Safe Haven, page 7
CHAPTER SIX
The Home and Garden Depot was in total darkness when a sudden noise awoke all its inhabitants. Each night when the rats had come, they had found another way into the huge warehouse and tonight was no different.
There had been silence, followed by a loud crack, as if something had given way, then the small scrambling feet and excited screeches had begun to echo around the cavernous building, quickly followed by fearful cries.
Small lights flicked on and candles were lit as everyone realised they were under attack. The familiar sound of breaking glass, followed by sudden whooshes made Mike realise, Molotov cocktails were being thrown. He carefully moved to the edge of the shelf to get a better view. Although he was high up, he could see some of the rats, burning. Their bodies writhed in agony as the flames enveloped their rough brown fur and then consumed their flesh. The size of the creatures made him feel uneasy. He knew that rats tended to grow according to their environment and conditions. If there was a large supply of food and few predators, they were likely to grow to a reasonable size, but some of these were the size of small dogs.
"Fuck me," he whispered, almost hypnotised by the river of furry bodies that was scurrying below. "Look at the size of these things."
When he got no response from Lucy, he turned to look at her. He could see in the dim candlelight that she hadn't moved. She was still lying flat on her back, a tear had run down the side of her face and her whole body was quivering. Mike immediately moved across and cradled his left hand underneath her.
"Lucy, what's wrong?"
She looked at him, ashamed, "Rats. Mike, I'm terrified of rats."
"It's okay, I'm here, I won't let anything hurt you."
"You don't understand, I mean I have a real fear of rats, Musophobia, Suriphobia, Murophobia. Call it whatever the hell you want, my parents sent me to a shrink for it after I found one in our basement. It didn't help."
She looked straight at him, and he saw that her eyes were filled with the tears of a childhood nightmare. Mike moved in and kissed her on the forehead. He sat up and gave himself more room on the narrow shelf by dangling his feet over the side. He reached across for his rucksack and pulled out his shotgun, a machete and the two aerosol cans he had been issued by Jules along with a lighter.
"What are you doing?" asked Lucy between sobs.
"Like I said, I won't let anything happen to you. If anything gets up here, I'll deal with it."
"Hold me Mike?" she begged.
He remained in position, dangling his legs over the side of the shelf and watching the events below. Mike extended his hand back for Lucy to hold. "I'll hold you later. If I let my guard down, I'm not keeping my promise." He squeezed Lucy's hand tightly and then let go again, torn between wanting to comfort her and having the necessary freedom to move quickly. "Sis, are you okay up there?" he asked, looking across the aisle and up to the next level of shelving.
Mike could see there was a small lantern glowing, but could barely recognise outlines of figures in the light. "We're fine. Beth, are you alright?" Emma called across to the shelf just down from her.
"Oh yeah... Great," she replied.
Mike continued looking down and saw a number of the rats trying to ascend the metal racking only to be foiled by the greased legs. His respect for Jules etched up a further notch as the rats soon lost interest and skidded away with the rest of the pack. His eyes followed their route as they scurried and weaved around the flames on the ground and towards the front of the DIY megastore.
He squinted into the relative darkness where many of the rats disappeared into a structure he didn't remember seeing before he bedded down for the night. It was built from pallets, a large garden shed, racking, tarpaulins and heavy cardboard boxes. There were discarded jars and cans scattered about. The rats that didn't enter ran up the outside of the makeshift dwelling and feasted on scraps of food. The construction came to life as hundreds of excited brown, furry creatures feasted on the bounty that had been left for them. The shanty building throbbed with terrifying ferocity as the white breezeblock of the cash office it was built against began to get painted red with bloody spray as the vicious rodents fought each other for delicious morsels.
Mike heard agitated words from several aisles down, but couldn't make out what was being said. He looked back towards Lucy who had put her forearm over her eyes, hoping it would help block out her fear. It didn't.
"Lucy, come here a second."
"I can't Mike. Don't you understand, I can't."
"They're gone."
"What do you mean they're gone?" she said slowly moving her forearm away.
"I mean they're gone. There's something at the front of the store, I can't quite see what it is, but they've all headed there. I think they've set up a trap." Mike reached into his rucksack, pulled out his binoculars and focussed them down towards the front of the store.
Another Molotov cocktail flew towards the entrance of the structure. Mike pulled the binoculars away from his eyes before the flare burnt his retinas. When the whoosh had died down, he brought them back up and saw things a little clearer in the stronger light. He caught sight of two objects holding down a tarpaulin. "Nobody could be that fucking stupid," he said.
"What?" asked Lucy, rising to the urgency in his voice.
"They look like Calor gas cylinders," he said bringing the binoculars back down from his eyes.
"What do you mean?" she asked shrugging.
"Y'know, gas cylinders, like you use for a barbecue or a heater."
Three more Molotov cocktails arced through the air towards the structure, exploding into small fountains of flames as they landed. The entrance and the exterior were now fully consumed. High pitched screeches sent shivers into the night as rodents burnt to death. There was little risk of the fire spreading through the building as it mainly consisted of concrete and corrugated metal, but the burning fuel from the Molotov cocktails would certainly trap the rats inside.
A rifle shot rang out from further down the warehouse. Mike and Lucy looked at each other in panic. "They are that fucking stupid!" said Mike. "Em, get down now," he shouted, as he grabbed hold of Lucy and pushed her as far towards the back of the shelving unit as she could physically move. He draped himself over her and a split second later, another shot fired, this time followed by what Mike thought the end of the world might sound like. A cacophonous explosion, followed by another and another and another, made the whole building quake. The sturdy metal shelving creaked and screeched as the thunderous roar tore down the aisles of the store. The rat trap almost vaporised. Mike and Lucy felt their shelving unit buckle a little, and both relinquished their grip on the other, ready to try and make an escape, but the movement was just momentary, and as the initial waves of the explosions died down, the terrifying displacement of air and space began to normalise. The thunder of the explosions themselves drowned out the single thing that Lucy and Mike knew would be the disastrous result of such an ill thought out plan. The glass that made up most of the storefront had been blown into the night. The flames that had whooshed through the building were nothing compared to the ones that had broken through the front and found an abundance of fresh and nourishing oxygen to feed on. The initial flames licked high into the night sky, followed by the deafening sound.
They both knew instantly that the rats were gone, but they had just alerted every RAM in the city to their presence.
Another tremulous noise carved a sharp note of fear through the already terrifying dark as one of the huge metal shelving units two aisles over gave way. The heat and force from the explosions had buckled the steel too far. Over the clatter and crash of the metal collapsing onto the cement floor sang a chorus of petrified screams. Mike and Lucy shuffled to the edge of their shelf. Looking down the aisle they could see random splashes of fire as the waves of the explosions had found something combustible, but that was nothing compared to the blackness that lay beyond where the vast glass entrance had been. The ebony shroud would soon uncover a nightmare, no one could imagine.
Earlier in the night when the occupants of the warehouse had settled down like some weird tribe of tree people nestling into a steel jungle, there had been ladders and harnesses to help them with their ascents. Now, there was no time to waste waiting for someone to come along with a ladder to help people down. When Emma had been buried in a collapsed building back in Candleton, it had been a race against time to get her out before the air had run out. Air wasn't the problem this time. The things that lurked in the thick dark night, awakened by the blast—they were what Mike was worried about.
Once the steel had ground and clattered to an abrupt finale, the groans, screams and cries of the people who had been using it as their night time dwelling took over.
"Em!" Mike yelled into the relative darkness of their own aisle, "Get Sarah and Beth and anyone else who doesn't strike you as a clueless fuckwit and meet me next to the collapsed shelving. And be quick about it."
His words were angry and he wanted people to hear that he was not someone who suffered fools. He grabbed his rucksack and took a tight hold of the solid metal frame, ready to begin climbing down. He looked at Lucy, her face sad and scared, still not having got over the episode with the rats, still not having accepted that they were in yet another life and death situation.
"Luce," the only time he had used the name before was when they had been intimate together, but now, knowing once again that this vision of her could be one of his last, he felt the need to use it again. "I wish I could say to you to sit this one out, you've been through enough, but I can't. You and Em are the only people I can rely on one hundred percent. If there is just a sliver of hope that we can get out of this, I need you with me."
Lucy looked at him in the dim light and took a deep breath. When she exhaled, it fluttered like it did when someone had been hiding tears and upset. She swallowed, placed the Glock in the back of her jeans and pulled herself to the edge ready to descend straight behind Mike.
"C'mon, let's do this." The fear came out in her words, and it broke Mike's heart to hear it.
"Your brother never thought about becoming a diplomat before all this happened?" Sarah asked, confounded that Mike would come out with something so damning of his hosts.
"He's never been into the whole treading lightly thing, and to be honest, I just might beat him to finding whose idea it was to ring a fucking dinner gong for the RAMs."
The true consequences of the explosion hadn't registered with Sarah. Emma, Lucy, Beth and Mike had been in lots of situations since their journey began. They understood what attracted RAMs, what actions were dangerous or downright suicidal, and to that end, they were the people to watch and listen to. Sarah hadn't contemplated what would happen as a result of the noise and the flash and the front of the store disintegrating into a pile of webbed metal and broken glass. She felt a sudden urge to be sick. "Do you think those things, the RAMs will come?"
"The entire city is in a silent darkness, and all of a sudden, there's a deafening explosion and a beacon of flames a hundred feet high. Oh yeah, I'm pretty certain, every last one of the fucking things will be heading straight for us," Emma replied as she began shimmying down the side of the shelving unit.
By the time she'd reached the debris of the collapsed shelves, Mike was already flinging large scraps of metal to one side in order to try and find survivors. The sporadic patches of fire gave him enough light to work with, and he glanced around angrily towards the faces of the dazed and the petrified who looked on as if giving him help would make the situation more real, more terrible.
He took hold of a huge buckled piece of metal, and Emma and Lucy joined him. They grunted and huffed as the three of them lifted the weighty debris. Immediately a hand became visible, then an arm, but nothing more. As they carried the large piece of steel to the side, away from the working area, they looked at the severed limb. A few weeks earlier, they would have been horrified to see such a gut wrenching image, but now they were different people. Sarah went across to them intent on helping, and as soon as she saw the bloody arm, she had to run to the side and be sick.
Beth and Jules got a small group working on the other side of the collapsed unit and before long, they had managed to find an old couple. They were shaken and had cuts and bruises, but that was all. Lucy went across to help them, while more people joined the ranks of the diggers. When Mike was satisfied that there were enough people searching the wreckage for survivors, he took hold of Emma's arm and led her away. Jules came to join them.
"When this is over, I want to meet the person who came up with the idea for the rat trap, but right now we've got bigger problems," growled Mike. "We won't have more than a few minutes before we're inundated with RAMs—we need to get out through the back and as far away as we can, as quickly as we can."
"That won't give us time to dig everybody out of the wreckage. I'm not leaving them," Jules said.
"Well, good luck with that," Mike replied, beginning to walk away. "We're leaving."
Some of the people from the warehouse stood behind Jules, watching on with growing concern.
"You can't leave," she said, fumbling her pistol from the back of her jeans. "You can't leave us!" she pointed it feebly in Mike's direction, tears had begun to roll down her cheeks. "You can't leave us," she said more weakly this time. "Please don't leave us." The men and women gathering behind her looked down at the ground. Jules had been admired and revered by them all, but this night had been the straw that had broken the camel's back.
Mike looked at her, he looked at Emma, then he looked back towards Jules. "I'm sorry Jules."
He walked away as his host dropped her gun on the floor and fell to her knees sobbing. A middle aged man and woman from the group behind her immediately went to her aid.
Emma looked at the pathetic figure, and then reluctantly followed her brother. When she caught up with him, he had found Lucy, who was being helped by Sarah as they treated the wounded. Mike took hold of Sarah's arm.
"Tell Beth to get everyone together, our people are leaving now," he ordered.
Sarah looked surprised at first that Mike wasn't asking her but telling her to do something, then, she looked behind him, beyond the wreckage and into the darkness. He knew what was out there, he knew what was coming. She went to find Beth without a word in response.
"We can't move some of these people, Mike. One of them's got a broken leg. One's got what looks like a torn ligament..."
"If we don't go now, we're all dead. It's that simple," replied Mike taking hold of Lucy's arm and beginning to lead her away. She shook her arm free and stood her ground.
"That isn't who we are Mike. We don't leave people who need our help. If we do, then we're no better than the raiders. These people might be weak now, but they can be made strong. We grew strong. We learned to survive. We can help them. We can show them what it takes."
"This is madness, we're going to be attacked any second and you're playing fucking Florence Nightingale to a bunch of..."
Lucy erupted, "A bunch of what Mike? A bunch of frightened, hurt and helpless people who didn't ask for any of this to happen to them? I can treat these people," she said gesturing to the slowly increasing line of figures recovered from the debris. "I'm staying, Mike. Do you think Hughes or Barnes or Shaw would run out on them?"
"Seriously?" he asked, fuming. "How short is your fucking memory, Lucy?" she turned away to go back to work, but Mike grabbed tight hold of her arm and pulled her round to face him. "Where were your fucking heroes when you were tied up in the back of the ambulance or stuck in that little cupboard waiting to die?" Emma, in turn, grabbed hold of Mike's arm to try and calm him down, but he pulled it away aggressively. "Maybe if I'd have coshed someone I'd called a friend and left his family for dead, then kidnapped his girlfriend, you might think a bit more highly of me."
Lucy took hold of his wrist and angrily pulled his clenched hand away. "Stop behaving like a child Mike, you know what I meant."
"Yeah, I know exactly what you meant." Their stares fixed for a moment, and then Mike turned in the other direction. Emma went to him, but then caught his gaze and immediately backed off. She was familiar with that look and the tornado that usually followed. Mike tore his eyes away from his sister and began to look around the dimly lit interior of the building. There were people trying to find survivors in the wreckage, there were older men and women comforting children, there were looks of fear and looks of sadness. Some of the trapped were screaming, some were silent. Jules was kneeling down on the floor, almost catatonic, knowing it was all coming to an end. There was still a group of people behind her, and her brother Andy stood over her with his arms folded. Mike's eyes narrowed as he saw the rifle they had given Jules earlier on, strapped to his shoulder. He was the one who had fired at the canisters, and the chances were good, he was the one who had come up with the plan.
Mike swept past Emma, marched straight up to Andy, and before Jules's brother even had chance to understand what was going on, Mike's fist made square contact with Andy's jaw, knocking him from his feet and into the land of unconsciousness. The small crowd gasped at the brutal display, then looked away as they saw the rabid anger remained in Mike's eyes.
Jules, whose world had fallen apart in the last few minutes, got to her feet still crying. "What did you do to my brother?" she screamed, leaning forward, her hands clenched into fists by her sides.
In that instant, a memory came back to Mike. The morning he had been forced to kill his stepfather Alex, Sammy had come into the room. She had screamed uncontrollably, and asked almost the same question "What did you do to daddy?" Mike looked at the fallen man and looked towards Jules, the anger now replaced by pity, guilt even. She was an adult who had a huge amount of responsibility thrust upon her shoulders, but for those few seconds that Mike regarded her, she was just a frightened confused little girl.
