‘Someone could have told him! Someone from the Complex, from the future – Someone –’ My head spun, trying to fit it together.
I was so desperate for this to be his fault, so desperate for it to be something I’d been deceived or coerced or forced into, but I knew deep down that wasn’t true.
I’d done this. I’d brought Tobias out here. I’d made the call.
And now he was gone. And Tabitha was still coming.
Calvin edged towards me, hands outstretched for my gun. Even though I was grieved out of my mind, I could see how distraught he looked. ‘Jordan,’ he croaked, pressing his hand around the pistol, ‘I do not deny responsibility for what has happened here, but – but please believe that my only intention was to help you. I brought you out here because I truly believed your brother had the power to put things right. It was –’ His eyes drifted to the sling, a tear spilling down his cheek. ‘It was supposed to work.’
I released the gun. Calvin pulled it from my hands and stowed it away behind him. He laid his hands on my shoulders. ‘I am truly, truly sorry.’
I couldn’t breathe. I felt the evaporating warmth of my brother’s corpse against my chest and the devastating weight of all that had happened, of all that would happen when the clock ran down to zero, and my resistance crumbled to pieces. I collapsed into him, sobbing.
Calvin’s hands slipped around my back as my legs gave way again, and for a long moment it didn’t matter who he was or what he’d done, only that he was here and real and holding me together as I cried and cried and cried.
Calvin lowered me to the ground, then stepped out of his biohazard suit. I lay on my side, still crying myself blind, my breath coming in wet, choking moans.
He crouched over me again. I hunched, crossing my arms over my chest as his hands hovered past Tobias. ‘What are you –?’
Calvin slid his arms under me and hoisted me into the air, cradling me like a baby. He threw one last glance at the countdown screen behind us and then began hulking slowly towards the exit.
‘There may be no hope left of saving the world,’ he grunted. ‘But that doesn’t mean I can’t save you.’
LUKE
THURSDAY, AUGUST 13, 1.49 P.M. 3 HOURS, 11 MINUTES
We slipped out of Shackleton’s office, over the unconscious bodies of the fallen guards, and squeezed into the lift across the hall. Seven of us, all armed with either a pistol or a rifle or both.
‘Okay,’ said Mr Weir, hand drifting to the panel on the wall. ‘Moment of truth.’
He hit the button. With a jolt and a clunk, the lift began sliding downwards. Nervous murmurs filled the tiny compartment. No turning back now.
‘Duck for cover as soon as you can find it,’ Reeve said. ‘Whoever’s down there, we don’t want to make it easy for them.’
He pushed forward, pistol raised at the doors. Miller and Tank took up positions on either side of him.
The lift crept down, torturously slow, like someone was making sure I had time for the last hundred days to flash before me while we travelled to the bottom.
And you’re still here, I told myself. All that misery and you’re still here. Surely that has to count for something.
I held tight to the spare pistol Tank had handed me, finger still throbbing and oozing blood where Shackleton had gouged it open. Would I do it? Would I shoot someone if it meant saving Mum or Georgia or one of the others?
The lift rolled slowly to a stop, and the sound of raised voices on the other side of the doors snapped me back into focus. There was a ripple of movement as everyone tensed and raised their weapons.
Finally, the doors slid open.
‘– don’t care what she did!’ said a voice I couldn’t place. ‘If you touch her again –’
‘What?’ snarled a second voice. ‘You’ll shoot me?’ That was van Pelt, the guy from the roof. ‘What then, Louisa? What do you think happens when Shackleton finds out he’s lost another member of his ruling council?’
I peered into the enormous bunker, its walls embedded with a circle of heavy doors leading off into the Co-operative’s tunnel network. Shelves stacked with food and other supplies stretched out from the wall to our left, partially blocking the view, but I could still see where the argument was coming from.
In the centre were a couple of black leather couches with a coffee table between them. Cathryn was sitting at the foot of one of the couches, weeping into her hands, while van Pelt and a grey-haired woman stood over her, looking ready to tear each other apart.
‘Idiot,’ the woman snorted. ‘Is that what he promised you? A place on some fictitious council? And I thought Aaron was gullible.’
It was Cathryn’s mum, Louisa Hawking. Miraculously, in the heat of the argument, neither of them had heard the lift door open.
Reeve and Miller crept out towards them, Tank right behind. The rest of us spread out, taking up positions behind the storage shelves.
Cathryn let out a loud sob at her mum’s feet.
‘Quiet!’ Hawking barked, then set her sights back on van Pelt. ‘I think Shackleton might place a slightly higher value on a healthy sixteen-year-old candidate than a worn-out businessman, don’t you, Arthur?’
Van Pelt shrank back from Hawking, his hand moving to the pistol on his hip. ‘My contribution to this cause –’
‘Was strictly financial,’ she finished coldly, ‘and has already been paid in full.’
I crouched behind one of the shelves, looking between the stacks of cans and beyond to the row of unmade beds on the other side, wondering if we should just wait here until they finished each other off.
But then, with a nauseous jolt, I saw them. Mum and the others. All still there, and still alive. Bunched up on one of the beds, with three guards standing around them in a circle – Officer Cook and two of his mates from the Complex this morning.
Mum was staring anxiously at Cathryn, a purple mark across her face where one of the guards had obviously struck her. Mr Burke, still handcuffed, one arm crudely bandaged, sat beside Mrs Burke. Georgia cowered in his lap, the three of them finally back together again after weeks apart. Soren was perched behind them all on the opposite side of the bed, rocking back and forth, still messed up from his interrogation last night.
Reeve spotted them too and took a hasty step back, out of the guards’ line of sight. But their attention was flickering between the prisoners on the bed and the argument across the room.
‘Get up,’ Hawking snapped at Cathryn. She nodded at a bookshelf on the far wall. ‘Find something to read. If I see you anywhere near the other prisoners again –’
‘Find something to read?’ Cathryn shrieked, standing up, finally taking her hands away from her face to reveal the deep gashes Peter had scratched into her cheeks the night before. ‘Do you seriously think –?’
Her mouth fell open at the sight of Reeve and the others. My insides turned to stone.
Hawking and van Pelt whirled around. The guards at the bed followed suit, and in two seconds, everyone who could lay their hand on a weapon was pointing it across the bunker.
I dropped behind my wall of cans, bracing for the roar. But instead of erupting in gunfire, the whole bunker turned deathly silent.
Nobody moved.
One shot would plunge this place into a bloodbath, and it looked like no-one on Team Shackleton valued the cause more highly than they valued their own life.
Mum still hadn’t spotted me. I saw her glance at Mr Burke, trying to catch his eye.
No! I thought. Stop! You’re going to get yourself –
‘You okay, Cat?’ grunted Tank, ending the silence. He stood maybe two metres back from them, his rifle fixed squarely on Hawking.
‘Please,’ Cathryn begged, ‘don’t shoot her.’
‘Don’t want to shoot anyone,’ said Tank.
‘Then how about you all just back away nice and slow,’ said van Pelt, sounding a lot less cocky than the last time I’d run into him, ‘and we forget you ever came down h
ere?’
‘Where’s Shackleton?’ said Reeve.
‘Not here,’ said van Pelt. ‘Now, unless you want –’
‘Give us back our people,’ said Reeve, not missing a beat. ‘You hand them over and it’s done. We’re out of your hair without any more –’
There was a shout across the room, and a blur of movement sprang from the bed.
Not Mum. Soren.
He threw himself at one of the guards, knocking him down to the floor and out of sight.
I heard screams from the bed. The other two guards reeled back as –
BLAM!
– either Soren or the guard fired a pistol blindly into the air.
Mrs Burke dived to the floor, dragging Georgia with her. Mr Burke sprang up, his hands still cuffed behind his back, and charged the nearest guard.
‘STOP!’ Hawking demanded, bringing her gun around. ‘Stop or I’ll –!’
Automatic weapons-fire exploded throughout the room and she hit the floor. Cathryn screamed.
Tank threw up his arms, horrified. ‘It wasn’t me! It wasn’t me!’
A roar rose up from right beside me, and Mr and Mrs Weir suddenly burst out of hiding. Van Pelt panicked, diving behind one of the couches.
More gunfire. Georgia wailed in terror, somewhere out of sight. I looked back at the bed. Soren was on his feet, spinning in a circle like anyone could be a target. Mum was gone. I raced along the row of shelves, eyes sweeping through the gaps in the groceries, but she was nowhere –
Whump.
I slammed straight into someone running past in the opposite direction.
‘Luke!’
‘MUM!’
She threw her arms around me, weeping with relief, then went rigid again as another round of rifle-fire cut the air behind us.
Soren let out a gut-wrenching shriek.
‘Quick!’ said Mum, breaking away. ‘We need –’
CLUNK.
The noise cut through everything else in the room. A deep, reverberating sound of metal on metal.
CLUNK.
Mum squeezed down on my hand.
I looked up, searching for the source of the noise.
CLUNK.
It was moving. Circling the room.
It seemed to be coming from inside the walls.
CLUNK.
The firing stopped, everyone else as mesmerised as we were.
CLUNK.
‘The doors,’ I breathed, turning to the wall as the sound boomed closer.
‘It’s like before,’ said Mum. ‘Someone’s locking us –’
CLUNK.
The nearest door, almost behind us, shuddered like it had just been struck with a battering ram.
Then a new sound. A clattering, groaning noise.
My eyes swept along the wall and froze on the lift.
A steel door, massive and handle-less like the others, had just rolled in front of it.
CLUNK.
The noise echoed and died.
And there, standing beside the door, still dressed in the same blood-spattered shirt, a pistol in one hand and a riot shield in the other, was Noah Shackleton.
‘I wouldn’t,’ he warned, as weapons flew up at him. ‘You would all suffocate long before anyone found a way to free you.’
He strode out across the bunker, surveying the scene with absolute calm, like he was completely oblivious to the sounds of anguish in the air all around him.
I was clenching my pistol now, rage and fear burning through me, chewing me up like acid.
‘I understand that emotions are running high,’ said Shackleton, glancing at Cathryn as she wept over her mother. ‘However, I think it best that we forego any further action until after Tabitha’s release this evening. We will have a far greater chance of coming to an understanding once that whole contentious business is behind us. Until then, I have taken the liberty of placing this facility under lockdown.’
‘It doesn’t matter!’ I spat, barging out from behind the shelves before I even knew what was happening. ‘They don’t need us! Calvin’s still alive! He and Jordan are out there right now with Tobias!’
I was just ranting. I had no idea if any of it was true anymore.
Shackleton lowered his shield, propping it against one of the couches. ‘You are correct,’ he smiled, not missing a beat. ‘It most certainly doesn’t matter. Whatever grand designs my former security chief may have concocted, your last slender hope of disrupting my work evaporated with the fallout. As of this morning, Tobias is nothing but an ordinary baby. If an attempt is made to use that child to neutralise Tabitha, he will fail, and he will die. Which leaves us –’ Shackleton set his pistol on the coffee table and sank contentedly into the couch, ‘– with nothing to do but wait.’
THURSDAY, AUGUST 13, 3.58 P.M. 1 HOUR, 2 MINUTES
I barely even noticed as the skid rolled to a stop. I just sat there in the back of the cage, staring with unfocused eyes out at the sky.
The sun edged down slowly towards the deserted houses. The fighting was over now, everything quiet and still. Like it was all dead already.
The last two hours were a hazy mess, but I’d somehow pulled myself together enough to walk. I had scattered memories of trudging through wasteland, of Calvin pulling me down behind some rocks as the guards from that other skid came searching for us.
How did we get back inside Phoenix? I racked my brains and dredged up a vision of Calvin dragging his way up the wall on the rope we’d used to get out. He must have pulled me up with him, because there was no way I was capable of scaling any walls.
A clank of metal stirred me out of my daze. Calvin was standing over me, pulling open the back of the cage. He rested a hand on my shoulder.
I staggered out of the skid, Tobias’s body still heavy against my chest. It was cold now.
Amy climbed out after me. Silent. I don’t know how I’d been expecting her to react, but after a cry of shock at the sight of Tobias, she’d gone completely quiet for the rest of the journey back. Either that or I’d just been too out of it to hear her.
We were behind the medical centre. You couldn’t see the full extent of the destruction in town from here, but there were still plenty of smashed windows and scorched walls, and the stench of smoke hung heavily in the air.
The rain had disappeared, and now sun streamed down cheerfully between the clouds in a mockery of the devastation on the ground.
Calvin pulled some keys from his belt and unlocked the same door to the medical centre that we’d broken through a month ago, on our way to free Mum and Georgia and the others. For all the good that had done.
‘He’ll be down in the bunker,’ said Calvin, leading us through a little storeroom and out into a spotless white corridor. ‘If we can get down there …’ I trailed off. No end to that sentence. No plan.
We kept walking, out towards the front of the medical centre. I folded my arms under the sling, staring down at my brother’s body again, shocked at how quickly the colour had drained out of it.
Not even a person anymore. Just a thing.
I dragged my eyes up towards Amy. She quickly looked away.
It would have been better if she’d just yelled at me. There was nothing left of me to tear down that I hadn’t already demolished myself. I shuffled down the shadowy corridor, Mum and Dad and Georgia still condemning me over and over again inside my head.
We reached the front of the medical centre, and Calvin grabbed my arm, pulling me quickly across the reception area, past the smashed glass doors looking out on the carnage in the town centre. The Shackleton Building stood just across the street. All quiet. There must surely have still been a few people lying low in houses or getting lost out in the bush, but it wouldn’t take the Co-operative long to round them up tomorrow.
Assuming there was a tomorrow, even for us.
And there was a huge part of me that really hoped there wasn’t, that Tabitha would just take us all out and be done with it. Better no humanity at all than a hu
manity with Shackleton in charge.
Calvin released my arm. We were back out of sight of the town centre now, moving down the corridor that led to the tunnel entrance.
My hand dropped to my pocket. There was a phone there. It took me a minute to figure out where it had come from.
It was Ketterley’s. The one I’d lost in the skid crash this morning. Calvin had insisted on stopping to look for it on our way back.
Why? What were we going to do with it? Call Shackleton and ask him nicely to surrender?
I’d tried to phone Luke. I remembered now: the phone was still working despite all the rain, and I’d tried to call Luke, but the phone had just rung and rung, and I’d burst into tears in the back of the skid.
He was dead. Either gone already or he’d be twisted inside out when Tabitha came through in an hour’s time. All our struggling to save him from Peter, and we’d only bought him a few more miserable hours.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Amy.
I jumped, the sound of her voice pulling me back out of myself, into the dim light of the medical centre.
‘I’m sorry I wasn’t more co-operative. I’m sorry I told you not to trust him.’ Her eyes flickered with that faraway look of hers, like she was listening to a voice that no-one else could hear. ‘You were right. You did the right thing. I know – I know it didn’t turn out the way we wanted it to, but that doesn’t mean …’
Her brow furrowed as she searched for the words.
My feet crunched on broken glass. There was a huge hole in the widow next to us, like a person had been shoved through it.
‘Look,’ said Amy, as we rounded another corner, ‘just don’t give up, okay? Don’t stop hoping. I know that sounds like a stupid thing to say –’
‘Don’t stop hoping?’ I shouted, something snapping inside me. ‘Are you insane? Hope is what made me kill him! I murdered my brother because I hoped he was going to save us all! Because I was stupid enough to believe we were meant to stop this!’
‘What if we still are?’ said Amy.
‘LOOK AT HIM!’ I rounded on her, out of my mind, backing her up against the wall and ripping open Tobias’s sling. ‘DOES THIS LOOK LIKE A HAPPY ENDING TO YOU?’
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