Stormwalker

by Mike Revell

  All I knew was there was something inside me and for all this time I’d ignored it. Because it was so much easier to pretend it wasn’t there. But I couldn’t pretend anymore.

  “Jack!”

  Dillon grabbed Iris and dragged her away, right to the edge of the bubble. Iris struggled against his grip, desperate to break free, to come back for me.

  I counted to three, then threw my Hunter pack into the Darkness. It disappeared from view, then landed with a splash in the river. There were two location devices in a black box, weren’t there? One for the ground, and one for the sea. I couldn’t figure out how to work the first one, but with a bit of luck, the river would activate the second.

  “Come on then,” I said, glaring up at the storm. I wasn’t scared of becoming Dreamless now. Maybe I was never meant to find Jack’s dad. But I could buy the others some time, at least. Help them get back to safety after I stupidly lured them into the storm with me. Not all characters could live happily ever after, could they?

  “JACK!” Iris cried, as I stepped back, out of the light, and into the raging Darkness.

  I knew what memory it would be. I knew what the storm wanted me to see.

  I’m standing outside the hospital ward. Dad’s holding Mum in his arms. They don’t know I’m here. They think I’ve gone to buy them drinks.

  Even though Mum’s been in pain for months, she’s never cried.

  But when I left the room, she must have given in.

  She must have broken down.

  Because now she’s not fighting, she’s not holding it off. The tears are flowing out of her eyes and trickling down her face.

  “Yes,” I croaked, as the Darkness whipped and snapped around me . . .

  Because it was working—the plan was working. The dark clouds snapped at the air, lashing out. I did my best to ignore them. Because this was it. This was the moment. My mind filled with images of Mum, of Dad beside her.

  The machines around Mum are beeping, the nurses rushing me out—

  I’m looking at her through the window, seeing her white face, her sunken eyes—

  Now we’re back at home and she’s in bed, gagging and retching—

  Pain racked my body. I wanted to give in. I wanted to let go. Being Dreamless would be better than this. Anything would be better than this.

  No. Not yet.

  I shook my head, making my voice louder.

  “You’re going to have to do better than that,” I shouted.

  I held Mum in my arms. I saw her eyes fade. All this time I’d called it the Longest Day because all she could do was lie in bed and all we could do was watch. But Mum died before the Longest Day—she died as soon as she got that stupid leukemia.

  There . . .

  “I could never say it before,” I said, the words thick in my throat. “But I can say it now. Leukemia! Leukemia, leukemia, leukemia!”

  My eyes burned with the tears streaming down my cheeks. I opened myself up—letting all the memories flood out. My body sagged as the energy drained out of it and I fell onto the hard ground. I wanted to get up, to have one last look at Iris and Dillon. I wanted to see if they’d made it to safety. My arms wobbled, straining with the effort. Then I collapsed.

  The Darkness loomed over me and I knew that this was it.

  Dad was right. There was a death coming.

  This was the end.

  36

  Nothing.

  Nothing in every direction. I tried to get up, but my arms were too cold, my legs too heavy. I couldn’t move. Panic screamed through me—

  And I realized something else. Something far scarier than my numb body.

  I wasn’t breathing. I opened my mouth, but my throat was so dry that no sound came out. What was happening to me?

  Drink.

  The thought flickered out of nowhere, but now that it was there, I couldn’t shake it. It was more than a thought. It was a need.

  Drink. I needed water.

  Grimacing with the effort, I rolled onto my side. Everything was white. A never-ending sea of white, and a quiet so loud that my ears rang with it.

  I cleared my throat. “Hello,” I said, testing the word. It came out more like a croak.

  “Hello?” I said, louder now. There was no reply. Am I dead? I thought. Is that what this is?

  The Darkness, I thought with a sudden pang. It had been so close to Iris and Dillon. They were in danger because of me. I was supposed to get through to Icarus 1. I was supposed to reach Jack’s dad. But I’d failed.

  “Iris!” I shouted, trying to sit up again. “Dillon!”

  “They’re not here,” said a voice.

  I froze.

  Hearing Iris wouldn’t have surprised me. Any of the people from Dad’s story, I could have coped with. But that wasn’t Iris or Quinn or any of the others.

  That was—

  That was Mum.

  The shock jolted my muscles awake. I scrambled back, but it was impossible to tell if I was going anywhere. There was nothing to judge my movement by.

  It couldn’t be Mum.

  This was just another memory. The Darkness was still feeding, it had to be.

  “Where are you?” I called. Maybe this was what happened when you became Dreamless. Maybe everything got taken away until this was all that was left.

  “Somewhere in your father’s head,” Mum’s voice said. “This is where all his characters go, when their time is up.”

  “W-what? What are you talking about?”

  There was movement at the other end of the room.

  Room? Is that what this is? A room?

  As soon as I thought it, the whiteness shifted. Shapes formed in it, and out of nowhere some walls appeared. They were still white, but not as bright. An off-white. A hospital white.

  Now there was a bed in the corner of the room, with machinery around it. Wires and coils, and a horrible humming noise.

  “Oh no,” Mum said. “I’d rather not go back there. Can’t you make it something else? Something nice?”

  “What do you mean? I don’t understand.”

  “You don’t have to understand,” she said. “You just have to think, and feel. You’ll see. Try it now. Don’t think about the bad days. Think about the good ones.”

  There was a crack in the wall. I peered through it.

  There was Mum pushing me on the swings. There was Dad taking me to my first football game. Now we were sitting in the park, the three of us, having a picnic and enjoying the sunshine.

  “Yes,” Mum said. “That’s better. That’ll do.”

  “How are you here?” I asked. “You died.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I did. But you don’t have to be alive to be a character in someone’s story.”

  “Am . . . am I dead too?”

  “Yes,” she said. “And no.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s up to you. After all, it’s your story, just as much as your father’s.”

  The cold feeling drained away. I spun round, looking for Mum in the nothingness, but her voice was gone now.

  “Mum!” I called. “Mum, come back!”

  Orange flickered at the edge of my senses—

  And everything broke apart.

  37

  Screaming. Constant, high-pitched screaming.

  The orange light flared and flickered. Fire. It was all around me.

  “Thought I’d lost you there,” yelled a voice, and as the fog cleared, I realized it was Seth.

  “You’re okay,” I spluttered through cracked lips. I shook my head, trying to gather my senses. What on earth had just happened? Mum . . . she had been so real.

  I reached out and Seth gripped my arm, hauling me to my feet. My knees gave out under the weight, but he held me steady. With his spare hand, he swirled the stick of fire around us.

  We were still outside camp, still in the wasteland, but the Darkness wasn’t even trying to get close. On the horizon it raged as strong as ever, but here . . . it had re
treated high into the sky.

  “What . . . what’s going on?”

  “A very good question,” he said, and for a second I was sure I saw a smile on his lips. “But I was hoping you’d be able to tell me the answer to that. You’re the one who did it.”

  The Darkness was higher than I’d ever seen it. It was like we had an invisible wall above us, stopping it getting closer. In the distance, I could make out Iris and Dillon waving from beside a glowroot meadow. They’d managed to get away. They hadn’t been hurt.

  My fear . . . there was so much of it before, but now there was something else where the fear used to be. Before now, I couldn’t handle the bad memories. There were too many of them. But now they were gone. Maybe the Darkness couldn’t handle them either.

  For a second I felt elated. I’d bought Iris and Dillon time. They’d made it to safety. Then I remembered the black box, and my stomach plummeted.

  “My idea didn’t work,” I said, as the memory of the hill came crashing back. Even chucking the location device in the water didn’t seem to have lured Icarus 1 here. “I’m sorry.”

  “You can apologize later,” Seth said. “Let’s get back to camp first.”

  He helped me over the rough ground, and we worked our way toward the meadow where Iris and Dillon were standing. Seth ditched the stick before we got too close to the plants.

  Iris marched over to me and smacked me on the shoulder. “What was that about?” she shouted. “You could have got yourself killed!”

  “I don’t know what you did,” Dillon said, his face pale even in the dark, “but it was brilliant. The Darkness just sort of . . . ran away.”

  I looked up at the storm again. It was still there, seething, but it wasn’t coming any closer. “I don’t know what I did either,” I said, which was pretty much the truth. The back of my neck tingled as I thought about that place I went to—its shifting walls, the sheer whiteness.

  And Mum . . .

  “Come on,” Seth said. “They’ll probably be waiting for us.”

  We set off back toward camp. My legs burned as if I’d run a marathon, and I still had the remains of a stitch in my side. My skin prickled where the Darkness had got so close. But we were okay—somehow, all of us had made it.

  When I saw the LRP officers lining the edge of the light barrier, I thought they were going to cheer us on. The rest of camp was standing behind them, the timetable forgotten. But they didn’t clap or cry out. They just stood there.

  As soon as we made it through the light, they grabbed us.

  “You’re coming with us,” they said, “at the express order of the Marshal.”

  What?

  I tried to fight free, but the grip on my arms was too tight. “Where are we going?” I demanded, kicking up dust as I struggled to match their pace. “Where are you taking us?”

  And then I saw.

  They marched us through the square, up to the church, where the Marshal had argued with Quinn. Through the curtains they dragged us, and into the building itself. The Marshal was sitting there in his high-backed chair, waiting.

  When he saw us, he clapped—loud, echoing in the open space.

  “Bravo. A solid effort indeed,” he said, a mad glint in his eyes. “You can chuck your Hunter gear over there. You won’t be needing the packs anymore. Your time in this camp is at an end.”

  Seth was breathing heavily, his shoulders rising up and down like a lion. Iris and Dillon huddled together, the same shock I was feeling plastered all over their faces.

  After all that, it had all been for nothing?

  “You don’t deserve to make that decision,” I spat, sounding loads braver than I felt.

  “Oh? And why is that?”

  “Tell them,” I said. “Tell them what you’ve been hiding from them.”

  “You are a clever one,” the Marshal said, his eyes narrowing to sharp points. “Tell me . . . how do you know? No one knows. No one remembers. No one!”

  “I never did like drugs,” I said.

  “Hmm. Shame. Well, no drink for you, then. As for you three—” he clicked his fingers, and an LRP officer brought in a tray of drinks; I could smell the lemon balm drifting off them from here—“you can have a choice. But first, I’ll tell you a little story. Leave us,” he added to the LRP officers, before folding his hands on the table, and staring at Iris, Dillon, and Seth in turn.

  “The City is dead,” he said. Seth and Dillon gasped. Iris just stood there glaring back at the Marshal. “We found it after our first year at camp. After so long without hearing from them, Quinn suggested we go looking. We didn’t have the airship, so we had to drive. It took three cars to make it to the walls, and over a week to finish the trip. But . . .”

  He stopped to clear his throat.

  “We were too late. There was nothing left. Nothing but bones and dust. The buildings of London ruined. Buckingham Palace, crumbled and deserted. The dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral crushed. The streets littered with rubble, all the buildings overgrown with ivy. It wasn’t pretty.”

  This wasn’t right. It wasn’t supposed to end this way. I was supposed to finish the story and get home, back to the real world, with school and Danny and football and Dad all better.

  But Dillon spoke first. “No,” he said.

  “No what?” said the Marshal.

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “It is not a case of whether you believe it or not, boy. This world is dead. We are the last survivors. You should be thanking me! Think of all I have given you. Would you rather live out your days in despair, or enjoy at least an illusion of hope? At least you thought you could do something. At least you thought you were heroes. Better that than sitting around, waiting to die. You can go right back to feeling like that now, if you want. All you have to do is drink.”

  He indicated the three glasses, before him on the table. Somehow, he must have found a way to work his lemon balm medicine into the liquid.

  “Don’t drink it!” I yelled. “Don’t drink it. You’ll just go round and round like this forever.”

  I thought of Dad, back home, never able to throw Mum’s ashes out to sea. And me . . . I was just the same, wasn’t I? Hiding from the Longest Day. Hiding from Mum’s leukemia.

  “You can’t hide from the truth,” I said. “All it ever does is make things worse.”

  “Drink,” the Marshal cooed. “Drink it, and you can leave. Drink it, and all this will be gone. You can live a life full of hope once more.”

  “You’re a liar,” I spat. Something had flickered inside me when the cylinder hadn’t worked. It burned hotter and hotter, fueled by the anger and the frustration. It had been replaced by the cold certainty that I was going to die as the storm closed in. But now that I was still here, I was determined to put up a fight. “Tell them. Tell them what you’ve been hiding.”

  The Marshal’s eyes reduced to sharp points. His nostrils flared, but when he spoke, his voice was calm and measured. “You really do remember, don’t you?”

  “I remember all of it. How you turned Quinn Dreamless. How you covered up the plane, just so no one found out about Icarus 1. How you hid the radio call from the whole camp . . .”

  “Hmm. Well, it was a shame to have to exile Quinn. He was tremendously useful. Took a great deal of persuading to follow my plan too. He was desperate to get through to the City. I, on the other hand, couldn’t allow us to reunite with them. It was easy enough to influence the memories of such a small camp, but the whole City? No, no, no. Far better to stay hidden. Isolated. Free from their filthy ideals.

  “I don’t expect you to understand. How could you? You’re a boy, a duplicate. You couldn’t possibly understand the stresses of managing so many lives. I wasn’t supposed to be here at all, you know. I would much rather have been back in the City. I had a plan, a perfect plan, to cull the population, but Quinn, your father and the other Marshals put a stop to it. If they’d let me have my way, maybe the City would still be alive. But now look at me. I
’m here! And they are not.”

  “Quinn?” Iris said. “What do you mean, Quinn and the other Marshals?”

  “He was a Marshal, back in the City. He was supposed to lead Icarus 3. How different things would have been, eh? If little old me hadn’t snuck aboard and crashed the ship. I couldn’t exactly stay, could I? Not after my plans had been exposed. He tried to fight me at first, but everyone has a weakness, if you’re clever enough to find it. He was very fond of you,” he added, glaring at me. “After I forced his best friend onto Icarus 1, all I had to do was hint at your untimely demise, and he would do whatever I asked of him.”

  “The other camps will stop you,” I said. He was sounding more and more mad with every second, but I couldn’t think of anything to do apart from talk. “They’ll put an end to all this.”

  “Ah, yes, the others,” he said. “You’re quite right, they’ll certainly try. If they can find us.”

  Dillon was staring at the Marshal, his mouth hanging open. He tried to interrupt him, but all that came out was a strangled squeak.

  “What is it, boy? Speak up.”

  “You . . . you said we’d never heard from them. You said they must be dead.”

  “Of course I did. I couldn’t have anyone interfering, could I? We picked up their frequency within weeks. Icarus 2 was transmitting a distress signal. It ended soon enough, as, I’m sure, did they. Shame. As for Icarus 1, they were most persistent. At first I thought they wanted to steal our glory, but after we found the City dead, I realized they wanted more than that: they wanted to steal our land. So I thwarted their efforts to communicate. With Quinn’s help, I kept us isolated, and thanks to my medicine, no one suspected a thing. Until you,” he said, glaring at me again.

  “I heard the radio call from Icarus 1,” I told him. “They said something about Operation Phoenix. That doesn’t sound like they want to steal our land. It sounds like they want to team up.”

  “It’s the same thing,” the Marshal spat. “I didn’t know how close they were to finding us until that plane crash. Your father will want to dispose of me, I’m sure, but he’ll never locate our camp.”

  “You’re insane!” I said, my mind racing. I looked quickly around for something, anything that could help, but there was no way out. All I could think to do was keep him talking, keep Iris and the others from drinking that lemon balm.