“First sign of non-civilian activity, Cap,” he said. “Worth checking inside?”
Banks nodded and waved Hynd forward to investigate. The sarge motioned Banks over to join him ten seconds later, standing at the doorway of the squat building. Banks had seen Hynd stand up to some rough situations in the past but he’d rarely seen him look green around the gills.
“It’s bad, Cap,” the sergeant said as Banks reached him. “Maybe keep the younger lads away. It’s nothing they’ll want to see.”
Banks walked past him and headed inside. He had thought he’d seen carnage in the square but the scene inside the building was far worse. Bodies and body parts lay strewn across the floor, tables, and bar of what had obviously been a café. A head, only the head, sat on top of an electric hob, cooked and still cooking, burned into a black ball, eyes popped and running down scorched cheeks. Banks turned off the hob and covered the head with an upturned cooking pan but he knew it was a sight and a smell that would be revisiting him in his dreams.
There had been plenty of shooting in the cramped area. The bodies mostly wore military-style clothing, webbing and flak jackets and discarded weapons. Those, along with a scattering of shell casings on the floor, told Banks they been firing at something, not only each other. He suspected more of the spider-things, whatever they might be, but the only dead present were the men who’d been doing the shooting.
The bodies all felt cold to the touch, the blood congealed, dried, and gone dark; Banks guessed, from bitter experience, that whatever had happened had gone down at least a day ago, maybe even longer. With Hynd at his side, they picked their way through pools of blood and gore, breathing shallowly through their mouths.
Banks headed for a darkened doorway at the rear. His gut instinct, honed from too many such situations over the years, told him they were in the right place, that the hostages were here somewhere. It also told him that they were too late for any rescue attempt.
The hallway at the rear of the café was lit with a flickering neon strip but was dim and dark due to the now recognizable gray web hanging in sheets from the ceiling. Banks and Hynd managed to part it carefully with the barrels of their weapons, neither of them in any hurry to get any of the stuff on their hands.
They found their hostages in a cramped room, little more than a large walk-in larder, at the rear of the property.
There were six bodies, packed standing upright, and all had been cocooned and wrapped like the ones hanging between the buildings outside. Hynd had to work hard using his knife to cut the web away from their faces; they didn’t look like locals and further cutting revealed western T-shirts, jeans, work boots, and one passport in a jacket pocket; Tim Woods, from Chislehurst, Kent.
Banks gave up all pretense of maintaining silence.
“Sarge, take Wilkins and see if you can get that vehicle going. Send Brock in to me. We’ll pile these poor buggers in the back of the jeep and get them back up the hill. The least we can do for them is see they get home.”
“What about these fucking spiders, Cap?” Hynd said. “There must be dozens of the fuckers if they did all this. If so, where the fuck are they now?”
“I don’t have a Scooby, Sarge,” Banks said. “And as long as they stay out of our way, I don’t care. Let’s get back up the hill so I can call in an evac order and get us the flock out of here.”
Banks and Brock cut the dead free from as much of the web as they were able to remove. Three of the bodies bore slashing wounds similar to the one he’d seen on the sick man earlier; the others had broken necks and bite marks at their throats so deep that their heads lolled alarmingly, making the blackened wounds gape wide. Brock looked green around the gills.
“If you’re going to spew, lad, take it outside. The smell’s rank enough as it is without you adding to it.”
To the young private’s credit, he stood his ground, helping Banks free the bodies and drag them out into the hallway outside the larder. Hynd came back a few minutes later.
“We got the jeep running, Cap. There’s not much fuel in her,” he said, “but she’ll get us back up the hill okay.”
“Let’s get to it then,” Banks replied. “We’ve left Wiggo alone with those women long enough. Knowing his patter, he’ll have got at least one slap by now.”
— 6 —
Jim White died sometime between four and five in the morning; no one noticed until Maggie went to check on him.
“Jim?”
His eyes were closed and he wasn’t breathing, whereas the last time she’d looked his chest had been rising and falling in steady breathing. She thought him to be asleep, put under by the morphine, but when she put a hand on his ribs there was no movement and, where he’d been hot to the touch before, now he felt quite cool, chilled.
“Private Davies,” she called out and the man was at her side in seconds, having heard the panic in her voice,
The lanky private worked hard on the dead man with CPR and mouth to mouth but after a few minutes, it was obvious they weren’t getting him back. Davies looked up at Maggie.
“He’s gone. I’m sorry.”
“Aye, me too,” she replied. “The poor bastard probably saved our lives taking a chance on making the radio call. And this is his reward?”
Davies put a hand on her shoulder.
“This isn’t on you,” he said. “It was one of those bloody spiders. If you need to hate anything, hate them.”
“They’re dumb beasts, doing what dumb beasts do.”
“Same as it ever was,” Davies replied, then looked back at the body. Black sepsis had seeped through the earlier bandaging and the smell of it rose from the body.
“Give me a hand here,” he said. “We’ll put him in one of the other rooms; you don’t need to be looking at, or smelling, a dead man for the rest of the night.”
Maggie took the legs, expecting to struggle, but White looked to have lost half his body mass in the time he’d been lying on the rucksacks. What was left of him was skeletally thin and wasted like a famine victim. It was as if they carried a bag of dried skin stuffed with wood and it held about as much semblance of life. She had tears in her eyes for the colleague she’d lost but couldn’t recognize the man he had been in the dead thing in her hands. She was thankful when they reached the second room down the corridor and Davies spoke quietly.
“Thank you, miss. You can put him down now, I’ll take it from here.”
She returned to the chamber. Kim had her head down, sobbing, and Reynolds refused to meet her gaze. She busied herself in making three mugs of coffee and took one out to where Davies now stood at the window in the first room across the corridor. He smiled sadly.
“Thank you, miss.”
“The name’s Maggie,” she replied. “I stopped thinking of myself as a miss a long time ago.”
“And I’m Joe. I stopped thinking of myself as Joshua after a few weeks on the Easterhouse estate.”
She managed a smile at that.
“Thanks for what you did for Jim.”
“I wish it could have been more,” he said and returned to his watch at the window as Maggie took the other two cups through to the main doorway where Corporal Wiggins stood guard. He took the mug carefully, then went to light a smoke.
“Can I have one of those?” Maggie asked on a sudden impulse.
“I didn’t have you pegged as a puffer,” he said.
“Five years stopped,” she said, taking a light and inhaling deeply. “But if I ever needed an excuse to start again, this is it.”