Prav sighed. ‘No. What good would that do? You helped save the girl in the end and that’s got to count for something. People like Ardwyn Hughes become strong by making people like you and me distrust each other. I’m not going to give her the satisfaction.’
And with that she had left David to heal what he could.
The playlist that helped her concentrate came to an end and she removed her headphones, thinking that it might be technology’s way of saying that’s quite enough for one night.
She heard something fall over downstairs.
Prav left her desk and went to the office door, which opened onto a short hallway and the staircase down to the ground floor.
‘Spence?’ she called.
There was the sound of something being dragged.
He’d probably decided that he needed to go looking for something in one of the cells, which were now being used as general storage and overspill for the evidence room. Even though the custody suite was out of commission, Burton was one of the few stations left with a front desk where the public could hand in lost-and-found, because knives and drugs didn’t need to be fed and monitored in case they choked on their own vomit or pissed on the floor. Spence was in his sixties; whatever he was trying to move, he was likely to give himself a hernia.
‘Do you need a hand with anything?’ she called as she went downstairs.
She saw Spence in the long corridor that ran from the front desk to the back door. He was lying on the floor, face down, being dragged backwards by something that made no sense. For a start, it had no arms or forelimbs, just a pair of thickly muscled legs with knees that rose over its back as it crouched by Spence’s head. It was dragging him with a whiplike tongue that was wrapped around his throat, and he was leaving a streak of red on the floor.
The thing looked at her, opened its mouth and squealed.
That was when she saw that the door to what had once been the cellar of the old Victorian building was open. Normally it housed just the boiler and electrics, but something simian with a pig’s face launched itself out of there, jabbering at her, and all of the other doors in the corridor were open, spilling forth creatures that looked like they’d stepped straight out of a vivisectionist’s nightmare.
Prav ran.
She didn’t run without purpose, though. She dashed for the back of the building, towards the changing rooms. There was a rack of personal radios permanently on charge, and she grabbed one, pivoting left down a side corridor and towards the unused cells. Something close behind her skidded on the polished floor as she took the corner too sharply for it to follow and crashed into a bank of lockers, screeching. She didn’t look back to see what it was, simply yanked open the first cell door that she came to, praying that it was being used for storage, and threw herself inside. She saw boxes, a filing cabinet, two old desks stacked on top of each other, and a huddle of broken office chairs. She tipped the filing cabinet over as the door was shoved from the other side; it landed with a crash, drawers flying open and spilling old property records everywhere, but it stopped the door opening more than six inches. A hand snatched through the gap, except it wasn’t a hand, it was a pig’s trotter with a thumb. A yellow eye peered at her through the viewing slot in the metal door, and something half-snarled, half-squealed: ‘Goan tah eeechooo!’
‘The fuck you are.’ Prav shoved the desks towards the door too, and upended them onto the filing cabinet, then began throwing boxes onto her makeshift barricade. When it became clear that no amount of pushing from the other side was widening the gap any more, she took out the radio.
‘All units, all units! This is bravo zero! Burton central is being attacked! Over!’ Despite her best efforts to remain calm there was no disguising the panic that was creeping in at the edges. ‘All units, all units!’ she repeated. ‘This is—’
‘Bravo zero, this is mike three,’ said Mick Ryland’s voice on the other end. ‘Prav, is this a joke?’
‘No, it’s not a fucking joke, Mick!’ she screamed. ‘Some fucking I-don’t-know-what-the-fuck-they-are have broken into the station! They got Spence! They got him on the fucking floor!’
‘Bravo zero acknowledged,’ Ryland replied, clipped and professional. ‘On way, five minutes.’ There was a brief pause and then: ‘Hang in there, Prav, we’re coming.’
When she turned back to the door, whatever it was that had been trying to get through was gone, but she could still hear sounds of things being thrown around, doors crashing open, and furniture being upended from elsewhere in the station. She sidled up to the gap and peered through. There was a man and a woman in the corridor. At least, the man was definitely a man. The woman was… different. They were having a conversation, and then he turned around and Prav saw that he had Everett Clifton’s black sickle-knife stuck in his belt and that hideous bone horn thing in his hands, and he was grinning like it was Christmas morning. She recognised him from the information supplied by David Pimblett; it was Matthew Hewitson.
And he saw her peering out.
Prav gasped and ducked back into the room, but it was too late. Hewitson came to the door. He looked down and around at the barricade and gave the door an experimental push, and when
