Down: Trilogy Box Set (141 page)

Gough shook his head and said, “I believe that was the queen’s husband.”

Woodbourne bounded up the stairs to Benona’s flat and knocked on the door. When there was no reply he banged harder.

“It’s me,” he called through the door. “I’ve been to the hospital. I found a doctor. I’ve got a car to take her to him.”

He heard the door unlocking and it slowly swung open.

Benona was ashen. She walked away from the door, with small, shuffling steps.

“Did you hear what I said? I’ve found her a doctor. I’ve got a car downstairs to bring her to hospital.”

“No hospital.”

She sat down on the sofa.

“What do you mean, no hospital?”

“She’s not going to hospital.” She began to sob.

Woodbourne strode past her into Polly’s room. The curtain was drawn. The duvet was pulled up to her neck.

“Polly, it’s Brandon. Wake up. What’s the matter? Wake up.”

He sat beside her and felt her head. When he left it had been hot. Now it was cool. He shook her.

“Polly, wake up!”

He stumbled into the other room.

“She’s not waking up,” Benona said. “My baby is dead.”

“She can’t be.”

She made an animal sound, a cross between a wail and a groan. “She’s dead, Brandon. Is all over. My life is over. My baby is dead.”

He swallowed hard. “I don’t know what to say. I’m sorry. I …”

“You what?”

“I loved her. I love you.”

She looked at him. Though her face was wet she made no effort to dry it.

“You love me?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“You sure I go to Hell when I die?”

“You told me you had your husband killed,” he said. “Was that the truth?”

“Yes, is true.”

“Then you’ll go.”

“I want you to kill me.”

He recoiled as if yanked by a cord. “What?”

“Kill me.”

“I can’t. I won’t.”

“I thought you were a killer.”

“I am but I won’t kill you.”

She got up and went to the kitchen and got a paring knife from the drawer.

“You said when I got to Hell if you found me you’d take care of me there. If I’m going, I go now. I can’t live another minute without Polly. You come too. We can be together and you can take care of me. Here, take it.”

With every step she took forward, Woodbourne took one backward until he was pressed against the wall. She kept coming until she was inches away. Looking up into his horrified face she pushed the knife handle into his palm.

“Do it. I don’t care if it hurts.”

He stared at the knife. “It won’t hurt.”

“You promise?”

“I promise.”

“You promise you come with me?”

“I promise.”

He’d always been a blade man. He knew how to kill a victim slow and he knew how to kill one fast. His hand moved so quickly she never saw it coming. The carotid blood hit him in the chest and then the face when bent over to catch her falling body. He felt her go limp and slowly lowered her to the floor.

He hadn’t cried since he was five or six but his chest began to shudder. He caught himself. There wasn’t time for grief. She’d be there, scared, waiting for him. Who knew what scum might be wandering about London, set to pounce on a new arrival to Hell. He took the knife, red with her blood and smoothly slit his own throat, ear-to-ear.

Ben and his security detail pulled up in front of Benona’s flat. The red car Woodbourne had taken from the hospital was still running at the curb. His agents insisted Ben stay downstairs while they made entry. He’d interviewed Benona there two months before after Woodbourne released mother and daughter and fled the scene, after he’d been caught and sent back to Hell. While Ben waited, he wondered why Woodbourne had returned and why he’d rushed to the hospital? He had so many questions. A pair of agents had been dispatched to the Homerton Hospital after calls to the place went unanswered.

An agent came down to get Ben.

“They’re all dead,” he said.

Ben ran up the stairs and stumbled through the small flat taking it all in.

The agent said, “It looks like he killed the girl, maybe suffocated her. Then he killed the woman and committed suicide.”

“I’m not so sure,” Ben said.

His mobile rang. It was one of his people calling from the hospital. He listened and rang off.

“No, it didn’t go down like that,” Ben told the agent. “What happened here was something entirely different.”

Del and Willie pushed the cafeteria doors open a few inches at a time and were relieved they didn’t creak or squeal. Once inside they closed them just as carefully.

The lobby of the cafeteria housed the administration offices and a lounge where residents congregated before entering the dining area. The only light came from the glowing fire exit signs. The swinging double doors to the dining room were closed.

Del cradled the fire-extinguisher thermite bomb in his arms, his pistol stuck in his waistband. Willie had the remote-control unit.

Willie whispered to him, “I’ll push the right door open and you slide it in. Don’t roll it. It’ll knock the battery off.”

“I know, I know,” Del whispered back. “I’m not stupid.”

Willie tiptoed up to the doors and put his hand on the right one. Del was a pace behind.

He mouthed the words, one, two, three, and pushed hard.

Del took a step forward and blinked into the faintly lit space. There was no sign of the sleeping Hellers he had spied through the window.

“Why aren’t you tossing it?” Willie whispered urgently.

“’Cause I can’t see no one,” Del replied. “Maybe they footed it. I’m going in.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah, I think they’re gone.”

Del went in first and Willie followed. The cafeteria floor was a mess of discarded food containers but it was empty.

“I’ll get the lights,” Willie said.

“We should check the kitchen first,” Del said, but it was too late. Willie hit the switches.

Heath and a large bunch of Hellers barged in from the kitchen. Willie and Del turned to flee but their way out of the swinging doors was blocked by Monk and another rover. Both men had been hiding in the lobby.

“Toss it!” Willie yelled.

In his high anxiety, Del forgot to slide it. Instead he rolled it like a cylindrical bowling ball and it clattered and bumped along stopping a couple of yards short of Heath.

“Set it off!” Del screamed.

“We’re too close!” Willie shouted.

“Set it off!” Del repeated.

Willie pushed the detonator button.

Nothing happened.

Willie pushed it again and again. Shouting that the wire must’ve gotten detached he ran toward the bomb only to be met by Heath who punched him in the gut with a kitchen knife, bringing Willie to his knees.

“You trying to do us harm, old man?” Heath said with a maniacal look on his face.

“Shoot it,” Willie croaked as loudly as he could.

“Get him, he’s got a gun,” Heath shouted to Monk.

Del had his revolver in his hand. He turned and shot Monk in the chest, the other rover in the face.

“Shoot it,” Willie groaned one more time before Heath slashed his throat.

Del took a step forward and aimed his pistol with both hands at the red fire extinguisher.

He fired.

The shot missed and slammed into the tiles. All the rovers except for Heath scattered around the cafeteria.

“You’re dead, old man,” Heath said, calmly walking toward him, “but not before I skin you alive.”

“Two left,” Del said, his hands shaking.

“What’s that, old man?” Heath said.

Del fired again. A spray of tile fragments flew into the air but the bomb didn’t budge.

“One left,” Del said.

Heath was no longer walking. He began to close the distance between him and Del at a run.

Del held his ground and squeezed the trigger one last time.

The bullet caught the cylinder on its end, piercing the skin.

The thermite exploded in a flash of pure yellow.

The fireball consumed Heath a fraction of a second before it reached Del and the rest of the Hellers, vaporizing everyone and sending the rovers back to Hell.

Campbell Bates probably wouldn’t admit it but there were times he actually seemed to be enjoying himself. Seated at a makeshift drafting table set up in a grassy area outside the Richmond forge he found himself humming Gilbert and Sullivan while he transferred drawings from the blast furnace book to sheets of parchment. He hadn’t done drafting since his days as a mechanical engineering student and though he hadn’t thought about it in years, there were certainly times at law school when he wished he’d remained an engineer.

After studying the design of William’s forge Bates had decided to attempt to modify its design rather than building a new furnace from scratch. When he showed his first design to the group of Earthers camping out at the forge, Leroy Bitterman had said, “There’s not much I have to offer, Campbell. I’m not even sure why I’m here. I should be back in London with the others.”

They had split roughly into two groups. The male scientists plus Trotter had been sent to the forge and the female scientists and non-scientists like Karen Smithwick, Stuart Binford, and George Lawrence remained at Whitehall Palace. It was Cromwell’s opinion that the women would be too vulnerable staying at the forge, surrounded by lecherous forge workers and soldiers. But the women were just as frightened to be left behind at the place where the lecherous Suffolk had assaulted Brenda Mitchell. It was left to Karen Smithwick to demand an audience with Cromwell to seek his assurances the women would be safe. Cromwell would later tell one of his ministers that this woman had more steel in her spine than Suffolk ever did. He had promised Smithwick upon his honor that the womenfolk would be free from assault.

The men at the forge had shared Bitterman’s opinion about their utility. Particle physicists, computational scientists, and electrical engineers were hardly suited, they claimed, to the task of designing and building nineteenth-century blast furnaces. But Cromwell had not been persuaded and all of them had been mustered into service.

Bates had tried to rally them to the cause. “Look,” he had said, “Hopefully the cavalry is going to arrive in the form of the SAS and automatic rifles. But until they do, we’ve got to show some progress or Cromwell and Suffolk might just decide to have one or more of us killed as an example. None of us know what we’re doing but we’ve got this book with schematics and we’ve got some world-class mathematicians among us. So what I need is for you to work out the temperature, pressure, and thermodynamics of modifying this forge’s chimney stack to get as close as possible to the examples in the book.”

“We’ll do the best we can,” Henry Quint had said and Bates had shaken his hand in appreciation.

Bates had not tried to convince Anthony Trotter of that man’s usefulness because he didn’t think he had any. Trotter resented that he’d been dragged out of London, much preferring his comfortable rooms and decent food at the palace, but now that he had been sent here, he tried to work out the angles of escape versus cooperation. If a rescue attempt were going to be in the cards then he’d have to make sure that none of his fellow captives would bad-mouth him and sabotage his career upon his return to Earth. But was that even possible now? They all hated him for seeking special privileges and some harbored suspicions he’d had a role in Brenda Mitchell’s death. If they were stuck here for good, he would need to earn his keep with Cromwell. He would need to become invaluable. While the others worked he napped upon the grass or walked, deep in thought around the perimeter of the forge, watched all the while by Cromwell’s soldiers ringing the site.

The time came to start dismantling the brickwork of the now-cooled chimneystack. It pained William to destroy his precious forge even for the sake of building a better one. He complained that his men were iron-makers, not bricklayers, but work began nevertheless. He sent his younger men scrambling up ladders with hammers to remove bricks and toss them down to the grass to be stacked and re-used. Others began shoveling and carting river mud to be mixed with straw and laid into wooden molds to make new bricks. When William saw Trotter sitting idly by, he approached him.

“So, Master Trotter, will you be involved with taking down the chimney or fashioning new bricks?”

Trotter frowned at him. “Neither. Go away.”

William spit on the ground. “Do you know that you’re a worthless sort of man?”

“William, you’re the sort of lout who thinks that only manual labor is useful. I do my work in my head. I’m a thinking man, something you probably never understood during your miserable life and now that you’re dead, I’m sure you are quite beyond learning. Off you go. Flex your muscles and go shift something heavy. I’ve got some serious thinking to do.”

Captain Greene’s D Group had fallen into a rhythm of patrols in their defense of the Upminster hot zone. They had cleared the initial crowds of Hellers streaming into the zone with minimal bloodshed and expenditure of ammunition. As the days wore on they were aware of a continuing presence of Hellers in the surrounding woods but there were only sporadic challenges to their dominance, mostly from poorly armed men desperate for a second chance at life. Their mission, however, had not been without dramatic turns.

Early on, Greene had ordered a squad of three troopers to go on a game hunt. One of his men had built a rudimentary smokehouse of branches and leaves and Greene decided to build up a stockpile of smoked meat. While stalking a deer, a trooper named Finch had fired at what he thought was a deer obscured by undergrowth.

The pleading voice of a woman had called out, “Stop, don’t shoot!”

The other soldiers had closed on the spot and Finch had yelled, “Show yourself and show your hands.”

Another female voice had said, “You’ve shot her. She can’t raise her arms.”

“Come out slowly, the both of you,” Finch ordered.

“Please don’t hurt us.”

Both women were only partially clad, missing various articles of clothing. One was in her forties, the other, bleeding from the upper arm was twenty years younger. They had both appeared petrified and weak.