State of Emergency (20 page)

Foreman and Dave managed to scramble past Todd on the
ladder so they could get to the lift shaft doors on B3. Between
them, they wedged open the doors using the aluminium
struts, which Foreman had slipped into his back pocket. He
was first off the ladder, followed by Dave, and then they
helped Marty and Todd over the lip of the opening onto
B3.

The smell of smoke hit them and they started to wonder
if it had all been worth the effort. Todd collapsed onto the
concrete floor just beyond the doors, exhausted. He had
lost a lot of blood and was growing weaker by the second.
The senator bent down to take a look at his injury. None of
them had any medical know-how, but a section of bone was
protruding at least an inch through his skin.

'Todd,' Foreman said gently. 'We have to keep moving.
Can you get up?'

'I'm fucked, man,' he replied. 'I can't feel my arm, and
I'm so cold.'

Dave came over and crouched down, their earlier fight
forgotten. 'We'll get you out of here, Todd. Just be strong,
yeah?'

The four of them stared across the car park level, which
was shrouded in smoke. It was packed with cars, but
none of them looked the way they had when they'd been
parked earlier that evening. Windows were smashed, and
concrete supports and steel beams had flattened the roofs
of at least a dozen vehicles. Others had popped bonnets
or blown tyres. One four-wheel drive had rolled onto its
neighbour.

'What now?' Dave asked.

'Good question,' Foreman replied with a heavy sigh. 'The
smoke is thickest over there.' He pointed east, to the far side
of the car park. 'You three wait here. I'll go take a look.'

Instead of heading straight across the car park, Foreman
first veered left to check out the emergency stairs. A narrow
paved path ran from the elevators to the exit, which was
directly below the emergency door they had tried on the
Ground Level. He didn't need to go the whole way. He could
see from twenty yards away that it was blocked by a single
piece of concrete that probably weighed a couple of tons.

The senator paused for a moment to get his bearings
in the shrouded half-light. The smoke burned his throat.
He yanked at his shirt sleeve, the hand-sewn seams giving
with surprising ease. Covering his nose and mouth with the
expensive fabric, he moved along the driveway, between the
rows of decimated cars. Fifty yards on, he jumped suddenly
as the alarm went off in a Toyota Prius. It was loud, amplified
by the concrete all around. In a few minutes he had reached
the centre of the level – four giant concrete columns, pitted
and blackened with smoke, that stood on either side of the
ramps leading up and down.

The smoke was thicker here, and Foreman started to
cough. His eyes stung and watered. Then he saw reddish
flames and a pink tinge to the fumes. The smell of burning
plastic was overpowering. There was no way they could get
out that way, even if the emergency exit that side of the
level was clear.

He glanced back towards the elevators but he could no
longer see his companions. For a fleeting second he had an
almost uncontrollable urge to run, just run and never look
back. Gazing at the ramp leading up to B2, he almost did.
The others would find their own way out. He saw Sandy's
face and the imagined face of his unborn baby.

Foreman spun on his heel and ran back to the
elevators. The shapes of Dave, Todd and Marty solidified
through the smoke. They were sitting with their backs
to the wall where the air was a fraction clearer.

'The far exit is impassable. That's where the fire is. But
there's a car ramp, up and down. It's our best hope.'

Dave helped Todd to his feet.

'I'm okay,' he said shakily. 'I can walk.'

'The smoke's getting worse,' Marty said gravely.

'It is, and it's worse still over there,' Foreman replied,
nodding towards the ramp. 'But there's no alternative. He
ripped his other sleeve away and handed it to Todd. 'Use
this.'

Marty tore at his own shirt sleeve and Dave ripped it in
two. They covered their mouths with the cloth and followed
Foreman into the thickening smoke. Then they all froze as
they heard a loud series of explosions close by.

'Sounds like they're coming from the ramps,' Dave said.

'Not on this floor though,' Foreman noted. 'Come on!'

Rather than retracing his steps to the ramp, Kyle led
them away from the elevators and towards the front of the
building. The fumes were a little less suffocating there. They
turned down the first aisle but stopped after only a few yards.
A car had been pushed into the aisle and blocked the way. It
was covered with glass and dust. Foreman led them between
two other cars and they reached the second aisle. To their
left and a few yards ahead a four-wheel drive was burning.

A car horn blared. They ran past it and saw a man's smashed
head slumped on his steering wheel. One of his arms lay across
the dash and protruded through the shattered windshield. His
hand had been split down the middle to the wrist between his
third and fourth fingers. Blood fanned out across the bonnet
and was still dripping onto the concrete like leaking oil.

As he ran, the senator felt a growing sense of foreboding.
They were doing something wrong. He had just seen something
that wasn't right. Dave was next to him, then Marty.
Todd was struggling along a pace behind.

'How you doing, Todd?' Dave called, glancing back
without slowing his pace.

'I'm doing,' he gasped. His face was lathered with sweat,
streaked black with soot and grime.

Dave dropped back. 'You can make it, man.' He went to
put his shoulder under Todd, but Todd shook it off.

'No, I'll slow you down. I'm cool.'

A trunk lid lay in the middle of the aisle. Todd and Dave
went around it different sides.

It was then that the burning car they had just passed
blew.

Thick smoke hung low along the road that circled the CCC.
The Dragon ran along the tarmac. Reaching the rear of the
mall, he ducked into a small car park. The body of a man
lay sprawled face-down on the concrete, his back a field of
glass shards. For a second the corpse looked to the Dragon
like some sort of macabre porcupine, and he laughed. This
was the first victim of the evening's handiwork he had seen
up close, and he felt not a scintilla of guilt nor remorse. His
overriding emotion at that moment was contempt for the
dead man, who had been fool enough to be in the wrong
place at the wrong time.

He swung open a door at the loading bay at the back
of the car park and found himself in a warehouse behind
the Kmart. The place was deserted. He ran along a corridor,
seeing no one. But he pulled out his Smith & Wesson just
in case. He turned a bend and went through another door,
and then he was on the shop floor.

The store had been closed for an hour when the bombs
went off, so it had been empty. The front windows had been
blown in, sending glass across the shop right to its rear wall.
It crunched under the Dragon's boots. Once-neat shelves
holding everything from paperback books to the latest toy
robots were scattered randomly, flung around the space like
a deck of playing cards flicked into the air.

The Dragon strode to the wall at his left. Close to the rear
of the store was a door with a sign reading 'Maintenance'. It
was locked, but one shot from the Smith & Wesson and the
Dragon had smashed a hole above the handle, shattering
the locking mechanism. He kicked the door in and it flew
back, smashing against a brick wall.

Flicking on a light switch to the right of the doorway,
he could see a narrow corridor. Storerooms led off left and
right, and at the end of the passageway was a hatch in the
far wall. It too was locked, but not for long. Switching on
a torch strapped to his head, the Dragon pulled himself up
into the opening and began to crawl forward.

The maintenance conduit was a little over a hundred feet
long and lined with wires and dotted with junction boxes
and larger units that bristled with cables. He covered the
distance in 30 seconds and reached a metal ladder. It rose
25 feet, bringing him out into another tunnel.

The light from the torch bobbed about the walls of the
maintenance passageway, illuminating more metal boxes,
wires, thick ropes of multicoloured cable and glass-fronted
panels. It was absolutely silent here. The Dragon felt cut off
from human existence, a physical enactment of what he had
felt in his heart and his shrivelled soul ever since he was a
boy. It pleased him.

He knew from the map Dexter Tate had shown him
that this conduit was only a couple of hundred feet long.
It covered the short distance from the mall to B2 of the
CCC, but with every step it felt as though the tunnel was
growing longer and that he would never reach the end. It
was hot and confined, and a lesser man – one without his
years of training – might have panicked. But the Dragon
kept his breathing steady and his pace even, and in less than
two minutes he had reached the far end, a metal door that
opened from the inside. It swung outwards, a few feet above
the floor of B2.

He jumped down, the door slammed against the wall, and
he leaned back against the opening. He wanted to breathe
deeply, but the air was scorching and fumy. He removed the
gas mask from his shoulder bag and pulled it on.

A few dozen yards to his left the Dragon could just make
out the ramp leading down to B3 and up to B1. Here, in the
eastern part of B2, the car park was ablaze from at least three
intense fires. Two of these lay between him and the centre
of the level, where the ramp was situated. A fierce fire was
also raging to his right, at the eastern end of B2.

He pulled out the GPS and glanced at the screen. The
red circle marking Kyle Foreman's position showed he was
moving east from the elevators, towards the ramps. So the
Dragon had no choice. If he was to intercept the target, he
would have to get through the fires to his left. Only then
could he reach the ramp and get down to B3.

He ran between the rows of cars, taking steady breaths
filtered by the mask. He had to push north, towards the back
of the CCC, to get around the more intense of the two fires,
constantly aware that at any moment a car could explode next
to him. He approached the ramp from the north and looked
down to B3. There was no sign of Foreman. That was good. He
jumped over a low parapet and landed on the tarmac slope.

Once he could make visual contact with Foreman, he
would take him lower down, into the bowels of the building
where he could deal with him unseen. The senator would end
up just another charred corpse, most likely unidentifiable.

The Dragon lowered his shoulder bag to the floor. With
deft movements he pulled out a grenade, tugged the pin
away and flung it behind him. Then, as he ran down the
ramp into B3, he tossed the remaining two grenades one
after the other. They exploded two seconds apart, bringing
huge chunks of masonry down onto the top of the ramp
from B2 to B3 and showering him with dust. A moment
later there was another crash from the top of the ramp as
three vehicles landed on top of each other, sealing up the
opening completely.

The Dragon leaned against a pillar, panting into his mask.
He took one last clean breath, then ripped the mask from his
face and tossed it into a pile of rubble nearby. Peering down
at himself, he could see that his suit was covered with dust
and stained with oil and dirt. That was good. He needed to
look a little roughed up.

He tore at the sleeve of his jacket and then leaned down to
rip his left trouser leg. Removing his commando knife from
its sheath at his waist, the Dragon bent forward again. With
a steady hand, he plunged the knife into his calf, carefully
avoiding the major blood vessels. The result was a nastylooking
flesh wound that bled well but would cause no
long-term damage.

Ignoring the pain, he pushed himself away from the wall,
sheathed the knife, pocketed his gun and limped away to
crouch behind a pile of debris to await the arrival of Senator
Kyle Foreman.

The boom was ear-splitting and was followed by a rush of
material shooting outwards. Marty and Foreman were blown
off their feet and sprawled forward onto the concrete.

Dave was thrown onto a car to his right and ended up
with his nose an inch from the shattered windshield. He felt
a burning sensation in his calf. Looking down, he saw flames
leaping from his trousers. The scene seemed to be moving
in slow motion. Dave hit his leg with his bare hands. They
stung and he yelped. It was burning fuel. He yanked at his
backpack, saggy on his shoulders, and smothered the flames
with it. Then he tore the fabric away from his leg.

It was only then that he saw Todd lying face-down,
his body twisted horribly. A line of burning fuel from the
exploded car was racing towards him. Dave slid off the hood
and ran to his friend, screaming hysterically.

He grabbed Todd's leg and dragged him along the ground
away from the stream of burning fuel. Marty and Foreman
were just coming to. The senator pulled himself to his
knees.

'Todd?' Dave was leaning over him. The boy's face was
badly burned, his skin blistered from temple to chin. One
eye was open but sightless, clouded in grey. 'Todd?' Dave
shook him.

Todd started. He tried to look at his friend, but he seemed
to be totally blind. He grabbed at Dave's arm and started
to cry. He was trying to speak. Dave couldn't make out the
words and leaned in closer, but Todd's head slumped to one
side.

'Todd . . .
Todd
!'

Foreman and Marty were beside Dave, pulling him to his
feet. 'Come on, we've got to go,' Marty was saying.

Dave felt as though time had stood still. He could see his
friend's dead face, but it wasn't real. None of this was. He
was going to wake up any moment and shake it off – a bad
dream, nothing more. Marty's voice cut in, but Dave couldn't
make out what he was saying. He turned and saw the old
man's anxious face close to his. His mouth was moving but
the words were soundless.

Dave felt himself propelled forward, strong hands gripping
his arms. He was running, running without knowing why
or where he was going. He felt the ground rise, the acrid
air choking him as he gasped. He watched the ramp slide
past, the concrete columns to left and right. They were close
to the top of the ramp. They stopped and Dave heard Kyle
Foreman swear. Marty made a loud choking sound in his
throat.

Ahead of them lay three burning cars and a huge concrete
slab from the caved-in ceiling. The way was completely
blocked.