Stormwalker

by Mike Revell

  I ducked out of sight behind the nearest building, waiting to see if she would follow me, listening to the thump-thump-thump of my heart and the crackle of the Darkness above.

  When I peeked round the corner, she’d gone.

  And that robot thing—whatever it was—was still driving along the road.

  The distant wailing siren had stopped. It must have been some kind of alarm to alert the camp to the danger. They were all here, living their lives, dealing with this every day. Just trying to stay alive so they could rescue the City and build a new home for their families.

  Me . . . I’d prefer a lifetime of Shakespeare lessons over the Darkness.

  I waited until I was sure Iris had gone, then crept through the ruined streets. The lights hummed around me, so bright I could see all the way to the edge of camp. In the middle of the dome was the market square. It was easy to recognize, because it was the only part of this dead world that still looked used.

  The square was busier than the streets around it. Kids scurried to and fro, carrying containers and scrap metal or bartering at market stalls for food. Were all of them illegal duplicates like Jack was? Everyone wore the same dirty clothes, like a filthy school uniform. Above them, strung across the storm-eaten rooftops like washing lines, a series of wires emitted puffs of mist. I could smell the lemon balm from here.

  And in the distance, behind the church’s clock tower, stood the hollowed and crumbled building that made Cambridge what it was. King’s College Chapel. In my world, it was tall and intricate and if you squinted you could make out little statues sitting in nooks and fine carving on the spires. Here, there were no spires. They’d crumbled and smashed on the road. The roof had caved in, and out if it now poured great beams of light.

  Dad once told me you could climb that roof and see all the way to Ely. Here, you’d only see a hundred yards beyond the ruin, where the edge of the light met the endless black.

  Dad . . .

  A cold knot tightened in my stomach. If this was a dream, then it was getting worse. The one at school had only lasted a few seconds at most. I’d have to tell Dad now. He’d take me to see a doctor. They’d ask me all about Mum and the Longest Day and the L-word and I didn’t want to talk about that, didn’t want to even think about it, so I latched onto a happy memory and held it in my mind.

  Football.

  The academy scouts were coming, weren’t they?

  If I could wake up. If I could get out of this dead world.

  A sudden wail made me jump. I glanced up, holding my breath. A fresh scream tore through the air as the Darkness slammed into the light again. Motes of dust danced above me.

  I had to try something.

  The dry ground crunched beneath my feet as I crept toward the edge of camp. The hairs on my arms danced, and my skin felt twice as sensitive. Every breath of wind made me prickle. I glanced over my shoulder, making sure no one was watching.

  I hadn’t seen anyone go out there since Quinn brought us back. And judging by the stuff they put me through, the film and the lemon balm and all those questions, they didn’t want anyone to try.

  Up close, the light gave off waves of heat. The thrum of electricity was loud in my ears. The Darkness whooshed and wailed. What would happen if I walked right out?

  Jack’s thoughts hung just out of reach. I could dive into them . . . I could find out. But if I was going to do this, maybe it would be better not to know. The raw, red marks on my wrists told me I could get hurt here.

  I couldn’t remember ever feeling pain in a nightmare before. And I’d had some scary ones. Once I fell off the roof of a skyscraper. I’d been chased by monsters and aliens and fought against dragons, but every time anything really bad happened, I always woke up.

  Maybe I didn’t have to go all the way out.

  Maybe it would be enough just to get close . . .

  One last glance over my shoulder. No one around.

  I walked slowly up to the barrier, held out my hand. It was too big, like the rest of my features when I looked in the mirror at school. I didn’t need to see my reflection to know I had blond hair again. Jack’s hair and Jack’s hands.

  I edged my fingers closer to the light. My quickening heart was almost as loud as the screeching storm now. It drummed against my shirt: thump-thump, thump-thump, thump-thump.

  Whispering broke out all around me, quiet at first, then louder and louder. A vision filled my mind, so sharp and clear. A grave. A headstone marked with a name. Caroline Smith. Mum . . .

  I couldn’t breathe. The whispering came faster and faster. Impish faces appeared in the Darkness, just beyond the barrier of light, beckoning me closer.

  Then a yell rang out—a loud, terrible yell.

  11

  Firm hands gripped my shoulders and I cried out in shock.

  For a heartbeat I thought it was her. I thought she’d climbed right out of the earth and was dragging me back, back, back through the mud and dust.

  “Mum,” I choked. “Mum, it’s me—”

  A man’s voice hissed in my ear.

  “What do you think you’re doing? You could get yourself killed!”

  I staggered back, my feet scrabbling on the ground. I clenched my teeth, trying to shrug him off. “I’m just trying to get home!” I tried to sound fierce, but the words came out quiet.

  I whirled round, and found myself face to face with Quinn. A badge on his chest displayed the letters lrp. It made me think of police.

  “This is home, Jack,” he said. My shoulders slumped and all the fight, all the energy, drained out of me. I didn’t want to be called Jack anymore. Why couldn’t they just realize that wasn’t my name? This was supposed to be my nightmare.

  Iris stepped out from behind him, her eyes wide with worry.

  “He’s . . . he’s been acting strangely ever since Cleansing,” she said. “He’s not . . . you don’t think he’s . . .” But whatever she was about to say, she couldn’t finish.

  Quinn gripped my face in his hands. Blue-gray bags spread underneath his eyes, as if he hadn’t had a good night’s sleep for days.

  “No,” he said, answering Iris’s unasked question. “No, if he was turning, there’d be physical signs by now. Jack . . . what were you thinking? Why would you even go anywhere near it?”

  “I . . .” I started to say, but all the argument had leaked out of me, flooding away with the last of my hope. I’d run out of options. I didn’t know what to do. “I don’t know . . .”

  “Do you feel sick at all? Can you still remember the number they gave you in Cleansing?”

  “Three hundred and eighty-six,” I mumbled. “And . . .” I wondered whether I should tell him about the sick feeling that churned every time I tried to access the part of me that belonged to Jack. His forehead was creased with concern, and Iris was obviously worried if she’d done all this to stop me. “I threw up after they let me out of the chair, but since then I’ve . . . I’ve been feeling fine.”

  “All right,” Quinn said, finally stepping back. He turned to Iris. “Sometimes the lemon balm takes a while to kick in. If he’s sick any more, come right back to me, and we’ll see what we can do. But he looks fine. He’s not turning, at any rate.”

  “Okay,” Iris said. She glanced at me, then quickly turned away when she caught me looking.

  “As for you,” Quinn said, leading me away from the edge of the light, where the Darkness still swirled. “I promised your dad I’d keep you safe, and I can’t do that if you go throwing yourself at the storm like that. Go back to your class now, and we’ll forget this ever happened. I won’t mention it to the Marshal. I won’t say a word to anyone. Sound good?”

  At the mention of Jack’s dad, the whirlwind of thoughts in the back of my mind sped faster, and I gritted my teeth, willing myself not to throw up again.

  And the Marshal . . .

  As soon as Quinn said his name, an image flashed up. Another face I’d never seen before. Another name I somehow knew.

&nb
sp; I looked into Quinn’s eyes. He reminded me a little bit of Dad, before the grayness took over his face, before the stress lines made him look older than he was.

  I closed my eyes and tried to make sense of everything. It couldn’t have been a nightmare, because if it was, I’m sure I would have woken up by now. I couldn’t have got knocked out by the bike, because I didn’t even hit my head. And it wasn’t a hazard I had to warn Dad about, like I first thought, because it was a completely different world. But if it wasn’t a nightmare, and I wasn’t unconscious, and it wasn’t my world, then what was going on?

  Those strange changes . . . they began after Dad started writing, didn’t they? The first time I noticed the odd features on my face was after our argument. When I jumped into the dead world at school, Dad had been at counseling. And this . . . Dad was in his study when I left the house!

  A sudden thought hit me. It sounded stupid. Impossible, even. But as soon as I thought it, some part of it made total sense.

  What if I wasn’t dreaming?

  What if . . . what if I’d jumped right into Dad’s story?

  12

  I’m in Dad’s story.

  It sounded ridiculous. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized I could be right. I mean . . . the Darkness was a storm, wasn’t it? And there was a storm when Dad first started writing again. This place was some dead version of Cambridge. Quinn reminded me of Dad, and Jack . . . I guessed he was a bit like me, because as far as I could tell, he didn’t have a mum either. And then there was the lemon balm . . .

  But how?

  That was the thing that didn’t make sense. How can anyone just jump into a story? Did it mean this place, this whole camp, was just words on a page? Iris—was she real? Or was she just a character in Dad’s head?

  Thinking that made the sick feeling squirm inside me again, so I pushed the thoughts away and followed Iris back toward the market. The eyes of all the other kids followed us. Wherever they were going, they didn’t stop—just glared as they passed. Was it because I broke the timetable Iris was going on about?

  Iris kept glancing at me sideways, as if she expected me to sprout horns at any second.

  “I’m not an alien, you know,” I said.

  “You’re freaking me out. I don’t care what Quinn said. What was that back there?”

  I didn’t reply, just kept focusing on holding back Jack’s thoughts. If they erupted through the fog again, I didn’t think I’d be able to avoid throwing up, and if I was sick around Iris . . .

  “Jack! Stop ignoring me.”

  “I’m not ignoring you.” I hated myself for telling her. Of course she’d be scared, if her friend didn’t know what was going on, if he said he wasn’t even from around here. I was so determined to wake up that I didn’t stop to think about it.

  But if this was Dad’s story, then he must be in control of how long I was here for. So I’d better stop acting like Owen, and start being more like Jack.

  “It’s like Quinn said, the lemon balm is taking a while to kick in. But I’m okay. Really. You don’t have to worry.”

  She shot me a disbelieving look but didn’t argue the point any further.

  Before long, we arrived at a storm-blackened gateway in a long, eroded wall. I recognized it immediately. I’d been through the real one with Mum. It was one of the entrances to King’s College. We paid to look round at the grounds and the chapel. It was beautiful. The buildings dated back hundreds of years, with ancient portraits and wooden carvings designed for King Henry VIII.

  There was none of that here. It was like the remains of a castle. The kind where they had to show you paintings to describe what it used to look like, because the crumbled walls made it impossible to tell.

  More kids came out through the doorway, most around my age, but some a bit older. I was starting to wonder where all the grown-ups were. I’d only seen a few since we’d got to camp. But I knew better than to ask—I didn’t want Iris to panic any more than she had already.

  I followed Iris through the entrance. Ahead of us was a wide open space. In my world, it would have revealed magnificent gardens surrounded by high walls. Here there were just burned patches of rubble on the ground and the walls were only partly intact.

  A side door led to a stone staircase that went down, down, down into a murky cellar. Lamps flickered on the walls, casting just enough light to see a couple of yards ahead of me. My footsteps echoed on the flagstones, ringing all around.

  Then the space opened out, and my jaw dropped.

  A row of electric lights hummed gently above us, illuminating a dark arched ceiling and old brick walls. I’d heard about the university cellars. Everyone had. They were supposed to house huge barrels of expensive wine.

  This one was converted into a great hall, with cobbled-together beds just visible on the far edges of the room, with scrap curtains dangling around them as if whoever designed them went for all out luxury but gave up halfway. On one side of the room, a sign said girls’ dormitories and on the other was boys.

  And at the opposite end of the hall—

  I’d seen generators before, back in the truck, and in the real world too. Dad had a small one in the garage, and sometimes coach brought one to our school football matches if he knew there was going to be a big crowd, so he could play music and cook food at halftime.

  But I’d never seen a generator like this. It was massive, and even from here I could make out the knobs and dials, the flashing green lights. Why couldn’t I hear it? It was switched on—it must have been, or there wouldn’t have been any light to protect the camp. Even the small generators at school rumbled and chugged. The most I could hear now was a low murmur.

  It was hard to keep the awe off my face. After seeing how dead the world above was, I never expected anything like this to exist below it. But Iris was watching me carefully as we reached the bottom of the stairs. I cleared my throat and looked over to the right-hand side of the room, so she wouldn’t be able to see my reaction.

  There was a noticeboard on the wall, covered in crinkled sheets of paper and pinned in place with drawing pins. On either side of it were more TV screens, all showing the same thing—footage of families back home in the City, receiving packages of food and drink.

  A man appeared onscreen, and the footage shrank as text popped up. It reminded me of charity commercials I’d seen on TV.

  “. . . Have you ever wanted to be a hero? Now’s your chance! As part of Icarus 3, everything you do for our camp will improve life for your families in the City . . .”

  “. . . Points for you means prizes for them! Don’t leave them to suffer while they wait for evacuation . . .”

  “. . . Remember, the better you do your job, the sooner we can communicate, the faster the evacuation process can begin, and the quicker your family will get their rewards for your hard work . . .”

  Iris grabbed my arm and pulled me away from the screens.

  “We better get changed,” she said. “See you in the classroom?”

  “Er, yeah,” I said. “Yeah, sure.”

  She headed off to the girls’ dormitories. I walked across the hall, passing more kids going the other way. A few of them nodded or waved, but none of them stopped me as I moved through to the dormitory. I froze in the doorway, taking it all in. I didn’t know what I’d been expecting, but it wasn’t this.

  The beds weren’t beds exactly, just makeshift mattresses covered in fabric. At the foot of each bed was a chest. Most of them were so loaded with junk that the lids couldn’t shut, and the objects spilled out over the floor.

  There was a name tag on each box, so I worked my way around the room until I found Jack’s bed and dug around for some spare clothes. There were T-shirts and trousers, but no shoes.

  None of them were clean, exactly, just slightly less dirty than the rags I was wearing. It felt good to get into something dry, but my damp shoes were making me shiver and I couldn’t replace them.

  I sat down on the bed, ta
king everything in.

  Now that I had a bit of quiet, it was easier to hear myself think.

  But as I went back over everything I’d heard since the storm chased us toward camp, I couldn’t help feeling uneasy. I was in some kind of weird future, I knew that much. The City was in trouble, and we’d set out trying to find a new home for everyone. And if I’d got it right, somehow our actions here helped our families back home.

  Jack’s thoughts were still there, buzzing at the back of my mind. I looked up. The room was still empty, and I couldn’t see anyone through the doorway. It would be safe, wouldn’t it? If I threw up here, no one would see. I took a deep breath to steady my nerves. I needed to know more about the kid inside my head.

  I closed my eyes and ventured toward his thoughts.

  I was shut in a cupboard, surrounded by bare walls. I crouched in the corner, hugging my knees, praying they didn’t come down here, praying they didn’t look—

  Footsteps on the stairs, booming above my head.

  My dad’s voice, rising, panicked.

  “There’s nothing down there,” he said. “Just a cellar. It’s where Ayden sleeps—we’ve only got one room, see, and . . .”

  They were outside the cupboard now.

  I held my breath—listening, listening.

  The handle rattled. The door creaked. They were trying to open it. They were trying to get inside. I rocked again, back and forth, back and forth, not daring to breathe.

  BOOM.

  The door banged open and suddenly there was a wail . . .

  Two pairs of hands grabbed me, dragging me out . . .

  Someone crying, “No! Please, not Jack!”

  Another voice, harsher, hissing, “Be quiet, man!”

  I pulled out of the rush of images, blinking back hot tears. Every breath shuddered on the way in and rattled on the way out. My forehead was slick with sweat.

  That had felt so real . . . as if . . . as if I’d been there myself.