Crawlers (14 page)

‘Because you don't know how far you'll get! You might get trapped in another room just like this one. More to the point, you might get trapped in one that's not as good as this one – not as safe, or as easy to fortify.'

‘It hasn't been all that “safe” so far,' muttered Robert – to Ben's surprise.

‘Besides,' Josh went on quickly, ‘even if you did get past the sentries, where exactly do you think you'd go after that? How far do you think you're going to get with the whole building riddled with crawlers or people who've been bitten by them? What exactly do you think you're going to achieve,' he added, ‘by
abandoning
us like this?'

‘What?' said Ben again. ‘But . . . what do you mean?'

‘Hello?' said Josh. ‘Have you thought this through at all?' He pointed at Lisa. ‘She's in no shape to come climbing through ceilings with you – and I don't think poor Robert here is, either, do you?'

Pale-faced, Robert cradled his arm and scowled.

‘We have to stay with them,' said Josh, with an expression of injured nobility. ‘We're going to stay here and wait for help to arrive. That's all there is to it.'

‘You can stay,' said Samantha, standing up. ‘I'm getting out of here.'

‘Works for me,' said Lauren.

‘If we make it, we'll tell everyone you're up here,' promised Jasmine.

‘
Well
,' scoffed Josh, momentarily disconcerted, ‘I should've guessed you people would have no qualms about leaving your schoolmates behind. It's everyone for themselves with you lot, isn't it? But, Ben,' he added, turning, ‘I'd thought better of you. I thought perhaps that loyalty to your school might mean something more to you. Clearly I was wrong.'

‘Josh,' said Robert firmly and exasperatedly, ‘just
shut up
.'

Ben stared at him. Robert's days of crawling for Josh's favour were gone, it seemed. Stunned by this mutiny from the last of his supporters, Josh blinked several times then fell silent.

‘All right,' said Samantha, turning to Ben. ‘How're we going to do this?'

Ben made a face. ‘It was my idea: I guess I ought to go first, just in case it turns out to be as stupid as Josh says. If I hit a dead end too soon, I'll turn around and come back. If I get anywhere useful, I'll try to signal you somehow. And if you don't hear from me and, er, I don't come back . . .'

‘Good luck, Ben,' said Jasmine. ‘We'll be waiting.'

‘I don't suppose anyone's got something like a torch I could borrow, by any chance?' Ben asked.

Jasmine gave him a sympathetic look, but no one answered.

Ben pursed his lips. Fair enough: he didn't exactly tend to carry torches around with him at all times just in case, either. Well, there was nothing more to be said. The lockers squeaked ominously as he climbed back on top of them. He pushed out the square tile that was nearest to the thick bar in the ceiling. Then, after a lot of wriggling and struggling that he was certain would thoroughly undermine anything heroic about his exit, Ben climbed through the gap.

The bar in the ceiling was maybe twenty centimetres wide. Ben realized he was going to have to lie on his chest, using his arms and legs to push himself along through the darkness. His school shirt and trousers scraped along the surface of the bar with a gritty, grating sound. Before the receding light from the security room behind him got too faint, he stopped to look at his right hand: his pale skin was already charcoal-grey with the dust of decades. It was filthy up there. His eyes and nose itched abominably.

Ben pushed on. The dark around him deepened, and he began to imagine things.

He thought about the storey above: if he lifted himself off
the ceiling bar even a little he could feel it against his back – concrete, rough and unforgiving. He imagined its solidity, its weight. He imagined it sinking, the gap getting narrower until he was trapped, squashed flat, or just stuck there for ever. Then he imagined the contents of the darkness to either side of him – armies of crawlers keeping silent pace with him, biding their time, watching how far he'd get, while in the rooms below ranks of enslaved adults waited, still as statues. Bolts, screws and other protrusions from the bar kept stubbing his fingers or scraping his belly, but Ben didn't mind. These things were better than what was in his head.

Then –
whump
– his head hit something.

The ceiling cavity was so dark by now that he hadn't seen anything coming. He flinched so violently he almost fell off the bar, and had to hold on tight for a moment.

When he'd got himself together he reached forward with his right hand. He felt bricks and mortar, blocking the way ahead up to the ceiling and stretching away to either side.

Ben had crawled past three internal plasterboard walls since the first one he'd left behind. The room beneath him was therefore the fourth along the passage from the security room. He had no idea how far he'd travelled in terms of actual distance but he hoped it was enough to get a head-start on the sentries. Because this, he realized, was as far along as he or anyone else in the group was going to get.

Nervously he reached out with his left hand and scrabbled in the dust and fluff for the edge of the nearest ceiling tile. He found one, and dug at it with his fingertips until it lifted. Gently, silently, but fighting another sudden and terrible urge to sneeze, Ben laid the tile on the upper surface of one of its neighbours. Then he peered into the square of empty space it had left behind.

There was a thin line of light that Ben immediately identified as coming from the gap under a door. The light, presumably from the passageway outside, stopped at the edge of something that Ben realized could be close to his face. Heart pounding a bit, he reached through the gap and felt around with his hand. He was right: just below him was a long edge of something – a shelf, he realized.

Ben knew the room was small: he'd only just passed the last internal wall when he'd met the brick one. He craned his neck down to see if he could make out more details, and his dark-adapted eyes found the looming silhouettes of what could be more shelves.

He removed the ceiling tile that was just to the left of his knees, placing it somewhere off to his right, as before. Trying as best he could not to allow any of his body weight to press down anywhere else, he wriggled around until he was in position to feed his feet through the gap. He kept wriggling – lying crosswise on the bar now – until his legs,
then his waist, could follow his feet into the room below. Of course he still couldn't reach the floor, even with the tips of his toes: he wasn't tall enough. He held the edge of the ceiling bar as tightly as he could, partly because as he pushed himself through the gap he was supporting more and more of his weight, but partly also because he knew that in a moment he would have to let the bar go. Once he did, there might be no way up again.

He let it go anyway.

Ben landed almost instantly, stumbling a little, but managed not to lose his balance. Turning to face the light under the door, he groped forward like a blind man until his hands met the door's sides, feeling around for a switch. He found one. When his eyes adjusted to the sudden glare of the overhead bulb, Ben looked around.

He was in a broom cupboard.

Three of the broom cupboard's walls were lined almost floor-to-ceiling with the shelves he had noticed before. The shelves were quite deep, and the room was so small that the ones to Ben's left and right almost met the sides of the door. There were perhaps two square metres of floor space – which, Ben supposed grudgingly, was actually quite big for a broom cupboard. But the place was still a broom cupboard, and not much to look at, particularly after the effort he'd made to get there.

Grimly, Ben started looking around for anything that might be . . . useful.

There was a vacuum cleaner, tucked in the gap under the lowest shelf, in the cupboard's left-hand corner from where Ben was standing. Yes, undoubtedly ‘useful' for its purpose, but not quite what he had in mind.

The shelves were stacked with cleaning products – packets of dusters and bottles of chemicals. Ben had seen a film once in which the hero had mixed a few common household chemicals in various proportions and produced some handily powerful home-made explosives. Detailed instructions had not been provided.

There was a mop and bucket. The mop handle was made of wood, about a metre and a half long and quite solid-looking. Ben supposed that this, held quarterstaff-style, might make a useful mêleé weapon: a fabulous martial artist like Jackie Chan or Tony Jaa would have no trouble holding off a horde of bitten adults with that. But Ben was not a fabulous martial artist.

There was a toolbox. Ben opened it without much enthusiasm but was still disappointed to find that it only contained the things you usually find in a toolbox. Not even a crowbar. Just a hammer, a spirit level and an assorted bunch of ordinary screwdrivers. You might hurt someone (or something) with those, Ben supposed, but only if they were close enough
to grab you already, and by then it would probably be too late.

Josh had been right. This room
was
worse than the security room. Ben's idea of finding an escape route for everyone, the idea that had caused Jasmine to smile at him in that wonderful way, had turned out to be nothing more than a waste of everyone's time. Alone, covered in dust, Ben stood in the broom cupboard and sighed.

Then Samantha stuck her head through the hole in the ceiling.

‘Wow,' said Samantha. ‘This is your way out?'

Ben watched as her eyes flicked around the broom cupboard, taking in the details.

She smirked. ‘No offence or anything, but it's a bit crap, isn't it?'

‘I thought,' said Ben, attempting to regain some control over the situation, ‘that the idea was that everyone was going to wait for my signal. What are you doing here?'

‘Fancied a change of scene,' said Samantha blithely. Then: ‘Turn around.'

‘Why?'

‘Because I'm coming down, I'm in a skirt, and I don't want you eyeing up my knickers. Obviously.'

‘Oh,' said Ben, colouring slightly. ‘Right.' He turned to face the door. He heard scuffling, wriggling, the slap of feet meeting floor, then Samantha was in the broom cupboard with him.

‘You can turn back now.'

When he did so, Samantha was smiling and looking him straight in the eye. Both legs of her black school tights were laddered, exposing bare, pale skin. Her white school blouse was smeared with dust and dirt from the ceiling cavity. Her face was grubby. Her blonde hair was tousled. As she stood there, hand on hip, Ben was uncomfortably aware that the broom cupboard, no palace to begin with, seemed to have halved in size.

‘Look at this place,' said Samantha, still grinning. ‘Lauren's going to freak. She's claustrophobic, remember?'

‘Lauren's coming too?' asked Ben, horrified. ‘What for?'

‘Same reason as me,' said Samantha. ‘Because we thought you'd found us a way out. Or were you maybe planning to ditch us all and go off by yourself, like your mate said?'

‘Josh isn't my mate.'

‘Is anyone?' asked Samantha, innocently.

Ben frowned at her. ‘I was just about to climb back up,' he said. ‘I was going tell everyone this was a dead end.'

‘Whatever,' said Samantha, losing interest in him and looking instead at the surrounding shelves and their contents.

‘Can't you go tell Lauren to go back?' he asked.

‘She's probably halfway here by now. She'll have had a bad enough time just getting on the bar-thing. If I tell her to go back, she'll just freeze completely, then we'll be stuck here. In this cupboard.' Samantha smirked again. ‘Just the two of us.'

Ben was starting to get infuriated. Samantha was so impossible, he found himself wanting to say something – anything – to take that smirk off her face.

‘That stuff you said before,' he began. ‘You don't seriously think Jasmine's got a crawler on her, do you?'

Samantha's eyes glittered. ‘Why? D'you fancy her or something?'

‘No,' said Ben. Then: ‘Well, that's got nothing to do with it.'

Samantha raised an eyebrow.

‘What I mean is,' said Ben quickly, ‘was that stuff about Jasmine being a traitor just to wind her up, or what?'

Samantha's eyes narrowed. ‘You don't know Jasmine,' she said. ‘You never laid eyes on her before tonight.'

‘That's true,' said Ben. ‘But—'

‘I'm at school with her,' said Samantha. ‘I tell you, she's changed.'

Ben blinked. ‘How do you mean?'

Before she answered, Samantha looked quickly up at the hole in the false ceiling. Then she took a step closer to Ben.

‘I don't like her,' she said. ‘That's no secret, you must have figured that out by now. But do you want to know why?'

‘If you like.'

‘She's
cold
,' said Samantha. She grimaced. ‘Unfriendly. Her first day at Swatham I tried to get talking to her, we all did, but she blanked us. It's been the same ever since. Oh, in class she's always first with her hand up, always brown-nosing – but outside? Nothing.' Samantha sneered. ‘Jasmine's too good for the rest of us. She's always kept herself to herself. Only now . . .' She frowned.

‘What?' said Ben.

‘Now she won't shut up! The whole night she's yapping – we should do this, we shouldn't do that. Worse than your mate Josh.'

‘I told you,' said Ben, ‘he's not my—'

‘Listen,' said Samantha, stepping so close to Ben now that he could feel the warm breath that came with her words. ‘Something's definitely different about Jasmine tonight. The way she speaks, the way she's been acting – she's not normally like this. So
watch her
, that's all I'm saying.'