LIFERS Chapter Forty Nine

Satisfied the others remained undisturbed after what could only have been a second explosion, Ella went to the front hall and expected to find Marianna waiting there to be released; only she wasn’t. She returned to her room to see her sitting on the bed with the envelope in her hand.

‘Those tears are wasted on your mother, Marianna,’ she said from the doorway.

Marianna used the back of her hand to wipe them. ‘I need to get away from this place. My car’s here but I don’t know where.’

‘It’ll be at the far end of the street, in the garage, but you’ll need to be careful in getting to it because there’s a man out there, a private investigator who came looking for a girl we’d taken. I’ve since handed her back to him but for whatever reason he has he won’t leave.’

Marianna stood. ‘And was that explosion his doing?’

‘You heard it, then?’

‘I felt it.’

Ella nodded. ‘I don’t know what he’s trying to achieve, but I have a feeling he’s not going to stop until we’re either all dead or all in custody, so it would be wise if you left as soon as possible. You’ll have to walk along the centre of the street and not shelter in any of the doorways; if he sees you’re wet he’ll know you’re not from here.’

Marianna walked over and handed back the envelope. ‘I want you to know I will never come back here,’ she said. ‘I won’t contact you; I won’t…’ she trailed off, a frown on her face.

Ella put the envelope in her dress pocket. ‘You won’t what?’ she said, then noticed how Marianna stared past her, over her shoulder. She turned to see the billow of black smoke outside the large window over the front doors and rich orange flames licking at the glass. A heartbeat later the window imploded and showered the hallway in wood and glistening splinters.

‘Quick, follow me,’ she said.

‘Where to? Where are we going?’

Ella stopped and turned, saw how fast the thick, black, cumulus cloud poured into the hall and rolled along the ceiling toward them. ‘This place is a tinderbox,’ she shouted. ‘It’ll reduce to ash in no time, and that door was our fastest way out, so we’ll have to use the tunnels.’

When they reached the bottom of the stairs, Ella opened a small flap on the wall to reveal a red button. She pressed it and a loud claxon sounded. The doors on either side of the hall flew open and a rush of people from each of the doors headed for the kitchen under the stairway.

Marianna caught up to her grandmother. ‘What tunnels?’

‘Just follow these people; they’ll take you to where you need to be.’

‘Why, where are you going?’

Ella looked back up the stairs to see the smoke had already covered half the height of the door to her room. ‘There are a couple of things I have to take care of before I can leave,’ she said. ‘Go, I’ll meet you down there.’

..

Marianna looked on as her grandmother moved out of sight on the landing; she turned back to the passing horde who either didn’t see her or didn’t care about having a stranger in their midst. And when all of them had entered the kitchen, Marianna followed the last one down a narrow stairway into a much smaller room and then down another hatch in the floor. This time she found herself in a pitch black tunnel where the same tang of body odour she caught from her grandmother now seemed to strip oxygen straight from the air, and other than the jigger of flashlights and the silhouettes of peoples’ heads and shoulders, Marianna could see very little else.

The noise they made was one of hushed panic, each of them with something to say but neither of them listening to the person next to them. She looked back in the hope she’d see her grandmother but all she saw was the fading light from the small room she just left as it reflected off the wet stairway.

She was still moving forward but continued to look at the receding view when she slammed into the back of one of them. For some reason the line had come to a standstill and the hushed sound of panic soon turned to an alarmed sound of panic. A loud, solitary voice, shouted from the front, and by its tone, Marianna could tell something serious had happened.

She looked back one more time to finally see another beam of light jutting about and moving toward her. Relieved, though she didn’t understand why, she moved toward her grandmother and was about to speak when the one who shouted and ran back through the crowd arrived and spoke first.

‘The tunnels,’ he said, breathless. ‘They’s blocked, Ella.’

She shone her flashlight on his face. ‘All the tunnels are blocked?’

‘No, but the only tunnel that’s clear s’one leadin’ to the cinema,’ he said. ‘And the garage hatch is stuck good ‘n tight, we cain’t get it open.’ he stopped, took a breath, then swallowed. ‘And Brett’s lyin’ there … dead.’

..

Ella remained silent for a few seconds; all she earlier feared had come about. The investigator was out there and would no doubt be manipulating the course of whatever would take place next. He’d done all of this, blocked the tunnels, set fire to the town hall, and now was in the process of rounding them up ready to be handed over to the authorities. But that was one certainty she expected, whether by his hand or her own.

’Okay,’ she said, ‘head for the cinema, it’s big enough and it’s dry.’