance at Robert Nelson’s body, and set off.

She moved slowly, listening to every sound. The soft whisper of her boots as she crept through the tunnel; Remy’s claws, clacking occasionally on the concrete floor, making her heart leap. Something dripping somewhere. After around ten minutes, she heard faint scratching that made her pull up in alarm, until she realised it was probably just a rat. That was a good sign, she decided. Rats tended to flee from predators.

Like cowards.

Conny shook the thought away with a grimace.

She pressed on.

*

The light hurt her eyes, even before she rounded the bend and saw the distant platforms and the signs, and finally knew exactly where she was.

Monument Station, on the north bank of the Thames.

It was one of London’s less-busy stations, and by the look of the platforms, it had been evacuated and secured: the cavernous space was flooded with the same soft orange light that she had seen in the ghastly train carriages. The amber glow made the instantly-recognisable walls of the station otherworldly and threatening, barely keeping the shadows at bay.

She reached for the radio clipped to her shoulder, and thought better of it. She’d made it this far by moving silently, and she’d be damned if she was going to blow that at the last minute, when the exit was almost in sight.

Monument was very close to London Bridge Hospital. Once she reached the safety of the surface, she thought, she could radio for help and head directly to Logan. Get him out of the city entirely, if necessary.

She approached the light carefully, keeping a watchful eye on Remy, ready to turn and run if he so much as blinked. He trotted beside her as if there were nothing out of the ordinary, and she allowed herself to relax a little. When she reached the platform, she lifted Remy up onto it before clambering up herself. The station remained silent, and she glanced up at the CCTV cameras dotted along the platform, wondering if they were still operational and, if so, whether there was anybody monitoring them.

Probably not. The Chief Superintendent had said they were shutting down the whole rail network: Monument Station would have been completely evacuated like all the others, security staff included.

She groaned inwardly when she realised that if Monument was totally empty, the gates to the station would surely be shut. She and Remy would be locked in.

She quickened her pace, heading up the still escalator and into the small ticketing hall.

Dammit!

There were two sets of heavy iron gates at Monument: one in the ticketing hall itself, and another at the top of steps that led up to the street-level exit.

Both were locked.

She tested the inner gate. It looked like it had been locked electronically. There was some give in it, but there was no way she could open it manually.

Remy pushed his nose between the bars, sniffing at the fresh air, and looked up at her hopefully.

“Working on it, Rem.”

She glanced back at the escalator, half expecting to see one of the hideous creatures following her. Nothing.

To the right of the escalator, she spotted a door marked
staff only
, and she headed for it, clenching her fist in triumph when it opened at her touch.

Beyond the door, a narrow corridor opened out into a small control room and a couple of offices and storage rooms. Somewhere in those rooms, she would find the button that would open those gates, she was certain of it. She waved Remy inside and closed the door quietly behind her, heading for the control room.

Inside, she saw four blinking monitors delivering the monochrome CCTV feed from the cameras dotted around the station, and a control panel.

She ran her fingers across the buttons until she spotted what she was looking for.

Inner Gate.

Outer Gate.

She hit them both, and sighed in relief when she heard the hum of the motor revving up out in the ticketing hall. Turning to the CCTV monitors, she saw the inner gate opening.

“Time to go, Rem,” she said.

And she flinched.

Had she just caught movement on another monitor in the corner of her eye?

Something on the platform that she had walked across minutes earlier?

“Time to go!”

She ran, figuring she had thirty seconds, maybe less.

Burst out into the ticketing hall with Remy at her side.

Through the inner gate while it was half-open, up the tunnel toward the steps and—

The outer gate was padlocked.

The electronic mechanism had lifted the outer gate open a little way; less than a foot, she guessed, but further progress was prevented by a heavy chain and a sturdy-looking lock.

Remy scampered through the narrow gap easily.

Conny slammed into the unforgiving metal, jamming herself into the opening that was almost big enough to accommodate her. She pushed with her legs, wedging herself between the gate and the floor.

She wasn’t going to make it.

She screamed in frustration, and once she started, she couldn’t stop. Terror and grief and guilt; pouring out of her lungs until she felt sure she could never stop.

“Hey, hey, calm down. We’ll get you out of there. Calm down, it’ll be okay.”

Her eyes flared openat the sound of the voice
.
Standing in front of the gate, with Remy at his side, she saw a British Army soldier wearing full tactical gear.

“It’s behind me,” she snarled, unnerved at the note of primal terror in her voice.

He lifted a flashlight, pointing it through the gate.

“There’s nothing behind you.”

Conny twisted, craning her neck to look back through the iron bars. He was right. The steps that led down to the ticketing hall were empty.

I’m losing my mind.

“Hang on,” the soldier said. “We’ll get you out.”

He waved a
hurry up
gesture at someone that Conny couldn’t see, and moments later she heard keys rattling.

When the gate opened, Conny fell out, collapsing to the ground, and began to scrabble away from Monument Station
.
The soldier who had spoken began to help her to her feet, and she heard another behind her, re-locking the gate.

“There are things in the tunnels,” Conny gasped, “creatures—”

“Not anymore,” the soldier said grimly, and he pointed up.

To the west, above the city’s skyline, the night glowed amber.

London was burning.

“They’re on the surface?” she asked weakly, already knowing what the answer must be.

He nodded, and took her arm, leading her away from the entrance to the station.

“First reported sighting was in Hyde Park around thirty minutes ago. There have been multiple sightings since then, all over the centre of the city. Nothing confirmed, but it’s chaos out there. Lots of casualties.”

“Thirty minutes,” Conny repeated absently. “You guys got here quick.”

“We were already on our way.”

Conny stared at him, puzzled.

“The military was called in when we lost the police.”

“Lost,” Conny repeated slowly. “But that would mean…”

“You’re the only one that has come back, yeah. As far as I know, anyway.” His stern expression crumbled a little.

Conny’s mind began to creak. It was just too much to process.

Somewhere in the distance, an explosion rocked the evening, and moments later a helicopter roared overhead, flying low.

“We’re quarantining central London,” the soldier said. “You need to evacuate.”

She nodded at him numbly.

“The nearest evac point is across the bridge,” he pointed at the Thames, “London Bridge Hospital. We have people there who will get you to safety. You know where it is?”

London Bridge Hospital
.

Conny knew where it was.

Intimately.

Conny jogged across London Bridge with Remy keeping pace easily at her side, each stride setting off tiny detonations in her wounded calf. She paused around halfway across the river when a formation of jets streaked across the sky, heading for the centre of the city.

She turned to watch as the aircraft passed overhead, half-expecting that they were about to open fire on the city. Surely the situation hadn’t become so bad in thirty minutes that the military were under orders to
bomb
the capital?

Apparently not: the jets continued north for several seconds and then banked left, disappearing from sight to the west.

A reconnaissance mission, then.

Now that she was able to see more of the skyline, Conny could see that the most severe of several fires raging in the city was two or three miles to the west, along the Thames. Knightsbridge, perhaps, or Kensington.

Above the city, she saw the spotlights of several helicopters surveying the streets below.

It would be a disaster zone in the most densely crowded areas, she thought, picturing the murderous creatures tearing through Trafalgar Square and Oxford Circus and Camden. The panic alone would injure many; it was, she guessed, probably the cause of the fires that she saw. There were likely a thousand car crashes occurring in the city centre at that very moment. Even without direct contact with the creatures, the chaos of the burning city would claim many casualties.

The southern bank of the river, by comparison, looked far quieter: no sign of fire, no helicopters.

She began to breathe a little easier. If the trouble—which Conny subconsciously labelled the
infestation
—was confined to the north of the river, then Logan was safe, and the army had already secured the hospital. He might even have been evacuated already.

The worst of it was over.

She turned her back on the burning centre of London and pressed forward, biting down on the pain in her leg and increasing her pace.

*

The area outside the hospital was awash with light and people. There were three buses parked outside, engines running, and a group of soldiers were guiding a steady stream of patients and visitors toward them.

As Conny neared, two large military-looking trucks pulled up alongside the buses, and armed troops began to spill out of them. Around sixty in total, she guessed. They began to make their way to London Bridge, hauling pieces of equipment and sandbags. It looked for all the world like they were planning to set up machine gun emplacements on the bridge.

Quarantining
the city
with bullets.

She pushed through a crowd of bodies toward the hospital, flinching when a soldier grabbed her elbow.

“Hospital’s being evacuated, Ma’am.”

“My son is in there,” she snapped, and shook away his hand.

He looked her in the eye for a moment, his expression impatient, and nodded, stepping aside to let her pass.

She moved through the entrance and into the reception area.

London Bridge Hospital offered private healthcare only, and was small by the standards of most modern hospitals, with a little over a hundred rooms for patients. The reception area itself was plush, but cramped: a cosy waiting area and front desk opened out into a corridor containing elevators which transported patients and visitors to the treatment areas upstairs. The neutral decor was clearly meant to lend the place a cool, calming atmosphere.

It wasn’t working.

The interior of the hospital was in chaos, and Conny’s progress was slowed almost as soon as she entered the building.

The walls reverberated to the sounds of human anguish: cries of grief and disbelief; moans of pain and despair. The UK very rarely experienced natural disasters of the scale seen in other parts of the world: earthquakes were infrequent and lacked strength, and the weather almost never unleashed itself on the country with the sort of savagery experienced by those for whom tornadoes or tsunamis were simple facts of life.

The people streaming out of the hospital did not have disaster preparedness drilled into them, and it showed in the shock and confusion on their faces.

Two men in army uniforms holding exquisite M27s were trying to hold the tide of people back, in a futile attempt to keep the evacuation of the hospital orderly, and were failing pretty spectacularly.

Remy cut through the crowd like a hot knife, and Conny followed, making her way to the nearest of the soldiers. He looked stressed and afraid, almost like he was considering whether a short burst from his rifle might get everyone to just shut up and
listen.

She glanced back at the hospital exit. At the rate that things were going, there would be a crush in the doorway.

This is going to get ugly
, she thought.

“Wrong way, Ma’am.”

She blinked, and turned to face the soldier. He nodded at the exit, and Conny shook her head firmly.

“My son is a patient. I need to find—”

The soldier waved a hand for her to stop.

“I don’t know anything about the patients, Ma’am. We’re just here to make sure everybody gets out. Your boy might be in there. Bottom three floors of the hospital have been cleared, I know that much. We have choppers en route for those who are too sick to get on the trucks and buses. ETA twenty-five minutes. Once they’re gone, we’re pulling back, got it?”

He met her eyes, ensuring that she understood.

Conny nodded her thanks, and turned away, guiding Remy toward the distant elevators. If the bottom three floors of the hospital had already been cleared, then Logan might still be in there somewhere. His room was on the top floor.

Twenty-five minutes
, she thought.

She had plenty of time.

*

A bank of four elevators was located in the corridor behind the reception desk, but Conny moved straight past them: all were in use, of course, and likely there were people on the top two floors stabbing the
call
button repeatedly.

She made for the stairs. They were narrow, and a trickle of those who weren’t willing to wait for the elevators flowed down from the upper parts of the hospital.

Conny took the stairs two at a time, ignoring the ache in her muscles.

When she and Remy made it to the top floor, she stepped into tension so thick it almost knocked her backwards. The people who were already there—the top floor had to be still half-full of patients at least—were all clustered around the windows which faced the river, staring out quietly.

The silence in the place was putrid, and Remy huffed softly at her side, apparently coming to the conclusion that things might be better if they moved on.

“It’s okay, Rem,” she whispered, and she moved closer to the windows, unable to tear her gaze away from them.

Matters outside were deteriorating quickly.

The London skyline looked like a warzone of the sort that Conny had only ever seen previously on TV; the backdrop to a solemn news presenter reciting facts that were virtually impossible to comprehend. Tracer fire arced from the dark clouds, spat down onto the city from an aircraft that she could not see. At ground level, the fire seemed to be everywhere now, and pulses of light seared her eyes at regular intervals as small explosions rocked the city.

Her jaw dropped.

Without that newsreader to provide a reassuringly detached soundtrack, their place taken by the soft
whump
of the distant explosions, the sight of what was happening to London was mesmerising and terrifying beyond all reason.

How could things have fallen apart so fast that airborne attacks on the city had already been sanctioned? What next? Missiles?

Nukes?

The disastrous view from the hospital window meant only one thing.

We’re losing.

The army had been called in and, just like the police, they were dying.

There wasn’t time to consider how that was possible; how a bunch of creatures that killed with claws and teeth might be able to defeat one of the most advanced military forces in the world.  Screw waiting for the military; she’d evacuate her son herself. Commandeer a car, point it south and just
drive.

She began to move from room to room, searching for Logan
.
Typically, he was in the last room on the floor, near the fire exit. He was staring out of the window in shock, and didn’t see his mother approaching.

Conny ran into the room, grabbing his arm.

“Logan, we have to
go
.”

He didn’t respond.

And when Conny followed his gaze, she saw why.

A helicopter.

Approaching fast.

Too fast
, Conny thought, as she stared at the incoming vehicle in horror.

The chopper was big, but it was flying as though buffeted by the wind like a frail insect, veering crazily and lurching down toward the hospital. As it neared, Conny saw the blades stuttering.

It’s out of fuel
.

It was heading right for them.

“Get down!”

Conny wasn’t even aware that she was shouting. She hit the deck, grabbing a handful of Logan’s hospital-issue nightgown and pulling him down beside her. The chopper roared toward the windows, and the top floor of the hospital filled with screaming…

…and it disappeared from sight.

Moments later, a crash shook the building, rattling the windows in their frames. Conny could clearly hear a loud, metallic squeal as the downed helicopter scraped to a halt on the roof.

Fine dust rained from the ceiling.

Remy sneezed.

Conny stumbled to her feet, helping Logan up. She clasped his cheeks in her palms, and couldn’t keep the tears at bay.

“Are you okay?”

Logan flinched away, his lip curling.

“Not really. I’m dying, didn’t you hear?”

Conny recoiled at the bitterness in her boy’s voice. She hadn’t told him about the disease that had claimed his father, nor the possibility that Logan might inherit it, not until three weeks earlier.

When he had woken up one morning to find that he could barely move his left hand.

He had hardly spoken to his mother since she told him that Huntington’s might be a possibility. For those three weeks, he retreated into his shell and refused to come out, speaking monosyllabically and keeping his eyes pointed at the floor. When the option to spend three nights at London Bridge Hospital while he underwent tests had been offered, Logan had jumped at it, and Conny knew it was because he couldn’t stand the sight of her.

It broke her heart.

“Logan, I—”

A crash somewhere behind Conny cut her off, the noise followed immediately by screams of surprise. Conny spun around, her nerves blazing; expecting to see that one of the monsters had smashed its way into the building.

She blinked.

The crash had been the noise of someone kicking open a door labelled
roof access.
The
someone
was actually four men: two, who looked no older than twenty, carried a third—who appeared to be unconscious—draped across their shoulders. The last of the four men brandished a pistol as he moved out in front of the others.

“Looking for a doctor,” he growled, waving people back from the exit and moving inside the hospital.

Remy immediately began to snarl when he saw the firearm, and a space opened up around Conny as the people crowding into the corridor moved away anxiously, their eyes fixed on the gun. She grabbed the dog’s collar with her right hand, holding him back, and held her left arm protectively across Logan’s chest.

The man with the gun stared down at the growling dog, surprised.

“Remy,
hold
,” she said firmly. She glanced up at the man with the gun. “I could let him go,” she said evenly. “He’s dealt with firearms before. He’s
fast.
I’d rather it didn’t come to that, because people might get hurt. I need you to place that weapon on the floor.
Now.
”

The man with the gun lifted his gaze to Conny.

“And what? You’ll
arrest
me? You do know what’s happening out there, right? In fact, fuck it, throw me in jail. A steel cage would probably be the safest place to go right around now, anyway.”

Conny frowned, confused, and felt her cheeks burn. In a way, he had a point. Was she even a police officer anymore? After abandoning several of her colleagues to die—and then killing another herself?

I should be the one in prison.

“We’re not here to hurt anybody,” he continued. “I absolutely do
not
want to have to shoot your dog. Please, I’ve had a rough couple of days. Don’t make me do that.”