Her Glock stared back.
“What the hell are you doing?”
I didn’t answer, already planning my next move. She was standing beside a stairwell, but had little cover. I had even less. If either of us fired, this close to each other, it would all be over.
I tried to reason with her.
Yeah, like that ever works, soldier.
“This place is wrong, Brennan. You know that.”
“What?”
“You saw what they were doing to those kids. What else are we going to find?”
“So you want to blow it up?”
“It’ll send a message. To whoever’s behind all this.”
She took a step closer. Dangerous. “We’ve already sent a message. We’ve taken the base.”
I snorted in derision. “And you think that’ll be the end of it? Where did all that medical equipment come from, Brennan? The guns, the body armour? None of that was here before the Cull. It’s been brought in from outside. Settle here and you’ll find yourself under siege when the real owners turn up.”
“Where’s the trigger?” She hadn’t heard a word I was saying.
“We could still get out of this alive.”
“‘We’? Are you sure about that? Downstairs it was them. ‘You might as well tell them.’ Now I’m supposed to believe we’re in this together?”
“I never said I wanted to stay here. That wasn’t part of the deal.”
“Neither were your grenades. Drop the gun.”
“Brennan, listen—”
“Drop it.”
It was no good. I couldn’t guarantee that I’d be the quicker shot, not anymore.
“Okay, I’m putting it down.”
Slowly, purposely, I lowered my gun to the floor and slid it over to her. She stopped it with her foot as I straightened, hands in the air.
She stalked towards me. “It’s a shame. I liked you. Thought you might fit in.”
“Like Fenton fitted in? How did that end up?”
“Come on, you met him.”
I gave her my best lop-sided grin—the full Han Solo. “Sure, and I wanted to put a bullet in his head from the first moment, too.”
She was in front of me now, the Glock inches away from me. She wasn’t buying my charm offensive. Couldn’t blame her.
“The trigger.”
“In my jacket.”
She hesitated, weighing up whether to get me to take it out or do it herself. She went for the former, and I did as I was told, bringing out an old battered mobile phone, which I dutifully offered her, looking her full in the eye all the time. She glanced down at the phone, and I struck.
Dropping the phone, I swept my hand into the wrist of her gun arm. She fired, doing permanent damage to my eardrum, but the bullet ended up in the plasterwork, not me. There was no time for finesse. I shoulder barged her, sending us both crashing to the floor. Scrabbling for her gun arm with my left hand, I found her throat with my right. She kicked and thrashed, but I was too heavy, pinning her arm down, crushing the breath from her. She gasped, her eyes wide, her struggles diminishing by the second.
I took no pleasure from this. I’d liked her, too.
Perhaps that’s what made me sloppy.
The knife went into my thigh, almost to the hilt. I cried out, releasing my pressure on her neck, enough for her to pull the blade free and find another home between my ribs.
She heaved against me and I rolled onto my back, the knife still sticking out of my side. Brennan scrambled to her feet, bringing her gun down to bear.
My hand went to my pocket as I cursed myself for being a stupid old man, and a shot rang out.
Brennan’s body toppled forward to land beside me.
My head swimming, I looked up to see Jasmine standing at the bottom of the stairs, a briefcase in one hand and my P99 in the other.
IT WAS ALL a bit of a blur after that. I remember Jasmine falling to her knees beside me, checking my injuries. I screamed at her not to remove the knife. It was plugging the wound. If she pulled it out, there was no telling what damage it would do.
And then I think I was sick.
Some reunion.
After that there were only snatches of memory. Jasmine getting me to my feet, yelling at me not to die. My arm was around her shoulders, and we were stumbling through sliding doors.
A lift. You weren’t supposed to use lifts in emergencies.
This was an emergency. wasn’t it?
Sirens.
Gunfire.
More doors.
Darkness.
When I awoke, I was on a bed. I tried to move, but thick leather straps cut into my arms and legs. There were restraints over my chest as well. What was happening?
I struggled, and a shadow fell over me, blocking out the harsh lights in the ceiling above.
A face coming into focus.
Her face.
Of sorts.
Her skin wasn’t as smooth as I remembered, her cheeks more pronounced, eyes sunken. Her beautiful hair had been cropped short, turned prematurely grey.
I wasn’t exactly an oil painting myself.
“Jasmine?”
“Shhh,” she said, stroking the side of my face. “You need to rest.”
I looked around, taking in the drip beside the bed, tubes snaking down from the plastic pouch to the shunt in my arm.
“You’re going to be okay. The knife’s out. It was a clean cut.”
“You patched me up?”
She smiled. “Just like new.”
“And you’re really here? I’m not dead?”
A laugh now, but again, not like I remembered; nowhere near as hearty, like she hadn’t used it for a long time. “You’re not dead. You’re safe. We’re in the bunker. No one can get in here.”
I tried to move again, testing the restraints. I burned where the knife had gone in, despite the painkillers. Jasmine placed a gentle hand on my chest. “Stay still. You’ll open the stitches.”
She increased the dose down the line, my head swimming as the drugs flooded my system.
“Can you let me out of these?”
She was stroking my hair now, long fingers against my scalp.
“Soon, darling. They’re for your own safety. I didn’t want to, but she was right.”
“Who was?”
Jasmine walked away over to a metal work bench, her back to me. “Olive, my assistant.”
I looked around the room. The walls were whitewashed breeze-blocks, a heavy metal door, slightly ajar across from my bed. There was little in the way of furniture. The workbench, and a lighting array. A chair sat to the side, my jacket thrown over the back and the remaining remote grenades on the seat.
There was no one else here.
Jasmine was examining a security monitor, like those in the hub, flicking through camera feeds.
“We were lucky Ruth didn’t get down here first.”
“Who’s Ruth?”
If Jasmine heard the question, she didn’t answer. “Most of the others are dead, but I can’t find Ruth. It doesn’t matter. They can’t get in.”
She carried on clicking, the picture shifting on the display. I couldn’t quite make out what I was seeing; an endless cavalcade of rooms and corridors, some empty, some with bodies.
I wondered if anyone had found Brennan yet.
Jasmine leant over and flicked a switch on the monitor. The screen went dead.
“Yes, I know!” Jasmine spat, her tone suddenly harsh.
“Jas?”
She laughed, turning to me. “Allison used to call me that.”
“You’re scaring me, sweetheart. Let me out of these things.”
“You always were a terrible patient.” She returned to the table top, a briefcase open in front of her. I watched her produce a small bottle, drawing some of the clear liquid it contained into a syringe.
“What’s that?”
She turned, and her eyes gleamed, but not like before. They were cold, shallow—and quite
, quite mad.
“It’s the cure,” she said, grinning as she walked towards me. “And our future.”
The cure. My mind went back to the girl in the ward, the doctor. No one had forced Jasmine to do this. My Jasmine. She’d done it herself.
I struggled against my bonds. “Jasmine, whatever that stuff is, I don’t want it.”
“You don’t understand. We’ve been performing experiments here.”
“I’ve seen your experiments.”
“But you haven’t seen the results; you don’t know what this will do. No more disease. No more suffering. Do you understand? When we take this, we’ll have nothing else to fear. Just the two of us, together. Like it was supposed to be.”
Then she looked up, her lips drawing back, angry.
“You don’t have to be here!” she barked.
I looked where she was glaring. There was no one there.
She stroked my hair again, the syringe in her other hand. “Don’t listen to her. She’s just scared. But there’s no need to be. Not now.”
“Don’t listen to who? Jasmine, who are you talking to?”
She stared at me as though I was delirious. “Olive. You’ll get used to her. She’s always banging on about something, yadda, yadda, yadda, day or night.” She gave a peal of laughter. There was nothing infectious about it now. It made my skin crawl. “I just can’t seem to get shot of the stupid bitch.”
There was a thud from outside the room, like someone banging against metal. Jasmine returned to the monitor, re-activating the screen. A young girl in pyjamas was slamming an open palm against a vault door. She was bald, her clothes covered in what could only be blood.
“And there she is. It’s about time.”
I struggled to remember the name Jasmine had mentioned. “Ruth?”
Jasmine was transfixed on the screen, lost in her thoughts. “Such a shame, but we don’t need her anymore.”
Her head snapped around, glaring into empty space again. “Well, you go out there, then.” She turned her attention back to me. “Don’t worry. Ruth can’t get in. No one can. And once we’ve done this, we’ll set the charges, bring the place down around her ears. The Cabal won’t be pleased, but when they see you, see what I’ve achieved...”
She flinched. Shutting her eyes, her head cocked to the side, as if she was waiting for someone to stop talking... or to leave.
Finally, she sighed, her eyes opening again. “Thank God for that.” She leant close, conspiratorially. “Don’t worry, we’ll get rid of her, too. I need her to help set the charges for now.” She rolled her eyes. “Just my luck she’s the only one who knows the demolition codes, but as soon as we’re out of here, we need never see her again.”
“Olive?”
She nodded, smiling.
I understood.
Jasmine flicked the syringe, clearing the bubbles in the liquid before slipping the needle into the shunt in my arm.
“Now, I’m not going to lie, this is going to hurt. That’s why we strapped you down. It’ll be worth it, though. Besides, you know me. I’d scream the place down if I got a paper cut. If I can get through this, anyone can, especially you.”
“You’ve taken the cure?”
“I couldn’t exactly test it on anyone else, could I? I wanted to tell Allison, but Olive wouldn’t let me.”
“You told Olive.”
“She said that they’d take the glory. This had to be my discovery.” A shadow crossed her face. “To make amends.”
“For what? Jasmine, what do you need to make amends for?”
She came to me, this new twisted version of my beloved Jasmine.
“Gently now,” she cooed, applying pressure to the syringe.
It felt as if someone was pouring lava into my veins. I had experienced pain, but never like this. I couldn’t move, every muscle in my body knotting at once. I tried to scream, but my jaws were locked together so tight I thought my teeth were going to crack.
And all the time, Jasmine whispered in my ear, telling me that it was going to be all right, that I had found her. We would be safe.
She knew it was true. Olive had told her.
Eventually, the pain subsiding, releasing my muscles, letting my body relax. I choked, tasting blood in my mouth. My head was spinning, my brain feeling like it was expanding, pressing against my skull, wanting to break free.
I could hear Jasmine a million miles away, although the words didn’t make sense. It didn’t even sound like her voice anymore. Not the voice I remembered, not the woman I remembered. This wasn’t right. It wasn’t how it was supposed to be.
The leather strap sliced into my forearm as I struggled to slip my hand into my pocket. My fingers curled around the transmitter, flicking the safety-guard up with my thumbnail, feeling the button beneath.
My vision was starting to clear, Jasmine’s face coming into focus. For a moment she looked the way she was, before the Cull, before it all, but then reality rushed back.
She was speaking to me, but I couldn’t hear the words. I thought she said my name.
Don’t you give up now, soldier!
Sir, no sir, etc.
I pressed down on the detonator.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
UK number-one bestselling author Cavan Scott is currently trying to work on everything he loved when he was ten. He has written for Star Wars, Doctor Who, Warhammer 40,000, Judge Dredd, Blake’s 7, Highlander, Danger Mouse, the Beano and Vikings. His new Sherlock Holmes novel, The Patchwork Devil, is out now from Titan Books, with a sequel in the works. He lives in Bristol with his wife, daughters and an inflatable Dalek called Desmond.
For all the fans of the Hooded Man novels; I can never thank you enough.
“Look back over the past with its changing empires that rose and fell, and you can foresee the future too.”
—Meditations, Marcus Aurelius
PROLOGUE
ONCE, A LONG time ago, this was a world. A living, breathing world.
Now it’s just a shell, a shadow of what it once was. Not that Mouse could remember the time before; he was far too young. This was the only world he’d ever known, the one he’d grown up in. Alone, more or less, since he was very little. He had vague recollections of a family, parents maybe—or at the very least people who had looked after him... to begin with. But they weren’t around for very long. He couldn’t remember exactly why: one minute they were there, the next they were gone. Anything could have happened to them really; as much as it was a dead world, it was also a dangerous one.
It hadn’t always been that way. Somehow, Mouse knew that. Perhaps the people who’d been around during the first few years of his life had told him so. There had been peace... of a kind. Some sort of order, at any rate. It was all he did know, as he hadn’t come across anyone who could tell him more. Not that he’d ask. It wasn’t wise—you only fell for that once. Trust was a hard thing to come by in this day and age, so it was best just to not get involved.
He’d been scavenging all this time, and had become incredibly good at it. Hunger was a pretty good motivator, even when you were very small—not that he was much bigger now—and fear kept you safe. Mostly. It was a combination that had worked well enough up to this point. It had also seen him travel a lot, moving on if a place had already been picked over—or he’d found all he could. Flitting from one burnt-out town to another, just as he was doing today. Sometimes you got lucky, like when he’d found that untouched basement with the tinned goods in. Tins were his best friends, they survived anything.
More often than not, there were days like this, when he found nothing. Mouse took one last look over his shoulder, at the scarred remains of the structures he’d been searching. The latest city he’d entered, which looked pretty much like all the others he’d ever come across. Except it wasn’t like all the rest, he felt. And there was a sadness he couldn’t explain as his eyes took in the rubble that filled the streets, the caved-in walls of buildings, bricks sticking out like broken teeth.
He shrugged, hitching up his backpack and leaving. It was time to head off somewhere else, somewhere that held more promise than this.
Time to hit the road again.
MOUSE HADN’T BEEN walking for very long down that road when he came across a curious sight in the distance.
He was used to seeing blackened stretches of land; there was little else sometimes, between the towns and cities. What remained of that living, breathing world he had never seen. But the landscape here was slightly different. It was uneven, rising and falling around him. As Mouse drew closer, he saw that it was littered with short, squat columns, fixed into the ground. He crouched and peered at one of them, running a finger over the surface, then wiping off the ash that covered it. Beneath were rings, lots of them: larger on the outside, then progressively smaller the closer to the centre they came.
There were lots of the strange objects here, all of differing sizes and shapes.
“It used to be how you could tell the age,” came a voice from behind him.
Mouse jumped, whipping out the piece of jagged metal he used as a weapon. How anyone had crept up on him was a mystery; Mouse was the quiet one, the sneaker—though someone was obviously much better. But the speaker wasn’t as close as he’d sounded. He sat on one of the odd columns, his cloak hanging down over the sides. He was leaning on something long and twisted, two hands clutching it for support. His white hair and beard rippled in the breeze passing through this place, and his skin was as wrinkled as old leather. Mouse had never seen anyone as old as him, in fact. The man looked older than time itself.
Mouse was simultaneously terrified and intrigued, fixed to the spot. But standing here out in the open like this, gawping, was a good way to get yourself killed. Perhaps it was a trap, and any moment now he’d be attacked from other angles, his backpack snatched from him as he was kicked and stomped into the ground.
He made a concerted effort to move forward, placing one foot in front of the other. “You... You stay where you are,” warned Mouse, looking about him all the while as he covered the distance between them, expecting at any moment to have to defend himself.
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