11.5

As Solomon fell, howling in pain, Vic let out a low menacing chuckle and ran for the door.

‘What are you doing?’ Solomon said. ‘We need the key.’

‘Hoo! You are as dumb as you look! There ain’t no fucking key, sonny,’ he laughed. He punched the button on the wall, cleverly disguised behind a square of moss.

The bastard’s tricked me, the realisation belatedly came to Solomon.

As the klaxon again went off, the door opened. And with it the cage door unlocked, releasing the other dog.

Vic – and the knife Solomon had worked so hard to obtain – disappeared into the next room, leaving Solomon alone in the dark with the dogs.

There were half a dozen in the room with him, judging by the sounds they were making.

The room was in total darkness.

Their senses would far outweigh his. He had no chance really.

Thinking fast, he decided his best course of action and went for it.

He knew the dogs were hungry.

They wouldn’t be fussy.

So he gritted his teeth and pulled the steak off the back of his head.

It was stapled with three huge, barbed staples and it was agony to tear off.

Most of the back of his scalp came with it when it finally came free.

Blood coursed down the back of his head, but none of that mattered.

He had something to feed the dogs that were charging for him.

The nearest dog – he couldn’t make out what breed it was, but it was big – hit his legs hard and he managed to shove the chop between its drooling jaws just as they snapped for him.

It began chewing contentedly as his arse hit the floor.

Though it pained his body, he managed to spring to his feet.

He listened intently, using the greedy slurping sounds to determine the dog’s location in the absence of any light.

He charged the dog, which was already most of the way through the steak that he was sure still had three decent-sized chunks of his flesh stapled to it.

The base of his left fist slammed down right between its eyes.

There was a horrid meaty thud and the dog went limp for a second.

Solomon took advantage of the time he’d given himself and grabbed the dog’s neck.

He began to twist sharply, the dog’s growls fading into a whimper which in turn faded to silence as its neck broke beneath his powerful grip.

He felt like an utter bastard, but he refused to let it to be his end.

Grabbing the dead dog by the collar, he waved it in the snout of the other dogs who had started to come in for the kill.

It was elation itself when they took the bait and began greedily chewing their fallen companion.

The light at the far end of the room began to strobe, revealing the scene in second-long flashes.

He soon began to pray for darkness to return.

He knew he didn’t have time to dwell on this; they had already exposed the dog’s gleaming ribcage.

Blood dripped from their muzzles as they greedily tucked into the banquet of steaming offal.

The sight chilled his blood.

Better it than me, he thought.

He pressed the button and hoped like hell that it worked.

It was a relief when the shutter door began to open.

In the next room were maybe a dozen cages, full of Dobermans, big ones that looked as though they’d tear you a new one just playing.

He’d handled big dogs like this before, but these were strangers. And he was wearing a suit made entirely of meat.

Plus, for shits and giggles, Craven had put some mutated beasts in here. A pair of them had their teeth on permanent display due to their muzzles being rotted away. These two in particular were muscular beyond belief and they looked mean as hell. The low growls they uttered made his bowels quake.

He didn’t like his odds.

There was a button set into the floor in front of one of the cages.

And in this cage was a dog with a key attached to its belt, like Vic had said in the last room.

The thought of the conniving old prick made Solomon curse under his breath but then he focused on the job at hand.

Stolen novel; please report.

Doing anything but that was liable to get him torn to shreds.

‘Press this button for the key,’ read the luminous green paint beneath the button.

‘Yeah right,’ Solomon said.

He already knew how things worked in here.

He scanned the room again.

There were ten cages in total.

The two dogs he’d noticed as being mutated were staring at him, barking fit to raise hell.

He swore he could see the bars in their cages buckling as they hurled themselves against them.

Their growls went through him and it was all too easy to imagine them wrenching the skin from his bones.

There were other noises coming from in here, ones which he couldn’t quite identify.

They didn’t seem important, so he pushed it from his mind.

There seemed no other buttons, though there was a control panel on the wall.

He couldn’t make much sense of it thanks to the dark and the adrenaline that raced through his veins.

‘Looks like it’s the button,’ he said to himself.

He crouched next to it.

Sighed and high-fived it.

When he pressed the button, a number of things happened simultaneously.

The lights came on, revealing the whole room to his startled eyes.

That fucking klaxon again began to sound out, threatening to permanently derail his train of thought.

The false ceilings above each of the cages gave way, dumping a terrified person in with the dogs.

The sight of the screaming faces – some of them children – chilled his blood.

He darted for the nearest cage.

To his delight it had a loose metal bar on the front and he took no time in wrenching this free and raining down blows on the dog’s head as it tried to savage the young boy before it.

When it was no longer a threat he ran to the next cage.

‘Save yourself,’ a distorted voice chuckled from the tannoy system. ‘They have no future anyway. Not in this world.’

Solomon flipped off the unseen speaker and darted to the next cage.

A little girl was screaming as the Doberman in the cage with her began to shake her arm in its jaws like a fleshy chew toy.

Solomon shoved his makeshift weapon through the bars of the cage and managed to thrust it into the dog’s throat like a snooker cue, hard enough to put it off its potential meal.

As it released its grip on the girl’s arm and turned to face him, he hit it hard on the top of the skull.

It let out a low whimper as its legs buckled.

He looked around, deeply traumatised by the scene of the dogs savaging the people trapped in their cages.

No way to save them all, he thought, despairing, as screams began to echo around the room.

Youngest first, he thought.

Another thought hit him like a brick to the skull; they put the lights on so I didn’t miss any of this. The twisted bastards.

Then his eyes fell upon something that was potentially the answer to the problem.

In one of the cages was a woman with her throat being torn out by one of the mutated nightmare dogs.

Solomon could see a red button under her.

But he had no idea what it did.

The last button he’d pressed had been a disaster, but there had been no other way around it.

He shoved the bar into the cage, trying to get to the button, but the dog grabbed the weapon in its teeth.

He cursed.

The dog’s teeth were actually beginning to sink into the solid iron bar.

Sure don’t want those fucking jaws wrapped around any part of me, he thought.

As if it had read his mind, it let go of the bar, turned and bared its teeth at him.

At least the lady has nearly checked out, he thought with a grim smile.

She was lying on her back, her hands clamped to her throat.

Judging by the amount of blood that was coursing out from between her fingers it was already too late.

Solomon pulled the bar back, slamming the dog’s head into the cage as it refused to let go.

He wrenched it to the side and it eventually came loose.

He thrust it in, this time hitting the button set into the base of the cage.

A shrill alarm went off.

‘Holy shit,’ Solomon said aloud as all the cell doors simultaneously clicked open.