Ravage: An Apocalyptic Horror Novel(67)

“We could use a third pair of hands for this,” said Shawcross.

Annaliese hurried up to the two men and placed her hands underneath the breeze block. The cement was cold to the touch and gritty.

“After three,” Shawcross said. “We all shove it towards this window here.

“One…two…

“Three!”

They heaved the block up into the air and watched it tumble towards the double-paned window. The glass cracked and then gave way. The way the panes were tempered led to them falling out of the frame in a few solid sheets rather than shattering into many shards. It worked out well, because once the window pane had fallen, the aluminium frame was clear and safe to climb over.

“Come on,” said Mike. “Let’s get inside.”

The group formed a line and began to funnel through the open window. Shawcross went first, feeling it his duty to lead the way. Annaliese was the last to go inside. She wouldn’t have felt right leaving people outside where she couldn’t see them. For some reason she felt responsible for them. She didn’t want to see anybody else get hurt.

The room they had entered into was a typical office, with cluttered desks and coffee-stained keyboards. Annaliese picked up a photo frame from the nearest desk and examined it. There was a woman in the photo with two young boys. Annaliese wondered if they were all okay.

She glanced at a clock on the wall.

“Hey, I just had a thought,” said Annaliese. “If everything is okay elsewhere then people should start arriving for work soon. It’s gone eight.”

Mike shrugged. “I really hope so. I’ll give a kiss to the first person I see, but…”

Annaliese nodded. “I know, it’s a pretty big hope.”

“I just think that there’s no way that this thing isn’t happening elsewhere.”

“We should find a television. Then we’ll know.”

Shawcross opened up the door that led into the outdoor corridor. He raised a hand to keep everyone back while he checked that the coast was clear. After a few seconds, he beckoned to them all and the group got moving.

The hallways were unlit and eerie. Whenever Annaliese had visited the building previously, the various corridors and offices had always been bustling. It wasn’t that the zoo employed a lot of people, particularly; it was more that the corridors were narrow and the rooms small.

Shawcross halted beside a door on the right. “This is the staffroom,” he said. “Let’s get inside.”


He opened the door and reached in for the light switch. The room became bright, illuminated by the light Shawcross had switched on and also by several windows that overlooked the woods at the edge of the park. The room gave Annaliese a strange feeling of normality as she looked around it. The pool table in the centre was still littered with balls and cues where a game had been abandoned mid-session. An empty crisp packet adorned a small side cabinet. A forgotten coat hung from a wall peg. The room’s plush sofa seemed inviting. Somebody had left a paperback on one of its cushions, The Final Winter. The room had a lived-in feel and spoke not of the horrors that had occurred so close by.

“Thank the heavens,” said Mike as he ran over to a snack vending machine at the far side of the room. He pulled some change out of his pocket and began pushing numbers into the keypad.

“Is there a phone in here?” Charlotte asked. “I want to try and call my mom. The one in the hotel room didn’t get a dial tone.”

“There’s no phone,” Shawcross told her. “But there’s something even more important.” He headed over to the cabinet beside the pool table and swept aside the empty crisp packet. He plucked up a TV remote that had been hiding underneath it. The old-fashioned CRT screen, fixed to one of the room’s corners by brackets, flickered to life as Shawcross pointed the remote at it and pressed a button.

The picture was dim for a moment, but slowly faded in. The news came on, loud and blaring.

Mike moved up besides Annaliese, a chocolate bar half-raised to his mouth. “Holy cow,” he said before taking a bite. His face wore an expression of utter shock as he chewed robotically.

Annaliese watched the news report with utter horror. Banners at both the bottom and top of the screen read, NATIONAL EMERGENCY. The anchor-man providing the report looked mortified; not at all like the unflappable journalists the BBC usually placed in front of their cameras.

“We are getting word from France that Paris has now been declared a quarantine zone. Armed forces are forming a perimeter around the city and are preventing anybody from leaving. There are suggestions from local sources that the UK Government is preparing similar measures for London and other major cities.”

Shawcross was shaking his head. “This cannot be.”

“We take you now to scenes outside Westminster, where an emergency government assembly is holding crisis meetings.”

The newsfeed switched to a camera on location. It showed the full scope of the nightmare they were now living in. There was total silence in the staffroom as they all realised just how much trouble they were in.

The camera feed was from a helicopter a hundred feet above the Thames. The lens was focused on the spiny structure of the Houses of Parliament. Unbelievably, the face of Big Ben was dented and scorched as if some airborne vehicle – perhaps another helicopter – had collided with it.