Acolyte (33 page)

‘Thank God for Prohibition,' said Kendrick.

They heard the upper door give way, accompanied by the screeching of the shadows.

‘We know sunlight hurts them,' said Kendrick. ‘Let's see what an inferno can do.'

*

The screeches continued. One by one, they heard the sunlamps smash.

The creatures were just outside now; Never dropped into the hole and vanished from sight. As Jonah lowered himself down, the corpses came directly into his eye line, Hopkins still with the towel covering his mutilated face. He thought of the way that Kendrick had kept hold of the corpses, just in case they were needed, just as a way to
finesse
an escape. It didn't even seem like an extravagance. It was simply what Kendrick did.

He ducked down, lying flat and following Never. The tunnel was tight, perhaps three feet across. Cold, damp earth that felt like clay surrounded him, barely high enough for him to be able to rise
onto his knees, frequent wooden supports making the space even more constricted.

With Never in front he felt hemmed in. Buried. He prayed the tunnel was short because more than a few minutes spent here would leave him close to madness.

Behind him he could hear a deep scrape as Kendrick carefully replaced the flagstone in the basement floor. By now the steel door was taking a battering.

After a few metres of suffocating progress, Jonah stopped when he felt Kendrick's hand tug on his foot.

‘There's a support back here I need to kick down,' Kendrick said. ‘Above us is a mound of earth; I need to seal off the tunnel before the fuel goes up. The rest of the tunnel should hold, but if it starts to give, get moving as fast as you can.'

‘How long until …?'

‘In about sixty seconds.'

Jonah found himself counting backwards from sixty as he kept going, the downward slope of the tunnel more and more pronounced. He hissed ahead at Never to speed it up, hearing the sound of kicking behind him, then the soft murmur of a steady flow of earth. He stopped, listening, waiting for the sound to grow, to approach along the tunnel and consume them all.

All he heard was Kendrick's breathing.

‘Move on,' whispered Kendrick, and Never picked up the pace, Jonah still counting down the seconds in his head. He reached zero.

Suddenly, behind, above, below, came the thump of ignition transmitted through the ground, and the inhuman screams of the shadows caught in the flame. Jonah paused, breath held for a moment, a trickle of debris falling.

The tunnel remained intact.

The screaming was still audible, punctuated by the additional thumps of fuel canisters catching.

‘Get moving,' said Kendrick. ‘The tunnel dips down even more ahead. It gets a little damp then comes back up.'

‘Just how deep are we?' whispered Jonah.

‘Maybe fifteen feet,' said Kendrick. ‘This goes on under a twenty-foot fence by a disused rail track out at the back of the property. When we're through, a five-minute run along the old railroad will bring us to where I have another car.'

Jonah tried to picture how far they still had to go before they got out. He'd not paid much attention to the layout of the grounds outside the house. He couldn't recall even
seeing
a fence at the rear.

‘How far to the end of the tunnel?' he asked.

‘Eighty yards, give or take,' said Kendrick.

They kept going, slow progress that seemed interminable. They hadn't heard sirens yet, but surely the fire at the house had been called in.

As they went, the muddy clay underneath started to get increasingly damp and slippery. Jonah began to lose his grip, his legs sliding. When his right foot hit a support strut a little too hard, Kendrick scolded him.

‘This tunnel is almost a century old,' Kendrick said. ‘It's survived a lack of repairs and plenty of subsidence, so be careful.'

Damp gave way to wet, a thin layer of cold water which deepened as they continued along the tunnel's downslope. Soon it was a foot high. Jonah started to shiver. Claustrophobia was taking him, now. It felt like the air was impossibly sparse.

‘Not far,' Kendrick kept saying.

Then Never stopped ahead. ‘Uh, problem,' he said. ‘It dips right here.'

‘Keep going,' said Kendrick.

‘You don't get me,' said Never. ‘It
dips.
There's hardly any air space above the water. I think the tunnel's completely submerged ahead.'

‘So turn onto your back,' said Kendrick. ‘We have nowhere to go but forward. It should only be a couple of metres before it rises
again. Jonah and I will stay here. Flash your light three times when you're through, and we'll follow.'

There was silence for a few seconds, then Jonah heard the deepest sigh he'd ever heard anyone take.

‘Right, then,' said Never Geary. ‘Wish me luck.'

It took Never a few moments to turn onto his back, then he started to move forwards slowly, his feet slipping now and again and forcing muddy water into Jonah's face. Soon all Jonah could hear were the gentle ripples hitting the side of the tunnel beside him. He watched the light as it went. It faded for a moment, came bright again, then vanished.

‘His flashlight went off,' he said to Kendrick.

Kendrick switched his own off, leaving them in absolute black to give them the best chance of seeing Never's. ‘It may have failed in the water,' said Kendrick. ‘Or the water itself could just be too opaque. Keep looking for it.'

They waited, Jonah keeping watch, hoping for some sign. ‘I can't see anything,' he said.

‘The tunnel can't be submerged for very far,' said Kendrick. ‘He's had long enough. Get after him.'

‘But what if—'

‘Get after him,' said Kendrick, putting his own flashlight back on. ‘We can't afford to spend more time here, and that's our only way out.'

Jonah twisted until he was facing the tunnel roof. It looked soft, fragile. Given a regular flooding, the supports here must surely be rotten. What if the tunnel was blocked? Slowly, he moved on, Kendrick's light just enough to see by at first, but his ears were in the water now. His neck already ached, holding his head as high up as he could manage, breathing in the limited air.

His hands were numbed by cold, his arms and legs were stiffening.

Buried, he thought.

His foot slipped; he felt the impact of it against the side wall but kept his head above the surface.

The water was higher with each movement.

Buried.

The light was almost gone, just vague glints now on the wet roof an inch above him. He was breathing through his nose, his panic hard to suppress, moving at a slower pace to avoid disturbing the water. He closed his eyes as the water lapped up into them.

The sense of being in his own waterlogged grave was unbearable.

The water was too high now to afford reliable breathing. It was time to go under, to keep pushing forward until his breath failed him or, dear God, he found his shoulders pressing against Never's dead feet.

Now.

He took his final breath, meagre as it was, keeping on going, eyes closed, counting to himself, slipping, feeling complaints from his lungs, wondering how far he had gone, how far there was left.

His hands were sliding, his feet the only propulsion that seemed to be getting him anywhere, then one foot struck another support and he was certain it moved, certain he'd dislodged it. The pain in his lungs was growing, urging him to take a breath that would be his end, as the walls seemed to narrow and the roof pressed down, down,
down
above him.

And then he saw the sparks that preceded unconsciousness, flecks of false light in his eyes; too far to go, his coordination failing, reducing him to a frantic scrabble for any kind of purchase. Too far, and—

A hand on his shoulder, gripping his clothes, dragging him. A voice, muffled by the water, then clear as the water fell away from his ears.

‘It's OK,' said Never. ‘You're through.'

Taking a sudden breath that set him coughing, Jonah opened his eyes, Never's face right above his own, his flashlight working.

‘The tunnel comes out into a brick room, just down here,' said Never. ‘I thought I'd come back and see if you needed me. You seemed to be taking forever.'

It took Jonah a long time to answer. Breath was precious. ‘Yes,' he said. ‘We couldn't see your light. Too muddy.'

‘I tried calling out, but couldn't risk being too loud.'

Jonah managed a smile, an edge of desperation to it. ‘Come on,' he said, aware that Kendrick would be coming through any moment. ‘I don't want to spend all winter in this fucking tunnel.'

‘Me neither,' said Never, starting to shuffle backwards, the upward slope quickly taking them above the water. ‘Promise me we can have a holiday soon. Somewhere sunny.'

They both started to laugh. Then Kendrick emerged behind, and, like kids caught by a teacher, they stopped.

‘Break over,' said Kendrick. ‘Let's get to the car.'

It was early morning when Annabel reached the outskirts of Chicago. After leaving the hotel in Billings, she'd ditched the unusual gun she'd taken off the woman but had kept the canister that had saved her. Then she'd spent a frantic few hours putting in as much driving distance as she could before it had occurred to her to change the damn car. However they'd tracked her down, the hotel had required her licence plate at check-in, so she had to assume they had it by now. She had parked up in Rapid City, abandoning the vehicle a few minutes' walk from a used car lot where a man who seemed constructed entirely from wrinkles, tan and leer had sold her a battered Toyota worth half what she paid. It left her with only nine hundred in cash, but there was no way she was going to use the one credit card she had left; she'd used the other for the hotel, and while both were – in theory – impossible to trace to her, she must have screwed it up somehow. It had to be how they'd found her.

Cash only from here on in.

She stopped for gas, and to get change for the road tolls she knew were coming. The exhaustion that had hit her in the hotel – and which had meant she'd stayed longer than planned, long enough to be caught out – had only grown worse overnight. Further on, she stopped again and grabbed an hour of rest, but, given her underlying panic, she wasn't certain how much actual sleep she'd managed in that time. She dreamed of that door again,
vast and dark, something hitting the other side – a dream triggered by a basic fear of looming peril, that was all, but after that she gave up any further attempt at sleep.

Her stash of cola was enough to keep her going through the early hours, into the overcast morning. The Sunday traffic was light and the driving monotonous, but her mind was scrambled by the combination of caffeine and adrenaline. She was on autopilot, and glad that she couldn't contemplate what was looking for her, glad that she couldn't think clearly about the fate of Jonah and Never.

And now, after twenty hours on the road, she was nearing Chicago. She came up to an automated toll, dug around in her pocket for the change, and wound the window down. Then she fumbled it, catching the top of the window as her hand went out. The coins spilled from her grip, hitting the tarmac.

She threw a look to the heavens, swore, and got out. Sparse as the traffic was, there was a car in the lane to her left. The lane to her right was clear, then another car in the furthest of the four. She gathered up what she'd dropped. As she began to stand, she saw a black four-by-four stop behind the car in the lane furthest from her. It was stationary for only a few seconds, the car in front starting to drive off, but it was just long enough for Annabel to note the strange choice, with a free lane right beside her.

She stood fully. The driver of the four-by-four had wound down his window ready to pay. The man's eyes met hers then looked away fast.

Too
fast.

She got back into her car with the same feeling of imminent danger she'd had in the hotel, the one she'd almost ignored, the one she'd thought was stupid.

The one that had been the difference between escape and capture.

She sat where she was, money in hand, and waited for the black car to go. Another car entered the lane beside her, obscuring
her sight of the black car's driver, but as the seconds ticked by and the four-by-four didn't move, her suspicion grew.

After twenty seconds, another car came up behind it. Annabel crossed her fingers and hoped that the new driver was an impatient one; sure enough, it hadn't even been there for the count of ten when the horn started to blare.

The four-by-four drove on, sluggish. Annabel waited, watching it get ahead.

A blast of horn came from behind her, snapping her out of it. She glanced in the rear-view mirror, hand up in apology, but waiting just a little longer. Then she paid and went on her way, keeping an eye on the black car, now well ahead of her. She kept her speed low but the black car matched it, every other vehicle going just that bit faster than either of them.

Annabel considered her options. She couldn't think of any way they could have found her, but that was moot right now. If she was imagining all this (and she hoped to God she was), there was little to lose by giving the black car the slip all the same.

She saw an exit up ahead and moved into the left-most lane, timing it until she was almost past before pulling sharply across the other lanes and taking the exit, feeling a surge of triumph when she saw the black car forced to continue on ahead.

The triumph faded when she realized she had no idea where she was going, but she could deal with that in a moment. She looked around her. Still in the outskirts of the city, there wasn't much around: bare scrubland and run-down industry. She took the next right, the long straight road empty of vehicles. The surroundings were desolate, too: on one side of the road was an electricity substation, and on the other, what looked like an old industrial park, a series of beaten-up concrete buildings with no signs of life. Even though it was so early on a Sunday, she suspected that the life signs here were never exactly
healthy.