Tooth and Nail

by Chris Bonnello

  ‘What was that thing you used to say to Thomas?’ Ewan asked without turning around. ‘You kept saying it to him after Beth died.’

  ‘I said plenty of things to that boy after he lost his mum. Could you—’

  ‘It was something about how missing her would be painful but not a bad thing…’

  McCormick nodded, and made his way to Ewan’s side. Before he spoke, he took a look around the cellar for Ewan’s sake to make sure they were alone. No doubt the lad had established that nobody was in the farm next door or the generator room, but it was best to double-check. Finding nobody, McCormick repeated the words as he joined his lead soldier in staring at the Memorial Wall.

  ‘The pain of missing someone is always worth it for the joy of having known them. Always.’

  ‘Yeah… that was it. Where did you hear that?’

  ‘I have to admit,’ McCormick said with a smile, ‘I made it up myself. It was a lesson I learned after Barbara died. As much as it hurt to lose her, I’d take that pain all over again. If mourning is the natural cost of love, then it’s a cost worth paying.’

  When he looked towards Ewan, he saw his disengaged expression. Maybe the lad couldn’t apply positive thought to the deaths of his family. Or Charlie.

  ‘Why,’ McCormick asked, ‘what are you thinking?’

  ‘Right now I’ve reached Ben Christie,’ Ewan answered. ‘I need to remember something about him.’

  McCormick gazed at the Memorial Wall, and found Ben towards the bottom of the list. Only Rachael Watts, Daniel Amopoulos and Charlie Coleman had died after him.

  ‘How come?’ he asked.

  ‘Because a few weeks ago I watched my best friend become nothing more than a chiselled name in a slab of rock,’ Ewan said, pointing a twitching finger at Charlie’s name. ‘And once I saw it, I realised how easy it’d be to forget who these people really were. So now, every time I look at this, I read down the list and try to remember something about each person.’

  McCormick knew that smiling wouldn’t be the reaction Ewan wanted, but he found his young friend’s attitude touching. He hid the smile as well as he could, as Ewan pointed to the top of the wall and reeled off some memories.

  ‘Sarah Best used to help Kate when she got anxious in French. They weren’t even friends but she helped anyway. Callum Turner came up with the Oakenfold Code… “the problems are not the person”. We all adopted it, and the teachers were proud of him for coming up with it at the age of twelve. Joe Horn always joked about being best in the school at chess club, even though he never reached a semi-final. Then there’s Elaine, Arian and Teymour… they deserve to be remembered for more than just dying on Jack’s generator mission.’

  Ewan turned to McCormick, revealing the redness in his face.

  ‘Remember a few weeks ago,’ he snarled, ‘when I yelled at you for not adding the Rowlands? Three good people died in New London helping us get out of the Inner City, and they didn’t even become chisel marks. They didn’t become bloody anything. And I don’t want to forget them either.’

  ‘If they mean that much to you—’

  ‘It’s too late now. You’ve already added Charlie, and he died after them. I’m scared about what’s going to happen next.’

  Scared. Have I ever heard him use that word before?

  ‘You’re taking a stupid risk,’ Ewan said with watery eyes, anger and love blending in his voice. ‘If Lorraine’s hand twitches at the wrong time, your name’s next on this list. Whether you die on the operating table, or somewhere in New London with your stitches ripped open. If you meet a clone that’s faster than you, your name’s next on the list. If…’

  Ewan’s sentence collapsed. McCormick tried to take advantage of the silence, but couldn’t find anything to say. His lead soldier was absolutely right.

  ‘Don’t you dare become just a chiselled name in a bloody rock,’ Ewan managed to continue. ‘Other than my dad, you’re the only man I’ve ever trusted. You’re not allowed to mean that much to someone just to die on them. Don’t you dare do that to me.’

  McCormick closed his eyes. As a mathematician, he knew the logical response. As a human, he didn’t want to hurt a young man who meant so much to him. But as a leader, he knew there were some situations that were impossible to get right. He chose to be honest.

  ‘Ewan, I will keep myself on this planet as long as I can, for you and the others. But if it ever came down to a choice between staying alive for you or dying for millions of prisoners, you understand that I have to choose the greater good. That’s why we’re fighting this war.’

  Ewan turned back to the wall with a cold expression on his face. McCormick heard other people’s footsteps at the top of the stairs, and realised how little time he had.

  ‘Ben Christie was a terrible singer,’ he said. ‘He used to randomly burst into song, and whenever Thomas told him to shut up he’d smile and sing louder.’

  Ewan gave a barely-visible smirk, and nodded. McCormick watched as Ewan’s gaze dropped to the last three names – Rachael, Daniel then Charlie – and then relaxed himself.

  Truth be told, Ewan seemed more relaxed than McCormick.

  How do we know this wall won’t have all of our names on it one day? McCormick thought to himself. Is there truly a chance of anyone here becoming more than ‘a chiselled name in a bloody rock’?

  No, this war won’t end like that. We won’t let it. One way or another, t his Memorial Wall will never be full.

  The voice of defiance buoyed him, but McCormick knew it was only guaranteed to be true because there would be nobody left to chisel the final name.

  The Oakenfold crew came down the stairs. It didn’t take long for all seven students to ready themselves, with everything from assault rifles and knives to radios and lighters. It may have been a mission that impacted them personally, but it was encouraging to see them driven by vengeful enthusiasm rather than fear. The comms team, Alex and Shannon, joined them in the crowded circle, and they all linked hands around the Memorial Wall.

  ‘To honour those who gave everything they had,’ said McCormick, ‘we will give everything we have. To honour the dead we will free the living, united by our differences.’

  ‘United,’ came the response. But it sounded different to normal.

  Some of the students, including Mark and Raj, had said it emphatically. Like they were preparing for a fight to take their whole world back. Ewan and Kate had barely whispered, and McCormick noticed that their eyes had glanced towards him. They were afraid of what would happen to him once they left.

  It was an unusual feeling, having his worries reciprocated. Normally when his soldiers left, he would hope and pray that he was not saying a final goodbye to any of them. This time his young fighters feared the same for him too.

  Nine Underdogs went into the exit tunnel, with not one word spoken between them. Simon gave a worried look towards McCormick, and Raj gave a hopeful thumbs up. Gracie looked like she was trying to avoid the sight of him altogether. They were gone a moment later, leaving McCormick in a Spitfire’s Rise he did not recognise: one that lay completely silent.

  In order to break that silence, the first place he visited was the living room. Thomas was there, spread out on the empty sofa with his face buried into the backrest. He should have been in bed an hour earlier, but McCormick didn’t mind. The boy had spent the entire day processing the news of the operation, and still needed more time.

  ‘Thomas,’ he said.

  ‘What?’ came the nine-year-old’s whisper.

  ‘I’m going to the clinic in a few minutes. I just thought I’d say good night.’

  ‘Good night.’

  There was no expression in Thomas’ voice. He was giving the response expected of him; the next line in the script.

  Once in a while, he would leap at McCormick and cling onto him like some kind of cuddly leech, keeping his thin arms wrapped around his chest until he had been told to let go at least three times. It was problematic for an agein
g man, but on principle McCormick never objected. At that moment, a hug attack from Thomas would have been most welcome. McCormick was frightened. More frightened than he wanted any of his Underdogs to know.

  But there would be no hugs that day. Thomas, like most of the crowd in the cellar, despised him that day. McCormick sighed, and walked to the foot of the stairs.

  ‘I love you, Thomas. And I’ll see you tomorrow.’

  ‘Mum used to say that.’

  It wasn’t worth pushing the issue. McCormick left the living room and made his way up the stairs.

  If only to delay the inevitable, he opened the trapdoor to the attic and pulled down the ladder. There must have been enough time to see Barbara.

  He would forever be thankful to his old friend Polly for letting him lodge in her house after Barbara’s death. She couldn’t possibly have predicted her home would become a place like Spitfire’s Rise. McCormick’s most treasured possessions had been in Polly’s attic long before Takeover Day, just metres above a houseful of people who had no idea he had any prior link to the house at all.

  He found the cardboard box in its place next to the boiler and, as always, picked out the Anglesey honeymoon photo first.

  When he knelt down to grab it, his arm brushed past a second cardboard box. Momentarily distracted, he checked inside it to see if the envelopes were still there, and counted eleven as expected. He wondered how many would remain when the time came to hand them out.

  He brought his attention back to his late wife. There was surprisingly little to say to her. On the brink of going under the knife, in a house where all the occupants were angry with him, only one topic came to mind.

  ‘That’s the worst thing about leadership, Barb,’ he began. ‘They can train you to teach, and they can train you to guide people. But they can never train you to deal with the loneliness.’

  He kissed the part of the photo which held Barbara’s face, and returned it to the cardboard box. Once it was back in place, he had run out of excuses. It was time to face Lorraine.

  *

  Lorraine could be an intimidating person, but never more so than now. McCormick lay flat on the clinic bed wearing nothing but his underwear, as the Underdogs’ nurse marched to and fro across the clinic in an understandably foul mood.

  She opened the top drawer of a dulled filing cabinet that had once held McCormick’s student assessment data. Now it held Lorraine’s emergency medical supplies, some of it in sealed jars that had dusted over from months of idle storage. Lorraine’s hand emerged with an unused bottle of clear liquid, and she readied her syringe.

  ‘I never thought I’d use expired drugs on a patient,’ she mumbled with a weak tremor.

  McCormick had a couple of humorous comebacks in mind, mainly about how he never paid attention to use-by dates on food. But he knew the process would be more tolerable if he only spoke when asked a question.

  ‘So how much do you weigh?’ she asked.

  ‘Still eighty-four kilograms.’

  ‘Not eighty-three or eighty-five?’

  ‘Well, we might have all weakened the springs on the scales by weighing ourselves too much,’ he said with a chuckle.

  ‘Do you definitely weigh eighty-four kilograms?’

  ‘Yes. I do. So one kilogram makes a difference, does it?’

  ‘If you give the wrong amount of anaesthetic to a patient, you could kill them. If you give a child an adult’s dose they won’t wake up. I have to calculate how much to give you based on your age, height, weight, body mass index and general state of health, and I can’t afford to get it wrong. A teaspoon too much will cause permanent brain damage.’

  She poked the syringe through the bottle’s foil cap, and spent nearly a whole minute measuring the correct amount, tapping the syringe to get any bubbles to the top, then squirting and re-measuring. Eventually she seemed satisfied, and turned to McCormick with the loaded syringe.

  ‘And all of this,’ she continued, ‘so you can go running around in New London and probably get yourself killed!’

  ‘If I get killed and we destroy the AME project… I know you don’t want to hear this, but that’s a win. An extremely good one.’

  ‘It’ll be a better win if the shield dies and you don’t.’

  ‘Obviously,’ said McCormick, suppressing the nerves in his voice. ‘And that’s the result I’m aiming for. I don’t want to die, Lorraine. I want to go out on the nineteenth, run around and shoot clones, get out alive and make it home again. But that involves risk, as war always does.’

  ‘Has it occurred to you that you’ll be under the same roof as Nicholas Grant? Marshall and Pearce? Oliver Roth? And just days after an operation?’

  ‘It’s crossed my mind,’ McCormick answered, staring up to the ceiling to avoid Lorraine’s glare. ‘But have you read the AME report? It’s terrifying. I have to be there for this, Lorraine. I can’t just sit at comms while the young ones do the dying. That’s what cowards and presidents do.’

  ‘There’s no shame in recognising your limits.’

  ‘No, but there’s shame in accepting them.’

  Lorraine did not reply, and McCormick breathed a sigh of relief. Tired of conversation, and fatigued from debating the issue, he stretched out his right arm and invited the needle towards his skin. The inside of his lower arm was still dotted with miniscule scars from forty years of blood donations. He was no stranger to needles.

  ‘Just… promise me you’re not looking for trouble,’ said Lorraine.

  ‘I promise I’m doing the right thing. That’s enough.’

  ‘No, it’s not. If I do this, you have a duty to keep yourself alive and uncaptured!’

  McCormick gave a warm smile. Their two principled minds had done nothing but clash ever since his collapse, but beneath their differences they were the closest of friends.

  ‘I’ll do everything I can to stay out of trouble,’ he said. ‘And believe me, I won’t just be doing it for you. I’ve got my own vested interest in staying alive!’

  Lorraine took a deep breath, and in the seconds it took to find a vein and insert the needle, McCormick tried to forget the enormity of the operation. His friend was using expired anaesthetics to send him to sleep, and then she was going to carve him open with a sharpened kitchen knife. All this without any surgical training, and a selection of memories that remained from her nursing years. And at the end of it all, there was the soldering iron that lay at the back of the room. The very sight of it made him shudder. When the time came…

  A prick in his arm caught his attention, and he turned his head just in time to see the last of the colourless fluid vanishing into him. McCormick’s nervous system began to numb itself, and his last conscious sight was of Lorraine’s eyes as she began to cry.

  Chapter 5

  A year and a half ago, during one of his worse meltdowns, Ewan had found a way to escape Oakenfold. It had been a ridiculous strategy: in his unthinking rage he had run outside, lumbered up to the gate and just pressed the buzzer – an idea which the rational Ewan would never have considered. The receptionist assumed it was a class heading out for a PE lesson, and had buzzed him out without checking the CCTV screen.

  It had taken the rest of the day for anyone to find him. Maybe they had assumed he had run into Harpenden to take a bus somewhere, but Ewan hadn’t been stupid enough to surround himself with the general public. All he needed to do – all he had the mental strength to do – was find a hiding spot on a nearby hill that overlooked the school, and stay there until transport home arrived at the end of the day. It had seemed like a good idea at the time.

  Once he had calmed down and realised how much trouble he had got himself into, he had spent the afternoon searching for the perfect vantage point: one where he could watch the panicked staff running in and out of the gates, the entertained students looking on from the windows, the police cars coming and going, and his mother’s arrival when the school finally called and admitted they’d lost her son.

  I
t had taken long enough, but that day’s troubles were finally worth it. Ewan and his team knew exactly where to hide outside Grant’s AME test centre.

  He hadn’t liked the prospect of walking the whole way around Harpenden rather than through it, as it added miles to his team’s journey. But it wasn’t like they were short on time. They had about ten minutes’ walking left to do, and several hours of waiting would follow.

  Ewan turned around to look at his friends, expecting them to be weary and exhausted. It was nearly midnight, after all. Instead, he found them just as determined as they had been at Spitfire’s Rise, but without the additional layer of worry that McCormick had given them. Out of sight really was out of mind.

  Raj and Kate were at the back of the group, whispering to each other. Ewan decided to keep away from them when he noticed their hands were joined. Mark was towards the front, overtaking Ewan whenever he got the chance. Whether he was hurrying the group or trying some kind of power play, Ewan neither knew nor cared.

  In the middle was the trio Ewan almost didn’t notice: Silent Simon being straight-faced and apprehensive – a world apart from the smiling humorous boy he had been at Oakenfold. Lazy Gracie, who did and said as little as possible, allowing herself to be led by people she considered superior to herself. And Jack, who was stimming his fingers and most likely daydreaming again. Or planning for all possible outcomes. Sometimes the line between the two was blurry for him.

  ‘Ewan,’ came a whisper from Raj, audible from a distance in the silent countryside.

  Ewan turned around to find Raj holding up his mobile phone and battery. He nodded, and Raj prepared to phone comms.

  ‘Mark,’ he said, ‘time Raj. Three minutes.’

  It got rid of the icy giant breathing down his neck. Mark huffed, but did as he was told. Once the phone was switched on, Grant’s technology would take a minimum of three minutes to detect its location. Calls to the comms unit were never long.

  With Mark at the back of the group timing her boyfriend, Kate ran up to Ewan.