Tooth and Nail

by Chris Bonnello

  In his last moments of brain activity, he thought of his years in the 3rd Durham Boys’ Brigade, his holidays to Whitby with his long-gone parents, and the day he started university. He thought of the generations of students who had come and gone over the decades, and his honeymoon in Anglesey. He thought of his escape from depression. He thought of Ewan West, the closest lad he ever had to a son, and the words in the letter that awaited him at Spitfire’s Rise. He thought of the thirty-nine years he had spent in marriage to Barbara, the two years Polly Jones had spent rebuilding him, and the 365 days he had spent with the best friends he had ever had.

  Ewan, Kate, Lorraine, Thomas, all of you… I loved you so much.

  And Barbara…

  Thank you, Barbara…

  *

  Not many rooms away from Joseph McCormick’s body, Oliver Roth looked at his computer screen in disbelief, verging on horror. He had seen and heard every moment of the end of McCormick’s life, spying on the CCTV system with the excuse of using it to find the remaining rebels.

  He brought his hands to his face and clawed against his own skin. After every lesson Marshall had taught him about self-control, every lecture about strategic thinking, the same man had finished off McCormick with an impulsive gunshot to the heart.

  Roth no longer knew what kind of death he had wanted for the old man, but his dream of ‘sticking your head on the spike of an electric fence’ had faded away during that conversation in the store room. One thing was for sure: he was overcome with a feeling that McCormick had deserved better.

  Iain Marshall was right there onscreen, standing over the corpse of his greatest enemy, the furious expression on his face so stern that he must have known how much he had screwed up. Nathaniel Pearce couldn’t interrogate a dead body. There would be no McCormick clone model either, like he had watched Crossland suggest over the CCTV, and no extractable memories that could reveal the location of Spitfire’s Rise.

  And on top of that, McCormick’s bomb would not be stopped. Roth checked both the clock on his wall and the digital clock onscreen, both accurate to within a second of each other. They showed less than ten seconds until Kate Arrowsmith’s watch read ten thirty.

  ‘Iain,’ he muttered to the psychotic idiot on his screen, ‘Grant’s going to kill you for this.’

  Marshall wandered to his leather chair, but didn’t have time to sit down and collect himself.

  10:30:00 p.m., 19/05/0001. Somewhere below them all, a button was pressed.

  The resulting explosion tore apart McCormick’s body and everything within twenty metres of it, including Marshall, his entire office, and the final computer that held anything related to the AME shield. Iain Marshall had no time to react, or even notice the explosion, before he vanished into the fireball.

  Roth did not see the explosion – just the sudden appearance of static on his screen and a moment’s pause before the room shook horribly around him – but it was immediately obvious what had happened. Roth ran towards the exit into the Floor B corridor, jaw hung open in shock, as human staff began to scurry around in panic. Most of the way down the corridor, smoke emerged from Marshall’s office.

  Oliver Roth had never felt so saddened to be right. Given the choice between survival and victory, Joseph McCormick really had chosen victory.

  Chapter 27

  For the first few moments after they pressed the button, Ewan heard nothing. Just as he began to wonder whether the detonator had worked at all, the shockwave hit the stairwell and threw all three of them off the top step.

  Ewan landed halfway down, bashing his ribs against the stairs. He cursed in pain, but was distracted by a sudden realisation.

  That explosion came from above.

  ‘Did anyone else feel…’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Alex, pulling himself up using the bannister. ‘That came from one of the upper floors.’

  Ewan hauled himself upright, and reached his uncoordinated hands in the direction of his pockets.

  ‘Give me a second, I’m phoning comms.’

  ‘Now?’ asked Alex. ‘Why not stick with the plan, and barge upstairs to grab McCormick while they’re distracted?’

  ‘We need to find out what the hell that was.’

  As he inserted the battery into his phone, his eyes landed on Kate. She sat in silence, holding up her last victim’s radio. Voices were starting to yell.

  ‘Nick! Get to the bloody radio!’

  Nathaniel Pearce…

  ‘You’d better tell me what the hell that explosion was,’ bellowed Nicholas Grant. ‘It felt like it came from your floor!’

  ‘It did!’ came Pearce’s wail. ‘Iain’s office is gone!’

  The breath halted in Ewan’s throat.

  ‘Gone?’ Grant screamed.

  ‘Yes! Literally gone! I’m standing here right now… there’s just a pile of black debris and walls splattered with fire! It’s still burning now!’

  Ewan looked around, and found confused expressions that mirrored his own. It all sounded too good to be true.

  ‘The AME computer?’

  ‘Destroyed,’ Pearce wailed, like a man who had just lost a family member. ‘The rebels have won. All my technology… all the research I ever did on AME… it’s gone, and the computer’s in a billion pieces…’

  Hold on, thought Ewan, did we seriously just win? How the hell did we do that?

  What did McCormick do?

  Alex was pumping his fists in delight. Kate looked as confused as Ewan, but nonetheless she was smiling.

  Ewan’s phone powered up, and he started to dial.

  ‘What about Iain?’ Grant’s voice asked through the radio.

  He asked about the computer before he asked abou t Marshall. How revealing.

  ‘His body’s in here next to the desk. At least, I’m pretty sure it’s him.’

  ‘And McCormick?’

  ‘…Nowhere to be seen.’

  ‘Wait wait wait,’ said Alex. ‘Why did he ask about McCormick? Why on Earth would he be in Marshall’s office?’

  Ewan’s brain had never been particularly fast when it came to academic subjects, but his strategic instincts operated like lightning. If McCormick had entered Marshall’s office – for the first time in his life – and the computer had suddenly been destroyed, there was only one logical explanation. The bomb had been with him all along.

  And if McCormick could no longer be found, despite being guarded well enough to have no chance of escape, there was only one logical explanation for that too.

  Lorraine answered the phone.

  ‘Did she push the button?’ came her tight, choking voice. One sentence alone was enough to reveal her level of distress.

  ‘Yeah,’ Ewan answered. ‘We all did.’

  A yell, strong enough to rattle Ewan’s eardrum, sounded in his earpiece. It was loud enough to catch the attention of Alex and Kate.

  ‘Lorraine?’ Ewan asked. ‘…What just happened?’

  *

  Shannon had tuned herself out of the conversation. Listening to Lorraine’s explanation had been traumatic enough the first time, and she already knew what had happened. Marshall was dead, his office and computer destroyed, and the AME project had been utterly annihilated just hours before it would have rendered her father invincible.

  And all it had cost them was the life of Joseph McCormick.

  Shannon hadn’t had much longer to deal with the news than the strike team. Lorraine had finished her explanation about a minute before half past, which left Shannon mourning McCormick while he was still alive.

  ‘Just come home,’ Lorraine finished. ‘The mission’s over, and McCormick can’t come with you. Get out while everyone’s still distracted.’

  Shannon could hear Ewan’s voice shouting in the background, but Lorraine hung up without letting him finish. She turned to Shannon with a look in her face that was nothing short of harrowing.

  ‘The whole world’s uglier now,’ Lorraine groaned.

  ‘My father lost
his shield,’ Shannon replied. ‘He won’t be invincible after all. It could have been uglier, I guess.’

  But not much uglier.

  I t’ll be even tougher for Lorraine once she gets home , and tells the others what she did.

  ‘I couldn’t stop Joey Shetland from killing himself,’ she wailed. ‘I couldn’t save Callum Turner when his insulin ran out. I couldn’t cure Roy Wolff’s stomach cancer. And now I helped McCormick engineer his own death. What kind of nurse…’

  ‘You can’t save everyone, Lorraine.’

  It was the only sentence that came to Shannon’s mind, and she knew it wouldn’t help. Lorraine rested her weary head in one hand, and stared deep into Shannon’s eyes.

  ‘Tell me you can forgive me for what I did.’

  Shannon raised her eyebrows in surprise. She knew that Lorraine wanted comfort, and that comfort from anyone would do. But forgiveness was a big word to use so soon.

  ‘I can understand why you did it,’ she answered.

  ‘But tell me you can forgive me…’

  Shannon’s mind wandered to the McCormick she had known and loved, who had taken her in and accepted her despite her background, and done more for her in three weeks than he ever could have known. She remembered his gentle humour, and his quiet but unrelenting love. Her thoughts rested on the first night she had met him, when he had stood over her in the clinic with his unforgettable warm smile.

  A smile that would never return to Spitfire’s Rise.

  ‘Shannon?’

  ‘I can understand why you did it,’ she repeated.

  *

  When Oliver Roth had learned that his enemies had escaped, his main reaction was relief.

  The destruction of Marshall’s office had wiped out any chance of organising Floor Z. The soldiers scouring for fictional explosives had not been told their orders had expired. The surviving insurgents were able to vanish without a trace, victorious but without their leader.

  Roth was just grateful to return to his room for the night. He staggered along his Floor A corridor, the last of his energy faded after an evening that had involved a fight in a burning Experiment Chamber, a rampage through the HPFC, escorting a high-profile prisoner through the darkness, and the violent death of Iain Marshall. And Roth knew that if it weren’t for his boss’ orders to hunt the other rebels, he could have died in the blast too.

  He walked into his messy bedroom, dropped his helmet onto the floor, sauntered to his bedside and collapsed onto his covers with an ear against his pillow, half-focusing his eyes towards his personal armoury. Even in his own sanctuary, he was surrounded by instruments of death.

  When Oliver Roth looked back on his short life, he didn’t see much that mattered. There were a couple of old schoolmates he had liked, but he had focused more on his bullying victims. There had been vague hobbies, but his biggest efforts went on his social media presence. There had been plenty of decent teachers, none of whom he had respected. Now every one of them – from the pleasant but useless to the unbothered and ineffective – had all ended up inside their nearest Citadel. Some may have been dead.

  Meanwhile, McCormick had achieved more than that whole bunch in the five minutes they had spent alone. And somehow, McCormick’s departure from Earth didn’t feel like an extra Underdog scalp. It felt like the world had lost a part of itself. The only man ever to have seen Oliver Roth’s vulnerable side was dead, which was both a distress and a comfort.

  Without moving himself from his bed, he kicked off his boots as angrily as he could. It had been more than a year since he last went to bed before midnight, but he just wanted his brain to shut off for the night. The anger infesting his thoughts was unbearable, and it came from a perfect storm of three different sources.

  First, the fact that McCormick had seen through him. Roth never had placed his trust in another person. He had plenty of mates at school, but no real friends. And certainly no girlfriend who would expect him to open up. He was neither abused nor loved, and his apathy towards the human race was probably the biggest reason he’d been able to slip so easily into his job.

  The second reason for his anger was the obvious one: he had failed the night in every conceivable way. He had let Ewan out of the Experiment Chamber instead of letting him burn. He had been moments too late to stop McCormick from revealing the code to Kate. But his biggest mistake had come from a rare moment of compassion, when he had offered McCormick his shirt back. It had covered up the scar which, in hindsight, must have been where someone had inserted the bomb. Without that shirt, Iain Marshall would have been smart enough to realise what was going on.

  Finally, and worst of all, he knew it was too late to change anything about himself. McCormick had tried in vain to bring him away from darkness, but he must have known that Oliver Roth could not be turned. His allies would kill him the moment he became ineffective. Maybe five years earlier, a man like McCormick could have changed him. But even at the young age of fourteen, Roth had already made the decisions that would define the rest of his life. McCormick may have talked about lives being falsely predestined, but Oliver Gabriel Roth would have to remain the murderous assassin forever.

  Roth buried his face into the pillow, and took a breath deep enough to rupture a weaker man’s lungs. Whichever way he looked, in his home life and his work life, as an assassin and as a person, as a potential hero and as a certain villain, he was a failure.

  Chapter 28

  At five o’clock in the morning on the first anniversary of Takeover Day, Ewan was alone in the basement.

  My family were murdered a year ago today.

  His new family at Spitfire’s Rise all knew where he was. But they knew not to disturb him. Just like Lorraine, who had sealed herself in the clinic again, Ewan had found his own space and planned to keep it all morning. He sat on the concrete floor alone, with McCormick’s envelope in his hand.

  For the eleventh or twelfth time, Ewan read the stone tablet in front of him, and remembered a personal detail about each of the chiselled names.

  *

  UNDERDOGS MEMORIAL WALL

  In loving memory of those who fought and

  gave their lives in the Great British Rebellion.

  Sarah Best

  Callum Turner

  Joe Horn

  Elaine Dean

  Arian Shirazi

  Teymour Shirazi

  Rosanne Tate

  Miles Ashford

  Chloe Newham

  Tim Carson

  Roy Wolff

  Mike Ambrose

  Beth Foster

  David Riley

  Val Riley

  Sally Sharpe

  Svetlana Karpov

  Ben Christie

  Rachael Watts

  Daniel Amopoulos

  Charlie Coleman

  Raj Singh

  Joseph McCormick

  *

  Twenty-three dead in the space of a year. It seemed almost bloodless compared to the wars of old. But of an army that had numbered thirty-three including Shannon, only ten remained. The smallest army in world history.

  But they had won the night. That particular night, at least. Against odds which should have been insurmountable, they had earned the right to stay in the war. Perhaps in a month or so they would feel proud, but that morning Spitfire’s Rise had transformed into a dull, sad building without atmosphere or character. The loss seemed bigger than one man.

  Kate and Thomas had seized the farm for themselves, to share long hugs and wallow in understandable misery. Even with Ewan and Alex’s support, Kate still blamed herself for McCormick’s death. Unfairly of course, but logic and facts didn’t matter in the face of guilt and heavy anxiety. Ewan now understood why McCormick had been so opposed to Kate being the one who pressed the button: it was a heavy burden for an anxiety sufferer to bear, and she would bear it for a long time.

  Alex had felt awful too, but his worries were different. Something about another gap in his memory, when he had apparently prove
d to Lorraine and Shannon that Spitfire’s Rise was safe. He had no recollection of the conversation, and the women were reluctant to give him any details. It was driving him crazy.

  Ewan decided the hours had dragged for long enough. It was time to open the envelope and read McCormick’s letter. He had pushed the idea to the back of his mind for as long as he could, occupying his time by reading the names on the Memorial Wall again and again. The letter would be the last communication Ewan and McCormick would ever have, and the thought of their relationship ending terrified him. As long as he refused to open the envelope, there would always be something new from his mentor to look forward to.

  But he owed it to McCormick to read his dying words. Ignoring the letter would be worse than clapping his hands over his ears like an infant, and would silence the man’s performance before his final curtain.

  Ewan held his breath and tore open the envelope. Jack had turned the generator back on after he realised nobody was going to bed, so there was more than enough light to read.

  The words were difficult to stomach.

  My dear friend Ewan,

  Although I take no pleasure in writing this letter – if you’re reading it I must be a nother casualty of this war – I’m happy for the opportunity to say some important things to you. I t’ ll be difficult to put my collection of unordered thoughts onto paper , but I ’ll do my best.

  I know it’s tragic to lose anyone from our family , but try to avoid wasting your days feeling sorry for me. I lived to a ripe old age by modern standards, and spent my years filled with joy. I lived to watch so many people grow into their best selves, and by the end of my life I be came the only war leader in history to know every one of my soldier s personally . No matter how I met my death, whatever pain or despair I may have felt at the end, it cannot cancel out the wonderful years I’ve lived .