Anthony Horowitz - Necropolis

Somehow, she got to the other side, taking the last step with a surge of relief. At that exact moment, Red’s screams ended and she turned round to see him being held in the air by a group of the creatures who were standing at the edge of the building she had just left. His body was limp. Blood was pouring from a dozen stab wounds in his arms and chest. Then they let him go. He seemed to glide rather than fall through the air, as if he weighed nothing. Finally, he smashed into one of the parked cars, crumpling the roof and shattering the front windscreen. An alarm went off. With a screech of triumph, the creatures who had killed him lurched themselves onto the bridge.

Lohan was standing, watching them. He let them get about half-way across before he stretched out a hand and closed it around a lever set in a wall. He smiled briefly, malevolently, and pulled. At once, the bridge collapsed. It was like one of those magic wands used by conjurors at children’s parties. The different sections folded, then plunged downwards. Five of the creatures went with it, hitting the road in an explosion of bone and blood. The rest were left on the other side, jabbering and shaking their fists, unable to cross.

Behind them, something vague and dark rose up over the side of the rooftop. The swarm of flies had arrived. Lohan signalled and set off across the second apartment block, making for a door on the far side. If he was going to mourn the man who had died, it would have to wait. He went through, waited for Scarlett and Draco, then slammed it shut. There was a flight of stairs on the other side. It led down into a room humming with pipes and banks of machinery. There was a service lift on the other side. Lohan hit the button and the doors opened at once. The three of them piled in. He pressed two buttons: the ground floor and the basement.

Scarlett stood inside the confined space, panting. Her heart was racing at a hundred miles an hour. It felt unnatural to be suddenly standing still, knowing that there was danger all around but there was nothing she could do and nowhere she could go as the lift carried them down. She just hoped there wouldn’t be anyone waiting for them at the bottom.

But Lohan was completely relaxed, leaning against the back wall, the pendant hanging around his neck. Water was dripping down his forehead, over his eyes. “You are to go with Draco,” he said. “I have made arrangements. There are people waiting. You will be safe with them.”

“What about you?” Scarlett asked.

“I will lead them away.” He lifted the pendant, glanced at it, let it fall again.

“They’ll kill you…”

“If they find me, they will kill me. But my life is not in question here. You are all that matters. You must get away.”

“This is my fault.” Scarlett felt miserable. She had led the creatures to the apartment. They were only here because of her. “I’m sorry…”

“You are one of the Five!” Lohan stared at her as if he couldn’t believe what she had just said. “Do not be sorry. Do not be a little girl. You have the power to destroy them. Use it.”

The lift doors opened. They had arrived at the ground floor. Lohan stepped forward and looked outside. Scarlett could hear the wail of police cars, but there was nobody around and she guessed that the police hadn’t yet worked out that they had crossed from one building to another. But the jade pendant would bring them soon enough. Lohan gave a last instruction in Chinese to Draco and then he was gone. The doors slid shut behind him.

“You stay with me now,” Draco muttered.

Red had been killed. The man with the machine gun was dead. Lohan was probably next. But he didn’t seem to care.

The lift continued down to the basement. It opened into an underground car park. There was a shiny black car waiting for them and at first Scarlett couldn’t believe what had been arranged for her, what was waiting there beneath the building. But at the same time, she knew it made complete sense. She remembered what Lohan had told her. The entire city was against her. Every policeman, every surveillance camera, every official was looking out for her. How was she meant to get past them all?

The car was a hearse. There was an open coffin in the back, the inside of it lined with cream-coloured satin with a pillow at one end. Two men were waiting for her. They were dressed in dark suits, like undertakers, but she recognized them from The Peak. They were the ones who had killed Mrs Cheng. One of them made a gesture. Scarlett knew what she had to do.

This time she didn’t argue. Without even hesitating, she climbed into the back of the hearse and lay down. It occurred to her that only a few hours ago, when they had tried to lock her in the boot of a car, she had thought it would be like being buried alive. And here it was, happening for real.

She laid her head on the pillow. The two men moved towards her. And then once again darkness claimed her as the lid was bolted into place.

Nobody noticed the hearse as it swung out of the underground car park and began to make its way south towards Victoria Harbour. Everyone’s attention was on the building where Lohan and his friends had been found. The hearse emerged on the other side, turned left at a set of traffic lights and set off down the Golden Mile.

It never did more than ten miles an hour. If anyone had been watching it, the fact that it was moving so slowly would only have made it all the more unlikely that it was being used as an escape vehicle. But very soon it had left the crowds and the police cars behind. In the front, the driver and his assistant gazed straight ahead, their grim faces hiding their joint sense of relief.

For Scarlett, it was less easy.

She couldn’t see anything. She couldn’t do anything. She couldn’t even move. She was lying on her back, trapped in a black, airless space with the lid bolted into place only inches above her head. She was completely at the mercy of her own imagination. Every time the car slowed down or stopped, she wondered if they had been discovered. Worse than that, she imagined a nightmare scenario where something had gone horribly wrong and she really was taken to a cemetery and buried alive. Every nerve in her body was screaming. She could hardly breathe.

After what seemed like an hour, she felt the car stop. She heard the doors open and slam shut. A long pause. And then suddenly a crack of daylight appeared, widening as the coffin lid was lifted off. A hand reached out to help her and gratefully she grabbed hold of it. Gently, she was pulled out like a corpse returning to life. She found herself trembling. After all she had been through, she wasn’t surprised.

Where was she? The hearse had been parked next to a fork-lift truck in a warehouse, filled with pallets and crates. There were skylights in the ceiling but it was also lit by neon strips, hanging down in glass cages. One of the men had hit a switch that brought a sliding door rumbling down on castors, but before it reached the floor Scarlett glimpsed water and knew that they were near the harbour. The smell of gunpowder hung in the air. Normally, she might not have recognized it – but there had been plenty of it around in the building she had just left.

The driver was already stripping off his jacket and black tie. The last time Scarlett had seen him, he had been wiping a bloody machete on a cloth up on The Peak. He had been the one with the backpack – long hair and glasses – and he was younger than she had first thought, in his mid-twenties. He was wearing a short-sleeved shirt under the jacket and she noticed a tattoo on his upper arm, a red triangle with a Chinese character inside.

“My name is Jet,” he said. Like all the others, he wasn’t bothering with surnames. He spoke hesitant English but with a polished accent. “I will be looking after you now. This is Sing.”