Crawlers

11:01pm

For a long time there had been silence. Jasmine and Samantha glared at each other. Robert nursed his arm and grimaced. Ben looked around the room. 

Behind him was the door to the monitor room, where Josh was still freaking out in private. To Ben's left was the door through which Hugo had been snatched by the adults standing sentry outside it. To Ben's right lay Lisa, still unconscious. 

Ben found himself looking up at the ceiling. 

It was made of white plastic tiles, each one about thirty centimetres square. As Ben stared up at them an idea started to form in his mind. 

He got up from his spot on the floor and went over to the chair that Hugo had been using, which was now empty. He pushed it along until its back was against the room's third and last set of lockers, which were still standing against the wall. He stood on the seat, put one foot on the top of the chair's back, and straightened his knee. With a certain amount of very uncool scrambling and twisting, he managed to pull himself up. 

Now he was lying on top of the lockers, on his back. 

'Mind telling me what you think you're doing?' asked Samantha, hand on hip. 

'Give me a second,' said Ben. 'I want to try something.' 

Reaching his hand up to the nearest of the square plastic ceiling tiles, he pushed at it experimentally. 

It lifted. It moved so easily that Ben's entire arm went in with it. The tile tipped from his fingers and fell lightly on top of one of its neighbours. 

The space behind it was empty. 

Ben blinked. Then, to the ominous creaking of the lockers underneath him, he wriggled and scooted until his head and shoulders lined up with the square hole he'd just created. He took a deep breath, then stuck his head through. 

His hunch had turned out to be right. The room's tiled ceiling wasn't its true ceiling at all: the tiles were held up by a grid of some kind of light metal, probably aluminium, behind which there was a gap of another half a metre or so before the concrete underside of the next storey above. 

It was dark in there. The light of the room below coming up around his shoulders didn't penetrate far. In the second or two it took Ben's eyes to adjust he found himself hoping strongly that there was nothing waiting for him in the surrounding shadows. If he was attacked by crawlers now, with his shoulders trapped, he wouldn't stand a chance. 

'What's up there? What can you see?' he heard Jasmine ask. 

'Shhhhh,' Ben hissed back, making 'keep it down' gestures with his hands, which were still below him in the room. Now he was starting to be able to make out the details he'd been hoping for. To his right, if he turned his head that way, the light from the security room below was now visible to him as a series of faint intersecting lines - the glow escaping weakly around the sides of the ceiling tiles. And to his left...

To his left - back towards the lifts - was darkness. The lower half of Ben's body was still lying on top of the lockers: his left arm was pressed against that wall. But up here, above the ceiling tiles, the wall stopped. There was a sort of lip of woolly-looking insulation material sandwiched between two layers of plasterboard, then another grid of ceiling tiles - this one belonging, of course, to the room next door. 

He gulped. Then he sneezed. It was disgustingly dusty up there. But the fact remained: 

'I...' he said, hardly believing it. 'I think I've found a way out.' 

'What?' 

There was a chorus of enquiry and celebration from the room below, and in that second Ben wished he hadn't spoken so soon. Because now, of course, he could see that his 'way out' had major problems. So they could get into the next-door room if they wanted: so what? There were so many sentries outside, the chances were that the door of that room was blocked too. But it was a start. 

'Quiet down there,' he told them. 'Let me think.' 

After some more wriggling, and a nasty moment when the aluminium frame around him felt like it was cutting into his shoulders and back, he managed to force his arms through the gap so they were up there with him. He pushed down on the tiles to either side of himself - and that was when his suspicions about those were confirmed for him. There was a soft creak, then a crunch: the tiles popped out under his weight and fell to the floor below, provoking a squeal of alarm from Lauren. They obviously weren't much stronger if you pushed down on them than if you pushed up - certainly not strong enough to take anyone's full bodyweight. 

Ben paused, thinking, as the sudden uprush of light through the new gap sent purple splashes across his dark-adapted retinas. 

Light, he thought. Some part of the ceiling grid had to be stronger than the rest, to support the room's lighting. Craning, wriggling, the frame biting into his back, Ben turned, looking around in the dusty, dark ceiling cavity, searching for what he wanted. 

And he found it.