by Frank Tayell
“Was that to do with Prometheus?” Kim asked.
“Hang on. One at a time,” Sholto said, adding, “this thing keeps dragging to the left. I think there's something stuck on the rudder.”
After Sholto had explained who he was, twice, the initial surprise gave way to remembering why we had gone to Lenham Hill in the first place. The fuel tanks, installed long after the bunker itself, were accessed above ground via a nozzle disguised as a water valve. Sholto had stashed an electric car in a garage in the village. We loaded it with fuel-cans, but before we left there was one last thing we had to do. Standing by the car, about a thousand yards from the edge of the aerodrome, he turned to Kim.
“You want the honours? Ladies first and all that?” he asked, holding out a smart phone. This time, I could see her roll her eyes. “No? Suit yourself. Here,” he handed me the phone. On the screen was a comically large red button. “I was bored,” he said.
I pressed the button. A dialogue came up, “Execute programme. Yes. No.” I looked at him
“I was bored, but I did have other things to do,” he said. “Press yes.”
I did. There was a muffled bang. The earth shook, the car rocked. A gout of flame speared skywards from the entrance to the bunker. Then there was a roar of sound, as the ground above the facility shook. Earth flew up and outwards. Then there was a secondary explosion as the fuel tanks, buried only a few metres below the surface, erupted, sending a towering column of flame into the sky. The concrete of the airstrips buckled and suddenly collapsed inwards, the hole getting larger as the ground nearby starting caving in. And then it stopped, leaving a crater of bubbling burning earth, beneath an oily black cloud of smoke.
“Probably should have closed those airlock doors,” Sholto said.
Then we drove back along the train line to the river.
“Yeah. I can't see what it is,” Sholto said, bending over the side of the boat “Something's tangled with it or bent it out of shape. I can't tell from here. Anyone fancy going into the water and having a look? I was kidding,” he added with a grin.
“It's not going to be a problem is it?” Kim asked.
“Couldn't tell you. Up until a few months ago the most I knew about boats was that the pointy end is the front. I'd not taken mine out more than a mile from shore. So, your guess is as good as mine. Wouldn't want to take this out to sea. But I think we'll be fine along the river.”
“Can we go back to what you were saying about Lord Masterton,” I said. “You hadn't mentioned that before. You said you had confronted him?”
“Right,” he said, walking back to the wheel. “I'll start again from the beginning. Our Dad worked for the government. Essentially he was a hit-man, though since it wasn't official, it didn't get called that. As far as anyone else was concerned he drove a truck. Deliveries across Europe, that was his cover, the official reason why he spent so much time away from home, his son and his wife. A wife who, whilst he was away for three months, gave birth to a second son, you. That last mission before he died. No, not a mission, that sounds far too glamorous. The last job, something went wrong. When he came back, either not all of him did, or maybe he brought back something with him. PTSD, flashbacks, whatever you want to call it, he started re-living whatever he'd been through. He killed our mother. Then he came back to reality and he killed himself, but not before making a phone call to his handler.”
“And that was Lord Masterton?” I asked.
“No. That was Quigley. Though I didn't find that out for years. I saw it all. I'd snuck out. I often did, and I was trying to sneak back in through the garden. The murder, the suicide, I saw that, and then I saw the car pull up a few minutes later. I saw a man get out. I saw him go into the house, and bring you out. Then I watched him start the fire.” He rolled up his sleeve to show a white scar on his arm.
“That's what brought me out of it. When the flames got close enough to set my jacket on fire. I ran. I don't remember much of what happened next, not until the next morning. I was walking along a street somewhere. I couldn't tell you where, I didn't recognise it. Don't remember anything about it, except for the newsagents putting out the boards with the morning headlines. It made the front page. House fire. Four dead. Mother, Father, teenager and their infant son.
“After that life got tough. It hadn't been great to begin with, what with Dad away a lot, with Mum's world suddenly just being about this new baby. Even before you were born, well, the euphemism is that I'd gone off the rails a bit. With literally nowhere left to go, thinking I was being hunted, I fell in with the only people I knew. It was a gang, basically. Not your off-cut thugs, but a real organised crime outfit. They were the middle men for guns, drugs, people, you name it. Four years, I spent with them. I'd dress up as a public school boy, carrying a duffel bag with heroin or whatever inside, and a cricket bat poking out the top, muling stuff across London and beyond. Officially I was dead, you see, and I thought you were too. Well, I was just a kid, and I thought that some mysterious man had shown up and killed the baby brother I'd resented. Let's just say I was pretty messed up. I didn't care about anything or anyone.
“Then, one day, four and a bit years after that fire, a bag of cash in one hand and a bag filled with passports in the other, I walk into a room and find the people I’m meant to be handing this stuff to are all dead. So I’m standing there, looking at these bodies, and I think to myself that maybe its time to think about the future. I figure that of all those passports there's got to be at least one that looks vaguely like me. So I run, and this time I didn't stop running until I got to the other side of the Atlantic.
“I bought myself a new identity and then I found that I had a bit of a talent for making money. I got rich, but I couldn't stop thinking about that man, the one who'd taken my brother away from that house and, I assumed, murdered him. I started plotting my revenge, and that took a long time.
“All I had to go on was what that man looked like. It isn't much to go on now, and was even less back then. I bribed and blackmailed, and worse, I'll admit it. I got access to databases and records, or at least to the people who had access. But it was slow going. It took years. I was getting nowhere, until I saw him on the news. There he was, a new MP, part of some trade delegation. After that, things speeded up. I figured out a dozen ways of getting him, of getting revenge, but by then I'd realised he had to work for someone, and I wanted to get them all. So I continued digging and bribing and blackmailing until I found out that it was Lord Masterton who'd signed off on those missions. It was him that had sent Dad overseas.
“So that's when I finally came back. I was going to kill them both. Except then I found out you were alive. More than that, Masterton had paid for your schooling, you'd grown up with his daughter, and you'd grown up with the same name our parents gave you. I figured... well, I figured maybe I'd give him a second chance. I got back on the plane and went home again.
“I kept an eye on you, as much as I could, tried to figure out what to do next. You seemed happy enough, even if you were squandering your life on politics. But if that was what you wanted to do, then you should get your chance. I didn't want Masterton or Quigley or anyone else using your past as a hold over you, so I made contact with Masterton's daughter, Jen. Told her who I was, told her I wanted a meeting with her father. Told her I wanted to try and smooth it all out. I met with him, told him what the deal was. That you got to live your life and that you were to be left alone. That was my big mistake. He engineered for you to stay in the UK. It was why he had that fictitious uncle of yours die, leaving you with that debt-ridden house and no option but to keep working for his daughter.”
“Why didn't you just say something?” I asked.
“Because by then, I'd started to uncover something worse. Something bigger. Prometheus and the vaccine and everything else. I didn't know what a lot of it meant, but I could see it was bigger than some family reunion.”
“And then the world came to an end?” Kim asked.
“
Sort of. For me, it started falling down a bit before last February. If anything the outbreak saved my life. Even when you're as good at it as I was, there are certain questions you can't go asking without someone taking notice. I was about twelve hours ahead of them when those patients in New York got injected with the virus. So, all in all, I'd say I’m pretty grateful for the apocalypse. I got out of the US, managed to get over here, and went to your flat. You were gone, of course, but by the way there was a dead goon outside your house, the way your computer was gone and you'd eaten nearly everything except the wallpaper paste, well, I knew you'd escaped.” He grinned.
“I recognised him, you know,” Sholto went on, “The dead guy outside your house. He was one of our Dad's successors. Probably sent by Quigley. Or Masterton. It's much the same thing. Since you had the computer, and the files I sent you, I reckoned if I was going to bump into you anywhere on this benighted island, it'd be at Lenham Hill.”
I do believe him. I don't know why. That same instinct that told me to trust Kim tells me he isn't lying. He is Sholto and he is my brother, whatever that means. I went to Lenham Hill and I found answers, but they were to questions I didn't know to ask.
We're about five miles downstream of the golf course now, heading slowly, but quietly, back towards London. We'll find Annette and Daisy and rescue them, if we still can. Then I'll find somewhere safe for them and Kim, but not for me.
I still don't know if I am carrying the infection within me. Of the few scraps of paper Sholto had managed to piece together none shed any light on the virus itself. He thinks the doctor is out there somewhere and means to track him down. Perhaps we'll find him. Perhaps.
To be concluded...
Table of Contents
Day 106 … 26
th
June … Kim
Day 109 … 29
th
June … Stonehenge
Day 110 … 30
th
June … Rescue
Part 2: Escape
Day 112 … 2nd July … Others
Day 113 … 3
rd
July … Farms
Day 114 … 4
th
July … The Bomb
Day 116 … 6
th
July … Bitten
Day 110 … 10
th
July .. Escape
Day 113 … 13
th
July .. Prometheus
Epilogue