CHAPTER SEVEN TEN

The bodies were still there. The ruin of Camp H seemed untouched since the brief, terrible battle of the day before, and the scene had a familiarity that made Jack’s skin crawl. The metal containers in which Miller and the Choppers had made their base—a prison and vivisection centre for the Irregulars and Superiors they managed to capture—were crushed by the forces unleashed upon them. Several dead soldiers lay alongside one container, and scattered across the clearing in the container park were fifteen or twenty more corpses. It was difficult to tell exactly how many—Jack had seen them frozen by the Superior he’d helped rescue, then shattered into pieces by his father’s deadly whisper. Those pieces had now thawed. Carrion birds were feeding on them, and he could see the red streaks across the concrete where some had been dragged away during the night.

Miller sat in his wheelchair beside the ruined prison container. He was alone, and at first glance Jack couldn’t tell whether he was alive. But he reached out with his mind and touched upon the chaos of Miller’s thoughts, and as they emerged from between containers, the madman’s eyes were upon them. He’d gathered dead soldiers’ jackets across his lap, around his shoulders and over his head. He was huddled down in his chair. Jack could only see a small pale spread of skin, and the glimmer of one eye. He might have been the Emperor from Star Wars, but if so he ruled a doomed empire.

“Stay on your toes,” Jack said. “Rhali?”

“I think we’re alone now,” she said.

“Could be a song there, somewhere,” Sparky quipped.

Jack led the way. Breezer came with him, and behind them were Sparky, Jenna and Rhali.

Fleeter had flipped out as soon as they’d moored and left the boat, saying that she was going to scout the way ahead. Jack hadn’t even bothered trying to call her back. She had her own agenda.

“That’s far enough!” Miller called. There was something wrong with his voice; a growl, rough-edged.

Jack laughed. “What, Miller? Have you got us covered?”

“Monsters,” Miller muttered. His words echoed from the container piles around Camp H.

“Yeah, right,” Rhali said. “We’re the monsters.” Her voice was quiet. But there was fear and fury there, and Jack had never heard her so alive.

“I said that’s far enough!”

Jack and his companions stopped.

“Why?” Jack asked.

“I don’t want to be seen,” Miller said.

“What did he do to you this time?”

“Your father, you mean?”

“Reaper,” Jack said. “He’s no longer my father.”

“Oh, he is, boy. And you’ve got it in you too. I can see it in your eyes, the way you stand. You’re dripping with power, and when you use it, you’ll become a monster as well.”

Jack tried to blink away the memory of those three Choppers he’d killed. He was afraid Miller might see it.

“Why aren’t you dead?” Rhali spat.

“I am!” Miller laughed. It was a horrible, high giggle, made more dreadful because his body and wrapped clothing barely moved at all.

“We don’t have time to piss around, here,” Jack said quietly. He started walking forward again, trying not to see the human parts scattered around his feet, and trying not to remember the terrible things he had seen inside those containers. In the larger collection of containers, the research rooms where the unfortunates had been dissected and stored. And in the smaller unit, the prison where they’d kept those due for experimentation. Monstrous. Almost unthinkable. And the man responsible for all of it was this wretched thing before him.

Jack’s anger rose again. He’d already held a gun to this bastard’s head and refrained from pulling the trigger. But he had greater weapons than guns.

Far greater.

“Stay back!” Miller said. A hand emerged from the clothing, palm out. Two fingers were missing, their stumps ragged and wet.

Jack stopped. “I can help you.” The idea of fixing some of Miller’s wounds was reprehensible. Yet even thinking that way gave Jack a sense of inner peace. I’m better than him, he thought. But there was nothing superior about that idea. It was a fact, and even entertaining the idea that he could help Miller was proof of that.

“Help?” Miller said, and then he laughed again. He slumped in his chair as he did so, as if each time he exhaled he shrank a little more.

“I can’t help him,” Rhali said. Jack wasn’t aware that she’d advanced with him, but he would not tell her to wait. She’d been through too much for that. There was no violence in her, but she still had rage to expend somewhere, somehow.

When they drew close to Miller, and he threw back the jackets and hoods covering him, everything seemed to change.

There was barely a human left. Reaper must have worked on Miller for some time after Jack and his friends and family had left, and perhaps some of his Superiors had taken a turn as well. The woman who could freeze flesh with a breath. The knife man. Perhaps someone who could pin life to something that should be dead.

He wore a white surgical mask across his face, but it could not hide the mutilation. His ears had been torn off. One eye was missing, and both eyelids had been sliced away, leaving his remaining eye wide and white and frantic, and flowing with moisture. His nose was broken and caked with dried blood, and beneath the mask his jaw seemed to protrude too far to the left. It moved constantly, as if he were chewing cud.

“Oh, my God,” Rhali whispered.

Miller chuckled. “Like what you see?” He moved more clothing aside.

Reaper had taken more from each of his legs, removing the left all the way up to the groin. His left arm was twisted and broken, thumb and three fingers removed so that only the middle finger remained. Perhaps Reaper had thought it an amusing gesture, though Jack doubted he had any humour left in him at all. Miller’s shoulders were bruised and lacerated. There was nothing visible that was untouched, and no telling what horrors the bloodied, fouled clothing still hid. He stank. It was pitiful and sickening, but Jack looked deep for any shred of sympathy.

“No,” Rhali said. “No, I don’t like it. But you deserve it. Every cut and stab and gouge you’ve made on another innocent has been visited upon you. I could never hurt you, Miller, much as I want to. I kept my humanity, even through everything you did to me. The starvation, the deprivation. The humiliation. So I could never avenge myself on you. But I see you now…” She went close to him, too close for Jack’s comfort, but Miller merely winced back into his chair. “And I hope it hurts.” Then Rhali turned her back on Miller forever and glanced sadly at Jack as she walked away.

“Okay,” Jack said. He nodded at the ruined shell of the vivisection suite. “I think in there would be an appropriate place to talk.”

“You’re going to torture me?” Miller drawled, totally unconcerned.

“No,” Jack said. “No, probably not.”

There were still bodies inside. They might have died when Jack and Fleeter first pushed them over—when flipped, gentle movements would translate as incredibly fast, violent actions in the real world. But he thought it likely the Superiors had returned to finish the job. Jack averted his eyes, but the stench of rot was cloying.

He wheeled Miller into the vivisection room. The metal table was stained with dried blood, and more blood was puddled where buckets had been kicked away from the drainage points. Walls were deformed, the ceiling crushed down, tools of torture scattered across the floor. Jack thought perhaps Miller had spent some time on this table at Reaper’s hand.

Breezer came with him and stood with arms folded across his chest. He could not hide his disgust at the man in the wheelchair, and it was not only at his appearance. Jack had not asked Breezer how many Irregulars he’d known who had been taken by the Choppers, but it was a fair bet that parts of some of them resided in sample jars in the next room.

“So all this torture and pain and death, and what did you find out?” Breezer asked. “Was it worth it? Has any of this been worth anything?”

“I’m too tired to talk about it,” Miller said. “We’re so close to the end that none of it matters anymore. Big Bindy will blow in…” He turned his mutilated left arm, pretended to look at a watch that was not there, giggled. “Hours. Or minutes. Or…” He tilted his head, his exposed eye watering constantly.

“In about ten hours,” Jack said. “And the bomb’s in the Imperial War Museum.”

Miller’s one good eye swivelled and settled on Jack. Then he shrugged. “It doesn’t matter.”

“You’re probably right. But what does matter is helping anyone left alive in London. You can do that.”

“Me? You see what’s left of me, boy? I’m barely human anymore.”

“You haven’t been human for a long time,” Breezer said.

“I’m a scientist, and—”

“You’re a murderer!” Breezer stepped forward, and Jack was surprised to see Miller jerk back in his chair. Filled with bravado, still he was in pain, and scared. Good. That might make what came next much easier.

“I’ll only ask once,” Jack said. “We need you to provide a safe route out of London. We know if we just storm the Exclusion Zone it’ll be a massacre. We’ll be cut down, bombed, slaughtered. But you can call them off. You can tell the Choppers to stand down and let us out.”

“I could,” Miller said. “And then all this would be released to the outside world.”

“The only thing released would be human beings with remarkable abilities,” Jack said. “All this murder and chaos and hatred…that’s your doing.”

Miller chuckled again. It shook his body, and his pain was obvious. “I don’t care anymore,” he said. “I want to die. Look at me! Look what he did to me! My only wish now is for your bastard father to die with me.”

“You might want to die,” Breezer said, “but what about—”

“You’re all monsters,” Miller said. “The Evolve was my creation, so you’re all my children. And I condemn you to death.”

“That’s…” Breezer shook his head, then looked at Jack.

Jack nodded.

Breezer turned Miller’s chair and wedged it against the metal examination table, locking its brakes, holding Miller’s one good arm down against the side of the chair. The mutilated man laughed, but Jack could not tell whether he was afraid or purely mad. His remaining, lidless eye was wide open, either way.

“Like father, like son,” Miller said.

“No,” Jack said. “Not at all.”

He stepped forward and pressed his hands to Miller’s face.

The same ruins, the same day, the same tumbled wreckage of the London Eye. Lucy-Anne has seen the Eye since her last dream, so this time it is different—less damaged, only scarred high up with the impact site, with charred and broken pods further down where the helicopter tumbled and exploded. The aircraft’s blackened remains straddle a safety barrier next to the burnt-out ticket office. Lucy-Anne cannot understand how Angelina Walker survived that wreck to emerge as Nomad. Perhaps she also dreamed herself to life.

As she thinks of her, Nomad appears. She climbs from the helicopter’s ruin and jumps down to the ground, landing with barely a touch. She starts to walk away from Lucy-Anne, and it is the dream of destruction once again. In the distance the light will soon bloom, a bright flash that for an instant will look like creation, but will bring destruction.

But Lucy-Anne wonders, Isn’t all creation a violent event? The Big Bang, life from no-life, and London’s evolution?

But there is a difference. The bomb about to erupt is meant purely for destruction, and in its place it will leave a sterile, dead place.

Lucy-Anne follows Nomad, frantically trying to shout for her, but she has no voice. Any time now, any time now…

And then Nomad turns back to face her and lifts her hand, points, two fingers aiming at Lucy-Anne like a gun. “You and me,” she says. “You and me together.” She starts running at Lucy-Anne and the surroundings change in the blink of an eye.

A street, burning, shooting, screaming, bodies, flames and smoke, and Nomad leaps a burning motorbike and drives Lucy-Anne to the ground, straddles her, and drives her pointed fingers down into her throat, silencing the words that were building there—a cry for mercy, a scream of anger, and a question:

You and me?

Lucy-Anne snapped awake and sat up. Sparky held her so she didn’t tip to the ground, and Jenna glanced back and smiled. She must only have been asleep for moments, because everything was the same—the ruins of containers and several vehicles, the grotesque scattering of bodies and body parts, and the people she’d come with standing and sitting, waiting for Jack and the man called Breezer to emerge again.

The sun was high and hot. London was warm, but the usual humid, acidic stink of the city was absent now. She could smell only rot and death, and when she blinked she saw Nomad’s expressionless face as the woman killed her.

Breezer appeared at the warped door opening in the larger container, stepping out grim-faced. Jack pushed Miller’s wheelchair out behind him and let it roll down the ramp on its own. Miller slowed to a halt and looked up at the sky. He looked different. More whole.

“Jack doesn’t look too happy,” Jenna said.

“Sparky,” Lucy-Anne said, holding out her hand. “Help me up, mate. Leg’s gone to sleep.” He reached for her and held her upright, and she knew that he knew that her leg was fine. She just wanted the contact.

“Your hair needs dyeing again,” Sparky said.

“I only did it a week ago.” They looked at each other, dumbfounded, as time struck them both. A week ago they’d still been living outside London, ignorant of much that was occurring inside the toxic city, full of rebellion and a need to understand. In her mind her family was still alive, and in Sparky’s was the hope that he might see his brother again one day. All those hopes were now dashed, and so much had happened that they were both changed people. They’d never be the same again. Beyond London now seemed as distant and mysterious as the city had once been.

“Fuck me,” Sparky whispered.

“Yeah,” Lucy-Anne said. She nodded towards Jack.

Jack was gesturing them over. He looked around at the piled containers, alert for trouble. Probably looking for that Fleeter girl, Lucy-Anne thought. She’d only known her for an hour or two, but already she didn’t like her.

“I’ve helped him,” Jack said. “After all he’s done, I healed three broken ribs, eased the pain of his ruptured eye, reset his jaw. I stopped a bleed in his left lung, and dispersed a blood clot that was moving towards his heart.” He stood beside Miller and waited until they had gathered around. Only Rhali stayed away at the other side of the clearing. “And I’ve told him that this is what he’ll be destroying. What I can do, and what so many others can do as well.”

Miller was shifting in his chair, and at first Lucy-Anne thought he was crying. But then she heard the terrible sound of laughter.

“But he doesn’t care,” Breezer said.

“Tell him to do what we want!” Sparky said. “That thing Guy Morris could do, you know. Whisper it in his ear! Can’t you do that?”

“I tried,” Jack said.

Miller’s laughter burst into loud, hearty guffaws. He groaned in pain as well, but the discomfort seemed to humour him even more. “Your father would thank you for healing some of what he’s done to me,” he said. “More for him to torture next time!” His one good eye was rolling in its socket, leaking a pale pink, bloody fluid.

“He’s mad,” Lucy-Anne said.

“I can belt it out of him,” Sparky said, stepping forward with his fist raised.

“No,” Lucy-Anne said. “I mean he’s really mad. Insane.”

Jack nodded. “Maybe that’s why I can’t get through to him.”

Miller looked back over his shoulder at Jack, then at Sparky standing in front of him, fist still raised. “Ohhh, don’t hurt me!” he shrieked, cackling, wiping bloody tears from his cheeks.

“Bloody hell,” Sparky said. His shoulders slumped.

“So what now?” Lucy-Anne asked.

“Now we all die,” Miller said. “Boom! Big Bindy!” He pointed at Lucy-Anne. “You die.” He jabbed a finger at Sparky. “Blondie dies.” And across at Rhali. “That brown bitch dies, too.”

Jack turned to strike him, but he was too late. Lucy-Anne moved quickly, flowing forward and bringing her fist around. She’d always been ready with a punch, even before Doomsday and the strain it had put her under, but this was the first that ever felt truly righteous. She felt the solidity of his cheekbone beneath her knuckles, and heard the creak of his neck as the blow turned his head to the side. It stopped his vile utterances and his laughter, and the silence following the punch was almost peaceful.

“Yeah,” Sparky breathed softly.

“Come on,” Jack said. “Let’s leave him to his bomb. We’re getting out of here.”

“Leave me?” Miller asked. His voice was fluid with blood. “You’re not leaving me. You’ve saved me.” He lifted his right hand and flexed his mended fingers, turning his hand this way and that as if it were something precious. “Oh, thank you, Jack,” he said. For the first time, his voice sounded almost normal.

As he reached down into his clothing Lucy-Anne was already moving, pulling Sparky down with her, shouting, “Get down!” Perhaps Jack could have flipped like Fleeter and prevented what happened next. That he didn’t could have been down to surprise, or maybe it was something darker. Maybe he really didn’t want to.

With the hand Jack had fixed, Miller lifted a gun and pressed its barrel into his mouth. His final mad chuckle was swallowed by the gunshot, and by then Lucy-Anne had looked away. But she still heard the wet patter of Miller’s tortured mind scattering across the ground.

There was silence for a few moments. The gunshot echoed away, and somewhere in the distance a flock of birds took startled flight, complaining at the sky.

“Right,” Sparky said shakily. “So Miller’s probably not going to help us.”

Lucy-Anne couldn’t hold back a giggle, but it quickly faded. They stood and headed away, all of them doing their best not to look back. Warm wet death was something they had all seen too much of.

Of them all, it was Rhali who walked with the most composure. For the first time since they’d rescued her, she seemed at peace.

They crossed what had once been Camp Hope and passed into the cool shadows between piled containers. When they emerged from the container park and started back towards the river, Lucy-Anne looked around for Andrew. But he was nowhere in sight. She felt a momentary panic, a sense of utter loneliness. Then a hand rested on her shoulder. Rhali.

“Bloody excellent punch,” the girl said, grinning from ear to ear.

“Classic!” Sparky said. “I taught her everything she knows!”

She taught you, more like,” Jenna said.

“I was always scared of her,” Jack said. “It’s the purple hair, I think.”

Lucy-Anne gave Jack the finger. “Eat me.”

Her old boyfriend raised one eyebrow, and Sparky started making some rude gestures behind his back.

Lucy-Anne laughed a little. And she also cried gentle, thankful tears, because she was back with her friends, and they were as close to family as she had left anywhere in the world.

Keen to get away from Camp H and the horrors it still contained, they decided to cruise upriver again towards where they had embarked. There was the silent understanding that they had talking to do and decisions to make, but for now putting distance between them and the camp was the priority.

Fleeter had not reappeared. Jack said she was probably following them, and that made Lucy-Anne uncomfortable. But at the same time she was returning to herself, feeling stronger, and grasping a new purpose—to help her friends survive.

“Are you sure they won’t just let us out?” Lucy-Anne asked Jack. They were sitting in the open at the boat’s bow, watching the serene Thames ahead of them awaiting the boat’s disturbing wash. The others were under cover back towards the cabin. Jack looked sad and lost.

“They’ve kept everyone in London for this long,” Jack said. “I’ve heard plenty of stories about escapees being murdered. Bodies put on display, sometimes, to dissuade others from trying to break out. Why would they change their minds now? Their problem of London is about to be solved once and for all, so they’ll do more than ever to keep anyone from getting out.”

“But they’ll be retreating,” Lucy-Anne said. “Pulling back, if they know what’s about to happen.”

“Not until the last minute, I doubt. They’ll have trucks, helicopters.” He shook his head.

“It’s not hopeless,” she said, sensing the despair in him. He only looked at her. “Really!” she insisted. “We’ve got nine, ten hours yet. We’ll find a way.”

“I don’t see how,” he said. Lucy-Anne reached out and held his hand, and a rush of memories of her and Jack assaulted her. Most of them were good. He was above all her friend.

“We stop the bomb or get out,” she said. “Anything else is not an option.” She was proud of herself. Saying that whilst remembering her dreams—the blast, the flames, the heat-flash blanching everything that London had become into a white-hot mess—took some effort.

Jack smiled, then sat back against the bench. “We thought we’d lost you,” he said. “So what happened?”

“Rook found me,” she said. She leaned back next to Jack, and with the sun on her face and the gentle movements of the boat, she felt almost relaxed. London could almost have been its old self again.

“A Superior,” Jack said.

“No, not at all. Rook was all on his own. He went with Reaper because it suited his purpose.”

“Which was?”

“Revenge. He was in a dark place. Such a…sensitive boy. He and his brother survived Doomsday and lived together for a while, but then the Choppers took his brother, and the birds showed him what happened. They slaughtered him. Took his brain.”

“They’ve experimented on so many,” Jack said.

“But he saw something in me. We connected, I guess. And maybe fell for each other, just a little.” It seemed strange talking like this with Jack, because until recently they had been a couple. But she sensed no hostility from him, and no surprise. Their relationship had been strong from the moment they’d met, marred only by the weight of expectation between them—that they should be together. They were much better together as friends. Anything else just got in the way.

“I saved him,” she said. She sensed Jack’s confusion.

“I thought he was gone?”

“He is, now. But I thought I’d saved him. I’ve got something too.”

“The dreaming? Nomad touched you?”

“I’ve met her, Jack. Seen her in my dreams, and met her for real, and sometimes both are the same. But the thing I’ve got is all my own. Something I’ve always had, when I think back to when I was younger, but always a more subtle thing than it is now. More gentle. Nomad told me I was what she’s been looking for forever. And Rook too, he told me his brother had something of his gift even before Doomsday.”

“So what does that mean? And what can you do?”

“I think it might mean that everyone left alive had something beforehand that Evolve caught onto. And I can dream. At first I thought I was seeing the future, or forms it might take. I dreamed of meeting Rook and his birds attacking me, and they did, briefly, after he died. I dreamed of Nomad and the bomb. I dreamed of meeting you by the river and the Choppers waiting there, but I didn’t know how that one turned out, and didn’t have a chance to change it.”

“Change?”

“I think I can…I thought I could change events in my dreams. Lucid dreaming, guiding things. Rook died and I dreamed him alive again, and for a while he was.” She looked at the scratches on the back of her hand, put there by Rook’s nails as he fell into the hole. “But then fate caught up with him, exactly as I’d seen it before. I might have stretched things a little, but I don’t think I really changed anything.”

“That’s amazing,” Jack said. “I had nothing before. Don’t think so, anyway. But Nomad’s touch has given me…” He trailed off, looking into a distance no one else could see.

“What?” Lucy-Anne asked.

“So much,” he said. “So much that I really don’t know what I might become.”

“So we’re special,” Lucy-Anne said. She couldn’t keep the bitterness from her voice, because being special hadn’t done much for her thus far. “My talent’s not caused by Doomsday, and it’s grown just by being here. And you’ve been touched by a freak.”

“We’re all special,” Jack said, looking along the boat at his friends. Rhali smiled. Sparky gave them the finger. “Differentiating between who has a gift and who doesn’t—who’s normal, or Irregular, or Superior—loses sight of everyone’s uniqueness. We do that, and we might as well sink the boat and drown right now.”

Lucy-Anne thought of Rook and how conflicted his gift had made him. She’d seen him cold-bloodedly killing Choppers out of a burning need for revenge. She had also seen his more vulnerable, needy side, and the part of him that was still a child. And she realised that the Rook she’d fallen for had been the human boy, nothing more or less.

“We’re all special,” she said, nodding.

“And we always were.”

“So we stop the bomb or get out.” She smiled at Jack, her special friend. “Sinking the boat is not an option.”

“Right.” He smiled back. For a moment too brief to measure but too precious to ignore, all was well with the world.

Загрузка...