Crawlers

11:07pm

The bar in the ceiling was maybe twenty centimetres wide. Ben realized he was going to have to lie on his chest, using his arms and legs to push himself along through the darkness. His school shirt and trousers scraped along the surface of the bar with a gritty, grating sound. Before the receding light from the security room behind him got too faint, he stopped to look at his right hand: his pale skin was already charcoal-grey with the dust of decades. It was filthy up there. His eyes and nose itched abominably. 

Ben pushed on. The dark around him deepened, and he began to imagine things. 

He thought about the storey above: if he lifted himself off the ceiling bar even a little he could feel it against his back - concrete, rough and unforgiving. He imagined its solidity, its weight. He imagined it sinking, the gap getting narrower until he was trapped, squashed flat, or just stuck there for ever. Then he imagined the contents of the darkness to either side of him - armies of crawlers keeping silent pace with him, biding their time, watching how far he'd get, while in the rooms below ranks of enslaved adults waited, still as statues. Bolts, screws and other protrusions from the bar kept stubbing his fingers or scraping his belly, but Ben didn't mind. These things were better than what was in his head. 

Then - whump - his head hit something. 

The ceiling cavity was so dark by now that he hadn't seen anything coming. He flinched so violently he almost fell off the bar, and had to hold on tight for a moment. 

When he'd got himself together he reached forward with his right hand. He felt bricks and mortar, blocking the way ahead up to the ceiling and stretching away to either side. 

Ben had crawled past three internal plasterboard walls since the first one he'd left behind. The room beneath him was therefore the fourth along the passage from the security room. He had no idea how far he'd travelled in terms of actual distance but he hoped it was enough to get a head-start on the sentries. Because this, he realized, was as far along as he or anyone else in the group was going to get. 

Nervously he reached out with his left hand and scrabbled in the dust and fluff for the edge of the nearest ceiling tile. He found one, and dug at it with his fingertips until it lifted. Gently, silently, but fighting another sudden and terrible urge to sneeze, Ben laid the tile on the upper surface of one of its neighbours. Then he peered into the square of empty space it had left behind. 

There was a thin line of light that Ben immediately identified as coming from the gap under a door. The light, presumably from the passageway outside, stopped at the edge of something that Ben realized could be close to his face. Heart pounding a bit, he reached through the gap and felt around with his hand. He was right: just below him was a long edge of something - a shelf, he realized. 

Ben knew the room was small: he'd only just passed the last internal wall when he'd met the brick one. He craned his neck down to see if he could make out more details, and his dark-adapted eyes found the looming silhouettes of what could be more shelves. 

He removed the ceiling tile that was just to the left of his knees, placing it somewhere off to his right, as before. Trying as best he could not to allow any of his bodyweight to press down anywhere else, he wriggled around until he was in position to feed his feet through the gap. He kept wriggling - lying crosswise on the bar now - until his legs, then his waist, could follow his feet into the room below. Of course he still couldn't reach the floor, even with the tips of his toes: he wasn't tall enough. He held the edge of the ceiling bar as tightly as he could, partly because as he pushed himself through the gap he was supporting more and more of his weight, but partly also because he knew that in a moment he would have to let the bar go. Once he did, there might be no way up again. 

He let it go anyway. 

Ben landed almost instantly, stumbling a little, but managed not to lose his balance. Turning to face the light under the door, he groped forward like a blind man until his hands met the door's sides, feeling around for a switch. He found one. When his eyes adjusted to the sudden glare of the overhead bulb, Ben looked around. 

He was in a broom cupboard. 

Three of the broom cupboard's walls were lined almost floor-to-ceiling with the shelves he had noticed before. The shelves were quite deep, and the room was so small that the ones to Ben's left and right almost met the sides of the door. There were perhaps two square metres of floor space - which, Ben supposed grudgingly, was actually quite big for a broom cupboard. But the place was still a broom cupboard, and not much to look at, particularly after the effort he'd made to get there. 

Grimly, Ben started looking around for anything that might be... useful. 

There was a vacuum cleaner, tucked in the gap under the lowest shelf, in the cupboard's left-hand corner from where Ben was standing. Yes, undoubtedly 'useful' for its purpose, but not quite what he had in mind. 

The shelves were stacked with cleaning products - packets of dusters and bottles of chemicals. Ben had seen a film once in which the hero had mixed a few common household chemicals in various proportions and produced some handily powerful home-made explosives. Detailed instructions had not been provided. 

There was a mop and bucket. The mop handle was made of wood, about a metre and a half long and quite solid-looking. Ben supposed that this, held quarterstaff-style, might make a useful melee weapon: a fabulous martial artist like Jackie Chan or Tony Jaa would have no trouble holding off a horde of bitten adults with that. But Ben was not a fabulous martial artist. 

There was a toolbox. Ben opened it without much enthusiasm but was still disappointed to find that it only contained the things you usually find in a toolbox. Not even a crowbar. Just a hammer, a spirit level and an assorted bunch of ordinary screwdrivers. You might hurt someone (or something) with those, Ben supposed, but only if they were close enough to grab you already, and by then it would probably be too late. 

Josh had been right. This room was worse than the security room. Ben's idea of finding an escape route for everyone, the idea that had caused Jasmine to smile at him in that wonderful way, had turned out to be nothing more than a waste of everyone's time. Alone, covered in dust, Ben stood in the broom cupboard and sighed. 

Then Samantha stuck her head through the hole in the ceiling.