Justice (Chapter One)

Chapter One
Instantly, I knew that we had no choice but to hide. Pulling Shannon into an alley and clawing the cardboard boxes down on top of us was our only option. I shuddered as every motion rustled plastic wrapping and every shift of weight created glacial scrapings against the tarmac. The dogs were, inevitably, getting closer; their barks and the wail of the alarms created a discordant symphony against the cold wall of night. This was serious. We had just breached one of the most secure buildings in the country and we’d failed to make it out undetected.
Shannon reached out her gloved hand and clasped my arm – hard. I could feel her hand trembling, see her blue-grey eyes searching and flickering. She wanted me to respond, to reassure her, but I stayed perfectly still. I kept my eyes firmly on the ground, my mousey hair sending shattered shards across my face, and focused on the smell of sludge coming from the drain behind us. I became an inanimate object, a piece of packaging, a disregarded fragment of cardboard and I kept one thought in my mind – the fact that Sense had destroyed my family and, for that, I was going to rip them apart. I didn’t move. I didn’t breathe. I just kept on twisting my fingers through the straps of my rucksack, checking it was still there. Without it, all of this would be for nothing.
How long were we crouched there? Five, ten minutes? I rubbed my index and forefinger against my forehead; perhaps I could push a solution to this mess out of my mind? And then the sirens crashed down the alley.
The Red Coats were here. And then, the dogs. With each bark, Shannon’s grip on my flesh intensified. Her body, wedged between a hardened darkness and my unrelenting nerve, oscillated against me. A split second before she did it, I knew that she was going to speak and there was nothing I could do to stop her.
“Is it them?” she said, trying to whisper, her thin frame flailing like polystyrene wrapping.
“Shut up.”
“I can’t feel my legs. God, what are they going to do with us?”
“Shut up.”
“How are we going to get out? There’s no way out of here, is there?”
“Shut…”
It was then that I noticed that the dogs had fallen silent. They knew exactly where we were. Looking up, Sense’s flashlights softly combed the opposite wall. They swirled and looped, longing to illuminate the next contestant, the next Parasite to be removed. Shannon whimpered. Stoically, I watched as the beams of light converged and swept towards us, swiftly followed by the sounds of anonymous voices and the straining of leather boots. A helicopter, blades swiping, chopped overhead; it would be equipped with heat sensors. To them, our capture was a given.
“Run! Shannon, go, now!”
Shannon’s hand was no longer on my arm, but I still held onto the rucksack. As the boxes collapsed into the alley, an avalanche into the night, I felt my footing collapse. In that split second their lights covered me. I sprung to my feet. Charging and pushing and driving my legs, I swerved away from seemingly un-dead shapes with plastic shields and lurching Alsatians. Fists balled, I ran faster. The smoke welcomed me. Down one passageway, then another –thank you London for your maze-like qualities - I didn’t look back. I didn’t look back for Shannon.
From the darkness, I fell into the back of some estate, metal garage doors and yellow skips circling around. My breath lit matches in my lungs. The chopper was still above; I couldn’t outrun it, sport was never my strong point, but maybe I could outsmart it? Wrenching at a side door, hard enough to feel paint and rusty metal come away in my glove, I prayed that it would open. It worked and, with another yank, I was in.
I burst into the black. From the cavern, a face appeared and became three dimensional, charging my line of vision. Over-baring and shadowy, the shape seemed to grow a tentacle, a tentacle that shoved me backwards, sending me out towards the Red-Coats and their dogs. Clearly, another Parasite in hiding – you would have expected a little solidarity, don’t you think? His jagged cheekbones and wired eyes jutted forwards, forcing me against the doorframe.
“Get out.”
He smelt of beer and sweat.
“Please…”
“Out! Now!” There was no manoeuvrability in that voice.
“Just let me stay here for a minute. I won’t move, I...”
“Out before I crack your face in.” The negotiations seemed to be at an end.
And with another hard smash to my shoulder, the nameless shadow threw me back into the chase, out into the smoke and the fires.
I heard him mutter, “Silly little girl.” In other circumstances, he would have paid dearly for a comment like that. Right here, right now though, no time to argue about it –refuge clearly occupied.
Stumbling, I turned and ran back the way I had come, the smoke curling up to meet me - over concrete block walls and into a stairwell with a classic 1980s housing estate lift. The thought that it had probably seen its fair share of yellow police tape shot through my head, but I didn’t have time to care. I threw myself in and pressed all the buttons. I waited for the doors to shut. Nothing happened. The raised numbers stayed ominously dark. I looked around; the brushed metal walls reflected a pale face and black clothes. Was that me? Had I really become so thin? The moles on my cheeks seemed to merge together like newly formed land masses. I looked terrible. I pressed the buttons again. I reached down to twist the silver ring that I wore on the little finger of my left hand, but my black gloves prevented me. Where the hell was Shannon? Had she been caught? And still nothing – the only thing lighting up was another fire in the distance. It felt like the whole of London was ablaze. I was a piece of helpless meat in a metal oven as the inferno swept in around me. I charged out of the defunct lift and around a tight corner.
It was then that I smashed headlong into a wall.
I fell backwards and the concrete rose up to jar my bones. The wall was moving. Slowly, it came forwards until it was standing over me.
“Get up or I'll drag you.”
The burly, compact flesh clawed its way from the night. The apparition was covered in red; the dark outline of a puncing fist was imprinted across its chest.
In seconds, I was handcuffed, my arms bent the wrong way like deformed wire coat hangers and I was hauled towards a black, windowless van by a faceless member of Sense, a Red Coat of course. I said nothing. He held me limply, presumably deciding that I wasn’t a great threat in the scheme of things. With London burning and thousands of Parasites looting, I probably wasn’t his greatest concern.
Sickly petrol pumped across the streets from unseen sources. Flames corroded featureless flats and discount shops, relishing the fight against the November cold. In the distance, the London Eye was a giant Catherine Wheel of fire – the Parasites would be proud of that one.
I found my chest jolting from the influx of fumes, poison racing up to my thudding brain, the screech of distant vehicles winding ovals of pain through my ears. So this is what the capital had become…
We were nearly at the van when, from the shadows, a hooded figure hurled a brick or piece of paving slab in our direction; I felt the displaced air shift as it missed my head by inches. In a blink, I was weighted to the floor. Fifteen stone of Red Coat beached on top of me and my faced dragged against something on the ground that felt like sugar – I realised, when I tasted blood, that there was nothing sweet about it.
It felt like we stayed in that position for hours -bricks and bottles skidding against the ground, war cries roaring overhead and the glass grinding ever deeper against my cheek. Bitter, gagging petrol seeped into my mouth.
I found myself drifting off, miles away from the madness of the last few hours, to anywhere but here, to a place when things were calm and simple. My mind sheltered in the memory of a holiday in Devon and eating clotted cream ice cream on a chilly beach while Dad insisted that we fly a kite, even though no one was really bothered. I’d ended up with the job of ‘kite retriever’ and Dad’s kite flying skills had meant that I’d spent most of the afternoon avoiding some perilously low fly bys. I could feel the scouring wind as it burnt my face down near the shoreline, icy light playing across the water, the skeletal kite, like some giant seed pod, fragile in my hands. Afterwards, we’d gone to an out-dated pub for dinner and my cousins, Lara and Matt, had met us for a few games of pool. We’d argued about a foul shot and...
With no warning, I was winched up by the Red – his crimson uniform and gold buttons bursting into life under the surrounding fires. Rivulets of sweat poured down my face; the smoke infiltrated my eyes; the blood from my cheek dripped from my chin. So this was adventure? Awkwardly, the Red hurled me to one side as a rider-less Control horse reared in our direction and then, gracefully unaware of the dangers, cantered away into the waves of smoke. At another time, it might almost have been poetic. Then, his hands were on me again. The doors to the black van lurched open, metal hinging to life. I was dumped on a narrow, plastic bench inside the van. Resigned to the inevitable clunk of the bolt drawing across the door, I wondered if Sense had any idea that information powerful enough to bring them down was peacefully sleeping in my rucksack.
Inside, it was hard to tell how many were in the cage and the proximity quickly bred an uncomfortable silence. We were snared and helpless and the nameless creatures clearly had no desire to discuss it. Heat from the riot outside pulsed through the body of the van as the rhythmic thumping of bricks bashed down, sending rivets of pain into my spine. I tried to feel out the extent of the damage to my face, but the cuffs and the pain made it impossible. Then, a small voice called out,
“Clara? Clara, is that you?”
It was Shannon. I sighed. Well, at least she wasn’t dead.
“Yep, it’s me.”
She was somewhere deep in the cage. It was hard to see anything but, after a few seconds, a trembling, grey outline edged out, shimmering from the black.
“So they got you too then?”
Why was she whispering? Everyone in the van could hear.
“Obviously they got me too.”
“Yeah, course they did. Are you OK? What happened?”
“I’m fine. I would’ve got away if some people weren’t so competitive about hide and seek.”
“What?”
“Don’t worry about it. I’ll tell you another time.”
“Well, at least we’re both allright. That’s something, isn’t it? But Clara…”
“Yep?”
“You did manage to ditch the, you know, the thing?”
Her voice dumped that not so subtle hint into the air. She must have interpreted my pause as a moment of brain-death as she followed with,
“The rucksack, you ditched it right?”
God. For once in her little blonde life Shannon was right.
I knew she’d taken my silence as an admission and I was glad that she had the sense to keep her mouth shut. One word of rebuke, one little sigh of annoyance and I would have ripped my hands out of the cuffs and cracked her face open.
It was going to be a long drive to the compound.