Tom picked nervously at his nails, staring at the floor and apparently unaware of Kyle’s gaze.
Maybe me getting involved in all this was inevitable too, Kyle thought.
A fresh surge of guilt washed through him. Ever since Volkov, Kyle had erected an invisible barrier between himself and his brother, and that barrier had merely grown larger as the world became progressively more bizarre and dangerous. Kyle had been so wrapped up in his own thoughts that he hadn’t stopped to see things from Tom’s point of view.
The kid was like a walking Wikipedia page dedicated to explaining neuroses and anxiety; he always had been. He probably didn’t feel dread on the McIntosh ship because he felt it all the damn time.
And he was right.
About everything.
Kyle stood up and nodded a silent thanks at Sykes, who was intently focused on his own boots once more, and moved over to Tom, sitting heavily on a chair next to him.
Tom looked at him inquisitively.
“Okay,” Kyle said quietly in a tone that suggested a continuation of a debate that had been on pause for a long time. “Everything’s fucked, and we’re here. So what now?”
Tom studied Kyle’s face for a moment and broke into a rare grin.
“Now we do the only thing we can do,” he said.
“Which is?”
“We bring the whole fucking thing down on their heads.”
Chapter 20
This is insane.
The words had been rolling around in Nathan's head for several long minutes.
Ever since Dick Skinner had passed him the gas mask.
Some part of Nathan had held out hope that Fred Sullivan would see the folly in his plan to rid the ship of all dissenting voices. Even a civilian would surely understand that a force numbering no more than five hundred had no chance of defeating a force at least six times its size in a battle.
Only when Nathan saw the crate of masks did he realize that Fred Sullivan was no ordinary civilian. In fact, he thought, the old man could very well be Satan himself.
Hell, if Satan actually exists, he's probably watching Sullivan and taking fucking notes on how to most efficiently kill an entire species.
There would be no battle. Fred Sullivan was not the kind of man who engaged in simple fighting, fair or otherwise. He was a man that focused on outcomes, and how best to attain the ones that benefited only himself.
Nathan stared around the deck. All five hundred of the names that he and Skinner had decided would be loyal to the cause had been alerted that they were required on the flight deck for 'a drill'. There were a few dozen others who happened to be on deck too, including a couple that Nathan knew were very definitely not loyal; men who had muttered in dark corners that money was worthless, and that all that mattered now was power and those who had the balls to take it.
Nathan pointed them out to Skinner, and had received a shrug in return.
"By the time this is over, they will be the ones that are outnumbered," Skinner replied.
"And you think they'll just take this on the chin?"
Skinner looked at Nathan thoughtfully.
"They will if they want to live."
Fuck me. Spend a little time with Sullivan and even a hopeless case like Skinner turns into a ruthless bastard.
"Better put the mask on, Nathan. The...uh, drill starts in sixty seconds."
Nathan slid the mask over his face and tightened the straps at the back of his head. The world became suddenly muffled, distant and muddy as white noise.
He felt numb.
Sullivan had contingency built on contingency. The Conqueror was rigged: the air conditioning vents had been loaded with a deadly nerve agent ready to fill the lower decks with gasping, rattling death at a moment's notice.
Sullivan had planned for the eventuality of killing the entire crew before any of them had even set foot on the ship.
He wasn't a psychopath. He was a monster, every bit as bad as the one locked up on the ship that sat miles to the west.
The old man hadn't wanted a list of loyalists because he wanted an army to fight for him. He just wanted to know how many would be left when he was done with the killing.
What if it hadn't been enough to crew the ship?
It wasn't a question Nathan wanted to dwell on. He felt a strange, lurking certainty that if that had been the case, Fred Sullivan would have killed them all anyway. Better to die than to admit defeat.
In the distance, across the ominous sea of gas masks, Nathan heard a muffled voice counting down.
Ten.
Nine.
A couple of the soldiers on the deck shuffled awkwardly on the spot; doubtless they were the ones who had some idea of what was actually happening. Maybe they were picturing the clean-up they would be required to undertake over the next few hours, tossing the corpses of their friends overboard until their arms ached.
Eight.
Seven.
Six.
We're all utterly disposable to him. Every last one of us. No more than cattle.
Five.
Four.
Three.
Two.
I've got to get the hell off this boat.
One.
Below deck, air vents sighed poison into the narrow steel corridors; into the mess rooms and the sleeping quarters, filling every corner of the ship with a killer every bit as invisible as the one that Fred Sullivan's satellites had dropped onto the surface of the planet weeks earlier.
This was no sophisticated scientific apocalypse, though. There was no reshuffling of the genes; no extraordinary side-effects.
Just death.
Unlike Wildfire, the release of the gas proceeded without a hitch: humans had long ago perfected the art of simple killing.
Far above the deck, Fred stood on the viewing platform, breathing filtered air through a gas mask. There was very little danger of the toxin making its way to the deck, and even less likelihood of it proving deadly when the harsh North Sea wind dispersed it. There was virtually no chance of the poisonous cloud reaching Fred's position.
But only a fool would fail to prepare for the worst possible outcome.
Chapter 21
At first glance, the mutation didn’t appear to be much of anything, but when Kyle stepped into the cargo bay that had been retrofitted to become a very specific kind of prison, he felt the hairs on his neck stand up nonetheless.
The hold was a vast space, and for a moment Kyle was reminded of King Kong being shut in a similar cell while he was transported toward his inevitable Hollywood death.
Most of the huge space that greeted Kyle, though, was empty; a place of shadows that claimed all the corners, making the place feel dislocated and surreal as a bad dream. There was no giant monster.
In the centre of that empty space, lit by harsh floodlights that kept the gathering shadows at bay, stood an array of machinery that looked to Kyle like a blend of a high-tech hospital and an engineering bay. Blinking lights danced across metallic surfaces. He saw something that looked like a pulse monitor, and other displays that he didn’t recognise.
Tangled tubes and wires snaked from the equipment, all making the same short pilgrimage to the large table onto which Jake McIntosh had been placed.
From where Kyle stood, wreathed in the shadows, very little of the creature was visible. Enormous steel manacles covered the thing’s limbs almost entirely, and were reinforced by heavy chains. The creature looked roughly human-sized, if on the big side. A far cry from a fifty-foot tall gorilla.
Beyond the table, Kyle saw what looked like four banks of audio speakers, as though a rock band had set up their equipment in preparation for an ear-shattering performance to come. That must be the low frequency sound equipment Sanderson mentioned, Kyle guessed, though he could not fathom why such a setup might be required.
For good measure, the entire construction was locked inside a huge steel cage. Six-inch thick bars prevented Kyle from getting any closer than fifty feet
or so away from the table that held the key to whatever the hell Project Wildfire was all about.
He stood a few feet back from the bars, peering through the gaps and trying to make out some part of the terrifying creature the crew and Sanderson had described to him, but could see nothing.
He took a half-step closer.
“Don’t,” Tom whispered at his side, and pointed at a discreet CCTV camera mounted on a nearby wall. “We’re not supposed to be down here. Stay in the shadows.”
Phil Sanderson was still locked in debate with the young female doctor, and the rest of the crew were apparently still locked in debates that were entirely more internal in nature.
Whatever happened on the ship, Kyle didn’t give the crew much chance of lasting long if Sanderson reneged on his promise to have them relieved. Somewhere below the general air of dread on the ship, Kyle could feel an undercurrent of something else. Despair, maybe. Crawling insanity. Something dark was written in the eyes of the crew members. Something permanent.
One way or another, things on the ship were going bad, rotting like a corpse in the sun.
When the brothers were finally alone, Tom finally seemed to relax a little.
"What do you think?" Kyle asked.
Tom stared thoughtfully at Kyle for a moment before responding.
"I think they're feeding us bullshit and trying to persuade us it's chocolate. It's like Sykes said, nobody gets to know the whole truth. That's how Sullivan operates. It always has been. This whole thing was built on the work of tens of thousands of people, most of whom didn't know a thing about it until it all kicked off. So all this stuff?"
Tom waved a hand around the cargo hold.
"I'd say that whatever this is, it's definitely not what they have told us. Or what they've told Sykes, for that matter."
Kyle nodded. It made sense, or at least as much sense as anything seemed to make these days.
"You think Sanderson knows what's going on?"
"Maybe. He probably knows more than anyone else here, sure, but come on, Kyle. Some kind of hyper-evolved monster? Incredible speed and strength? Something that doesn't operate according to the laws of physics as we know them? Doesn't it all sound like the kind of fairytale you'd tell a child to keep them away from something you don't want them to go near?"
"Yeah, could be," Kyle admitted.
"I wouldn't be surprised if whatever this sensation everybody is feeling on this ship turns out to be man-made either. Gas, maybe. And just look at all this security. Rather than being designed to keep something in, doesn't it seem more like it's here to keep people from getting too close? It's like the lion enclosure at the zoo. We can look, but only from a distance. Sanderson says he is here to extract the thing's blood. But maybe he is here to inject it with something."
Kyle rubbed his forehead as he tried to digest his brother's words. It felt like his headache had decided to take up permanent residence.
"So what else could all this be about?" he asked finally.
"It looks to me more like a life support system," Tom said. "I have no idea why, but if keeping this thing alive is so important to Fred Sullivan, I think we have to take it away from him. It's the chance we've been waiting for."
"Take it away how?"
For a long moment Kyle wasn't sure his brother had heard him. When Tom finally answered, his tone was a little hesitant, as though he was still working through it in his mind.
"Everything here runs on electricity, right?"
"I guess."
"So let's cut the power."
Chapter 22
Michael patted Bryn down and felt a surge of frustration when he discovered the man wasn't carrying a set of keys. As satisfying as it had been to rearrange the face of the man who had stared at his daughter in such an unsettling way, he found himself wishing it had been Rhys that had followed Claire instead.
Bryn chuckled through the blood filling his mouth, his humour dissolving into a hacking cough. He spat a gob of blood and saliva onto the floor.
"Ma will kill you for this," he mumbled thickly. Michael stared down at the man's grinning face, and saw broken, bloodied teeth. For a second he balled up his fist again and fought to suppress the urge to finish what he had started. Beating a man to death was easy; it was just a case of forgetting to stop. Michael knew that only too well.
"Thought you'd free your friends and run, is that it, Cripple? Heh...I guess I shouldn't call you that now though, right?"
Michael swayed a little on unsteady legs. He still felt mostly numb below the waist, and standing unaided was like trying to balance on a narrow beam that stubbornly refused to remain still.
"I need you alive, Holloway. I don't need you talking."
Michael let his legs tumble beneath him, and used his momentum to connect a final solid punch on Bryn Holloway's jaw. The back of the man's skull connected with the floor with a dull thud, and the light in his eyes flickered.
More importantly, he shut up.
Bryn still had Darren Oliver's shotgun tied to a makeshift holster around his waist. Michael retrieved it and popped it open. As Rachel had informed him several days earlier, the gun held a single shell.
I definitely won't be shooting my way out of here.
"Dad, what are you going to do?"
With his pulse thundering in his ears, Michael had momentarily forgotten that Claire was standing behind him. He frowned.
"Don't worry, Claire. The gun's not for him."
He cracked the door open and scanned the courtyard. It had filled up considerably since the last time he looked. He didn't see Rhys or Annie, but it looked like most of her people had now emerged from the towers. He saw a fire had been lit, and smelled the aroma of roasting chicken and his mouth began to water.
It seemed like only moments earlier that he had been sitting next to that fire himself, cooking up canned beans to serve as a celebratory feast. Sitting with Claire and Pete and Linda, and feeling almost like a family. Almost normal.
They're just people, he thought. No different to us. Sitting out there, terrified and hungry, wondering if the castle will keep them safe from the horrors outside the walls. Afraid of the horrors that might be lurking inside.
Just people.
Michael felt a surge of guilt and hesitated.
Can I do this?
He heard a faint moan. Bryn. Beating the man to a pulp had been the point of no return. Turning back now meant death. For Michael. For Claire. For everybody.
I have to do this.
"We have to hide, Claire, and we have to stay quiet. Just like in Aberystwyth, okay?"
Claire nodded, her eyes wide.
"Do it, Dad."
Michael pulled himself back to his feet a little shakily, marvelling at the legs that he couldn't quite feel, but which seemed to be gradually growing stronger. The pain in his back was a raging inferno, but he welcomed it with open arms.
With a grunt he bent and hauled Bryn to his feet. The man was punch drunk. Michael propped him against the wall, leaning his hip into Bryn to keep him from falling, and threw the tower door open wide.
Nobody in the courtyard seemed to notice. None of them would see it coming.
Michael grabbed Bryn's collar, and leaned in close.
"Say hi to the family for me, Bryn," he said.
And then he stuck the needle deep into Bryn's arm and filled his veins with Jason's blood. He pushed Bryn outside and closed the door, turning to Claire and pointing at the stairs."
"Up," he hissed.
Moments later, muffled by the heavy wood, Michael heard a noise that filled him with euphoria and remorse and familiar terror.
Shrieking.
*
The shriek snapped Rachel out of the fog of shock that had clawed at her ever since John had died, dragging her forcefully back into the present.
In the cell, the noise reverberated around the walls and chilled her. It almost sounded like it was multiplying.
Because it was.
Rachel bolted to her feet and stared through the narrow viewing window in the door. In the courtyard she saw a familiar and terrible sight: one eyeless monster giving birth to two more. And then to five.
Death swirled around the enclosed space; a vortex of blood and teeth.
Linda had told Rachel that Michael had asked her to take some of Jason's blood, and only now did she truly understand why. Stripped of all weapons, Michael had engineered a way of getting his hands on the most powerful weapon of all; the one that had destroyed the whole world.
It was a manoeuvre so reckless, so rash, that Rachel could only stare for a moment in stunned silence, wondering if it could possibly have come from Michael.
And then she grinned.
Michael had been resisting taking direct action ever since Victor’s bunker. Even as the knowledge that her brother's blood was poison reverberated darkly around the corners of her mind, Rachel couldn't help but feel that Michael—the Michael she had first met in St. Davids; the man that had been determined to stop the carnage—had finally returned.
Rachel was surprised to find tears stinging her eyes. Only now, as an extraordinary symphony of violence raged beyond the safety provided by the sturdy locked door, did she realise how totally she had abandoned all hope. Its unexpected return cracked open a door in her mind and allowed an emotion other than rage and hate to have its day.
She blinked the tears away angrily and scanned the crowd outside, ignoring the screams and the shrieks and the arterial spray that pumped into the air, like a dozen grisly garden sprinklers had been set off in succession.
She saw no sign of Michael, and hoped he was locked in somewhere safely, as she herself was.
When Rachel felt Emma's hand land softly on her shoulder, she turned and choked out a half-laugh, half-sob at the sight of the girl's wide, frightened eyes.
"Michael," Rachel said by way of explanation. Emma's confused expression informed Rachel that she hadn't quite put it all together.
"We might get out of this, yet," Rachel said, and returned her gaze to the massacre unfolding beyond the door.
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