Tooth and Nail

by Chris Bonnello

  She pulled the door open, and the last free students of Oakenfold Special School crept back into the building they had escaped from together. After almost a whole year, it could perhaps have been a sentimental moment. But Nicholas Grant was days away from launching an invincible protective shield that might have been perfected in that same building, so it hardly felt magical.

  The alarm didn’t sound. Ewan looked disappointed, as far as Kate could tell. It wasn’t proof that clones were in the building, but it kept the possibility open.

  ‘Nothing above a whisper,’ Ewan said, following his own instruction. Before splitting up, the group of six stood together for a brief moment of shared empathy. Raj said it first.

  ‘United by our differences, guys.’

  ‘United,’ whispered everyone else.

  Ewan wasted no time in heading for the classroom nearest to the entrance – the one for the profoundly disabled students, who had needed rolling in and out of school in specialised wheelchairs. Simon followed him with a nervous huff.

  Raj and Gracie headed straight for the sensory room, already resigned to not finding anything interesting.

  ‘Shall we?’ asked Mark.

  ‘Yeah, sure,’ replied Kate.

  ‘This way first. Head teacher’s office.’

  The reception was right next to them, but Mark had made his decision to inspect the most important room first. Kate started to follow him as he set off, but a thought struck her.

  ‘Wait… isn’t this the long way round?’

  ‘Yeah. There’s something I need to grab from my locker. Assuming they haven’t raided it.’

  I was at my locker when it started…

  Kate’s brain faded into autopilot as she followed Mark, her eyes fixed on his feet as they trod before her. It was the least appropriate time to retrace the past, but perhaps Nicholas Grant had chosen the school for that exact reason.

  And to be fair, it was working.

  It had been between English and maths, and she had been exchanging her exercise books in her locker. Chloe and Sally had complained about not getting a signal on their phones. In the background, Charlie was shouting about his human rights being taken away because he couldn’t access social media.

  The staff had looked worried, but said nothing. Rule number one in times of crisis – hide everything from the students, even news that might help them.

  With Chloe and Sally equally clueless, Kate had walked down the corridor and noticed Raj talking to his friend Callum.

  ‘I overheard two of them,’ said the dyslexic kid who would one day become her boyfriend, ‘saying something about a fire in town. But not just one. Loads of buildings are on fire. There were gunshots too. Maybe it’s a riot.’

  Kate had not believed the bit about gunshots. She had learned a lot from the false rumours people had spread about her in mainstream. Exaggerations and blatant lies were unquestioningly believed in schools, while the truth was ignored for not being entertaining enough. But something was worrying their teachers…

  ‘OK,’ said Mark, returning Kate to the present. ‘Here we are.’

  Kate realised how lucky she was that some sneaky clone hadn’t opened fire from around a corridor corner while she had been daydreaming. She’d have been dead before noticing any attackers. Of course, Ewan would have called it lack of due care and attention on Kate’s part, rather than luck.

  Mark opened his locker in near-total silence, the clicks of his combination lock the loudest noise in the corridor except for Kate’s erratic breathing.

  ‘Can’t even see the numbers,’ Mark muttered. ‘I just know I put them to triple-zero whenever I locked it, so I know how many… here we go.’

  The pained scrape of the metal locker sounded deafening to Kate’s sensitive ears. But the faint expression on Mark’s face showed his indifference to it.

  ‘Single malt,’ he said. ‘Scottish, twelve years old. Well, thirteen now.’

  ‘Malt?’ whispered Kate. ‘Isn’t that vinegar?’

  ‘Whisky.’

  ‘You brought alcohol into school?!’

  ‘Kate, I spent a year away from lessons after stabbing my dad in the leg. I was already set up to fail my exams, and my adulthood was screwed before it had even begun. When Grant took over I was about a month from leaving this graveyard. Thought I’d do some celebrating on my last day, in front of as many people as possible. What were they going to do, expel me?’

  Kate could barely contain her disbelief. She looked at the walls, if only to make her face less visible to Mark. She could have sworn one of the pieces of artwork on the corridor wall was Simon’s, since it was as bright and vivid as his personality had been back then.

  It was odd how the little things stuck in her head. Kate had also been looking at Simon’s artwork when the rumoured gunfire had reached Oakenfold Special School. Everyone was late for maths but none of the staff cared. They were all too busy with this mystery crisis that the students must not know about.

  Until Judit Ciskal, one of the reception staff, broke the news. She was wounded, bleeding from her shoulder, and running full pelt down the corridor yelling at the students to hide. There had been screams and meltdowns and panic attacks at the sight of real blood and the promise of something dangerous in the school.

  Kate remembered the sight of her first clone: the tall bald model, which she had seen a hundred times since in a hundred other clone soldiers. She had believed him to be a real human at the time. He had run around the distant corner in navy blue uniform, with an actual assault rifle in his hands. It had been a sight Kate had never seen before, and would never have expected in a school.

  And wow, this clone had been angry. The type of angry she would later learn was built into their neurology, as Nathaniel Pearce had built his soldiers with ‘peace’ and ‘war’ settings. She had seen angry people before, but nobody with that kind of face…

  Judit had stopped to bend over and help a frozen student to his feet. When the clone had got too close, she drew out a cutlery knife and went for him. And that was when the clone had shot her to death.

  ‘Besides,’ said Mark, ‘I’m eighteen now, so I can legally drink this even by old world standards. This is coming back with me tonight, and I’ll still use it to celebrate leaving Oakenfold. Just leaving in a different way.’

  Kate jumped at the sound of Mark closing his locker, and followed him further down the corridor. He reached for his radio.

  ‘Anything yet, guys?’ he asked.

  A short pause, which Kate used to collect herself.

  ‘Nothing in the classrooms,’ came Ewan’s voice. ‘But they give a good view of the outside. Simon mentioned a bunch of metal shapes he saw around the school’s perimeter.’

  ‘Mentioned them?’

  ‘He does talk, you know. Around people he actually trusts. He saw these little shapes outside dotted around the place. They look like land mines.’

  ‘Better be careful on the way out then. Raj, how’s things?’

  A short pause, although long enough for Kate to hear Mark’s voice echo off the walls. It had risen above a whisper, and that worried her. Mark’s complacency could spell trouble, but she didn’t dare to tell him with words.

  ‘I’m here too, you know,’ said Gracie. ‘Raj found the sports hall, and he’s looking through it right now. It’s packed with these huge things.’

  ‘What kind of things?’ asked Mark, impatiently.

  ‘He said something about power. He thinks they generate electricity or something. They’re big whirring things that reach halfway to the ceiling.’

  ‘So that’s how they’re powering the school, huh.’

  Kate took out her own radio.

  ‘No,’ she gasped into it, ‘this is something else. We can power the whole of Spitfire’s Rise with a small petrol generator. Those things in the sports hall are for powering the AME shield.’

  ‘It’d make sense,’ came another voice, which she recognised as Jack’s. ‘The energy needed t
o maintain a shield over the school would be massive. Oh, and I’m fine out here, by the way.’

  ‘Have you seen anything?’ asked Ewan.

  ‘I’d have told you if I’d spotted movement,’ said Jack. ‘But now you mention it, I can see those little land-miney things too. But I don’t think they’re actual mines.’

  ‘How come?’

  ‘Because they’ve made no effort to hide them. They must be for something else.’

  There was a momentary silence. Neither Kate nor any of the other students came up with any ideas.

  ‘We’ll keep searching,’ Kate said. ‘We’re almost at Paul’s office.’

  Even after a year it still felt good to call the head teacher ‘Paul’ instead of ‘Mr Dale’. Special education had always been less formal in those ways, and it had been the ideal refuge for teenagers who had been traumatised in schools full of Misses and Misters in posh suits.

  ‘Speaking of Paul,’ said Mark, ‘I wonder if we’ve found him.’

  Kate looked around, and saw nothing. Then she looked down and noticed the skeleton a metre from her toes.

  She shuddered, but held herself together and kept silent.

  It was the remains of an adult. Presumably a staff member. Or perhaps an adult student, since Oakenfold catered for nineteen-year-olds too. But Kate didn’t like to think of people in James’ year dying in their school.

  I know your birthday ended three hours ago, she thought, but happy birthday,James. I hope it was one that you liked.

  ‘I don’t even know what happened to Paul,’ she whispered. ‘He might have survived. I… I know who this is.’

  A cutlery knife lay next to the wall, less than a metre from the skeleton. Judit had made the mistake of threatening a clone with a weapon, so she had been executed instead of captured. But Kate hadn’t hung around to watch. She just ran.

  At the other end of the school, a small group of staff members had shepherded the students through the back exit into the outdoor play area. It was normally reserved for the Block One students – those who were profoundly disabled – but that morning it was open to everyone. Kate had followed, looking for her friends in the crowd, finding only Chloe and Sally. She made it through the exit doors, and her heart leapt with relief at seeing James rocking himself next to the swings. When he saw her, his rocking and grunting had not stopped. But he had reached out towards her with a nervous stimming hand. It was love, in the kind of way only James could show, and that nervous stimming hand had been etched into Kate’s memory ever since.

  Mark and Joe Horn were already attacking the fence. It was a sturdy fence, deliberately designed to keep people like them inside, but when half a dozen others joined in it didn’t take longer than a minute.

  The staff members didn’t follow. Presumably they had got themselves captured trying to save more students.

  When the fence came down, only some of the students fled. Some didn’t want to risk getting shot. Some were frozen in panic. Some of the Block One students simply thought they weren’t allowed to leave school, because it wasn’t home time.

  Kate had watched as James had frozen himself to the swing, too deep in his routine-based comfort zone. But eventually he had relented and taken his younger sister’s hand. Maybe the fear of losing Kate had been worse than the fear of breaking his routine.

  In what she remembered as Oakenfold’s proudest moment, each Block Two student chose someone with a more noticeable disability, and brought them along on their escape. Even Silent Simon had found another student with Down’s Syndrome and helped her along.

  In what she remembered as Oakenfold’s most shameful moment, it had taken five minutes for them all to realise the difficulty of guiding profoundly disabled teenagers through the countryside with a literal army giving chase. Even Ewan – who had been absent that day, but met them in a field on his way to Oakenfold after something dreadful had happened at his house – had been in no position to come up with bright ideas. When a row of soldiers appeared at the end of the field, Mark had shouted ‘get bloody running, they’re not worth it!’ and everyone had obeyed.

  Everyone except Kate, who had tried. But two minutes later…

  She had evaded the oncoming army, and James had followed his captors as instructed. Within a few minutes, she had found the group again and joined them in their confused chaos.

  So there they were: the last free students of Oakenfold. Kate, Mark, Ewan, Raj, Simon, Jack, Gracie, Sarah, Callum, Joe, Chloe, Sally, Rachael, Daniel and Charlie. (Kate raised an eyebrow when she realised she had thought of the dead students in Memorial Wall order.) They had wandered across the fields in a clueless daze, until Ewan had run ahead to find a place to shelter. He had later returned – with bloodied hands – and guided them all to the place he’d found. Inside, an ageing man with tears in his eyes had welcomed them…

  ‘Judit Ciskal?’ asked Mark. ‘Receptionist extraordinaire?’

  Kate nodded.

  ‘Looks about her height. I remember her running around as well. So maybe Paul Dale’s still alive… guess we’ll never know. Let’s get to his office.’

  Kate followed, hiding her contempt for the young man who had – rightly or wrongly – forced her away from her brother.

  One thing was certain, though. Whether the skeleton had been Judit or someone else, Kate had known them personally.

  The arrival at Spitfire’s Rise was the end of Kate’s personal story of Takeover Day, but as time went by she had pieced together a nationwide picture based on the accounts of other survivors. The very first place Grant had attacked were the barracks and RAF bases, disabling any military force on British soil that had not belonged to him. (Even Ewan’s dad had only narrowly escaped with his life.) After that, his armies had focused on places where children could be found – schools, nurseries, theme parks and so on – because once he had the children, he had the parents too. All it had taken was a television broadcast with the words ‘your children will be waiting for you in your local habitation complex’, and resistance among half the adult population was gone.

  Not long later the National Grid had been taken down, Grant using his own power sources to run his Citadels, and the invasion of city centres had begun. Rural villages had come afterwards, and places with immobile populations – mainly hospitals and care homes – had been saved for last. Kate imagined that Oakenfold had been pushed further down the priority list because of the disability levels of some of their students, allowing them to hear the news of Grant’s armies before they arrived.

  It was another thirty metres or so to Paul’s office. When they arrived, Mark poked his head around the glass built into the door, and leapt back as if from an electric shock.

  He had seen something inside.

  Without a word or anything beyond a finger held out to silence Kate, he whispered into his radio. Really whispered.

  ‘We’ve found someone,’ he said.

  ‘Where?’ came Ewan’s immediate answer.

  ‘Paul’s office. One clone in front of a laptop… bloody fast asleep.’

  ‘Actually asleep or just pretending?’ asked Raj.

  ‘His radio’s at the other end of the desk. He’d have to climb to reach it. If he were pretending, he’d have it in his hand.’

  So this was their trap, thought Kate. One clone in the headteacher’s office with a panic button. Once he presses it, a whole clone army descends on Oakenfold and makes sure we never get out.

  But if that’s true, what’s the laptop for?

  ‘So,’ she asked, ‘what do we do?’

  Mark had already drawn out his knife.

  Before Kate could breathe another word, Mark had silenced his radio and pressed against the door.

  For a huge figure, Mark was stealthy when he needed to be. He crept through the door, holding it open for Kate behind him, and took tentative steps across Paul’s old carpet. He positioned the knife in his hand with the blade facing inwards.

  He’s going to slash the clone’s
throat.

  The sleeping figure’s face was clear in the glow of the laptop screen. Mark stepped around the other side of him so he would not cast a shadow across his face, and in the blink of an eye his left hand had gripped a batch of hair.

  Kate wished she had closed her eyes: by the time the victim had opened his own, the knife had done its work. Mark had cut deep enough for the creature in the chair to be beyond saving, and the sheer panic in his face showed that he knew it. There was enough energy left in him for a gargled groan, and then he was dead.

  Kate started to breathe again. Mark’s attention went straight to the laptop.

  ‘This technology’s pretty complicated by clone standards,’ he said. ‘It’s not the usual numpty-proof system they use in New London.’

  Kate had noticed. She had also noticed the lack of a panic button on the man’s radio, and the fact that he had used his vocal cords to let out his final groan. She chose to say nothing. Mark would put the clues together by himself, and react in his own way.

  ‘Now this is really weird,’ he said. His voice quivered, suggesting to Kate that he had worked out what he had truly done. As predicted, he was trying to ignore it.

  ‘What’s weird?’ she asked, trying to ignore it too.

  ‘The AME shield is ready. Just a tap of this button and it goes up.’

  Kate walked over to look, careful where she stepped. The carpet beneath grew redder, stickier and more soaked with every heartbeat. There was a progress bar on the laptop screen, 100 per cent complete, waiting for someone to click ‘OK’ and raise a metal-proof shield over Oakenfold Special School. They were one click away from achieving a feat never before seen in the realm of science, and proving that Nathaniel Pearce’s technology could make Grant invincible forever.

  But its controller had fallen asleep. In fact, the progress bar said the task had been finished at 12:09 a.m., so he must have been asleep for the last three hours.

  It can’t be that simple, can it? She thought. Heroes don’t just win because villains fall asleep, right?