SEVEN DEADLY THINGS (Henry & Sparrow Book 3), A FOX [good books to read for adults .TXT] 📗

the cliff. Francis released his grip and rolled onto his side as Barney leapt up and dragged the body away from the edge, which was crumbling fast.

‘Lucas!’ yelled Francis. ‘He’s still down there!’

Barney crawled back to the edge, grabbing one of the tree branches to anchor himself, and held out one arm. A few seconds later he had hauled Lucas up onto the trembling lip of the land.

‘Back! Get BACK!’ yelled Francis, snatching a hold of the two of them and dragging them away into the field. ‘It’s going to go!’

‘On my count! All of us at the same time — same level!’ shrieked Kate, shining her torchlight on the mid-section of the solid wood panel. ‘Give it everything you’ve got!’

They rushed the door as one, shouldering it painfully. Nothing.

‘AGAIN!’ screamed Kate. They gave it all they had. There was a crack as the wood splintered around the weight of the concrete slab on its far side. The slab shifted but did not tip. The old wooden board, though, was cracked in two, and she was able to punch the top of it away. Light flooded through the slim gap. It was just wide enough to climb through.

She boosted Nikki up first, driving her through the ragged opening with as much velocity as she could manage at her awkward angle.

‘GO!’ said Craig.

‘No — YOU GO.’ He was skinny and light, and she womanhandled him through, glad that Nikki was there to catch him, as he still had no hands free to save himself.

She felt, rather than heard, the collapse.

Barney thought he might not be able to manage that night’s show. He had wrenched his arms quite severely… and he suspected he’d shortly be in police custody, no matter how much evidence there was that he hadn’t been involved in this murder spree. He wondered if he had accidentally killed Mike, the security chief, though. It was possible he’d broken the guy’s neck.

He got to his feet, feeling as if he was on the inflatable castle back in the kids’ adventure playground. The ground was shaking and bouncing.

Mike lay on his back, close to the edge, unconscious and maybe dead. They should try to drag him back onto the safer ground… but then the earth gave one last shudder and fell away, taking the security guard with it.

Microseconds were in play for Kate now as she shot through the gap, Nikki swiping at her shoulders and tugging her into the open air.

A bright blade of pain shot though her calves and she wondered whether she would ever see her feet again. A thundering rumble was rolling around her, from the collapsing bunker but also the cliff face above. Stones and grit were flying. Nikki was screaming. Natural and man-made structures were roaring, surging, cracking, flailing and falling.

Kate threw her arms up over her head and blinked out of the world.

31

Lucas had always known his past was a circle. The intense trauma of his mid-teens was riven through his very bones. He fancied a magnetic resonance imaging scanner could probably see the shockwaves in his femurs, his tibias, his ribs, his skull… like the hairline cracks left in rocks by seismic events.

Some people said what didn’t kill you made you stronger. He didn’t subscribe to that. You could grow a tough shell, but when the framework that held you up on the inside was rocked and cracked at so young an age, could it ever be as strong as before?

That day on the crumbling Suffolk coast proved to him, once again, that the past, like Halley’s Comet, was back once more, swinging by on another close orbit, full of evil portent, threatening to finish what it had started when he was fifteen.

As the gritty groan of the landslip subsided, he could hear only a bass hum of all too familiar dread inside his head. He was dimly aware of Francis and the silver-shirted guy trying to stop him, but he pushed them away and staggered to the collapsed edge of the field. In a rising cloud of displaced sand and dust he could see a stew of broken branches and roots, lumps of earth and rock, and the long, flat edge of what had once been the roof of the bunker. It was caved in and half buried in sand, pebbles and organic matter.

The path down to this wreckage was untrodden by man; freshly opened earth, webbed with abruptly denuded roots. He could see a black work boot protruding off to the right of the bunker. If Mike wasn’t dead yet, he soon would be; barely a trace of life force was there.

Lucas did not pause to consider the stability of this new-born cliff face; he’d already sensed it was sound enough to withstand another year or two of east coast erosion. He half climbed, half slid, down to the front end of the bunker — or what little remained of it beneath the landslip. His heart was crashing painfully in his chest, but he seemed to have forgotten how to breathe. Kate was here, somewhere… buried… buried alive.

He made himself stand still, inhale and close his eyes. Filtering out the myriad people now approaching the scene at speed, he brought Sid out and let the blue glass stopper hang from his fist.

‘It’s Kate,’ he told it, aloud, as if that would help. ‘Be precise.’

There was a drone buzzing overhead and shouts from the Suffolk police, no doubt arresting the silver-shirted guy and Francis. He had to block them out before they got closer. There might be only seconds before it was too late for Kate.

Sid spun, twisted to a figure of eight, then swung back and forth, indicating the plane and orientation. Lucas angled with it and walked with light tread until Sid pulled down and halted, straining at his chain. There was a broken wooden board with a WARNING — DO NOT ENTER sign spray-painted on it. It was pinned down at an