It wasn’t until he arrived that he looked at the health centre, and found nobody on guard outside. Back at the cornershop, Mark crept along the road like a stalking cat, his shotgun pointed at the entrance and Gracie hidden behind his back.
‘No guards,’ he whispered to Simon. ‘Maybe they don’t want to draw attention to the place.’
Raj was surprised it hadn’t occurred to him before. Putting clones outside would make it the most visibly active building in Hertfordshire.
He left his cover and jogged over to Mark and Gracie. Mark didn’t complain. He must have reached the same conclusion.
When Raj was close enough to see through the windows, he found nobody on the other side. He and his friends walked through the entrance without a shot fired.
‘You realise,’ Raj whispered, ‘this is the most obvious trap in the history of traps.’
Behind him, Simon shuddered. Gracie’s eyes looked back to the street and her jaw hung open, as if about to ask whether she could change her mind.
‘Whatever,’ said Mark. ‘I wasn’t expecting to survive this anyway.’
‘What?’ asked Gracie, her voice far louder than a whisper. ‘You knew this was dangerous?’
‘No such thing as a safe mission, Gracie. Now man up and get ready.’
She ran.
Raj didn’t call her back. He couldn’t afford the volume. When he prepared to run after her, Mark’s hand landed on his shoulder.
‘Don’t. They’ll only shoot you too.’
Gracie Freeman ran back up the road in plain sight, as fast as her tired feet could manage. Raj tensed his ears for the inevitable gunshot that would kill his old classmate, and readied himself for the hail of bullets that would fly at him moments later.
But the bullet never came. Gracie vanished, alive and well, back to the safety of the cornershop.
Raj looked back at his remaining friends, and found Simon waving a hand in front of his nose. Mark poked his own nostrils inside the health centre, and scrunched up his face.
‘You’re right, Simon,’ he said. ‘It stinks in there.’
‘What do you think they’ve been doing? Something with chemicals?’
‘Not that kind of smell, Raj.’
Mark leapt into the corridor, his rifle pointed high. Raj followed, coughing his way through the stench. The further into the health centre he ventured, the more recognisable the smell became.
He reached reception, and found three dead bodies in the waiting room.
Raj gazed at the bodies, and froze in confusion. It would have been a perfect moment for a clone to pop up and shoot him dead, if the building had been populated. The dead bodies wore no uniform, and their hands were empty of weapons. Gunshot wounds painted their chests, and a single bullet had been fired into each of their heads at close range. Their killer had hung around to make sure they were dead.
‘Found another two in here,’ said Mark from behind the reception desk. ‘They’re not soldiers either. Just regular people.’
‘Clinic staff?’
‘Do they look like year-old skeletons? These people died a few days ago.’
Raj saw Simon waving from one of the consultation rooms. He jogged over, and shielded his eyes when he saw what lay inside.
Spread across the floor of what had once been a doctor’s office, a man with a cut throat lay dead in a pool of his own blood.
‘No bullet wounds,’ Raj whispered.
Simon gestured towards the man’s hands and feet. The circular bruises were still in place around his wrists and ankles; bruises that could only have come from handcuffs fastened too tight.
‘Mark,’ Raj called across the health centre, ‘we found Lieutenant Lambourne.’
‘What, is he wearing ID or something?’
‘No. But someone went to an effort with him.’
Mark made his way over. When he arrived, he was holding a blood-covered pillow in one hand.
‘Bloody hell,’ he said upon seeing the body. ‘They really wanted him to suffer.’
‘Yeah,’ said Raj. ‘They cuffed him, cut his throat and let him bleed. And they took their time, which meant he must have watched everyone else die first. Lambourne must have felt very lonely at the end.’
Simon pointed to the pillow, and shrugged his shoulders.
‘Some of the offices had been turned into bedrooms,’ said Mark. ‘People lived here before Tylor and his clones came along. You saw those bullets in the head, right? That was Tylor’s work.’
Raj wiped his brow. He knew what this meant.
‘Shannon wasn’t being taken here,’ he said. ‘She was being taken from here.’
Chapter 19
Iain Marshall approached the door, an impatient march in his step left over from his army days. It was a time for actions rather than meetings, but nonetheless a meeting had been called. And it made no sense for the architect to meet him as low down as Floor G.
Nearly forty-eight hours had passed since the rebels had broken into the Inner City, and the hole in the wall had not yet been fixed. It may have been guarded day and night with biorifle soldiers, but Marshall had more faith in reinforced concrete.
He walked through the door to find Nathaniel Pearce on the other side. That alone made his bad day worse. Grant’s Head of Military stood less than a metre from his Chief of Scientific Research, and the tension between them could be sensed like the push of two repelling magnets.
Marshall noticed the window to his left, and realised why he was on Floor G: the level that held the interrogation chambers. He was on the comfortable side of the two-way mirror, away from the clinically tiled floors and polished tables of tools and blades. Through the glass, Oliver Roth danced a knife between his fingers in front of a suitably terrified man.
‘Who the hell is that?’ asked Marshall.
‘Your fourteen-year-old assassin,’ replied Pearce.
‘The man next to him, you simpleton.’
‘Adnan Shah.’
‘And who the hell is Adnan Shah?’
‘The architectural consultant for the northern wall,’ said Pearce. ‘Two days have passed without a full repair, so I thought a little professional encouragement was needed.’
A scream came from the other side of the mirror. Marshall grunted to himself.
‘Nat,’ he started, ‘I know military strategy isn’t your strong point, so let me give you some friendly advice. There’s no point in tormenting someone without a crystal-clear objective. Before you go diving in with knives, you have to know what you want first.’
‘Maybe you should give your boy the same advice.’
Marshall glanced at Oliver Roth, who seemed to be enjoying himself. There was no denying Pearce’s point.
‘So what’s your objective?’ Marshall asked. ‘To make Shah snap his fingers and instantly fix the wall? We’re not talking about those clones you grow in a couple of hours. Materials take time to gather. Walls take time to reconstruct. Wet concrete takes time to set.’
‘Yes,’ said Pearce, ‘he tried telling us that.’
Marshall frowned from one corner of his mouth. It was dumbfounding to think that once upon a time, Nathaniel Pearce had been his best friend.
‘Marshall Contractors’ – later ‘Marshall-Pearce Solutions’ – had been the perfect recovery from twelve years in the armed forces, followed by a bloody dangerous career as an arms dealer. Positive relationships meant everything in that profession, and when the warlords started to grow weary of Marshall, running a safe business at home seemed like the way to go. Better to quit while you’re still alive.
He had pulled Pearce from the teeth of bankruptcy, a move that seemed like a good idea at the time. Iain and Nat made a fortune together until a well-mannered, eccentric character by the name of Nicholas Grant walked in, bought the company, and walked out again.
Neither Marshall nor Pearce could get their heads around it. The son of Francis Grant – oil tycoon billionaire – had cashed out and switched professions.
Most people in the dying fossil fuel industry had jumped ship to the rise of renewable energy, but Nicholas Grant just bought a security company. It was inexplicable.
Another yell from behind the glass returned Marshall to his senses.
‘We don’t have time for this,’ he said.
‘Don’t wet yourself,’ said Pearce. ‘He’s made of flesh, and flesh has nerve cells. He’ll give in.’
‘And do what?’
‘Admit his incompetence. We can’t shoot him just because concrete takes too long to dry. It’d be unfair dismissal.’
Marshall shot Pearce a disgusted glare.
‘That’s your objective? Get him to incriminate himself then replace him with someone else?’
‘He’s had two days, Iain.’
Marshall looked through the mirror at a man who pleaded for a chance to do his job, tormented by the same teenage boy who had fired the laser cannon through his wall in the first place.
Marshall truly missed the Oliver Roth he had first come to know: the handsome twelve-year-old with a brilliant intellect and a taste for adventure. Plucking him out of Marshall-Pearce’s youth training programme had been a brave but foolhardy move (a long story, and one which Nicholas Grant could never find out about). But that cheeky, daring boy was gone, replaced by the teenager behind the glass. Like child stars who grew up in the limelight and became drug addicts, Oliver Roth had neither the wisdom nor the role models to know how to handle his newfound power.
I never thought I’d miss Keith Tylor, Marshall thought to himself. The man may have been impossible to get on with, but he had been far more professional in carrying out his business.
The thought of Tylor triggered a separate issue in his head. Half a week had passed since the incident, and it was time to stop avoiding the issue.
‘We need to talk about Shannon,’ he said.
Pearce gave him eye contact for the first time in weeks, the surprise visible in his face.
‘What about her?’
‘It’s about time we admitted she might be a problem.’
‘A dead problem, Iain.’
‘Have you seen her body?’
Pearce gave no answer, and turned his head back to the horror show.
‘Here are the facts,’ Marshall continued regardless. ‘First, Keith called me from Hertford, telling me he’d killed everyone except her.’
‘Including Little Lambo. I remember.’
Marshall nodded, with a discreet frown. As professional as Tylor had been, Marshall dreaded to think what he had done to Anthony Lambourne in the end.
‘Then later that evening,’ he continued, ‘he called half a mile from New London, asking for access through the security gate. He hung up in a rush, saying something about Shannon killing his clones. She grabbed a knife and killed them while he was distracted by the phone.’
‘Maybe Lambo taught her some of his fancypants knife stuff.’
‘Or maybe the clones were under orders not to hurt her. Anyway, that was the last I ever heard from him. A few hours later he stopped checking in, and my scouting team found his body later that night. A hundred-ish stab wounds. Shannon killed him single-handed, so I’m willing to bet she’s still alone out there.’
‘Even Nick isn’t asking us to search for her. If the great Nicholas Grant says she’s not a problem, she’s not a problem.’
‘Nick was always tricky when it came to Shannon,’ muttered Marshall. ‘Maybe he does and doesn’t want her dead.’
‘Well she is dead, Iain,’ said Pearce. ‘She had one chance at survival, and she stabbed it to death.’
‘She’s more resourceful than you think.’
‘Lambo was the resourceful one. Shannon was a jumped-up bystander. And now she’s a dead bystander, who probably died of thirst in a field somewhere.’
‘She’s not dead until I see her body.’
‘Then send your boy,’ Pearce finished with his trademark smarmy grin. ‘If he gets stabbed to death too, we’ll know you’re right.’
Marshall had spent a whole military career keeping his impulses under control, and eight years as an arms dealer being patient with monstrous people. At that moment he did neither. Instead, he raised a clenched fist and smashed it into Nathaniel Pearce’s nose.
Pearce barely remained on his feet, and clutched his face as two nostrils’ worth of blood began to dribble. The look in his face was one of surprise rather than shock or horror.
‘You apathetic, feeble-minded moron,’ yelled Marshall as his former best friend steadied himself. ‘You imprison and torture the best man for fixing the wall – the most useful guy on our payroll right now, including you. You use one of my staff to do your dirty work, then joke about him dying like Keith. You make assumptions about Shannon based on nothing more than wishful thinking. You have literally no idea how to solve anything unless you can throw clones at it. Now listen to me, ’cos I’m telling you what’s going to happen with the wall.’
Pearce took his hand away from his wreck of a nose, and listened as if the punch had never happened.
‘First off,’ said Marshall, ‘Oliver’s going to let Shah go, and pretend the whole thing was just a warning. Then you let him get back to work. We keep the biorifle soldiers in place at the hole, right up until Shah tells us the concrete is set. In the meantime Grant wants the new prisoners dead right now, and I’ve got a plan. The daily food drop’s in half an hour, and we’re going to disappoint them.’
There came another scream, blunted by the double-glazed window. Then an inaudible sentence from Roth, punctuated with laughter. Marshall bit his lip.
‘Worried about him?’ Pearce asked with a grin.
Marshall sneered.
‘It’s times like this I’m glad I spent my life in the violence business,’ he said, ‘rather than shutting myself away in a lab somewhere. Bet this freaks you out.’
‘Honestly it doesn’t,’ Pearce replied, with very little emotion to show for his words. ‘I’ve spent my life in biological science, and my clone research was so secret that I didn’t even look for ethics approval. So I’ve dissected apes for anatomical research. I’ve poisoned dogs alongside clones just to compare how their bodies reacted to ricin gas. I’ve performed autopsies on clones that I’ve personally put to death. Or just close to death, in some cases.’
Marshall gave no response beyond a blank expression, as Pearce withdrew a handkerchief from his shirt pocket and wiped the blood from his face.
‘Truthfully,’ Pearce said, ‘when I look in there, all I see is meat. And meat doesn’t scare me.’
*
Ewan checked his watch again, as discreetly as he could. It was one of his last remaining possessions.
Eleven o’clock, April twenty-seventh. Feeding time.
Bloody hell, we’ve been in this walled pressure cooker for nearly two days.
He had joined Charlie and Kate in a mass gathering for the daily food drop, accompanied by Patrick and Ruth. They had left Jack and the sons in the shelter to guard the rucksack of gadgets. Besides the binoculars, door combination hacker and the other non-combat tools, it contained two more smoke grenades and a small stick of dynamite. They’d be a fat lot of good inside the Inner City, but were still worth guarding.
Ewan found himself among a growing crowd of emaciated faces, who had been forced on an eleven-month diet of just enough food but little more. Grant may have ensured there was enough for all, but some had managed to seize more than others.
‘I wonder if they’ll send some birthday cake tomorrow?’ Charlie joked at his side. ‘They’d do that for me, won’t they? For my sweet sixteenth?’
Oh great, he’s making jokes about imprisonment. The first step towards accepting it.
‘Pretty sure it’ll be the same as yesterday,’ Patrick answered. ‘Bread, processed biscuit, bottled water and mass-farmed veg. Sorry Charlie.’
‘What’s the time?’ asked Ruth.
‘Exactly eleven,’ answered Ewan. ‘They’re later than y
esterday. Can’t even see them in the distance.’
His eyes wandered to his podcopter wound. It didn’t look good. He had taken the bandage off a few hours ago to find that his forearm had changed colour. It was infected, not a shadow of a doubt, and the surface of his skin looked like it was crying out for help.
He had hidden the wound from his friends as much as possible, as well as his terrified reaction. Another week without Lorraine’s medicines and the infection would do Grant’s job for him.
Ewan looked among the crowd, and saw a thousand faces as worried as his.
‘What’s up?’ he whispered.
‘This is the first time the food’s ever been late,’ whispered Patrick, ‘after nearly a year. Literally, the first time.’
Ewan glanced around, and caught three separate people looking at him. Even after two days, the stares from the locals were still frequent. Ewan and his friends had spent most of their lives being stared at, but this time it was different. They were four combat-suited teenagers in a world without soldiers, known only for their sudden appearance from nowhere. People were curious, but afraid to ask.
Ewan turned and tapped his friends on the shoulders.
‘We should leave,’ he whispered.
‘What?’ asked Kate. ‘You’re not hungry?’
‘The food’s not coming. And the reason doesn’t even matter. When a crowd gets scared, they blame the odd ones out.’
Kate and Charlie wasted no time in following him, as the crowd’s whispers grew in the air like the build-up of static electricity. In the five minutes it took to get to the Rowlands’ house, Ewan was astonished at the deafening volume a thousand whispers could reach.
Jack rose from his seat in surprise.
‘What happened? Food fairy didn’t come?’
‘Yeah, something like that.’
Aidan and Benjamin looked at one another, sharing the same anxious faces as the crowd outside. Ewan beckoned the Underdogs together, and they huddled in the middle of the room like a sports team before a tense match.
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