Fallout

by Chris Morphew

  ‘Tank,’ I said.

  ‘Alive,’ Luke commented.

  No-one had seen Tank since Mike and Cathryn lost him in that skirmish with security. All we’d known for sure was that he hadn’t reappeared back in town. But then, neither had a bunch of others. There were at least thirty people who hadn’t shown up on our feeds.

  ‘Jordan!’ said Peter. ‘If you let me out, I can go up there and –’

  ‘He’s digging,’ breathed Luke, as though Peter hadn’t spoken. ‘Look. He’s trying to find the entrance.’

  A shiver raced up my back. ‘We need to get him down here.’

  ‘Whoa, hang on, are you sure that’s –?’

  ‘Before someone sees him!’ I said, running for the entrance.

  Luke came sprinting up the corridor behind me. ‘What if it’s a trap?’

  ‘A trap?’ I said, ducking under a half-collapsed beam. ‘If Shackleton knew we were here, you really think he’d send Tank?’

  ‘That would be the “trap” part,’ said Luke. ‘Like in your vision. You saw security coming down here.’

  ‘Yeah, but…’ I trailed off, realising I had no end to that sentence.

  We shot out of the research module and up the hall through the living area. I poked my head into the lounge room on my way past. Mr Hunter was sitting on his bed, drying his hair with a towel. Mum and Georgia were still in the kitchen, helping Ms Hunter pack away the food.

  ‘Get ready to run,’ I said.

  ‘Why?’ said Mum, grabbing Georgia’s hand. ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘Probably nothing,’ I said. ‘But get ready.’

  Way down in the bowels of the Complex, I’d set up a panic room to hide Mum and Georgia whenever my vision came true and Shackleton finally worked out where we were.

  Not today, I thought. Please don’t let it be today.

  Luke’s dad followed us into the surveillance room. ‘What’s happening?’

  ‘Tank,’ said Luke. ‘He’s up at the entrance.’

  Mr Hunter glanced at the same feed Peter had shown us. ‘We need to get him down here before someone sees him.’

  Luke threw up his hands like we were staging a mutiny.

  I stopped at the control panel, fingers hovering over the button that would open the trapdoor. I could see the anxiety on Luke’s face, and suddenly I wasn’t so sure he was wrong. ‘Are we doing this?’ I asked.

  Luke took another look at the feed. Tank was still clawing at the ground. How long before he hit concrete?

  ‘All right,’ said Luke, shaking his head. ‘Yeah. Open –’

  ‘Wait!’ said Mr Hunter.

  I jerked back from the control panel. ‘What?’

  Then I saw it. A second shadowy figure, shifting into view behind Tank. It turned slowly, peering around at the bush, sweeping a long, dark shape through the air at chest height.

  ‘He’s got a rifle,’ said Mr Hunter.

  ‘See?’ said Luke, his face drained of colour.

  Mr Hunter rubbed his face. ‘Get the others. Get them as deep into the Complex as you can.’

  ‘What? No! I’m not just going to leave you out here to get –’

  ‘Hang on,’ I said, watching the screen. The man with the gun crouched next to Tank. I moved closer, scrutinising the man’s ragged outline. ‘Look at him. Look at his clothes. I don’t think – does that look like a security officer to you?’

  Neither of them answered. My eyes stayed fixed on the monitor. Something about this didn’t add up. Either way, the image of security storming in and gutting this place was too fresh in my mind for me to feel sure of anything.

  Finally, Mr Hunter turned and headed for the corridor. ‘Whatever this is, we need to deal with it. Open the door.’

  Luke started to answer, but his dad had disappeared.

  I pushed the button. On the laptop screen, Tank and the other man scrambled out of the way as the ground opened up under them.

  They knelt over the entrance, staring down into the blackness.

  ‘What are you waiting for?’ I hissed, hand resting on the control panel, ready to close the trapdoor as soon as they got inside. But still they didn’t move.

  I gave up waiting and dashed out after Luke’s dad.

  I could hear Tank calling down the stairs. ‘Hello?’

  ‘Shh!’ I hissed. Even if this wasn’t a trap, Tank was going to bring the whole Co-operative down on top of us if he didn’t shut up.

  Mr Hunter was standing at the bottom of the stairs, shoving a clip into the rifle Soren had abandoned before.

  ‘Tank!’ I snapped, cutting him off as he started calling out again. ‘Get down here!’

  Silence. Then: ‘Jordan?’

  ‘Hurry up! And tell your friend to put his gun down.’

  My heart pounded. I heard a shuffling noise, feet on concrete, and then a dull hiss as Luke sealed the entrance.

  ‘It’s closing!’ Tank panicked.

  ‘Just get down here.’ I said. My eyes flickered to Mr Hunter, kneeling to take aim up the stairs. ‘Wait. The gun. Throw the gun down first.’

  ‘No way!’ said Tank. ‘You think we’re –?’

  But he was drowned out by a sudden, noisy clattering as the other man did what I’d asked. I jumped out of the way as the rifle rocketed off the stairs and skittered across the floor.

  ‘All yours, Jordan,’ called a second voice, warm and familiar. ‘But how about you let me come down and say hi before you start shooting?’

  Relief exploded in my chest. Mr Hunter stood up, lowering his rifle. A huge smile broke across my face as the mysterious gunman slowly descended the last few steps, hands above his head, grinning. I ran forward and hugged him. ‘Reeve!’

  ‘Good to see you, kid,’ he said, lowering his arms and patting me on the back.

  ‘Reeve, where have you –? You’re so thin,’ I said, feeling the bumps of his spine poking up through his clothes. I stood back from him. He was wearing a tattered old hospital gown, the one he’d had on the night we’d rescued him from the medical centre. It was belted together with a bit of rope over a pair of jeans that might once have been the right size for him, but were now hanging off him like clown pants.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Reeve, bending to pick up his gun again. ‘It’s been a rough few weeks.’ He smiled again as Luke emerged from the surveillance room. ‘Hey, mate.’

  Tank came down the steps behind Reeve, mouth hanging open, dressed in the school uniform he must have been wearing the night Shackleton rounded everyone up. It was filthy, not much more than rags by now. His face was covered in patchy stubble.

  A high-pitched shriek cut through the corridor behind me, and I almost jumped out of my skin. Cathryn came hurtling out of the girls’ bedroom and threw herself at Tank.

  ‘Guys,’ said Luke urgently, over the sound of her sobbing. ‘Did anyone –?’

  But he was silenced mid-sentence as Mike came shoving past. ‘What the crap, man?’ he laughed, punching Tank in the arm. ‘Where have you been? We thought you were –’

  ‘HEY!’ Luke boomed.

  And it was such a shock to hear him demanding their attention that they all turned and gave it to him.

  ‘Everyone, please, just shut up for a second,’ said Luke. He turned to Reeve. ‘Did anyone see you come down here?’

  Reeve scratched at his ragged beard. ‘No,’ he said after a minute. ‘No, I don’t think so.’

  Luke let out a long breath. ‘Okay. Good.’

  Tank was gazing around at the corridor again. ‘What is this place?’

  ‘This is their place,’ said Mike. ‘The overseers. This is where they live.’

  And at that moment, like he’d been waiting for an introduction, Soren came tearing in from the other end of the corridor. ‘Jordan! My mother says you have to come back –’ He skidded to a stop, taking in the sudden crowd in the corridor. ‘Why are they here?’

  Tank strode towards him. ‘You.’

  ‘Stop!’ Soren ordered. ‘Stop rig
ht there!’

  Tank kept walking. ‘Screw you.’

  ‘You should do what he says, man,’ said Mike, weirdly nervous.

  ‘No,’ said Tank.

  Huh, I thought, a smirk pulling at my lips. Since when did Tank start having independent thoughts?

  ‘On your knees!’ said Soren, glancing at Luke and me, like he expected us to back him up. ‘Now!’

  ‘You’re not even real,’ said Tank, closing in. ‘Where’s Peter? Tell me or I’ll smash you.’

  Soren turned and ran. Tank went to chase him, and I was tempted to let him go, but the last thing we needed down here was another fight.

  ‘Tank, wait!’ I called. ‘Just stop for a second.’

  Tank hesitated long enough for me to come over and grab his arm. ‘Where’s Peter?’ he demanded again.

  ‘He’s here,’ said Cathryn. ‘Pete’s here, but…’

  ‘Trust me,’ said Mike, ‘you don’t want to see him.’

  After everything they’d put him through, Peter hadn’t exactly welcomed Mike and Cathryn with open arms. Even with Phoenix’s accelerated healing power, they’d only just lost the bruises from their last visit to Peter, and we’d kept them well away since.

  ‘I’ll take you to him,’ said Cathryn.

  ‘I’ll take you to him,’ I said. Better to keep Tank with me for now than to leave him here with these guys. ‘But don’t expect him to be happy to see you. And if you do anything stupid, I’ll –’

  ‘What’s going on out here?’ asked Luke’s mum, appearing in the doorway.

  ‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘Sorry, false alarm.’

  ‘Who are they?’ she asked.

  ‘Friends,’ said Luke, which was true of Reeve at least. ‘Just give us a minute, all right?’

  He turned back to his dad, cocking his head at Mike and Cathryn. ‘Can you keep an eye on things out here?’

  Mike scowled.

  ‘Hey…’ said Tank, eyes dropping to Mike’s right hand, taking in his missing fingers for the first time. ‘Mate… What happ–?’

  ‘Go and see Pete,’ said Mike, sticking the hand into his pocket.

  ‘C’mon,’ I said, nodding at Reeve to come too.

  Luke and I guided the two of them deeper into the Complex, leaving Mr Hunter to hold the fort.

  ‘They didn’t tell us about any of this,’ said Tank, awed.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘There’s a lot your overseers didn’t tell you.’

  Tank grunted, squeezing down the hall with more difficulty than Luke and me. ‘They’re not my overseers.’

  ‘Okay, Peter’s just through here,’ said Luke, as a battered leather couch came into view up ahead. ‘But listen, he’s kind of sick. It doesn’t take much to get him angry. You might want to keep your distance.’

  ‘I just want to see him,’ said Tank.

  Peter was still standing at his little window.

  ‘Pete?’ Tank stopped a few metres short of him, eyeing the bars over his doorway. ‘Mate, what are you doing in there?’

  Peter’s eyes went dark. ‘Open the door.’

  ‘Not a good idea,’ said Luke in an undertone.

  ‘Jordan!’ said Peter. ‘Bring him in here!’

  ‘Hang on,’ I said, keeping my voice level, suddenly remembering why we’d been down here before Tank and Reeve had arrived. ‘Wait until we’ve checked on Bill, and then we’ll work something out.’

  ‘He kidnapped me out of my freaking bed!’ Peter yelled. ‘He held me down so Mike could beat the freaking crap out of me!’

  ‘Settle down, mate,’ said Tank. ‘Let me –’

  ‘BRING HIM IN HERE!’

  WHAM!

  Tank shot through the air, slamming into Peter’s door like he’d been magnetised. He crumpled against the barricades, grunting as the impact knocked the wind out of him, then dropped to the floor in a heap.

  Reeve gasped behind me.

  Peter shouted and bashed his fists against the other side of the door.

  Tank scrambled away from him. ‘What –?’ He stood up, wiping his nose, smearing blood across his face. ‘What was that?

  ’ ‘Wait over there,’ I said, pointing Tank across the room and walking over to deal with Peter.

  ‘Jordan, come on,’ said Peter, eyes darting around. ‘He should have just done what I said!’

  ‘Listen,’ I told him, ‘this isn’t how things get fixed. Just relax, okay? Give us time to deal with this properly.’

  ‘But –’ Peter glanced from Tank to his own hands, then back to me again, like he was struggling to figure out what had happened. His expression softened and his eyes dropped to the floor. ‘Yeah.’

  ‘All right. Good. I’ll come and see you tomorrow, okay?’ I started back to Bill’s room, picking up Luke, Reeve and Tank on my way past. Moving on to the next thing, as though I hadn’t just watched someone get levitated across a room.

  ‘I think we might have a bit of catching up to do,’ said Reeve, looking out the way we’d come.

  Soren was waiting for us in the doorway. He ducked back inside as we approached.

  Bill looked just the same as we’d left him.

  ‘How is he?’ I asked Kara, weaving between the chairs to the bed.

  But her attention was fixed on Tank. He stopped in the doorway, like he was thinking about making a run for it. I couldn’t figure out the expression on Kara’s face, but it was the first time I’d seen her look at him like he was an actual human being. ‘My letter. You saw it too?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Tank, wiping his nose again, ‘we got it.’

  ‘Who’s this?’ asked Kara, eyeing Reeve with her usual cold scepticism.

  Luke was looking at him too. ‘Hey. You were with Bill in the medical centre. What were they doing to him? Did you ever see them wake him up?’

  ‘Mate,’ said Reeve, shaking his head at the bizarreness of it all – this weird huddle of people standing around a homeless guy’s bed in a secret underground hide-out. ‘I’ve got no bloody idea about any of –’

  There was a groan from the bed.

  Bill’s eyes snapped open. He rose up from the mattress to look at me, arms tugging at his restraints. He snorted absently as the feeding tube moved in his nose, face breaking into a smile filled with swelling gums and mangled teeth.

  And then suddenly, his expression shifted. ‘NO!’ he snarled. ‘No, no, no! You’re not right! You are not mine!’

  ‘It’s okay,’ I said, backing off a bit. ‘Bill, listen to me. Just take it slow, all right?’

  ‘No! I need… Please…’ He mouthed soundlessly, seeming to lose his train of thought. He gazed around the room and his face lit up again. ‘We’re here,’ he said breathlessly. ‘We are here. Yes, yes, it’s almost –’ He turned to Luke. ‘How many days?’

  ‘Until Tabitha?’ said Luke.

  ‘HOW MANY DAYS?’

  ‘Fourteen,’ I said. ‘We’ve got two weeks left. Bill, what do you know about Tobias? Do you know what –?’

  ‘It’s time!’ he shouted, falling back against the mattress. ‘Almost. Almost time.’ He was crying, ecstatic, head rolling from side to side.

  ‘Almost time for what?’ snapped Soren, getting tired of it. But if Bill heard him, he didn’t show it.

  ‘Bill…?’ I said.

  ‘Almost time,’ he repeated, over and over, eyes drifting shut, tears still rolling down his face. ‘Almost time… Almost…’

  His head slowly rocked to a stop, and then he was gone again.

  Chapter 5

  FRIDAY, JULY 31

  13 DAYS

  ‘So you guys are, what, scientists or something?’ said Reeve the next morning, scraping up the last of the soup Luke’s mum had allocated him for breakfast.

  ‘Something like that,’ said Kara.

  Reeve glanced up at Luke and me. ‘And they’re on our side now? Even after what they did to Tank and his mates? And to you guys?’

  ‘It’s complicated,’ I said, standing to collect the empty
bowls.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Reeve. ‘I got that.’

  We were sitting around on the beds in the boys’ room. Reeve and Tank had spent the night here on the spare bunks and woke up talking as if those springy old mattresses were the best things they’d ever slept on.

  ‘Is there more?’ Tank asked.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, taking his bowl away from him. ‘At dinner.’

  Ms Hunter had already given Tank and Reeve twice as much breakfast as anybody else, a decision which almost brought her and Soren to blows. Kara had broken it up, and Soren had stomped off to his room, where he was probably having a good long whinge to Mike about it.

  ‘I’m still hungry,’ Tank grumbled.

  ‘Join the club,’ I told him, taking the bowls through to the kitchen.

  ‘What about you guys?’ Luke asked. ‘Where have you been all this time?’

  When we’d last seen Reeve, he was running blindly into the bush, drawing a pair of armed guards away from the rest of us so we could escape from the medical centre.

  ‘Well,’ said Reeve, leaning back against the wall, ‘at first it was just me. And for a good while after you kids busted me out, I spent most of my energy just surviving. Hanging around the outskirts of town, trying to get my head around what was going on. Trying to find out where my wife and my kid were. Then, about a week back, I was out at – there’s a lake not far from here, and I was out there grabbing a drink, and I spotted this cave in the side of the rock face.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, sitting down next to Luke again. ‘We’ve been there.’

  ‘Course you have,’ said Reeve. ‘Anyway, I swam across and climbed up into the cave, and suddenly here was this kid –’ He jerked a thumb at Tank. ‘– standing over me, ready to smash my head open with a rock.’

  Tank smirked. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘It took a bit of work, but I was able to convince him that I wasn’t going to hurt him. I filled him in on what was going on in town, and he explained how these overseers of his had warned him and his mates to get out.’

  ‘They’re not my overseers,’ said Tank again, running a hand over his right shoulder, where Kara and Soren had branded him with a tattoo.

  ‘No,’ said Kara. ‘We are not. That is why I sent you that last letter. I wanted to offer an explanation for our behaviour. I wanted to apologise.’