Crawlers (6 page)

‘Stop them!' she shouted – narrowly avoiding catching Hugo's flailing elbow in her eye. ‘Block the hole, someone, before more of them get in!'

On the wall beside where Ben happened to be standing he'd spotted something: a single board made of cork with a wooden frame, perhaps eighty centimetres wide by forty tall. It was dotted with notices that had been pinned to the cork – details of shifts for the staff, a laminated list of fire-drill procedures and a handwritten sign saying: WASH UP YOUR MUGS!

Ben pulled it off the wall. His first step took him up onto the seat of the chair nearest the sink. His second launched him upwards to land with his feet in the sink itself, crushing one of the creatures that had landed there under the thick soles of his school shoes – but Ben wasn't even looking at it. He was
looking at the air-duct's thirty-centimetre-wide hole and the wriggling things about to pour out of it.

Ben slapped the wide notice board over the hole. He felt a sudden and shocking pain in the fingers of both his hands – in the rush of the moment he'd forgotten to make sure they were free of the edges of the board. Pulling his bruised fingers out, he turned and put his back against the board to keep it where it was.

Then he saw what was going on in the room. He was standing in the sink, so he had a pretty good view.

As well as the spider-thing he'd crushed, another already lay flattened and immobile in the centre of the floor. Ben's eyes travelled from the foot that still stood on it, up the leg, and found to his surprise that the person who'd stomped on it was Robert. Robert's eyes, still red from crying, were alight with a savage triumph Ben had never seen in him before.

‘There!' screeched Lauren, pointing with a trembling hand at the third creature as it scuttled out from beneath a chair. ‘Oh, God! Kill it!
Kill it!
'

Samantha's foot came down:
scrutch
. Splayed out around her shoe, the thing's pale legs gave a convulsive shudder, then went still.

‘Are there any others?' asked Jasmine. Her eyes – like those of the rest of the group – were searching every millimetre of the floor.

‘Not any more,' said Samantha. She lifted her shoe and gave it a dainty wipe on the carpet.

‘Um . . . help?' said Ben. ‘A little help over here, please?'

His moment of quick-thinking heroism had passed. He did not like standing in the sink on the squashed remains of a spider-thing while more of them eagerly burrowed and scrabbled at the thin layer of wood between them and his back. He could feel them behind him, the surprising strength of them, pushing and digging. The aluminium duct cover had been no match for them: it could only be moments now before they'd come through the notice board – and then through him.

‘The board's not strong enough!' he said. ‘I can't hold them!'

Jasmine looked at him. ‘Help him, someone!'

Hugo scanned the room. ‘Here.' Spotting a metal wastepaper bin in the corner, he grabbed it and tipped out its contents. ‘This should keep them out for a bit, at least.'

‘Good thinking, mate,' said Josh – while (Ben noticed) taking a cautious step back.

Hugo came on regardless. Ben looked down at him, surprised again. Until this moment he'd always thought of Hugo as just some kind of farting buffoon. But here he was, coming to Ben's rescue without question.

‘You think that bin will do the trick?' Ben asked him.

‘Get the board out of the way,' said Hugo. ‘I'll put this over the hole. Nothing to it.'

‘OK then,' said Ben gratefully. ‘On three. But I warn you, these things really,
really
want to come in. Ready?'

Hugo nodded.

‘One, two . . .
three
.'

Lifting the board clear, Ben jumped past Hugo, landing on a clear spot on the floor and turning quickly. There was a
clank
as Hugo clapped the bin over the hole, then a moment of expectant silence.

Everyone in the room was focused on Hugo. He stood there, his back to the room. But then, still holding the bin in place, he turned and frowned at Ben.

‘What?' Ben asked.

In answer, Hugo took the bin off the wall.

No spider-things came out of the hole. The vent was empty.

The creatures had gone.

‘There,' said Josh, standing back from the bulging clump of maroon and charcoal-grey material he'd been wedging in the hole as best he could. ‘That looks solid enough.'

‘If those things want to come in again,' said Samantha, ‘it's
going to take more than our blazers to stop them, don't you think?'

‘I told you,' said Josh, ‘it's temporary. Just to give us a bit of warning so we can do something else.'

‘But
what
else?' asked Samantha. ‘What do you think we're going to do? I mean, do you even
know
?'

Josh pursed his lips.

Ben was still feeling slightly humiliated after the creatures' sudden disappearance. But seeing how little Josh enjoyed having his leadership questioned cheered him up a bit.

‘I'm sorry,' Josh told Samantha, with a tight, fake smile that Ben knew meant he wasn't sorry at all, ‘but I thought it was obvious. We'll keep an eye on the hole in case the spiders come back, of course. If necessary, we'll take shifts. But until they attack again, blocking that hole with anything bigger would mean we can't get to the taps and the sink. And if we stay here much longer,' he added, ‘we're going to need those.'

‘What for, cups of tea?' asked Samantha. ‘Oh yeah, I can see that'd be a big help.'

‘Tea,' said Josh, eyes narrowing, ‘yes. Water too. But also . . . something else.'

‘What?' Samantha asked.

By way of a reply, Josh looked away from Samantha. ‘Hugo?'

‘Yes, mate?'

‘Are you still watching the screens? Are those people still outside the door?'

‘No change, mate,' Hugo called back. ‘That teacher's gone, but the rest of them are still out there, just . . . standing there. Like they're waiting for something.'

‘Waiting for
us
,' said Josh, looking back at Samantha. ‘They're on guard, in case we try to come out of these rooms.'

‘Yeah,' said Samantha. ‘Maybe. So?'

‘So,' Jasmine answered for him grimly, from her place on the floor, ‘do you notice a
toilet
in here?'

There was a moment of scandalized silence as the full implications hit home.

‘No
way
,' Samantha announced. ‘There is
no way
I'm going to go to the loo in that sink. Not with you lot right there.'

‘Then I hope you don't mind holding it in,' said Josh. ‘We could be here a long time.'

Samantha made a contemptuous sucking sound with her teeth, and turned to Jasmine. ‘All right then, genius,' she said, changing the subject. ‘What about you? Discovered anything yet?'

‘I'm . . . not sure,' said Jasmine.

She had retrieved the flattened remains of the three dead creatures and was now using the notice board on her lap as
a makeshift dissecting table. Well, strictly speaking she was poking at them with a biro, but that was the best she could do in the circumstances. English might be Jasmine's weakest subject but biology, supposedly, was her strongest. Examining the creatures seemed a sensible next step: it might give her an idea of what they were up against. But so far all that she had managed to do was disgust herself.

Each spider-thing was about twenty centimetres across. Instead of eight legs though, weirdly, they had five – four long ones on one side of their wide, flattened bodies and only one, a thicker one, on the other. Also, apart from a thin band of red at the joints of each of their legs, they were almost transparent – like jellyfish. The creatures were nearly as unpleasant dead as they had been alive. They gave off a faint fishy smell and they were sticky to the touch. There was something deeply wrong about their see-through legs and the little strips of blood at their joints. Jasmine was not squeamish, but the rubbery way the creatures' flesh resisted the push of her pen made her gorge rise.

None of this was visible to anyone else. To Ben, Jasmine seemed as unfazed as if she dissected monsters every day of the week.

‘What have you found?' he asked, even more impressed by Jasmine than he had been before. ‘What are these things? Where do they come from?'

‘I honestly don't know,' she admitted. ‘These animals . . . they're not like anything I've ever seen before.'

Ben looked at her. ‘What makes you say that?' he asked.

‘Well, for one thing' – Jasmine grimaced – ‘it looks like they don't have any . . .
orifices
.'

Samantha made a snorting sound in her nose. Lauren sniggered. Jasmine sighed.

‘Er, what about the mouth, though?' asked Ben. ‘We've seen them bite, so . . .'

‘That's just it,' said Jasmine, pointing. ‘Look: they've all got these two probosces . . .'

‘Pro-
whatties
?' said Samantha.

‘Like needles,' Jasmine explained. ‘A pair of them, very sharp, for puncturing skin. But that's it. There's nothing here you could really call a mouth, and nowhere I can see for food to go. In fact . . .' She paused. ‘I think that whatever this creature is doing when it bites, it's got nothing to do with eating at all.'

‘What do you think it's doing, then?' asked Josh, without much patience.

Jasmine looked at him. ‘I've . . . got a theory,' she said carefully.

‘When Ms Gresham got bit,' put in Samantha, ‘she just seemed to go mental – right?'

‘Her eyes were weird,' said Ben.

‘It was the same with the Barbican staff,' Jasmine told him, glad he'd noticed that. ‘When we were trying to get them to let us out, they had the same look.'

‘And then the people outside,' said Ben. ‘The way they attacked, the way they stopped – it was all at once. Almost like . . .'

‘Like they're being
controlled
,' said Jasmine.

Ben and Jasmine looked at each other.

‘So you're saying . . .' Josh began. ‘Wait, what are you saying? That what we've got here is some kind of spider that
takes over your mind
?'

‘Like I said,' said Jasmine, looking down, ‘it's just a theory. Anyway,' she added a little defensively, ‘I don't think you could really say they're spiders.'

‘We could call them something else,' said Ben, eager to help. ‘How about . . . crawlers?'

‘Excuse me,' said Samantha, putting up a hand. ‘Hello?'

Everyone turned to look at her.

‘This conversation is fascinating to you, maybe,' she said, ‘but we've got a bit of a situation here, don't you think? For a start, I mean, is
anyone's
phone working yet? Anybody?'

Lauren flipped her mobile open, then shut it again glumly.

‘Well there you go,' said Samantha. ‘No phone. No Internet. Not even texts – and believe me, I've tried.'

‘What's your point?' asked Jasmine.

‘If we'd kept moving,' said Samantha, ‘we might have been all right, but oh no! Thanks to you we're stuck here, with no phones, no food, and not even a
toilet
. What I want to know is, what are we going to do about it?'

‘I don't know – Samantha, wasn't it?' said Josh with icy politeness. ‘If you have any thoughts to share I'd be delighted to hear them. What do
you
suggest we “do about it”?'

‘You're the one who put himself in charge,' Samantha snapped back. ‘What made you feel you could do that, by the way? What makes you the boss here? Have you got some special qualifications we should know about, or what?'

‘You mean, do I have any prior experience of being attacked by' – Josh sneered at Ben and made quote marks in the air – “
crawlers
”, then trapped in a room?' He smiled at Samantha mirthlessly. ‘I'm afraid not.'

‘Then what gives you the right to put all our lives in danger like this?'

Josh's smile froze.

‘Samantha . . .' said Jasmine warningly.

‘No, you just shut it too,
Jasmine
,' said Samantha, not even looking at her. ‘I mean listen to you, all of you, poncing along with your “I've got a theory”. What are we doing here? Why is this happening to us? What's going on?
When are we going to get out?
'

‘For God's sake,' roared Josh, ‘that's precisely what we're trying to
work out
, you stupid pleb!'

Ben blinked, and there was a sharp intake of breath from the rest of the group. Here it was: the side to Josh he'd always suspected, the side that people at Walsingham pretended wasn't there.

The effect was immediate.

‘Why, you stuck-up . . .' began Samantha.

‘. . . snot-nosed . . .' said Lauren.

‘. . . arrogant little public-school
git
!' Samantha finished. ‘How
dare
you call me a pleb?' Apart from two hard spots of red on either side of her nose, her face had gone pale with rage. ‘But that's what you think of us,' she added, triumphant now, hitting her stride. ‘That's what you
all
think of us, all of you, isn't it?' she repeated, turning to include all the boys.

Uh-oh . . .
thought Ben.

‘Just 'cause your parents paid money to send you to school, you think that gives you the right to look down on the rest of the world. Look at yourselves,' said Samantha, ‘acting the boss, giving orders like you're born to rule.'

‘Oh, for God's sake,' Josh repeated, rolling his eyes. ‘For your information, the only reason I took charge is because nobody else did!'

Samantha snorted. ‘Yeah, right.'

‘It's true! I didn't hear
you
coming up with any ideas until
we were in here. Come to that, you haven't said anything worth a damn
since
, either. All you do is bitch about how your mobile doesn't work!'