Crawlers (18 page)

‘What?' Samantha snorted. ‘I was supposed to give you my
phone
?' She waited while Lauren tinkered with hers. Once that was lit too, she said: ‘OK. Everyone follow me.'

There was a short carpeted landing, then a flight of wide steps that curved gently to the left. At the end of each of those steps, touched by the dim glow of the phones, was a row of empty seats.

Someone must have turned the lights off after the evacuation: deserted and dark, the theatre auditorium was very different to how Ben remembered it from the start of the evening. In the dark he felt the emptiness, like the silence, seem to swell around him – as if the room was alive, breathing. The theatre was much warmer than he remembered too, almost like a hothouse.

Why's there nobody here?
Ben wondered. Of course it was a relief not being attacked or chased, but he felt an immediate and definite sense that coming into the theatre might have been a mistake.

The steps finished almost at the stage itself. ‘All right!' said Samantha, immediately scrambling up onto it. ‘Check me out!' She turned to face the darkness, and bowed. ‘Thank you!' she said, acknowledging thunderous imaginary applause. ‘You've been a beautiful audience! I love you all! Goodnight! God bless!'

There
, thought Jasmine, gaping at her in astonishment.
That's why Samantha's the way she is
. Her mind flashed to the conversation on the bus, all the way back at the start of the evening: like Jasmine, Samantha hadn't answered Ms Gresham's question about what she wanted to be. But unlike Jasmine, who simply didn't like talking about her plans in front of others, Samantha hadn't answered because she'd presumed it was obvious: she wanted to be famous. Even in the middle of everything that was happening, Samantha lived her whole life like it was a performance. And she couldn't stand to be ignored.

‘You're a
star
, babes,' said Lauren, standing at Samantha's feet. ‘The world may not know it yet, but you're going to be a real celebrity, I'm telling you.'

Her face lit eerily from below by her phone, Samantha smiled.

‘What's that?' asked Ben, pointing.

‘What's what?' said Samantha, annoyed that Ben had spoiled her moment.

At the back of the stage something had caught his eye. The light of Samantha's phone didn't travel far, but its glow had passed over several strange, pale shapes that loomed out of the darkness behind her.

Ben climbed up onto the stage and pointed again. ‘Back there. I saw something that wasn't there before. Something . . . weird.'

Jasmine and Lauren clambered up to join him and Samantha. The four of them looked at each other in the phone-light.

‘Should we check it out?' asked Ben.

‘Do we have to?' asked Lauren.

‘Stay here if you want,' said Jasmine. ‘We won't go far.'

The production design for the play had been sparse and minimal, with no onstage furniture or props other than what the actors brought on with them: the stage was an empty space except for its backdrop, which was a large, wide expanse of plain, dark wood panelling that seemed to stretch up all the way to the Main Theatre's two-storey-high ceiling. But the backdrop wasn't plain or dark any more.

Some odd-looking, long, white objects had been stuck upright in rows against the wood. They were all of a similar size – around two metres tall and just less than a metre wide, rounded at the top and bottom. There were perhaps twenty of them in the row at stage level, and another twenty above that. But as Ben approached and the light from the girls' phones got stronger, he saw that there were twenty more above those, then
another
twenty, and so on, carrying on upwards further than the light could reach.

The white objects were bulbous and lumpish, and made of some opaque, resinous substance. The texture on the nearest was rope-like, yet also somehow dribbly or melted-looking. Its uneven surface twinkled stickily.

Samantha grimaced. ‘Well, Professor?' she said, cocking her head at Jasmine. ‘Got another theory to dazzle us all?'

‘How should
I
know what these are?' asked Jasmine, annoyed. She considered the objects and frowned. ‘They look a bit like . . . pupal casings, maybe.'

‘Huh?'

‘You know – cocoons? Like for caterpillars?'

Samantha snorted and grinned. ‘Bit big for caterpillars, don't you think?'

Ben didn't see what she was grinning about: he didn't think this was funny. Besides, he had just noticed something else:

‘This one's got shoes.'

It was true. In the second row up, a little higher than his eyeline, the toes of a large pair of battered-looking workman's boots were protruding from the front of the lower end of one of the cocoons. And once Ben saw the first pair, he started seeing shoes all over the wall – brogues, trainers, all sorts. He even spotted a section of smaller cocoons, high up, all sporting footwear similar to his own school shoes.

Ben took a step back. The bad feeling he'd had since they'd entered the theatre was intensifying.

‘They've got
people
inside,' he murmured, feeling a sickly stirring in his stomach.

‘Guys?' called Lauren suddenly. ‘
Guys!
'

Exchanging a startled look, the three of them went back to rejoin her.

‘There's something in here with us,' hissed Lauren in a panicky whisper. She pointed at the empty auditorium. ‘Out there.'

Everyone squinted into the darkness and held their breath.

‘There's nothing,' said Jasmine.

Clunk.

‘There!' said Lauren.

‘I think one of the seats just moved,' Ben whispered.

They were the kind that flip up when no one is sitting on them.

CLUNK, clunk
.

Ben saw it that time: the second, softer
clunk
was an upholstered seat bouncing against its back.
Something was under the seats
. And it was getting closer.

‘Is it the crawlers again?' asked Lauren.

‘Can't be,' said Ben. ‘They're too small.'

‘Well, let's not wait here for it to attack us, whatever it is,' said Jasmine. Then she gasped and froze, her eyes wide.

As they'd all turned right to leave the stage, the light from Lauren's phone had illuminated a hideous sight.

Ben had been wrong.

This crawler was bigger than any they'd seen. Caught in
the light just as it had been sneaking up on them from the side, it reared on two of its metre-long legs; extending three more outward into the air around itself in a wide gesture of defiance it held itself there, poised, pale and quivering.

On its underside, instead of stingers there was a bizarre kind of three-sided beak: this opened like a flower, revealing a red mouth lined with white, incurving hooks and glittering with running slime. As Jasmine stood staring at the creature, transfixed with shock, Ben grabbed her, pulling her back. It was lucky he did, because the thing's beak or whatever it was suddenly jabbed a full metre straight out of its body and snatched at the space where she'd been standing with a
snap
.

‘Go! Go! Get out! Everyone!
Now!
' gibbered Ben, finally regaining the power of speech. Samantha and Lauren were already on their way so, yanking on Jasmine's arm to send her off ahead of him, he ran.

Wham. WHAM!
Two more of the giant crawlers dropped onto the stage from the lighting rigs above. Ben heard seats being flipped all over the theatre: as he charged up the stairs to the exit he glanced back and saw a converging ripple in the auditorium as even more of them gave chase.

‘Run!
Run! RUN!
' he yelled, whether to the girls or himself he wasn't sure. Nobody needed further prompting. The theatre doors banged back on their hinges and swung shut, but no
one even thought of trying to seal or block them this time, they just kept running – back up the stairs, back to the foyer's upper level.

Ben ran into the choking gas at full pelt, careless of the battle still raging by the main entrance. The girls were ahead, Jasmine nearest: when she suddenly stopped Ben ran straight into her, his flailing arms connecting with two other bodies as he did so.

‘Sorry!' he spluttered. ‘Sorry!'

‘Come on!' yelled Samantha, frantically punching at the wall. ‘Come on, come on,
come on
!'

Magically, to Ben's astonishment, sliding doors parted in the fog. A downward-pointing arrow winked on. Lights beckoned from inside the elevator cubicle. Ben and the three girls piled in.

‘
Doors closing
,' the lift announced in its female voice. ‘
Lift going down.
'

I squirmed in my pit. Twenty-two minutes remained until Steadman's bombs were due to detonate. I confess, I was anxious.

I needed only to keep intruders out of the Barbican for just a little longer. But it was fully armed, fully trained soldiers who were being sent against me now.

I had been careful to choose and retain the strongest of my subjects, keeping them from the attentions of my drones. Even so, my defensive forces were down to half what they had been. The subjects who remained were loyal of course, and touchingly careless of their own safety in their desire to serve me. There were, however, few trained fighters among them, and most were unarmed.

It was fortunate, therefore, that my
newest
subjects were soldiers themselves.

In the lull after beating back the latest incursion, two of these suited men broke away from the pack. Bringing their guns with them they quickly climbed the stairs and – with no direct prompting from me – posted themselves on the balcony. While my main force returned to their positions once more to prepare for the next wave of attack, I watched through the two soldiers' eyes as they took aim, covering the foyer entrance.

Their positioning was perfect. The gas was clearing: they had a commanding view. Now any armed intruder who proved too troublesome could – to use a vivid term I'd just gleaned from the two soldiers' minds – be ‘slotted' from cover.

I had snipers. I adore it when my subjects use their own initiative.

In the pit I settled back as comfortably as I could. The
cocoons were protected and soon they would hatch. I had only to wait for my young human
protégée
to come for me.

Twenty-one minutes, now.

‘You saved us, babes!' said Lauren to Samantha, eyes shining.

‘How?' asked Jasmine. ‘How did you know where to go in the fog?'

‘You're not the only one with ideas around here,' Samantha told her.

‘Let's hope yours are better than mine,' said Ben with feeling. ‘The theatre was a
bad
suggestion. Sorry, everybody.'

‘What
were
those things?' Samantha asked.

‘Which things?' Ben asked back. ‘The big crawlers or the cocoon-things?' Realizing how stupid he sounded, he scowled and banged his fist against the cubicle's metal wall. ‘I just wish we could find out what's going on!'

‘Those cocoons,' said Samantha quietly. ‘You're sure they've got people inside?'

‘You saw the shoes,' said Jasmine. ‘Men. Women. Schoolkids.' She paused. ‘Maybe that's why, apart from Hugo and Lisa, we haven't seen any kids with crawlers on
them, just adults. Maybe all the other kids are in there.' She shivered.

‘But what're they doing, all wrapped up like that?' asked Samantha. ‘What's going to happen to them?'

‘Maybe they're dead,' said Ben. ‘Or . . . maybe something worse.'

‘Wh-what are you talking about?' asked Lauren, quailing.

‘Never mind,' said Jasmine firmly.

There was a pause.

‘Well,' she added as brightly as she could, ‘at least now we're in this lift we can try some different floors. Where are we going first?'

‘I thought we'd start at the bottom,' said Samantha.

‘Sounds appropriate,' said Ben. ‘We're pretty much at rock bottom ourselves, right? I mean, it's not like things could get much worse.'

‘Stop it, Ben!' said Jasmine, annoyed. ‘Of course things could be worse. We're still free, aren't we? We haven't been caught yet. We're doing all right!'

Ben had known what he was saying was unhelpful even as he'd said it. Chastened by Jasmine's refusal to give in to the bleakness of their situation, he looked at his feet.

‘Sorry,' he said, again.

Maybe Josh would have handled all this better
, he
thought. Josh almost never seemed down or discouraged; that was one of the things Ben found most annoying about him. How were Josh and Robert doing anyway? he wondered. Was Lisa was still unconscious? But then Ben noticed that the lift was slowing to a halt.

‘OK,' said Jasmine. ‘Get ready on the buttons. If anything bad happens we need to be able to shut the doors and get out of here as quickly as possible.'

‘Yes,
thank you
, Jasmine,' said Samantha. ‘I had worked that out for myself, you know.'

The doors slid open.

There was no forest of arms reaching in to grab them. There was no choking smoke, no gunfire and no crawlers, big or small – or none they could see. Instead, the room that the doors had opened to reveal was . . . empty.

Ben, Jasmine, Samantha and Lauren just stood there looking out. The room was silent, a silence Ben didn't want to break, and for once even Samantha and Lauren seemed to share the feeling.

To the immediate right of the lift doors was a wall that was covered in mirrors. The Barbican's usual bare concrete loomed from the ceiling, and the same ‘blue worms trodden into grey mud' carpet stretched off for some ten metres to the left before turning right round a corner: the room was a sort of L-shape. It was brightly lit and clean. Of what was going on
in the rest of the building it bore no signs whatsoever. It was just an empty room.