There was an explosion above them, and the stairwell sang with shrapnel. Something cold touched Jack"s ear. Dust stung his face. He kept running, step after step, holding Emily"s hand with the grim certainty that her survival depended upon it.
"Grenade!" someone shouted, and he heard the metallic clash of something bouncing from the stair railings.
Emily screeched and fell into him. He had no chance, tripping forward with his arms outstretched to break his fall. He struck Rosemary"s back and she fell as well, striking the landing and twisting, rolling, and Jack was down with her, Emily clasping onto his back.
Clang...clang...the grenade still fell, and though he had no idea where it would explode, moving felt better than lying still.
Rosemary had found her feet and was starting down the staircase to the second floor, and Jack and Emily were following, when the explosion came. It did not seem as loud as the first, but it blew him against the wall, s.n.a.t.c.hing Emily"s hand from his and spinning the world around his head. He was being struck from all sides, battered and thumped and cut; falling, or being hit by debris, he was not sure. When he gasped in a huge breath it was laden with dust and smoke. He opened his eyes, saw nothing, and for a few seconds he was terrified that he had been struck blind. But then someone wiped a hand across his face and Jack saw the blood.
"Jack?" Emily said, leaning over him, crying. He smiled and she cried even harder, and he thought, Do I really look that bad? More blood ran into his eyes and this time he wiped it away himself.
His head hurt. Everything hurt.
There was more shooting from up above, but it seemed to be receding.
Someone was shouting-Sparky-and the words faded in as if he was rushing in from a great distance.
"...outside and meet you behind the hotel, find somewhere to hide?"
"Okay!" Rosemary called from much closer.
Jack sat up, and used the wall for support as he found his feet. Looking up, he realised how lucky he was to be alive. The whole flight of stairs they had just come down had collapsed, sending a shower of concrete, tiles and reinforcement rods tumbling below. On the landing above the gap, Sparky and Jenna were already peering cautiously through the door onto the third floor. Jack wanted to say something, but with a quick glance back at him, Jenna was through and gone. She looked terrified, and there was blood on her neck.
"Can you walk?" Rosemary asked him.
"Of course."
"Don"t worry, dear," she said to Emily, "it looks worse than it is. Head wounds bleed a lot."
"Can you fix it?" the girl asked.
"Soon."
This time it was Emily leading Jack. They went down to the second floor landing, then had to climb carefully over the ruins of the fallen flight to head for the first floor.
"Where are the Superiors?" Jack asked.
"Still fighting, somewhere," Rosemary said. "But they"re farther away. Must have pushed the Choppers back."
"So this is a normal day for you, I suppose?"
Rosemary surprised and delighted him by laughing. "This is the first time I"ve ever been shot at, would you believe? And I"ve never in my life fired a gun."
They pa.s.sed the first floor door, and with every step Jack was feeling stronger. He used a handkerchief handed him by Emily to dab at the blood running down his forehead, and he even managed a smile when she briefly aimed the camera his way. Glad that survived, he thought, chuckling at how ridiculous that was. Glad we survived!
Jack tried to think tactics, but his mind was not working very well. Blown up, shot at, he was confused and disorientated. He could not recall what the street outside the hotel looked like, and for a few seconds he had trouble remembering whether it was even day or night. Then he remembered Gordon being shot-the blood splashing the air behind him, the way he"d fallen like a chunk of meat in an abattoir-and the present punched back at him.
"Won"t they know we"re in the stairwell?" he asked.
"Maybe," Rosemary said. She paused between first and ground floors, and for a terrible moment Jack thought she was going to hand him the gun. She shook her head. "It"s all we can do. We can"t afford to get trapped-"
The door a flight below them crashed open. It rebounded from the wall, and Jack heard the squeal as the mechanical door closer pulled it slowly shut again.
Silently, Rosemary signalled, Up!
They climbed back to the first floor landing. The door out of sight below them opened again, slower, and this time they heard footfalls as at least two people entered the stairwell, boots grinding on grit.
"Clear!" a voice whispered.
Jack opened the door, hoping against hope that the hinges on this one were better oiled. He glanced at the corridor beyond, then went through, pulling Emily after him. Rosemary followed, and he waited until she chose which way to go.
The corridor looked exactly like the one on the sixth floor, and that disorientated him even more.
He heard gunfire in the distance, then a m.u.f.fled explosion that thudded through the building fabric and brought dust down from the ceiling. Rosemary paused, looking up, tilting her head to listen.
"Can you tell-" Jack asked, but then Rosemary clamped a hand across his mouth. She looked at Emily and nodded across the corridor at a door.
Emily had it open in an instant, and Rosemary pushed Jack in after her. It was a basic room, though still quite large, with two double beds, a desk, and an en-suite bathroom just inside the door.
Jack went immediately to the window, careful not to touch the heavy curtains as he peered outside. Emily came with him, and Rosemary remained at the door.
The window looked down behind the hotel, at an area once used for staff parking, deliveries, and service access. He could see no movement, but he concentrated on the areas where people could be hiding: behind the overturned bins; under the verdant bushes that had broken out from the neighbouring garden; inside the three vehicles still parked there, all sitting on flattened tyres and with unreadable graffiti daubed across their doors, bonnets, and roofs.
"What do you see?" Rosemary whispered. She was standing behind the closed door, one eye to the spy-hole.
"Nothing," Jack said. "Back of the hotel. No movement. They must have come in the front."
"They"ll have it covered," she said. "They always..." She trailed off, and Jack watched her slowly raise her hand, then step back and point the gun at the door.
He motioned at Emily to lie between the two beds, then went to Rosemary, waiting for her to act. And then he heard the voices. They were distant at first, m.u.f.fled and mysterious. But they were coming closer.
"Did you see them?" he whispered. Rosemary did not answer. She looked even more scared than she had before, and the gun in her hand was shaking.
"No," she said at last, "but I heard him."
"Him?"
"Miller."
"Who"s-?"
Rosemary held up her head and nodded at the door.
The voices outside were louder now, and Jack started picking up some of the words. "...here somewhere, they must be, so I don"t want any more..."
"...every floor, from the bottom up." This was a quieter voice, obviously answering the man in command.
"...stairwell...dead, and blood everywhere, so we must have hit one of them at least."
"...more than a bullet to kill some of these freaks."
There was a pause at that, and Jack stepped closer to the door. They must be almost directly outside. He sensed Rosemary shifting so that she could still aim her gun at the wooden door, then he leaned over so that he could see from the spy hole.
Two men and a woman stood just along the corridor to the left, faces and bodies distorted by the door viewer. The tall man and the woman wore the distinctive blue uniforms worn by all Choppers, and they had guns held at the ready. The woman had short hair and soft features sharpened by her serious expression. The other man-shorter, older, black-clad, close-cropped grey hair the last stand against baldness-was obviously in charge. The way the other two looked at him...for a moment, Jack wondered if he was a Superior.
But these were Choppers, and if he had to hazard a guess, he"d name this short balding man as Miller. The name so feared by Rosemary.
"They"re here somewhere," the short man said to the two soldiers. He looked at a small device in his hand, shook it angrily. "Not clear where, but somewhere. I want at least one of those two kids alive."
Kids! They"d been seen, or betrayed.
Rosemary glanced at him, eyes wide in surprise. Jack stepped away from the door, suddenly terrified that it would blow in, torn apart under a fusillade of bullets and smoke and chaos, and Rosemary would go down and the soldiers would come in, mindful of their order to keep one of the kids alive and deciding, on the spur of the moment, which one it would be.
"Yes, sir," the woman said. The other soldier mumbled an acknowledgement as well, and then Jack heard boots thudding away along the corridor.
...at least one of those two kids...
"Rosemary," he whispered, leaning in close.
"Not now," she breathed. "He"s still out there."
Jack touched the woman"s face and turned her until they were eye to eye. "You owe me."
Rosemary nodded, averting her eyes, then turned back to the spy hole.
Jack went to Emily, pulling her up to sit on one of the double beds. "We"re okay," he said quietly, "we"re safe." And he did not believe a word of it.
"They"re trying to kill us," Emily said. "I saw that man, Gordon, and his head...his head..." She did not cry, did not sob, yet her words would not come.
"I know," Jack said. "But we"re going to get out of here, I promise."
"And then we"ll go and find Mum and Dad?"
"Yeah." He hugged his sister, and for the first time he thought of how finding their parents alive would change the relationship he and she had developed over the past two years. He hated the selfishness of that idea, and could barely understand it. But they had embarked upon this time of change eagerly, and perhaps now, when everything he knew and loved was under dire threat, was the first time he had truly considered the effects such change would have.
He could still hear gunfire in the distance, and from somewhere far away another explosion vibrated through the building. A large pane of gla.s.s in the window cracked.
"He"s gone along the corridor," Rosemary said. "Jack, a second?" She was waving Jack to her without taking her eye from the spy hole.
Emily squeezed his hand and nodded.
When he reached the woman, she was holding the gun down by her side. But she was still shaking. "Professor Miller," she said without any prompting. "He"s the head Chopper, from what any of us can make out."
"He wants me and Emily."
"What makes you think-?"
"I"m not b.l.o.o.d.y stupid, Rosemary."
She sighed. "I know. I know that, dear."
"What does he want with us?"
"Will you trust me, Jack?" She touched his shoulder, squeezing slightly as though trying to force trust into him.
"After this? After everything you"ve kept from us: the dogs in the tunnels; the Superiors; whatever it is you know about my father?"
"Yes, after all this, I still need you to trust me. There"s plenty you don"t yet know, but...it"ll take some explaining. And now isn"t really-"
More gunfire, this time from closer by. A door opened and slammed, followed by another, and then someone screamed in agony. The screaming went on and on until another gunshot shut it off.
"I"ve never done this before," Rosemary said, nodding down at the gun. "I"m just an old woman, but I"m doing my very best for you, son. Now that it"s all gone so wrong so quickly, I"m doing my very best. So please, until we get out of here and find somewhere safe to talk...trust me?"
She was pleading. She tried not to make it sound like that, but it was obvious.
Jack nodded. "Okay. But everything I do in here, and every decision I make, is for the good of my sister."
Rosemary smiled and squeezed his shoulder again. "You"re a good man, Jack."
Man. No one had ever called him that before. No one but himself.
When they opened the door, all was silent. They crept out into the hallway, Rosemary going first with her gun, and the building sat around them calm and still. They moved quickly along the corridor. It wasn"t until they were closing on the fire exit door at the end that the shooting began.
Jack dropped, turning as he did so to fall across Emily. Rosemary fell against the wall and slid down to the floor, and for a terrible moment Jack thought she"d been hit. He looked for blood, but saw none, and then she turned around, looking past him back the way they had come.
She sighed. "Not this floor."
Jack shook his head. "This floor, but not this corridor. It"s coming from the other wing. We need to go."
They moved to the end of the corridor, pa.s.sing doors that might not have been opened for the past two years. Are there bodies? Jack wondered. A sad story of lonely death behind each door? The hotel smelled musty, though not unpleasant, but he had no idea whether there would still be the smells of rot and decay after so long. He felt as though he were inhabiting two times: the here and now, with people chasing and shooting at them through a deserted building in the dead Toxic City; and the past, where people spent brief periods of their busy lives in a room in one of London"s many hotels.
Rosemary reached the fire escape door first. She looked back past Jack and Emily again, but did not seem to see anything that alarmed her.
"I"ll go first," she said. "After I know it"s safe..." She trailed off, her eyes went wide, and she brought the gun up in two hands. It was pointing directly at Jack"s stomach.
"Wait!" he said, but she was not looking at him.
This time it was Emily who pulled Jack down. He turned as he fell, looking back along the corridor at the two Choppers who had appeared at its junction with the hotel"s central core. They were the same man and woman he had seen talking to Miller outside the room door.
Bullets ripped along the corridor, slicing into the plaster walls, blowing jagged splinters from door frames, filling their world with violence and noise once more.
Rosemary braced herself against the wall, then looked down at her gun, turning it this way and that.
"Safety?" Jack shouted, because he really had no idea either.
The shooting stopped. "That"s them!" a voice hissed.
"Okay," the woman said. "Just get the old b.i.t.c.h." The two soldiers ran along the hallway, guns raised, and when the woman stopped and braced into a firing position, the male Chopper jerked to a halt and shot his companion in the leg.