Apocalypse Cow (36 page)

He spun as he dropped, but Lesley didn’t see him hit the ground, as she was too busy flailing for some kind of purchase to stop sliding towards the open door, along with Terry, whose upper body was dangling out. Somehow, Terry managed to brace himself on the door frame. Lesley butted up against him. The combined weight of Geldof and Mary thumped against her hip and – even with debilitating panic trying to shut down her brain – she had time to pray that Terry’s muscular arms weren’t just for show.

Lesley had always thought accidents were supposed to happen in slow motion, that you had time to reflect on your impending doom. For her, the crash took place at a terrifying speed. Had they been flying in open space, Bernard probably would have been able to right the helicopter with little effort; it was little worse than bad turbulence. But there was no room for error in the station, and the movement was enough to bring the rotors into contact with an overhead cable.

The helicopter lurched violently to the left, sending them toppling back into the cabin. There was a sharp ping, followed by the whiplash zing of severed cable. Something whizzed just past the top of Lesley’s head as the chopper shuddered, yawed and then dropped the five metres to the platform. Lesley barely had time to register the shuddering impact before the helicopter began to spin. The blades sheared off on contact with a concrete pillar and cartwheeled across the platform. A large section of one of the rotors skipped clean over the station roof, while smaller fragments embedded themselves in the nearest train, all accompanied by the crazed whine of the engine and the whisper of flying metal.

And then, as suddenly as it had begun, it was over. The helicopter slid to a halt. The screaming engines took one last breath and sighed into silence. Lesley waited for the pain to come, for blood to begin gushing out of a wound that shock was concealing from her. But, as she patted her body with trembling hands, she realized she was unharmed. Terry, Mary, James and Geldof were all doing the same.

Lesley had come to terms with the fact she was not dying when she noticed the rip in the fuselage, where the broken cable had sliced through the metal like a giant razor-sharp claw. That was what had whipped inches over her head. She
followed
the ragged cut, which ran diagonally down and bisected the windscreen directly in front of the pilot’s seat. A fine mist of blood was sprayed across the Perspex. That was when Lesley realized she couldn’t see Bernard.

She leaned forward, almost against her will. He was slumped to one side, held in place by his seatbelt. The top of his skull was missing, sliced off at a jaunty angle to expose a cross-section of his brain. Two weeks ago, the gory image would have set her stomach churning, but her only thought now was that a few inches lower and that would have been her.

A scramble to exit the helicopter followed. They jumped onto the platform, instantly slumping to the ground. Mary was shaking uncontrollably while James knelt before Geldof, who was resting his head on his knees. Terry grabbed Lesley’s hand and helped her to her feet. She stumbled over to the edge of the platform where Brown had fallen. The track was empty. There was a trail of blood, what looked like pints of the stuff, leading under the train at the next platform. Terry joined her and looked down at the gory trail.

‘Do you think he’s dead?’ Lesley asked.

‘If he isn’t, he will be soon,’ said James, who had also appeared by Lesley’s side. ‘We should go.’

‘Shouldn’t we look for him, just to be sure?’ Lesley suggested.

Terry put a hand on her shoulder. ‘Let’s just get out of here.’

As Lesley stared at the bloody smear on the track, her suspicion that Brown had the virus came whispering back. It was very unlikely that an average human could have survived that fall, yet he had dragged himself away. All the same, she didn’t have the nerve to leap down and follow the blood trail.
Even
a badly wounded Brown would be a fearsome adversary, and if he really was infected, she had no desire to be anywhere near his bodily fluids.

James salvaged the bags from the wreck and then marshalled the remaining group members. The colour had returned to Mary’s cheeks, although she was clutching Geldof’s hand so hard Lesley was worried she might break some fingers.

They set off down the track to walk the few hundred metres to the Chunnel entrance. Lesley glanced back at the train Brown had crawled under. Nothing moved save for a curtain, caught by a slight breeze, fluttering through an open window.

Please let him be dead
, she thought.

18

Brown and out

The tunnel mouth yawned before them, at first taking shadowy nibbles from the rails, then swallowing them up in one gulp of impenetrable blackness. They stopped on the verge, lined up like wildebeest along the banks of a murky river, waiting for the first brave, or stupid, individual to take the plunge and draw the attention of the lurking crocodiles.

Lesley chewed her bottom lip and shone her torch into the hungry maw, which swiftly gobbled up the weak beam. In the dazed moments of rest between rounds of sex the previous evening, she had begun to chart the book she planned to write about their flight, roughly figuring out the chapters. Each one so far contained some kind of mishap to be overcome. Now she was staring the final chapter in the face. If the pattern so far was anything to go by, there would be a nasty surprise waiting for them in the unwritten pages ahead.

‘I’m not so sure this is a good idea,’ she said, her mind flipping through all the possible titillating ways a character could die while walking through a sub-sea tunnel during an
outbreak
of a pernicious virus that turned animals into deadly fiends.

Terry was eyeing the tunnel mouth as though he expected it to sprout a set of fangs and start gnashing. ‘Oh, it’s a terrible idea. Who suggested it?’

‘That would be you,’ Lesley replied.

‘Somebody should have told me I was being a moron.’

James also clicked on his torch, which cast a far more virile and determined beam than Lesley’s. ‘Too late for second thoughts, folks.’

‘It’s never too late for second thoughts, especially when that second thought is: “I think we’re about to be suffocated, drowned, electrocuted, shot and/or eaten alive”,’ Lesley retorted. ‘I’d rather swim to France than go in there.’

‘Good luck with that,’ James said.

His face expressionless, he walked into the tunnel. Everyone stayed put while he quickly became nothing more than a bobbing light. Lesley braced herself for the sound of snapping jaws and for the light to be dragged off into the void at great speed. Nothing happened.

‘Bugger it,’ she said, and followed, the others keeping step.

Torchlight danced skittishly across the blank walls and floor of the tunnel as they advanced at a brisk pace to catch up with James, who had stopped to wait for them. When his face loomed out of the darkness, he was wearing a small smile.

‘If I get killed, I’m so going to haunt you for suggesting this,’ Lesley told Terry. ‘Floating teacups, underpants in the blender, toothbrush up your bum while you’re asleep. All that poltergeist bollocks.’

Terry squeezed her hand. ‘You’re not going to die. At least, not until you’ve published your book and written a will leaving all your money to me. Then you might have a wee accident.’

A cry of pain echoed down the tunnel as Lesley pinched Terry, hard.

They crept forward, wary of losing their footing on the rails, alternating their beams between the track, the walls and the darkness ahead of them. Lesley glanced back longingly at the circle of light a few times, until the tunnel curved and there was nothing left of the outside world to see. Before very long, they came to a recessed doorway in the tunnel’s left-hand wall, perched at the top of a short flight of metal stairs. A green sign showing a stick figure following an arrow through the door was affixed to the wall.

‘What’s that?’ Terry asked.

‘It’s a service tunnel,’ Mary said. Everyone turned to look at her. ‘People used it to escape during the Chunnel fire, remember?’

‘Let me check it out,’ James suggested. ‘It might be better than walking on the tracks.’

James mounted the stairs, each clanking footstep drawing a cringe from Lesley. She strained to hear if the racket was attracting the attention of any lurking animals. In particular she was worried about rats, which tended to enjoy hanging around dark, damp tunnels. She thought she heard a scuffing sound from somewhere behind them. In the silence that followed James disappearing through the door, she convinced herself it was just her imagination.

A few tense minutes later, James returned. ‘It looks good. Let’s go.’

The others clunked up the stairs and shuffled through the
walkway
in single file, emerging into a passageway slightly smaller than the train tunnel. It was as dark as the main tunnel, but at least the floor was smooth, reducing the risk of a sprained ankle.

‘How far is it to France, then?’ Geldof asked.

‘Good question,’ Terry said. ‘Anyone know?’

In normal circumstances, smart phones would have been whipped out in a frantic rush to be the first to Google the factoid. Instead, there was silence.

‘In that case, we should only have one torch on at a time,’ James said. ‘Save on batteries. We don’t want to run out halfway across.’

Lesley could see the logic in the argument, yet as the torches snapped off one by one, she grew increasingly fretful. One torch was enough to illuminate little more than a few metres ahead. Outside the cone of light was darkness so profound it made her head swim. It lay deep and blank ahead and flowed around the torchlight, like water around the prow of a boat, closing in again behind them. The thought of creeping through a pitch-black tube with only one puny light source brought a tightness to her chest she had not felt since she had outgrown her teenage asthma.

Every tiny noise they made – footsteps, the whisper of fabric, a rasp of breath – echoed along the tunnel. The sounds came back to Lesley’s ears as the fast and furtive footsteps of somebody creeping along behind them, the rustle of ratty backs brushing the walls, the hungry pant of a hulking bull. She quickened her step, crowding into James’s back. Her foot clipped his ankle.

‘Ow!’

‘Sorry. I’m just a bit nervous.’

‘Just nervous? I’m bricking it,’ Terry said.

Lesley tried to laugh. It came out as a wheeze.

They tramped on, gradually descending. The service tunnel began to smell of damp rock with an undercurrent of fungus, even though the walls of the tube were fashioned from moulded concrete. Lesley thought she could sense the great body of water bearing down on them. As a girl, she had always hated being driven through the Clyde Tunnel, fearfully eyeing the trickles of water that ran down the walls. She assumed they were an advance party whose job was to find sneaky ways down from the riverbed, slowly nibbling at the structure until it was compromised enough for the river to come roaring through and drown the wide-eyed girl clutching the back of the driver’s seat. And the Clyde Tunnel was only a few hundred metres long, small potatoes compared with this behemoth.

Lesley wasn’t really a babbler, but in this situation she felt any kind of conversation was better than listening to her own internal prophecies of doom.

‘You know, this is pretty ironic,’ she said in a slightly squeaky voice. ‘We’re trying to sneak through from Britain to France, but it’s always been the other way round.’

‘What do you mean?’ Terry asked.

‘You used to get loads of immigrants trying to walk through, until security was tightened. The odd one still tries to make it.’

‘Do any of them get through?’

‘No. Actually, I think one of them got hit by a train or something last year.’

‘Well, that’s encouraging,’ Geldof said. ‘I don’t suppose the others were eaten alive by zombie animals, were they?
I’m
sure hearing that would really help keep our spirits up.’

Lesley fell silent.

On they marched, the sway of James’s torch across the blank tunnel walls lulling Lesley into a trance-like state that dulled her fears down to an acceptable background level. She completely lost track of time, so had no idea how far they had come when James, who was walking several paces ahead of the rest of the group, stopped abruptly.

‘What is it?’ Geldof whispered.

The beam of light, which had faded from strong white to golden yellow, played over something partially blocking the tunnel. It looked like a cross between a lorry and a subway carriage, exactly the kind of vehicle an evil mastermind would use to ferry minions around his underground lair. The door to the driver’s cabin lay ajar.

‘Probably a service vehicle,’ James replied.

James edged forward, the others huddled up behind him. When they reached the front of the vehicle, he shone his torch into the cabin. The following pack shrieked in unison when the light picked out a skeletal corpse lying askew in the driver’s seat. He or she was dressed in a brown overall that had been ripped to shreds, revealing the off-white glimmer of bone. The key sat in the ignition.

‘What happened?’ Geldof asked.

James leaned into the cabin and looked closely at the bones. ‘Rats. You can see the teeth marks on the bones. Don’t worry, though: this guy’s been here for a few weeks. The rats have long gone.’