Down: Trilogy Box Set (125 page)

“King’s men here?”

“A whole platoon crossed earlier, or so we was told,” Dirk said.

“Strange times,” Woodbourne said, “but I’ll be making the best of it. I’ll be off. Don’t say you saw me or next time we cross paths you’ll be headless, the both of you.”

“We won’t say nothing,” Duck said. “Where are you headed?”

Woodbourne didn’t say. He hurtled across the lawn and disappeared into the darkness.

“I thought I was done for,” Duck said. “Nearly peed my trousers. I’m glad he didn’t want to cast in with us. Don’t trust ’im as far as I could toss ’im.”

The door Duck tried to open was the one Delia and his minders had used for his walks on the laboratory grounds. It was locked.

“What now?” Dirk asked.

Duck told him to stay put while he found a rock in the flowerbeds that he threw through the plate glass.

Dirk cackled and wondered out loud what kind of a fool would fashion a door of glass.

Stepping inside Duck called for the two people he knew best, Delia and Barry, one of the security guards. “Delia, it’s Duck back among you. Barry, are you there?”

He led his brother through the empty and dark corridors, illuminated only by yellow security lights and red, glowing exit signs.

“It’s like a castle in ’ere,” Dirk said. “But not the ancient and smelly sort.”

“It’s massive, all right. This way. I’ll show you where they was keeping me.”

The door to the jail built to house Hellers was wide open and the doors to the individual cells were unlocked. Duck almost ran to his old quarters and when Dirk caught up with him he excitedly showed off all the amenities: the bed, the TV, the shower, and the toilet which he flushed over and over, explaining its miraculous now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t features.

“Now for the best part,” he exclaimed. “I’ll show you where they keep the grub.”

The kitchen was around the corner. As an inmate, food had been delivered on a tray but Delia would sometimes take him into the pantry to pick out snacks. There were still a good number of provisions in store: biscuits and crackers, canned soups with pull-tabs which Duck had learned how to open, cans of soda, bottles of beer, peanut butter, jelly, loaves of sliced bread, and the
piece de resistance
in the freezer—tubs of ice cream.

Duck grabbed a spoon and dug out a scoop of chocolate ice cream and presented it to his brother.

“What do I do with it?” Dirk asked, sniffing at it.

“You lick it and then you chew on it.”

Dirk gave it a lick. His face became all grins and he licked the spoon until there was nothing left.

“What did I tell you?” Duck asked.

“It’s a marvel,” Dirk said. “Can I have more?”

“You can ’ave the entire boxful. Come on, you ’ave that one and I’ll ’ave this one, the white one with chunks. We’ll take it back to my quarters and I’ll show you my favorite vids on the tele machine.”

Delia was trying her best to relax, aided by a nighttime cup of cocoa. Following her return to Earth, she had left London for her elderly mother’s place in the Cotswolds. The old woman was mentally sharp and could have fully grasped her daughter’s ordeal but Delia elected to stay mum. With a daughter in the employ of MI5, she was used to hearing little about her work. What Delia told her was that her last assignment had left her drained and it was left at that. But as her mother pottered about the cottage, she cast frequent sidelong glances of concern at Delia who couldn’t seem to find a comfortable rhythm, spending much too much of her time staring out the window at the greenery and chewing her nails.

“Frightful things happening down in London,” her mother had clucked at the morning TV.

“Yes, quite. Frightful.”

“I expect your colleagues are involved.”

“I expect they are.”

The phone rang. Her mother took the call and gave Delia the handset. “It’s a Mr. Wellington calling from London.”

Delia put down her mug of chocolate.

“Delia, how are you doing?” Ben asked.

“As well as can be expected,” she replied in little better than a monotone.

“Well, take it slow. Look, sorry to bother you. Tried ringing your mobile with no reply. The duty officer had your secondary number. Do you have your computer with you?”

She dutifully fetched it from her bedroom and listened to what Ben had to say. Her mother didn’t have Wi-Fi so she tethered it to her mobile to retrieve and view the file Ben sent through.

“Christ. When is this from?” she asked.

“About an hour ago. Silent alarms were triggered. We weren’t actively monitoring the feeds from inside the lab but we had a look-see and there they were.”

“Bad pennies turning up,” she said.

“Right. So the question for you is who’s the other one?”

“His brother, Dirk.”

The video was from inside of Duck’s old cell. The two lads were lying side-by-side on the narrow bed, spooning ice cream and watching
The Little Mermaid
.

“We have a good profile of Duck,” Ben said, “and we can be quite certain he’s not much of a threat but we wanted to get a sense whether the same was true for the other one.”

“Dirk’s equally harmless. I hope you’re not going to ask me to come down and mind them. I really couldn’t, not in my state.”

“Heavens no,” Ben said. “You’ve done more than enough. Wouldn’t be on. Even if you were chafing at the bit. The entire MAAC complex is a no-go zone. We couldn’t roll them up if we wanted to. We’ll just keep eyes on them and see what they do once they’ve cleaned the place out of food.”

“Duck’s like a locust,” Delia said. “He’ll eat everything he can lay his hands on. How are John, Emily, and Trevor getting on?”

“They went back on a mission with a squadron of SAS to find Paul Loomis and stop Hellers from coming over.”

“Oh my …” She began to cry and had to hang up the phone without saying good-bye.

All night a steady stream of Hellers materialized on the grounds of the MAAC compound. They were men mostly, but a smattering of women too, from Bexley and Gravesend mainly, Heller towns in the vicinity of Dartford village. All of them made their way to the muddy road near Dirk and Duck’s cottage, propelled by tales of a miraculous passageway back to the world they had late departed.

And when they arrived on Earth, painlessly and instantly transported, they stumbled about in and around the tennis courts, trying to process the weird sights of manicured grounds, electric lights, modern buildings, security fences, and parked automobiles. None approached the shattered glass door leading inside the lab. Instead, they made their way across the car parks toward the town, breaking into houses along the way to scavenge food and drink. There weren’t many residents left within a mile or two of the lab but there were some who had refused evacuation orders. Those who encountered Hellers didn’t fare well. None of these invaders were rovers, at least not that night, but they weren’t gentle souls either. Although human flesh was not devoured, murder was in the air.

While these Hellers were flying about in a state of euphoric confusion, Brandon Woodbourne’s activities were measured and purposeful. As soon as he cleared the MAAC perimeter he began breaking into those vacant houses with cars in the driveways or lock-up garages, looking for keys. Inside one house he found a set of Volvo keys and a meat cleaver in the kitchen. Soon he was driving west on familiar but largely empty roads. Compared to his last visit to Earth, the lack of traffic was startling. He began pushing buttons on the dash trying to make the radio come to life. When one of the buttons made the radio glow he heard the explanation. An announcer was warning residents of London and the Home Counties, those who had not yet attempted evacuation, to stay indoors with doors and windows locked. The BBC was aware of an increasing number of emergency calls regarding invaders but emergency services were unable to respond to the vast majority of incidents.

He drove on, wondering if she’d still be there and if she were, what he would say to her.

Like a dog returning for a long-buried bone, Heath pushed his gang through the strange, dark, and largely empty streets of London, east toward Shoreditch. Along the way they invaded shuttered public houses, murdering landlords who had stayed behind and raping their wives and daughters. Fueled by beer and gin they grew ever bolder, kicking in the doors and windows of flats and shops, helping themselves to silver, jewelry, and coins, leaving paper money behind unaware it had value. Not that they knew what to do with their booty. Many of them had been thieves on Earth and larceny was in their bones. Monk emerged from one closet wearing a tuxedo jacket and a strand of pearls, sending Heath into drunken hysterics.

During the nineteenth century, the East End of London and Shoreditch in particular had been the center of the furniture and textile industries. Young Heath had grown up as a shepherd boy but one day he’d had enough of the beatings his father delivered for even minor transgressions. He ran away to London and found a menial job around stinking vats of dyes. As he grew into a hard-edged man who preferred crime to labor, Shoreditch declined in tandem with his own diminishing morals on its way to becoming the epicenter of London’s crime and prostitution scene. A man like Heath fared well in a place like Shoreditch and with fond memories churning inside his fevered brain, he tried to make sense of the geography of the modern borough of Hackney.

“I don’t remember none of this,” Heath said, spinning in place on the sidewalk at the head of his pack of drunken men. “It’s all jumbled up.”

“If you don’t, I don’t,” Monk said, choosing to urinate on the spot. “In my day which was much before your day I hardly ventured into London. What is it you’re seeking?”

“My old diggings. Me and my mateys used to hole up in a cellar in a building near the railway line. I wish to see it again if it has not been torn down. I have memories of the place, you see, good memories.”

“Well, let’s find it then,” Monk said, weaving away. “Look there!” he exclaimed. “A tavern.”

The rovers needed no coaxing. Soon they had smashed through into another shuttered pub, stealing bottles from the bar. Heath waited outside, looking for a landmark which might help him. His eye settled on a street sign embedded into the side of a building.

“Fuck me! Shoreditch High Street. I know where we are. Monk! Come out of there. We’re going this way.”

Benona Siminski was frantic. It had been a bad couple of months, a terrible time, and just when she thought things could get no worse, they did. Polly, her little girl, was ill with a high fever. Two months earlier, she and Polly had been hostages, held by the Heller, Brandon Woodbourne, until he shot and killed two policemen and a visiting welfare worker from the council. In the aftermath, she had been debriefed by MI5 agents and threatened with deportation if she breathed a word of what they called, “the ravings of a lunatic.”

“If Woodbourne was lunatic, why you care what he say?” she had asked.

They would not provide an answer. It was a security matter.

“If he was lunatic, why did I see a death certificate for him online from 1949?”

These kinds of online documents were unreliable, she was told.

“Okay. I don’t care,” she had said. “I keep my mouth shut. Just leave me and my daughter alone.”

Yet being left alone was not enough. There were scars, emotional scars. Polly became withdrawn. She refused to go back to school. She had nightmares. Benona knew because she had to quit her cleaning job and stay at home at night. She heard her calling out in her sleep. For Benona, sleep was elusive. Her insomnia made her nerves raw. She took it out on the social workers and psychologists the school foisted on Polly. She was labeled a difficult parent. She had to sign on for benefits. Money was tight.

Then the troubles came to London. She, more than anyone, knew what Hellers were and she was frightened. Her neighbors on Glebe Road in Hackney heeded the evacuation orders. She thought about returning to Poland but she didn’t have the money for the flight so she hunkered down in her modest walk-up flat by the railway tracks. Then, the catastrophe. Polly got one of her recurrent ear infections. Her local doctor wasn’t answering calls. The casualty wards were closed. Polly was howling in pain and spiking a high fever. She needed to get antibiotics.

“Baby, you stay here. Don’t answer the door for nobody. I’m going to get you some medicine.”

“But mama, don’t leave me alone!”

“I’ll come back before you know it. Lie on sofa and watch your video, okay?”

She kissed her and was soon alone on Kingsland Road at two in the morning.

The road was always deserted this time of the morning. She was used to being out late alone because she finished cleaning offices in the city late. But there was something in the still air that filled her with dread. Kingsland Pharmacy was dark as were all the shops. She didn’t know why she bothered but she tried the door. It was locked, of course. A metal sign stand had been left outside the Chinese takeaway next door. She lifted it over her head and, closing her eyes, rammed it into the plate-glass window of the chemist. An alarm went off. She stepped back to see if any lights went on in the flat above but the windows stayed black. After using the metal stand to clear away the shards, she climbed into the store. With the alarm sounding in her ears she found a light switch and went to the back.

She knew which antibiotic had cured Polly in the past and she started searching for them among the racks of plastic bottles. Amoxicillin. She found a huge bottle, a five-hundred count, and briefly thought about taking only as many as she needed but the thought of Polly alone persuaded her to take all of them and beat a hasty retreat.

She climbed out of the broken window backwards, trying to avoid the sharp glass on the ledge but before her second foot touched the sidewalk she smelled the odor she thought she would never smell again.

She slowly turned around and found herself staring into the coarse, leering face of Heath and fifty drunken rovers.