Living Hell

by Catherine Jinks

  I pierced it, but only just. As I wrenched my sword free, the OTV reared up, or swung around – I’m not quite sure. It all happened so fast. One flashing tentacle grazed my face, knocking me over. Dygall grabbed me.

  ‘Run!’ he screamed.

  For a second or two I stumbled along backwards, trying to find my feet. Then I lurched upright. Dygall released my arm. There was an awful smell and a fine, almost supersonic whistling noise. I nearly tripped on the rolling Dewar flask, which Merrit had dropped. I’d just had time to register that it was open – that the lids were missing – when a flash of heat made me look around again.

  The OTV was pitching and tossing wildly. Through its flanks I could see an orange glow, which quickly erupted into visible flames that licked from one of its open mouths and singed its lips. The shiny black casing crumpled and smoked. All of a sudden, it began to collapse in on itself. As the fire was smothered, the monster died. It was still twitching, but its guts had been burned away. It had swallowed Dygall’s Molotov cocktail.

  The smell was so bad, I could hardly breathe.

  Merrit seized me, and jerked me around. Though she was saying something that I could hear perfectly well, it didn’t make sense. I couldn’t process it. I could still see, however – well enough to realise that the free-ranging shuttle was badly damaged. Merrit’s liquid oxygen had splashed across a good forty per cent of its outer surface, leaving shrivelled, purple-grey scars and bubbling blisters. It was writhing around in a puddle of its own bodily fluid.

  The other shuttle hadn’t moved. It was still doggedly trying to eat its way through the Bridge door.

  ‘I’ll do this,’ I coughed. ‘Stand back.’

  I think Merrit snatched at me, but she was too slow. I flew towards the unmarked shuttle, yelling. With every kilojoule of energy that remained in my arms, I drove my blade into its carapace – which was far thinner, and more elastic, than the OTV’s. A blunt-edged blow wouldn’t have done much; it would simply have reshaped the mass, creating a dent for the briefest of moments. But my weapon was sharp enough to cut. It split the skin, and out poured a great gout of yellow slime. I hacked again, as the shuttle fell off the door. I hacked and hacked. I was shouting and crying. Yellow and red stuff slopped over my suit. The smell was beginning to strangle me.

  ‘CHENEY!’ screamed Merrit. ‘LOOK OUT!

  ’ I whirled around, but in the wrong direction. I was facing Merrit, and she was pointing over my shoulder, open-mouthed. I turned on my heel, and saw another OTV. It was heading down the street. Tearing down the street towards us. Those things could move so fast! They were so big, yet they could move so fast!

  ‘Shit!’ I screeched – and in my panic to escape, I slipped in all the liquid underfoot. I fell to my knees. ‘Run!’ I bawled. ‘RUN! RUN!’ I jumped up, but the thing was practically on top of me. I spun. I swung. Yellow droplets splattered as I wielded my wet sword. It connected, and the shock ran straight up my arm. Bam was barking. Someone was shrieking. Pulling my weapon free, I saw the dog dive straight past me – saw it fasten its jaws around the lip of the OTV’s yawning mouth, and dangle there for an instant – before being sucked into the maw.

  I slashed again, madly. Then I was pulled off my feet. There was a tentacle wrapped around my ankle; I realised this as the mouth in front of me flexed open wide. The lips peeled back. I reached for my pocket. The grenade! Last resort!

  At which point something – a blow – knocked the breath from my body. The light from my eyes.

  And there was darkness.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-ONE

  ‘Cheney. Cheney.’

  Someone was holding me, cradling my head. When my vision cleared, I saw my mother. My mother’s face.

  It was caked and smeared with dry muck, and the hair was gelled into choppy peaks, and the eyes were red, but it was my mother’s face.

  I opened my mouth to speak, and found that I couldn’t.

  ‘It’s all right,’ she murmured, her voice breaking on a sob. ‘You’ll be all right. Oh, Cheney . . .’

  My heart was skipping along in a very peculiar manner. I suddenly remembered where I was, and stiffened. The muscles in my limbs, however, responded sluggishly to the demands of my brain.

  Mum was stroking my cheek.

  ‘Shh,’ she said. ‘Give it a minute. It’s the shock. You caught the edge of it.’

  The shock? What shock? Where was the OTV? I tried to lift my head, without success. Then Dygall’s face appeared above me, red and beslobbered.

  ‘Is he all right? Is he all right?’ Dygall kept repeating. He clasped my hand in both of his, and pressed it against his chest.

  This pressure seemed to be coming from a long way off, through several layers of fabric. But when I checked, there was nothing lying between his skin and mine.

  What was happening to me?

  ‘It’s affected the peripheral nerves,’ my mother said, to someone out of sight. ‘It’ll pass.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ said a voice – and I caught my breath.

  It couldn’t be . . . it wasn’t possible . . .

  ‘Dad?’ I croaked.

  I turned my head, and there he was. Standing over me, with some kind of long metal stick in his hand. He looked incredibly old, and there was an oozing burn on his face, but it was him. It was really him.

  I started to cry.

  ‘Dad . . .’

  Mum pulled me up, and hugged me ferociously. Dygall, who was kneeling beside her, had to let go of my hand. He stood up. From my slightly higher perspective, I could see Merrit, hovering alone some distance away, her eyes fixed nervously on the distant starboard junction. A great, dark, glistening mound rose up behind her, utterly motionless. But . . .

  ‘Where’s Haemon?’ I discovered that my tongue could move more freely, though my voice was still hoarse.

  ‘Where’s Inaret?’

  ‘They’re still up there,’ said Dygall, pointing. Mum’s grip tightened.

  ‘Haemon?’ she echoed. ‘Inaret?

  ’ ‘They’re in the air duct,’ Dygall explained, and Merrit added, from where she was standing, ‘They should be right up here. Behind the access panel.’

  ‘Holy hell,’ said my father, and vanished from my field of view. Thankfully, I was recovering at a rapid pace. My hands no longer felt as if I was wearing gloves. My neck was no longer stiff. I struggled up to a sitting position, and saw that my father had crossed to the nearest air-duct access panel. He looked at it, then looked around.

  ‘Merrit,’ he began, ‘if I lift you -’

  ‘- I’ll pull it open,’ Merrit finished weakly. ‘But someone had better keep watch . . . just in case . . .’

  ‘I will,’ said Dygall.

  While Dad and Merrit struggled with the access panel, my gaze drifted away from them, across the scene of carnage that surrounded us. The street was a mess of lurid colour. One shuttle seemed to be smeared across several metres of floor; the other lay structurally intact but perfectly still, its blisters gleaming. Near it, the first OTV had shrunk in size. Its singed and flattened shape was smoking a little.

  The second OTV hadn’t been reduced to such a pitiful condition. In fact, it was moving. One tentacle quivered slightly. One mouth twitched.

  ‘Mum . . .’ When I tried to point, I couldn’t quite make the half-fist that was necessary. My fingers wouldn’t close up that far.

  So I waved them instead.

  ‘It’s all right, dearest,’ Mum said. ‘That OTV’s done for.’

  ‘What – how -?’

  ‘An electromagnetic charge. Your dad found a marvellous thing in GeoLab. It’s a kind of extendable torch, for lighting up crevices or peering down holes. But when he took off all the safety shields and reset the charge, it made a wonderful weapon.’

  ‘Tuddor zapped that OTV,’ said Dygall, without looking at us. ‘He trashed it with one blast.’

  ‘GeoLab!’ I suddenly remembered. The grenade. I fumbled around in my pocket. ‘Mu
m . . . there was a man . . . he said he came from GeoLab . . .’

  ‘Oh yeah.’ As Dygall’s glance swept from the port to the starboard tubes, alert for any sign of trouble, he tried to explain. ‘We met a man – we didn’t know him – you didn’t know him, did you, Cheney?’

  ‘No.’ I produced the little grey object. ‘He gave me this. It’s an explosive device.’

  ‘Tuddor?’ Mum’s voice was suddenly sharp. She looked over to where Dad was helping Inaret down from the air duct, one-handed. In the other hand he grasped his gleaming weapon.

  Haemon was already out. He stood pressed against Merrit, his face buried in her chest, his arms encircling her waist. She was patting his back.

  ‘What?’ Dad grunted. He wore a strange, bleak expression. Inaret wound herself around his upper body.

  ‘Didn’t you say something about sending Beniah out to the Depot?’ Mum sounded hesitant. ‘Something about blowing it all up, to stop it from producing more RARs . . .?’

  ‘Yes, I did. What about it?’

  There was a pause. Mum turned to me. I said, ‘Beniah didn’t make it to the Depot, Dad.’ And I lifted the grenade.

  Dad shut his eyes for an instant. His whole body seemed to sag. Within seconds, however, he had recovered. He squared his shoulders and his back straightened. The lines around his mouth were firm again.

  ‘I’ll take that,’ he declared, striding towards me. Shifting his grip on the baton, he plucked the explosive device from my open palm. Then he slipped it into his pocket.

  Meanwhile, Inaret continued to cling to him like an adhesive.

  ‘Cheney!’ Merrit suddenly spoke up, her voice pitched high. ‘Cheney, look! Dygall – look – it’s Yestin!’

  I was so fuddled, I didn’t know what she was talking about. I just blinked. Dygall jerked around, but Mum didn’t stir. Dad said, ‘Yestin? It’s okay. You can come out now.’

  I craned my neck to peer behind me, towards the starboard junction. As I did so, Dygall cried, ‘Yestin!’ Even Inaret turned her head, lifting it from my father’s breastbone.

  Yestin was emerging from the open stair shaft. I couldn’t believe my eyes. Though limping, he was otherwise unchanged: still thin, still crooked, still colourless. It was like seeing a ghost.

  ‘Oh, Yestin!’ Merrit sobbed. She started towards him, breaking Haemon’s grip, and the three of them ended in a tangle just a few steps from the junction. ‘Come back here!’

  Dad barked. ‘Don’t wander off, you should always stay together!’

  ‘Yestin . . .’ I mumbled, and my mind started to work again. I looked at Mum. ‘Sloan!’ I gasped. ‘Where’s Sloan?’

  ‘Oh, Cheney.’ Her lips trembled. When her eyes filled with tears, my fingers closed around her arm. They were working perfectly, at long last.

  ‘Where is he? What happened? Mum!

  ’ ‘We had to leave the air duct,’ she quavered. ‘After we escaped from MedLab, we tried to look for you, Cheney, but the duct was swelling -’

  ‘I know that!’

  ‘- so we had to get back down – somewhere near BioLab -’ ‘What happened to him? Tell me!’

  ‘I’m telling you, Cheney.’ She caressed my stiff hair. ‘We were in the tube – Sloan had the scalpel – he was in front, and he saw the OTV first – he told me to run, and I ran – we hid in a stair shaft, Yestin and I -’

  ‘An OTV?’ I moaned. ‘Oh no . . .’

  ‘But Sloan didn’t follow us. Arkwright must have turned back as well. I didn’t know what to do . . .’ Mum’s voice, which had firmed up, began to wobble again. She wrapped her arms around me. ‘Oh, Cheney,’ she faltered, ‘I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I just didn’t know what to do. I had Yestin . . . I had to get away . . . we went upstairs, and your father – your father was there – he had his zapper, but when we went back to look, that thing was . . . it was already eating his . . . there was nothing we could . . .’ All at once she was crying, weeping into my neck. She couldn’t even finish.

  What little strength I had left seemed to drain from my body. Sloan was gone. He had abandoned us. He had faced down an OTV with a laser-head scalpel – and he had lost.

  All that courage . . . all that brilliance . . . it had been consumed like one of his pet micro-organisms.

  How was I going to survive without my Big Brother?

  ‘He can’t be dead,’ I whimpered. ‘He can’t be dead! Not Sloan!’

  ‘Cheney, listen.’ It was Dad, leaning over me. He took my chin in his hand. I saw that he was no longer holding Inaret. ‘We can’t do this. We don’t have time. Are you listening? Cheney? Comet, get him up. Comet!

  ’ I’d never heard Dad talking to Mum like that. To me, yes – once or twice – but not to Mum. When she failed to respond, he hauled her up himself. His face could have been cast from solid steel.

  ‘Come on,’ he said, releasing her hold on me. ‘Get up, Cheney, we can’t stay here.’

  ‘Why not?’ Mum wailed. ‘Where are we supposed to go?’

  ‘Stop it.’ Dad spoke brusquely. ‘Get a grip, you heard the boy. Beniah didn’t make it. We’ve got a job to do. If we disable the Depot plant, and finish off the other units with this . . .’ He waved his extendable torch.

  ‘With that?’ Mum’s laugh made me flinch. ‘Are you insane? Do you know how many shuttles there are, on board this ship?’

  ‘What would you suggest, then?’

  ‘You want to drag all these children off to the Depot?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘So you want to split up? You want to take the only weapon and go? How am I supposed to defend them if you do that?’

  ‘You wouldn’t have to defend them, Quenby.’ Dad was talking through his teeth. ‘They can obviously defend themselves.’

  I couldn’t believe it. They were arguing. They were both alive, and they were arguing!

  ‘What are you doing?’ I cried. ‘What’s the matter with you?’ I was on my feet now, but my knees felt like fluffy insulation fibre. ‘Don’t shout at each other, that won’t do any good!’

  Dad stared at me for what seemed like ten minutes (though it must only have been a couple of seconds). It was the first time he’d spared me much more than a glance since my awakening. I saw the strain around his eyes, and the rigid set of his jaw, and the terrible seeping wound on his cheekbone.

  He reached for the back of my head with one hand, pulled me towards him, and planted a bruising kiss on my brow.

  ‘You’re right,’ he said, letting me go. ‘No shouting. No arguments. We’ll do this by the book. Input first, before we make our decisions. Anything important you kids want to say? About your weapons, maybe? They seem to have been pretty effective.’

  As Dygall gave him a rapid account of the liquid oxygen and methylated spirits – as Merrit kept watch for approaching danger – I cast around for my sword. It was lying near the electrocuted OTV, which was still subject to the odd nervous tremor. I edged towards its slack tentacles with great caution, retreating quickly once I had retrieved my precious blade.

  Though daubed with gummy stuff, the sword was otherwise undamaged. There wasn’t a scratch on it.

  I was amazed that something so old could have been manufactured so well.

  ‘. . . I see,’ Dad was saying when I rejoined him. ‘In other words, you’re out of ammunition.’

  ‘There could be more,’ Dygall remarked. ‘We didn’t have time for a really good look.’

  ‘There’s certainly more liquid oxygen in MedLab.’ Mum seemed to have recovered, to some extent. She spoke clearly and forcefully. ‘In BioLab, too, I’ll bet.’

  ‘And we cut off our wrist bands,’ Dygall interjected. ‘It seems to work against the samplers . . .’

  ‘Oh, I took care of that long ago,’ said Dad, holding up his naked wrist. I noticed that he barely looked at us, but kept scanning the junctions on either side. We were in a very vulnerable position. I wasn’t surprised to see him so jumpy.

  The mention of wr
ist bands, however, set me thinking. I wondered how – and when – he had cut his off.

  ‘Dad,’ I said, ‘how did you escape from BioLab? How did you make it to GeoLab? What happened to the others?’

  Dad hesitated. He dragged his gaze back from the closest junction, and fixed it on me. I saw him swallow.

  Mum said, ‘Later, Cheney. This isn’t the time.’ But Dad was already talking.

  ‘I should have gone with Beniah,’ he said quietly, almost as if he was addressing himself. ‘We should have made up our search party after the job was done. It was my fault. All my fault.’

  ‘Tuddor -’ Mum began.

  ‘If you want to know, Cheney, I was lucky.’ Dad’s tone was harsh. ‘After Lais copped it, and Ottilie, and Firminus, it didn’t take me long to ditch my wrist band. Good job there weren’t any OTVs around. I didn’t encounter one of them until I was breaking into GeoLab.’

  ‘Tuddor.’ Mum raised her voice. ‘The kids don’t need to hear this. It’s not useful.’

  Dad blinked at her.

  ‘What we need to do now is work out our next step,’ she continued. ‘Are we going to blow up the Depot, or look for liquid oxygen, or fortify the Stasis Banks, or what are we going to do?’

  And then I remembered.

  I don’t know why it hadn’t crossed my mind before. Perhaps the electric shock had affected my memory.

  ‘Wait!’ I gasped.

  They all turned to stare at me.

  ‘In there!’ I gestured at the Bridge. ‘There’s someone in there! We have to get him out!’

  ‘Oh!’ Merrit, too, had clearly forgotten. ‘Yes! That’s what we were doing! We have to help him!’

  Dad frowned. ‘You mean -’

  ‘Are you sure?’ Mum interrupted. ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I saw someone,’ said Haemon, weakly. ‘Through the access panel.’

  ‘The shuttles were trying to get him,’ I finished, and became suddenly aware of my parents’ troubled expressions. ‘What?’ I demanded. ‘What’s wrong?’