Silver by Chris Wooding

Author:Chris Wooding
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scholastic Inc.
Published: 2014-09-10T04:00:00+00:00

He could hear them out there. He could sense the weight of them, pressing on the doors.

Wanting to get in.

Mr. Sutton ran his eye over the defenses for the tenth time. The doors were wooden, plated with thin metal. They were barred, boarded shut, barricaded with heavy desks, and braced with benches jammed against the opposite wall. The doors to the other stairway leading to the foyer were similarly secure.

It still wasn’t enough.

The Infected were changing. Adapting. If another one of those hulking monstrosities came along and started pounding on the door, they’d break through eventually. And what was to stop them from coming back with arms like drills, or as spidery wall-climbing things that could get up on the roof?

He glanced up at the overhead fluorescents. At least they had light. Fear spread easily without it. In their cold, institutional glare, things seemed a little less desperate. That was something to be thankful for.

But just like the doors, he knew it wouldn’t last forever.

Like many remote institutions, Mortingham Boarding Academy had its own electricity supply in case it was cut off from the grid. Unfortunately, that supply came from an ancient, petrol-powered system of generators. When the Infected had cut the power — and considering how well the attack was timed, Mr. Sutton was in no doubt that they’d been responsible — the generators had taken a little time to power up and grind into life. They hadn’t been needed for years, and Mr. Sutton hadn’t even been sure they’d work. But they did, thankfully, because this place would have burned down around them if they hadn’t.

There was only one problem. The generators were housed in the basement of the school building, in locked rooms near the school’s vast boiler, and there was no telling how much fuel was in the tanks. No telling how long it would last, or whether the Infected would get to the generators and sabotage them first. If they could make it till dawn, he’d count them lucky. Being realistic, he figured they had a few hours at most. The system was only supposed to cover a short outage, and Mortingham was a big place. Across the campus, most of the lights had been left on, even in those buildings where not a single person remained.

And they were about to start draining it even more.

The doors creaked as the Infected surged against them like a tide. They were gathered there at the top of the stairwell. Their buzz-saw moans drifted through into the corridor — so near to their prey, and yet so far.

Mark knelt on the floor, busy at his new device. Something to do with resistors and transformers and a dangerous amount of electricity. Mr. Sutton didn’t understand it exactly, but Mark assured him that they needed it for what they wanted to do. Otherwise they’d short out the whole building.

The device was a large metal box that Mark had taken from one of the DT labs, with some parts stripped out and others put in.

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