Numbers 3: Infinity (18 page)

‘Sarah?’

My voice echoes back to me, along with someone else’s.

‘Not Sarah. Daniel.’

Where the fuck am I?

‘Daniel?’

‘We’re in the bunker, Adam. You’ve been out cold. Saul’s got away.’

It all comes back to me. Saul and the gun. Me and the knife. Me bottling it.

‘How long’s he been gone?’

‘About five minutes.’ 

‘Shit!’

‘I’ve nearly got out of this belt. Can you tense your wrists, really tense them? I think I’m there.’

My hands have gone numb, but I feel a tugging, pulling sensation and then Daniel’s free. He sits up and finds the torch in my pocket. His hand’s a bloody mess.

‘I thought he’d killed you for a minute.’

‘Yeah, you and me both. That’s the second time that bastard’s shot me.’ He laughs weakly. ‘I need to stop this bleeding. Might take a while.’

‘I’ve gotta go, Daniel.’

I haul myself up to a sitting position.

‘I know. I’ll follow you. I’ll fix myself up first.’

‘Can you manage?’

‘Yeah, yeah. You get started. He’s got five minutes on you, that’s all. You can catch them.’

Another explosion sets my spine vibrating. This one sounds more like a rumble. A stream of small stones and dust tips down from the ceiling a metre away from us. ‘Daniel, this ain’t a great place to be if they’re blowing it up.’

‘No,’ he says. ‘I wasn’t expecting any more bombs. That’s either very good news or very bad. I might go back in there, have a look.’

‘Just get out, mate.’

‘There’s others in here might need a hand. But you must go after Sarah. Go on, Adam. Go. Follow the white dots. There’s a bit where you have to crawl, but it’s okay. Keep going. I won’t be far behind.’

‘Okay,’ I say, ‘I’m out of here. Thanks, Daniel. I’ll see you later.’

I set off, heading away from the door.

Behind me, Daniel shouts out, ‘Have you got your knife? Check Adrian’s pockets, Adam.’

I double back and go through Adrian’s things. He’s unconscious, but still breathing. I remember his number – he’ll live. But he don’t deserve to. There’s a phone, another small torch and some keys in his jacket. I pocket the torch and chuck the keys over towards Dan. ‘Here, you might find a use for these.’

Then I leg it. I run past boxes and crates and bottles and buckets. There’s so much stuff here – food, medicine, clothes. Stuff that’s sat here for two years while outside people have been starving and suffering and freezing.

I can’t think about that now. What’s in my mind is that Sarah and Mia came this way, saw this, were here minutes ago. I’ve got to get to them, catch them up, but there’s one person in between. Saul.

Chapter 41: Sarah

I
want to make it a game for her, but I can’t. I’m too scared. She nods and a frown creases the space between her eyebrows. She’s caught my anxiety. She can feel my terror in the sweat oozing out of me, from my hand to hers. I squeeze her hand even tighter.

‘Run, run!’ I say and we do, as fast as we can down a big sweeping road and into the city.

There are piles of rubble, streetlights lying at all angles like metal tree trunks, but you can tell it used to be a beautiful place. Parts of it still are. Here and there the buildings remain intact, standing like sound teeth in a mouthful of decay. Still holding hands, we run past a big church with a great arched doorway. The square in front of it is full of tents and makeshift shelters, the sort of refugee camp that sprang up in every city after the Chaos. The sort of place that was meant to make do for a few weeks until we all got back on our feet. Two years later it’s the sort of place most people are still living in.

Briefly I think about stopping. Maybe we could stay here, lose ourselves in the crowd. But as we pick our way through, the stench hits me. It smells like a farmyard. Instinctively I look down. The cardboard boxes, the plastic sheets, the wads of newspaper are all sitting in a thin soup of human waste. We’re treading in it. It’s on our shoes now. I grab the hem of my coat and hold it up to my face.

‘Mia,’ I shout, ‘do this. Do it with your blanket. Hold it up.’

She doesn’t argue. She can smell it herself. Her eyes are watering and red-rimmed.

We’re nearly through the camp when I get a stitch. I pull up and gasp as the squeezing pain grips me. I stand still and lean forward, but Mia tugs on my hand.

‘Mummy, run,’ she says.

‘In a minute,’ I say, and my words are no more than a whisper. The pain’s nearly taken my breath away.

‘Mum-my,’ Mia whines. She’s dancing from foot to foot on the spot. I know she hates it here – I do too – but right now I can’t move.

‘I know, I know. Just hang on a minute.’

I try to breathe slowly and steadily. The pain eases away, my stomach muscles relax. I let Mia pull me past the last shelters, down the side of the church and on through the streets. But her foot catches in the trailing edge of her blanket. She stumbles and the blanket falls out of her hand onto the flagstones.

‘Mummy!’ she wails. Her precious blanket is lying in a puddle, wetness soaking into it, making the blue darker as we watch.

‘Oh, Mia, for goodness’ sake!’

She’s looking at it, dancing from foot to foot again.

‘There’s no point whining. We’ll have to leave it.’

‘No, Mummy. No, no!’ She stops dancing and stamps. She’s crying now, flapping her hands about.

‘Mia, come on. We haven’t got time …’

I try to tug her away, but she digs in her heels so I’m practically dragging her along the ground.

‘Mia! Stop it!’

‘Mummy. Don’t!’

She twists her hand out of mine and starts running away from me.

‘Mia, wait!’

She doesn’t turn round. She’s running hell for leather down the street, away from the church, away from me. I try to run too, but I can’t manage more than a couple of steps before I get a stitch.

‘Mia!’

Her back shouts defiance at me. She’s getting further away. The pavement is cobbled and slippery. The sound of our feet is muffled by the fog. And now I listen I realise there’s hardly any noise at all. This city has a ghostly feel – it’s a place that’s had the life sucked out of it. And now I get a tingling in the back of my head, a sense that I’m being followed. Still moving, I look over my shoulder. There’s nothing there. All I can see is a couple of hundred metres of empty street before the fog swallows it up.

I look ahead again.

The road’s empty.

Where’s Mia? Where the hell is she?

I pick up the pace, cradling my stomach with my hands. There’s a tall wall running down the right-hand side of the road, with branches reaching over the top. It could be someone’s garden or yard. About halfway along I come to an iron gate. It’s open.

I put my hand on the metal latch. It’s cold and wet – everything’s wet in this fog. Inside I can see bushes and trees and suddenly I’m overcome by a sense of dread.

‘No, not here,’ I mutter to myself.

But she must have gone in here. It’s the only place on the street she could have gone.

‘Mia!’ I shout. ‘Come back here.’

I can’t see her. There’s a path, with trees either side of it.

I’ve seen this before. I’ve been here. I know this place.

‘Mia! Come back!’ I’m desperate now as I realise what’s happening. Dreams and reality are colliding, like they did before. Like they did in the Chaos.

I reach up to push the gate wider so I can follow her in, but the stitch is back. It’s not just in one place now, it’s spreading over and under my stomach, aching, squeezing, paralysing me. It’s not a stitch – it’s a contraction. I’m in labour. Why now? Why?

I grasp the ironwork of the gate with both hands and lean into it, trying to breathe my way through the pain. I close my eyes for a few seconds.

Breathe. Breathe. You can do this.

My eyes are closed but I can still see trees, layers of dark trunks and stones like sentries in my mind’s eye. I can feel the gravel underfoot.

There’s a face close to mine.

There’s a hand with a knife.

It’s my nightmare.

I can’t go into this place. It’s evil.

The pain lessens a bit, and I open my eyes and look through the gate.

There’s no one there.

Mia’s gone and I have to go after her.

Chapter 42: Adam

B
reathe, breathe, breathe.

There’s been another rockfall, more serious this time. I’m crawling on my hands and knees with my torch in my mouth when I feel the vibration and, a second or so later, hear the noise. The boom of the explosion mixes with the rattle of falling stones dropping into water and onto me.

The whole lot could come down. I’d be buried here. I feel like I’m buried already – the air’s so full of dust it gets stuck in my throat. My chest’s heaving, I’m choking, desperate.

Breathe in through your nose and out through your mouth.

That’s what my mum taught me when it got too much for me, when the numbers were crowding in on me. I take the torch out of my mouth and cover the bottom of my face with my hand, trying to filter the crap out of the air.

In through your nose, out through your mouth.

The noise dies away. Now there’s just the noise of my breath, in and out, in and out, and the sound of my blood thudding in my ears.

Sarah and Mia must have done this, so I can, too.

I put the torch back in my mouth and press on, swishing my hands and knees through the freezing water. The beam of torchlight moves about as I crawl, bouncing crazily on the rock wall next to my face. It makes the whole place feel even smaller. All it picks out is a metre-wide circle of rock with a weaker circle outside that. Everything else looks blacker, almost like it don’t exist. A couple more minutes and then the bright circle of light isn’t near my ear any more, it’s way over to my right, and it’s picking up these weird shapes, like teeth sprouting up from the floor. Still on my hands and knees I grab the torch and shine it around. The ceiling’s five or six metres high and there are teeth there, too, growing down.

‘Christ!’

For a moment my mind plays tricks on me. I’m in a gigantic mouth and the jaws are closing. I try to hold the torch steady, concentrate the light on one of the weird shapes. It ain’t moving. It’s a cave, not a mouth, and I’ve got to get out of here.

I ease up onto my feet, glad to get out of the water. I can breathe in here. My chest heaves as I suck the air in. Something’s different here, not just the space. I can taste smoke on my tongue.

Now I’m upright and breathing, I can run again. Which way now? There’s a white mark on the wall. I start jogging, even though my knees are killing me. This has got to be it, hasn’t it? I gotta be near the way out.

And I am. Light filters in from an open entrance. I belt up to it and burst out into the real world again.

There’s a metal gate flat on the ground in front of me, like someone shoved it from inside and trampled it underfoot.

It’s difficult to work out where I am. It’s foggy – a cold, clinging sort of fog. There’s brambles all round where the tunnel comes out and then a field, a hillside. I can just make out some shapes below, buildings, a city. And leading down, three sets of footprints in the dew: two following a straight line, one made up of little feet, all over the place.

Sarah and Mia made it out.

But Saul is on their tail.

I set off down the hill at a run.

Chapter 43: Sarah

‘M
ia! Mia!’

My voice reaches out into the fog, which flattens it, deadens it, kills it.

There’s no reply. Didn’t she hear or is she playing some kind of game?

I shove open the gate, stumble in and set off along the path Mia must have taken. For a few metres it’s gravel and trees and grass.

Then other shapes appear among the tree trunks, grey-black oblongs. Gravestones. A creature looms out of the fog, a huge bird or something. I can’t make it out for a moment, but as I get nearer I can see it’s not an animal and it’s not alive. It’s a winged figure, an angel on top of a pedestal.

I’ve got to find Mia and I’ve got to get her out of here.

The gravel crunches under my feet and I leave the path and walk through and round and over the graves.

I think of the camp we’ve just walked through, the filth of it. This is where most of those people will end up. How
many have been buried here already? Does their sickness lurk in this turf? Does it hang in the droplets of fog that I’m breathing in now?

‘Mia!’

I spin round. Everywhere’s the same. Grey and black. Trees and stones.

The path leads uphill. I’m puffing now. The fog sticks in my throat and my lungs. It doesn’t seem to have enough oxygen in it. Oh, God, where’s Mia? I can’t do this. I’m too big, too slow, too tired.

Ahead of me, I catch a movement. Something darting behind a gravestone.

‘Mia, I can see you. Stay there. I’m coming.’

I struggle up the hill but when I get to the stone, she’s not there. Something low and dark flashes away from me, visible now and then between the grave markers. Quick and silent. A rat.

‘Mia! Mia, please, I’m frightened. Where are you?’

Further down the hill, back the way I’ve come, something’s moving in the mist. Was she down there all the time? Did I plough my way past her?

‘Mia?’

The shape disappears again, crouching low, ducking behind a tree. Then a thin voice reaches me.

‘I’m here, Mummy.’

High-pitched, child-like.

Mia?

My hormone-addled brain registers a child who needs a mum. It could be Mia. I want it to be Mia.

‘Mia?’

‘Mum-my.’ Two-tone, sing-song. A child calling out to its mother.

‘I’m here. I’m coming.’

I’m close to the spot where I saw the movement. It was too big to be another rat. I look right and left. Water drips from the branches onto the top of my head. A drop trickles down the nape of my neck and I shiver.