Down: Trilogy Box Set (110 page)

“We should help him,” Stuart said.

Angus found the courage to speak to the young man. “What happened to you?”

“Rovers,” he rasped. “Gut-stabbed.”

“You’re stabbed?” Glynn said.

The man took his hands off his abdomen. His intestines were visible through the gaping wound.

Several of the boys dropped back a few feet. Harry threw up.

“We need to get you help,” Angus said. “Which way is help?”

“Are they still about?” the man panted.

“Who?”

“The rovers.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. We didn’t see anyone else.”

The man said, “At least I won’t be eaten.”

“Did he just say eaten?” Danny asked Craig.

Angus began to climb over the log. When Glynn asked what he was doing he replied, “Let’s just see if this whole thing’s staged. He’s probably trying to frighten us with a sack of sheep guts.”

Glynn followed and the two boys kneeled at the man’s side.

“Christ, it’s real,” Angus said, when the man moved his hands away. He turned his head and gagged at the man’s rank odor. “It’s fucking real. What the hell is going on?”

“You got any water, friend?” the man asked.

“No but we can try to bring you some from the pond,” Glynn said.

“I haven’t seen you before. Which village do you hail from?”

“We’re at Belmeade School,” Angus said. “Well we were.”

“You’re too young.”

“Too young for what?” Stuart said from the other side of the log.

“Did you see my mate?” the man said. “When the rovers come we hoofed it. They got me but I hope my mate got free.”

Danny noticed something off to the right. A patch of dark blue on the forest floor.

While the boys were debating how they were going to bring water to the man they heard Danny calling. “Guys, I think you need to come here.”

There was a blue cap lying next to a man’s head. The rest of the body was several feet away on bloodstained pine needles.

Transfixed by the horror, the boys looked into the head’s staring eyes and then those eyes blinked and the dry lips moved.

Most of them screamed.

They ran back to the gut-stabbed young man.

“Your friend’s dead!” Angus shouted.

“He’s not dead.”

“Tell us where we are and what’s going on,” Angus demanded. “We won’t help you unless you tell us.”

“You don’t know?”

“We have no idea, all right?” Glynn yelled at the top of his lungs.

“You must be new ’uns,” the man rasped. He managed a short painful laugh. “Well let me be the first to welcome you to your new home. Welcome to Hell.”

Ben Wellington spent most of the brief helicopter ride from Dartford to Whitehall on his mobile. On the bench across from him, Emily Loughty and John Camp were too numb and exhausted to do anything but stare out the windows at the sprawl of greater London. They hadn’t seen the sun in a month and the glare stung their eyes. Phone to ear, Ben silently offered Emily his sunglasses but she shook her head. The yellow light, though painful, was too precious.

Shortly before touchdown he pocketed the phone and said, “The cat’s well and truly out of the bag.”

“People know?” John asked.

Ben told them about the physics blogger Giles Farmer and his article which had primed the pump a day earlier. It was titled,
The Mystery of the Massive Anglo-American Collider: Have We Opened a Nasty Door to Another Dimension?
Any possibility of falsely rubbishing Farmer’s story had now collapsed under the hysteria surrounding the mass disappearances and intrusions along the path of the tunnels of MAAC, the Massive Anglo-American Collider.

Police and army units were responding to a “series of incidents” as the government was characterizing the evolving situation, but there was a clamor, rapidly approaching hysteria, for answers. Farmer was all too willing to go before the cameras from the stoop of his bed-sit in Lewisham and from this soap box he was challenging the authorities to come clean.

“Farmer says he knows you,” Ben said.

“I remember him,” Emily said. “We talked a few times on the telephone. He was bright but on the fringe.” She shook her head then continued, “Well, maybe he was more clever than me.”

“Do you want to see his article?”

“I don’t have the strength for it at the moment.”

“He says he spoke to your father.”

“Christ. I need to call my parents and let them know we’re safe. They must be frantic.”

“Can she use your phone?” John asked.

Ben passed it over and she had a brief, tearful chat with her mother. Emily told her that Arabel, Sam, and Bess were all in good health and that arrangements were being made to fly them to Edinburgh. She’d be up when she could but she had work to do and yes, it had everything to do with the problems they were watching on TV.

“I didn’t know what I could tell her,” Emily said, handing the phone back.

“I’m afraid I have no advice,” Ben said. “The prime minister will have to make a statement soon but not before the Cobra meeting.”

Ben shook his head at the list of texts accumulated in the last few minutes.

“What?” John asked.

“One of the missing boys from the school in Sevenoaks is the son of the Secretary of State for Defense, Jeremy Slaine. He’ll be in attendance at the Cobra meeting.”

John let out a weary, “Wonderful.”

With the landing pad at Whitehall in sight, Ben’s phone rang. “My wife,” he muttered. “No, I won’t be able to return home,” he said to her. “I’m just about to meet with the prime minister. Did you get the girls from school? Good. Keep them inside and lock the doors. I’ll be home when I can. Yes, I know. I’m sorry. I’ll ring you back in an hour or so.” When he finished he said, “In times of crisis, I always seem to be placing job over family. Not my finest moment.”

When they entered the crowded Cabinet Office Briefing Room A at Whitehall John saw people wrinkling their noses the way he had sniffed at Hellers. It dawned on him that after a month without a good wash, he and Emily probably smelled as rank as the dead. Ben had briefed them that the entire cabinet was going to be in attendance along with a host of military, police, and civilian advisors. The front of the room displayed video feeds of the main TV channels and CCTV footage from around London. The PM’s principal private secretary scanned the conference room and picked up a telephone. “Tell him we’re ready,” he announced.

When Prime Minister Peter Lester entered he went straight for John and Emily, insisting they remain seated.

“We’re so grateful you made it home safely,” he said, doing an excellent job of appearing to ignore their aroma and grime. “It’s good of you to come here directly from your ordeal. Would you like something to eat or drink?”

They both said “coffee, please” simultaneously which briefly lifted the pall in the room. Everyone chuckled except for Jeremy Slaine, the secretary of state for defense, who looked as if his head might explode from incandescent rage.

The PM took his place at the head of the table and pointed at Ben. “Mr. Wellington, I believe you’re in the best position to brief us on what happened this morning at Dartford. And by the way, in George Lawrence’s absence I’ve made you acting DG of MI5.” He offered a terse congratulations but Ben swallowed hard at the news and looked shaken.

Ben began with a bald recitation of the facts. The planned MAAC restart had occurred at 10 a.m. and after the collider reached full power, the automatic shutdown mechanism had seemingly kicked in within the planned few nanoseconds. He couldn’t be sure of the timing because the control-room personnel had vanished. The missing personnel included a number of VIP observers, namely the UK energy secretary, Karen Smithwick, the US energy secretary, Leroy Bitterman, George Lawrence, head of MI5, Campbell Bates, the director of the FBI, Anthony Trotter, the assistant chief of MI6 and acting head of the MAAC, and some twenty MAAC staff members including Matthew Coppens, the acting head of the Hercules Project, Henry Quint, the former director of MAAC, David Laurent, a senior scientist, and Stuart Binford, the lab’s head of public relations. In addition three MI5 agents guarding the control room were caught up.

The tally on returnees was a happier story but not without tragedy. Of the eight civilians who had disappeared a month earlier from an estate at South Ockendon, Martin Crandall, Tony Krause, and Tracy Wiggins had survived and were receiving medical evaluations. Four members of the same family of builders had all perished. And one woman, Alice Hart, a council electrical inspector incredibly had elected to stay behind in the other world.

Of the Dartford victims, he was pleased to report that all had been rescued. Emily’s sister Arabel, her two children, and Delia May, an MI5 analyst, were also in a reasonable state of health receiving medical attention.

Two of the rescuers, Emily and John, were before the committee. Trevor Jones had insisted on accompanying Arabel Loughty and her children to Edinburgh. An MI5 jet was standing by to transport them from Stanstead when they were released from medical care. And lastly, Brian Kilmeade, the medieval weapons expert, who by all accounts had acted with exemplary skill and heroism, had also made the incredible decision to remain behind.

Ben then turned to the current and evolving crisis. He apologized for the lack of details but promised to update the committee in a few hours when more would be known. As far as he had been made aware, an entire class of Year Ten boys had disappeared from their dormitory at the Belmeade School in Sevenoaks and an undetermined number of souls were missing from the town centre in Leatherhead and a housing estate in Upminster. A large number of aliens, or Hellers as they were being called, were rampaging through Leatherhead with smaller numbers at Sevenoaks and Upminster.

“And finally …” Ben said.

Jeremy Slaine hit the table with his fist and interrupted him. “I can no longer sit in silence,” he fumed. “My son, Angus, is one of the boys who’s gone missing. Are you aware of that?”

“I am, sir,” Ben said. “I’m very sorry.”

“Sorry won’t cut it, will it? What I cannot understand and what I find utterly incomprehensible is that the majority of this cabinet was kept in the dark about this affair until yesterday.” He gave the prime minister a withering look and said, “Peter, that was inexcusable. If we were not in the midst of a crisis I would resign immediately.”

“I do apologize, Jeremy,” Lester said. “I take full responsibility for the information blackout. We desperately wanted to contain the story as a matter of public safety. We wanted to avoid panic at all costs and were cautiously optimistic we could contain this. We were wrong. I assure you, we will do everything possible to retrieve your son and his classmates.”

“I believe it was the height of irresponsibility not to mothball MAAC at the first sign of trouble,” Slaine said. “We must now reap what you have sown.”

“With twenty-twenty hindsight, I might have come to the same conclusion,” the prime minister said. “However, brave people, like Dr. Loughty and Mr. Camp, risked their lives to save innocent parties, and we did not wish to abandon them.”

The Home Secretary, Margaret Beechwood, in an obvious attempt to diffuse the awkward row, said, “Mr. Wellington, you were just about to conclude your remarks, I believe.”

“Yes, Madam Secretary,” Ben said. “I was saying that there was one more item to report, in some respects the most extraordinary in a sea of extraordinary events. There was one more individual who arrived here with our people at Dartford. He is someone known to all of us, a former monarch of England. We have in our custody King Henry the Eighth.”

The room erupted with the clamor of a dozen voices and the prime minister had to raise his hands and ask for quiet.

“I’ve been aware of this for only an hour or so,” the prime minister said. “Suffice it to say it adds a rather bizarre and urgent element to an already bizarre and urgent crisis.”

“Has the queen been notified?” the home secretary asked.

“The palace has been briefed about the general nature of the crisis but no, we haven’t as yet disclosed King Henry’s arrival. We feel we need to satisfy ourselves that this man is who he claims to be.”

John piped up, “He’s Henry the Eighth, all right. Believe me.”

“I’m not suggesting you’re wrong, Mr. Camp,” the prime minister said, “but we need some kind of independent verification before we present him as such to the queen.”

“Before I went over,” John said, “we commissioned a Henry expert, a Cambridge history professor, to help me profile him. This guy, Malcolm Gough, has already signed the Official Secrets Act.”

“Margaret,” the prime minister said to the home secretary, “could you arrange to get this professor down to London straight away and arrange for a secure location for him to interview our—what shall I call him—our visitor?”

“If I may,” Slaine interrupted, “this is a sideshow. People’s lives are at risk in London. I understand there have already been casualties. My son’s life is at risk. Might we address these issues?”

“Yes, let’s move on, as Jeremy suggests,” the prime minister said. “Margaret, would you brief us on the ongoing police operations?”

The home secretary passed the baton to the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police who asked his assistant to pull up CCTV footage from Leatherhead.

Sir Evan McPhail rose and went to the front of the room. “The home secretary has asked us to coordinate a response with the home county police departments affected by this invasion. In Leatherhead we have supplemented the resources of the Surrey Police with a number of armed tactical officers and armored vehicles. This CCTV feed is from Church Street in the town centre.”

“It looks deserted,” the prime minister said.

“What is that?” the deputy prime minister asked. “Is that a body?”

“It’s deserted now,” the commissioner said. “And yes, I believe that is the body of a member of public. Here is footage from ten o’clock this morning.”

Men were streaming down the street, running wildly and chaotically, attacking people with their fists and feet. One of the men appeared to stomp and kneel over a man where the corpse would later be seen.