The Night of the Triffids (44 page)

    'Keep moving,' a Marine hissed. 'I'll watch your backs.'

    With one Marine in the lead and one guarding our tail we moved along the corridor. Torrence had been busy here. Offices had been converted into a self-contained hospital. I glimpsed scrubbed tiles and the massive overhead light of an operating theater.

    That was the moment when points of light suddenly appeared at either side of my head, streaking away past me down the corridor.

    Instantly I dropped to one knee. Looking back, I saw a pair of black-uniformed guardsmen firing automatic rifles at us. The Marine guarding our tail had caught the worst of it. His lifeless body lay face down in the corridor. Squeezing the trigger of my own gun, I hosed the men with sub-machine gun rounds. More wildly fired shots ripped plaster from the walls in clouds of white dust.

    Blinking dust from my eyes, I saw the two men crumple to the ground.

    'Move it!' hollered the Marine in front. He charged forward down the corridor. We followed.

    A moment later he burst into a lobby. Straightaway I saw a line of black-uniformed figures manning a makeshift barricade of upended desks, filing cabinets and cupboards. Strangely, though, they were on the same side of the barricade as us, not, as you might think, on the other.

    'Drop your weapons,' Gabriel shouted. '
Drop them
.'

    Some chose not to.

    A well-aimed shot from Marni's pistol sent one of the men rolling back against a desk, both his hands gripping his throat.

    I fired in short bursts, bullets stripping away chunks of wood from the desktops. But a number of rounds found softer targets. Black-uniformed figures jerked like marionettes with their strings cut before dropping to the ground. Other Guardsmen took the second option.

    Shouting at the tops of their voices, they threw aside their guns and raised their hands. Gabriel moved forward, ordering the surviving Guardsmen to lie down on the floor with their arms outstretched. I noticed that he limped, and he left a bloody footprint on the carpet. A glance at Sam Dymes told me that a bullet had nicked his chin. Gradually, a red beard formed around his lower jaw. But he didn't look too badly injured, considering, and he moved forward to talk to the Marine.

    At that moment, I realized that my left ear seemed oddly cold, as if a piece of ice had been pressed to it. To my surprise its upper third had simply vanished. My fingers, when I looked at them, glistened crimson, too. I looked down at my right arm. It was dotted with tiny wounds from each of which hung a pearl of blood. Luckily, I felt no pain in the arm and when I moved it experimentally it functioned well enough.

    It took some minutes to move the surviving Guardsmen and their wounded into a storeroom. I noticed a telephone in the corner and took the liberty of tearing it from the wall before locking the men in.

    Once our small and increasingly blood-soaked team had re-assembled in the lobby Sam said in a low voice, 'I don't see any alternative now but to go straight over that barricade.'

    'You figure that Kerris and Christina are still here?'

    'That's what the most recent information tells us.'

    Gabriel looked at us. 'Everyone reloaded?'

    We nodded.

    'OK,' Sam whispered. 'Let's do it.'

    We ran at the wall of upended furniture. At that moment my arm decided it was a good time to start hurting. Grunting, teeth clenched, I scrambled over the barricade to slither down the other side.

    I was greeted by the sight of a second line of upended tables that had been pulled around the end of a corridor to form yet another barrier.
Great… just great,
I thought, as my nervous system settled down to flashing pain signals bright and clear to my long-suffering conscious mind. Holding the sub-machine gun in one hand, I lumbered forward. Just then the muzzle of a rifle appeared over a table, and I found myself looking along the barrel to a pair of green eyes framed by red hair.

    I stopped in my tracks. 'Kerris?' I said in disbelief.

    The rifle was lowered to reveal a surprised face. 'David Masen? It's about goddamn time.'

    

    

    

    I just stood and stared at Kerris's face. Until that moment I'd found it hard to believe that I'd ever set eyes on her again.

    She smiled. 'I was beginning to think you were never going to get here.'

    'As trips go, it was a little on the eventful side,' I managed to say.

    A moment later Gabriel walked up. 'You'd better finish off that embrace inside,' he told us with a tired smile. 'We might have company at any minute.'

    We moved deeper into the corridor. Two Guardsmen lay dead along the walls. From a side door burst Christina. 'David! David!' She lunged at me and hugged me hard enough to remind me about the state of my arm. But despite the lively waves of pains ebbing and flowing across my forearm, I gave her a delighted hug. 'Hey, it's good to see you again… you've not been harmed at all?'

    Christina's face shone with excitement. Then, in a surprisingly articulate manner, she said, 'Kerris made us a war up here! She shot the bad men. Then built the wall. Then we sat waiting for you…' She gave me a sudden scolding look. 'But you took ages and ages to get here, slowcoach.'

    I smiled. 'Well, I'm here now.' I looked at Sam. 'All we have to do now is figure out how to get everyone
away
from here.'

    Sam touched his jaw thoughtfully. He looked surprised when he saw the blood on his fingertips. 'I guess we can't go anywhere in a hurry. What strikes me, however, is that at some point those elevator doors will open. Then either Torrence's men or our own people will come out. So until then I better make sure there's a guard on the barrier.'

    He went to have a word with the Marine, who took up a position behind an upturned table with his machine gun.

    Meanwhile, Marni stepped forward. Kerris started when she saw her. Both women looked searchingly at each other. As if unconscious or the action Kerris ran a finger across her face, following the same line as Marni's scar. It was the action of someone looking at their reflection in the mirror.

    'You're my sister, aren't you?' whispered Kerris.

    'Marni can't speak,' I said and told Kerrrs briefly what I knew of her background.

    Kerris nodded. She seemed stunned by the sight of the woman who stood in front of her. 'Long ago I did wonder if I had a twin. After all, I have plenty of brothers and sisters, and some of those were sets of twins. But we must have been separated at birth. Just look at her eyes. They're identical to mine… only her poor face… I'd like to get my hands on the rats who did that to her.'

    'It looks like you've already made a start.' I nodded at the dead Guardsmen.

    Kerris told me what had happened. She'd been staying with Christina when the attack alarm had sounded. There had followed some garbled telephone calls from the ground floor saying that what amounted to a battle was being fought down there. Guardsmen holding the ninetieth floor had told Kerris that she and Christina were being moved to another part of Manhattan. Clearly if that happened Sam and his men would then have the problem of finding the two women all over again. Kerris, therefore, had decided that the time for action had come. She knew that the Foresters had managed to infiltrate three operatives into the nursing staff stationed on the floor. So, arming themselves from a hidden cache of weapons, they had shot dead two of the Guardsmen, then managed to barricade the entrance to the corridor. More Guardsmen had made it to this floor where they built a second barricade. The ace that Kerris held - and she knew it - was that the Guardsmen wouldn't risk injuring Christina and the precious egg cells that she carried in her ovaries by trying to shoot their way in.

    In turn, I told her that the battle downstairs had been further complicated by an influx of triffids onto the streets.

    For a while an uncanny silence settled over the ninetieth floor. It was neither stormed by Torrence's men nor relieved by ours. No telephones rang. The electric lights burned steadily. Beyond the windows a blood-red sun settled on the horizon. We busied ourselves checking weapons and dressing our wounds. Fortunately none of us had suffered any serious injury. Probably the worst hit was Gabriel. A bullet had smashed through his calf. Nevertheless, he continued to hop round with the aid of a broom, the brush part tucked below his arm in a fair imitation of Long John Silver.

    I joined Kerris at the window.

    'Can you see anything?'

    'We're too high. From up here everything looks perfectly normal.'

    She nodded out across the island to where the Hudson River gleamed red-gold in the sunset. 'Beautiful, isn't it?' Wistfully she added, 'It could be something out of Paradise. I once went on a fishing trip upriver. You could see what remained of all the millionaires' mansions on the hillsides, and just for a minute you could imagine what they were like before everything went wrong. In my mind's eye I could see children playing in swimming pools and moms and dads reading in deckchairs or cooking sizzling steaks on barbecues…' She shook her head sadly. 'Do you think those days will come again?'

    'In some parts of the world they already have,' I told her. 'Back home we still have Bonfire Night. We build big fires outside, fire off skyrockets, and bake potatoes. Children love it. Adults, too.' I smiled. 'But all the adults seem to wake up with hangovers the next morning.'

    'Bonfire Night? What's that?'

    'An old pagan custom.' I felt a grin breaking across my face. 'Probably linked to some fertility rite or other. We burn effigies of a man called Guy Fawkes on the fire, too.'

    'What a curious people you British are.' She wrinkled her nose, amused. 'And to think I went and did something as ridiculous as fall in love with one.'

    I kissed her. 'If we're going to do this thing properly,' I told her, 'you must come home and meet my family.'

    She looked round the office where we were perched hundreds of feet in the sky. 'When we get out of here, the pleasure will be all mine. Then, to comply with those other Old World conventions, we'll get married too, won't we?'

    I smiled. 'Why not?'

    And just for a moment I felt suspended in a bubble of happiness… one as wonderful as it was incongruous.

    

    

    Perhaps as some kind of natural antidote to that precarious time high in the skyscraper people busied themselves with trivial distractions - brewing fresh jugs of coffee, playing cards for matchsticks. Later I found Sam Dymes sitting on a desk, jotting notes on a pad.

    He glanced up, noticing my bandaged head. 'Say, David, how's the ear?'

    'The bit that's still attached to my head stings like crazy.' I gave a tired smile. 'As for the other chunk that's lying somewhere down the corridor, it doesn't hurt one bit.'

    Sam chuckled. 'I guess that's what you English call gallows humour. Coffee?' He poured the steaming liquid into a paper cup. 'Torrence certainly doesn't stint on quality.'

    'Thanks.' I took the cup. 'How's the arm?'

    He raised the arm in its sling a little. 'Oh, fine, fine. Just nicked me in the crook of the elbow.' In that characteristic way of his Sam suddenly changed conversational tack. 'You know, a funny thing happened to me in the middle of all that fighting. Of all things, the answer to an engineering problem that had been bothering me for months suddenly popped into my mind. There I am, firing at living human beings and I suddenly say to myself, "Sam Dymes, why don't you run the rail track to the north of the lake, not the south, because…" Oh, you don't know what on Earth I'm talking about, do you?' His speech speeded up as he became enthused. 'Before my military service I was a railway engineer, and I will be again when my tour of duty is over - God willing. You see, I'd got this thorny, even downright bamboozling problem of running a railway line from a new harbour on a lake to town. Only there were all these hills and crags and dirty great ravines in the way… bothered the hell out of me. Whatever I planned it never worked out right. Then, as we came storming up that corridor, guns blazing, grenades booming away like the coming of the apocalypse, I suddenly said to myself: "Sam, why don't you run the rail track to the north of the lake… You'll save miles of track and months of labour…" Now, David, that strikes me as a mighty peculiar time to have such an idea, right bang in the middle of a blood-and-guts battle, huh? So now I'm taking a few minutes to write it down so I don't forget.'

    Sam talked on for a while. I realized that, like Kerris and I making dreamy plans for the future, the gangling engineer had found a temporary refuge in his vision of a new railway line.

    I glanced round. Marni and Christina had found an instant rapport. Smiling, they communicated with an impromptu sign language that both appeared to understand. The Marine chatted to female lab technicians who'd been part of the undercover team. Kerris still gazed out of the window. Now night had fallen. Lights burned steadily from neighbouring buildings.

    Only Gabriel Deeds sat on the barricade. He watched the elevator doors with brooding eyes. Beside him stood a heavy machine gun that he'd taken from a dead Guardsman. I knew he was waiting for the moment when Torrence's men would rush from the elevators.

    

    

    The elevators, despite Gabriel's state of readiness, remained resolutely inactive for the rest of the night. We slept in shifts. Sam, Gabriel and I took it in turns to keep a watch on the elevator and the corridor that led to the stairs. In the morning we made a breakfast from food still in the canteen. Sam made sure that drink and food reached our captives in the storeroom.