Tooth and Nail

by Chris Bonnello

  The scary side of the Experiment Chamber lay open before him, and Ewan engaged in a one-man war against the horrors of military science. He released his first incendiary grenade, which landed at the base of the first metal pillar. It exploded with a furious vomit of fire, which spread across the tiled floor and spilled up the pillar towards its border points. Ewan threw a second grenade at the other pillar, and a third at the collection of metal objects in the corner. They both exploded with equal ferocity, and through squinted eyes Ewan could see the objects in the pile begin to alter their shapes, and then melt. The border points, however, were holding on for longer.

  With three nearby fires burning at over 2,000 degrees Celsius, Ewan’s skin prickled with sweat. He turned his rifle the right way round, and fired his bullets into the control panel. The gun clicked before he thought it would, and he threw his assault rifle to one side with a snarl. He would have to approach Floor B with nothing but his handgun.

  The Experiment Chamber was all but destroyed, with one incendiary grenade remaining. But Ewan’s head was turning woozy. The fires around him began to moan and shout. The chamber had no flammable objects inside, but it was drenched in roaring flames regardless as the incendiary grenades burned on their own fuel. The thermite reactions would continue until they got bored of destruction, eating away at their surroundings and choking up the atmosphere.

  It was time to quit while he was ahead. Ewan staggered towards the door and reached for the handle, just in time to hear the click-clack of the door locking itself. Ewan pulled, but nothing happened. He swiped his stolen keycard, and was met with a red LED.

  He was trapped inside the burning chamber, and the smoke was descending around him.

  Ewan looked out of the porthole-shaped window. The grinning young assassin on the other side had fiery ginger hair.

  Chapter 20

  Oliver Roth waved a friendly hand through the porthole window. Then he turned it round and stuck up a middle finger.

  Ewan did not respond. His brain was split between two tasks: searching for an idea that would give him the slightest chance of survival, and outstaring his enemy. He pointed his nastiest expression towards the fourteen-year-old assassin who had killed eight of McCormick’s army – soon to become nine – and hoped that just for those couple of seconds, Roth would see in Ewan’s eyes just how much he hated him.

  Ewan heard a buzz from the edge of the door. Roth had pressed the security intercom. With no better ideas, Ewan pressed the talk button and let his enemy’s voice into the room.

  ‘Surprise, retard,’ said Roth happily. ‘Long time, no see.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Ewan snarled into his side of the intercom, ‘it’s been a few weeks. How’s your broken nose?’

  ‘Good as new – it healed in less than a fortnight. How’s Charlie? Did he get better?’

  Ewan felt a surge of boiled anger through his arteries. Whether it was his temper or the approaching fires, he couldn’t tell.

  ‘Oh,’ said Roth. ‘Still dead then.’

  ‘You killed him on his birthday.’

  ‘Who gives a crap?’

  ‘Me. And I’m amazed you even remember his name.’

  ‘Well, yeah!’ said Roth with an enthusiastic grin pointed through the glass. ‘I love learning about the people I’ve killed! Beth Foster… Miles Ashford… Tim Carson… the Rileys… and another three, including Charlie. You can poke fun at my broken nose until you burn to death in there, but I’ve caused you more pain than you could ever cause me.’

  ‘Why not open the door and put that to the test?’

  ‘Nah, I’m alright thanks.’

  Something horrible got into Ewan’s throat and sent him into a coughing fit. He had spent the conversation racking his brain for ideas on how to escape a burning room with a locked entrance, and had come up with nothing. Roth was watching his every move. The heat was increasing, the oxygen running low. And Alex was on his way to the nearest stairwell, clueless about Ewan’s troubles and too far away to rescue him anyway.

  ‘Looks like you took those incendiary grenades from the biorifle soldiers,’ Roth laughed. ‘Aren’t you happy I left them for you? I figured you’d use them to set up your own death trap.’

  ‘You wanted me to kill a biorifle platoon, just so I could take their weapons?’

  ‘Unless they killed you first. Either way I’d have been happy. Besides, they’re just clones.’

  Ewan’s eyes, watery from the advancing smoke, gazed at the burning floor at the stone pillars. The powdered remains of clone blood between them, long burned away, had proved Grant and Roth’s attitude to their own soldiers.

  At that moment, Ewan realised.

  That clone was let into the chamber somehow. H e didn’t smash the glass like I did.

  There must be a second door somewhere.

  ‘You alright, Ewan? Not dying on me, are you?’

  Ewan didn’t answer. He turned his head, spotted a cupboard with red and white tape, and figured it might have held some emergency equipment. He ran from the entrance, jerked open the cupboard door and found a gas mask. It wouldn’t filter all the smoke, but it was better than nothing. He removed his helmet, rested the mask halfway over his forehead, then returned to the door and pushed the intercom again.

  ‘I’d love to stay and chat, but I just had my ears talked off by Marshall.’

  ‘Irritating, isn’t he?’

  ‘The worst, except for you. Anyway, I’m heading for the other exit – the one inside the chamber. Feel free to chase me.’

  Oliver Roth’s face lost its overconfident grin, and his eyebrows started to rise. Clearly the thought of a second exit had passed over his head too.

  ‘It’ll be locked,’ he replied. ‘It’ll be for nothing. You’re going to burn in there.’

  ‘Fine,’ finished Ewan. ‘Stay here and explain to Grant how you failed to get me again. Bye.’

  At just the right moment, Ewan had remembered how to be manipulative. He secured the gas mask around his face, hoping he could get out of the room before it melted to his head, and leapt through the empty pane of the shattered window.

  Bloody hell ! How can one room contain so much heat?

  Ewan tap-danced his way across the Experiment Chamber, avoiding puddles of burning thermite on the floor, praying his clothes wouldn’t catch fire. Even the large melting pile of metal objects, presumably there to test the shield during experiments, had started to emanate its own heat. Ewan slammed himself at the nearest wall, edging around the room in an effort to find the concealed door.

  He felt woozy, as if drunk, drowning and burning all at once. He knelt down to search for a richer pool of oxygen. The walls, so clean and white when he had arrived, were covered with enraged reds and oranges. At the top, but creeping down with each second, they were charring black with smoke.

  Ewan found the second exit.

  It was locked.

  He didn’t waste his breath on shouting or swearing. Grant must have only built fire escapes for his human staff, not for those on the wrong side of the Experiment Chamber glass. He was locked in the room on both sides, and he was going to die.

  Somewhere under the sound of the roaring flames, Ewan heard a buzz. He lifted his head towards the control room, and saw Oliver Roth bursting through the entrance. Perhaps he didn’t know the second exit was locked, or perhaps he wasn’t willing to gamble.

  Ewan pulled the pin from the final incendiary grenade, and launched it through the empty window frame. It bounced off the control panel, and landed on the floor beneath Roth’s feet.

  Roth made it through the window frame and into the chamber just before the grenade went off, releasing a set of fireballs that attacked every remaining computer, console, button, lever and filing cabinet.

  Ewan West and Oliver Roth shared the same burning room, and both were armed. Unfortunately, Roth had brought a shotgun to the fight.

  Ewan did not have time to draw out his handgun. Roth’s first shot barely missed him as he
took shelter behind the large pile of melting test objects.

  ‘Your choice, Ewan!’ Roth yelled between coughs. ‘Stay low to the ground and choke slowly, or pop your head up and have your suffering ended by a nice quick gunshot!’

  Ewan did not offer a response. He looked to the floor and found that a bunch of odds and ends had fallen away from the pile before him. Some were everyday objects such as phones and watches, and others were half-kilogram weights made of different metals.

  Ewan grabbed hold of the nearest weight, ignored the searing heat against his hand, and lobbed it as hard as he could towards Oliver Roth.

  Roth did not look bothered. Not until the weight passed between the two stone pillars. He had not witnessed Ewan switching on the AME shield.

  The weight detonated against the shield, causing violent red ripples and a fiery explosion that threw Roth from his feet. As the assassin fell against the wall, Ewan jumped upright, leaned around the pillars and shot him four times in the chest.

  As satisfying as it would have been, Ewan did not hang around to watch Roth collapse to the hot ground. He leapt back through the empty window frame, took a running jump over the burning control panel, and tore off his gas mask as he landed in front of the open door. Wheezing, weakened, but alive, Ewan stumbled back into the Floor F corridor, slamming the door closed behind him just to be certain.

  He shot his tired gaze down the corridor, and found himself to be safe. There were no clones waiting for him. Oliver Roth had acted alone, and lost.

  There’s no way I should still be alive after all that.

  It’s almost enough to make me believe in luck. Almost .

  *

  With surprisingly little guidance from Lorraine and Shannon, Kate had found the lower battlements of Floor L. The corridor looked different to anywhere else she had seen in New London.

  Her corridor stretched in a straight line as far as her eyes could see: a mile or two, at the very least. Most Outer City corridors had turns at least once in a while, accounting for the different-shaped rooms they passed, but not this one. Kate was fairly sure she could fire a bullet each way down the corridor and hit both the eastern and western Citadel walls. Every hundred metres there lay a door on her left, unlabelled and cream-coloured. She picked one at random, took a deep breath, and swiped her latest stolen keycard.

  There was no buzz. Snipers didn’t like to be distracted by sudden noises.

  She opened the door, slowly and silently, and found what must have been the smallest type of room in the whole Citadel. There was enough space for a small man to lie down on its inbuilt mattress, but little more. At the front end, a square hole in the concrete wall pointed diagonally downward, through a widening tunnel to the cool air of the outside.

  The floor was occupied by a sniper, who lay on his front with both hands wrapped around a rifle that had been fixed in position. When Kate looked at his short mattress, she discovered why Grant could afford to design the rooms so small.

  She was looking at half a clone. Its body ended at its waist, with a perfectly formed head, shoulders and arms, and a torso large enough to contain its vital organs. Clearly, Nathaniel Pearce had decided not to waste resources on legs they would never use. The clone model was built for the specific purpose of sniper duty, and the design of their bodies – like the absence of vocal cords – must have made them easier for Grant and Pearce to control.

  Kate used her childhood gymnastics experience to walk lightly on her toes, ensuring her approach was silent.

  She almost felt sorry for the half-clone; she could only imagine how long the sniper had laid there, or how his attention span had coped with continuous, unrelenting sniper duty. But nonetheless, this clone would be as determined to kill her as any other. Kate slid her knife from its sheath, held her breath and bent over the clone on the mattress like a sinister tooth fairy.

  ‘Guys!’ Ewan’s voice yelled from her radio. ‘Good news!’

  Kate leapt in horror. The clone on his mattress rolled over with panic across his face. He fumbled for the handgun on the belt around his stumped abdomen, but his vision was obscured after hours of having one eye closed and the other through a telescope. Kate fell to the mattress knife first, and stabbed it into the front of her victim’s neck.

  ‘Is this important?’ she whispered. ‘I’m… busy.’

  The clone’s eyes rolled up towards his brain, and Kate watched his face for fading signs of life. She noticed how little she regretted her actions, or even felt anxious about killing a clone from inches away, given the urgency of the night’s mission. She was proud and alarmed in equal measure.

  ‘Two targets down, three to go!’ Ewan screamed, thankfully after Kate had turned the volume low. ‘I just destroyed the Experiment Chamber!’

  ‘Make that three targets down,’ answered McCormick’s voice. ‘The archive was closer than I thought.’

  ‘It’s gone already?’

  ‘Paper burns very quickly. There are no more written records of AME left in existence. Just the backup server to go now, then we can storm Marshall’s office and put an end to AME forever.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Ewan, ‘and just while we’re talking… I killed Oliver Roth.’

  Kate froze in disbelief.

  ‘Oliver Roth?’ said Alex. ‘You’ve got to be kidding.’

  ‘Four bullets in the torso, then I locked him in a burning room. I’m pretty sure we can go home tonight and declare once and for all that he’s dead!’

  Kate felt two stone lighter. Somehow, the absence of one teenage monster made the whole Citadel feel less frightening. She pushed the dead clone from beneath her, and took his spot on the bloodstained mattress.

  ‘Wonderful news,’ answered McCormick, albeit with a humane twinge of guilt, ‘but I’m afraid he’s only bonus points. If the shield goes up, we still lose. It’s twenty past nine—’

  ‘Leave it to me, sir,’ Kate interrupted. ‘Go as fast as you can, but don’t do anything stupid. You’ll have more time than you think.’

  She focused one eye through the sniper’s scope. Through the lens of a telescopic sight, the whole world looked different. And not just because of the occasional tremble of focus, or the blur around the scope’s edges. Through a sniper rifle, every detail on the ground looked like something to be inspected rather than seen.

  She was thankful the wall faced north. The glow of the sunset was on her left, rather than in her eye. Plenty of twilight remained – twenty past nine wasn’t so dark in May – but she didn’t have long before the awkward part of dusk when it was too dark for plain sights, but too bright for night-vision.

  Her search began. She knew exactly what a border point looked like, having seen them up far too close at Oakenfold. A little part of her brain, which had been suffering from enormous anxiety at the moment the memory was made, remembered that each border point had its own miniature shield. Perhaps that meant that the loss of any single coordinate would bring down the whole network.

  Now, without the shields raised, the border points would not be impervious to bullets. Or at least, Kate hoped not.

  She found a landmine-shaped lump of metal in the grass within the first two minutes of her search. She fired a bullet straight into it, and in the dimmed light she saw a glimmer of metal somersaulting through the evening air like a tossed pancake.

  Kate smiled. It had been her first smile since the day she and Raj had watched the missiles over New London. Maybe, just for tonight, she was going to be OK.

  The border point had landed the right way up, but the LED was blank. It was out of action. In ten minutes’ time, Grant would push the magic button to a fanfare in his head, and be sorely disappointed. It could take hours for that point to be located and replaced.

  ‘Ewan,’ she said to the radio, ‘you can scrap the time limit. I don’t know how long we’ve got, but it’s more than ten minutes now.’

  ‘Prove it.’

  ‘I just shot a border point with a good quality sniper rifle.
The shield won’t activate unless every link in the chain is working. We’ve got loads of time before they replace it.’

  Ewan didn’t answer, suggesting he was satisfied.

  ‘Lovely,’ answered McCormick. ‘I’m almost at the HPFC. Don’t bother chasing me, Kate. I’ll be done by the time you get here.’

  Kate snarled. McCormick was most likely right, and there was no point denying it.

  ‘Fine, you do that,’ she whispered. ‘When I’m done here I’ll meet the others on Floor F and we’ll head upstairs together. That OK, boys?’

  ‘Not without me, you won’t,’ McCormick butted in before Ewan or Alex could answer.

  Stuff that. If I can’t put myself at risk for you, I’m not letting you do the same for us. Sorry sir.

  ‘We’ll be far above you,’ she answered. ‘We can’t afford to hang around for you to catch up, and then spend another half an hour waiting for you to recover. When you’re done with the backup server, find a safe place to hide and we’ll meet you on the way down.’

  ‘You’re trying to keep me safe. That’s not what I’m doing here.’

  ‘Sorry sir,’ came Ewan’s voice, ‘but Kate’s right. And we’re not just being protective. We literally can’t wait for you. Just trust us to do the right thing while we’re up here.’

  ‘Oh, I know you’ll do the right thing,’ answered McCormick with misery in his voice, ‘that I don’t doubt.’

  His feelings were clear without the need to see his face. The mission had been his first direct action against Grant since before Christmas. He had endured Lorraine’s ugly surgery to earn the right to take part, risked his life on a gamble in the vehicle port and exhausted himself with the stairwell, only to be denied the opportunity to see it through to the end. The final showdown would involve the other members of his family – the adoptive sons and daughter – but not the father. It almost made Kate feel guilty, but she knew better.

  ‘Good luck down there sir,’ she finished. ‘We’ll be in touch.’