Crawlers (10 page)

The grin had gone now. Ben's mouth hung open.

‘I . . . I didn't mean—' he managed.

Jasmine raised a hand to interrupt him. ‘Excuse me, but –
you know what? On second thoughts I'll watch the screens by myself.'

She turned her back on him and sat down facing the monitors.

After a moment she heard the door click shut behind her.

So that was how Ben found himself kicked out of the monitor room for the second time in less than half an hour. Only, instead of continuing to get on the wrong side of Josh, this time he seemed to have blown things completely with Jasmine.

What she'd said about him being ‘smug' had stung him badly. He was all too aware of the privileges of his fee-paying education. He
did
go to a posh school – and, to his shame, some kids at that school did think less of people who weren't so lucky. That was why Ben had flinched when Josh had called Samantha a ‘pleb'. It was exactly the kind of obnoxious, arrogant attitude that he most hated to be associated with. And now Jasmine had apparently classed him squarely in the same category.

Standing once again with his back to the monitor-room door, he looked at the rest of the group.

Robert and Hugo were simply staring into space. Ben supposed they must have zoned out; gone into some kind of
mental holding pattern while they waited to be rescued. But their expressions, he noticed, were every bit as eerily blank and vacant as those on the faces of the adults outside.

The silent, mousey girl – Ben had almost forgotten her name again . . .
Lisa
, that was it – just sat on her chair. Her hair still hung over her face and she was still hugging her knees, rocking herself back and forth, again and again.

Samantha and Lauren were huddled over their phones, whispering about something.

And lolling in a chair, looking up at Ben, was Josh.

‘Back with us so soon?' Josh asked – with what Ben considered a textbook example of the ultimate ‘smug grin'.

‘Er—' said Ben. But he was saved from having to think up some lame excuse for why he wasn't next door with Jasmine by a sudden interruption.

An explosion of sound resolved into beats. There was a bar of tinny keyboard intro from a mobile phone's built-in speaker. Then Samantha and Lauren started to sing.

‘
OOOOOOOH baby babe . . .
' they crooned, then looked at each other and burst into giggles as everyone turned to stare at them.

‘Er . . . 'scuse me?' said Hugo, who'd turned round in his chair.

‘
OOOOOOOH baby babe
,' they both sang, ‘
I'm a slave to your love!
'

‘Excuse me,' Hugo repeated. ‘Do you mind?'

‘Mind what?' Samantha asked innocently. The music continued, sounding incredibly loud after all the relative quiet in the room. Lauren too had stopped singing, but her grin was wide and her eyes gleamed in gleeful anticipation.

‘The music,' said Hugo.

‘What about it?'

‘Could you
turn it off
, please?'

‘Why?'

‘Because it's rubbish?' Hugo suggested.

Samantha's eyes widened as she pretended to look shocked for a moment. Then she shrugged. ‘That's just your opinion.'

Hugo stared at her, nonplussed, as the music continued. Samantha stared straight back.

‘Look,' he managed eventually, ‘I really,
really
don't want to have to listen to this stuff.'

‘Cover your ears then,' said Samantha.

Hugo blinked. ‘You . . . you're not the only person in the room, you know!' he spluttered.

‘Well spotted,' said Samantha serenely. ‘So?'

‘So . . . why should the rest of us have to put up with your horrible racket?'

‘Why should we have to turn our music off?' Samantha asked back. ‘Just because
you
say so?'

‘But . . . can't you listen to it on headphones or something?'

‘Don't have none,' said Samantha, still staring at him.

It was a challenge, Ben realized. This was a game that Samantha had obviously played many times before. And now it was Hugo's move.

What could he do? Ben watched Hugo's face as the possibilities slowly percolated through the brain behind it. He could try to grab the phone from the girls, but that was very physical: Hugo was reluctant to push things that far. Ben watched him look to Josh for guidance.

But Josh shook his head.

Now Ben could see that Hugo was
really
confused. Hugo always relied on Josh. But while being mates with Josh might count for something at their school, apparently that meant nothing here.

Hugo was out of his element. He was helpless.

‘Well, I think it's very selfish of you!' he said finally.

Samantha's grin was triumphant.

Ben just watched. An ugly thought had occurred to him.

He was in the same position as Hugo, he realized; worse, probably. He knew next to nothing about the people in the room with him. Even the ones from his own school weren't much more than strangers to him – or enemies. And yet here they all were, trapped together, reacting to the situation in their various unpredictable personal ways.

What if Jasmine was right?
he thought. What if one – or more! – of the group
had
been secretly bitten and taken over? Suddenly it didn't seem like such a ridiculous idea after all, for one simple reason:

How would he know?

The door to the monitor room was solid and fitted well in its frame: when Ben had closed it behind him Jasmine was sealed off from the rest of the group. For the first time, she was alone. Her shoulders sagged with relief.

She did feel a little bad about kicking Ben out.
OK
, she admitted to herself,
maybe more than a little
. But the silence of his absence felt blissful. For a few minutes at least she didn't have to put up a front any more. At last she could give in to what she was really feeling.

For more than two hours now Jasmine had been busying her mind with what was happening, working out what to do about it. She'd made herself concentrate on each moment as it came, examining every detail, wringing out all the information she could. It had been a good strategy, because behind all that cool analysis her ears still rang with screams.

Jasmine was scared. Horribly, desperately scared.

This wasn't, she knew, a question of cowardice or weakness.
While it was true that the boys – or Josh, Hugo and Ben at any rate – seemed, on the outside, to be relatively unfazed by their situation, Jasmine knew that wasn't because they were stronger than her.
It was because they weren't thinking clearly.

They believed they were going to be rescued – that it was only a question of waiting. This comforting certainty had taken the place of any further rational examination of the situation. Jasmine could see why: the possibility that they
weren't
going to be rescued was too grim to contemplate.

She looked at the time-code at the corner of the nearest monitor. If the evening had gone according to schedule the play would be nearing its end. Before much longer, she and Ms Gresham and the other girls would have been on their way home. The gulf between that outcome and what had actually taken place seemed impossible to reconcile.

How had it happened? How had she ended up trapped with a load of kids she hardly knew while the rest of the building went mad? What were the crawlers? Where had they come from?
Why was this happening to them?

Sudden movement on the monitors snapped her out of her reverie.

No less than four police vans had arrived: the feed from the camera that covered the Barbican's main entrance was flickering with their revolving lights. As Jasmine watched, the
vans' doors slid back, spilling out black-clad men in helmets carrying batons and shields.

Riot police.

Jasmine reached forward and started punching buttons on the console in front of the monitors. Obediently their contents began to change and swap as they showed the feeds from different cameras all over the building. The view of the frozen sentries out in the passageway vanished, settling instead on one she hadn't seen before: this camera must be positioned on the foyer ceiling. It looked down on a spot not far from the main street entrance.

At first the police were visible only as a growing shadow against the glass. But not for long. Two of them shoulder-charged the doors, then they all burst into the foyer. They locked shields and formed a phalanx, batons raised.

It was weird seeing the scene unfold in silence – scarier, somehow. There were maybe thirty riot police on the screen but all Jasmine could hear was the sound of her own breathing.

She got halfway out of the chair to tell the others what was happening – but then she noticed more movement on another of the monitors. A hard ball of ice-cold fear formed in her chest.

‘Oh, no . . .' she whispered.

On one, two, three of the screens now Jasmine could see people sneaking into position, massing in the foyer's
surrounding passages. Each one of them moved with eerie precision, following exactly the footsteps of the person in front of them. Each had an indistinct but unmistakable shape on the back of their neck.

At the same time Jasmine noticed a strange, spreading blur on the stretch of concrete wall over the main doors – over the heads of the police. This wasn't something wrong with the screen:
it was more crawlers.

The police were walking into another trap. And there was no way to warn them.

All at once, baring their teeth in identical snarls of rage, hundreds of people burst from their hiding places and charged at the ring of riot police from all directions.

Jasmine watched in silence.

Ordinary men and women – middle-class, culture-loving adults dressed in suits and dresses and overcoats and cardigans – were now storming across the carpeted foyer like ravening beasts. The police barely had time to brace themselves before the first of them crunched into the ring of shields, which vanished under a scrum of pressing bodies, screaming faces and flailing, grasping limbs.

The police apparently couldn't quite bring themselves to hit their opponents. Instead they held their sticks crosswise to try to fend off the crowd. But their circle squeezed inexorably inward. Slowly they were being pushed back.

When they were in range, the crawlers dropped on them.

One by one, the police stopped fighting and started slapping at themselves. An officer in the centre suddenly froze in place, standing completely rigid before collapsing.

Then the ring of shields broke. The crowd surged through.

Again, it happened very fast. One or two black-clad figures remained standing for a few seconds more, brandishing their batons, but threats, even blows, had no effect. In moments all the hapless riot cops were on the floor – forced to the ground and held down while the crawlers did their work. The crowd piled on top of them, grabbing arms and legs, yanking off helmets. Soon the last of the invaders was subdued.

Now, at last, the crowd pulled back. Their frenzy was gone. Their hands had stopped clutching and flailing and grabbing, and had fallen to their sides. Now they were waiting.

One by one the fallen riot police got up again. One by one – eyes glassy and staring, movements awkward and puppet-like at first – they joined the surrounding crowd. Without speaking, or even acknowledging each other, the crowd dispersed. Pausing only to pick up the discarded shields, helmets, armour and other equipment that were the only evidence of the battle that had just taken place, they set off in the various directions from which they had come.

The screens emptied of people, leaving bare carpet and deserted corridors.

So much for getting rescued.

‘Here,' said Samantha suddenly as the music continued. ‘Can you smell something?'

While Ben, Robert, Josh and Hugo sniffed the air, Lisa stopped rocking herself.

‘No,' said Josh.

‘What?' said Ben. He noticed that Lauren had started smiling.

‘There's a weird smell in here,' said Samantha. ‘Seriously. I think it's getting stronger.'

‘What kind of smell?' said Hugo.

‘I don't know,' said Samantha, ‘but I think it smells a bit like . . . wee.'

Lauren made a snorking sound in her nose, then burst out laughing.

Samantha sniffed once, then grimaced. ‘Yeah,' she said, nod-ding, ‘there's a definite whiff of wee in here. Can't you smell it?'

The boys looked at each other uncertainly.

‘It's almost,' said Samantha, ‘as if someone's
wet themselves
.'

She turned, casting a suspicious glance at everyone in the room – before finally, exaggeratedly, settling on Lisa.

Under her fringe of hair Lisa jerked her face to one side as if she'd been slapped.

Lauren laughed like a hyena.

Ben frowned. He really couldn't smell anything. But then, of course, he realized . . .

‘
Has
anyone wet themselves?' asked Samantha. ‘No?' she added with heavy emphasis when nobody answered. ‘Oh. Then it must be
you
, Lisa.'

Lisa said nothing, just sat frozen on her chair.

Samantha started to smile – the kind of smile a cat might make while torturing a mouse.

‘Lisa has these
accidents
sometimes,' she said. ‘She doesn't mean to, but she just can't help it. It's a bit embarrassing, so don't be mean to her about it, but I thought you boys should know. If something starts to smell a bit
pissy
in here, don't worry. It's only Lisa.'

Ben and the other boys said nothing. What could they say? Ben felt his face going red and he didn't know where to look. The worst thing was, he knew that the lack of reaction would make poor Lisa think that everyone was taking Samantha's words at face value.