* * * * *
"These... boots... are..."
Lines of the song ran through Sarah's befogged head. She was half grunting, half gasping odd snatches from it as the Limiters on either side forced her to keep walking, each step causing the most terrible pain in her hip, as if barbed wire was being slowly twisted deep in her flesh.
Little by little, Sarah was dying, and the Limiters knew it. So much for emergency medical attention. They didn't give a jot about her. They would probably get a pat on the back from Rebecca even if they delivered a dead body.
But Sarah knew she had to stay conscious and was fighting the darkness that threatened to swamp her.
"...made for walking... one of these days..."
One of the Limiters grunted something guttural at her, but she defied him, carrying on with the song.
"... these boots are gonna walk all over you..."
Sarah's blood left a broken, splattered trail behind her. Quite by chance, once or twice it spilled across patches of Parchers that Elliott had sprinkled in her wake as she and the boys had fled the very same way. Brought to life by Sarah's blood, the bacteria flared with such brilliance it was as though light was blazing directly out of the very ground itself, like flashlights from the outermost circle of hell.
But Sarah was oblivious to her shining path. She had fixed her mind, completely and absolutely, on a single, overwhelming purpose. As far as she could fathom, the Limiters were taking her in the same direction Will and Cal had gone.
That was good and bad.
It probably meant that further Styx were also on their trail, so her sons were in danger.
But it also meant that she might still be able to help them. Even if it was the last thing she did.
51
When he came up behind the Limiter patrol, Drake had to slow down. He swore silently. There was nothing he could do to get ahead of them.
Chancing his luck, he crept closer, to assess the situation. They were dragging someone with them, but he wasn't going to jump to any conclusions about the captive's identity. Maybe it was just some unfortunate renegade the soldiers had caught, he thought as he kicked his heels, impatient to get going again. He touched the stove guns strapped to his thigh — it would be pushing it to use them against four soldier in the first place, and he also didn't want to risk hitting their prisoner.
So he was forced to bide his time until finally the patrol lugged the prisoner out onto the ledge a the drop to the Sharps. From there, they took the longer ridge path down. As soon as they were out of sight, Drake rapidly descended the rusty Coprolite ladder, taking cover the instant he touched bottom. The air glittered with millions of tiny, slow-moving glass particles, which rimed his eyes and lined his throat. As he weaved between the massive glass stumps and the fractured sections of column left in the aftermath of what clearly had been a devastating explosion, he repeatedly had to stop and hide. He spotted a number of dead Limiters around the place, but it was swarming with quite a few live ones, too, conducting a search of the area.
He came to the passage he knew Elliott would have taken, but its mouth was completely blocked by a collapsed glass column. His only option was to skirt farther around the perimeter and take the next available route.
In the process, he spotted the patrol with the prisoner again as they stormed down the last section of the ridge. Two of the four Limiters immediately peeled off, probably to check in with their comrades deeper in the cavern. The remaining two allowed their captive to drop to the ground. He heard a woman's scream as the figure fell.
Whoever she was, Drake couldn't just leave her to their mercy.
He picked up a shard of obsidian and slung it fifty feet to the left of the Limiters' position. The pair of soldiers reacted immediately, raising their rifles and stalking toward where it had landed. Drake chose his moment and threw another large shard to draw them even farther away, then stole across to where the woman lay. Cupping a hand over her mouth lest she cry out, he lifted her in his arms and made for the exit tunnel.
Once he'd run far enough, he put her down.
She was wearing a Limiter's uniform, but, even stranger than this, the woman's face was somehow familiar to Drake. She tried to say something, but he told her to stay quiet as he assessed her injuries.
"These bandages... who did this?" he asked, noticing with surprise that the dressings were identical to ones he and Elliott carried.
"You're a renegade, aren't you?" Sarah threw back at him.
"Just tell me — did Elliott do this?" he pressed.
"Small girl, big rifle?" Sarah managed in reply.
Drake nodded, still trying to figure out where he knew her from.
"A friend of yours?" Sarah asked. She saw Drake raise his eyebrows. It was uncanny; for an instant it could have been Tam before her: a leaner version, maybe, but the quizzical expression was identical. At once she felt she could trust this total stranger, this grizzled man with hard blue eyes and an odd-looking device around his head.
"Well, she's a lousy shot," Sarah chuckled grimly.
Drake was taken aback; the woman was showing the most incredible bravery despite the magnitude of her wounds. But he was wasting precious seconds.
"I've got to go," he said apologetically, standing up. "My friend Elliott, she needs my help."
"And I need to help my sons, Will and Cal," Sarah said.
"Ah, so that's who you are," Drake realized with a start. "The legendary Sarah Jerome. I thought I recognized your—"
"And if you want to know what the Styx are up to," Sarah interrupted, "we can talk along the way."
* * * * *
Elliott led the boys to another arch, although it hadn't withstood the ravages of time as well as the first one. Only a single pillar was still standing, the rest lying in pieces across the flagged platform.
Will and the others had just stepped off the giant flagstones when the baying of stalkers rolled toward them again. The sounded alarmingly close. Elliott had been going at full speed but came to a dead stop, spinning around to face the boys.
"How can I have been so incredibly stupid?" she burst out in a fierce whisper.
"What do you mean?" Chester asked.
"Can't you see it?" she said, her voice cracking with exasperation.
Crowding around her, Will, Chester, and Cal exchanged blank looks.
"They've been harrying us for miles... and I didn't spot it." Elliott gripped her rifle with such aggression that one of her knuckles cracked. "What a fool!"
"Spot what?" Chester said. "What are you talking about?"{
"The pattern... We've run into Limiters at every turn, and we've gone exactly where they wanted us, like hens in a roundup! They've corralled us, time after time."
Will thought she was about to break into tears, she was so livid with herself.
"I've played straight into their hands..." She let the stock of her rifle slide to the ground until it rested in the dirt, then she leaned against the barrel, her head bowed. She was visibly crestfallen, as if all her sense of purpose had suddenly left her. "After everything Drake taught me. He wouldn't—"
"Oh, don't even, we're doing just fine," Cal cut her off, trying to remain calm but sounding far from it. Spent to the point of collapse, he just wanted to get wherever and finally rest. "Can't we just go along there?" he appealed to her, pointing at the perimeter of the Pore.
"No way," Elliott replied wanly.
"Why not?" he pressed her.
She didn't answer for a moment, her eyes on Bartleby. The cat's head was up and his ears cocked alertly; as they watched he raised his head even higher and sniffed. Elliott gave a resigned nod as she finally answered Cal.
"Along there, somewhere, is a bunch of Limiters, all with rifles trained and ready." At the boys's continued refusal to accept what she was saying, she seemed to pull herself together, her eyes flashing angrily at each of them in turn. "And out there" — she jerked her thumb to the left — "will be enough White Necks to fill
a stinking church. Why don't you ask your Hunter? He knows."
Cal glanced at his cat and then regarded Elliott dubiously, as Will and Chester took a few paces in the directions she had indicated to scrutinize the barren landscapes.
Pulling down his lens, Will could see a considerable distance up the slope where the menhirs lay in haphazard arrangement. "But... but there's absolutely no one there," he insisted, his voice whining with the implausibility of it all.
"Nothing this way, either," Chester added. "You're getting jumpy, Elliott, that's all. We're fine, really," he pleaded as he and Will wandered back to rejoin her.
"If fine is being shot to shreds, boy, then I'd have to agree with you," Elliott said tersely as she swung up her rifle in a single deft movement, readying it against her shoulder.
52
Drake bombarded Sarah with question after question as they went, grilling her about what she knew. She was finding it increasingly difficult to concentrate and often answered disjointedly, sometimes getting the sequence of event in the wrong order as she told him about Rebecca and the Dominion plot.
Eventually they lapsed into silence, Drake because he was trying to conserve his energy to carry Sarah, and Sarah, because the spells of light-headedness were coming with greater frequency. Like a leaking bucket, she felt the lifeblood seeping form her. The odds were stacked heavily against her ever seeing her two sons again.
"These boots are gonna..." she wheezed as Drake carried her along. The pain from her shattered hip was so vast and all-consuming that at times she saw herself as a cork bobbing on the surface of a shiny red-hot ocean, which, at any moment, might fold over her and suck her into its depths. She fought and fought to stay afloat, to stay focused, but her whole head throbbed with a searing pain from the gunshot wound to her temple, as if her brain had been cleft in two.
"You keep lying when..."
And finally, Drakes chest heaving with the exertion, they came to the gradient down to the Pore.
Despite his fragile cargo, he broke into a run.
* * * * *
A singsong shout rolled over the expanse toward them.
"Oh, Will!"
He went rigid.
"I know you're there, Sunshine!" it called gleefully.
Will recognized the voice without a moment's hesitation. He locked eyes with Elliott.
"Rebecca," he gasped.
For an instant none of them moved.
"I think we're in trouble," Will said helplessly.
Elliott nodded. "You're so right," she agreed, her voice devoid of any intonation.
Will felt exactly like a rabbit caught in the blazing headlights of a huge juggernaut that was thundering down on it.
It was as if, deep in his bones, he'd always known this moment would come, that it had been inevitable right from the start. And yet he'd led all of them straight into it. His befuddled gaze fell on Chester, but his old friend gave him such a glare of bitter recrimination and contempt that Will had to turn away.
"Well, don't just stand there! Take cover!" Elliott barked.
They scattered, Elliott and Chester flinging themselves behind one menhir as Will and Cal took another.
"Oh, Willlllll!" the voice came again, spiked with little-girl sweetness. "Come out, come out, wherever you are!"
"Do nothing," Elliott mouthed at him with a rapid shake of her head.
"Hey, big brother, don't jerk me around!" Rebecca shouted. "Let's have a little chat, for old times' sake."
As Elliott had commanded, Will didn't respond. He stuck an eye around the side of the boulder, but saw only darkness.
Rebecca went on, unamused. "OK, if you're going to play silly games with me, let's get the rules straight."
There was a lull. In the ongoing absence of any reply from Will, Rebecca continued.
"Righty-o... the rules. One... as you seem a little bashful, I'll come down to you. Two... if anyone gets it into their head to take a pop at me, the gloves are off, and this is how it'll go. First I'll let slip the stalkers; my little darlings haven't been fed for days, so, trust me, you really don't want that. Or in the unlikely event the dogs don’t do you in, my squad of crack riflemen will. Last, I've got the Division with some heavy ordnance up here... their guns will smash anything in their path, you included. So, pull any stunts and you'll suffer the consequences. Got that?"
There was another pause, then her voice came, more strident and imperious this time. "Will, I want your word I've got safe passage."
Will quite trying to see up the slope and slumped back behind the huge menhir. He felt that Rebecca would be able to look right through even that, solid rock, as if nothing more than a pane of glass separated them.
A chill sweat trickled down the small of his back, and he found that his hands were shaking. He closed his eyes and, banging his head against the rock behind him, moaned, "No, no, no, no, no."
How could it have gone so wrong? They'd been making good progress toward the Wetlands, with wide open spaces before them and an abundance of routes to choose from. Now they were in this appalling predicament, hemmed in with a colossal black hole behind them. How could it have come to this.
And in Rebecca, they were up against somebody so utterly merciless and brutal; somebody who knew him like the back of his hand.
He shot a glance over to Elliott, but she was remonstrating with Chester. Will couldn't catch anything of what they were saying. As he watched, they appeared to reach agreement and their frantic exchange finished. Elliott quickly shucked off her rucksack and began to delve around in it.
"Hey, Mole-face," Rebecca called down. "I'm waiting for your answer."
"Elliott!" Will hissed urgently. "What do I do?"
"Buy some time. Talk to her," Elliott snapped, not looking up as she began to play out a length of rope.
Encouraged that Elliott seemed to have settled on a course of action, Will took several deep breaths and poked his head around the edge of the menhir. "Yes! OK!" he yelled back to Rebecca.
"That's my boy!" Rebecca answered cheerfully. "I knew you'd be up for it."
In the ensuing seconds they heard nothing more from Rebecca. Elliott and Chester each tied the rope around themselves, then Chester slung the other end of it across to Will as Elliott crouched down behind her rifle.
Will shrugged at Chester, who just shrugged back. Will could only think that, as a last resort, Elliott had decided they were going to attempt to climb down the Pore. He couldn't see any other way out. He turned to Cal. His brother was whimpering quietly to himself, his face nestled in Bartleby's neck as he clasped the agitated animal to his chest. Cal had lost it, and Will couldn't blame him. Will secured the rope around himself, then knotted it around Cal's waist. His brother passively allowed him to do so, without questioning why.
Will glanced back at the Pore. It was their only way out. But was it much of a solution? What was Elliott thinking? Will had seen for himself that the hole consisted of a sheer rock face, with nothing to cling to. It looked pretty grim for them all.
Will heard Rebecca whistling in the darkness as she approached.
"You are my sunshine," he murmured, recognizing the tune. "I really hate that song."
When she spoke again, she was much closer.
"Right, this is as far as I'm coming.
Massive searchlights blasted on from farther up the slope.
"Whiteout!" Elliott exclaimed, raising her head from her rifle as the blazing light hit the scope. She squeezed her eye shut several times, recovering from the glare. "That's just freakin' great!" she fumed. "I can't get a fix on anything now!"
Dazzling beams of light swept back and forth over the area where Will and the others were hiding, sending solid black shadows slashing across the ground.
Will stuck his head a little farther around the edge of the boulder. He'd had to turn off the headset to protect it, and the blinding intensity of the lights made it difficult to see, but he could make out someone — it certainly looked like Rebecca. S
he was standing in the open ground between two menhirs. He pulled back and glanced at Elliott, who was still lying prone, an array of explosives and stove guns within easy reach on the ground. She adjusted the position of her arms, ready to fire on the figure, even without the use of the scope.
"Don't! Don't shoot her," Will begged in a whisper. "The stalkers!"
Elliott didn't reply, her focus fixed on her target.
"Will! Got a little surprise for you!" Rebecca called out. Before she'd finished speaking, her voice came again, like some ventriloquist's trick. "Quite a surprise!"
Will frowned, and couldn't stop himself from taking another look.
"Meet my twin sister," Rebecca's voice announced. Or, rather, two voices announced, in unison.
"Careful!" Elliott warned as Will got to his feet and stuck his head even farther around the side of the menhir.
As he watched, the solitary figure appeared to split into two, revealing that a second girl had been standing immediately behind the first. The two turned to face each other, and Will saw identical profiles. They were mirror images.
"No!" he choked in disbelief, pulling back a little, then leaning out again.
"How's that for a bombshell, bro?" the Rebecca on the left shouted.
"All the time, there's been two of us, completely interchangeable," the Rebecca on the right cackled.
His eyes weren't deceiving him.
There were two Rebeccas, side by side.
It had to be a trick — an illusion of some kind, or maybe a second person wearing a mask. But no. As the twins moved, as the twins talked, it seemed as though they were absolutely identical.
They continued to chatter in such a quick-fire way that he couldn't tell which of them was saying what.
"Your worst nightmare — two irksome little skin and blisters, two little sisters!"
"How else do you think we worked it when one of us had to be Topsoil at all times?"
"We took turns babysitting you a the Highfield home."
"One on, one off, one up, one down, doing tours of duty for all those years."
Tunnels 02 - Deeper Page 47