Pandaemonium (34 page)

Blake, understanding that this is hardly the time for counselling, drops a shoulder, slams into her and picks her up in a fireman’s lift, carrying her off in time to see Beansy and Yvonne turn the corner out of sight.

Kane, by dint of that moment’s aghast fascination, has faced the rear long enough to witness Rocks tumble to the deck. He’s courageously trying to keep himself between the monster and Caitlin, but in attempting to check his pace and not run into the back of her, his feet have kicked together and brought him down.

Caitlin stops and turns, aware of him tumbling at her heels. She bends down to help him, but from Kane’s lengthened perspective, he can tell the creature is going to get there either before Rocks is vertical again or only a couple of paces later.

Almost everything inside Kane is telling him to flee. Maybe it’s only the spark of disbelief that presents an alternative course; from a lifetime’s experience, he knows it can’t be courage. He hefts the fire extinguisher again and runs in the opposite direction to the one his survival instincts are dictating.

‘Caitlin - get clear,’ he calls, just as all four of them are about to converge. Caitlin throws herself to one side and Kane drives the cylinder forward with all of his momentum, smashing it into the creature’s face. He feels it in his shoulders, in his abdominals, and in his own rattling teeth as something crunches, something breaks on the end of the metal.

The creature reels, staggering backwards, then collapses against a wall before dropping to the floor. Kane turns to assist Rocks, but he is already up and running, Caitlin a couple of paces ahead.

Kane glances back as he reaches the corner. The creature is climbing to its feet, black blood and what looks like teeth pouring from jaws that don’t appear to connect properly any more. He can still feel an echo of the impact in his hands. It is the only act of violence he has committed in his adult life, and despite what he committed it
upon
, the memory of the sensation makes him feel sick. Nonetheless, he knows the whole guilt and self-disgust package would have been a worthwhile price to pay if the fucker was actually dead.

He turns the corner into the corridor leading to reception, and is dismayed to find his fellow fugitives heading towards him, rather than away with all possible haste. He can’t see beyond the fire doors behind the rearmost figure of Beansy, but he’s guessing that this means the mystery guest didn’t come stag.

With Blake burdened by the weeping weight of Rebecca, it is Rocks who is leading the retreat. He and Kane soon converge, midway along the passage, upon the door to the executive dining room. This has been unused and out of bounds during their stay, so they have no idea what is in there or where it leads. All they know is that it is their only option.

Kane grabs the handle. It jerks down freely enough but the door itself fails to budge.

‘Fuck’s sake.’

He tries the handle again, pulling back against the door in case it’s just an awkward catch, but there is no way this thing is shifting. The rest of the group has gathered behind him.

‘It’s locked,’ he reports. ‘It’s fucking locked.’

He looks to either side, finds a creature filling the corridor to left and to right. The one with the sore face doesn’t look inclined to sit licking its wounds, nor to forgive and forget, while its counterpart lets out an ear-splitting roar, preparatory to a charge.

Einstein said that ‘religion is an attempt to find an out where there is no door’. Kane has never understood this quite so acutely as now. There are no more fire extinguishers, no weapons to be improvised.

Rocks shoulders it, stepping back to the opposite wall and hurling himself against the solid wood. It doesn’t give. Kane reflects bitterly on how reassuring that would be if they were safely locked on the
other
side, when suddenly it swings open twenty degrees.

They all pile into the narrow gap, Kane shoving Blake and Rebecca through it with the creatures flanking him mere yards away. The door slams to, the second Kane is clear. He sprawls on the carpet, looking up to see the key being turned by the determined figure of Sendak, who then slides a formidably heavy sideboard back into place as a barrier.

Breathless and choking with the sheer impossibility of what has transpired over the past two minutes, Kane stands up, turns to Sendak and tries to speak.

‘It was, it was . . .’ is as far as he can get. He points back at the door, eyes wild, unable to articulate.

Sendak, grim but calm, silently puts his fists to his temples and extends his index fingers.

Kane nods in frantic affirmation.

The only article of non-functional decor is a yellowed and tattered head shot of George W Bush taped about seven feet up on one wall. That the gormless fucker is smiling down upon a scene of chaos and total disaster is almost reassuringly familiar.

There’s a clock a few feet along from George. Adnan reads that it’s dead on eleven, then realises that the second hand isn’t moving. WTF? That’s what his watch read when it died on him this morning. He checks his mobile, as he has been doing since: the only thing it’s good for, the paltry signal it achieved yesterday but a memory in the face of today’s flatline. The phone tells him it’s ten past ten. It feels much later, and he fears it’s going to be a very long night.

Everyone is just standing around, some dazed, some hysterical, all of them waiting for someone to tell them what to do. The only adult, Mrs McKenzie, seems fully occupied by tending to the quivering wreck that is Gillian, slumped on the floor against a wall with her arms clutched around her knees. Anxious glances are directed towards the corridor, searching for Sendak, or at least for one of the teachers.

Those doors have to be closed, Adnan thinks. He understands this with a primal need, like they’re letting in poison gas. They have to be closed, and now, but he feels as though he doesn’t have a voice to demand it, like if he opened his mouth to speak, nothing would emerge. He’s just waiting, they’re all just waiting, helpless children, crying for the grown-ups to come. He sees Maria with her hands clasped and her lips moving, recognises that she’s saying Hail Marys. That’s the first thing to jolt him out of stasis: gods or grown-ups, they would die if they kept waiting for either to show up and save them.

The second jolt is more physical: a reverberating thump against the emergency doors, accompanied by a slap of feet and a low growl of frustration. The doors hold, but the whole frame is shaken. They open outwards, which makes them all the harder to breach, but this also means they’re only as good as the hinges holding them up and the wood those hinges are screwed on to.

Adnan takes hold of a badminton net-stand and carries it to the emergency exit, where he slides it through the handles for further reinforcement.

‘We need to barricade this fucker, right now,’ he announces. ‘And get those other doors shut as well.’

One or two of them look at him like he’s raving incoherently, but for most, the message gets through and the spell is broken. Maria unclasps her hands and helps Deborah in putting a shoulder to a set of five-a-side goals, looking almost grateful to be taking action. Radar arrives at the emergency exit with a second net-stand. There is another wallop at the outside doors as he and Adnan pass the shaft between the handles, but it’s duller, the added metalwork absorbing part of the blow. It will hold.

Satisfied, Adnan glances towards the corridor doors and sees that one side is still open, Jason Mitchell stood beside it. Adnan is about to ask what’s causing the hold-up when he sees Miss Ross hurry through the gap. She has a shotgun in her hands, but she’s holding it out in front, palms up, like it’s covered in slime and she can’t bear to touch the thing.

She places it on the floor, alongside a box which she had been cradling between her upper arm and her side. A second, larger box is suspended from her shoulder by a strap. She places this down also, then pulls a piece of paper from a pocket and hands it to Deborah.

‘I want a list of who’s missing and a list of who’s here.’

‘Yes, miss,’ Deborah responds.

‘Now,’ she says, very gingerly lifting the shotgun. ‘I don’t suppose any of you lot knows anything about . . .’

Adnan grips it by the barrel and takes it from Miss Ross’ hand. ‘Tannhauser twelve-gauge. Combined gas-ejection and pump-action. Ghost-ring sights.’ He bends down to retrieve the box of shells and begins loading them into the gun. ‘Takes eight in the breech, one in the tube. Gas ejects the spent shell and the pump chambers the next.’

He pumps the gun to chamber the first shell, inserts the ninth round and hands the weapon back to the slightly awestruck teacher.

‘Who says you learn nothing from video games?’ he adds.

Deborah leans on the side of a ping-pong table and quickly scribbles down her list of who is present. She scans the hall, counting heads, checking the figure tallies with the number of names, then starts a new column headed by the word ‘Missing’. The tears come on as she begins to write. Despite what she saw in the dining room, it’s only as she puts names on paper that the truth of it seeps through. Philip O’Dowd. Dan Guthrie. Liam Donnelly. Julie Meiklejohn.

This last makes her shiver, sends something through her that starts as terror and ends as ice, stemming the tears and putting emotions on hold. She glances at Gillian, or rather at the blank-eyed husk that remains of Gillian, and glimpses another reality, not so far away. In that parallel world, it was she who went off with Gillian during the party, back to
their
bedroom, where it was she, not Julie, who died at the hands of a demon.

In this reality, however, she is still alive, and a very different person, all because thirty-odd hours ago, a bag slid a few feet inside a luggage hold. And why did it slide? Because the bus swerved. The bus swerved because the driver turned to look at the fire, the fire started by a hastily discarded fag, the fag discarded because Guthrie was on the warpath, the deputy on the warpath because Cameron’s music was too loud, his music having been turned up because Deborah had turned up her own . . .

‘You okay?’ asks a voice, hauling her out of this vortex. It’s Adnan. She wipes her eyes and nods in accompaniment to a breathy ‘yeah’. Then she clears her throat and feels a cold sense of determination take hold. These parallel worlds could regress infinitely behind the present reality for every one of them. They are not lucky, they simply
are
, and the only thing that matters is keeping it that way.

‘I’m compiling a list of who’s missing,’ she announces to the group. ‘Everyone who’s not here, I need their names.’

Adnan and Radar have a look at who’s already on the sheet. Marianne and Cameron are the first to be listed below the ones they know to be dead.

‘Rosemary and Bernie,’ says Maria. ‘And Caitlin.’

‘Ewan,’ states Adnan. ‘Matt.’

‘Rocks,’ offers Radar. ‘Dazza too. And
Kirk
,’ he adds pointedly.

‘At least that makes me feel a bit better,’ Adnan mutters, almost but not quite under his breath. Deborah gapes at him, can’t believe he said this.

‘No, I just mean it’s some comfort to think these monsters aren’t the scariest thing out there.’