Last Hope, Book One: Onslaught (8 page)

“Okay, Frankie,” Budd said. “I’ll just put my feet up and relax.”

Juliette smiled and then gestured towards the group of people. None of them appeared to have noticed their arrival. “Shall we go and introduce ourselves?” she asked.

“Sure, I’m all for making new friends,” Budd answered with a wink. He led the way to the group, letting his eyes jump between them, forming an initial impression about each person as he approached.

The first to catch his attention was a hotel worker. The mauve-suited employee was standing up at one end of the table, his arms folded across his chest. He looked to be in his mid-forties, was short and stocky, and his brown hair was touched with grey. His mauve suit jacket had been discarded and his white shirtsleeves were rolled up, revealing the inky stains of tattoos upon his forearms. Around his waist he wore a tool belt, complete with screwdrivers, wrenches, a knife and a hammer. The man’s face was blank and expressionless; he was saying little, but from the way several of the others looked to him, Budd guessed he had already done enough to earn at least some of their respect.

The second man, the most vocal, was tall and thin, and stood at the opposite end of the long table. He had black hair above a narrow, pale face and was wearing a well-cut black suit. On most of his fingers were rings, and he wore golden bracelets around his wrists, all of which shimmered in the candlelight. He was obviously a guest.

“What are we going to do, lock the doors and wait until the food runs out?” The second man said. “Sit here and wait until we fucking starve to death?”

Another vocal member of the group was a woman in her thirties. She wore a pinstriped panttorchsuit and had brown hair in a ponytail and a face that appeared clogged with makeup. She was expressing her agreement with the black-haired man’s opinions, standing to the side of his left shoulder.

Budd counted ten others, including two more mauve-suited employees and three, fully attired, Catholic priests. These ten were sitting around the table, but none of them spoke out. For now, it seemed they were all content to listen.

“Hey, good to see you,” the hotel worker with the tool belt said as Budd and Juliette neared the candle-lit table. His voice was tinged with a Yorkshire accent and he looked warily at Budd’s axe.

“Yeah, you too.” Budd replied. “Any idea what’s happened?”

“Judgement Day,” one of the priests said. His hands were clasped around a silver flask and his comment earned nods of approval from his two fellow men of religion.

“Fucking terrorists,” the black-haired man said.

The man in the tool belt shook his head. “No, we don’t,” he answered. “My name’s Andy, please take a seat. We’re discussing what to do next.”

“There’s no discussion,” the black-haired man said as Budd and Juliette pulled up chairs. “We need to leave London.”

“T’radio said that this has happened elsewhere,” Andy said.

“What does it say now?”

“Nothing,” the Yorkshire-man replied, but, either to prove or disprove his words, he took out a small clockwork radio and put a few turns on the mechanism. He then switched it on and rolled through the numerous frequencies. There was only white noise.

The black-haired man spoke over the static. “See, there’s nothing now, so the reports you heard could just be rumors. We all know how fast people panic. We should make our way out of London as soon as possible.”

“Well, before we make a decision, we should clear t’hotel, make sure that all of t’survivors are found,” Andy replied.

“No way,” the black-haired man said. “If they’ve made their choice to stay in their suites, I can make mine to leave. Who’s with me?”

“Some people will still be sleeping. What about them?”

“Screw them, we need to escape. For the last time, who’s with me?”

Before anyone had a chance to answer, the whole group heard fast footsteps falling on the corridor outside the bar. They all turned to look at the open doors.

The feet pounded towards them.

Frank burst in.

His face was flushed from running and his voice was distressed as his lungs gasped for air. “Everyone,” he called, “you’ve got to come and see this.”

Frank waited as the group got out of their seats and gathered up some candles, and then he turned around and went back the way he’d come. Some of the group, particularly the three elderly priests, struggled to keep up with the eager pace he set, and the line gradually strung out along the corridor and down the staircase as it progressed.

Juliette fell into step with another young couple and walked a few paces behind them. As the male of the pair was carrying a large flashlight, Budd was contented enough, pleased to be both in the middle of the group and close to a source of light.

He held Juliette’s hand as they moved along and they rounded the bottom of the staircase, meandering through the dark and narrow corridors of the employee-only area until they reached the reception. The front-runners of the group were already across it, passing the open doorway into the Tropical Walkway.

“Where do you think we are going?” Juliette asked.

“Haven’t a clue, baby cakes.”

They left the black and white tiled floor of the reception area and entered the Tropical Walkway. At its far end, Frank and a couple of the others were already out on the pavement. They had their heads tilted backwards as they looked up to the sky.

Budd glanced up, staring through the glass roof, but his own movement disguised whatever was happening above him and so he lowered his eyes to the handful of corpses on the red-carpeted pathway that cut between the plants and trees. Most of the fallen were guests, but several were wearing matching green pants and sweatshirts, and they appeared to have been tending to the flora when the tragedy had struck. One of the gardeners had collapsed on a narrow pathway between the foliage, thirty feet beyond the intersection to the basement elevator. At the bottom of the path was the door to a wooden shed, which was emblazoned with the signs EMPLOYEES ONLY and DO NOT LEAVE UNLOCKED.

Budd noted the discovery and carried on. He and Juliette were nearly at the main entrance to the New Millennium Hotel, where the glass doors had been propped open and the four mauve-suited attendants were slumped on the ground at their posts. Those of the group who had already reached the outside were looking up to the sky.

Their faces were shocked, gasping.

Budd and Juliette ventured outside together and immediately looked up. It took a few seconds before Budd fully comprehended what was happening. Beside him, Juliette said something in quick, quiet French.

The sky was falling.

The cloud, which Budd thought looked a further shade darker than it had from the Skyview Restaurant, was descending the building at a rate of a few feet per second. It was already three-quarters of the way down. Everything above it was obscured in a thick, pea-soup greyness. He let his eyes wander from the hotel to the area around it; as far as he could see, the grey cloud was tumbling down.

I felt like one of so many bugs I’d stepped on over the years. I immediately had a great empathy for what they would’ve felt as the sole of my boot cast an ominous shadow across their worlds. It wasn’t nice…

Budd looked around at the group of fellow survivors; most were still looking up, silent, transfixed by the amazing, yet frightening, sight. Several of them had taken out mobile phones and were holding them up in the air, trying to make calls. From their expressions, Budd was sure they were having no success.

Juliette placed her arm on his shoulder and then indicated to the abandoned streets. “What has happened?” she asked, her eyes exploring the roads and pavements, where cars stood idle and the dead rested upon the tarmac. “What has happened to this place?”

Budd didn’t offer an answer.

Instead, his eyes focused on one of the mauve-suited door attendants who had fallen out of the hotel and was lying on his front, spread-eagled on the ground. There was a stain of dry, crusted blood on the pavement from where he had landed on his nose. As Budd watched, the attendant’s left arm twitched, moving several inches back and forth.

A moment later, it did it again.

Standing next to Budd, Andy also spotted the movement. “Did you see that?” he asked.

Budd nodded. “Some sort of twitch.”

The man’s left leg kicked out and banged against the glass door, which made enough sound to grab the attention of the entire group. They all watched the limb spasm again.

With caution, Andy stepped towards the body. He knelt by the corpse and rolled the body onto its back, overcoming the stiffness that had worked into its joints. Almost instantly, he recoiled in shock. Behind the smashed nose and the mask of blood, the man’s eyes moved from side to side, not uncontrollably like the arms and legs, but seemingly with purpose.

They were dull and sunken, but they were looking around.

“He’s alive,” Andy exclaimed, stepping away. “Does anyone know first aid?”

From the back of the group, a middle-aged man with a plump face and receding hairline raised his hand. The woman next to him tugged at his sleeve, as if pleading with him to reconsider. “It’s my duty, Caroline,” he said to her, and then he moved out of her reach. “I’m a doctor,” he said as wider attention focused on him. “I can take a look.”

“Thank you,” Andy said, but before the doctor could reach the body, another corpse jerked out. Its arm shot up and down, rapping its knuckles on the pavement. The strange sight sent muffled cries of discomfort across the group; every member was acutely aware of how close the descending sky was to their heads.

The grey mass was about to engulf them.

“I think we should head inside,” Budd said, ushering Juliette through the main entrance. He was careful to steer her away from both of the twitching bodies. At the far end of the Tropical Walkway, another body was lashing out on the ground.

Wordlessly, the entire group followed Budd and Juliette’s lead.

Moments after they had all got inside, the cloud settled on the ground like a giant curtain. It was so thick that it obscured the view of anything even a few yards beyond the hotel’s front doors.

Budd pulled up a chair and sat beside Juliette. He was glad to reach the candle-lit bar, safe from the view of the twitching bodies. There had been many more as they’d journeyed along the dark corridors and up the staircase. He took off his Stetson and ran his hand through his hair. “You okay, kiddo?”

“I believe so.”

“Stick with me,” he said, half a smile on his lips. “Nothing bad ever happens to me in my nightmares.”

“You still believe that this is a nightmare?”

“Most of the world is dead, their bodies are learning to breakdance and we just watched the sky fall to earth. I’m pretty sure that this qualifies as a bad dream, aren’t you?”

“We should not have left those people out there. What if they are alive?”

Budd waited a while before he answered, his voice low, almost a whisper. “What if they’re not?”

Gradually, the rest of the group convened around the large candle-lit table and the individual mutterings and concerns grew in volume, each person trying to be heard above the others. In the end, Andy calmly and carefully knocked the side of his hammer against the tabletop, waited for all eyes to settle upon him, and then hung the tool back on his belt. “Doctor,” he said, glancing at the bespectacled man who had not given his name, “is there a medical explanation for what’s happened to these people? Firstly, why they collapsed, an’ secondly why they’re now moving? I’d swear that t’porter’s eyes were following me.”

Sitting next to his wife, who, Budd guessed, was in her mid-forties, the doctor looked anxious as the people around the table waited for him to rationally explain the night’s events. He pushed his circular spectacles up his nose and then wiped at a bead of sweat that had sprung from his forehead. “Truly, I do not have any reasonable idea as to why so many people would die in such a short space of time. An extremely contagious viral infection, maybe a biological weapon, my guesses would be no different from yours. As for the movement of the corpses we have witnessed, cadaveric and postmortem spasms are well-documented phenomena, but, to my knowledge, they would not involve such sustained and violent activity. As far as I am aware, a deceased organism is not capable of such acts. And I have checked several of these people for pulses and heartbeats. There were none to be found.”

“So what the fuck are you saying?” interrupted a voice from the far end of the table. The speaker was standing beside the counter of the bar, a little way from the rest of the group. Budd turned and recognized him as the black-haired man who’d advocated leaving the hotel. “Are these people dead, or not?”

“They must be dead, but they are showing a reaction that I have never seen, or even heard of. Honestly, I have no more answers than any of you.”

“Well, this doesn’t change a fucking thing. I reckon we should get out of this death trap to the countryside.”

Around the table, several people spoke at once, talking over one another as their fears and insecurities grew unabated. The senseless jabbering continued until Andy hit the table with his hammer again. “I’m staying. There’s plenty of food an’ stored water in this building, everything we need to survive until whatever has happened becomes clear an’ we’re rescued. We’ve no idea what’s beyond these walls. We’re safer in here, for now.”