Freefall

by Roderick Gordon

  “The Crawfly?” Will interrupted. “So he was your father!”

  For an instant Rebecca’s eyes were suffused with a fiery light, as if she was about to release an incandescent fury on Will. He knew then that by repeating the unpleasant nickname Uncle Tam and his gang had bestowed upon him, he’d insulted her dead father. But she blinked, and quickly looked away from Will. She was calm and collected when she resumed. “It was left to my sister and me to see the purge through with our grandfather. That’s why we had the phials.”

  “Purge? What do you mean?” Will asked again.

  “Our plot to release Dominion Topsoil, to carry out the word of the Book of Catastrophes.”

  As Will racked his brains, trying to remember if he’d seen her grandfather or heard anything about him during his time in the Colony, a question leaped out at him. “At the Pore, you and your sister each had a phial. So how did you manage to come by both of these?” he quizzed her.

  “She gave me hers for safekeeping. The one with the black wax on the stopper is the virus. The other — with the white wax — is the antidote.”

  “Hold on,” he said. “That doesn’t make sense. If you had both of the phials, why did she push you down the Pore? Why would she do something as dumb as that?” he asked, thinking he’d caught the twin in a lie.

  “Because we were having a flaming row. We fought, and she must have been so mad at me, she didn’t stop to think about the phials,” Rebecca said without a moment’s hesitation.

  “What were you fighting about?”

  “I told you already — after you and the others were blasted over the edge, I was upset. I said to her that I couldn’t go along with her plans any longer. That I’d had all the killing I could take. She went crazy.”

  “How do I know if you’re telling me the truth? What if your sister and grandfather still have some of the virus left, and they’re going ahead with the plot while we’re stuck down here?”

  “They don’t. The virus you’ve got in that phial is all we had of it, and all that’s needed for a full-blown pandemic.”

  “But why don’t they just make some more?” Will asked, staring intently at the black-topped phial.

  “It’s not that simple. They might try to reengineer it, but it will take time to produce the same strain — months, possibly years. Anyway, whether or not you choose to believe me, I swear to you that phial is all there is.” She paused, wiping her face with her filthy hand. “So now you have the key.”

  “I have?” Will said.

  “Sure.” Rebecca’s jet-black eyes were supremely confident as she answered. “Deliver those specimens to the right people on the surface, and they’ll be able to vaccinate the Topsoil population. Then if, by some miracle, more virus is manufactured and the purge is restaged, it won’t have any effect — none at all. You have the power to stop Dominion in its tracks.”

  “Yeah, that’s all great, but how on earth do I get this to the surface?” Will asked.

  “You’ll figure it out, Will. You were always clever like that. And when you do, you’ve got to take me with you,” Rebecca said, “because I can be useful to you. I can tell people the whole story.” Then she gave a deep sigh, glancing at Bartleby, who was napping by her side. “And I know there’s no way you’ll ever believe me, but I miss Dad so much. He was my father, too.”

  “Hurry it up, you stupid old fart,” the Rebecca twin said under her breath.

  “Did you say something?” Dr. Burrows asked, casting a nervous glance at the Limiter prowling in tight circles around him as he tried to work on a translation of the tablets.

  “No, nothing,” she replied innocently. “How’s it going — nearly finished?”

  “Hah!” he exclaimed. “You’re asking me to do the impossible. All I’ve made out so far in these inscriptions is something about seven —”

  “Seven what?” she cut in.

  “I don’t know. I can read the word seven or seventh, but I don’t know what it’s in relation to. This is really hard going — I can get a handful of words, but then I’m lost.” He readjusted his glasses, peering at her as she perched on a mound of fungus.

  “Oh, come on — it can’t be that difficult,” she urged him.

  “I keep telling you and you just won’t listen. I have to have the drawing of the Burrows Stone from my journal,” he said despondently. “There are too many variables for me to do this quickly. It will take me yonks to piece it together — unless, that is, you happen to have a cryptanalyst with a high-spec computer hidden away somewhere down here.”

  The Limiter said something in the nasal Styx tongue to the Rebecca twin, and she nodded.

  “OK,” she announced, easing herself down from the fungus. “What are our options? You’ve got a basic map there — even if we can’t read the words, we must be able to use it somehow.”

  “Well,” Dr. Burrows began, sounding more upbeat.

  “So, come on then, spit it out,” she urged him, clapping her hands together. “What can we do?”

  “We explore until we spot something that ties into the icons on the map. Then we might just be able to get ourselves on the right track.”

  The Rebecca twin considered this for a second. “So … let me get this right … you’re expecting us to slog through hundreds of miles of these slimy tunnels on the off chance we see something familiar — maybe with a big ‘seven’ on it? Is that the best you can come up with?” she asked snidely.

  “Have you got a better suggestion?” Dr. Burrows said. “We could make a start where I discovered the skeleton with these tablets. From there, we fan out in ever-increasing search radii, and we comb every last inch of the tunnels…. We explore them thoroughly for anything that might help us.”

  The Rebecca twin didn’t look too convinced. “Sounds like a long shot to me,” she said.

  Dr. Burrows’s expression turned to one of confusion. “Rebecca, why is it that all of a sudden you’re so keen to help me? You weren’t the slightest bit interested in my work all those years in Highfield.”

  “I just want to go back to my people, Dad,” the Rebecca twin said, all sweetness and light. “Or at least get out of this grotty place. OK,” she said, glancing at the Limiter, “let’s give Plan B a try, but I don’t want us to wander too far.”

  “Excellent,” Dr. Burrows said, wrapping the tablets carefully in his handkerchief again. “And while we walk, I want to hear more about your people. I know so very little of them.”

  “You and the rest of the world,” the Rebecca twin said. In the Styx tongue, she added, “Thus it has ever been, and thus it will ever be.”

  When Will returned to the shack there was no sign of Chester in the main room. He assumed he was on Elliott watch. Will was actually quite relieved — he needed time to think things over. Bartleby padded past him and made straight for the hearth rug, where he stretched himself out in that luxurious way only cats can. “Good old Bart,” Will said, and sat down on the rug next to him.

  Will took out the phials, reknotted the cord attached to them that the Rebecca twin had snapped, then hung them before him, wondering if they really contained Dominion. After a while, the crackling fire gave him an idea. How easy it would be to throw the phials into it. He knew the heat would destroy the virus and, worst-case scenario, if any of it were to escape, it would be highly unlikely to get all the way up to the Topsoil population and infect it.

  On second thought, though, that didn’t seem like such a clever idea — he and the others wouldn’t fare so well if any of the virus happened to escape the flames. He’d rather not die like the men in the test cells that Cal had told him about. Perhaps, he reasoned, it would be better to get Martha to build a fire a safe distance away from the shack and burn the phials there — just in case.

  But he shouldn’t overlook what Rebecca had said about delivering Dominion to the right people Topsoil and, by doing so, derailing any further attempts by the Styx to start a pandemic. In which case, he thought to himself, it wou
ld be extremely rash of him to destroy the phials.

  He also realized that it was now imperative that he return to the surface with the deadly cargo as quickly as he could. He didn’t know how he was going to manage it, or quite what he’d do when he got there, but he had to try.

  Bartleby yawned.

  “Why can’t my life be more like yours, Bart? Nice and simple,” Will said as he scratched the cat’s whiskery chin. “Want to swap?”

  The cat nuzzled against his hand and began to purr his rumbling purr. His skeletal tail slowly swiped from side to side, looking for all the world like a malnourished snake performing an act of levitation. “Good boy,” Will said, and the cat slid open his saucer-sized eyes and regarded him affectionately.

  “So what do I do?” Will posed to the empty room as he dangled the phials in the air, the flames of the fire visible through the clear vessels as if it was actually inside them.

  Bartleby must have thought Will wanted to play with him, and flicked out one of his huge forepaws in a kittenish attempt to cuff the dangling phials.

  “Whoa! No!” Will quickly snatched away the phials. “Holy smokes, that was close!” he spluttered, imagining the tinkle of glass as the phials shattered on the floor and flooded the shack with the deadly pathogen. Bartleby had stopped purring and was eyeing Will with disappointment, clearly put out that his new master was such a killjoy.

  Will immediately went over to the nearest map chest and pulled open the top drawer. “Here it is,” he said as he found a small leather tobacco pouch he’d spotted there before. He carefully wrapped the phials in a strip of burlap and then placed the diminutive bundle in the pouch. “Perfect. That should protect them from any knocks … and cats,” he said to Bartleby, as he weighed the pouch in his hand. Then he frowned, falling into thought for a moment. Chester needs to know about this, he decided, starting for Elliott’s room.

  When Will entered, Chester was wide awake in the chair beside Elliott. He dipped a cloth into a bowl, squeezed out the excess water, then dabbed the girl’s forehead.

  “She’s badly dehydrated,” Chester said. “And look at her. She’s getting so thin. I mean, it’s not as if she was very big to begin with.”

  “Fading away,” Will said, repeating the precise words Martha had used to describe what had happened to her son.

  “Yes,” Chester nodded. “Maybe what you said was right. Maybe we should just leave and take our chances outside. We’d be all right if we took enough Aniseed Fire with us to ward off the spiders. And if it all comes to nothing and we draw a complete blank, maybe Martha will take us back.”

  “Doubt it,” Will said. “Especially if we nick her precious plants.”

  “Oh, I really don’t know what we should do,” Chester said through a sigh.

  “Neither do I,” Will agreed.

  “Get anything useful from the Styx twin?” Chester asked, changing the subject.

  “Just this,” Will replied, taking out the leather pouch and unwrapping the burlap from around the phials.

  Chester blinked in astonishment as he focused on what was there. “Dominion? She gave you Dominion?” he said loudly, then shut his eyes tight and shook his head. “No. I don’t believe it. It’s not the real thing.”

  “Want to see it?” Will said, extending his hand with the phials over Elliott’s still form.

  “Hello? No!” Chester declined. “I don’t want to go anywhere near that stuff. And I don’t want anything to do with that evil cow.” He placed the cloth back into the bowl and wiped his hands on his shirt before he spoke again. “Do you really believe she’s given you the actual virus?”

  “I’ve got no way of telling. I suppose we could always try it out,” Will replied. “You know, one of us act as a guinea pig.”

  Chester gave him a quick look, trying to figure out if his friend was serious or not.

  “And we could decide which of us it should be with a game of chess,” Will said, unable to keep a straight face.

  Chester grinned. “Not likely. You’ve been practicing way too much. I’d have more of a chance with Rock, Paper, Scissors,” he said. Then the smile left his face and he moved his chair around to Will’s side of the bed. “OK, so straight up, tell me exactly what the Rebecca twin said.”

  “Well … for starters, she swears her sister is responsible for everything and that she was forced to go along with it.” Will held up his fist, the phials in it. “She also says this is all the Dominion the Styx have got. So they can’t go ahead with their plot.”

  Chester’s eyebrows hiked up at this. “How likely is that?”

  “She said that even if we don’t believe her, and the Styx have got more, we should get this to the right people on the surface. They’ll be able to produce the vaccine.”

  “Apart from the fact that we can’t get to the surface, this all sounds like a load of bunk. I don’t believe a word of what she’s telling you,” Chester said adamantly.

  “Hold on,” Will urged him. “Think it through logically. Maybe this Dominion is real, but she knows there’s no way we can get Topsoil, so it actually doesn’t matter if we have it or not. Or she really believes we can find a way back, and she’s trying to buy her way in, because she wants to go home. Or maybe, just maybe, she’s genuine, and she was forced to do everything by her sister, and this is her way of proving it to us.”

  Chester shook his head. “Um … run that by me again.”

  “Look, it’s simple: If there’s even the tiniest chance we can save tens of millions of lives on the surface, and help Elliott in the bargain, then don’t we have to try everything we can to get out of the Pore?”

  “If you put it like that, then yes, of course we have to,” Chester agreed. “And what about the twin? Do we leave her here with Martha?”

  “No, we take her with us when we go. She promised she’d spill the beans on the Styx and their plans,” Will said.

  Chester rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “So, we should just pack up our bags and go.”

  From the doorway a voice made them both jump out of their skins. “I warned you about letting that Styx girl in,” Martha said. “This is what happens. This is how it always starts.” Then she turned on her heel and left.

  14

  MARTHA NEVER said a word to either of the boys about what she’d overheard, and as much as they could in the cramped confines of the shack, they both tried to stay out of her way for a few days. Will continued with his routine of nursing Elliott, playing chess against himself, and sorting through the salvaged items in the outbuilding, but now there was the added responsibility of Rebecca.

  But his and Chester’s main preoccupation remained Elliott and her continued decline. It was agonizing to watch her lying there on the bed, the sweat pouring from her, and to listen to her outbreaks of feverish babbling. She was forever saying Drake’s name and reciting the sequence of numbers that meant nothing to the boys.

  Will became increasingly depressed, to the point that he could think of nothing else but Elliott’s plight. Even when it wasn’t his turn to watch her, he would frequently keep Chester company, the two of them sitting in silence together. On one such occasion, Chester spoke to him.

  “Will, you can’t stop yawning and you look completely done in. Why don’t you go and get your head down?”

  “All right,” Will mumbled, heaving himself to his feet with another yawn, then shuffling off next door.

  “Whassat?”

  Will didn’t know how long he’d been asleep, but he awoke with a start, as if someone was calling urgently to him. He sat bolt upright and looked nervously around the gloomy room. Nothing appeared to be amiss, so he strained to see if he could hear anything further, but there was only Chester’s deep breathing as he slept soundly on the pile of carpets on the floor.

  Will threw off the light blanket and went to check on Elliott in the next room. Deep in fever, she was rolling her head from side to side on the sweat-stained pillow, and her arms made occasional small flailing
movements, as if she was struggling against someone or something. As he leaned over and felt her forehead, she was muttering, but it was nothing that made any sense to him.

  “Too hot,” he said in a whisper. “Come on, Elliott, you’ve got to beat this.”

  For a few minutes he watched her, wishing there was some way he could ease her suffering. Then he made his way back through the main room and out of the shack. He stopped on the porch, sitting himself down on the top step. He was grateful for the gentle breeze blowing up the slope, and he shut his eyes, enjoying it on his face.

  When he opened his eyes again, the glow from the garden seemed to be brighter than ever, bathing the cavern in a glorious array of multicolored radiance. It called to mind the summer evenings when the fair had come to Highfield Common — seen from afar, the stray light in the sky above it was not dissimilar to the phantasmagoria he was witnessing now.

  As his eyes roved over the beds on either side of the path, he could have sworn that some of them were growing in intensity while others were becoming more muted, as if passing the baton from one to another. The changes were enough to alter the light on the porch, chasing his shadow around the wood decking behind him.

  He moved down to the bottom step and raised his hand before him so he could admire the colorful hues falling on it, which dissolved from yellow to orange and then to a palette of reds and blues, all in constant rotation. He thought of the fair again. It didn’t take very much to imagine the mêlée of organ music and the old rock ‘n’ roll songs, the hoots of laughter and the calls of excited children rolling across the grassy fields.

  “Homesick?” said a deep voice.

  Will squinted, making out someone sitting a few steps behind him.

  It was a man, a large man, and his profile was familiar.

  “Uncle Tam!” Will said aloud, wondering why he wasn’t more surprised or more frightened by what he was seeing. “But you’re … you’re dead!”

  “Ah, that’ll explain why I’ve been feeling a bit off-color recently,” Tam replied wryly.