Fallout

by Chris Morphew

  Too many people down here, I thought, not for the first time. Too many people and not enough space. Things had never exactly been friendly in this place, but now it was like you couldn’t open a door without walking in on someone else’s argument.

  Luke stared at the ground, turning the camera box over in his hands. I felt a flicker of recognition, but the thought was pushed out of my mind as my mum appeared in the doorway. She walked into the kitchen, bleary-eyed, with Georgia trailing behind her.

  ‘Oh, thank goodness,’ said Mum, putting an arm around me. Her stomach bulged out in front of her, pushing up her shirt. We’d done our best to make sure everyone had enough clothes, but maternity wear options were pretty limited down here. ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to fall asleep. I was just –’ ‘Mum, it’s fine,’ I said, crouching to put my hands on her stomach. ‘How’s she going in there?’

  ‘She?’ said Mum.

  ‘Yeah, I changed my mind,’ I said. ‘I’m going with girl.’

  Mum sighed, resting her hands on mine. ‘Believe me, I will be only too happy whenever this kid decides to come out and settle it for us.’

  According to Kara, that could happen any day now. But given that Mum was carrying an almost full-term baby after less than three months of pregnancy, it wasn’t much more than guesswork.

  ‘We just have to ask him to come out,’ said Georgia, nudging me aside and grabbing hold of Mum. ‘Hey baby!’ she shouted. ‘Get out of there! We want to talk to you!’ She collapsed against Mum’s stomach, giggling.

  ‘Hey, Georgia,’ said Luke, holding a bright pink camera he’d pulled from the box. ‘We got you a present.’

  Georgia’s face lit up. ‘Cool!’ She grabbed the camera and gave him a lung-collapsing hug. ‘Thanks!’

  ‘No worries,’ Luke coughed.

  ‘Thank you,’ mouthed Mum, looking even more grateful than Georgia. It hadn’t been easy keeping a six-year-old entertained in this place.

  Georgia loosened her grip on Luke. She looked up, face twisted in concentration.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ he asked.

  Georgia frowned. ‘You’re trying to be happy, but you’re not.’

  Luke stepped away from her, suddenly uncomfortable, knowing as well as I did that this was beyond the scope of a normal six-year-old’s perception skills. ‘I’m fine,’ he said. ‘It was a bit scary going out to get the food, but I’m okay now.’

  Georgia shook her head. ‘I don’t believe you.’

  My stomach turned. We’d been protecting Georgia as much as we could from all the horrors of this place, but how are you supposed to keep anything from a kid who can read your mind?

  ‘I’m going to go check on Kara and Soren,’ said Luke, heading for the door.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘I’ll come with you.’

  ‘You should kiss my sister some more!’ Georgia shouted as we left the room. ‘That’s what makes you feel happy!’

  She burst into another round of giggles, and I felt a smile creep across my face. I saw Cathryn re-emerging from the girls’ bedroom and quickly wiped it away again. ‘She okay?’ I asked.

  Cathryn shrugged. ‘She said she just needs to rest.’

  I didn’t know what to do for Amy. She never complained about life down here, or about what was happening to her, but I could see she was struggling. And her body’s need for extra food wasn’t exactly helping her fit in.

  Kara had done a few tests, trying to figure out what exactly was happening to Amy. The closest she could get was that the fallout had somehow ‘sped her up’. Amy’s whole body – heartbeat, nervous system, even her mind – was running three or four times faster than normal.

  It should’ve killed her. That was Kara’s diagnosis. But then, I could fill a warehouse with all the things in Phoenix that should have been true.

  With practice, Amy was getting better at slowing her movement and her speech down to normal, but it was a big effort for her. It didn’t surprise me that she was choosing to spend a lot of her time alone.

  ‘You okay?’ asked Luke, nodding at the surveillance room. ‘You sure you want to go in there?’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ I said, pushing the door open, ‘I won’t hurt him.’

  Kara and Soren were across the room, setting up a row of computers along the wall that, until recently, had been covered in photos of Peter, Luke and me. Kara had been in here all afternoon, rearranging things.

  Soren was lying under the table, plugging something in. Kara moved along the row, hitting the power buttons, and the laptops whirred to life.

  ‘I’d like to apologise for my son’s outburst,’ she said, turning around.

  Soren’s head snapped up. ‘It was not an outburst. I have nothing to –’

  Kara stared at him over the top of her glasses. ‘I am not interested in having this discussion again.’

  Soren’s hands twitched, like his first impulse was to throttle her. But whatever else he might be capable of, Soren was still not in the habit of standing up to his mum.

  ‘Fine,’ he growled. He got up and walked back out of the room. Kara pursed her lips, but let him go.

  ‘Anything new in town?’ I asked, turning to the main circle of surveillance computers in the middle of the room.

  ‘There was another altercation at one of the meal tables a little while ago,’ said Kara. ‘The men involved were disciplined.’

  ‘Nothing unusual there,’ said Luke, leaning in behind me as I sat down at a laptop looking in on the Shackleton Building. I punched the right arrow, cycling through the different camera angles.

  By now, Shackleton’s concentration camp was running with typical Phoenix precision. Everyone in town had been assigned their own seat in the town hall to sleep on. They even played movies on the big screen to keep the kids from getting too out of hand.

  Outside, in the giant, sparkling foyer area that had once been Shackleton’s ‘welcome centre’, security had set up a food line and a row of portable showers and toilets. They’d also erected a circle of razor-wire fence on the main street, stretching from the front doors of the Shackleton Building to the fountain in the centre of town, so that the prisoners could get out into the sun.

  People seemed to be allowed to move freely around the camp, but there was no escaping the eye of security. Dozens of officers, all armed with rifles and capsicum spray, patrolled the building around the clock, quickly stamping out any hint of misbehaviour.

  The whole thing was just a bit too clean for something the Co-operative had come up with on the fly. It seemed to be a contingency plan they’d had up their sleeves all along.

  I kept scanning through the surveillance images, hammering the button more quickly now, nerves starting to get the better of me. ‘Where are you?’

  ‘There!’ said Luke. I backtracked through a couple of images, hand freezing over the keyboard as I spotted him at a table in the welcome centre, hunched over an empty dinner plate. Dad.

  He was deep in conversation with Peter’s parents. It was hard to tell from this distance, but it didn’t seem like anything too awful had happened to them while we were out. Maybe Calvin really had given up on them.

  After they were captured, Calvin had dragged the three of them to the security centre every day for interrogation, trying to figure out where the rest of us were hiding. And every day I’d sat here, glued to the screen, watching. It had been horrible. Excruciating. At one point, Luke and his dad had needed to physically hold me back from running out there in a suicidal attempt to put an end to it. But no matter what Calvin did to them, Dad and the others never gave us up.

  And now, it seemed like Calvin might have finally put an end to it himself. Today made it a full week since their last trip to the security centre.

  Dad glanced up as a security officer approached the table. The officer jerked his head in the direction of the hall. Dad and the Weirs got up without arguing and joined the crowd that had started milling towards the doors.

  Bedtime. They were shutting eve
ryone in for the night.

  Kara walked up behind us. ‘Soren is still working on a way to circumvent the new restrictions on the surveillance network,’ she said, in the closest she ever came to a sympathetic tone. ‘Once we’ve established a way to disable –’

  I rolled my eyes. ‘No offense, Kara, but if Peter hasn’t been able to figure that out, why on earth would you think Soren had any chance of…?’

  I stopped talking, distracted by the grainy surveillance image that had just flashed into view in front of me. Kara’s new row of computers – which I now realised were just the old surveillance monitors from the storeroom – had finished loading and were now relaying footage of the Complex’s research module, or at least the few rooms that hadn’t been blown up or concreted over.

  Crazy Bill lay strapped to a bed in the room where I’d been held prisoner the night we first came down here. In the three weeks since we’d rescued him from the medical centre, Kara had kept him alive with an old I.V. unit that Soren had repaired and a feeding tube thing. She’d done everything she could think of to bring Bill around, but he hadn’t even moved since we’d put him there. Hadn’t even opened his eyes.

  At least, not until about five seconds ago.

  Chapter 3

  THURSDAY, JULY 30

  14 DAYS

  We bolted into the corridor. Soren had just emerged from the toilet. He doubled back to follow us, guessing that something was up.

  Mike had been waiting outside for him. ‘Hey, boss –’

  ‘Not now!’ snapped Soren, shooing him away, and we raced through to the old research building, down a half-destroyed corridor strewn with debris.

  ‘Have you been down to see him?’ Luke glanced back at Kara. ‘While we were up on the surface, did you do anything?’ He ducked just in time to avoid smashing into a bit of pipe sticking out of the concrete.

  ‘No,’ said Kara, ducking under the pipe after him, ‘no-one has gone near him.’ And it was a sign of how far we’d come that I actually believed her.

  The corridor opened up for a minute, and we shot past Peter’s room, still barricaded from the outside. His face appeared behind the little hole in his door.

  ‘Jordan! Jordan, get over here!’

  ‘In a minute!’ I called back.

  We kept running, snaking past abandoned research stations half-drowned in concrete. The destruction got steadily worse as we went along, closing in on the site of the explosion that had brought this place down.

  I stopped as we reached a block in our path: a rusty old bookcase, pinned to the wall by two heavy lengths of pipe we’d wedged across the corridor. I kicked the bits of metal loose and they clattered to the ground, freeing the bookcase.

  Luke pulled it aside, revealing a misshapen gap in the wall – the remains of an old doorway, leading into the remains of an old laboratory.

  Kara slipped inside and I ducked in after her. I could still hear Peter shouting behind us. I tried to tune it out, tried not to let it get to me, but the dull dread was already creeping back into my stomach.

  He was right here. Luke’s future murderer, right here under our roof, and getting more unstable by the day. It was insane. An accident waiting to happen. But what choice did we have? We weren’t about to kill Peter, couldn’t let him loose on the outside, and didn’t have enough sedatives to keep him knocked out for more than a few days. Our only option was to keep him here, keep him as calm as possible, and try to avoid giving the past any reason to repeat itself.

  Not that reason was much of a priority for Peter anymore.

  Bill’s bed sat in the middle of the room, on the one bit of ground that still resembled a flat surface. Steel chairs littered the floor, cemented in at weird angles. I guessed this had been a meeting room back before the explosion. But given that my first experience of this place had been waking up strapped to one of those chairs, it was hard to picture it as anything other than a prison.

  I crossed to the bed. Bill wasn’t moving. His hair and beard had grown back a bit, and Kara had found a gown for him to wear, but apart from that he looked exactly the same as when we’d brought him down here.

  ‘Who are you?’ I whispered, staring down at his closed eyes.

  Bill had been a piece of this puzzle since the very beginning. It had been him who’d dragged us into this fight. He knew – or seemed to know – more about what was going on in Phoenix than practically anyone. But since he’d spent most of the last few months either imprisoned or unconscious or both, we knew almost nothing more about him than the day we’d first met.

  Kara frowned and reached down to take Bill’s pulse.

  ‘You saw it, right?’ I said. ‘You saw him moving on the monitor.’

  Bill let out a groan, twisting away from her. Kara’s hand snapped back. We’d warned her what Bill was capable of.

  ‘I certainly saw that,’ she said, as Bill settled back down. He didn’t open his eyes again, but there was something different about the rhythm of his breathing. He seemed less comatose and more like he was just sleeping.

  ‘Bill?’ I said, ignoring the nervous shiver that ran up my spine as I leant over him. ‘Bill, can you hear me?’

  No response. I put a hand on his shoulder.

  ‘Careful,’ said Luke.

  ‘Yeah,’ I whispered. But if Bill knew something about Tobias, we couldn’t afford not to know too. I bent down to try again. ‘Bill. It’s Jordan. Are you –?’

  ‘Jordan,’ Bill croaked.

  I straightened up again, giving him space. Giving myself space, in case he decided to lash out or something. ‘Yeah, that’s right,’ I said. ‘Are you ready to wake up now, Bill?’

  His mouth opened again. He murmured something but I couldn’t make it out, especially not with Peter still yelling from up the corridor. I threw a frustrated glance behind me.

  ‘I’ll go see what he wants,’ said Luke.

  ‘No,’ I said reflexively, wishing I hadn’t let my irritation show. ‘Leave him. Wait until –’

  ‘Jordan, I’ll be fine.’

  ‘Soren, why don’t you go with him?’ Kara suggested.

  ‘No,’ said Soren and I at the same time.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Luke, ‘I won’t open the door.’

  He’ll be okay, I told myself. But it was like this every time I wasn’t with him. Because that was the thing that kept bugging me about the surveillance video Kara and Soren had shown us: I wasn’t in it.

  Where was I when Luke was getting stabbed to death?

  I pushed the thought aside and bent over the bed again. ‘Bill? Are you still there?’

  If he was, he showed no sign of it.

  ‘Waste of time,’ Soren muttered under his breath. He grabbed Bill by the shoulders and started shaking him. ‘Hey! Wake up!’

  ‘Stop that!’ I shoved him away and he staggered on the uneven concrete, almost knocking over the I.V.

  Soren grabbed the back of a chair, finding his footing again. ‘I am not afraid of –’

  ‘Soren,’ said Kara, silencing him. ‘Why don’t you take a seat, and I’ll tell you if I need your assistance?’

  ‘Mum, you cannot just –’

  ‘Take a seat, Soren.’

  Soren glared at her, but did what he was told. I circled around the bed to avoid having my back to him.

  Outside, Peter’s shouting came to a sudden stop. I tried to convince myself that meant he was calming down.

  Bill was flat on his back again, like nothing had happened. Kara crouched down and opened the battered kit she kept under the bed. ‘My kingdom for fifteen minutes in that medical centre,’ she said under her breath, bobbing back up with a torch and a silver sedative pen. ‘Only use it if you have to,’ she said, handing me the pen. ‘They’re not going to last forever.’

  She eased one of Bill’s eyes open and flashed the torch inside. The pupil shrank a bit under the light. Kara let go of him and the eye snapped shut again.

  ‘Is that good?’ I asked, as she reached a
cross to check the other one.

  ‘It means he’s alive,’ said Kara. ‘But given I have no idea what that “machine” you found him in was doing…’ She trailed off as Luke reappeared in the doorway.

  ‘Is Peter okay?’ I asked.

  Luke shrugged, rolling his eyes. ‘He only wants to talk to you.’

  ‘Of course he does.’ I sighed, looking to Kara. ‘What’s the story here?’

  ‘He might wake up at any moment,’ Kara told me, in a voice that said my guess was probably as good as hers, ‘or he might never wake up at all. I’ll send Soren for you if anything changes.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Luke. ‘If Bill does wake up, I’m sure he’ll let everyone know about it.’

  By the time Luke and I got to his room, Peter was back to yelling again. ‘JORDAN! JORD–!’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, crossing to his door. ‘I’m here. What’s up?’

  ‘Jordan! Quick, come in,’ said Peter. ‘I need to show you something.’

  ‘Not now,’ I said. ‘Luke and I are –’ I faltered, catching the flicker in Peter’s eyes at the mention of Luke’s name. ‘It’s Crazy Bill. Kara thinks he might be about to come around.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Peter. ‘Crap. What are you going to do if he wakes up, you know, crazy?’

  ‘Good question,’ I said, mind already drawing up contingencies to get Mum and Georgia to safety. ‘But that’s why we need to get back there. What did you want to tell me?’

  ‘Right,’ said Peter. He grabbed his laptop from the bed. ‘Thought you might want to know about this.’

  Peter held the screen up in front of the gap in the door. It was a surveillance feed. The entrance above our heads. The sun had gone down on our way back from the supply truck, but I could still make out the dark form moving low across the ground.

  There was someone up there, and they were trying to get in.

  Chapter 4

  THURSDAY, JULY 30

  14 DAYS

  The figure moved again, shifting through the grass on hands and knees. It was impossible to see much more than an outline, but there weren’t many people in Phoenix with a silhouette that size.